User talk:Doc glasgow/BoxWatch

Force the talk pages back to the red zone

For starters (and to warm up your muscles), I propose the following exercise: go through articles' talk pages and nuke those that contain no content except those contentious "owned by WikiProject X" boxes. Миша13 19:27, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Why? ^High_InBC^{(Need help? Ask me)} 19:57, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Cos they amount to spam.--Doc^ga pox on the boxes 20:09, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

I suppose a category can serve the same purpose of organizing the articles. I do not see how the boxes are spam. ^High_InBC^{(Need help? Ask me)} 20:14, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Explain to me the point of 'organising the articles'?--Doc^ga pox on the boxes 20:23, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't know much about projects, but I believe the purpose is to group similar articles with editors of compatible taste. Linking the articles somehow is an integral part of achieving that. Perhaps I am missing something fundamental here, not sure what the issue is. ^High_InBC^{(Need help? Ask me)} 20:37, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

I believe you're missing two points:

1. More experienced editors, upon seeing a blue "discussion" tab, expect to find some actual talk about article's merits there. What they often see instead (due to overzealous talkpage tagging by WikiProjects) is an otherwise vain box with colorful images and subboxes.
2. Quite an usual modus operandi of new projects is: pick a category (the more articles the better) and tag all articles' talks with their ownership boxes. It is not at all possible that all these articles can suddenly fall under an active scope of the project - hence we call it "spam".

Миша13 20:48, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Ah, well that makes some sense. I did not get any of that from the page though, reading the page it seems like the border around the square divisions is the problem. I was about to give some CSS advice on how to make the border invisible. ^High_InBC^{(Need help? Ask me)} 20:50, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

FACT: Out of 198 (one hundred and ninety-eight) talk pages that transclude {{running project}}, 97 (ninety-seven) contain no other text than the template itself (that makes, d'oh!, roughly 50%, as in half) and all these have been tagged as of March 2006. Not meaning to single out this project - it's a result of an evaluation made on the first random pick from the graaaaand list of WikiProjects (no kidding, really). Миша13 21:18, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

There seems to be a real lack of understanding about the importance of wikiprojects, how they help us improve an encyclopedia for readers, and how the project templates fit into this. There are many ways in which the templates are essential for editors who use them, here's one example;

• Here is a new editor who has been creating numerous articles that relate to one topic.
• Since being informed of the relevant project and template, what he does is add the template to the back of his new article, he opens up the drop down box in the template, and adds his article to the list of new article announcements.
• This is picked up by other project members, who make style or content amendments if required.
• The article, via its tag, is picked up by the automatic Assessment table which gives figures as to the latest quantity and quality of articles relating to the topic. Allowing project members like me to quickly assess new articles for improvements, and gain an overview of all the articles relating to the topic.

There are numerous other important benefits to the tags and the projects, but that's just one very recent example that comes to mind. Basically, editors like me who edit 100s of articles on one topic for the benefit of readers need these centralised projects - and the accompanying tags - to keep abreast of what is going on with the topic. What needs to be merged? What needs to be expanded? What needs to be cleaned up? What do other interested project members think of this article? etc etc etc. For topics generally poorly represented on wikipedia, especially particular countries or regions, these projects are a lifeline to improving presentation for readers and their success so far is evident. Improving presentation and detail on articles is what we're supposed to do here. The proposal to "go through articles' talk pages and nuke those that contain no content except those contentious owned by WikiProject X" is really destructive and will hamper the goals of many serious editors to the detriment of readers.-- Zleitzen^(talk) 10:44, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Zleitzen has a good point, generally things directly related to improving the encyclopedia are not considered spam. ^High_InBC^{(Need help? Ask me)} 13:28, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Talk page boxes? No, no, no. The boxes that need redesigning or nuking are the infoboxes that are misused to present metadata, when they should be carefully designed to be a tabular form of an "at-a-glance overview" of an article. Carcharoth 22:44, 2 May 2007 (UTC)