Wikipedia:WikiProject Cetaceans/Collaboration

The Cetaceans Collaboration of the Month is a collaborative effort to improve whale, porpoise and dolphin-related articles, to help them reach featured-article standards. Anyone, no matter what their level of knowledge about Cetacea, is welcome to lend a hand. An article is chosen by people interested in the topic from a pool of nominations, and for the next month the chosen article is worked on, under Wikipedia's principle of collaborative editing. This provides a single article for people to concentrate their efforts on collaboratively.

Collaborations were selected monthly from September 2006 until January 2007, with irregular activity thereafter (four further selections in 2007) until the last selection in April 2008, since which time it has been inactive. To date, one of the articles selected is currently a Good or Featured article - Right whale.

Selecting the next collaboration
Collaborations are changed roughly on the 10th of every month. The selection process involves three steps:
 * 1) Nomination: New nominations can be made at any time and should be added at the end of the Candidates for next Month section. Insightful comments may assist others in casting their vote.
 * 2) Voting: To vote for an article, add your ~ under the article's support section. Any registered Wikipedian can vote on this page, regardless of their level of knowledge about the subject.
 * 3) Selection: The colllaboration is selected by approval voting; thus, you may vote for as many candidates as you like, and opposition votes have no bearing. The article with the most support votes is selected as the winner. In case of a tie, the candidate that was nominated first wins.

A nomination will be removed and archived when the new article is chosen if it did not receive an average of at least 1 vote per week since the day it was nominated.Nominations are open

Preparing the next collaboration
To change to a newly selected article, first close the previous one:
 * 1) Remove the article from current collaboration page to reflect the change.
 * 2) Change COTM=yes on the previous selected article talk page to COTM-old=yes
 * 3) Note the selection in the collaboration archive.
 * 4) Send the article to the assessment page to check where it falls on the grading scale.
 * 5) If appropriate, the article should be referred to Peer review and later to Featured article candidates.

Now prepare the new article:
 * 1) Change to the new selection at the current collaboration by replacing the old article with the new.
 * 2) Remove the new article from the Next collaboration section, and note it on the collaboration archive.
 * 3) Change the COTM-nom=yes on the newly nominated article talk page to COTM=yes
 * 4) Contact the Wikipedians who voted for the winning article in their talk pages, leaving.

Nominating articles

 * 1) First, decide if it is necessary for the article to require a collaboration. Minor grammatical errors and other simple tasks can be done by one person. Be bold!
 * 2) Add the nominee to the Next collaboration section, and follow the following format:
 * 3) Add COTM-nom=yes to CetaTalk on the top of the article's talk page.