As you can see, this is about as bare-bones of a newsletter as you can get. The reason for this is that the newsletter has and will be inactive, but we wanted to get a last one out detailing the current state of our project. The truth is that WP:NOVELS is in bad shape. Only a few editors are active in editing inside of our project. Our Peer Review section, this newsletter, our task forces, and our collaboration center are all dead; although a collab is picked each month, not a lot of work seems to occur.
Out of these ashes, we are proposing that the project start an A-class review system. This will hopefully bring people together for reviewing, and will perhaps get the project some sorely-needed attention from others who can come in and help rehabilitate it. Final plans have not been established, but we will see about getting a mass message out to all of the project members if/when it is set up; discussion of this can be conducted on the General Forum.
This newsletter will probably be the last we will have for a long time, as neither Ed nor Kevinalewis have the time to create these every month. However, if any editor is willing to step up and create one, we would be glad to assist you in making it up.
If you don't want to create a newsletter, but would still like to help, there are plenty of things that can be done. As detailed on the right, the Novels Peer Review section has four articles needing attention, but only one review has been done; one from May, one from November, and one from December have not had any comments left on them. Please consider helping out there; even a 15-minute review would help.
Talk between Kevinalewis and the_ed17, the two project coordinators, has led to us deciding to suspend elections for coordinators indefinitely. With the exceedingly low amount of participation in the last elections (five total votes), we do not feel that it is worth it to try to set up another election.
20 positions remain unfilled at the Job Centre. Members who are active project contributors are encouraged to apply even if they can only do a position for a short time.
Collaboration of the Month
This month's Collaboration has been selected by popular vote and is : Shantaram (novel). The next collaboration is due for selection in April, so cast your vote.
Peer review and assessment news
Peer Reviews are still open for four articles – Sector General, Petals of Blood, Scenes of Clerical Life, and Flowers for Algernon. Feel free to submit any novel-related article that you are working on for review, but please consider stopping by and reviewing an article; we need more reviewers for our articles (there is a PR that has been open since May)!
Recently a new worklist had been created and quietly arrived, the Cleanup listing which gives a fairly comprehensive hit list of "novels" related articles that have been tagged for something or other.
Since then a new Article alerts listing has also been added of more topic and "urgent" items worthy of our attention.