User talk:Schwede66/mayors

History and politics are combined interests of mine and amongst other things, I'm trying to set up a page for each Mayor of Christchurch. There is a significant number of redlinks on that mayors page, and the grand idea is to have a mass release of the articles as one big DYK (Did you know...?).

The proposal
The DYK Hall of Fame has a section on DYK hooks with more than 5 articles. Well, let's be bold and tackle the record, which stands at 26. Here's how:
 * there's 25 mayors that haven't got articles, and there are plenty of sources,
 * in addition, there are 2 chairman (the predecessor role to mayor, and that could arguably be counted as mayor, too), one of them with good sources (the other one, I haven't looked yet), and
 * in addition, there are about 7 existing articles where a 5x expansion would be possible (to meet DYK criteria).

So the best case scenario is a DYK with 34 hooks. Now how's that? I'm aiming for C or B class article quality. I'm planning on having this ready for publication on the homepage on 9 October 2010 to coincide with the local body elections. So I'm guessing the DYK nomination would have to go up in late September.


 * note: There is a special occasion holding area for DYK noms to coincide with events. Adabow  ( talk )  08:20, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

The proposed team
I have invited two Wikipedians to join me in this exercise. I'd be honoured if you were to accept the invitation:
 * Adabow - am getting somewhat involved
 * XLerate

The project
Please refer to the project page.

Things to do
I generally research a person and copy and paste the sourced text into a draft article. When there's enough material there, I start writing the article, creating the inline cites as a I, and removing the original text as I've used it. There's a few standard sources for each article:
 * NZETC - a good starting point - copy text into each article
 * CCC ex mayors - gives the year (but often not quite right, as mayoralty often changed mid Dec and it's recorded for the following year only)
 * Papers Past - the one local newspaper that's online is (The) Star
 * you can usually find mayoral election dates not just in the Star, but other South Island newspapers often report this
 * other biographical details - generally just in the Star
 * obituary - often also in other newspapers, but the Star one is mostly the most comprehensive
 * genealogical details
 * Shipping lists - various internet sources
 * If somebody died in Christchurch and is buried in one of the bigger cemeteries, they are often referred to in 'xyz Cemetery Tour' document by Richard Greenaway (available online via Christchurch City Libraries)

... more to come.

What do you think?  Schwede 66  09:05, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Notice board post
Just to let you know that I have posted details about this task at the New Zealand Wikipedians' notice board. Adabow ( talk )  09:10, 19 May 2010 (UTC)