The project currently has 35 members. A warm welcome to our newest members: ARBAY, Coldmachine and Floorhugger.
Cheshire's current divisions
Preparation for the local government changes in April is ongoing. You are invited to join the WP:2009ENGLAND taskforce to coordinate the necessary changes to articles, categories, maps, infoboxes etc across articles on England. Within Cheshire, the articles for the new unitary authorities Cheshire East and Cheshire West and Chester have already been created and need expansion.
The Cheshire Portal has been converted to use random selections. There are currently 8 selected articles, 8 selected biographies, 8 selected pictures, 13 sets of four DYKs (52 in total) & 6 quotations. The topics box has also been reformatted & expanded, to highlight more Cheshire content.
Espresso Addict has proposed aiming to bring the portal up to Featured Portal status in 2009. Current standards for featured portals suggest having 15–20 items in each section. The main content that needs to be developed is biographies, preferably of GA class or above and with a reasonable quality free image. Lots of well-known people have associations with Cheshire, including the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, Nelson's mistress Emma Hamilton & mountaineer George Mallory; a list of suggested biographies for project members to develop is here.
The Cheshire Project Collaboration for the next few months is Crewe. In this time, we aim to expand it beyond its current start-class, perhaps taking it to WP:GAC.
This is the first edition of the Cheshire newsletter, which aims to inform members about what is happening across the project and to facilitate cooperation between people to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Cheshire. To help with this, a questionnaire is attached about how you see the Cheshire WikiProject developing over 2009. Finally, if you want to edit the next edition of this newsletter, please volunteer!
In an effort to assess the progress of Wikiproject Cheshire, it has been decided to send a questionnaire to members. To answer, please copy this questionnaire and paste your answers on the answer page. While participation is, of course, not compulsory, thoughtful answers will help the project to develop and improve. Thank you.
1. The project is always looking for new members, so we want to find out which ways of attracting and approaching potential members work best. Do you remember how and why you joined?
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2. How would you describe your involvement in the project? What activities do you undertake and how often do you edit Cheshire-related article?
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3. Do you feel like you receive adequate support/contact from project members?
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4. The project talk page is intended to be the hub of the project, where members discuss articles and help each other improving them. Until very recently it has been almost inactive, but do you check the project talk page?
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4a. If the talk page was more active, would you get involved in discussions there?
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5. When viewing Cheshire-related articles, are there any issues that have stood out as needing attention or frustrated you? (Traditional counties POV, poor coverage about a particular subject, vandalism going unnoticed etc)
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6. Maintaining the Cheshire portal is one of the Cheshire WikiProject's main aims, providing a display of the best and most up to date articles that are part of the project. There is currently a drive to promote it to featured status, but input from a wide range of members is needed. Do you have the portal on your watchlist?
