Misplaced Pages

The WikiProject Greater Manchester Newsletter
Issue XV - March 2009

Project News

Happy birthday! It was the project's second birthday on 24 February, so thank you to everyone who's helped improve and Greater Manchester related article, not just our members, your work is very much appreciated. The last month has been very successful, with lots activity:

• Promoted articles:

Radcliffe, Greater Manchester is best known as a mill town, but was mentioned in the Domesday Book and features the medieval Radcliffe Tower, which is a Scheduled Monument.

There are 38 Scheduled Monuments in Greater Manchester; SMs are nationally important historic sites. The 38 include castles, medieval halls, and Bronze Age cairns.

Nico Ditch stretches from Ashton-under-Lyne to Stretford and according to legend was dug in a single night to defend against the Danes.

The Cine City, Withington, was the third cinema to open in Britain and when it closed in 2001 it was the third longest running cinema in England. It was opened in 1912, and demolished in 2008.

The Manchester Mark 1 was developed from the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, also built in Manchester, and was one of the first electronic stored-program computers in the world.

• Current nominations: As of the completion of this newsletter, there are no GA nominations, but Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine and Buckton Castle are at FAC. The articles detail the world's first stored-program computer, and the best preserved castle in Greater Manchester. There's a good chance that one or more of these interesting articles could be promoted, so please keep an eye on them in case there's any way you can help!

• Charles White (physician) and Worsley featured in the DYK section of the front page last month (actually, Worsley featured in January but was missed out of the last newsletter!). For details of the DYKs by the project that have appeared on the main page, see Did you know?

• The project's cleanup listing has been updated with stats from 24 February 2009. As of 8 October 2008, 447 (26.5%) of 1689 our articles needed a clean-up, this has risen slightly to 455 out of 1809 (25.2%). This is encouraging as the proportion has gone down, and indicates the standard of the project's articles are steadily improving. While the high-profile successes of GAs and FAs are important, the project's aim is to improve all GM-related articles.

• WT:GM: The project's talk page is a forum for discussion and to keep up to date with the latest project developments and initiatives put it on your watchlist! Recently there have been discussions on articles to be deleted, the congestion charge, how to get members involved and working together, and plenty of other stuff.

Sister projects

In an attempt to encourage communication between related wikiprojects, or to at least raise awareness, this section is dedicated to the important goings on of WP:Merseyside and WP:Cheshire, our sister projects and the only other user groups dedicated to improving articles in North West England.

• WP:CHES – After a period of low activity, the project has picked up recently, with initiatives (such as beginning a newsletter and sending a questionnaire to its member) to encourage greater participation from its members. This has paid dividends with two GAs being promoted in February and greater activity in general.

• WP:MERSEY – After being set-up in September 2008, the project is experiencing a period of lowish activity. While the project has a handful of FAs and GAs, most of its articles are unassessed; assessing requires no familiarity with a subject, so any help WP:GM members can lend would be greatly appreciated.

Other news

There is a meet-up scheduled for 14 March in Manchester for anyone interested. It is not organised by WP:GM and is open to all wikipedians. More details can be found here.

Written by Nev1, based on a template by Jza84 | Single-Page View

Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:GM?? Please nominate yourself at WT:GM! New editors are always welcome!

Aims

Our extant short-term project aims:

• Obtain GA status for Salford.
• Obtain GA status for Kersal Moor.
• Obtain GA status for Manchester city centre.
• Obtain GA status for Congestion charging in Greater Manchester and Greater Manchester Transport Innovation Fund (TiF).
• Get a lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county.

After a flurry of activity in January, progress on the Salford article has slowed, but it is steadily progressing towards a good standard. If you think you can help improve an article, be bold and get editing! Although these are the project's explicit short term aims, we endeavour to "improving all Misplaced Pages articles that are concerned with Greater Manchester", so every edit is valuable.

The project compared

The Greater Manchester WikiProject is one of the leading UK-based groups. Some other projects are no as lucky as we are in the numbers of active enthusiastic users. Below are some statistics of the other leading UK projects and some geographically close to Greater Manchester.

	GTRM	YORK	LOND	MRSY	CHES	DERB
FA	34	22	15	8	3	0
GA	42	32	27	6	24	1
B	105	182	228	11	57	37
C	99	126	43	19	29	68
Start	713	1654	1749	188	570	461
Stub	769	3214	1201	104	454	680
List	47	87	57	5	21	21
Unassessed	0	0	555	1230	13	21
Total	1809	5317	3876	1571	1171	1289

Member News

There are now 46 active members of WikiProject Greater Manchester (with a further 17 members inactive since 1 September 2008) as 1 new member joined the project in February:

• Majorly

Majorly is an experienced editor who has recently decided to join WP:GM, and has been working hard on Cheadle Hulme. The project is always looking for new members, and if you spot an editor who makes good changes to Greater Machester related articles why not invite them to join up by adding this template to their talk page: {{SUBST:Welcome WPGM}}.

Reminders...

• Images!
  There are some good images around, but more are still needed if we're going to get a "lead/static image in every infobox of every town in the county"! The requested photographs category lists some of the articles needing images.

• Articles needing attention
  Please remember that the list of stubs needing expansion and the list of articles needing cleanup are in permanent need of attention.