User blog:George Dance/January 2013

What a difference a J makes! In January I changed my byline, from George Dance to George J. Dance. That doesn't sound like that big a deal; but on PPP it meant going over 250 articles one by one, which took more than half the month. On the plus side, that gave me a chance to review all of those articles of mine, some of which had been posted back at the start in 2011, and bring them up to the current standard: reformatting bibliographies (including adding Internet Archive links to the public domain works), adding more external links where possible, ensuring these articles were on the Lists of Poets and vice versa, and rereading and rewriting in general. Every article had to be read, which may explain why it took so long.

Another week was spent finally wrapping up the Poetry Foundation project, which I had been working on and blogging about for a big chunk of 2012. As of the end of January, everyone with both a Poetry Foundation bio and a Wikipedia article (plus a few who didn't have Wikipedia articles) is now on PPP. As a result, the number of red-linked poets (ie, poets without articles) on the List of U.S. poets fell so low, that I was encouraged to finally start a campaign to get articles on the rest of them onto PPP as well. That is the current project, which, as of the end of January, was completed only to the end of the letter C.

Not that it's all been work, work, work. Not only has improving the individual articles often been fun; but I've been taking time off, which is usually spent doing other things to spruce up the wiki. Most are pure fun, forgotten as soon as they happen; but two I remember in particular:

1) I added a new online poetry source, Poets' Corner, with its own article, and a number of links on individual articles (more to come). That gave me the idea of creating a new list, the List of online poetry resources. While that list has just 18 sites at present, those sites contain hundreds of thousands of poems. Those can be accessed both through that list (and the sidebar to follow, probably in the "About Poems" module) and in individual links for each author (similar to those just added from the Poetry Foundation.

2) I spent one enjoyable weekend adding a few poems by Emily Dickinson: selecting and rereading the poems, and then searching for appropriate pictures. While the result was modest (8 new poems), it's a matter of quality rather than quantity -- the online poetry resources (see above) supply the quantity. Eventually the About Poets" module will be as finished as possible, and then it will be time to start building "About Poems"; but for now the idea is just to add a few great poems, one poet at a time. There will be more of that in the future.

I've also been adding photos, of course, mostly in conjunction with new articles, but occasionally for older ones (such as my own, as part of the review process). There are plenty of other things I've stopped to do, though most are on impulse and quickly forgotten. But they keep the work of building the wiki fun; and their cumulative effect is adding up to a more impressive site every month. George Dance (talk) 21:14, March 9, 2013 (UTC)