Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cooperatives

Restarting this Wikiproject in 2022

Hello everyone, I'm new to Wikipedia and am very interested in improving the coverage of cooperatives; my first article contribution has been creating History of the cooperative movement in China. This Wikiproject has been marked as inactive for the past two years. I'd like to see it come back to life. I've gone through this Wikiproject's participant list and moved everyone who has not contributed to Wikipedia at all in the past 5 years to "inactive", and I'll be leaving a note on everyone else's talk page to see if they are still interested in this Wikiproject. If not, please mark yourself as inactive. If you do still want to be a part of this project, then what are some of your ideas for how we can improve Wikipedia's treatment of cooperatives? IohannesChicaginiensis (talk) 17:59, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for starting this - I'm keen to help. — LittleDwangs (talk) 18:51, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

I have worked on the article on housing cooperatives and was unable to secure acceptance for an article on business coperatives related to the carpeting or flooring business. I have held longstanding membership over the decades in various kinds of cooperatives. MaynardClark (talk) 01:48, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

@MaynardClark maybe articles can be developed together as Drafts (or elsewhere) to meet minimum criteria and then move them to mainspace. --Zblace (talk) 07:57, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Great, so already @LittleDwangs, @MaynardClark, @Zblace, @Jfricker, and myself have expressed that they're still interested in this project. I've gone ahead and removed the "inactive" status from the Wikiproject templates. Since this project was marked inactive, many related subpages were autodeleted, and I've tried to strip away the red links to make the Wikiprojects page a bit more accessible to a newcomer. So much of the stuff relating to article assessment has rotted away though, I'd prefer it if someone who has more experience with those things take a look and help me figure out how to repair all that. I think getting article assessments back up and running would be one way to provide an ongoing rhythm to this project.

We don't need the assessment mechanics running though to start working on a few things. One of the standout things to me is that the main Cooperative article is... not that great. It's rated "C" quality in all its projects, and I see why. The sections are rather lopsided and don't have any narrative flow between them. The Origins and history section seems full of random facts that various one-off editors felt like throwing in. It would be great if a group of editors could go through the main article and fashion it into something coherent. Anyone up for the challenge?

Another thing the Wikiproject could do is establish guidelines for parallel articles. For example, I created an article with the title History of the cooperative movement in China by analogy with the article History of the cooperative movement. But not every article is "History of the cooperative movement in [place]", there's also History of cooperatives in Canada, Cooperative movement in India, Danish cooperative movement, and British co-operative movement. It would be nice to standardize the titles of these types of articles to all be of one form (or two, perhaps we want one set of "History" articles and another set of "Present-day" articles). If anyone has thoughts, they'd be welcome. IohannesChicaginiensis (talk) 04:00, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

@IohannesChicaginiensis maybe it makes sense to use Wikimedia Chat also for faster communication and brainstorming ideas at this point...consider to join https://chat.wmcloud.org/wikimedia/channels/en_wikiproject_cooperatives

--Zblace (talk) 08:01, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm having trouble logging in to the link you've provided; are we supposed to use our Wikipedia credentials or create a new account? Although, to be honest, I for one would prefer if we kept our discussions on this chat page for now. There aren't that many people interested in this project, and if we keep our discussions here then what we say will all be in once place for anyone in the future to look over and get up to speed. IohannesChicaginiensis (talk) 19:04, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

@IohannesChicaginiensis if you did not use it before then you can open the account following info on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chat If need be I can also send email invites. --Zblace (talk) 07:12, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Hello, I'm new to Wikipedia but would be happy to help with this. Currently interested in improving pages and coverage relating to housing cooperatives. Yoctera (talk) 12:09, 23 October 2022 (UTC)