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With all the hub bub about Google knol, I began to wonder how Wikipedia's wine coverage stacks up against the other prominent web-based (user generated) wine resources like Helium.com, Vinismo, Encylowine and Citizendium in relation to our Top-Importance articles. After just a cursory review, I was pleasantly surprised at how well situated we are. While we are not in a competition in a sporting or financial sense, we are nonetheless trying to position Wikipedia as the web destination of choice for wine related resources. To that regard, we are clearly ahead. Now there are some very specialized websites in different regional categories, that have more depth on a particular subject but for broad wine related coverage we seem to be in good shape. In relation to the 4 sites I mentioned above, Helium and Citizendium are the only ones that seem to offer any real alternative for original content. Vinismo seems to be more of a "wine guide" with more indepth listing on wineries than on actual wine or wine regions and Encyclowine just copies everything from us and is essentially a mirror. What are your guys thoughts? And as a side, what about linking to some of the Helium articles as external links in our main articles? Agne Cheese/ Wine 06:51, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
Hey guys. The more I looked at Encyclowine and noticed it layout with Google Ads, maps and pictures created by Wine Project members, etc-the more it bothered me that they were not giving proper attribution to Wikipedia in accordance with the WP:GFDL license. At the very least there should be a link back to the original article like Carmnere/ Carmenere, Fermentation/ Fermentation (wine) and images ( Walla Walla Ave Map/ Image:Walla Walla AVA map.JPG) so that people can see the article history and original contributor. While other sites don't owe us royalties for our work, I do think our basic copyright of getting credit and attribution still applies. So I sent an email to the webmaster of the site and will see where it goes from there. Looking at the Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks and Wikipedia:GFDL Compliance pages, it seems that in order for them to become compliant they need to have a link at the end of each article or image they use that takes the reader back to the original Wikipedia page. It is something to keep an eye on. Agne Cheese/ Wine 17:24, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
As you can see from my Jan. 19, 2008 contributions, I've gone on a bold categorization spree of French wine articles. Most of my work involved creating and populating the categories Category:Bordeaux wine, Category:Bordeaux wine producers and Category:Champagne (wine). I also expanded Category:Champagne producers and depopulated a great deal of redundant categories. I hope this effort was of some modest benefit to the project.
Here's my issue: I'm only just begun populating Category:Bordeaux wine producers. Most of those wineries still reside in Category:Wineries of France. Nearly all of the Bordeaux winery articles contain the template {{DEFAULTSORT:Chateau xyz}}. Shouldn't we alphabetizing by the proper name and not by the word "Château"? Can someone from project wine please advise before I can proceed?-- The Fat Man Who Never Came Back ( talk) 20:47, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Howdy! I recently got around to tackling our Sauternes article and User:Wetman lent a much appreciated hand in tidying up the article. On the talk page he has expressed a concern about the use of jargon in the article and tagged the phrases "drinking well" and chaptalization as phrases that needed additional clarification. He also gives the impression that there might be more in the article. While I disagree with characterizing chaptalization as jargon (and explain on the talk page why), I can see where he might think that phrases like "drinking well" would be but I'm at a lost as to an alternative way to phrase. It is definitely a case of being "too close" to the subject matter that my eyes have lost several shades of objectivity to see how the "average reader" would look at it. A fresh set of eyes and perspective would be of great help to see if there are things that could be "de-wine geekified". Thanks! Agne Cheese/ Wine 07:14, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
I am really busy at the moment and honestly getting a little frustrated with the Featured Portal nomination for the Portal:Wine. If someone has some time to look at the nomination and the people's comments and could take a couple minutes to help me out, it would be appreciated.-- Chef Christopher Allen Tanner, CCC ( talk) 19:18, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
Hey congratulatons with the achievement- very well done. MURGH disc. 10:11, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm sitting here with my Halliday's Australian Wine Companion and a bunch of other resources, and there are a pile of Australian wineries which don't have articles yet (and which I feel well equipped to write about). Before I dive in however, has a consensus ever been established about what constitutes a "notable" winery? I'm familiar with WP:COMPANY of course, but they are only general guidelines and I'd like to fit within established "Wikiproject - Wine" guidelines if they exist. Cheers Manning ( talk) 01:15, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
I've been working on some of the American Viticultural Area articles for California wine lately. We now have at least a stub, with a wine region infobox, for every AVA within the six-county North Coast AVA. I would encourage others to expand some of these stubs and maybe find one or two worth promotion through WP:DYK. Also, I've been working on fixing a few article problems related to county appellations versus AVAs, and as a result there are now four county appellation articles:
I don't know if we need or want an article for every county in California, but I propose that for counties with significant production where the county appellation regularly appears on bottlings, it makes sense to have articles like these. These are mostly stub or start quality, and could use more information on history, production levels, industry sales and workforce, etc.-- Kharker ( talk) 23:55, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
In other news on this topic, I've edited the American Viticultural Area article itself to break out the California AVAs into five broad regions, following the example in the California wine article. I think that makes more sense than a single list of 200+ wikilinks to AVAs most people have never heard of.-- Kharker ( talk) 20:11, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
I am a bit concern with the recent furry of editing on the Resveratrol article. While it is certainly an importantly wine-related topic, it is also a very scientific and technical article-one that I, personally, don't feel that I have the background expertise to evaluate well. If anyone on the project with more of a scientific background (Bduke perhaps?) gets a chance, please take a look at this article. I am most concern with some of the contribution histories of the editors who have recently contributed to the page. They seem to be single purpose or singularly focused on this one topic with what appears to be competing agendas. I see that the article also falls under the Pharmacology and Chemistry Wikiprojects so I'm going to drop a note there as well. Agne Cheese/ Wine 00:28, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
Answer They all have some relation to the world of wine. However two of the above are labeled with the Wine project's banner as falling under our scope and two are not . And there is this guy who is listed on List of wine personalities but also doesn't have the banner as well as the other Roman writers in Ancient Rome and wine. The follow up question to this is--should they? Any of them? I mean, we try to tag articles that as a project, we have an active interest in maintaining. How far does that extend to bio articles where "wine" is only a partial component? Agne Cheese/ Wine 21:13, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
"World of the world" ;^)
While our Rosé article is not in bad shape, I just noticed how detailed and well illustrated the fr:Vin rosé article is. It would be a wonderful addition if any Project member, well versed in French, would be willing to translate and incorporate some of the info into our english article. On our main page User:Mroconnell list himself as a volunteer but he hasn't been active recently. If anyone else knows of someway, pass this note along. Agne Cheese/ Wine 05:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
I've been having a fling with a sultry Italian Project, she seduced me over a bottle of Enfer d' Arvier - don't worry I'll soon get rid of her and be back with you guys soon enough. :-)) But one of the things I've been working on which hopefully will be useful for a lot of the Country Projects we interact with, such as France and Spain, is ways of semi-automating the assessment of articles. And one of the things that involves is grabbing the sizes of articles. So you can compare the article's current assessment against it's current size. A small project like this one is great for testing :-), but here's some that crossed my radar. The following are Starts that are anything from 10kb to >30kb (!) - people might want to have a look at them and see what if anything needs doing to them to get them up to B standard. Could well be that they're either there or just need a bit of copyediting, a bit of referencing, or an image or two - these should be "quick wins" for the Project and a bit of a change of scene for those who've been slaving away on a load of obscure appellations ;-/ :
The ordering might seem eccentric, but it's from smallest to biggest within a category, so you should probably work backwards ;-/. 10kb is a bit light for a B for many articles, but by the time you get up to 15kb you can be looking at a B for all but the most general articles. That latter will include many of the Top ones, but I'd guess the Highs in particular must be pretty close. Conversely the Mids seem to include big general articles where the Wine angle is only a minor one, and we may want to think about extracting the wine information and moving our Project affiliation from the big general article about say Mainz to a more specialist article devoted to the wine of the area (and surely we have a Rhineland-Pfalz wine article?). Likewise for the Stubs over 4500 bytes :
Like I say, I'm not saying these are all automatic B/Starts's, some obviously aren't, but they're good candidates for some attention and possible promotion. I've not looked at any of them yet. And get on with it :-))) - I'll have some other fun stats coming soon.... FlagSteward ( talk) 01:38, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
All of the AVAs now have at least a stub-class article with a wine region infobox and a few references. The American Viticultural Area article itself could use some work, if anyone is interested. Of the individual AVA stubs, several rather important AVAs cry out for more content, especially history information and any data about numbers of wineries, crop yields, economic impact, important wineries, wine tourism, etc. They could all use improving, but my Top 12 stubs to improve ASAP would include:
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If you'd like to help improve ones of these AVAs, go for it!-- Kharker ( talk) 19:22, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
I just noticed that the First Growth article doesn't just talk about First Growth Bordeaux, strangely enough it also lists the chx of the Graves Classification and the Saint-Émilion Classification, but not the 2nd-5th Médoc or 2nd Sauternes. There are even two subheadings on "Other Classification Schemes in France" and "Burgundy"! In my eyes, all of this seems very inappropriate to the title of the article, given the existence of the articles Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855, Classification of Saint-Émilion wine, Classification of Graves wine, Cru Bourgeois and Classification of wine, and definitely confusing to the reader. This is a case where I have some problems in seeing any benefit in this duplication of material - I think this article should be significantly pruned, and I could even live with it becoming a redirect to 1855 article! Tomas e ( talk) 13:29, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
Some more photos to look at. One of those cases where you're taking a photo of one thing, and then realise afterwards that you've captured something completely different - in this case a rather neat example of tears of wine in some Caluso Passito. Any opinions on which is best? I'm torn between the tight crop which has no distractions, and the wide shot that gives "context" - there's scope for an 'in between' crop which cuts out the bottle and some of the glass, but given the text of the article I think it's quite useful to have the context (with % alcohol etc). As an aside - another one for the collection of "wines I have drunk where neither grape nor appellation has a Wiki article" - I've quite a few of those. :-))) - and really quite nice. Actually, that would be a great idea for WBW - bloggers have to either review a wine that's not on Wikipedia, or "pay" for reviewing one that's a stub by upgrading the article. FlagSteward ( talk) 23:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
When I was expanding the history section of the German wine, I started to browse through some pictures I took in September when I visited Kloster Eberbach in Rheingau. Next to this place, I discovered an area where various grape varieties and vine training systems were on display. In order to remember what was what (this was after all just after several hours of wine tasting...) I also took a photo of each sign. I was sure I had photographed something that was supposed to be an old vine training system, and thought I'd include this picture as an illustration for this article. One of the displays was labelled Alter pfälz. Kammerbau (old Palatinate Kammerbau), which OCW mentions as being of Roman origin, so I naturally chose this. Here's the image, by the way. But then I realised - it just doesn't look right! It uses steel wires, for a start, and in comparison to the OCW illustration, it's higher, it only includes one row of vines and there is nothing about it that brings a "Kammer" (roughly "chamber") into mind. To be quite honest, in OCW it looks very much like this. However, this latter exhibit was labelled as something completely different and much more modern. Since I expect people who take the trouble of producing an exhibit like this to know what they're doing, it seems strange if things would have been so seriously mixed up. However, it would be far from impossible for someone to switch the signs by just uprooting their poles, so I was starting to think that some prankster may have switched (at least) two signs. Because of this, I wonder if we have a viticulturalist on board who actually can recognise different "Germanic" vine training systems from photos? If so, in order not to influence that person, I'm not going to tell with which system the second image (which I suspect is the Kammerbau) was actually labelled. Tomas e ( talk) 20:25, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Another list thrown up by my bot, of Wine articles (B's and High Starts) lacking infoboxes. As a Project I feel we're a bit short on infoboxes, and this might throw up some inspiration for new ones, as well as highlighting underuse of existing ones :
One obvious thing to do would be a big box with links to all the main Burgundy villages and areas, but I feel we could do more to present the "essential" numbers on regionsbetter, current production, that kind of thing, a regional equivalent of the appellation box. FlagSteward ( talk) 01:49, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
On the other hand, a few B's get thrown up by my bot as GA candidates based on certain statistics - again I must emphasise I haven't looked at these myself, and am definitely not saying that GA won't take a lot of work in some cases, but what do people think about :
I suspect Wine will need more work than most - but wouldn't that be a terrific article to get GA'd? FlagSteward ( talk) 01:24, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
While commenting the suggested french winery infobox, Tomas e pointed out that by stating a category like "cases per year" ought to be clear to as many as possible. There is a little explanatory line in the infobox now, but keen minds at the Template:Conversion branch are possibly playing with making a convertor from "wine case" -> liter/hectoliter ~ US gallon, at this talk_page. I stated I thought the 750 mL bottle in packed in a 12 case had application to the entire wine world, but I don't feel so confident the standard is absolute, I keep finding anomalies in my resources. Is it so simple that we can state an overwhelming global majority for "wine case" or too diverse to be a good idea? MURGH disc. 11:17, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
I have made some minor changes to the Carmenere article. I have fixed the references format a bit, as well as added some more info. Can someone please give it a quick copyedit? While you are at it, what do you guys think is needed to make this an FA? Suggestions? -- Charleenmerced Talk 01:37, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
Dear WikiWinos, we seem to have a problem. There is a User:Lightmouse who seem to have made it his speciality to do various style & format cleanups, including converting various units. I got the impression that he has decided upon eradicating acres and hectares from Wikipedia and replacing them with square kilometers. Since hectares and acres are the only units that (to the best of my knowledge) are ever used in the wine world, I asked him to stop doing this for wine-related articles. But it seems that what units is relevant to wine articles is of little interest to this fellow. As an example, this edit to Alsace wine was my first encounter with this editor. He's also behind the "useful" edit which gave introduced the fact that Château Cantemerle is 0.91 km2. I asked him here not to do such edits. (Btw, this guy has a very strange way of handling his talk page - he archived my question on a page which you can't find from his own talk page and then replied on my talk page!) The way I read his reply he apparently thinks his opinions weighs heavier than reliable sources, and there doesn't seem to be much need to understand the subject of the article you're editing en masse. Sigh! Is that really the way these tools were meant to be used? If anyone else would like to drop this user a line I'd be more than grateful. I just started to wonder why I bother to check up sources for many of the edits I perform, since this obviously isn't professional literature... Tomas e ( talk) 22:15, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I think a large part of his confusion is that he is assuming ha/acre are specialist terms and seems to fail to understand that they aren't. They are the most common and ordinary terms used in everyday usage for any discussion relating to vineyards and wine regions--whether or not you're dealing with someone who knows nothing about wine or a wine specialist. It is just the overwhelmingly dominant and consistent usage across the board, regardless of medium or audience. To not use those terms is a great disservice to the reader since they will lack the context in understanding the information presented in the Wikipedia article with what they are going to encounter in every other information source that they are ever going to encounter involving wine. If the Alsace wine article was modified to say only that "In 2006, vines were grown on 153 sq km" and then in every reading about the qualifications to be an Alsace Grand Cru AOC vineyard they have to produce "65 hectoliter per hectare or less."--how in the world are they going to be able to easily understand that context? What happens when they go to read about a particular wine estate and learn that the estate has 26 hectare]planted-are we going to expect our readers to immediately be able to convert that into sq km to understand how large this estate is in Alsace? It makes absolutely no sense to divert from using the standard, consistent and common usage to something that is completely foreign. I noted the example of how absurd it would be to convert all the figures in the Economy of the United States article from the US Dollar to Euros under the pretense that the USD is a "specialist measurement". I think that situation is very similar to what we have here. Agne Cheese/ Wine 14:20, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
I just saw this article for the first time and it is in pretty good shape (I have not read it all though, just looked it over). Should we try to get this to GA? It has all the information there, we just need a good copyedit, fix the intro, some more info and sources. We should at least get it to B. -- Charleenmerced Talk 07:31, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I saw an interesting post on the Village Pump- Neglected subject area needed for Wikipedia:Academy content drive by novice Wikipedians-about a potential content drive to get a group of students from Columbia University to learn about Wikipedia and create articles for an area where coverage is lacking. I went ahead and boldly nominated the subject of Wine and offered the Project's assistance. Hope you all don't mind. :) I do think this can be a great opportunity to expand some stubs as well as getting some interesting articles created (Like Wine in cooking, History of French wine, Colonial British wine trade, etc) while we continue to focus on getting our Top importance articles up to snuff. But even if the NY Wikipedians decide not to use wine, we may still want to create some of the proposed sub pages for potential benefits for future Wine Project members--like...
What jumps out to you about the listing of FAs by types? While I think our current strategy of focusing on getting our Tops/Highs to B/GAs is ideal, I did find this current listing and attached article to be very interesting. Agne Cheese/ Wine 16:16, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
Unless my count is off, I think we are currently at 98 wine related DYKs. What is very awesome about that list is that there have been at least 10 different wine project members contributing to the various articles that have been featured (and a couple like the Great French Wine Blight and Thaddeus Hait Farm coming from outside the project). While we might be lagging in the FA front, having these DYKs help tremendously in getting "front page" exposure for Wikipedia's wine content. Great work everybody! :) Agne Cheese/ Wine 00:59, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
I thought this was worth breaking out of the #Anomalous article sizes thread above. In particular Agne's comment :
My take is a bit different, and to be honest I think that example is not the most helpful they could have chosen - Kashmir is a massive subject, the closest in US terms might be an article on Virginia, only with more history and wars. The Kashmir example weighs in at just 35kb, Virginia is up around 100kb, which gives you some idea of how deficient the Kashmir article could be considered to be..... Good old WP:CSB :-) So I'm not sure how helpful that example is, I find it more useful to look at wine examples. We can agree that GA articles are better than B articles, so you might want to look at the state Carménère and Tempranillo when they were approved as GAs in April 2007, they were 13-16kb and had 13-17 separate sources, with around 30 refs in total. And that's for GA on grapes that have a bit more history than many, so the B standard must be some way short of that. I think it's misleading (and a bit depressing!) to base the standard off anomalous articles such as Zinfandel which has an unusual amount of history and genetics to write about. "Below the GA standard represented by Tempranillo and Carménère" is more realistic for the typical grape article than trying to judge it off a 58kb article such as Chardonnay. (as an aside Agne, I think it is positively unencyclopaedic to delete the popular culture section on Chardonnay, certainly from a British perspective) I must admit though, I think either Tempranillo was a bit lucky, or the GA standard is lower than I thought. ;-/ Going back to the assessment instructions is also useful IMO. For B :
Now I thought "a majority of" counted as a weasel phrase, :-) but technically you only need 51% of the "material needed for a comprehensive article" to be in the majority, even if realistically you'd be looking at 60-70%. And of course you need to define "a comprehensive article". I guess we have one ready comparison in the Oxford Companion to Wine, obviously we are not forced to be concise by the need to pay for dead trees to print on, but perhaps it might be helpful if we regarded the average Jancis entry as somewhere in the GA to A region and benchmark off that? I still feel that in general that our grape entries need a bit more
ampelography, but I'd suggest that aside from that articles such as Zin are more like an A than a B.
I guess that's all a long-winded way of saying just to cut the B's some slack, the standard isn't quite as high as you might think. :-) —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
FlagSteward (
talk •
contribs)
16:50, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Oh absolutely it's about comprehensiveness rather than absolute size, I'm sorry if I left the impression otherwise, that's why I was emphasising that B-criterion of "majority of material needed for a comprehensive article". I only mentioned the size thing because it's just not very easy to judge "comprehensiveness" for the "average" article against a potentially massive article like Chardonnay or Zin. Even the "perfect", comprehensive article for Tempranillo will be a lot bigger than "perfection" for the vast majority of grapes, so all I'm saying is that the independently-verified Tempranillo GA is a better benchmark than Chardonnay. Which personally I think must be pretty darn close to an A ("A fairly complete treatment of the subject....May miss a few relevant points") rather than a minimum-standard-B - great work, I'd not looked at it recently (and the pop culture thing I noticed ages ago, so it may have been between edits). Must be worth a shot at FA?
I guess the difference is I'm arguing that "majority of material" covers (say) 60-90% of "perfection" (as measured by FA), with Starts covering say 20-60% and A 90-99%; I sense you're working on Starts covering say 20%-80%, B is 80-95% and A is 95-99% - we're debating those 60-to-80%-of-a-FA cases. I guess we could just compromise at 70%? :-))
I feel you're slighly over interpreting here. All the B criteria say is that "Useful to many, but not all, readers. A casual reader flipping through articles would feel that they generally understood the topic, but a serious student or researcher trying to use the material would have trouble doing so, or would risk error in derivative work. To my mind "a casual reader feeling that they generally understood the topic" is a lower standard of proof than "any" reader having a "solid understanding of the subject". That's closer to the GA requirement of "A good treatment of the subject. No obvious problems, gaps, excessive information. Adequate for most purposes, but other encyclopedias could do a better job." Again the GA criterion seems to suggest that a GA is not as good as Jancis.
Whereas I see things differently. Let's just take the Tops for a moment. If we've got an article up to the standard where it is "Useful to many, but not all, readers." and there are Top articles that are only "Useful to some, provides a moderate amount of information, but many readers will need to find additional sources of information. The article clearly needs to be expanded." - then too right the Project would benefit more from additional work going on the article providing "a moderate amount of information" than on the article that is already "Useful to many, but not all, readers." OK, an individual editor may want to take it further, particularly once they are "into" a subject, but that's a bit different - personally my style is more of a "get to 'useful' and then move on to the next", Zin was a bit of an aberration. :-) Talking of which, did Amatulic do whatever we were waiting for him/her to do on that? Or should I just get on with GA? I'm not sure that Zin really proves your point though.... Anyway, you could say that any non-FA article is "not doing our readers the type of service it should", I'd just say that the Top Starts are more deserving of our efforts, that's all. FlagSteward ( talk) 23:24, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Though here is the big thing. What benefit is it to anyone, to have a lower or sub standard B article? Does it really benefit the project or more importantly the reader to have the Zinfandel at its "early B" state before your rewrite when I reassessed it to start or the Zin article that we have today thanks to your tremendous rewrite? The same with my Chardonnay example before. It benefits no one seeing our number of "B" class articles (Top importance or otherwise) go up if they are truly not good, quality articles; if they are truly starts rather than something we would want to polish up to GA. As for Zin, I do think we gave plenty of time and good faith to his objections. I would remove the tag and go ahead with the nom. Agne Cheese/ Wine 23:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
After seeing my snuffu with originally rating Château d'Yquem & Château Lafite Rothschild as B, I went through and looks at our B class articles. Some were pretty obvious in lacking in MAJOR areas (beyond just lack of referencing which, overall, is our most common problem). I was WP:BOLD in reassessing those as start. In others it was more a borderline case, not so cut & dry, and I would like to encourage more discussion on the talk page. More opinions are certainly valuable and I think overall a better understanding of everyone's view will come out if we work on a particular example. Agne Cheese/ Wine 00:40, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Our Top importance article should be more of a priority than what they currently seem to be. I'll raise my hand and note that I will get easily distracted with things like stub killing and hunting for DYKs. But these top importance articles are the ones that get the highest page views and are most likely the introduction for a lot of folks to the quality and resourcefulness of Wikipedia's wine articles. Having those article in great shape will go along way towards making Wikipedia be the kind of online tool that I'm sure we would all like to see. To one extent, this does reinforce my belief that we should be diligent in cases like our B-class standards particularly for these important articles but I feel compelled to put my money where my mouth is. I will heed Flag's plea and recommit to getting these Top importance article up to B class. Outside life permitting, my optimistic goal will be to work on one a week. I like grape and wine region articles so those will probably be the ones I focus on the most (and of course any help will always be appreciated). I think I'll start with Cabernet Sauvignon. I promise to try not to get too distracted with new articles, stubs & DYKs. :P Agne Cheese/ Wine 08:49, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Hey guys! Just to let you know that I've been chatting with Gary Vaynerchuk of the WLTV vblog. He is certainly a prominent figure in the wine world (at least from an internet focus) with his audience overlaping quite a bit with the type of wine drinker that would use Wikipedia as a online wine resource. In fact, as mentioned in our last newsletter, Gary points to Wikipedia as one of the " best online resources" for wine. Plus, his very active WLTV forums includes many instances of "Vayniacs" turning to Wikipedia for wine info. He has graciously agreed to be the topic of an upcoming "Wiki Winos" segment. So stay tune for that. One item that came up in the conversation was the appropriateness of including some WLTV video links in Wikipedia articles--not linking for the sake of linking but using any links that can offer some value to the article. I talked to him a little about the WP:EL policy and that Wikipedia is not a wine guide so the episodes that are almost entirely just "wine reviews" wouldn't be appropriate but episodes that do go into some large detail about the wine grape/style/region would be viable as a potential link. An example of an episode that I, personally, would consider appropriate is this episode on Sherry--namely because I think it compliments the article's description of the different styles of Sherries and goes into some detail about the characteristics of those different styles. But not every episode of WLTV is like this and I think it probably would be best to take the links on a case by case basis with a discussion on the talk page about the links. What do you guys think? Agne Cheese/ Wine 03:41, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Feel free to add and fiddle with that list at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wine/Bot_Category_List as required, I've roughly sorted it but may well have missed things - the MW's almost got buried for instance. Looking at it you can see that we could do with standardising our category names, particularly for wineries - the standard Wiki format is "Something of Somewhere", but I think it's certainly OK to break that convention where WP:ENGLISH requires something more natural such as "German wine" or "New Zealand wine". The Yadkin Valley cat in particular stands out. I've removed the four "Wine in Piedmont" format Italian regional cats, as they just seemed to get in the way of the hierarchy between Italian wines and eg Wines of Piedmont. I also have a feeling that "Wine Grapes of..." should become "Grape varieties of ..." but don't have strong views either way, it just needs synchronising. FlagSteward ( talk) 12:57, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
I feel it be useful to get SatyrBot working for the Project? It can do a couple of things :
Seems to me that these would all be useful things to do. I've made a list of categories over at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wine/Bot_Category_List (with a handy shortcut of WP:WINECATS to bring it up when you're writing articles). The idea is that any article in those cats would get tagged with the Project banner, so we need to be quite "conservative" about what goes in the list. I've removed the following from the list :
as I feel that stuff like sangria and Martini are best covered by the Mixed Drinks Project, despite their wine base - but are there any more that should be removed? Satyrbot can be a bit controversial, but the problems seem to arise when either the cats don't match the Project goals or the Project isn't active enough to keep an eye on the results. Neither apply in this case. I'll ask him to do a trial run if that's possible, otherwise if there's no objections within a week I'll set it up "permanently". FlagSteward ( talk) 12:57, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
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With all the hub bub about Google knol, I began to wonder how Wikipedia's wine coverage stacks up against the other prominent web-based (user generated) wine resources like Helium.com, Vinismo, Encylowine and Citizendium in relation to our Top-Importance articles. After just a cursory review, I was pleasantly surprised at how well situated we are. While we are not in a competition in a sporting or financial sense, we are nonetheless trying to position Wikipedia as the web destination of choice for wine related resources. To that regard, we are clearly ahead. Now there are some very specialized websites in different regional categories, that have more depth on a particular subject but for broad wine related coverage we seem to be in good shape. In relation to the 4 sites I mentioned above, Helium and Citizendium are the only ones that seem to offer any real alternative for original content. Vinismo seems to be more of a "wine guide" with more indepth listing on wineries than on actual wine or wine regions and Encyclowine just copies everything from us and is essentially a mirror. What are your guys thoughts? And as a side, what about linking to some of the Helium articles as external links in our main articles? Agne Cheese/ Wine 06:51, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
Hey guys. The more I looked at Encyclowine and noticed it layout with Google Ads, maps and pictures created by Wine Project members, etc-the more it bothered me that they were not giving proper attribution to Wikipedia in accordance with the WP:GFDL license. At the very least there should be a link back to the original article like Carmnere/ Carmenere, Fermentation/ Fermentation (wine) and images ( Walla Walla Ave Map/ Image:Walla Walla AVA map.JPG) so that people can see the article history and original contributor. While other sites don't owe us royalties for our work, I do think our basic copyright of getting credit and attribution still applies. So I sent an email to the webmaster of the site and will see where it goes from there. Looking at the Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks and Wikipedia:GFDL Compliance pages, it seems that in order for them to become compliant they need to have a link at the end of each article or image they use that takes the reader back to the original Wikipedia page. It is something to keep an eye on. Agne Cheese/ Wine 17:24, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
As you can see from my Jan. 19, 2008 contributions, I've gone on a bold categorization spree of French wine articles. Most of my work involved creating and populating the categories Category:Bordeaux wine, Category:Bordeaux wine producers and Category:Champagne (wine). I also expanded Category:Champagne producers and depopulated a great deal of redundant categories. I hope this effort was of some modest benefit to the project.
Here's my issue: I'm only just begun populating Category:Bordeaux wine producers. Most of those wineries still reside in Category:Wineries of France. Nearly all of the Bordeaux winery articles contain the template {{DEFAULTSORT:Chateau xyz}}. Shouldn't we alphabetizing by the proper name and not by the word "Château"? Can someone from project wine please advise before I can proceed?-- The Fat Man Who Never Came Back ( talk) 20:47, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Howdy! I recently got around to tackling our Sauternes article and User:Wetman lent a much appreciated hand in tidying up the article. On the talk page he has expressed a concern about the use of jargon in the article and tagged the phrases "drinking well" and chaptalization as phrases that needed additional clarification. He also gives the impression that there might be more in the article. While I disagree with characterizing chaptalization as jargon (and explain on the talk page why), I can see where he might think that phrases like "drinking well" would be but I'm at a lost as to an alternative way to phrase. It is definitely a case of being "too close" to the subject matter that my eyes have lost several shades of objectivity to see how the "average reader" would look at it. A fresh set of eyes and perspective would be of great help to see if there are things that could be "de-wine geekified". Thanks! Agne Cheese/ Wine 07:14, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
I am really busy at the moment and honestly getting a little frustrated with the Featured Portal nomination for the Portal:Wine. If someone has some time to look at the nomination and the people's comments and could take a couple minutes to help me out, it would be appreciated.-- Chef Christopher Allen Tanner, CCC ( talk) 19:18, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
Hey congratulatons with the achievement- very well done. MURGH disc. 10:11, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm sitting here with my Halliday's Australian Wine Companion and a bunch of other resources, and there are a pile of Australian wineries which don't have articles yet (and which I feel well equipped to write about). Before I dive in however, has a consensus ever been established about what constitutes a "notable" winery? I'm familiar with WP:COMPANY of course, but they are only general guidelines and I'd like to fit within established "Wikiproject - Wine" guidelines if they exist. Cheers Manning ( talk) 01:15, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
I've been working on some of the American Viticultural Area articles for California wine lately. We now have at least a stub, with a wine region infobox, for every AVA within the six-county North Coast AVA. I would encourage others to expand some of these stubs and maybe find one or two worth promotion through WP:DYK. Also, I've been working on fixing a few article problems related to county appellations versus AVAs, and as a result there are now four county appellation articles:
I don't know if we need or want an article for every county in California, but I propose that for counties with significant production where the county appellation regularly appears on bottlings, it makes sense to have articles like these. These are mostly stub or start quality, and could use more information on history, production levels, industry sales and workforce, etc.-- Kharker ( talk) 23:55, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
In other news on this topic, I've edited the American Viticultural Area article itself to break out the California AVAs into five broad regions, following the example in the California wine article. I think that makes more sense than a single list of 200+ wikilinks to AVAs most people have never heard of.-- Kharker ( talk) 20:11, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
I am a bit concern with the recent furry of editing on the Resveratrol article. While it is certainly an importantly wine-related topic, it is also a very scientific and technical article-one that I, personally, don't feel that I have the background expertise to evaluate well. If anyone on the project with more of a scientific background (Bduke perhaps?) gets a chance, please take a look at this article. I am most concern with some of the contribution histories of the editors who have recently contributed to the page. They seem to be single purpose or singularly focused on this one topic with what appears to be competing agendas. I see that the article also falls under the Pharmacology and Chemistry Wikiprojects so I'm going to drop a note there as well. Agne Cheese/ Wine 00:28, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
Answer They all have some relation to the world of wine. However two of the above are labeled with the Wine project's banner as falling under our scope and two are not . And there is this guy who is listed on List of wine personalities but also doesn't have the banner as well as the other Roman writers in Ancient Rome and wine. The follow up question to this is--should they? Any of them? I mean, we try to tag articles that as a project, we have an active interest in maintaining. How far does that extend to bio articles where "wine" is only a partial component? Agne Cheese/ Wine 21:13, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
"World of the world" ;^)
While our Rosé article is not in bad shape, I just noticed how detailed and well illustrated the fr:Vin rosé article is. It would be a wonderful addition if any Project member, well versed in French, would be willing to translate and incorporate some of the info into our english article. On our main page User:Mroconnell list himself as a volunteer but he hasn't been active recently. If anyone else knows of someway, pass this note along. Agne Cheese/ Wine 05:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
I've been having a fling with a sultry Italian Project, she seduced me over a bottle of Enfer d' Arvier - don't worry I'll soon get rid of her and be back with you guys soon enough. :-)) But one of the things I've been working on which hopefully will be useful for a lot of the Country Projects we interact with, such as France and Spain, is ways of semi-automating the assessment of articles. And one of the things that involves is grabbing the sizes of articles. So you can compare the article's current assessment against it's current size. A small project like this one is great for testing :-), but here's some that crossed my radar. The following are Starts that are anything from 10kb to >30kb (!) - people might want to have a look at them and see what if anything needs doing to them to get them up to B standard. Could well be that they're either there or just need a bit of copyediting, a bit of referencing, or an image or two - these should be "quick wins" for the Project and a bit of a change of scene for those who've been slaving away on a load of obscure appellations ;-/ :
The ordering might seem eccentric, but it's from smallest to biggest within a category, so you should probably work backwards ;-/. 10kb is a bit light for a B for many articles, but by the time you get up to 15kb you can be looking at a B for all but the most general articles. That latter will include many of the Top ones, but I'd guess the Highs in particular must be pretty close. Conversely the Mids seem to include big general articles where the Wine angle is only a minor one, and we may want to think about extracting the wine information and moving our Project affiliation from the big general article about say Mainz to a more specialist article devoted to the wine of the area (and surely we have a Rhineland-Pfalz wine article?). Likewise for the Stubs over 4500 bytes :
Like I say, I'm not saying these are all automatic B/Starts's, some obviously aren't, but they're good candidates for some attention and possible promotion. I've not looked at any of them yet. And get on with it :-))) - I'll have some other fun stats coming soon.... FlagSteward ( talk) 01:38, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
All of the AVAs now have at least a stub-class article with a wine region infobox and a few references. The American Viticultural Area article itself could use some work, if anyone is interested. Of the individual AVA stubs, several rather important AVAs cry out for more content, especially history information and any data about numbers of wineries, crop yields, economic impact, important wineries, wine tourism, etc. They could all use improving, but my Top 12 stubs to improve ASAP would include:
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If you'd like to help improve ones of these AVAs, go for it!-- Kharker ( talk) 19:22, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
I just noticed that the First Growth article doesn't just talk about First Growth Bordeaux, strangely enough it also lists the chx of the Graves Classification and the Saint-Émilion Classification, but not the 2nd-5th Médoc or 2nd Sauternes. There are even two subheadings on "Other Classification Schemes in France" and "Burgundy"! In my eyes, all of this seems very inappropriate to the title of the article, given the existence of the articles Bordeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855, Classification of Saint-Émilion wine, Classification of Graves wine, Cru Bourgeois and Classification of wine, and definitely confusing to the reader. This is a case where I have some problems in seeing any benefit in this duplication of material - I think this article should be significantly pruned, and I could even live with it becoming a redirect to 1855 article! Tomas e ( talk) 13:29, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
Some more photos to look at. One of those cases where you're taking a photo of one thing, and then realise afterwards that you've captured something completely different - in this case a rather neat example of tears of wine in some Caluso Passito. Any opinions on which is best? I'm torn between the tight crop which has no distractions, and the wide shot that gives "context" - there's scope for an 'in between' crop which cuts out the bottle and some of the glass, but given the text of the article I think it's quite useful to have the context (with % alcohol etc). As an aside - another one for the collection of "wines I have drunk where neither grape nor appellation has a Wiki article" - I've quite a few of those. :-))) - and really quite nice. Actually, that would be a great idea for WBW - bloggers have to either review a wine that's not on Wikipedia, or "pay" for reviewing one that's a stub by upgrading the article. FlagSteward ( talk) 23:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
When I was expanding the history section of the German wine, I started to browse through some pictures I took in September when I visited Kloster Eberbach in Rheingau. Next to this place, I discovered an area where various grape varieties and vine training systems were on display. In order to remember what was what (this was after all just after several hours of wine tasting...) I also took a photo of each sign. I was sure I had photographed something that was supposed to be an old vine training system, and thought I'd include this picture as an illustration for this article. One of the displays was labelled Alter pfälz. Kammerbau (old Palatinate Kammerbau), which OCW mentions as being of Roman origin, so I naturally chose this. Here's the image, by the way. But then I realised - it just doesn't look right! It uses steel wires, for a start, and in comparison to the OCW illustration, it's higher, it only includes one row of vines and there is nothing about it that brings a "Kammer" (roughly "chamber") into mind. To be quite honest, in OCW it looks very much like this. However, this latter exhibit was labelled as something completely different and much more modern. Since I expect people who take the trouble of producing an exhibit like this to know what they're doing, it seems strange if things would have been so seriously mixed up. However, it would be far from impossible for someone to switch the signs by just uprooting their poles, so I was starting to think that some prankster may have switched (at least) two signs. Because of this, I wonder if we have a viticulturalist on board who actually can recognise different "Germanic" vine training systems from photos? If so, in order not to influence that person, I'm not going to tell with which system the second image (which I suspect is the Kammerbau) was actually labelled. Tomas e ( talk) 20:25, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Another list thrown up by my bot, of Wine articles (B's and High Starts) lacking infoboxes. As a Project I feel we're a bit short on infoboxes, and this might throw up some inspiration for new ones, as well as highlighting underuse of existing ones :
One obvious thing to do would be a big box with links to all the main Burgundy villages and areas, but I feel we could do more to present the "essential" numbers on regionsbetter, current production, that kind of thing, a regional equivalent of the appellation box. FlagSteward ( talk) 01:49, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
On the other hand, a few B's get thrown up by my bot as GA candidates based on certain statistics - again I must emphasise I haven't looked at these myself, and am definitely not saying that GA won't take a lot of work in some cases, but what do people think about :
I suspect Wine will need more work than most - but wouldn't that be a terrific article to get GA'd? FlagSteward ( talk) 01:24, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
While commenting the suggested french winery infobox, Tomas e pointed out that by stating a category like "cases per year" ought to be clear to as many as possible. There is a little explanatory line in the infobox now, but keen minds at the Template:Conversion branch are possibly playing with making a convertor from "wine case" -> liter/hectoliter ~ US gallon, at this talk_page. I stated I thought the 750 mL bottle in packed in a 12 case had application to the entire wine world, but I don't feel so confident the standard is absolute, I keep finding anomalies in my resources. Is it so simple that we can state an overwhelming global majority for "wine case" or too diverse to be a good idea? MURGH disc. 11:17, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
I have made some minor changes to the Carmenere article. I have fixed the references format a bit, as well as added some more info. Can someone please give it a quick copyedit? While you are at it, what do you guys think is needed to make this an FA? Suggestions? -- Charleenmerced Talk 01:37, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
Dear WikiWinos, we seem to have a problem. There is a User:Lightmouse who seem to have made it his speciality to do various style & format cleanups, including converting various units. I got the impression that he has decided upon eradicating acres and hectares from Wikipedia and replacing them with square kilometers. Since hectares and acres are the only units that (to the best of my knowledge) are ever used in the wine world, I asked him to stop doing this for wine-related articles. But it seems that what units is relevant to wine articles is of little interest to this fellow. As an example, this edit to Alsace wine was my first encounter with this editor. He's also behind the "useful" edit which gave introduced the fact that Château Cantemerle is 0.91 km2. I asked him here not to do such edits. (Btw, this guy has a very strange way of handling his talk page - he archived my question on a page which you can't find from his own talk page and then replied on my talk page!) The way I read his reply he apparently thinks his opinions weighs heavier than reliable sources, and there doesn't seem to be much need to understand the subject of the article you're editing en masse. Sigh! Is that really the way these tools were meant to be used? If anyone else would like to drop this user a line I'd be more than grateful. I just started to wonder why I bother to check up sources for many of the edits I perform, since this obviously isn't professional literature... Tomas e ( talk) 22:15, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I think a large part of his confusion is that he is assuming ha/acre are specialist terms and seems to fail to understand that they aren't. They are the most common and ordinary terms used in everyday usage for any discussion relating to vineyards and wine regions--whether or not you're dealing with someone who knows nothing about wine or a wine specialist. It is just the overwhelmingly dominant and consistent usage across the board, regardless of medium or audience. To not use those terms is a great disservice to the reader since they will lack the context in understanding the information presented in the Wikipedia article with what they are going to encounter in every other information source that they are ever going to encounter involving wine. If the Alsace wine article was modified to say only that "In 2006, vines were grown on 153 sq km" and then in every reading about the qualifications to be an Alsace Grand Cru AOC vineyard they have to produce "65 hectoliter per hectare or less."--how in the world are they going to be able to easily understand that context? What happens when they go to read about a particular wine estate and learn that the estate has 26 hectare]planted-are we going to expect our readers to immediately be able to convert that into sq km to understand how large this estate is in Alsace? It makes absolutely no sense to divert from using the standard, consistent and common usage to something that is completely foreign. I noted the example of how absurd it would be to convert all the figures in the Economy of the United States article from the US Dollar to Euros under the pretense that the USD is a "specialist measurement". I think that situation is very similar to what we have here. Agne Cheese/ Wine 14:20, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
I just saw this article for the first time and it is in pretty good shape (I have not read it all though, just looked it over). Should we try to get this to GA? It has all the information there, we just need a good copyedit, fix the intro, some more info and sources. We should at least get it to B. -- Charleenmerced Talk 07:31, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I saw an interesting post on the Village Pump- Neglected subject area needed for Wikipedia:Academy content drive by novice Wikipedians-about a potential content drive to get a group of students from Columbia University to learn about Wikipedia and create articles for an area where coverage is lacking. I went ahead and boldly nominated the subject of Wine and offered the Project's assistance. Hope you all don't mind. :) I do think this can be a great opportunity to expand some stubs as well as getting some interesting articles created (Like Wine in cooking, History of French wine, Colonial British wine trade, etc) while we continue to focus on getting our Top importance articles up to snuff. But even if the NY Wikipedians decide not to use wine, we may still want to create some of the proposed sub pages for potential benefits for future Wine Project members--like...
What jumps out to you about the listing of FAs by types? While I think our current strategy of focusing on getting our Tops/Highs to B/GAs is ideal, I did find this current listing and attached article to be very interesting. Agne Cheese/ Wine 16:16, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
Unless my count is off, I think we are currently at 98 wine related DYKs. What is very awesome about that list is that there have been at least 10 different wine project members contributing to the various articles that have been featured (and a couple like the Great French Wine Blight and Thaddeus Hait Farm coming from outside the project). While we might be lagging in the FA front, having these DYKs help tremendously in getting "front page" exposure for Wikipedia's wine content. Great work everybody! :) Agne Cheese/ Wine 00:59, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
I thought this was worth breaking out of the #Anomalous article sizes thread above. In particular Agne's comment :
My take is a bit different, and to be honest I think that example is not the most helpful they could have chosen - Kashmir is a massive subject, the closest in US terms might be an article on Virginia, only with more history and wars. The Kashmir example weighs in at just 35kb, Virginia is up around 100kb, which gives you some idea of how deficient the Kashmir article could be considered to be..... Good old WP:CSB :-) So I'm not sure how helpful that example is, I find it more useful to look at wine examples. We can agree that GA articles are better than B articles, so you might want to look at the state Carménère and Tempranillo when they were approved as GAs in April 2007, they were 13-16kb and had 13-17 separate sources, with around 30 refs in total. And that's for GA on grapes that have a bit more history than many, so the B standard must be some way short of that. I think it's misleading (and a bit depressing!) to base the standard off anomalous articles such as Zinfandel which has an unusual amount of history and genetics to write about. "Below the GA standard represented by Tempranillo and Carménère" is more realistic for the typical grape article than trying to judge it off a 58kb article such as Chardonnay. (as an aside Agne, I think it is positively unencyclopaedic to delete the popular culture section on Chardonnay, certainly from a British perspective) I must admit though, I think either Tempranillo was a bit lucky, or the GA standard is lower than I thought. ;-/ Going back to the assessment instructions is also useful IMO. For B :
Now I thought "a majority of" counted as a weasel phrase, :-) but technically you only need 51% of the "material needed for a comprehensive article" to be in the majority, even if realistically you'd be looking at 60-70%. And of course you need to define "a comprehensive article". I guess we have one ready comparison in the Oxford Companion to Wine, obviously we are not forced to be concise by the need to pay for dead trees to print on, but perhaps it might be helpful if we regarded the average Jancis entry as somewhere in the GA to A region and benchmark off that? I still feel that in general that our grape entries need a bit more
ampelography, but I'd suggest that aside from that articles such as Zin are more like an A than a B.
I guess that's all a long-winded way of saying just to cut the B's some slack, the standard isn't quite as high as you might think. :-) —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
FlagSteward (
talk •
contribs)
16:50, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Oh absolutely it's about comprehensiveness rather than absolute size, I'm sorry if I left the impression otherwise, that's why I was emphasising that B-criterion of "majority of material needed for a comprehensive article". I only mentioned the size thing because it's just not very easy to judge "comprehensiveness" for the "average" article against a potentially massive article like Chardonnay or Zin. Even the "perfect", comprehensive article for Tempranillo will be a lot bigger than "perfection" for the vast majority of grapes, so all I'm saying is that the independently-verified Tempranillo GA is a better benchmark than Chardonnay. Which personally I think must be pretty darn close to an A ("A fairly complete treatment of the subject....May miss a few relevant points") rather than a minimum-standard-B - great work, I'd not looked at it recently (and the pop culture thing I noticed ages ago, so it may have been between edits). Must be worth a shot at FA?
I guess the difference is I'm arguing that "majority of material" covers (say) 60-90% of "perfection" (as measured by FA), with Starts covering say 20-60% and A 90-99%; I sense you're working on Starts covering say 20%-80%, B is 80-95% and A is 95-99% - we're debating those 60-to-80%-of-a-FA cases. I guess we could just compromise at 70%? :-))
I feel you're slighly over interpreting here. All the B criteria say is that "Useful to many, but not all, readers. A casual reader flipping through articles would feel that they generally understood the topic, but a serious student or researcher trying to use the material would have trouble doing so, or would risk error in derivative work. To my mind "a casual reader feeling that they generally understood the topic" is a lower standard of proof than "any" reader having a "solid understanding of the subject". That's closer to the GA requirement of "A good treatment of the subject. No obvious problems, gaps, excessive information. Adequate for most purposes, but other encyclopedias could do a better job." Again the GA criterion seems to suggest that a GA is not as good as Jancis.
Whereas I see things differently. Let's just take the Tops for a moment. If we've got an article up to the standard where it is "Useful to many, but not all, readers." and there are Top articles that are only "Useful to some, provides a moderate amount of information, but many readers will need to find additional sources of information. The article clearly needs to be expanded." - then too right the Project would benefit more from additional work going on the article providing "a moderate amount of information" than on the article that is already "Useful to many, but not all, readers." OK, an individual editor may want to take it further, particularly once they are "into" a subject, but that's a bit different - personally my style is more of a "get to 'useful' and then move on to the next", Zin was a bit of an aberration. :-) Talking of which, did Amatulic do whatever we were waiting for him/her to do on that? Or should I just get on with GA? I'm not sure that Zin really proves your point though.... Anyway, you could say that any non-FA article is "not doing our readers the type of service it should", I'd just say that the Top Starts are more deserving of our efforts, that's all. FlagSteward ( talk) 23:24, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Though here is the big thing. What benefit is it to anyone, to have a lower or sub standard B article? Does it really benefit the project or more importantly the reader to have the Zinfandel at its "early B" state before your rewrite when I reassessed it to start or the Zin article that we have today thanks to your tremendous rewrite? The same with my Chardonnay example before. It benefits no one seeing our number of "B" class articles (Top importance or otherwise) go up if they are truly not good, quality articles; if they are truly starts rather than something we would want to polish up to GA. As for Zin, I do think we gave plenty of time and good faith to his objections. I would remove the tag and go ahead with the nom. Agne Cheese/ Wine 23:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
After seeing my snuffu with originally rating Château d'Yquem & Château Lafite Rothschild as B, I went through and looks at our B class articles. Some were pretty obvious in lacking in MAJOR areas (beyond just lack of referencing which, overall, is our most common problem). I was WP:BOLD in reassessing those as start. In others it was more a borderline case, not so cut & dry, and I would like to encourage more discussion on the talk page. More opinions are certainly valuable and I think overall a better understanding of everyone's view will come out if we work on a particular example. Agne Cheese/ Wine 00:40, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Our Top importance article should be more of a priority than what they currently seem to be. I'll raise my hand and note that I will get easily distracted with things like stub killing and hunting for DYKs. But these top importance articles are the ones that get the highest page views and are most likely the introduction for a lot of folks to the quality and resourcefulness of Wikipedia's wine articles. Having those article in great shape will go along way towards making Wikipedia be the kind of online tool that I'm sure we would all like to see. To one extent, this does reinforce my belief that we should be diligent in cases like our B-class standards particularly for these important articles but I feel compelled to put my money where my mouth is. I will heed Flag's plea and recommit to getting these Top importance article up to B class. Outside life permitting, my optimistic goal will be to work on one a week. I like grape and wine region articles so those will probably be the ones I focus on the most (and of course any help will always be appreciated). I think I'll start with Cabernet Sauvignon. I promise to try not to get too distracted with new articles, stubs & DYKs. :P Agne Cheese/ Wine 08:49, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Hey guys! Just to let you know that I've been chatting with Gary Vaynerchuk of the WLTV vblog. He is certainly a prominent figure in the wine world (at least from an internet focus) with his audience overlaping quite a bit with the type of wine drinker that would use Wikipedia as a online wine resource. In fact, as mentioned in our last newsletter, Gary points to Wikipedia as one of the " best online resources" for wine. Plus, his very active WLTV forums includes many instances of "Vayniacs" turning to Wikipedia for wine info. He has graciously agreed to be the topic of an upcoming "Wiki Winos" segment. So stay tune for that. One item that came up in the conversation was the appropriateness of including some WLTV video links in Wikipedia articles--not linking for the sake of linking but using any links that can offer some value to the article. I talked to him a little about the WP:EL policy and that Wikipedia is not a wine guide so the episodes that are almost entirely just "wine reviews" wouldn't be appropriate but episodes that do go into some large detail about the wine grape/style/region would be viable as a potential link. An example of an episode that I, personally, would consider appropriate is this episode on Sherry--namely because I think it compliments the article's description of the different styles of Sherries and goes into some detail about the characteristics of those different styles. But not every episode of WLTV is like this and I think it probably would be best to take the links on a case by case basis with a discussion on the talk page about the links. What do you guys think? Agne Cheese/ Wine 03:41, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Feel free to add and fiddle with that list at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wine/Bot_Category_List as required, I've roughly sorted it but may well have missed things - the MW's almost got buried for instance. Looking at it you can see that we could do with standardising our category names, particularly for wineries - the standard Wiki format is "Something of Somewhere", but I think it's certainly OK to break that convention where WP:ENGLISH requires something more natural such as "German wine" or "New Zealand wine". The Yadkin Valley cat in particular stands out. I've removed the four "Wine in Piedmont" format Italian regional cats, as they just seemed to get in the way of the hierarchy between Italian wines and eg Wines of Piedmont. I also have a feeling that "Wine Grapes of..." should become "Grape varieties of ..." but don't have strong views either way, it just needs synchronising. FlagSteward ( talk) 12:57, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
I feel it be useful to get SatyrBot working for the Project? It can do a couple of things :
Seems to me that these would all be useful things to do. I've made a list of categories over at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wine/Bot_Category_List (with a handy shortcut of WP:WINECATS to bring it up when you're writing articles). The idea is that any article in those cats would get tagged with the Project banner, so we need to be quite "conservative" about what goes in the list. I've removed the following from the list :
as I feel that stuff like sangria and Martini are best covered by the Mixed Drinks Project, despite their wine base - but are there any more that should be removed? Satyrbot can be a bit controversial, but the problems seem to arise when either the cats don't match the Project goals or the Project isn't active enough to keep an eye on the results. Neither apply in this case. I'll ask him to do a trial run if that's possible, otherwise if there's no objections within a week I'll set it up "permanently". FlagSteward ( talk) 12:57, 8 March 2008 (UTC)