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 8,468 last month to 8,621 on October 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 57 is just behind WP:GM who have 58. WP:GM also has the lead in FAs at 49 out of a total number of 2,266 articles.
Currently we have twenty two 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.
Dead links
This month I thought that I would concentrate on the problem of link rot in articles. Many of you will have spotted a BOT tagging references with the {{Dead link}} template. The template is added when the external link in a reference is detected as being inaccessible or is a redirect to the main page of the site. You should not remove references that are marked as dead unless you are replacing the reference with a new reference. The information in the reference may be useful to someone trying to locate a valid reference for the text. In order to help this process, when adding references in the first place, add as much detail as possible. It is easier to put in the detail while the reference is in front of you rather than waste someone else's time having to fill in the detail. If you want more detail then see Wikipedia:Link rot.
Many of the project's articles have been tagged in this way by the BOT and it would be useful if members could take a look at the tagged references, when visiting a page, and see if the problem can be resolved. May be the link is now active again in which case it is just a simple task of removing the template. May be an archived copy of the link can be located at the Wayback Machine, just add the link to the reference, if it is templated use the =archiveurl & =archivedate paramerters to record the new location of the link. If the site has been restructured then it may be possible to locate the same page used in the reference by following the links from the home page of the site. In this case replace the URL in the reference and remove the tag. Finally a replacement reference may need to be located if copies of the existing reference cannot be tracked down. If a new reference is used then the old reference and the tag can be removed.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The November 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.
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