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Module talk:WikiProject banner/Archive 11

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Lowercase sigmabot III (talk | contribs) at 04:02, 15 August 2018 (Archiving 1 discussion(s) from Template talk:WPBannerMeta) (bot). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Latest comment: 7 years ago by WOSlinker in topic Suppressing class categories
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Adding PageAssessments parser function

Latest comment: 8 years ago54 comments7 people in discussion

The WMF Community Tech team just finished developing a small new extension called PageAssessments whose purpose is to store page assessment metadata in a database table and make that data available via an API. We would like to enable this functionality for English Wikipedia by adding the #assessment parser function into the {{WPBannerMeta}} template. This will not change anything about the output of the template and will be a completely invisible change to end users. All it will do is cause the 'project', 'class', and 'importance' parameters for each project assessment to be recorded in a database table for each page that includes this template (or subtemplates). This will improve the efficiency of pretty much any query or report that is WikiProject-related and make it easier to build WikiProject-related tools (like WikiProject X). The change would basically be adding something like {{#assessment:{{{PROJECT|}}}|{{{class|}}}|{{{importance|}}}}} to the template code. Are you guys OK with this change to the template? Do you have any questions or concerns about it? Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 00:15, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

@MSGJ, WOSlinker, Happy-melon, Harej, and Isarra: Pinging some folks who might be interested. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 00:23, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
I strongly support this. Currently the reports bot maintains its index of WikiProjects and articles through a database table it generates anew every 24 hours. This process takes over an hour and is very inefficient because it has to do a complicated database query that accounts for all the different category names WikiProjects use. This new database table makes this process much more efficient. If you're a bot or gadget developer you will find this useful. And there are no changes to the interface in the process. Harej (talk) 02:49, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
I can't see any reason not to do this. Would you mind sandboxing the code so we can see exactly where this will be inserted? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:06, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
Don't forget there's also some banner templates that don't use WPBannerMeta. A list is at Template:WPBannerMeta/Conversion. -- WOSlinker (talk) 12:43, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the tips. I will definitely sandbox the code first and let people take a look at it. I'm not sure exactly when we will be ready to move forward with this, but probably sometime in the next few weeks. It's already deployed on some other wikis, but there is concern about it flooding the database connections on enwiki since this template is included on so many pages. I'll let you know when we're ready to push ahead. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 17:40, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

@WOSlinker, MSGJ, and Harej: I've added the new code to the sandbox template. Please let me know if that looks correct or if anything needs to be changed, as I'm hoping to only do this once (since it's a huge load on the servers). Kaldari (talk) 08:42, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

No not really. You seem to be imposing FQS on every project when not every project uses the full scale. A lot now have their own bespoke quality scales. It would make more sense to put your code into /core where the class and importance have already been normalised. I can have a tinker if you wish. Regards — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:48, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Sure, any help would be great. Ideally we want the data in PageAssessments to match what is output by the template. Kaldari (talk) 16:22, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
I assume you mean tinkering with /core/sandbox rather than /core itself. Just want to make sure we aren't making any unnecessary edits to the main templates. Kaldari (talk) 17:04, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
I assume that if a project does not use assessments then the whole tag will be omitted? What if a project uses class but not importance? Can the tag be used with just the class? What if assessments are used but class and/or importance are unassessed? Should this be passed as a blank parameter to the tag or should "Unassessed" be used? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:41, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
@MSGJ: If a project doesn't use assessments, but still tags articles, we would still want to capture that information, i.e. that the WikiProject has "claimed" an article, so {{#assessment:WikiProject NoAssessments||}}. If no class or importance are given, those should just be passed as blank parameters, e.g. {{#assessment:WikiProject NoAssessments|FA|}} or {{#assessment:WikiProject NoAssessments||Low}}. Kaldari (talk) 22:46, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
Is there any distinction between an "unassessed rating" by a project that uses assessments and a "claim" by a project that doesn't use assessments? (You didn't answer the question above on whether "unassessed" or "unknown" was allowed as a class/importance rating.) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:57, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
There is a distinction: some projects consciously do not have ratings, see for example Template talk:WikiProject Women#Importance. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:24, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
Indeed. My question was whether there is any distinction in the PageAssessments database. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:51, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
@MSGJ: "unassessed" or "unknown" (or any value) is allowed as a class/importance rating in PageAssessments. I don't, however, see any value in an assessment of "unassessed". I would prefer that any unknown or unassessed ratings just be passed as empty parameters to PageAssessments (unless that makes things substantially more difficult). It will make things much easier to query if anything besides an actual assessment rating is recorded as null. As far as PageAssessments is concerned, there is no distinction between an empty assessment from a project that doesn't do assessments and an empty assessment from a project that does. Basically all assessment data is treated as optional for all projects. Kaldari (talk) 01:24, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
The present setup is that if a project banner is set up to recognise class and importance parameters, but in a given usage those are not set (whether the param is absent or present but blank is immaterial), then it's passed through from {{WPBannerMeta}} to {{WPBannerMeta/core}} and subtemplates as a null value - an empty string, if you like; so the page gets categorised in e.g. Category:Unassessed Computing articles or Category:Unknown-importance Computing articles. However, if a project banner is set up to not recognise class and/or importance params, then there is nothing to pass through, and the special character "¬" is used as a placeholder by {{WPBannerMeta}}. This is not interpreted as either "unknown" or "unassessed", but instead it denotes "meaningless" - as in "this concept has no meaning", like zero divided by itself is meaningless. So there is no class/importance processing, and no categorisation since there is no meaningful category in which to place the page. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:44, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
That makes sense. In the case of the assessment class being "¬" (or absent), it would be best to pass a blank parameter to PageAssessments. Perhaps in the future we could have it handle those cases differently, but right now there is no practical way to handle such a distinction in the PageAssessments data. Kaldari (talk) 20:41, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

PageAssessments: code ready

Okay I have put the code in Template:WPBannerMeta/core/sandbox and there are some tests on Template talk:WPBannerMeta/testcases. (Obviously the lower box is just for testing and will not appear on the deployed version!) A couple more questions:

  • I assume you are interested in all the extended class ratings used by various projects such as Template-class, Redirect-class and NA-class?
  • If a project has subprojects or task forces, do you want to record each task force's interest in the article as well? For example should we be calling {{#assessment:Crime task force|B|High}}?

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:39, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

@MSGJ: Thanks! Yes, definitely interested in the extended class ratings. Adding assessment data for subprojects and task forces would be great, but I'm also OK with leaving these out if its too complicated. The format you suggest, {{#assessment:Crime task force|B|High}}, would be correct. Kaldari (talk) 20:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
Code for setting task force assessments is in Template:WPBannerMeta/taskforce/sandbox. However it can only work if the TF_n_NAME parameter is defined. (You will see that in the first example the military task force does not currently use this parameter so the assessments will not be set.) It would be possible to go through the templates filling in these missing parameters if necessary. I could even add a tracking category for it. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:35, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
@MSGJ: That looks great! A tracking category for the missing parameter would also be helpful. Do you think it would be possible to put this into place in the main template late Friday night or Saturday (so that it can populate the database over the weekend). It would be good to avoid adding this during peak hours (16:00 to 04:00 UTC) since it's going to create a huge number of database queries (although they will all be low-priority in the job queue). Also, will it require editing more than 1 subtemplate? Kaldari (talk) 22:05, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Probably won't be available Saturday but can make the change on Sunday. Yes the two affected subtemplates are /core and /taskforce. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:35, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
@MSGJ: We may want to stagger the two changes to give the databases and job queue some time to breathe. Like maybe doing the /core change Sunday and the /taskforce change next weekend. At this point I'm assuming that you would prefer to make the changes yourself, but if not, let me know. Kaldari (talk) 02:07, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

I've deployed to /core and tested on a few articles by making a null edit to the talk page and then checking the API output. Seems to be working well at the moment. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:45, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

The code in Template:WPBannerMeta/taskforce/sandbox is ready to deploy when needed, and there is now Category:WikiProject banners with missing task force name to track the templates which are missing the TF_n_NAME parameter. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:59, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Actually, let's hold off on adding the taskforce code for now. I think I want to add a way for PageAssessments to differentiate between WikiProjects and taskforces/subprojects before we add the taskforce assessments. I'll let you know when it's ready to move forward. Thanks again for all your help with this! It's been extreme valuable. Kaldari (talk) 23:04, 19 November 2016 (UTC)
No problem — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:46, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
For what it's worth, the auto-updating WikiProject Directory does not distinguish between WikiProjects and task forces. Harej (talk) 21:14, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Since some project templates use PROJECT_NAME instead of PROJECT, PageAssessments is recording the project name as {{{PROJECT}}} for those. Since none of these non-WikiProject projects actually use assessments, can we just change the code to {{{PROJECT|}}} in the core {{#assessment}} code? (PageAssessments will ignore any records with blank project names.) IMO, it seems like non-WikiProject projects should use their own templates rather than piggybacking on the WikiProject meta template, but I suppose that's a separate issue. Kaldari (talk) 16:41, 6 December 2016 (UTC)
PROJECT is a required parameter so those templates should really be fixed up. Could you give me some examples so I can see if there is a sensible way of defining that parameter for those templates? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:15, 6 December 2016 (UTC)
@MSGJ: It looks like the main offender is {{WikiTown banner core}}, which is a meta template for other templates such as {{Freopedia}} and {{Toodyaypedia}}. Kaldari (talk) 23:27, 6 December 2016 (UTC)
Okay I'll take a look. In the meantime there is certainly no harm in putting the pipe in — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:11, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
I have added the PROJECT parameter for the WikiTown projects, so these should now be recorded as Freopedia and Toodyaypedia in your database. I have also added a pipe to prevent the error happening in future, and I have added a check for this which will populate a tracking category. Any progress with the task forces? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:38, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Still working on it: T154216. Kaldari (talk) 06:14, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Subprojects

@MSGJ: OK, we are finally ready for subprojects. The format that the subproject data needs to be in is: {{#assessment:Medicine/Neurology task force|GA|low}}, in other words: {{#assessment:{{{PROJECT}}}/{{{NAME}}}|class|importance}}. This is slightly different than the sandbox code that you wrote up earlier. Kaldari (talk) 01:37, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Will need to rewrite some of the code - currently PROJECT is not passed to the taskforce template. Will also require the same update to any project template using taskforce hooks. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:50, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

I've made a few tweaks to the code and the page assessments should be filtering through. There's a lot of work to do at Category:WikiProject banners with missing task force name though. Basically every taskforce hook needs (a) PROJECT parameter and (b) TF_n_NAME parameters to be defined. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:21, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Thanks! I'll see what I can do to get the parameters added. Kaldari (talk) 17:58, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Do we need to update {{WPBannerMeta/hooks/tfnested}} as well? I'm not sure I understand what that template is for. Kaldari (talk) 18:45, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
No, that code is just for producing the label which appears when the banner is collapsed inside a banner shell. No impact from this change. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:17, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Seems to be working. One problem that I've noticed is that about half of the task force names are of the form "the something task force" and the other half are just "something task force". "Something task force" works a lot better for my purposes, but it causes the grammar in the template to be a bit awkward: "This page is supported by Beekeeping task force." And unfortunately we can't just hard-code "the" into the template since a lot of task forces are actually WikiProjects, which would yield: "This page is supported by the WikiProject Beekeeping." It's unfortunate that setting up WikiProjects as task force parameters has become a normal practice as it leads to lots of inconsistencies in PageAssessments. Anyway, do you have any suggestions for how to handle the "the" situation? I could add some code in PageAssessments to explicitly strip it out, but that seems a bit hacky (and English specific). Kaldari (talk) 20:51, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
If it's always the case that a preceding "the" should be removed, then I think it should be fairly easy to use a template to do that. Shall I look into it? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:46, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Yes, a preceding "the " should always be removed from the assessment record. That would be great if it could be removed by a template. Kaldari (talk) 17:59, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Something like the code below should do it, but I am worried about any valid projects that start with "the" (e.g. theology) as I'm not sure how the template will handle the space. Will do some proper testing shortly. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:12, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
{{#ifeq:{{ Str left | {{{NAME}}} | 3 }} |the|{{str right|{{{NAME}}}|4}}|{{{NAME}}}}}
@MSGJ: Unless we can detect for the space, I think it will be safer for me to chop it off on the PageAssessments side. I can also filter out bold markup while I'm at it (which a lot of NAME parameters use for some reason). Kaldari (talk) 18:28, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
New code for cleaning up project titles at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/337963/. Kaldari (talk) 21:54, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

As you prefer. It's an ugly hack wherever the code goes ;) We're basically using a parameter for a purpose it was never designed for. If building this from scratch we probably would have taken a different approach, such as |TASKFORCE_NAME=beekeeping from which the name "the beekeeping taskforce" could be automatically used, and |SUBPROJECT_NAME=Beekeeping could give "WikiProject Beekeeping". — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:03, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Kaldari, by the way all the banner templates should now be updated to produce the correct code for subproject page assessments. I've deleted the tracking category because all were fixed. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:00, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
@MSGJ: It seems that the taskforces defined by the tf X parameters are working correctly, but the task forces defined via {{WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces}} are not being recorded by PageAssessments. For example, the only task force being recorded for {{WikiProject Medicine}} is the Dermatology task force, since all the other task forces are defined via {{WPBannerMeta/hooks/taskforces}}. (You can look here for the current list of what task forces PageAssessments has records for.) Any idea why it might not be working? Kaldari (talk) 03:31, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
Yes, found another subtemplate which needed the parameter passing through. Should be working now?! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:02, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Looks like it's working now. Thank you! Kaldari (talk) 01:27, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Template:Substcheck

Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

Is Template:Substcheck still in use? I can't find the logic which applies that template. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 12:57, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes, it is in nearly every WikiProject * template. They all include the line |substcheck=<includeonly>{{subst:</includeonly><includeonly>substcheck}}</includeonly>. Which only ever transcludes the Substcheck template when the WikiProject template is substituted, which is the reason for the substcheck. -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:55, 25 March 2017 (UTC)
Wonder if it merits template protection then. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:16, 25 March 2017 (UTC)
It has this effect. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:29, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Let automatic categorization ignore the Importance parameter

Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

WP:VG doesn't classify redirects by importance (I imagine most projects do the same). Is there a way to set the template, even project by project if necessary, to ignore |importance= when the article is classified as "Redirect"? It would be easier than having to manually remove the parameter each time. czar 18:19, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

@Czar: The template will automatically classify NA-importance for any redirect, unless the importance has been set manually. It sounds like you are asking for the parameter to be ignored completely if the page is a redirect. If there is consensus for this, we might be able to make this change to Template:Importance mask. Otherwise you can set up a custom importance mask for your project. (Ask if you want to know more.) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:14, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
@MSGJ, yes, there is consensus that WPVG's redirects, drafts, etc. non articles should drop recognition of the "importance" param (easier to ignore it than to manually set each to NA). Can you help with the mask? czar 21:10, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
@Czar: Please check if {{WikiProject Video games/sandbox}} is doing what you desire — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:02, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
Late response: yes, that seems to do what we needed. Thanks! --PresN 15:03, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Proposal to add quality criteria to WikiProject templates

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 138#Add quality criteria to WikiProject templates. The proposal was to add a show/hide link to the right of the quality rating so editors could more easily see what the rating actually meant. A mock-up:

 
 This page is supported by WikiProject Ecoregions, a collaborative effort to help develop and improve Wikipedia's coverage of ecoregions. The aim is to write neutral and well-referenced articles on these topics. See WikiProject Ecoregions and Wikipedia:FAQ/Contributing.
Start
This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale.

Detailed criteria: The article has a usable amount of good content but is weak in many areas. Quality of the prose may be distinctly unencyclopedic, and MoS compliance non-existent. The article should satisfy fundamental content policies, such as BLP. Frequently, the referencing is inadequate, although enough sources are usually provided to establish verifiability. No Start-Class article should be in any danger of being speedily deleted.

Reader's experience: Provides some meaningful content, but most readers will need more.

Editing suggestions: Providing references to reliable sources should come first; the article also needs substantial improvement in content and organisation. Also improve the grammar, spelling, writing style and improve the jargon use.
Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Notes:

  • The [show] link will apply only to projects that have accepted the standard assessment scheme defined in {{Grading scheme}}, and will be implemented in {{WPBannerMeta}}. Projects with non-standard quality scales or criteria will not be affected
  • The [show] criteria will be in one place only, the {{WPBannerMeta}} template, not replicated in all the project templates.
  • The standard quality scale criteria defined in {{Grading scheme}} are extremely stable (i.e. cast in stone), but to ensure the criteria in the {{WPBannerMeta}} template are in sync with those in {{Grading scheme}}, we will make them both share the same text files.
  • Addition of the [show] criteria will cause an increase in page size for a talk page with just one project banner from about 30,000 characters to 30,500 characters on a desktop, and from about 21,000 to 21,500 characters on a mobile device. Since the main target is editors, and they will usually not use a mobile device to edit, we may suppress this feature on mobiles.

The response at the village pump was 4–2 in favor if the author gets a vote. Reasons against were that the template already provides a link to the quality scale, so this is pointless clutter, and it would increase message size. The reason for supporting is that editors would be more likely to click on the [show] link, so assessment quality would improve. Given the many pages that would be affected and my lack of coding skills, I do not propose to make the change myself, but would hope for a volunteer. Are there serious technical difficulties or concerns? Aymatth2 (talk) 15:25, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

What about those with the extended scale? In my experience, those outnumber the ones with the standard scale. Also, what about those which have set up a custom scale, but the only actual customisation is to either disable one (often A-class), or to add one or two (such as Book-class or Redirect-class). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:17, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
I would be fine with supporting the extended scale as long as it does not add much complexity. If there are simple ways to support more customized scales and definitions, that would be good too. Maybe there is a way to pick up any available definitions, so X class [show] is supported if X_detailed_criteria, X_readers_experience and/or X_editing_suggestions have defined values in the project context. But I would prefer to keep it simple to start with. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:28, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

More informative optional text for categories of Wikiprojects

Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello, when I will use the template {{WikiProject Academic Journals}} or {{WikiProject Plants|class=Category}} at some category talkpage, it will show text: 

Category  	This category does not require a rating on the project's quality scale.

It is not much useful. Could it be possible to change the text to more descriptive according to certain Wikiproject needs? For example the mentioned Wikiprojects can have texts: 

Category  	This Wikiproject follows Categorization of journals.

or 

Category  	Recommendations for categorizing plants.

Or something like a wikilink to guidelines or to recommendations. I know that there is optional BOTTOM_TEXT for each Wikiproject template, but optional text would be useful for categories of Wikiprojects. How to do that? Snek01 (talk) 12:46, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

@Snek01: I have moved your question here because it is relevant to this template. The text you mention is produced by Template:WPBannerMeta/qualityscale. It is currently not possible to change this (and to my knowledge no one has ever asked for this before). However you could probably copy that code somewhere and make the changes you want and then implement your customised code using HOOK_ASSESS. It may be complicated because you are adjusting such an intrinsic part of the template (i.e. the class ratings part). Alternatively if there was demand for this feature from multiple projects we could look at adding the functionality here. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:44, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Removing the "importance" parameter

Latest comment: 8 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion

Following the discussion at WP:Village pump (technical)/Archive 155#Removing the "importance" parameter from a WikiProject banner, I followed the advice given by Redrose64 and have done the required edit to {{WikiProject Disability}}. In the same discussion Iridescent mentioned that a bot could go around to all the existing banners to remove the Importance parameter. What do I need to do to get such a bot task done? If there's anything else I've missed or done wrong please let me know. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:18, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

AnomieBOT is the bot you want (Anomie I assume it falls under WikiProjectWorker and wouldn't need a separate BRFA?). I'd strongly advise leaving the assessments in situ but invisible for at least a couple of months before a bot run to remove them—if people object to the removal it's a lot easier to just make the existing assessments visible again, than to re-add an assessment to every page. ‑ Iridescent 11:31, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Yes, leaving |importance=low etc. on every talk page is harmless - nothing is displayed, no categorisation is performed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:41, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone know where the discussions on removing priority/importance ratings are for {{WikiProject Disability}} and {{WikiProject Visual arts}}. I would like to summarise typical reasons in Wikipedia:Assessing articles. Is there an easy way to find other projects that skip the ratings? Aymatth2 (talk) 12:06, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Aymatth2 See WT:WikiProject Disability#Proposal to remove the Importance parameter from the project banner and the article assessment system where I proposed the removal a month ago, nobody responded at all so per "silence = agreement" I've gone ahead. "Importance" is often a subjective personal opinion and subject to dispute. It's also of little to no actual value in the project's article improvement system - the Stub/C/B/GA/FA says everything we need to know about the article's quality, regardless of what it is about or how "important" anyone thinks it is. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 13:18, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Some projects follow one the two "standard" schemes, which give reasonably objective criteria, and some follow tailored schemes, like {{WikiProject Iran}}. Most effort should be given to improving articles on the most central aspects of the project's subject area. But with some areas it may be unavoidably subjective, like the difference between low- and mid-importance visual artists. I hoping for ideas on when importance ratings don't work to use in the Wikipedia:Assessing articles essay. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:42, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
You might consider taking a look at WP:VG/A#Importance scale. I don't think anything there is out-of-step with your essay--I think it might be good to point out that breaking down a field into subsections and then providing assessments for those subsections can help with good assessment. --Izno (talk) 15:54, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
@Izno: Thanks for pointing that out. I have added a note on it to the essay. An interesting approach that others might want to follow. Aymatth2 (talk) 16:50, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
As regards Visual Arts, a conscious decision was made not to include "importance" when the template was originally created a decade ago, so there's never been a "decision to remove it" as such. Occasionally people will suggest adding one, but it never finds any support. "Importance" really doesn't work on arts topics; someone interested in 19th century English history painting, someone interested in traditional Chinese porcelain, and someone interested in pre-Colombian architecture will each have a completely different idea of what "high importance" means.
As I often point out, what editors feel ought to be the important topics rarely correlate with what the readers consider important topics; in terms of what the readers are actually reading, Darth Vader consistently gets more pageviews than United States and World War II combined. To take the disability project as an example, if you look at what the readers are actually looking for there's not actually a very strong correlation between pageviews and "importance"—ultra-core topics like Speech and language impairment get fewer views than trivia like I've fallen, and I can't get up!. ‑ Iridescent 17:14, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
@Iridescent: Good points. I have added them to the essay. The pageviews difference makes sense: Darth Vader has galactic importance while the other two articles just cover minor details about one species on a small green planet. Aymatth2 (talk) 11:55, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

And old idea, revisited, part 2

Latest comment: 7 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

This is a follow up to Template_talk:WPBannerMeta/Archive_10#An old idea, revisited, related to discussions with Nihiltres (talk · contribs) and Dispenser (talk · contribs) at Wikimania 2017.

  • Mockup 1 was the original idea. Tried to include "vital" articles in there, but for 10,000 articles, this is really flagging this at the completely collapsed level.
  • Mockup 2 effectively treats vital articles as another Wikiproject, with vitality replacing importance. It's quite neat, but discussions at Wikimania led me to a third mockup
  • Mockup 3 the main thing is we separate type (article, list, category, media) from assessment, and can offer all levels of assessments for things that require assessments. I've also re-designed the issue-flagging so it's actually clear what the icons mean. Some of the links would have to be updated / some pages created, but you get the general idea.

Now of course, there is currently no B-class topics, or C-class media, so if consensus is against having those, we could easily restrict assessments to partial lists depending on type. I don't see support for anything but featured media, but on topics or lists? I absolutely see a demand for those. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:27, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

There have been several proposals for a Good List class. They failed (see for instance Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations/Archive 22#Request for comment on stand-alone lists being nominated as Good Articles or Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 123#Good Lists - others exist as well); so any other graduations for lists are not likely to succeed either. That's with the exception of MILHIST which already has AL, BL and CL, see WP:MHA#SCALE. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:18, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
I know for a fact that WP:PHYS would make use of B/C/Start/etc... lists. I suspect most projects would too, were it actually easy to set up. I'm not proposing we extend this systematically and create new reviewing process when there's no demand for such (e.g. Good lists, Good media, Good portals, etc...), just that we extend the scheme to support such assessment when needed. Projects that have no desire to assess lists could easily continue not doing so, but from my experience there is an appetite to keep track of how lists perform. Reading from the RFC, it seems most people objected because no solid criteria for a good list have been put forward. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:35, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
As I noted above, that RfC was not the only proposal. But we already have the mechanism for any WikiProject to add AL/BL/CL if it wants to, it is {{class mask}}, see for example Template:WikiProject Plants/class. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:37, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
The class mask is a real pain in the ass to setup, and most don't want to bother dealing with that. Nihiltres (talk · contribs) is working on externalizing the classes to a json file however, it looked real promising from what I saw of it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:47, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
@Redrose64 and Headbomb: I've written up a little of my plans in the section below. Specifically, {{class mask}} would be replaced with WikiProject-specific JSON files that extended or overwrote parts of the "default" class set. This would help implement "type" separation from assessments. I do think, though, that we'd be better off implementing the design improvements first before we tackle the headache of disentangling "type" assessments from quality assessments. I'm going to start writing up code to reimplement most of WPBannerMeta in Lua, so the most helpful thing at this point would be to get the main design improvements solidified so that I can get them out. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 00:02, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

To keep this discussion going: I've been eyeing the implementation details here and it looks like a lot of the functionality of the redesign is applicable to {{WikiProject banner shell}}; it'd be really helpful if someone could itemize the features of this redesign as they'd be applicable to each template. Some support will happen in this template—or Lua reconstruction thereof—but some major features, like including a "master" rating, would have to happen in the banner shell. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 20:52, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

  • Would this make sense to wrap into {{article history}}? It already covers the status rating of the article (GA/FA, could extend down to Start for unified/"master" rating), and the template could also house a condensed listing of the relevant WikiProjects (I would go multi-column with shorter line heights, compared to the mockups). My gut tells me that WikiProjects create a lot of needless work for themselves (esp. relative to their editor capacities) by tagging talk pages rather than generating, say for WP:VG, database readouts of all articles of "instance: video game, video game developer, etc." These templates are supposed to improve editor productivity, so wouldn't it better to generate readouts for any grouping of WP articles, e.g., topics related to Ursula Le Guin or financial companies in Iceland without necessitating a separate Ursula Le Guin (etc.) WikiProject with infrastructure and all? (Again, let the projects who actually use their custom features keep them—Milhist, Chem, anyone who actually uses their "importance" ratings—I'm thinking more of the vast majority of WikiProjects that have simple needs or are altogether dormant, where we should try to reduce editor maintenance costs while refining this template, if possible. czar 06:18, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Suppressing class categories

Latest comment: 7 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

I would like to add "class = Disambig" to Template:WikiProject Disambiguation so that all the tools that rely on PageAssessments data (XTools, CopyPatrol, Popular Pages Bot, etc.) will recognize these pages as disambiguation pages (as most of them don't have any other WikiProject banners). However, this would needlessly categorize all of these pages into a new NA-Class Disambiguation articles category, which would be silly. Is there any way to suppress the creation of class categories (besides not passing a class)? If not, could a way be added? Kaldari (talk) 20:27, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

I rather think that XTools etc. recognise pages as disambig-class by their being in a subcategory of Category:Disambig-Class articles, and not by the presence of parameters in WikiProject banners. That being the case, here is what I would do:
  1. Modify {{WikiProject Disambiguation}} to have two new lines: 
    |QUALITY_SCALE=inline
|class={{class mask |dab|disambig=yes}}
  2. Create Category:Disambig-Class Disambiguation articles with the following content: 
    {{CategoryTOC}}
[[Category:Disambig-Class articles]]
After a while, the category will populate. There should be no need to create any other categories. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:59, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
Or instead of step 1, you could add the category to the banner without displaying the class type. <includeonly>[[Category:Disambig-Class Disambiguation articles]]</includeonly> -- WOSlinker (talk) 20:13, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
You'd need to be careful how you did that, so that |category=no would still be honoured. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:39, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
True. <includeonly>{{#ifeq:{{lc:{{{category|}}}}}|no||[[Category:Disambig-Class Disambiguation articles]]}}</includeonly> -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:28, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
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