User blog:LostInRiverview/Project of the Month - July 2013

 Project of the Month - July 2013 Hello TSWers!

As I promised last week, we're bringing back an old feature of The Sims Wiki. The old 'Clean up of the Month' is now a Project of the Month!

Here's how this works. The PotM is a completely voluntary program, aimed at focusing on a particular problem on the wiki, or simply on an area where we could stand to improve. Users can "sign up" as volunteers by leaving a comment in this blog. Volunteers that have signed up are not obligated to follow through, but we hope that you do. As well, you can still contribute to the project even if you choose not to formally volunteer. Those users that sign up and contribute to the project will get recognized in next month's PotM blog, and get a userbox to place on their userpage. It also looks good on any prospective user rights applications that are submitted. *wink*

This month, we'll be focusing on Image cleanup. We have many images on The Sims Wiki that are of poor quality, have nonsensical or generic names, aren't categorized correctly (if at all), or aren't licensed correctly (if at all). Our goal is to get as close as we can to:
 * This Month's Project
 * Eliminating low-quality images (especially if higher-quality images can be found)
 * Eliminating unused images, or finding a suitable way to use them
 * Renaming generic filenames to names that relate to the subject being depicted in the images
 * Properly categorizing and organizing images, and
 * Showing the proper license and copyright information on all images.

This project will need many volunteers and will require many different contributions. These include:
 * Ways to help
 * Nominating unused images for deletion using the Delete template, or finding ways to use those images in articles on the wiki.
 * Finding replacements for images of poor quality, or nominating those images for deletion using the Delete template.
 * Licensing and properly categorizing these images.
 * Properly categorizing these already-licensed but uncategorized images.

Ultimately, a lot of the contributions will be hard to definitively track. However, there are some categories and statistics pages which we can watch, and ultimately we can use those to create and analyze goals.
 * Goals

There are about 550 unused files currently. Let's try for a 25% reduction by the end of the month - we're shooting for about 413 unused files by the end of July. There are only 63 images in the poor-quality images category; with a 50% reduction, that number drops to just 32 images.

However, the area that perhaps needs the most attention is uncategorized files - there are over 1000 uncategorized files on the wiki! Hopefully we can really focus in and hopefully get us below 1000. I think it would be wonderful to get to 500, but that all depends on how much effort we put into this.

We'll use the weekly news blogs to keep track of our progress towards these goals, and revise them as necessary. If you have any ideas on future Projects of the Month, feel free to put them in the comments section below.

Thanks in advance for any contributions you make to this project!

--  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 02:24, July 3, 2013 (UTC)