201:(RRTF) of WikiProject Novels, which focuses on articles related to author Rick Riordan. It has accomplished much considering it rarely (if ever) has more than twenty active members. For example, it has gotten six articles to Good Article status, fought back against "fan edits", and completed several drafts. However, it struggles with having enough active participants, despite having almost 50 pages in its scope. (It's worth noting about half are stub or start class.) In 2015 the Percy Jackson Task Force (the group's predecessor) died out completely if not for actions made by several editors renaming it and broadening its focus. But little improvement has been made. Today, RRTF still tries to remain an "active" task force. The group's remaining members knew they needed a new approach. The idea was an
299:"Most Wikipedians just want to fiddle with small things without commitment to any greater goal, not too many want to do the heavy lifting of extensive content writing, tedious maintenance work like fixing deadlink citations, etc. FWIW, I think it's not a good idea to create separate wiki pages for taskforces/subprojects until there is a substantial number of genuinely active contributors. If the number of active contributors is small, I'd say keep your conversations on the Talk page of a larger more active WikiProject (obviously one that is relevant) so people keep seeing the activity and possibly join in. If the conversations are taking place between a couple of folks in a subproject, nobody else is going to see it. I'd stay on the major project page until they kick you out."
279:..."My overall view on task forces (and special projects) is that you need a small core of committed members, a narrow focus, and achievable goals in the short term. You also need a wider group of editors willing to review the work at GAN and FA, something that WikiProject Military history excels at. WikiProject Military history has also really benefited from having formal assessment tiers like B-Class and A-Class, as well as a system of awards and recognition. These things help focus Military history members to support their fellow members by reviewing their work. I think task forces and special projects have a future on WP, but only if they have a narrow focus and modest initial goals."
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the
Military history project contributor seems geared towards that end. I would argue that that project is the most successful on Knowledge (XXG), and seems to be the only one to have found out what to do with the A-classification. Ideally, some of these task forces/WikiProjects will become more active as Knowledge (XXG) expands. For example, I'm currently a member of
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page has been written and tweaked a bit. On the other hand, the
Nintendo task force likely has a lot of stuff going on right now and will for a while because Nintendo-related pages are being updated and new video games are constantly being released (both by Nintendo and third-party developers, including some larger video game companies) for the
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Lingala, and
Swahili, I'm not surprised that any haven't turned up. Now, question the legitimacy of a task force devoted to an author or a project centered around religion in a single country all you want, but you would think that a country with over 80,000,000 people (also the 11th largest by land in the world, the location of Belgium's
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254:, and becoming active on the work group's talk page. Since then, a few other people have started doing regular work on webcomic articles as well, and the field has slowly been improving. There's still fairly little discussion, but it is believed that the cleaned-up resources trigger editors to get more engaged.
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had a hiatus because of lack of editors. Maybe you can help a narrow subject more by just editing it instead of pouring energy into a dying task force. There has to be a middle ground between the views of destruction and saving of task forces. Anyway these are ideas on what to do with task force that
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Well this is an odd case but I wanted to include it. Military
History Wikiproject (milhist) has many "task forces". They really are only ways to sort topics and few actually have active members. They really only get together editors interested in a topic rather than organising work. It just documents
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points out that there are plenty ailing WikiProjects to go around. So, we can conclude that narrow scope isn't the only thing that kills working groups. It would be nice to see an op-ed on the problems WikiProjects face and how to fix those (if one already hasn't been written). That quote taken from
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Personally, I think whether or not a task force dies depends both on how long the task Force's topic is relevant for and how much old pages need to be updated and new ones created. For example, for pages about books by a certain author, you rarely need to go back and add or change anything once the
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Editors come and go, task forces have active and inactive phases - and an inactive taskgroup is a steady accumulation of tasks resources and queries for the next person who wants to revive that task group or wikiproject. In an editing community that is broadly stable we should expect this. OK yes I
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So do we need to minimise the number of subprojects or even eliminate them? Or is there a different solution? RRTF has said that while WP:NV didn't agree that the group was needed it "didn't interfere with the fledgling task force". However, while I was looking through WP:NV's talk archives, I saw
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Task forces and subgroups play a vital role for their parent projects and ultimately, the encyclopedia itself. They do this by specifying and taking care of tasks that the parent projects may not have time for. The downside? With a less broad focus they can die out quickly if the task force cannot
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IMO task forces die because they tend to be very niche and the brainchild of only one or two editors, and are sometimes created as a result of a tantrum if they're not getting their way in a wider WikiProject. As a result, when they drift away from
Knowledge (XXG) or the topic, the taskforce dies
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for reviving the project, but there's only so much I can do with only a handful of interested editors. I sincerely doubt that there are any
Congolese users on en.wikipedia. I wish that weren't so, but in a country with such sparse internet access and with a population that speaks mostly French,
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To my opinion, task Forces are temporary by nature. When the main job is done, there is not much left to do. Keeping them artificially alive might be a waste of time. I fact, I have far more worries about WikiProjects that set the tone for the entire project, for example by setting their own
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So are task forces needed? Well it depends. I've heard users say "My group (or group's subject) is (or could be) influential for
Knowledge (XXG)", and I agree with you, however subjects can be interesting to you but there may not be enough notable pages or active and interested users such as
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about John Rocco, Riordan's illustrator, which is currently ongoing. Apparently the idea came from a lack of notable books published by
Riordan during the summer months except Rocco's birthday. (Rocco was added to broaden the group's scope.) RRTF claims that the idea is working with boosting
786:, has task forces for Municipalities and Politics. They may have very little or no activity for years at a time but when a census or election comes around the pages spring into life with a frenzy of activity for a couple of months or even just a few weeks before going back to sleep again.
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find or keep active members. For you readers who may not know what task forces or workgroups are, they're subgroups that focus on a certain "tasks" under their parent projects' scope. Many have their own organisation of members, roles, important tasks, and how to solve them.
246:. Properly sourcing webcomic articles has always remained difficult, and over the years, many webcomic enthusiasts left Knowledge (XXG). By 2015, the work group was completely deserted. A new user tried to clean up the project's pages and create a few new ones, rebooting the
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guidelines were much less strongly enforced, and web content was covered by very few reliable sources, so a lot of low-quality articles on webcomics were being produced at a rapid pace. When a lot of articles were subsequently deleted for not meeting notability guidelines,
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taskforce that finished up before 2008, but it was only in 2014 that any notice was added to the the page directing people back to the parent project. The deserted discussion page can be pretty confusing for new users just getting the hand of
Knowledge (XXG)'s workings.
712:(of which I am a member) which has, not only a much broader area to cover, but a scope that is expanding every day. So in that case, it really is a never-ending task. It could very well be its own WikiProject, as could many other Military history task forces. Of course,
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makes the interesting argument that a task force is temporary by nature...Indeed, the name would suggest that they were created to complete some sort of "task" and nothing more. This is perhaps easier for tasks where the scope is, even if large, is finite.
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both cover all things battleships and all things
Yugoslavia in World War II, respectively. That's expansive, to be sure, but, even if this encyclopedia is never finished, they will probably hit a wall on relevant content. This is in comparison to the
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I hope that one day we will have more healthy, productive task forces doing more of the good work they are doing today. By "more" that may mean fewer subgroups altogether. Whatever the case I hope you found this article interesting and useful.
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which is about battleships. However, this "Operation" is one of the only ones to have longlivity and good success but at least the others do direct work. Even this one relies on a core group. This is what our reporter from milhist said,
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what these editors have done. This is something I've found common among subgroups. The groups that work are narrow and intersect subjects. The group does have "long term collaborations" that are in codenames like
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670:(up from barely 4 million at the 2014 low point) - so we need to get used to the idea that the overall community is broadly stable even if within that there are many other trends, positive and negative.
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I get confused by editorials purportedly written by two people, but with frequent use of "I" and "me." Do these editors share a brain? Isn't that against policy?03:09, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
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In some ways, I find that Knowledge (XXG)'s extreme permanence can make completed/dead taskforces confusing for new users because nothing really marks that they are finished.
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Some task forces are active periodically, they might appear dead for long periods but spring into life for specific reasons. An example I'm familiar with,
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Why Task Forces are Dying in 2017 – and is there anything we can do to stop it? Opinions and examples from across the project.
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notability guidelines without consent of the wider community. And often in breach of the standard notability guidelines.
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I believe my opinion is clear, task forces are important for Knowledge (XXG). Others don't agree. One editor told me,
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Just task force and subgroups are dying? Many WikiProjects are also semi-dead ever since we keep losing editors.
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So maybe the problem of being to hard to keep members can appy to ANY project on the site. You may remember that
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Honestly Task Forces have been dying for many years. See how many Tasks Forces are inactive at the WikiProject.
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to the top of each section in pre-publication copyedit. Suggestions for how to do it better are welcome... ☆
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brethren) will in time garner more African users as internet begins to proliferate the continent. -
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which, not too long ago, was tagged as "semi-active". I've undertaken some of the
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Make your project page cleaner and up to date so people know you are serious
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Knowledge (XXG) talk:Knowledge (XXG) Signpost/2017-07-15/Op-ed/Earlier
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little communication between the larger project and its subgroups.
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Merge, or expand, existing subgroups for broader content roles
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Give members not helping out a reason to, like an edit-a-thon
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Keep goals modest so as not to overwelm new members
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Increase communication between parent and subgroups
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71:Why task forces and subgroups are dying in 2017
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476:Discuss this story
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244:controversy ensued
45:← Back to Contents
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