This is an archive of past discussions about User:MDCollins. 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.
Hi, I saw from WP:CRIC that you are a Somerset supporter. You may have noticed that I have been doing some work on expanding the articles for their players recently, notably Craig Kieswetter, Omari Banks and Zander de Bruyn. I am also paying particular attention to Andrew Caddick due to his upcoming retirement, and the fact he was a leading England player for a number of years. I would appreciate any input or contributions you might have on these or other Somerset CCC related articles, and particularly would appreciate comments on the how the Andrew Caddick article is shaping up. Harrias (talk) 12:11, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for the message. I am very interested to see what you've been working on - I'll have a proper look when I get a spare bit of time.—MDCollins (talk) 21:58, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I'm not sure who's best to ask about this, but as you're the editor with most edits to the above template I thought you might be the right person. The other day, I asked whether it would be worth adding strike rate and economy rate to the infobox as optional fields. My rationale is that modern cricket, especially with the advent of T20 and the IPL, isn't all about batting/bowling average and being able to score quickly is almost or bowl tightly is almost as important in the short form of the game as batting for a long time and taking wickets. My reservation is that it might make the infobox too long, where should the line be drawn? Although my suggestion at WT:CRIC didn't draw much attention, PeeJay2K3 (talk·contribs) commented (in fact his comment was the only reply) that it might be useful to have the number of 4s and 6s or the bowling strike rate. Anyway, just a thought. Thanks, Nev1 (talk) 19:14, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
Hi - thanks for the message. I'd seen the conversation but was waiting to see what others thought. My personal opinion is that it is long enough, but if there is consensus for lengthening it then that can be done. I'll have a think about it and we'll see if we can get any further comment.—MDCollins (talk) 21:29, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
Adoption
Hi
I'm good with cricket, I've alot of knowledge about the game...
I'd like to help develop cricket and AFL (Australian Football League) in wikipedia. I work well with anyone who has good knowledge about sport, I'm new and raw and will require some assistance. You can read my (talk) for more Information on what I'm like, I'm mostly sport.
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 6,651 last month to 6,881 on August 23rd). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 41 out of a total number of 1,972 articles. In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 47 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 44.
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
Summer treasures?
As the summer holiday season draws to a close, it is likely that many of our project Yorkshire members will have visited the Yorkshire coast. Some will have digital photographs stored on their camera cards or have leaflets and guide books about places they have visited. Now is the time to put all that wonderful treasury of information onto Wikipedia, before they all get lost in the run up to Christmas. (Ah yes, I can see supermarkets selling off barbecues to make room for baubles.)
There are two major categories for our coastal venues Category:Coastal settlements in North Yorkshire and Category:Coastal settlements in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Many of the articles in these categories are not kept up to date on a regular basis. Although it has to be said that some of the articles about the more popular resorts are well maintained and regularly watched for vandalism. Some tend to suffer from being overlinked to commercial enterprises but most sit there waiting patiently for a bit of TLC.
Fish and tricks at the seaside
Our own watchlists often become unmanageable after a while, so here is a way to make the task of keeping an eye on specific articles much easier.
You can create your own separate Watchlist for any articles that you are interested in helping to maintain or expand by:
listing the articles on a clean Sandbox page
clicking on "Related changes" in the toolbox area to get a list of recent changes for your adopted articles
copying and pasting the URL displayed on the address bar of your browser to a convenient place, maybe your to do list.
And, of course, you can change the options at the top of the page to display more or fewer changes, as usual.
(This trick works for any special little watchlists that you might like to create!!)
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 August 18th.
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...
Delivered September 2009 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an * before your username on the Project Mainpage.
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...
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...
Hi. Judging by talk pages/histories you're the most regular contributor on the Rebus novels. I've read a fair few of them of late and look at the pages it strikes me now that it'd more appropriate to merge all the character articles but Rebus into a List of characters from the Inspector Rebus series (or similar title). Then expand that, adding all various characters that appear across multiple books. Cafferty and Siobhan could sustain their own articles, but in their present state I reckon they'd look far neater tidied up and put in a larger list. Then if they get too big they can be split off again. Just thought I'd run it by you before getting on with it. HornetMike (talk) 00:26, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Fine by me - I haven't touched any of them for quite a while now. Like you say, they can always be split off again if there is a lot of content. Go for it.—MDCollins (talk) 18:47, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Done. I've only read a bout a third of them, and borrowed them from the library so I don't have them with me, so the information is pretty basic. So there may be character/information omissions that should be in there. HornetMike (talk) 20:59, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
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...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered January 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) · 14:49, 2 January 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 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...
I re-read the edit summary of a reply I made to you here and I realised you might interpret it in the wrong way. The bit about "confused nagging" isn't meant to say anything other than I was just refering to your edit of "there's something nagging in my mind ... but I might be confusing it with something else". Anyway I just wanted to be clear that no other meaning was meant in my edit summary. Sorry, Rambo's Revenge(talk)17:02, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
Hey! If I wasn't agreeing with you, then maybe I could have mis-interpreted it; but as we are forming consensus, and seem to be in agreement I doubt I would have even thought about it! Thanks for the thought though. —MDCollins (talk) 23:27, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
Long time, no talk! I've been leaving you to 'your own thing' rather than bothering you about 'Thomas' stuff, but I could do with an opinion here. I'm having a real battle with an anon editor who seems to have swallowed the entire rulebook and is applying WP guidelines to the letter with a litigious fervour I have not previously encountered here. There are a lot of editors who have been rankled by his activity. An example is that he sees the {{for2}} template as unnecessary and has been religiously changing them to anything else, including inappropriate {{main}} templates. We use {{for2}} to link subsections of the T&F/RWS character pages.
Recently he attacked Major characters in The Railway Series, changing all the {{for2}} links to {{main}}, which of course is misleading. (He has done the same to the T&F pages. I have yet to find the enthusiasm to correct them.) After much heated discussion, ranging across WP, I have re-re-applied the {{for2}} templates that link to the TV series page (with revised wording) and he seems to be tolerating these, for now.
However, in the 'main' characters at the start of the article, the context of the link to the TV series is different and hence the format is different too. If you look at the most recent stream of edits (23 Feb), he has changed my recently-applied formatting to a different form, where the link is more disguised. I cannot decide whether his edits were good for the article or not, and just wanted your opinion on whether they provided the best wording for a link between the RWS and T&F pages.
I hope the above makes sense. I ended up editing very late last night, and the after-effects haven't worn off yet. Cheers.
Hiya - sorry I haven't been any help recently. I did notice the rather "kind" message he left on your talk page yesterday and had a look at the tfd discussion but it was late and even I was getting confused with them all. I've had a quick look at the Main characters (his last edits); I don't find a lot wrong with the format (apart from Don and Doug which is a broken link...), don't see it makes much difference. However, I don't think the link is even necessary. Why link to a TV series summary when it then points to the {{main}} anyway? Why not remove the link altogether? Could leave in place "Duck is a main character", or remove it altogether as the main characters cross over anyway (just point out the exceptions)? Actually re-looking back at how it looked last month, maybe it does make a difference. It is more clear that the old link would link to a character summary, rather than perhaps the main article. Could revert, or consider removing.
We either need a "Main" template or the "see also", both is probably excessive. I'll have another look into things tonight.—MDCollins (talk) 10:43, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
Thank you. You have made me re-evaluate the need for those links, and you are right, they are not needed. Each of the main characters also has a "Main" template leading to their main article, which covers both book and TV characteristics. The section in "Major characters..." and its T&F equivalent are only summaries, so it is not right to cross-link one summary to another. The lesser characters are another matter, since each subsection is effectively a 'main' in its own right, and cross-linking is entirely appropriate.
I'll remove the links now (which were all 'pre-move' anyway!).
Thankfully our 'friend' must have gone to bed as everything's been much quieter so far today -- yesterday the intensity was getting towards the point of me considering giving up editing...
Don't do that! Just remember that these editors who just turn up and try to change everything get bored after a few days, and in a couple of weeks you can do a mass revert and they probably won't even notice. Remember the trouble in the past - Felix? etc. Those who stick around edit longest!—MDCollins (talk) 22:55, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
Ahh. Sage words, my friend, thank you. It was the intensity that was the problem, and once he started stalking my contributions I wondered what I'd have to do to escape and get on with my other editing in peace. (He must have been stalking as there's no way he'd have otherwise stumbled across Tower Bridge and the Furness K2 (suggested prototype for Edward)...)
Things have moved on. He has gloated over 'winning', regarding the overlinking in steamroller -- it took an effort to avoid getting into a slanging match there! But his TfD for {{for2}} has been thrown out. Now he's trying to prove that that template can only be used as a hatnote (where it is unlikely to be useful). Sigh. I am biding my time. There are about 6 of 'my' articles he has attacked (among 100s of edits), and I'll need to revisit them when things have quietened down. (He also has a thing about heading text, and most are reduced to single words.) Some of his edits are good, but his style is so confrontational (BOLD+++) that this is not so easy to spot. As for the template, I now don't care if he gets his way, as I'll just create a new template to do the same job, or else apply the formatting directly, which is how it was applied in the first place!
The actual changes I've made to the articles are RULE based. They are not my own opinions of aesthetics. You simply cannot use that style of disambiguation on Major characters in The Railway Series because it is not necessary and unwieldy. Also the hatnote is not meant to be used in this function. Also, disambiguation is for terms that may be CONFUSED. Clearly, the application is for related articles. Disambiguation is used for tangential topics, not related topics.
The obsession with hatnotes is yours. My obsession is making a quality encyclopaedia.
Wikipedia has very few rules, essentially they relate to Notability, Reliability (of information) and Verifiability. Beyond that there are Policies and Guidelines, and these are to be applied using common sense.
You should also be aware of Wikipedia:Ignore all rules, which allows any editor to ignore a 'rule' if it is preventing the improvement of Wikipedia. Claiming that {{for2}} can only be used as a hatnote is just such a rule. You should be well mindful of that if you want to avoid making every WP editor hostile to your intents.
If you got out of your thomas world, you would see that NO article uses this hatnote to link to other articles. Hatnotes are for disambiguation, and if you want to disambiguate bluelinks, then do it in the paragraph. YOU DO NOT NEED {{for2}}!100110100 (talk) 21:46, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
Well said, that man. I've just written effectively the same thing on the "Major characters" talk page (before seeing what you'd written here). Do you think he'll get the point?
The fact that this format isn't used outside these articles may simply reflect the fact that there are no other subjects (currently) that need this treatment. Doesn't mean it's wrong!
BTW Mr 308 the only reason I am spending a lot of time in 'my thomas world' at the moment is because of your continuing insistence on degrading the articles. What I should be doing at the moment is post-FA review of two articles, GA preparation of a third, and pre-DYK proof-read of a fourth. That is why I might not get round to repairing the articles for a number of weeks. -- EdJogg (talk) 02:35, 28 February 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 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...
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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...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered April 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) · 09:07, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
In your travels, can you please standardize on Wilbert Awdry as the normal link, this being the actual article title? (There are 10 or more redirects!)
I use the standard formatting: ...the [[Wilbert Awdry|Rev. W. Awdry]]... to produce ...the Rev. W. Awdry...
Also, where you see written "[t|T]he Railway Series of children's books by...", could you remove the 'of ' please? Most likely to be encountered in prototype loco pages, but I don't expect you to go hunting for them!
2. - to "The Railway Series children's books by..." - really? OK, having thought about it for a few minutes, I see your point but it's a bit clumsy; It's not as simple as "The Winnie the Pooh children's books" because of the use of 'series' as a proper noun. TBH, won't "The Railway Series by..." be just as effective? If it's not obvious, they'll click through if they don't know who/what/where/how won't they?—MDCollins (talk) 22:16, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
It is a bit clumsy, but it is providing complete and concise context for pages where the very presence of such information can be frowned upon! You could get away with removing 'children's', perhaps, but I think 'books' is needed to focus just what 'The Railway Series' is. For an example, see LMS Stanier Class 5 4-6-0#In fiction; I usually try to restrict such references to the minimum text. -- EdJogg (talk) 11:26, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
OK, fair point. In articles ex-universe, as it were, such as the Black Five article your text reads fine. Other articles, directly within the WP:THOMAS framework it could be simplified. The first sentences have got quite long too (and overlinked?), I was wondering whether the Whyte notation could be moved later in the lead nearer to which class of locomotive it was based on. Also, when is anthropomorphism not fictional? Tautology? Tell me if I've cut too much out here... Example:
Incidentally, the italicising of characters is a bit hit and miss. Some of the full names are italicised (Gordon the Big Engine) (I'm not sure whether it necessary or not), but the piped links tend not to be. Thoughts?—MDCollins (talk) 12:02, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
Moving Whyte notation, fine. Not sure about losing fictional or keeping anthropomorphic. Comparison with other articles is inconclusive. None of the Alice in Wonderland animals mention anthrop., but Lightning McQueen (from cars) does. Several articles don't mention fiction, but those that do tend to link fictional character (I looked at a couple of Cars characters too). I don't really have a strong opinion -- just consider what someone coming to the character/article for the first time might think.
Italicising should be done in accordance with WP:MOS, so book or story titles probably should be, and characters not. Different rules may apply at the start of the multi-character pages where we want to highlight the name the first time -- bold might be permissible there, since most are also redirect targets.
I would assume that the first thing that a lot of people looking at the article for the first time would probably think "anthropo-what?". What about keeping fictional, but unlinked? I'm just concious of the possibility of 4/5 consecutive words being linked to separate articles, which is confusing and excessive. I guess the difference between "A in W" is that animals in fiction tend to be anthropomorphic anyway. Locomotives are seen as inanimate (sort of) and it is the added face in illustrations that makes them more anthrop than normal. Can you see what I'm getting at?—MDCollins (talk) 14:02, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
Yes, actually the same thought had occurred to me, but I didn't have time to write any more! Your linking suggestion seems sensible, although the 'anthrop...' article doesn't obviously mention fictional either! -- EdJogg (talk) 16:43, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
OK, so we re-write anthropomorphism as well!! My thoughts while at work were maybe try this: [[anthropomorphism|fictional anthropomorphic]] or [[anthropomorphism#In literature and arts|fictional anthropomorphic]] although that section is pretty dire. It would increase the blue sea, but would keep the links more logical. The Literature section of anthrop almost seems more of a description of allegorical than anthrop. It makes you wonder whether it is even worth linking to; however, we should. I'll add it to the long list of things that I don't have time to tackle.—MDCollins (talk) 23:12, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
My ToDo list grows quite happily by itself, so I'm afraid you're on your own with that one.
As an idea to reduce the 'blue sea', how about this?
Urgh. Doesn't seem right that we should distinguish diesel locos and not mention steam-power. We could use a phrase such as "...steam locomotive with a tender..." (or "...steam locomotive with side tanks to carry the water...", as appropriate). I'm not sure how far we should dumb-down here! We certainly cannot assume any technical knowledge of the workings of a steam loco!]
And I keep being drawn back to wanting 'steam locomotive' to precede 'character' in the first sentence. Maybe if we don't link it there, we can then link 'tender loco'/'tank loco'/'diesel-electric loco'/'diesel-hydraulic loco' later on? Although it is recommended practice to link the very first occurrence, where you have a series of links I think you can get away with linking a little later -- especially for something like 'steam locomotive'. So we have:
Using a semi-colon in place of the 'and' (after 'Christopher') works well at breaking up the flow, I think, provided that it's clear 'he' refers to Henry and not Christopher! We might be able to drop 'character' too, but I think it's OK. Still not happy about that second sentence; still has adjacent links... -- EdJogg (talk) 11:09, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
Maybe we're being to pedantic about this; You mention dumbing down the technical knowledge, but for those without any background in steam locomotion, will they care enough about the actual workings? There isn't anything wrong with adjacent links so long as it scans well enough to guess which links point where. If you think it works better to have steam loco after fic.anthrop. I'd be happy just to link it I think (but drop character). The semi-colon works well.....
..well, if you really want me to be pedantic, we mention 'green' in both sentences -- a problem that will only affect Henry, James and Edward -- but otherwise I don't think we can improve on it!
Good! We don't have to mention green twice if it is unnecessary... Just realised that we agreed on your talk page that TRS would not be italicised though; I've removed them in the finished example. Wikibreak for a few days now, but at least we're sorted!—MDCollins (talk) 20:40, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
I need to read through the Thomas article properly, but what I've read seems very good. Did you mean to omit 'the' from The Railway Series in the first sentence? --EdJogg (talk) 13:09, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Um, no - well spotted. That's what you get from re-organising the existing links! Haven't touched the TV aspect or the later sections; for my money the list of model railway gauges and manufacturers can go...—MDCollins (talk) 21:26, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Agree about the gauges/manufacturers, although some info is not present at 'Merchandise' yet. That paragraph needs to be re-written and perhaps better summarise the Merchandise article.
Incidentally, going back to my original point, did you know that Rev Awdry has no less than EIGHTEEN redirects to his name? Only two have any mainspace links: "Wilbert Vere Awdry" and "W.V. Awdry". Like I said, I'm tackling them as I find them.
That's rather a lot, but I'm not surprised given the permutations of his name! On a similar note (sort of), I just saw your edits to the Cameo section of TRS, and wondered about the wording of the first sentence. Could we say "The Rev. W and Christopher Awdry..." instead of "The Rev. W Awdry and Christopher Awdry"? Speaking it aloud it works, but I'm not sure in print. If he wasn't titles, "Wilbert and Christopher Awdry" works fine, and is infinitely better than the reptition. What do you think?—MDCollins (talk) 12:29, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
Good point - lots of work to be done! I was having a look at the project page yesterday and saw that some of the rationalisation still hasn't been done (4 years after we agreed, 2 years after I was determined to make a start on it...).
We still need to tackle the Skarloey Railway issue, although since we last discussed it, most of the main engines now have their own pages (which I have just let pass) so this should make things a little easier to resolve. I suggest we tackle other areas first!
Fantastic!! Nice work - that was on the list too. The other domestic comps need a bit of attention too (something I was looking at I'm sure went to 2008. Pro40/Friends Provident need noting as former competitions etc. I'll try and make sure all the Unicorns players (that have played 1 match before ;-) have got articles too.—MDCollins (talk) 22:58, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I am not sure how double hooks were so I checked each under the normal criteria you would use for one article. They both pass the character limit, are well referenced and so on. Should be fine. It was submitted fine, good stuff! SGGHping!00:50, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
It used to be so simple, but then it all got templated up, with templated tags and templated messages, icons, section headings and all that. SGGHping!00:57, 3 May 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 8,063 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...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered May 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) · 07:13, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
On May 12, 2010, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Unicorns (cricket team), which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, quick check ) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.
Hi, I just noticed the list before you sent me the message - great work! It looks pretty decent and the referencing has shaped up well. I'm sure it doesn't matter too much that some of the Truro School Reunited links are not usable for non-Truronians, particularly if there's no other available link. Not sure why some work and some don't, that is a bit odd. Even so, it all looks good, and a lot more professional than the previous arrangement. Bretonbanquet (talk) 01:01, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
Hi MDC,
Yep, you're absolutely right, the article seemed pretty moribund: no references, very little activity in its time as a live article. Seems to me this was simply through lack of input, rather than a redundancy of the term, however.
The redirect has resulted in a number of perverse (in the legal sense} outcomes.
- Part-time medium-pacer Steve Waugh, who in his day specialised in bowling in the closing overs of ODIs, is now tagged as a failed quick.
- Bruce Yardley - whose "technique was slightly unusual in that he bowled at near medium-pace" (fulldisclosure: yes, I have knowingly pointed this out in his article is now tagged a failed quick.
-Rohan Kanhai's part-time medium is now that of a failed quick.
I would argue that medium pace is a discipline correlated but semi-independent of Fast bowling, and should have a stand-alone article. Your thoughts on this matter? --Shirt58 (talk) 12:42, 17 May 2010 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for your thoughts here. I've always been a bit confused by that medium pace article. To my knowledge, most of the bowlers I'd stumbled over (hadn't checked them by any means) have either linked to [[fast bowling|medium]], [[seam bowling|medium]] or [[swing bowling|medium]]. Often it seems that it is hard to reference whether they are just slow non-spin bowlers, whether some are medium who swing a bit, or just plain medium. As I'm sure you're aware, once they get slightly faster than fast, they can be either medium-fast or fast-medium (I always assume the former is slower). TBH I only shoved it to fast bowling as it seemed the most comprehensive, and the parent article (hopefully) of seam bowling and swing bowling.
I think a look at all three to try and work out the distinctions between them would be a worthwhile project for somebody, but in the state it was in, "medium pace bowling" wasn't a lot of use to anybody, most people probably didn't know it existed (I'd never seen it before) and I didn't think it was the list box of types of cricket bowling. I now see it was (my bad) and it has affected more articles than I thought it would. If you proposed un-doing the move, I wouldn't object; maybe it just needed a better clean-up, but there has never really been much consistency. To which article would one link a slightly faster than medium bowler? It's hard to distinct between them sometimes.
Incidentally, I've just had a look at bowling (cricket) which fails to mention the types of bowlers at all (save in the info-type-box); the template on that page Template:Cricket positions has [[Fast bowling|pace bowling]] and spin bowling (under the [american] category: "defensive players"; "offensive players" lists batsman, batting order and runner!, but not Merv Hughes ;-) ). Some work to be done methinks...Feel free to bring this to WT:CRIC if you want.
Yeah, I got a fair few photos, and I've definitely got squad numbers for the starting XI in the programme. Have a look through my flickr images, and let me know if you want any releasing. I copyright them there, but would be more than willing to upload them to the commons for use here on request. Regards, Harriastalk09:22, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
Alumni
I think WP:SCHOOLS would be a good bet. I was trying to think of a way we could get more people involved in the discussion, and try and establish a stronger consensus, and that might be a good way. I don't really know what Corbynz' issue is with the list - it just seems like a no-brainer to me. He hasn't yet put up a decent argument against it, in my view. I would prefer that it didn't come to warnings and blocks, but Corbynz has already reverted three times today, whereas you and I have reverted once each. Let's hope some other editors come along and join the discussion, strengthen the consensus and Corbynz sees sense. In the meantime our case would probably look better by leaving Corbynz' version in place. If there's no advance, we can contact an admin - I can't imagine one agreeing with him. Bretonbanquet (talk) 22:21, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
Now that you mention it, I'm not sure who else uses "T20I" as an abbreviation for "Twenty20 International". Nevertheless, it does feel like a more natural abbreviation than "Int. T20" (no offence). – PeeJay22:08, 30 May 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 8,082 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...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered June 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) · 10:52, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
Hello. Your account has been granted the "reviewer" userright, allowing you to review other users' edits on certain flagged pages. Pending changes, also known as flagged protection, will be commencing a two-month trial at approximately 23:00, 2010 June 15 (UTC).
Reviewers can review edits made by users who are not autoconfirmed to articles placed under flagged protection. Flagged protection is applied to only a small number of articles, similarly to how semi-protection is applied but in a more controlled way for the trial.
When reviewing, edits should be accepted if they are not obvious vandalism or BLP violations, and not clearly problematic in light of the reason given for protection (see Wikipedia:Reviewing process). More detailed documentation and guidelines can be found here.
Thanks for the info you provided at the cricket captains discussion. In light of the fact that the international teams have captains (combined with the canvassing concerns), I've thought it best to just withdraw the nomination for now. So you can feel free to pursue the changes you suggested to the category names for the captaincy categories. Good Ol’factory(talk)00:43, 16 June 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 8,202 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.
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.
Pending changes
The trial period for Pending Changes is under way and will last for two months. Initially this will be restricted to a pre-defined set of articles that are updated on a daily basis. The queue of articles for the trial is here. This involves a change to the article settings, similar to article protection, that allows edits by anonymous and non-autoconfirmed users to be delayed before going live. (It is possible to set it so that all edits need reviewing but this is not been used for the trial.) These edits will only go live when they have been reviewed by another user who has been granted the Reviewer user rights. Pages with revisions waiting review can be found here. A large number of the regular editors have been granted this privilege for the trial and if not it can be requested here. It is a good idea to have a look at the pages that have this applied so that you are clued up for the discussion following the trial. Those of you with one of the selected articles on their watchlist will get a notification at the top of the watchlist page when there are pending changes to an article on their watchlist.
Once the trial is over there will be a discussion on rolling the system out generally or to reject this method of handing changes. If you want more details on this then take a look at the help document.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The July 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 July 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) · 11:38, 8 July 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 8,225 last month to 8,254 on July 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 56 is just behind WP:GM who have 59. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 44 out of a total number of 2,201 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.
Maps
This month I thought that I would focus on the current discussions over the maps used in infoboxes for UK articles.
Firstly an initiative by user Nilfanion (talk) is currently under way on producing map data for the whole of the UK. The maps would cover all counties, wards, civil parishes etc. and be derived from the Ordnance Survey OpenData release. Further details can be seen here where feedback would be appreciated on two specific concerns—the colour scheme and line thickness. Discussion is also taking place as to what features to include on the maps, such as rivers, roads and railways.
Second discussion here on another alternative for mapping data changes to existing maps in infoboxes for districts, boroughs and cities in the UK.
Thirdly a discussion on Wales maps in place infoboxes is under way here, which has branched out into a general discussion on the initiative by user Nilfanionhere.
It would be good if members take time to have a look at these various proposals and comment, where they feel they have some input to offer, as these proposals could potentially affect all of the UK articles with maps in their infoboxes. If you do not speak now then you will have to put up with the results!
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The August 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 August 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) · 10:36, 5 August 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 8,254 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...
Hello, I have completed a general cleanup of the adopter information page for the adopt-a-user project, located here. During my cleanup, I have removed several inactive and retired users. In order to provide interested adoptees with an easy location to find adopters, it is essential that the page be up-to-date with the latest information possible. Thus:
If you are no longer interested in being an adopter, please remove yourself from the list.
If you are still interested, please check the list to see if any information needs to be updated or added - especially your availability. Thank you.
You are receiving this message because you are listed as an adopter here.
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) · 00:25, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
Hi there MDCollins! You may be wondering, what have I done to sound the alarm this time? Nothing. I'm messaging you in regards to the adopt-a-user program, which currently has a backlog of users wishing to be adopted. This doesn't make much sense, as we have a considerable list of users offer adoption, so there shouldn't be any backlog. I've begun to eliminate this backlog myself through a matching program, but I need your help to make it work. Of course, adoptees and adopters don't have to go through there, but I believe it helps eliminate the backlog because someone is actively matching pairs.
On the list of adopters, I have modified the middle column to say "Interests." It's easier working with other users that have similar interests, so if it's not too much to ask, could you add your interests in the middle column? For example, if I was interested in hurricanes, computers, business, and ... reptiles? I would place those in the middle column. Counter-vandalism and the like can also be included (maintenance should be used as the general term). The more interests, the better, since adoptees can learn more about you and choose the one they feel most comfortable working with. The information about when you're most active and other stuff can go into the "Notes" section to the right.
Finally, I've gone around and asked adoptees (and will in the future) to fill in a short survey so adopters can take the initiative and contact users they feel comfortable working with. We all know that most adoptees just place the adopt me template on their user page and leave it - so it's up to us to approach them and offer adoption. So, please take a look at the survey, adopt those that fit your interests, and maybe watchlist it so you can see the interests of adoptees and adopt one that fits your interests in the future.
Once again, thank you for participating in the adopt-a-user program! If you wish to respond to this post, please message me on my 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 8,468 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...
Invitation to particpate in the December 2010 Wikification Drive
Hi there! I thought you might be interested in the December 2010 Wikification Backlog Elimination Drive. We're currently recruiting help to clear a massive backlog (22,000+ articles), and we need your help! Participants in the drive will receive barnstars for their contributions! If you have a spare moment, please join and wikify an article or tell your friends. Thanks!
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...
: 17 August 2009
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.
