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 9,683 last month to 9,730 on March 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 73 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 68. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 55 out of a total number of 2,928 articles.
Currently we have thirty Yorkshire featured articles:
As of 29 March 2012, we have assessed 100% of all articles with a project banner.
(Some new and additional article talk pages may still require a banner however)
Thanks
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...
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.
Link rot
This month I thought that we should focus on link rot in articles. Articles are created with lots of references to online sources as this is often easier than using printed sources. This is all well and good until a few months down the line when the web site is no longer available or has been re-organised and the page linked to has been moved. Whatever the reason for the change results in the reference link in our article becoming dead or just pointing at the main page of the site in question. The link therefore provides no verification for the information in our article and needs to be repaired. If you find a link like this then it should be tagged with the {{dead link}} template rather than deleted as the information may give someone a clue as to where to find a replacement link. If you know where the page has been moved to then go ahead and change the URL in the reference rather than tagging it. You could Google to see if a new page can be located or use the Wayback machine to see if there is an archived copy of the page available. If an archived version is located then use the |archiveurl= and |archivedate= fields of the {{citation}} template to record the archived version of the page.
The more information that is recorded when the reference is added the easier it is to find replacement URLs so remember to record as much information as possible when adding a reference. A bare URL with no information as to page title, publisher, publication date etc. makes finding replacements almost impossible. You can add archive details when adding a reference so that there is a backup copy already recorded for the reference. A BOT is currently operating to add archive details to live links to prevent future link rot. For more information on the subject of link rot see here.
It would be good, if this month, we try to reduce the number of {{dead link}} templates in the project's articles as a BOT is currently going round adding the template to articles.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The April 2012 articles selected below are an editors choice as there were no 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.
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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