Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Requests/Archives/2011

Text moved from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Requests/Archive 1, originally from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Requests. Page history here. Baffle gab1978 (talk) 23:42, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Comment

Though not a *member*, I try to do my share of copyediting from day to day. I was mildly astonished to discover a newbie (User:Keidax) welcomed to the guild on his first day at WP, and getting stuck into the horrendous List of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's characters. WOW!! Keep up the good work, folks. Cheers, Bjenks (talk) 16:08, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for helping out. They were welcomed because they signed our membership list. The template welcome message helps newbies to navigate the Guild, so it's a useful guide. If you have time, why not participate in our current drive? You do not need to be a member to join in the fun! Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 21:48, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

I have actually been picking up some of the very oldest (and cruddiest) ones, some of which seem to need a lot of room on the cutting-room floor. Cheers,Bjenks (talk) 02:16, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Dacian Draco feedback

Philg88, your help with the article Dacian Draco is greatly appreciated. Also, the image that you found so fast it is so welcome. In the article I mentioned a sculpture located in the center of a city Orastie, and I tried to upload a photo of it. Unfortunately,it appears that even photos of sculptures in public places are copyrighted (?) I hope I obtain a reconstructed one, too. Yet, your image will remain. Again, thank you so much. Now, the article looks much better Boldwin (talk) 04:04, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Copyeditors with a sense of humour needed.!

I recently found the very funny Citation Needed - blog, that collects examples of wikipedia entries where, sadly we have been less than successful in achieving a good academic tone. I've bookmarked it with the intention of checking it semi-regularly, both for some laughs and to help out the project by cleaning up the articles they highlight. It occurred to me that there were probably some excellent copy editors out there who might also like to do this, hopefully it can bring a smile to your copyediting while directing us to articles that could really benefit from some copyediting love. Ajbpearce (talk) 17:20, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

During the May drive, I copyedited Cultural depictions of penguins, which had the statement "They are painted as great percussionists, but this depiction couldn't be further from the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Penguin actually has a very hard time keeping beat, and cannot successfully hold one, let alone two, drumsticks." (I deleted it, but with a lot of regret.) --Stfg (talk) 13:52, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

This blog post is almost two years old at this point, but what can I say, I'm out of touch. I dare you to not think about it the next time you see the word alot. Braincricket (talk) 04:34, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Howzabout this scholarly article on the Oxford Comma (OdCom). The whole site that it comes from is a delight, in fact. --Stfg (talk) 13:34, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

The joys of omitting commas: I've just added one to this sentence: "In 1834 Bird and Brett published a paper on the analysis of blood serum and urine in which they argued against some work by Prout." I'm sure they are more comfortable now. --Stfg (talk) 22:34, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Jimmy Page and Martin Luther removal

The editor requesting the copyedits has been blocked as a sock-puppet. After looking at the past discussions it seems that the editor's sockmaster was putting lots of articles up for FAC without being involved in the edits. (see here and here)

The articles were in a reasonable state, Jimmy Page at B-class and Martin Luther at GA. There were some minor issues on Jimmy Page, I changed # to No. and fixed hyphens and dashes with a dashes script.

These articles are not in need of a copyedit, they are unlikely to be placed at GAC or FAC in the immediate future, and we have a backlog on the requests page, it seems prudent to remove them and concentrate on the other articles. Chaosdruid (talk) 10:21, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Also removed Massachusetts Institute of Technology as it was a request by the same editor and it appears as if it is not being worked on. Chaosdruid (talk) 15:49, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Request any article needing copyedit?

I am presuming that I can request copyediting on any article needing it, regardless of class. Am I correct? I have requested Mohammad Nasim Faqiri as a test example. --DThomsen8 (talk) 13:00, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

In most cases, you can request copy editing on any article; however, the article you put on the request page is being considered for deletion, and the Guild does not copy edit any article that is up for deletion. If the deletion clears up, a member of the Guild will copy edit the article. The Utahraptor^Talk/_Contribs 15:23, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining the policy. Another member of the Guild has done a copyedit, but by the policy, she cannot take credit for it in this drive. --DThomsen8 (talk) 18:36, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

1978 European Cup Final

Nathan2055 'copyedited' the article and only changed four words. Now in my eyes that is not a copyedit, the article is on hold at GAN because of prose issues yet none of these were addressed at all. I would like to ask if another member of the GOCE would be kind enough to give the article a proper copyedit because the issues are there and quite frankly the last one was a disgrace and brings the reputation of the GOCE down. I have had listed a number of articles here now and the quality of the copyedits has been fantastic but this one was awful. NapHit (talk) 17:27, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I will have a go. --Stfg (talk) 20:16, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - in limbo?

Just wondering whether this request has fallen into limbo in a way that might embarrass GOCE.

The request was made on 02 August in advance of a GA review. The GA reviewer did a fair amount of copyediting himself on 06 August, and he passed the review on the same day. User:Bobnorwal started copyediting on 09 August, but without putting {{working}} on the GOCE Requests page, and without using inuse tags. When Bobnorwal had got about a third of the way in, the requester suddenly started editing, in the course of which he undid some of Bobnorwal's work. That may have been inadvertent, as he tried to restore it, but not by a wholesale revert, and his restoration was far from thorough. For example, Bobnorwal edited something to read

with "a one-legged man"

but after the requester was done, it read

with a "a one-legged man"

(and it still does today).

This article is being edited quite busily at the moment, as it has been pretty constantly in recent weeks. According to its history page, 500 edits ago was dated 5 June 2011. This hardly looks like an article that has stable enough content to justify a very thorough copyedit such as GOCE would do. Was the request reasonable? Should we complete or decline it? --Stfg (talk) 13:49, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Most of the edits are being reverted, but working on it right now could lead to edit conflict difficulties, as there quite a few edits every day. It looks like Bobnorwal had a go, but gave up --Dianna (talk) 23:24, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

As someone pointed out, the reversal was accidental - my connection was flickering and I couldn't post the edit I was doing. I saved the whole article with what I was going to add in Notepad, and after a reboot posted the thing, unknowingly removing Bobnorwal's additions. It was just a misunderstanding caused by bad internet. And yes, I admit it still attracts editors (though ever since it passed the GA, mostly about box office receipts). Hope it gets more stable by the time the DVD comes out, in October. igordebraga ≠ 03:02, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

It is still listed on the talk page, and someone may yet choose to do the requested copy edit. I added a notation there that the article is still being heavily edited and thus a copy edit may be difficult to do at present. --Dianna (talk) 04:32, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

What to do when we finish a request?

I've just finished a copyedit for A5 (Croatia), my first copyedit for the GOCE in some time. There are no instructions for what to do when we finish. Should I delete the request? I see that there's an archive page — am I supposed to do something with that? Thanks! Scartol • Tok 17:23, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

You can add

::{{done}} ~~~~

to the section on the requests page, as done at WP:GOCE/REQ#Horrible Bosses, for example. --Stfg (talk) 13:17, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Discontinue archives?

I am thinking about discontinuing maintenance of the archive pages. They are not getting the number of page views to justify the amount of time it takes to do the maintenance on them. Any thoughts? --Dianna (talk) 04:28, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Agree. --Tagishsimon (talk) 07:23, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

I don't feel too comfortable with dropping archives, but I understand why you brought this up, since it appears that you're doing most, if not all, of the archiving. How about we archive once a week or once every two weeks? That way, it's not as tedious. The Utahraptor^Talk/_Contribs 13:08, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

I think it's a lot of extra work to archive requests, even having done it only a couple times myself. If archives were kept, what might be even better than cutting it down to once a week or something would be to find someone to write a bot to do the archiving for us. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 13:40, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

AIUI the task would consist of: (a) housekeeping activities to keep the archive page up to date and to delete completed items from the requests page; (b) noticing when requests seem to have fallen by the wayside and checking with requesters/copy editors to find out what they consider the position to be. Is this correct?

If that's what it is, and if it's wanted, then I can offer to do it. I don't want to become a GOCE coordinator, now or in the future, but that much housekeeping would be OK. In particular, I know that requests are sometimes declined for various reasons and I don't want to make such decisions. Presumably the present coordinators will continue with that anyway. --Stfg (talk) 16:59, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

I was concerned about the amount of time it consumes to keep archives as opposed to the value of doing the work. If no one ever looks at the archives but me, the work is valueless. It was consuming 15 to 30 minutes a day to maintain. It needed to be done daily or it would be more difficult to maintain, as less clueful people would remove items from the requests page without updating the archives, and then the hunt was on to try to locate the information. The present maintenance task, if the archive is dropped, is much as Stfg describes: deleting completed items; monitoring progress; and performing spot checks when newer editors take on a task. If you are interested in helping with this work, Stfg, that would be great :) -- Dianna (talk) 18:09, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

I still think we should get a subst template written to do this for us - from the initial request right through to archiving. It only needs one parameter and four or so variables. 0=initial request, 1=working, 2=completed, 3=declined (4=removed - if needed)

It could even set GA and FA candidates to be flagged and FA's moved to the other FA sub-page.

I think either UtahRaptor or Torchiest mentioned they would be into loooking into my suggestion, but I do not know how far that may have gone. Chaosdruid (talk) 00:01, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin was removed a few hours ago, but has GOCE actually done its work on it? The {{Copy edit}} tag (placed by the requestor on the same day they made the request) is still there, and the copy editor who signed up for the task has so far made only one edit, a reversion of vandalism. --Stfg (talk) 10:11, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

I have re-added this so that progress can be monitored. Sorry about that; it was just an oversight --Dianna (talk) 18:01, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Looks as if User:Sp33dyphil may have forgotten about it. He's very busy, but so far has only done a single reversion of vandalism on this article. --Stfg (talk) 09:39, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

I have asked Speedy for an update, as the main editor there is asking for a status update. Chaosdruid (talk) 17:12, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

A possibly silly question

Hi! I'm one of several editors belonging to WP:CRO who have recently rewritten Croatia article before it is submitted to WP:GAN. I'd rather have the article copyedited before the GAN, but would like to move it forward in the GOCE queue. Would it be possible to replace any of the article copyedit requests that I have submitted earlier - preferably one of the two sitting there the longest time - with this one? Or is this a silly question after all?--Tomobe03 (talk) 22:41, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

You can have no more than three requests at any one time. If you already have three, remove one of them and put your new article in as a new request (and mark it as urgent for GA). Cheers. --SMasters (talk) 03:47, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer. I placed a notice to withdraw A11 (Croatia) and a request for Croatia instead at the bottom of the queue. Hope this arrangement is fine.--Tomobe03 (talk) 11:27, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

August requests archive omissions

It appears there are two articles still unaccounted for...

• Peru national football team
• VISA FIVB Beach Volleyball International‎

We need to check them to ensure they were ce'd, or why they were taken off the list. I would have done it now, and will do it tomorrow if they are not resolved, but I have to log off.

Chaosdruid (talk) 23:47, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I did VISA FIVB Beach Volleyball International‎. As it was in October, when archiving had been closed, I forgot to archive August and September requests completed in October. Apologies for that. As penance, I've checked out Peru national football team and archived its completion (by User:Baffle gab1978) too. --Stfg (talk) 09:15, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Stats

For no very interesting reason, I've just counted the requests on this page (not the FAC subpage) that belong to various classes. There are 44 requests, as follows:

• 19 popular culture (11 songs and albums, 4 artists/groups, 2 video games, a film and a manga character);
• 8 history (3 battles or campaigns, 3 disasters, 2 other);
• 7 geographic (including the motorway);
• 10 other.

All of which is probably of no use at all, but it's interesting that popular songs and albums account for 25% of all currently outstanding requests. --Stfg (talk) 12:49, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Infinity on High

User:Basilisk4u requested c/e of Infinity on High on 10 September for GA review, saying "I have until tomorrow". On 11 September, they had worked on it a little more and it passed its GA, since when it has been worked on by another editor who also writes well. On 10 October I had a look and thought it looked pretty good, so I asked Basilisk4u whether they still wanted it done. There has been no reply, although Basilisk4u is editing actively. Is this one to drop? --Stfg (talk) 09:30, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

I would say so - they have had ample time to reply. Looking at it the article, it appears there are some minor punctuation details remaining but on the whole it seems ok (though I did only speed read it once through!) Chaosdruid (talk) 11:20, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

removed as declined - unnecessary as already passed GA and seems fine as is. Chaosdruid (talk) 15:01, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

First Transjordan attack on Amman (1918)

Thanks very much for all your hard work, much appreciated. --Rskp (talk) 05:40, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi, the clarification "Which side is the 1st and 2nd Light Horse Regiments referring to?" was cut today because I think its been answered by adding a few new subsections and reworking that terrible sentence. Please let me know if there is any problem. Thanks again, --Rskp (talk) 07:01, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Error with completed copy-edit template

There is an error in the coding of Template:GOCEtb that renders a dynamic time stamp. If you go to any use of this template, no matter when it was posted, the time stamp will give you the current date and time because Template:Currentdate is used for the time stamp portion of the signature line. I've exhausted my ideas on ways to fix it, drawing from welcome and warning templates as examples. Unfortunately, what works on those does not work on this one. I don't understand template coding well enough to figure out what's different about this particular template that causes normal means of signature display to fail. ❇Zoë Alkaia ❇ 07:23, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Alright, I borrowed a line of code from Template:Talkback and I think I got it to work. Now, instead of a user parameter, there is an optional parameter called sign. Just put your four tildes right after the equal sign, like you're signing it. So when you transclude the template, it will substitute your signature in there and use it at the end of the message text. I updated the documentation accordingly. Just copy-and-paste from the Usage box, fill in the article name, and you're good to go! Braincricket (talk) 10:00, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

P.S. All those templates that were transcluded before now will just be blank, i.e. without signatures. Braincricket (talk)

Great, thanks! ❇Zoë Alkaia ❇ 16:24, 30 December 2011 (UTC)