Good day everyone, I've created this post to discuss how we can improve WookieeProjects in their current state, based on my own experiences and observations.
Introduction
When WookieeProjects were founded, they were intended for editors to collaborate and focus their efforts on certain types of articles and ensure they satisfy the site's policies and writing and presentation standards. As a result of their creation, we've seen many articles achieve this goal, grouping together related reading material in the process.
In today's environment, the community has given WookieeProjects a much larger focus, going so far as to implementing them in the article nomination process directly and automating the task of organizing them under the respective projects. This, however, is where I feel that focus ends, as I will explain below.
The current state of WookieeProjects
From my observation, I feel that WookieeProjects have been reduced to nothing more than glorified categories for status articles, something to be tacked onto a nomination page so that Jocasta can perform her necessary duties and place it under the relevant project(s). In my opinion, this greatly diminishes their value and ignores their potential. A status article symbol represents all the time and effort dedicated to the article by the editor(s), and its attainment should not be the sole goal of a project.
A project can encompass much more than a well-written article, such as maintenance work and identifying useful sources of information. In fact, we already have projects that do not concern status articles at all, such as Images and Web. It was also brought to my attention that Creators and Women helped alleviate an issue that had long plagued the wiki, that being the standards for out-of-universe person articles, and therefore giving us proof of the benefits concentrated efforts like this can bring.
Some ideas
So, how can we help WookieeProjects be more recognizable beyond their association with status articles? I'm going to throw out some ideas here.
Sources lists
Identifying and listing sources that fall under the scope of a certain project helps editors in researching information for articles they wish to write. One such project that already does this is Galaxy's Edge. However, this could be a monumental task for more prominent topics as there may be hundreds, if not, thousands of such sources out there.
In one case, I once made a source list for The Mandalorian project, which listed items that were yet to be listed under the Sources section of articles covered by the project's scope. I have since abandoned the effort of keeping that list updated due to how exhausting the task was for one man; The Mandalorian has since become a global phenomenon with countless tie-in material.
Targets
Similar to Project Stardust, a project leader could set certain targets for the members of the project. One example could be reducing the number of articles in a maintenance category by a certain threshold. Although they weren't covered by a specific WookieeProject, we've seen great success with this in the archive links cleanup of 2020 and more recently with modernizing the Quote template's referencing in 2023.
Another example could be a weekly/monthly write-up of a larger article, or perhaps a group of articles tagged with a stub template, Update, or Expand. This can go hand-in-hand with the "Featured topics" idea that has been discussed for some time now.
Organization of articles
Also concerning Featured topics, articles covered under a topic of interest could be grouped together and displayed on a project subpage; Astrography's coordinate challenge is one such example. If we think of wars in galactic history, as covered by Massive Damage, the individual battles within the war could be the focus of editing efforts. The same could be done with subjects featured in a video game level or a television episode. The organization thus helps editors identify outstanding tasks in the topic of interest.
There is, however, one serious issue I have not mentioned in all of this; manpower. As we've seen, projects often fall into disuse either due to a lack of interest over time or available editors. There unfortunately isn't a direct solution, as we cannot compel editors to edit and it is ultimately their decision to make. That's all I could come up with for now. Please feel free to leave any ideas and their implementations below. With this post, I'm hoping this issue will be addressed with time.
UberSoldat93 
(talk) 10:17, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
Discuss
- I definitely understand all of the points that Uber has made, it's been recently suggested that I or another user take over and revive Wookieepedia:WookieeProject Video Games, which I have considered, but overall it doesn't seem worthwhile due to me being time poor and not seeing any real purpose behind it. I think all of these suggestions are valid, but I think if we want to make progress in this way we need to start initiating some of these ideas into the Wookieeprojects that we have now and exploring how effective they can be. That's up to the leaders/members of our many current WookieeProjects, but for many of them there's no real detriment to them continuing as they are. I also really want Featured Topics to finally become a thing and I believe that will motivate many users into doing completionist runs on articles that will benefit their relevant WookieeProject. Commander Code-8 Hello There! 11:12, 8 May 2023 (UTC)