Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-06-21/WikiProject report

WikiProject U2 is a small and enthusiastic project that focuses on the Irish rock band U2, formed by Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, Jr. The project was started by Smithcool in June 2007, but became inactive a year later. Three editors came together in April 2010 to revive the project, and in less than two months it has seen the promotion of one new featured article and a major overhaul of the project's page. WikiProject U2 is currently home to four pieces of featured content: U2, City of Blinding Lights, No Line on the Horizon, and List of awards received by U2. An additional 16 good articles give the project's members plenty to be proud of, especially since its scope embraces only about 300 articles. The project maintains a to-do list which includes getting Achtung Baby through a featured article nomination, pushing Zoo TV Tour through the good article process, and preparing U2 360° Tour for a good article nomination. This week, we interviewed Melicans, Y2kcrazyjoker4, and Dream out loud.

'''What motivated you to revive WikiProject U2? How difficult has it been to rebuild the project and what are the biggest challenges currently facing WikiProject U2?'''
 * Melicans: I think it was who first made the attempt to revive the Wikiproject earlier this year. Since I was member in the WikiProject's first incarnation and the vast majority of my Wikipedia contributions have been to U2 articles, I jumped at the chance to be a part of it's rebirth. There are only four principal editors to the U2 articles (myself, Dream out Loud,, and Y2kcrazyjoker4), and perhaps another two or three ( and  come to mind) that help to build or review the occasional article and contribute to talk page discussion and debate. With so few contributors, I would say that the most difficult part has been group collaboration; while I worked on "City of Blinding Lights" and No Line on the Horizon, Merbabu and Y2kcrazyjoker4 focused on revamping The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby for example, so our attention has been split. The lack of members means that it is difficult for us to improve the vast majority of articles. With over 350 articles tagged as being part of the WikiProject only a few get the attention that they desperately need, and these are generally the more well-known songs and albums since they are more likely to be searched for. As a result of this, articles such as Original Soundtracks 1 and "Staring at the Sun" are in dire need of attention.




 * Y2kcrazyjoker4: It was who spent a lot of effort formally reviving the project - he did a lot of the grunt work like putting together the project page, adding the WikiProject templates to all relevant article and file pages. His interest in reviving the project stems from a renewed interest in collaborating on U2 articles. Within the last 8 months, there has been a lot of contributions to U2 articles and recently, we began a drive to promote several articles. We were mostly just tracking the status of these articles with a list on the U2 talk page, but after we began making lots of progress, Dream out loud probably felt it was time we formally organize our efforts. Rebuilding the project has not been too bad, as the project is relatively small in scope, and our regular members have been in regular communication with each other. Our biggest challenge is trying to dedicate the same level of attention to all articles. We have focused our efforts on improving a small subset of the project's articles at a time, and our low membership means that few other articles will see much attention until we have moved on from what we were working on.


 * Dream out loud: After WikiProject U2 was first created by in June 2007, I had high hopes for the project to become really active.  But less than a year later, the project really got nowhere, and I tagged the page as inactive at the end of 2008, around the same time Smithcool stopped contributing to Wikipedia.  I continued to edit U2-related articles on here, but with the sudden "spike" of new U2-related articles and edits to old ones, I thought reviving the project would be a good idea.  Since over 300 articles are within the scope of our project, I thought the project would be a great way to monitor the progress of those articles and collaborate with other editors on similar articles.

'''Several of the project's articles have recently been featured article candidates and good article nominees. Were you involved with promoting one of these articles? Were you successful?'''
 * Melicans: I'm proud to say that I was involved with several of the recent FAC's and GAN's. "City of Blinding Lights" is one of my favourite U2 songs, so when I visited the article last November I was disappointed to see it's condition. I gave it a complete revamp and, thanks to the additions and edits made by other members of the WikiProject, by early January it had been listed as a Good Article. By the end of February it had been promoted to Featured Article status thanks to the excellent replies, copyedits, and suggestions made by the reviewers, which was my first successful nomination. Only a few days ago No Line on the Horizon, which I spent a great deal of time on last year, was promoted on the third attempt. Although I did not nominate them, I also did a lot of work on the recent Good Articles "Moment of Surrender" and 1997 U2 concert in Sarajevo. My next goals are to bring Original Soundtracks 1 to GA, and to make No Line on the Horizon a good topic; the album article and "Moment of Surrender" are already at or past that level, and the other song articles aren't too far off. Several more song and album articles are getting close to the GA and FA thresholds, so it will be interesting to see how they fare.




 * Y2kcrazyjoker4: I was involved with several promotions. Merbabu and I collaborated on Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree—U2's most successful and well-known albums—and helped get these articles promoted to Good Article status. They are both very close to being nominated as Featured Articles. Our previous Featured Article nomination for Achtung Baby failed in January, but after roughly 5 months of improving, I believe it is ready for a re-nomination. I was also involved in several non-single song articles being promoted to Good Articles, including "Moment of Surrender" and "Zoo Station". I also helped push U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky to GA status, making it just the 2nd concert video in our project to be promoted. MelicansMatkin and I collaborated on 1997 U2 concert in Sarajevo, which was created, written, and promoted to GA status in a matter of weeks. I contributed to No Line on the Horizon at various points in its history, although I was involved very little with the FA push. I've done various copyediting on a wide range articles, several of which our project's members helped promote to Good and Featured Article status. Overall, I'm very pleased with the progress we've made.


 * Dream out loud: I have worked on several articles that have become good articles, my first of which was U2 3D. It's an extremely long and detailed article, which I wrote from scratch, almost entirely by myself.  I say that not to brag, of course, because Wikipedia is all about collaboration, but rather to show what things were like before the project was revived.  I wrote the article by myself because there weren't really any editors out there interested in writing it with me or who were willing to help.  Of course, since then things have changed.  "Zooropa" (song) has been greatly expanded, and I did get some help on that one to make it a good article.  I also created U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky, and shortly afterwards  began work on the article and he made it into the good article it is currently.  Right now, I hope to get all three of those to feature article status quite soon. Perhaps surprisingly, I didn't really contribute much to the U2 article, but other editors have gone a great job getting it to featured article status, as well as other articles such as "City of Blinding Lights" and No Line on the Horizon.

'''The project appears to be currently concentrating its attention on the article U2 360° Tour. Are there plans to send this article through the good article process? If so, what tasks are considered the most important for getting the article ready for a GAN?'''
 * Melicans: I've been hoping to get this article through the GAN process for a while now, but unfortunate events keep occurring which prevent it from happening! The first was the incomplete list of opening acts for the planned fourth leg in the second. No sooner were those announced then Rolling Stone completely overhauled their website, breaking all of their links that had not been manually archived. And then of course Bono threw his back out, resulting in the cancellation of the planned third leg; and although it was a slight inconvenience to us in terms of adding and structuring the information, it's naturally been much more problematic for the man himself!
 * As of right now I would say that the most important task is repairing the broken links, or finding alternate sources. The ever-essential copyedit is also needed to make sure the text is solid and cohesive. Once more information is known regarding the possible impact of Bono's injury on the next leg of the tour, I would say that we should be ready for GAN, with FAC a short way off.




 * Y2kcrazyjoker4: Events outside of our control have delayed any nominations. As mentioned, the North American leg postponement has necessitated some structural changes to the article, and many of our references to Rolling Stone's website went dead when they re-organized the site and put lots of content behind a paywall. These are probably the biggest obstacles in our way. In any case, this tour has been in the news a lot recently, and U2 have a reputation as a great live band, so I believe this is a topic that we should naturally concentrate on. It would be great to have articles for both No Line on the Horizon and its supporting tour promoted. Articles on an album and its tour both complement each other very well—one reason why I've also been trying to get Achtung Baby and Zoo TV Tour promoted.


 * Dream out loud: I haven't contributed a whole lot to this article, but I'm guessing this is our biggest focus right now because the tour is an ongoing event that will be lasting until sometime next year. We do want to get this to featured article status eventually, but our current goal is to get it to good article status first, which is on our "to do" list on the project page at the moment. I think its a well-written article, but I try to focus my edits on older articles that haven't had much attention lately and let them see the light of day, and let other editors work on the new material.

Has WikiProject U2 formed any close relationships with other WikiProjects?
 * Melicans: To a degree; naturally there is some overlap in our articles with WikiProject Songs and WikiProject Albums, and so occassionally a WikiProject U2 member will make a query on those respective talk pages about some matter. Occassionally requests will be made of those members for a quick copyedit on the prose, or pointers on what may be missing from the article. Outside of those, I wouldn't say that there are any particularly close relationships.


 * Y2kcrazyjoker4: Although a few articles have some relevance to the WikiProject Alternative music, we haven't had much contact with the project except for some of its members occasionally providing some help with GA and FA reviews. Most of our contact with other WikiProjects has been with WikiProject Songs and WikiProject Albums, just because most of the articles in the U2 area are songs and albums. I occasionally follow those projects' talk pages for any new developments on things like track listings, charting, and certification information. But I wouldn't say we've been closely involved with too many things.




 * Dream out loud: WikiProject U2 is the only project I've actively been a part of since I've been an editor of Wikipeida. I have added my name to the list of other WikiProjects, but I never got too involved with them.  Obviously, WikiProject U2 is a subproject of WikiProject Music, and I would love to get some active participants from other WikiProjects to help us out.  I haven't currently attempted to form any relationships with other WikiProjects, but I think it's a great idea to do so, especially by contacting the ones the probably still think our project is inactive, or don't even know our project exists.  For the U2 3D article, I did do some work with WikiProject Film since the article is more film-related than it is music-related.  As big as their project it though, it has been a little difficult working with them.  For example, I nominated U2 3D for A-Class and after making the suggested changes to the article, the review sat untouched for 3 months (despite being listed on the WikiProject Film page), and eventually one of the project members just listed the article as "failed".  I really think that the article is ready for featured article status, but I'm just a little bit skeptical of nominating it because of issues I've dealt with in the past.

'''What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new member help today?'''
 * Melicans: I would say that the most immediately pressing needs are copyedits; with just four regular contributors the eyes quickly get accustomed to the prose, and so we often miss a lot of little spelling and grammatical errors that hold the articles back at GAN and FAC, as well as details that we have overlooked. New members are more than welcome to put look at the articles with their fresh eyes for these kinds of things. A full list of articles we hope to soon get to GA and FA can be found at Talk:U2. In addition, building articles that are really lacking in information and content is also needed; little known songs such as "Electrical Storm" and "Love Is Blindness" and the articles on every band member not named Bono are just some examples of what need a lot of work.


 * Y2kcrazyjoker4: Our most pressing need is for more users. All of our current members are good writers that are well-informed on U2 and can craft excellent articles. Unfortunately, there's only a few of us and we can't cover as much ground as we would like. When this project initially existed a few years ago, there were dozens of members, but we haven't been able to match that membership yet since reviving the project. A new member can help today by expanding articles that haven't seen much attention. Many of the band's less popular singles are stubs, and most of the albums don't quite meet the same quality standards set by No Line on the Horizon, Achtung Baby, and The Joshua Tree. Most of the band's live videos have been all but ignored. Another matter that some users may be able to assist with (depending on their geographical dispersal) is helping us confirm charting/certification information for international locations, as chart archiving does not go as far back as the beginning of the band's career.


 * Dream out loud: Getting more people involved would be a great asset to our project, but it's about the quality of the members, not the number we have. When the project was first created, we had a large list of members who signed up, most of whom never contributed anything to the project. Now our list has just 3 members, and we've been more active than ever.  I would really like to eventually, someday, see an article for just about every U2 song.  There are plenty of sources out there (both online and print) about every U2 song to make them notable, and they can create a large contribution to Wikipedia as a whole.  A lot of stubs have turned into redirects, which I think should be turned into B-Class articles.  As long as U2 exists, there will always be new articles to create (new songs, new albums, new tours, etc.) but we can't forget about the old material that just sitting there untouched.  Most people probably haven't heard of songs like "The Playboy Mansion", which is far from a hit U2 song, but could still potentially become a well-written article, up there with articles like "Running to Stand Still".  We welcome new members, and anything they could possibly add to existing articles would be very beneficial.

Anything else you'd like to add?




 * Dream out loud: I don't remember where this discussion took place, but I remember someone commenting on our recently-revived project, stating how it should have been created into a taskforce, rather than a whole WikiProject. I think the reasoning had to do with the lack of members or something, but like I said earlier, its about the strength of the members you do have, not about how many members you have altogether.  I never considered a taskforce, but with the amount of articles in our score, I think a WikiProject is appropriate and I really do have high hopes for the project. I can see it becoming very productive in the near future.


 * Melicans: Of all the interactions I have had on the WikiProject, I have found those on the U2 WikiProject to be among the most pleasant. Naturally there are disagreements (some quite long and drawn out), but you quickly get accustomed to each other's editing styles and the articles are both interesting to read and fun to build. Any interested users are encouraged to contribute; meet us at WP:WPU2 and join the fun!


 * Y2kcrazyjoker4: We appreciate having this opportunity for an interview, and we hope that it can give our WikiProject some much-needed attention!

Next week, we'll confuse port with starboard while desperately trying to tie a reef knot. Until then, sail over to the archive for some shore leave.