Talk:Urban Sketchers

This article was nominated for deletion on 9 March 2013 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

I am Jorge Royan, and my user is "Jorgeroyan". As you will realize inmediately, I am a new user. So I begin asking for forgiveness for my possible lack of proper etiquette. I am argentine and live in Buenos Aires. English is not my native language. I see the need to write this, since the situation we (Urban Sketchers, or "USk") created regarding our Wikipedia entries is - I find now- beyond my original abilities and want to correct it. To begin with, USk is, as the text says, a non-profit global community of artists that practice drawing on location in cities, towns and villages. We are all amateurs who are building this community. As an internet project, we are working on a very similar direction to Wikipedia. We (USk) are smaller, but we are of one mind with you. This effort of putting eight different versions of the same text in eight languages online in different Wikipedia sites came as a result of my first one, in spanish. And the first , in turn, came as outcome of the fact that I am a photographer and donated 3000+ images to Wikimedia Commons, to be offered globally with a Creative Commons License. My account is temporarily co-operated by me and User:Barcex in order to upload part of my photo collection to Wikimedia Commons. After this, I proposed to the USk Board writing a Wikipedia entry, and after that I gathered a volunteer group to translate it to French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, English and Indonesian. Eight languages. They did, I uploaded all the versions to all these sites and that was it. But then some problems appeared. Some versions began receiving warnings, and the portuguese version was put down. So today I spoke with User:Barcex and he explained me some things I was not aware of. That we can be suspect of self promotion, that the pages need more references, that they can't be "Orphans", that they need to link to other pages, that we need images, etc, etc. So, now I am in this position: I need to explain to the responsables for each version how to create their own accounts and once there, how to improve and resolve the problems the lack of references create. So, this goes to

Apologize for the lack of tech skills with which I uploaded the 8 versions and
Express that now we know (I hope) what to do, we will put our best effort to organize our group, polish and complete these entries.

We are a -very fast- growing community, and we believe our existence in Wikipedia is really adequate to Wikipedia's goals and to the benefit of all. Thank you Jorgeroyan Jorgeroyan (talk) 21:36, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. I know of Urban Sketchers from their Flickr Group, but didn't realise they were more than that. If the article survives the Articles for Deletion discussion, I expect it will need to be completely rewritten and become much shorter! Sionk (talk) 22:00, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Sionk. We are struggling to correct all this, but we need time. It is still Jorge here. Alex Zonis will take care of this page, but she is on vacation. Please give us time to learn the system and correct all, we'll do it fast. there are thousands of sketchers now and we are growing FAST. Thanks!

Jorgeroyan Jorgeroyan (talk) 11:31, 12 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Clean up

I've made a start at cleaning up the article, adding independent news sources, removing promotional or irrelevant content.

However, I don't understand the 'Communities' section. What do the dates in the table represent? Can these communities be verified? Sionk (talk) 18:54, 17 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]