This is an archive of past discussions about User:Northumbrian. 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.
Thank you for reviewing articles. I noticed that you just reviewed Rahul Gandhi[1]. While of course the main purpose of reviewing is to weed out malicious edits, I think it would be good if we reviewers looked a bit further than that. That change introduced a grammar error, and added nothing worthwhile. Adding "one of" to the superlative "most prominent political family" may make sense when there is no clarity who is most prominent, but in this case it only adds confusion where there was none before. It only raises the question: Who are the other most prominent political families? — Sebastian04:02, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
I agree it really doesn't add much, if anything, to the article. But, beyond weeding out malicious edits, my take is that another main purpose of the pending changes trial is to encourage anonymous editors to contribute, even if their first contributions are clumsy as this one was. Something as minor as this I'm willing to let pass through, as beyond my review, it becomes a cleanup issue.
My impression of the trial so far is that many reviewers are already going beyond the strict guidelines given on the project page: that if it isn't vandalism or a BLP violation, then let it through. I've seen edits reverted that I thought were fine; I've seen others let through that were absolutely appalling. What's becoming clear is that every reviewer is going to review pending changes at his or her own interpretation of the guidelines, and also at his or her own comfort level, and that not every other reviewer is going to agree with them.
Anyway, I think if you do look at my reviewing history, you'll see that on quite a few occasions I've gone past the pending changes guidelines myself, weeding out many edits that technically met the standards but that add unsourced content, introduce POV, etc, or otherwise honestly don't add any value (as you suggest in your original post). There are also other occasions when I have accepted an edit that was useful but needed cleanup, and I've gone in myself and added a source or copyedited the addition. Again, reviewers are not going to see each proposed change the same way but will deal with it the best way they see fit at the time. Northumbrian (talk) 04:23, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I like your intention to encourage new editors. I realize it wasn't clear from my post that that editor wasn't new; he or she has done the exact same edit before under a different user name. So it was a sockpuppet, rather than a new user.
Your observation is interesting; I haven't had enough experience to reach a conclusion yet. But obviously the introduction here is starting very differently from the one at de:wp. (I wrote something about that when the discussion started here a year or two ago; if you like I can dig it up.) I must admit, I don't know how to look at someone's reviewing history, and I even forgot my way back to the guidelines; it's strange that there is no link to that on Special:OldReviewedPages or Special:StablePages. — Sebastian04:48, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
I don't know of a specific way to view a particular editor's pending changes either; but in my case (and a large number of other reviewers, I wager), you'll know them in my contribution history as all the edits with summaries along the lines of undid edit XXXXXXX by... :o)
The guidelines are here. To be honest, I'm sure I've rejected many more edits than I've approved, to the point where I thought I wasn't "doing it right" (that is, I was being far too strict) and went back to the pending changes feedback page and sought some perspective and guidance.
Recently, I've been consciously trying to approve more edits than I was at first, but I take your point about perhaps being too careless (as you say, I didn't notice that the edit you pointed out was not made by an anonymous user but rather a repeat offender). I have in the past, on suspicious edits, checked the page history or user contributions, but this one did slip through. Apologies for that. Northumbrian (talk) 05:09, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
No worries - you are obviously more conscientious about this than I am. I wasn't even aware (or had forgotten) that the guideline currently was so limiting. The main reasons why I wrote to you were that it irked me that the sockpuppet had re-reverted my reversion, and that I always get something out of a discussion like this. — Sebastian05:23, 4 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 8,225 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...
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→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 10:37, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
KC Stadium
Hi, not quite sure about the edits you did to KC Stadium re the west stand. The table now has a different name to that in the text, should the text be updated to the table or visa versa? Keith D (talk) 20:24, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
Sorry, the text should be updated to match the table, forgot to do that. Apparently Hull City announced a new sponsor for the west stand, a resort. The old reference on the KC site (a PDF diagram of the stands) hadn't been updated to reflect that yet last I checked when I made the edit; the only other reference found was the brief press release on the Hull City site. I used that for the reference for the name in the table, but forgot to update the stand name in the text. I can do that if you like. Northumbrian (talk) 23:32, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
I've changed the stadium name back to eBuyer in the table and just added a sentence about the new sponsorship agreement in the text with a reference to the Hull City press release. I think we'll need to keep an eye out for drive-by name changes in the table until the situation can be clarified a bit more. Northumbrian (talk) 23:45, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for investigating. I was also confused by the web-site, I had a note to check all of the stand names when the KC stadium site was back working but it does not clear things up as you say the diagram is not up to date. Just have to keep an eye open to see if the site changes the information. Keith D (talk) 10:06, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
Hello again, Northumbrian. I am gettng a headful of Wikipedia this weekend, thanks to your good explanation skills. The reference that someone added to the Jane Greer page is lovely, but the page number is wrong. I went in to change it, and found that while everything else on the page is editable, the references section is blank. What's up with that?Terrierista (talk) 17:08, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
Hello again. The place in the article where you can change the page number is the part enclosed in the <ref></ref> tags in the article's main text area; those tags are generally placed right after the material that the enclosed source is referencing. What the <references/> tag at the bottom of the article does is:
finds the source material enclosed in any <ref></ref> tags in the article's main text and convert them to footnote markers that link to the actual reference in the References section, like this: [1]
moves the source material inside the <ref></ref> tags to the References section
So, to change the page number, click Edit at the top right of the article, then find in the edit box this text (it should be just a few lines down):
<ref>''The passionate mind: sources of destruction & creativity'' By Robin Fox [http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=6tEpG5kCu7QC&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=%22Jane+Greer%22+%22Plains+Poetry+Journal+%22&ots=zwY_fsGFEt&sig=A3UDya_T6mQNsIP-tlkt3XtpFME#v=onepage&q=%22Jane%20Greer%22%20%22Plains%20Poetry%20Journal%20%22&f=false Google Books] p. xxvi </ref>
...and then change the page number right at the end, before that final </ref>, to the correct one. You can then click the Show Preview button to show you what it looks like before you actually save the changes. If it's right, leave an edit summary in the little text box just above the Save Changes/Show Preview buttons (so other editors looking at the page history will know what kind of change you made; it's a courtesy thing), maybe something like "corrected page number in reference", and then click Save Changes. If it isn't right, you can go back and edit and then click Show Preview as many times as you want until it's right before clicking Save Changes.
I hope I'm responding in the right way, but here goes: I think I can breathe a little easier about this article for a while. I changed the incorrect date in one reference, added a third reference about the Writer's Digest award (which, BTW, WD says is not archived online), and left a brief note describing what I did. You have been indispensible, Northumbrian; thanks so much for your generosity. When my life settles down a bit, I think I might like to explore Wikipedia a little more.Terrierista (talk) 20:01, 30 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...
Hi. As you recently commented in the straw poll regarding the ongoing usage and trial of Pending changes, this is to notify you that there is an interim straw poll with regard to keeping the tool switched on or switching it off while improvements are worked on and due for release on November 9, 2010. This new poll is only in regard to this issue and sets no precedent for any future usage. Your input on this issue is greatly appreciated. Off2riorob (talk) 23:43, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 8,334 last month to 8,468 on September 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 56 is just behind WP:GM who have 58. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 48 out of a total number of 2,228 articles.
Currently we have twenty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
Wikipedia 0.8 release
Work is starting on preparing release 0.8 of the off line version of Wikipedia and the articles are in the selection stage. The initial selection has been done using some metrics about each of the articles. The number of projects that are interested in the article and the breadth of the individual projects. This is followed by the ratings of quality and importance that have been assigned to the article by each of the interested projects. There is also factored in what is termed the "External interest points" which is based on the number of hits the article gets, the number of unique internal links the article has and the number of inter-wiki links the article has. If you want more detail of the algorithm used then see here.
They have also selected a specific version of each of the articles that they consider is a stable version without vandalism using a version of the WikiTrust algorithm.
After all of this work they have come up with a selection of 116 articles that have been tagged as relevant to our project and these can be viewed here. We have a chance to influence this selection by reporting articles that people do not think are suitable or where an inappropriate version has been selected. It would also be a good idea to try and tidy up these articles before they get published if anyone has the time. Of the 116 the two articles that have been identified by tags as most needing attention are Asda and Rotherham. We have until October 11th to check out and report any problems or improved versions that need to be incorporated in to this release.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The October 2010 articles selected below are the editors choice as no one came up with any other suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on March 23rd.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered October 2010 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an * before your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 00:26, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 8,468 last month to 8,621 on October 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 57 is just behind WP:GM who have 58. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 49 out of a total number of 2,266 articles.
Currently we have twenty two Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
Dead links
This month I thought that I would concentrate on the problem of link rot in articles. Many of you will have spotted a BOT tagging references with the {{Dead link}} template. The template is added when the external link in a reference is detected as being inaccessible or is a redirect to the main page of the site. You should not remove references that are marked as dead unless you are replacing the reference with a new reference. The information in the reference may be useful to someone trying to locate a valid reference for the text. In order to help this process, when adding references in the first place, add as much detail as possible. It is easier to put in the detail while the reference is in front of you rather than waste someone else's time having to fill in the detail. If you want more detail then see Wikipedia:Link rot.
Many of the project's articles have been tagged in this way by the BOT and it would be useful if members could take a look at the tagged references, when visiting a page, and see if the problem can be resolved. May be the link is now active again in which case it is just a simple task of removing the template. May be an archived copy of the link can be located at the Wayback Machine, just add the link to the reference, if it is templated use the =archiveurl & =archivedate paramerters to record the new location of the link. If the site has been restructured then it may be possible to locate the same page used in the reference by following the links from the home page of the site. In this case replace the URL in the reference and remove the tag. Finally a replacement reference may need to be located if copies of the existing reference cannot be tracked down. If a new reference is used then the old reference and the tag can be removed.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The November 2010 articles selected below are the editors choice as no one came up with any other suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on March 23rd.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 8,621 last month to 8,665 on November 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 62 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 60. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 49 out of a total number of 2,292 articles.
Currently we have twenty four Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
Happy Christmas
Wishing all project members a Happy Christmas and thanks for all the work you have put in to the project over the last year. We have made great strides forward especially in the area of Good Articles
and this month we have a bumper set of seven articles trying for GA status. Some passed the review while others did not, but even a try moves an article forward. Thanks to ll those involved in these articles and keep up the good work.
Cleanup listing
Some members will know that we were subscribed to the clean-up listing that was produced on an occasional basis by a BOT. The BOT owner has left and has not released the source of the BOT for someone to pick-up. The last run of this BOT was in March of this year. Others have stepped in and produced a new tool that runs on the tool server to provide projects with similar information.
The clean-up listing gives details of all of the articles with the project's banner that have clean-up tags attached to them. The listing is in alphabetical order but can be sorted on class, importance or the number of different tags found in an article. If you want the listing grouped by the different tags then the tag grouped listing should be used.
According to the tool run dated 28 November of the 8,729 articles in this project 2,725 or 31.2% are marked for clean-up, though I am unsure how it gets the article count figure as that does not appear to match the counts from the assessment table.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The December 2010 articles selected below are the editors choice as no one came up with any other suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 8,665 last month to 8,678 on December 13th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 63 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 61. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 49 out of a total number of 2,304 articles.
Currently we have twenty four Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered January 2011 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an * before your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 08:21, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
