User talk:IJReid

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WikiCup 2023 September newsletter

The fourth round of the competition has finished, with anyone scoring less than 673 points being eliminated. It was a high scoring round with all but one of the contestants who progressed to the final having achieved an FA during the round. The highest scorers were

Epicgenius, with 2173 points topping the scores, gained mainly from a featured article, 38 good articles and 9 DYKs. He was followed by
Sammi Brie, with 1575 points, gained mainly from a featured article, 28 good articles and 50 good article reviews. Close behind was
Thebiguglyalien, with 1535 points mainly gained from a featured article, 15 good articles, 26 good article reviews and lots of bonus points.

Between them during round 4, contestants achieved 12 featured articles, 3 featured lists, 3 featured pictures, 126 good articles, 46 DYK entries, 14 ITN entries, 67 featured article candidate reviews and 147 good article reviews. Congratulations to our eight finalists and all who participated! It was a generally high-scoring and productive round and I think we can expect a highly competitive finish to the competition.

Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 4 but before the start of round 5 can be claimed in round 5. Remember too that you must claim your points within 10 days of "earning" them and within 24 hours of the end of the final. If you are concerned that your nomination will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews. It would be helpful if this list could be cleared of any items no longer relevant. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.

I will be standing down as a judge after the end of the contest. I think the Cup encourages productive editors to improve their contributions to Wikipedia and I hope that someone else will step up to take over the running of the Cup. Sturmvogel 66 (talk), and Cwmhiraeth (talk)

Categories

Hello, IJReid,

We don't categorize dinosaurs by modern nation-state boundaries. It makes no sense at all to talk about "Canadian dinosaurs" as if they lived within a countries' boundaries. Nations are modern inventions and didn't exist millions of years ago. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:36, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Liz: Fair, but then the existing categories relating to continent also require removal or other revision because those are similarly problematic. What would you suggest as an alternative? Titles such as "Canadian dinosaurs" appear in multiple primary sources and secondary sources on these topics, such as for example Matthew (1920) "Canadian dinosaurs" Natural History vol. 20. Any sort of "by location" article runs into similar problems, though modifying the wording to be "from Canada" could solve this? No animals respect the arbitrary decisions we have made about political boundaries and yet we still have categories on Category:Birds by country. IJReid ^{{{T - C - D - R}}} 04:43, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, again, IJReid,

When you are changing categories on an article that have been present for years, it would help if you included an edit summary explaining why you think they should be changed. This will help avoid edit wars between editors who have disagreements about categorization. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:36, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

More on categories

Hello, IJReid,

Recently, we've seen a lot of dinosaur categories emptied. You can see some recent ones by scanning Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion. I went on the WikiProjects for Paleontology and Dinosaurs to see if there was some discussion going on that is prompting these changes but I don't see anything.

You seem to be the primary editor (but not the only one) to empty out these categories so maybe you could clear things up for me and explain a little bit about all of these changes over the past week. Are you cleaning up from a past editor who didn't know what they were doing? Or are these creatures being recategorized regarding their taxonomy? I wouldn't be concerned if these was happening to just one or two categories but this emptying out is not happening through WP:CFD (as it should be done) and it's affecting dozens of categories.

Thanks for any information you can provide. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:26, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Liz The entire discussion can be found at WT:PALEO#Categorization proposal where a guideline for the project (and perhaps WP:TOL) was agreed with as much consensus as you would generally see, including a list of category types to be deleted and categories to be used. I guess the discussion could have taken place at CFD, but it felt more appropriate to discuss project guidelines within the project, and the resulting recategorizations can be referenced to that discussion. As the discussion points out, most of the categories are built upon the foundation from a past editor who created and incompletely populated hundreds of categories, but some are agreed to be kept and others not. I am editing mainspace articles individually to ensure that they are all consistent, rather than targeting specific categories, which is why they are ending up empty. IJReid ^{{{T - C - D - R}}} 00:33, 20 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Oxford Clay Formation

A tag has been placed on Category:Oxford Clay Formation indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and removing the speedy deletion tag. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:15, 30 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]