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This week, we focused on the windy city by interviewing the director of WikiProject Chicago. The third largest city in the United States is associated with over 22,000 articles, including 64 featured articles and lists. Originally started on 5 July 2005, the project has been home to multiple collaborations and other initiatives from time to time. Currently, the project is sponsoring a featured topic drive intended to bring a collection of articles related to Millennium Park up to featured status by 1 September 2010.
1. First, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in WikiProject Chicago.
TonyTheTiger: I describe myself as the "Director" of WP:CHICAGO. I have been involved in most affairs of the project for over three years now. I first reactivated the project in late 2006, ran the collaboration of the week for a year, comment on most WP:AFD, WP:PROD, WP:RM and other types of discussions at Article alerts, coordinate the Featured topic drive, monitor the quality log and do whatever I can to help out. I have had my hand in a large proportion of the project's favorably reviewed articles at WP:FA, WP:GA and WP:FL.
2. When did you first join WikiProject Chicago? What are some of the challenges that the project has met since you joined, and how were they dealt with?
TonyTheTiger: I joined the project in the late fall of 2006. Not much was going on so the first challenge was to really become a legitimate project. I requested the assistance of Elkman to get our {{ChicagoWikiProject}} template up and running. We first only had a few hundred articles tagged with our template, and we currently have well over 20,000 articles tagged. The issue has at times been controversial, because many do not see our project as a relevant talk page template for someone who attended college in Chicago decades ago, for example, but as people have become accustomed to having our template on their pages, we have been able to lend a hand in deciding encyclopedic matters for various articles. The most recent example would be the floundering Zak Kustok article that was WP:PRODed. When alerted, we were able to help develop the article into a legitimate resource. At first, we have struggled to monitor the articles with the tag and tag articles that are within the project. The WP:AALERTS system has made this much easier. We have also had problems dealing with low manpower and numerous unrated articles. For a while WP:Illinois had some active editors who rated many of our articles while rating articles that also fell within their project. More recently Xeno has come up with an automated bot rating inheritance system that has helped us tremendously.
3. What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?
TonyTheTiger: I am not sure where the idea for WP:AALERTS came from, but prior to that system, I monitored WP:FAC, WP:FAR, WP:GAC, WP:GAR, WP:FLC and WP:FLRC to manually produce a list of discussions to watch. I think we were one of the few, if not the only project with a centralized location for such discussions for a while. WP:MILHIST also had a centralized discussion system that predates the alerts and I don't know who was first.
4. Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?
TonyTheTiger: The project has been unsuccessful in developing an A-Class review, an internal Peer Review and a Collaboration of the Week. I think I have learned that the people who do work for the project often do so in relation to other interests. Not many editors view this geographic interest as their main editorial interest. I think project planning as if this project is the primary focus will be difficult. We have to attempt to plan in a way that will call attention to work that needs to be done without relying on the commitment of editors to focus on this project.
5. What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
TonyTheTiger: When WP:Illinois was more active, we interacted with them quite a bit. Back in 2007 they were still creating articles and templates for all municipalities and we worked together to fill in holes in the map as they arose. As a geographically-based project, we interact with several projects that are formed for other reasons. Raime of WP:SKY lends a hand on any tall building issues ranging from overseeing the WP:FL promotion of List of tallest buildings in Chicago to helping resolve specialized concerns for the Trump International Hotel and Tower (Chicago)WP:FAC and lending a hand with less well-developed articles such as Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and Residence Tower. On issues related to WP:NRHP, Doncram has been quite a resource and we have helped him out as well. He has had a hand in the development of many of our WP:FA and WP:GA articles. Ruhrfisch started helping us develop BP Pedestrian Bridge into a WP:FA because he does a lot of work for WP:BRIDGE and he eventually helped motivate us to purse a WP:GT and then WP:FT for the Millennium Park including the Bridge. This is our project's only current FT. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Maps task force, has helped us indirectly by creating maps for our articles like they have for all geographic projects. Some of their members have even created street signs for articles such as Washington Park Court District and Rush Street (Chicago). As a geographic project, we often overlap with projects for our sports teams and athletes. So we are often talking with WP:CFB, WP:MLB, WP:NFL, WP:NHL, WP:BBALL, WP:WPCBB, etc on matters related to our athletes.
6. What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles within its scope, developing over the next years and Chicago improvement?
TonyTheTiger: The project once had a mission of improving the article Chicago to WP:FA after it failed a few FACs. At some point, I hope to see a nucleus of editors with an interest in at least getting the WP:GA rating back for the article. The mission for the project is now much broader. We attempt to foster encyclopedic content of any article listed at WP:CHIBOTCATS, which is the list of categories for Cook County, Illinois-related articles that bots tag with our template. In addition, we adopt all WP:GA, WP:FA and WP:FL articles that are for subjects in the Chicago metropolitan area and not in one of these categories. As Wikipedia grows, we expect our the number of articles under our umbrella to grow. We hope to protect encyclopedic content. Unfortunately, now that we are maturing, a lot of our successfully reviewed content from 2007-09 is under attack at WP:GAR and WP:FAR. One way the project will grow is improve these articles to retain their ratings or reinstate their ratings. I also expect the project to grow as a secondary project for articles. However, continued efforts to protect the overlapping encyclopedic content of other projects will surely benefit Wikipedia.
TonyTheTiger: It is indeed dissappointing, but it shows that after success can come dissappointment and failure. However, we eagerly anticipate WP:Meetup/Chicago 3.1.
On behalf of the Signpost, we'd like to thank TonyTheTiger for his time. In addition, we invite you to check out WikiProject Chicago! Anyone who would like to help out can take a look at the project's list of open tasks or browse their articles, particularly the backlog of unassessed articles. Next week, get ready to root, root, root for the home team! Until then, play pitch and catch with our old reports in the archive.
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