Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 8,082 last month to 8,202 on May 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 54 is just behind WP:GM who have 58. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 43 out of a total number of 2,182 articles.
Currently we have twenty Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
To bring all other top priority articles (currently 15 with 2 at FA) to at least Good article status
To set up a weekly or monthly selected article improvement drive (See this month's feature below)
To produce a regular news letter for circulation to members
and apropos of the above a 2010 New Year article improvement drive/collaboration is being organised.
Images
As a change from all the election related material this month I thought that we could look at images. With summer on its way in England then it is time to spend away from the computer and in the great outdoors. There are many events and places to visit so if you are taking time out at any of these then take along your camera and capture the scene. Then when back home you can upload the images to Commons so that they can be used on any of the projects run by the foundation. This is preferred to uploading just to Wikipedia as they are more widely available to other projects and save time of people having to make the transfer of suitable images. When uploading images to Commons then you need to categorise the image to enable it to be located easily and to group it with others of a similar theme. It is best to put it in a specific category, but if you cannot find one then pick the best fit you can and others will shift it around into more suitable categories. The process is similar to article categorisation and multiple categories can be added, as appropriate, but an image should not normally be placed in a category and one of it's sub-categories.
There are a number of articles requiring images and the Yorkshire related ones can be found here. Take a look before you go out as you may be able to fulfil one of the requests while out visiting.
If you locate an article that requires an image and no suitable image is available then add the {{reqphoto}} template to the article talk page to flag the article appropriately. If you want an image of a specific thing then you can use the of= parameter to give details. For example, if an interior shot is required of the building that is the subject of the article then use {{reqphoto|of=interior}}. You can narrow the image to a location by using the in= parameter, {{reqphoto|in=Yorkshire}} will request a photo in Yorkshire. If you use North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire or the East Riding of Yorkshire in place of Yorkshire then it will categorise in the appropriate sub-category but will not show up in the request box. A way round this is to apply Yorkshire and the division to the request and they will show up but remain unlinked. So to a request an image in the East Riding of Yorkshire it may be best to use {{reqphoto|in=Yorkshire|in2=the East Riding of Yorkshire}} to show in the request box and classify it in both Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Yorkshire and Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
For biographical articles the biography project template {{WPBiography}} has a needs-photo= parameter which should be set to yes if a photograph is required.
When adding an image to an article also check the talk page and remove the flags if the image fulfils the request.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The June 2010 articles selected below are the editors choice as no one came up with any other suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis. The latest listing was created on March 23rd.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
