User:Ganeshk/Gastropods/News


 * April 23rd 2010: a huge number of new bot-created species articles and genus articles are now up and running for a total of over 14,000 articles. Currently we still have no FA articles. We have 6 GA articles, and only 20 B quality articles. We have a total of only 156 articles that are above Start class.


 * In February 2010, we set up guidelines to follow for creating species stubs using a bot, working from a list of species in a genus article.


 * We also compiled a list of useful and not so useful online resources on gastropods. Please add any suggestions and comments to the list, which can be found here.


 * In December 2009, we had over 6,000 articles in the project. Out of those, over 5,000 were stubs, more than 3000 of which were created by a bot and many of which were untouched by human hand. Invertzoo and Davniel Cavallari are more than halfway through updating and fixing up the stubs.


 * In October 2009, we acquired a page where you can get a randomly selected gastropod article. It's different every time you access it: random gastropod page. This might be handy if you want to fix up just one article at random. Or if you want to see how many of our articles need some attention. Or if you just want to be surprised!


 * In September 2009, thanks to User:Snek01, we acquired a beautiful Portal for our project, see Portal:Gastropods!


 * In 2009, thanks in large part to User:Anna Frodesiak, we gained an article for  every superfamily and family of gastropods listed by Bouchet and Rocroix, 2005, including all the fossil families. This was a very major step forward!

Promoted to Good Article Status!

 * Sunday April 18th 2010, Eustrombus gigas is now a Good Article.
 * Tuesday November 17th 2009, Byne's disease is now a Good Article.


 * Wednesday October 14th 2009, Socorro springsnail is now a Good Article.


 * Friday September 25th 2009, Kerry Slug is now a Good Article.


 * Monday August 10th 2009, Love dart is the first of our articles to be awarded Good Article status.

These are three of only 48 Good Articles in Wikipedia's biology coverage. Hopefully we will be able to improve more of our other gastropod articles to reach this status (which is awarded under review from an editor who has not made any major contributions to the article, see here for information about the process ).

Although our total number of articles is impressive, currently the Gastropod Project is way below average (for the encyclopedia as a whole) in terms of how many articles we have that have GA status (6) and FA (featured article) status (0).

If you are a member of the project who made major contributions to an article, you cannot be the prime reviewer for GA status, but you can give suggestions on the review page for ways in which articles can be improved while the GA review is on-going. In the near future we will list on this page (or on the talk page) the names of articles that we are hoping to request GA review for, and then hopefully contributors will take a look and see if they can help fix up, add to, or polish up one or more of those articles.

Wiki-Conference
At the first Wiki-Conference New York on July 25th 2009, many in the Wikipedia community heard for the first time about WikiProject Gastropods. However, a number of attendees had already read the gastropod article Love dart, which was a very successful Did you know on the English Wikipedia Main Page, see below.

In particular our founder Jimmy Wales seemed to very much enjoy hearing about the progress of WikiProject Gastropods, which grew from one article in April 2004, to 5,237 articles by late July 2009. Jimbo awarded us with a Barnstar, which is currently sitting resplendent here: User:Invertzoo. Although Jimbo dedicated it to one of us, the honor should be shared by all of us, because we have all worked hard on this project over time.

Not quite so new news


 * 2009, March to June, clean up of widespread copyright violations in gastropod articles


 * In March 2009, a huge number of copyright violations (over a thousand of which were in gastropod articles) were discovered.
 * For a simple outline of what happened, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Gastropods/Subpage: the history of this CopyVio event. For more info see many messages left on this page and also this special page: . It took three months to clean up and save our articles from possible deletion.


 * Reminder to editors about copyvio: (This is a quick note, there are several exceptions of course.) When creating (or adding text to) articles, material from most traditional sources (excluding public domain and free content sources) needs to be rewritten from scratch. Do not use traditional kinds of text verbatim or almost verbatim, unless you are featuring a quote, which must be marked as such. Be careful of copyright issues, and also avoid plagiarism where this is relevant.

"Did you know?" on the English Wikipedia Main page
Project Gastropods continues to achieve a frequent presence on the Main page, with links to new articles. If you achieve any new gastropod-related DYKs, please add them to the list on this subpage: Portal:Gastropods/Did you know/archive

How is the Project doing? - article statistics, updated every few days:
On September 23rd 2009 we succeeded in paring down our number of completely unassessed articles to zero! On July 25th 2009, that number was 938. For the last 6 months up to at least March16th 2010, two of us (User:Invertzoo and User:Daniel Cavallari) have been carefully going through all of the stub articles working on them. There are now nearly 6,000 stubs, half of which had no importance rating and the great majority of which needed major clean up of many kinds including having the taxonomy updated.

Note: this table does not include articles on slug or snail related topics that have not yet been tagged with the Project Gastropod template. If you come across an article that does not have the template on its talk page, please copy this WikiProject Gastropods and put it onto the article talk page. From that point onwards, that article will be included in the statistics.

If for any reason you need up-to the minute data, you can run the bot by going to page, entering Gastropods into the slot, and hitting Go.