NOTE If you leave a message here, I will respond here, unless you ask for a response on your talk page. Similarly, if I comment on your talk page, I will look for a reply there.
Welcome!
Hello, TheresaWilson, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome!
Guess what? I just got reverted just for trying to update the EOBIW page on a situation that happened on our John Edwards article, as well as for other articles. The reverting editor called my edits "confusing". I don't know what the heck is going on with them, but I sense something suspicious.--Andrewlp1991 (talk) 23:59, 1 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Mm. That's an editor I'm not familiar with. The trouble is that anything which reduces the degree of "liberalness" here is going to be viewed with extreme suspicion. You've little chance of winning against their preconceptions. TheresaWilson (talk) 00:23, 2 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I am dismayed by the efforts of a few to spin the Expelled discussion as if their need to protect and promote the movie's agenda overrides intellectual integrity.
I wasn't exaggerating when I stated I'd read virtually reference and citation in the article and gone well beyond that, even contributing references of my own. However, there's a core who seem committed to undermining efforts to lay bare the film.
Hi Unicorn: I'm in Nottinghamshire. Creationists are the same the world over. I first really got involved just over a year ago when I found Conservapedia and subsequently RationalWiki. I was absolutely amazed at the creationist/ID scene in the US & am very disappointed to find that it's encroaching in the UK. Obviously I haven't seen the movie but everything I've read makes me believe that it was created as propaganda purely. I can rant but try to hold myself back, having lost my temper in the past and thereby lost my argument - willful stupidity really annoys me. TheresaWilson (talk) 17:01, 31 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I hadn't encountered either of these 'pedias' until now, and I just explored both. It looks like there's a struggle for intellectual honesty within Conservapedia, dogma versus integrity. I noticed some debates start out "Mainstream science is anti-God, therefore it can't be trusted," when nothing is further from the truth. Repeat a lie often enough, and it's believed. I notice a few implied that whatever was said and done to Myers and Dawkins was deserved, while others tried to be more balanced.
In the US, we're undergoing an assault upon intellectuality, not merely science, and it's coming from several fronts, not just the DI/ID people. I'd argue Australian Rupert Murdock has single-handedly damaged our country, but he had a lot of help. He took control of right-wing television and to a degree right-wing radio. They call themselves 'neo-cons', since 'far right wing' carries an unpleasant whiff. Since neo-cons fall outside the bounds of true conservatism, we often hear remarks that McCain or W (or any other conservative they disagree with) aren't "true conservatives", or that Bush Sr was a "old-fashioned liberal Republican", or Goldwater's or Buckley's idea of conservatism is "outdated" or "too liberal".
At the same time, the far left is just as guilty with their notions of political correctness and undermining education for boys because of feminists' belief schools were prejudiced against girls, especially in math and science. We're now graduating classes where boys aren't prepared for college, particularly in those fields of math and science. Presently, we have school systems that graduate only 50% of their students, compared to high 90%+ in the 1960s. W's first Secretary of Education was found to have manipulated records and student placements to disguise his school system had a dismal record.
The federal government moved to take extend control over public libraries and especially library records. Our government wants to know what we're reading and now they want to know what we're viewing. A congressman recently submitted a bill to ban certain web sites in libraries to "protect readers".
I believe we're the only nation in the world still officially using the English (Imperial/Royal) system of measurement. We lost an entire Mars mission thanks to some laboratories being on one standard and some on another.
It's a tough time for those of us who are educated and peer beyond the rhetoric.
(taking breath) I used to work in the UK, consulting mostly from London into the north counties. I saw all the scenic spots, Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, etc. (smile) I remember driving up the, um, M-1, was it? Someone pointed to the left and said, "There's Sherwood Forest." Took all the romance out, he did.
You ought to come over to RatWiki (where I'm SusanG - we're composed of a hard core (the cabal - which doesn't exist) of editors who were kicked out of Conservapedia 15 months or so ago and sundry others of like mind. We endeavour to put forward Rational interpretations of the whackier emanations of blogsites generally and Conservapedia in particular. We've a nice bit of stuff about the Expelled film (just search "Expelled). Conservapedia's site owner has some weird views (he's Phyllis Schlafly's son) - one of the best over recent months has been his insistence that Richard Dawkins' professorship was fraudulent. They're currently proving that Richard Lenski's latest experiments are faked! (see: s:Lenski dialog) because it corroborates evolution.
You can't see Sherwood forest from the M1 & it'd be on the right travelling North. Don't forget that England was once forest top to bottom - we were there before the Brazilians started chopping down their trees! I lived in Sheffield for most of my life so you saw our dirty East End while zooming past on the M1.
Regarding Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Affirmative Action President, while reading the Conservapedia article and looking at Conservapedia, like you, I came across the affirmative action reference, but then I stumbled upon Conservapedia actually calling Obama the Affirmative Action President, and then defining it. I edited this into the Comservapedia article, and then used the Affirmative Action President page to define how it was used. I felt this was historically and societally significant. It was NOT an attack upon Obama.
Never thought it was (an attack) but, as you know, I'm a bit(!) anti-CP and they're bragging about the fact that they started it as a meme. I'd rather not give them publicity. It seems to have died out anyhow so it was probably electronic ephemera. TheresaWilson (talk) 14:35, 1 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for drawing my attention to this slander in User:Ed Poor/POV pushing. I have removed all the incorrect text to User talk:Ed Poor/POV pushing. One cannot of course delete it for good as Wiki keeps the old versions (unless one perhaps is a sysop).
keep. The image is almost iconic as a relevant illustration of the article. I have to admit that my main reason is as an improvement to the readability of the article, however it seems to me that the attempts to lawyer or fiibuster this image off the wiki seem to be bureaucracy for its own sake rather than for the improvement of the article and of Wikipedia as a whole. The spirit of the "law" should be the guidance rather than a particular over severe, one-sided view which the "deletionists" seem to be taking. TheresaWilson (talk) 09:52, 17 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Hi again: I now notice your note about being in a hospital bed with webpage limitations. I'll attempt to fulfill your request and see if participants find it appropriate. I wish you a good and preferably speedy recovery. ... Kenosis (talk) 16:38, 17 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Ay'm sure that Ay've no hidea to whhhat you're referrin'. You're hobviously a hwest country bumpkin ov little educashon or breedin', keyndly refrayn from botherin' me in this rawther loutish manner. TheresaWilson (talk) 14:27, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I created a category for Category:Romeo and Juliet films that I'd like to verify if I have it right before proceeding much further.
This category (which has potential to reference 50 or so films and screen adaptations), I intended to be a more specific category within Category:Shakespeare on film. As I understand it, it would be redundant to include both Category:Shakespeare on film and Category:Romeo and Juliet films, but it feels eerie removing the Shakespeare on Film category.
I have just thought of an idea that could help to improve your WikiProject (Nottinghamshire). I have looked at the counties in the East Midlands and Compared them to the amount of those counties with WikiProjects, they are Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. We all share a common purpose, that is to work on the articles of our county's which includes local history, geography and biographies.
Therefore to help us share methods of research and many other needs (basically 'constructive collaboration' as I call it) I am proposing that we form an alliance, NOT a Merger. I believe an alliance allows us to be independent just as before but in collaboration as well. This could really benefit our WikiProjects and I feel we might be the first in Wikipedia's history. I am a member of WikiProject Lincolnshire, I have founded WP:Latin and have already proposed the idea with relatively positive feedback still coming in and have placed a notice in WikiProject England. 95jb14 (talk) 17:46, 24 September 2009 (UTC).[reply]
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 6,881 last month to 7,532on September 26th). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 41 out of a total number of 1,993 articles. In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 49 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 47.
For those of you who made changes to the coastal places articles after last month's feature. I think that the Scarborough article got the most attention and improvements during the month.
There has again been a number of suggestions on the ToDo list at Yorkshire Portal and this has been kept up to date.
The football and rugby editors have continued keeping abreast of most, if not all, of the top clubs. Great!
WikiProkject Yorkshire editors have been busy on vandal patrol at watchlist. Thanks.
A big Thank you to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Priority Articles
The top priority articles that have been identified to date are as follows -
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
When looking at school articles please take time to check the Ofsted links in the article and the references as the site has been restructured and the links to the reports may just redirect to the main page. These need to be corrected if any are found. The link in the infobox has been corrected so that one should still operate correctly.
Please remember...
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on September 4th.
Monitor Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Infoboxes Many of our articles would benefit from the addition of an appropriate infobox.
References Please remember that the list of stubs needing expansion is always in need of attention. Please take a look and see if you can help. One small edit, such as adding a reference section and reference, to an article each session would make a big difference.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 7,532 last month to 7,738 on October 30th). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 43 out of a total number of 2.034 articles. In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 52 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 47.
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
The addition of the popular pages facility to the Yorkshire sidebar last month has thrown light on which of our articles Wikipedia readers actually access most. The first month for which there is complete data is September when Arctic Monkeys were in pole position with an average 6,869 hits daily. In second place with 5,781 was Wuthering Heights followed by Dracula with 4,996. The table is sortable on a number of attributes but the sort takes a while to complete.
As the page has a link to current data it is possible to see and compare current raw data for daily hits. So far the October statistics (up to October 20th) reveal that Dracula with 5,474 daily hits is well ahead of seasonal favourite Guy Fawkes with 4,411, and last month's favourite, Arctic Monkeys, are pushed into third position with a daily hit score of 4,259.
Three football clubs Leeds United A.F.C., Hull City A.F.C. and Middlesbrough F.C.get into the top 25 along with several pages about literary topics such as the Brontë family and their works. Television personalities are well represented, Jeremy Clarkson (4,559) is 4th overall in the list and Judi Dench is 23rd with a hit score of 1,577. Do the history topics in the top 25 suggest homework assignments?
It will be interesting to monitor the rise and fall of pages on the list which will also suggest where our efforts as a project might best be directed for maximum impact.
Please remember...
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on September 4th.
Monitor Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Infoboxes Many of our articles would benefit from the addition of an appropriate infobox.
References Please remember that the list of stubs needing expansion is always in need of attention. Please take a look and see if you can help. One small edit, such as adding a reference section and reference, to an article each session would make a big difference.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 7,738 last month to 7,870 on November 29th). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 43 out of a total number of 2,045 articles. In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 52 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 51.
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
Christmas Greetings
Welcome to all our active members. This is the twentieth newsletter, the Christmas 2009 issue, and by the time it reaches members there should still be time to drop some helpful hints about seasonal gifts for Wikipedians. The obvious things are computer and digital stuff, and books. (On Wikipedia socks are only for those with a sad identity crisis.) What sort of things? Well, computer stuff can be anything from a high spec laptop, through wireless networks, antivirus software, graphics software to memory cards and memory sticks. Digital cameras are coming down in price and an MP3 player can double up as a memory stick.
A useful book for apprentice Wikipedians is, "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" by John Broughton, it's full of tips, tricks and explanations and can be bought at about half the price on the cover if you shop around. "The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality" by Andrew Dalby has just one five star review on Amazon, and the review of "The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia" by Andrew Lih says "it's a book that will certainly make you think, but it will also leave you frustrated!". It might be a better idea to go for a reference book about your next favourite sport, hobby or indulgence. A good atlas always comes in useful as does a thesaurus, for when you come across the seventh time a word has been used in a paragraph! Or the good old phrase "is the home of" turns up yet again.
Stocking fillers include pens and pencils, to replace the ones which fall on the floor and are never to be found again, and notebooks of all shapes and sizes. A ream of printer paper and the odd ink cartridge might be useful too.
Happy Christmas.
Please remember...
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on November 6th.
Monitor Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Infoboxes Many of our articles would benefit from the addition of an appropriate infobox.
References Please remember that the list of stubs needing expansion is always in need of attention. Please take a look and see if you can help. One small edit, such as adding a reference section and reference, to an article each session would make a big difference.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 7,870 last month to 7,888 on December 16th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 53 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 51. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 43 out of a total number of 2,048 articles.
Currently we have seventeen Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
Every month, two articles will be selected for the project to improve, one B-class and one Start-class. The January 2010 articles are an arbitrary choice of the newsletter editors but members will be asked to nominate future articles for improvement.
Update statistics. (These drastically affect the accuracy of this encyclopedia so make sure the data displayed in the article is up-to-date.)
Check to see if the article is following the appropriate suggested article guidelines.
Make sure the article is NOT an advertisement. If it is written like an advertisement, fix it. If you cannot, notify us on the appropriate subject header on this talk page or on the article talk page
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on December 11th.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 7,888 last month to 7,950 on January 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 53 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 52. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 43 out of a total number of 2,074 articles.
Currently we have seventeen Yorkshire featured articles:
There are now 73 members of WikiProject Yorkshire! The membership remaining unchanged since the last newsletter though the number of active members is currently low.
Thanks
A very big Thank you to all the editors who labour away quietly and help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
To members who have added suggestions to the ToDo list at Yorkshire Portal.
To the football and rugby editors who have done stirling work in keeping abreast of the top clubs.
To all the WikiProkject Yorkshire editors who have been busy on vandal patrol at watchlist.
Great!
Priority Articles
The top priority articles that have been identified to date are as follows -
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
Assessment
This month we focus on article assessment as a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes on this. In January the new version of the bot used for generating the information was deployed. For the observant you will have noticed the changes made to the assessment table on the left, it now has details of all of the pages other than articles that are tagged with the project banner. Now you can see counts of the categories, templates, files and other miscellaneous tagged pages that the project is looking after. The article count earlier in the newsletter does not include all of the newly reported classes as they are not really articles.
A new facility is the ability to click on any of the numbers and get a list of the articles that are in the intersection of the article importance rating with the quality rating. For example this enables you to see all of the articles that the project has rated as high priority stub-class articles. This is something that was not readily available prior to this revision of the bot.
The quality ratings are only valid at the time they are done and may be out of date as some of the assessments were done over two years ago. Many of the articles have changed since they were rated so it would be good if members could re-rate them when they see substantial changes to a particular article or flag it up for someone more experienced to take a look at and revise the quality rating if appropriate. Many of the articles were rated before the introduction of the C-class rating so may be over rated as B-class articles or under rated as Start-class articles.
Other changes have taken place in the formatting of the log files and more is to come. The data is now stored in a database off wiki and so tools can be written to generate further reports, have customised rating levels for projects etc. The bot is also able to get through the articles quicker and so is reporting changes daily rather than about weekly as with the previous version.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The February 2010 articles selected below are as discussed on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on December 11th.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 7,950 last month to 7,987 on February 27th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 52 is just behind WP:GM who have 53. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 44 out of a total number of 2,117 articles.
Currently we have seventeen Yorkshire featured articles:
There are now 73 members of WikiProject Yorkshire! The membership remaining unchanged since the last newsletter though the number of active members is currently low.
Thanks
A very big Thank you to all the editors who labour away quietly and help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
To members who have added suggestions to the ToDo list at Yorkshire Portal.
To the football and rugby editors who have done stirling work in keeping abreast of the top clubs.
To all the WikiProkject Yorkshire editors who have been busy on vandal patrol at watchlist.
Great!
Priority Articles
The top priority articles that have been identified to date are as follows -
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
Biographies of Living People
This month we need to concentrate efforts on Biographies of Living People (BLP) as detailed at WP:BLP. There is currently ongoing discussions about what should be done with nearly 50,000 unsourced articles on living people that have accumulated and being tagged with the {{BLP unsourced}} template. Options range from deleting all of them immediately to a period of grace for the articles to be sourced. There is also discussions as to what should be done, going forward, with new articles on living people that are created without sources. Do have your say on these discussions here, if you are interested in biographical articles.
As a project we have not tagged many biographical articles but looking at the articles of people under the Yorkshire category an estimate of 150 of these are tagged as unreferenced. This does not include those related to the various sports people who play for the many teams in the area. Obviously those articles relevant to the project we would want to save from the axe and so we need to concentrate our efforts on referencing articles that have been tagged as unreferenced. Once articles have been given some references then the tag can be changed to {{BLP sources}} or removed, if full referencing has been done.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The March 2010 articles selected below are the editors choice as no one came up with any other suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on December 11th.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 7,987 last month to 8,063 on March 30th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 52 is just behind WP:GM who have 55. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 44 out of a total number of 2,139 articles.
Currently we have eighteen Yorkshire featured articles:
No members left the project this month: though the number of active members is currently low.
Thanks
A very big Thank you to all the editors who labour away quietly and help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Thanks to thos members that have been referencing the Biographies of Living People that was raised last month. We have cut the number of totally unreferenced articles to five.
To members who have added suggestions to the ToDo list at Yorkshire Portal.
To the football and rugby editors who have done stirling work in keeping abreast of the top clubs.
To all the WikiProkject Yorkshire editors who have been busy on vandal patrol at watchlist.
Great!
Priority Articles
The top priority articles that have been identified to date are as follows -
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
Biographies of Living People
As a follow up to last month's feature on BLP articles a BOT is now creating project listings of those BLP articles that are tagged as totally unreferenced. The listing for our project can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Yorkshire/Unreferenced BLPs, I have added a link to this from the project side-bar for easy access to the listing. There are just five articles remaining on the list at the time of going to press, so well done.
General Election
The next General Election will be announced sometime during the month and so we need to concentrate our efforts on the articles relating to this. There are two main sets of articles relevant here, firstly the constituency articles and secondly the articles relating to the candidates that are standing for election. Taking the first group there are a number of boundary changes relating to the constituencies in the area that will be implemented at the time of the General Election. These changes need to be reflected into the settlement articles that are affected by the change. I would suggest that the settlement's history section is updated to include details of the former constituency when adding the new one so that information is not lost. All of the constituency articles will need to be kept up to date with the list of candidates that are standing for the election. Much of the basic work on this has been done but new candidates will emerge until the closing date for candidates to declare. Note that the order of candidates should be maintained in ballot paper order prior to the result being declared so that we do not favour any of the parties in the election. So even if A. Aardvark is standing for the "Lets do away with wiki" party then they should appear first regardless of if we support them or not.
On the second set of articles, those on candidates, we are back to issues relating to BLP, NPOV and to avoiding them, or their supporters, using wiki as an electioneering medium. We should be vigilant to remove anything that ventures into this area as quickly as possible. There may be articles for candidates who are standing that are not tagged for the project so it would be good for these to be tagged so we can keep an eye on them. It is also a good time to improve the articles on the candidates as they will no doubt get more hits during the election period. Those of you in the UK may also see some of the candidates out on the campaign trail and it would be good to get a photo for their article if possible. It does not have to be a Yorkshire related politician as there are lots of articles about politicians that needed photos or updates to dated images.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The April 2010 articles selected below are the editors choice as no one came up with any other suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on March 23rd.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 8,063 last month to 8,082 on April 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 55 is just behind WP:GM who have 56. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 44 out of a total number of 2,161 articles.
Currently we have eighteen Yorkshire featured articles:
Thank you and well done to all those who contributed.
Article Activity
Bramhope Tunnel promoted to GA following review on April 2nd Tickle Cock Bridge was nominated, reviewed and promoted to GA on April 3rd Cottingley Fairies was nominated, reviewed and promoted to GA on April 27th
Member News
There are now 75 members of WikiProject Yorkshire! A warm welcome to the new members that have joined us since the April newsletter:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
Elections
The next General Election will take place this month as will the local elections in a number of areas in the region and so again this month we need to concentrate our efforts on the articles relating to these.
Last month I concentrated on the general election related articles in the run up to the announcement of the election. This month we need to concentrate on the aftermath of the election. The constituency articles are the first ones that need to be looked at and the results added to each of these. This gives us an opportunity to have some references on these pages as there will be extensive media coverage for the results. The articles relating to the set of new MPs will need to be updated to include details of their election victory and the office they take up in the new parliamentary session. At the same time those articles relating to politicians who loose their seat will need to be updated to cover this and to show the successor to the seat/office they held. Other articles that need to be looked at are the settlement articles to see if they need updating as a number of them mention the party that represent the place and some give details of the MPs that represent them.
As well as the general election there is also the local elections that are being held on the same day and again this needs to be looked at when updating the settlement articles as the council make up is often described in the governance section or given in the infobox. These elections will necessitate new articles creating for each of the councils that are holding elections to record the details of the election and the results. Others may generate these articles and members should tag these with the project tag {{WikiProject Yorkshire}} when they find them so that they can be tracked and are not forgotten about.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The April 2010 articles selected below are the editors choice as no one came up with any other suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on March 23rd.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 8,082 last month to 8,202 on May 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 54 is just behind WP:GM who have 58. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 43 out of a total number of 2,182 articles.
Currently we have twenty Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
Images
As a change from all the election related material this month I thought that we could look at images. With summer on its way in England then it is time to spend away from the computer and in the great outdoors. There are many events and places to visit so if you are taking time out at any of these then take along your camera and capture the scene. Then when back home you can upload the images to Commons so that they can be used on any of the projects run by the foundation. This is preferred to uploading just to Wikipedia as they are more widely available to other projects and save time of people having to make the transfer of suitable images. When uploading images to Commons then you need to categorise the image to enable it to be located easily and to group it with others of a similar theme. It is best to put it in a specific category, but if you cannot find one then pick the best fit you can and others will shift it around into more suitable categories. The process is similar to article categorisation and multiple categories can be added, as appropriate, but an image should not normally be placed in a category and one of it's sub-categories.
There are a number of articles requiring images and the Yorkshire related ones can be found here. Take a look before you go out as you may be able to fulfil one of the requests while out visiting.
If you locate an article that requires an image and no suitable image is available then add the {{reqphoto}} template to the article talk page to flag the article appropriately. If you want an image of a specific thing then you can use the of= parameter to give details. For example, if an interior shot is required of the building that is the subject of the article then use {{reqphoto|of=interior}}. You can narrow the image to a location by using the in= parameter, {{reqphoto|in=Yorkshire}} will request a photo in Yorkshire. If you use North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire or the East Riding of Yorkshire in place of Yorkshire then it will categorise in the appropriate sub-category but will not show up in the request box. A way round this is to apply Yorkshire and the division to the request and they will show up but remain unlinked. So to a request an image in the East Riding of Yorkshire it may be best to use {{reqphoto|in=Yorkshire|in2=the East Riding of Yorkshire}} to show in the request box and classify it in both Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Yorkshire and Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
For biographical articles the biography project template {{WPBiography}} has a needs-photo= parameter which should be set to yes if a photograph is required.
When adding an image to an article also check the talk page and remove the flags if the image fulfils the request.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The June 2010 articles selected below are the editors choice as no one came up with any other suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on March 23rd.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 8,202 last month to 8,225 on June 21st). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 54 is just behind WP:GM who have 59. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 44 out of a total number of 2,193 articles.
Currently we have twenty Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.