Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Membership/News/2012 Annual Report

Report by Stfg, Torchiest and Diannaa | 31 December 2012 2012 Year-End Report

Guild membership continued to grow during 2012. At the end of September, the bimonthly backlog elimination drives brought us to the point where the age of the oldest copy edit tags is less than a year, a position we will seek to maintain from now on. Recent drives have had the additional target of fulfilling all requests made on our Requests page before the start of the drive month, a target we have met in all of the last three drives. We have added two new activities: the Copy Edit of the Month contest has been run in every month from August on, and blitzes were held in October and December. We introduced a Hall of Fame to recognise exceptional contributions to our work. The mentorship project has been reinvigorated by the addition of two new active mentors.

Membership
The Guild's membership has grown from 764 in December 2011 to 869 in December 2012. This is an increase of 105, or 14%. We welcome all our new members to the Guild!

Requests page
The record shows that we fulfilled 460 copy editing requests during 2012. There are currently 68 requests awaiting attention.

Coordinators elections
The coordinators elected for the first half of 2013 are:


 * Lead coordinator: Torchiest
 * Assistant coodinators: BDD, Miniapolis

Elections will be held again in June, so please keep the Guild in mind when looking for ways to expand your Wikipedia participation.

Backlog elimination drives
At the beginning of the year, there were 4152 articles in the backlog, and more than 4500 were added during 2012. At year end, 3005 remain, and we have cleared all articles tagged before this year.

January 2012 drive


 * In our first drive of the year, 33 editors reduced the backlog by 169 articles and cleared July, August and September 2010 from the list.

March 2012 drive


 * This time 40 editors reduced the backlog by 500 articles and cleared October, November and December 2010 from the list.

'''May 2012 drive


 * In our most successful drive of the year, and our second most successful ever, 32 editors reduced the backlog by 1166 articles, clearing January, February and March 2011 from the list. Our most prolific contributor, Lfstevens, copy edited 730 articles in the month!

July 2012 drive


 * In July, 36 editors reduced the backlog by 499, clearing May and June 2011 and all but four articles from July 2011. In this drive we reintroduced a bonus incentive to copy edit requests and succeeded in clearing all requests made before before July 2012.

September 2012 drive


 * This time 28 editors reduced the backlog by 312, clearing July, September and October 2011 from the list and all requests made before September 2012. At the end of this drive, for the first time in the history of the Guild, all articles in the backlog had been tagged for less than a year.

'''November 2012 drive


 * In our most recent drive, 33 editors reduced the backlog by 101 articles, clearing November and December 2011 from the list and completing all requests made before the start of November 2012.

Blitzes
In October we instigated a series of one-week blitzes of articles tagged for copy editing from selected WikiProjects. We have held two blitzes so far.

'''October 2012 blitz


 * In our first blitz, six editors edited 44 articles altogether, completing all tagged articles belonging to Wikiprojects Olympics, Albums and Football, and a few from WikiProject Television.

'''December 2012 blitz


 * We had planned to tackle WikiProject United States, but the CatScan tool that we use to identify relevant articles was not working, so we blitzed the oldest copyedit category instead. Ten editors participated, and 56 articles were cleared from the January 2012 cleanup category.

Copy edit of the month
We ran our first monthly Copy Edit of the Month contest. Every month, each editor may submit a single article into the contest. In the following month, the efforts are discussed and editors may vote for the copy edit they consider best. The results so far have been as follows:

Hall of Fame
The GOCE Hall of Fame was created this year, and three members have gained places on it:
 * Lfstevens in March 2012, for his huge contribution to that month's backlog elimination drive;
 * Dianna in May 2012, on attaining a total of one million words copy edited during backlog elimination drives;
 * Baffle gab1978 in December 2012, for completing 116 copy edits from the GOCE Requests page in 2012.

Mentors
After the mentorship programme had stagnated for a while, an appeal for new mentors brought forth two new volunteers, BDD and Miniapolis, in August. Both are highly experienced copy editors. Any budding copy editor who would like to be mentored can view our mentorship page to see who is currently available. The chosen mentor should then be approached directly on their talk page.

Plans for 2013
There are a number of new ideas for discussion and implementation in 2013:
 * Begin keeping track of what happens to articles after they receive requested copy edits.
 * Monitor our track record fulfilling requests for Good Article Nominations and Featured Article Candidates.
 * Use this new information to recognize the top contributors to such requests.
 * Add specialized themes and topics for the monthly events to keep things interesting and varied.