Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Membership/News/2013 Annual Report

Report by Torchiest, Baffle gab1978 and Jonesey95 | 31 December 2013 2013 Year-End Report 

Thanks to everyone for another great year! Membership in the guild continues to expand, and we reached a major milestone this year. We had our biggest year ever for requests, and officially copy edited about 3,000 articles during our drives and blitzes. The new blitzes have been quite successful, but we have indefinitely shuttered the Copy Edit of the Month Contest.

Membership
The Guild's membership has grown from 869 in December 2012 to over 1000 in December 2013! We welcome all our new members to the Guild. Thank you for helping us reach such a huge milestone!

Requests page
Many thanks to all those who've helped with the requests. The record shows that we fulfilled 545 copy editing requests during 2013. Five were declined, and three articles and a template were eventually deleted. In 2012 we completed 460 requests. On January 1, 2014, there were 49 open requests.

Two new GOCE talk page templates were added in 2013. GOCEstartce can be used to inform requesters that their requests are being dealt with, while GOCE-ab is for dealing with accepted requests that appear to have been abandoned by the copy editor. While we don't want to rush anyone, we think it's important that requests are dealt with in a timely manner.

We've rewritten the instructions for requesters and copy editors; we hope this will make them easier for first-time requesters and copy editors to follow.

Coordinator elections
The coordinators elected for the first half of 2014 are:


 * Lead coordinator: Jonesey95
 * Assistant coordinators: Baffle gab1978, Miniapolis
 * Torchiest has been elected Coordinator emeritus.

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 3,005 articles in the backlog, and approximately 5,000 were added during 2013. At year end, 2922 articles remain, and we continue to maintain a backlog of just over a year.

January 2013 drive
 * In the year's first drive, 33 editors copy edited 482 articles and cleared most of the January, February, and March 2012 backlog.

March 2013 drive
 * In March, 26 editors copy edited 572 articles, with three editors hitting the triple digits, and we essentially eliminated the backlog from February, March, and April 2012.

'''May 2013 drive
 * 24 editors participated in May, and we cleared 695 articles from the backlog. Thanks primarily to Lfstevens, who contributed 603 copy edits, this was our biggest drive of the year. We cleared the April 2012 queue completely, and cleared about one third of the backlog from May and June 2012.

July 2013 drive
 * For our July drive, 30 editors removed 276 articles from the backlog. We trimmed the remaining May and June 2012 backlog by about 75%.

September 2013 drive
 * We had help from 22 editors this month, who combined to copy edit 272 articles. The June and July 2012 queues were completely cleared.

'''November 2013 drive
 * For our final drive of the year, 22 editors copy edited 318 articles. We removed 97% of the backlogs from August and September 2012.

Blitzes
We ran six blitzes in 2013, in alternating months with the backlog drives.

'''February 2013 blitz
 * Nine editors removed a total of 23 articles from the requests page backlog in the first blitz of the year.

'''April 2013 blitz
 * In April, we focused on articles needing copy edits from March 2013. Eighteen editors signed up, and the monthly total was reduced by 70 articles.

'''June 2013 blitz
 * The theme for June was articles needing copy editing from WikiProject Military History. Twenty editors completed 35 articles during this blitz.

'''August 2013 blitz
 * Nine editors removed 30 articles from the GOCE Requests page during our August blitz.

'''October 2013 blitz
 * Eight editors cleared 42 articles from the WikiProject Film backlog queue in October.

'''December 2013 blitz
 * The theme for December was articles that were in some way related to religion. Twenty articles were copy edited by seven editors.

Copy Edit of the Month contest
The Copy Edit of the Month contest ran through most of the year, although participation dwindled over time. Every month, each editor would submit a single article into the contest. In the following month, the efforts were discussed and editors voted for the copy edit they considered best. The results for 2013:

Plans for 2014
A personal note from your new Lead Coordinator: I encourage all active members of the Guild of Copy Editors to feel that they can contribute to the operation of the Guild. My first copy editing drive was just one year ago, and here I am out at the front of the phalanx, ready to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous syntax, to take arms against a sea of troubled grammar.

How did I end up here? By participating, by paying attention, by asking questions on the Guild's Talk pages, and by being a little bit bold when it came to editing the Drive and Blitz pages. I'm just a volunteer editor, like yourself. You can do what I do, and you should, if you are competent and willing.

I do not have grand goals for 2014. I am more of an incrementalist than a visionary. My two big goals for the next six months are to improve the Guild Coordinators' Task List so that tasks do not slip through the cracks, and to create a guide (probably in the form of a suggested Watchlist) for Guild Coordinators and regular members who want to follow and contribute to the workings of the Guild.

Other than that, I think the Drives, Blitzes, and Requests list are working well and have no plans to change them in any significant way. If you are the visionary type and have a great idea, come on over to the Guild Coordinators' Talk page and tell us all about it. Welcome to 2014! – Jonesey95 (talk)