LGBT Archive:Community portal

Welcome to the community portal. This is the place to find out what is happening on the LGBT History Project Wiki. Learn what tasks need to be done and what groups there are to join, and share news about recent events or current activities taking place on Wikipedia.

Please start entering any articles you feel able you can write or start, or go to WantedPages where there are links to articles that need writing. Please report any problems to: jonathan@lgbthistoryuk.org.

Upgraded to mediawiki-1.17.0 on 5 November 2011, and to mediawiki-1.20.2 on 16 February 2013.

New features

Two templates were added during August 2012:

• Template:Stub adds a stub message and a puts the article into Category:Stubs, which has been introduced to list articles that have been started, but have scope for considerably more work.
• Template:Disambig adds a disambiguation message and logo and puts the article into the Category:Disambiguation pages.

Some additional templates were added during August 2012, to facilitate the clickable maps of the various countries of the UK. These templates are based on templates used on Wikipedia.

Statistics

We added our thousandth article on 25 September 2012. For the current number of articles see Special:Statistics.

We've now joined WikiIndex - see our page there at http://wikiindex.org/LGBT_History_UK. You'll see we've got a wikiFactor of 4, in other words there are at least 4 articles (as shown on Special:PopularPages) that have been viewed at least 4,000 times. We also now have a WikiNode - a way of linking to other "neighbour" Wikis.

Geographical coverage

We now have articles for:

• every county in England (shire counties, ceremonial counties, metropolitan counties, plus some)
• every former region in Scotland
• every historic county in Wales
• every historic county (the "six counties") in Northern Ireland
• every London Borough
• every unitary authority in England (completed 10 March 2013)
• 12 of the 32 current local government areas in Scotland

Archiving

This project has been selected for archiving by the UK Web Archive - see http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/66158869 - the first snapshot dated 22 October 2012 has now appeared on the UKWA site and further snapshots will appear from time to time.

Ongoing tasks

The following things need to be checked on a regular basis:

• Uncategorised pages: every article should belong to at least one category
• Dead-end pages and Orphaned pages: these can never be eliminated altogether, but should be kep to a minimum – for instance to under 50 pages each so they can all be viewed on the first page of the listing
• language expressing a particular point of view: "we", "us", "sadly", "fortunately", ... Articles containing such expressions are likely to need more thorough reviewing, not just removing the words in question.
• language that will date: "this year", "last year", "recently", "currently", ...

Extensions

Cite Extension: the extension for adding refences (footnotes/citations) has been added. See example of use on the page "Capital Gay".
TitleBlackList: to help combat spam and vandalism, the extension for blocking titles has not been added.
CheckUser: I installed this – but don’t think this has taken.

Please email me to let me know what extensions you would like installed. And also any ideas to prevent spam.

Timeline

The Timeline of UK LGBT History was added in October 2011. The aim is to have entries for all the most significant events in UK LGBT History from the earliest times. Each entry should include a link to the article which deals with the event or person in more detail. For earlier centuries, each article should ideally have an entry in the Timeline, but we may have to be a bit more selective from say 1960 onwards.

Publicity

The Wiki had its official launch at the LGBT History Month pre-launch at The Oval, 21 November 2011, and a stall at the London Metropolitan Archives Conference, 16 February 2013.

Backups

The MySQL database is being backed up regularly.