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The Sociology WikiProject third newsletter is out!
According to our April mini-census, we have 15 active members, 6 semi-active ones and 45 inactive. Out of those, 4 active, 3 semi-active and 1 inactive members have added themselves to corresponding categories since the mini-census. The next one is planned, roughly, for sometime next year. The membership list has been kept since 2004.
On that note, nobody has ever studied WikiProjects from the sociological perspective... if you are interesting in researching Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Research and wiki-research-l listerv.
Moving from research to teaching, did you know that many teachers and instructors are teaching classes with Wikipedia? This idea is getting support from the Wikimedia Foundation, and some really useful tools have been created recently. I have experience with that, having taught several undergad classes, so feel free to ask me questions on that!
And as long as I am talking about professional issues, if any of you is going to any sociological conferences, do post that to our project - perhaps other members are going there too?
In other news: the a automated to do listing reported in the April issue went down shortly afterwards, but seems to be on the path to reactivation. We still have an active tag and assess project, and comparing the numbers to the April report, we have identified about 350 more sociology-related articles (from 1,800 to 2,150) and assessed about 100 (from 1,300 to 1,400).
We now have a listing of most popular sociology-related pages. It is updated on the 1st of every month, starting with August, and reports which of our sociology-tagged articles are most frequently read. Of course, GIGO holds true, so after looking at it right now and trying to determine what is our most popular article, my first action was to shake my head and remove Criminal Minds (which, perhaps not too surprisingly, outranks all sociology articles in period tested). Second item I noticed it this month's Industrial Revolution, beating Criminal Minds, that moved from close to 30th position in August/September, to 9th in October and 2nd in November. If you'd like to discuss this or any other trends, please visit WT:SOCIOLOGY!
Finally, with the reactivation of Article Alerts, we are getting our own here. Bookmark that page so you can keep track of sociology related deletion debates, move debates, good and feature article discussions, and more.
Our first task force (Wikipedia:WikiProject Sociology/Social movements task force) was created (1 June 2010).
If you have basic or better graphic skills, our projects needs a dedicated barnstar (award) (currently the closest we can get is the Society Barnstar.
As always, I highly recommend watchlisting the Wikipedia:WikiProject Sociology page, so you can be aware of the ongoing discussions.
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