Dear Authors and Editors, Two main topics, please look at the first few lines of each, at least.
======================== 1. The Article Checklist For a long time, I have thought that it would be useful to track certain data *about* articles (so, metadata) on article "Talk" pages. I would like to start a debate about whether we should do this, and what form the system should take. In the last two days, I have spent probably too many hours developing a rather complex template, which is used on this page: http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Talk:John_Doherty_%28fiddler%29 As you can see, the template/checklist tracks * workgroup category information * article "status" (in this case, it is a "developing" article as opposed to a "developed" article, a "stub," or an "external" article (e.g., one from Wikipedia and with little change yet) * whether the article is an orphan (i.e., whether any other articles link to it) * whether a "basic cleanup" of the article has been done We could track many other kinds of information. But with just this information, the template *automatically* generates all sorts of useful categories. For example, here are the categories that the John Doherty article has been placed in: Developing Articles | Nonstub articles | Internal Articles | Music Developing Articles | Music Nonstub articles | Music Internal Articles | Music Orphans | Orphans | Music Cleanup | General Cleanup Now here's the idea. Suppose we place that checklist on *all* Citizendium articles. Then we have exhaustive lists of all Philosophy Stubs, all Biology Developing Articles, all articles needing cleanup, and so forth. We can, also, choose from dozens of other optional fields that would generate hundreds of other useful categories. We can then organize all sorts of *new* Big Projects; imagine a Big De-Stub-ification; a Big Copyedit; a Big Footnote Standardization; and so forth. To read more about the proposal, please see: http://pilot.citizendium.org/wiki/Citizendium_Pilot:The_Article_Checklist Here's my question for you: should we add The Article Checklist to the talk page of every article, or is that more trouble than it's worth? To discuss, please see: http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,587.0.html We CAN do a Big Cleanup without adopting the Article Checklist, but the former would be an excellent opportunity to start the latter. So now, about the Big Cleanup. ================== 2. The Big Cleanup As we did with the Big Speedydelete, we can go through the entire corpus of Citizendium articles and clean them up in certain simple ways. Just divide our entire corpus of 2000-2200 pages into around 100 groups of 20 articles. Then people sign up to go through all of the pages in a certain group, using a "to do" list for each article: * Bold the article title, if necessary. * Remove all unused (red) templates, images, category tags, and interwiki links. * Add workgroup category tag(s). * Add (or remove) the CZ Live tag as appropriate. * Check the "Content is from Wikipedia?" box if the article is sourced from Wikipedia. * MAYBE: complete the Article Checklist? Sounds doable, no? At the end of this distributed, incremental mini-project, our articles are all completely shorn of the missing templates, images, categories, and interwiki links; they're all properly assigned to workgroups; they're all properly marked "CZ Live" or not; and we've given Wikipedia credit in all and only the cases where it's deserved. And...if we make the Article Checklist *part of* the Big Cleanup, then we also keep track of the "status" of the article, whether it's an orphan, and create all sorts of useful new categories. We also, then, have a new technical tool that we can use to automatically place our articles into many useful new categories--which in turn can be used for innovative initiatives. So, my questions to you are: * We *do* want to do this Big Cleanup thing, right? * If so, is there anything else we should put on the "to do" list for the Big Cleanup? * If we *are* going to use the Article Checklist, should we start up that initiative while we're doing the Big Cleanup? In other words, should we make "place the Article Checklist" an item on the "to do" list for the Big Cleanup? To answer, please go here: http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,590.0.html --Larry _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
