This is an archive of past discussions with User:MRacer. 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.
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 6113 last month to 6344 on May 30th). We have recently overtaken WP:LONDON which has 6283 articles. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 38 out of a total number of 1850 articles. In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 42 is just behind WP:GM with 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
Browsers
According to the article Usage share of web browsers the percentage of people using the Mozilla Firefox browser has increased steadily since 2004 and it now stands at 22.56%. The percentage of Wikipedia editors using Firefox is probably considerably higher because the Firefox browser has a number of advantages for editors. Not least of these is the add-on that lets you right click on a web page to get a Cite Web pop up on the menu. WPCITE allows you easily to create a citation template. This makes the laborious task of filling in web citation templates (almost) a thing of the past.
Another advantage of Firefox is the ability to use wikiEd which is a full-featured Wikipedia-integrated text editor that adds enhanced text processing functions to edit pages. And there is a spell checker Currently, wikEd works under Firefox, SeaMonkey, Safari, and Google Chrome, but not under Internet Explorer and Opera.
Mention of these other browsers reminds me that not all browsers render pages in the same way. What appears to be a beautiful layout in one browser can be rendered as a tangled mess of text and images by another. As most browsers can be downloaded for free, it is worth having several on your computer just to check the appearance of articles. Bear in mind that many people who use Wikipedia just for reference will have only Internet Explorer, and possibly quite an old version, so some of the latest "bells and whistles" may not work for them.
My apologies to old hands who already know all this, but to new users it really is worthwhile looking into the possibilities of different browsers on Wikipedia.
September 2011, web browser usage share. Source: Median values from summary table.
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 9th.
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.
As of 30 May, 2009, we have assessed 100% of all articles with a project banner.
(Some new and additional article talk pages may still require a banner however)
Thanks
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.
Delivered June 2009 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 to the WikiProject talk page. → This newsletter/release was delivered by ENewsBot · 00:12, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 6344 last month to 6538 on June 28th). We have recently overtaken WP:LONDON which has 6318 articles. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 39 out of a total number of 1862 articles. In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 45 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 44.
Thank you and well done to all those who contributed.
Article Activity
Siward Barn was promoted to GA on May 10th Oslac of York was promoted to GA on May 18th Thomas Ferens was promoted to GA on June 6th Wilfred was promoted to FA on June 9th Ilkley was nominated for GA on June 11th Sheffield was nominated for a FAR on June 18th Peak District was nominated for GA on June 18th York was submitted for a peer review on June 21st
Member News
There are now 64 members of WikiProject Yorkshire! A warm welcome to the new members that have joined us since the June 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
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
Citing sources for your text
In recent months some really promising Yorkshire articles from new editors have been appearing on Wikipedia. These editors have worked hard to produce interesting and informative texts with some exquisite images. However, some of these articles have lacked any verifiable sources, an absolute must for Wikipedia articles. Additional research is usually necessary to write a good article. An article has to be verifiable and citereliable sources which ideally should include books or peer reviewed journal articles. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed. The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material. All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation.
Fortunately, Wikipedia provides a number of easily used tools to help with this task. Beside the Firefox add on that was mentioned last month there are a couple of toolbar options to help editors.
The first is on the default toolbar. It's the <ref>...</ref> button. This places any text that is placed between the markers in the References section on the article page.
The second handy tool is obtained by going to the my preferences section on the menu tabs at the top of the page, click GADGETS, go to Editing gadgets and check refTools. Save your options and a new CITE button is added to your editing toolbar. This little wonder, when clicked, produces options for citation templates beneath the existing toolbar. It is a fairly simple task then to copy and paste the information into the template and when you've completed as much as you can, click the Add citation button. This produces an inline citation. Of course this all depends on there being a References section on the page with either the <references/> markup or {{Reflist}} template added.
If you are in doubt about an unsourced statement, try copying the phrase or sentence and pasting it into the search box of your favourite search engine. Often this turns up a source which you can then add to the article yourself by filling in one of the citation templates on your editing toolbar. If you want to request a source for an unsourced statement, consider tagging a sentence by adding the {{fact}} template, a section with {{unreferencedsection}}, or the article with {{refimprove}} or {{unreferenced}}. Alternatively, you may leave a note on the talk page requesting a source, or you may move the material to the talk page.
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 June 18th. Here is an extract
The project has 15 top-importance articles. 8 of them, or 53.3%, are flagged for cleanup.
Articles with dead external links (Oct 2008), Articles with unsourced statements (Mar 2009)
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.
Delivered July 2009 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 to the WikiProject talk page. → This newsletter/release was delivered by ENewsBot · 00:32, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 6,538 last month to 6,651 on July 27th). WP:LONDON have had a major tagging spree by a bot and now have 12,595 articles which is twice as may as this project. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 39 out of a total number of 1,946 articles. In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 46 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 45.
Thank you and well done to all those who contributed.
Article Activity
Peak District passed a GA review on July 2nd Ilkley failed a GA review on July 19th Arctic Monkeys kept following GAR reassessment on July 21st York nominated for GA review on July 21st Geoffrey Boycott nominated for GA review on July 25th
Member News
There are now 65 members of WikiProject Yorkshire! A warm welcome to the new members that have joined us since the July 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
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
Images
This month we focus on a recent requirement for images in articles—that of supplying alternative text for each of the images. This has been raised in FAC debates and is now a requirement for FA articles and as a result there is a general push to get all images marked-up. For example the {{Infobox UK place}} is currently undergoing changes in preparation for the use of alternative text on its images.
Alternative text is text added to the image mark-up to describe the image to someone who cannot see the image. The alternative text is in addition to the caption and should not duplicate information in the caption. It should be added, without any wikimark-up or line-breaks in it, using the alt= parameter of the image mark-up. For more information on this see WP:ALT.
Example
The exterior of York Castle, including a large portion of the motte.
[[Image:York castle exterior.jpg|thumb|100px|alt=A tall, circular, roofless building of honey coloured stone positioned on top of a high mound of grass.|The exterior of York Castle, including a large portion of the motte.]]
(If you are using a standard graphical browser and want to read this image's alt text, ask the browser to display the image's properties. Usually right click, properties.)
The same requirement is to be applied to Math-mode formulas but is probably less important to this project as very few of our articles contain such mark-up.
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 June 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...
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.
The Video games project has created a member list to provide a clearer picture of its active membership.
All members have currently been placed in the "Inactive" section by default. Please remove your username from the "Inactive" listing and place it under the "Active" listing if you plan on regularly:
Ideally, members are encouraged to do both, but either one meets our criteria of inclusion. Members still listed inactive at the beginning of November 2009 may be removed. You may re-add yourself to the active list at any time. Thank you for your help, and we look forward to working with you.
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...
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...
Members listed in the "Unknown" section will be removed from the membership list and category at the end of January 2010. You may re-add yourself to the active list at any time. Thank you for your help, and we look forward to working with you.
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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.
