Wikipedia:The Problem with Projects: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:27, 24 February 2008

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==Types and Grades of projects==

It is proposed that there be at least three different "types" of WikiProjects recognized. These would include the "national/subnational", the "academic discipline", and the "cultural phenomenon" projects. Miserable names, I know, and if anyone has any better ones, lemme know. Why these in particular? Also, projects could be broken up into "core" and "ancillary" projects. A "Core" project would be one which directly relates to a standard academic discipline, has no obvious parent project which could take over its function, and/or has such a parent, but turning the smaller project into a subproject of the "parent" project would be less than productive. As an example of the latter, for instance, while [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Texas]] (and all its subprojects) are all in a sense clearly "descendant" projects of [[Wikipedia:WikiProject United States]], considering that the scope of the Texas project and its subprojects clearly falls within the scope of the "larger" project. So, inif that theirproject, primathefor logisticswhatever ofextremely suchunlikely a mergerreason, andwere thefound benefitsto thereafter,actively arecounterproductive suchfor thatwhatever therereason, wouldor besimply nomoribund reasonwith tolittle accomplishif suchany ahope mergerof unlessreviving, thereit weremight extremelyvery serious,reasonably seeminglybe unsolvable,considered problemsto withmerge it into the childlarger project.United TheStates majorityproject, ofgiven the benefits to be garnered by doing so, including presumably causing other projectseditors to become at least potentially interested in that content, whichthereafter. And, asof course, if it were found to be explicitly, don'tcounterproductively, havePOV recognitionpushing asto beingsuch eithera nationsdegree orthat generalit academicmerited fieldsdeletion on that basis, orthe areso-called projects"parent" dealingproject onlycould withcreate a comparativelyseparate small"subproject" areato withindeal onewith orthe morerelevant cultural phenomenacontent, wouldsuch beensuring consideredthat "ancillary"there projects,were orat anyleast othersome ongoing supervision of that content. Other examples of similar namesituations could be used as well.

The majority of the other projects, which, as it were, don't have recognition as being either nations or general academic fields, or are projects dealing only with a comparatively small area within one or more cultural phenomena, would be considered "ancillary" projects, as the content with which they work, while important, may already have one or more other active projects which are prepared to work to improve and maintain that content.

Like it or not, much of the content we have relates to individual nation states, in terms of history, locations, people associated with them, etc., most specifically existing nations. There is an "Economy of" article for I think every individual nation on the planet. There are also countless articles about politicians from individual nations, the history, including military history, of individual nations, the physical and political geography of individual nations, and so on. Also, in all honesty, if we want photos of articles related to any number of individual articles, many of which can only or best be found by editors involved with certain states, it helps to have a central gathering place where they can converge. Similarly, if not perhaps as obviously, it would make some degree of sense that separate overseas territories of individual nations have separate articles. Despite his best intentions, for instance, a citizen of Liverpool isn't really likely to be hopping a bus to take photographs of [[Saint Helena]], nor is a citizen of Paris going to get one of [[Miquelon]]. Thus, although they might never be particularly active projects or subprojects, it makes sense to a degree to have individual subprojects for most of these major overseas territories as well.