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Zeppelin FAR

Zeppelin has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:01, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Cabinet Merkel

Currently rated as top-class but as a stub. I think it could be rated higher, but if not the article will need expansion. Comments? Agathoclea 16:12, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

First some preliminary remarks:
  • At the moment, this article contains almost the same content as Cabinet of Germany, to which Bundesregierung also redirects. This presents the problem that redundant information has to be kept consistent. I can see the argument for a separate article (as noted in the history) but I wonder if this article should be merged into Cabinet of Germany until such time as there is a change of chancellor, at which time it could be reinstated as a historical record, which could then be expanded to include a historical assessments of Merkel's chancellorship. If the article is retained, I think it should be renamed "Merkel cabinet". "Cabinet Merkel" sounds French to me (not to mention wine labels!).
  • I also wonder if there should be a different article on the Bundesregierung (or if it should redirect elsewhere), i.e the executive branch in Germany ("government" as the term is used in parliamentary democracies).
  • If both articles are retained, Cabinet Merkel presumably should include only such details as relate specifically to the Merkel cabinet, as opposed to the current Cabinet of Germany (from time to time).
Having said that, I think the article could perhaps be upgraded to Start. As regards expansion possibilities (of one of the two articles), perhaps these could include things like
  • the coalition agreement,
  • the discussions within the coalition ("intragovernmental opposition"?) and
  • the policies pursued by the cabinet
(with all the problems involved in discussions of very recent history).--Boson 19:09, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Assessment requests

Please watchlist the assessment page and answer to the assessment requests there. Can we improve this page or process so that the requests don't get lost? Kusma (討論) 14:21, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Start versus B class : providing feedback to authors using some new switches (live test running in Mainz task force articles)

A problem I see in our current assessment process is that the boundary between Start- and B-class is not very well-defined. That makes the rating not very useful to article authors, who do not get feedback what they should do to improve the article. Start-class is defined as "weak in many areas", and it would be nice if we could at least tell the author one of the areas in which we think the article is weak (otherwise they might feel the rating is an insult to their nicely written article) However, we do not have many people who review and assess articles, and so I think we need an easy and quick checklist for B class status. One such checklist exists at the Military history project, and they have implemented switches in their template {{WPMILHIST}} that correspond to the checklist.

I have adapted their idea in our template. As this is a somewhat major change, I have only implemented in the articles that belong to the Mainz task force so the changes are easier to revert. I have also not fixed our assessment scale yet, but link to the Military history scale for the moment. The template uses the following five switches (I renamed them from those the Military history people use; I would like to hear comments on whether these names are reasonable):

  • Bref, set to yes if the article has appropriate inline citations, no otherwise
  • Bcov, set to yes if the article reasonably covers its subject, no otherwise
  • Bstr, set to yes if the article structure seems okay (headings etc.), no otherwise
  • Bgra, set to yes if the grammar of the article is okay, no otherwise
  • Bsup, set to yes if the article has decent supporting material (images, external links etc.), no otherwise

If an article meets all five criteria but is not B-class, it is put in Category:Potential B-Class Mainz articles. If an article is rated as B-class but fails to meet one, it is put in Category:B-Class Mainz articles needing review.

Some examples for the new switches in action can be seen at Talk:Anna Seghers, Talk:Mainz Cathedral, Talk:1. FSV Mainz 05, and Talk:Deutschhaus Mainz.

If there is no significant opposition to the use of these switches, I would like to adapt them for the whole Germany project (and move them out of the Mainz box into the assessment box). Of course I'll delete the test categories for Mainz, I am just using the task force articles for a live demonstration of what I think we should do. Thoughts or improvements would be much appreciated. Kusma (討論) 12:28, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

It seems those changes have been added to all of the project banners, wheter they have anything to do with Mainz or not. Additionally it has added Auschwitz concentration camp to Category:B-Class Mainz articles needing review. Start-class articles which need attention, maps, or images have had these requests moved outside of the banner itself.
Apart from those technical problems, I think this is a great idea. I think it would be better, however, if the fourth criterion covered language in general not only grammar.--Carabinieri 12:37, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
I think I fixed it. The change is on the standard project banner, but was supposed to be in the part active only for Mainz (damn misplaced }}). I'll rewrite the project banner sometime soon (based on the clear and nice code in the MILHIST template), it is rather confusing ATM. Kusma (討論) 12:47, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Language instead of grammar probably works. Could be renamed to Blan=yes if the language is decent (we are not demanding brilliant prose, though, that is for FAs only). Kusma (討論) 12:50, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Technical problems might still be visible for a couple of minutes since "The job queue length is currently 158,532". Kusma (討論) 13:06, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
That's a very nice idea, I'm looking forward to its final implementation. --doco (☏) 14:00, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
There are still some things we should think about before we go ahead with a project-wide rollout. The most important is the naming of the parameters. In {{WPMILHIST}}, they are called B-Class-1 through B-Class-5. I didn't like these unintuitive names and therefore replaced them by the not really intuitive abbreviations above. The advantage is that the parameter names are a bit more descriptive; the disadvantage is that we can't simply copy the MILHIST B assessment. (This might be an advantage though - we should check whether the article has improved since the MILHIST assessment anyway). An advantage of unnamed parameters is that we can slightly re-scope them without renaming (like the discussed change of "grammar" to "language" above). Kusma (討論) 09:02, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
With the goldfish memeory that I have, I'd prefer named params. Agathoclea 09:48, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Could someone besides me have a look at Category:Start-Class Mainz articles and try to use the new switches there? That should give us more experience whether they make sense and how we need to fix them. Kusma (討論) 15:26, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Before we implement this project-wide, I would like to discuss how strict we want the referencing criterion to be. We must fight the temptation to be too strict and should not approach the GA criteria too much (incidentally, the GA and FA criteria are getting close in practice). So maybe we should change the referencing criterion to "includes sources and reasonably references all major points"? Kusma (討論) 07:45, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
Only just saw this thread - I recently did the same changes to the {{WPFC}} banner for WP Former Countries and I'm very happy with how it's been working so far. I like your idea for a potential-B-class category, that's something not done with the WPMILHIST banner. With regards to citation, your suggested changes make sense - very strict requirements for referencing should be in place for GA/FA articles, not B. Unlike you, I kept the B-Class-1,... names because I felt that the numbered list in the banner matches the parameters sufficiently (and that I was too lazy to change them). A further thing: do you have clear boundaries for separating Stub-class and Start-class (apart from the presence of Stub templates)?- 52 Pickup 11:16, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Excellent to see some more discussion about this :-) I think that once we get to implement this project-wide (I have been busy with non-Wikipedia things recently; others are welcome to take the initiative on this), we should also use the standard naming convention for the switches. Once there are a couple more projects using this syntax, perhaps we can get Outriggr to add this to his amazing JavaScript (see User talk:Outriggr/metadatatest.js) to make it easy to use. About Start-class and Stub-class: well, if it's no longer Stub-class, the stub template should be removed, so I think the criteria for stub class should be more or less those for tagging as a stub. Kusma (talk) 11:41, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
That script was new to me - thanks for bringing it up! I can have a go on the banner if you like. Do you want to break up these assessments by sub-project to? That is, do you want Category:B-Class Mainz articles needing review, and simlar ones for Munich etc? That will have an effect on the complexity of the template code. - 52 Pickup 11:11, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
I think we should reduce the complexity of the template code. I am not even sure that we need the importance switches for the task forces / subprojects. The current code of {{WikiProject Germany}} is amazingly ugly and hard to understand; it probably needs a complete and clean rewrite based on ideas of the {{WPMILHIST}} and similar well-written complex templates. That is especially true if we want to extend the idea of task forces and subprojects; if I had an arbitrary amount of time, we'd already have a "German Democratic Republic task force". I also think there could be sufficient interest for a "Transport in Germany" section including all the rail stations and autobahns, and I'm sure that somebody will want to start a Nazi Germany group. So if you rewrite the template (I encourage you to do so), I suggest to try to reduce the horrible spaghetti code and write a new, clean and extensible template. (Please do so in a sandbox first; changing the main template often will cause the servers to melt, as it is transcluded more than 15,000 times). Kusma (talk) 11:20, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
No problem. The WPMILHIST banner do not break up ratings and importance across task force - and the WPFC version doesn't have importance at all. I'll put the test version at Template:WikiProject Germany/test and play with it there. - 52 Pickup 11:42, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Morgenthau Plan

This article appears to lack neutrality; it relies heavily on a single book and is filled with original interpretations of primary sources. Someone with a sound knowledge of the immediate aftermath of WW2 in Germany needs to take a good look at it.--Nydas(Talk) 14:14, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Third Reich Daggers

I noticed there wasn't anything on wikipedia about the Daggers and Bayonets of the third reich 8thstar 21:46, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Assessment of recondite articles

Are there any guidelines on how to assess articles on recondite subjects? I thought perhaps the WP 1.0 editorial committee might have considered the question. I am thinking, for instance, of articles about mediaeval figures about whom very little is known. For instance, at first glance, I would rate Charles, Archbishop of Mainz and Eike von Repgow as Stub Class on the basis of the amount of information. However, though both are very notable, very little is apparently known about them. What does one do when an article has less than 10 lines but that is more than any other encyclopedia and apparently sums up anything that is known about the subject? Once style, references, etc. have been perfected, one could argue for any rating between "Stub" and "A".

A slightly different question arises for German subjects, where more is known, but Wikipedia still has more than any English encyclopedia, possibly more than any German encyclopedia. If many important aspects are missing, should an article be rated Start Class, even if it is more comprehensive than the most other prestigious encyclopedias (which may have nothing at all on the subject).

I suspect Wikipedia has a lot of articles classified as stubs that contain more information than any other English language encyclopedia.

I am asking this now because I have generated a list of about 100 articles that are listed as unassessed for WP:GER and also for WP:Biography, hoping to kill two birds with one stone. Someone has already asked a similar question at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography/Assessment#hort, sparse, but complete articles 

 --Boson 01:05, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
Well, it takes someone knowledgeable to make the decission that the article reflects the public knowledge about the subject and then move it up accourdingly. A drive-by tagger wil not be able to do that. 07:34, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
If the article makes clear that nothing more is known about its subject (ideally mentioning others who have noticed that), I don't think there's a problem with rating it as a "B" (see also my discussion above about the criteria for a B rating). In particular, shortness and stubbiness are two different things -- an article about a person or object of note where nothing much is known can be short but complete. Better ratings than "B" should be given out through some sort of community / peer review kind of process anyway (I'm busy IRL at the moment, but hope I'll manage to do something about that here in the next couple of months). It will be good to have verifiable sources that say nothing more is known than what is in the article, though (for example, I can provide a citation that claims that no picture of Andreas Joseph Hofmann exists, so nobody will be able to complain about the lack of a picture once everything else has reached GA or FA level). Kusma (討論) 12:12, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

The so-called "Third Reich"

Could it be, that this project is an advertising campaing for N-Germany and its products? Habibie 22:48, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes. Content of the project seems imho to be dominated by male militarists. And if it is not obvious by the "taste" of their articles it should be explicitly noted whether "it is the intention to glorify the Nationalsocialist regime" or not. 08:19, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I just deleted content of "Waffenfarbe" completely! Is it something specific? Is it of any information? Is it useful? This is not vandalism! It's not a joke! Take care of what all this is about! It's of no use to have a word (topic) like "Hitlerjunge" in a contemporary encyclopedia. It was a topic for Brockhaus-Encyclopedia-Editors in 1936! Habibie 08:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Bot's just reinvented the page! So don't worry. But: the page's not a stub - it's a shit! No matter what language an encyclopedia is written in. Suggestion: put all this shit under a topic like the so-called "Third-Reich".Habibie 09:01, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
The articles aren't about the German words, but about the English terms for German topics that happen to be borrowed from the German words. If a German word isn't an English name for an encyclopedic concept, we don't have an article on it, but if it is, we do. --Delirium 09:55, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Which English dictionary explains "Waffenfarbe" as an English term? In which edition did that happen? I'm just very very uncertain. Could it be the Britisch didn't mark their vehicles until they seen it on German cars and considered that as an innovative act? Habibie 10:26, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Don't write articles about German words, when it's merely words! I agree. ... Habibie 10:35, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Possibly it is a book behind it written in HTML? Wikipedia as a platform for documentary books ... mmh. Don't we have the book German Military in the Wikibooks already? Couldn't we put it there?

Well, Wikibooks isn't a replacement for Wikipedia. Any notable concept should also have a Wikipedia article, even if it's only notable within a particular field of research. As for Waffenfarbe, it's not in the dictionary because it's used only in the context of military history. However it is pretty frequently used in English by military historians, as you can find if you search for the term on Google Books. --Delirium 20:08, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Thank you. What is the inter-relation between the two Wikis? Is it a completion like "try wikibooks if you don't find it here". I'd think there must be a conceptual difference. I'd think for example HowTos (like "How to tune a guitar") are conceptually a matter for a book in wikibooks. (same with "How to distinguish German soldiers and vehicles according to their colour") Habibie 23:06, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Joseph Goebbels FAC

Joseph Goebbels is up for nomination, but no one seems to be doing much about it. There's been a few comments and an objection to the nomination, but I don't feel it's entirely justified. In any rate, it's very general. Just really "more footnotes", and as I'm concerned the article is well-cited already. I tried my best to conjure up a lead, but I'm no Goebbels expert, so someone needs to look it over.

My personal opinion is that the article is of surprisingly high standard and contains no noticeable controversies. The only thing keeping me from giving it outright support is the length (around 50k should not be a problem) and the fact that no one with any in-depth knowledge about Goebbels has provided it with a blessing.

This is a really worthwhile nomination. Your assistance would be invaluable.

Peter Isotalo 07:49, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Busy, help needed

I have been pretty occupied with real life stuff recently, and haven't had much time to devote to the project. Can somebody else try to keep our to do list (transcluded on many talk pages; new members usually get to see this) and the requests page up to date? Any help would be great! Kusma (talk) 19:54, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Categorisation of places by district?

I notice that according to the Project divisions section, you have a categorisation dept... seems a tad redlinked, though, so I'll just spam this page for now.

A number of länder seem to have very large numbers of "places" articles, and by and large these don't appear to be categorised at any finer-grained geographical level. There are some kreis categories, though: what would the feeling be about adding these systematically? Alai 04:22, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Good idea. We should actually have a task force / department / whatever for the districts and municipalities (several thousand independent municipalities do not even have articles); they should also make sure everything is neatly categorized in consistent Kreis categories. Kusma (talk) 07:27, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Just as well I mentioned this now, then, rather than in several thousand article's time! I've noticed Bavaria looks especially "full", I'll probably start there. Eponymous district categories in Category:Districts of Bavaria, with the district articles in there currently moved into those? What about categories at the Regierungsbezirk level? Alai 13:57, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
FYI, there was a discussion about adding automatic categorization in the Infobox German Location, see Template talk:Infobox German Location#Categories: Cities/Towns/Villages in (state). I think it's not in a concluding stage yet, but it may save you/us some work. Regierungsbezirk level may be a nice idea, but several large states (Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, Brandenburg, Thuringia) don't have that (anymore). Markussep 15:36, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I meant specifically Bavarian regions: as I understand it, most of the states never had them, several have abolished them recently, and one plans on doing so soonish (leaving just three others that do). Infobox auto-categorisation seems like a good plan to me, at least until such time as yet-finer categories are desired. Alai 16:13, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Baden-Württemberg seems to be going the same way. I've proposed splitting up its stub category by region, you might likewise want to consider adding regional and/or district "permanent" categories. Alai 15:18, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Also related to this, please see this bot request. If you've any objection to these being populated from the infoxes and nav templates (or voluble enthusiasm for it), please comment there. Alai 04:52, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

OK, I'm just about ready to start this. Does anyone have any particular preference between the likes of Category:Munich (district), vs Category:Munich district (etc, etc)? Likewise for the region-levels cats. Parenthical disambiguation in categories seems a bit pointless unless the root phrase isn't a natural one, but some people seem to insist on following the main article precisely. Alai 03:30, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Getting back to this, I'm still interested in doing this within the infobox. The original idea was to break it up into "Cities/Towns/Villages in (state)" since that could be done by the infobox with little fuss. Doing it at a district level would IMO be too difficult for the infobox to do, so for that you'll probably need a bot. - 52 Pickup 22:04, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Support Germany-article for Today's featured article !

Please comment at Today's featured article for this proposal. Lear 21 14:33, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

It will be on the Main page April 7. Kusma (talk) 15:25, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

U-Bahn's in Germany

Is there any consensus about how an article should look regarding U-Bahn stations in Germany? Kingjeff 23:52, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

any changes you have in mind? Agathoclea 19:04, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if there is any. After looking at this one and this one I figured there wasn't anything much in any other ones. Kingjeff 23:46, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

There are some articles that have more info - if the lack of content is what you are querying. There is a lot of information out there, but I have not yet gotten around to include it. Agathoclea 09:05, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Translations from de-wiki and GDFL issues

A subject we have talked about in the past. User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Translation_under_GFDL sheds some more light on the matter. Agathoclea 19:04, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Probably Jimbo is right that the source looks ugly on the article itself, and a decent edit summary in the history should be sufficient. However, I do not really feel enlightened about the correct interpretation of the GFDL. Kusma (talk) 19:57, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Winfried Hassemer

I am currently writing an article for Winfried, and I have a photo of him, but I don't know how to enter it onto the article. Help? StarWarsGirl 18:49, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Project tag on Talk:Karlovy Vary

Following the recent acrimonious failed proposal to rename the article to Carlsbad, User:Darwinek added a Project Germany tag to the talk page here, which has been reverted & is now being argued about, with some claiming the town is sufficiently "related to Germany" to be covered. I notice the project has not even tagged Alsace - is there a Project policy on what geographical areas are covered by it? Johnbod 14:41, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

From the project's main page: "This project covers the creation and editing of articles related to the nation of Germany, its cities, counties, geography, transportation, culture, history and so on. It aims to expand Wikipedia's resources on Germany in a fair and accurate manner." I agree with Balcer's rationale for removing the tags here. Olessi 15:14, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for that & comments by various eds on that page. Johnbod 21:08, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
The tag should ramain until the consensus is finalized. There is a big conversation on this on the talk page. Kingjeff 21:34, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Putting a Germany WikiProject tag on an article about a city that is currently in a country different from Germany serves no real purpose other than inciting edit wars. There is no need for us to include Vienna in the project although it was a German-speaking city in the Holy Roman Empire (in fact, the political center of Catholic Germany) unless we want to make it our primary aim to annoy Austrians. Let's do something productive instead. Kusma (talk) 07:50, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

{{Gerwelcome}}

I created a specialised welcome message for new users who contributed to Germany-related topics. Don't forget to subst it: {{subst:Gerwelcome}}. —KNcyu38 (talk • contribs) 13:01, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Amelie Beese

I've wikified the Amelie Beese article to the best of my ability, but it still needs properly referenced citations. I have this strange feeling that I'm posting this in the wrong place, but this is the only place I can think of to make sure the to-do list gets updated. --Leopold III 20:52, 4 April 2007 (UTC)Leopold III

Bilateral relations discussion

I would like to invite you all to participate in a discussion at this thread regarding bilateral relations between two countries. All articles related to foreign relations between countries are now under the scope of WikiProject Foreign relations, a newly created project. We hope that the discussion will result in a more clean and organized way of explaining such relationships. Thank you. Ed ¿Cómo estás? 18:50, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Naming conventions

Hello there! I would like to start a discussion about naming conventions for German municipalities and locations that share the same name. I have placed some questions to discuss here. I would be happy if anyone of you shared your opinions.

Daranios 16:34, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Berlin article

Members of this project may like to monitor the Berlin article. It seems that one user has assumed ownership of the article and swiftly reverts many good faith edits. - 52 Pickup 11:13, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Hello. The categorization taskforce is trying to find WikiProjects interested in using the bot of Alai to identify Germany-related stub articles which do not currently have a category (besides the stub category of course). If the project is interested, we could create something like Category:Uncategorized Germany-related stubs (amounting to roughly 450 articles) which could then be categorized by people knowledgeable in the subject, thus reducing the risk of improper categorization. Please let us know on the taskforce's talk page if you're interested. Cheers, Pascal.Tesson 00:33, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

As there was one positive response (at the cat-proj page), and no objections, I've created Category:Uncategorised German articles, and populated it from the first 50 articles on my list. If this proves useful and unproblematic, I can finish doing so. Alai 04:59, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

I see they're steadily shrinking... Should I go ahead and populate with the rest? Alai 02:32, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes please. I've linked to this conversation in the newsletter, so maybe some more help is on its way. Kusma (talk) 06:29, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
OK, populating now. Alai 03:52, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Excellent. Now we only need a categorization expert to write Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/Categorization... Kusma (talk) 11:09, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
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