It contains the workspaces for compiling catalogues of Mesoamerica-related articles, lists, categories, images and templates. These can then be analysed for coverage and rated for content. This will assist in setting priorities and identifying areas in need of further work. These catalogues can also be easily monitored for recent changes via the '"Related changes" facility.
Each of these mainpages has an associated set of subpages, which contain the content and detail relevant to that section. Much of the material in those subpages can also be viewed directly from the mainpages so that the material can be reviewed all at once. The actual work and editing takes place on the subpages themselves, not the mainpages.
This introductory section can be "hidden" via the hide/show toggle which appears to the right of the "03. Project Catalogue" title, above.
Below is the auto-generated of all currently-defined Mesoamerican subcategories+mdash; that is, all subcategories of the overall parent Category:Mesoamerica. (NB: javascript needs to be enabled for this to display properly, and the display may also be dependent on browser type and settings).
Deeper levels of the category tree may be perused by clicking on the '+' symbol, adjacent to each subcat (however, see also the note above).
The articles within each category sublevel are also displayed, in italics.
Category tagging
All of the categories & subcategories under this structure may (or should) be tagged with the WP:MESO project banner template on the corresponding Category talk page, with the parameters set as follows:
{{WP Mesoamerica|class=NA|cat=yes}}
Articles within category tree
In general, for the articles contained within these categories:
every in-scope article for the project should be assigned to one or more of the categories within this structure (the article may of course also have other categories attached to it that are outside of this structure); and conversely,
all articles within this category structure are eligible to be included within the scope of the WP:MESO project.
There are some exceptions to the above general principles—
there may be some broad-topic articles with a significant Mesoamerican component that the WP:MESO project would want to keep track of, but for which categorisation under 'Mesoamerica' & subcats is not warranted. Pre-Columbian could be one such example.
Equally, there may be the occasional article appearing somewhere in this scheme that is not mainly concerned with Mesoamerican scope, and the project elects not to include it.
An alpha-sorted list of all the categories within the category tree structure, that have had their category talk pages tagged with the {{WP Mesoamerica}} project banner template. Ideally, this listing should match those in the auto-generated category tree structure, above (note that categories may appear more than once in the category tree, if they are interlinked to different 'branches').
Below is an (incomplete) listing of Mesoamerica-related articles, i.e. those which have been assigned to at least one of the categories in the Mesoamerican category schema.
This listing was generated with the assistance of the Catscan tool. Owing to the replication lag and the ongoing (and unresolved) corruption of the en.wiki database replica on the toolserver, some entries are missing (incorrect ones have been manually discarded), and this list is incomplete. It also does not contain Mesoamerica-related articles which have not been assigned to one of the categories in the category schema.
The listing has been sorted by Mesoamerican category or subcategory- note, articles will appear more than once on the listing below if they are assigned to more than one of the Mesoamerican categories.
The following high-level activities need to be performed on this data:
Compare with category listing to identify any articles missed (because of database inaccuracy)
Sort these articles into related themes per the proposed scope, instead of the actual categories they are currently assigned to.
In parallel, identify the level of detail at which the article resides- ie, pan-Mesoamerica, regional-specific, culture-specific, location-specific, sub-component-specific -note, need to develop hierarchy scale before this exercise.
Matrices can be drawn up with the information from (2) and (3) to show coverage by theme and detail-level. From this, "missing" themes/articles can be identified, and the result will also assist in considering how the category schema should look like.
A related activity will involve the adoption and assignment of an article rating scheme, and apply this rating to the various articles. This will assist in identifying those most in need of improvement, and those which are near to FA or other high-quality status.
Other searches need to be performed to identify existing articles which lie outside of the category schema, and assign and record these appropriately.
purpose: Project banner template; identifies in-scope articles, includes the priority tasklist, alerts other editors to this WikiProject. Also used for recording article assessments per the rating scheme via its parameters, there are other flags as well.
placement: On the Talk page of relevant articles, at the top.
purpose: Project banner template for descendant WP:AZTEC wikiproject; identifies in-scope Aztec-related articles, has the same article rating functionality as the WP Mesoamerica banner, classifying article assessments into Aztec-specific subcats as well as the overall Mesoamerican rating scheme categories.
placement: On the Talk page of relevant articles, at the top.
A compendium of images, maps, diagrams, and other media suitable to illustrate Mesoamerica-related articles is to be defined here.
All such media should conform to the appropriate licensing standards, not be in violation of copyright, indicate their source and have a correct licensing tag attached.
All media (whose licensing status allows, eg excluding "fair use") should be uploaded and available at commons, where they should be appropriately categorised and described (note, categorising Mesoamerica-related media at commons is another outstanding task!).
This listing of image and other media resources is yet to be compiled.
