I've been trying to compile an overview of what the various
WikiProjects on the Swedish and Norwegian Wikipedias (sv,no,nn)
have accomplished. The reason is that some of the best work is
done within WikiProjects, and I want to find success factors and
bring inspiration for other projects to improve.
Most projects have a list of participants and some way to indicate
which articles they try to cover. However, the people who do
actual work within a project are not necessearily the same who
have listed themselves as participants. And an edit in an article
isn't necessarily "part of" the project. For example, if I edit
[[Napoleon]] to describe a disease he had, that edit is possibly
part of WikiProject Medicine, but not part of WikiProject War.
To better assess the amount of activity within each project, it
would really help if each edit could be tagged as belonging to a
WikiProject. This is how I think it could work: In order not to
make things complicated for beginners, the default behaviour will
be just as it is today. But in the personal settings, I should be
able to specify a list of tags for tasks, projects or teams that
I'm involved in. The elements of this list would then appear as a
<select><option> drop-down in the edit page. If a tag is
selected, it is saved in the revision history and can perhaps be
seen in RecentChanges and article history. Recent Changes and user
contributions could use these tags as selectors, so you could get
a recent changes per WikiProject.
This is just a suggestion. I'm not about to implement this. If
you think this is a good idea, feel free to use it.
What I propose is just a single, free form plain text tag to be
associated with each edit. I don't suggest that the system must
verify that such a WikiProject exists. The scheme is not limited
to WikiProjects. But there is where I see its first use.
Here are two examples of team statistics on other websites, that
might serve as further inspiration:
On
PGDP.net (Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders)
volunteers proofread pages from scanned books. It's also a
competition to get a high page count. But members can join teams
and teams compete on the sum of their members' page counts.
On
LibraryThing.com, members are able to catalog their personal
libraries and bookshelves. They can also join discussion groups,
and each group has a list of which members have the most books. A
sum of counts is also presented for each group.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se