User talk:John Broughton/Wikiproject Notable races for the House 2006

Wikipedia:WikiProject Notable races for the House 2006 is a WikiProject intended to produce a set of high-quality articles with a consistent format for all notable races in the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2006 mid-term election.

The genesis of this project is a page that has roughly a paragraph on each notable/competitive race for the House in 2006: United States House elections, 2006. This project is based on the belief that these races are sufficiently interesting - and information about them will be sufficiently useful in the future - so that most (roughly 100) of the races described at that page deserve a full article of their own.

This project is also based on the belief that there are enough editors who were interested in these races to divide the work so that no single person has to do an overwhelming amount of work to complete this project: 70-80 new articles and the improvement of 10-20 existing articles. Participating editors will not simply be pointed to a needed article and asked to create or improve it; rather, this project will provide standard outlines, links to sources, a model article to use as a basis for new articles, and other support so that this is truly a collaborative project, not simply a group of editors who happen to be working on similar articles.

Subpages and related pages

 * /Scope of this project: List of races (91) included in this project, with status of each. Also includes a list of the races that were in United States House elections, 2006 but are not included in this project (24); and a list of district election articles that have been created by others but are not in either of the other lists (3).
 * /Starter page: A page with section headings, a category, and any other standard elements (including small notes about content). This page should be copied when starting a new article.  The page also includes suggestions, including some links, on finding existing articles that also have information on this race, information that should be copied to the new article.
 * /Guidelines for the organization and content of articles: Description of recommended content for each section; Q&A on what should and should not be in an article on an election.
 * Model election article (to be selected - possibly one of the Arizona races)
 * /Quality checklist: A checklist for quality and completeness. (Replace with a to-do list?)
 * The template used to mark articles as belonging to this project

Definitely planned steps
1A - Move really fast to create campaign articles (template/shell/skeleton/whatever) for all competitive races where an incumbent won or there was an open race. Copy the info from articles on challengers into the campaign articles. Then slap redirects on the articles on challengers (if of questionable notability) so that there is no need for proposals to delete these (AfDs) for these. (Such AfDs are bad precedent, in general, and a waste of time regardless of outcome. Successful AfDs can kill off source info if older versions of articles have information not in the version that was deleted; article histories are potential sources to recruit editors for this project.)


 * Status: Done.  36 campaign articles exist as of 11/12/2006, roughly twice what existed before the project began; 15 to 20 AfDs have been avoided.

1B - Create a template to put on temporary campaign articles so other editors understand why they are in rough shape, and that they will improve. (Template is .)


 * Status: Done.  Template has been applied to roughly 20 articles (those that aren't in good shape).

1C - Monitor AfDs and suggest redirects, as was done for Samm Simpson, where there is a significant chance that the final result will be "Delete".


 * Status: Ongoing

2A - Finish this page and the subpages. For example, a really good campaign article might contain (polls, snapshots of campaign funding at various points, results, newspaper endorsements, a good selection of links to local newspaper stories, etc.) (In the best of worlds, finish one article so that it can serve as a model.)

2B - Post the wikiproject, officially.

2C - Recruit a few editors to review the project plans, and modify accordingly.

3A - Recruit more editors and start the process of chosing which elections they want to work on.

3B - Create initial campaign articles for all 92 election races in this project, using the starting "template".

3C - Link all existing biographical articles (incumbents and notable challengers) and all state-wide election articles to their respective election article(s); copy any relevant information from them to the election articles. (This will hopefully result in recruiting more editors.)

4 - Finish 92 campaign articles for 2006 House races that are in this project. That phase includes an ongoing rating/evaluation of the quality of each article, and the use of a checklist to validate that an article is in fact finished.

Optional steps
5 - Improve the quality of wikipedia bio articles for incumbents in competitive races (defeated or not), winning challengers, and notable but not-winning challengers: good citations, good copyediting, etc., as a baseline for 2008 races.

Related projects
A - Do the same for the 30+ Senate races. (As of early November, for example, the Florida Senate campaign article is devoid of any significant content except primary results and polling information.)

B - House races 2008 - starting in mid-2007, build articles for those races expected to be competitive (either a dominant party's open primary or the general election).

Shortcut
Our Shortcut is WP:USC. Also, WikiProject US Congress, and Project Congress redirect here.

WikiProject U.S. Congress notice
Place a WikiProject notice Template:WikiProject U.S. Congress at the top of an article's Talk page to direct editors to the WikiProject U.S. Congress for guidelines. This notice will appear as this:

To use it, place

or

at the top of an article's Talk page

Related Portals
This project is accessed through these portals:
 * Portal:Biography
 * Portal:History


 * Portal:Politics
 * Portal:Government of the United States


 * Portal:United States

Other related WikiProjects

 * WikiProject U.S. Congress
 * WikiProject History

Participants

 * John Broughton
 * Sholom