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...