User blog:George Dance/June, 2012

June 2012 - On June 26, PPP celebrated its first anniversary. It was great to look at how much has been accomplished this year. But there is so much more to do. This month I was busy both (1) adding new poets, and (2) improving previously added articles on poets.

(1) One of our glaring holes has been in biographies on modern British poets. I spent the first 2 weeks working on that by blue-linking Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse. That in turn led to discovering J.C. Squires's Selections from Modern Poets anthologies and blue-linking those as well. The bulk came from Wikipedia, but I'm still adding articles (if only stubs) on those that Wikipedia does not carry; there are now more than 100 original PPP articles, not bad I guess. Of course the emphasis is on importing articles, since that is more efficient; but even there it now takes longer, as I'm making more improvements, especially down in the bottom of the articles: external links, categories, "See also" lists, and publications.

(2) Along those lines, I've also decided to take time to go back and improve some of the articles I imported earlier, in the same ways. I spent the last 2 weeks walking through the list of U.S. Poets Laureate, fixing their bibliographies (mostly with information from the Poetry Foundation, and adding new External Links (chiefly NNDB and PoemHunter. It takes a while, but (as I see it) these are the more popular poets, and the ones most likely to be accessed; it only makes sense to invest time in improving them. Bibliographies (that is, the poet's publications) are a good place, because Wikipedia'a are generally not that good; so I've begun doing the same for Canadian poets who have detailed bibliographies on line (but that's July, so I'll leave it for now).

I've also continued to add pictures. Unfortunately the counter is stuck at 799 -- I hope that doesn't mean that, every time I add a picture, an old one is removed! If not, then we may even be up to 1,000 by now; with more to come. George Dance 00:01, July 3, 2012 (UTC)