Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years in science

Related fields

Looks good. I've been including some things that some might say don't belong on these pages, like Mathematics, Exploration, Aeronautics, and Computer Science. What do you guys think? Gentgeen 20:45, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Sounds fine. They're part of science until we have enough to devote a page to Years in Mathematics, Years in Exploration... etc. Granted, I haven't edited many scientific articles, so I'm not an authority on such matters, but as an outsider, it's great. - user:zanimum

Nobel Prizes

Should there be some sort of link to the Nobel Prize page from each of the years in science? Some might not know about Nobel, so a link might be useful. - user:zanimum

Done, and added other scientific awards as well, as Nobel only covers Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine (and Literature, Peace, and Economics (disputed), but they're not scientific). Are these the correct awards to include, are there others? I'd like the most significant award for each major dicipline included.

Suggestions

It sounds like a good project. Two points:

• 1. Make sure you consider the smaller sciences (geology, meteorology, etc)
• 2. I trust you are cross referencing the various science timelines

dml 14:01, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Yes, any scientific discipline should be included, I just put up the one's I've encountered most while adding years.Gentgeen 03:22, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 23:28, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 16:47, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Future

What should happen with this project going forward? It never saw much activity, given its unusual scope, and has been lifeless for a few years. We could attempt to revive it or to merge it — one way or another — with a related project, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject History of science.

Regardless, I'd like to help improve the general quality of the year in science articles (before they're officially dumped from this project and potentially onto another). --Mrwojo (talk) 04:44, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Update: Many of the year in science articles provide little information. Finding perspective is difficult when each page is just a list of (potential) facts. --Mrwojo (talk) 04:39, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Portal:History

Is up for FPOC. This is one of the highest (if not the highest) visibility portal on Wikipedia, I recommend commenting on it! Cheers, ResMar 23:26, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!

Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

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Harej (talk) 16:58, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Proposal: Revive The "Years in science" Project

Metawade (talk) 16:07, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

I'd like to propose moving this project from status defunct to status active, under the assumption that the significant edit activity on the various 'YYYY in science' pages justifies having a project within which to discuss further evolution of the pages as a whole.

Some notes:

• This project was created 2003-10-24T22:04:11 by User:Gentgeen
• This project was marked inactive 2005-07-18T21:44:13‎ by User:Hiding
• This project was marked defunct 2014-04-30T04:51:24‎ by User:Srich32977
• There have been 503 edits made by 67 users to 2016_in_science (as of Oct 17)
• There were 1044 edits made by 97 users to 2015_in_science
• There have been 7350 edits made by 538 users to the 7 documents in 2010_in_science onward
• There have been 8638 edits made by 862 users to the 17 documents in 2000_in_science onward
• There have been 36362 edits made by 2864 users to the 517 documents in this project (1500_in_science onward)

There would appear to be sufficient interest in these pages to justify a project to maintain them. Furthermore, I'd like to discuss a variety of ways to improve the pages, and this project seems like the best place to have that discussion and arrive at consensus. However, I am new to editing wiki pages, and my assumption (that interest in the pages underlying a project is sufficient to justify the project itself) may not be valid (depending on what semantics Wikipedia puts on projects). I'd appreciate the perspectives of others interested in these pages.

Benefits I see to having a "Years in science" project:

• Provides an intuitive place to discuss the future of the "YYYY in science" pages as a whole
• Provides a place to document the preferred format, intention, conventions and semantics associated with these pages.

I have a variety of ideas on how these pages can be improved. Assuming this project is the best place to discuss them, I will make separate sections for each proposal so we can discuss each of them individually, and so that this section can stay focused on a discussion of whether to renew this project or not.

One possible alternative to reviving this project is to move meta-level discussions about the "YYYY in science" pages to Talk:List_of_years_in_science. I'm not attached to the project itself, I just want a place where we can reach consensus about issues related to all of the pages in this family. I suspect that the project is a more intuitive umbrella than the "Lists of years in science" page, but I'm open to hearing arguments against reviving the project.

Unless I hear push-back, I will mark the project active on Monday Oct 24th.

Proposal: Convert all "YYYY_in_science" pages to a consistent format

Metawade (talk) 16:42, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

The format of pages before 2007 is organized by topic (eg 1998_in_science), those after 2007 are organized by month (eg 2015_in_science), and 2007 itself is an intermediary form (2007_in_science). Having a consistent format benefits both humans (increased readability and writability) and bots (ability to correctly insert new entries into the markup stream). There are a variety of possible paths forward:

Formats under consideration

By Month

This is the format advocated by Wikipedia:WikiProject_Years. An example is 2015_in_science. If we decide on this format, It would involve converting 508 webpages (using automated tools, of course). An example of how 2006_in_science would look in this format can be found in my sandbox.

A concrete description of the format:

• Each "YYYY in science" page consists of the following section 2 headers:
  • Events
  • Awards & Prizes
  • Births
  • Deaths
  • See also
  • References
  • External links
• Within the "Events" section, the following section 3 headers exist
  • January
  • February
  • March
  • April
  • May
  • June
  • July
  • August
  • September
  • October
  • November
  • December
  • Undated
• Within the per-month subsections within the "Events" section, bullets enumerate the science worthy events that happened in that month
  • The bullet starts with "<month> <day>"
  • If there is only one entry for the day in question:
    • The entry continues with "– Brief description of the event.<ref>Source.</ref>"
    • The entry may end with an optional parenthetical link to some branch of science (e.g. Astronomy)
  • else (there are multiple entries for the same day)
    • sub bullets are added for each entry
    • these sub bullets do not repeat the month or day or – ... it consists solely of the description of the event, reference and optional link to branch-of-science.

Note in the example from my sandbox that each entry is annotated with the "branch of science" it was originally listed under.

By Topic

An example of this format is in 1998_in_science. If we decide on this format, it would involve converting the pages for 2007 onward to a per-topic structure. Note that performing this conversion using automated tools is made more complicated by the fact that individual entries in these pages do not provide a "branch of science" within the topic. We could heuristically pick a best guess from a list of topics based on the words appearing in the entries, but this would inevitably get things wrong in some cases (so manual curation will be needed here ... but see the related proposal below that would help with this).

Current By Month, Past By Topic

In this hybrid approach, the current year (e.g 2016_in_science uses the "by month" format, and previous years use the "by topic" format.

• Pros:
  • One can see the chronological development of the current year
  • One can see per-branch developments for previous years
• Cons:
  • Bots need to know how to parse two separate formats, adding complexity
  • Humans need to learn two formats, adding complexity

By Month and By Topic

In this hybrid approach, there is both a "By Month" section and a "By Topic" section, repeating the same information. Humans would be welcome to add entries in either the "By Month" or "By Topic" sections, and bots would monitor the pages for modifications and ensure consistency between the two sections (inserting missing entries).

• Pros
  • Provides the best of both worlds
• Cons
  • Requires bots to keep things synchronized (and even with bots, having redundant entries will start to diverge in situations where the bot cannot identify that two slightly different entries in different sections refer to the same underlying concept.

I'd prefer not to go down this route, but listing it for completeness.

Discussion

My (User:Metawade) preference would be to start converting all pages from 2006 down to 1500 to a by-month format (I have code to automate this process). I may convert the pages in 2000 onward over the next few days as a forcing function ... that will bring this discussion to a wider audience and encourage conversation).

Elsewhere, mfb comments: I'm not sure if an organization by month is the best choice. For 2016 it is great because it allows to follow the progress easily. But for past years? Using 2006 as example, do we really care if the human genome project got completed a month before or after the discovery of more moons around Saturn got announced? If you are interested in a specific topic (e. g. medicine), sorting the article by topic makes it way easier. If it is feasible, I would suggest to go the opposite direction: Convert "by date" lists to "by topic" after a few years. --mfb (talk) 16:04, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

There are definitely pros and cons to both approaches (purely chronological vs by-topic-then-date). @Mfb:, how do you feel about a purely chronological listing, but with an (optional) "topic" added at the end of each entry (indicating which branch(es) of science the entry pertains to)? See my sandbox for an example of what 2006 would look like. The advantage of this approach is that we can associate each entry with multiple topics (by adding multiple topics at the end of the entry) ... whereas if we use the "sort by topic" approach, adding the entry to multiple topics requires us to repeat the entire content of the entry in multiple places (prone to divergence, difficult to keep in sync). Metawade (talk) 19:24, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Adding the topic works as well if we find a reasonable set. Shouldn't be too hard. That way both ways to read the table are available without conversion work. --mfb (talk) 21:44, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

@Metawade, Mfb, and Wjfox2005: FWIW - perhaps both formats, "date" and "topic", may be a consideration? - esp if an automated process could expedite posting in both formats - perhaps in the same article (ie, "YYYY in science") - or perhaps in two different articles (ie, "YYYY in science" and "YYYY in science - by topic") - in any case - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 19:00, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

I would prefer a separate page then to avoid duplicate content in an article. If the second page is automatically generated, it is a nice feature. --mfb (talk) 19:49, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

Proposal: Add "branch of science" annotations to individual entries

Metawade (talk) 19:59, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

In the 2016_in_science page (and all pages from 2008_in_science onward), individual entries about significant scientific events, inventions and discoveries are listed in chronological order. This is in contrast to pages before 2007 (eg. 1998_in_science), which present events grouped by "branch of science".

Although a chronological listing is intuitive for humans and bots, it is also quite beneficial (for both humans and bots) to have some context for which branch(es) of science a particular scientific event applies to.

I'd like to get buy-in from those of us interested in these pages around annotating each event with a list of zero or more links to relevant "branches of science". See my sandbox for an example (for the year 2006). Note that each entry ends with a parenthetical branch of science to which the entry applies.

Having such annotations al entries will help humans, but will be especially useful for bots (automated conversion of pages to other formats, extraction of information for use in other pages, etc.)

Discussion

User:Metawade and other watchers of this page, I also think that adding information on the "branch of science" to items of these articles would be very useful. I have suggested adding the branches of science to items at Talk:2020 in science, here.

What I have suggested was converting the list to a table with tags and categories. These would include the branch/es of science of items. There could also be filtering functionality via these tags and categories similar to the current Watchlist.

One examplary implementation for an article, which contains items of the list, is: 2020 in the environment and environmental sciences (without any MediaWiki changes).

Alternatively to converting the list to a table, there could also be some other options or a way to switch between different view modes (including table). These alternatives could include some way to e.g. use Wikidata for items of such lists by which you can add colored tags etc (this would be more similar to the example in your/Metawade's sandbox). Before the list can be converted to a table, there probably need to be some changes to the MediaWiki software – in particular most importantly this task for adapting tables to mobile but also e.g. for tags (the tasks are linked at the talk page). More information as well as a wealth of other ideas to improve these articles can be found in Talk:2020 in science.

--Prototyperspective (talk) 17:40, 19 September 2020 (UTC)