Wowpedia:Projects

...and by rough draft I mean very rough. Please offer input or improvements!'

WoWWiki Projects are a collaboration of editors coordinating their efforts to improve a set of articles that cover a certain area of interest.

Projects have several visible benefits:

• Improved consistency and quality across articles of a certain subject.
• Central gathering areas for editors with similar interests to collaborate.
• New users have an easy to find a starting point for getting involved in an area they find interesting or have expertise.

Projects aren't meant to give a group of editors certain authority over a set of articles. This is only a collaboration tool to draw people together. All normal WoWWiki policies apply.

Starting a project

New projects should be started when enough editors have interest to start it.

A project is started up as a page in the WoWWiki: namespace, for example WoWWiki:Lore project. Project participants then use that page and the talk page to organize their efforts.

Some possible problems:

• Projects with little interest fizzle out and die
• Many small, inactive projects start up and pollute the project space.
• Duplicate projects

A simple project approval process would probably take care of most problems with starting up a project. It doesn't have to be too stringent, probably something simple like 3 editors signing up and final admin approval. And, some basic rules to prevent someone signing up three sock puppets with no edits to start his Thrall/WWE Crossover Fanfic project.

Also, dead projects will have to be monitored and deleted. Our deletion policy will probably need a caveat added for removing dead projects.

Finding projects

Projects should be easy to find. An editor should be able to get a list of all active projects and browse for one that interests him.

The obvious idea is to add a category for all projects, like Category:Projects. A secondary list on this page might be a good idea too, listing the major projects with a blurb on what they are doing.

What's on a project page

What to put on the project page is largely up to the project members, but some basic guidelines are possible:

• Project description and scope
• List of active participants
• List of tasks for editors
• General guidelines for writing project articles (i.e. follow this format for X, add this category for all Y articles)
• Links to major articles

With good active projects, this list will evolve and a general project layout will form and be reused on other projects.

Project articles

Each project gets its own category for project pages as well as articles that fall in the project's scope. Wikipedia goes all out with its categories with things like "Top-importance articles in Military History" - most WoWWiki projects don't need to get that fine-grained. To prevent category spam from multiple projects, a good idea is to make a template for projects which gets put on the talk page. This template auto-cats the talk page (not the article) to the appropriate category.

Talk page tagging is another important way to spreading the word about projects. If a user clicks an article and wants to edit or read the talk page, he is directed to a project that might interest him further.

Smaller projects

There's no reason someone's one man pet project needs to be completely excluded from the projects area. Many people already start up projects on a page in their User space, looking for help from others. If enough interest is generated, this small project can become bigger. We should have a category for them, and referenced here for others to find.