Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Wines task force/Newsletter/02-21-2008

Welcome to this edition of the Wine Project Newsletter. The harvest season is in full swing for the wine regions of the southern hemisphere. For our wiki-winos in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, Argentina and other southern hemisphere wine regions, now would be a great time to pack your camera for a beautiful vacation to wine country. You know you deserve it. ;) In addition to the wine & the sun there will be opportunities to snap a picture that could help some of Category:Wine articles needing photos. From grapes (Pinotage, Sémillon, Viognier, etc) to wine regions (Coonawarra, Heathcote, Western Cape, Catamarca, Casablanca, etc) to wineries (Klein Constantia, Vergelegen, Yalumba, Wynns, Brown Brothers Milawa Vineyard, etc) there is always a need for good quality wine photos.

On to the rundown.

News & Notes

 * Boxes, they want Boxes! Infoboxes that is. Thanks to a nifty amount of bot work by User:FlagSteward we now have a a list of high or B level articles that are missing infoboxes. In addition to be a quick and easy source of information for our readers, infoboxes will also be important for articles that the Project will want to take up to WP:GA or WP:FA level. Below is a listing of available infoboxes.
 * for wine regions (AVAs, AOCs, etc.)
 * for vineyard / wineries, tailored for US
 * for vineyard / wineries, tailored for France *note This template is currently being updated with a discussion on the talk page about ways to improve it.
 * for vineyard / wineries, tailored for Australia
 * for Italian wines, tailored for Italian wine regions
 * for wine grape varieties


 * All American Viticultural Areas now have articles! Thanks to the awesome work by User:Kharker, every American Viticultural area has at least a stub quality article. There is still room for improvement and Kharker has pinpointed the top 12 AVA articles most in need of some love and affection.


 * Speaking of some good old, fashion down home love and affection.... (Still legal in most countries, I believe :p) FlagSteward has compiled a list of some important start class & stub class articles that really could use some brushing up. Later on in the newsletter, I'll include some of these articles in our Traffic count section.


 * Speaking words of wisdom, let it beeeee a B-class wine article. What exactly is a B-class wine article and how much work needs to be down on some of our Top importance wine articles to get them up to B-standard. There is a discussion about this going on at the Project talk page, feel free to share your opinions here.


 * Did you know.... that since our last newsletter, we had 14 more wine article featured on the Main Page's DYK segment? Kudos to the editors to who created or significantly expanded these articles including User:Nwinther who tagged team with a couple Wine Project editors to get Château Cantemerle featured; User:Murgh who created several new articles that were featured including the The Wine Advocate and Haut-Médoc AOC and User:Tomas e who help clarify the murky origins of the Shiraz grape on point the grape article and with his DYK on the ancient Shirazi wine.
 * ONGOING housekeeping
 * Wine Project Survey- Let your voice be heard!
 * Philip Greenspun illustration project/Requests - Request that wine-related illustration that you've always dreamed of!

Traffic Cop
Rankings based on page views in Dec 2007.--Top five entries also show January page views for added context.
 * [[Image:Stop hand nuvola.svg|45px]]Traffic cop-A sampling of how often wine related article are being viewed. In this edition we are going to take a look at the 18 Top importance wine article, currently listed as being a start class. There is a strong likelihood that these are the articles that will first introduce people to the quality and depth of Wikipedia's wine coverage. The type of first impression that these articles give will have a large influence on how often they'll come back to use our articles.
 * 1) Cabernet Sauvignon - 19,321 views, in Jan 2008 23,588 views
 * 2) Merlot - 18,122 views, in Jan 2008 19,331 views
 * 3) Sparkling wine - 15,452 views, in Jan 2008 16,199 views
 * 4) Chianti - 13,095 views, in Jan 2008 17,111 views
 * 5) French wine - 11,061 views, in Jan 2008 15,599 views
 * 6) Italian wine - 8654 views
 * 7) Burgundy wine - 7803 views
 * 8) Winemaking - 7334 views
 * 9) Sangiovese - 4352 views
 * 10) Australian wine - 3929 views
 * 11) Grenache - 3815 views
 * 12) Vitis Vinifera - 3729 views
 * 13) Spanish wine - 3425 views
 * 14) Cabernet franc - 3151 views
 * 15) American wine - 2331 views
 * 16) Argentine wine - 1771 views
 * 17) Portuguese wine - 1437 views
 * 18) South African wine - 1261 views

Potential wine Good Articles & Features

 * On the wine project talk page there is a discussions about possible GAs with an evaluation by our Wine Project GA liaison User:VanTucky on the closeness to GAs on some of them.
 * Wine Project member User:Charleenmerced has inquired about the possibility of Carménère becoming a Featured article candidate. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts.

Wiki-Winos
For this edition of Wiki-winos, we are stepping outside of the project to a fellow long time Wikipedian who is every bit a Wiki-Wino at heart. Meet User:EvanProdromou who, in addition to being a MediaWiki developer, is one of the founders of Vinismo, an online wine guide with a focus that compliments Wikipedia's Wine articles. While Wikipedia is not a wine guide, Vinismo certainly is. The Wine Project may want to open up some discussion on importing articles and content that might not be appropriate for Wikipedia (an non-notable winery or extensive discussion on a particular wine, etc) over to Vinismo where such content is desirable.

Wine articles on the Web
A sampling of how Wikipedia's wine articles are viewed and used across the Web
 * Celebrity fans Gary Vaynerchuk of "WineLibrary TV" fame recently told the Boston Globe that Google and Wikipedia "are your best online resources" for wine.
 * Sommelier (start class, mid imp)-So where does the term sommelier come from? Is it a "beast of burden" of just a beastly soul? Find out what answers folks get when they turn to the Wikipedia article.
 * Mission grape (start class, low imp)-Were plantings of the Mission grape in New Mexico the oldest in the US? Well that information is not currently in our Mission grape article which is lacking according to one wine blogger].
 * Plavac Mali (stub class, low imp)- What is the relationship of this obscure Croatian grape to Zinfandel? The question was asked and Wikipedia was there with the answer.

Till next time
"And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine." -G.K. Chesterton "Wine and Water"

Agne