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Portal:University of Oxford is open for business, and help requested

The headline says it all - we now have a portal. Take a look and see what you think; most of the items (article, biography, picture, DYK and quotation) change randomly as you purge the cache. It would be useful if people knew of additional vaguely Oxford-related "Did You Know"s (e.g. alumni / academics) to add some more variety. Do you know any good Oxford-related quotations? Can we get a few more articles up to "B" or even "GA" class? ("B" class being the minimum acceptable level for showcasing in a portal.) Is there a great Oxford photograph that should be included in the mix? Suggestions / comments / offers of help welcome. BencherliteTalk 00:03, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Is there any reason to include the banner of the project on alumni (Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, for example) of the University? I think the banner should be for articles directly related to Oxford (colleges, buildings, programs etc). There are categories to list alumni.--Karljoos (talk) 11:34, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Many WikiProjects routinely tag all articles within appropriate categories with their project banner - see the bot's talk page (and this is just one bot doing the work). I thought (as one of the more active WP:OXFORD editors) that we should join them, which is why I posted the bot request. It has various advantages, in no particular order: the existence of the project is more widely publicised; the existence of the portal is more widely publicised; it makes it easier to see which Oxford-related articles are the most viewed and ought to be candidates for improvement; it adds another method for editors to find articles that they might wish to work upon (e.g. the "stub" category, or B-class articles that might with a bit of polish become a Good Article). I certainly see the project's scope as encompassing not only the buildings and the courses, but the alumni and academics, so I see no reason only to tag only the buildings and courses etc. Categories for articles and WikiProject banners for talk pages aren't alternatives, and they can both be used together. BencherliteTalk 12:40, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
I agree with m'learned friend Bencherlite. – ukexpat (talk) 15:28, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

I think the Project is now tagging articles far too widely. I do not see the need for example to tag articles about Australians where the only Oxford contact is that they were Rhodes Scholars. An example is David Rivett, but I have see many others. Its talk page puts it in two other Projects that are important. The Oxford one is not. I think this will just lead to confusion about what Oxford articles we should concentrate on. --Bduke (Discussion) 21:43, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Frankly, if anyone works on any Oxford-related articles, or gets involved in the project after seeing the tag, so much the better. There are precious few of us doing anything: the list of members on the front page is rather out of date, and only a handful of people ever post here besides me. The project banner has an "importance" parameter, and I would suspect that most alumni/academics rate a "low" importance. As a project, if we want to concentrate on anything together, it will be the 75 "top" and "high" importance articles tagged as such a long time ago, mostly with little to show for it since being tagged. BencherliteTalk 22:03, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
Ok, you are feeling besieged here on your own. I still think that tagging all these articles is a mistake. I see lots of the tags because they are on my watchlist because I have edited them. I do so for reasons other than the Oxford connection. The Oxford tag is now the top one on these articles which makes us look bad, like this is a take-over bid. --Bduke (Discussion) 22:27, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Future collaboration

I'd like to suggest working on pages relating to Wadham College for its 400th anniversary next year, as we accidentally missed Brasenose's 500th this year. Anyone interested? BencherliteTalk 22:03, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Xenobot Mk V has completed a task for WP:OXFORD

8,112 edits were made (3112 +5000). Please note that near the beginning of the task a handful of edit summaries incorrectly reported that the work was done for WPUKPOL - but the tags were appropriate for OXFORD.

Editors will need to go through Category:Automatically assessed University of Oxford articles and remove the |auto=??? after verifying (and amending where appropriate) the class rating that the bot provided.

Feel free to drop by my talk page with any questions or concerns. –xenotalk 22:57, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford

This new article was a mess but I have done some work on it fixing links and removing long lists of holders of the various chairs, which were copied direct from the articles on the chairs themselves. The section on history of the faculty reads like a direct copy from something and is likely a copyright violation. The only reference in it (ref 3) is quite inadequate. I have asked the editor who started this article. If this can not be resolved quickly, that section should be deleted. --Bduke (Discussion) 02:09, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

It is a copyright violation as a direct copy of the faculty web site - reference 1. I have removed it all. --Bduke (Discussion) 02:18, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot announcement

This message is being sent to each WikiProject that participates in the WP 1.0 assessment system. On Saturday, January 23, 2010, the WP 1.0 bot will be upgraded. Your project does not need to take any action, but the appearance of your project's summary table will change. The upgrade will make many new, optional features available to all WikiProjects. Additional information is available at the WP 1.0 project homepage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 04:07, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject proposal

There is a proposal to set up a WikiProject Oxfordshire; please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Oxfordshire. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:26, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

The observant may have noticed that we have new FLs: Bodley's Librarian, Laudian Professor of Arabic, Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture. Savilian Professor of Geometry is on the way, and I've got a couple more that I'm working on. Anybody fancy joining in? Also, any suggestions as to where I can find lists of the statutory professors in the 20th century? Online book archives have the Historical Register for 1900, but not beyond. Sometimes when I'm looking for potential candidates to work up to FL status, it's difficult to work out whether the post was vacant for a few years or whether someone was appointed but is hard to find! BencherliteTalk 11:52, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Considered doing Jesus Professor of Celtic? For the FT. Maybe could be a GA, if too short to be an FL - rst20xx (talk) 21:10, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
I was thinking more GA than FL for that one. Anyway, am waiting to see if I can get hold of anything about a successor to Thomas Charles-Edwards being postponed for financial reasons, as rumour has it. Anyone got anything? BencherliteTalk 21:06, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
You could email him - thomas.charles-edwards@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk - rst20xx (talk) 02:24, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
Yeh, I could, except that asking TCE "Is your job going to be abolished when you retire next year, and if so could you please give me details of a published reference that I can use for Wikipedia?" may not be the most productive of enquiries... No rush, anyway (either with the GA or finding out if the post is being suspended). There might be something on one of the internal university webpages, but I don't have access to those. BencherliteTalk 10:31, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
...where should I look? lol - rst20xx (talk) 20:55, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Clean up listing

This has now been generated at Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Oxford/Cleanup listing. BencherliteTalk 21:06, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced living people articles bot

User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects provides a list, updated daily, of unreferenced living people articles (BLPs) related to your project. There has been a lot of discussion recently about deleting these unreferenced articles, so it is important that these articles are referenced.

The unreferenced articles related to your project can be found at >>>Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Oxford/Archive 4/Unreferenced BLPs<<<

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Notification regarding Wikipedia-Books

Hadronic Matter
An overview
 
An example of a book cover, taken from Book:Hadronic Matter

As detailed in last week's Signpost, WikiProject Wikipedia books is undertaking a cleanup all Wikipedia books. Particularly, the {{saved book}} template has been updated to allow editors to specify the default covers of the books. Title, subtitle, cover-image, and cover-color can all be specified, and an HTML preview of the cover will be generated and shown on the book's page (an example of such a cover is found on the right). Ideally, all books in Category:Book-Class University of Oxford articles should have covers.

If you need help with the {{saved book}} template, or have any questions about books in general, see Help:Books, Wikipedia:Books, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, or ask me on my talk page. Also feel free to join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as we need all the help we can get.

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Tony Benn

A request has been made for the article Tony Benn to be peer reviwed at WP:Peer review/Tony Benn/archive1. Any comments welcome. –– Jezhotwells (talk) 02:06, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons

The WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons (UBLPs) aims to reduce the number of unreferenced biographical articles to under 30,000 by June 1, primarily by enabling WikiProjects to easily identify UBLP articles in their project's scope. There were over 52,000 unreferenced BLPs in January 2010 and this has been reduced to 32,665 as of May 16. A bot is now running daily to compile a list of all articles that are in both Category:All unreferenced BLPs and have been tagged by a WikiProject. Note that the bot does NOT place unreferenced tags or assign articles to projects - this has been done by others previously - it just compiles a list.

Your Project's list can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Oxford/Unreferenced BLPs. As of May 17 you have approximately 152 articles to be referenced, a 1.9% reduction from last week. The list of all other WikiProject UBLPs can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/WikiProjects.

Your assistance in reviewing and referencing these articles is greatly appreciated. If you have any questions, please don't hestitate to ask either at WT:URBLP or at my talk page. Thanks, The-Pope (talk) 18:15, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

... is going to be Jesus College Boat Club (Oxford), to mark the last day of Eights Week. As we've got friends coming for the weekend, I'm unlikely to be able to keep an eye on the article on the day, so if a few extra people could add it to their watchlists and keep an eye out for sly vandalism or accidental errors, that'd be grand. The anti-vandalism patrol should be able to cope with the usual addition of rude words etc... Thanks, BencherliteTalk 09:22, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

The Temple at Thatch (Evelyn Waugh)

Perhaps the project will be interested in this piece of Waugh marginalia? Brianboulton (talk) 18:45, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Oxoniensia

The back issues of this journal on the history, architecture and archaeology of Oxford and Oxfordshire are now available online at this website address; there are some useful bits and pieces in there for university-related articles. BencherliteTalk 09:33, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

University of Oxford articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the University of Oxford articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of November, 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

For the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team, SelectionBot 23:47, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

University of Oxford (colleges) articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the University of Oxford (colleges) articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Sunday, November 14th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of November, 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

If you have already provided feedback, we deeply appreciate it. For the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team, SelectionBot 16:38, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject cleanup listing

I have created together with Smallman12q a toolserver tool that shows a weekly-updated list of cleanup categories for WikiProjects, that can be used as a replacement for WolterBot and this WikiProject is among those that are already included (because it is a member of Category:WolterBot cleanup listing subscriptions). See the tool's wiki page, this project's listing in one big table or by categories and the index of WikiProjects. Svick (talk) 20:26, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Main article University of Oxford lack of references

As the wp:fr article on University of Oxford was pretty poor and that the article here was a GA, I started to translate the article into French. Only then did I realise that the section history (at least) was rather poor in on-line references. Could one of you have a look? Many thanks. --Anneyh (talk) 20:08, 21 November 2010 (UTC)