The project currently has 35 members. A warm welcome to our newest members: ARBAY, Coldmachine and Floorhugger.
Cheshire's current divisions
Preparation for the local government changes in April is ongoing. You are invited to join the WP:2009ENGLAND taskforce to coordinate the necessary changes to articles, categories, maps, infoboxes etc across articles on England. Within Cheshire, the articles for the new unitary authorities Cheshire East and Cheshire West and Chester have already been created and need expansion.
The Cheshire Portal has been converted to use random selections. There are currently 8 selected articles, 8 selected biographies, 8 selected pictures, 13 sets of four DYKs (52 in total) & 6 quotations. The topics box has also been reformatted & expanded, to highlight more Cheshire content.
Espresso Addict has proposed aiming to bring the portal up to Featured Portal status in 2009. Current standards for featured portals suggest having 15–20 items in each section. The main content that needs to be developed is biographies, preferably of GA class or above and with a reasonable quality free image. Lots of well-known people have associations with Cheshire, including the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, Nelson's mistress Emma Hamilton & mountaineer George Mallory; a list of suggested biographies for project members to develop is here.
The Cheshire Project Collaboration for the next few months is Crewe. In this time, we aim to expand it beyond its current start-class, perhaps taking it to WP:GAC.
This is the first edition of the Cheshire newsletter, which aims to inform members about what is happening across the project and to facilitate cooperation between people to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Cheshire. To help with this, a questionnaire is attached about how you see the Cheshire WikiProject developing over 2009. Finally, if you want to edit the next edition of this newsletter, please volunteer!
