Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Molecular Biology

This page was nominated for deletion on 10 June 2019. The result of the discussion was speedily deleted.

Discussion initiated at WT:WikiProject Biology

Problem

There are many small Wikiprojects within biology (compares to unified WP:Physics or WP:Medicine) with large overlaps in scope. Their efforts could be more efficient if joined into larger projects.

Proposal

A Possible unification of some of the sub-cellular wikiprojects with large scope overlaps, including:

• WP:MCB
• WP:BIOP
• WP:GEN
• WP:COMBIO

Initial draft structure:

• Formatting using WP:X templates (as WP:MED, WP:EVO and WP:WPWIR
• Unified talkpage
• Unified main landing page, but maintain distinctiveness of taskforces

T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 02:17, 26 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I would say that somewhere in the projects and partnerships area we should consider giving some information on other Wikiprojects. If we don't want to do the whole structure of WP:BIOL and its daughter projects, we should at least get WP:BIOL, WP:Micro, WP:Physio, and WP:MED as those projects would likely be of most interest to participants here.

As for discussions, is there a way to hook in the talk pages for those projects until we actually merge them?

And then, as for metrics, I'm thinking that we need to see if we can include something about how those are measured. Maybe a link to the rubric and some information about how we run our assessments (in the future of course). I'd be happy to scrounge that up if you think that sounds good. Also noting the absence of WP:BIOP. Are we going to fold that into the other taskforces, or did you just not include it for some other reason?

Finally, in metrics, I have been bothered for some time about COMBIO's lack of expanded article classes and just chucking everything into NA. Now it also bothers me that the charts are uneven. To me, it is a good thing to be able to keep track of redirects and category pages and so on. What are your thoughts on having a conversation about expanding that? Prometheus720 (talk) 15:58, 28 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Currently I've placed all projects' "Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team" tables in the Metrics section. There's a pretty large overlap in them (e.g. wp:GEN's table has >90% overlap with wp:MCB). It might even be better to consolidate to one? T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 13:23, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've also asked whether Article alerts can be added to a module over at User_talk:Isarra. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 13:30, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The current draft name is WikiProject Genetic, Molecular and Cellular Biology. I'd be a fan of a shorter name, since even this long name omits developmental biology, microbiology, biochemistry, biophysics, bioinformatics, computational biology etc. My suggestion would be something like WikiProject Molecular Biology or similar, but I'm flexible and happy to wait for more people to contribute to a consensus. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 07:47, 29 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not against the current name. However, I'm not against changing it either. I have toyed around with Cellular and Molecular Biology (CMB) but unfortunately, WP:CMB is already registered as a shortcut. Your idea of Molecular Biology has a shortcut choice of WP:MOL or WP:MOLBIO, of which I would much prefer the latter. So it seems a better choice than trying to register CMB for us. I'd support your name, although I also would like to hear more ideas before we run with it. Prometheus720 (talk) 01:39, 30 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That WP:CMB is already registered shouldn’t be much of a problem. It isn’t used normally on a single page with the 4 pages where it is used being this discussion, two tables with all three letter shortcuts and the destination page. The page is also tagged as historical so it’s very unlikely it will see more use in the future. Trialpears (talk) 13:28, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A look through wikidata:Q15884967 also gives an indication of the range of WikiProject names that are used across languages. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 01:49, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

+1 for WP:Molecular Biology. Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 08:07, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Another vote for Molecular Biology! Thanks for all the work on this! Ajpolino (talk) 20:04, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've asked about the technical/practical aspects of merging wikiprojects over at the WikiProject_Council talkpage. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 13:25, 5 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've done a bit of digging and it seems that Discussions on other WPX projects are populated by User:Reports bot, and that one must somehow subscribe to this bot in order to receive Discussion links. The bot (as well as the Requests system) is maintained by User:Harej who is semi-inactive.

I took a look at his contribs to see if he has done any setup before, and found this diff in which it seems he input parameters for a Wikiproject in order to set it up for various WPX things. I believe that this is where we need to go. Due to WP:OWN I don't think it should be a problem for us to just go in and input parameters for GMCB/BIOL/any other projects we redesign--however, after a first glance I'm not entirely sure I understand everything on that page.

@Isarra and Evolution and evolvability: Does this seem correct to both of you? We may have to try emailing Harej soon. Prometheus720 (talk) 17:43, 9 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Prometheus720: I think that looks right thing to copy. My advice is try it because it can always be undone if it breaks something! Isarra will have to give any further advice on anything more technical than that, since it's well beyond my coding skills! T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 12:24, 10 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Evolution and evolvability:Turns out that page is protected and I would have to submit an edit request, so I'm trying to work everything out in advance. I'm having some trouble with one of the parameters though. There is a service to send an automated list of missing articles using Wikidata. I looked at WP:WOMSCI for reference, and I really like what their list does--it spits out articles which have entries on other Wikipedias but not on enwiki. That is exactly what I would want for WP:BIOL.

To do this, you have to input a SPARQL query. I was previously unfamiliar with SPARQL but it's basically just a system to get data out of a database by making simple statements. However, their query doesn't mention anything at all about languages--it seems to just define Wikidata objects that would be of interest to their project, namely women scientists. I don't understand if the code of Reports bot does the languages part for us or what. I'm at a bit of a standstill at the moment. Do you know anything about SPARQL that might help me figure this out?

Finally, I'm taking a look at the metrics section. If you want to set up metrics for GMCB you could probably set it to the default of looking at the talk page banner, but for WP:BIOL we don't use the banner for most of the articles under our scope. For the purpose of metrics I'd probably want to use categories or another SPARQL search to return a list of articles under our subprojects as well. So I have to figure that out as well--somehow I need to represent the larger footprint of WP:BIOL across its subprojects. I don't think I'll have this done for a day or two, but I will let you know when I do so that I can help you set up GMCB to your liking. Hopefully I'll be a pro by then! In the meantime I will continue working on other modules.Prometheus720 (talk) 06:53, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Prometheus720: Sadly I'm also a SPARQL beginner. However Wikidata:Request_a_query may be useful. It'd be similarly useful at some point to generate a list of in-scope articles that are FA in other languages but not English. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 07:06, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Evolution and evolvability: That's a fabulous idea! It has also occurred to me that even if we can't use SPARQL to generate these lists automatically, we might be able to set up something with categories using PetScan and just run the search again every so often. I designed a draft recurring schedule for maintenance like that for WP:BIOL, so that would just be another thing to do monthly or so. I guess I'll give up and try and request a query. Thanks for that link! Prometheus720 (talk) 16:05, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I just tried adding myself as a member and the GUI hangs. It's been loading for several minutes. I'll be working on the same module for WP:BIOL soon enough so I may be of some help then. Just thought I would mention it now, though, in case it's an easy fix. Prometheus720 (talk) 18:51, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Prometheus720:. So the template is {{WPX member box}}, which creates be calling the link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=edit
&preload=Template:WikiProjectCard/Preload
&editintro=Template:WikiProjectCard/Editintro
&summary=Joining+WikiProject
&title=Special:MyPage/WikiProjectCards/WikiProject_Molecular_Biology
&create=Join+WikiProject

I'll have to pass this question to Isarra. The equivalent for Women in red works fine, so there must be something I've not yet set up for this page. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 00:01, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To lighten load on Isarra, Also pinging Jmorgan (WMF) and I JethroBT (WMF) as Meta:FormWizard gurus who might be able to spot a quick fix. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 10:44, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Prometheus720, Evolution and evolvability, and Isarra: I think I see what the problem is here. In order for the Join function to work, FormWizard needs instructions for what to show in the form. It's not finding any where it expects it to, so the GUI is hanging. Template:WPX member box doesn't generate that, unfortunately, and these instructions are typically housed in the MediaWiki: namespace. For example, WP:WikiProject Women in Technology uses MediaWiki:Gadget-formWizard/WikiProject Women in Technology/Join. I'm going to copy over some instructions from another source to MediaWiki:Gadget-formWizard/WikiProject Molecular Biology/Join and make some changes to the text, which should address the problem. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:22, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I was editing WP:BIOL's statistics section to have a collapsible bit that showed a table of small stat tables--actually I copied the code from the Metrics section you built here and tweaked it a bit. Thanks for making that!

In the process I found out that WikiProject Ecoregions does not have stats via WP 1.0 bot in order to even generate a table. We will have to deal with that here as well, sooner or later. So I'm gonna link you to the guide at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot#Setting up for the bot. It will not be totally possible to get this working until we have a talk page template here, but it should not be too hard to basically just copy off of similar projects and then tweak to make sure it supports what we do and do not want to support.

One thing that has bothered me about COMBIO for example is that it doesn't support article classes like file, template, redirect, etc. Everything just goes into NA and in a big project like this will be, that is not ok. So I would wish for something more like MCB's, which has pretty much whatever we would need at first glance.

In the mean time I will be setting this up for WP:Ecoregions since they already have most of the stuff they need for the bot to run. If you want I can help set it up here when we are ready, or you can get started yourself. Up to you/your schedule. See ya! Prometheus720 (talk) 20:06, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]