[Haskell-cafe] Haskell WikiProject

[Robin Green]

Is anyone else interested in forming a Haskell WikiProject on Wikipedia,
to collaborate on improving and maintaining the coverage and quality of
articles on Haskell-related software and topics (broadly defined)? Not
just programming topics specific to Haskell, but also ones of interest
to the Haskell community.

Some of you might already be doing this from time to time, but forming
an explicit WikiProject might help to:

* Highlight things that could use some attention
* Divide up tasks (based on expertise or interest)
* Recruit more editors (sticking a banner on article Talk pages can let
  editors know the WikiProject exists)
* Eventually (something for the future, maybe!) work together on a
  Wikipedia Haskell Portal
* And of course, improve the visibility of Haskell on Wikipedia, which
  should help our community

Here's a good example to start with. The article on Eager evaluation
could do with some improvement - and possibly should be merged into the
Lazy evaluation article, I'm not sure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eager_evaluation

We could also probably create some more articles on projects written
in Haskell, and add more references to Haskell research papers.
Software projects don't have to be polished to be covered in Wikipedia -
or even working! - they essentially just have to be "notable", as the
Wikipedia guidelines define it.

By the way (getting a bit offtopic here) an annoying limitation of the
Wikipedia category system, that you couldn't run queries like "Give me
all the articles in the Haskell category that are also in the
Unreferenced category" has now been partially addressed by the
experimental prototype of Category Intersection:

http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/intersection/

This is slightly better than Googling, because crucially, it searches
*recursively* through categories. That means it will turn up articles
that are in a subcategory of "Category:Haskell programming language" but
don't explicitly mention Haskell. Don't know if there any such articles
yet, but it's worth bearing in mind that you can do this. I think it
will, in principle, make topic-specific maintenance a bit more
convenient - and it's what I've been waiting for before getting
involved in topic-specific maintenance.

If you want to just express interest in signing up for such a
WikiProject (no commitment required whatsoever!), please reply
privately via email or publicly on my User Talk page (User talk:Greenrd)
- to avoid clogging up this mailing list.

-- 
Robin