User blog:George Dance/July 2012

In the first month of our second year, the emphasis has shifted from creating new articles to improving those already on the wiki. With over 6,500 articles (over 2,100 of them on poets), the need to add new poets is less pressing, while the need to bring earlier articles up to present standards becomes more so.

Two more poetry anthologies The New Poetry and the Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (both 1917), were linked, and many new poets' articles added. The articles of those already on were also reviewed, and improvements made, chiefly in these sections:

1) Recognition - this was split off as a separate section, where that hadn't been done already. 2) Publications - In an effort to offer better bibliographies than the skeleton ones (just title and date) in Wikipedia, I made increasing use of Worldcat to find and list publishers' info, and (since most of the works by authors are public domain), of Internet Archive to link book titles to online copies of the books. 3) See also - This section, usually just a link back to the master list on which the poet belongs, does not exist for many of the early entries. This review is a good opportunity to add it, and (at the same time) to check whether that poet is on the master list (and to add him or her, if not). 4) References - For an organization that purports to deletes unreferenced articles, Wikipedia sure has a lot of them. 65-75% of those I've imported have no inline citations at all. In those cases the addition of a bibliography (with its citation, usually of WorldCat or Poetry Foundation but sometimes another source) also meant the beginning of a reference section. 5) External links - Plenty of new external links - to poems in the anthologies and other sources (like PoemHunter), and to the bibliographical information in NNDB and other sources (like Spartacus). 6) Pictures - The counter began working again, and PPP was found to have over 900 picutures. While we add pictures much more slowly, now that so many articles already have them, I expect to top 1,000 pictures in August. George Dance (talk) 03:45, August 12, 2012 (UTC)