Hello friends,
It is time for a review of the Collaboration of the Month for January
2012. Lets have a look at what we achieved in these COTMs. As usual,
I'm delivering the verdict before the month ends. :).
Last month we had decided to take up just one COTM considering that
fewer members were taking interest in it and choose an article for
Good Article improvement. The one's selected were :
* [[Premchand]] as INCOTM &
* [[Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi]] - for GA.
During the period under question, Premchand had 133 edits from 17
contributors. This was very good from the point of view of COTM even
though it was about half of the previous COTM - Mullaperiyar Dam. The
COTM was a success in this case as the article on Premchand improved
substantially:
* Improved infobox
* Improved lead.
* Size - increased from 974 words to 3361 words - a 3.5 times increase.
* There was very large restructuring of Biography alongwith expansion.
Biography went from zero subsections to seven.
* A new section on "Styles and influences" has been added.
* Referencing greatly improved from 7 to 47.
* Images went from nil to two.
* List of works, now in tabular form but still quite trashy.
* External link cleanup done and went from five to two.
* Five books were listed in the References (=Bibliography) & Further
reading section. Previously none.
Is Premchand ready for GA? No, the article is still having huge gaps
in content and the list of works is far too clunky to even think of
it. It needs even more development despite the increase in size.
However, the article reads much better now, is referenced a whole lot
better and is now satisfactory which it was not earlier. So, imho a
successful INCOTM.
The top four editors of Premchand during 01January 2012 to the time of
writing this email were:
* utcursch - 51 edits
* Hisham - 43 edits
* Nitika.t - 19 edits
* Redtigerxyz - 11 edits
To encourage contribution, they have been awarded a Barnstar for
taking time and effort to participate. This is the first barnstar both
Hisham and Nitika.t are getting for their contribution as editors and
separate from their official role. I trust they will value these more
than the others they have received till date.
MANY THANKS TO ALL WHO CONTRIBUTED IN PREMCHAND COTM (Yes, I'm shouting!)
The GA of the month was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi saw lots of
activity - 316 revisions by 27 users, boy, that exceeded Premchand.
But it takes a humungous effort to set articles right for GA nowadays.
There was a lot of editing and deletion as we had User:Rjensen, a
history prof in the states doing lots of work, judging material with
the fine eye of an expert. His user page blurb tells all about his
experience.
{{quote|Since taking a PhD at Yale in 1966, I have been an active
historian, with numerous books, articles and papers on quite a variety
of themes, especially American political, social, military and
economic history, as well as historiography and quantitative and
computer methods. Since 1971 I have authored, coauthored or edited 21
scholarly or popular books, and written 45 scholarly articles. My most
recent popular books I served as well on the editorial boards of six
scholarly journals such as the Journal of American History and the
American Journal of Sociology and have been a permanent or visiting
professor at U Illinois-Chicago, Washington U, U. Michigan, Harvard U,
West Point, Moscow State (in Russia), etc. Currently I am retired from
teaching and am a Research Professor at Montana State University,
Billings, Montana, USA. Here's the favorite book I've written: The
Winning of the Midwest: 1888-1896 (1971), online free.}}
We are honoured to have User:Rjensen amongst us. His improvement of
Gandhi brings to the article the hallmark of the professional
historian.
The top editors were:
* AshLin - 119 edits
* Rjensen - 64.
* Karthikndr - 56.
* AroundTheGlobe - 30
* Debastein - 13
The reason why is that yours truly has started the Master Class and
the class is still stuck on Reference cleanup. About 110 refs have
been cleaned up by me. The article has now got 146. But there has been
many references removed, some fused, and almost all improved in some
way or the other. Yet about 60 odd refs still remain. A number of
posts on Master Class dealt with this aspect.
Of the three Master Class students, one was preoccupied with
studies/SSB interview and outreach and genuinely had problems to edit,
one did not bother to edit after opting in and the third, Debanjan was
hampered by his College server not downloading Wikipedia to see much
less to edit. But Debanjan came back with a vengeance and in barely
couple of days clocked up 13 decent edits here alone.
Kudos to AroundTheGlobe and Karthikndr for their sterling work in GA.
Since we are nowhere near completion, Gandhi defaults to February. We
continue to edit it till it is GA or bust. Barnstars for GA will be
awarded only after Gandhi becomes GA again.
In the next post, I shall be discussing the proposal for next month's COTM.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
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