Wikipedia talk:Reform of WikiProjects

message: This category probably doesn't contain all the British WikiProjects, but it certainly contains most of them. Of these, most are geographical - England (state), Somerset (county), WPUKGeo (general geo), London (city), waterways, etc. Indeed all but one or two, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject UK Trams, not only are UK topics but don't have any other likely parents. There's 25 or more projects right there (after deducting 1 or 2 possible exceptions) which could share one template with parameters. Just look at Talk:London - it has England, London, Cities, UKGeo, inside a banner container. That could easily be reduced down to one banner! (e.g.  (city=yes would automatically set geo=yes).
These groups aren't going to introduce template sharing voluntarily. They all have vanity, they all love their templates. Some of these groups love their templates more than the articles they're attached to.
We have to:
#Use a sledgehammer - add these parameters to , redirect the old ones to it, and get cleaning up talk pages (if resistance is low, bots can then be sent out to replace the excess templates with parameters and remove any no-longer-needed banner containers), or
#Get some consensus behind some sort of more formal process as discussed above and on attached page, or
#Accept that the lunatics have control of the asylum and just forget all about it. (But, be warned, people are surely likely to start asking whether these banners serve any purpose at all, and even the good ones could be in danger).
Up to you. --kingboyk (talk) 19:49, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks like a sound idea to me. The same thing could possibly/probably be done with Wikipedia:WikiProject United States, particularly regarding locations which have changed states over time. And the "sledgehammer" has been used before, by WikiProject Canada among others. It might be a good idea to establish some sort of guidelines for when such could take place, though. John Carter (talk) 19:53, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

text: is a really excellent example of this concept in practice. --kingboyk (talk) 16:15, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Good idea, although I, who might be responsible for a lot of such, particularly recently regarding Mexico and the Polynesian areas, think what you're probably dealing with is more categorization as "People from X" than because they were specifically born or lived there, and the categorization could maybe be changed as well. Also, such tagging is one of the few ways that most of the related portals can determine which biographies are worth including. I think the reason in many cases is the hope that editors from the area might be able to at least find photos that an outsider might not. I have proposed a variety of Biography task forces before, specific for profession or field of activity, and certainly national groups would work as well. My only question would be that, ultimately, it might entail a very large number of national subprojects, maybe even a few hundred, and that might complicate the banner a lot. John Carter (talk) 18:04, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

text: One per country?  So every city, town, village, mountain, river (etc) would fall under one "United States" banner?  Or would the US use particular state projects/banners? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 18:04, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it might be possible to have a US rivers joint task force with WikiProject Rivers, a mountains task force with WP Mountains, etc. Those might be good ideas, if we can get the banner wizards to get together to work on them. And I just became an admin on the basis of saying I wanted to work on banners. Do I know exactly the wrong time to make such statements or not? Regarding the US, Canada, and some of the other huge countries, there might be need for further specification in some instances, but I think in general the idea is probably a good one. John Carter (talk) 18:10, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: One question which will come to mind to a lot of editors is, if such banners are to be created, how small the constituent units of the banner should be. This is important, as those constituent units should probably be based on the same territory as the extant WikiProject or subproject related to the area. I've started an extremely complicated template at User:John Carter/WikiProject Rivers, which might serve as a partial basis for such future templates, and found that difficulty is a very real one. One of the problems is that, in effect, development of such banners might help to inhibit the creation of even smaller work groups in the future, for good or ill. I've foregone inclusion of the various subprojects relevant to the counties of England, for instance. Certainly, categorization could also be a real problem with developing such a system, which should probably also relate at some point to the formal proposal here as well. Anyway, I've still got a lot to do with the sample template, and am off back to it. John Carter (talk) 20:42, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

text: One per country, yes, but individual states and cities could have workgroup parameters. I'm not suggesting these groups be told "you're not wanted any more" just "please share an upstream template". --kingboyk (talk) 17:47, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Let's start with [[:Category:WikiProject United Kingdom]] 

message: I know I'm not alone in this. I really dislike national and regional WikiProjects tagging articles about people merely because the person lived or was born in that country or region. They never get edited by the WikiProject, they just boost numbers.
I would, then, further propose that if national and regional WPs migrate to one banner per country, that at the same time the articles about people within their scope get moved to a WPBiography workgroup e.g. "UK biographical articles" (a joint workgroup between projects in effect, but with the code in ). This wouldn't increase clutter as  belongs on all bio talk pages anyway. --kingboyk (talk) 17:43, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Good idea, although I, who might be responsible for a lot of such, particularly recently regarding Mexico and the Polynesian areas, think what you're probably dealing with is more categorization as "People from X" than because they were specifically born or lived there, and the categorization could maybe be changed as well. Also, such tagging is one of the few ways that most of the related portals can determine which biographies are worth including. I think the reason in many cases is the hope that editors from the area might be able to at least find photos that an outsider might not. I have proposed a variety of Biography task forces before, specific for profession or field of activity, and certainly national groups would work as well. My only question would be that, ultimately, it might entail a very large number of national subprojects, maybe even a few hundred, and that might complicate the banner a lot. John Carter (talk) 18:04, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

text: One per country?  So every city, town, village, mountain, river (etc) would fall under one "United States" banner?  Or would the US use particular state projects/banners? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 18:04, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it might be possible to have a US rivers joint task force with WikiProject Rivers, a mountains task force with WP Mountains, etc. Those might be good ideas, if we can get the banner wizards to get together to work on them. And I just became an admin on the basis of saying I wanted to work on banners. Do I know exactly the wrong time to make such statements or not? Regarding the US, Canada, and some of the other huge countries, there might be need for further specification in some instances, but I think in general the idea is probably a good one. John Carter (talk) 18:10, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: One question which will come to mind to a lot of editors is, if such banners are to be created, how small the constituent units of the banner should be. This is important, as those constituent units should probably be based on the same territory as the extant WikiProject or subproject related to the area. I've started an extremely complicated template at User:John Carter/WikiProject Rivers, which might serve as a partial basis for such future templates, and found that difficulty is a very real one. One of the problems is that, in effect, development of such banners might help to inhibit the creation of even smaller work groups in the future, for good or ill. I've foregone inclusion of the various subprojects relevant to the counties of England, for instance. Certainly, categorization could also be a real problem with developing such a system, which should probably also relate at some point to the formal proposal here as well. Anyway, I've still got a lot to do with the sample template, and am off back to it. John Carter (talk) 20:42, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

text: One per country, yes, but individual states and cities could have workgroup parameters. I'm not suggesting these groups be told "you're not wanted any more" just "please share an upstream template". --kingboyk (talk) 17:47, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: One other thing about national and regional WikiProjects

message: I believe that there are several articles which inherently relate to a number of related subjects which are unlikely ever to have a "general" WikiProject developed for them. As a result, these separate projects have, to a degree, no choice to adding their separate banners to certain articles of importance to all of them, increasing banner clutter. I'm thinking in particular of topics which might be relevant to all the Abrahamic religions or Vedic religions. I think that these problems could be addressed if there were any way to create a banner which might indicate that those selected articles which are inherently within the scope of these disparate projects could have a specific banner made up for these common interest articles, saying, for instance, "This article related to the development of Abrahamic Religion is within the scope of WikiProject Christianity, WikiProject Islam, and WikiProject Judaism" (opting for alphabetical order here, although Judaism-Christianity-Islam - time order, of Judaism-Islam-Christianity might be possible as well)", with the banner endowed with the option of granting separate assessments for all the relevant main projects. In the instance above, maybe adding WikiProject Bible in some instances might make sense as well. Personally, I think that many/most of the projects in these situations would probably agree to using such a banner on those articles of common interest to all of them. Is there any precedent for the use of such a banner, though? John Carter (talk) 16:25, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Additional concerns 

message: I'm a editor with WP:BIRD and I've been noticing an increasing trend over the last year or so for editors on the various regional (country, continent, etc) to tag our bird species (and genera and even families) articles with regional tags on the basis that the wretched creature (or taxa) in question is found with its borders. Or, in some cases, has been seen in that country on one or more occasions (what are known in the business as vagrants). While this seems pretty acceptable if the species is a well known and emblematic one, such as the New Zealand Kiwi or the Japanese Crane, in some cases unfortunate and rather unknown species have been lumbered with five country tags or more. In theory species such as the House Sparrow, Barn Owl, Peregrine Falcon and Ruddy Turnstone could end up with hundreds of tags if this trend continues. Unless the species is a country endemic (like the Golden Dove of Fiji) or emblematic (like the Bald Eagle, which actually hasn't even been adopted by the US Wikiproject!) is there any justification for this over-abundance of tags? Why not claim rock, tree, road and sand as well, since they are found in countries too? What can I do if articles get over-tagged? In the case of Little Cormorant I threw all the country tags into one of those shells, leaving out the WP:BIRD one since we actually do most of the maintenance for the article? Is that acceptable? I've also deleted tags when the species in question doesn't actually occur in the country involved; could I prune some of these tags as well? Sabine's Sunbird  talk 03:43, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It sounds like you have the right idea. Personally, I'd just remove the tags that aren't really related, but in any case, giving BIRD more presence is appropriate. -- Ned Scott 05:09, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  The scramble for articles 

message: An article type, that is, Ancient History of Western and Northern Europe, Italy, Greece, North Africa and the Mid-East, is not a featured Project on wikiprojects. As these hitory pages are representative of a time period that is of most interest to the community, it doesn't seem as though these histories are co-ordinated, which is why i propose to create a new wikiproject, entitled Ancient History of Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. This should provide an illuminating disscusion, and also it will better organise a set of subjects that provide the greatest degree of insite into where we are coming from, and to also where we are going. If anyone is interested, please contact my talk page. --Tom.mevlie (talk) 12:02, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that there is a need to co-ordinate these histories, as they are more or less interconnected, but I don't think that a new WikiProject would be the best way to deal with this. Perhaps a Task Force would be more helpful, under the guidance of the relevant WikiProjects. In any case, the WikiProject Council is the best place to discuss such matters. (By the way, an alternative idea for the title could be "Ancient History of the MTW map area"; much shorter, wouldn't you agree? ;-)). Waltham, The Duke of 21:25, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The comparatively nascent Wikipedia:WikiProject History would probably be the extant group whose scope would include such articles, as it is about the only one whose scope is large enough. Part of the problem is going about and tagging all the relevant articles for all the various projects. With only about 50% of all articles tagged at all so far, that can be and is a real problem. But I do think that there probably are enough projects regarding the general subject of history already that there probably isn't a specific need for the creation of a new one. John Carter (talk) 17:06, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Create A wikiproject 

message: I have looked in a number of pages but have not been able to find any guidelines on template syntax on the topic of requesting images. There are a number WikiProject templates that have some form of needimage=yes field and create entries in categories. However there is some variation in naming convention of the template tag and the name of the resulting category. Is there a standard example anywhere?
Traveler100 (talk) 08:49, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  WikiProject template - needimage syntax 

message: I wrote some 2016 updates into the page. They're just my own perceptions, but they are unsigned comments, and intended to be editable by anyone (to be descriptive, not advocacy :-).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:23, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  2016 updates