Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Core topics/Core topics COTF

==antarctica==

Should we just start with Antarctica, seeing as how there's already 4 votes for it? This way we can have a new article every Sunday (just like WP:COTW). Besides, I've already started improving it. ;) Gflores ^Talk 06:58, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Month against Week

Since this collaboration deals with such important topics, I think the article needs more than a week ro reach a sufficient level of quality, maybe a month. CG 17:42, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

I tend to prefer a longer time so I can get books out, read them, digest them, etc., but I know others feel differently. Gflores & Maurreen will have finished before I've even started! Walkerma 22:31, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I think a fortnight will probably be better. Maureen? Gflores ^Talk 22:40, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

A fortnight is a good compromise. Maurreen 03:06, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Removing nominations

How about if we change:

• "Nominations will be removed if they are not seconded within a week or if they haven't won in a month" to
• "Nominations will be removed after a week if they are or after a month if they haven't received three votes."

Maurreen 04:12, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree we probably need to change this now it's fortnightly, but is there a missing word or phrase in this new sentence? I don't understand the "if they are" part. 3 votes after a month seems good. Walkerma 05:03, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Oops! You are right. What I meant was to suggest a change to:

• "Nominations will be removed after one week if they are not seconded or after one month if they haven't received three votes." Maurreen 04:14, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Seems fine to me. Walkerma 04:34, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Break

I have to go out of town for about a week and probably won't be able to help here. Maurreen 19:08, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Rollover & technology

Should the collaboration for Technology start Feb. 26? Maurreen 21:46, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good! Strangely, tech is listed as a GA, while we have it as start-class. I'm going to create a todo, feel free to add stuff to it. Gflores ^Talk 22:00, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that's great! (And I'd got books on toys & humanities out the library, grrr...!) Walkerma 22:25, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Away

Sorry I've been away; life gets in the way. Maurreen 19:58, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Rollover?

Technology's fortnight is up. Should we rollover, change COTF to either "collaboration of the month" or "collaboration of period to be determined for each article as we go along"? I would lean toward "collaboration of the month". Maurreen 20:24, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi, I think it depends on amount of work from group and number of folks working. At current size, I suppose fortnight is too ambitious, given no other groups/people working on a focus article. A time limit is good -- perhaps monthly and move on if an article reaches a well developed status before month is up. At the same time, another idea comes to me -- key article groups -- that I am posting on the main Core topic page now... Vir 16:24, 14 March 2006 (UTC) (P.S. per Martin's comment below, fortnight is fine too.) Vir 16:24, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I think we should stick with a fortnight, and just roll over if we need to (as we should now). I think we need to keep some momentum, and hope some more folks will pitch in as this COTF gets more widely known. Also, as Gflores has pointed out, technology is much harder to write about than Antarctica, some topics will get done in a fortnight but some won't until we have more people. Walkerma 06:32, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

I can't do much more with technology right now. I'm ready to rollover, if anyone else would like that. Maurreen 04:38, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Anyone mind if we roll over Humanities till April 30? I hope to do a bit on it before then, I've been busy. Although things are flagging here at the moment, I think it's important we keep this COTF going because in time we will have enough people to keep it on track. Walkerma 04:38, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

OK with me to keep it through April. Maurreen 18:19, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Archive?

I think Martin had created an archive, but I don't see it and don't remember where. Maurreen 19:42, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean this, Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Core topics/Past COTF? It's the first thing on the page. Or are you referring to something else? Gflores ^Talk 03:55, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Yep, that's the one I created. Does it need to be more prominent? Walkerma 20:20, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

I see; I was looking on the COTF page instead of the general core topics page. I'll put a link at COTF. Maurreen 03:59, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Keeping this alive

I had been tentatively planning to list this as an inactive collaboration, until I saw Martin's post above. If we are going to try to keep this alive, how can we make it more alive?

For instance, could we maybe take turns doing the rollovers?

And do we still want to aim for a fortnightly rollover? Other options are weekly, monthly and open-ended. Maurreen 18:19, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

My choice would be monthly. That should give anyone interested enough time. And it would be easy to remember. Maurreen 16:29, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I updated the {{Wikipedia:Community Portal/ctc-summary}} for you. It might be worthwhile for you to expand the description at the summary, per the other collabs in the left column at Wikipedia:Community_Portal#Collaborations (a cpl of sentences, instead of just one word). Thanks :) --Quiddity 22:53, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Thank you! I've just tried to keep things ticking over while the main coordinator is away, and I missed that. I was thinking of adding, "Often these topics are quite broad, making them harder to write, yet they are frequently viewed. Please help us ensure they are not neglected." What do people think? As for updating it beyond Science, I'll leave that up for another day or so, then we'll move to a new topic. Walkerma 06:26, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

It might help a little if the brief on the Community Portal page were a little more about the current article and a little less about describing this project. The introduction could be reduced to a single sentence as with the GA collaboration, and a paragraph used for the article. It would also look better if the article paragraph were indented slightly as with the AID. E.g.:

The Core Topics Collaboration of the Fortnight works to polish essential Wikipedia topics.

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical universe, material world or material universe. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The term generally does not include manufactured objects and human interaction unless qualified in ways such as, e.g., "human nature" or "the whole of nature". Nature is also generally distinguished from the spiritual or supernatural. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the galactic.

You can help pick the next Core Topic collaboration article.

But that's just my $.02 worth. Thanks. — RJH (talk) 14:45, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Good idea. Thanks. Maurreen 16:15, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Supplement, etc.

We have some articles listed here that are not on the current core topics list but are on the supplement. I'm thinking we could include supplement items as long as the item has been listed there at least a week. Maurreen 15:56, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

I think we should accept nominations from the supplement as well - if they really need the work, they'll attract the necessary votes. If people feel they are less important to work on, they won't vote for them. I believe we would consider anything on the supplement to be automatically important enough for V0.5 and later release versions, so from a pragmatic point of view we need the supplement articles improving as much as the main core. Walkerma 16:05, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Then while we're at it, should we make all articles on countries and multinational regions eligible? Maurreen 16:14, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

New template!

Hello, in an attempt to help collaborate across COTW projects, I'm making a template that displays the current picks of each. I've made a template for you to be able to add the name of the current article {{CoreCOTW article}}, which you can also use to transclude in your other templates so you don't have to update those manually. You'd only need to update this new one to populate the others on rollover. Will be back later with the link to the new footer template that lists all current articles. plange 01:29, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Plange! Walkerma 02:05, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

It was Maurreen's idea, so can't take all the credit ;-) It's now done. {{COTWCurrentPicks}} Do you want me to replace areas on this project that use your current article name? plange 02:51, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm so late. Thanks for doing that! About your question -- if you still want to, that'd probably be good, but I don't entirely understand what you're asking. Maurreen 00:08, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Changed it for you-- now you only need to edit {{CoreCOTW article}} to change where the name of the article appears on your main project page and {{voter-1.0COTF}}

pushing to 1.0

any reason we can't make the space up on the community portal say something about 'pushing to 1.0' or something similar for COTF? when i saw COTF, i was like 'oh, just another COT__', but if people knew it was associated with a really commonly sought after goal like 1.0, i think there'd be a lot more interest and participation. and more prominent space, i mean geez, wikipedia 1.0 is a main goal of the wikipedia project, i'd be for giving it main page space. JoeSmack ^Talk 17:43, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Industry COTF

If people are OK with this, I'd like to let Industry run as COTF till the end of the month. The main reason for this is that many of the active people from the 1.0 project are busy getting our test CD (Version 0.5) produced as a CD at the moment. I voted for industry myself, and I would love to spend a bit of time on adding to the article, but Version 0.5 has to take precedence for the next week or so. Is this OK? Walkerma 04:57, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Feedback on failed COTF

I'm new to this so excuse the newbie type question

I can't see where one finds the reason why a proposed collaboration failed so that any new proposal has a better chance of success.

If it's for lack of votes do we know whether that is because of lack of awareness or lack of people to work on it? How does one go about rounding up people to tell them that it is suggested as a project so that they can then decide on whether or not they can find time to vote/participate?Cosmopolitancats 17:55, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your interest in helping out! If you mean "Fail" in the sense that the nomination was removed for lack of votes, the introduction to the page says, "Nominations can be removed after one week if they are not seconded or after one month if they haven't received three votes." Typically we remove them more slowly than that, usually only if they don't get a second vote after a while. To reduce that problem, it's important to add the {{nom-1.0COTF}} template to the talk page of the article you are nominating, so people who watch that page will add their votes. You might also contact the relevant WikiProject - see Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory for a list.

If you mean "Fail" in a vaguer sense, that not much work got done, that is a much harder problem to deal with. I really wanted to do a lot with "Industry", but it passed as COTF at a really bad time for me (I was too busy on other things). Sometimes you get little happening, but other times you get a couple of people who put in a lot of effort - articles like Antarctica and Nature were greatly improved by this collaboration. If you want your passed nomination to get worked on, you can contact people you know who might be interested (which may be hard if you're a newbie!), then get some good books out the library, and get to work! Please join us with Sex if you can! Walkerma 02:34, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Core topic in ACID

The core topic Death is the current ACID this week (and probably next also as we as usual was a bit late), perhaps you should help that poor article this week? _→AzaToth 01:57, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Fork?

Is it time to put a fork in this thing? It doesn't seem to be getting too much activity and the Amazon Rainforest has been up on the Community portal for ages. Is there a better way to do core article collaborations that will attract more activity?—RJH (talk) 22:34, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Well I stumbled upon the collaborative project today and until just now I was confused about the activity of the project. I can see now that this place gets little traffic and hardly any productivity goes on; so for the sake of new editors looking for somewhere to offer their help, it might be time to fork.--tdh5609 (talk) 21:16, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

I've tried to keep this page going but it rarely gets much interest. The people who originally set up the collaboration are no longer active on WP, and I have other priorities. So although I think we need to be improving our core topics, this format doesn't seem to be working well now. I think that User:Proteins is interested in taking over the Core Contest and making it an annual event. Although there was a problem with the prizes (which was very nicely fixed by Proteins!), the contest itself was incredibly successful in getting core articles improved. The progress made in those two weeks was better than two years of this collaboration! Are there any other suggestions? I'll remove the template from the Community Portal, and we can figure out how to archive or mothball this collaboration. Walkerma (talk) 14:27, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Update - I decided requested comments first on the Community Portal talk page, because I didn't want to mess up the layout of the page. Walkerma (talk) 14:34, 30 January 2009 (UTC)