Wikipedia:WikiProject Illinois/Newsletter/Post Census Report

Census results

On October 4, 2007 WikiProject Illinois embarked on a membership census. The census was the project's first since its establishment on September 24, 2005. Due to the nature of the wiki, and the two years that had passed, it seemed likely that many of the project's older members were no longer active. The project page had grown stagnant and the census provided an opportunity to see who was still around, slaving away in their own corner of the encylopedia, unknown to the rest of the Illinois editing world. Well, now, the tabulation is complete, and after a notice at the Community Portal, we have gained a couple new members amongst the cluster of project veterans who returned to sign up.

Of the 55 members listed on the project membership list on October 4, 26 editors returned to the list to "resign up," thus, confirming their current activity within project areas. If you received this message, you were one of those editors. The List of Participants has now been updated to reflect the results of this membership survey, with members who failed to respond highlighted as "inactive." Now, as a group of editors, we have a core list of individuals, that will hopefully grow in size as the project strives to become a better organized central collaboration space for editors working on Illinois related topics.

What's next?

The big question, where does the project go from here? Well there are a few proposals being floated at this project page. Little discussion has occurred thus far, and participation would be key to all of them. Some ideas include:

• An A-class review system, under the WP:ILLINOIS banner, to serve the Illinois and Chicago WikiProjects.
• A project newsletter, of which this is a beta version.
• Project restructuring, to include regional and specific discipline task forces.
• A monthly project collaboration to grow out of our currently idle collaboration division.

From the Editors

• Welcome new members: Laleena, Omnedon and Rickvaughn
• Interested in helping building and developing a project newsletter? See, start and join in on the proposal discussion.
• The table is back up at the List of Participants and it has several blanks you can fill in if you have not done so already. They are: where you are originally from, where you live, the project areas you work in, your join date, and now, your status (which has been filled in for you).

News & Notes

• Don't forget to add the project page to your watchlist so you can monitor the project talk page for relevant discussion.
• As a note: WP:ILLINOIS is the project page shortcut and WT:ILLINOIS is the project talk page shortcut.
• Kranar drogin essentially single-handedly cleared out the massive backlog in Category:Unassessed WikiProject Illinois articles, feel free to sprinkle his page with barnstars and thank yous, he deserves it. Everyone can help keep it cleared out by checking it for unassessed articles. For more information see the Assessment division of the project, though it isn't as project specific as it should be, it has enough info to give assessors an idea of what to do. Be aware that classes A, GA and FA can only be imposed by outside review processes.
• The AlexNewArtBot dumps new Illinois related articles on this page periodically. You can help monitor new material by watchlisting the page, and combing new Illinois articles for clean up, referencing and other needed editing work.

Contributors to this Issue

• IvoShandor