Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Italy/Archives/2008/May

Assessment drive update

I figure the end of the month is a good time to report back on what I've been up to. In fact I've reached a bit of a landmark, in that I've now assessed all the unassessed non-comune articles on the list I created when I started this 2 months ago. Now of course there's been another 80 no-importance Stubs and 250 Unassesseds added since then, but having done 1600-odd articles already, that doesn't seem too big an obstacle. What's really taken the time is that I stupidly decided part way through to do a bit of quality control as I went along. Just getting an infobox (and persondata if appropriate) into every Unassessed article seemed worth doing, of course that then developed into wikifying, adding interwikis and listas if I remembered, at least one proper reference is always nice, and in some cases I ended up doing complete rewrites to B-class standard, depending on how enthusiastic I felt. Hence why it's taken so long, but it feels like I've made a difference to several 100 articles, although the 100+ cyclists were a bit of a low point... I also got pretty bogged down with the fashion articles, which in general are popular (quite often 100k+ hits/year) but badly written, and if they're referenced at all, tend to use random Google hits as sources. It also doesn't help that even the WP:RS in that area can be contradictory, you should certainly be wary of the fact-checking on the NYT fashion articles in particular.
I figured that the articles on modern designers will look after themselves one way or another, and I find the historic figures more fun anyway - how many modern designers will have Wiki articles citing the CIA as a major source like Emilio Pucci does? And founding a multinational empire is much less interesting than the creative genius that fails in business, like Elsa Schiaparelli or Fiorucci. The one article that I couldn't face but that is a complete disaster is Roberto Cavalli - it looks like it came from his press office, it needs a complete rewrite. Another thing that might be fairly easily fixed by spending half an hour in a department store with a camera, is the lack of photos in the fashion articles. There's a reasonable number of logos, some pictures of stores, but almost no pics of eg a Fendi baguette bag. I guess one reason is that Betacommandbot has been cleaning out a lot of images that were grabbed from websites. :-) But it should be quite easy to take reasonable photos of that kind of thing (in general there's no problem in eg taking a photo of someone wearing a Pucci dress, but putting the cloth in a scanner would be a no-no). Other areas that I've noticed need work, in no particular order:

1. Something that would help me a lot on the comune infoboxes would be to have more saint articles - we're missing a lot of the "middle-ranking" saints that are still big enough to be patrons of quite a few comuni, let alone the little local saints. Sort of thing that there must be lots of out-of-copyright books about, so I guess it would be quite easy to do - I'll see what I can do about organising a "wish list".
2. The mountains are in reasonable shape (they have their own Project), but I quite often see red links to rivers/valleys. Some of that could be fixed by unifying the river and valley articles, but it's definitely something I've noticed - and not just minor Alpine torrents, either.
3. The Province Of.... articles are generally in pretty poor shape, I'd guess they're more of a priority than the comuni right now.
4. I've got some plans for the comuni, but I suspect there's quite a lot of frazioni articles out there that need sweeping into the Project and the frazioni categories, if you see any "loose" ones. More on them later, but I'll also make the comment that even the it.wiki guys give up and lump all the frazioni, localita, borghate etc into a single category - I know it won't satisfy the pedants, but that would seem to make life a lot easier.
5. If anyone wants some nice little "discreet" projects to tackle, then you could go round some of the big cities, sorting out their quartieri/rioni etc to say low B standard - Naples would be a good one to start with.
6. Politics - most of the parties are in quite good shape, but I've suggested over on Talk:Forza Italia that it might make sense to consolidate various small articles into a single Factions of Forza Italia type article, which could give valuable context. Even it.wiki doesn't have an article for the Liberal-Popular Union. Or was it the Liberal Populars‎, Popular Liberalism‎ or the People's Front of Judaea? And there's quite a few red links scattered over the politics nav boxes: Template:Italian political party factions, Template:Secretary of the Italian Socialist Party, Template:President of the Italian Senate and so on.
7. Companies - it's a general weakness of Wikipedia, but the coverage of Italian companies is pretty weak. I suspect one reason may be that there's not much coverage in English of any but the very biggest quoted companies, and odd sectors like the fashion industry.
8. Just as a comment, I've seen several articles use "Province of Bolzano-Bozen" where the natural WP:ENGLISH usage would be Alto Adige, or Alto Adige/South Tyrol - particularly in the history articles. Something to watch out for, I can understand why it's happened but it's wrong English.
9. Interwikis - it's always worth checking to see if there's an equivalent it.wiki article and if so, creating interwiki links. If nothing else it could give you several sources of inspiration for the en.wiki article, but interwikis are important in their own right, particularly for a Project like this.
10. Images from other wikipedias - the other reason to look for interwikis, there's often photos you can move across to here or Commons.

Those are just some ideas if people are looking for jobs to do. My personal plan looks something like this :

1. Get my bot running to auto-assess the comune articles within the Project
2. Then do the comune articles outside it - it's almost easier for me if they've not already got Project tags, so don't worry about tagging comune articles for now
3. Clear up the remaining unassessed articles and get them down to zero.
4. Once all that's done, I'll give Satyrbot the word and it can add thousands more articles to the Project based on membership of "Italian" categories, and we start all over again... But it would be nice to see that zero first. :-) In the meantime, there's the City IT infoboxes :
5. I've already synced the it.wiki comuni with the official ISTAT list of 8101, so I just need to use that to identify the equivalent en.wiki articles and get the bot to assess them all for the project
6. Do some more work on the saints if I can't persuade someone else to do it :-)
7. Then I can get on with my tool for speeding up the City IT infoboxes - sorry Ian, I've got a bit waylaid on that, but it is still happening. Trouble is that it seems to entail some fairly major housekeeping jobs before you can get on with it - for instance, to get some help with linking the frazioni, you need a list of en.wiki frazioni articles. So you look at the current ones in the cats, and find that most of them are stubs with no it.wiki equivalent (so I was bold and redirected them to the comune), some justified creating it.wiki equivalents, and in other cases they needed interwikis setting up in one direction or the other. Then it was over to it.wiki, consolidated a list of all the articles with either a frazione infobox or category, and then looked for en interwikis in the Italian articles. That gave me 100+ article names, which was all I needed for the infoboxes - but since most of them didn't have fraz cats and needed a bit of a tidy, I gave the articles a bit of a sort out whilst I was about it. There's been a couple of things like that, apart from improving my saints lookup list to catch maybe 80+% rather than the current 60% (returns diminish quite quickly as you get into the tail) there's not a lot more to do there before I can start throwing CityITs at lots of comuni articles. I don't think it will ever quite be fully automatic, but it'll be a lot quicker than doing it manually.

That should keep me busy for a while.... FlagSteward (talk) 21:12, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd just like to draw people's attention to the current statistics table on the front page. :-))) For future reference, the permanent link is here - 7221 articles all assessed, compared to this one when I started this nearly three months ago, when there were 6580 articles, of which 3325 were unassessed. I did 1300 or so comuni with User:FlagBot, my new assessment bot - please let me know if it's screwed up at all.

Next I'll be tagging all the remaining comuni - I've already synced the main ISTAT list with the comuni cats and comune template usage on it.wiki, and have grabbed the outgoing interwiki links from those 8101 articles; it's already highlighted the odd missing article, like Curti, Italy. After that, I will probably try and tag a load of non-comune articles, and then it'll be putting CityIT infoboxes onto all the comuni. FlagSteward (talk) 01:02, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

All 8101 comuni in the January 2008 ISTAT list now have articles on it.wiki with Comune infoboxes, and you can interwiki from it->en and en->it without going astray like you did before - there were a few articles missing because people had seen blue links from articles on everything from Chicago supermarkets to Latvian goddesses. But I seem to have nailed all of them, as measured by the fact that all 8101 have a City and towns in... category - a few had lost them either through vandalism of the end of the article or just not having a province navbox. It's amazing how much time you can spend fiddling around with that kind of housekeeping, but it needed to be done. 3288 of the comuni were not tagged with the Project banner, but I've now tagged and assessed them - unfortunately one can no longer start up the statistics bot, so it will probably not be visible on the table for another few days. As before, do let me know if my assessment bot has screwed up anywhere. One pleasant surprise was that only 400 or so articles in the untagged ones were missing infoboxes, so that means there's only 1062 infoboxes to add - this is more manageable than I thought, it looks like my CityIT-adding "assistant" can be less fancy than I originally planned as I don't mind being semi-manual for that kind of number. But it would be nice to update the Detroiterbot CityIT's that don't have a map, and have 2001-4 era data. Soemthing for a much later date. I've started working on the saint articles that will be required - 65 saints will take care of over 75% of the patroni on the 1062 articles, 105 saints will take it over 85% (and leave only single-comune saints). The other target is to spend time scraping through various categories to find other articles that should be tagged with the Project banner - there's too many out there at the moment that aren't in the Project that should be, and it's a bit less demanding on my code if I'm adding tags from scratch than modifying existing tags with an assessment. FlagSteward (talk) 01:40, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Need help with photo request

Is there anyone here with a Flickr account who would be willing to ask a Flickr user to remove the "noncommercial" provision from the license on this photo of Alessandra Mussolini, so we can use it on her article? FYI, the same uploader seems to have many other nice photos of Italian public figures. Kelly ^hi! 00:41, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood

It has been mentioned at that this article could benefit from an "expert" taking a look at it. I'm sure the comments from anyone from this WikiProject would be welcomed. Savidan 01:05, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Vittorio Messori

Hi, could someone help with the translation of it:Vittorio Messori? It has been requested for more than a year now. Thanks for any help. --Eleassar ^{my talk} 20:03, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

P.S.:I think you should be notified that your project template has been removed from Talk:Italian cultural and historic presence in Dalmatia. --Eleassar ^{my talk} 20:03, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Newsletter

Could someone please make a newsletter for this Wikiproject? thanks perseus the awesome 101 (talk) 16:51, 24 May 2008 (UTC) Perseus101

Draft Guidelines for Lists of companies by country - Feedback Requested

Within WikiProject Companies I am trying to establish guidelines for all Lists of companies by country, the implementation of which would hopefully ensure a minimum quality standard and level of consistency across all of these related but currently disparate articles. The ultimate goal is the improvement of these articles to Featured List status. As a WikiProject that currently has one of these lists within your scope, I would really appreciate your feedback! You can find the draft guidelines here. Thanks for your help as we look to build consensus and improve Wikipedia! - Richc80 (talk) 21:57, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Scope of Project, should we set up taskforces?

As per #Assessment drive update above, I've been scoping out some catgories for bulk tagging with the Project banner. I'm still working my way through them, rejecting any that don't totally "fit" in the project (for instance Category:Italian chefs mostly has Italian-born chefs working overseas) but at the moment it's looking like something like 20,000 articles that could be tagged, including such obscure categories as Category:Italian jazz flautists. ;-/ At the moment the Project has 8,101 comune articles, a few hundred frazioni articles and about 2000 "other" articles. So I guess one question is whether I should do this at all? Personally I think it's a good thing, but I think that eg football articles are better treated using the Italy taskforce of the football Project as effectively a daughter project of this one, in a similar way to eg the Sicily Project. I'd guess at least half the articles are people articles, so perhaps the way forward would be an Italy people taskforce, perhaps under the aegis of WP:WPBIO rather than this project. Thinking about it, I'm tempted to tag quite "widely", with taskforce=culture, sport, history for now, and then we can decide whether to implement them formally at a later date - it's a lot easier to start implementing a categorisation at this stage. But I appreciate that increasing the number of non-comune articles in the Project 10-fold is quite a big step, so I thought I'd canvas some opinions before going ahead with it. FlagSteward (talk) 15:23, 26 May 2008 (UTC)