Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-07-15/Op-ed

Op-ed

Why task forces and subgroups are dying in 2017

Task forces and subgroups play a vital role for their parent projects and ultimately, the encyclopedia itself. They do this by specifying and taking care of tasks that the parent projects may not have time for. The downside? With a less broad focus they can die out quickly if the task force cannot find or keep active members. For you readers who may not know what task forces or workgroups are, they're subgroups that focus on a certain "tasks" under their parent projects' scope. Many have their own organisation of members, roles, important tasks, and how to solve them.

Examples

Rick Rioridan Task Force

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That's the case for the Rick Riordan task force (RRTF) of WikiProject Novels, which focuses on articles related to author Rick Riordan. It has accomplished much considering it rarely (if ever) has more than twenty active members. For example, it has gotten six articles to Good Article status, fought back against "fan edits", and completed several drafts. However, it struggles with having enough active participants, despite having almost 50 pages in its scope. (It's worth noting about half are stub or start class.) In 2015 the Percy Jackson Task Force (the group's predecessor) died out completely if not for actions made by several editors renaming it and broadening its focus. But little improvement has been made. Today, RRTF still tries to remain an "active" task force. The group's remaining members knew they needed a new approach. The idea was an edit-a-thon about John Rocco, Riordan's illustrator, which is currently ongoing. Apparently the idea came from a lack of notable books published by Riordan during the summer months except Rocco's birthday. (Rocco was added to broaden the group's scope.) RRTF claims that the idea is working with boosting participation but if it's lasting, only time will tell. You can still participate in the John Rocco edit-a-thon ongoing until August 1st.

Webcomics work group

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Another example is the webcomics work group. The group was founded back in 2005 in order to improve coverage on webcomics. At the time, Wikipedia's verifiability and notability guidelines were much less strongly enforced, and web content was covered by very few reliable sources, so a lot of low-quality articles on webcomics were being produced at a rapid pace. When a lot of articles were subsequently deleted for not meeting notability guidelines, controversy ensued. Properly sourcing webcomic articles has always remained difficult, and over the years, many webcomic enthusiasts left Wikipedia. By 2015, the work group was completely deserted. A new user tried to clean up the project's pages and create a few new ones, rebooting the requests lists, creating a list of reliable sources, and becoming active on the work group's talk page. Since then, a few other people have started doing regular work on webcomic articles as well, and the field has slowly been improving. There's still fairly little discussion, but it is believed that the cleaned-up resources trigger editors to get more engaged.

Military History WikiProject

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Well this is an odd case but I wanted to include it. Military History Wikiproject (milhist) has many "task forces". They really are only ways to sort topics and few actually have active members. They really only get together editors interested in a topic rather than organising work. It just documents what these editors have done. This is something I've found common among subgroups. The groups that work are narrow and intersect subjects. The group does have "long term collaborations" that are in codenames like Operation Majestic Titan which is about battleships. However, this "Operation" is one of the only ones to have longlivity and good success but at least the others do direct work. Even this one relies on a core group. This is what our reporter from milhist said,

..."My overall view on task forces (and special projects) is that you need a small core of committed members, a narrow focus, and achievable goals in the short term. You also need a wider group of editors willing to review the work at GAN and FA, something that WikiProject Military history excels at. WikiProject Military history has also really benefited from having formal assessment tiers like B-Class and A-Class, as well as a system of awards and recognition. These things help focus Military history members to support their fellow members by reviewing their work. I think task forces and special projects have a future on WP, but only if they have a narrow focus and modest initial goals."

Are task forces needed?

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I believe my opinion is clear, task forces are important for Wikipedia. Others don't agree. One editor told me,

"Most Wikipedians just want to fiddle with small things without commitment to any greater goal, not too many want to do the heavy lifting of extensive content writing, tedious maintenance work like fixing deadlink citations, etc. FWIW, I think it's not a good idea to create separate wiki pages for taskforces/subprojects until there is a substantial number of genuinely active contributors. If the number of active contributors is small, I'd say keep your conversations on the Talk page of a larger more active WikiProject (obviously one that is relevant) so people keep seeing the activity and possibly join in. If the conversations are taking place between a couple of folks in a subproject, nobody else is going to see it. I'd stay on the major project page until they kick you out."

So do we need to minimise the number of subprojects or even eliminate them? Or is there a different solution? RRTF has said that while WP:NV didn't agree that the group was needed it "didn't interfere with the fledgling task force". However, while I was looking through WP:NV's talk archives, I saw little communication between the larger project and its subgroups.

Conclusion

So are task forces needed? Well it depends. I've heard users say "My group (or group's subject) is (or could be) influential for Wikipedia", and I agree with you, however subjects can be interesting to you but there may not be enough notable pages or active and interested users such as WikiProject Christianity in India. And that was a WikiProject! So maybe the problem of being to hard to keep members can appy to ANY project on the site. You may remember that The Signpost had a hiatus because of lack of editors. Maybe you can help a narrow subject more by just editing it instead of pouring energy into a dying task force. There has to be a middle ground between the views of destruction and saving of task forces. Anyway these are ideas on what to do with task force that I've found.

Merge, or expand, existing subgroups for broader content roles
Increase communication between parent and subgroups
Have a member recruiting program
Give members not helping out a reason to, like an edit-a-thon
Eliminate unproductive subgroups
Reimagine roles for task forces
Make your project page cleaner and up to date so people know you are serious
Remember regardless of your member list what your goal and job is: if you build it they will come
Keep goals modest so as not to overwelm new members
Create a core group of really active members and a larger group of less active members

I hope that one day we will have more healthy, productive task forces doing more of the good work they are doing today. By "more" that may mean fewer subgroups altogether. Whatever the case I hope you found this article interesting and useful.

In this issue

Discuss this story

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See Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-07-15/Op-ed/Earlier for discussion that occured prior to publication.

Honestly Task Forces have been dying for many years. See how many Tasks Forces are inactive at the WikiProject. GamerPro64 03:31, 15 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

To my opinion, task Forces are temporary by nature. When the main job is done, there is not much left to do. Keeping them artificially alive might be a waste of time. I fact, I have far more worries about WikiProjects that set the tone for the entire project, for example by setting their own notability guidelines without consent of the wider community. And often in breach of the standard notability guidelines. The Banner talk 07:49, 15 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I think whether or not a task force dies depends both on how long the task Force's topic is relevant for and how much old pages need to be updated and new ones created. For example, for pages about books by a certain author, you rarely need to go back and add or change anything once the page has been written and tweaked a bit. On the other hand, the Nintendo task force likely has a lot of stuff going on right now and will for a while because Nintendo-related pages are being updated and new video games are constantly being released (both by Nintendo and third-party developers, including some larger video game companies) for the Nintendo Switch. We've even seen a few new faces editing those pages. — Gestrid (talk) 15:42, 15 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
IMO task forces die because they tend to be very niche and the brainchild of only one or two editors, and are sometimes created as a result of a tantrum if they're not getting their way in a wider WikiProject. As a result, when they drift away from Wikipedia or the topic, the taskforce dies with them. WikiProjects are a much more stable way of improving material so I'm not too worried about the death of task forces. Number 5 7 20:45, 15 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I get confused by editorials purportedly written by two people, but with frequent use of "I" and "me." Do these editors share a brain? Isn't that against policy?03:09, 16 July 2017 (UTC)~T P W

I tried to clarify this by adding the author to the top of each section in pre-publication copyedit. Suggestions for how to do it better are welcome... ☆ Bri (talk) 03:14, 16 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Just task force and subgroups are dying? Many WikiProjects are also semi-dead ever since we keep losing editors. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 05:28, 16 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
- Editors come and go, task forces have active and inactive phases - and an inactive taskgroup is a steady accumulation of tasks resources and queries for the next person who wants to revive that task group or wikiproject. In an editing community that is broadly stable we should expect this. OK yes I know that there is a steady increase in the number of very active editors, those who save over a hundred edits a month in mainspace, but overall edits are pretty stable at 5 million a month and have been for a while (up from barely 4 million at the 2014 low point) - so we need to get used to the idea that the overall community is broadly stable even if within that there are many other trends, positive and negative. Ϣere SpielChequers 11:27, 16 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The Banner makes the interesting argument that a task force is temporary by nature...Indeed, the name would suggest that they were created to complete some sort of "task" and nothing more. This is perhaps easier for tasks where the scope is, even if large, is finite. Operation Majestic Titan and Operation Bora both cover all things battleships and all things Yugoslavia in World War II, respectively. That's expansive, to be sure, but, even if this encyclopedia is never finished, they will probably hit a wall on relevant content. This is in comparison to the African military history task force (of which I am a member) which has, not only a much broader area to cover, but a scope that is expanding every day. So in that case, it really is a never-ending task. It could very well be its own WikiProject, as could many other Military history task forces. Of course, OhanaUnited points out that there are plenty ailing WikiProjects to go around. So, we can conclude that narrow scope isn't the only thing that kills working groups. It would be nice to see an op-ed on the problems WikiProjects face and how to fix those (if one already hasn't been written). That quote taken from the Military history project contributor seems geared towards that end. I would argue that that project is the most successful on Wikipedia, and seems to be the only one to have found out what to do with the A-classification. Ideally, some of these task forces/WikiProjects will become more active as Wikipedia expands. For example, I'm currently a member of WikiProject Democratic Republic of the Congo which, not too long ago, was tagged as "semi-active". I've undertaken some of the recommended steps for reviving the project, but there's only so much I can do with only a handful of interested editors. I sincerely doubt that there are any Congolese users on en.wikipedia. I wish that weren't so, but in a country with such sparse internet access and with a population that speaks mostly French, Lingala, and Swahili, I'm not surprised that any haven't turned up. Now, question the legitimacy of a task force devoted to an author or a project centered around religion in a single country all you want, but you would think that a country with over 80,000,000 people (also the 11th largest by land in the world, the location of Belgium's sole colonial adventure, the site of the "African World War", and the birthplace of the most stereotypical dictator of all time) would have its place among the other WikiProjects. I pray that this project (and its WikiProject Africa brethren) will in time garner more African users as internet begins to proliferate the continent. -Indy beetle (talk) 20:40, 17 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In some ways, I find that Wikipedia's extreme permanence can make completed/dead taskforces confusing for new users because nothing really marks that they are finished. WP:Molecular and Cell Biology had a WikiProject_Cell_Signaling taskforce that finished up before 2008, but it was only in 2014 that any notice was added to the the page directing people back to the parent project. The deserted discussion page can be pretty confusing for new users just getting the hand of Wikipedia's workings. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 00:13, 26 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Some task forces are active periodically, they might appear dead for long periods but spring into life for specific reasons. An example I'm familiar with, WikiProject South Africa, has task forces for Municipalities and Politics. They may have very little or no activity for years at a time but when a census or election comes around the pages spring into life with a frenzy of activity for a couple of months or even just a few weeks before going back to sleep again. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:11, 31 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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