Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Wines task force/Newsletter/12-08-2007

Welcome to back to the revitalization of the Wine Project newsletter. I know it has been a while since the last report and many, many thanks to FlagSteward for publishing the last newsletter. Despite the dearth in communication, the wine project has still been humming along thanks to the efforts of several project members.

NOTICE! Wine Project survey
After the initial publishing of the newsletter a survey about the Wine Project was posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wine/Survey. Please take a moment to share your thoughts about various aspects of the Wine Project and Wikipedia's wine coverage.

Member's spotlight

 * User:Kharker has been hard at work with several American wine related articles, including making at least a stub quality article on the wine industry of every US state. This exciting development has every link on Template:American wine BLUE! (Kudos also to User:Rmhermen for developing the template in the first place). Kharker's efforts have also produced several DYKs including recent ones on Nebraska wine and PlumpJack Winery. Anytime we can get wine coverage on the Main Page of Wikipedia is a huge plus in spreading awareness of Wikipedia's coverage of Wine and the Wine Project itself. Way to go!
 * User:Murgh has been working on several winery articles, including correcting the spelling & accents of many of the Bordeaux wine chateaus. He has also contributed some self made photos of wine labels to many articles including Image:Château de Pez 1975 detail.JPG and Image:Château Chasse Spleen 1937 detail.JPG. For that he has earned the eternal jealously from many wine project members for being in possession of some of these fabulous wines. :)
 * User:VirginiaProp has been hard at work on many Virginia wine related articles like the Monticello AVA, home of the early winemaking efforts of Thomas Jefferson.
 * User:Tomas e has been hard at work with our German wine, Alsatian wine, and Austria wine articles, including creating and contributing personal photos to the the German wine auctions.
 * User:Symposiarch has also been a valuable contributor to our German wine articles, especially in cross linking to the German Wikipedia articles.
 * User:Bethling has been wiki-wino-gnome (new word!) in helping out with some of the wine stub sorting, changing the generic to the more specific Category:Wine region stubs, Category:Wine biography stubs, Category:Wine grape stubs, Category:Winery stubs. This tedious and mostly thankless job provides an invaluable service to the Wine Project in helping us to better categorizes our stub articles so that folks with certain strengths or interests (like writing about wineries or grape varieties) can focus on those articles more easily. It also helps with further categorization like into the sub categories of Category:Wineries that many winery articles are missing.
 * 'Speaking of tedious and thankless tasks....User:MIckStephenson has also contributed with more, very much needed wiki-wino-gnomery (another new word!) with his copy edit skills on several Spanish wine related articles like History of Rioja wine and Catalan wine. Additionally he provided much needed "local" perspective and first hand knowledge to greatly improve these articles prior to their display on the main page as DYKs.
 * Did you know....that Wikipedia has one of the better coverages of Spanish wine regions on the web? This is thanks in large part to the work of our resident Spanish winemaker User:BodegasAmbite who has been diligently working away on creating at least Start-class quality articles, many with maps, on nearly every Spanish Denominación de Origen like Cariñena (DO) and Jumilla (DO). Way to go!
 * And there are many, many more Kudos to give out. It takes the collective work of every wine loving Wikipedian to make Wikipedia the type of quality wine resource that we all want to see. Big or small, from copy edits to stub sorting to uploading images to creating templates to working on articles, everyone's contribution is greatly valued and appreciated. Be sure to pop a cork sometime in the near future and raise a glass to YOU! You certainly deserve it. :)

Back to the nitty gritty

 * Operation stubkiller Overall, the Wine Project has been doing well in this regard with no Top level or High level importance articles being classified as stubs. With these articles being essentially our "core" wine articles, this is very good news and a lot of credit goes to the work of Flag Steward who made these importance categories a personal mission to improve. We still have 870+ stubs out of the 1550+ wine articles but the vast majority of them are in the Low importance category. That is not to say that we should ignore these articles. There are a lot of interesting subjects that may tickle someone's fancy to want to expand. If you expand the stub more then 5 times its original kb size, you can nominated it for DYK. Of our Mid importance articles nearly half are stubs which can also use a lot of love and affection.
 * Pictures! Pictures! Maps! and oh...Pictures! Yes, like many subjects in Wikipedia there is always a need for pictures and illustrations. They can add so much benefit to the quality of a wine article from providing a visual context to the subject to simply giving a break for the reader from the wall of text in the article. While not every lives near a vineyard, wine region or winery there are many photo ops that just a regular wine lover can take. Have you enjoyed a nice Mosel wine lately? What about a wine from Tuscany, Napa, South Australia or Washington state? How about a Merlot, Viognier or Zinfandel? Set aside a glass, maybe next to the wine bottle for identification and take a pic. Don't have the desire to be a budding Annie Leibovitz or Mathew Brady? Fear not! For there are needs for many hands in the boiler room. Interested Wikipedians can comb through the images stored on Wiki-Commons as well as the various resources at Public domain image resources. There are also many photos available on Flickr with creative commons license. But you must carefully check the license to make sure it is one of the Wiki-friendly licenses. If not, you may consider contacting the photographer and seeing if you can get permission for the picture. There is also a need for some wiki-gnometry in tagging wine related images with Category:Wine-related images or to add articles that need a image into Category:Wine articles needing photos by modifying the project banner template with " " like on the Talk:Sangiovese page.
 * Good Articles and Featured articles The Good Article process has been going through some rough patches which is why some editors are choosing not to participate it in. However any wine project member (or non-member for that matter) is free to nominate any wine related article for Good article status. In fact, the Great French Wine Blight was created and nominated by User:Anonymous Dissident and earned GA status on Nov. 27th. The Wine Project still doesn't have a Feature article though there are some potential nominees currently sitting in our B class and GA class categories. If anyone feels ambitious enough to try their hand at WP:FAC please drop a note on the Project talk page and I'm sure you can get help with peer review, copy editing and the like. More potential FA-fodder could be found in some of our Category:Wine-related lists like List of Artists who have created a Château Mouton Rothschild label, List of Burgundy Grand Crus and Spanish wine regions.
 * Did you knows? The project has been quite successful in getting Wikipedia's wine related content featured prominently on the Main page with 27 DYKs since October! As mentioned earlier in the newsletter, DYKs are very valuable in increasing awareness of Wikipedia's wine coverage and the work of the Wine Project. The additional eyeballs on the article also help with improving content and many times the article comes out in better shape after its time in the sun thanks to additional edits by Main page readers. If you create a new article or expand a stub/start class articles more than 5 times its original kb size then nominate it for DYK on the template talk page within 5 days of starting your work. If selected for DYK, be sure to add it to the wine project's main page in the DYK section of WikiProject Wine/right panel.

Well that is it for now
This newsletter was aimed more as a catching up piece. I'll try (girl scouts honor!) to keep the communication more updated about the happenings of the Wine Project. Don't hesitate to drop a note on the Wine Project talk page, especially if you need help or advice with an article. We're all here to help!