We hope everyone had a happy holidays and hope that the New year greets you well. As with most December months editing was down somewhat as everyone enjoyed the holidays with their families and spent time relaxing not thinking about the Wonderful world of Wikipedia. In light of the decrease in editing the project got a lot of tasks completed and paved the way for a lot of work to be done in the new year.
Mistletoe post card
Let me start by saying we are going to try and make the newsletter more interesting. Some editors have suggested its a bit dry and generic so we are going to work on that.
As some of you may know, over the past few months we have been working on determining the activity levels of the US related projects and we have completed that analysis. All of the projects that relate to United States topics were contacted about collaboration and support and many accepted the offer. A year ago only a couple projects were supported by WikiProject United States and now we have 60 projects we fully support and 5 more that are Joint projects maintained by us as well as other projects such as WikiProject Military History. By having multiple parent projects supported these US related topics we will increase visibility and traffic to the articles as well as increase collaboration between projects for the betterment of the articles and Wikipedia. Although we may continue to add projects as the project grows the tempo of that will be greatly reduced going forward.
During December Kumioko was able to get his bot, Kumi-Taskbot through the bot approval process to automate a few of the tasks previously done manually and using that bot we completely transitioned the remaining 75, 000 articles into the WikiProject United States banner with the corresponding supported project. The bot continues to perform maintenance on the articles and the article talk pages and should allow us to spend much less time on mundane tasks and more time developing articles. Some of the items that the bot will be performing include:
Converting WikiProject banners
Adding the appropriate WikiProject banner to additional articles
Sending out this newsletter
fix problems with the WikiProject banners such as invalid formatting, parameter addition and replacement, and other talk page cleanup related functions.
Future tasks will include fixing problems on article pages as well as other tasks as needed.
If you have a suggestion for a task that could be done by a bot and pertains to United States related articles please leave a note on Kumioko's talk page for consideration.
Articles of note
This section highlights some of the US related content that has been promoted to Featured Status in the last 2 months: Note:Articles pertain to one or more of the WikiProjects relating to United States topics but not necessarily WikiProject United States.
Watercolor painting of Cleveland tower at the graduate college, Princeton University.
Events and meetups
December events
Wikimedia DC hosted Fine Art Edit-a-Thon and GLAM-WIKI Meetup on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.! During the Edit-a-thon they had 18 new articles created or improved.
The GLAM project was very active the last couple months with United States related activities and tasks and they could use more help. If you are interested in Art, libraries, museums or other areas relating to antiquity all are encouraged to participate. They have several projects relating to the Smithsonian institution, National archives, Children's Museum of Indianapolis and several others.
Upcoming events
Wikipedia day cupcakes
There is another DC meetup scheduled for sometime in January TBD. If you are interested in attending the information can be found here.
January 15 is known as Wikipedia Day to Wikipedians. On this date in the year 2001, the wiki-based Wikipedia project went public after spending five days on Nupedia.
In 2012, Wiki Loves Monuments will come to the United States. If you are interested in photography or in monuments this might be an interesting event for you. More information is available here.
Wikimania 2012 is coming fast. As some may have heard, Washington, D.C., was selected as the 2012 site for Wikimania, and we're down to about 215 days. If you are interested in attending, more information can be found here.
Do you have an event you want everyone to know about? Let us know so we can post it for everyone to see.
Portals and portal related content
The United States portal is getting very close to Featured portal status. With the new push to get a space on the main page for featured portals I would like to start devoting some time to getting this one built up. If anyone would like to help out with this leave a message on the talk page here.
In addition to Portal:United StatesPortal:Supreme Court of the United States was recently promoted to featured status as well. We have a lot of portals related to the United States that could be promoted relatively quickly and with minimal work. If you have any recommendations for a portal that you would like to get promoted please let the project know.
Some other possibilities for future collaborations can be found on the collaborations talk page and are: Camp David, the White House, Charles Lindbergh and Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. If one of these sounds like a good candidate please add it to the list of candidates or add your own if you have some ideas about an article that would make a good collaboration.
Caution: The projects in this section are associated or maintained by multiple projects. Under no circumstances should the banner from another project be replaced with the banner for WikiProject United States.
