Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Somerset/Archive 3

Latest comment: 14 years ago by Derek Andrews in topic Pageview stats

List of Grade I listed buildings in Somerset

Over the last couple of weeks I've been doign some editing on List of Grade I listed buildings in Somerset and now I'd like to ask for some help. There are a few dates, architects & grid refs etc I've not been able to find (& lots of red links for the creation of new articles!). I definitely think it is too long at 154 kilobytes & over 400 refs & I'd like to ask for advice about splitting it into several articles for each Unitary Authority and/or non metropolitan district - before I add more photos etc.— Rod talk 22:59, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Category:Wells nominated for renaming

Hi, I just spotted Category:Wells has been nominated for renaming. The discussion is at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 January 28#Category:Wells if anyone wants to contribute.— Rod talk 14:32, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Northover

I'm after some advice. I've been working may way through Category:Somerset geography stubs & have got it down from over 600 to just over 200 articles by expanding them to start class, redirecting, merging etc but now I've got to Northover which I don't think is particularly helpful. I've found 2 places in Somerset called Northover. One is part of Ilchester at ST522230 & the other on the outskirts of Glastonbury at ST484381. I think both should be included in their parish articles & perhaps a disambiguation page put in the place of the current (not very informative) article. Any thoughts?— Rod talk 15:28, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

I think you are right. What status do they have now? The Ilchester one used to be a parish, but seems to have been merged. --Derek Andrews (talk) 21:10, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
Neither is a parish anymore.— Rod talk 21:48, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

South West Coast Path

South West Coast Path has now been a stable GA for over a year, with recent additions particularly in relation to some places in Cornwall. Apart from a few sections without citations I was wondering what others think would be needed to achieve the Featured article criteria? Would anyone from this wikiproject be interested in working on getting the South West Coast Path article to FA? I've started a discussion on Talk:South West Coast Path and comments are probably best put there.— Rod talk 11:02, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

New Cleanup listing for Somerset articles

After many months of waiting a Bot has now updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Somerset/Cleanup listing. It shows more articles in need of attention, of one sort or another, than we had back in October when the list was last updated. Of our 1797 articles 219, or 12.2%, are flagged for cleanup. If anyone can help with any of the problems identified, that would be great.— Rod talk 22:59, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Coordinators' working group

Hi! I'd like to draw your attention to the new WikiProject coordinators' working group, an effort to bring both official and unofficial WikiProject coordinators together so that the projects can more easily develop consensus and collaborate. This group has been created after discussion regarding possible changes to the A-Class review system, and that may be one of the first things discussed by interested coordinators.

All designated project coordinators are invited to join this working group. If your project hasn't formally designated any editors as coordinators, but you are someone who regularly deals with coordination tasks in the project, please feel free to join as well. — Delievered by §hepBot (Disable) on behalf of the WikiProject coordinators' working group at 06:36, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Would anyone like to take this on as we don't have a formally designated coordinator?— Rod talk 08:32, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Transport infbox/template

I really like the look of this - {{Transport in Worcestershire}} and think a Somerset version would be a useful addition. What do others think? --TimTay (talk) 10:26, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Seems fine, if you want to set it up we can add to it. We already have rivers etc in the Somerset template would these be duplicated?— Rod talk 10:40, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
OK, I made a start in my sandbox and will carry on over the next few days as time permits. It is currently in expanded state for ease of edit/preview but I will publish in collapsed state. For the moment I have commented out the entire bus section as I am not away of any bus-related articles in Somerset. User:TimTay/sandbox/Transport in Somerset Feel free to add content. As for duplicated content I really don't think that is an issue. --TimTay (talk) 13:35, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
I've started adding some - but where do cycle paths go?— Rod talk 14:57, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Turn my back for five minutes and you go and finish it! :) See {{Transport in Somerset}}. Cycle routes go right at the bottom in the last section. I'll add a couple. --TimTay (talk) 17:13, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Somerset - 18 months review

Its now 18 months since WikiProject Somerset was create and, as project veterans will know, it has become my custom to do a review every 6 months. The first 6 month review is at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Somerset/Archive 2#6 months on - achievements & work to do and the 12 months version at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Somerset/Archive 2#Somerset WikiProject is 1 year old.

WikiProject Somerset was proposed on 14 September 2007 by User:Derek Andrews with this edit [1]. Within a few days the basic project page and templates had been set up and 1778 articles had been identified as possibly relevant to the project. Of these 4 were FA standard and 5 GA.

18 months later we have a much clearer focus on the 1798 articles currently tagged for this project (quite a few having been removed as not relevant, hamlets merged into their parishes & others added) including importance ratings which are automagically included in the "current status" table on the project page.

In the last 6 months 50 new articles have been started, with 7 of them making it onto the front page in the Did You Know section. Articles passing reviews include Ælfheah of Canterbury getting to FA, and Blackdown Hills, John of Tours, River Parrett and Bridgwater and Taunton Canal achieving GA status. Several of these articles are also included in our new featured topic "Physical Geography of Somerset" - the first geography FT on wikipedia.


There have been improvements to a range of other articles, as shown in the table below:

Summary table, showing state at Sept 07, Feb 08, Sept 08 & March 09

Date Number of articles
  FA   FL   A   GA B C Start Stub Unassessed Total Lists cleanup
Sept 2007 4 - 0 5 4 - 4 1 1760 1778 - -
1 Feb 2008 8 - 0 12 67 - 607 985 0 1691 12 -
8 Sept 2008 9 - 0 17 73 18 644 1027 0 1802 14 149
1 Mar 2009 8 3 0 21 66 56 1005 608 0 1794 27 217

In the summary table above Featured Lists have now been separated from Featured articles and class C was only introduced in autumn 2008.

You will note that the number of stubs has fallen considerably, largely by tackling the geography stubs reducing them from 540 to 112. This means that almost all articles in List of civil parishes in Somerset are now start class or better & include population data, governance etc - 405 of them are now included in Category:Civil parishes in Somerset (the only exceptions are Whitchurch, Yeovil Without and Wellington Without).

Lists have also done well in the last 6 months with the creation of List of schools in the county of Somerset and its 3 sub lists - NB not all secondary schools (which are generally considered notable) have articles yet. Another set of lists is those for Grade 1 listed buildings; List of Grade I listed buildings in Somerset has 7 sub lists which give us plenty of red links to be working on - although recent articles on the buildings of Wells have helped.

In June 2008 a new tool was developed showing articles related to this project which require cleanup. This originally identified 177 (10%) of articles with cleanup tags of various sorts. This had been reduced to 149 by the beginning of August, however increased over the last 6 months, due to including other categories such as "coordinates missing" (which has now largely been dealt with) rather than a reduction in the quality of the articles. It now shows that 196 articles, or 10.9%, are flagged for cleanup. Articles about schools in Somerset stand out as being particularly prone to needing cleanup and improvement. The list is updated infrequently, but does provide some pointers as to whether further work (particularly providing citations) is needed. The worst article identified, which has at least 8 cleanup categories, is Severn Barrage.

Articles rated top importance eg Geology of Somerset, Economy of Somerset & Culture of Somerset need improvement and expansion, as do all of the major settlements at Category:Towns in Somerset, rivers at Category:Rivers of Somerset & the districts ie Mendip, Sedgemoor, North Somerset, South Somerset, Taunton Deane and West Somerset. There are still several requests for articles, on the "to do" list, and loads of other articles still need work - perhaps members of this wikiproject would like to suggest the areas they think are most important to work on?

I have really enjoyed working with all of you, including those who have recently joined, over the six months, however I now need to let you know that I will be reducing the time I spend on wikipedia. I've reached a crucial stage in my doctoral studies and, at work, am managing a major project - therefore I'm going to be a bit busy! I will still monitor my watchlist & help out where I can, but will not be as active as I have been in the first 18 months. I would welcome any comments on the progress of this wikiproject so far & areas for further work.— Rod talk 16:41, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Rod, if I remember correctly, you have made these threats to spend less time on wikipedia before, but it doesn't seem to slow you down any. Thanks for all your efforts, and your latest review.
I don't know if there is any one best approach, given that we all have our own interests and capabilities. Certainly it is nice to know what needs to be done so we can make informed decisions about how we choose to spend our time. Reducing the cleanup listings would be good as that will improve the readers' experience. In a similar vein identifying the most visited pages would be useful, and I believe there is a new stats package coming out this month, but I can't remember now where I read that. Maybe it would be useful if we could decide on a 'page of the month' to work on as a team, while still carrying on doing out own things?--Derek Andrews (talk) 20:14, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
Just out of curiosity I ran some stats for feb 09 on a non-scientific sample of pages from the cleanup list
  • somerset - 18749
  • glastonbury - 13782
  • wells - 7723
  • Bristol_International_Airport - 6370
  • Severn_Barrage - 4773
  • M5_motorway - 3821
  • West_Somerset_Railway - 1510
  • A303_road - 1085
  • Wincanton - 939
  • Devon_and_Somerset_Fire_and_Rescue_Service - 858
  • Queen's_College,_Taunton - 402
  • Horace_Batchelor - 342
  • Redhill,_Somerset - 247
  • Bath_International_Music_Festival - 220
  • Barwick,_Somerset - 206
  • Student_Impact - 174
  • Richard_of_Ilchester - 121
  • Macmillan_Way_West - 85
  • Hunstrete_Lake - 49
I'm not sure if we can read too much into the absolute numbers (many might be search engine bots, editors making changes or checking pages etc), but they might give some insight as to which articles are most important to work on. The numbers come from [2] - note the huge spike on 6 Feb in that example. Any explanations?--Derek Andrews (talk) 11:13, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
We had significant snowfall on the 5&6th Feb & I believe the A303 was blocked with serious accidents.— Rod talk 20:47, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Severn Barrage

I've nominated Severn Barrage at Wikipedia:Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive largely because an important proposed development like this needs a better article & to reduce the mass of cleanup tags. If you feel it is appropriate you could support the proposal, which, if successful, should bring the article to the attention of a wider collection of editors.— Rod talk 16:14, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

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AndrewRT(Talk) 21:14, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Updated clean up listing for WP:Somerset

Just to let you know the Somerset WikiProject cleanup listing has been updated for the first time in months. We are moving in the right direction having reduced the number of articles with cleanup tags from 196 a few months ago to 81, or 4.0% of the total now - which is good, but help in dealing with the issues identified on those 81 would be good.— Rod talk 08:21, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Project popular pages

Following the post a few months ago when User:Derek Andrews got some data together on page view stats for a selection of pages from this project, a new tool is available to do this more systematically/regularly. I will submit a request for this for this wikiproject.— Rod talk 09:17, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Help with Somerset pages needing clean up

A new Cleanup listing for this project has been generated based on data as of 16th Aug. I've made a start on some of the 122 articles listed as having problems (and showing by strikethrough which have been done), but other contributions would be useful. Some specific examples with major and varied problems include: Millfield, Millfield Preparatory School, Severn Barrage, Arthur C. Clarke, Shute Shelve Cavern, Clevedon Community School, Heart Bristol and West Country dialects. Many others require additional references. A couple I'm having particular problems finding sources for at present include: Severn Escarpment and Oldfield Park railway station. Any help with these or any of the others on the list would be appreciated.— Rod talk 20:50, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Please keep an eye on Yeovil.

Please keep an eye on the Yeovil article. An IP editor (User:86.157.184.79) and a newly registered editor (User:Adelaide09), who I suspect is the same person, keep adding unsourced material about a non-notable person to the article. I reverted it twice as non-notable, but when the editor came back as a newly-registered user and added the exact same info I now consider it to be vandalism. As such it isn't subject to 3RR, but I still need to tread carefully so would appreciate someone from here keeping an eye out and acting as necessary. Thanks. --Simple Bob (talk) 23:41, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

England at GAC!

Alerting all WikiProject Somerset/Archive 3 members that England is undergoing a review for WP:GA status. Things you can help with are listed here. Please help if you can... England expects that every man will do his duty.... :) --Jza84 |  Talk  16:19, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

WP Somerset - 2 years old

Its now 24 months since WikiProject Somerset was created and, as project veterans will know, it has become my custom to do a review every 6 months. The first 6 month review is at 6 months on - achievements & work to do, the 12 months version at Somerset WikiProject is 1 year old and the 18 month version at WikiProject Somerset - 18 months review.

WikiProject Somerset was proposed on 14 September 2007 by User:Derek Andrews with this edit [3]. Within a few days the basic project page and templates had been set up and 1778 articles had been identified as possibly relevant to the project. Of these 4 were FA standard and 5 GA.

2 years later we have a much clearer focus on the 2180 articles currently tagged for this project (quite a few having been removed as not relevant, hamlets merged into their parishes & others added) including importance ratings which are automagically included in the "current status" table on the project page.

In the last 6 months we have gained several new members and over 100 new articles have been started, with 18 of them making it onto the front page in the Did You Know section. A couple of high importance articles Transport in Somerset and Somerset County Council have been added.

Articles passing reviews include several new Featured lists: Grade I listed buildings in Bath and North East Somerset, Grade I listed buildings in South Somerset, Grade I listed buildings in Mendip, Grade I listed buildings in Sedgemoor, Grade I listed buildings in Taunton Deane, Grade I listed buildings in West Somerset and Grade I listed buildings in North Somerset. If the current GA nomination Grade I listed buildings in Somerset passes these have the chance of becoming a featured topic. Climate of south-west England was promoted to GA.

There have been improvements to a range of other articles, as shown in the table below:

Summary table, showing state at Sept 07, Feb 08, Sept 08, March 09 & Sept 09

Date Number of articles
  FA   FL   A   GA B C Start Stub Unassessed Total Lists cleanup
Sept 2007 4 - 0 5 4 - 4 1 1760 1778 - -
1 Feb 2008 8 - 0 12 67 - 607 985 0 1691 12 -
8 Sept 2008 9 - 0 17 73 18 644 1027 0 1802 14 149
1 Mar 2009 8 3 0 21 66 56 1005 608 0 1794 27 217
1 Sept 2009 8 9 0 24 63 77 1099 850 0 2153 23 122

In the summary table above Featured Lists have now been separated from Featured articles and class C was only introduced in autumn 2008.

You will note that the number of stubs, which had fallen, has grown again largely due to new articles on listed buildings.

The Cleanup listing for this project has been tackled to a large extent - falling from a maximum of over 200 articles to it's current 74 - although many of these have been dealt with and I expect this to fall to 30-40ish the next time the bot runs. The list is updated infrequently, but does provide some pointers as to whether further work is needed. The worst article identified, which has at least 6 cleanup categories, is Severn Barrage.

Articles rated top importance eg Geology of Somerset, Economy of Somerset & Culture of Somerset still need improvement and expansion, as do all of the major settlements at Category:Towns in Somerset & the districts ie Mendip, Sedgemoor, North Somerset, South Somerset, Taunton Deane and West Somerset, although rivers at Category:Rivers of Somerset has been expanded. There are still several requests for articles, on the "to do" list, and loads of other articles still need work. There are 174 articles still needing photographs (shown at: Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Somerset so if anyone has a digital camera and time to visited these sites that would be useful.

Following discussion after the review 6 months ago an examination was started of which pages receive most hits. A tool showing the project Popular pages now gives a monthly report ordered by number of views. Following the first run of this a brief discussion, about the dominance of biography articles over geography, considered whether people who were born in the county but don't have particular local significance should be included in the project - this was not fully resolved.

This is one of the most active projects nationally, and the only highly active project in south west England (as shown in the table recently drawn up as part of the review of WikiProject England) and we are doing quite well in achieving the projects aims. However I would welcome any comments on the progress of this wikiproject so far & areas or priorities for further work.— Rod talk 09:29, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Pageview stats

After a recent request, I added WikiProject Somerset to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Somerset/Popular pages.

The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. You can view more results, request a new project be added to the list, or request a configuration change for this project using the toolserver tool. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! Mr.Z-man 02:09, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for this. I find the list interesting and useful. Personally I was surprised at the dominance of biography articles over geography within the top 100. The death of Harry Patch may have influenced this but I would not have suspected John Locke would be the most popular page - there must be more philosophy students using wikipedia than I thought. Perhaps we need to reconsider the project's importance rankings in the light of this data?— Rod talk 21:26, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
It does raise an interesting question. Does John Cleese, for example, really belong in this wikiproject. He may have been born in the county (and gone to my old school) but merely being born here isn't the same as Harry Patch who has lived here all his life. Perhaps we should revisit membership criteria for articles which only have a slight (or short temporal) association with the county. I don't see us as being on a mission to bag as many articles as possible for the project. Less is more as they say... --Simple Bob (talk) 22:01, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
They were originally included when the project was set up & a bot tagged all articles in Category:People from Somerset with the project banner. I would welcome people thoughts on whether the project banner should be removed from those who may have been born in Somerset but subsequently emigrated & their notability is unrelated to the county. I have asked at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography#Do county projects include all "people from x"? what other county projects do on this. Comments welcome.— Rod talk 09:19, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Just a theory on why John Locke is so popular — Last weekend the Daily Telegraph mentioned him in two of their crosswords, maybe Wikipedia is a source for crossword solvers. Putney Bridge (talk) 18:49, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
That may have a little effect, but Locke is usually a high-traffic article. Nev1 (talk) 19:23, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
That could be something to do with the Lost (TV series), and his namesake John Locke (Lost), which has been runing for five years. Pyrotec (talk) 22:28, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Could be, but John Locke (Lost) receives about a third of the philosopher's views. I'd expect that if someone turned up at John Locke looking for the Lost character they would go through the dab page, but it only gets a few thousand views each month. Nev1 (talk) 22:34, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm not suggesting that they are "lost" (sorry about the pun). Several of the major characters in Lost are named after real people. That information is already in the wikipedia article: Lost (TV series)#Recurring elements, which you've obviously not looked at before dismissing my comment; and the wikilinks are also there. There is much speculation on what Lost is all about, time travel, free-will, etc. I'm suggesting that people are looking at John Locke, the philospher, and some of the other character-names based on real people, as a way of trying to forecaste what may happen in future episodes of Lost. Pyrotec (talk) 22:59, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Lost (TV Series) gets some 14.5k hits per month and is no. 227 in the list. Pyrotec (talk) 23:07, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
It could be the 1000+ links from the Article Namespace that does it, not to mention the backlinks that Google finds.--Derek Andrews (talk) 10:13, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect use of Post Town in infoboxes

Something (fairly minor) for you to be aware of. In the {{Infobox UK place}} which is used at the start of every town and village article, there is a parameter post_town. Several Somerset articles have this as BRISTOL, TAUNTON, or BATH depending on the settlement's postcode. This is incorrect as the postcode district and post town are different - the latter is a subdivision of the former. Cheddar and Draycott are both in the BS (Bristol) postcode district, but they are in the CHEDDAR post town.

A list of post towns and the settlements they contain can be found in the appropriate postcode district articles listed below and also at this website.

I am not suggesting a mass editing campaign to correct this, but I would encourage you if you are editing an article to consider correcting the post town if it is not accurate. --Simple Bob (talk) 07:30, 8 October 2009 (UTC)