In the Summer of 2011,Wikimedia UK andARKive are collaborating ona project to improve Wikipedia's articles on threatened species. This will involve sharing some of ARKive's text content with Wikipedia, and community outreach through online and offline events. This will involve a fixed-period in-residence role that we are calling Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador. Andy Mabbett, known on Wikipedia asUser:Pigsonthewing, has been appointed to this role, starting on 11 July. He's written ablog post about the role.
The project will involve internal tasks of improving content and liaising with the Wikipedia and Wikiproject communities. Internal tasks will include:
Improving the target articles using text and references from an agreed selection of ARKive's fact-files. This includes both extending and improving the content of the articles and increasing the number of helpful wiki-links between articles.
Adding external links from target articles to relevant ARKive pages, on a wide range of specific species.
Informing other language Wikipedias of relevant articles in English, where this is not already being done by Wikipedia's processes.
Keeping relevant Wikiprojects informed of the improvement work.
As part of this collaborationWildscreen have kindly agreed to release thetext (note:not images or other media) of 200 of theirARKive articles (listed below) under aCC-BY-SA 3.0 License and theGFDL.
Those agreed to date are listed below, together with some suggested article sections for expansion.
Click on the icon for "print fact sheet". (It is a little icon to the right of the "A"s, in the upperish right.) This will give you all the text on one page, useful for cut and pasting. You can also scroll through the individual tabs (same content though).
Decide which sections of text are helpful and transfer them to the Wiki article. Some articles may only need a small update. Others that arestubby, can get a huge head start. Some can just use isolated sections. Make sure to transfer the list of Arkive references as well. (Easiest is just to transfer as a set into the Wiki article references section.)
Add{{ARKive}} in the external links section if appropriate. (Note the template instructions are helpful for understanding how to fill in the fields. Or compare howAfrican elephant or othercompleted improvements do it.)
Format the refs, wikilink text, do any other quick edits to integrate.
To show attribution, insert{{ARKive attribute}} between the references header and the first reference.
Consider using this edit summary:Text from [[ARKive]] donated by [[Wildscreen]] under CC-BY-SA 3.0 & GFDL; see [[Wikipedia:GLAM/ARKive]]
Return to this page and strike-through the relevant item, below, so that we can keep track of progress.
Also, copy the link for the improved article to the relevantWork done section; please feel free to sign, so everyone can see how hard you're working ;-)
If additions were substantial, and eligible, investigate getting aWP:DYK award - you can ask on this project's talk page if you need help, or a nominator. Or seekPeer review with a view to obtaininggood article orfeatured article status.
Wildscreen have agreed to release their ARKive text about the following species (more to follow). Struck through titles have been improved, and moved to thesection below.
Common box turtle: For this one, was able to quickly get from a stub to maybe a B class article in content. Very helpful!TCO
Hawksbill turtle: No text transferred. Could not find any gap that they help us with. We have a featured article and it is pretty integrated.TCO
African rock python (Diff): xferred all ARKIVE text. We had a C article, but takes us to B. They have more length and a lot of our text was unreferenced.TCO
tiger chameleon (Diff)- Able to transfer almost directly a lot of the text to add sections and expand article. Also added image from commons -Wikisamia
On31 July 2011,Did you know? was updated with a fact from the articleCommon box turtle, which GLAM/ARKive improved. The fact was... that the malecommon box turtle(pictured) has to lean back past the vertical to mate with the female? If you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please suggest it on theDid you know? talk page.
On6 August 2011,Did you know? was updated with a fact from the articleGeorge McGavin, which you created or substantially expanded. The fact was... that TV presenterGeorge McGavin cooks and eat insects? You are welcome to check how many hits the article got while on the front page(here's how,quick check) and add it toDYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on theDid you know? talk page.
