Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Wines task force/Newsletter/04-1-2007

The Wine Project Newsletter!
Issue IV - April 1st, 2007

Welcome to the latest edition of the Wine Project Newsletter! Feedback is always welcome. Please consider dropping a comment on the Newsletter talk page, to let us know how we improve future editions.

News and notes

Welcome to our New Project Members

Since our last newsletter 4 new editors have joined the Wine Project. Be sure to extend a warm welcome to User:Theorb, User:Swallowtail, User:Il cacciatore and User:Alexparr. For our new members, feel free to dive right in and don't hesitate to share your thoughts on various wine related project on the Wine Project talk page

New Grape Infobox

User:Scharks has created an info box for all our wine grape articles at Template:Infobox grape variety. Currently the majority of our grape articles are lacking this infobox. Consider pitching in and checking out the category Category:Grape varieties so that every Grape article can be fitted with our shiny new infobox.

Discussion on going on grape article formatting

On the Wine Project talk page there is an on going discussion about setting up a Standard_structure_of_a_grape_article. User:Stefan has set up a sample grape article template at Wikipedia:WikiProject Wine/Template grape article. Feel free to share your thoughts on this endeavor that will help bring some consistency to our wine grape articles.

Wine related photos wanted

Category:Wine-related images has been created as an easy catalog of all wine related photos and to help with a new feature added to our {{wine}} talk page template. If a particular wine article is in need of a picture, you can add "needs-photo=yes" to the template and the article will be added to Category:Wine articles needing photos. Be sure that any new images uploaded have a Wikipedia acceptable license.

New stub categories created

Kudos to User:Bethling for her work in creating 4 new wine related stub.

{{winery-stub}} - for articles about wineries
{{wine-bio-stub}} - for biographical articles about people related to wine
{{wine-grape-stub}} - for all those articles that are about grapes
{{wine-region-stub}} - for the articles about AVA's, AOC, etc.

Thanks to the quick work on Wine Project members, the 700+ articles that were in Category:Wine stubs were quickly recategorized and placed under their proper stub type. These new stub types also give the Wine Project members an opportunity to get these articles in their proper categories. For instance, all {{wine-grape-stub}} should be listed in Category:Grape varieties and any applicable sub categories.

Wine related deletion notices

User:Bduke has set up Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Wine for help in keeping up to date on Wine related deletion discussion as well as proposed mergers. A listing of these articles also appear on the front page of the Wine Project.

Wine articles Commons Watchlist

User:Stefan and User:Saintrain have been working on developing a Wine article watchlist. The watchlist is still in development at time of this newsletter publishing.

Two new Good Articles for the wine project.

These past two weeks the Wine Project had two articles awarded GA status, Languedoc wine an Champagne (wine region). Champagne (wine region) is currently under Good Article Review

Wine Sub Projects

Operation Stub Killer'

Since our last newsletter, we now have 1072 articles under the Wine Project banner with 761 Stubs and 238 Starts. We did make some progress in improving the overall quality of our core articles reducing the number of stubs in Category:High-importance Wine articles from 76 stubs at time of last newsletter to 57. We also dropped the percentage of articles that stubs account for from 75% to 71%.

Every newsletter, we will continue the challenge of improving the overall quality of articles by tracking the percentage of stubs and tracking the increase in the number of Start class articles. A particular area in need of work is the 203 stubs in Category:Wine grape stubs.

Wiki-Wino : Steve Moulding

What got you first interested in wine?

Trying to make some when I was a very young kid in England. A friend and I got a bright idea one day that if we left some apples in a barrel of water in his back garden and were to come back in a month, we'd have wine. It didn't turn out quite the way we'd hoped for, but it got me started.

What brought you to Wikipedia?

Getting more and more hits when using google. At some point it became time to see what it was all about.

What type of wine articles do you enjoy editing?

I'm an organizer, editor, and filer. You'll see more of this from me than the big one piece articles. It should be finite in scope however, but not trivial. The Bordeaux project for example...doable.

What non-wine related activities do you also enjoy on Wikipedia?

Chasing vandals and catching sock-puppets. Passing on non-notable, patent-nonsense and hoax pages to the admins. Keeping an eye on the peacocks.

What is your favorite wine? Least favorite wine?

Favourite....Haut Batailley 2000. Incredible.

Least favorite....anything corked, anything Manischewtiz (though I'd probably drink the corked wine if I had to).

Most disappointing...Oregon Pinots...they taste like grape juice to me (which technically they are I guess). Maybe I just havent had the right one yet.

What is the most under appreciated wine, in your opinion?

Oooh...good question. Don't know.

What efforts on a wine related article are you the most proud of to-date?

No single article...many contributions here and there that hopefully add up in the end.

Know any good wine jokes/quotes?

Said to Winston Churchill : "If you were my husband I'd poison your wine".

Replied Churchill : "Madam, if you were my wife I'd drink it".

Have you ever had a "Wine snobbish" moment? If so, tell us about it.

I'm not sure who was the snob in this story...maybe no-one, maybe both. Anyway...I was in my local wine store on Madison Avenue in NY browsing the Bordeaux, looking, as usual, for something to try. A new salesman came over and asked, snootily I thought, what it was in Bordeaux that I might want help with. I asked him if the Chateau Marbuzet in my hand was Cru Bourgeois Exceptionnel or just regular Cru Bourgeois (I know it was one, and Haut-Marbuzet was the other). He said, sighing, that presumably I meant was it one of the five Grand Crus? No, I said, I mean which Cru Bourgeois is it. He confessed he didn't quite know what I meant. I smiled, said no matter...let's look it up, and pulled out my Bordeaux notes from my backpack. I thanked him for his time and he melted away, not to be seen again that visit.

What area of the wine project would you like more editors to focus on

Nothing specific. I think if the organizers and watchdogs keep doing their thing, the writers do theirs, and both do some of the other, then we'll have done well.

What are some wine related reliable sources (i.e. a wine book or web site) that you like using when editing wine articles?

Staples on my bookshelf

Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia (Tom Stevenson)
The Wines of Bordeaux (Clive Coates)
Bordeaux Medoc & Graves (Stephen Brook)

Wine Improvement Drive- Sauvignon blanc

For this edition, we are going to share some Wiki love on the start class article Sauvignon Blanc. We hit a bit of a road bump with our last WID-Pinot Gris, though we did succeed in taking this Top Level Importance article from a stub to now B-class quality. The article still has a way to go before it complies with the Good Article Criteria-namely expansion of the various wine regions that produces Pinot Gris and some improvement in prose formating and copy edits. Feel free to chip in and continue to help this article progress towards GA.

B-Article Adoptions

To better focus the Wine Improvement Drive on the articles that need the most improvement (our Stubs and Start class) articles, we will run a parallel improvement drive on our Category:B-Class Wine articles. Our goal is to improve 2-3 of this articles into GA quality article between each newsletter. To adopt an article, see the Category talk:B-Class Wine articles page for more details.

This newsletter is sent to those listed under Participants on the Wine Project page. If you wish to no longer receive this newsletter please include Decline newsletter next to your name on the Participant list.
If you have any Wikipedia wine related news, announcements or suggestions drop a note in the Comments/Suggestion area of Wikipedia:WikiProject Wine/Newsletter.