Forum:Let's talk about article rot... AGAIN.

Forums: Index > Village Dump > Let's talk about article rot... AGAIN. (talk)

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Okay, so I hope everyone remembers the previous forum by Skully. If not, go remember. Anyway, I've been looking at older features and thinking, "This looks like unfunny crap." Now, I'm not saying all of the older features are bad, just a whole bunch of them. Therefore, I would like to purpose that we revert all the featured articles featured between two-thousand five and two-thousand nine (that includes two-thousand five and two-thousand nine) back to their original featured version. There would probably be some exceptions, but fore the most part all of them. Discuss. -- 22:43, June 18, 2011 (UTC)

Well most of the 2005 features weren't up to our current standards anyway. Why? Lack of users meant short articles became the best availble articles. As we grew, so did the standard required for a feature. Yes, IPs have often turned features to crap. But reverting them all would be stupid as most early features have been greatly improved. -- Frosty dah snowguy contribs KUN PLEB 22:54, June 18, 2011 (UTC)

I can see that. But I still we should revert a lot of them. I just think it would be better for the articles. -- 23:09, June 18, 2011 (UTC)

I think it's a bit too extreme as a solution. Skullthumper, I agreed with. This, I don't. --Scofield & The Machine 10:25, June 19, 2011 (UTC)

If you see an article, featured or otherwise, that is rotted, iz wiki, {{sofixit}}. I wouldn't support mass "blind" reverts, since it would undo formatting fixes, such as category additions moves, useful links, depreciated tag removals, interwiki links, et cetera. Undoing years of formatting fixes is arguably worse than the article rot itself. De-rotting the articles will involve removing bad additions while retaining useful edits, and separating the two requires effort. If you want to do that, go ahead. --Mn-z 14:52, June 19, 2011 (UTC)

What he said. --108.20.67.158 15:21, June 19, 2011 (UTC)

For this. I very briefly considered auto-reverts myself, but I didn't for all these reasons. – Sir Skullthumper, MD (criticize • writings • SU&W) 15:28 Jun 19, 2011

Yup.

1234 ~ 10:20, 20 June 2011

Hate to be the one thats hated for saying stuff...but care should be taken to make sure that "good" edits stay or edits by the author(s) stay too ... no? ShabiDOO 11:42, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

Exactly. Which is why it has to be done manually.

1234 ~ 10:48, 20 June 2011

Okay...just wanted to be sure it wasn't going to be bot-ed or a big sweep. ShabiDOO 11:59, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

Sing up ?¿!¡

I suppose if this is serious then there should be some kind of sign up? Ill put down the periods and people can sign up for the periods they like...more than one if they like (though best to sort out the policy before it starts. I guess. Maybe. (I dont remember the exact dates when it began and I dont have time to look that up (nor sure how) so can someone edit this after me? ShabiDOO 11:59, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

Lyrithya...i know. For a fact that you have some organizational skills so could you atleast put amalgamate those into the trimonthly headings? Or monthly if thats thy command? So that this doesnt become a rediculous unfollowable list of a few thousand articles and sign next to the articles you do please. And if you can make the sublists colapsable it would mean even less tyrany, if that is thy wish? --ShabiDOO 13:31, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with organisation. I simply do not have time to dedicate myself to any particular chunk. Articles here and there that I come across, that I've already been doing and shall continue to do, but beyond that, eat my first waffle.

1234 ~ 13:43, 20 June 2011

Me too. We dont disagree at all. But i dont understand what happened. There was a list of 2000 articles a moment ago and now its gone. I suggest we put those into colapsable lists under the chunks and users sign off each article after doing it. --ShabiDOO 14:19, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

I typed a huge chunk of text earlier on, then my laptop died. Hurray. Anyway, don't we want to be systematical? I don't want us to miss out articles like Mordor or Seven Deadly Sins, which are features apparently. And I discovered them because I was searching for features in Jan-March 2005, not because of some random cake or something. So I vote we do it systematically. Or some people do it systematically :) msRebeccaBlack 15:58, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

March-June 2005 (hahaha sucker you get an extra month)

Gotta get down! msRebeccaBlack 11:41, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

• Ireland 23 March
• Kitten Huffing 23 March
• Pot v. Kettle 24 March
• All Your Base Are Belong To Us 25 March
• Seven Deadly Sins 26 March
• Mediocre Britain 27 March
• RTFM 28 March
• Spanish Inquisition (TV show) 29 March
• Mordor 30 March
• George W. Bush (featured) 2 April
• Scotland 4 April
• Senator 5 April
• Robot 7 April
• Air Guitar 8 April
• IKEA 10 April
• Livejournal 11 April
• Cabbage 14 April
• MC Hammer 14 April
• God 18 April
• Pong! the Movie 20 April
• National Try To Assassinate The President Day 22 April
• Vitamin 24 April
• Japan 25 April
• Lies 26 April
• Doctor Who 29 April
• St. Peter's Basilica 2 May
• Table of Contents 5 May
• Kitten hurling battle 8 May
• Nostradamus 10 May
• Teletubbies 12 May
• Phonics 16 May
• 1927 17 May
• English-American Dictionary 19 May
• Axis of Evil Hot Dog Eating Competition 22 May
• Bon-bons 25 May
• The Oldest Trick in the Book 27 May
• Idiotic Table of the Elements 2 June
• KITTENHOEFFER magazine stand 4 June
• Open-Heart Surgery for Dummies 6 June
• You have two cows 9 June
• Game:Zork 11 June
• Cowation 14 June
• Anonymous 17 June
• Lord Byron 20 June
• Aesop's Fables 24 June
• Romania 27 June
• Greatest Inventions 30 June

July-September 2005

• Banned from the Internet 3 July

• Fountainhead Earth 6 July

• WMD (Donuts) 10 July

• Kool Aid 13 July

• University of California 16 July

• Banana Phone 23 July

• Incompleteness Theorem 26 July

• Fascist 29 July

• Fanfiction.net 5 August

• War on Terra 8 August

• Stereotype Reassignment Surgery 11 August

• Raccoon Tail v. Super Mario Cape 14 August

• The Flintstones 17 August

• Terri Schiavo 20 August

• Estonia 23 August

• Flying Spaghetti Monster 26 August

• List of weapons that don't exist, but should 31 August

• Random humor 4 September

• World War I (video game) 6 September

• Wikipedia 9 September

• Wikipedia/old 9 September

• Dude, Where's My Time Machine? 16 September

• Quantum Economics 20 September

• X Window System 23 September

• Certificate of Hitlertude 26 September

• Ipod Nano 200gb Instructions 29 September

October-December 2005

• Missing milk 2 October

• Dake-Bonoism 5 October

• Orange construction barrels 7 October

• Bloodbath 9 October

• Redundancy11 October

• Zombies 13 October

• Crimes inspired by video games 15 October

• Newmath 17 October

• Bar Mitzvah 19 October

• AAAAAAAAA! 21 October

• Peer 23 October

• The GI Joe-Transformers War 25 October

• Styrofoam 27 October

• -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . 29 October

• Alternate Universes I Seriously Hope Do Not Actually Exist 31 October

• Much Ado About Yokels 2 November

• Founding Fathers 4 November

• British film industry 6 November

• Philip Glass 9 November

• Air 10 November

• Gibberish 13 November

• The Most Quotable Smackdown of All Time 15 November

• Uncyclopedia Brown 17 November

• Niggers 19 November

• Keira Knightley In A White Corset And Kate Beckinsale In A Black One 22 November

• Fecal E.Coli 23 November

• J.D. Salinger 26 November

• Afghanistan 28 November

• Barrel Clown 30 November

• Euroipods 1 December

• German grammar 3 December

• Emoticonics 5 December

• Attack of the 500 foot Jesus 7 December

• Red Shirts 10 December

• IPod yocto 12 December

• Poop Cuisine 14 December

• Poland 16 December

• George Bailey 17 December

• UnNews:New "voice chat" feature proposed for mobile phones19 December

• John Seigenthaler Sr. 21 December

• North Korea 24 December

• UnPoetia:The Night After Christmas 26 December

• I Fucking Hate the Bermuda Triangle 28 December

• The artist formerly known as God 30 December

Jan-March 2008

Lollipop - CONTRIBS - WRITINGS - SHOP - Now adopting! - 21:20, 20 June 2011

Jan-March 2009

ShabiDOO 11:59, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

Jan-March 2010

I'm merry for thee to do that, but however, I had loads of shit on my plate, so please do the "Sysop for a month". |Si Plebius Dato' (Sir) Joe ang Man on Fire CUN|IC Kill | 11:34, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

Whatever articles strike my fancy; you can't stop me

1234 ~ 12:52, 20 June 2011

• I'm in favor of it being boted. I think if we do it manually the whole point of this proposal is lost. So I guess I'll have to agree with Lyrithya, here... -- 13:54, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

i imagine that using bots will revert edits by the authirs and other good edits...no? --ShabiDOO 15:11, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

Yes.

1234 ~ 15:44, 20 June 2011

What was this list that appeared. There was a list of the 2000 or so featured articles and their dates. I am not imagining things. If I could find it, or if anyone has a link to that sight then I could arrange them into the time chunks. And if someone can tell me how to make it all collapsibile that would be cool. And if it seems like I am just hijacking this and you guys want this to go another way, just say so and we will taaaaaalk until we all have dihareha. ShabiDOO 19:21, June 20, 2011 (UTC)

Navheaders, navsections, and some other nav. That's how you make stuff collapsible. For details, find something collapsible and steal the code; that's what I always have to do.

1234 ~ 02:02, 21 June 2011

Botting would be worse than leaving the article rot. It can, and will, undo interwiki links, regular links, categories, typo fixes, et cetera. Granted someone else could come along and manually restore those, but the needed manual edit to correct the data-loss in the bot revert would defeat the purpose of having a bot revert in the first place. --Mn-z 02:00, June 22, 2011 (UTC)

suck my balls... AGAIN.

-- Soldat Teh PWNerator (pwnt!) 03:56, Jun 21

Better Idea

Instead of organizing the articles by date, I suggest that you go through the articles alphabetically, each person doing 1 letter (or two, or three, or 1/2 or whatever). Category:Featured is already organized alphabetically, and making the list by feature date is almost as much work as actually cleaning up articles. This method will include "recent" features, but it might be wise to check those articles too and undo any rot that is creeping in at early stages.

Also, it may be helpful if you leave a statement like "restoring featured version" or "cleaning up rot" so that future reverters don't have to look as deep in the history to find the last "correct" version.

And finally, be careful when reverting, and make sure to keep the good edits in and bad edits out. Don't assume that the last edit by the author (or an established user) is free from rot: even if it is a revert by the original author, s/he may have not gotten rid of all the rot. --Mn-z 01:55, June 22, 2011 (UTC)

^ —Sir Socky (talk) (stalk) GUN SotM UotM PMotM UotY PotM WotM 01:59, 22 June 2011

Hey...too late man. I already did it. I learned a lot about excel in the proccess. I organised all of 2005-2010 in lists...sorted by date. The reason why I think its better to go by date...is because the idea would be...the older it is...the more rot...or the more similar kinds of changes a user will make. I was about to paste all the articles again. A user could take a month at a time and Lyrithya is free to edit whatever she pleases. Some months in the first years had very few artices. If you still think we should go through it alphabetically, I could resort all of the articles that way...I do have the feeling though that doing it by year will make the work a little more pattern like. What do you think? --ShabiDOO 02:05, June 22, 2011 (UTC)

Since you already wasted time and effort on organizing the articles by date, it would make more sense to do it that way. That being said, it does not necessarily follow that older articles would have more rot. Most of the 2005 edits and many of the 2006 aren't up to the standards of a modern "decently written and finished" article. These have had more time to accumulate rot, but may also have been beneficially expanded or rewritten. Also, cleaning up something like Senator is about helpful as diffusing Category:People who didn't fuck your mom in the kitchen last night. --Mn-z 00:09, June 23, 2011 (UTC)

It wasnt a waste of time, since...now we have the articles available by date (which was something I wanted to be able to do the first time I checked featured content as a user...and discovered a lot of ways to streamline things with excel and I also learned that angels cannot pass gass when they are dancing on a pin head. Im working slowly on getting them into collapsible tables. Its probably best to put it all on a new forum page...and each sub heading will be per month with a status, I guess all starting as untouched or in progress for those who volunteered a month. ? --ShabiDOO 00:16, June 23, 2011 (UTC)