Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Archives/2012

FAC discussion on electing leadership

A discussion is underway at Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates, regarding electing leaders. Sorry, the discussion is long and heated and no simple section to send you, but see the whole page.

GOCE coordinator leadership and elections have been mentioned as one model to learn from. Appreciate any insights and participation.

(And this is not evil "canvassing". Please give whatever insights you have pro/con or expecially in terms of expanded learning. You can feel free to say what a bad guy TCO is too.  ;-))

TCO (Reviews needed) 20:03, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Heh, not so much "long" as "You'll go blind and insane if you try to read the whole thing" :) Where we are now is, User:Mike Christie has put up a poll to determine which of the multitudinous issues we're going to tackle first. At the moment, it looks like first up is going to be a discussion about the current FAC leadership, specifically User:Raul654. I don't think anyone has to worry that they're going to "miss out" if they don't track every edit; as each question comes up for voting, everyone will repeat the important points. My best guess for the section to keep your eye on if you don't want to miss a chance to vote (or not-vote) is WT:FAC#Leadership structure and current leadership. - Dank (push to talk) 21:06, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

... and then I realised that I didn't have to wade through this stuff, and the will to live came flooding back. The first difficulty I have is that, looking through the pages to do with featured content generally and FAC in particular, I could not find anything that objectively describes what the roles are and how people are appointed to them. What is your equivalent of our Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Coordinators? As some people have said at WT:FAC, it's difficult to discuss what kind of elections you want, unless you know what you're electing.

My second difficulty is that, although you don't have a clique in any formal sense, you end up with a de facto clique when a culture evolves in which the same few people back-answer one another time after time. What is your estimate of the ratio of the number of posts in that thread to the number of different editors who have made posts? It's very intimidating, you know.

Since you've pointed us there, and since I really don't want to dive into WT:FAC, please may I also say this. The featured content people do great work raising the quality of content they look at, but imho you're mistaken to lament that FA+GA is only around 0.1% of WP and that it needs to be raised. Here's why. People submit whatever subjects they like for FAC and GAN, and many of them are topics like films, television series, popular songs and albums, etc, for which any non-devotee could find out what they might want to know, just by googling to find the blogs and fansites. IMHO the most valuable parts of WP, or any encyclopedia, are those subjects where you can't find much of anything unless you can access a university library or a Jstor subscription. Everything in the tree of life comes into that category. For example, I'm fascinated by centipedes. If you follow that link, you see links to 13 families, of which all but two are redlinked. Click Scutigeridae and you see a family of 20 genera, all but two of which are redlinked. One of the two bluelinked is Scutigera, not very arcane since it was featured on the BBC's children's programme Deadly 60 last year. Click on that and you get redirected to one of its species, and not the one featured on the children's programme. As far as I know, Wikipedia doesn't yet even tell you how many Scutigera species there are, much less describe them. Now, filling such gaps would mean creating lots of stubs and start-classes that would have no prospect of getting further. But that would be great, because it would enhance the information content of Wikipedia, even if it would reduce the percentage of FA+GA. All I'm suggesting is that you FAC guys could be a little less contemptuous about content at lower levels of article assessment (some of which is of very high quality, by the way, but whose authors haven't bothered to jump through the hoops needed for badges of honour). --Stfg (talk) 10:46, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

You make lots of excellent points. I have two requests: that we take these one at a time (if anyone is interested) so that people are more likely to respond, and that if this simply becomes a rehash of WT:FAC, we take it to WT:FAC. You cut right to the bone of what's great and awful about communication on Wikipedia ... you can never be quite sure who knows what they're talking about, because it's deeply ingrained in our culture and policies not to tell people that they're spouting garbage. The most unpleasant thing about FAC is that this code of silence is weakest there ... and I can understand why, the level of provocation is higher, but it's still a shame, and doesn't fit well in the Wikipedian culture. - Dank (push to talk) 12:41, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Very fair. Dan or TCO, please do feel free to take any of what I wrote across to WT:FAC if it's better discussed there. I won't be watching, because the stress levels there are too high for me. But that doesn't matter: I've had my say and it's all I need. Thanks for hearing. --Stfg (talk) 12:52, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

• "some of which is of very high quality, by the way, but whose authors haven't bothered to jump through the hoops needed for badges of honour". Mmmm. Too bad there isn't a group of FAC escorts who could help people guide their noms through. No pun on the various meanings of "escort" by the way.–OneLeafKnowsAutumn (talk) 13:54, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Effects of drives, and strategy

I'm not sure if this had been raised before, but after having briefly looked at the main page's progress table, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that since September 2011, the net effect of bi-monthly drives has been negative. Only a 378-article improvement were made since then, versus the 583-article total increase during October and December. Compare this to earlier drives, during which more than 5624 articles were cleared while a net 1727 articles were added. I suppose that's a worrying sign for the Guild, as it suggests a lowering number of drive participants, and the reluctant mentality during the non-drive months, especially for those who have special requests (apart from the FAC department) since virtually nobody from the Guild was around to address them.

I've got a few comments about and a few suggestions for this issue. The most notable issue, for me, is perhaps the way the Guild increases its member-base; at the moment, is there even a way of increasing our member-base at all? I suppose this could be partially achieved through direct invitations with prospective GOCE members. To that end, somebody needs to create an invitation template, similar to this one, or just by posting a personal message on their talk page. Once a new editor joins the Guild, there needs to be a way of training them. GOCE "How to copy-edit" is a good start, although it may not be useful to those who'd like to participate in FAC copyedits. I believe communication is a vital aspect in creating an efficient and integrated group of people. So, why can't we start an IRC channel named #wikipedia-en-goce, and since I don't want it to turn out a failure like #wikipedia-en-milhist, it could be manned (preferably) permanently by the coords. This would present real-time communication between good copy-editors and new signups or those who have requests. These are only two of my ideas; I'd like to talk about them first before presenting the rest. --Sp33dyphil ©^hat_ontributions 22:54, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

By the way, what happened to all those users who logged more than 100,000 words during earlier drives? Have they disappeared?

This has been brought up a few times, and I think I even addressed it in the Guild's end-of-year newsletter ("Plans for 2012"). We're growing as a project, but our drives aren't as lively as they used to be. What we need to do is encourage all of our incoming new members to participate in our Backlog elimination drives. Somebody can watch the GOCE sign-up page, and whenever they see a new member, they welcome them to the Guild using the GOCE welcome. Perhaps we can change the welcome a bit to emphasize our drives more?

As for training, there's the mentorship program, but it's not yet in full swing. In my nomination statement on the elections page, and in the newsletter, I stated that I was planning on getting the mentorship program in full swing. I mentioned here that I was preparing a statement detailing my plans for the Guild, and mentorship and drive participation will be addressed in that statement. I plan on having the statement out by Thursday or Friday. Lastly, perhaps we could also emphasize mentorship (as well as our Backlog elimination drives) in the welcome message? As I said, I will go more into detail about this when I release my statement. Regards, The Utahraptor^Talk/_Contribs 23:41, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Speaking of ways to increase participation in the drives: I took the liberty of posting an announcement at the Community portal. I hope that's cool with everyone. Please take a look at it and change the wording if you like. Most of the text was inspired by Top 10 reasons to join the Guild of Copy Editors.

I'd be in favor of an IRC channel in which to sip electronic coffee while copy editing articles about manga characters and Elvis movies. There are times when being able to converse and get another opinion in real-time would be really helpful. Why did it tank at the Military History Project? How do we avoid the same mistake?

Let's not overlook fun. Maybe we could hold silly competitions during the non-drive months. It could help maintain a level of light-hearted participation and interest during that time. We could give out awards for finding (and correcting) the best Hilarious Statement, Word Salad, Ironic Picture Caption, Mistranslation, etc. All in good fun, of course. There may not be enough fodder for such a competition to work; I'm not sure. Read this post. Peace. Braincricket (talk) 13:58, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

The MIlHIST IRC channel failed since nobody goes on to provide 24/7 presence. I don't understand why it's there at all. I think there'll be more purpose of a GOCE IRC regarding real-time advice. --Sp33dyphil ©^hat_ontributions 23:33, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Last year I had made Template:GOCEinvite, but I guess it got lost since I never categorized the template with the GOCE tag (just did it now). Feel free to make changes to it or use it as you please. I'll pin it to the "GOCE templates" page shortly. --Tea with toast (話) 05:08, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Where are the archives?

I was looking at the archives here because I was involved in GOCE in 2009, but the archives begin in March 2010. Does anyone know what happened to the pre-March 2010 archives? Thanks. 15:04, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Archives go back to 2008. Here is this page as it was 200 edits ago, linking to all the old archives. Since then, someone has collapsed it in a way that doesn't provide for its expansion. Does anyone know how to make it expandable? --Stfg (talk) 16:17, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I remembered and was surprised to see them gone. Thanks for trawling through history and finding these. Truthkeeper (talk) 17:22, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

I have fixed it. Easy-peasy. Thanks for pointing this out, Truthkeeper. I think this is what you were looking for. --Dianna (talk) 17:47, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

RFC to make FA leaders elected, not appointed

An RFC is underway to consider a proposal to make the Featured Article leadership elected.

TCO (talk) 05:05, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Absense

I apologize for my semi-absense over the course of the past week or so. Something came up in RL that I had to take care of. Thankfully, it was nothing major, and I expect to return to normal editing tomorrow. I will also have my detailed statement of plans out tomorrow. Regards, The Utahraptor^Talk/_Contribs 01:11, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Question on the Language desk

Hi all, there's a question on the Language Ref Desk that is pure copyediting, just made for all of you. I thought some of you might like to take a look, and I for one would be very interested to see any of your replies. IBE (talk) 23:22, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Banners and their usage

I have raised a question on the drive page concerning banners and how they are being used. Chaosdruid (talk) 00:56, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Trial for FAC Requests page

At the top of the FAC Requests page, it says that the page is undergoing a trial. In the discussion that led to the page's creation, HJ Mitchell mentioned a month-long trial, but after a month no further discussion was made.

In my opinion, the FAC Requests page, although slow-moving, has proven to be beneficial to the Guild, and should be a permanent addition to the Guild. What does everyone else think? The Utahraptor^Talk/_Contribs 03:21, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

I agree. --Stfg (talk) 08:54, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

It's a good idea and I think we could do more with it, but I don't want to pull anyone away from the January copyediting drive. Comments are welcome now, though. - Dank (push to talk) 12:22, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

@Utahraptor. It is less than slow moving. I added a request on 20 Jan at which point there were 22 requests in front of it in the queue. There are still 22 today with no sign that any of them are being actively worked on. Seems to me that as a requester, I might be better off adding at the main list. SpinningSpark 19:02, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

• Not sure anyone is maintaining that page, since forex W.E.B. DuBois is already FA (so the request should be deleted). Ling.Nut3 (talk) 11:22, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting that. I've removed the request, as FAC examines prose very thoroughly. I've just checked through the whole list, and there are no other promoted ones just now. I've transferred two that are GANs to the main requests page. All the others are GA except: List of chronometers on HMS Beagle, which is currently C-class but aiming to become FL, and DNA nanotechnology, which is B-class but has received a FAC review encourging it to come back to FAC soon. I'm not sure if these were correct decisions: any comment please? --Stfg (talk) 14:07, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Copyright review?

Hi. :) Would you guys consider encouraging copy editors to look for signs of copyright violations before they begin their work, maybe at Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/How to? There would be three advantages to this: (1) it is relatively easy to find copy-pasting when it is "as placed." You just have to search for a couple of text strings and see what matches, or even run a duplication detector comparing the article to sources so precisely copied strings pop out; (2) it can save the copy editors a lot of wasted time if somebody finds out later, after their investment, that they were working on unusable base (I've made no secret of the fact that it really bothers me to see volunteer hours wasted refining something we can't keep. :/); and (3) it might avoid the copyright issue being missed because the content has been changed just enough that it is not as apparent to others.

I realize that many copy editors are already conscious of the issue, but I know that it's easy to develop tunnel vision when you're used to focusing on one task. (I remember once working on an article on the copyright problems board, I was about to mark it clear of copyright problems and return it to the wilds before I realized that - copyright problem or no - it was a massive BLP violation. I'm so used to looking for copying that I don't always even process what I'm reading. :D) --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 20:38, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi, Moonridden Girl. Thank you for your important reminder. I have added some instructions for detecting copyright violations to our Beginner's guide and placed a notice in our Ombox. Please feel free to edit the material if need be. --Dianna (talk) 05:49, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you so much, Diannaa! That's great. :) --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 12:31, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

Let's cut the cr...

...uft! (Well, what did you think I was going to say?)

Anyone who has taken part in a drive and tried to clear some of the longest-tagged articles will have noticed that a very high proportion of them are cruft of some kind. Quite often, multiple issues have been tagged since the Jurassic, but nobody has come back to try and do something about it. Those articles -- vanity articles, over-long in-universe plot summaries, etc -- are a real drag to edit, and I'm sure many copy editors lose interest in the face of such a depressing wall of rubbish. Meanwhile, both the requests pages are heavily backlogged, and work on them, which was going brilliantly in December, has come virtually to a standstill.

I suspect this wall of cruft is losing us contributors. So, for a couple of weeks, I've been trawling through the oldest months still to have articles tagged {{copy edit}}, and seeing if any can be removed. A couple have been sent to {{Rough translation}}, one copyvio investigation has been launched, and I've detagged about 10% of the rest (on the grounds that they need a complete rewrite, so why copy edit the pre-rewrite version?), putting {{GOCEreviewed}} on their talk pages instead. If anyone wants to know which ones, I'm keeping a list at User:Stfg/GOCEreviewed.

I hope this exercise will make future drives more enjoyable, but the trouble is, I'm only detagging about 10%, far less than the real amount of cruft. This is basically from timidity. An article is about an arguably notable subject, is justifiably tagged for copy edit in the sense that it certainly is badly written, so isn't that what we're here for? So then one leaves it tagged. But should one?

I'm tempted to suggest that if an article has been tagged with tags indicating a need for major (re)creation of content, such as inadequacy of references, tags such as like-resume, all-plot, etc, and empty sections waiting to be written, and if nobody is interested enough in the article to tackle the content problems after some length of time (6 months, say?), then maybe we shouldn't feel too obliged either, and unless a copy editor chooses to work on such an article, {{GOCEreviewed}} could be made semi-automatic. I've done a brain dump of the sort of things that might make us want to spurn an article (and what might not) at User:Stfg/GOCEreviewing; any comments on its talk page would be welcome.

What do you think? --Stfg (talk) 17:28, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Clearly a great start and a good idea. - Dank (push to talk) 19:46, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Sorry for not responding sooner. Unfortunately I do not have the editing time available any more to help out for many hours a day like I used to do. I was hoping to at some point begin pre-checking articles for copy vio and cruft concerns, and did do some of this during the January drive. Copy vios can be easy to spot (large blocks of unwikified text being dropped into the article on a single edit; prose of better quality than the rest of the article), but it is hella easier to find the source early on, before the material starts appearing in Wikipedia mirrors all over the internet. Unfortunately User:Coren and User:CorenSearchBot are MIA at present. Overall a Stfg has a good idea that would help manage the backlog and make better use of our only resource: the time of our volunteers. --Dianna (talk) 20:08, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, Stfg, you have identified part of the reason why I have not contributed as much in recent drives as I did in the past (although the largest reason is that I just don't have as much time anymore). I've been spending more of my copy editing time responding to request articles (many of which don't have a "copy edit" tag on them, so that doing them does not decrease the "tagged" articles in the backlog). These days I am less eager to even take a peak at the oldest tagged articles because I know of the high probability of coming across disaster articles. I would support any efforts to somehow get rid of the hopelessly-in-need-of-a-rewrite-(or-deletion) articles. --Tea with toast (話) 03:10, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

cleanup template

You might be interested to know that the {{cleanup}} template is being considered for deletion at WP:TFD. Bwrs (talk) 23:59, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and this has led to a small eruption(*) of people changing it to {{copyedit}} without changing the date, causing old monthly copyedit categories to be recreated. I'm re-dating them when spotted, but if anyone can think of an efficient way to get the message across ... --Stfg (talk) 01:15, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

(*) For anyone who likes those silly collective nouns: an eruption of drive-by taggers? --Stfg (talk) 01:15, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Clean-up and copy edit are actually not the same thing. Clean-up usually relates to sloppy formatting or wikification needs, whereas true copy editing involves only the prose. I have left a note at the deletion discussion page. Hopefully I don't sound too anal, he he. -- Dianna (talk) 06:26, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

(←) Now a request has been made at Template talk:Copy edit#Compatibility tweak to alter the parameters of the {{Copy edit}} template, saying "This will allow one to change {{cleanup}} (and any of a large number of other templates) to {{copy edit}} with less muss and fuss." User:Anomie has done that, without consultation here. We're going to get dumped on. The template is fully protected. Can we get this reverted, please? --Stfg (talk) 18:26, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

The template deletion discussion closed yesterday with no consensus to delete. Thank bog, as there are 26,085 articles requiring clean-up, dating back to 2007. Some eager tagger added the tag to over 7000 articles in August 2011 alone. No one seems to be working on this maintenance category, so Guild editors are reminded that we can be dealing with clean-up when we visit the article. I like to do everything possible to bring the article up to standards, even during copy edit drives.

Examples of possible clean-up (not an exhaustive list)

Clean up funky tables

Clean up old code and replace with wiki mark-up

Reduce over-linking (unlink common words and duplicate links)

Improve layout and section headers

Move pictures around for better appearance

Run the dashes, Advisor, and general formatting scripts:

importScript("User:GregU/dashes.js");
importScript('User:Cameltrader/Advisor.js');

--Dianna (talk) 19:32, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Where does one insert the 'importScript' code? --Greenmaven (talk) 05:33, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

You put it in your commons.js. You can do it yourself by following the instructions at User talk:GregU/dashes.js and at User:Cameltrader/Advisor. Or if you want me to install the scripts for you, I could do that. --Dianna (talk) 06:08, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

I will do it, (thanks) --Greenmaven (talk) 03:56, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Gerunds

I have noticed that it has become extremely common for the wrong pronoun to be used before a gerund. For example, searching "him being" returns nearly 4000 results. Have these become acceptable on Wikipedia, or should these be changed to "his being?" If they should be changed, could this be the task of a bot? (Not that I know how to make one.)14jbella (talk) 20:40, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

You're right, and I fear the language is evolving that way. Apparently it's called a "fused participle". The news clips on the BBC Red Button service have them about once every three sentences, which drives me bonkers! Is it possible to define the rules for a bot, so that it wouldn't generate too many false positives? Lacking a bot, I think it's good to change any instances you find that read poorly (i.e. most of them). By the way, you might like User:Tony1/Noun plus -ing. --Stfg (talk) 22:10, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

"John Doe was ungainly, due to being a robot" is almost workable, but very ugly. Are there even more horrible constructions that I haven't imagined? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:21, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Ah wait, so you're saying that "John Doe was ungainly, due to him being a robot" is the real problem? If so, isn't this the same sort of issue as the proliferation of "located off of" et cetera? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:23, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Same sort of issue in what way? (By the way -- "due to"? <g>) --Stfg (talk) 22:37, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

I hadn't thought about it, but after reading that guide, I realize it would probably be very difficult for a bot to detect these subtleties. 14jbella (talk) 02:51, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes. The Transitional fossil article has this: "While it is easy to imagine natural selection producing the variation seen within genera and families, ...". I suppose "producing" here is a gerund, but tagging 's on to "selection" would be awful, wouldn't it? Hey ho! --Stfg (talk) 12:31, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Copyright violation

Copyright violation is one of the most feared problems on Wikipedia. With the Guild, we have a large number of editors sifting through some of Wikipedia's worst and most overlooked articles, where many pieces of copyright-violating text are probably lurking. Copy editors who don't notice a problem might even leave the offending text in place while making the violation more difficult to detect. I realize that a thorough check for copyright violation is a laborious task, but could we at least ask drive participants to do something basic, like running articles through User:CorenSearchBot/manual before a copy edit? A. Parrot (talk) 20:41, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

I think that's a good idea, and it will help us clear the backlog faster, too. But I'm on record that we really ought to be getting some help with this rather than having to check every little thing ourselves; User:Mdennis (WMF) is checking into whether we can get some help from the WMF, from Amazon or from the publishers themselves. - Dank (push to talk) 21:41, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

I agree. The backlog is enormous here, and the smallest step that we can take to clear it - including merely running it through a bot - would be immensely helpful. Wer900 (talk) 18:16, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Urgent Copyedit Template?

I think it would be a good idea if the general articles needing copy-editing were segregated from the extremely bad ones. To these ends, there should be a parameter in the {{copy edit}} template which allows it to be tagged as a page in urgent need of copyediting. I think this will allow us to set priorities better and eliminate the most harmful pages before they are seen by too much of Wikipedia, before moving on to clearing the remainder of the backlog.

It is my hope that copy-editing can proceed with greater efficiency and will be better-targeted once this is done. Wer900 (talk) 18:44, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Urgent copy edit needed at Joseph Kony

I don't know how many of you are aware of this video about a war criminal who has played a part in abducting thousands of children and turning them into criminals, but the video has gone viral on facebook. Now I know wikipedia is not a soapbox/doesn't exist to right wrongs blah blah blah, but I think this is a special case. My request is this - after watching that video, the next destination for the millions who watch it will likely be the wikipedia page. Unfortunately, the article's prose is pretty poor. I've already started a copy edit but I'm currently in Tanzania operating from crappy internet cafes, and so I can't really get on with it. It would be great if an experienced copy editor/group of copy editors could head over there and finish the job.

Many thanks. Basalisk ^{inspect damage}⁄_berate 13:59, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately the article is not stable enough for a major copy edit right now (137 edits in the last 24 hours). I will try to at least clean up the lead --Dianna (talk) 23:23, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

 Done I was able to give the whole article the once-over. -- Dianna (talk) 23:54, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your help! Basalisk ^{inspect damage}⁄_berate 13:59, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

WT:FAC#Clerking

Would anyone be interested in clerking at FAC? The copyediting duties would be more or less up to you; one option would be to check some subset of new FACs against a checklist such as WP:Checklist. Ideas welcome here or at the link above. - Dank (push to talk) 18:52, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

No takers? Okay, another option is to just verify that requested copyediting changes have been made ... as needs to be done at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Battle of Radzymin (1920)/archive2. That's a good way to learn MOS, Chicago and Garner's, btw. - Dank (push to talk) 16:17, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

A Free Ride

Please have a look at this article for copy-editing. FA discussion is going on here. --SupernovaExplosion ^Talk 12:56, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Some comeents on the FAC indicate the need for a copy edit. It's already listed on the requests page. --Stfg (talk) 15:17, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Template:Culture of region

Template:Culture of region - There is an ongoing talk about the benefits and disadvantages of generic templats that produce redlinks pls see Template talk:Culture of region#Concerns.Moxy (talk) 15:32, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Analysis of spelling mistakes in WP vs. 'other' sites?

Hi,

I wonder if anyone can help me answer this question? http://osdir.com/ml/general/2012-03/msg31886.html

Cheers, --Dan Bolser (talk) 00:07, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Purely anecdotally, if a Wikipedia article has reached GA then I expect it has less than 25% chance of having any single glaring spelling error or typo in it. By contrast, when reading articles on the BBC News Website then I would estimate that in an equivalent amount of text there would be, on average, one or two glaring spelling errors or typos.

A quality broadsheet newspaper in the UK, for example The Times, these days manages only slightly better than the BBC News website, except on its front page and usually its lead editorials. (It used to be much, much better than this.) I'm not sure about its web content.

Having said that, the vast majority of Wikipedia articles are not at GA level or above, and in some of them, the writing is so bad as to be almost incoherent. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 00:26, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

I build lists of identified spelling errors using AWB typo fixing form time to time. I would expect 10s thousands but less than 100,000 out of 4 million articles. Obviously this is a limited subset of spelling errors (originally chosen to be "guaranteed" wrong but in the last few years expanded to merely "very very likely") so there will be more spelling errors. But the "glaring" errors, excluding using the wrong word, will mainly be caught. I could do a scan now and see. Rich Farmbrough, 22:33, 22 March 2012 (UTC).

I started a scan, it looks like regex-typo fixes are at the 50-100k level. Rich Farmbrough, 15:46, 26 March 2012 (UTC).

GOCE mentors needed

Hi everyone, I sadly had to change my status as a GOCE mentor to "busy" because that is the state of my life right now. This means that the only 3 mentors listed on the mentorship page are unavailable. I would appreciate other GOCE members who would like to come forward to help out here. I've had a few users seeking mentorship on my talk page, and I hate to turn them away with out being able to direct them to someone else who can help them. Thanks. --Tea with toast (話) 04:31, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Things in my life are still pretty hectic, so I won't be able to return. Perhaps we could try to recruit more mentors? Maybe ask a few of the more experienced Guild editors if they're interested? The Utahraptor^Talk/_Contribs 20:57, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Question regarding the templates

Hi there! After inserting the GOCEreviewed tag into an article having other issues that need attention prior to copy editing would I delete the copyedit tag or does it stay in the article? -- MenschMitHut (talk) 05:52, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for joining our effort. You add {{GOCEreviewed}} to the article's talk page (as you correctly did at Bao Du Feng), not to the article itself, and then, yes, you remove the {{copyedit}} tag, as you also correctly did. In the case of that article, some of the necessary copy editing was done by another editor about 4 days ago, so I finished it off by removing the promotional material. It's worth doing this rather than mark the article GOCEreviewed in a case like this, because it's easy and, as an orphan, this article isn't guaranteed to get much more work done on it. --Stfg (talk) 08:10, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. mmh (talk) 08:19, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Art & Australia

Can someone please check the CE I have done and let me know if it has improved the article enough to remove the copy edit tag? Thanks L1ght5h0w (talk) 21:38, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for asking. Yes, you did improve it, and I've taken the liberty of removing the tag. There's a note on your talk page too. Best regards, --Stfg (talk) 13:13, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

English proficiency guideline?

Hi, I've been looking for a guideline delineating how good an editor's English has to be in order to edit effectively. This issue is coming up quite a bit with new editors going gung ho at many articles with little English. Any thoughts? Thanks Span (talk) 22:07, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Editors tend not to be blocked just for lack of English language skills until they reach the heights of User talk:Pumpie.

Of course, one can merely politely suggest they edit the Wikipedia of their mother tongue (and help them find it), but if they don't like such suggestions, then there's not much more to be done unless blocks are an option. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:39, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

I wasn't thinking of blocking, more a guideline for foreign language editors along the lines of WP:COMPETENCE. Maybe no such guideline exists. Span (talk) 22:38, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

WP:COMPETENCE is not a guideline, and also (additionally) recommends against mentioning it to the people to whom it refers. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:50, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Also, the point about blocks, is that if people choose to edit here, then blocking is the only way to prevent them from doing so. What you could do is to write an essay expressing the view that if people have limited English skills (defined in some way?) then they should consider editing the Wikipedia of their mother tongue (and give the link that helps them find it). But such an essay isn't going to make them go away, it's merely going to offer them a suggestion. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:55, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, I'm not an official or anything, but it seems that authors of well written articles seem to have 'at least the equivalent of a US high school English education. At least, it use to, seeing as what public education has turned into these days; but I digress. In my opinion, you don't have to necessarily understand Shakespeare to be "qualified" to edit English. I would even go so far as to say that as long as you can speak the language fluently, do your best, and maybe ask for feedback if your not sure, you should be fine. I could be wrong though, and if I am, someone please tell me so. L1ght5h0w (talk) 13:36, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

There isn't an "official" guideline, and it's probably impossible to make one that's consistent with being the enclopedia "that anyone can edit -- and does". For general editing, some users' skills at research and article planning exceed their English language abilities by quite a lot, to put it mildly. For copy editing, I agree broadly with you, but there are levels and levels. What you describe is certainly enough to do a good job clearing articles tagged {{copy edit}}. For articles trying for GA, you need both that and a knowledge of those parts of the Manual of style that are listed in criterion 1b of the Wikipedia:Good article criteria. The only thing is, many people think they know more about the language than they actually do, and schools teach some pretty awful misunderstandings (like the one that you should put a comma wherever you'd make a pause in speech). So a read of something like the guide to Grammar, Punctuation, and Capitalization is a good idea. It's for American English, but even though I'm British I found it very helpful. Our own Manual of Style, although hard to digest, is also pretty good in my view. To do well at FA level you need more: all aspects of the Manual of Style relevant to the subjects for which you edit, and the ability to turn ordinary writing into stylish writing. The best way to learn it that I know of is to go and look at some FACs during their review and see what people do and discuss there. I'm not going to name names, but you'll soon spot some great writers there and some of their comments in the FAC reviews are enlightening. There's a good read at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Checklist. Anyway, this is just my 2 pence. There's nothing official that I know of. --Stfg (talk) 16:34, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Awesome suggestions, and very nicely put. I believe everyone could always benefit from learning more about language (not just English), and how to properly use it (not trying to sound "superior" here; I have many flaws, even in the English language, and am willing to admit it; but I am always willing to learn). L1ght5h0w (talk) 16:31, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Chess piece

Me again. Still working on getting the hang of CE-ing, so if someone could check my work on the Chess piece page, and let me know, I would appreciate it. I won't always ask for someone to check my work, but I just feel better asking since I'm just starting out. Anyway, quick link: changes L1ght5h0w (talk) 21:38, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I had a quick scan of your changes. They seemed well done to me. I may have missed other changes that could have been made but I think the article is in good shape. Note that I made one change that reversed your editing. Regards --Greenmaven (talk) 23:13, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate it. I shall continue to CE in efforts to help further my skills as an editor, and to help out Wikipedia. L1ght5h0w (talk) 13:29, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Question...

I'm currently attempting a small CE on the article Triune continuum paradigm, and have recently reading some of the lessons on User:Tony1/How_to_improve_your_writing (the link from the project's main page). Upon looking over the paradigm article, I came across this sentence:

The theories were applied for the case of general system modeling, which produced the corresponding three principles that compose the paradigm:

Of course, the part(s) that are underlined and bold here are not like that on the article. Anyway, I remember reading on Tony1's pages things about past/present tenses and a few other things and was wondering about the following things:

• The tense of the underlined parts are different. I wanted to know if that would matter here or not.
• I also wonder if the bold "three" could be removed, as following this sentence is a bulleted list of three principles, each one with "the first principle", "the second principle", "the third principle", respectively, as the reader would realize there are only three principles.

Just wanted to check and see if I am understanding the lessons correctly, or if I have the right idea, and it just doesn't apply in this case, or if I should go back and read through the lessons again, which, eventually, I do plan to do, just to make sure I'm staying on top of things as best I can. I appreciate any feedback! L1ght5h0w (talk) 17:01, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

The sentence, as it stands, is very difficult to parse. I might try to convey the same meaning using a much simpler sentence. How about:

• "The theories, when applied to general system modeling, produce three principles:"

-- Dianna (talk) 17:15, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Oh, nice. Would you mind if I used that?

-- L1ght5h0w (talk) 17:35, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Go ahead :) -- Dianna (talk) 17:42, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks =) L1ght5h0w (talk) 17:43, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

new template, useful, or just good practice of my photoshop skills?

I've noticed in the last month at least 2 articles that were requesting copyedits while they were very fluid in terms of their content, and were not suitable candidates for copyediting at the moment. There was also a brief discussion about this on another page somewhere (I forget where exactly). As I have no life whatsoever (or was avoiding having to mow the lawn), I created this template which seems like it might be useful, although I don't consider it "done" yet, (I was having a hard time with the parameters that would allow the substitution of an editors name for the generic "a member of" line). Thoughts, opinions? Useful? -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 20:19, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

haha, I suppose showing the template might help...(oops):

{{ce-flux|user=Despayre|date=April 15, 2012}}

My copyedit would read:

On April 15, 2012 a member of the Guild of Copy Editors reviewed this article in response to a copyedit request. The editor determined that this article's high rate of change prohibits a meaningful copyedit. Please resubmit your request when the article stabilizes. We welcome any comments on our talk page.

Lfstevens (talk) 22:44, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Ya, I like that better too, but if you wanna change the graphic...well.. those are fightin' words! Changing the template now...(alhtough I did kinda like the "state of flux" too...I'll get over it) -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 01:41, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Also, created a redirect for {{GOCEflux}} -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 03:37, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Maybe change "the editor determined" to "the editor's opinion was"? It would sound less like an edict, I don't want to make this a controversial/confrontational kind of template. Since we say "you are welcome to resubmit", does that mean we're removing it from the requests page, and if so, shouldn't we say something about that too? Or change the resubmit phrasing too? -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 06:30, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Good catch. How about "The editor concluded ..." Lfstevens (talk) 07:10, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

A couple of questions and a bug:

• How would the use of the new template interact with direct liaison with the requester?
• {{GOCEdone}} has parameters listing previous copy edits also. The parameters stack. How woulsd the proposed change affect this?
• The use of {{REVISIONUSER}} appears to name the last editor to edit the page, rather than the one who added the template. At least, I suppose that must be why it has my username on it now :)

--Stfg (talk) 21:05, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

P.S. and today's date rather than the date you added it --Stfg (talk) 21:06, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean about the direct liason, can you elaborate a little on that (it may not be usable in all situations either)?

I have included the stack now. (Some final tuning is probably needed still) Do you know of a page where I can see what that stack should look like?

Ok, here's what we have {{GOCEflux|user=guild member|date= |requester=|old-user-1 through 5=|old-date-1 through 5=}}. Just like GOCEdone, the old-dates and old-users are there to show previous attempts. You can see a sample on example 3. I have used a few little parsing IF commands to change the case of the "A" if there's no guild member or date specified, and to include a comma if needed after the "member of" phrase. As well you can add the option to specify who requested the copyedit in the first place. All parameters are optional, if left out, you end up with the 3rd sample. The if command was a little easier to figure out after some coffee , if there are other conditional phrases that might be useful, I think I can make just about any IF statement work now, incl nested IF's (which operates like an OR).

{{GOCEflux|user=Despayre|date=April 17, 2012|requester=Stfg}}
{{GOCEflux|date=April 17, 2012|requester=Stfg}}
{{GOCEflux|old-user-1=Lfstevens|old-date-1=April 14, 2012,}}

-- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 08:36, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Just about the direct liaison for the moment. It's the same as I said here, really. When someone makes a request of us, that is a human bean asking us for help. Either we carry out the request, or we discuss the obstacles with them. Exceptionally, this may lead to an agreement to withdraw the request, in which case we just remove it from the requests file and no further action is necessary. More often it leads to agreement to place the request on hold using the {{On hold}} tag until some desired development has occurred. We have cases now or recently where requests were put on hold because work on the article was busy, and where citations were dubious and the requester intends to work on that. My difficulty is to envision when I'd ever want to put some boilerplate on an article talk page as a way of declining a request, rather than having such discussions, or when I'd want to send a basically sound request to the back of the queue when putting it on hold for a week or month would do. --Stfg (talk) 10:20, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Ahh, that's where it was hiding! Yes, I remember our conversation. I have two possible approaches/answers. The first one is that this would only be added to the talkpage as a notice to all editors (who may or may not know about the request) who are active on the page. If they are trying to improve an article to GA, FA, or whatever, this may give them a slight additional incentive to work together. Especially if there is some kind of time pressure for them (ie, trying to get up to a certain quality for an anniversary date for main page inclusion, or for the "On this day" section). This was not suggested as an "instead of" approach necessarily, although possibly on a very small article with some silly squabbles it may suffice, but I see that as less likely for sure. The other reason for it would be that if there is another request for copyedit, either by the same editor or another one who is unaware of the request that was recently withdrawn (and who may have requested a copyedit directly from an editor's talk page), this would suffice to:

a) probably stop that event from happening, since it's listed on his article's talk page, and

b) it would be a fast and obvious red flag for the GOCE member who comes in a few days later and sees that the article was already attempted recently. It does seem that it's not uncommon for editors to ask GOCE members for a copyedit directly on their own talk pages.

In a situation like where you say "citations were dubious and the requester intends to work on that", I would suggest that would not be a good example of when to use this template.

In a separate idea, this template could possibly be expanded include a more specific reason if you think that would help too. Again, that would allow all editors to see the cause for the delay, as well as providing an obvious visual flag if another GOCE member is either invited, or wanders, in.

I'm not stuck on this template with any kind of religious fervor though , in large part, I've enjoyed the challenge of programming the little sucker, and that's a little knowledge that's good to have, but I do see where it could be useful in addition to your direct conversation with the requesting editor as well. And finally, my intent for this template was to be helpful, not confrontational/adversarial in tone, I think it still comes across a little on the "edict" side more than it needs to, so I'm all in favor of alternative text ideas (esp. if they don't involve me writing a bunch more {{#IF}} statements to keep the grammar correct. -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 15:24, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Change of category name

Just in case anyone wants to comment, there's a proposal to change the name of Category:Guild of Copy Editors to Category:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors. I can't see any issue with it, but mentioning it just in case. --Stfg (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Tabs

Hi all

Did someone agree to or request the tabs changes made by CC (Thumperward)?

At present the last tab rolls off the side of the page in 1280 x 1024 dpi, and I hate to think what they look like in 1024x768 etc. Chaosdruid (talk) 01:57, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Never heard of Thumperward—the tabs have been ruined. --Greenmaven (talk) 02:59, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I see Thumperward has altered tabs on other pages and has had an objection made about it (his talk page). This is a Guild Page and should be left to the senior Guild members to maintain. It was fine already. --Greenmaven (talk) 03:08, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree they don't look good. (I use text-size=largest for reasons of comfort, and they actually look even worse with that, but that's probably a rarity and I'll live with it). The advantage of Thumperward's approach is that there is a .../tabs page that gets transcluded on to each of our pages, so updates only need to be made in one place. Hence I feel that we should ask for improvements to the presentation rather than rowing back on the structural change. I'm very tied up with a big c/e at the mo and am not at my best when it comes to visuals anyway -- would anyone care to take this up with him? --Stfg (talk) 10:22, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I've fixed the tabs subpage myself...or at least it looks fixed on my screen. Don't know it will look for you Stfg. How does it look to everyone else? Basalisk ^{inspect damage}⁄_berate 12:14, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

One issue with the width is that I added a few additional tabs which were used in the dozens of various copies of the tab code that were previously in use. If those extra tabs are problematic then they can easily be removed again, and with a single edit rather than thirty. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 12:17, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for doing this, Chris. In all I support the idea of a tabs subpage, as otherwise they are a bit of a nightmare to maintain when a change is desired. But on my screen it is too wide. We need to remove two tabs, I think. -- Dianna (talk) 13:32, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, one quick gain was eliminating the duplicate "newsletters" tab, which I've just done. The other two "new" tabs are "mentorship program" and "mailing list": removing them should give an almost identical maximum width to the old setup. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:38, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Please could they stay? I think they are useful and losing them wouldn't be justfied by the loss in width. (Actually, on my screen there are now more things visible than before.) Perhaps we could remove "program" from the mentorship one? And thanks from me too, Chris, and for your help, Basalisk. --Stfg (talk) 13:43, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

The present version is hanging over the edge by only a few pixels, and I am no longer getting a scroll bar at the bottom of the screen. I am satisfied that this version will work. -- Dianna (talk) 14:24, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm glad that is sorted :¬)

For anyone using the {{Page tabs template, I use a similar format, with my userpage first row separated onto a top-row page User:Chaosdruid/toptabs. I also expanded the template to 12 tabs from the original 9 a few weeks ago — if anyone feels that 9 was too limiting they can now add some more! Chaosdruid (talk) 14:33, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Typo

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but the May copy-edit drive banner says that Eary bird sign-up is now underway. It isn't very obvious, but what with this being the Guild of Copy Editors, it doesn't reflect well on us. Peacock28 01:05, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Found it and fixed it. Thank you. Art LaPella (talk) 01:18, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about the trouble; the om-box is tricky to find. Thanks -- Dianna (talk) 01:59, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Just passing through...

Hey guys! Just passing through to say what a great job you guys are doing with this WikiProject. :) It's been close to four years since I started it and it's nice to see that it's still going strong. Wish I wasn't too busy these days to be as active on here. *wave* -Samuel Tan 15:09, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for dropping us a line, come back soon and maybe join in with one or two drives for old times sake :¬) Chaosdruid (talk) 02:21, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Hey Chaosdruid. :) Well... I just might! I've decided to spend more time on Wikipedia after all after rediscovering how enriching it can be - even personally - to create and improve articles, so I just might drop back in here to help out once in a while.  :) -Samuel Tan 13:56, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

FAC Requests page

Work on FAC requests has almost completely stalled, and a few people have started to delete their requests and move them to the main requests page. I'm wondering whether we should abandon it and move all the requests back to the main page, in order of request date. What do people think? --Stfg (talk) 20:50, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

<sheepish grin> I didn't know there was a FAC requests page...</sheepish grin>. Followed immediately by the dumb question... where is it? -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 02:37, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Baaaa. Perhaps we haven't made it prominent enough. It's at Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Requests/Potential Featured Articles --Stfg (talk) 10:13, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I was hoping that our FAC-request page would be useful as a way of exchanging information among FAC copyeditors, but that never happened. At this point, I think I'm in favor of getting rid of that page and putting all requests on the main request page. - Dank (push to talk) 21:02, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Dianna and HJ Mitchell have agreed too. I'll do it over the next couple of hours. --Stfg (talk) 18:28, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Unreachable references

Earlier today I asked a question (in the wrong place of course) about unreachable references. In summary, I noticed that there were references at the Emily Benn article (e.g. this) that were not reachable because I don't have a subscription to timesonline.co.uk. I was trying to tidy up the article due to a {{Copy edit}} request, however it now seems that there are some articles that cannot be signed off by the GOCE as it isn't possible to verify all article text due to unreachable references (or at least references that are not practical to reach). There is a similar case when the article includes references to physical texts that are not easily available to the GOCE editor (e.g. in a physical text in a distant library). What is the policy/approach to completing a copy-edit attempt when it is not possible to verify article text due to an unreachable reference? GFHandel ♬  09:02, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

There isn't a policy, so this is only my personal view. A copy editor should try to look at sources when the article's meaning isn't clear and the source might help, or when you suspect copyright violation, or when you have some reason (even just a hunch) that the source might not really support the citation. Otherwise, you aren't obliged to do a citation check as part of a copy edit (the main purpose of which is to improve prose). In this case, since the two statements sourced to timesonline are not libellous and not POV, I wouldn't worry about it, especially as the subject of the article appears to have seen it herself.

Different advice may apply if you can identify an editor who is looking after or championing the article. I can't see one for this article, but that would be the case when dealing with a request on our request pages, for example. In such a case, you can try dropping a note on the article's or champion's talk page asking them to locate the citation for you. --Stfg (talk) 10:39, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Table markup fix request for invitations

I would like to request that the width: 100% be taken out of the table markup for the invitations sent out to people's talk pages. This style parameter makes things look very ugly when a user has things on his/her talk page's right-hand margin (such as an archive index or a table of contents) — it forces the GOCE invitation to be pushed way down on the page. See here, in my own talk page's history, to see what things looked like before and after I made this change myself in my own talk page.

Also, it would help greatly if a signature (~~~~) were included at the end of the invitations; otherwise, the invitations won't get archived by MiszaBot III (or, I assume, by other archival bots). I had to add signatures myself (via the {{Unsigned}} template) in order to get these things to be archived. (Yes, I suppose I could just delete them, but I prefer to archive everything that's ever been on my talk page.) — Richwales 05:47, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

The signature was added in the last newsletter at the suggestion of the bot operator. Is it okay if it is inside the box, or does it have to be below? I will get a friend check the whole thing and look for other tweeks ;) -- Dianna (talk) 06:36, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

I actually didn't notice the signature added to the latest newsletter (probably because the previous one didn't have any signature and I was going on autopilot adding signatures to several things left in my talk page). I'm not familiar enough with the archival bots to know if they'll see a signature embedded in a box or not. Hopefully your friend will know. Thanks for being willing to look into these issues. — Richwales 14:07, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

How about we experiment on your talk page? If you remove the {unsigned} from down-below, we will be able to see if the archiving bot finds and acts on the date stamp inside the box. It should archive on the 6th or 7th of May, which is a good week before I will have to send out a newsletter. Here's what my friend came up with (the width=100% is gone, so it should not be problematic—plus it has ultra-kewl special effects. Comments? Suggestions?)-- Dianna (talk) 02:06, 29 April 2012 (UTC):

Invitation from the Guild of Copy Editors The Guild of Copy Editors invites you to participate in their May 2012 Backlog elimination drive, a month-long effort to reduce the size of the copy edit backlog. The drive begins on May 1 at 00:00 (UTC) and ends on May 31 at 23:59 (UTC). Our goal for the drive will be to eliminate January, February, and March 2011 from the queue. Barnstars will be awarded to anyone who copy edits more than 4,000 words, and special awards will be given to the top 5 in the following categories: "Number of articles", "Number of words", and "Number of articles of over 5,000 words". We hope to see you there! – Your drive coordinators: Dank, Diannaa, and Stfg. >>> Sign up now <<< To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Request for Guidance to improve my Copy editing Skills

I am R.Muthusamy from Chennai, India. I have joined Wikipedia on 13th DEC 2011 and contributed 60 articles in Tamil Wikipedia and about 10 articles in English Wikipedia. I find that Copy editing skills are required for Wikipedians. I would like improve my copy editing skill. Kindly communicate the steps needs to be initiated. Today I will add my name in the Members list. Regards. Thank you. Iramuthusamy (talk) 17:56, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, just going over the front page of the project, I find these two links:

• how-to guide
• How to improve your writing

The second providing actual activities/problems you can do. Hope this helps. L1ght5h0w (talk) 12:46, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh, also, feel free to ask if you have any questions/problems with anything, or you would like someone to check your work. I did this for the first couple of articles I copy/edited to make sure I was doing it correctly. L1ght5h0w (talk) 12:48, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that there really are not any "steps" required. Just be sure you understand Wikipedia's Manual of Style and are able to correct errors on articles. With that in mind, there is one thing that I find to be very helpful:

• If you are copy editing an article, and come across something you don't understand, or don't know how to fix, be sure to ask about it. Either here, or on the article's talk page. Alternatively, if you aren't sure about something, leave it alone, and continue to copy/edit the rest of the article.

Good luck! L1ght5h0w (talk) 12:58, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

FAC, Wikidata

A couple of opportunities here, for anyone who's interested. At FAC, we really need two or three copyeditors of any skill level who will jump on random nominations (whichever ones appeal to you) and make a list of simple problems (if there are any) for the nominator to fix. We've found by trial and error (mostly error) that the best way to handle nominators, especially new nominators, is to give them some straightforward suggestions. If they do respond, then it gets them more comfortable with the process, and if they don't, then seasoned reviewers will know to wait and see how things develop before investing a lot of time in the article. For anyone interested, you're going to earn a lot of wiki-love just by performing this easy but vital service. It's really pretty straightforward ... if you reply here or on my talk page, I'll walk you through it.

Meta:Wikidata, the first new Foundation site since 2007, is getting $1.9M US dollars in funding from Google, Paul Allen and Gordon Moore. Their goal is to improve machine translation for the Wikipedias, and to make it easier for people to input information and have that information show up in some fashion on Wikipedia pages, especially in infoboxes. So far, best I can tell, no one has been hired with copyediting skills, in any language ... so there may be some openings in the future, possibly for pay, and if not, it's certainly a chance to get your work noticed in a big way. If anyone's interested, reply here or on my talk page. - Dank (push to talk) 16:09, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Quick Question

Used in this context: "On 1 July 1942 he was called to active duty and attended a one month refresher course at the Medical Field Service School, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania." Should "Medical Field Service School" remain capitalized? Same question for "Medical Training Center" in this: "He then served for over a year in the Medical Training Center at Camp Joseph T. Robinson, Arkansas and as..." Appreciate it. L1ght5h0w (talk) 19:00, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Let me add this, I know to capitalize specific places like (just an example): "New York School of Art". So I guess what I really need to know is if the two are proper nouns or not. But, when I ask myself that question, the answer seems to be yes, they are proper nouns and should be capitalized. Still would like feedback. Thanks. L1ght5h0w (talk) 19:07, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

My habit is to use Google Books and follow the crowd, which capitalizes those places: [1] [2] Art LaPella (talk) 19:22, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh, cool idea. Thanks =) L1ght5h0w (talk) 19:34, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

GOCEreviewed inconsistency

Editor Easwarno1 has kindly pointed out that, for the case where we place {{GOCEreviewed}} on an article's talk page, Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/How to#GOCEreviewed tag says,

"The tag {{copy edit}} should not be removed from the article in this case. This is not to be used as an attempt to deny copy edits. You should watch the article and make your copy editing contributions when you feel other clean-up measures have been sufficiently performed."

I had forgotten this, and in fact it's inconsistent both with the wording on the template's banner itself, and in its documentation. The documentation says (my italics), "Relevant cleanup tags should be added to the article, in place of the {{copyedit}} tag, to indicate the necessary changes." The template says (its own italics), "Once these issues have been addressed, and any related tags have been cleared, please tag the article once again for {{copyedit}}."

So we have an inconsistency that we need to resolve. In my view the template and its documentation are right and the How-to page is wrong because:

• while the {{copyedit}} tag is on the article, people doing GOCE work are going to keep coming to the page and we risk their wasting time before they notice the banner on the talk page;
• the presence of the tag while a copy edit is not feasible prevents us from clearing out the old categories;
• the How-to seems to take an very optimistic view of the likelihood of the other tags being processed promptly. In practice, as we all know who have looked at the older monthly categories, the worst articles are more likely to accumulate yet more tags than to lose the ones they have.

Remembering a couple of other recent threads, I would like to replace the How-to paragraph with the following two:

"The tag {{copy edit}} should be removed from the article in this case.

"{{GOCEreviewed}} should only be placed on the talk pages of articles that have been found in the monthly copyedit cleanup categories, not on articles for which requests have been made at WP:GOCE/REQ. In the latter case, if we propose to decline a request because the article is not suitable for copy editing, we should discuss it at the requester's talk page."

Any comments please? --Stfg (talk) 20:28, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't know, but I need to remember to check the decision on this cause I just tagged an article with GOCEreviewed. L1ght5h0w (talk) 20:43, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Stfg that these modifications need to be made. -- Dianna (talk) 21:22, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Stfg that these modifications need to be made. --Greenmaven (talk) 04:32, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Just read more about it, and I agree with Stfg. L1ght5h0w (talk) 21:08, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

 Done. Thanks everyone. --Stfg (talk) 21:25, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

An offer you can refuse

I'll be happy to review links showing your copyediting work for anyone who's participating in this month's drive. Let me know what you want me to look for ... I can give you feedback on simple things, like spelling, or I can do something more in-depth if you prefer. - Dank (push to talk) 22:05, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

No takers? Hmm.

I would like feedback on this, specifically it being my attempt to improve this article from GA-level prose to FA-level prose. In recent months, I have avoided ce-for-FA completely, because I don't have faith in the process or in what is needed. So, a clear account on what is still needed in this case would be very useful.

Flaws I've found in my ce-for-FA previously have been a tendency to retain too much of the original author's phrasing or wording, often on the assumption that it's just a turn-of-phrase that looks wrong to me but perhaps looks right to everyone else. When reviewed at FA, it turns out that it looks wrong to everyone else at least one other person too! There may also be some over-compensation for that... but in the wrong places.

One advantage is that the article is quite short. One disadvantage is that it's British English. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 00:48, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh, while I think of it, another thing that articles I copyedited for FA "failed" on, was only wikilinking terms that might not be familiar to the general reader, rather than explaining them in full. Seems a strange reason to fail an FAC, but one thing to watch out for on that is salvor only being wikilinked - not a word I've heard widely used. Although, their activities are rather explained by the surrounding text. So, definitely input welcome. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 00:52, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Sure thing, I responded on the article's talk page. Agreed that you want to avoid making too many changes (which can strike writers as fussy) ... what to change and what not to change comes with practice. I'm not sure what "I don't have faith in the process" means. I find wikilinking questions hard, and I avoid them per my standard disclaimer. - Dank (push to talk) 17:27, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

WikiProtocol: OK to remove newsletters?

I'm glad to get the GoCE newsletters, but they're pretty much all of my talk page now. What's the protocol here? Can I just delete them? Should they be archived somehow?

Thanks! -P₁h₃r₁e₃d₁₃ (talk) 18:11, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

The choice is entirely yours. I believe many people do delete them. --Stfg (talk) 19:12, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Globalization article for copy edit

I just added a copy edit tag to the article Globalization. Although I just posted a major re-structuring edit of this de-listed good article (too bad I didn't get it done in time to add it and myself to May drive), it can use another set of eyes! Recent edit is discussed on the article talk page; the effort is associated with a new WikiProject proposal. Cheers! Meclee (talk) 19:56, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

GOCEreviewed reasons

This section started on the talk page of the May 2012 GOCE drive and has been transferred here by consensus. Please continue the discussion here.

Regarding "notability", if a page is truly non-notable, it is (as per the full version of the template) subject to deletion or merging. In either case, the work of a copyeditor will be wasted. You are incorrect in that "no one ever considered this a contradiction"; I (and I would guess others) have in fact gone through articles with both "copyedit" and (justified) "notability" tags and removed the copyedit tag, placing {{GOCEreviewed}} on the talk page (of course, if the "notability" tag is not justified, as seen through having the requisite two non-primary references, I remove it instead). Allens (talk | contribs) 16:10, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

When I come across articles of dubious notability with copyediting problems, I usually put both {{nn}} and {{copyedit}} on top of them. Sometimes I copyedit myself and tag only for notability. I do not believe it to be "wasted work", as the good prose is going to survive at last one week in the worst-case scenario of an immediate Afd, but more commonly sticks forever with new references or a Merge outcome. Moreover, I am against the rationale of the template you linked, which implies that copyediting is sometimes inappropriate.--M4gnum0n (talk) 15:01, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

I can think of a number of other circumstances when copyediting, at least for the moment, is inappropriate; I am curious as to your (and others') opinion on them:

• If the article is dealing with technical/specialized matters that are currently incomprehensible to the copyeditor.
• If there is suspicion of copyright violations, copyediting can inadvertently help conceal this, so should not be done.
• If there is a current edit war or similar large-scale disagreement about content, when copyedited text is likely to be immediately changed.
• If someone is actively changing back corrected text, reintroducing errors, such as due to the person having a more limited command of English than they think - this happened in the March drive with Uttar Pradesh and has happened previously. (I personally would probably, while suspending the copyedit for the moment, go into the process of dispute resolution, but given its often-cumbersome nature and the lack of time all of us have, I can easily understand deciding otherwise, and might myself depending on time pressures.)

I will shortly extract out (refactor) this part of the discussion since it's getting off-topic for the header. If anyone objects, please move it back. Allens (talk | contribs) 16:18, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Here is my opinion on every point:

• Obviously you can't fix an article when you don't understand its contents, but then why remove the {{copyedit}} template hiding the problem?
• The copyright example is the only one when copyediting is truly "inappropriate". In that case, the entire article should be blanked with the {{Copyvio}} template together with the {{copyedit}} tag, which will then show up again if/when the copyright issue is resolved.
• An editor can either decide not to meddle with edit wars, or he can go on and copyedit anyway. It is his choice alone and neither is objectively wrong.
• Wrongful reversions are something that happen after copyediting, so they have little relevance here.

About this discussion's placement: I would move it further to Template talk:GOCEreviewed, as it is still off-topic here and this page will die shortly anyway. --M4gnum0n (talk) 13:11, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Two comments regarding specific ones of the above, and one general comment:

• An alternative when one finds a copyright problem is to work on either:

• Paraphrasing the copy-pasted or too-closely-paraphrased material (I've done this with a couple cases so far);
• Removing the copy-pasted material from the article, if it's too much for paraphrasing to be practical (I've also done this with one case so far). (One then has to keep an eye on it to make sure someone doesn't "restore" it, unless one arranges for it to be revdel'd.)

• The wrongful reversions in the case in question were happening during the copyedit.
• More generally, I don't see:

1. removing "copyedit";
2. adding any appropriate tags (like {{expert-subject}} and {{technical}} in the first instance mentioned) that aren't already present and/or discussing the problem on the article's talk page; and
3. putting "GOCEreviewed" on the talk page

as "hiding the problem". Hiding the problem would be removing {{copyedit}} without placing {{GOCEreviewed}} on the talk page. The template in question does, after all, request that the copyedit tag be replaced, after the other problems are fixed. It also adds the talk page to a category, Articles reviewed by the Guild of Copy Editors. It is probable that going through that category (containing 442 articles at the moment) would reveal some inappropriate placements; it is also probable that going through would find articles in which the other problems have been fixed without the proper replacement of "copyedit" on the article's page. I encourage anyone interested to go through said category; I'll take a look at it myself. (Hmm... it occurs to me that it should be possible to use {{Date}} to take the existing free-form Date field in {{GOCEreviewed}}, translate it into ISO format (yyyy-mm-dd), and add the talk page to a second category (something like "Articles reviewed by the Guild of Copy Editors by date") sorted by the date. Not sure if it's worth it at the moment.) Allens (talk | contribs) 15:27, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Replacing a specific articlespace template with a vague one on the talk page is something I can call "hiding the problem". Its usage and purpose are not really clear to me, even after reading its documentation. --M4gnum0n (talk) 16:36, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Just on the subject of placement: I don't think Template talk:GOCEreviewed would be the right place to move it. Too few people will watch that page, and this discussion is about when and why the template is used, not technical issues about its design. If you want to move it to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors (our main talk page), then that might make sense. Any objections, anyone? --Stfg (talk) 14:43, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

OK for me.--M4gnum0n (talk) 16:53, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

No problem; sorry about putting it in the wrong place initially! I'll reply to M4gnum0n's points once someone moves it. Allens (talk | contribs) 17:16, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

It was fine, and the refactoring was helpful. I'll move this whole section over there 24 hours after I posted that suggestion, unless there are objections before then. --Stfg (talk) 17:56, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Since {{notability}} was a common feature of this month's articles for me, I should explain that I ignored it when deciding whether to edit. If I saw AfD or other explicit intent to delete, I passed on the article. Only a handful of the questioned pieces I worked on were deleted during the month. From what I can tell, {{notability}} does not trigger a review process, unlike the other delete-related tags. I used {{GOCEreviewed}} only when I saw no way to copy edit, usually because the prose was wholly unintelligible. (I did {{prod}} a couple of the most vaporous pieces I encountered.) Lfstevens (talk) 15:22, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Fair enough. There is such a thing as spite tagging, so we should never place {{GOCEreviewed}} without checking that tags are fair. Other reasons to suspect that an article may not be worth a copy editing are tags for rewrite and all-plot (which is not copyvio but is still abuse of intellectual property). --Stfg (talk) 15:42, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

As I noted, I do check for whether {{notability}} is properly placed, and removed it in several cases when it wasn't. I probably should be PRODing more of the articles that I've tagged with {{GOCEreviewed}} - e.g., referenceless articles about obscure villages - but I've had a negative experience in the past with PRODing (of an article I'd just created with about 8 references from 3 different secondary sources) that left a bad taste in my mouth. Allens (talk | contribs) 00:24, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Question about my first copyedit...

Hi there!

I'd like to have a go at doing some copyediting, and I recently (and a bit pre-emptively!) added myself to your membership list. I wanted to start with something that falls into my areas of interest, so I picked the article on Ethnocinema from the December 2011 backlog. Having taken a first look at it, it seems to me that it might actually need merging with the Ethnographic film article, as it looks to me like these are variant terms for the same thing, with 'Ethnographic film' (or 'Ethnographic cinema', which also redirects here) being the more generic, and 'Ethnocinema' a variation used mainly (perhaps solely) by one academic. I'm a bit of a newby, so basically any advice on whether merging is a good idea, and, if so, the best ways to go about it, would be great!

All best, Loriski (talk) 17:12, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree that merging is probably a good idea, although the state of the Ethnocinema article (neutrality, etc tags) may cause some headaches. The appropriate templates to use appear to be {{Merge from}} (on the Ethnocinema article) and {{Merge to}} (on the Ethnographic film article); be sure to also put something on the Ethnographic film article's talk page, and point the link in the template towards there. (Twinkle can do part of the template-posting automatically, incidentally.) Allens (talk | contribs) 22:23, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Greaat! Thank you for your advice, Allens. Yes, I'm anticipating a few headaches, and also a fair bit of work - but hopefully also an interesting project to work on! Thanks so much for your help. Loriski (talk) 13:34, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Drive format and incentives

Hello all. On the talk page of the May drive, Greenmaven commented, "I think we should discuss incentives generally, after the drive." This is the time to have that discussion. We'll be announcing the July drive around a week from today. Do participants want it to be as previous ones, or is there anything you'd like to see changed?

To avoid threading getting very complicated, I suggest that each substantive proposal could perhaps be made in a subsection of its own. That way, each proposal would get its own discussion. --Stfg (talk) 12:36, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Change the leaderboard categories

I say we get rid of the "most 5k articles" this time around, and re-add the old "most requests completed" category. Seems like we're getting a lot of requests these days, and most of the articles on the requests page are generally bigger anyway. (Full disclosure: I have a request on that page.) The other option would be a category for most articles from the oldest three months of the backlog. We'd have to use the honor system for that, but we already do that plenty. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 13:33, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Concur. In fact, I would like to see us empty the Request backlog as a specific goal for July, and do so again every drive from now on. The ce backlog is looking more and more doable now. At 500 a month, we can finish in one more year. If we can do more, it will take even less long. It would be great to start thinking about a "service level" commitment for 2013. Lfstevens (talk) 16:05, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

I would support not giving barnstars for > 5k articles, though I do not feel strongly about it, which is why I suggested adding a fourth category for the requests. I edited one article that was 6 words short of 5k words, and was tempted to ask it to be counted. I did not ask, because obviously the line has to be drawn somewhere. The wordcount covers those who choose to edit long articles. --Greenmaven (talk) 13:59, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Oldest 3 months: most articles (leaderboard), most words (leaderboard), or just a percentage markup of the number of words? --Stfg (talk) 19:29, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure what you're meaning by "a percentage markup of the number of words". Allens (talk | contribs) 22:06, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Oops, I expressed it clumsily. I mean taking the word count and increasing it by some percentage. --Stfg (talk) 22:21, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

(←) Quick question about the proposal to drop the 5k+ category: is this because we really don't want the category, or just to make room for a requests category? If the latter, please note that we can have both if we want. The limit to the number of categories is the width of the table, and we can certainly manage four. (My view is that 5k+ is useful, as it compensates a bit for the groan factor of taking on one of those ginormous -- and ginormously tedious -- pieces of manga fancruft and the like.) --Stfg (talk) 12:33, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

I think we could have four columns – the extra one for requests. --Greenmaven (talk) 13:48, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Handling requested articles

I can see the idea of requests page articles counting in a separate category provided that a request can be handled over more than one month if need be - particularly when working with a requestor, it can take a while (moreover, even if the total time isn't more than a month, it can easily go over a month's boundaries). I am worried that otherwise people will feel a need to do too quick of a job on articles that need a more intense going over - in many respects, it's easier to quickly fix a badly-written article's blatant problems than it is to quickly fix a better-written article's more subtle problems. Do remember that copyediting, according to {{copyedit}}'s default message, also can involve fixing "style, cohesion, [or] tone", not "just" grammar and spelling. (I also tend to feel that copyediting an article from the requests page should involve some degree of peer reviewing - pointing out where clarifications are needed or the article is otherwise incomplete - as well as copyediting.) Some higher standards for reviewing copyediting of requests page articles may also be called for. Allens (talk | contribs) 19:02, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Good thoughts, all. We have had requested articles as one of the leaderboard categories in the past. What we could do is require that all requested articles get reviewed by another editor, and perhaps double check with the requester to make sure they are satisfied with the work done. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 21:38, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree with both ideas. If the reviewer thinks the job is adequate, but the requester disagrees, then all of the reviewers will need to take a look. Allens (talk | contribs) 10:44, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree with all the above. Maybe the article can be credited in the month that it is finished, or the next drive month. If interactions with a requester are included then maybe we need to give additional credit. --Greenmaven (talk) 13:52, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

(←) There's some history around this. There was a requests category only in the first drive, after which it was removed and 5k+ was created. (Can anyone remember why?) There was then a 50% markup of the word count for a while, but we dropped that for the September 2011 drive for a combination of reasons. The full story, for anyone who wants it, is at WT:GOCE/COORD#GOCE culture. I think some of the arguments there still apply, though perhaps not all. If you read it, bear in mind that it took place at a time when we had received some criticism for a "rewards culture" that was alleged to undermine quality.

Is there perhaps a slight inconsistency in wanting a leaderboard category counting the number of requests serviced, and being concerned that quality will be lost if we do rushed jobs?

As Allens pointed out, a copy editor's contribution to a GA or FA can take a lot of time. It is sometimes desirable to have the requester do some things before we start the main edit. Then there is the core job of going through the article to improve the writing (at all levels, as Allens says). Then there is an often protracted postlude where, ideally, you watchlist the article and its GAN/FAC review pages and help out where needed. But only the "core job" is high intensity and much affected by the word count, and this is the only part that has been considered in drives in the past.

Can we invent an approach which meets all the following?:

• quality -- no rushed jobs;
• enough reviewing, but don't overload ourselves with unnecessary reviewing tasks;
• reduce the requests backlog;
• encourage people to work at the right level for their abilities;
• keep it simple (preferably reward actions only within the drive month).

--Stfg (talk) 13:19, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

The requests category was removed because we had almost completely cleared the requests backlog at the time. Once we cleared it, we decided to add a new category. Over time, as the size and activity level of the guild has grown, more and more people have been making requests, such that we've developed a new backlog, which, although not stretching as far back in time, is actually almost as big now (55 requests) as what we had back at the end of April 2010 (62 requests). —Torchiest ^talk_edits 14:43, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

OK, we certainly want to get the backlog down. Let's go for it for a target of clearing requests up to and including June. But I propose these modifications:

• No problem about articles where pre- or post-editing actions take place outside the month, but the intensive word-smithing should be done during the month;
• Editors limited to one article "working" and one "on hold" at any time;
• Instead of having a leaderboard category for this, give a 50% increment to the word count (reason: this emphasizes quality over quantity);
• We could, however, have a leaderboard category for articles from the oldest 3 months (as well as the markup suggested in another subsection).

Any comments on this? --Stfg (talk) 10:45, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Enlarge the leaderboard

Whatever we decide (above) we could consider a fourth category on the board. Is it also worth while to have six places on the board for each category instead of five? Let a few more people get up there. --Greenmaven (talk) 03:37, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Focussing on the oldest three months' articles

+1 to liking the idea of a separate category for tracking the 3 oldest months' articles. I'm not opposed to a separate one for requests either, but I thought the main goal of the drives was to reduce the old article backlog, seems like it would make sense then to track who's doing the most there. -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 22:17, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

True, but when we first started doing the backlog drives, the requests page had a lot of really old requests, as in, more than a year old, so that was part of the focus. I guess we're doing pretty well when the oldest requests are only a few months old, but it seems like we've been getting a little further behind lately. I think another time we also gave double credit to word count for all requested articles completed. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 22:23, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Double credit for some articles

I had also been thinking of double credit for some articles: I would ask the lead coordinator to judge at what point in the month the remaining gruesome articles in the oldest three months are deserving of double credit. I think this would require a judgment call for each drive rather than some rule. We don't want editors hanging back for the articles to be worth more. --Greenmaven (talk) 03:14, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I think something like this is a good idea, even if it's not just after a certain point in the drive. It's not very uplifting when I've spent a few hours, or more, on an article like the extremely dense Shinji Takahashi was (Stfg may remember that morass of word soup), at over 11,000 words it took me three days, and while I've been doing that, other editors have been collecting points for articles that are 1-300 words in length, which I think most of us could knock out in about 10-15 minutes. I'm not trying to sound whiny/cranky here, or make any comments on anyone else, I hope I'm not coming across that way, but if we're looking for some kind of fairness, there may be something that could be tweaked here. I fully understand that those other articles are equally in need of copyediting as well, and they shouldn't be ignored. -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 18:23, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Greenmaven's point that "We don't want editors hanging back for the articles to be worth more" is a key one, I think. Also, that judgement call could be difficult, possibly even invidious, for the lead coordinator to make (better: all coordinators by consensus, but still potentially troublesome). Those really horrid articles tend to hang fire till they are among the very oldest anyway. Could we cover it by a rule-based reward for the oldest 3 months, do you think? --Stfg (talk) 19:46, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I think that would make more of an incentive to move on those last painful few, yes. -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 05:29, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes. No reason not to give double credit for the whole 3 months. --Greenmaven (talk) 09:21, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Drop the barnstar for the most articles edited on the first day

We should be encouraging steady effort through the month. A downside of any incentive is that work may be skimped under the pressure of competition. The 'one day's effort' approach is particularly at risk of this in my opinion. --Greenmaven (talk) 03:05, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Good point. (Admittedly, I'm biased - the program I wrote doesn't handle that particular barnstar...) Allens (talk | contribs) 10:50, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

+1, it seems like an award for happening to have time on that day. I copyedit as time permits and the urge overwhelms me , so I have a 1 in 30 shot on average. Also, I think that kind of award may encourage, uhm, "less attentive" work. -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 18:26, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Active mentoring

I have been surprised at the very exponential curve of the (implied) graph of editor wordcounts. Particularly at the number of registered editors who end up doing 0-3 articles. Can we find a way to engage them more fully? I propose a (new) welcome message template to go on their talk page, with an invitation to contact a named Mentor. This role may be performed by the coordinators; I do not know how much work they already have to do; or we might need to ask for nominations and election of Mentors. The editors who register clearly intend to contribute; I am curious to know why they do not, and whether they lack confidence or just the time. --Greenmaven (talk) 03:28, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I signed up last month thinking that I'd have the time to copy edit one or two articles. But as it turned out, school finals kept me busy for the entire month, and I was unable to even log on to Wikipedia, much less copy edit an article, until the very end of the month (and even then I didn't have time to copy edit, I only had time to answer to messages on my talk page). I don't know how often this occurs, but it's one possible reason for no/low participation. As for your idea, I support it fully; we do appear to have a small problem with people who sign up but don't edit, and something should be done about it. The Utahraptor^Talk/_Contribs 03:47, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I think we need to be very careful about this, for many reasons. One is that when someone first shows up, we have no idea whether they are a professional copy editor, someone who has come to disrupt, or anything in between. They need different approaches, and we can't tell until we see what they do. Another difficulty is the danger of being too eager. Some people prefer just to ease themselves in gently, and hate the idea of being pounced on by well-meaning people wanting to help before they know what help is needed. We need to be welcoming without being in-your-face. I know that if someone had templated me when I first signed up for a drive, you wouldn't have seen me for dust. If the template had offered a mentor, you wouldn't even have seen the dust :) --Stfg (talk) 10:30, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

My guess is that people who want to be disruptive don't bother to register. I would expect that a large proportion of minimalist editors just end up not finding time to edit. But there may be some who need a bit more support. Perhaps a welcome template could just say "Thank you for joining the drive, let one of the coordinators know if you have trouble getting started". Another interesting template, after a drive has finished, could be "Hello, I noticed that you registered for our drive but did not edit any articles. We are doing a survey to find out why people register and then edit very few or no articles. Your feedback would be valuable to us." --Greenmaven (talk) 13:43, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I like both of those. On the first point, we do occasionally get registered editors coming to disrupt. I won't describe cases, for fear of drawing attention to them (both that I know of are quite well concealed). But it's probably quite rare, and you suggested messages don't do anything to encourage disrupters. Thanks. --Stfg (talk) 13:55, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

(←) I've been thinking about these a lot, because I feel very uncomfortable about leading people to think that we're in any way "on their case". Many people like to plough their own furrow and feel manipulated when asked to explain their actions or inaction. For the opening how-to-get-help message, I propose instead that the drive page and the drive announcement can carry well-positioned messages saying that coordinators will be glad to help and that the drive talk page can also be used to ask for help. For the post-drive why-didn't-you-do-any template, I just don't think we'd learn enough to justify the risks involved in asking people to explain themselves. Would welcome more comments on this. --Stfg (talk) 11:03, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Maybe only ask them if they've signed up at least twice and not edited? I am on your side about not wanting people to feel like you are on their case, it may stop them from signing up in the future, but if they aren't contributing anyway, what are we really losing? And we may gain some insight from their answers that allows us to tailor things a little differently to enable additional participation (although, I don't have any idea what would prompt that solution, but I guess that's the point). Also, I'd suggest using non-threatening imagery in the questionnaire template, bunnies are good (this kind, not this kind) . -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 14:56, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Mmmm, could I vote for the second kind please? Kidding apart, you started a train of thought: it would be less implicitly judgemental if we were to send a message to all who registered, with words to the effect of "we're asking everyone who registered for the drive, whether they edited many, few or no articles". If we were to do that, what question(s) exactly would we ask, and where would we request that the answers be put? --Stfg (talk) 16:56, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

How about sending that questionnaire out, making it clear it went out to everyone who signed up, and then say, "If you signed up but didn't end up doing any copyediting, we'd be interested in knowing why, so we can increase participation, please let us know." Where to send it, that's easy, this seems obvious, failing that, is there some kind of polling mechanism/webpage we can use, (I haven't seen one), but anonymity in reply might also help get more answers. Also add me, 2 votes for the latter bunnies -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 15:53, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Automated assessment

Please point me to the right place to discuss the idea of automatically assessing the quality of WP articles. The thought was triggered by this NYT article claiming that automated assessment reached about the same scores as human graders. I would love to see pre- and post- scores for articles I edit. Lfstevens (talk) 16:11, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

This is also interesting - it gives a bit more information what at least one piece of software is looking for. Allens (talk | contribs) 17:33, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Since we don't really have the cheater problem, my curiousity remains piqued. Lfstevens (talk) 02:34, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

WP is a knowledge production system

There must be things we can learn from industry in the field of Quality Assurance. I am interested in W. Edwards Deming, who was ignored in America but immensely influential in post-war Japan. He is quoted in WP as having said, "Anybody can produce quality if he lowers his production rate. That is not what I am talking about. Statistical thinking and statistical methods are to Japanese production workers, foremen, and all the way through the company, a second language. In statistical control, you have a reproducible product hour after hour, day after day." We have a very interesting production system at WP. Maybe a project for a WP Research Fellow? --Greenmaven (talk) 22:26, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

My knowledge of Edwards Deming's work is quite sketchy, but in using statistical techniques to improve manufacturing quality, he was interested in the 'outliers'. So he was as much interested in the outstandingly good quality product as in the inferior product. His method, as I understood it, was to eliminate the outliers by studying the reasons for their existence. Why one would see the highest quality products as a problem, I will return to, if anyone shows an interest in my thinking. Deming worked with factory owners to eliminate the outliers successively, until the quality divergence bandwidth was as narrow as possible, thus achieving a product of consistent quality. I am trying to see how this approach might be applied to WP. I see two possibilities: article quality and editor quality. More later. --Greenmaven (talk) 22:06, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Wikignome gadget

This gadget is in beta, but it's really useful for copyediting, especially for minor edits. Maybe we should link to it on the guild page, with a note that it's still a bit unstable? The issue with it seems to be mainly edit conflicts, otherwise it works fine. ʝunglejill 06:42, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

It does look extremely useful. However, the documentation says "It is currently being updated daily and is not recommended for general editing activity at this point", and there's a really horrible known issue where an edit conflict will treat the other user meanly (as you described on its talk page, Junglejill). I think we should keep watch for now and recommend it once the issues are resolved.

Do we have a list of tools and gadgets useful to copyeditors anywhere? There are a few such tools. If we don't have a page, shall we create a list on the Guild home page, to include things like Ucucha's duplication detector, popups, page-size, ... ? --Stfg (talk) 10:21, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

I have a listing, in a form to be copied into an appropriate .js page, at User:Allens/sandbox/scripts_in_use. (I created this earlier to help out Avery with Wiki-specific stuff.) It includes duplinks (thank you for telling me about that one, and about the Signpost series on useful scripts), page-size, viewing of persondata, Advisor (best used after AutoEd and the dashes.js script - see later), dabfinder, PlastiSpork's date scripts, and a combination of (the safe/safer) parts of AutoEd with User:GregU/dashes.js. I need to try to get User:Ohconfucius/script/EngvarB.js to work for me - it currently doesn't, so it isn't included in the "scripts in use" page. Allens (talk | contribs) 16:36, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Good idea, Stfg, we could create a subpage for the guild titled "Useful tools for copyediting". The message on CatScan that appears on this page should be moved there. I also submit that The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is useful for assessing current usage and grammar. ʝunglejill 00:05, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

COCA could be very useful. One question: registration is required almost immediately (you don't even get enough free tries to get right through the "5-minute" intro) and requires a name and email address, but the site has no privacy policy that I can find. Do you know anything about how they use email addies, Junglejill? --Stfg (talk) 10:20, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Let's include reflinks, too. Lfstevens (talk) 15:37, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Discrepancy between header, example for 2010 request archives; Proofreader?

Hi. I'm currently working on that program to figure out:

• What articles the GOCE (and LoCE) has edited, when, and if possible by what copyeditor; and
• Which, of those articles, have achieved GA/FA after the (first) copyedit.

I have two questions. First, the 2010 request archive tables have the following header:

! Date posted
! Article name
! Requestor's username
! Date copy edit started
! Copy editor's username
! class="unsortable" | Remarks

but the following example:

| October xx (date requested)
| [[Article]]
| [[User:]] (requestor)
| October xx (date completed)
| [[User:]] (editor)
| (remarks)

Is the second date listed the date the copyedit started (as per the table header), or the date it was finished (as per the example)? My second question is about the old League of Copy Editors template, {{WP LoCE}}. It has a space present for a "proofreader". What was this person's function? I'm currently assuming that it's about the same as a reviewer during a drive, but can change that in the program if need be. Thanks! Allens (talk | contribs) 17:49, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

We had originally recorded the date the copy edit was started, but later this was changed. So the data available varies. Re: The LoCE - that's before my time. -- Dianna (talk) 22:52, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

proofreader≈reviewer is probably a reasonable assumption. LoCE was before my time too. Allen, if we can do anything to help this project by making adjustments to the format of the current and future archive pages, please don't hesitate to say so. It would be well worth it. Also, Chaosdruid once suggested to use templates to handle archiving. I don't need them just for my basic archiving work, but if it would help your project in any way, we can look into it again. --Stfg (talk) 10:03, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I checked with Ukexpat, who was in the LoCE and served as a "proofreader" - Ukexpat says that treating this as a reviewer is about right. What I need in regards to format are four things:

• Consistency - e.g., switching in the middle of a table is definitely a no-no.
• Sufficient information - e.g., when a copyedit is completed, so that I can determine if it subsequently attained GA or FA (for instance, I've copyedited Astatine, but after it became a GA, so that shouldn't be counted). This information also needs to be in a format that a program can interpret (e.g., not "free text" like the Remarks/Purpose column).
• Documentation - as in, making it clear what a column is and what the contents mean (that's the problem with the above - the headers are saying something different than the example).
• Notification - as in, once the applicable section of the program is written (see below), letting me know (unless it's obvious that I know) about any changes so that I can adjust the program.

Provided these are followed, most formats are fine. Thanks for the thought! Allens (talk | contribs) 23:52, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Under the 'remarks' column, does FAC mean it already has that status, ditto GAN? Or are they hopeful of attaining it? --Greenmaven (talk) 12:21, 13 June 2012 (UTC) Oops! Further reading has given me the exact meanings of FAC and GAN – I am not very familiar with that whole process. I also discovered that these tables are laboriously updated by Stfg. Basically: what are we going to see in the table when an article achieves FA or GA status, or will we need to discover that elsewhere? --Greenmaven (talk) 12:32, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I had in mind more of a listing of all the articles copyedited that subsequently attained GA or FA, and possibly some additional information as to who was involved with copyediting them, when the copyedit happened, etc. Extending the output program to insert information into the requests archive as to GA/FA status, etc, would be a definite feature to add once the initial version is working properly. Allens (talk | contribs) 23:52, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm willing to change the header of that column from Remarks to Purpose if that would be clearer. Allen, would that hinder your program development? --Stfg (talk) 14:00, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

No problem. For one thing, I doubt the program will be interpreting that column - it's too variable. For another, that section of the program is yet to be written as of the time of this writing. What I have written are the parts that fetch and parse (for the following:

• LoCE templates ({{WP LoCE}}).
• GOCE templates ({{GOCE}}).
• Backlog drives. (In the process of parsing the longer-ago backlog drives, incidentally, I have concluded that my existing mechanisms of detecting negative/positive reviews are a bit too all-encompassing (perfectionism on my part); I'll modify that in the barnstars program.)

I'm now working on the requests archive interpretation - thus the question above. Allens (talk | contribs) 23:52, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I think the remarks column should be renamed 'Purpose' (see above). I noticed it was non-sortable and had a few ideas. This is really a 'micro-database' and I would like all columns to be sortable. This would necessitate a more constrained format, if it is to be useful. I propose that each non-blank-entry begin with GA or FA (which makes FAC and GAN acceptable). This is followed by either standard descriptors in lower case or, for the present, free text. I hope we can kill several birds (above) with this stone. We can then, of course, focus on the various sets of articles at their various stages of development. --Greenmaven (talk) 02:32, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

July Drive: summary

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions and discussion above. I hope to create the drive page on Wednesday and would just like to check my understanding of the consensus. Based on the last unchallenged statement about each topic, the following list would be what we agreed. But there may have been discussion fatigue, so if there's anything in the list that you disagree with, plase pipe up in the next 36 hours or so.

• Leaderboard: there will will be four columns -- the usual three plus number of articles from April, May & June 2011 -- and six rows.
• Oldest three months: we will award a 100% bonus to the word count for each such article. The bonus adds to your individual word count but not to your leaderboard position (we'll add the bonus after the drive is over).
• Requests: we will award a 50% bonus to the word count for each article taken from the requests page. Reviewers will try to review every such copy edit, taking into account requesters' comments. We will count those articles mainly copy edited during the drive, allowing that some preparatory discussions with requesters may have taken place before the drive and that interactions may continue after the drive. There's a limit of one request {{working}} and one {{on hold}} for each copy editor at any one time. This is to avoid articles being held up when other editors might have liked to work on them.
• 1st-day barnstar: is abandoned.
• Still under discussion: subsections #Active mentoring, #Automated assessment and #WP is a knowledge production system don't affect the drive format as such and need not be closed at this stage.

Over to you. --Stfg (talk) 14:09, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree with all of the above, except for two parts. I still think we should get rid of the 5k barnstars. My view is this: copy editing is copy editing. Whether you do one huge article of 10,000 words, or 50 articles of 200 words each, you're still doing the same amount of copy editing. We still have the award for biggest overall article to spur larger articles. In fact, what if we just replaced the 5k column with a single biggest article column? That would have the same general effect, and would be an interesting way to shake things up a little, while maintaining the same spirit. The other thing is, and I don't have a preference one way or the other on the details, but I think we should give requests and oldest months article the same bonus, to keep things from getting too complicated. We're editors, not mathematicians. :) —Torchiest ^talk_edits 14:49, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Just for clarification, by "single biggest article" do you intend that an editor could only have their one largest article in that column, or that the six biggest articles in the drive would be there, allowing an editor to have several entries? --Stfg (talk) 15:31, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I would prefer that each editor can only include their very biggest. That would spread the fun around more. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:41, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree with the dismissal of the 5k's, they generally take a lot more concentration than some of the other ones. As I said above, most of us could rip through the 1-300 word articles in about 15 mins, but after you've spent a few hours on one really long arduous one, there's definitely a bigger feeling of accomplishment, and I think that's worth a nod. -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 16:00, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Keep the 5ks. Generally they are much more complicated, often requiring reorg in addition to a straightforward ce. Lfstevens (talk) 18:13, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

It's even possible to have five categories if we want. User:Stfg/Sandbox1 shows what it would look like (I just used copies of columns 1&2 to get 4&5). For people like me who use larger text sizes, there's a bit of line wrap, but it's not bad even at largest size. Please comment on whether we have both 5k+ and Torchiest's idea, just one or the other, or neither. Re Torchiest's point about giving requests and oldest articles the same bonus, that was my fault (because we used to add 50% for requests before). The majority said 100%, so shall we go for that? I suspect it may prove to be a bit high, but we can experiment and discuss again after the drive. --Stfg (talk) 18:00, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Okay, forget that idea. I'm fine with doing five columns in that case. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 18:41, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Until requests becomes a large issue again (I understand it had a large backlog in the past as well), I think 50% is good. The idea is to clear out the backlog on these drives, currently, the backlog of requests seems fairly small comparatively. -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 20:22, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and I agree with 50% for both oldest and requests. Doubling seems like too much. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 23:06, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

(My apologies about not responding sooner - I've been working on the program to gather data on GOCE/LoCE-edited articles, including from drives and requests; once it's done I'll post a "report".) The above looks good in almost all respects. I suggest that the boost for requests-page articles allow for copyediting during the month prior to the drive, provided that the copyedit is finished during the drive month (allowing for the copyeditor returning to assist during GA/FA checks, after expansions/alterations, or similar).

I just remembered that we need to decide whether (appropriate) marking as GOCEreviewed will be counted in the article count category. In the last drive, it was. (If such marking is not to be counted, then people should not put it into their listing of articles for the drive.) Allens (talk | contribs) 14:45, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Hrm... I never counted articles I left with that note, there was no copyedit done. Seems like it should not be counted. -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 15:23, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm most reluctant to include copy edits of requests that were started in the previous month. It would allow people to get a running start. I don't really believe that the text modification phase of an average request is significantly larger than it is for an average tagged article of the same size.

I never counted GOCEreviewed articles either. My present view is that they should not be counted, because if an article is borderline and placing GOCEreviewed requires prolonged thought, we should probably copy edit it, and avoid creating an incentive not to do so. If it doesn't require prolonged thought, why list it? Checking for copyvio does take longer than the other reasons, but, well, we can just bask in the glory of having found one, cant we? --Stfg (talk) 21:50, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I never counted GOCEreviewed articles either and I don't support counting them. I think 5K+ articles should be rewarded because they are usually more tedious than several shorter articles with the same word count, but I could live with them not being rewarded. --Greenmaven (talk) 13:34, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

(←) The July drive page has now been created, incorporating the above (checks welcome). Thanks for the great ideas. --Stfg (talk) 14:11, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

The notes for the leader board seem not quite right; does note [1] need to be on the words column? I thought the idea was that the bonus would apply to your total, including your leader board total. Seems like notes [1] and [3] could be combined into something like "The number of words in the longest article you copy edited, not including any 50% bonus. Only one entry for any editor." and only placed on the longest article column. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean? The other thing is, are we getting rid of the special "largest article" award and replacing it with the standard gold and silver GOCE awards? —Torchiest ^talk_edits 14:43, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

In the past, the bonus for requests didn't apply to the leaderboard total, only for your individual barnstar. In fact, the instructions used to say don't add the bonuses to your word count, we'll do it, even though people put word counts on the leaderboard. This keeps a level playing field for everyone on the leaderboard and avoids undermining the incentive to edit big articles from the later tagged categories. On your second point, I overlooked that. I think the golden typewriter probably should replace the "largest article" award, especially since that article will probably also get a 10k+ award, but what do you think? --Stfg (talk) 15:35, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I say match it up with the rest. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 16:05, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. I've done a bit of editing to hopefully clarify the leaderboard column headers slightly. (Is a note on the 5k+ Articles column regarding that a 10k article counts twice, etc, desirable?) Looks good; thanks! Allens (talk | contribs) 18:34, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Good idea about the 5K+ note; people are often unclear about that. Done. --Stfg (talk) 20:32, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

I've checked over the July drive page and it looks great! I made a couple of small changes – I put a red note encouraging people to read the instructions, since we've incorporated a few changes this drive; plus I've amended the Reviewers instructions to include reviewing as many articles from the Requests page as possible. I intend to focus mostly on reviewing rather than copy editing this drive, depending on the volume of copy edits we do from the requests page, and can continue to make the graphs if you like. -- Dianna (talk) 19:38, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Dianna. Those changes are a good idea. It would great if you could do the graphs again. 00:00 is still 1am for me -- not a feasible time for intelligent action :) I plan to be doing more reviewing this time too. It will be worth it to see the requests clearing. --Stfg (talk) 20:32, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

One more idea for backlog drives

I was looking back through some old GOCE drive pages, and I noticed that we've increased our word count requirements some since the beginning. This may be discouraging for the least active participants. I'm in the GA nominations backlog drive right now, and I noticed something: they have an award for reviewing just one nomination. What if we gave out a minor barnstar to anyone who copy edits at least one article, but doesn't qualify for any other awards? It might encourage at least some participation from the people who sign up but then don't do anything. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 18:01, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Makes sense to me. I'm not sure if the Minor Barnstar quite fits, although I suppose a lot of copyedits could be considered minor edits. Allens (talk | contribs) 19:30, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Good idea! What about {{The Modest Barnstar}}? -- Dianna (talk) 19:40, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Well, the minor was the only one I could think of that we weren't already using and which seemed appropriate for potentially just a single copy edited article, which could include one with 50 words. We already use the modest for 4,000 words total, which doesn't seem fair. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 19:45, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

 Done. Nice idea. --Stfg (talk) 10:30, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Monthly mini-contest independent of drives

Although, that gives me another idea for something we could try, independently of the drives. What if we had a monthly contest for something like the most difficult or most interesting copy edit? We could allow people to submit any copy edit they do during the month, and then at the beginning of the next month, for a week or so, let people vote on the submissions. Only one entry per editor on that as well. The person with the most votes for their submission gets a barnstar. This could be good for a few reasons. It would encourage people to tackle difficult work, and it could also give other people examples of how to tackle difficult work. It would also be a form of peer review for the very toughest copy editing. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:41, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I like the sound of this idea. -- Despayre  ^{tête-à-tête} 15:57, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Me too, very much! --Stfg (talk) 16:15, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Definitely, for all the reasons you mentioned. ʝunglejill 19:58, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

I like the idea; good thought! By "most difficult", are you meaning "starting from the worst origins and bringing to a fair level", "starting from a fair level and bringing to a good/great level", or either/both of these? Allens (talk | contribs) 15:09, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Any of those. It would be up to each editor to weigh all those factors individually when voting, and decide based on what they viewed as most important. On the other hand, we could conceivably have themes each month, like, best WP:FAC copy edit, or best broken English article fixed. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:23, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

I'd call it "most notable", and let the editor decide. Lfstevens (talk) 22:51, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

We could even just call it the "Copy Edit of the Month" contest. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 23:05, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Agree with all the above. --Greenmaven (talk) 07:25, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps approval voting (possibly with a limit of [number of copyedits]-1 for the number of votes castable, to help avoid ties), instead of one vote per editor? Allens (talk | contribs) 19:38, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Just to make sure we're on the same page, above, I meant one article submitted per editor, not one vote per editor. I hadn't really considered the best way to do the voting. Can you explain your limit idea a little more? I'm somewhat confused about that calculation. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 19:50, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

I was thinking of doing approval voting, but with people being at least encouraged not to vote for every entry, since that does the same thing as abstaining. (It's fine to do that when there are the same number of candidates as there are seats, but hopefully more than one copyedit per month will be submitted...) Allens (talk | contribs) 20:02, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Ahhh, now I get it. When you said "[number of copyedits]-1", I thought you meant people earned votes by copy editing somehow. You meant one less than the number of entries submitted. That could work, but I feel like if the idea is to pick the "best" one, each voter would have to really think about it if they could only pick one, instead of potentially almost-blanket approving. Either way, I'd be interested to get more input, and I figure we could try doing the first contest in August, so we're not in a rush to get it organized on top of new coordinators and a new backlog drive, both happening in ten days. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 20:37, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

April 2011 already cleared

Somebody has been very busy, and the April 2011 category has already been cleared! Thank you to that kind person. Shall we add July 2011 to the drive target?

Sounds good to me. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 18:27, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Agree. --Greenmaven (talk) 22:36, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Agree. --Lfstevens (talk) 05:27, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

 Done. Thanks. --Stfg (talk) 19:33, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Need to make drive sign-up easier

Many people find signing up for drives difficult. I tried to make it easier the other day, but am not sure whether this has helped or confused people, and perhaps we need a new way. Can anyone remember why we want people's names in two sections (Participants list and Totals subsections)? Can anyone see why it might be that two people signed in the July Participants section but then created their Totals subsection in the May drives Final-results page? (I can't find any link that would take them there). Was the template a good idea? Two people have signed in the Particpants section -- should I create Totals subsections for them or not? (I asked one of them, but they haven't replied). I'm kinda thinking we might have people sign up just by putting ~~~ somewhere and a coordinator will create their Totals sections. This would actually be easier than trawling through both sets to find out who has signed in one but not the other. Any ideas how we could make it less confusing for people, please? --Stfg (talk) 19:36, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Pretty much the entire layout of the GOCE drives was lifted from the GAN backlog drive a couple years ago. Most of it was done that way just because it was already set up that way. I think a lot of the logistical problems aren't as severe with GAN drives because there are no word counts and other such minutiae to keep up with. Personally, I don't see why we wouldn't just have one list and do all work there. I can't think of a downside. —Torchiest ^talk_edits

It may have been done that way to make it easier to send newsletters to the participants. But now, people have to add their name to the mailing list to get any newsletters, including those specifically about the drive. So the sign-up section at the bottom may have outlived its usefulness. -- Dianna (talk) 20:57, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, both. Well, we must solve this problem, as signing up is evidently too complicated. One of my sandboxes was a draft for what I propose. You'll see that I've suggested a very simple sign-up section, from which a coordinator can take usernames, check rollovers, and create totals subsections. It should be easy to use and will be much less work than detecting and correcting muddled signups. No need for a Participants section any more. I've also removed the alphabet headers and the alpha TOC. The result will allow people to get directly from the contents list to their own totals subsection, and having done that once, they can bookmark them if they want. That wasn't possible before. A side effect is that subsection headers are in the basic format, not individual fancy sigs. That would be easy to do if really wanted, but I think basic-format section headers are a gain rather than a loss. There are some other, more minor changes. Please comment -- I'll install this tomorrow morning and copy across existing sign-ups if there's agreement. --Stfg (talk) 12:39, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm fine with basic headers and all the other changes you've made. I'm researching a way to make this even easier, significantly so, for both signups and coordinators. There's a bigger initial investment of effort to get all the pieces in place, however. Are you okay with just letting the current format go for the July drive, since it's only a few days away, and working on a better setup for the September drive? —Torchiest ^talk_edits 13:36, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, absolutely. By "current format", did you mean as-is, or as amended by my proposal? I'm OK with either, but just wanted to be sure. --Stfg (talk) 14:09, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I just meant as is. My thought was it might confuse people who have already signed up if we change the format at all this time around. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 14:46, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

OK, let's stay as is this time. --Stfg (talk) 15:24, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I may have created a misunderstanding there: I was going to transfer all existing sign-ups to the new format myself, not ask them to do it again. They'd see the new format but not need to take any action. The new method would apply only to people who haven't yet signed up. --Stfg (talk) 15:38, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

(←) On reflection, I've just amended the page to say that if anyone has difficulty with the procedure, they can just sign up in the Participants section. I'll spot that and do the rest. Let's leave like that for this drive. I've seen where you're heading, Torchiest, and I think it's a great idea. --Stfg (talk) 20:39, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! It might take a while to implement it correctly, hence my desire to have a month to work on it. I'm going to have to look into the nitty gritty details of filling in all the values we want for subsections, but I'm confident I'll figure it out eventually. Might need to consult with someone who's done it before though. We'll see. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 20:46, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I can see it's complicated. Making it easy to do sign-up could be a big win, though. Many people find it difficult currently. Thanks for tackling it. --Stfg (talk) 21:56, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I think I've got a stripped-down structure of my idea working now. Take a look here and see if it makes sense. We can modify the instructions and layout as needed, of course. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 03:39, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't know if this relates to what people are calling "difficulty signing up", but I delayed signing up for a couple of days because when I previewed the page (both "Participants" and "Totals"), it wouldn't display properly: it displayed my username twice. When I finally signed up, I made sure to follow all instructions and examples, but still had to manually edit the page to remove the duplicate username that was generated. I don't understand whether this was a browser issue, a script on the page, or whatever, but it definitely made me feel as though I were messing up what should have been a simple procedure. Dementia13 (talk) 00:33, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Reading the directions literally, I can see how there could be a little confusion about how much information you need to add. It looks like you added the template to the totals section and then signed it; signing isn't necessary, but the directions make it sound like it's part of the process. The participants section looks like you maybe just double signed. But we've got a much simpler method coming up for the September drive, so it shouldn't be an issue going forward. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 02:18, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Counting articles detagged as not needing C/E

We agreed above not to count articles on which we placed {{GOCEreviewed}} during the July drive, but because we phrased it like that, we didn't specifically mention articles that we de-tag simply because we find that they don't need copy editing at all. For the same reasons as we agreed for the GOCEreviewed ones, I think these should not be counted. What does everyone else think? --Stfg (talk) 16:23, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

I've always wondered what to do in that situation. I edited a page yesterday (Closed Mondays), that probably shouldn't have been tagged in the first place. It needed some copy editing, but way less than your average tagged article. I added it to my total, but I do feel a little guilty about doing so. Ultimately, total pages and total words edited are imperfect measures of the amount of effort put in to editing. Tdslk (talk) 23:03, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Please don't worry about that. Sometimes we get easy ones, sometimes hard ones, that's just how it is. You did what was necessary there and provided a citation too. Plenty enough to justify counting it. --Stfg (talk) 08:55, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

If no editing was necessary, don't count them (but I agree in the above case—count it) --Greenmaven (talk) 12:54, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

OK, let's close this. We won't count them. --Stfg (talk) 21:16, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Copy Edit of the Month contest

I've been working on this, and I'd like some more input on the best way to structure things. My current concept is as follows:

• The submissions period lasts one month (e.g. August 1–31 for the first drive).
• The voting period lasts two weeks (e.g. September 1–14 for the first drive).
• Anyone can submit one article for the contest, but they can change their submission before the deadline.
• Anyone can vote for one article, but they can change their vote before the deadline.
• The voting will only be supporting the single article's copy editing you like best, for whatever reason you choose.
• There will also be open-ended questions and discussion allowed for all submissions.
• The first and second place vote totals get gold and silver awards, respectively.

Does anyone think there could be any problems with this? Should the submission/voting time periods be different, or even overlap? Should the number of votes per person or awards given out be different? Thanks. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:27, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Looks good. If submissions can be swapped, I think voting and discussion should start only after submissions are closed (as you've specified it). Are we happy that the voting period goes into the following month? People may pay less attention to looking at submissions when involved in a backlog elimination drive. Would, say, 3 weeks for submissions and the rest of the month for discussion and voting be too short? --Stfg (talk) 17:15, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh, my idea was to do this every month, not alternating with backlog drives. I had also considered doing a half month of submissions and a half month of voting, but I don't think it would interfere too much with the other process, and in fact might blend nicely, since people are more likely to be already doing copy edits during drive months. It would just be an interesting and continuous feed of activity in the background of the project, something any editor could drop in on, take a look at, and vote on. I had considered submitting something about it to the Signpost to get the word out about it. The other thing is, we're approaching the light at the end of the tunnel on the backlog, amazingly, and we'll have to have something else to occupy our time. :D —Torchiest ^talk_edits 17:25, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I see. (I didn't realise you meant every month.) Yes, that seems perfect. I had already been thinking that after this drive we could consider having just the two oldest months as the drive targets in future, to help us focus more on the requests. We shouldn't let the backlog creep back up, but requests appear to be coming in faster these days, and it would be good if we could encourage and keep up with that trend, since that's how we can help develop quality content. Your idea works brilliantly with that. --Stfg (talk) 20:24, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

What if we allowed submissions to come only from the requests page? Would that be too limiting, or would it dovetail nicely? As for the backlog, we could always scale back drives to every third month once we get below, say, 1000 articles. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 20:43, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Very interesting ideas. What do others think? --Stfg (talk) 22:05, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

The idea of reducing to the oldest two months is great, as is reducing the number of drives. Changing focus to the requests page is a good idea, as long as the work is checked. Poor or incomplete work in that area can have a really bad impact on our reputation! I like the contest idea too. -- Dianna (talk) 02:47, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Excellent. I can't figure out at the moment whether limiting the contest to requests would be too limiting or not, but it might be. We're going to be learning from experience, aren't we, so how about placing no restrictions on the August contest, and then reviewing how it went afterwards? It's even possible to have different themes in different months, as I think you (Torchiest) said early on. --Stfg (talk) 12:03, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Kind Hearts and Coronets

I've gotten into an edit war with someone who believes that my writing is "clumsy", "clunky" and too informal, and that his or her version of the film synopsis is superior. I've finally gotten the IP to agree to a third opinion. So could somebody please review the last two versions and render a verdict? (There's a long, mostly one-sided discussion in the talk page as to our views on each other's faults.) Clarityfiend (talk) 19:09, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

I made a few remarks over there, but I welcome input from anyone else who's interested in trying to calm things down a bit. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 19:33, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

How to handle names of fictional characters

Is there a general rule for naming characters in fictional sections? In "regular" articles about the real world, the first time a person's name is mentioned, it is first and last, and thereafter, only the last name is used. Is it the same for fictional works, or are first names used in those cases? I'm wondering because I was working on Ghostbusters (franchise), and it alternates between using last names, both names, and first names. I cleaned up it pretty well, but it still needs some touching up to get it all normalized. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 02:19, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

I had the same difficulty with Del Boy. Looking at an existing FA on a fictional character, it seemed that the last name was the one to use, but Del Boy is Derek Trotter and several members of the Trotter family are involved. I used last name where unambiguous and Derek or Del Boy otherwise, but in the end it felt like a mess. Help! --Stfg (talk) 09:39, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, Torchiest, like Stfg, I had the same situation with The _(three) Godfather fims, and to a lesser extent with The Sopranos. In all instances, writing these plot summaries resulted in having to use given names, rather than surnames. -- Gareth Griffith-Jones (talk) 10:24, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

I've run into this repeatedly, as often on bio's as on ficto's. I use lasts where unambiguous, indirects (pronouns, etc.) where fitting and firsts when there's no other good choice. Probably should seek a ruling. Lfstevens (talk) 15:29, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. I asked this elsewhere, so I'm going to link to the other conversation. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 19:55, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

a copyeditor for me

hey all,

i just want to know if this is the right place, i am looking for copyeditor from the uk due to time difference the person who helps me just now means there is a problem but does fix something but not all who can copyedit any work i do before it goes live in article and possible copyedit my talk page posts to be more egiable and easier to understand.

The reason i ask is i am dyslexic very badly its impossible for me to use a spellchecker as generally it does not have a clue what i am trying to say or spell, and since i can not phonetical spell words i can not improve the spelling for the spell checker to fix it, nor do i knwo which word is right to use, and grammar no point even trying i dnt understand the basics of english to do it

For example "phonetical" gives me five options none of which i believe are right, even if one is i have no clue what it is, these are all the suggestions"phonetic al phonetic-al phonetics phoneticist phonemics" and this is another one "egiable" with four choices again i dnt think any are right and i have no clue how to spell it "expiable enviable negotiable deniable"

If this is not the right place can anyone advise where i might be able to get someone as a copyeditor for me--Andrewcrawford (talk - contrib) 18:29, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

September drive incentives

Would everyone be happy to adopt the same approach for the September drive as we did in July, with 50% bonuses for requests and oldest articles and six steps on the leaderboard? The current numbers of articles in the 2011 monthly categories are: July 3, August 100, September 108, October 135, though this may come down a little after I've processed for copyright violations, machine translations and a few other horrors. Should "oldest articles" go up to September or include October? Views, please. --Stfg (talk) 15:36, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

I'd say go ahead and include October, since we've still got a couple weeks to go, and July could be cleared out by then. Plus, that would mean we'd end with less than a year's worth of backlogs, something worth celebrating. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 16:12, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

October it is, then. --Stfg (talk) 13:59, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Stfg, you're doing an awesome job. Three months in the "oldest" category are enough. There's nothing wrong with overachieving. Pick the 3 mo's when the drive begins. I'm still hoping for "rookies" awards. Lfstevens (talk) 07:29, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the encouragement. You're not doing badly yourself, what with a half-million rollover count! The September drive page needed a list of months on it when it went live, if only as a placeholder, but yes, we can modify it to reflect consensus any time before the drive starts. Speaking of which, the September drive page features a new sign-up system that is very much easier to use. It was designed and tested by Torchiest, and he deserves our thanks for this big improvement.

As to rookie awards, there was some discussion here, where you first proposed it. It would be no problem to have further discussion, if you like. The July talk page may be off many watch lists by now, so if you want to copy that whole thread over here, I believe that would be fine. --Stfg (talk) 09:53, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

I actually thought having six slots per award was a little excessive, with thirty possible winners. I did last time, and I will again say I think we should remove the 5k+ category. On the one hand, we didn't even get to the No. 6 position with it, but on the other, we had a dozen people get the award for one or two articles edited. It just seems a bit redundant between the awards for word count, the awards for top word counts, and the 10k awards. I think we should replace it with requested articles and trim back to top five again. But I'd like others to agree or give alternate suggestions before making changes. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 12:42, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Five is enough. The longies are much more interesting to work than the shorties, so they provide their own reward. It might be fun to have silly categories like "most village articles" or "most video game articles" to motivate people to slog through them. Lfstevens (talk) 03:02, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

(←) Current numbers in the 2011 monthly categories are July 3, August 91, September 93, October 117 -- total 304. In July we started off with 302 from the oldest months and cleared 298 0r 299 of them. It looks like August and September have fewer than usual real nasties. So I feel now that we should include October in the incentives. If we do it, not only will the backlog be under a year, but it will stay that way provided we clear 2 months every 2 months. --Stfg (talk) 09:23, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Support. Lfstevens (talk) 03:02, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

agree to October. Neutral on 6th place-getters. Still think 5k+ articles need encouraging. Editing on an iPad for the first time! --Greenmaven (talk) 07:18, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

It looks like a consensus -- 2 in favour, 2 (adding me) neutral, none opposing -- for going back to top-5, so I'll change the drive page now. I see no consensus on 5k+ vs. requests, so let's keep that as is for the September 2012 drive. --Stfg (talk) 11:11, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Drives FAQ updated

During the July drive, an editor pointed out how the drives FAQ can mislead a bit on questions of reserving articles and how to avoid two editors accfidentally working on the same article. I've tried to improve the FAQ to be more clear about these questions. Here's the diff. Comments and further improvements welcome. --Stfg (talk) 11:08, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Before and after for Copy Edit of the Month

I know the inaugural contest is already in progress, but having just added my own submission, I realized it might be helpful to include before and after links for the articles, so as to make it easier to compare the differences. Any thoughts or suggestions on this? —Torchiest ^talk_edits 17:51, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

A diff would be nice, to ensure that everyone is considering the copy edit rather than whatever may have happened to the article afterwards. Would newer editors know how to create them? If we do this, perhaps we could also offer to help do this for anyone unsure of how? --Stfg (talk) 20:18, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I was thinking we could just have coordinators manually add them after the submissions period is over, which shouldn't be too difficult to manage unless we get a huge influx of entries. I was also thinking we could, yes, just put a note saying to add the links to versions, and ask a coordinator for help if needed. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 20:31, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Mentorship program

Is there still a demand for the Mentorship prgram? If so, any ideas how we might get it active again? --Stfg (talk) 09:44, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

As a novice copy editor, I think that would be a good idea. Though it won't work if experienced editors don't participate. ~Cheers, TenTonParasol 14:02, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I'll help, I am pretty experienced I have done about 18 copyedits. Obtund^Talk 22:03, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

I can pitch in too if needed. All the best, Miniapolis (talk) 20:12, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Nice tagging

Just found in an article:

<a company> has tied up with <another company> to put Ads on the back side of the e-Tickets issued to the passengers and reaches out to 10.3 Lakh unique eyeballs^{[clarification needed]} every day.

A cure for cataracts? --Stfg (talk) 12:40, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Britannica 1911

I'm just wondering what to do with the article Sydney Thompson Dobell. It's tagged for {{copyedit}}, but it contains lots of text from the 1911 Britannica, and all I can find wrong with it is that it's rather quaintly old-fashioned, not actually bad. To my mind, it would be rather a shame to modernise it. Should I do so, or mark it {{GOCEreviewed}} and explain why, or what else? --Stfg (talk) 18:25, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

I see what you mean. The language is a bit archaic, but not unacceptably so. Why not leave a message with Philafrenzy, who originally placed the tag a year ago, and find out what their concerns are? —Torchiest ^talk_edits 18:37, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Can do, but are there some principles about this general issue? Philafrenzy put all those multiple issues on it. I'll do a light edit to try to retain the flavour while dealing with things that might be confusing, and leave a note on the talk page about it. Will message Philafrenzy afterwards. --Stfg (talk) 09:14, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure. To me, it seems outside of policy, just a stylistic preference. The only comparison I can think of is consistently following the British/American/etc. English usage that an article has when making new edits to it. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:43, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Newbie Question... (not a Guild member)

I noticed Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia on the Community portal page and fulfilled the copy edit request... but I'm (very!) new to contributing and I don't think I have commented my edits correctly. Should I undo them and resubmit, so they're tagged as "Copy edit: ... ", or is it best to just leave it? Pinginrua (talk) 16:16, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Welcome! I think the edit summaries are fine, and the copy edit you did of that section was excellent. No need to change anything. --Stfg (talk) 16:32, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Whew! I've wanted to contribute for some time but, yeah, it's nerve-wracking doing your first one! Thanks a million. Pinginrua (talk) 08:17, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

I remember the feeling, but please don't worry. Do what your judgement guides you to, and if there's a mistake, which we all make from time to time, someone will be along sooner or later to put it right. Hope you enjoy it here. --Stfg (talk) 08:44, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Beatles RfC

You are invited to participate in an RfC at Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/The Beatles on the issue of capitalising the definite article when mentioning that band's name in running prose. This long-standing dispute is the subject of an open mediation case and we are requesting your help with determining the current community consensus. Thank you for your time. For the mediators. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 00:23, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Copy Edit of the Month

The contests don't seem to be generating a lot of activity, with only three submissions in the September contest and only three votes in the August contest. Any thoughts on how to increase participation? Or perhaps this just isn't a popular enough idea to continue. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 17:29, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Aren't there about 25 editors in the guild? That should be enough right there, if we could just encourage the guild members to !vote. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 17:36, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Our mailing list goes out to about 700 people, I think, and it's been mentioned there multiple times. And yes, I thought that even if we didn't get a lot of submissions, we'd get plenty of voting, since you don't have to do the former to do the latter. Amazingly, we have fewer votes than submissions in the first contest though. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 17:46, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

As a new boy on the Guild – my first copy-edit this month – I would like to know

• if I can submit my effort, or is it for someone else to do so. I noticed that User:GabeMc has Imagine (song) on the list of three, and
• who can one vote for.

-- Gareth Griffith-Jones/GG-J's Talk 17:59, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Anyone can submit and you can !vote for whoever you want. ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 18:07, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Just to be clear, this actually is just a straight up vote. You can also vote without making a submission or even technically being a "member" of the guild. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 18:43, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you to both. I shall do so. -- Gareth Griffith-Jones/GG-J's Talk 18:48, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

GOCE strategy

The September 2012 drive finally got the backlog to less than a year and sucessfully cleared all requests made before September. At the end of the month, there were 37 requests outstanding, none as old as four weeks (it creeps up in the even-numbered months, though). Requests seemed to be added faster than before, perhaps because getting them done faster releases the regular customers from the three-request limit quicker.

Maybe it's time to review what we do and whether we'd like to adjust anything. The intention of this post is to generate discussion. I've broken it into subsections in the hope that it will help threading. Feel free to add further subsections if you like. As specific things get agreed, we can implement those at the same time as continuing the rest of the discussion.

One last generality: whatever we do, let's try to avoid instruction creep. More facilities and better guidance, not more rules. --Stfg (talk) 12:09, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Overview

One thing we could think of is to adjust the frequency of backlog elimination drives and their targets and incentives. The next subsection is for that kind of discussion. If we find ourselves in less of a rush, maybe we can find ways to improve the quality of our work, for example by incentivizing checks, or by providing mechanisms to support copy editors collaborating on articles. That's the next subsection. Next, if we do want to push on quality, in order not to be arbitrary, perhaps we should be clear about what we do and don't expect of people. For example, not everyone should be editing in preparation for FAC, but there are other levels (like tagged stubs), where people can do very valuable things without (for example) knowing the MOS upside down and backwards. So the next subsection is about skill levels. --Stfg (talk) 12:09, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Drives

• Do we want to push for a still greater reduction of the backlog, or are we happy simply to ensure that it gets no worse? (I assume we don't want to let it get worse again.) If the latter, we'd have more time to look at quality and at even faster turn-round of requests.

• The Wikify drives have been bimonthly on the even-numbered months, so we have meshed nicely with them by using the odd-numbered months. This month, WikiProject Wikify is discussing what they want to do, but if they continue as before, should we do so too? One possibility is to continue bimonthly, but initially only list two target months and incentivize only those. In a month when it goes very well, we might then decide to incentivize the next month, whether or not we make a target to complete it.

• The removal of template {{Wikify}} and the consequent retagging may create a lump in the number of articles in the backlog, which will mature in about a year's time. For example, this morning there were already 230 articles tagged for copy edit in October 2012, so we may end up with over 800 in the whole month, nearly double the usual. Do we want to do anything to anticipate this now, or deal with it when we get to it?

• (By the way, in the middle of last month, I looked at 12 articles that had been retagged from {{Wikify}} to {{copyedit}}. Of those 12, three could be prodded for lack of notability -- all three PRODs were uncontested. One of the PRODs was also a copyvio, as was one other article, which has been tagged as copyvio and reported to the copyvio investigators. These articles were tagged {{Wikify}} in October 2009 and not dealt with in all the time since, so maybe it's not surprising that the average quality was so low, and we may see quite a lot of such articles. --Stfg (talk) 12:09, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

• I've had a couple ideas for modifying the drives and Copy Edit of the Month (CEM) contests:
  • We could start running a drive every month that would count only the oldest tags. The goal each month could be to clear just the oldest month. If we complete that, the goal is updated to the next month. That way, if we finish the oldest month, we're keeping pace. If we start into the next month, we get a little bit ahead. But the target would be just to keep our backlog under one year. This is similar to Stfg's second bullet point, but would be more continuous. His method could be easier to implement though.
  • We can remove the requests part out of the monthly drive and make that the new CEM focus. Instead of voting, we just give credit for every article copy edited that gets to good or featured article status. This would encourage quality work in a more measurable way. Also, if we did it every month, the copy edits would not have to be done within a particular time frame. Basically, you would just post any article you'd done a request on when it was promoted. I think that would be a very easy system to use, since other people would be doing the reviews of our copy edits for us. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:47, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Quality

This is the difficult one, because we shouldn't be driving good editors away by breathing down their necks. But Torchiest and I are concerned at some instances of poor quality during the last two drives.

• Can we persuade more of the experienced Guild members to help with the checking? What incentives would help?

• Should we be firmer in dealing with unacceptable edits, including restoring the tags; asking people not the place the {{GOCE}} template; asking people not to take part in drives; asking people not to take on requests?

• Currently, when a request is completed, the copy editor either archives it or tags the request as {{done}}, when I archive it. Would it be useful to have a third option: a template inviting another editor to look it over? The idea is that if one editor can do a 99% perfect job, then two can make it 99.99%. (If we do this, I think it should be optional, because it's the approval of the requester, rather than a GOCE checker, that really matters.) --Stfg (talk) 12:09, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

This is a bit tricky. I think we've got a pretty stable roster of maybe a dozen or two core copy editors that have solid track records, but there are always a few new people each month who may not be familiar with the process. What about having instructions that new editors must request reviews of their first copy edit before continuing? Another option could be adding a new row to the leaderboard for most copy edits reviewed, replacing one (or two) of the other awards. I would like to take this opportunity to again suggest removal of the 5k leaders from the table. :) We could have a supplemental goal that all copy edits submitted must be reviewed. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:53, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Skill levels

Our main page has a Useful links section which says: "The Manual of Style – Getting familiar with this document is not optional. *grin*" The opening paragraph of our drive page has: "Please make sure that you know how to copy edit and that you are familiar with the Wikipedia Manual of Style before you begin copy editing ..." Do we really mean this? Our basic how-to guide has a much less intimidating introduction for people who won't be editing for GA/FA.

I agree that this wording is a bit over the top. The manual of style is huge, and thorough knowledge of it is not required to be effective in improving most of the articles in the backlog. Guiding new members towards the advice for newcomers, such as the beginner's step-by-step guide, might be more appropriate. -- Dianna (talk) 15:59, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

• Can we reduce the emphasis on MOS so as not to drive away those who would do good work on tagged articles?

• Can we make it part of the mission of checkers to advise checkees if they are editing at too high a level?

• May I add a few things to the basic instructions in our how-to guide. Some of the commonest errors are changing to the copy editor's preferred date format, heavy overlinking, and violations of WP:ENGVAR (of which a very common one is to change the spelling of travelling/traveling, not realising that it's a cross-pondian thing)?

• This is a good idea. -- Dianna (talk) 15:59, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

• Seconded - ENGVAR problems like mixed or incorrect usage are very common. It's not always an obvious choice - things like Oxford spelling and serial commas can make a difference at GA and FA reviews. I've fallen foul of Engvar on many occasions. Baffle gab1978 (talk) 03:48, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

• In our how-to-guide, would it be a good idea to separate GA and FA into separate sections? (Only some parts of the MOS are required at GA.) --Stfg (talk) 12:09, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

• This is a good idea. -- Dianna (talk) 15:59, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

• A "tips and tricks" piece would save some grief. I've run into occasional objections when I've added {{GOCEinuse}} tags to longer articles and when I've used {{sfn|...}} and/or {{harv...}}. People also sometimes object when I fail to highlight that one of my changes is more than a pure copyedit. Lfstevens (talk) 05:02, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

• Yes - I think this and a simpler guide than the existing WP-wide one would help new and inexperienced editors build their skills and confidence more quickly.Tony1's tutorials are pretty good - if rather verbose. Baffle gab1978 (talk) 03:48, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Simplified Manual of Style Art LaPella (talk) 04:58, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

• Lovely! If nobody minds, I'm going to spend some time soon placing links to that in various places on GOCE pages.

@Lfstevens: I'll try putting something about GOCEinuse in Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/How to at the same time as revising the sections on GOCEreviewed and Removal of copyedit tag; then I'll ping you ask you to check it. We already have Wikipedia:Basic copyediting#Edit summaries, but should we enhance it? (With those two pages plus Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/How to/Step by step guide, I think I feel a little bit of reorganising our tutorial material coming on!) Any other tips & tricks we should cover? --Stfg (talk) 14:02, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

November drive proposal

I propose to set up a backlog elimination drive for November with targets:

• articles tagged in November and December 2011 (currently 278 articles, but this will reduce a little);
• all requests made before the start of November 2012.

I propose that the rules reman the same except that editors of articles of over 10K words should receive the 10K barnstar only if they don't make it to the top five in the "my longest article" category, as these get the lovely typewriter barnstars (they have antique value, you know).

Are there any comments on Torchiest's proposal to remove the 5K+ leaderboard category? It didn't gain support previously, so we'll only do it if it does now. And are there any other proposals? I'll create the drive page on Tuesday if there's no discussion, but it can be delayed if there is. --Stfg (talk) 13:17, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

The 10K barnstar proposal makes sense. Inspired by Torchiest's comment above, I think it might make sense to change the oldest article incentives to only apply to the single oldest month in the drive, to encourage people to take on the those last, execrable, articles. Once a month gets finished, the new oldest month becomes incentivized. (The next month could be released once the few remaining oldest month articles all had someone working on them, so that people wouldn't feel pressured to rush through those last articles of a month.) Tdslk (talk) 17:12, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Torchiest's comment was part of a proposal to move to continuuous, monthly drives. As that's such a radical step, I'd prefer to wait until people have given their views before implementing it. To avoid the backlog rising again, if we have drives every N months, then I think we need to have at least N months' target, and we're most likely to achieve it if we declare that target up front. Otherwise, there may not be the same sense of urgency, and we may not get to the second month in time to complete it. What I had in mind was to have two months' target initially, with the possibility to incentivize the third month non-retrospectively if we get to that point. Does that make sense? --Stfg (talk) 10:48, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

That makes sense. I know Torchiest's idea was different, but it inspired my idea above. Based on a Torchiest story.... Tdslk (talk) 15:43, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Given the October explosion (400+ articles tagged so far with more than half the month to go) should we rename the drives to "blitzes" and focus on the number edited rather than on the backlog. If we stay with "backlog", should we focus on the # of months left rather than the # of articles? Lfstevens (talk) 16:52, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Here's something I was thinking about which makes me favor focusing on the oldest articles. We're not the only people that copy edit articles. The longer an article keeps the tag, the more likely some random editor will come along and fix it. If we work on more recent tags, we could be making more work for ourselves by limiting the chance for someone else to do the work for us. Usually the articles that are still tagged after a year (or more) are either rarely edited or total dogs. The blitz term gives me an idea though. Maybe we could do single week blitzes in the off months, no frills, just as many words and articles as possible with no complicated modifications. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 22:45, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, otherwise I agree with Stfg's plan for the next drive. Cut 10Ks when redundant, start with two oldest months in backlog, add third month if possible. Alternate idea: we could just give out a 5K award to anyone who copy edits an article of that size or greater, instead of counting them on the leaderboard. Less overheard and maintenance. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 22:52, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

A new tool called Wikipedia:Page Curation was launched by the WMF in September; the tool is designed to make assessing new articles easier and less time-consuming for the new page patrollers. It looks like this is what is driving the sudden bulge in the number of articles being tagged for copy edit. As there are over 26,000 articles queued up to be assessed, we could be seeing a bulge in the number of pages tagged for quite some time to come. As far as the focus of this drive, my feeling is that we should continue rewarding editors who focus on the oldest tagged articles and on the Requests page. We can reassess moving forward once we see how our workload changes given this new assessment tool. -- Dianna (talk) 00:06, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Before the uptick we were still 18 months + from clearing the backlog, assuming we maintain the current pace. Given that we have already cleared the easily worked old shorties, maintaining this year's backlog reduction pace will be a stretch. If the influx doubles (it might grow more than that), the backlog will grow something like 1-200/month (~300 per drive) net of our efforts.

Another option is to consider redefining how we handle the lower forms of life: those that sport (or should sport) {{notability}}, {{unreferenced}}, {{rough translation}}, etc. Instead of copyediting them, we could prod them, or unabashedly remove all uncited content. Such moves would increase our productivity and upgrade the quality of what remains. Many such articles are gone from the backlog after traditional editing, but they are now flooding in. Lfstevens (talk) 03:51, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I definitely agree. When I first started doing this, I copy edited every single terrible article I came upon. My first drive's list is littered with redlinks now. But hopefully a lot of articles get filtered out of the list by others doing just that type of tagging and deleting for us, so by the time they're the last month or two on the list, they've been cleaned out somewhat. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 04:13, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

In the month before the drive starts, I already take a look at each article in the target months, checking for copyvio and machine translation and for a combination of tags that call for rewrite rather than copy edit. I remove the {{copyedit}} tag from all of these. Figure based on the current rate may be pessimistic, because even when we're not doing a drive, the number of articles tagged in each month slightly decreases. The oldest months have usually been around 150 by the time they become the oldest, although this may change because of {{Wikify}} retagging (short term) and page curation (maybe for ever). We need to keep watch on that. The pattern of gradual decrease over the months strongly supports Torchiest's point that copy edits of older tags are more productive than those of recent tags.

What does everyone think of Torchiest's idea of 1-week blitzes in the off months? I like it. --Stfg (talk) 09:47, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Support Lfstevens (talk) 16:33, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Given that the most recent month(s) have a disproportionate # of shorties, it is at least possible that we could keep the backlog going slightly down by scrubbing those each drive without preventing success on the oldies, at least for the next year. I found 200+ articles under 4k in September/October. Lfstevens (talk) 04:42, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Another thought: One possibility for encouraging drive participation would be "adopt a project". We'd announce to the project that we're going to focus on their articles for some period (depending on how many there are), and encourage them to join us in the endeavor. We'd guarantee to clear their copyedit backlog. We might surface a few new editors that way. I don't know if there's a way to cross-reference projects with copyedits, but we would start with the project that had the most entries and work our way down. Lfstevens (talk) 16:33, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I love that idea! I've done similar things with the CatScan tool. It can be done by adding the general "Wikipedia articles needing copy edit" to the categories, then adding the project template (or templates, if there are redirects and shortcuts to the main one) to the templates section of that search tool. I tried it with WP:VG and got 54 results, which sounds about right. This might work really well with the blitzes idea. Each blitz could have an associated project or projects, or a general theme. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 17:04, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Here is a list of all WikiProjects by size, which we could use as a guide for how to prioritize or select projects to adopt. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 17:06, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I like the idea of associating 1-week blitzes with projects too. Maybe try to favour active projects that might be more likely to help and to make use of it? If we can keep them really simple (no leaderboard, no bonuses, no requests as we shouldn't be rushing those, just simple word counts), then it seems implementable. --Stfg (talk) 17:41, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

This could be fun. We could post an announcement on the project's talk page, "You're getting blitzed by the GOCE next week!" or something like that. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 17:44, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I like this idea. I think it would be especially cool if we partnered with projects where some topic experts might not be native speakers of English. Some of my most fruitful editing work has been as a result of that sort of collaboration. Tdslk (talk) 21:03, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

(←) This is getting lots of positives and no negatives. Is it rushing things too much to try and do one this month? I have time this week to set up a page using a simplified version of our drive pages, and if we run it, say, Saturday 20th to Friday 26th, there would be time to complete it and issue barnstars before the November drive starts. I have no view on which project to go for -- you tell me! --Stfg (talk) 23:07, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd been debating going for it, but I'm up for it. Since this would be a test run, we might not want to get too ambitious, just in case we don't get a big enough response. WP:VG has 54 articles, and that seems like a good amount to attempt. WP:BIOGRAPHY, the biggest project on Wikipedia (over 1 million articles), was just featured in the Signpost this week, and has 64 articles tagged; that might be getting more attention in general, such that if we posted a notice explaining our intentions, we could get some attention ourselves. If anyone has another project they'd like to suggest with a similar number of articles, that's fine with me too. I would prefer running it from midnight Sunday the 21st (7pm Saturday the 20th U.S. Central time) to midnight Sunday the 28th, since it would be easier for me to start and stop it on the weekend. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 23:21, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm in. Lfstevens (talk) 23:27, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

(ec)Just to clarify: was that 00:00 on Sunday morning to 23:59 on Saturday evening, or something else? I get confused about midnight ;) I agree about not being over-ambitious on the first occasion. Biographies have their own special issues. Let's maybe get some experience before tackling them. --Stfg (talk) 23:30, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Heh, I think so. Whatever comes out to seven complete days. :) I'll look at some other projects and maybe make a short list to choose from, unless everyone is okay with just doing video game articles to start? I'll admit I'm biased. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 01:28, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I won't boycot VG, but I'd prefer something of broader appeal, e.g., US, Science, Schools, etc. Lfstevens (talk) 04:44, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

List of possible projects

• WP:WikiProject Olympics – 9
• WP:WikiProject Albums – 12
• WP:WikiProject Football – 17
• WP:WikiProject Television – 26
• WP:WikiProject Schools – 33
• WP:WikiProject Video games – 54
• WP:WikiProject United States – 64
• WP:WikiProject Biography – 64
• WP:WikiProject Film – 67
• WP:WikiProject India – 282

The numbers are all over the place, and I'm sure the India articles would be relatively difficult in addition to being numerous. Thoughts? —Torchiest ^talk_edits 05:45, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

With the very small numbers, we may like to combine two or more projects into one blitz, but we won't know how many to include until we have some idea of how fast we get through them. So it might be better if we go for the lower half (higher numbers) on this list this time (?) --Stfg (talk) 09:52, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Another thought: some of these topics, especially schools, video games and India, account for quite a large number of the really difficult articles that hang fire for longest in the drives. I don't know whether that means we should go for them (to help drives be successful) or avoid them, though :) --Stfg (talk) 12:45, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

No need to be bold the first time out. Let's do something easy and kill it. The articles aren't going anywhere. Lfstevens (talk) 15:16, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Should we just start at the top of that list and see if we can maybe knock out the first 2–4 projects? Also, generating the lists is a little bit difficult; I would be willing to add the list of available articles to the top of the blitz page. We could then just check them off and sign our names to each one, and keep a simple table listing everyone's totals without maintaining individual lists. Once all articles on the list are completed, I can add the next project's articles. Shouldn't be too tough to manage for just a week. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 17:38, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

It's probably a good idea to have that list, thanks. If we do that, we need to ask editors to tag their chosen list item with {{working}} to avoid clashes. The other way to manage this is to provide a link to the approriate Catscan search, like this (which was taken from the drives main page). But those may be harder for new editors to use, and they can be slow when the servers are busy, so the list is probably better.

It would be a shame if willing editors were to come looking for an article to edit and find none left, so I wouldn't start with anything too small until we know our pace. Some of the articles may be small, too. How about schools, with the intention to choose another once we see what we're managing? Torchiest, if we go like this, you have to be allowed to make instant decisions on which project to go for next, so as not to run out of articles. Feel free to do that, as far as I'm concerned.

I've now created a main blitzes page, an October blitz page, a Blitzes Userbox (linked from the bottom of the main page), and various internal pages. Take a look. The word counts are still being negotiated. --Stfg (talk) 18:41, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I'll just plan on going down the list I made above. I'll start with the first two, and once they're getting close to completion, I'll add the next one. I should be able to keep tabs on it pretty closely over the weekend and get a feel for how quickly it's going. If we get a lot of activity, I will get a larger buffer of items on the list. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 20:01, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I hope we're letting the projects know we're coming and that we welcome their feedback and contributions.Lfstevens (talk) 04:08, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I posted notices earlier on Friday. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 04:29, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Another newbie... (please check my work)

I just finished my first copy edit (Von Gaffron und Oberstradam). I am wary of removing the {{Copy edit}} tag without someone checking my work, so I would appreciate it if someone could have a look. NardusM (talk) 19:13, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I'll take a look for you. --Stfg (talk) 20:02, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Very nice job -- you've made it read very smoothly. --Stfg (talk) 20:15, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Copy edit review requested on Dd (Unix)

I started to copy edit the section of the dd (Unix) article which contained a copy-edit notification. The whole article could use a little clean-up as well, but I'd like to make sure I'm on the right track before I launch into too much more. OhioGuy814 (talk) 02:33, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I just looked at your changes, and I think they're great. I'm a programmer, but even for me the original text is dense and difficult to parse. Your copy edits removed a lot of extra junk that only confused the meaning, and focused on the subject of that section. Nice work; I say keep it up! —Torchiest ^talk_edits 03:12, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll remove the {{copyedit-section}} template from that section and keep working on the rest of the article. OhioGuy814 (talk) 02:33, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Newsletter

Hi all

Just wondered how long we have been using "Fall" (or even seasons?) in the newsletter title?

I find it a little bizarre that I have not noticed it before, perhaps it is a recent thing? As a British/European editor I find it a little crass that the wording resorted to fall rather than the more internationally acceptable title of autumn. Chaosdruid (talk) 07:22, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

@Chaosdruid – you beat me to it. I agree entirely with your posting above. (turn aside, cover half of mouth with hand and mutter, "There is too much American English in Wikipedia.")

Ha, ha!

Cheers to all! -- Gareth Griffith-Jones/GG-J's Talk 10:02, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Mwaaahaha! Damn near autumned off my chair when I saw that, doncherknow! --Stfg (talk) 10:12, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

There again, is it really an Americanism? The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd (3rd stanza) Springs to mind. --Stfg (talk) 12:08, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

What? No, that title has to do with making the backlog total fall. *shuffles off quietly* —Torchiest ^talk_edits 12:34, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Seems to be the silly season for summervus. --Stfg (talk) 13:43, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, my bad. Here in Canada we say "fall", not "autumn". "Autumn" is too highfalutin for us :) -- Dianna (talk) 14:49, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Our southern hemisphere friends probably don't appreciate it either way. But it was my fault on that last one. 10/18/12 never forget. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 14:53, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

We have southern hemisphere friends? Awesome! Lfstevens (talk) 04:07, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

We have indeed. But one of them got an iPad and hasn't been seen at GOCE since. Now I hate iPads! --Stfg (talk) 23:56, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm debating breaking out the AWB to go back and fix them all. It's really intolerable. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:03, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't -- there's around 600 on the list. We made a mistake, as humans can, but I'd be surprised if anyone thought we did anything worse than momentarily forget that the seasons are different in different parts of the world. --Stfg (talk) 15:40, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Besides, there's snow on the ground here this morning, so "autumn" is just sooo last week. -- Dianna (talk)

We have the reverse problem in Texas. It's still summer here. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 19:28, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Lucky you ... Summer bypassed us again this year ... and the so-called promised Indian Summer broke its promise. Disappointed, Great Bitain Aka __ Gareth Griffith-Jones/GG-J's Talk 21:33, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Turn of the century

Hallo, at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Guild_of_Copy_Editors/Projects#Turn_of_the_century you do not give any guidance as to what phrase should be used instead of "turn of the (last) century". An editor has been adding the, to my mind horrendous, wording "turn of the 19th and 20th centuries". (example.) I think that in some cases no clarification is needed (eg an article like Chapeltown, Leeds where the text refers to "the 1880s", "the next decade", "the turn of the century" in quick succession), but in other cases I suggest that "the end of the nth century" or "the beginning of the nth century" is probably the best and simplest wording. It might be useful to offer advice on that project page. (The editor seems to have stopped for now, as requested on his/her talkpage.) PamD 16:39, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I moved this from the coordinators talk page, as it seems like it would be better to get a bigger discussion on this from as many editors as possible. I pretty much agree with what you've said. In some cases with a clear chronological progression, "turn of the century" is fine on its own. I'd tend to favor "the beginning of..." or "the end of..." whatever century, as that's as unambiguous as possible. Just as "turn of the last century" is ambiguous, the phrase "turn of" any century is ambiguous, since some people might think the century being "turned" was the ending one, while others would think the one that began. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 16:53, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree with that. Also, "turn of the century" feels a bit colloquial to me. Expressions like "around 1900", "five years either side of 1900", "from 1895 to 1914", ... are often suitable. When we see an expression like "turn of the century", it's sometimes tempting to stick with the writer's thought and try and include turning and centuryness in our rewriting, but we don't have to. Thanks for raising this, Pam. --Stfg (talk) 17:06, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Personally I avoid the phrase because of its ambiguity, and would instead use "the end of the 19th century" or similar, as I did here. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:20, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

• I have seen articles in which 'turn of the century' was followed by parenthesis (1880-1920) for example--a 40 year span! One cannot replace 'turn of' with 'end of' in any case as 'turn of' means some period of time before and after the xx00 year. What period of time is not clear at all to anyone other than the mind of the original writer whose work was copied into WP--and thus unknown to WP readers. I have been writing 'turn of the 19th to 20th century', for example, to fix the apparent ambiguity that some writers write 'turn of the 20th century' to mean the beginning of the 20th century while others mean the end of the 20th century. But the ambiguity problem here is much bigger than that. Each component needs to be considered Hmains (talk) 01:56, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

We could reword "turn of the century (1880-1920)" to something like "between 1880 and 1920" and get rid of the redundancy. Unfortunately, "turn of the century" is a fixed idiom, and "turn of the 19th to 20th century" isn't quite idiomatic. There are many other ways of wording this idea. --Stfg (talk) 09:48, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

• I don't see much of a discussion here, so I will change all 'turn of the 19th to 20th century' for example, to 'turn of the 20th century'. I will also disambiguate 'turn of the century' to 'turn of the nnth century' based on the content of the article or its underlying references. Hmains (talk) 02:34, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, I think we're mostly agreed that "turn of the century" is ambiguous and should be avoided if possible. Perhaps a phrase like "end of the 19th century and into the 20th" would work better? —Torchiest ^talk_edits 02:46, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

I think there is consensus that "Turn of the nth century" is ambiguous, as is "Turn of the century" where it does not have a context (dates in one or other or both centuries) which makes it clear what is meant (as in the example which brought this to my notice). If "end of the nth century" or "start of the nth century" aren't felt appropriate in a particular context, perhaps "around x00" is suitable: that covers the 40-year span adequately, as the range of "around" is in the mind of the reader. (Or "around the start of the nth century": might be the solution, as here in Chain O'Lakes.

By all means hunt out and fix (elegantly) the occasions where there is actualy ambiguity from this phrase (any examples?), but I suspect that in most cases it is not causing any problem. And perhaps for a project like this the edit summary should be more informative than just "copyedit, refine cat, and AWB general fixes". PamD 07:40, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

From Chambers 20th Century Dictionary (1983 Edn.): "turn of the century, year the period of the end of one century, year, and the beginning of the next". So "turn of the nth century" is ambiguous in failing to say whether the nth is the outgoing or the incoming century. And as Pam says, it means the same as "around xx00". In Pam's example, "By the turn of the 19th to 20th century, the area was almost completely filled with housing" could easily become "By around 1900, the area was almost completely filled with housing", or better still, to get rid of the stacked prepositions, just "By 1900, ...", since the almost already makes it approximate. --Stfg (talk) 10:07, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

@Hmains, on your talk page you linked to Turn of the century, which mentions that CMOS considers "turn of the n-th century" ambiguous. We should be removing that phrase, not adding it, shouldn't we? --Stfg (talk) 11:10, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree with you, Stfg. -- Gareth Griffith-Jones/The Welsh Buzzard 11:40, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

I've just checked the Oxford English Dictionary under "Turn": usage 18(c) has "turn of the century, the beginning or end of the century under consideration". So "turn of the nth century" is officially (well, highly-respectedly) ambiguous. (And it's certainly ambiguous in practical terms, just like all-numeric dates such as 01/02/2012 - Jan or Feb? - and "biennial" and "biannual" which are so often muddled that it's safer just to say "twice a year" or "every two years" as required). We want (a) clarity and (b) prose which doesn't make the reader wince. PamD 13:30, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

• I had been changing 'turn of the century' to 'turn of the xxth century to yyth century' based on the context I found in the articles and also was changing 'turn of the yyth century' to 'turn of the xxth to yyth century' again based on context. I was stopped by an Admin who started reverting my work and telling me I had no basis in the MOS/elsewhere for doing what I was doing (see my talk page). If you can get the MOS changed to show WP authors 'should be' writing 'turn of the xxth century to yyth century' or whatever else is agreed upon as unambiguous, then I will change articles to that. I just try to implement in mass whatever the MOS says about such things. Thanks Hmains (talk) 00:06, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's understood. Whatever that admin may have said to you, what's going on here is not to criticize your activities but to better understand the usage question. Recall that PamD's opening gambit was to invite better guidance at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Guild_of_Copy_Editors/Projects#Turn_of_the_century. Maybe this discussion can generate it.

The question at issue is one that might be covered by a good dictionary or usage guide, but I quake in my boots at the prospect of trying to get the MOS to be either of those! If you recall all the debates around dashes there about a year ago, can you imgine what would happen if we let WT:MOS loose on participles and gerunds? But maybe this thread can at least enable us to put something more specific in the place that PamD pointed us to. What is your view about the purely usage question, so far? --Stfg (talk) 00:43, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

The OED and Chicago both agree that "turn of the nth century" is ambiguous. In many cases the context will make it quite clear, and there is no point in amending it (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). If the meaning is not clear from the context, but an editor is completely sure that they nevertheless know what is meant, then one of the phrases like "about 1900", "at the beginning of the nth century" etc should be used. Chicago manual, as quoted in [[[Turn of the century]], recommends not using any form other than plain "turn of the century", and "only in a context that makes clear which transition is meant". There is no place for the ugly "turn of the 19th and 20th centuries". PamD 19:37, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I've mentioned this discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Dates_and_numbers#.22Turn_of_the_century.22 where the MOSNUM enthusiasts hang out. PamD 19:45, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Agreed that simple "turn of the century/decade/millennium" is best. However, the 'horrendous' wording is supported by the OED: It was as a doctrine of free will that Neo-Platonism was embraced by St Augustine at the turn of the fourth to the fifth century. Only two other examples with a number in OED: He begins with a splendid assembly of Church of England men all earnestly proclaiming, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doctrines then trendy. (Meaning ca. 1800, if we're to go by other tokens of "at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries".) The evolutionary significance of the original Neanderthal discovery and of other human remains uncovered at Paleolithic sites was not apparent until the turn of the 20th century. (Written in 1979.) The only example with a single number thus means the beginning of the named century. MWNC seems to agree: "the beginning of a new period of time". Garner's has the following examples: By the turn of the 21st century, there were hundreds of published references to mondegreens; but around the turn of the 20th century, 'spitting image' (or 'spittin' image') appeared. Again, in both cases the number refers to the new century. I suggest that if we're going to have a number, it should be with this sense, since even the OED does not provide an example of the opposite and such usage seems to be unattested, but that we should make sure the context makes it clear. — kwami (talk) 05:00, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

As is usual, User:Kwamikagami has 'hit the spot' perfectly. I have never understood any other interpretation of the phrase, than that explained by kwami here. Sincerely, -- Gareth Griffith-Jones/The Welsh Buzzard 05:37, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes. Having read what Kwami says, my views have changed. --Stfg (talk) 10:17, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

• comment. Would 'at the turn of the 20th century' be better or 'around the start of the 20th century'? Why? Hmains (talk) 18:03, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

imho the latter, because everyone understands what it means, and that isn't the case for the former. --Stfg (talk) 18:41, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

"At the turn of the X" has a more poetic feel, suggesting a cycle of change rather than a mere date. The turn of the year invokes the depths of winter and yule logs. The turn of the century invokes the dawning of a new era, such as automobiles and motion pictures for the 20th. "At the start of" is more prosaic, which is perhaps more appropriate for an encyclopedia even if less enjoyable to read. It might be a good rule of thumb that, if a number is needed, "at the turn of" isn't the best phrasing to use. — kwami (talk) 07:20, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

• So is there agreement or just silence about using 'around the start of the nnth century' in all these cases? Hmains (talk) 03:26, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

I would venture to say that we have our answer to your question above in kwami's two postings. -- Gareth Griffith-Jones/The Welsh Buzzard 11:02, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

I have provisionally added a couple of bullets to the project page to try to clarify things. Will they do? If there's to be further discussion, please can we have normal talk page threading and not repeated restarts? --Stfg (talk) 12:19, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Your alternatives do not include "around the start of the XXth century" which would seem to be, along with "at the start of the XXth century" part of the solution for original writing or copyediting improvement in this area. Thanks Hmains (talk) 18:28, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Added now. --Stfg (talk) 18:39, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm a newbie, too!

Just finished my first copyedit as well...Japonism. Definitely wasn't easy! I'd appreciate someone taking a look at that for me. I did remove the template, but I'm still not sure how I did. Thanks! AFisch99 (talk) 15:19, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorry it took so long. I'll take a look. --Stfg (talk) 13:26, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Is there a physicist in the house?

One of the requests currently near the top of our requests page is for a copy edit of Jürgen Ehlers, an article about a significant 20th-century physicist. The intention is to take it to FA, so the copy edit needs to be excellent. However, it's very difficult, as the article is highly technical and full to the brim with ambiguities like the one in the following sentence: "In his doctoral thesis, Ehlers pointed out a duality symmetry between different components of the metric of a stationary vacuum spacetime, which maps solutions of Einstein's field equations to other solutions." What does the "which" refer to here? Grammatically, it should be to the staionary vacuum spacetime. But I suspect it is really meant to refer to the duality symmetry, and it could even be to the metric as far as I can tell. An editor with some knowledge of the subject would have a much better chance than anyone else of doing a good job here and not getting tripped up, bogged down and shaken about. Does anyone feel up to this one, or have any suggestions? --Stfg (talk) 20:24, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

It has been done now. --Stfg (talk) 22:17, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Second blitz

I'm thinking we can schedule the next blitz to occur from Sunday, December 16, 2012, 00:00 UTC to Saturday, December 22, 2012, 23:59 UTC. That puts it, hopefully, after college finals but before the holidays. As for focus, I think WikiProject United States is a pretty good size to attempt, as it's about equivalent to the number of tags we tried in October. Thoughts or suggestions? —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:05, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Sounds good to me if it's not too close to Christmas for people. I should be free to issue barnstars on the 23rd. --Stfg (talk) 22:19, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I probably should have said university as well. ;) —Torchiest ^talk_edits 22:30, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

As well? Also, has anybody run into problems using catscan lately? It's been over a week since I got anything other than a MySQL error. Lfstevens (talk) 00:36, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I tried to use it the other day and it did not work at all. I tried it just now and the page wouldn't even load. -- Dianna (talk) 00:59, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Any more thoughts on this? Just want to double check that WikiProject United States and the date range are both okay. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 18:54, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

If we can get a list of articles, I'd say put a date on the page and in the ombox and see what happens. It can't hurt, I guess. (I just got Catscan loading almost instantaneously, but it timed out when I tried a scan.) --Stfg (talk) 19:17, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll work on putting together a list today. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 19:28, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Darn, CatScan errored out for me. I was hoping it maybe timed out for your because your query was too broad. Well, if we can't get a list together, another alternate idea would be to have the blitz focus on just the oldest month in the queue. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 19:34, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes indeed. I doubt if I'll find time to pre-process for copyvio etc, unfortunately. --Stfg (talk) 21:36, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Copy edit review

I copy edited the Mellow Yellow coffeeshop (diff) article. It was my first attempt at copy editing, so I'd love for someone with experience to give me some feedback and review my copy edit. Thank you! Emayv (talk) 19:52, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

I found a couple more things to do, but all in all your work was very good. Thanks for your interest in helping out with copy edits. -- Dianna (talk) 01:06, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for helping me. Emayv (talk) 18:19, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I copy edited the 100 Bullets article. Askin to Emayv, it was my first copy-edit - can someone review it for me? How did I do in fixing bare URLs? What about the text-fixing at the Plot section? Thanks in advance! WolfgangAzureus (talk) 02:57, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

On the bare URLs, you've improved them, but I highly recommend using the {{cite}} and related templates to format citations. They make it easy to fill in all the information and also allow bots to parse citations. On the copy editing, I don't think all the groups mentioned need to be in quotation marks or italics. On this, " In each issue, the mysterious Agent Graves approached someone who had been the victim of a terrible wrong." you got the tenses matching, but for fictional events, you should use the present tense instead. Hope that helps! —Torchiest ^talk_edits 03:21, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings

Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings is a new report at Wikipedia:Database reports.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:31, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Wow, that's handy! It looks like the majority of them are underscore problems rather than true misspellings though. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 17:20, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I think that's just the way they are presented (using a template). The first few shown with underscores don't have them on the pages linked to. This is very fascinating: why would anyone make a redirect from Tennesseee instead of correcting the spelling at source? Ditto for many of the others. I'd've thought these redirects are merely obsucring errors that the redlinks would have shown up, and so making it less likely they'll get corrected. --Stfg (talk) 18:45, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Duh, you're right. I only glanced at them and didn't realize they were misspellings in the first place, e.g. Monsters Inc. As for redirecting from misspellings as opposed to correcting them, I think that has to do with misspellings being possible search terms, like typos, where we still want users to get to the correct page. But poor links is an undesirable side effect of that practice. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 18:51, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Objections to the long-established practice of redirecting from misspellings could be directed to the talk page of Wikipedia:Redirect: "Reasons for creating and maintaining redirects include: ... Likely misspellings (for example, Condoleeza Rice redirects to Condoleezza Rice)." And Template:R from misspelling. Art LaPella (talk) 19:05, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I just fixed all of the "Tennesseee"'s. While it would be a good way to inflate my edit count, it seems like the larger task would be something for which a bot would be useful. Does anyone know if there is one? (Even just one that sends a notice to your talk page like when you link to a disambiguation page.) Tdslk (talk) 19:13, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

@Art: Thanks. My feelings were more like puzzlement than objection. The puzzle is solved now :)

@Tdslk: Probably a bot should only process those that have first been validated by a human bean, since a bot cannot tell the difference between a misspelling and a legitimate alternative spelling. --Stfg (talk) 19:25, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Related: bugzilla:42880. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:57, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Present vs past tense in fictional summaries

I know present tense is used for summarizing fiction, but it seems a bit tricky when getting into events that supposedly happened in the past, or before the story proper begins. My example is a case where a summary begins with a flashback, which is written in the past tense. It reads a little weirdly to me, but then switching to present seems to confuse the timeline a little bit. Any thoughts on this? —Torchiest ^talk_edits 14:42, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I've had this a couple of times too. I think the best way is to pretend that the time of the current story is consistently the "present", and that background history is in the past with respect to it, like this:

Fred is studying at university. He passed his entrance exams a year ago and took a gap year before going up, so now at last he can afford the tuition fees.

I don't know your current case. How would this look there? --Stfg (talk) 15:10, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Look at the synopsis section of God of War (video game). The first few paragraphs are in the past tense before switching to in-game events. It's not as clear cut as your example because the entire past event is in order in front of the "current" events. Tourchiest (talk) 15:44, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I think that reads very well. "A series of flashbacks reveals ..." nicely anchors us in the game's present and justifies the past tense. "When the game starts ..." two paragraphs later nicely delimits it. Changing that part to the present would probably confuse it, as you say. --Stfg (talk) 16:25, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, forgot to say thanks for your second response. I left it with the past tense for the flashback part. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 14:05, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Newsletter...

Might it be easier to have all the newsletters on a centralized page, and just have the bot drop a link on the user's talkpage to tell them it's there? MSJapan (talk) 00:54, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I was thinking along that line myself. They're kinda big. Here's an example of what we could try:

End of Year Events from the Guild of Copy Editors The Guild of Copy Editors invites you to read the latest issue of our newsletter. Highlights of this month's events: November and December 2012 Copy Edit of the Month Contests December Project Blitz January 2013 Backlog elimination drive Coordinator election nominations end Saturday Read the latest issue here. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list. Message delivered by EdwardsBot (talk) 23:57, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Or this:

End of Year Events from the Guild of Copy Editors The Guild of Copy Editors invites you to read the latest issue of our newsletter: Read the latest issue here. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list. Message delivered by EdwardsBot (talk) 23:57, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

-- Dianna (talk) 01:52, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

This last issue was particularly huge, but they have been bigger with all the new events we have now. If we did this, we could add more information, such as monthly tag counts and the like. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 02:02, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Indeed we could. Thanks for the idea, MSJapan. I like this idea a lot, too, and Dianna's suggestions seem ideal. I slightly prefer the first, as I think the prominence it gives to the events will help us. --Stfg (talk) 10:50, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

This is basically what the Signpost does. On each user talk page, it drops a notification that includes an index to the most recent issue. It seems to work pretty well. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:59, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

The top example doesn't link to sections of the newsletter, which essentially has only one section. So I have amended it a bit to make it clearer that these are links to the event pages and not to the newsletter. The top example uses code from The Bugle, the Military History newsletter. -- Dianna (talk) 22:56, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I think I like the first one better. If there's nothing as an eyecatch, there's no incentive to read the newsletter, which is the case with the second one. MSJapan (talk) 19:49, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Origin of place names

In an article about a city, should a section discussing the origins of its name be called Etymology or Toponymy? I can't find a very precise statement of what the difference is, when applied to place names. --Stfg (talk) 14:52, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I would favor the latter, since it's essentially a specialized subset of the former. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 15:00, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

It should unquestionably be called Toponymy. Malleus Fatuorum 16:07, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Torchiest – except for the "favour" and the "specialised" –
 – Gareth Griffith-Jones/The Welsh Buzzard 16:18, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Haha, I guess I'm outnumbered. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 16:20, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I had this discussion some years ago here - I argued that, though we should strive to be educational, we should not use words that almost no-one understands, like "Toponymy". I lost the argument, and since then have tended to use terms like "Origin of the name". It's longer, but everyone understands it - which I believe is important. Ghmyrtle (talk) 16:56, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Good job we can't link section headings, or people would spend all their time reading Etymology and/or Toponymy which are both fascinating articles in their own right! But don't forget, of course, about filology and folk etymology too. I would obviously favour the specialist toppy-gnomey, or am I just being a bit of a troll? Martinevans123 (talk) 17:14, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think I've ever used either toponymy or etymology as section headers, and wouldn't recommend that anyone did, for the reason Ghymyrtle points out. It's perfectly straightforward to describe the origin of a place name at the start of a History section for instance, without using either term. "Etymology" is incorrect though. Malleus Fatuorum 17:40, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

As bad as to be incorrect, eh? Why so, Malleus? --Stfg (talk) 19:09, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Do you not have access to a dictionary? Malleus Fatuorum 19:25, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Everyone except Malleus is reminded they need to be nicer ... Art LaPella (talk) 19:49, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't see that it's necessarily incorrect, but it's definitely less precise. Besides, on what other occasion would you get to use the fancy word toponymy, if not this one? —Torchiest ^talk_edits 20:02, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

[3]? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:06, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

WP:VNT. :P —Torchiest ^talk_edits 20:10, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

"Dagnabbit, Musky!" - the synopsis sounds like the average wikipedia Talk thread. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:31, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure which is worse: the subject matter of the movie, or the quality of that article. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 20:42, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

But cleverly features neither "etymology" nor "toponymy". But is this an example of good usage: Church Gresley? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:47, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

(←) @Malleus, that would be popguns at dawn, if I had a popgun and could be bothered to get up that early. Obviously, you silly, I consulted dictionaries before starting this thread. They rather bear out Torchiest's theory. Wanna borrow one? Best, Simon. --Stfg (talk) 11:58, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

If you'd bothered to consult a dictionary then you wouldn't have needed to start this thread. But I will now leave you to your childish ramblings. Malleus Fatuorum 18:35, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm glad I found this thread as it reminded me to make this change, having forgotten about it for months. Perhaps if Ghmyrtle hadn't lost the argument.... PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 20:28, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Haha, now that's just showing off, by using simple words! "A rose by any other toponym would smell as sweet? Martinevans123 (talk) 20:43, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

This toponymifying could be quite catching. For instance, I heard somewhere that some places are so good they toponym them twice.... PaleCloudedWhite (talk) 21:21, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Consider yourself banned for life, PCW, ien naam is genoeg! Martinevans123 (talk) 21:28, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

There just aren't enough toponyms. Some have to be used over and over. --Stfg (talk) 01:00, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Tricky bit of quoting

I'm really struggling with this piece of text in the xiangqi article:

For these reasons, Harold James Ruthven Murray, author of A History of Chess, theorized that "in China it [Chess] took over the board and name of a game called 象棋 in the sense of "Constellation Game" (rendered by Murray as "Astronomical Game"), which represented the apparent movements of naked-eye-visible astronomical objects in the night sky, and that the earliest Chinese references to 象棋 meant the Astronomical Game and not Chinese chess".

The problem is that what appears to be a quote from Murray refers to him in the third person, which makes me think it's just a muddle of quoting and commentary. It also doesn't make sense that an apparent quote has the term constellation, but then parenthetically corrects itself to say he used the term astronomical in his text. It continues on with him actually using astronomical in the second reference to the game's name. Anyway, it's a puzzle. I've changed it to read as follows:

For these reasons, Murray, author of A History of Chess, theorized that "in China [chess] took over the board and name of a game called 象棋 in the sense of 'Constellation Game'"—rendered by Murray as "Astronomical Game"—"which represented the apparent movements of naked-eye-visible astronomical objects in the night sky, and that the earliest Chinese references to 象棋 meant the Astronomical Game and not Chinese chess".

The other problem is I can't find the source text online to see what it actually says. Any ideas or suggestions for improving this? Thanks all. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 04:11, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

I am able to see a snippet view of Murray's book A History of Chess, and though it does not seem to contain this quotation, it confirms you are on the right track with the meaning. -- Dianna (talk) 04:52, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I searched for "constellation" and it returned zero entries for the book, so I just replaced it wholesale. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 16:17, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Heads up: some newbies coming your way, hopefully

Hi all, I just wanted to let you know that a couple of the experiments that the WMF is currently working on to get more people interested in editing (Wikipedia:GettingStarted, for example, as well as a banner campaign targeting readers, which you should see in the next few days if you log out) involve copyediting tasks, so if things go really well, you might be seeing a surge of new copyeditors coming your way :) In conjunction with this work, Steven Walling and I are going to take a crack at rewriting Wikipedia:Basic copyediting to be more general and new-user friendly. If you happen to see a newbie copyediting articles out in the wild, please welcome him/her and extend an invitation to join this project! Cheers, Accedie^{talk to me} 19:03, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

The "five Cs" summarise the copy editor's job

I "undid" this revision by User:SlimVirgin today.
We have had the following listed thus, "The "five Cs" summarize the copy editor's job: Make the copy clear, correct, concise, complete, and consistent. Copy editors should make it say what it means, and mean what it says" for as long as I have been aware of this article.
My edit summary – "Reverted good faith edits by SlimVirgin (talk): comprehensible means the same as clear (understandable)" – explains why I reversed User:SlimVirgin, who has immediately reverted my edit.
Surely the duplication of comprehensible with clear (both meaning "understandable") should not remain and 'complete' should be restored –
 – Gareth Griffith-Jones |The Welsh Buzzard| 19:05, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Did you mean to post this at talk:copy editing? This page is for discussion of the wikiproject, and while the contents of copy editing would be of interest to the guild, the article's talk page is probably the best place to begin a discussion of wording in that article. Tdslk (talk) 19:29, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Note: This discussion is proceeding at Talk:Copy editing –
 – Gareth Griffith-Jones |The Welsh Buzzard| 20:12, 28 December 2012 (UTC)