Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Finish WikiProject X

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Thanks

Hi @John Roe thanks for sharing this wish about Wikiproject X and your interest in revitalizing it. If I may ask, what problem or promise did the project intend to solve? Are there particular goals that you're seeking to achieve through Wikiproject X? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 16:31, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Fix ping: Joe Roe. I think the goal is explained in the italic paragraph at the top of the wish.* Pppery * _{it has begun} 23:34, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Exactly. The linked project reports (1, 2) also go into considerably more detail. Joe Roe (talk) 23:55, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

+10, great reminder this needs closure

Thanks for writing this up. WikiProjects remain by far our most scalable approach to project-based self-organization; deserving of simple modern tools and streamlining. –SJ talk  14:06, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

The latest progress on this subject

Wow, even after nine years, and multiple years after I stopped work, WikiProject X remains the biggest name in on-wiki collaboration. I'm disappointed that no one has taken up the mantle since – the quantity and scope of wiki collaborations and partnerships has only grown over the years, and the demand is absolutely there.

I've revisited this work in recent years for exactly that: I need these tools to exist for my work, and I know this is a common problem, so I am working on common solutions. My product vision and implementation strategy is described in a blog post I wrote last year.

The upshot of that blog post is that the best approach is probably not working on CollaborationKit, but by supporting systems that make it easier for editors to build their own tools. If the Wikimedia Foundation could assign developers to work on what are basically Toolforge tools and templates, that would be the second-best way they can support this effort. The first-best way they can support this effort is to figure out how to make services like Pageset production-grade services, allowing much tighter integration into Wikipedia. Harej (talk) 17:34, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

@Harej: That all sounds fantastic. I'm so happy to learn that you're continuing this work. I could change the wish to "give Harej a big pot of money to implement this", but perhaps it would make more sense to break it up into individual components, e.g. "make Pageset production-grade"?

Do you have any thoughts on the future of the more meta aspects of WPX, e.g. the automated wikiproject directory? That's actually what led me here – trying to get a handle on which projects are and aren't working using the very out of date manual directory is a drag. Joe Roe (talk) 11:12, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Broadening

WikiProjects (smaller, more focused groups of editors) don't make sense for small wikis. IMO a functional group needs 5–10 'core' or highly active participants, and 50–100 others. If your whole community only has 50 highly active editors, then there's no point in splitting off a few; the main Village pump or other gathering point (which might be off wiki) is sufficient. This is not a case of "build it, and they will come"; this is a case of "many hands make light work" or "united we stand, divided we fall". It will realistically only be functional at the largest communities. For the Wikipedias, that likely means en, de, fr, and es, probably ja, ru, pt, it, and zh, maybe fa or pl, and probably not ar, nl, he or anything smaller. Smaller communities should be focused on Teahouse and Growth's Newcomer programs instead of subject-area WikiProjects.

("Functional" means: If I post a question on the group's talk page, will I get a useful answer within a day or two?)

In addition to this being primarily useful for larger communities, it also means that the 'subject' for the group needs to correspond to what's available. At w:en:WP:WikiProject Council, we've been talking about merging up some groups, in the hope that the end result will be more useful overall. While doing this, we're keeping an eye on the mw:ORES/Articletopic#Taxonomy, which is partially derived from the English Wikipedia's WikiProjects. The main advantage it has over the current situation at enwiki is that it covers almost all subjects in 64 categories, instead of a couple thousand (mostly inactive or weak) niche groups. Most of the larger Wikipedias (and perhaps Wikidata and Commons, too) would benefit from a "WikiProject Geography"; some would benefit from having several geography-related groups, such as a "WikiProject Europe", or even a "WikiProject Italy". Very few of them, even at the English Wikipedia, would be able to sustain a group of people that is interested in working on much narrower sets of articles.

For non-subject areas, the same general principle applies. The scope for the group should be wide. For example, you might be able to sustain a copyediting group or a sourcing group, but you won't be able to sustain a group that only copyedits a single subject area, or that only adds sources to sports articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:01, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Consultation on WikiProjects & on-wiki collaboration

Hello, @Joe Roe, @Sj, @Harej, & @WhatamIdoing: Thanks for either writing up this wish or providing more thoughts and feedback related to the wish. My name is Ilana, and I’m on the Campaigns team at the Wikimedia Foundation. We’re currently running an on-wiki consultation that focuses on WikiProjects and other forms of on-wiki collaboration, and we would love your feedback. We’re holding this consultation because we want to know more about the current state of WikiProjects and other forms of collaboration on the wikis, including their successes, challenges, and people’s hopes for their future. Overall, we want to make it easier for people to connect with other contributors, and we want to make it easier to have fruitful collaborations. As a starting point, we want to learn from everyone, and that’s where this consultation comes in. We appreciate any feedback we receive. Also, I’ll be at Wikimania, if any of you will be there, and will be happy to chat about this some more. Thanks! IFried (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

@IFried (WMF), I think it would be useful for you to see whether Danny left any notes about his "neighborhoods" idea. It'd probably also be a good idea to glance over w:en:WT:COUNCIL. The focus of the recent conversations has been about having fewer niche groups, and one of the challenges has been overlapping/interdisciplinary subjects (e.g., women in sports: is that 'women' or 'sports'?). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:04, 5 August 2024 (UTC)