Wikipedia talk:Article Improvement Drive/Archive 4

message: What is sorely missing in AID practice, to my mind, is a community-enforced mechanism for moving articles over to more appropriate collaborations (e.g. the sorely missing biodiversity (for species articles) and technology (for engineering and computation topics) collaborations). That would help to lighten the load. - Samsara (talk • contribs) 00:49, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Etiquette for moving articles to other collaborations? 

message: Dear All,
I note the following things:
*Almost a week after the introduction of the increased threshold of 4 votes per week, the active nominations have decreased from 74 to 67.
*Eleven (11) more articles will expire by or on the 13th, properly a week after the introduction of the raised threshold, assuming no additional votes for those articles.
*More articles are nominated on weekends than weekdays.
*I am writing this on a Saturday morning.
*As there are fewer nominees, each nominee may get more votes (this cricically depends on voter psychology, of course!)
While I can't be certain that the threshold was rigorously applied (someone should probably check this, some deadline dates look at bit odd as well, presumably due to the "what, you mean February has 28 days?" effect), it may be worth keeping the idea of raising the weekly threshold to five (5) at the back of our minds - presumably a number of candidates in the region of 20-30 would be ideal? - Samsara (talk • contribs) 10:12, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think that's a good idea. I say we wait for few more weeks and see what happens because this raise of limit works. It works slowly, but works. As for checking, I'll add a feature to my bot today which will check the nominated section for fraud ((date2-date1)/7*4 == number of votes), but only for nominations which were added after March 6... --Dijxtra 11:52, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hey Dijxtra, you can use one more if and calculate the correct date for nominees added before March 6 (if you want:)) Btw, this new 4 votes/week needs at least 1 months to stable. Lets wait till April or May to see. --Ugur Basak 22:03, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, I know, I'm doing that the whole day today :-) You can't imagine how painfull is it to debug a CGI script which reports no errors, just dies silently :-) --Dijxtra 22:07, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

text:  There, I finally got it. Now the bot checks to see if somebody messed up the nominated section. For nominations after March 6 it also checks if ((number of weeks)/7)*4 is equal to required number of votes. But, now we have a whole lot of work to fix the errors from the past :-) --Dijxtra 22:26, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  i really never programmed CGI's, but i know script programming script langueges are really difficult. I can just say, Good Luck :) --Ugur Basak 22:29, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Threshold effect - raising it further? 

message: Approved for AotW with 26 votes:
* Asteroid deflection strategies
Removed from AotW with 36 votes:
* John Seigenthaler Sr.
Funny how this thing works. :) I know I've seen similar high-vote articles get removed from AotW in the past, but it looks like the old archival pages have been removed so I couldn't track them down. — RJH 17:01, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe John Seigenthaler Sr. didn't get the required amount of votes to survive through a week, so it was removed.  A few days later the AID article was then choosen, which is why John Seigenthaler Sr. wasn't eligible. --lightdarkness (talk) 17:07, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh I understand the reason why it was removed. I just find the above to be ironic, and perhaps an indicator that this selection approach is not always ideal for maximizing participation. :) — RJH 23:41, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Not really.  Presumably, Seigenthaler only got those 36 votes over an extended amount of time, while the former article got votes much faster, and so at the rate it was going, it would have been over 36 by the time it reached that age, had it stayed as just a nom that long. --Rory096 22:08, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Which archival pages have been removed? --Dijxtra 22:55, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  My recollection is that the pages listing the removed articles used to go back for several years. Now it only goes back to 2005. — RJH 23:41, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

text:  Scratch that. What I'm probably remembering is the CotW, where I've seen similar things happen. (C.f. Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week/Removed/Summary.) Sorry, my mistake. — RJH 23:49, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Quantity is nothing. An article can be deleted through AfD with just a handful of votes, while another could attract hundreds but not reach a consensus. The vote count means that Seigenthaler attracted a mild but not critical amount of interest, and it took a long time for this to die down. While on the surface you're right that it seems weird, I think the system is pretty fair for its purposes. BigBlueFish 09:35, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

text: If I remembered correctly, I removed John Seigenthaler. For a very long time, it seemed like it would win, but there was just not enough votes. Once it nearly made it, but because of invalid votes, it didn't. It just shows you it doesn't demonstrate the interest level compared to other articles--Steven 21:31, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Just for the record 

message: We have a problem. Number of people to be notified when new AID is elected was tremendous while we had only one AID article, and now it is... double tremendous :-) I musn't use my bot for posting notices on talk pages, so everything has to be done by hand. As we can see, nobody wants to do that. So what do we do now? There are 4 possibilities:
# We recruite few people willing to help with rollover
# We convince guys at Wikipedia:bots that we need this stuff to be done by a bot
# We decide not to post notices on talk pages at all
# We return to only one AID per week, so rollover by current rules becames managable by hand
So what do we do now? --Dijxtra 23:01, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *If we need extra people to post messages on user-talks, I'll be happy to help.  Joyous | Talk 23:59, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

text: *One a week!  There was NOT consensus to do two! Juppiter 04:06, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I agree, the statement at the end of the vote said the majority consensus was for two, but when the vote is 6-4, it's not a consensus, just a majority.  I think we should go back to 1, not only to help with rollover, but for overall participation. --lightdarkness (talk) 14:02, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I agree. Either that, or we don't post the notices in the talk page. It takes too much time and effort, I spend 10 min doing that when there was only 1 AID, it will take even longer. As well, it divides people's attention when you have 2 AID. Those articles then won't get the desired attention of AID. Lastly, maybe, just maybe, we should get a bot to do the notice, if we're going to keep doing it. But personally, I don't see the use of the notices. If a person is on Wiki a great deal of time, they will check the Community portal sooner or later in a week. If they aren't on, they don't see the message. Therefore, it isn't much of a use. --Steven 21:36, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I tend to agree with steven. I think we should abolish notices. And return to only one article per week since now it turns out that the decision is controversial... --Dijxtra 19:03, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I strongly suggest moving back to one a week, I didn't even know about the poll until I saw the results.  We may have more voters on AID, but that doesn't mean we're going to have the contributors to the winners. - Hahnchen 18:07, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I would move back to one a week.  Two is overwhelming and just hurts the AID as it causes there not to be much work done on either article (something like 6 edits for Great Leap Forward?).  One is just easier to concentrate on. I, too, did not even know about the poll until it was all over, and the results were hardly overwhelming. PDXblazers 05:49, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

text: I don't see why you can't just use AWB to post the messages, it would take like 5 minutes. --Rory096 22:09, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rollover 

message: Many feel that consensus was not reached in the decision to go to two articles per week and it should go back down to one. Juppiter 04:50, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vote #4: Return to one AID article per week 

message: But I'm not pasting that damn template onto seventy user pages. -Litefantastic 13:28, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: I'm staging the rollover now

message: I've been constructing a checklist for articles. It primarily deals with editorial and technical issues, i.e. things that need to be done in every article. It may be useful to use such a list for AID articles. 
Another improvement which may help AID would be to replace the useless userbox with a useful projectbox, something like the following, but preferably without the userbox aesthetics. 
It would need to be regularly updated, of course. Zocky | picture popups 13:27, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  May I propose some improvements? 

message: (Originally posted at Wikipedia_talk:Article_Improvement_Drive/Maintenance)
How an article is removed from the list states, "Articles need four votes per week to stay on the list."  A quick survey of the list shows several "needs at least X votes" that are not divisible by four.  The vote requirements and due dates for many articles seem arbitrary.
I'd be happy to correct the vote requirements and dates, if someone would like me to.  Then, someone braver than me can remove the articles that have failed to receive sufficient votes.  -Scottwiki 09:22, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah heck, I'll just make the corrections now.  No better time than the present ....  -Scottwiki 09:25, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Oops, my bad.  I won't make any corrections.  -Scottwiki 09:51, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  BTW, we have a bot which does that kind of checking ;-) --Dijxtra 15:11, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rule requiring four votes per week is honored in the breach ... 

message: I stopped by the Anime COTW and noticed they have a good idea on their hands: reelection. An article can be reelected to serve as the AnCOTW if it gets two more votes before the next election. As part of my What The Hell, Let's Try It and Find Out policy of system modifcations, I'd like to propose we have a re-election system (although not neccesarily the one they use), so we can use articles more than once. Some of these articles deserve it, if you think about it. -Litefantastic 20:54, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: * I see. You mean it would say something like "This previous winner had X votes," and any additional votes for its re-nom would count toward its overall scoring. So a previous winner that won with 25 could only beat a fresh contender with 32 if the old nom got 8 votes, by 8 new voters. Is that what you mean? -Litefantastic 00:12, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *I think, if we make a seperate subpage for succesful nominations which mentions at the end of removal "how many additional vote the nomination had". When it would be renominated in future, it can be considered as additional votes in the nomination and we can start fresh voting after adding those numbers.  Shyam (T/C) 04:09, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *You mean you could vote twice. -Litefantastic 12:31, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *Yes, I do mean this. After frsh renomination, which contains only additional votes (minimum 8 votes), which should be renominated after an interval of minimum 3 months, anybody would simply eligible to vote.  Shyam (T/C) 12:49, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *I agree with that idea. --Steven 21:18, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

text: *I second. (^'-')^ Covington 06:50, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

text: *Wait a minute? we're voting to give old nominations an edge? Is that what you're trying to do? Sorry, I must have misunderstood then. In this case, I'm opposed. I would rather agree to the idea of renominating after a reasonable wait. --Steven 00:42, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *What you support is what you oppose: renominating after a reasonable wait and counting the earlier votes. -Litefantastic 01:16, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I mentioned minimum 8 additional votes because when an article gets selected it would be having 3 or 4 additional votes generally so we can atleast escape these 3-4 votes while it would be renominated. It can simply be started from 0 vote. If majority wants to escape this point then we can.  Shyam (T/C) 06:11, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Vote #5: Reelection

message: #Litefantastic 20:54, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Support

message: #Steven 20:24, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Oppose

message: *While I agree with the idea, I would like one thing clarified. As of the present, are we allowed or not allowed to renominate votes that were previously removed? --Steven 20:27, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: * I see. You mean it would say something like "This previous winner had X votes," and any additional votes for its re-nom would count toward its overall scoring. So a previous winner that won with 25 could only beat a fresh contender with 32 if the old nom got 8 votes, by 8 new voters. Is that what you mean? -Litefantastic 00:12, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *I think, if we make a seperate subpage for succesful nominations which mentions at the end of removal "how many additional vote the nomination had". When it would be renominated in future, it can be considered as additional votes in the nomination and we can start fresh voting after adding those numbers.  Shyam (T/C) 04:09, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *You mean you could vote twice. -Litefantastic 12:31, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *Yes, I do mean this. After frsh renomination, which contains only additional votes (minimum 8 votes), which should be renominated after an interval of minimum 3 months, anybody would simply eligible to vote.  Shyam (T/C) 12:49, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *I agree with that idea. --Steven 21:18, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

text: *I second. (^'-')^ Covington 06:50, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments

message: Are any new process or rules really needed? Can't we just renominate any article after a reasonable wait? Maurreen 04:26, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *Wait a minute? we're voting to give old nominations an edge? Is that what you're trying to do? Sorry, I must have misunderstood then. In this case, I'm opposed. I would rather agree to the idea of renominating after a reasonable wait. --Steven 00:42, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: *What you support is what you oppose: renominating after a reasonable wait and counting the earlier votes. -Litefantastic 01:16, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I mentioned minimum 8 additional votes because when an article gets selected it would be having 3 or 4 additional votes generally so we can atleast escape these 3-4 votes while it would be renominated. It can simply be started from 0 vote. If majority wants to escape this point then we can.  Shyam (T/C) 06:11, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Simplifying

message: I've added a /vote subsection to this page; link is at the top. Whenever you have a vote, just list it here (the next one should be Vote #6), and when it's finished, record it there and update the chart. -Litefantastic 00:24, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Rock the /Vote

message: Doesn't the AID have too many nominations? Is there a lack of maintenance/admin work here or something? To me it seems like too many articles are up for voting, it wasn't like this back in mid 2005. — Wackymacs 18:12, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There are people doing maintenance on this project. How ever, maintainers cannot delete or prevent new nominations, they can only remove the ones that have passed their due date. Recently, there has been a boom in the number of articles being nominated and a number of voters, so more and more articles are staying up longer and longer, creating a huge list. For example, there are now nominations with 50+ votes! --Steven 20:33, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Way too busy? 

message: New England was not suppose to be removed for another 7 days.  Why was it removed today?
My bad, I meant to remove the nomination one space above.--Steven 01:13, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  New England 

message: I know this is an enormous idea, and might end up killing the AID instead of doing any good, but hear me out first. Currently (with the exception of Belgrade), some of the articles nominated become chosen 2-3 months after the nomination. By then, people that have signed their names might have already done what they can to improve the article, meaning there are less things to do on the articles. Its not likely someone would wait for 3 months before editing the article. In this sense, there are less people actually editing an article when its actually chosen for AID. My thought would be to stop accepting new nominations for a period of time, let the current nomination number drop back to a reasonable number, then restart AID again. And this time, maybe restrict the voting process, so that a nomination does not take 3 months to become chosen.--Steven 00:52, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm, how do you mean "restrict the voting process"? I think a better idea would be to increase the number of votes required to 5 per week. That should eliminate candidates much more quickly. jacoplane 00:56, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, that would help clean up the nomination list. However, I see the raise a short term action, it should not be kept at 5 votes per week for to long, or we might end up loosing too many nominations. --Steven 00:42, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I support the proposal of 5 votes per week instead of restriction of new articles as well as voting process.  Shyam (T/C) 09:50, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I meant to say, we can have fresh policy for newly nominated articles which should have 5 votes per week to retain on the page. In addition to that, all the articles are already nominated we can make a fresh policy which may be effective from e.g. 19 May to have 5 votes per week to retain on the project page.  Shyam (T/C) 21:19, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Like I said, such a change would be both unnecessary and destructive. The only articles that could possibly survive in such an environment are ultra-mainstream ones like Jesus and the rare nationalistic fervor-inspired one like Belgrade; the vast majority of other highly worthy articles, which would have gotten a chance to be AIDed otherwise, will randomly happen to get 4 votes instead of 5 some weeks and be immediately eliminated. Terrible idea. Moreover, new nominations tend to take a week or two at least to build up some support, and midway-supported articles tend to go through a small "dry spell" because they're surrounded on both sides by the rest of the nominees; those are survivable at 4 votes, but often won't be at 5, for articles that deserve, and would otherwise have gotten, AID support. If there are 4 separate users, 4 separate talented, involved, dedicated Wikipedia editors supporting the article in question, for every week the article's been on the list, that's vastly more than enough than should be necessary to give the article another few days on the list! -Silence 06:30, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This argument could be, and was used when we voted on whether or not to raise the threshold to 4 votes a week. The only problem it would cause if we raise it to five at the current moment would be that a massive number of nominations would be taken down. However, may I remind you that that is the purpose of raising the bar. Otherwise we have way too many nominations. However, once the number has settled down again, things will go back to normal. We might end up having only 5-6 nominations going past the first week, yes, but that also means one of those 5 or six will almost definitly be choosen for AID in the coming week. That means the nomination to AID is only 1-2 weeks of wait, better then a 2 month wait we are currently experiencing. --Steven 14:03, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

text: May be, we can fix a limit of e.g. 25 articles. If there are already 25 articles in the list, there is no hard and fast requiremnt to nominate another article.  Shyam (T/C) 13:29, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree to this. However, I strongly oppose the idea of 2 articles per week, we tried that idea, and it failed miserably. As for Silence's comment, this project is a Improvement drive, not a page for people to put up their articles for 2 monthes and we'll fix it up kind of thing. They have projects like that already. The point is, most articles are on the nomination list for WAY TOO LONG. If we don't raise the bar, the list will just keep on getting longer unless we imply a limitation. --Steven 16:00, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleaning up AID 

message: Could we shorten the "Article Improvement Drive" section that appears in the community portal  (by removing the picture and leaving just one paragraph) to include the Wikipedia:Article assessment project? CG 19:03, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree with this decision. The AID is recieving less attention as it is currently, removing the picture would just make us disappear completely. --Steven 22:34, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

text: If you mean Wikipedia:Article assessment then you shouldn't say Wikipedia:Article assessment project. It seems like a glorified WP:PR. Also I don't see the connection. Addition of this new thing does not imply a need to shorten an older one. --MarSch 11:26, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  In the community portal 

message: 10 days ago User:Lethe removed votecount vrom headings without discussing he move before that, so  it had to be reverted since the AIDbot can't cope with the new format. Well, I'll be returning from my wikibreak in a week or two and will be able to spare some time to mess with the bot, so I think that now is the time to put the issue on the vote, so I cat adapt the bot if the community decides that we don't want the votecount in the headings. --Dijxtra 10:49, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess. We have most of the maitenance voting already. (^'-')^ Covington 23:30, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vote #6: Removing votecount from headings 

message: Hi,
As far as I see, very few people vote properly and make all the necessery changes in numbers and dates while voting. Is there any user who's job is to oversee the voting proces? Because, this looks quite chaotic and only vote counts are relatvely valid. --Ante Perkovic 06:05, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Does anybody oversees the voting? This looks kind of chaotic!