Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives/May 2025

If a more experienced copyeditor is willing, I would appreciate a brief skim of Christianity in Gaul. I tried my best but the entire article basically was likely copied from a 1913 century encyclopedia and at this point my mind is a pile of mush so I probably missed some things. Cheers, GoldRomean (talk) 20:13, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

:Looks good, and thanks! All the best, Miniapolis 22:22, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

Should the word count for this article be done manually? Clearly it's not 17 words worth of work. I've noticed this issue with other articles as well in which most of the prose is in chart or list form. GoldRomean (talk) 20:54, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

:List articles, frankly, are a PITA to copyedit :-). You need to copypaste all the stuff you need to work on into a word processor (FWIW, I use LibreOffice) and get the word count from that. Thanks for your help and all the best, Miniapolis 22:26, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

:[https://wordcounter.net/ This online tool], after copy and paste, gives a word count of 2,217 (2,217 words 13,947 characters). The article's table looks out of whack. I'll see what I can do to fix it. Dhtwiki (talk) 02:08, 5 May 2025 (UTC) (edited 06:25, 6 May 2025 (UTC))

::Wow, thanks. I noticed the table was off but I'm pretty bad at wikimarkup so didn't want to touch anything and screw it up more. Now that it actually looks readable I might give it a look when I have time :). GoldRomean (talk) 15:02, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

:::(Nevermind I'm stupid it's been copyedited already (less than 3 hours after your cleanup too)!) (Wait, now that I look at it the copyedit was only to a few lines and the tags/templates were removed without issues addressed, should I add them back or something?) Cheers, GoldRomean (talk) 15:05, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

::::The article reads well enough, and I would leave it alone. The recent edit that removed the September 2023 copy edit tag didn't accomplish much but what it did accomplish was mostly well done (I did remove a piece of apparently erroneous text that crept in with that edit). The article has had a copy edit tag for almost two years and many edits to improve the article have been made since, as often happens, even if they aren't from people operating within the guild. Dhtwiki (talk) 06:25, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

::Sorry to bother again, but planning to copydit List of Spanish Americans - using the site your provided, does 8839 words look correct? Thanks, GoldRomean (talk) 02:48, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

:::I stripped away the bullet points, which prevent "Page size" from giving an accurate reading. After that, "Page size" gave a count of 8,658. The lower number is probably due to the copy paste to wordcounter.net including various things, such as the table of contents, that aren't going to be copy edited but won't make much difference to include if the copy-paste measurement is all that one has. Dhtwiki (talk) 06:43, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

:::P.S. I removed the bullet points using a regular expression, which makes it fairly easy. I would never expect anyone to go to the trouble of removing them one by one. Dhtwiki (talk) 06:49, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

::::Thanks - I'll use 8658 then! GoldRomean (talk) 13:27, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

@Assignmentfreelance claims to have been working on/has finished working on (the way they formatted it makes it hard to tell) Dr. Shamika Ravi, except that was actually a draft they themself created, and the format on that is off too. What now? Mox Eden (talk) 12:21, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

:any suggestions on thesame? Assignmentfreelance (talk) 12:28, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

::Well, it certainly can't count for the drive. All the best, Miniapolis 13:36, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

::Yeah. First, it would be best for you to work on articles listed in :Category:All Wikipedia articles needing copy edit instead of your own, particularly ones tagged under September, October, and November 2023. Second, use templates like {{tl|Working}} and {{tl|Done}} to mark your work. Third, do not make up word counts. Use WP:Prosesize and install the gadget using the instructions given here. Mox Eden (talk) 13:39, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

I've been concentrating on getting the backlog number down, rather than the oldest articles, by quickly dealing to the plethora of recently tagged small articles and stubs, usually a trivial matter of fixing some spelling and grammar which would take about the same amount of time as tagging the article. I am getting a bit grumpy, because I had thought that the CE tag is for long chunks of prose, or more complicated stuff. Am I wrong? — Jon (talk) 22:45, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

:No, as long as the articles have been tagged for copyediting; untagged stubs don't count for the copyediting drive. Thanks for your help and all the best, Miniapolis 00:11, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

:That is valuable work, because to see the total backlog number grow is dispiriting. Many articles are, as you say, short and their prose ameliorated by a few corrections. Dhtwiki (talk) 06:38, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

::I agree that fixing many short articles, or articles where one sentence is tagged with {{tl|copy edit inline}}, is valuable work, because seeing the backlog number go down is encouraging to other editors. We used to have an editor who would quietly fix hundreds of short articles during some drives. They are still copy editing, but not in that volume. It takes all kinds of people making all kinds of edits to make this WikiProject successful; I encourage you to edit in ways that are satisfying to you.

::

::As for getting grumpy because someone tags an article for copy editing because of a trivial fix that is needed, it helps to remember that someone may be running out the door to take kids to soccer practice, or not good at writing prose, or focused on other work. Identifying a problem is the first step in getting it fixed; a person who tags a problem is performing a valuable service for readers. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:13, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

:::Thanks, that's probably what I needed to hear! — Jon (talk) 06:16, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

:::The editor "who would quietly fix hundreds" still does so, although perhaps not for each drive, while keeping an account of what they've done on one of their subpages. I fondly remember a phrase of theirs: "murdering the shorties". Dhtwiki (talk) 09:41, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

We are currently 2,176 articles, our lowest backlog level since November 30, 2023. It would be great to do another 130 or so high-quality copy edits before the end of the drive (we need more than 104 to account for new additions) to get below that level. It is wonderful to see the upward drift of the backlog count stall and head in the other direction. I can commit to at least 15 copy edits before the end of the month. Who's in? – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:29, 29 May 2025 (UTC)