This is an archive of past discussions with User:Euchiasmus. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
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 8,254 last month to 8,334 on August 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 56 is just behind WP:GM who have 58. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 47 out of a total number of 2,218 articles.
Currently we have twenty one 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.
Updates
Last month I brought your attention to the proposals for changes to maps in articles and the newer maps have started to be deployed on some of the Scotland and Wales articles. The English ones will follow on though there has been comments on the loss of some features so this may be revised before mass deployment.
The trial for the pending changes implementation has ended and after discussion a straw poll is under way and now is the time to voice your opinion over the trial and if pending changes should continue to be used or if it should be abandoned.
A further batch of about 10,000 images from the Geograph project has been uploaded to Commons. If you are looking for an image then there may be one available on Commons you just have to search for it! Many of the images are incorrectly categorised at the moment but these are being rectified as they are spotted. If you have time then you can give a hand checking out the image categorisation.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The September 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...
Hi there. I’m new to editing in Wikipedia, so am treading gently - I don’t want to trample on anybody’s toes. I signed up because I use Wikipedia a lot and thought that it would be good to contribute too. I actually live in Milburn so the entry on Milburn, Cumbria seemed a good place to start.
My problem here is that I think the page needs a complete re-write. Numerous errors of fact need to be corrected and a lot more needs to be said. Milburn is a very interesting place indeed.
If I understand the history of the page correctly, you didn’t write the original page yourself. But I’m writing to you as you see to have taken an active fatherly interest in keeping it on the straight and narrow. Could you advise me on protocol please here? I don’t want to post what would amount to a complete whitewash of the original if it’s going to cause a major upset. On the other hand I don’t want to leave the current entry uncorrected. Best wishes Crossview (talk) 10:34, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
Hello, Crossview - good to hear from you. I know what you mean about treading gently - I can remember being a new user myself. I'm happy to help.
The Milburn, Cumbria article could actually do with some work done on it, so it's a good place for you to start, especially with your local knowledge. Apart from any factual errors, it also has no structure (headings, etc), no map (see, for example, Brough, Cumbria to see how wikipedia maps can be included in an infobox), and no references.
Here's a suggestion: I've made a copy of the article into a personal "sandbox" at User:Euchiasmus/Sandbox1 - maybe you'd like to dive in and edit that copy - do what you like to it - completely "whitewash" it if you like - and I'll give you some feedback. When we're happy with it, we can simply copy and paste it into the real page...
Alternatively, there's no harm done if you want to start editing the live page - other editors can always revert what you do if they don't like it. When editors are making possibly controversial changes to a page, they sometimes add a note to the article's "talk page" (click the discussion tab at the top) to explain what they've done and why - so you could put a sentence or two on the talk page just to show that you are amending and not vandalising!
I'll have a look at what you do, and am happy to give you feedback. Hope you'll enjoy editing wikipedia as much as the rest of us (beware - it can become quite addictive!) Best regards, Euchiasmus (talk) 08:45, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for your prompt and helpful response. I'll follow your suggestion and build my page in the sandbox you provided. I'll be back in touch in a week or so. In the meantime I've found something called the Wikiproject for UK Geography and will use that to guide the structure of the replacement page - unless you advise against. Best wishes Crossview (talk) 14:17, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
So much for "a week or two". Other priorities intervened, as always. I've now got the basis for a new article though and have put it into the Sandbox as suggested. I wouldn't bother looking at it just yet as I've a lot of work to do on the references but eventually of course I'll be very grateful for your comments. I'll be back in touch when I think I'm ready. Best wishes Crossview (talk) 16:40, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Your work in the sandbox is very impressive and comprehensive. I actually did some small changes to it before reading your note above where you wrote "I wouldn't bother looking at it just yet..." - sorry for tampering with it! I found what I thought were a few minor typos, added a couple of wikilinks, and tried changing to the cite book and cite journal templates for the first few references - I've only got partway through, so that's why some are done and others not. Please take a look at what I've changed and amend any errors, and accept my apologies if I made any. (You can click the History tab at the top, and then click the (prev) link on the left of any edit to find out what changes have been made). Best wishes - Euchiasmus (talk) 22:03, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
No problems. I was wondering what had happened to you in fact, so am v pleased we're back in contact. As you can see I've got a lot of changes still to make and will be chipping away at it for a few weeks yet I expect. I'm still strugglling with the logic of what I want to say in some areas. I'd already twigged that I was doing refs to other Wikipedia articles in the wrong way. But the "cite" templates were a surprise. Are these there just to ensure uniformity? I'm wondering now what other templates I should be using. Oh, one last thing. I was delighted to find the reference to the Herald's review of David Butterworth's book. He was a good friend and a great loss to us all when he died suddenly a few years ago. I haven't yet quite worked out where this reference has come from. Is it a piece of Wikipedia magic? Best wishes Crossview (talk) 09:27, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
I use the "cite" templates because they give standardised formatting and I basically find them easy to use. Have a look here for some details - that page links to further information.
As for the reference, there's no magic involved! I stumbled across that webpage when trying to fill in the year and publisher of the book, and thought it was worth inserting. Not sure if you're familiar with the other sites I came across, or if they might be of interest to you: CWAAS catalogue, PastScape and Discover Cumbria, which has very detailed OS Maps. -- Euchiasmus (talk) 20:19, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
Hello again Euchiasmus. I think we can agree that I'm not cut out to be a social historian - at least not if any urgency is required! But at least I'm persistent and I'm pleased to say that I think that my Milburn page is now finally complete. I've just got to sharpen up the statistics in my introduction, then I'm done. I wonder if you could cast an editorial eye over it and tell me where I still need to bring things up to scratch? The thing that concerns me most is that the style in some areas is too conversational. This tends to happen where I'm dealing with speculative subjects. I know that an encylopeadia is meant to deal with facts, but then facts aren't always available in a subject like this and the grey areas tend to be those of greatest interest. So speculation seems inevitable unless you want a very dry account indeed. Anyway, I'll look forward to reading your comments Crossview (talk) 12:53, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
Hello again Euchiasmus. Looks like you're away for a while so I've concluded I'd better press on. I've taken note of your earlier advice, replaced the original Milburn stub with my revision and posted an explanation on the Talk page. It's all /very/ exciting. Hope you're back soon. Crossview (talk) 09:21, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
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 8,334 last month to 8,468 on September 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 56 is just behind WP:GM who have 58. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 48 out of a total number of 2,228 articles.
Currently we have twenty one 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.
Wikipedia 0.8 release
Work is starting on preparing release 0.8 of the off line version of Wikipedia and the articles are in the selection stage. The initial selection has been done using some metrics about each of the articles. The number of projects that are interested in the article and the breadth of the individual projects. This is followed by the ratings of quality and importance that have been assigned to the article by each of the interested projects. There is also factored in what is termed the "External interest points" which is based on the number of hits the article gets, the number of unique internal links the article has and the number of inter-wiki links the article has. If you want more detail of the algorithm used then see here.
They have also selected a specific version of each of the articles that they consider is a stable version without vandalism using a version of the WikiTrust algorithm.
After all of this work they have come up with a selection of 116 articles that have been tagged as relevant to our project and these can be viewed here. We have a chance to influence this selection by reporting articles that people do not think are suitable or where an inappropriate version has been selected. It would also be a good idea to try and tidy up these articles before they get published if anyone has the time. Of the 116 the two articles that have been identified by tags as most needing attention are Asda and Rotherham. We have until October 11th to check out and report any problems or improved versions that need to be incorporated in to this release.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The October 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...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered October 2010 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an * before your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 00:18, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
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 8,468 last month to 8,621 on October 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 57 is just behind WP:GM who have 58. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 49 out of a total number of 2,266 articles.
Currently we have twenty two 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.
Dead links
This month I thought that I would concentrate on the problem of link rot in articles. Many of you will have spotted a BOT tagging references with the {{Dead link}} template. The template is added when the external link in a reference is detected as being inaccessible or is a redirect to the main page of the site. You should not remove references that are marked as dead unless you are replacing the reference with a new reference. The information in the reference may be useful to someone trying to locate a valid reference for the text. In order to help this process, when adding references in the first place, add as much detail as possible. It is easier to put in the detail while the reference is in front of you rather than waste someone else's time having to fill in the detail. If you want more detail then see Wikipedia:Link rot.
Many of the project's articles have been tagged in this way by the BOT and it would be useful if members could take a look at the tagged references, when visiting a page, and see if the problem can be resolved. May be the link is now active again in which case it is just a simple task of removing the template. May be an archived copy of the link can be located at the Wayback Machine, just add the link to the reference, if it is templated use the =archiveurl & =archivedate paramerters to record the new location of the link. If the site has been restructured then it may be possible to locate the same page used in the reference by following the links from the home page of the site. In this case replace the URL in the reference and remove the tag. Finally a replacement reference may need to be located if copies of the existing reference cannot be tracked down. If a new reference is used then the old reference and the tag can be removed.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The November 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 8,621 last month to 8,665 on November 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 62 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 60. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 49 out of a total number of 2,292 articles.
Currently we have twenty four 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.
Happy Christmas
Wishing all project members a Happy Christmas and thanks for all the work you have put in to the project over the last year. We have made great strides forward especially in the area of Good Articles
and this month we have a bumper set of seven articles trying for GA status. Some passed the review while others did not, but even a try moves an article forward. Thanks to ll those involved in these articles and keep up the good work.
Cleanup listing
Some members will know that we were subscribed to the clean-up listing that was produced on an occasional basis by a BOT. The BOT owner has left and has not released the source of the BOT for someone to pick-up. The last run of this BOT was in March of this year. Others have stepped in and produced a new tool that runs on the tool server to provide projects with similar information.
The clean-up listing gives details of all of the articles with the project's banner that have clean-up tags attached to them. The listing is in alphabetical order but can be sorted on class, importance or the number of different tags found in an article. If you want the listing grouped by the different tags then the tag grouped listing should be used.
According to the tool run dated 28 November of the 8,729 articles in this project 2,725 or 31.2% are marked for clean-up, though I am unsure how it gets the article count figure as that does not appear to match the counts from the assessment table.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The December 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.
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 8,665 last month to 8,678 on December 13th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 63 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 61. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 49 out of a total number of 2,304 articles.
Currently we have twenty four 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.
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.
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...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered January 2011 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an * before your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 08:13, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
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 8,678 last month to 8,766 on January 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 65 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 60. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 50 out of a total number of 2,342 articles.
Currently we have twenty four 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.
Article Alerts
After nearly a year without the Article Alerts listing after the previous BOT operator departed a new BOT has been developed to give similar functionality. This was trialled on a few projects over the New Year period and has now been rolled out as a replacement for the original BOT. Just to remind members the listing gives changes to the status of articles tagged with the project template. It includes details such as good article candidate, articles up for deletion etc. the full list of workflows covered by the BOT can be seen here.
The BOT runs daily and updates the project listing at Wikipedia:WikiProject Yorkshire/Article alerts. The BOT edit summary indicates the extent of the change so if the listing is watchlisted you can quickly tell if there is anything that may be of interest. If there are things that the BOT does not pick-up then do report them here so that they can be fixed. If you think an article should be covered by the project then add the project template {{WikiProject Yorkshire}} to the talk page of the article.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The February 2011 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.
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...
