WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 4532 last month to 4822 on December 19th). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 29 out of a total number of 1763 articles. In the area of GAs, at 25, WP:YORKS also falls behind WP:GM with 36.
Thanks for all those who have been adding co-ordinate information to articles as a result of last month's newsletter. The major impact has been on the railway station articles, including disused ones, but other location articles have also been tackled. This effort means that the articles can be accessed directly from external sources such as Google maps and gives them a much higher profile.
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.
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.
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
Citations
Citations are a necessity to give credence to the articles that we produce, so that the facts given can be verified. One of the templates that is used for this is {{Cite book}} to give details of books used for creating the articles. There has been some changes to the template that we should be aware of and make changes accordingly when editing articles. The id= field should no longer be used to give the ISBN number for a book instead use the isbn= parameter. The page= and pages= parameters now have the p. or pp. automatically inserted and so we should just put the page number in the fields. Use page= for a single page and pages= for multiple pages. If the insertion of p. or pp. is not required then use nopp=true to suppress this. Note that the number of pages in a book is not specified using these fields and at the moment a new parameter is being discussed to cover this.
Happy New Year
Hope everyone enjoyed the festive season and are not feeling too worse for ware. At the start of a new year we all look back at what has happened in the last year and look forward to the coming year. It is time to take stock of what has happened in the last year well we have managed to get some priority articles selected and to get this newsletter in place to keep members up to date on what is happening. Articles have been tagged and assessed, a watchlist of these has been set up for members to keep track of changes to those articles that the project is interested in. So over all great steps have been made in the last year and thanks to everyone for the efforts put in. Looking forward it is time to make some targets for the coming year. If anyone has any ideas for what we should be doing in the coming year then please share them on the project talk page.
The project is now 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.
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.
The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.
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.
Just a note to say that I don't have access to Grove on this one - so if you do it might be worth checking the details. --Kleinzach23:01, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If you think it more expedient, I hope you will be so kind as to revert my move of Zaira yourself and to correct the Bellini operas navigation template back again, as well.
As to the rather obscure operas of the 17th and 18th centuries, I sincerely do hope that, sooner or later, as many of them as possible may be brought again to the light they very often are worthy of (surely as worthy as Bellini's phantasmal Zaira). All the best. Jeanambr (talk) 17:20, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
cf. the linked bit of the Manual of Style, your last edit on The Tempest added spaces around em-dashes which the MOS proclaims should be unspaced. No biggie since GAR doesn't care and we'd need to do a review of this before FAC anyways, but it might be useful to keep in mind for the future. --Xover (talk) 18:42, 2 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 4822 last month to 5108 on January 30th). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 31 out of a total number of 1798 articles. In the area of GAs, at 26, WP:YORKS also falls behind WP:GM with 41.
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
Article Activity Monitoring
Article activity is now been recorded at Wikipedia:WikiProject Yorkshire/Article alerts by the bot ArticleAlertbot. This gives details of the changes that have taken place in the last 14 days in the status of articles tagged for the project. The status changes being monitored are :-
Proposed deletion
Articles for deletion
Miscellany for deletion
Templates for deletion
Categories for deletion
Good article nominations
Good article reassessment
Good topic candidates
Featured article candidates
Featured article reviews
Featured list candidates
Featured list removal candidates
Featured topic candidates
Peer review
Requests for comments
Requested moves
Did you know
The project is now 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.
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.
The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.
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.
OK, I'll cop it sweet about Königskinder. I read it too quickly.
However, I'll take you up on Ariadne auf Naxos. We're told:
As well as composing the opera, Strauss provided incidental music to be performed during the play. In the end, the opera occupied ninety minutes, and the performance of play plus opera occupied over six hours. ... Hofmannsthal proposed to Strauss that the play should be replaced by a prologue ... Strauss was initially reluctant, but he composed the prologue ... This is the version that is normally staged today, although the original play-plus-opera is occasionally performed (for example, at the 1997 Edinburgh International Festival).
That says that incidental music was composed, performed once, put aside, but now occasionally revived. When that does occur, the incidental music is quite distinct from the music for the opera that follows the play.
Btw, I haven't used "the mere presence of the expression 'incidental music' in an article" to put it into the Incidental music category. There are many hundreds of articles containing this expression, and I chose only those ones that seemed directly relevant. I felt I was being quite judicious, actually. Cheers. -- JackofOz (talk) 22:38, 5 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I've opened a discussion on this at the OP. [1]. All contributions welcome. (I'm notifying all OP members who have participated in the discussions about the portal) Best, Voceditenore (talk) 09:56, 9 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
You may remember we talked about the 'voice part' column in List of operas by Mozart and whether to do similar ones for other lists. There's been a proposal to do one for the List of operas by Handel. I'd be grateful if you could have a look here. P.S. I don't think those proposing this really understand fully what is involved, re castrati etc. --Kleinzach00:24, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Welcome to the fray! I follow up most of the principal author's edits to try and tweak grammar and spelling, but the whole piece feels wrong. It reads as if the main source is Leodis database and other things randomly googleable. I feel I should sit down with Pevsner/Wrathmell and try and rescue the pre-skyscraper stuff, but it's a big job. I did add St John's church. Also, of course, there's the interesting question of "What is Leeds?", ie should this article also include Otley, Pudsey, Harewood, Bramham, etc? (Have you seen Talk:Leeds lately? It's dreadful.) Cheers. PamD (talk) 12:21, 15 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Someone on Talk:Leeds pointed out that some of us in the discussion are allowing the excitement of it all to get in the way of our being useful elsewhere on WP, so I've turned to a (short) book a very kind friend found for me on eBay: A Lifted Study-Storehouse: The Brynmor Jones Library 1929-1979 by Philip Larkin. The current paragraph on the Larkin page about his activities as Librarian I single-sourced from the Richard Goodman article. Knowing as much about libraries as I do about limestone pavements (I know one when I see one, and that's about it) I'm a bit scared about making a total mess of this, and was wondering what the best course of action would be. As the section stands (a) is it hopelessly flimsy in an all-round dismal fashion? or (b) just in need of attention in particular areas? Or maybe I should trim the detail out of the current paragraph, keep it as the introduction and then go into more detail? Did you see that in the autumn someone added a rather fine section on the Critical Opinion of PL? I was especially taken by the quotes from Chatterjee, Sisir Kumar (2007) Philip Larkin: Poetry That Builds Bridges, Atlantic Publishers: India. ISBN8-1269-0606-5, which seemed almost to delight in going against the received opinion of What's Wrong With Larkin. As a matter of interest, how did Such Deliberate Disguises turn out to be? On a completely irrelevent note, I recently happened upon a performance of Verdi's I Lombardi, a piece which proved to be distinctly better than what the standard line on his pre-Luisa Miller operas had led me to expect almost-instinct19:09, 15 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 5108 last month to 5202 on February 17th). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 32 out of a total number of 1801 articles. In the area of GAs, at 32, WP:YORKS also falls behind WP:GM with 42.
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
Orphan articles
Members may have noticed a new spate of article tagging by bots in the last month. A large number (over 250) of articles belonging to the project have been tagged with the {{Orphan}} template indicating that there are no or few incoming links to the article. It would be helpful if members tried to reduce the number of tagged articles by introducing wikilinks into related articles so that there is a minimum of three links to each of the orphaned articles. Once the links are in place the tag can be removed and the bot should not re-add the tag. The bot is currently only doing articles with no incoming links.
Portal
Those of you with eagle eyes may have spotted the change made to the Yorkshire Portal link in the project template. Rather than the usual jig-saw image it has been changed to the Yorkshire Rose image to give it a more distinctive look and hopefully raise the profile of the portal.
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 February 25th.
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.
The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.
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.
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 5202 last month to 5866 on March 29th). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 32 out of a total number of 1828 articles. In the area of GAs, at 35, WP:YORKS also falls behind WP:GM with 40.
To those who have done some work on sorting the orphan articles mentioned in the last newsletter. The number has decreased but there is still some way to go.
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.
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.
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
Co-ordinates
Further runs of the bot to tag articles with the {{coord missing}} template have been made during the last month. This has resulted in a significant number of the project's articles being tagged as needing coordinate data adding. At the time of writing there are 719 articles assigned to the Yorkshire categories with more expected as the bot moves articles from the United Kingdom and England categories into the county categories. It would be good if we could get the number down as when the co-ordinates are in place the article is available to other providers such as Google to display on maps. The best way of doing this is to complete the appropriate field(s) in the infobox template, if there is no template then consider adding one and killing two birds with one stone.
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.
The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.
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.
I wonder if you can give an opinion on the best word break for 'Subdivision'? It's a small matter but Michael Bednarek and I seem to be deadlocked, and I see you are around. See here. --Kleinzach07:53, 10 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It occurs to me that this won't be appearing on your watchlist: Talk:Philip Larkin/GA1. We've a very concientious and methodical reivewer looking over it, and some interesting discussions have been thrown up, some of which might benefit from yr specialist knowledge of the subject! almost-instinct15:04, 30 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
As you'll see if you look at the GA review I've rather thrown my toys out the pram. There's one editor I don't seem to be able to cope with. However the editor who put it up for GA review seems to know what he's doing, and I'm sure would appreciate your comments. Having to write up a Magic Flute... do you write for OPERA magazine, or something?! Since I'm being nosey, may I ask when your Hull years were? I suspect that there are/were people we know in common almost-instinct09:38, 2 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
How very wise, not living in Hull! Can't say my years there were my fondest. My father worked in the university administration in the mid-70s, so probably knew Larkin to a degree. The only thing my mother can recall hearing Larkin say to him was "Ah, David, last time I heard, you were in foreign climes". That sounds about right! almost-instinct10:02, 4 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 5866 last month to 6113 on April 25th). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 41 out of a total number of 1835 articles. In the area of GAs, at 36, WP:YORKS equals WP:GM.
Thank you and well done to all those who contributed.
Article Activity
Architecture of Leeds was promoted to GA on April 5th York was nominated for GA on April 7th York failed its GA review on April 17th
Member News
There are now 60 members of WikiProject Yorkshire! There have been no changes in the membership since the April newsletter.
Thanks
To those who have done some work on adding co-ordinates and infoboxes to articles as mentioned in the last newsletter. The number has decreased but there is still some way to go.
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.
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.
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
Article tagging
This month I thought that I would focus on article tagging. Article tagging is the means of identifying that an article is within the scope of the project. This is done by placing the project template {{WikiProject Yorkshire}} on the talk page of an article below any existing project banners. Some pages have a number of banners and can get very cluttered, if this is the case then a shell is used to wrap the templates together and collapse them down to a single line. The main shells in use are {{WikiProjectBannerShell}} and {{WikiProjectBanners}} and any new template should be added inside the shell template. There is no longer a requirement to add the 'nested=yes' parameter to the Yorkshire template when doing this as it will be ignored.
Why tag, you may ask, the reason is to be able to locate relevant articles among all of Wikipedia's articles. If article 'Foo' is relevant to Yorkshire then, unless it is tagged, no one in the project will know it exists unless they happen to stumble across it. The odds are against this happening so tagging makes it easily identifiable to project members.
Once an article has been tagged it can be assessed to see what quality and importance it is to the project. This is done using the assessment parameters to the template, 'class=' and 'importance=', you can leave these to more experienced people to pick-up and assign. The results of this are shown in the statistics table on the left of the newsletter. Tagging also makes the articles appear on the project watchlist, article alerts log and clean-up listing when they are refreshed by the appropriate bot. It also provides readers with a point of contact if they wish to discuss the article in more detail and no responce has been received on the article's talk page or a wider audience is required on the discussion.
I would therefore encourage members to add the project template to the talk pages of articles they find that are relevant to the project so the rest of us know that it exists. You can also tag templates, categories etc. as these are all relevant to maintenance of the articles in the scope of the project. Vandalism on a template can affect a large number of articles so it needs watching.
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.
The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.
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 May 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 · 07:34, 5 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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.
Hello from the Opera Project. I'm writing to all members on the active list to let them know that we could use your input on several issues currently under discussion on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera:
The use of italics in article titles
Possible changes to the article guidelines concerning "Selected Recordings"
Suggestions for the July Composer of the Month and Opera of the Month
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.
Terrific! And many thanks for the prompt response. Opera Japonica isn't a live site any longer, but there may be other synopses there (by other authors) that can now be used here. --GuillaumeTell 23:48, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
No. The OTRS identifies Kleinzach as the owner of the site. It doesn't give permission for us to take what we want. Only he can move material from there to here unless he files another OTRS opening up the site completely. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 00:57, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
Well, of course you're able to use anything you wrote (unless you signed over rights to Kleinzach), but just better to be careful when a problem could arise. =)
Thank you for letting me know. The synopsis provided comes directly from the program for the opera itself. I had planned on crediting the summary to the author (D. Kramer), but I was not sure how to do this. Please forgive me for my lack of knowledge. Even with crediting the author, does one need to paraphrase the summary? Also, how can the author be credited? I was rushed yesterday with typing it out, so I was planning on going back to check for errors and crediting the author today. Thanks again for letting me know. --Another Believer(Talk)17:50, 12 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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...
Thanks for your note on my talk page. I'm still not fully caught up. I'm not sure about the Gendarmes duet. I'd guess that they're both baritones of any kind. One could be a bass-baritone, but since it's a comedy song, I think vocal type is probably less crucial than characterisation. I don't think the song is very rangy, so most male singers, except maybe some tenors, ought to be able to handle it. I haven't had a chance to consider your Gaiety question, but I'll take a look when I get a chance. All the best, -- Ssilvers (talk) 01:42, 21 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I think you are right about the copy violation aspect. I'll try to reword the text tomorrow. I only added the refs because the name jumped out from a childhood memory of visiting Leeds Town Hall. Thanks for pointing it out. --Harkey (talk) 17:05, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I've moved some text, added headings, added infobox and reworded parts to try to avoid copyright issues. Please, if feel that you can improve on my efforts (and I'm sure you can), continue the good work.--Harkey (talk) 18:17, 25 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I finally got to your question. You are correct, the date is 1871, and I have now corrected it at the opera article and on Farnie's article. I can open the google book link to the libretto in the External Links. Unfortunately, it seems that you cannot access it from the UK. If you can find a link that works from your computer, feel free to substitute it, but the copy of the libretto that is there now has a title page showing the first date of performance and some production info, e.g. that Soldene directed. Charles Morton (impresario) was the theatre manager, and apparently this was his regular company at the theatre. -- Ssilvers (talk) 01:51, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Looking forward to seeing what you found. After many run-ins with you-know-who about two years ago, I stopped contributing anything about English-language translations/adaptations of the European operettas. He objected to all information about the English versions, saying that the info doesn't belong in the articles and that if I must write about them, I would have to start separate articles. This is a strategy with which I strongly disagree, because I think the reader of English Wikipedia should be able to see info about English-language versions of operettas and their original versions without having to click back and forth between two articles. Is it safe to wade back into operettas, or is he still monitoring them? -- Ssilvers (talk) 14:24, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds good. Of couse, if we expand the discussion of the original European production, then information about the English-language productions will usually be better balanced. All the best, -- Ssilvers (talk) 21:57, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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.
Thanks for the comment at Voceditenore's talk page. Your thoughts were very helpful and clear. If I come up with any other problems I certainly will come to you for help. Thanks too for fixing The Bartered Bride U.S. premiere info.Singingdaisies (talk) 00:39, 12 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Yes I was tired. I have a rather cushy job with a lot of down time/gaps so I do a lot of editing while at work. I am music director of a church and it really only takes about 4 hours a day to do what I need to do. Wikipedia helps pass the time. Of course Christmas and Lent/Easter season are crazy. lolSingingdaisies (talk) 18:15, 16 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
On September 17, 2009, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Gustav Hölzel, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits your article got while on the front page (here's how) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.
Thanks for the compliment. Perhap's Marini's portrayal of Felice in the United Kingdom premiere of Poliuto in 1852 got you onto that article. It probably was the Les Martyrs version performed in London given that Marini is a bass. I contemplated giving the opera's name as Les Martyrs, but Grove specifically said Poliuto. What do you think?Singingdaisies (talk) 18:19, 26 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
That makes perfect sense. Do you think the article is fine as it is or should I mention that the performance was probably an Italian translation of the 1840 French revision (of course that comment could be considered OR...)?Singingdaisies (talk) 21:03, 26 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the feedback. I wonder if any other sources list Nourrit as a librettist... I've currently got a few projects in progress but one of these days I might get around to digging up some more content on Poliuto.Singingdaisies (talk) 21:16, 26 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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...
In this case Wikipedia:Naming conventions overrides other languages if a proper name in English exists. Your examples of La Scala and Theater an der Wien are amusing, however do not work, because in this case it's the name of the opera, just like "La Fenice" would obviously not be under "Phoenix" (I think we can agree on that). However the theater in Turin does not have its own "brand" name, it is simply the royal theater, as is evidenced in the name inscribed on the UNESCO listing of Residences of the Royal House of Savoy. cheers Gryffindor (talk) 18:10, 5 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Please, do you have any knowledge of the architect C.Hodgson Fowler. I have been tidying up the Sykes Churches Trail and his name has cropped up a couple of times. All that I can get by googling is passing references. I thought you might know of a book or other source that I might obtain. Thank you.--Harkey (talk) 21:36, 7 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your very informative reply. Yes, a stub would be very useful. I shall try to obtain a copy of the book that you mentioned. It was only published in 2001 so BL at Wetherby must have one.--Harkey (talk) 08:41, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the minor alterations. I actually prefer your lede to mine. :-) I had seen The Trial at Rouen years ago while I was an undergraduate music student at Westminster Choir College. One of my professors somehow had a VHS copy of the opera, although I don't think it has ever been released commercially... I remember really enjoying Malbin's performance of Joan and since I recently have created articles on many of the role creators in this work I decided to write an article on it.Singingdaisies (talk) 00:48, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Utopia, Limited has been punctuated (or not) in every conceivable way (sometimes with the dreaded parentheses). Gilbert's libretto disagrees with some of the vocal scores (which disagree with each other), and the punctuation of the name varies within the libretto itself! The cover page has the word Utopia over the word Limited. Gilbert's own correspondence is inconsistent, and other publications that list the names of all the operas are all over the map, although a plurality punctuate it Utopia, Limited in the various publications. Wolfson, Ainger and Stedman all call it Utopia, Limited (at least most of the time). The best score available [here calls it Utopia, Limited. See also the Walbrook chapter on it. Marc Shepherd says that there is no definitive way to punctuate it, and he agrees with me that Utopia, Limited seems to be the best choice. As Ralph Rackstraw says, "I hope I make myself clear...." -- Ssilvers (talk) 17:53, 22 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Welcome back! Please come join the fun at the Philip Larkin Peer Review. There are a couple of instances where we are crying out for the sleek elegance of your prose :-) You'll be pleased to hear the Brideshead Revisited reference has bitten the dust. Also excised is the phrase "...Down Beat, the first of Larkin's many jazz magazines". I was delighted that my puerile joke went undetected for so long almost-instinct10:27, 31 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for sudden silence - am away in paradise for a few days. When I return at the weekend I'll go through the Peer Review page, filleting waht still needs to be done, and sorting it all out so it's more readable. Till then, almost-instinct18:38, 4 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'm beginning to think the my prince has come. Has all the sources, knows the subject backwards, keen to add to the article etc etc. I certainly intend to give him as much help as I possibly can. Given that the gentle peer review process has broken down I have urged him to be bold and amend/add to the text as he sees fit. almost-instinct09:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes I had seen it! (I can't remember why or where - maybe just when I was Googling) At any rate, nice to be reminded of it, a lovely piece, thank you :-) My fave bit:
“Well, I see you are young, but surely you must be at least an associate professor.”
WP:YORKS is a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 7,532 last month to 7,738 on October 30th). WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 43 out of a total number of 2.034 articles. In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 52 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 47.
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 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...
Thanks for the work, it's great stuff!! I don't think the ogg thing needs any text. I fixed the other problem with the infobox images. Each one has a separate name. I got me cross-eyed (and cross) for a while, though. 8-)--Harkey (talk) 19:11, 7 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sitting back and looking at your work with admiration. I've just looked up the definitions for admiration and this one fits best,
Hi again and thank you again. I've just checked through the alt texts for Leeds. I purported to be reading for errors, as you requested, but got so interested in the descriptions that I kept clicking my way back to re-examine the images. I saw things about Leeds that (in all my years living and working there) I had never noticed before! The Civic Hall is a personal favourite building. I agree that John Smeaton is out of place on the page. I think the whole notable/lord mayors section could be moved. I don't quite know where, though. I suppose that it can always be reincarnated from the old version of the page if it's needed in the future for any reason.--Harkey (talk) 16:13, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I would really appreciate more comments on the peer review. I think that the present one concentrates more on structure than content, which I suppose is a temptation for reviewers as it's safe ground for them, particularly when you read the talk page. I would like to see the article achieve GA status for the sake of all the regular editors who have toiled for so long to just maintain the article against vandalism and points of view.--Harkey (talk) 20:18, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
On a totally different note...
After going to the latest revival of the Miller Rigoletto at ENO I was wondering if this chap's name ought to be in blue: Anthony Michaels-Moore. After a Google search I found the following four sources:
Alice Coote is still in red?! She seems the kind of singer who would have a fan club. Thank you for offering to to add details to Anthony Michaels-Moore. Will do it tomorrow afternoon, and leave a this-in-still-in-construction template up for you to remove once you're done almost-instinct22:52, 14 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I knew you would enjoy wikilinking all those opera companies! ;-) Nice chronological order for the Verdi, too. I'm feeling bemused that there's a squabble on the PL page that I'm not at the centre of. Whatever next?! almost-instinct13:38, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The squabble has become a full-scale edit war, so I'm keepinggoing to try to keep well away from the PL page at the moment. SlimVirgin is going against consensus, Allriskinrev infringing rules ... ugh. almost-instinct 11:00, 17 November 2009 (UTC) almost-instinct11:00, 17 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"Uh, you could have [[]] 'd everything that you typed in - that's what I do - and clicked "Show preview" to see whether it came up red or blue" Yes, I know that - but you're not allowing for my suddenly becoming very lazy! In reality I'm not very knowlegeable about the correct names for european houses and imagined that I'd be opening up a can of something I didn't understand ... much easier to let you do it all ;-) almost-instinct14:01, 17 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I would have thought that Anyway, I've mostly been out (healthy exercise, travelling, eating, drinking, buying books, attending a meeting and socialising, listening to singers) today, so am rather out of the loop constituted getting back into the loop :-) Anyway, I'm willing to bet that the list of outstanding items from the PR will still be sitting there patiently when you return... almost-instinct08:33, 19 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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...
Only a small point, but I'm wondering why you made the deletion to the List of operas by Cherubini. Normally in these lists we note alternative names under which the operas were performed, though usually I think in parens after the title. Best. --Kleinzach00:57, 5 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merry Christmas from Hokkaido, where the snow lasts from November to April, the traffic doesn't stop for a snowfall of less than a metre, and the main sport is digging! --Kleinzach03:44, 25 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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 7,870 last month to 7,888 on December 16th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 53 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 51. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 43 out of a total number of 2,048 articles.
Currently we have seventeen 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.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
Every month, two articles will be selected for the project to improve, one B-class and one Start-class. The January 2010 articles are an arbitrary choice of the newsletter editors but members will be asked to nominate future articles for improvement.
Update statistics. (These drastically affect the accuracy of this encyclopedia so make sure the data displayed in the article is up-to-date.)
Check to see if the article is following the appropriate suggested article guidelines.
Make sure the article is NOT an advertisement. If it is written like an advertisement, fix it. If you cannot, notify us on the appropriate subject header on this talk page or on the article 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 December 11th.
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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You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war.
Please stop the disruption, otherwise you may be blocked from editing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.164.56.77 (talk) 23:00, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
