Wikipedia:WikiProject Gastropods/News about the Project


 * May 30th 2011: Chittenango ovate amber snail reaches GA status.


 * June 2010: we have well over 20,000 articles now, thanks to Ganeshbot, but of course all but a thousand of them are stubs. We have 4 "A" quality articles, 6 "GA" articles, and 26 "B" articles. We have 171 articles that are above Start class. The Portal looks good. The Project Page has been redesigned to be more compact, with all the details on subpages. However, recruitment of new members has been lagging because of the difficulty of finding contributions from new people among all of the new stub articles created by Ganeshbot. Fixing up the old unimproved stubs continues.


 * April 23rd 2010: a huge number of new bot-created species articles and genus articles are now up and running for a total of over 14,000 articles. Currently we still have no FA articles. We have 6 GA articles, and only 20 B quality articles. We have a total of only 156 articles that are above Start class.


 * In February 2010, we set up guidelines to follow for creating species stubs using a bot, working from a list of species in a genus article.


 * We also compiled a list of useful and not so useful online resources on gastropods. Please add any suggestions and comments to the list, which can be found here.


 * In December 2009, we had over 6,000 articles in the project. Out of those, over 5,000 were stubs, more than 3000 of which were created by a bot and many of which were untouched by human hand. Invertzoo and Daniel Cavallari are more than halfway through updating and fixing up the stubs.


 * In October 2009, we acquired a feature where you can access a randomly selected gastropod article. It's different every time you use it: random gastropod page.


 * In September 2009, thanks to User:Snek01, we acquired a Portal for our project, see Portal:Gastropods.


 * In 2009, thanks in large part to User:Anna Frodesiak, we gained an article for  every superfamily and family of gastropods listed by Bouchet and Rocroix, 2005, including all the fossil families. This was a very major step forward!

Promoted to Good Article Status

 * 25 May 2011, Chittenango ovate amber snail


 * October 8th 2010, Strombus canarium


 * April 18th 2010, Eustrombus gigas


 * November 17th 2009, Byne's disease


 * October 14th 2009, Socorro springsnail


 * September 25th 2009, Kerry Slug


 * August 10th 2009, Love dart was the first of our articles to be awarded Good Article status.

These are some of the Good Articles in Wikipedia's biology coverage. Hopefully we will be able to improve more of our other gastropod articles to reach this status (which is awarded under review from an editor who has not made any major contributions to the article, see here for information about the process ).

Although our total number of articles is impressive, currently the Gastropod Project is way below average (for the encyclopedia as a whole) in terms of how many articles we have that have GA status and FA (featured article) status (0).

Wiki-Conference
At the first Wiki-Conference New York on July 25th 2009, many in the Wikipedia community heard for the first time about WikiProject Gastropods. However, a number of attendees had already read the gastropod article Love dart, which was a very successful Did you know on the English Wikipedia Main Page, see below.

In particular our founder Jimmy Wales seemed to very much enjoy hearing about the progress of WikiProject Gastropods, which grew from one article in April 2004, to 5,237 articles by late July 2009. Jimbo awarded us with a Barnstar, which is currently sitting resplendent here: User:Invertzoo. Although Jimbo dedicated it to one of us, the honor should be shared by all of us, because we have all worked hard on this project over time.

Older news


 * 2009, March to June, clean up of widespread copyright violations in gastropod articles


 * In March 2009, a huge number of copyright violations (over a thousand of which were in gastropod articles) were discovered.
 * For a simple outline of what happened, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Gastropods/Subpage: the history of this CopyVio event. For more info see many messages left on this page and also this special page: . It took three months to clean up and save our articles from possible deletion.


 * Reminder to editors about copyvio: (This is a quick note, there are several exceptions of course.) When creating (or adding text to) articles, material from most traditional sources (excluding public domain and free content sources) needs to be rewritten from scratch. Do not use traditional kinds of text verbatim or almost verbatim, unless you are featuring a quote, which must be marked as such. Be careful of copyright issues, and also avoid plagiarism where this is relevant.

"Did you know?" on the English Wikipedia Main page
Project Gastropods continues to achieve a frequent presence on the Main page, with links to new articles. If you achieve any new gastropod-related DYKs, please add them to the list on this subpage: Portal:Gastropods/Did you know/archive

How is the Project doing? - article statistics, updated every few days:
On September 23rd 2009 we succeeded in paring down our number of completely unassessed articles to zero! Only two months earlier that number was 938. Up to at least March 16th 2010, two of us (User:Invertzoo and User:Daniel Cavallari) carefully went through the stub articles; half of them had no importance rating and the great majority needed major clean up of many kinds including having the taxonomy updated.

Note: this table does not include articles on slug or snail related topics that have not yet been tagged with the Project Gastropod template. If you come across a gastropod-related article that does not have the template on its talk page, please copy this piece of code WikiProject Gastropods and put it onto the article talk page. From that point onwards, that article will be included in these statistics.

If for any reason you need up to the minute data, you can run the bot by going to page, entering Gastropods into the slot, and hitting Go.