Boxes, they want Boxes! Infoboxes that is. Thanks to a nifty amount of bot work by
User:FlagSteward we now have a
a list of high or B level articles that are missing infoboxes. In addition to be a quick and easy source of information for our readers, infoboxes will also be important for articles that the Project will want to take up to
WP:GA or
WP:FA level. Below is a listing of available infoboxes.
All
American Viticultural Areas now have articles! Thanks to the awesome work by
User:Kharker, every American Viticultural area has at least a stub quality article. There is still room for improvement and Kharker has pinpointed
the top 12 AVA articles most in need of some love and affection.
Speaking of some good old, fashion down home love and affection.... (Still legal in most countries, I believe :p) FlagSteward has compiled a list of some
important start class & stub class articles that really could use some brushing up. Later on in the newsletter, I'll include some of these articles in our Traffic count section.
Speaking words of wisdom, let it beeeee a
B-class wine article. What exactly is a B-class wine article and how much work needs to be down on some of our
Top importance wine articles to get them up to B-standard. There is a discussion about this going on at the
Project talk page, feel free to share your opinions
here.
Sparkling wine is a subject that sparks the interest of many readers. What type of first impression do you think the article gives about Wikipedia's wine articles?
Traffic cop-A sampling of how often wine related article are being viewed. In this edition we are going to take a look at the 18 Top importance wine article, currently listed as being a start class. There is a strong likelihood that these are the articles that will first introduce people to the quality and depth of Wikipedia's wine coverage. The type of first impression that these articles give will have a large influence on how often they'll come back to use our articles.
Rankings based on page views in Dec 2007.--Top five entries also show January page views for added context.
On the wine project talk page there is a
discussions about possible GAs with an evaluation by our Wine Project GA liaison
User:VanTucky on the closeness to GAs on some of them.
For this edition of Wiki-winos, we are stepping outside of the project to a fellow long time Wikipedian who is every bit a Wiki-Wino at heart. Meet
User:EvanProdromou who, in addition to being a MediaWiki developer, is one of the founders of
Vinismo, an online wine guide with a focus that compliments Wikipedia's Wine articles. While
Wikipedia is not a wine guide, Vinismo certainly is. The Wine Project may want to open up some discussion on importing articles and content that might not be appropriate for Wikipedia (an
non-notable winery or extensive discussion on a particular wine, etc) over to Vinismo where such content is desirable.
Evan Prodromou has been a Wikipedian since 2002; he's a
MediaWiki developer and an admin on en:. He's the founder of
Wikitravel, and in 2007 founded a new
Open Content wine
wiki,
Vinismo.
What got you first interested in wine?
My Greek grandfather was a home winemaker, using grapes he'd grown in his own backyard. His wine was pretty awful, but as a kid I thought it was pretty impressive that he could take this fruit from the garden and make it into something to drink at the table.
Since then, I've had a casual interest in wines, but I'd never been much of a connoisseur and had mostly bought by price. I think like a lot of people I'd ceded knowledge of wines to a select priesthood. We don't want to know more about wines because we think you have to be a well-trained expert just to understand wines a little bit.
I think my real passion for wine started when I lived for a while in
Geneva in 2002 and
Lisbon in 2003. I was completely unaware of the domestic wines available in
Switzerland and
Portugal. I really loved picking up inexpensive
vinho verdes at my local stores, and doing port tours in
Porto. And you can get decent wine in the stores in Switzerland for just nothing. Finding out that drinkable, inexpensive table wines were a staple for Europeans was a real eye-opener; it made it seem like a big secret that I now knew about.
I think wine knowledge is something people can pick up iteratively. By which I mean, that you can take some time to study
Sauvignon Blanc from
New Zealand or
Merlot from the
Central Coast of California, without worrying about every other wine in the world. If you concentrate on some small wine subject, later it can be easier to learn about other wines and regions. You don't have to learn everything all at once in one big gulp -- going from wine bonehead to sommelier in one step.
I also think that when we learn about wines we "accidentally" learn about a lot of other things: geography, toponymy, geology, botany, languages, economies and governments. It's pretty valid to look at the world through a wine glass; there's a lot to see there.
So one of the main reasons I started Vinismo was to give myself a chance to learn more about wines from remote places, and to go into other regions that I thought I knew about already in more depth. I think that's one of the great things about wikis: it gives us a chance to teach each other. And I've learned a lot already in the time that Vinismo's been up and running.
What brought you to Wikipedia?
In the fall of 2002 I was writing a novel and I needed a good way to procrastinate. I'd remembered
Everything2, which I'd edited back when it was just "Everything". So I went back and edited some more in 2002. I posted a few stubs on various subjects I was interested in at the time that didn't have articles on E2 -- I remember
Paul Auster in particular. Just one- or two-paragraph glosses on each subject.
They were all deleted within 24 hours. On top of that, I got a mean message from an admin, saying something to the effect of, "You obviously underestimate the kind of work needed to write an E2 entry, and you should reconsider contributing here." I was pretty mad; I felt like the something I'd added was better than nothing.
In 2003 my wife Maj and I took a trip to
Thailand and
Viet Nam, and we were really frustrated with the accuracy and quality of the printed travel guides we had. Remembering my experience with Wikipedia, I thought that we could do something similar with travel guides: have people who were on the spot edit and update the information in the guides. We started
Wikitravel that summer, and it really started taking up all my time.
I became a
MediaWiki developer, and I also became a Wikipedia admin, so I guess I've stayed involved with this project, too. I guess at this point I'm pretty committed; I've been to
Wikimania twice (in
Cambridge, Massachusetts and
Taipei) and I'll be in
Alexandria this year, too.
What type of wine articles do you enjoy editing?
Well, most of the editing that I do is on Vinismo, not on Wikipedia. But the type of articles that I find most interesting are geographical ones -- articles for wines of a particular country or region. It might be an American's fascination with the mysterious foreign concept of terroir, but more likely it's a holdover from the immense amount of geographical work I did on Wikitravel.
I also try to add pages on wines and wineries on Vinismo whenever I drink a bottle of wine. Unlike Wikipedia, Vinismo has articles on each and every bottle of wine we can find -- each year of each wine by each winery in the world. So that means that every time I drink a bottle of wine, I've got something new to write. We estimate that there are probably >200K possible articles for Vinismo -- in each language -- and it's good to keep writing them.
What non-wine related activities do you also enjoy on Wikipedia?
I've always loved writing about 19th-century American history and American geography. It's probably been the work that I've enjoyed most out of the encyclopedia. But I think the greatest part of my work here is piecemeal -- I correct grammar, spelling, and clumsy constructions when I see them. A few times I've re-structured an entire messy article, but it's rare that I have the time or courage to do it.
I have spurts of doing admin work, and I continue to work on
MediaWiki, although most of my contributions nowadays are as extensions.
What is your favorite wine? Least favorite wine?
Right now I'm trying to learn more about Burgundy, so I'm poking around at, for example,
Mercurey. I'm also really into
Greek wine, like Naoussa. I think there are a lot of bargains in Greek reds right now. I also am working on
Rieslings from
Germany and
Alsace.
I'm not sure if I have a least-favourite wine. It's probably easy to be "ABC" and kick poor ol'
Chardonnay, but I actually enjoy Chardonnay, even when it's really oaked up. I like "easy" wines, if only because they make people think a bit about what they're drinking. I think when people take that first step and say, "I like this wine," that's when they start trusting themselves to learn more about wines.
What is the most under-appreciated wine, in your opinion?
I can't say. I think there are really just giant swathes of land with longtime traditions of making good wines that North Americans and Europeans don't know about because they're made for domestic markets. We see it in places like
Spain or even Eastern European countries like
Bulgaria.
I'm going to
Argentina this week, and I'm looking forward to digging into their domestically available wines. I think there's a whole lot there -- people like to turn up their noses at Argentinian wine, but I think there's lots to discover in that country.
What efforts on a wine related article are you the most proud of to-date?
Uh... Hmmm. Again, on Vinismo, I like our article on
Yarra Valley, which is our appellation of the month. I also like the start I gave to
Spain and
Italy, as well as a few others.
Know any good wine jokes/quotes?
I know it's really déclassé, but I really like what the character Maya in the movie
Sideways says about wine: I like to think about the life of wine. How it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. It's a nice sentiment.
Have you ever had a "Wine snobbish" moment? If so, tell us about it.
Here in
Quebec, where I live, we have two kinds of wine. The official provincial store, the
SAQ, is the exclusive seller of most wines. Except, that is, for wines bottled in Quebec itself, which can be sold in grocery stores and corner stores called dépanneurs. "Dep wine" is typically shipped in in bulk and repackaged here, and it's mediocre at best.
Anyways, my wife brought home a bottle of dep wine late at night when the SAQ was closed, and I got real angry. "We can't have dep wine in the house! C'mon! I'm a wine guy now!" My wife wisely pointed out that she was the only one who'd see the bottle, but I burst out, "What if the neighbours see it in our recycling bin?"
Yeah, it's pretty bad when you get to that point.
What area of the wine project would you like more editors to focus on?
I think probably the big thing for me would be to see more collaboration between Vinistos and Wiki Winos. I think that the two projects have a great complementary synergy: because WikiProject Wine is part of Wikipedia, it shares the authority of the project as a whole. But I think that because Vinismo is concentrated solely on wine and wines, we can be a little more focused. Our requirements for notability are nowhere near as high as Wikipedia's; I think that it'd be unlikely to have an article about a single wine in Wikipedia (I could be wrong, though...), but it's de rigeur on Vinismo. And we cover things from more of a wine-drinker's perspective: tasting notes, prices, that kind of thing are pretty important for us.
So, I guess what I'd like to see is more interactions between the two projects. Could we use dual-licensing to make transitioning text and images between the two projects easier? What about more inter-linking? Vinismo uses the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, which is very similar to the GFDL in spirit but technically incompatible. I think that as those two licenses become compatible, based on Wikimedia Foundation work on the matter, we can hope for easier portability of content between the two projects.
What are some wine related
reliable sources (i.e. a wine book or web site) that you like using when editing wine articles?
Well, I know that there are about 4-5 right answers on this point in terms of wine books, but I'm going to go out of the way to sing the praises of national and regional wine board Web sites. Although the surface layers usually have empty, promotional language and meaningless Flash videos, I've found some amazingly deep, complex statistics about wine production in different countries on their sites. Once you start digging into the parts of the site that are only for statisticians and wine importers, you can get some real nuggets of data that are very useful.
Wine articles on the Web
A sampling of how Wikipedia's wine articles are viewed and used across the Web
Sommelier (start class, mid imp)-So where does the term sommelier come from? Is it a "beast of burden" of just a beastly soul? Find out what answers folks get
when they turn to the Wikipedia article.
"And
Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,I don't care where
the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine." -
G.K. Chesterton "Wine and Water"
Agne
This newsletter is sent to those listed under Participants on the Wine Project page. If you wish to no longer receive this newsletter please include Decline newsletter next to your name on the Participant list. If you have any Wikipedia wine related news, announcements or suggestions drop a note in the Comments/Suggestion area of
Wikipedia:WikiProject Wine/Newsletter.
Boxes, they want Boxes! Infoboxes that is. Thanks to a nifty amount of bot work by
User:FlagSteward we now have a
a list of high or B level articles that are missing infoboxes. In addition to be a quick and easy source of information for our readers, infoboxes will also be important for articles that the Project will want to take up to
WP:GA or
WP:FA level. Below is a listing of available infoboxes.
All
American Viticultural Areas now have articles! Thanks to the awesome work by
User:Kharker, every American Viticultural area has at least a stub quality article. There is still room for improvement and Kharker has pinpointed
the top 12 AVA articles most in need of some love and affection.
Speaking of some good old, fashion down home love and affection.... (Still legal in most countries, I believe :p) FlagSteward has compiled a list of some
important start class & stub class articles that really could use some brushing up. Later on in the newsletter, I'll include some of these articles in our Traffic count section.
Speaking words of wisdom, let it beeeee a
B-class wine article. What exactly is a B-class wine article and how much work needs to be down on some of our
Top importance wine articles to get them up to B-standard. There is a discussion about this going on at the
Project talk page, feel free to share your opinions
here.
Sparkling wine is a subject that sparks the interest of many readers. What type of first impression do you think the article gives about Wikipedia's wine articles?
Traffic cop-A sampling of how often wine related article are being viewed. In this edition we are going to take a look at the 18 Top importance wine article, currently listed as being a start class. There is a strong likelihood that these are the articles that will first introduce people to the quality and depth of Wikipedia's wine coverage. The type of first impression that these articles give will have a large influence on how often they'll come back to use our articles.
Rankings based on page views in Dec 2007.--Top five entries also show January page views for added context.
On the wine project talk page there is a
discussions about possible GAs with an evaluation by our Wine Project GA liaison
User:VanTucky on the closeness to GAs on some of them.
For this edition of Wiki-winos, we are stepping outside of the project to a fellow long time Wikipedian who is every bit a Wiki-Wino at heart. Meet
User:EvanProdromou who, in addition to being a MediaWiki developer, is one of the founders of
Vinismo, an online wine guide with a focus that compliments Wikipedia's Wine articles. While
Wikipedia is not a wine guide, Vinismo certainly is. The Wine Project may want to open up some discussion on importing articles and content that might not be appropriate for Wikipedia (an
non-notable winery or extensive discussion on a particular wine, etc) over to Vinismo where such content is desirable.
Evan Prodromou has been a Wikipedian since 2002; he's a
MediaWiki developer and an admin on en:. He's the founder of
Wikitravel, and in 2007 founded a new
Open Content wine
wiki,
Vinismo.
What got you first interested in wine?
My Greek grandfather was a home winemaker, using grapes he'd grown in his own backyard. His wine was pretty awful, but as a kid I thought it was pretty impressive that he could take this fruit from the garden and make it into something to drink at the table.
Since then, I've had a casual interest in wines, but I'd never been much of a connoisseur and had mostly bought by price. I think like a lot of people I'd ceded knowledge of wines to a select priesthood. We don't want to know more about wines because we think you have to be a well-trained expert just to understand wines a little bit.
I think my real passion for wine started when I lived for a while in
Geneva in 2002 and
Lisbon in 2003. I was completely unaware of the domestic wines available in
Switzerland and
Portugal. I really loved picking up inexpensive
vinho verdes at my local stores, and doing port tours in
Porto. And you can get decent wine in the stores in Switzerland for just nothing. Finding out that drinkable, inexpensive table wines were a staple for Europeans was a real eye-opener; it made it seem like a big secret that I now knew about.
I think wine knowledge is something people can pick up iteratively. By which I mean, that you can take some time to study
Sauvignon Blanc from
New Zealand or
Merlot from the
Central Coast of California, without worrying about every other wine in the world. If you concentrate on some small wine subject, later it can be easier to learn about other wines and regions. You don't have to learn everything all at once in one big gulp -- going from wine bonehead to sommelier in one step.
I also think that when we learn about wines we "accidentally" learn about a lot of other things: geography, toponymy, geology, botany, languages, economies and governments. It's pretty valid to look at the world through a wine glass; there's a lot to see there.
So one of the main reasons I started Vinismo was to give myself a chance to learn more about wines from remote places, and to go into other regions that I thought I knew about already in more depth. I think that's one of the great things about wikis: it gives us a chance to teach each other. And I've learned a lot already in the time that Vinismo's been up and running.
What brought you to Wikipedia?
In the fall of 2002 I was writing a novel and I needed a good way to procrastinate. I'd remembered
Everything2, which I'd edited back when it was just "Everything". So I went back and edited some more in 2002. I posted a few stubs on various subjects I was interested in at the time that didn't have articles on E2 -- I remember
Paul Auster in particular. Just one- or two-paragraph glosses on each subject.
They were all deleted within 24 hours. On top of that, I got a mean message from an admin, saying something to the effect of, "You obviously underestimate the kind of work needed to write an E2 entry, and you should reconsider contributing here." I was pretty mad; I felt like the something I'd added was better than nothing.
In 2003 my wife Maj and I took a trip to
Thailand and
Viet Nam, and we were really frustrated with the accuracy and quality of the printed travel guides we had. Remembering my experience with Wikipedia, I thought that we could do something similar with travel guides: have people who were on the spot edit and update the information in the guides. We started
Wikitravel that summer, and it really started taking up all my time.
I became a
MediaWiki developer, and I also became a Wikipedia admin, so I guess I've stayed involved with this project, too. I guess at this point I'm pretty committed; I've been to
Wikimania twice (in
Cambridge, Massachusetts and
Taipei) and I'll be in
Alexandria this year, too.
What type of wine articles do you enjoy editing?
Well, most of the editing that I do is on Vinismo, not on Wikipedia. But the type of articles that I find most interesting are geographical ones -- articles for wines of a particular country or region. It might be an American's fascination with the mysterious foreign concept of terroir, but more likely it's a holdover from the immense amount of geographical work I did on Wikitravel.
I also try to add pages on wines and wineries on Vinismo whenever I drink a bottle of wine. Unlike Wikipedia, Vinismo has articles on each and every bottle of wine we can find -- each year of each wine by each winery in the world. So that means that every time I drink a bottle of wine, I've got something new to write. We estimate that there are probably >200K possible articles for Vinismo -- in each language -- and it's good to keep writing them.
What non-wine related activities do you also enjoy on Wikipedia?
I've always loved writing about 19th-century American history and American geography. It's probably been the work that I've enjoyed most out of the encyclopedia. But I think the greatest part of my work here is piecemeal -- I correct grammar, spelling, and clumsy constructions when I see them. A few times I've re-structured an entire messy article, but it's rare that I have the time or courage to do it.
I have spurts of doing admin work, and I continue to work on
MediaWiki, although most of my contributions nowadays are as extensions.
What is your favorite wine? Least favorite wine?
Right now I'm trying to learn more about Burgundy, so I'm poking around at, for example,
Mercurey. I'm also really into
Greek wine, like Naoussa. I think there are a lot of bargains in Greek reds right now. I also am working on
Rieslings from
Germany and
Alsace.
I'm not sure if I have a least-favourite wine. It's probably easy to be "ABC" and kick poor ol'
Chardonnay, but I actually enjoy Chardonnay, even when it's really oaked up. I like "easy" wines, if only because they make people think a bit about what they're drinking. I think when people take that first step and say, "I like this wine," that's when they start trusting themselves to learn more about wines.
What is the most under-appreciated wine, in your opinion?
I can't say. I think there are really just giant swathes of land with longtime traditions of making good wines that North Americans and Europeans don't know about because they're made for domestic markets. We see it in places like
Spain or even Eastern European countries like
Bulgaria.
I'm going to
Argentina this week, and I'm looking forward to digging into their domestically available wines. I think there's a whole lot there -- people like to turn up their noses at Argentinian wine, but I think there's lots to discover in that country.
What efforts on a wine related article are you the most proud of to-date?
Uh... Hmmm. Again, on Vinismo, I like our article on
Yarra Valley, which is our appellation of the month. I also like the start I gave to
Spain and
Italy, as well as a few others.
Know any good wine jokes/quotes?
I know it's really déclassé, but I really like what the character Maya in the movie
Sideways says about wine: I like to think about the life of wine. How it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. It's a nice sentiment.
Have you ever had a "Wine snobbish" moment? If so, tell us about it.
Here in
Quebec, where I live, we have two kinds of wine. The official provincial store, the
SAQ, is the exclusive seller of most wines. Except, that is, for wines bottled in Quebec itself, which can be sold in grocery stores and corner stores called dépanneurs. "Dep wine" is typically shipped in in bulk and repackaged here, and it's mediocre at best.
Anyways, my wife brought home a bottle of dep wine late at night when the SAQ was closed, and I got real angry. "We can't have dep wine in the house! C'mon! I'm a wine guy now!" My wife wisely pointed out that she was the only one who'd see the bottle, but I burst out, "What if the neighbours see it in our recycling bin?"
Yeah, it's pretty bad when you get to that point.
What area of the wine project would you like more editors to focus on?
I think probably the big thing for me would be to see more collaboration between Vinistos and Wiki Winos. I think that the two projects have a great complementary synergy: because WikiProject Wine is part of Wikipedia, it shares the authority of the project as a whole. But I think that because Vinismo is concentrated solely on wine and wines, we can be a little more focused. Our requirements for notability are nowhere near as high as Wikipedia's; I think that it'd be unlikely to have an article about a single wine in Wikipedia (I could be wrong, though...), but it's de rigeur on Vinismo. And we cover things from more of a wine-drinker's perspective: tasting notes, prices, that kind of thing are pretty important for us.
So, I guess what I'd like to see is more interactions between the two projects. Could we use dual-licensing to make transitioning text and images between the two projects easier? What about more inter-linking? Vinismo uses the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, which is very similar to the GFDL in spirit but technically incompatible. I think that as those two licenses become compatible, based on Wikimedia Foundation work on the matter, we can hope for easier portability of content between the two projects.
What are some wine related
reliable sources (i.e. a wine book or web site) that you like using when editing wine articles?
Well, I know that there are about 4-5 right answers on this point in terms of wine books, but I'm going to go out of the way to sing the praises of national and regional wine board Web sites. Although the surface layers usually have empty, promotional language and meaningless Flash videos, I've found some amazingly deep, complex statistics about wine production in different countries on their sites. Once you start digging into the parts of the site that are only for statisticians and wine importers, you can get some real nuggets of data that are very useful.
Wine articles on the Web
A sampling of how Wikipedia's wine articles are viewed and used across the Web
Sommelier (start class, mid imp)-So where does the term sommelier come from? Is it a "beast of burden" of just a beastly soul? Find out what answers folks get
when they turn to the Wikipedia article.
"And
Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,I don't care where
the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine." -
G.K. Chesterton "Wine and Water"
Agne
This newsletter is sent to those listed under Participants on the Wine Project page. If you wish to no longer receive this newsletter please include Decline newsletter next to your name on the Participant list. If you have any Wikipedia wine related news, announcements or suggestions drop a note in the Comments/Suggestion area of
Wikipedia:WikiProject Wine/Newsletter.