215:". A task force is essentially a semi-autonomous component group of a WikiProject that allows editors with a narrower interest to have a dedicated area for their work, but attempts to eliminate bureaucratic overhead by relying on the parent projects processes and technical infrastructure rather than creating its own. For example, a typical task force does not have a project banner in its own right; instead, it relies on a parameter in the parent project's banner (which is constructed so as to generate features such as assessment statistics for the task force without the need for additional effort).
154:, typically have little problem acting as discussion areas; but the extent to which they're seen as having the legitimacy to serve as forums for, say, guideline development is debatable. Furthermore, small projects generally have neither a need for dedicated processes of their own nor the manpower to keep them active; a project covering a hundred articles, for example, gains virtually nothing for the effort of creating and maintaining its own peer review process.
147:, are generally entirely dysfunctional. The scope is so large that most potential members simply don't share any substantial common interests—and those that do will typically interact through more focused sub-projects; thus, both WikiProject functions break down. This is unavoidable, to some extent; it seems that the core topics are simply too general to sustain a cohesive editorial community.
280:
means that discussions are split over multiple pages. This only becomes worse as formal processes are independently developed by the overlapping projects; if a process requires a certain critical mass of editors to function, but the available manpower pool is split among several overlapping processes, the likely end result is that none of them will actually be productive.
21:
332:(or a suitable derivative, to be developed as desired) be generally adopted for talk pages with more than some arbitrary number (perhaps two or three) of WikiProject banners. This will alleviate the major concern with excessive templates, while at the same time allowing legitimate multiple tagging of articles that are of interest to several projects.
55:
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A somewhat broader concern than pure redundancy is the fracturing of discussions and efforts due to related projects not interacting, or even being entirely unaware of each other's existence. This manifests most obviously when contradictory guidelines are adopted by such groups of projects, but can
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An obvious negative consequence of proliferating WikiProjects is that the common practice of projects adding talk-page banners to articles within their scope results in ever-increasing numbers of such banners on every talk page. While this may seem sensible in some cases, the hierarchical nature of
189:(actually weekly), drawing together user-talk-page subscribers to the TAfI alert to wiki-flashmob an article in need of attention, often more than doubling it in size and citations in a matter of hours. More projects have taken up the delivery of newsletters, though their maintenance, like those of
279:
Another concern is the creation of WikiProjects that have highly inter-related scopes due to splitting by type of article rather than topic. For example, the Albums and Songs WikiProjects cover largely the same material, and are populated by largely the same editorial community; but the separation
307:
links), and poor or biased coverage of women on WP generally, a proposal to merge all the women-related projects and task forces, or even make them daughter projects and mutual working groups of the new ones, failed to gain consensus. Instead, they've been declared "affiliates" of the project, and
184:
Not much has changed, overall, since this reform was first proposed, other than the general editorial decline after the "gee-whiz" boom of WP's rise. Now that the mountain has be climbed, a lot of people are going home, as it were. One completely different approach has been the revitalization of
169:
Despite the above charge of dysfunction, the largest project remain large and active, and large number of small-to-middling projects have died (though others remain very active). Most of the "mega-projects" have been productive in various ways; despite the lack of common highly topical interests,
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In brief, there is a certain range of scopes for which the existing WikiProject model is a good fit; projects broader in scope than this likely require a completely different approach, while narrower ones don't need all the features that have been adopted for WikiProject use, and may function more
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The extent to which a project can successfully fulfil both of these functions depends largely on its choice of scope. The more effective projects are generally those whose scope attracts a sufficiently large and cohesive community of editors. Projects with scopes that are too broad or too narrow
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the WikiProject, it would be added to a category or list of those who's banners need to be removed. A specific bot (or perhaps any available bot) would be requested to run the needed programs to remove banners. Once that is done, the project pages would be deleted (by an admin) and removed from
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handles this now. As a general rule, if it can be a taskforce/workgroup, they strongly urge that it be one, because small projects so often die off quickly, and they tend to drain editors from larger, better organized ones and diffuse their efforts, while keeping people in working groups within a
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essay on reliable sources for medical information has become accepted as an important guideline, various sports projects have developed tournament bracket templates and other coding of great complexity, the biography and military history projects have brought a remarkable degree of consistency of
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There is no obvious benchmark for when a project is sufficiently broad that the benefits of having internal processes are worth the effort to create and maintain them, but practical experience suggests that complex internal processes are not worthwhile for projects covering less than a thousand
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Architecture projects. Because, in many cases, these banners are used to provide practical functionality (most notably, article assessment tracking and statistics) to the projects involved, simply removing them has negative consequences for the projects; but few are set up to provide that
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There's now strong resistance to the creation of new "fractured" projects. However, very little has been done to merge existing active projects. There seems to be a sense of "leave well enough alone". A case in point was the formation of
193:, requires a lot of dedication (and a large number of portals are now moribund). Generally, specific calls to editorial action appear to have some positive effect, whether it be to improve a stub, or push and article to
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serve an important role within the
Knowledge (XXG) editorial community, being the default gathering points for editors interested in a particular topic area. Their function, in practical terms, is twofold:
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Technically, different criteria would be used – for example, guidelines for when a
Wikiproject should be split would be based on the number of tagged articles rather than the size of the project page.
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process. Any editor is able to nominate a WikiProject for discussion. The community at large will discuss the WikiProject in question, hopefully reaching consensus. That consensus could be to
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Also similar to the AfD process, a discussion could only be deemed "closed" by an admin, who would then be responsible for adding a tag explaining the consensus to the WikiProject's talk page.
425:"Re-purposing": changing the name, goals, and/or scope of a WikiProject; an example would be the proposal to change the World music WikiProject into a Regional and National music WikiProject
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The application of the current WikiProject model (and, in particular, all of its associated technical and procedural features) to all levels of groups has resulted in several problems.
481:(which has long played this role) to merge moribund projects into larger ones. This process could be encouraged and somehow more formalized, but there is no extant proposal to do so.
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the participants in these larger efforts often need and thus develop tools in common, which has been a boon. And some of their output has been influential. WikiProject
Medicine's
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many projects can result in long "chains" of banners; for example, an office building in
Houston might be tagged by the Houston, Texas, United States, Skyscrapers,
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Nevertheless, it is correct that many of the broadest-scope projects are editorial ghost towns, with most work happening on a much narrower topical basis; e.g.
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the WikiProject into another one, both WikiProjects would be notified and the two communities would have to merge. This may be better accomplished by a
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approach to several classes of article; and various science project have well-covered their areas with regard to most key concepts, figures, and events.
222:. This typically occurs when it becomes useful to have a central location for considering issues that lie at the intersection of two project scopes.
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This has become the working standard. It is now totally uncontroversial, even completely expected, to collapse two or more project banners into a
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428:"Re-tiering" (or "task-force-isation"): an example would be the Jesus WikiProject becoming the Jesus taskforce of the Christianity WikiProject
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gets very little done as the high topical level, despite constant activity on much narrower topics, like orchids or animal breeds or viruses.
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It contains the advice or opinions of one or more
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areas for issues concerning their chosen scope; this includes things such as guideline development for articles under their purview.
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the WikiProject and its associated banners. Similar to AfD, the discussion would last a week or until consensus is reached.
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As a method of addressing the above issues, it is proposed to create a WikiProject for
Discussion process similar to the
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are listed in a sidebar on its project page. Whether this will be an effective collaboration model remains to be seen.
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taskforce helps preserve activity in the larger group, as well as recruit attention to the needs of the smaller one.
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for comments and a simpler scheme; it's premature to edit them into this section of the essay at this stage.
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also appear as redundant template development, inconsistent category schemes, and other practical problems.
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Templates are posted, notifying associated parties of the proposal, and discussion is solicited
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functionality to parent or child projects, meaning that the entire chain needs to be in place.
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Task forces may be jointly operated by several (commonly two) WikiProjects; see, for example,
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the WikiProject into multiple projects, then the pages would be cloned to the new name(s)
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One approach developed to improve the function of narrowly-scoped groups is that of the "
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78:. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.
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For more and current informations on
Knowledge (XXG) reforms please go to
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the WikiProject into another WikiProject (perhaps as a task-force), or
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Too complicated, too forceful, likely to lead to bad feeling. See
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at a WikiConference, to focus on missing articles on women (i.e.
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old "collaboration of the week" style efforts into a new
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can form anywhere, and it is not unknown for either
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WikiProjects also function as centralized areas for
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This page is currently inactive and is retained for
150:Overly narrow projects, on the other hand, such as
421:, then that change is made. This includes both:
384:the WikiProject, nothing else needs to be done.
187:Knowledge (XXG):Today's articles for improvement
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456:Consensus is reached before changes are made
162:efficiently with a leaner structural model.
72:Knowledge (XXG)'s policies or guidelines
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152:Knowledge (XXG):WikiProject Marillion
119:WikiProjects function as centralized
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469:No such process emerged. However,
145:Knowledge (XXG):WikiProject History
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475:WP:WikiProject Council/Proposals
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461:Updates on such proposals
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492:Knowledge (XXG):Reforms
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410:If the consensus is to
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37:Knowledge (XXG):Reforms
517:Knowledge (XXG) essays
512:Inactive project pages
344:WikiProjectBannerShell
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229:This is basically how
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322:It is proposed that
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107:Background
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486:See also
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269:, below.
172:WP:MEDRS
94:WP:WPREF
86:Shortcut
448:Process
419:rename
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394:WP:1.0
389:delete
372:delete
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382:keep
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292:See
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360:AfD
305:red
254:and
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341:{{
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