User blog:George Dance/March / April 2013

March and April were busy months on PPP, so much so that we didn't even want to spare time for a community message in March.

The biggest area of interest was, once again, the "About Poets" module, and the largest project there was (once again) importing and improving the redlinked articles on our List of U.S. poets. By the end of April, we had worked through "S" on that list. For authors with work in the public domain, we linked their books on Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive. That brought in a host of new writing by new poets, such as Elizabeth C. Kinney, Charles Warren Stoddard, and William Wetmore Story, to name a few that I still remember. For everyone else, we added as many poetry links as we could find, from our new resource sites PoemHunter and Poets' Corner and from a variety of other online sites.

For all, we added photos whenever possible (ie, whenever they were licensed or in the public domain), from portraits to book covers to statues, homes, and other landmarks. We posted our 2,000th photo on the wiki in April.

We did not forget to upgrade existing poets on the site. John Keats got a major upgrade, as befits his major status. (We even added and linked to a Keats-specific resource, Keats' Kingdom. Others, from Francis Ledwidge to E.E. Cummings, benefitted from new photos and links.

In the "About poems" module, we continued to selectively add poems. One notable addition was a hat trick of George J. Dance translations of Arthur Rimbaud poems: Romance Novel, Sensation, and Vowels.

As well, we continued to link the two modules by adding several poems by one poet, linked directly to and from the author's article. We had already done this for Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson; we helped restore gender balance by doing the same for Alfred, Lord Tennyson in March and John Keats in April.

There is so much to do, but it is so heartening to see all that has already been done.