User:Mitchazenia/Newsletter 32A
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The Hurricane Herald This is the first half of the 32nd monthly newsletter of WikiProject Tropical Cyclones. The Hurricane Herald aims to give a summary of the WikiProject's progress and global tropical cyclone activity. If you wish to change how you receive this newsletter, or no longer wish to receive it, please add your username to the appropriate section on the mailing list. Please visit this page and bookmark any suggestions of interest to you. This will help improve monitoring of the WikiProject's articles. |
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This month's newsletter will be divided into 2 newsletters due to the special date of October 5 to WikiProject Tropical Cyclones. On October 5, 2005, User:Jdorje started WikiProject Tropical Cyclones citing these words still atop the project talk page: I just created this wikiproject, after several months of contemplating doing so. I hope everyone working on hurricane articles will get involved. I went ahead and wrote a bunch of guidelines, basically based on current practices...naturally since this is something I just wrote it doesn't necessarily represent community consensus and needs to be discussed. That discussion should probably go here for now...although eventually we may make these pages a little more structured. For a general TODO list, see the "tasks" item on the project page. Jdorje 23:17, 5 October 2005 (UTC). This newsletter is a look back from some of Wikipedia's Tropical Cyclones about the past of the project, the present setting and the future. You can be part of the future! Just help inform us on changes we can make to the project for improvement! Status of the project: 2005 By October 2005, the List of Atlantic hurricane seasons was quickly reaching its end goal of going back to 1492. By the end of the year, Miss Madeline took the initiative to extend the List of Pacific hurricane seasons and List of North Indian Ocean cyclone seasons back to its end, and a multitude of editors worked on the List of Pacific typhoon seasons to provide at least partial coverage back through 1950. Decent Southern Hemisphere coverage took longer, and they are still lagging behind the other basins in terms of historic coverage. The project had 5 featured articles within five months (1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, Cyclone Tracy, Galveston Hurricane of 1900, Hurricane Dennis, and Hurricane Floyd); all but one were delisted as our writing standards rose. The earliest discussions in the new project regarded the ever-expansion of hurricane articles. There were prominent sides taken between the inclusionists and the mergists, but the unique activity of the 2005 season led to that entire season having named storms, which in turn led to lower, and eventually no notability standards. Other old discussions that became project mainstays included sophisticated article categorization, as well as an effort to have an image for each storm. Key editors  These are the editors who have been recognized throughout the years as crucial to the project's success via this newsletter's Member of the Month segment.
Opinions on the project Where we stand Where have we improved? Where have we failed? Despite the progress, the project has been severely lacking since 2005. The important storms tend to get ignored. There has always been a trend for editors to write new articles, instead of improving the existing ones. As a result, the articles that were made were less and less notable over time, and eventually so much effort was put forth to get a featured article on a tropical storm that lasted 42 hours. There is redundant work being made as people trend toward the low-lying fruit, such as the timeline articles. Additionally, one of the biggest failures of the project is the inability to attract and maintain editors. At any given point in the last five years, there were generally only four users writing new articles or improving the existing ones to good status. Some of the most important articles in the project are still not featured, like Hurricane Andrew or Hurricane Wilma, and many of the early featured articles have lost their stars, such as Hurricane Katrina, Cyclone Tracy, or the 1900 Galveston hurricane. Our vision for the future: the next five-year plan
Our way of asking, "How can you help us? Concluding comments from the editors themselves |