Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-10-08/WikiProject report

WikiProject Biography is a WikiProject devoted to creating and improving Wikipedia's articles about people. The project was started by on 24 October 2002. It is now one of Wikipedia's most active projects, and currently has 400 members. Previously, it had a proposal to have project coordinators for all of its departments, but the page was marked as historical by on 3 April 2007 because there had been no discussion about the proposal for one month.

Current events

 * See also: The WikiProject Biography newsletter

The project's Summer 2007 Assessment drive began on 1 June 2007 and ended on 1 September 2007 with the hopes of lessening the project's backlog of around 113,000 unassessed, or unrated articles. As prizes, the top assessors, based on the number of articles they rated using the project's quality scale, received a barnstar for their work. By the end of the drive, over 100,000 articles were assessed, reducing the backlog by over half. 10,440 of the articles were assessed by the first prize winner, Ludahai. For comparison, the Spring 2007 drive, which came to a close on 24 March 2007, rated 40,000 articles; Sapphic assessed the most articles in that drive.

On 13 October, an IRC meeting will be held to help WikiProject members assess how to "revive" areas of the WikiProject that have gone stagnant.

Departments
The Biography project currently has 7 departments in order to split up and organize its workload.
 * The assessment department focuses on assessing biography articles to recognize them and also to show which ones need more attention.
 * The A-class review department is responsible for reviewing candidates for A-class status on the project's quality scale, and making sure that the project's current A-class articles do not fall below their standards.
 * The collaboration department tries to find articles that would require a project-wide collaborative effort, and get users together to improve an article to featured article status. is the current article collaboration.
 * The outreach department is the project's center for recruiting new users to the project, and it is in charge of producing a monthly newsletter to highlight the project's current events.
 * The peer review department conducts peer reviews of articles when they are requested in order to obtain ideas on how an article can be improved from users who have never read it before.
 * The translation department works to translate biographical articles from other languages into English, usually working on foreign language featured articles.
 * The vandalism department keeps an eye on biographical articles that are vandalized often.

Descendant projects
Task forces and projects related to WikiProject Biography include:
 * Arts and entertainment
 * Musicians
 * Actors and Filmmakers


 * Military
 * Royalty and nobility
 * British Royalty


 * Politics and government
 * Science and academia
 * Sports and games
 * Peerage
 * Baronetcies
 * Core Biographies

How to help
While the project has a very large amount of members, it could always use more help. If you want to join it, you can visit its members page and sign up.