Wikipedia talk:Maintenance collaboration of the week

message: I've heard some of the other-language projects occasionally declare periods of collaboration on particular backlogs.  Several people on en seem to have proposed that we do such a thing, but not much has come of these suggestions.  Our wikification backlog seems like a good candidate, since it's gotten quite large, and almost anyone can participate, whether or not they're familiar with article content.  So, would anyone object if I added this box to the top of the Community Portal for the appropriate period?  Feel free to improve it if you like. -- Beland 04:05, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I'm starting Wikipedia:Maintenance collaboration. See you there. Maurreen (talk) 04:02, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikification week? 

message: I don't think it's necessary to have nominations "expire" if they don't get enough votes.  If a maintenance backlog has been cleared (which seems unlikely), it can be de-listed, either during voting or when the end of the week comes around.  Expirations make maintaining the nominations page a lot more work, and people have to keep re-nominating things that need to get done. Maintenance projects are usually important, but neglected, and not very popular (and thus attract few advocates). Given the relatively small number of maintenance categories (compared to say, the number of articles) I don't think there will be a very long list of them.  Basically, we have what's in :Category:Wikipedia maintenance and what's on Template:Active Wiki Fixup Projects.  I'll tweak the project page to make the system that we simply chug through the nominees, in order of popularity.  Winners are of course to be removed.  I would even support automatically re-nominating them (starting over with zero votes) if they still have more than a week's worth of work on them after their time is up. -- Beland 23:32, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: OK. I like your changes. Maurreen (talk) 03:09, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Voting method 

message: Yay, we helped wikify about 500 articles, clearing about a quarter of the backlog in that category! -- Beland 00:30, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  First week a success 

message: (I moved this nomination here because this page has been emptied, but the associated status updates shown below are still relevant. -- Beland 00:44, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Nominated August 3 2005
; Support:
#Maurreen (talk) 07:40, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikipedia:Cleanup/September

message: Would it be possible to create a template for the current collaboration that displays just the name of the current project, as is done with Template:Cotw1, so that pages that don't wish to call the full banner can still display the current topic without having to manually update it every week? It would be most helpful, I think. — Your server has been MC MasterChef :: Leave a tip — 09:02, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Current collaboration template 

message: Looking at Wikipedia:Avoid self-references I suddenly got an idea. Why not make a project/collaboration out of creating :Category:Self-referencing templates, and then tagging all such templates (disputes, deletions etc) with:
 Category:Self-referencing templates
That way they would be easier to keep track of and manage. --Sherool 11:02, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Why would such a thing be useful? -- Beland 07:38, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Would this qualify as a possible maintenance collaboration? 

message: This collaboration has been a bit neglected lately.  I was thinking it might be better to have longer-term collaborations that focus on the most popular and most needy backlogs.  We could start with, say, the backlogs longer than 1 year or 1000 entries, and rank them by voting.  (I think I have a list of these, which I will post later.)  I think we might be able to be more productive if we focus on a specific goal, like eliminating a certain backlog or reducing it to a certain number of articles or a certain date.  Because we will be trying to make a larger effort on a long-term goal, I think we can do a little more publicity (like putting announcements on the "goings on" page, the VP, IRC, etc.) which will help us make more progress.
To transition, I'm thinking we can freeze voting on existing nominees, and schedule all of them for the traditional one-week run.  This will give these needy pages at least a little publicity, which will hopefully help them get attention while we are busy focusing on a smaller number of backlogs.
Sound good? -- Beland 19:01, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed procedural change 

message: I've updated the progress on the page, however didn't update :Wikipedia:Neglected articles because it is from a database dump 6 months old and the articles on there seem to already have had attention. I did update :Wikipedia:Articles requested for more than a year although the list was also updated 6 months ago, I don't know how to get more recent figures from :Wikipedia:Requested articles as it's seperated into several sub-pages and not organised by date. —TheJC (Talk • Contribs • Count) 09:09, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Progress update 

message: This seems like it has been on wikify for several months. I'm thinking it would be good to get something different. Maybe once a month it could change to the next thing with the highest number. Thoughts? Maurreen 07:16, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Since no on objected, I tried to update the template, but it didn't work. Can anyone help? Maurreen 15:19, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I hate this template now. I had to try and edit this, found out that I had to edit another template, went to edit that, found I had to edit yet another template, found that that redirected to YET ANOTHER template, went to edit that, at which point I finally managed to change the current maintenance collaboration. Its actually Wikipedia:Maintenance collaboration of the week/current, which leads to another template, that needs to be edited to change the maintenance collaboration. I've changed it to articles to be merged, since its one of the largest backlogs (besides cleanup, that is), articles requested for over a year has lost its importance, and the three candidates I can think that are suitable are wikify, cleanup and merge backlogs. --Draicone (talk) 12:09, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Procedural change?

message: I just added a new goal to your page.  Enjoy!  --Xyzzyplugh 14:58, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikipedia:Transwiki log

message: I templated the section of the Community Portal with the summary of the Maintenance Collaboration (is it really still weekly?) so that you can update it easily. Currently it says you guys are still wikifying. You'll need to update it; I suggest a short paragraph on what exactly merging is, how to do it (appropriate links), and why it is important. The page is Wikipedia:Community Portal/Maintenance Collaboration—I'd put it at the bottom of the project page. It's a privilege to have a summary on the Community Portal; use it wisely.--HereToHelp 03:00, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Community Portal section

message: How about the Maintenance collaboration of the week be Articles lacking sources sometime soon.  There are over 20,000 articles tagged in that category and undoubtedly many more that are untagged.  This is a major problem for Wikipedia's goals and credibility. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 21:07, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggestion 

message: I'd like to propose :Category:Category needed. Since recent changes to the way bots send the pages to the category, it has grown extremely rapidly and is now over 20000 articles, despite huge efforts that allowed the full cleanup of the categories for August (~4000 articles) and September (~13500 articles). A COTW would probably be a big hit to the backlog and there is some hope that the backlog is growing artificially fast right now (because of the bots). Once the backlog is cleared (or close to it) I think that the current team of enthusiasts will be able to handle the normal flow. Thanks. Pascal.Tesson 17:47, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another suggestion for COTW 

message: I think it's a really bad choice to target Wikipedia:Articles requested for more than a year. Not that it wouldn't be nice but there's some definite evidence that some of these articles just cannot be written either because the topic is non-existent or non-notable, because no one has a clue what they are or because the title is too vague to make it clear what the specific request is. Clearing the (now less than a 100) remaining articles is a noble objective but it's also unlikely that a COTW will help. I'm a mathematician and even I would not dare attempt writing any of those 16 articles. Sometimes it's better to have no article than one that is not written by someone competent enough. If this does make it as the COTW I predict that this will only result in a dozen or so new articles and the opportunity to help more maintenance projects which have more needs will be lost. Pascal.Tesson 18:07, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia:Articles requested for more than a year was the "Maintenance collaboration of the week" some months ago if I remember right.  I'm beginning to wonder if this collaboration is abandoned as articles to be merged has been the "collaboration of the week" for more than a month. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs) 19:17, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: oh. :-) Pascal.Tesson 20:42, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Well, I can only stress that one reason why the articles to be merged has been it for many weeks is because there's still a backlog of over 8,000 articles to be merged (though I wish I knew the exact amount now). Radagast83 08:35, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  About next week... 

message: A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.
:– Sent on behalf of Headbomb. 03:11, 11 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  A new newsletter directory is out!