Difference between revisions of "Conservapedia:Article Improvement Drive"

Revision as of 17:23, March 28, 2007

Welcome to the Conservapedia Article Improvement Drive (AID)!

AID is a project made up of Conservapedians, with the goal of improving the quality of important articles. Each week, we will take a vote, choose a needy article, and work on bringing that article up to Featured status. This can be done by adding relevant content, inserting references, copyediting, eliminating red links (by deleting the links or creating the articles), and improving the quality of related articles. The current project coordinator is Hojimachong^talk.

Voting Policy

If an article is nominated, it will remain on the following list for seven days. In this time, it must recieve eight (8) endorsements (signatures) from users interested in improving the article. If you wish to endorse an article, please sign your name using four tildes (~~~~) BELOW the signatures already present. If you wish to add a comment regarding the nomination, create a fourth-level heading (====Heading Goes Here====) BELOW the signatures already in place. The date listed next to the nomination heading is the date by which the article must receive eight (8) endorsements.

Voting For First Article

Bible (March 23)

• Hojimachong^talk 22:51, 16 March 2007 (EDT)
• MountainDew 23:07, 16 March 2007 (EDT)
• Sulgran 20:43, 17 March 2007 (EDT)
• Boethius 20:53, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

God (March 23)

Christianity (March 23)

• Hojimachong^talk 23:01, 16 March 2007 (EDT)
• MountainDew 23:09, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

Jesus Christ (March 23)

• Hojimachong^talk 23:01, 16 March 2007 (EDT)
• MountainDew 23:08, 16 March 2007 (EDT)
• Karajou 16:56, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

Germany (March 23)

• MountainDew 23:00, 16 March 2007 (EDT)
• Hojimachong^talk 23:01, 16 March 2007 (EDT)
• John 23:47, 16 March 2007 (EDT)
• Aschlafly 00:35, 17 March 2007 (EDT) (reason: Germany is the next biggest source of visitors after the U.S., and the article is among our weakest right now)
• Elamdri 12:31, 17 March 2007 (EDT)
• Boreas 12:56, 17 March 2007 (EDT)
• Sulgran 20:50, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

• COMMENT:German Democratic Republic is currently a much longer article than Germany

I vote we merge the 2.--Elamdri 21:06, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

Merge, and then improve! --Hojimachong^talk 21:08, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

Why merge? DDR != Germany, and the current DDR article seems to have enough base material to stand well on its own. Likewise, Germany has LOTS of potential outside the DDR phase. Merging seems VERY counter-intuitive. Instead, the current DDR article could become another candidate for this list. --Sid 3050 21:51, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

You have a point, but I still think we should at least add a bit of information from the GDR page to the Germany page, and then link to the GDR page off the Germany page.

Ah yes, of course. Sorry for not making that point more clear :) --Sid 3050 15:52, 19 March 2007 (EDT)

Dog (March 31)

• SharonS ^Talk! 16:43, 24 March 2007 (EDT)
• MountainDew 16:47, 24 March 2007 (EDT)
• Tmtoulouse 16:49, 24 March 2007 (EDT)
• ~ TerryK ^MyTalk 16:58, 24 March 2007 (EDT)

World War II (April 5)

• MountainDew 13:23, 28 March 2007 (EDT)

• COMMENT: Of the one's listed, Bible is pretty well done. It could use an extra pic or two. Karajou 16:56, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

Germany Chosen as First AID Project!

Germany and related articles have been selected to be the focus of the first Article Improvement Drive! Here are some things that need to be done:

• Get the important facts and statistics about Germany down. Population, Area, Government Organization, etc.
• Brief description of the geography of Germany.
• History section; Build up the history section. A good, strong section regarding Martin Luther and the reformation would be quite nice. Also, some content on the "barbarians" who brought down the Roman Empire would be great.
• Good content on the Holy Roman Empire.
• Some content on the Nazis (try to keep the content in the article itself to a minimum, and work on the seperate Nazi article. Too much would give a lot of undue weight.)
• A strong section regarding the politics of the Cold War and the role Germany played.
• Images; maps, flags, historic events, etc.
• Sources, sources, sources. Find sources, and if they can't back up a specific sentence, stick them in anyways. It adds reference material for later on.

Hints for Editing

One of the biggest things to remember is to write your content in an outside text editor before inserting it in the article. If you plan on rewriting a specific section, copy and paste that section to an outside text editor, edit it, and then re-insert it over the old section. If you wish to write entirely new content, write it in an outside text editor and then insert it. This eliminates edit conflicts. As a general rule, the "edit this page" tab should never be opened for more than fifteen seconds. If you absolutely have to (copyediting, fixing refs, etc.), place Template:inuse at the top of the page.

I just added a Reformation section. Will need to drop cites to the footnotes and add links.--Aschlafly 21:17, 21 March 2007 (EDT)

Edit conflicts are, in fact, a feature, and they took Mediawiki developers took some amount of time to develop. Using an external editor for the explicit purpose of avoiding edit conflicts just means you have a good chance of overwriting someone else's changes, right? --Interiot 21:49, 21 March 2007 (EDT)

• • Alice clicks "Edit this page" on a page.
  • Bob clicks "Edit this page" on the same page.
  • Alice finishes her edits and clicks "Save page". The page is saved with Alice's version.
  • Bob finishes his edits and clicks "Save page". Bob gets an "edit conflict" page.

This just sucks. It means you lost a lot of time making boring edits. Edit conflicts are things that definitely want to be avoided. --Hojimachong^talk 22:01, 21 March 2007 (EDT)

I'm familiar with what an edit conflict is. Unless Bob makes sure here properly merged his changes in with other people's, there's a good chance Bob just clobbered Alice's edits (which is why the devs took time to implement the edit conflict feature), which sucks even more, and wastes even more time (albeit someone else's time). --Interiot 22:14, 21 March 2007 (EDT)

Erm, the reason the "edit conflict" feature exists is to prevent Bob from clobbering Alice's edits. If there was no edit conflict, Bob would save over Alice's edits. But he doesn't, because of edit conflicts. --Hojimachong^talk 22:21, 21 March 2007 (EDT)

I... kinda think you guys mean and know the same. But the concern is with the initial suggestion. Quick table:

Regular wiki usage	Using external editor
Alice clicks "edit"	Alice clicks "edit", imports text into external app and closes the tab
Bob clicks "edit"	Bob clicks "edit", imports text into external app and closes the tab
Alice uses "Save Page"	Alice clicks "edit", pastes her section and uses "Save Page"
Bob uses "Save Page"	Bob clicks "edit", pastes his section and uses "Save Page"
Result	Result
Bob gets "Edit conflict"	Bob saves without problem (since his second "edit" click shows him the updated version)
Bob has to adapt his edit	Alice's edit was potentially vaped

Both results of course suck. A possible solution would be to insert a "This section is currently being edited by Hojimachong (start: 5pm EDT)" template into the section you want to edit to simulate a sort of temporary edit protection. That way, the "use external editor" solution would avoid accidental vapings. --Sid 3050 06:31, 22 March 2007 (EDT)

Thanks for clearing that up Sid! I just created Template:inuse to use in this situation. --Hojimachong^talk 11:57, 22 March 2007 (EDT)