Welcome to WikiProject United States on the English Wikipedia! We are a project dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to the United States, with an emphasis on subjects with regional and national significance. This project was formed to coordinate the development of United States related articles and help maintain the United States Portal. Some project goals are to help list and categorize United States related articles, develop quality standards for articles and build templates that help users browse the articles that fall under this project. This project also provides a place for Wikipedians to share information and resources regarding improvements to United States related articles. Here, editors can ask for help with certain articles and bring otherwise overlooked articles and problems, to the attention of other editors. For more information of the role of WikiProjects, check out WikiProject guidelines.
Articles of note
This section highlights US related content that has been promoted to Featured Status in the last 2 months: Note:Articles pertain to one or more of the WikiProjects relating to United States topics but not necessarily WikiProject United States.
Diagram of the Federal Government and American UnionMission Santa Clara de Asís, on the campus of Santa Clara University in CaliforniaSteam locomotives of the Chicago & North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards.
Project news
The months of July and August proved to be extremely busy months and we had several very important achievements. Although some projects have declined or don't wish to be supported by WikiProject United States we added about 25 more projects to the list of projects supported by WikiProject United States and will be using the United States banner. These projects include:
We are continuing to talk with the other United States related WikiProjects to determine interest in being supported by the project and having a closer collaboration with our project. By the end of September we will have contacted nearly all of them to determine which ones are active or inactive and which ones want to be supported by the project.
Below are some interesting things that have taken place of the last couple months:
EdoDodo was kind enough to volunteer his bot, DodoBot to help with the assessment of the projects articles as well as tagging additional articles for the project. The bot has also been busy with replacing the supported projects banners and replacing it with the WikiProject United States/Supported projects banners.
Census boilerplate - There is a discussion on the talk page for WikiProject United States about using a standard boilerplate for Census infomormation in articles here
Project self assessment - The WMF has asked us if we would be willing to do a self assessment of the project to see the things we are doing good and bad here. I think this would be a good opportunity for us to look at what we have done the last year and help focus our efforts for the next year or more.
Wikipedia loves libraries - If you haven't noticed the large message flashing across the top of your watchlist there is an event coming up called Wikipedia Loves Libraries with scheduled meetups throughout the country. All Wikipedians are invited to attend.
NRHP Washington project - WikiProject National Register of Historic Places has a discussion about a project to "get a fully-illustrated list for List of RHPs in DC and get the red-links out by Wikimania-in-Washington next August". If this sounds interesting to you check out the discussion here.
As of September 1, 2011 WikiProject United States has Exceeded 140, 000 pieces of content. This includes 38 projects, 650+ Featured items, 71,000+ articles and over 25 portals.
We have made major modifications to the WikiProject template adding functionality to track articles needing infoboxes, references, images, maps and Geographical coordinates. Additionally we have added functionality to display to do lists and comments for articles as well as WikiProject to do lists.
We created a WikiProject to do list for each project supported. Some still need to be filled out though so any help in filling in these templates would be greatly appreciated.
We made sure all supported projects support the full range of Quality and importance categories. This required many, many categories to be created.
We made sure all supported projects had a Recognized content subpage. We still need to make sure they are updated correctly and visible on the project pages.
Portals and portal related content
The United States portal recently failed its attempt at featured portal status due to some missing anniversary information and some other minor issues. We are going to continue to improve the portal over the next couple months and resubmit.
Portal:Houston is under Featured portal review here and after an almost complete overhaul by WhisperToMe it looks very likely that the portal will retain its Featured portal status.
In the near future several of the tasks for the Collaboration will be automated via a bot thanks to ErrantX. This will simplify the process of notifying editors and WikiProjects about collaboration candidates and selections that pertain to them.
If one of these sounds like a good candidate feel free to add it to the list of candidates.
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