Guideline:WikiProjects

A WikiProject is a group of people who want to work as a team to improve BattleTechWiki. This guideline outlines the accepted practices for starting and maintaining WikiProjects, as well as some tips for how to organize WikiProjects effectively.

What is a WikiProject?

A WikiProject is a group of editors interested in collaborating on a specific topic within BattleTechWiki. A WikiProject is a group of people, not a set of pages, a subject area, a list of tasks, or a category. The pages of a WikiProject serve as a central place for coordination, discussion, and organization of the group's activities related to the specific topic. WikiProject pages may be used to develop criteria, maintain various collaborative processes, keep track of work that needs to be done, and act as a forum where relevant issues may be discussed.

A WikiProject may also help build ties between editors interested in a topic, and the broader community interested in that topic: establishing partnerships, mentoring new editors, etc.

A WikiProject is fundamentally a social construct: its success depends on its ability to function as a cohesive group of editors working towards a common goal. Much of the work that participants do to sustain a successful WikiProject (quality assessment, peer review, coordination of volunteer editors, etc.) can be tedious, unrewarding, and unappreciated. To be effective, a WikiProject must foster an esprit de corps among its participants. When group cohesion is maintained—where, in other words, project participants are willing to share in the less exciting work—a WikiProject can muster the energy and direction to produce excellent articles systematically rather than incidentally.

Creating a WikiProject

WikiProjects exist in the project namespace and can technically be started by any user. However, to stop the proliferation of unused and underutilized WikiProjects, you must first propose the new project at the proposal page.

Before you begin

Interested in starting a WikiProject? First, check to see if the project (or related projects) already exist(s).

If your project doesn't already exist, it's time to look for editors with similar interests. This is the most important step. You must find people who want to work together on the project with you. The first stop should be to look for projects with similar interests (if any exist). Use the directories above or check the talk pages of related articles for projects with interests that overlap with yours. Post at the talk pages for those similar projects asking if editors are interested in your starting a project focused on your topic. If you can't find other editors with similar interests, consider participating in a current project instead. Single-editor projects tend to have short lives.

If your project idea fits within another existing project, and you're concerned coordination on this topic would either overwhelm the existing project, or be overwhelmed by it, consider organizing as a task force under that existing project instead. This would drastically reduce the amount of setup and maintenance required to keep the project pages functioning.

If you're having trouble finding interested editors, consider that the scope of your proposed project may be too narrow. BattleTechWiki is a huge place with many draws on editors' attention; finding several long-term editors with a sustained interest in one topic may not be easy. Projects with overly narrow scopes tend to become inactive due to lack of editors, not enough associated encyclopedia pages for sustained effort, or competing with a broader-scoped more popular project that draws the time of interested editors. Broadening the proposed scope may help to bring in more pages and editors; although a scope too broad may fail to interest editors who wish to collaborate on only a subset of your topic.

Proposing a project

If the project doesn't yet exist, but you've found interested editors, it's time to propose your project idea! Go to the WikiProject proposals page and search that page to see if your project idea has been proposed before (if it has, be prepared to justify why you feel this time the project will succeed). Follow the instructions on that page to create a proposal. You'll need to list the pages and categories that are key to your proposed group, as well as current WikiProjects that relate to those pages. Then interested users will sign-up to support the project (feel free to advertise this at related projects or pages. Canvassing is not a concern here; however, filling the support roles with new accounts is unlikely to lead to a sustainable project). While there are no hard rules for what constitutes "sufficient" support, projects that are likely to succeed tend to start with at least 6 to 12 active BattleTechWikins. Once that threshold is reached, the proposal can be considered successful and the project created (see below). If there is insufficient support to start the project after a few months, the proposal will generally be archived for future reference.

Create the WikiProject

Creating a WikiProject is technically as easy as starting a page titled BattleTechWiki:WikiProject Your Favorite Topic. However, various tools have been developed to help WikiProjects keep track of pages of interest and to facilitate collaboration on improving the encyclopedia coverage of a topic area. Getting a new project set up utilizing these tools is a slightly complicated process; you may ask [[BattleTechWiki:Masthead|BTW Staff], and/or on our Discord (where most interested experienced editors may be willing to help).

Task force

Based on discussion at a WikiProject proposal or at a given WikiProject, you may instead wish to start a task force under an existing WikiProject. A task force is a group of editors interested in a smaller part of a WikiProject's scope. Creating a task force gives those editors space to collaborate on the part of the WikiProject scope they are interested in, without drowning out broader discussion on the WikiProject's talk page. Additionally, task forces tend to have reduced administrative overhead, as they can use the tools and templates already developed for the parent WikiProject. Instructions for how to setup a new task force are at Guideline:WikiProjects/Task forces.

General principles

Tagging pages with WikiProject banners

Many WikiProjects use talk page banners to mark certain pages as within the scope of the WikiProject. This helps the WikiProjects to organize their progress improving pages within the project's scope. Additionally, talk page banners may point interested editors towards relevant WikiProjects where they might become involved, or just ask a question about an article. Consequently, pages should only be marked with WikiProject banners for projects that intend to support the tagged pages. Pages of broad interest may fall within the scopes of several projects, and may therefore have several project banners on their talk page (these banners are often collapsed to be less visible with {{WikiProject banner shell}}). In general, one should not attempt to police which projects are sufficiently relevant to place their banners on a given talk page.\ Conversely, projects that place their banners on a talk page have no special ownership over that page, and the consensus of project participants can be overruled by a broader consensus at a more visible forum.

Talk page banners

Creating a WikiProject talk page banner can range from simple to somewhat complicated. Project talk banners are generally created at Template:WikiProject Name (e.g. {{WikiProject Birds}}). The simplest way to create an adaptable talk page banner is to use the template {{WPBannerMeta}}. Using this template, a simple talk page banner might look like:

{{#invoke:WikiProject banner|main
|PROJECT             = Birds
 |BANNER_NAME        = {{subst:FULLPAGENAME}}
 |small  = {{{small|}}}
 |category={{{category|¬}}}
 |listas = {{{listas|}}}
|IMAGE_LEFT          = Ruddy-turnstone-icon.png
|MAIN_TEXT           = This article is within the scope of the '''[[Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds|Birds WikiProject]]''', a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Birds.  If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.
}}

which produces:

The {{WPBannerMeta}} template supports many other optional functions including task forces, portal links, peer review, and more. You can read about these functions at the template documentation. Much of this functionality can also be generated without using the {{WPBannerMeta}} template.

WikiProjects define their scopes

Many editors place banners on behalf of WikiProjects in which they are not participants. This practice is normally welcomed by WikiProjects as it brings to their attention new and interesting articles. Be judicious in making such placements by carefully reviewing the scope of the project. Information about the project's scope is often available on the WikiProject's main page, and sometimes also on documentation associated with the template. All editors should avoid tagging an article with a disruptive number of WikiProject banners. If an article is only tangentially related to the scope of a WikiProject, then please do not place that project's banner on the article.

If you place a banner for a WikiProject in which you do not participate, and one of its regular participants removes it, do not re-add the banner without discussion. A WikiProject's participants define the scope of their project (the articles that they volunteer to track and support), which includes defining an article as being outside the scope of the project. Similarly, if a WikiProject says that an article is within their scope, do not edit war to remove the banner.

Advice pages

Many large WikiProjects collect advice about how to apply BattleTechWiki's policies and guidelines to their specific subject area. This advice, sometimes in a separate advice page, sometimes in a section of the WikiProject's main page, is often excellent, and may helpfully consolidate and explain the specific details of many site-wide policies and guidelines, the application of which to a particular context might otherwise cause confusion among editors.

Editors who are working on such an advice page or section are encouraged to carefully study the main policies, guidelines, and relevant well-accepted general BattleTechWiki essays. The good advice pages do not conflict with the site-wide pages, and avoid unnecessary duplication of material from them.

WikiProject advice can best help editors by providing: subject-specific considerations in applying site-wide standards; links to subject-specific templates; a list of information that editors should consider including in a given type of article; relevant examples; and clear explanations (e.g., reasons why editors recommend "this" instead of "that"). Well-written WikiProject advice material also takes into account the fact that most articles are within the scope of multiple WikiProjects, and seeks to avoid conflicting advice, which can lead to unproductive "territorial" disputes between projects, and between projects and editors with WikiProject-unrelated editing concerns.

The following templates are available to WikiProjects for clarifying the distinction between WikiProject advice and BattleTechWiki-wide guidelines:

• {{WikiProject advice}}
  • {{WikiProject style advice}}
  • {{WikiProject notability advice}}
  • {{WikiProject content advice}}

Role of the BTW Staff

There may still arise situations when there is a seemingly intractable disagreement between projects. If that happens, you can ask for advice from the BTW staff. In severe cases, formal dispute resolution channels are available.

Dealing with inactive WikiProjects

Further information: BattleTechWiki:Project namespace § Deletion of project pages

Many WikiProjects fall inactive or semi-active because they have a lack of interested editors or they simply have served their initial purpose. Many small scope projects fall inactive or semi-active after establishing an organizational structure, advice pages]], layout and inclusion standards, reliable sources, and navigational aids. These projects are retained for reference as they may be viable because they provide topic-specific considerations of the many site-wide policies and guidelines that still apply to a subset of articles.

Identifying

While inactive projects do no harm to the encyclopedia, it may be beneficial to tag them as inactive, in order to divert interested editors to more active projects on similar topics. Projects are generally considered inactive if the talk page has received nothing other than routine/automated announcements or unanswered queries for a year or more. To verify that a project is inactive, post on its talk page asking if anyone minds marking it as such. If there are no objections, you can add inactive to the {{WikiProject status}} template at the top of the WikiProject page. This will add the project to Category:Inactive WikiProjects and display a message at the top of the page notifying editors of the project's status.

A project's inactive status can be reflected in its banner template by changing #invoke:WikiProject banner|main to #invoke:WikiProject banner|inactive This will replace the banner with a message saying that the project is inactive, and add the template to Category:Inactive WikiProject banners. All other template parameters should be retained, as this will make it easier to "revive" the project in the future.

Alternatively, a project that has gone inactive because it has served its stated purpose, had an unrealistic scope, or is otherwise unlikely to be ever revived can be marked as "defunct" per the instructions at Template:WikiProject status#Usage: Defunct projects. You can mark a project as defunct by adding |PROJECT_STATUS=defunct to its banner template. This will generate a more discouraging message, suggesting interested editors look for related projects. Sometimes small, inactive projects are simply merged into larger, more active projects. This could be a good option if you wish for links to the smaller project to now point to the larger project. If there's still an active community at the smaller project, it could instead be merged as a task force of a larger project. Guidance on that can be found here. If an inactive project never seems to have grown beyond its founding, you may consider moving it to the founder's userspace or nominating it for deletion. In general, medium or larger projects are marked as defunct rather than deleted to preserve the project's history. For more, see BattleTechWiki:Project namespace#Deletion of project pages.

Revival

Any editor may revive an inactive WikiProject by changing the {{WikiProject status}} template parameter to active. The guidance for starting a new WikiProject applies here: WikiProjects are groups of editors; if you can't recruit other editors to the cause, the project will likely become inactive again. If you decide to revive a WikiProject, consider the following tips:

1. Recruit other interested editors by posting on the talk page of similar WikiProjects, our Discord, Also update the project's status in the directory.
2. Archive old clutter (clean and simple is better for attracting new participants), use WikiProject templates appropriately to organise content (e.g., {{InfoBoxWikiProject}}) and make use of any helpful tools the project hadn't been using.
3. Provide clear suggestions on what participants can do, using {{To do}}, {{tasks}} and cleanup listings, and perhaps linking to relevant pages elsewhere. You can use the {{Help Out}} template, either directly or as inspiration.
4. Create any missing userbox, project banner, or user invite templates. See whether the assessment system for the project banner works, and fix it if not.
5. Notify existing participants of your efforts and invite them to contribute, to make suggestions, or to leave a note on the project's talk page about what they're currently editing.
6. Use automation to ensure most if not all appropriate pages are tagged with the project banner, thus promoting the project to those who may be interested.
7. Provide a Special:RecentChangesLinked link on the project page, using the project's article category. This gives an easy way to see recent relevant talk page discussions. Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Technology for example.
8. Seek out collaboration with related projects. Tell them that the project is active, invite them to help, and ask whether there is an article of mutual interest that both groups could collaborate on.
9. Respond promptly to queries and post occasional messages at the WikiProject's talk page to let people know what you're working on and how they can help.
10. Replace {{#invoke:WikiProject banner|inactive with {{#invoke:WikiProject banner|main and review the options according to the module documentation.
11. Update the {{WikiProject status}} template on the project page.

Renaming a WikiProject

Renaming a WikiProject is not as simple as moving the WikiProject page itself. The steps involved would generally include:

1. Ensure there is consensus for the rename.
2. Rename the WikiProject page, moving all subpages with it (for best results, seek the assistance from an administrator or staff member.
3. Update the WikiProject template to point to the new WikiProject page, and to have it use a new category that matches the new name.
4. Rename the relevant categories pages (also may require admin or staff member assistance).
5. If the WikiProject uses any of the tools referenced above, you may need to update the WikiProject listings used by those tools to ensure the tools will still work with the new WikiProject name.

See also

• Category:WikiProject templates
• Category:Inactive WikiProjects
• Category:Defunct WikiProjects