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...
