Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Werdna (talk | contribs) at 12:57, 6 June 2010 (→The British Museum wants to give you money and help you write articles!). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

• WT:LONDON

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London buses

We have some discussion of articles about London buses at places such as

• Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/London Buses route 77
• Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject buses#Bus route AfD's (full list)

As the bus is a notable feature of London, editors may be interested in these topics and discussions.

Colonel Warden (talk) 12:12, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

also:

Conversations:

Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_London_Transport#Update

Okip 15:27, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

General election

As you may be aware there is going to be a general election. The biggest impact on this project is that there are going to be some changes to constituencies. Some are split and merged, there are renamings and some seats that keep the same name are now made up of different wards. This will impact on locality article politics sections and infoboxes. MRSC (talk) 13:40, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Hi. I had a look at Hackney North and South; and they seemed to be correct. I added the ref in, as the wards were unreferenced. Looking at Barking and Dagenham opens up a can of worms. The whole political articles need to be restructured, with a lengthy table taken out of the article - moved to Politics of Barking and Dagenham? - and keyed to the ward results, which are there from 1998-2006 (only 2006 in Hackney). Some of this is already in Barking and Dagenham local elections.

So, there's three things to do:

1. Remove retiring MPs from infoboxes when parliament is proroged. My understanding is that sitting MPs remain MPs for their constituency until the new parliament is called.
2. Check the constituency information and correct in infoboxes; correct in articles.
3. Define a suitable structure and content for grouping borough politics articles. Much seems to be there for LB B&D, just badly structured. Much seems to be missing from (say) LB Hackney; but it has a better structure.

The other thing we need to do is hold the line about links to political parties - ie ensure if one is mentioned all get a look in. Hm, thanks for bringing this up (I think), there's a lot of work there ... all the best Kbthompson (talk) 16:06, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

FYI :- London Borough elections. Candidates, etc ... results will appear after the count. Kbthompson (talk) 10:15, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I emptied (and deleted) Category:Future parliamentary constituencies in London; the replaced constituencies I moved to Category:Parliamentary constituencies in London (historic). I got some of the dependencies on the replaced seats, but it would be good if other eyes could have a go from a different angle to confirm my omissions. Kbthompson (talk) 17:02, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

If you haven't already, you may want to ask BrownHairedGirl if she's planning to do these; in the past she's mass-updated the constituency articles (if you check the histories, about 75% of British and Irish MP and constituency articles were originally started by her), and may have a set of bulk templates just ready to drop into place once the figures are released. – iridescent 19:19, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

BP head office photo request

Hi! Has anyone yet photographed the BP head office at St. James's Square?

If one does not know which building it is, BP posted a copyrighted photograph here: http://www.bp.com/popuppreviewthreecol.do?categoryId=121&contentId=7003057

We need a Wikipedian to have a freely licensed photo of the building. BTW I checked Geograph and Flickr and couldn't find anything there. WhisperToMe (talk) 03:44, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

That photo looked as if it had been taken with an proper architectural camera. Even then, the horizontal convergence is extreme, so I looked on Google street view and sure enough the building is taller than the street is wide. Standing far enough back to get it all in will be impossible with and ordinary SLR. Even stitching several shots will be a bit of a challenge. I point this out, so that who ever goes, can plan the shot out before leaving home.--Aspro (talk) 12:04, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

I visited London, and so I took a photo of it (see File:BPheadoffice.JPG). If someone wants to take a higher quality photo or a better photo, he or she is welcome to get a better photo. WhisperToMe (talk) 21:47, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Backstage Pass tour of the British Museum - invitation.

Dear all,
Following the above thread about the British Museum, I'm pleased to announce the first real activity of the project - the BM is offering a "backstage pass" tour to any Wikimedians who wish to come along on Friday the 4th of June. Details below, copied from the Announcement by Mike Peel from Wikimedia UK. All London-based (or those who can make it there) Wikipedians are very welcome to come along. The crucial info and signup page is all here http://uk.wikimedia.org/Backstage_Pass.
Sincerely, Witty Lama 23:35, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

From Mike:

Wikimedia UK and the British Museum would like to invite you to a very special event taking place from 11am on Friday 4 June - a "Backstage Pass" to the British Museum!

"You may have heard of the British Museum’s exciting initiative, a Wikipedian-in-Residence, with Liam Wyatt joining us in June to work with museum staff and Misplaced Pages editors to encourage mutual understanding and improve the encyclopaedia in areas relevant to the Museum’s collection. In order to kick off the residency, I’d like to invite you to join us at the British Museum Misplaced Pages Backstage Pass Day, on Friday 4 June.

In the morning we have arranged a number of behind-the-scenes and gallery tours for Wikipedians. Then, after lunch together in the staff canteen, we will get together in the Clore Education Centre to talk about collaboration, have a question and answer sessions, hear pitches for adding notable objects and developing featured articles, and hopefully also forming some relationships for future working, during and beyond Liam’s residency.

I hope you can come; there’s a lot of interest here at the Museum about it. I look forward to welcoming you to the Museum. Matthew Cock, Head of Web, the British Museum

This will be an exciting, incredibly important, and - most of all - fun event, so I would encourage you to attend if you are able to. You can find out more information about what will be happening, and sign up to say that you are coming, at: http://uk.wikimedia.org/Backstage_Pass

Thanks, Mike Peel, on behalf of Wikimedia UK

The British Museum wants to give you money and help you write articles!

Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend the aforementioned Backstage Pass event at the British Museum. It was part of a wider project of engagement with Misplaced Pages (see WP:GLAM/BM) that has seen them take on a temporary Wikipedian In Residence, User:Witty lama. They see Misplaced Pages as sharing many of their aims, and they want to encourage involvement by Wikipedians with the museum, and vice versa. They have even offered 5 prizes of £100 at the BM shop for featured articles on BM topics - in any language.
Most Wikipedians probably don't know that the BM has curators dedicated to answering phone/email questions about their specialist areas, and most of their department libraries welcome visitors doing bona fide research - and they now seem to recognise that editing Misplaced Pages articles, especially about items in the BM's collections, counts for those purposes. I know that the first question most people will have is "Can we have images of all their stuff?" and I'd just ask people to be patient on that front. Let's just say that the museum are well aware of our hopes there, there are staff who see advantages to the museum in doing something, and it's being discussed at the highest level. On the other hand it's a very complex area that needs to be handled diplomatically. Literally in some cases - foreign governments can get very touchy about the dissemination of images of artifacts relating to their cultural history, and the museum needs to respect those concerns.
So for the moment the focus is on using the BM's huge resources of books, expertise etc to improve article content, and Londoners should be well-placed to visit the museum to do this. Hopefully we will also see articles being peer-reviewed by BM staff. Some of them are quite nervous about doing stuff on Misplaced Pages, a mixture of fear of professional ridicule, nervousness about the technical aspects, stories of rapid reverts of good-faith edits and just general culture shock - it's a very different world to the one they come from. So I'd ask everyone to look after any BM people that you see around the place, Misplaced Pages can gain a lot from their involvement and it would be a shame if they're discouraged for any reason. As I mentioned above, WP:GLAM/BM is the clearing house for the BM's involvement with Misplaced Pages, and I suggest that further questions/comments are directed there. Le Deluge (talk) 14:24, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

"They have even offered 5 prizes of £100 at the BM shop for featured articles on BM topics - in any language" – in what way does this differ from what got MyWikiBiz globally sitebanned? – iridescent 16:13, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

Leaving aside the likelihood that you wrote this to be deliberately provocative, I think that the distinction in both intent and outcome is blindingly obvious to anyone bothering to expend more than a modicum of intelligence. One case involves paying an advertising agency to write about your company, with the intention of improving that company's business (with concessions made to editorial standards in order to skirt deletion or sanction). The other case involves a non-profit with whom we share a mission (to share knowledge), who generously offers incentives for contributing to our collection of knowledge. The result is high-quality, informative articles about objects contained in the British Museum which have real providence. It is my polite recommendation that you continue to contribute in areas in which you can make constructive contributions (like RfA) instead of making provocative comments in lieu of contributing to others. — Andrew Garrett • talk 12:53, 6 June 2010 (UTC)