Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball/Australian baseball task force

Welcome to the WikiProject on baseball in Australia.

Did you know...?
To try and boost the interest in Australian baseball at all levels, we want to get as many articles as possible to get onto the Main Page of Wikipedia. The more that get there, the more that get clicked on by curious and interested people, and so the more it should snowball from there.

With that in mind, we're launching an effort to get articles listed in the "Did you know?" section. The main things for an article to be featured there are that the article has to be either brand new or newly expanded fivefold within the last week, there has to be at least 1,500 characters of prose, the fact stated in the 'hook' that appears on the main page has to be cited with an external reference in the article itself, and the article has to be neutral particularly concerning articles on people.

One of the things that's mentioned in the rules is that if content is moved from a user's sandbox to the mainspace, that the 'new'-ness of the content is treated as being from the date it goes into the mainspace, not the initial creation. What that means is we can still work on articles in sandboxes, and when they have the right amount and type of content they can be moved over to the mainspace and be nominated straightaway. With that in mind, if you are thinking about expanding a stub into a larger article, or are going to create a new article for the project, we'd like you to: Doing all this will mean the work you're doing can still be viewed by the rest of the task force and can get contributions from them, but are out of the way from the main content so they won't get marked for deletion, and are unlikely to be vandalized while being worked on.
 * 1) create a sandbox page from your userpage (if you're not sure how to do this, you can either speak to  Afaber012  on his  (talk)  page, or have a look at his sandbox to see how he's done it)
 * 2) if there's an existing stub, copy the content (don't worry about stub templates or category pages) and paste it into your new sandbox page
 * 3) list the article here with a link to the sandbox page

Newsletter
We've launched a newsletter for the task force, called the Southern Cross Pitch. Whether you're a member of the task force, or just interested in keeping up to date on what's going on around here, feel free to sign up here!

Goals

 * Improve Wikipedia's coverage of the sport of Baseball in Australia.
 * Create guidelines for Australian Baseball articles.
 * Improve and expand articles relating to the history of baseball in Australia.
 * Improve and expand coverage of Australia's state league competitions.

Scope

 * The project covers all articles about Baseball in Australia.
 * The project is new, so please help expand.
 * The project is separate to the main Baseball WikiProject to better organise the Australian articles and get them noticed more among the editors that are interested in Australian Baseball.

Members
If you want to join this WikiProject, please add your name to the active list.

Active

 * 1)  - Attempting to fill in as much as possible about Australian ball players in Japan.
 * 2)  - I can help with many articles. I extended the Ryan Rowland-Smith article to a B-class.
 * 3)  - Can help with current ABL articles
 * 4)  - Have been involved in Baseball most of my life. Happy to help where I can.

Inactive

 * 1)  - I will try and dig up bits and pieces and add to the ABL part as time goes on. I used to watch Perth Heat play and hope to do so again soon. Not on the net much but look forward to the challenge.
 * 2)  - I watch baseball nearly 24 hours a day on MLB TV, and know a fair bit about the game in Australia, so want to help out
 * 3)  - Don't know how useful I'll be but willing to do what I can. I'm only new so go easy on me.
 * 4)  - I love Baseball and I love Australia so I figure i can help out some how
 * 5)  - Will be able to provide South Australian input and dig up historical info to expand pages through ties with the SABL.
 * 6)  Play baseball in NSW. Keen to provide as much info on ABL as possible on Wikipedia, particularly regarding Sydney Blue Sox. Learning Wikipedia coding as I go, so if you fix up any syntax (etc) of mine, please let me know. :)
 * 7)  American fan who welcomes the internationalization of the game.
 * 8)  - Big Dutch baseball fan. Moved to Perth in 2007. Was very active on the Dutch Wikipedia during the 2008 Summer Olympic, want to discover Aussie baseball and help Aussie baseball grow on Wikipedia.
 * 9)  - Being a "Yank" (correct term for a U.S. citizen?!), I don't know how much help I can be, but I'll be happy to watch any "Talk" entries and perhaps add my "two cents" from time to time. I just created a new (stub) article: Baseball Australia Hall of Fame. I also created (and just revised) Baseball Australia Diamond Awards.
 * 10)  - New Guy here i have been a baseball fan since i was a 8 month old gonna try to help as much as i can
 * 11)  - Not around as much as i used to be, mostly interested in the old ABL articles, teams, seasons and all that, not bad at templates either.
 * 12)  (interested in anything Australian related in Baseball, teams, players, leagues, etc)
 * 1)  (interested in anything Australian related in Baseball, teams, players, leagues, etc)

Article Alerts
There are almost 300 articles for this task force to look after, which is a lot! Not everyone will have the knowledge and resources to be able to update and maintain all of them, but there are still ways you can help.

There are two boxes to the right of this message:


 * Article Alerts - Below is the current list of alerts for the task force:
 * This can tell you about certain changes made to articles in terms of the processes they're going through. It provides lists of articles undergoing requests for deletion, candidates for "Featured" or "Good Article" status, and articles in "peer review".
 * If the pages are being discussed in terms of possible deletion, please voice your opinion, even if it means you think it should be deleted: we'd prefer a few articles on important topics to maintain, than trying to look after a huge number of articles on unimportant topics or topics for which little to no information is available.
 * If the articles are up as Good Article nominees or Featured Article candidates, it might be best not to be the leading voice for the article itself, but conducting a review of another article in the queue ahead of it would be excellent in helping to speed the overall process up: the faster the queue is dealt with, the sooner our article can be reviewed.


 * Cleanup Listing - This can give you ideas for what to do next. It lists articles from this project that have been tagged as needing some form of maintenance. This includes articles that need expanding, more sources, updating and articles that aren't clearly notable. Have a look at the articles listed, if you can fix the problem its tagged with, and remove the tag. (Or if you think its already fixed, just go ahead and remove the tag.)

To-do
The following is a list of tasks you can do, for the full "to-do" list, or to add a request, click here
 * Improve this Project page
 * Replace the baseball-stub template with the Australian-baseball-stub template for Australian related articles
 * Improve articles related to the Australian Baseball League (now defunct)
 * Expand a stub

Assessment

 * /Assessment – Our rating system
 * Project statistics – Statistics for our rating system
 * V1.0 index logs, sortings, stats, etc

Templates
These templates are used to help identify various pages on Wikipedia as being a part of the Australian baseball task force.

Barnstars




This template can be added to the talk page of any user who you feel makes a great contribution to the task force or an article covered by the task force. When using it, replace  with a custom message such as " "

Articles


This template should be added to the bottom of any Stub article in the project. This will help to identify it to users who concentrate on expanding stub articles.

Talk pages




These templates should be added to the top of all Talk pages of articles in the project. This ensures that the article is included in WikiProject Baseball, WikiProject Australia and the Australian baseball task force. Other common parameters that are used for both are   and  , while   is used in the baseball template, and   in the Australia template.

User pages




Related projects

 * WikiProject Baseball
 * WikiProject Australian sports