User talk:Vermont/WikiProject Revitalize

General Discussion

Comment from Auntof6

Hello, all. I don't think I'll join (I've never felt I needed to be a project member to work on things), but I wish you good luck with this because it's certainly needed. I'll try to help where I can.

I do want to comment on the 4th goal: attract more constructive editors to the Simple Wikipedia. (It's Simple English Wikipedia, by the way. ;) ) Historically, I think attracting editors has been less of a problem than getting those editors to edit appropriately here, including not only understanding the requirements for simple language, but other things as well. The biggest thing I've seen that keeps well-intentioned new editors from being successful here is not understanding what exactly we mean by "simple English". There is sometimes a tendency to think that making an article shorter makes it simpler, but there's more to it than that. When working on this goal, I recommend heavily emphasizing the ways in which Simple English Wikipedia operates differently from other Wikipedias. (I have a list of some of them at User:Auntof6/simplediffs: feel free to steal it and let me know if you think of others.)

What do you think? --Auntof6 (talk) 02:45, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Comment from J991

Like Auntof6, I don't think I'll join, because I can help with vandalism without being a member. But I do have a couple ideas on how to improve the anti-vandalism side of things in addition to the obvious (restore the anti-vandal bot and revert vandalism as much as we can).

Firstly, I think we would benefit if we (jointly) went through the entire wiki and searched for vandalism that still hasn't been caught even months/years after it was done. Unfortunately, with 250,630 articles on our wiki, it's a massive undertaking. Still, there are enough of us here that we could check 1,000 pages each or something.

Secondly, I'm still in support of having no page creation allowed for IPs (as outlined above). The idea has been rejected by the community in a previous discussion. Despite that, I still think that 95% of IP page creations are QD candidates, and admins could spend more time improving articles if they didn't have as many bad pages to delete. J991 16:05, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Agree with the first. I've reverted few-month-old vandalism before, but I'm unsure how to systematically go through articles to find vandalism. It unfortunately doesn't seem feasible. I would be in support of disabling IP page creation and having an equivalent of AfC over here but I doubt that that'd be feasible. To be pessimistic, I see it as going one of two ways: the process receives no attention, and sits there essentially abandoned, or the process becomes severely backlogged due to our lack of active editors. --George (Talk · Contribs · CentralAuth · Log) 19:01, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

My point (fourth bullet above under Ideas, re:Pages not connected to [Wikidata] items) is less about vandalism per se and more about targeting for basic improvement pages essentially abandoned shortly after creation, with minimal content, incompletely wikified, and easily expanded from enwp content. That particular Special Pages Maintenance Report strikes me as a good pool of underdeveloped articles; I haven't explored the others yet. -- Deborahjay (talk) 20:50, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Some ideas.

Maybe marking the entire wiki as unreviewed on the NPP system and using the unreviewed pages feed. (we do have a NPP system I believe).

We could have to manually check subjects, perhaps by listing or indexing particular subjects manually and working through.

Maybe get a bot to list all the pages we have, and group them into a hidden category, thus creating a massive category covering the whole wiki. (Category:Unchecked pages with possible vandalism) We could then work using a script to remove the hidden category from checked pages, like page curation or AfC on en-wiki. This would require some preparation, both in the server load, and in the user-script.

> Arthur Kerensa (talk) 11:15, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

I'll be very glad and happy to join the project as I have 0% tolerance to vandalism. I spend 90% of my time here on looking for vandalized pages. --DJ Perez (✉ - ✔) 14:05, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Recruitment

Have you considered posting a notice about this new WikiProject on WP:Simple talk - or if not there, whatever serves as a community noticeboard? -- Deborahjay (talk) 19:19, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Ideas section

Under the ideas section, we do have some writing guides for people in those situations. I will have to go find the links when I have a chance, but they do exist. And then for the point after that about cleaning up our policies, that is always useful. But our reliance on en.wiki policies is very much on purpose, it allows us to not have to try and simplify policy while still having the same policy, simplifying policy often changes the meaning in something as "legalistic" as a policy. If we were to use unsimple language in our policies it could confuse our editors when we aren't consistent with what we strive for as a wiki. The only policies we actively have here are ones that are either easy to simplify or are different from en.wiki. See our guideline of Wikipedia:Follow English Wikipedia to see how we treat it. -DJSasso (talk) 14:31, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Oh and I am also not at all supportive of en:actrial because as a small wiki we are very reliant on IPs creating pages. We take the help from anywhere we can get it. -DJSasso (talk) 14:34, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

I didn't like it on en-wiki but it helped with the NPP backlog. We have no backlogs here, and on this I agree with you. Very few vandal pages get through without at least a QD and delete within an hour. If you want me to do anything specific with the bot, ir anything to help out here, please tell me. _{Vermont | reply here} 14:38, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

RevitalizeBot

I have blocked User:RevitalizeBot because it is an unauthorized bot. If functions are approved for it, it can be unblocked. To get functions approved, please go to Wikipedia talk:Bots. --Auntof6 (talk) 22:44, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Understood. Thank you for enforcing guidelines. We will request its approval soon. _{Adotchar| reply here} 23:37, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Another thought on this: I believe that the norm here is that a bot's name should reflect the name of the user who owns/runs it. Be aware that this bot may be turned down because it doesn't do that. --Auntof6 (talk) 14:39, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Understood. It is run/owned by myself and Zppix, the two coordinators of this WikiProject. So, would "ZppidotcharBot" be more suitable? Thanks, _{Adotchar| reply here} 14:42, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

I don't know. That would be up to those who can approve bots, which I cannot. --Auntof6 (talk) 14:48, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Either name is fine, the only requirement for the name is that it has the word Bot in it, and ideally you would say who was running it on the userpage. -DJSasso (talk) 14:24, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

If you see on our main page we already have a lot of the bot done. It's on toolforge, emails are setup, etc. Changing the name now would be cumbersome and needless. I have checked the policy, and some bots (Notably KMLBot) are named for what they do. With this, RevitalizeBot fits well, as it is for WikiProject Revitalize. _{Adotchar| reply here} 15:03, 20 December 2017 (UTC)