Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors

Problematic social media use article

The Problematic social media use article is exceptionally poor, and has been for some time, largely because it has been the subject of repeated student editing projects that have resulted in people adding material just for the sake of writing. The writing style reflects this, with a lot of school-essay style padding.

The article desperately needs tightening up, refactoring and copyediting; I think it could easily be reduced to half the length without losing anything of value.

Would anyone here be willing to take a look at it? — The Anome (talk) 08:56, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

I've tagged it with {{copy edit}}. If you want it done sooner, you can list it at WP:GOCE/REQ. All the best, Miniapolis 13:45, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Operation Ostra Brama#Requested move 13 April 2025

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Operation Ostra Brama#Requested move 13 April 2025 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Valorrr ^{(lets chat)} 16:23, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Dark mode compatibility

Just a note that it was reported that the pages of this WikiProject subspace do not support dark mode, due to the way it is using custom colors. See Recommendations for night mode compatibility on Wikimedia wikis for tips on how to support dark mode. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:39, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

I have improved dark mode compatibility with all or most of our main guild pages. The individual drive and blitz pages could use a little help, but that's a lot of pages. The main pages' tabs are using the default settings provided by Template:Start tab, which uses Template:Tab to build the tabs. That is the template that needs dark mode attention. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:42, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

I fixed {{Tab}} today, so the pages should look even better (along with many of the 6,000 other pages that use that template). – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:07, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

How to deal with drafts

What is our rule on listing article drafts in blitzes and drives? Mox Eden (talk) 13:29, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that we have not included articles from Draft space in our drives or blitzes. Articles in Draft space generally should not have maintenance tags on them (I imagine there might be a guideline about this somewhere), since they are by definition not ready for article space. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:47, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Good, 'cuz there's a bunch of drafts used as submissions in this month's drive. Please deal with that somehow, especially User:Fico Puricelli. He submitted using his own articles. Mox Eden (talk) 05:01, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

I've been willing to make an occasional exception for a regular requestor, but am starting to see more gaming by newer editors (particularly in the drives). According to the requests page, drafts may be copyedited at our discretion; however, we're busy enough with mainspace articles. I left a note at User talk:Fico Puricelli, and tagged the articles they listed as completed (without word counts) as unacceptable for the drive. It's no fun when we have to monitor like this. All the best, Miniapolis 13:11, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

Small articles, a new campaign type to reduce the backlog total

Dear friends, I've noticed a possibly fairly recent trend that many of the newly added copy edit tags in our backlog are very short articles (petscan). Because I didn't have all the know-how to dig into the petscan data properly, I instead did a little experiment in last month's Drive to see how many of these really short articles I could knock off, and if I could make a dent in the numbers. The results were encouraging; I managed 44 articles only between 18–25 May, without really breaking a sweat. Most of them were tagged in May or April 2025. What could we achieve with 20 or 30 editors working on it for a whole month? Therefore, I propose another type of Blitz or Drive, where we simply list articles in order of size. Now, a few of these articles were of dubious notability, spurious origin, AI noise, and perhaps could have been dealt with even quicker; but it remains true that a campaign of this sort would work wonders on our seemingly Sisyphean backlog, and if nothing else, it will improve our morale. And that is a thing worth doing, I think. — Jon (talk) 02:47, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

We can have themes for blitzes and drives that are not "the oldest backlog articles and all requests", the latter having been the rule lately. Someone would have to make up a list of eligible articles and post it so people can tick off the articles they have copy edited. Dhtwiki (talk) 08:24, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

Okay. When I'm better in a week or two, can I ask you more about it? I'm not familiar with all the machinery, but I'm happy to help with updating lists (wikitable?) from petscan. The volume is such that it would need a daily update; 2-3 new ones appear each day. We might need to experiment a bit to estimate numbers, etc. — Jon (talk) 00:04, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for posting that petscan link. I have modified it a bit to produce a list of the 100 smallest articles needing copy edit. I don't know about having it as the target of a drive (a blitz might be fun), but I'm definitely keeping it around for future reference. Sometimes I just want to drop the backlog count by doing some quality edits that don't take much time. – Jonesey95 (talk) 11:57, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

That's exactly right. A week-long blitz of (say) 500 articles, every now and then. Last one to the end misses out on ice cream. If I can manage 44 in a week, I'm pretty sure if 20-30 people pitched in we could make a massive dent in it. — Jon (talk) 13:02, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

The 500th-shortest tagged article, Directorium, is 1,752 words, according to the page size script. That's not all that short. I suspect that I'm not the only one who sometimes trolls for short articles during the drives, just to get the count lower. I'm not ashamed of this cherry-picking. I've done a Magna Carta or two in my day. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:32, 5 June 2025 (UTC)