Why did someone write F*CK YOU?
Probably because when you edit something on this page straight after the episode, you find that people are messing around with it at the same time, it's somewhat annoying
Useally I write up vandalism reverts in many many ways in the edit summarys, which is also the case for non-admin users who are cleaning vandalism. So the rv vandalism is just of those codes.
You can wrote those reverts in different ways in the edit summary as long as it is mentioned to make vandal cleaning easier. Generally I use {rv), {rv vandalism), (rv nonsense) or (rv stupidity) for that as well as (rv POV) for edits that violates
NPOV policy.
Also, you can also, like admins, warn users who are vandalizing pages such as the one who did it to Big (i've sent him a warning for that). You can use the vandal warning system
[1] by using the template subst:test (put {{ }} ) for vandalism (from 1 to 4 as only admins block users (test5 and above), subst:blatantvandal for blatant vandal., subst:test1a (or until 4a) for those removing contents, subst:comment (from 1 to 4) for NPOV violations and subst:test-self for those who've vandalized a page and reverted on their own. One user had suggested me to use the system after I was reverting vandalism in multiple pages.
By warning users that they cannot vandalized a serious project is a way to lower the vandalism, when they eventually get blocked by admins after repeat offensives.
Often I also put the page name after the type warning (exemple: subst:test1 | Big)
Administrators have their own codes for reverting vandalism, this is why we can see like Reverted edits, or revert to revision or BOT: rv edits, etc.
Just for your info it was
User:70.179.101.248, the one that preceded your revert, that added that nonsense. Generally, I would say about 90% of the vandalism are coming from unregistered users such as the above. So, be especially aware of IP (or anonymous users) whom also omits quite often to put any edit summary (although me too write brief summarys a lot too.) --
JForget21:18, 19 November 2006 (UTC)reply
Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia, Ecco1983! However, your edit
here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove spam from Wikipedia. If you were trying to insert a good link, please accept my creator's apologies, and try to reinsert the link again. If your link was genuine spam, please note that inserting spam into Wikipedia is against policy. For more information about me, see
my FAQ page. Thanks!
Shadowbot22:18, 20 November 2006 (UTC)reply
Hello Ecco
I found you through the Dyspraxia category page, which I also have (along with 'symptoms of dyslexia). I was reading your journal, which I thought was quite well laid out, is it ok if I pinch some of the applicable userboxes? I'm just mentioning it as a thing to say, really.
Hi Ecco1983! You have identified yourself as a user from
Manchester as indicated by your userpage. We are looking for dedicated and quality members of the editing community, who would be willing to join a Greater Manchester WikiProject - a kind of community action group interested in improving articles that relate to Manchester and
Greater Manchester.
We are hoping to have a diverse team, and would be grateful if you would be willing to register your interest at
this proposal page.
Hey! Thank you for the contact and rapid response! I'm also from the Greater Manchester area, and although it was originally proposed that the project be specific to Manchester, the consensus appears to be for a Greater Manchester wide WikiProject to be initiated
Should enough interest be registered, and the project be set up, no expectation is placed upon you at all! However, it is hoped that users of this group would be sent regular messages about what articles need improving, what statements we need references for, what articles require advanced features, images, maps, and then users who are part of this scheme could pool together their ideas and expertise and move articles forwards much more quickly as a community effort!
Should a particular article be a regular victim to distruptive editting, we can also work together to try to combat it.
Hi again! It seems things are moving faster than I anticipated! The
Wikipedia:WikiProject Greater Manchester is now live! It will take a little time for things to gather pace, but plese feel free to visit the project page and follow any instructions that appeal to you. Again, any questions, feel free to ask. Thanks,
Jhamez8416:55, 25 February 2007 (UTC)reply
Hello.... again =)
Thanks for that, I did pinch them before you gave permission.....Oh, do you have a facebook?
Hello! If you are receiving this message, that means that your user page is in a specific year category. Per a recent user-category per deletion, all specific year categories are to be deleted. If you wish to continue using year categories, you have two options:
If you wish, you may do both. Hopefully, this change in categorization will be quick and painless. Happy editing! --An automated message from
MessedRobot13:05, 9 March 2007 (UTC)reply
Hello fellow
WikiProject Greater Manchester participant! T=You may or may not be aware that our Manchester article has recently obtained
official good article status! This is a great acheievement, but we don't want to stop there! We're hoping to spend the next few weeks as a team to raise the standard of this article to
featured standard! It will only be possible if we work together, and hope you can take a moment to look both at the
FA criteria, and the Manchester article and aid us in this feat! Any problems, feel free to raise them at
Talk:Manchester! Good luck!
Jza8423:19, 10 September 2007 (UTC)reply
May seem like old news now, but Manchester was recently listed as a good article, try and make as much effort as you can with trying to make it featured.
Manchester Airport has seen unprecedented vandalism from anonymous editors recently, on 24th September it was protected by
MastCell for a period of 1 week. Make sure to visit the page (after that date) regularly so we can stamp out any "bad edits".
Try to invite more members to this project. As much as a streamlined team is good, the more editors we have the broader the range we can cover.
The project now has 28 members! 7 new participants enrolled this week, they can be viewed
here. There was also change to the welcoming messages this month, by
Jza84, which reinvigorated the style in response to the change of colours on the main and affiliated pages. See the welcome templates,
here. Finally, a barnstar has been created for the project! See the final design
on this page, and so far it has been awarded to one lucky participants,
WebHamster. Well done.
Greater Manchester Article News
Well has this month been a hub of activity, or what? (See:
Original diff) The new assessment scale has been welcomed by many here at
WPGM and as of 4th November, 81.37% of all 650 articles have been assessed with both importance and class. Two articles have been passed
good article criteria since last delivery, they are:
Didsbury &
Dunham Massey. Well done to all involved.
Current Debates
There was a lengthy debate over a certain number of related articles in Manchester City Centre this week, (See:
the thread involved). Aytoun Street, Barton Square, Brazenoose Sqaure, Dover Street, Manchester and Police Street were all flagged by
Pit-yacker as being deserved of deletion per lacking
notablilty. The process took 5 days at
articles for deletion and the result was,
delete. Other sections that readied editors into scrambling over themselves this month were: should Greater Manchester boroughs get their own infobox? Such as with
London boroughs.
The debate continutes.
Monthly Challenges
Same as last month, we've have to get Manchester upto Featured Article Standard. However, with Manchester now rated as
A-Class (above GA and below FA) it may be easier than first thought. Try to fill all the current "
to do" requirements. There has also been some talk of increased activity of bringing Greater Manchester to Good Article Standard. It would be ideal if all 650 articles were at least GA standard, but that will never happen in the next month. But please if you can, assess your ability to understand an article and if you're acquauinted with the task in hand and potentially long wait for a writing and for a review, go ahead! Be
bold.
Manchester Airport once again saw more vandal edits this month, and was protected for another consecutive month on 22nd October by
Jmlk17. Some users have also realised the extreme coincidence in the first half of 65% of editing IPs, i.e. all begin with "79.72". Could it be the same editor? If you can keep visiting the page to revert vandalism in sight. The most freqeunt additions that are factually incorrect are the inclusions of: Chicago O'Hare and New York-JFK to Pakistan International Airlines (T2) and Newquay to Air Southwest (T3). MAN also has a
peer review.
Although you may not have noticed that this WikiProject has a associated
portal. The page named,
Portal:North West England, is updated frequently, but it would be nice to get more editors. It too has recently undergone a
peer review, and some criteria has been added to get the page to
featured portal status. You could signify your involvement by adding {{
User Portal NWE}} to your userpage.
The project now has 31 members. 3 new participants enrolled last month, they can be viewed
here.
Andrew has also created another template for your
talk page (even though this links to your userpage) which displays for all to see that you are a member of the project. You can add it to your page by including {{
WPGM Talk}} to the page. It may be difficult to see the true effects of these welcoming messages, but I'm estimating that since the introduction of these that 12 new users have joined, all 100% have accepted their invitations, and therefore they are 100% successful in their aim.
Greater Manchester Article News
Once again, the project has been subject to much praise from three newly promoted featured articles, and one more good article.
Oldham (
nom),
Manchester (
nom),
M62 motorway (
nom) and
Chat Moss (
review) have all passed with flying colours. Featured articles now make up 0.03% more of the overall articles that there are relating to the project, than last month. Of all 791 pages which are tagged with
this template, 100% have been assessed with the new scale which was introduced last month. It may also be worth noting two others pages that are undergoing transformations are:
List of companies based in Greater Manchester and
Belle Vue Zoo.
Current Debates
There was a lengthy debate over
Manchester Airport this month, which lead to three article for deletions, second nominations viewable
here and deletion review viewable
here. Basically, what happened was there was quite a great misunderstanding of what the purpose of the lists actually were. They were to compile a list of the destinations served by each terminal and linked along into a sub-page, where it would seem the overview page (i.e.
Manchester Airport) would look less cluttered, as was the suggestion at the peer review. Some participants at the first AFD, stated that reviews shouldn't be carried out upon unless there is consensus, and as they are not authorative should only be used as a guide. It was soon sorted though and all three daughter-lists were deleted. There has also been a change to the projects aims, which took a dramatic overhaul this week following the FA pass of Manchester. The
change was performed by
Jza84. It is now recognised that we should bring not only top importance articles to
FA standard but also ones that have been long-since reviewed, like
Altrincham and
Stretford. And if you're wondering why Salford is there it's due to the fact that there is a consensus among the project members that as Salford is in such close vicinity to the City of Manchester, that it's our "duty" to help promote it. The change came about about after
this discussion.
Monthly Challenges
New this month, we have to get Greater Manchester upto Featured Article Standard. However, with Manchester now rated as
FA-Class and the proposed "skipping" of the GA process, it may not be too long before we see this under the success section on the project mainpage. It would be ideal if all 791 articles were at least GA standard, but that will never happen in the next month! But please if you can, assess your ability to understand an article and if you're acquauinted with the task in hand and potentially long wait for a writing and for a review, go ahead! Be
bold. The progress monitor can be seen
here.
Once again, Portal:North West England has been subject to much exposure on behalf of it's editors. The current status of the portal is looking good and it has so far gained unanimous support at it's
FPOC. Hopefully, it'll be promoted and we'll have yet another success on our hands. Also, most major articles that are relevant have been tagged with a shortcut to the Portal mainpage, by Jza.
And finally, have a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to all our Greater Manchester Wikipedians! The project now has 34 members. 5 new participants enrolled last month, they can be viewed
here. On behalf of the team I hope they have prosperous and enjoyable usership and wish them well with their forthcoming work!
User:Archtransit and
User:Rudget, both part of our team, are current candidates for adminship (see
here for Archtransit and
here for Rudget). We wish them luck with this persuit and hope they will become our latest project participants with admin status!
Simillarly, the
Portal:North West England is now officially a featured portal.
User:Rudget has been overwhelmingly involved with this portal and he too is hereby thanked on behalf of the project for his continued contributions to this page and many others.
There have been a number of debates this month, some of which with a high level of potential impact for the project and its members.
Article assessment for the project became a point of contention when around 1400 articles were tagged by a bot. Most of these artcles were on "minor" association football players. The consensus was that in our state of around 30 participants and as a predominatly geography based project, most of these articles should be untagged, at very least for the time being. Of our 1403 articles now tagged however, only (?) 85% are assessed - a drop of 15%!
Perhaps one of the most notable debates this month was the possibility of... scrapping the project newsletter!
User:Rudget has written the last three editions (that's all of them!) and has decided that he'd like to pass on the responsibility.
It has been proposed that a noticeboard system be introduced to highlight new issues in a near(!)-realtime fashion. I
User:Jza84 am writing what could now be the last GM newsletter for a while. If you're a member of the team, but aren't closely involved with the project, then we'd love to hear from you at
WT:GM with your views on which system of communication is the right way forwards (if any/both!).
Monthly Challenges
As was stated in last months newsletter, the
Greater Manchester remains a key article for the project, and one which has been identified as urgent in our quest for Featured Article status. Sadly, for all our other successes, Greater Manchester has changed little since
this time last year] (!) and is still an article requiring expansion and development. The new
WP:UKCOUNTIES guide may provide new ways in which to channel our efforts. Although we endevour to have
good article status even for our suburbs and hamlets, other articles specifically identified as needing development towards FA include
Salford,
Stretford and
Altrincham.
Many of our most crucial articles about our largest towns are still in poor condition:
Rochdale,
Bury,
Prestwich,
Bolton, and
Wigan are of "start class" standard - much lower than we should have. If you feel you can help, please
be bold and try to improve these.
One final challenge for this month is for all those with new digial cameras for Christmas, or even digial images stored away on a disc!... many of our place articles are still without a single photograph, and www.geograph.org.uk is running low on quality images. Even those with photographs often have a low quality photograph of the local church. MORE ARE NEEDED! Especially townscapes! If you think you can help, a barnstar is up for grabs for best picture added in the next month or so!
We're always looking for potential new project members and ways for greater communication, collaboration and participation.
WP:GM has a strong core of users, but would like to have more input from a wider user-base. If you can think of ways to improve our ways of working, please feel free to mention them at
WT:GM. Simillarly, if you notice a new or unapproached user who is producing sound work related to
Greater Manchester and its consituent parts, please don't forget to ask them if they'd like to join us, either in your own hand, or by adding {{
Welcome WPGM}} to their talk page.
Would you like to write the next newsletter for
WP:GM?? Please nominate yourself at
WT:GM! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered on January 5th, 2008 by
Jza84. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add two *'s by your username on the Project Mainpage.
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Since the January newsletter there has been an increase of 5 featured articles/lists, taking our total number of featured entries upto 16 17 (
Trafford passed today!).
Although WP:GM leads the way in terms of featured content by a local British project, the
Kent and
Yorkshire WikiProjects are close to this total, with 11 and 14 featured entries respectively.
Following a somewhat frenzied collaboration at the start of March, and a nomination by
User:Joshii, Greater Manchester was promoted to GA status. It's the first
metropolitan county to obtain this recognition.
There has otherwise been a reduction in WP:GM nominations for
GA status, something which the project has begun to discuss on the
talk page.
Having completed all but one of our short term aims
set last December, the project would like to look at developing new short term aims. Suggestions have been made here, but there is scope for flexibility. Do you have a entry you would like to see developed?
Two members have left the project however, each for rather different reasons:
Archtransit (
talk·contribs) was an administrator, and project member, who was found to have been abusing his editting and sysop privliges. Following investigation, Archtransit was banned indefinately. A report in The Signpost is found
here.
Rudget (
talk·contribs), also an administrator, decided to leave the project. Reasons mentioned included the demands of admin duties taking over too much time. Rudget helped towards
Didsbury's GA promotion, and
Portal:North West England's FP promotion.
Thanks
This WikiProject, would not be where it is today without each and every one of its members! Thank you to all!
WP:GM is a great project, and is leading the way for local WikiProjects of the UK. However, though the
project talk page is a hub of activity, it is regularly used by only a core of 5-6 editors, which isn't making the most of its potential. Indeed, a
study, by the
University of Minnesota found that "One-tenth of 1 percent of editors account for nearly half of Wikipedia's content value". We at WP:GM do not want to follow suit!
There are several editors who have, sadly, not editted since the turn of 2008, and others, which concentrate in areas other than Greater Manchester material (which is quite fine!).
The WikiProject Greater Manchester would like to know if YOU are still around, and if so, if you've like to be more involved, and, if not, why not and what can we do to get you involved and be a bigger part of the team?
Feel free to come by the project talk page and leave us a message on what you're working on and/or what you'd like to see improved. The project is only as strong as its members and we'd like to know if you're still active or if we can help you with your editting.
Images
A picture's worth a thousand words
In our last issue, a plea was made for more images to be submitted to Wikipedia/WikiCommons to improve the quality and context of our articles. Many of our
Top priority articles are still lacking in quality images, if any!
www.geograph.org.uk is an online resource of photographs of places in the UK, which we can use. Www.flickr.com also has some images we are permitted to use. Do you have a digital camera however? Can you take photographs of townscapes and landmarks in your local area that can be used here?
Middleton,
Hulme and
Rochdale all have examples of images in their lead that help give a sense of place and improve the context to our readers.
Simillarly, many of our most crucial articles about our largest towns are still in poor condition:
Stockport,
Bury,
Prestwich,
Bolton, and
Wigan are of "start class" standard with short lead sections and
unreferenced sections - a much lower standard than we should allow! If you feel you can help, please be
bold and try to improve these. There is
a list of resources that can help.
Would you like to write the next newsletter for
WP:GM?? Please nominate yourself at
WT:GM! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered on March 8th, 2008 by
Jza84. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add two *'s by your username on the Project Mainpage.
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Peterloo Massacre was nominated for FAC on 6 April. So far it has received support for FAS but feel free join the discussion
here.
The reduction of WP:GM GAs, mentioned in the last issue, has been tackled with
Buckton Castle and
Oasis (band) being passed on 9 March and
Upper Brook Street Chapel, Manchester on 7 April. We now have 13 GAs due to hard work of our contributors. Well done!
WP:GM still is still the leading local British WikiProject. As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 6 on
London and
Yorkshire who have 15 FAs each. Although taking the lead in FAs, WP:GM is still lacking GAs and falls behind
London by 6. This topic was at the front of the new aims discussion (
here) and is an important issue for WP:GM.
As mentioned above, new aims have been decided. See the right hand column for more details.
Member News
There are now 44 members of WikiProject Greater Manchester! A warm welcome to the 5 new members that have joined us since March:
Would you like to write the next newsletter for
WP:GM?? Please nominate yourself at
WT:GM! New editors are always welcome!
New Aims
The completion of all but one of the short term aims set last December resulted in
a discussion on
WT:GM to set new aims for the WikiProject. They are:
Obtain GA status for a third of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs.
It took us four months to get our last aims completed, why not try and see if these can be done in less time than before! All input is welcome but if anyone has any books or photos etc specifically related to these topics, they would be extra-specially welcome.
But before rushing ahead with these new aims, let's not forget the one that got away last time: to obtain B -> GA status for
Rochdale,
Wigan,
Bury,
Bolton and
Stockport. Most of these articles are in poor condition and in need of repair. Good quality images are urgently needed also. Let's make sure that this aim doesn't stay off our radar much longer.
Don't Forget...
Images! The shortage of good images was mentioned in the last issue and still hasn't been resolved! A good place to start would be the
requested photographs category but please remember that there are many articles not within this category that have the same need in common.
Assessment "Assess and review all relevant articles for quality, importance and progress" is one of our mid-term aims. At the present moment, there are only 43 unassessed articles. This task could be completed well before the next newsletter is out.
The
Peterloo Massacre article was promoted to
FA on 12 April. One of our top priority articles, it had previously been only start class. The process began on 25th March and since then underwent over 700 edits before the end of April, with
Jza84,
Malleus Fatuarum, and
Richerman making significant contributions to the rapid development of the article.
Ddstretch and
Mr Stephen also contributed to discussions on the article talk page.
Perhaps the most unusual event of April 2008 for the project has surrounded the
Denshaw article. Denshaw is a village of about 500 people in
Saddleworth,
Oldham, which attracted media attention due to vandalism of the stub class article. Once this was brought to the project's attention, efforts were made to improve the article which led to a successful DYK? nomination and might even advance it to
GA status with a bit more effort. In April there were over
19,000 visitors who saw the project in action. Contributors included
Jza84,
Ddstretch,
Malleus Fatuarum,
Hassocks5489,
Nev1 and
Mike Peel.
Also this month 5 articles featured on the DYK? section of the front page:
Hulme Arch Bridge,
Peterloo Massacre,
Bolton and Leigh Railway,
Barnes Hospital,
Denshaw, and
Platt Fields Park. This certainly puts into perspective one of the project's previous mid-term aims "feature on the Did you know? section with at least three articles related to Greater Manchester". If you've expanded an article 5 fold or started one with at least 1.5kb of prose in the past 5 days and it has an interesting and referenced fact don't hesitate to read the conditions of DYK? and nominate it
here. It gets the project noticed!
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still leading local British WikiProjects. As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 7 on
London and
Yorkshire who have 15 Featured Articles each. Although taking the lead in FAs, WP:GM is still lacking GAs and falls behind
London by 6 (we have 14, London 20). If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
Member News
There are 45 members of WikiProject Greater Manchester. One new member has joined the project this month:
Kieran5676 on 30th April and is interested in south Manchester.
The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A rather large "thank you" goes out to all the editors who edited article related to
Greater Manchester, or who edit the project itself.
Obtain GA status for one third (1/3) of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs.
It took us four months to get our last aims completed, why not try and see if these can be done in less time than before! All input is welcome but if anyone has any books or photos etc specifically related to these topics, they would be extra-specially welcome.
Most of the articles covered by our new aims haven't experienced much activity in the past month, if you thing you can help improve an article
be bold and get editing. Articles such as List of people from Bolton and List of railway stations in Greater Manchester already appear very close to FL status and may just require an editor to guide them through the
FLC process.
Our highest priority article is of course Greater Manchester, there is a peer review from March with issues still to be addressed before it can be put forward as a featured article candidate. Salford is another top priority article because it's the county's second city; it's under gone a lot of editing but still has a way to go before it reaches GA. Also active this month has been the
City of Salford article – part of our aim to get 1/3 of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs to GA &ndash.
Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Reminders...
Images! The rate of good images has gone up since it was mentioned in the last issue, but more images are needed! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment When this section was written, there was only 1 unassessed article! This task has probably already been finished, but it might now have. To check click
here.
Orphaned non-free media (Image:Victor in w and g.jpg)
Thanks for uploading Image:Victor in w and g.jpg. The media description page currently specifies that it is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a
claim of fair use. However, it is currently
orphaned, meaning that it is not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the media was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed.
You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that media for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see
our policy for non-free media).
If you have uploaded other unlicensed media, please check whether they're used in any articles or not. You can find a list of 'image' pages you have edited by clicking on the "
my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "Image" from the dropdown box. Note that all non-free media not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described on
criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you.
BJBot (
talk)
08:03, 2 June 2008 (UTC)reply
Old Trafford,
Murrays' Mills and
1990 Strangeways Prison riot all passed
GAC last month! In previous newsletters, the issue of WP:GM's lack of GAs has been raised numerously, so a large 'well done' to all those who contributed, be it little or large!
Also,
Milnrow and
City of Salford have been nominated at
WP:GAC. Feel free to join in with their discussions
here and
here respectively. To 'obtain GA status for a third of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs' is one of WP:GM's short-term aims, let's hope the
City of Salford won't be the last borough with this status.
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 8 on
London! Although taking the lead in FAs, WP:GM is still flagging a little in GAs and falls behind
London by 3. This is the closest we have ever got to taking the lead in local British GAs, if you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
And don't forget that the
Manchester congestion charge article will need all input possible to keep it up to date with the government's new legislation (grumble grumble)...
Member News
There are 46 members of WikiProject Greater Manchester. Our newest member is:
Let's not forget that
Jza84 became an administrator this month! Congratulations on your new role.
The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A rather large "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed..
Obtain GA status for one third of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs.
Most of the articles covered by our new aims haven't experienced much activity in the past month, except for
City of Salford being nominated at
WP:GAC. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Articles such as
List of people from Bolton and
List of railway stations in Greater Manchester already appear very close to
FL status and may just require an editor to guide them through the
FLC process.
Greater Manchester is, of course, our highest priority article.
Mr Stephen posted some milestones to getting this article up to
FA status a while back. Please
check them out and see what you can do.
Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Reminders...
Images! The rate of good images has gone up since it was mentioned in the last issue, but we'll need more if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment As of 12th April, we have had 100% of our articles assessed for quality! Even so, we still 151 of our 1551 article unassessed for importance. Please
take a look and see what you can do.
It's been three months since the last newsletter, but there's been a lot going on...
Promoted articles:
Greater Manchester is one of our project's top priority articles, the Greater Manchester article comprehensively covers everything to do with the county, from culture and history, to transport and demography.
Manchester United F.C. records and statistics is about the records of one of Greater Manchester's best know clubs, which feats like "the club currently holds the record for the most FA Cup triumphs with 11".
City of Salford is about the local government area and Greater Manchester's second city. Getting
Salford to GA is one our the aim's of our project, so hopefully this may help.
Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal is about the history and modern restoration of the disused canal running through the county. (It's now at FAC, so please improve the article if you can!)
Manchester Mummy is about Hannah Beswick, whose macabre fear of being buried alive lead to her demanding that her body was kept above ground and checked periodically for signs of life.
Milnrow is a small town in
Rochdale with a long history. The wool trade was important to the town and was the basis of much of its industry. (It's also the first GA for Rochdale!)
Ordsall Hall is an important Tudor hall in Salford with a reputation for being haunted!
Bert Trautmann is the German goalkeeper who broke his neck playing for Manchester City... and carried on playing!
The
Peterloo Massacre appeared on the front page on 16 August! Well done to everyone who contributed to the article about a key moment of Greater Manchester's history and managed to get it showcased.
A new
portal has been set up! The
Greater Manchester portal showcases some of the best articles to do with the county. Thanks to
Polishname for single-handedly getting it up and running.
There is a proposal to move members who haven't edited for a while to an inactive members list, so if you've not been edited recently but still want to be a member let us know!
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 5 on
Yorkshire and 11 on
London! WP:GM now is the leading project in terms of GAs too with 5 more than London and 7 more than Yorkshire! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Although the project has had a lot of GAs and FAs recently, most of the articles covered by our short term aims haven't experienced much activity recently.
Baby has undergone some change, but has a long way to go, and
List of railway stations in Greater Manchester is very close to FL quality. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Articles such as
List of railway stations in Greater Manchester already appear very close to
FL status and may just require an editor to guide them through the
FLC process.
Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Member News
There are 53 members of WikiProject Greater Manchester. Since 12 June, the project has gained 7 new members:
Welcome to everyone, and let's remember to make these new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help.
The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment As of 1st September, we have had 99.5% of our articles assessed for quality! Even so, we still 157 of our 1662 article unassessed for importance. Please
take a look and see what you can do.
Usually this is where this month's promoted articles are listed, however there is something more important this month. In September, the project was notified which of its articles were selected for
a DVD version of wikipedia. The 49 are listed
here, although the quality ratings are a bit out of date. Twenty-two of the articles were GA-class or higher, and only five were below B-class. These are articles that have been selected by wikipedia, not simply as the best but the most important, so they require our attention, most importantly those that fall below GA standards. We still have until the 20th October to make changes to the articles, so please if you think you can improve any of them in any way please do so!
In other news, it's been a busy month with plenty going on...
Promoted articles:
The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal is a disused canal undergoing restoration. The canal, which travels between Bolton and Manchester with a branch heading north east to Bury, was abandoned in 1961.
Having previously been described as "bare, wet, and almost worthless", Ashton-under-Lyne rose to prominence in the
Industrial Revolution as one of the most famous
mill towns in the north west.
Henry Taylor is Oldham's forgotten Olympic hero. He won 3 swimming golds at the 1908 Olympics, a record for most golds in a single games by a Briton until
Chris Hoy equalled it this year.
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 8 on
Yorkshire and 15 on
London! WP:GM now is the leading project in terms of GAs too with 5 more than London and 7 more than Yorkshire! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
There wasn't space in the last newsletter, but as of 24 July 2008 the project has a
list of articles that have tags on them. As of 14 July 2008, 351 (21.8%) of our articles need a clean-up, although this should have gone down as some have already received attention (the bot does not seem to update the listing often).
In other news, the
Merseyside Wikiproject has been set up. If you have an interest in the area or want to help out in any way, head over to the project page and pitch in.
In the past month we've achieved two of our short-term aims! The
List of railway stations in Greater Manchester was expertly guided through the
featured list process with hardly a problem, and now that
Tameside is a GA a third of the county's boroughs are GA status or better. There's still plenty to do, some our our top-priority articles need referencing or tidying up, so don't hesitate to dive in! If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! And please keep an eye on the 49 articles selected for the wikipedia DVD.
Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Member News
No new members joined the project in September and there are 49 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester. A new list of
inactive members has been started. Anyone who hasn't made an edit to wikipedia since 1 March 2008 automatically goes onto the list.
If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment As of 4th October, we have had 100% of our articles assessed for quality! Even so, 151 of our 1684 articles remain unassessed for importance. Please
take a look and see what you can do.
It's been a quieter month than September, but plenty has been going on...
Promoted articles:
Born in
Stalybridge and raised in
Ashton-under-Lyne, Hugh Mason was a mill owner and politician. He was popular among his workers for shortening the working week at his factories without cutting their pay.
No articles were DYKs this month. For details of the DYKs by the project that have appeared on the main page, see
Did you know?
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 8 on
Yorkshire and 14 on
London! WP:GM now is the leading project in terms of GAs too with 7 more than both Yorkshire and London! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
Trafford was featured on the main page on the 12th October and was viewed 13,800 on the day (27,100 times over 4 days).
The project's
cleanup listing has been updated with stats from 8 October. As of 14 July, 351 (21.8%) of our articles need a clean-up, this has risen to 447 out of 1689 (26.5%). Although this is disappointing, it reflects a more widespread use of tags on articles to indicate what needs attention rather than a decline in the standard of this project's articles.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Member News
There are now 53 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester as 4 new members joined the project in October:
Welcome to everyone, and let's remember to make these new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
On top of these aims, some our our top-priority articles need referencing or tidying up, so don't hesitate to dive in! If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment As of 1st November, we have had 100% of our articles assessed for quality! Even so, 75 of our 1708 articles remain unassessed for importance. Please
take a look and see what you can do.
November has been a successful month, with lots of progress made on articles, and more work in the pipe-line:
Promoted articles:
Scout Moor Wind Farm is England's largest onshore wind farm. Although it was opposed by environmentalists, the wind farm was opened on 26 September 2008 and provides enough power for 40,000 homes.
The River Irwell runs 39 miles from its source in Lancashire until it joins with the River Mersey. The river was important in the Industrial Revolution, and was left poluted with industrial waste and lifeless.
The
Bridgewater Canal is currently a GA nominee and the
Scout Moor Wind Farm is under scrutiny at
WP:FAC. Please keep an eye on these articles and if any issues are raised in their reviews help to address them. Hopefully, next month we can report on two more promoted articles!
Scout Moor Wind Farm featured in the DYK section of the front page last month. For details of the DYKs by the project that have appeared on the main page, see
Did you know?
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 8 on
Yorkshire and 14 on
London! WP:GM now is the leading project in terms of GAs too with 10 more Yorkshire and 11 more than London! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Member News
There are now 50 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester as 2 new members joined the project in November:
Welcome to everyone, and let's remember to make these new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Already we're making great progress, and
Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine and the
River Irwell are already GAs, while
Scout Moor Wind Farm is on the way to becoming an FA! The
Congestion charging in Greater Manchester and
Greater Manchester Transport Innovation Fund (TiF) are hot topics at the moment with the referendum currently open. As an aside, some of our top-priority articles need referencing or tidying up, so don't hesitate to dive in. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Articles needing attention Please remember that the
list of stubs needing expansion and the Wikipedia:WikiProject Greater Manchester/Cleanup listing|list of articles needing cleanup]] are in permanent need of attention.
I know it's early but since there won't be a newsletter for a month... merry Christmas everyone, enjoy the holiday and mince pies.
Delivered on 5 December 2008 by
Nev1. If you do not wish to receive future newsletters, please add two *s by your username on the Project Mainpage.
WikiProject Greater Manchester January Newsletter, Issue XIII
December has been a very successful month, with lots of article promoted, and hopefully more to come in January:
Promoted articles:
Scout Moor Wind Farm
Scout Moor Wind Farm is England's largest onshore wind farm. Although it was opposed by environmentalists, the wind farm was opened on 26 September 2008 and provides enough power for 40,000 homes.
The B of the Bang is the sculpture that was erected to commemorate the
2002 Commonwealth Games and for a while was the largest sculpture in the UK. And because of safety concerns, it may be dismantled.
Current nominations: January looks set to be very busy, with
Chadderton,
Cine City, Withington, and
Nico Ditch at WP:GAN, the
Greater Manchester portal up for Featured Portal status, and
Sale a Featured Article Candidate. Please keep an eye on these articles and if any issues are raised in their reviews help to address them.
Abram featured in the DYK section of the front page last month. For details of the DYKs by the project that have appeared on the main page, see
Did you know?
The project has a new tool, a
watchlist of all our project's articles. This should help us keep an eye on them and spot new editors who might want to join our project. Also, Jza84 has developed a
map of WP:GM's GAs and FAs. It shows a gap in coverage in the north west of the county, something we should try to change.
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as Featured and Good content goes, our lead is extending, with 10 and 16 more FAs than
Yorkshire and
London respectively, and 13 and 14 more GAs than Yorkshire and London! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Two of our aims were crossed off as
Scout Moor Wind Farm became an FA, and
Radcliffe, Greater Manchester a GA. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Member News
There are now 46 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 14 members inactive since 1 July 2008) as 1 new member joined the project in December:
Welcome from everyone, and let's remember to make new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
With the new(ish) year, I think it's right to look back over the year just gone. Last year was massive for our project, with lots of successes building on a successful 2007. In terms of featured content, we became the leading wikiproject in 2007, but 2008 saw us cement our status as one of the UK's leading wikiprojects: having started the year with most FAs (two more than London and Yorkshire), but falling behind in terms of GAs, we now have more FAs and GAs than any project under WP:UKGEO. While our aim is to improve all articles related to Greater Manchester, not collect trophies, we now lead the field by a long way and everyone deserves to feel proud for their part.
We've had articles featured on the main page, both in DYK? and as today's Featured Article, but success is more than a matter of numbers; the project has grown into a community where editors join together to provide information and improve Wikipedia. A great example of this is the work our project did on
Denshaw. Back in April, it was targeted by vandals and as a result was featured in national news. We stepped in and improved and protected the article, showing what WP:GM is capable of. This is undoubtedly the noisiest project in the UK and it's strength comes from the wide range of interests of its many members. We've even been so successful that we were accused of forming a claque.
During 2008, our numbers have increased and, while
some have left, we've welcomed many strong editors who will help bring the project more success. With so much emphasis on Good and Featured articles, it's sometimes easy to forget that a lot of effort goes into articles that don't get recognition. The table below shows that the number of B-class articles has increased since the start of 2008, and that the proportion of stub-class articles under our project has gone down.
My own experience of Wikipedia has been positive and enjoyable, especially due to WP:GM. I've worked on interesting subjects with nice people, and hopefully the experience is similar for others. We've covered subjects as varied and interesting as castles, mummies, computers, Olympic swimmers, and wind farms, stuff I probably wouldn’t know about if it wasn’t for Wikipedia. I enjoy being a part of this project, and as we approach the WP:GM's second birthday (24 February) I'm sure it will continue to go from strength to strength in 2009.
Would you like to write the next newsletter for
WP:GM?? Please nominate yourself at
WT:GM! New editors are always welcome!
Project News
January has been a very successful month, with lots of article promoted, and hopefully more to come in January:
Promoted articles:
View of Broadway in Chadderton
Chadderton is a town in the
Metropolitan Borough of Oldham. It has a long and interesting history beyond that of its
mill town façade; a Celtic hill fort, a medieval lordship and still an important industrial and metropolitan town.
Nico Ditch stretches from Ashton-under-Lyne to Stretford and according to legend was dug in a single night to defend against the Danes.
Article news:
Cine City, Withington is at WP:GAN, please keep an eye on these articles and if any issues are raised in their reviews help to address them. Unfortunately, despite
User:Joshii's effort the Greater Manchester portal did not become featured.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Member News
There are now 48 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 14 members inactive since 1 July 2008) as 2 new members joined the project in January:
Welcome from everyone, and let's remember to make new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Happy birthday! It was the project's second birthday on 24 February, so thank you to everyone who's helped improve and Greater Manchester related article, not just our members, your work is very much appreciated. The last month has been very successful, with lots activity:
Nico Ditch stretches from Ashton-under-Lyne to Stretford and according to legend was dug in a single night to defend against the Danes.
Cine City in 2004
The Cine City, Withington, was the third cinema to open in Britain and when it closed in 2001 it was the third longest running cinema in England. It was opened in 1912, and demolished in 2008.
Current nominations: As of the completion of this newsletter, there are no GA nominations, but
Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine and
Buckton Castle are at FAC. The articles detail the world's first stored-program computer, and the best preserved castle in Greater Manchester. There's a good chance that one or more of these interesting articles could be promoted, so please keep an eye on them in case there's any way you can help!
Charles White (physician) and
Worsley featured in the DYK section of the front page last month (actually, Worsley featured in January but was missed out of the last newsletter!). For details of the DYKs by the project that have appeared on the main page, see
Did you know?
The project's
cleanup listing has been updated with stats from 24 February 2009. As of 8 October 2008, 447 (26.5%) of 1689 our articles needed a clean-up, this has risen slightly to 455 out of 1809 (25.2%). This is encouraging as the proportion has gone down, and indicates the standard of the project's articles are steadily improving. While the high-profile successes of GAs and FAs are important, the project's aim is to improve all GM-related articles.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Sister projects
In an attempt to encourage communication between related wikiprojects, or to at least raise awareness, this section is dedicated to the important goings on of
WP:Merseyside and
WP:Cheshire, our sister projects and the only other user groups dedicated to improving articles in
North West England.
WP:CHES – After a period of low activity, the project has picked up recently, with initiatives (such as beginning a newsletter and sending a questionnaire to its member) to encourage greater participation from its members. This has paid dividends with two GAs being promoted in February and greater activity in general.
WP:MERSEY – After being set-up in September 2008, the project is experiencing a period of lowish activity. While the project has a handful of FAs and GAs, most of its articles are unassessed; assessing requires no familiarity with a subject, so any help WP:GM members can lend would be greatly appreciated.
Other news
There is a meet-up scheduled for 14 March in Manchester for anyone interested. It is not organised by WP:GM and is open to all wikipedians. More details can be found
here.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
After a flurry of activity in January, progress on the Salford article has slowed, but it is steadily progressing towards a good standard. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
The project compared
The Greater Manchester WikiProject is one of the leading UK-based groups. Some other projects are no as lucky as we are in the numbers of active enthusiastic users. Below are some statistics of the other leading UK projects and some geographically close to Greater Manchester.
There are now 46 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 17 members inactive since 1 September 2008) as 1 new member joined the project in February:
Majorly is an experienced editor who has recently decided to join WP:GM, and has been working hard on
Cheadle Hulme. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Sorry there's not been a newsletter for three months, it's not that there hasn't been anything to say but that there almost hasn't been time to say it...
On 20 March 2009 Manchester was "today's Featured Article" and received over
44,000 visitors. This was the culmination of about 2 years of effort from a lot of editors who found the article in
this state before the founding of the project. Along with
Greater Manchester, it's our flagship article and for it to reach the mainpage is a great achievement. It was an incredible collaborative effort and shows what the project is capable of, and since then we have gone from strength to strength. The
Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine was Today's Featured Article on 30 May, with
33,000 visitors.
Promoted articles:
Carrington Moss is an 1,100 acres (450 ha)
peat bog in Trafford; in the 19th century, it was reclaimed to be used agriculturally and for the disposal Manchester's waste, and is still used for farming.
Manchester Mummy is about Hannah Beswick, whose macabre fear of being buried alive lead to her demanding that her body was kept above ground and checked periodically for signs of life.
The town of Sale in Trafford was probably founded in the
Anglo-Saxon period and is best known as the home of physicist
J. P. Joule the founding place and former home of and
Sale Sharks rugby club.
Cheadle Hulme is a suburb of
Stockport that formed from several small hamlets, rather than growing around a church which was usual for medieval villages. (also
Stockport's first GA!)
Mellor hill fort is the only Iron Age
hill fort in Greater Manchester and was only discovered in the 1990s.
Partington, in Trafford, is a town and civil parish that was until the
Manchester Ship Canal opened in 1894, a mainly agrarian community. With the opening of the canal, Partington became a major coal port and following the Second World War was expanded as an
overspill estate for deprived parts of Manchester.
With all the project's success, we must be careful not to become complacent. In March,
David Beckham was delisted as a Good Article because it lacked enough references and was poorly written in parts. Improving an article and getting it reviewed for GA is a lot of effort and it's a real shame to see the article delisted, but a reminder that our role as an article writer is two-fold: once we improve them, we have an obligation to maintain them. Beckham is the kind of person who is regularly in the news, so the article will get a lot of attention and need regular updating, and it was written by members of
WP:FOOTBALL, but let's take it as a reminder of what's needed from us.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Over the past three months, we've succeeded in our aims of bringing
Eccles and
Worsley to GA status, thanks largely to the seemingly inexhaustible
Parrot of Doom. Recently another aim was added: bringing Stockport to GA standard. It's currently C-class and has some well developed sections. It will be a difficult task, but worthwhile considering it's Greater Manchester's third largest settlement. Also, the importance of bringing Salford to GA has been emphasised; it's currently B-class and should be the easiest of our aims to accomplish, although it's been there for a long time. Let's see if we can put this one to rest soon.
The project compared
Over the past three months, WP:LOND and WP:YORK have had a massive upsurge in the number of articles under their auspices. And interestingly, WP:YORKS has had an upsurge in GAs (10), and WP:LOND has had an increase in both GAs and FAs (8 and 10 respectively), closing down the gap with WP:GM. Although WP:DERB appears to have lost a GA, one of their articles was incorrectly tagged; however
Derwent Valley Mills is being prepared to become a Good Article candidate, and hopefully will be the project's first. With the recent retirement of
Ddstretch and
Espresso Addict, WP:CHES has lost two of its most active contributors, but is still managing to produce good articles such as
list of castles in Cheshire (
FL) and
John Douglas (now a Good Article candidate). The majority of WP:MRSY's articles are now assessed and will hopefully go from strength to strength.
There are now 48 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 17 members inactive since 1 September 2008) as 2 new members have joined the project since the start of March:
The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Manchester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Part of the seven arches railway viaduct in Cheadle Hulme
Cheadle Hulme is a suburb of
Stockport that formed from several small hamlets, rather than growing around a church which was usual for medieval villages, although there is evidence of activity dating back to the
Bronze Age.
Did you know that after the collapse of the Broughton Suspension Bridge in 1831, the
British military introduced the order to "break step" when soldiers were crossing a bridge? Featured on the
Did you know? section on 6 June 2009.
Other news:
Recently
Salford was turned into a disambiguation page with the article on the settlement moved to
Salford, Greater Manchester. This will hopefully make it clearer to the reader that
Salford, Greater Manchester, and the
City of Salford are not the same thing. Just remember to specify which Salford next time you're adding a wikilink to an article!
Although it wasn't technically this month,
list of people from Wigan was created on 2 July, and any help populating the list with sourced names would be great. It's one of nine such list for the boroughs in Greater Manchester (Bury doesn't have a list yet) and they all need populating.
Remember to be careful about editors claiming places are still in Lancashire, today I had to revert someone insisting that
Leigh isn't in Greater Manchester and recently the
Friends of Real Lancashirevoiced their dislike of the
Lancashire article so this issue isn't going to go away.
Just remember that the
project watchlist can help us catch vandalism and is worth checking from time to time.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Recently another aim was added: bringing Stockport to GA standard. It's currently C-class and has some well developed sections. It will be a difficult task, but worthwhile considering it's Greater Manchester's third largest settlement. Also, the importance of bringing Salford to GA has been emphasised; it's currently B-class and should be the easiest of our aims to accomplish, although it's been there for a long time. Let's see if we can put this one to rest soon.
Member News
No new members joined the project in June and there are 45 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 20 members inactive since 1 January 2009). The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Manchester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
The project compared
In June,
WP:LON has a massive upsurge in the number of FAs, with some great work by
Iridescent in promoting a swathe of bridge articles to FA.
WP:YORKS has over taken WP:GM in terms of GAs, and for the first time since June 2008 (when WP:LON had the lead), WP:GM is not the project with most GAs. In June, the
Derwent Valley Mills became a GA and is
WP:DERBY's first GA although there are more likely candidates in the pipeline.
WP:CHES continues to perform strongly considering it has few active editors, and in June
John Douglas (architect) was promoted to FA and there is currently a FLC. In June, there was discussion at
WT:MERSEY about how to generate more audited content (ie: GAs and FAs) and since then one article has been promoted to GA, there is one GAC and other articles being prepared for GAC.
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Salford is Greater Manchester's second city (although it is the
wider district which has city status), but for most of its history it was larger and more important than Manchester. The Salford Quays area will become the home of CBBC and BBC Sport in 2011.
The Peak District was the first national park in Britain and spans Cheshire, Derbyshire, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, Staffordshire, and West Yorkshire. It was used by the Dam Busters and used as a location for the
film based on the story.
Other news:
There's been a lot of article activity in the last month, especially in Wigan-related pages. Wigan is the only borough in Greater Manchester without a GA or FA to its name, and it would be great if this could change. A lot of work has been put into
Tyldesley, any and help to get it to GA would be great. There's also been a high-profile new article created:
media in Manchester. Pitch in on the talk page if you're interested!
Just remember that the
project watchlist can help us catch vandalism and is worth checking from time to time.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Last month, we achieved our long-standing aim of bringing Salford up to GA status. It's been a fine effort and perhaps we can concentrate on our other objectives, especially getting Stockport, the largest settlement article not to be at least B-class, to GA.
Member News
There are now 47 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 20 members inactive since 1 January 2009) as two new members have joined the project since the start of March:
J3Mrs has done some fine work on Wigan-related articles, especially
Tyldesley so hopefully we can help him with his efforts. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Manchester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
The project compared
In July,
WP:LON almost doubled in scope and now has over 12,000 articles – far more than any other UK county WikiProject. Last month, the
Peak District was promoted to GA; the area is mainly in Derbyshire but covers several other counties and is a massive achievement for all involved.
WP:CHES continues to perform strongly considering it has few active editors, with one FL promoted in July and another in the pipeline. WP:GM is still the leading UK county project in terms of FAs and by proportion of audited content (ie: GAs and FAs). A lot of effort has gone into producing this project's articles, so let's make sure we keep tags on them and that they don't degrade.
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Fair use rationale for File:Chelsea Fields Teela.jpg
Thanks for uploading or contributing to File:Chelsea Fields Teela.jpg. I notice the file page specifies that the file is being used under
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If you have uploaded other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on those pages too. You can find a list of 'file' pages you have edited by clicking on the "
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Sfan00 IMG (
talk)
18:41, 21 June 2010 (UTC)reply
Survey
Hi Helen!
I have put together a survey for female editors of Wikipedia (and related projects) in order to explore, in greater detail, women's experiences and roles within the Wikimedia movement. It'd be wonderful if you could participate!
It's an independent survey, done by me, as a fellow volunteer Wikimedian. It is not being done on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation. I hope you'll participate!
Any questions or concerns, feel free to email me or stop by my user talk page. Also, feel free to share this any other female Wikimedians you may know. It is in English, but any language Wikimedia participants are encouraged to participate.
I appreciate your contributions - to the survey and to Wikipedia! Thank you!
SarahStierch (
talk)
22:31, 27 September 2011 (UTC)reply
WikiWomen's Collaborative
WikiWomen Unite!
Hi Ecco1983! Women around the world who edit and contribute to Wikipedia are coming together to celebrate each other's work, support one another, and engage new women to also join in on the empowering experience of shaping the sum of all the world's knowledge - through the WikiWomen's Collaborative.
As a WikiWoman, we'd love to have you involved! You can do this by:
WikiWomen's Collaborative: Come join us (and check out our new website)!
WikiWomen - We need you!
Hi Ecco1983! The WikiWomen's Collaborative is a group of women from around the world who edit Wikipedia, contribute to its
sister projects, and support the mission of free knowledge. We recently updated our website, created new volunteer positions, and more!
Get involved by:
Visiting our website for resources, events, and more
Meet other women and share your story in our profile space
Why did someone write F*CK YOU?
Probably because when you edit something on this page straight after the episode, you find that people are messing around with it at the same time, it's somewhat annoying
Useally I write up vandalism reverts in many many ways in the edit summarys, which is also the case for non-admin users who are cleaning vandalism. So the rv vandalism is just of those codes.
You can wrote those reverts in different ways in the edit summary as long as it is mentioned to make vandal cleaning easier. Generally I use {rv), {rv vandalism), (rv nonsense) or (rv stupidity) for that as well as (rv POV) for edits that violates
NPOV policy.
Also, you can also, like admins, warn users who are vandalizing pages such as the one who did it to Big (i've sent him a warning for that). You can use the vandal warning system
[1] by using the template subst:test (put {{ }} ) for vandalism (from 1 to 4 as only admins block users (test5 and above), subst:blatantvandal for blatant vandal., subst:test1a (or until 4a) for those removing contents, subst:comment (from 1 to 4) for NPOV violations and subst:test-self for those who've vandalized a page and reverted on their own. One user had suggested me to use the system after I was reverting vandalism in multiple pages.
By warning users that they cannot vandalized a serious project is a way to lower the vandalism, when they eventually get blocked by admins after repeat offensives.
Often I also put the page name after the type warning (exemple: subst:test1 | Big)
Administrators have their own codes for reverting vandalism, this is why we can see like Reverted edits, or revert to revision or BOT: rv edits, etc.
Just for your info it was
User:70.179.101.248, the one that preceded your revert, that added that nonsense. Generally, I would say about 90% of the vandalism are coming from unregistered users such as the above. So, be especially aware of IP (or anonymous users) whom also omits quite often to put any edit summary (although me too write brief summarys a lot too.) --
JForget21:18, 19 November 2006 (UTC)reply
Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia, Ecco1983! However, your edit
here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove spam from Wikipedia. If you were trying to insert a good link, please accept my creator's apologies, and try to reinsert the link again. If your link was genuine spam, please note that inserting spam into Wikipedia is against policy. For more information about me, see
my FAQ page. Thanks!
Shadowbot22:18, 20 November 2006 (UTC)reply
Hello Ecco
I found you through the Dyspraxia category page, which I also have (along with 'symptoms of dyslexia). I was reading your journal, which I thought was quite well laid out, is it ok if I pinch some of the applicable userboxes? I'm just mentioning it as a thing to say, really.
Hi Ecco1983! You have identified yourself as a user from
Manchester as indicated by your userpage. We are looking for dedicated and quality members of the editing community, who would be willing to join a Greater Manchester WikiProject - a kind of community action group interested in improving articles that relate to Manchester and
Greater Manchester.
We are hoping to have a diverse team, and would be grateful if you would be willing to register your interest at
this proposal page.
Hey! Thank you for the contact and rapid response! I'm also from the Greater Manchester area, and although it was originally proposed that the project be specific to Manchester, the consensus appears to be for a Greater Manchester wide WikiProject to be initiated
Should enough interest be registered, and the project be set up, no expectation is placed upon you at all! However, it is hoped that users of this group would be sent regular messages about what articles need improving, what statements we need references for, what articles require advanced features, images, maps, and then users who are part of this scheme could pool together their ideas and expertise and move articles forwards much more quickly as a community effort!
Should a particular article be a regular victim to distruptive editting, we can also work together to try to combat it.
Hi again! It seems things are moving faster than I anticipated! The
Wikipedia:WikiProject Greater Manchester is now live! It will take a little time for things to gather pace, but plese feel free to visit the project page and follow any instructions that appeal to you. Again, any questions, feel free to ask. Thanks,
Jhamez8416:55, 25 February 2007 (UTC)reply
Hello.... again =)
Thanks for that, I did pinch them before you gave permission.....Oh, do you have a facebook?
Hello! If you are receiving this message, that means that your user page is in a specific year category. Per a recent user-category per deletion, all specific year categories are to be deleted. If you wish to continue using year categories, you have two options:
If you wish, you may do both. Hopefully, this change in categorization will be quick and painless. Happy editing! --An automated message from
MessedRobot13:05, 9 March 2007 (UTC)reply
Hello fellow
WikiProject Greater Manchester participant! T=You may or may not be aware that our Manchester article has recently obtained
official good article status! This is a great acheievement, but we don't want to stop there! We're hoping to spend the next few weeks as a team to raise the standard of this article to
featured standard! It will only be possible if we work together, and hope you can take a moment to look both at the
FA criteria, and the Manchester article and aid us in this feat! Any problems, feel free to raise them at
Talk:Manchester! Good luck!
Jza8423:19, 10 September 2007 (UTC)reply
May seem like old news now, but Manchester was recently listed as a good article, try and make as much effort as you can with trying to make it featured.
Manchester Airport has seen unprecedented vandalism from anonymous editors recently, on 24th September it was protected by
MastCell for a period of 1 week. Make sure to visit the page (after that date) regularly so we can stamp out any "bad edits".
Try to invite more members to this project. As much as a streamlined team is good, the more editors we have the broader the range we can cover.
The project now has 28 members! 7 new participants enrolled this week, they can be viewed
here. There was also change to the welcoming messages this month, by
Jza84, which reinvigorated the style in response to the change of colours on the main and affiliated pages. See the welcome templates,
here. Finally, a barnstar has been created for the project! See the final design
on this page, and so far it has been awarded to one lucky participants,
WebHamster. Well done.
Greater Manchester Article News
Well has this month been a hub of activity, or what? (See:
Original diff) The new assessment scale has been welcomed by many here at
WPGM and as of 4th November, 81.37% of all 650 articles have been assessed with both importance and class. Two articles have been passed
good article criteria since last delivery, they are:
Didsbury &
Dunham Massey. Well done to all involved.
Current Debates
There was a lengthy debate over a certain number of related articles in Manchester City Centre this week, (See:
the thread involved). Aytoun Street, Barton Square, Brazenoose Sqaure, Dover Street, Manchester and Police Street were all flagged by
Pit-yacker as being deserved of deletion per lacking
notablilty. The process took 5 days at
articles for deletion and the result was,
delete. Other sections that readied editors into scrambling over themselves this month were: should Greater Manchester boroughs get their own infobox? Such as with
London boroughs.
The debate continutes.
Monthly Challenges
Same as last month, we've have to get Manchester upto Featured Article Standard. However, with Manchester now rated as
A-Class (above GA and below FA) it may be easier than first thought. Try to fill all the current "
to do" requirements. There has also been some talk of increased activity of bringing Greater Manchester to Good Article Standard. It would be ideal if all 650 articles were at least GA standard, but that will never happen in the next month. But please if you can, assess your ability to understand an article and if you're acquauinted with the task in hand and potentially long wait for a writing and for a review, go ahead! Be
bold.
Manchester Airport once again saw more vandal edits this month, and was protected for another consecutive month on 22nd October by
Jmlk17. Some users have also realised the extreme coincidence in the first half of 65% of editing IPs, i.e. all begin with "79.72". Could it be the same editor? If you can keep visiting the page to revert vandalism in sight. The most freqeunt additions that are factually incorrect are the inclusions of: Chicago O'Hare and New York-JFK to Pakistan International Airlines (T2) and Newquay to Air Southwest (T3). MAN also has a
peer review.
Although you may not have noticed that this WikiProject has a associated
portal. The page named,
Portal:North West England, is updated frequently, but it would be nice to get more editors. It too has recently undergone a
peer review, and some criteria has been added to get the page to
featured portal status. You could signify your involvement by adding {{
User Portal NWE}} to your userpage.
The project now has 31 members. 3 new participants enrolled last month, they can be viewed
here.
Andrew has also created another template for your
talk page (even though this links to your userpage) which displays for all to see that you are a member of the project. You can add it to your page by including {{
WPGM Talk}} to the page. It may be difficult to see the true effects of these welcoming messages, but I'm estimating that since the introduction of these that 12 new users have joined, all 100% have accepted their invitations, and therefore they are 100% successful in their aim.
Greater Manchester Article News
Once again, the project has been subject to much praise from three newly promoted featured articles, and one more good article.
Oldham (
nom),
Manchester (
nom),
M62 motorway (
nom) and
Chat Moss (
review) have all passed with flying colours. Featured articles now make up 0.03% more of the overall articles that there are relating to the project, than last month. Of all 791 pages which are tagged with
this template, 100% have been assessed with the new scale which was introduced last month. It may also be worth noting two others pages that are undergoing transformations are:
List of companies based in Greater Manchester and
Belle Vue Zoo.
Current Debates
There was a lengthy debate over
Manchester Airport this month, which lead to three article for deletions, second nominations viewable
here and deletion review viewable
here. Basically, what happened was there was quite a great misunderstanding of what the purpose of the lists actually were. They were to compile a list of the destinations served by each terminal and linked along into a sub-page, where it would seem the overview page (i.e.
Manchester Airport) would look less cluttered, as was the suggestion at the peer review. Some participants at the first AFD, stated that reviews shouldn't be carried out upon unless there is consensus, and as they are not authorative should only be used as a guide. It was soon sorted though and all three daughter-lists were deleted. There has also been a change to the projects aims, which took a dramatic overhaul this week following the FA pass of Manchester. The
change was performed by
Jza84. It is now recognised that we should bring not only top importance articles to
FA standard but also ones that have been long-since reviewed, like
Altrincham and
Stretford. And if you're wondering why Salford is there it's due to the fact that there is a consensus among the project members that as Salford is in such close vicinity to the City of Manchester, that it's our "duty" to help promote it. The change came about about after
this discussion.
Monthly Challenges
New this month, we have to get Greater Manchester upto Featured Article Standard. However, with Manchester now rated as
FA-Class and the proposed "skipping" of the GA process, it may not be too long before we see this under the success section on the project mainpage. It would be ideal if all 791 articles were at least GA standard, but that will never happen in the next month! But please if you can, assess your ability to understand an article and if you're acquauinted with the task in hand and potentially long wait for a writing and for a review, go ahead! Be
bold. The progress monitor can be seen
here.
Once again, Portal:North West England has been subject to much exposure on behalf of it's editors. The current status of the portal is looking good and it has so far gained unanimous support at it's
FPOC. Hopefully, it'll be promoted and we'll have yet another success on our hands. Also, most major articles that are relevant have been tagged with a shortcut to the Portal mainpage, by Jza.
And finally, have a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to all our Greater Manchester Wikipedians! The project now has 34 members. 5 new participants enrolled last month, they can be viewed
here. On behalf of the team I hope they have prosperous and enjoyable usership and wish them well with their forthcoming work!
User:Archtransit and
User:Rudget, both part of our team, are current candidates for adminship (see
here for Archtransit and
here for Rudget). We wish them luck with this persuit and hope they will become our latest project participants with admin status!
Simillarly, the
Portal:North West England is now officially a featured portal.
User:Rudget has been overwhelmingly involved with this portal and he too is hereby thanked on behalf of the project for his continued contributions to this page and many others.
There have been a number of debates this month, some of which with a high level of potential impact for the project and its members.
Article assessment for the project became a point of contention when around 1400 articles were tagged by a bot. Most of these artcles were on "minor" association football players. The consensus was that in our state of around 30 participants and as a predominatly geography based project, most of these articles should be untagged, at very least for the time being. Of our 1403 articles now tagged however, only (?) 85% are assessed - a drop of 15%!
Perhaps one of the most notable debates this month was the possibility of... scrapping the project newsletter!
User:Rudget has written the last three editions (that's all of them!) and has decided that he'd like to pass on the responsibility.
It has been proposed that a noticeboard system be introduced to highlight new issues in a near(!)-realtime fashion. I
User:Jza84 am writing what could now be the last GM newsletter for a while. If you're a member of the team, but aren't closely involved with the project, then we'd love to hear from you at
WT:GM with your views on which system of communication is the right way forwards (if any/both!).
Monthly Challenges
As was stated in last months newsletter, the
Greater Manchester remains a key article for the project, and one which has been identified as urgent in our quest for Featured Article status. Sadly, for all our other successes, Greater Manchester has changed little since
this time last year] (!) and is still an article requiring expansion and development. The new
WP:UKCOUNTIES guide may provide new ways in which to channel our efforts. Although we endevour to have
good article status even for our suburbs and hamlets, other articles specifically identified as needing development towards FA include
Salford,
Stretford and
Altrincham.
Many of our most crucial articles about our largest towns are still in poor condition:
Rochdale,
Bury,
Prestwich,
Bolton, and
Wigan are of "start class" standard - much lower than we should have. If you feel you can help, please
be bold and try to improve these.
One final challenge for this month is for all those with new digial cameras for Christmas, or even digial images stored away on a disc!... many of our place articles are still without a single photograph, and www.geograph.org.uk is running low on quality images. Even those with photographs often have a low quality photograph of the local church. MORE ARE NEEDED! Especially townscapes! If you think you can help, a barnstar is up for grabs for best picture added in the next month or so!
We're always looking for potential new project members and ways for greater communication, collaboration and participation.
WP:GM has a strong core of users, but would like to have more input from a wider user-base. If you can think of ways to improve our ways of working, please feel free to mention them at
WT:GM. Simillarly, if you notice a new or unapproached user who is producing sound work related to
Greater Manchester and its consituent parts, please don't forget to ask them if they'd like to join us, either in your own hand, or by adding {{
Welcome WPGM}} to their talk page.
Would you like to write the next newsletter for
WP:GM?? Please nominate yourself at
WT:GM! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered on January 5th, 2008 by
Jza84. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add two *'s by your username on the Project Mainpage.
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Since the January newsletter there has been an increase of 5 featured articles/lists, taking our total number of featured entries upto 16 17 (
Trafford passed today!).
Although WP:GM leads the way in terms of featured content by a local British project, the
Kent and
Yorkshire WikiProjects are close to this total, with 11 and 14 featured entries respectively.
Following a somewhat frenzied collaboration at the start of March, and a nomination by
User:Joshii, Greater Manchester was promoted to GA status. It's the first
metropolitan county to obtain this recognition.
There has otherwise been a reduction in WP:GM nominations for
GA status, something which the project has begun to discuss on the
talk page.
Having completed all but one of our short term aims
set last December, the project would like to look at developing new short term aims. Suggestions have been made here, but there is scope for flexibility. Do you have a entry you would like to see developed?
Two members have left the project however, each for rather different reasons:
Archtransit (
talk·contribs) was an administrator, and project member, who was found to have been abusing his editting and sysop privliges. Following investigation, Archtransit was banned indefinately. A report in The Signpost is found
here.
Rudget (
talk·contribs), also an administrator, decided to leave the project. Reasons mentioned included the demands of admin duties taking over too much time. Rudget helped towards
Didsbury's GA promotion, and
Portal:North West England's FP promotion.
Thanks
This WikiProject, would not be where it is today without each and every one of its members! Thank you to all!
WP:GM is a great project, and is leading the way for local WikiProjects of the UK. However, though the
project talk page is a hub of activity, it is regularly used by only a core of 5-6 editors, which isn't making the most of its potential. Indeed, a
study, by the
University of Minnesota found that "One-tenth of 1 percent of editors account for nearly half of Wikipedia's content value". We at WP:GM do not want to follow suit!
There are several editors who have, sadly, not editted since the turn of 2008, and others, which concentrate in areas other than Greater Manchester material (which is quite fine!).
The WikiProject Greater Manchester would like to know if YOU are still around, and if so, if you've like to be more involved, and, if not, why not and what can we do to get you involved and be a bigger part of the team?
Feel free to come by the project talk page and leave us a message on what you're working on and/or what you'd like to see improved. The project is only as strong as its members and we'd like to know if you're still active or if we can help you with your editting.
Images
A picture's worth a thousand words
In our last issue, a plea was made for more images to be submitted to Wikipedia/WikiCommons to improve the quality and context of our articles. Many of our
Top priority articles are still lacking in quality images, if any!
www.geograph.org.uk is an online resource of photographs of places in the UK, which we can use. Www.flickr.com also has some images we are permitted to use. Do you have a digital camera however? Can you take photographs of townscapes and landmarks in your local area that can be used here?
Middleton,
Hulme and
Rochdale all have examples of images in their lead that help give a sense of place and improve the context to our readers.
Simillarly, many of our most crucial articles about our largest towns are still in poor condition:
Stockport,
Bury,
Prestwich,
Bolton, and
Wigan are of "start class" standard with short lead sections and
unreferenced sections - a much lower standard than we should allow! If you feel you can help, please be
bold and try to improve these. There is
a list of resources that can help.
Would you like to write the next newsletter for
WP:GM?? Please nominate yourself at
WT:GM! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered on March 8th, 2008 by
Jza84. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add two *'s by your username on the Project Mainpage.
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Peterloo Massacre was nominated for FAC on 6 April. So far it has received support for FAS but feel free join the discussion
here.
The reduction of WP:GM GAs, mentioned in the last issue, has been tackled with
Buckton Castle and
Oasis (band) being passed on 9 March and
Upper Brook Street Chapel, Manchester on 7 April. We now have 13 GAs due to hard work of our contributors. Well done!
WP:GM still is still the leading local British WikiProject. As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 6 on
London and
Yorkshire who have 15 FAs each. Although taking the lead in FAs, WP:GM is still lacking GAs and falls behind
London by 6. This topic was at the front of the new aims discussion (
here) and is an important issue for WP:GM.
As mentioned above, new aims have been decided. See the right hand column for more details.
Member News
There are now 44 members of WikiProject Greater Manchester! A warm welcome to the 5 new members that have joined us since March:
Would you like to write the next newsletter for
WP:GM?? Please nominate yourself at
WT:GM! New editors are always welcome!
New Aims
The completion of all but one of the short term aims set last December resulted in
a discussion on
WT:GM to set new aims for the WikiProject. They are:
Obtain GA status for a third of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs.
It took us four months to get our last aims completed, why not try and see if these can be done in less time than before! All input is welcome but if anyone has any books or photos etc specifically related to these topics, they would be extra-specially welcome.
But before rushing ahead with these new aims, let's not forget the one that got away last time: to obtain B -> GA status for
Rochdale,
Wigan,
Bury,
Bolton and
Stockport. Most of these articles are in poor condition and in need of repair. Good quality images are urgently needed also. Let's make sure that this aim doesn't stay off our radar much longer.
Don't Forget...
Images! The shortage of good images was mentioned in the last issue and still hasn't been resolved! A good place to start would be the
requested photographs category but please remember that there are many articles not within this category that have the same need in common.
Assessment "Assess and review all relevant articles for quality, importance and progress" is one of our mid-term aims. At the present moment, there are only 43 unassessed articles. This task could be completed well before the next newsletter is out.
The
Peterloo Massacre article was promoted to
FA on 12 April. One of our top priority articles, it had previously been only start class. The process began on 25th March and since then underwent over 700 edits before the end of April, with
Jza84,
Malleus Fatuarum, and
Richerman making significant contributions to the rapid development of the article.
Ddstretch and
Mr Stephen also contributed to discussions on the article talk page.
Perhaps the most unusual event of April 2008 for the project has surrounded the
Denshaw article. Denshaw is a village of about 500 people in
Saddleworth,
Oldham, which attracted media attention due to vandalism of the stub class article. Once this was brought to the project's attention, efforts were made to improve the article which led to a successful DYK? nomination and might even advance it to
GA status with a bit more effort. In April there were over
19,000 visitors who saw the project in action. Contributors included
Jza84,
Ddstretch,
Malleus Fatuarum,
Hassocks5489,
Nev1 and
Mike Peel.
Also this month 5 articles featured on the DYK? section of the front page:
Hulme Arch Bridge,
Peterloo Massacre,
Bolton and Leigh Railway,
Barnes Hospital,
Denshaw, and
Platt Fields Park. This certainly puts into perspective one of the project's previous mid-term aims "feature on the Did you know? section with at least three articles related to Greater Manchester". If you've expanded an article 5 fold or started one with at least 1.5kb of prose in the past 5 days and it has an interesting and referenced fact don't hesitate to read the conditions of DYK? and nominate it
here. It gets the project noticed!
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still leading local British WikiProjects. As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 7 on
London and
Yorkshire who have 15 Featured Articles each. Although taking the lead in FAs, WP:GM is still lacking GAs and falls behind
London by 6 (we have 14, London 20). If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
Member News
There are 45 members of WikiProject Greater Manchester. One new member has joined the project this month:
Kieran5676 on 30th April and is interested in south Manchester.
The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A rather large "thank you" goes out to all the editors who edited article related to
Greater Manchester, or who edit the project itself.
Obtain GA status for one third (1/3) of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs.
It took us four months to get our last aims completed, why not try and see if these can be done in less time than before! All input is welcome but if anyone has any books or photos etc specifically related to these topics, they would be extra-specially welcome.
Most of the articles covered by our new aims haven't experienced much activity in the past month, if you thing you can help improve an article
be bold and get editing. Articles such as List of people from Bolton and List of railway stations in Greater Manchester already appear very close to FL status and may just require an editor to guide them through the
FLC process.
Our highest priority article is of course Greater Manchester, there is a peer review from March with issues still to be addressed before it can be put forward as a featured article candidate. Salford is another top priority article because it's the county's second city; it's under gone a lot of editing but still has a way to go before it reaches GA. Also active this month has been the
City of Salford article – part of our aim to get 1/3 of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs to GA &ndash.
Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Reminders...
Images! The rate of good images has gone up since it was mentioned in the last issue, but more images are needed! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment When this section was written, there was only 1 unassessed article! This task has probably already been finished, but it might now have. To check click
here.
Orphaned non-free media (Image:Victor in w and g.jpg)
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orphaned, meaning that it is not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the media was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed.
You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that media for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see
our policy for non-free media).
If you have uploaded other unlicensed media, please check whether they're used in any articles or not. You can find a list of 'image' pages you have edited by clicking on the "
my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "Image" from the dropdown box. Note that all non-free media not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described on
criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you.
BJBot (
talk)
08:03, 2 June 2008 (UTC)reply
Old Trafford,
Murrays' Mills and
1990 Strangeways Prison riot all passed
GAC last month! In previous newsletters, the issue of WP:GM's lack of GAs has been raised numerously, so a large 'well done' to all those who contributed, be it little or large!
Also,
Milnrow and
City of Salford have been nominated at
WP:GAC. Feel free to join in with their discussions
here and
here respectively. To 'obtain GA status for a third of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs' is one of WP:GM's short-term aims, let's hope the
City of Salford won't be the last borough with this status.
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 8 on
London! Although taking the lead in FAs, WP:GM is still flagging a little in GAs and falls behind
London by 3. This is the closest we have ever got to taking the lead in local British GAs, if you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
And don't forget that the
Manchester congestion charge article will need all input possible to keep it up to date with the government's new legislation (grumble grumble)...
Member News
There are 46 members of WikiProject Greater Manchester. Our newest member is:
Let's not forget that
Jza84 became an administrator this month! Congratulations on your new role.
The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A rather large "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed..
Obtain GA status for one third of Greater Manchester's Metropolitan Boroughs.
Most of the articles covered by our new aims haven't experienced much activity in the past month, except for
City of Salford being nominated at
WP:GAC. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Articles such as
List of people from Bolton and
List of railway stations in Greater Manchester already appear very close to
FL status and may just require an editor to guide them through the
FLC process.
Greater Manchester is, of course, our highest priority article.
Mr Stephen posted some milestones to getting this article up to
FA status a while back. Please
check them out and see what you can do.
Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Reminders...
Images! The rate of good images has gone up since it was mentioned in the last issue, but we'll need more if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment As of 12th April, we have had 100% of our articles assessed for quality! Even so, we still 151 of our 1551 article unassessed for importance. Please
take a look and see what you can do.
It's been three months since the last newsletter, but there's been a lot going on...
Promoted articles:
Greater Manchester is one of our project's top priority articles, the Greater Manchester article comprehensively covers everything to do with the county, from culture and history, to transport and demography.
Manchester United F.C. records and statistics is about the records of one of Greater Manchester's best know clubs, which feats like "the club currently holds the record for the most FA Cup triumphs with 11".
City of Salford is about the local government area and Greater Manchester's second city. Getting
Salford to GA is one our the aim's of our project, so hopefully this may help.
Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal is about the history and modern restoration of the disused canal running through the county. (It's now at FAC, so please improve the article if you can!)
Manchester Mummy is about Hannah Beswick, whose macabre fear of being buried alive lead to her demanding that her body was kept above ground and checked periodically for signs of life.
Milnrow is a small town in
Rochdale with a long history. The wool trade was important to the town and was the basis of much of its industry. (It's also the first GA for Rochdale!)
Ordsall Hall is an important Tudor hall in Salford with a reputation for being haunted!
Bert Trautmann is the German goalkeeper who broke his neck playing for Manchester City... and carried on playing!
The
Peterloo Massacre appeared on the front page on 16 August! Well done to everyone who contributed to the article about a key moment of Greater Manchester's history and managed to get it showcased.
A new
portal has been set up! The
Greater Manchester portal showcases some of the best articles to do with the county. Thanks to
Polishname for single-handedly getting it up and running.
There is a proposal to move members who haven't edited for a while to an inactive members list, so if you've not been edited recently but still want to be a member let us know!
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 5 on
Yorkshire and 11 on
London! WP:GM now is the leading project in terms of GAs too with 5 more than London and 7 more than Yorkshire! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Although the project has had a lot of GAs and FAs recently, most of the articles covered by our short term aims haven't experienced much activity recently.
Baby has undergone some change, but has a long way to go, and
List of railway stations in Greater Manchester is very close to FL quality. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Articles such as
List of railway stations in Greater Manchester already appear very close to
FL status and may just require an editor to guide them through the
FLC process.
Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Member News
There are 53 members of WikiProject Greater Manchester. Since 12 June, the project has gained 7 new members:
Welcome to everyone, and let's remember to make these new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help.
The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment As of 1st September, we have had 99.5% of our articles assessed for quality! Even so, we still 157 of our 1662 article unassessed for importance. Please
take a look and see what you can do.
Usually this is where this month's promoted articles are listed, however there is something more important this month. In September, the project was notified which of its articles were selected for
a DVD version of wikipedia. The 49 are listed
here, although the quality ratings are a bit out of date. Twenty-two of the articles were GA-class or higher, and only five were below B-class. These are articles that have been selected by wikipedia, not simply as the best but the most important, so they require our attention, most importantly those that fall below GA standards. We still have until the 20th October to make changes to the articles, so please if you think you can improve any of them in any way please do so!
In other news, it's been a busy month with plenty going on...
Promoted articles:
The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal is a disused canal undergoing restoration. The canal, which travels between Bolton and Manchester with a branch heading north east to Bury, was abandoned in 1961.
Having previously been described as "bare, wet, and almost worthless", Ashton-under-Lyne rose to prominence in the
Industrial Revolution as one of the most famous
mill towns in the north west.
Henry Taylor is Oldham's forgotten Olympic hero. He won 3 swimming golds at the 1908 Olympics, a record for most golds in a single games by a Briton until
Chris Hoy equalled it this year.
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 8 on
Yorkshire and 15 on
London! WP:GM now is the leading project in terms of GAs too with 5 more than London and 7 more than Yorkshire! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
There wasn't space in the last newsletter, but as of 24 July 2008 the project has a
list of articles that have tags on them. As of 14 July 2008, 351 (21.8%) of our articles need a clean-up, although this should have gone down as some have already received attention (the bot does not seem to update the listing often).
In other news, the
Merseyside Wikiproject has been set up. If you have an interest in the area or want to help out in any way, head over to the project page and pitch in.
In the past month we've achieved two of our short-term aims! The
List of railway stations in Greater Manchester was expertly guided through the
featured list process with hardly a problem, and now that
Tameside is a GA a third of the county's boroughs are GA status or better. There's still plenty to do, some our our top-priority articles need referencing or tidying up, so don't hesitate to dive in! If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! And please keep an eye on the 49 articles selected for the wikipedia DVD.
Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Member News
No new members joined the project in September and there are 49 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester. A new list of
inactive members has been started. Anyone who hasn't made an edit to wikipedia since 1 March 2008 automatically goes onto the list.
If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment As of 4th October, we have had 100% of our articles assessed for quality! Even so, 151 of our 1684 articles remain unassessed for importance. Please
take a look and see what you can do.
It's been a quieter month than September, but plenty has been going on...
Promoted articles:
Born in
Stalybridge and raised in
Ashton-under-Lyne, Hugh Mason was a mill owner and politician. He was popular among his workers for shortening the working week at his factories without cutting their pay.
No articles were DYKs this month. For details of the DYKs by the project that have appeared on the main page, see
Did you know?
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 8 on
Yorkshire and 14 on
London! WP:GM now is the leading project in terms of GAs too with 7 more than both Yorkshire and London! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
Trafford was featured on the main page on the 12th October and was viewed 13,800 on the day (27,100 times over 4 days).
The project's
cleanup listing has been updated with stats from 8 October. As of 14 July, 351 (21.8%) of our articles need a clean-up, this has risen to 447 out of 1689 (26.5%). Although this is disappointing, it reflects a more widespread use of tags on articles to indicate what needs attention rather than a decline in the standard of this project's articles.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Member News
There are now 53 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester as 4 new members joined the project in October:
Welcome to everyone, and let's remember to make these new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
On top of these aims, some our our top-priority articles need referencing or tidying up, so don't hesitate to dive in! If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Assessment As of 1st November, we have had 100% of our articles assessed for quality! Even so, 75 of our 1708 articles remain unassessed for importance. Please
take a look and see what you can do.
November has been a successful month, with lots of progress made on articles, and more work in the pipe-line:
Promoted articles:
Scout Moor Wind Farm is England's largest onshore wind farm. Although it was opposed by environmentalists, the wind farm was opened on 26 September 2008 and provides enough power for 40,000 homes.
The River Irwell runs 39 miles from its source in Lancashire until it joins with the River Mersey. The river was important in the Industrial Revolution, and was left poluted with industrial waste and lifeless.
The
Bridgewater Canal is currently a GA nominee and the
Scout Moor Wind Farm is under scrutiny at
WP:FAC. Please keep an eye on these articles and if any issues are raised in their reviews help to address them. Hopefully, next month we can report on two more promoted articles!
Scout Moor Wind Farm featured in the DYK section of the front page last month. For details of the DYKs by the project that have appeared on the main page, see
Did you know?
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as featured content goes, we have a lead of 8 on
Yorkshire and 14 on
London! WP:GM now is the leading project in terms of GAs too with 10 more Yorkshire and 11 more than London! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Member News
There are now 50 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester as 2 new members joined the project in November:
Welcome to everyone, and let's remember to make these new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Already we're making great progress, and
Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine and the
River Irwell are already GAs, while
Scout Moor Wind Farm is on the way to becoming an FA! The
Congestion charging in Greater Manchester and
Greater Manchester Transport Innovation Fund (TiF) are hot topics at the moment with the referendum currently open. As an aside, some of our top-priority articles need referencing or tidying up, so don't hesitate to dive in. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Articles needing attention Please remember that the
list of stubs needing expansion and the Wikipedia:WikiProject Greater Manchester/Cleanup listing|list of articles needing cleanup]] are in permanent need of attention.
I know it's early but since there won't be a newsletter for a month... merry Christmas everyone, enjoy the holiday and mince pies.
Delivered on 5 December 2008 by
Nev1. If you do not wish to receive future newsletters, please add two *s by your username on the Project Mainpage.
WikiProject Greater Manchester January Newsletter, Issue XIII
December has been a very successful month, with lots of article promoted, and hopefully more to come in January:
Promoted articles:
Scout Moor Wind Farm
Scout Moor Wind Farm is England's largest onshore wind farm. Although it was opposed by environmentalists, the wind farm was opened on 26 September 2008 and provides enough power for 40,000 homes.
The B of the Bang is the sculpture that was erected to commemorate the
2002 Commonwealth Games and for a while was the largest sculpture in the UK. And because of safety concerns, it may be dismantled.
Current nominations: January looks set to be very busy, with
Chadderton,
Cine City, Withington, and
Nico Ditch at WP:GAN, the
Greater Manchester portal up for Featured Portal status, and
Sale a Featured Article Candidate. Please keep an eye on these articles and if any issues are raised in their reviews help to address them.
Abram featured in the DYK section of the front page last month. For details of the DYKs by the project that have appeared on the main page, see
Did you know?
The project has a new tool, a
watchlist of all our project's articles. This should help us keep an eye on them and spot new editors who might want to join our project. Also, Jza84 has developed a
map of WP:GM's GAs and FAs. It shows a gap in coverage in the north west of the county, something we should try to change.
WikiProject Greater Manchester is still the leading local British WikiProject! As far as Featured and Good content goes, our lead is extending, with 10 and 16 more FAs than
Yorkshire and
London respectively, and 13 and 14 more GAs than Yorkshire and London! If you see an article that you think deserves to be a GA, don't hesitate to nominate it at
WP:GAC!
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Two of our aims were crossed off as
Scout Moor Wind Farm became an FA, and
Radcliffe, Greater Manchester a GA. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
Member News
There are now 46 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 14 members inactive since 1 July 2008) as 1 new member joined the project in December:
Welcome from everyone, and let's remember to make new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
With the new(ish) year, I think it's right to look back over the year just gone. Last year was massive for our project, with lots of successes building on a successful 2007. In terms of featured content, we became the leading wikiproject in 2007, but 2008 saw us cement our status as one of the UK's leading wikiprojects: having started the year with most FAs (two more than London and Yorkshire), but falling behind in terms of GAs, we now have more FAs and GAs than any project under WP:UKGEO. While our aim is to improve all articles related to Greater Manchester, not collect trophies, we now lead the field by a long way and everyone deserves to feel proud for their part.
We've had articles featured on the main page, both in DYK? and as today's Featured Article, but success is more than a matter of numbers; the project has grown into a community where editors join together to provide information and improve Wikipedia. A great example of this is the work our project did on
Denshaw. Back in April, it was targeted by vandals and as a result was featured in national news. We stepped in and improved and protected the article, showing what WP:GM is capable of. This is undoubtedly the noisiest project in the UK and it's strength comes from the wide range of interests of its many members. We've even been so successful that we were accused of forming a claque.
During 2008, our numbers have increased and, while
some have left, we've welcomed many strong editors who will help bring the project more success. With so much emphasis on Good and Featured articles, it's sometimes easy to forget that a lot of effort goes into articles that don't get recognition. The table below shows that the number of B-class articles has increased since the start of 2008, and that the proportion of stub-class articles under our project has gone down.
My own experience of Wikipedia has been positive and enjoyable, especially due to WP:GM. I've worked on interesting subjects with nice people, and hopefully the experience is similar for others. We've covered subjects as varied and interesting as castles, mummies, computers, Olympic swimmers, and wind farms, stuff I probably wouldn’t know about if it wasn’t for Wikipedia. I enjoy being a part of this project, and as we approach the WP:GM's second birthday (24 February) I'm sure it will continue to go from strength to strength in 2009.
Would you like to write the next newsletter for
WP:GM?? Please nominate yourself at
WT:GM! New editors are always welcome!
Project News
January has been a very successful month, with lots of article promoted, and hopefully more to come in January:
Promoted articles:
View of Broadway in Chadderton
Chadderton is a town in the
Metropolitan Borough of Oldham. It has a long and interesting history beyond that of its
mill town façade; a Celtic hill fort, a medieval lordship and still an important industrial and metropolitan town.
Nico Ditch stretches from Ashton-under-Lyne to Stretford and according to legend was dug in a single night to defend against the Danes.
Article news:
Cine City, Withington is at WP:GAN, please keep an eye on these articles and if any issues are raised in their reviews help to address them. Unfortunately, despite
User:Joshii's effort the Greater Manchester portal did not become featured.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Member News
There are now 48 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 14 members inactive since 1 July 2008) as 2 new members joined the project in January:
Welcome from everyone, and let's remember to make new members feel included in the project! If you need help, you can go to the
project talk page, or perhaps look at the
list of members to see if anyone can help. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Thanks
A big "thank you" goes to all the editors who help make this WikiProject what it is; no edit goes unnoticed.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Happy birthday! It was the project's second birthday on 24 February, so thank you to everyone who's helped improve and Greater Manchester related article, not just our members, your work is very much appreciated. The last month has been very successful, with lots activity:
Nico Ditch stretches from Ashton-under-Lyne to Stretford and according to legend was dug in a single night to defend against the Danes.
Cine City in 2004
The Cine City, Withington, was the third cinema to open in Britain and when it closed in 2001 it was the third longest running cinema in England. It was opened in 1912, and demolished in 2008.
Current nominations: As of the completion of this newsletter, there are no GA nominations, but
Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine and
Buckton Castle are at FAC. The articles detail the world's first stored-program computer, and the best preserved castle in Greater Manchester. There's a good chance that one or more of these interesting articles could be promoted, so please keep an eye on them in case there's any way you can help!
Charles White (physician) and
Worsley featured in the DYK section of the front page last month (actually, Worsley featured in January but was missed out of the last newsletter!). For details of the DYKs by the project that have appeared on the main page, see
Did you know?
The project's
cleanup listing has been updated with stats from 24 February 2009. As of 8 October 2008, 447 (26.5%) of 1689 our articles needed a clean-up, this has risen slightly to 455 out of 1809 (25.2%). This is encouraging as the proportion has gone down, and indicates the standard of the project's articles are steadily improving. While the high-profile successes of GAs and FAs are important, the project's aim is to improve all GM-related articles.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Sister projects
In an attempt to encourage communication between related wikiprojects, or to at least raise awareness, this section is dedicated to the important goings on of
WP:Merseyside and
WP:Cheshire, our sister projects and the only other user groups dedicated to improving articles in
North West England.
WP:CHES – After a period of low activity, the project has picked up recently, with initiatives (such as beginning a newsletter and sending a questionnaire to its member) to encourage greater participation from its members. This has paid dividends with two GAs being promoted in February and greater activity in general.
WP:MERSEY – After being set-up in September 2008, the project is experiencing a period of lowish activity. While the project has a handful of FAs and GAs, most of its articles are unassessed; assessing requires no familiarity with a subject, so any help WP:GM members can lend would be greatly appreciated.
Other news
There is a meet-up scheduled for 14 March in Manchester for anyone interested. It is not organised by WP:GM and is open to all wikipedians. More details can be found
here.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
After a flurry of activity in January, progress on the Salford article has slowed, but it is steadily progressing towards a good standard. If you think you can help improve an article,
be bold and get editing! Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Wikipedia articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.
The project compared
The Greater Manchester WikiProject is one of the leading UK-based groups. Some other projects are no as lucky as we are in the numbers of active enthusiastic users. Below are some statistics of the other leading UK projects and some geographically close to Greater Manchester.
There are now 46 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 17 members inactive since 1 September 2008) as 1 new member joined the project in February:
Majorly is an experienced editor who has recently decided to join WP:GM, and has been working hard on
Cheadle Hulme. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Sorry there's not been a newsletter for three months, it's not that there hasn't been anything to say but that there almost hasn't been time to say it...
On 20 March 2009 Manchester was "today's Featured Article" and received over
44,000 visitors. This was the culmination of about 2 years of effort from a lot of editors who found the article in
this state before the founding of the project. Along with
Greater Manchester, it's our flagship article and for it to reach the mainpage is a great achievement. It was an incredible collaborative effort and shows what the project is capable of, and since then we have gone from strength to strength. The
Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine was Today's Featured Article on 30 May, with
33,000 visitors.
Promoted articles:
Carrington Moss is an 1,100 acres (450 ha)
peat bog in Trafford; in the 19th century, it was reclaimed to be used agriculturally and for the disposal Manchester's waste, and is still used for farming.
Manchester Mummy is about Hannah Beswick, whose macabre fear of being buried alive lead to her demanding that her body was kept above ground and checked periodically for signs of life.
The town of Sale in Trafford was probably founded in the
Anglo-Saxon period and is best known as the home of physicist
J. P. Joule the founding place and former home of and
Sale Sharks rugby club.
Cheadle Hulme is a suburb of
Stockport that formed from several small hamlets, rather than growing around a church which was usual for medieval villages. (also
Stockport's first GA!)
Mellor hill fort is the only Iron Age
hill fort in Greater Manchester and was only discovered in the 1990s.
Partington, in Trafford, is a town and civil parish that was until the
Manchester Ship Canal opened in 1894, a mainly agrarian community. With the opening of the canal, Partington became a major coal port and following the Second World War was expanded as an
overspill estate for deprived parts of Manchester.
With all the project's success, we must be careful not to become complacent. In March,
David Beckham was delisted as a Good Article because it lacked enough references and was poorly written in parts. Improving an article and getting it reviewed for GA is a lot of effort and it's a real shame to see the article delisted, but a reminder that our role as an article writer is two-fold: once we improve them, we have an obligation to maintain them. Beckham is the kind of person who is regularly in the news, so the article will get a lot of attention and need regular updating, and it was written by members of
WP:FOOTBALL, but let's take it as a reminder of what's needed from us.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Over the past three months, we've succeeded in our aims of bringing
Eccles and
Worsley to GA status, thanks largely to the seemingly inexhaustible
Parrot of Doom. Recently another aim was added: bringing Stockport to GA standard. It's currently C-class and has some well developed sections. It will be a difficult task, but worthwhile considering it's Greater Manchester's third largest settlement. Also, the importance of bringing Salford to GA has been emphasised; it's currently B-class and should be the easiest of our aims to accomplish, although it's been there for a long time. Let's see if we can put this one to rest soon.
The project compared
Over the past three months, WP:LOND and WP:YORK have had a massive upsurge in the number of articles under their auspices. And interestingly, WP:YORKS has had an upsurge in GAs (10), and WP:LOND has had an increase in both GAs and FAs (8 and 10 respectively), closing down the gap with WP:GM. Although WP:DERB appears to have lost a GA, one of their articles was incorrectly tagged; however
Derwent Valley Mills is being prepared to become a Good Article candidate, and hopefully will be the project's first. With the recent retirement of
Ddstretch and
Espresso Addict, WP:CHES has lost two of its most active contributors, but is still managing to produce good articles such as
list of castles in Cheshire (
FL) and
John Douglas (now a Good Article candidate). The majority of WP:MRSY's articles are now assessed and will hopefully go from strength to strength.
There are now 48 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 17 members inactive since 1 September 2008) as 2 new members have joined the project since the start of March:
The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Manchester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
Reminders...
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Part of the seven arches railway viaduct in Cheadle Hulme
Cheadle Hulme is a suburb of
Stockport that formed from several small hamlets, rather than growing around a church which was usual for medieval villages, although there is evidence of activity dating back to the
Bronze Age.
Did you know that after the collapse of the Broughton Suspension Bridge in 1831, the
British military introduced the order to "break step" when soldiers were crossing a bridge? Featured on the
Did you know? section on 6 June 2009.
Other news:
Recently
Salford was turned into a disambiguation page with the article on the settlement moved to
Salford, Greater Manchester. This will hopefully make it clearer to the reader that
Salford, Greater Manchester, and the
City of Salford are not the same thing. Just remember to specify which Salford next time you're adding a wikilink to an article!
Although it wasn't technically this month,
list of people from Wigan was created on 2 July, and any help populating the list with sourced names would be great. It's one of nine such list for the boroughs in Greater Manchester (Bury doesn't have a list yet) and they all need populating.
Remember to be careful about editors claiming places are still in Lancashire, today I had to revert someone insisting that
Leigh isn't in Greater Manchester and recently the
Friends of Real Lancashirevoiced their dislike of the
Lancashire article so this issue isn't going to go away.
Just remember that the
project watchlist can help us catch vandalism and is worth checking from time to time.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Recently another aim was added: bringing Stockport to GA standard. It's currently C-class and has some well developed sections. It will be a difficult task, but worthwhile considering it's Greater Manchester's third largest settlement. Also, the importance of bringing Salford to GA has been emphasised; it's currently B-class and should be the easiest of our aims to accomplish, although it's been there for a long time. Let's see if we can put this one to rest soon.
Member News
No new members joined the project in June and there are 45 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 20 members inactive since 1 January 2009). The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Manchester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
The project compared
In June,
WP:LON has a massive upsurge in the number of FAs, with some great work by
Iridescent in promoting a swathe of bridge articles to FA.
WP:YORKS has over taken WP:GM in terms of GAs, and for the first time since June 2008 (when WP:LON had the lead), WP:GM is not the project with most GAs. In June, the
Derwent Valley Mills became a GA and is
WP:DERBY's first GA although there are more likely candidates in the pipeline.
WP:CHES continues to perform strongly considering it has few active editors, and in June
John Douglas (architect) was promoted to FA and there is currently a FLC. In June, there was discussion at
WT:MERSEY about how to generate more audited content (ie: GAs and FAs) and since then one article has been promoted to GA, there is one GAC and other articles being prepared for GAC.
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Salford is Greater Manchester's second city (although it is the
wider district which has city status), but for most of its history it was larger and more important than Manchester. The Salford Quays area will become the home of CBBC and BBC Sport in 2011.
The Peak District was the first national park in Britain and spans Cheshire, Derbyshire, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, Staffordshire, and West Yorkshire. It was used by the Dam Busters and used as a location for the
film based on the story.
Other news:
There's been a lot of article activity in the last month, especially in Wigan-related pages. Wigan is the only borough in Greater Manchester without a GA or FA to its name, and it would be great if this could change. A lot of work has been put into
Tyldesley, any and help to get it to GA would be great. There's also been a high-profile new article created:
media in Manchester. Pitch in on the talk page if you're interested!
Just remember that the
project watchlist can help us catch vandalism and is worth checking from time to time.
WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the
congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.
Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.
Last month, we achieved our long-standing aim of bringing Salford up to GA status. It's been a fine effort and perhaps we can concentrate on our other objectives, especially getting Stockport, the largest settlement article not to be at least B-class, to GA.
Member News
There are now 47 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 20 members inactive since 1 January 2009) as two new members have joined the project since the start of March:
J3Mrs has done some fine work on Wigan-related articles, especially
Tyldesley so hopefully we can help him with his efforts. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Manchester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.
The project compared
In July,
WP:LON almost doubled in scope and now has over 12,000 articles – far more than any other UK county WikiProject. Last month, the
Peak District was promoted to GA; the area is mainly in Derbyshire but covers several other counties and is a massive achievement for all involved.
WP:CHES continues to perform strongly considering it has few active editors, with one FL promoted in July and another in the pipeline. WP:GM is still the leading UK county project in terms of FAs and by proportion of audited content (ie: GAs and FAs). A lot of effort has gone into producing this project's articles, so let's make sure we keep tags on them and that they don't degrade.
Images! There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The
requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.
Fair use rationale for File:Chelsea Fields Teela.jpg
Thanks for uploading or contributing to File:Chelsea Fields Teela.jpg. I notice the file page specifies that the file is being used under
fair use but there is not a suitable explanation or rationale as to why each specific use in Wikipedia constitutes fair use. Please go to
the file description page and edit it to include a
fair use rationale.
If you have uploaded other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on those pages too. You can find a list of 'file' pages you have edited by clicking on the "
my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "File" from the dropdown box. Note that any non-free media lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on
criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the
Media copyright questions page. Thank you.
Sfan00 IMG (
talk)
18:41, 21 June 2010 (UTC)reply
Survey
Hi Helen!
I have put together a survey for female editors of Wikipedia (and related projects) in order to explore, in greater detail, women's experiences and roles within the Wikimedia movement. It'd be wonderful if you could participate!
It's an independent survey, done by me, as a fellow volunteer Wikimedian. It is not being done on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation. I hope you'll participate!
Any questions or concerns, feel free to email me or stop by my user talk page. Also, feel free to share this any other female Wikimedians you may know. It is in English, but any language Wikimedia participants are encouraged to participate.
I appreciate your contributions - to the survey and to Wikipedia! Thank you!
SarahStierch (
talk)
22:31, 27 September 2011 (UTC)reply
WikiWomen's Collaborative
WikiWomen Unite!
Hi Ecco1983! Women around the world who edit and contribute to Wikipedia are coming together to celebrate each other's work, support one another, and engage new women to also join in on the empowering experience of shaping the sum of all the world's knowledge - through the WikiWomen's Collaborative.
As a WikiWoman, we'd love to have you involved! You can do this by:
WikiWomen's Collaborative: Come join us (and check out our new website)!
WikiWomen - We need you!
Hi Ecco1983! The WikiWomen's Collaborative is a group of women from around the world who edit Wikipedia, contribute to its
sister projects, and support the mission of free knowledge. We recently updated our website, created new volunteer positions, and more!
Get involved by:
Visiting our website for resources, events, and more
Meet other women and share your story in our profile space