User:AmosWolfe/Wolfe's WikiWeek

Wolfe's WikiWeek was a planned event by Wikipedia user AmosWolfe.

As of Sunday 1 December 2024, no date has been fixed. The content below has been kept for archive purposes only.

As the name suggests will last for 7 consecutive days. The staring point will most likely be either Northampton or Kettering railway station.

Purpose of the event

There are several reasons for planning this event, listed below in order of importance:

A personal holiday for myself
To acquire photographs for Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia
To promote Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects

Initial Statement

"I plan to purchase a 7-day All Line Rover which is a railway ticket that allows unlimited travel on most National Rail train services in Great Britain. It is my intention to travel around the country by train taking photographs for inclusion in Wikipedia - these will be released under a free licence and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Many of these will be railway-related but any requests for images (railway-related or not) should be placed on the Talk Page."

-=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=-

Places I would like to go

Scotland possibly on the Caledonian Sleeper if a sleeper berth upgrade is available.
Wales - the Valley Lines and some of the more picturesque routes.
- Ffestiniog Railway the only heritage railway included on this type of ticket.
Devon and Cornwall - including a few branch lines.
As many locations as I can from Category:UK rail transport articles needing images.

Places I probably won't go

East Anglia - nothing personal but I spent four years working on the railways there and want to go somewhere different.
Places and routes not included in the rover ticket:
- On the Heathrow Express or Eurostar.
- On the London Underground, Docklands Light Railway and Croydon Tramlink except for interchange purposes.
- Heritage railways - except those that have interchange stations with National Rail stations.

Any of the above may be waived if I get a large number of requests for photographs.

Preliminary project

Before Wolfe's WikiWeek can take place I need to:

~~Get a new digital camera~~ New camera received and ready
~~Beg, borrow, or buy a laptop computer~~ Acer Aspire One purchased
~~Arrange a week off work~~ not currently working
~~Have enough spare cash for my train ticket, overnight accommodation, food and beer~~ sufficient capital
All requirements met

While I was waiting for all of this, I went through Category:UK rail transport articles needing images from A to Z one article at a time. If an article already had an image then I updated the tag on the talk page to imageneeded=no which removed the article from the category. I also found images on Flickr with a Creative Commons licence and uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons. In December 2008 I completed from A to Z and removed 361 articles from the category (1,020 articles remained).

Further work in the category

As editors are adding articles and photos all the time, and not always changing the tag on the talk page (even I have done this), the number of articles in the category had grown again to around 1,230. A further "trawl" took place in October 2009 and reduced the number to 1,036.

Trial Trip 1

On Sunday 24 August I ordered a new digital camera (Fujifilm Finepix S5700). I collected it on Wednesday 27 August. I took a shorter and less expensive trip to familiarise myself with the camera.

I booked a West Midlands Day Ranger ticket on Saturday 30 August and visited several of these stations - (those in bold on the list had no image on the corresponding Wikipedia article at the time of creating the list).

Some images have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and more may follow and be added to articles.

Trial Trip 2

On Wednesday 22 July East Midlands Trains offered a special £10 fare to travel on any train, all day, called "Red Dot Day".

I took some more photographs during this trip.

Find out more

At this time the best thing to do is add this page to your Watchlist and check back whenever this page is updated. You may also use the talk page to ask questions, make requests, or leave comments.