Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom/Newsletter/December 2009

UK Politics Newsletter (December 2009)
Hi everyone. This is the first Newsletter for the UK Politics project, which I hope will become a regular feature in future. The project is undergoing some major changes at the moment, so I thought it would be a good idea to contact all participants and provide a brief update. Road Wizard (talk) 23:45, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Article tagging by Xenobot Mk V
Xenobot Mk V is currently tagging a large number of articles with our project banner. The tagging is based on a category list I prepared and the bot's operator estimates we are going to add over 25,000 articles to the project. As we haven't even reached 2,000 articles yet through manual tagging this change is going to make a big difference to us.

Article alerts
Article alerts have now been implemented for the project. The WP:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom/Article alerts page will be updated each day with details of proposed deletions, moves, reviews along with several other news feeds. You can keep the page on your watchlist or view a transclusion of it on the project main page.

Popular pages & Top 25 articles
A fairly recent feature that has been introduced is the project's Popular pages section. The popular pages show the 500 articles within our scope that have had the most visits each month. I think it will be a useful tool to help us prioritise which articles are the most important to get up to a reasonable standard.

Also I have set up a Top 25 articles page to keep track of the most popular pages each month. It will be interesting to see if any patterns or trends start to develop. It has already shown a surge in interest in the BNP during October 09 (their first Question Time appearance).

Newsletter editor/journalist
Anyone interested in producing or helping to produce a project Newsletter? Frequency of publication would depend on project activity, but perhaps one letter a month, or one a quarter would be a good starting point to aim for.

Assessment drive
Once the bot has completed its tagging run I expect that we will be left with several thousand unassessed articles. If that is the case I will be setting up an assessment task with the ultimate goal of 100% assessment. Anyone interested in helping is more than welcome.

Popular page improvement
Another task I am thinking of starting is a popular page improvement drive. Using the Popular Page data we can set targets like "no stubs in the top 500 articles" or "no article in the top 10 below GA standard". Does anyone want to take this forward?

Ideas & assistance
Any ideas to help the project and assistance in implementing them will be more than welcome.

Project co-ordination
It is looking likely that the UK Parliament constituencies project will be adopted as a task force of the UK Politics project. The main reasons being that our banners are duplicated on the same article and becoming a task force will allow them to share our article assessments without duplicating the work. Discussions on merging the project banners and project scope are currently in progress.

Upcoming events
We are probably now about half a year away from the next general election. As polling day grows closer we are likely to see a surge in politically motivated edits. Feel free to report any issues you need help with at the project's talk page.