User talk:PrincessofLlyr/2011/September

Latest comment: 12 years ago by Sross (Public Policy) in topic Update on courses and ambassador needs

MOU for Children's Literature course

While reviewing Ambassador listings, I noticed that you have not yet signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the Children's Literature course. Please go to Wikipedia:United States Education Program/MOU/sign and sign. Thank you. -- Donald Albury 01:14, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, and done. PrincessofLlyr royal court 12:54, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Battle of the Labyrinth

Hi! I'm a fellow member of the Percy Jackson Task Force, and I have been working on promoting The Battle of the Labyrinth to GA class. I have fixed many problems mentioned in Good article review, but I have been having problems with the last few things, which I have placed here. Do you think you could help? Cheers and happy editing! pluma Ø 00:25, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Hello! I have fixed the part about the great prophecy, but the rest will take a bit of research. I'll get back to you about that, okay? PrincessofLlyr royal court 12:59, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your help!

I appreciate your gnomish help with Portal:Speculative fiction. I try to catch all the little typos and whatnot, but some still get through, and I appreciate your help in keeping them to a minimum. If you'd like to help more with the portal, you are definitely welcome as well.   ···日本穣? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 03:21, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm already reading it most of the time, so why not fix stuff? :) Let me know what you need help with and I'll see what I can do. I'll admit that I'm utterly lost in the world of portals and what is involved with keeping them up. PrincessofLlyr royal court 12:56, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
The main things I need help with are the boxes on the right side which have changing information in them: "In the news...", "Bestsellers", "Upcoming releases", and "Upcoming conventions". The information in those is regularly changing. Also, being on the lookout for new articles, images/media, and DYK items to add to the appropriate sections on the left is good as well. ···日本穣? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 15:55, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

News and progress from RfA reform 2011

RfA reform: ...and what you can do now.

(You are receiving this message because you are either a task force member, or you have contributed to recent discussions on any of these pages.)

The number of nominations continues to nosedive seriously, according to these monthly figures. We know why this is, and if the trend continues our reserve of active admins will soon be underwater. Wikipedia now needs suitable editors to come forward. This can only be achieved either through changes to the current system, a radical alternative, or by fiat from elsewhere.

A lot of work is constantly being done behind the scenes by the coordinators and task force members, such as monitoring the talk pages, discussing new ideas, organising the project pages, researching statistics and keeping them up to date. You'll also see for example that we have recently made tables to compare how other Wikipedias choose their sysops, and some tools have been developed to more closely examine !voters' habits.

The purpose of WP:RFA2011 is to focus attention on specific issues of our admin selection process and to develop RfC proposals for solutions to improve them. For this, we have organised the project into dedicated sections each with their own discussion pages. It is important to understand that all Wikipedia policy changes take a long time to implement whether or not the discussions appear to be active - getting the proposals right before offering them for discussion by the broader community is crucial to the success of any RfC. Consider keeping the pages and their talk pages on your watchlist; do check out older threads before starting a new one on topics that have been discussed already, and if you start a new thread, please revisit it regularly to follow up on new comments.

The object of WP:RFA2011 is not to make it either easier or harder to become an admin - those criteria are set by those who !vote at each RfA. By providing a unique venue for developing ideas for change independent of the general discussion at WT:RFA, the project has two clearly defined goals:

  1. Improving the environment that surrounds RfA in order to encourage mature, experienced editors of the right calibre to come forward, pass the interview, and dedicate some of their time to admin tasks.
  2. Discouraging, in the nicest way possible of course, those whose RfA will be obvious NOTNOW or SNOW, and to guide them towards the advice pages.

The fastest way is through improvement to the current system. Workspace is however also available within the project pages to suggest and discuss ideas that are not strictly within the remit of this project. Users are invited to make use of these pages where they will offer maximum exposure to the broader community, rather than individual projects in user space.

We already know what's wrong with RfA - let's not clutter the project with perennial chat. RFA2011 is now ready to propose some of the elements of reform, and all the task force needs to do now is to pre-draft those proposals in the project's workspace, agree on the wording, and then offer them for central discussion where the entire Wikipedia community will be more than welcome to express their opinions in order to build consensus.

New tool Check your RfA !voting history! Since the editors' RfA !vote counter at X!-Tools has been down for a long while, we now have a new RfA Vote Counter to replace it. A significant improvement on the former tool, it provides a a complete breakdown of an editor's RfA votes, together with an analysis of the participant's voting pattern.

Are you ready to help? Although the main engine of RFA2011 is its task force, constructive comments from any editors are always welcome on the project's various talk pages. The main reasons why WT:RfA was never successful in getting anything done are that threads on different aspects of RfA are all mixed together, and are then archived where nobody remembers them and where they are hard to find - the same is true of ad hoc threads on the founder's talk page.

Delivered by MessageDeliveryBot on behalf of RfA reform 2011 at 16:00, 25 September 2011 (UTC).

Update on courses and ambassador needs

Hello, Ambassadors!

I wanted to give you one last update on where we are this term, before my role as Online Facilitator wraps up at the end of this week. Already, there are over 800 students in U.S. classes who have signed up on course pages this term. About 40 classes are active, and we're expecting that many more again once all the classes are up and running.

On a personal note, it's been a huge honor to work with so many great Wikipedians over the last 15 months. Thanks so much to everyone who jumped in and decided to give the ambassador concept a try, and double thanks those of you who were involved early on. Your ideas and insights and enthusiasm have been the foundation of the program, and they will be the keys the future of the program.

Courses looking for Online Ambassadors

Still waiting to get involved with a class this term, or ready to take on more? We have seven classes that are already active and need OA support, and eleven more that have course pages started but don't have active students yet. Please consider joining one or more of these pods!

Active courses that really need Online Ambassadors:

Courses that may be active soon that need Online Ambassadors:

--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 23:14, 27 September 2011 (UTC)