Wowpedia talk:Projects/Archive1

Votes
Add your vote below the appropriate heading.

Maintaining project participants list
From my past (and what should be current) experience maintaining a list of community team members, maintaining an up-to-date list is difficult task. I would suggest maintaining the list via the category mechanism.

So, if I want to join the Lore project, I would apply to join at Lore project/Signup or something and when my application was approved, all that would have to be done is put &#91;&#91;Category:Lore project members&#93;&#93; on my user page. If I wanted to leave the project, I might put a blurb on Lore project/Retired and just remove the category from my user page.

Also, if we wanted to indicate a project leader or leaders, they would just put &#91;&#91;Category:Lore project members| &#93;&#93; and that would bump their name to above the A in the category list.

Does that make sense? -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:16 PM PDT 4 Oct 2007
 * Personally? No need for any applications. Just sign up. And an entire page for Retired is just silly. --Sky (t · c · w) 01:21, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but sometimes it's nice to know who was interested in a topic at one time to maybe lure them back. Having an application process is optional, but if I started a project, I might not want just any bozo making changes in the name of the project. If you have too open a process, you get like wikipedia where they have annoying revert bots lurking around because they didn't restrict enough. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 6:39 PM PDT 4 Oct 2007
 * A category for users to add themselves to the project is a neat idea. As for signups, I think that might be up to the individual projects, with some guidelines on how to handle it. --Piu (?!) 02:24, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree with Piu, the application should be optional per project. I also like the category for users idea (and I like where the project organization is going, period :) -- 19:14, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Formal proposal
Before proposing this for official vote, details need to be worked out and the whole thing needs to be cleaned up. I've started that up. My convention is to list a suggestion but list up in the air things or second possibilities as italicized text below that bit. Feel free to add things like that, and we can discuss on the talk page here --Piu (?!) 02:16, 6 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I like what you added, one note though. I don't think all projects will necessarily need to categorize the articles that fall in their scope. For example, I think for the zone category project this would be of incredibly limited use and take a long time. I'm not sure how I should mention that on the page though, I just want it to be clear that it isn't *required* that a project categorize all it's article talk pages as being part of that project. --


 * It would depend on the project and it's goals. The article tag and categorization is meant for projects that are always ongoing, so it would make sense for a more generalized "Zone project." I took this idea mainly from wikipedia projects. Go to any article talk page and you're likely to find a project header. --Piu (?!) 02:51, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Deleting inactive projects
What's a good time period for determining if a project is inactive and should be put up for deletion? Or is deleting any project a bad idea? How about archiving dead projects at an inactive projects page, rather than deleting?
 * How bout one month then it gets marked "inactive." The project directory will distinguish active projects from inactive. I'd rather see editors adopt abandoned projects that are good ideas than have then deleted and lose all the work. Deleting should be done if a project has no hope of resurrection (i.e. it's scope is out of date).  Merging is also a possibility if a project with a similar scope exists. --Piu (?!) 20:34, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Project signups
Guidelines on how projects should accept new members? Leave it open for anyone to come and go? How about removing inactive members? How about selecting leadership per project?


 * Hmmm, I personally think applications would be a waste of time, but I think that if a specific project wants to use them, than they should be free to do so.


 * As for leadership, I'm not sure if I like it or don't. It's sort of an anti-wiki idea, but it could be useful in this context. If it was used, the people who start the project would probably be the leaders to begin with, but it would really be up to everyone working on the project who the leaders were. Since the leaders would have no more wiki-power than the normal project members (unlike admins vs normal users), the project group could basically decide to pick a new leader at any time.


 * As far as inactive members go, they would have to give permission upon joining for the group to remove the category from their user page if they are deemed inactive (that solves the "don't touch other people's user pages without permission" rule). If there was a group leader, this responsibility could fall to them, or just be agreed upon by the active members. -- 17:52, 6 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Shouldn't be too rigid. If people are constantly worrying about rules, they won't get anything done :) 18:24, 6 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree that projects should be as open as the wiki itself. Just putting your name down and jumping in with some editing should be good enough for most people. --Piu (?!) 19:04, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Creating new projects
How to start a project? Pre-approval, or free for all?
 * I reworked the Starting a new project section to make it easy to start up a new project. I'm trying to minimize red tape while at the same time not make work for administrators.  The basic idea is let people make their own projects, and if it violates too many guidelines, it gets deleted. Approval processes and requirements to even start up just creates more work for everyone. --Piu (?!) 20:30, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Example project name
I'm thinking "XXX" might not be the best choice ... 00:32, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, probably a bad idea. Aside from the obvious, you never want your examples to rely on red links. I was gonna replace examples with an existing project, but there's a chicken and egg problem there. --Piu (?!) 02:15, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The Wowpedia:Zone category project exists - I started it up using the guidelines we had so far, since confusion regarding that project was one of the things that led to this. -- 03:02, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Final Draft
I'd like to finish this up and get a final draft put up for vote. I did some more cleanups and need some more eyes for errors, copyedits, and ironing out any unclear parts. Also, I clarified some details that weren't there before so give it a read and post any problems. --Piu (?!) 03:31, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * What I didn't see. What are you going to do when people edit pages supposedly under the domain of a project without signing on to the project 11:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Honestly I don't think it will matter. If they are editing things contrary to the project, then they should be asked to stop or to discuss the changes with the project team. If they are basically doing what the project members are, they could be asked to sign on to the project. If it is a one-time edit, no action needs to be taken in my opinion. -- 21:13, 15 October 2007 (UTC)


 * As long as it is not mandatory to join a project I don't see a problem. To me this whole thing smacks of people laying claim to articles and being the authority when it comes to them being correct - which is very much anti-wiki.


 * You're right, it's certainly not necessary to join a project to edit the related articles. Article ownership is very un-wiki, that's why I added the bit up front that projects aren't meant to assert authority over a set of articles, just provide a place to get together and collaborate. It's possible an article can fall under multiple projects, so it wouldn't make sense to give one group control. --Piu (?!) 02:53, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * The purpose of the projects are for organization and information. The reason this whole thing got started (or at least one of the pushes for it) was due to someone not knowing about a project currently underway and changing things back. It wasn't that the people working on the project had authority, and the person who was out of the loop indeed agreed with the project once they were aware of it - they just thought the changes the group had made deviated from the norm, when in fact they were working to change the standard. There was no way previously for people to learn about the things others are working on, but now the project pages can serve as a place of communication. I think this should in fact improve the group-mindedness of the wiki - because someone is working on changes to a group of articles instead of just one, it is hard to have discussions because there is no talk page that connects all of these articles. Now there will be. -- 04:32, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

The Department of Redundancy Department is after you!
The link for 'project directory' in 'Finding Projects' links in the same page to the section 'Project Directory', which refers one to Wowwiki projects category... which is a link that's in the first 'Finding Projects' section. I'm dizzy now... --Azaram 05:18, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yup, completely redundant. Jiyambi removed the whole Finding Projects section, which cleans it up nicely. --Piu (?!) 00:06, 11 October 2007 (UTC)