For the second August edition, I decided to interview TonyTheTiger (talk · contribs), the lead member of the WikiProject which has strived to cover all Chicago topics since 2005. The project's membership puts it among the largest North American City WikiProjects on Wikipedia, in terms of contributors; it has tagged articles representing a broad representation of its topic of interest with 40 featured articles and lists, 140 good articles and slightly more than 15,000 other pages, which are in some way related, tagged.

Questions

• What is the project's history? How did you become involved?
  • The project was started on July 6, 2005 by User:Gpyoung in terms of creating a project page. I am not familiar with the history of any formal application to become a recognized project. It began both as an effort to work on articles related to Chicago in general and for the purpose of pursuing WP:FA status for the Chicago article itself, which had failed at WP:FAC three before the project began. The article passed at WP:GAC and twice passed A-class reviews. However, after the formation of the project, the article subsequently failed at WP:FAC three more times and the project was semi-active when I became involved.
  • I began visiting the project page and I signed up as a member on December 9, 2006. I realized the the COTW was inactive and reactivated it two days later. Then, I assessed what I like to work on and what the project needed. This was in late 2006 around the time of my first failed WP:RFA when it became apparent I needed more WikiProject space experience. The project had previously claimed the entire Chicago metropolitan area as its domain. However, I chose to make the project's objective articles related to Cook County, Illinois based on whether the article includes any of our claimed categories. Although we focus on Cook County, we are still receptive to assisting articles from this whole region and in fact just recently got Rob Pelinka and Matthew West promoted to GA in July. We have added all Chicago metropolitan area GAs, FLs, and FAs to the project. Aside from two exceptions, working with our set of categories determining the articles in the project has been a success. Our current focus is on a Chicago Project Featured Topic Drive.
  • As a result of this interview, we have taken a membership survey. Due to the strong response, we are attempting to become a more fully functional project by choosing coordinators. We hope to roll out several new features within the project on 1 September.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 13:34, 18 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• The project has many members; do you think this has increased the quality of articles, or should that be put down to extra work by others?
  • Several things have contributed to the increased quality of articles. Accurate accounting for the project was a start. Nobody knew what we had done and what needed to be done. Elkman helped us get {{ChicagoWikiProject}} programmed correctly and SatyrTN set up our first bot to help us keep track of the project. Within a few weeks of participating in the quality assessment we had our first picture of the project with 3 FAs and 13 GAs on 27 April 2007. Neither of them is a member of the project. Speciate who is a member of the project and Kranar drogin who by his membership at WP:ILLINOIS is essentially a member were extremely dedicated in getting articles assessed. Once we got a handle on things we started producing a lot of good work as a project. We had 9 FAs and 41 GAs by June 30, 2007, 22 FAs and 78 GAs by December 30, 2007, and 30 FAs and 109 GAs by June 30, 2008. As we watch our Good Article production and Featured Content production many of the articles are by users who claim some form of an affiliation with the project. However, many have also been nominated by people primarily associated with other projects. Members of the project have been active in the promotion discussions for many of these however. This would not have been posssible if we had not gotten the project organized so we could watch the appropriate discussion pages.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 13:36, 18 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• What could the possible reasons for the inactivity of the collaboration of the week?
  • There were two incarnations of WP:CHICOTW. The first had a limited history of a few articles that were pursuing FA status. After failing at FAC for the fourth time on August 3, 2005, Chicago became the first COTW, on August 9, 2005. On October 18, 2005 the Chicago White Sox became the next collaboration. Then on January 31, 2006 Chicago Public Schools became the collaboration according to the history at Wikipedia:WikiProject Chicago/COTW/Current. It seems that there were no other collaborations. Then on December 11, 2006, I began the second incarnation with weekly subjects. The highlights of the second incarnation show that it was fairly successful: during a year of weekly COTWs we created or improved articles that became thirty-four good articles, two featured articles, and a WP:featured list. These articles are still continuing to get promoted. Jon Burge is on the verge of becoming another GA and two articles are targeted for featured status in the featured topic drive. The objective of taking a DYK-eligible article close to WP:GA status in a week every week is quite challenging and I was unable to find anyone to pass the responsibility to when I attempted to focus my efforts elsewhere. Of course, a COTW could undertake any other goal such as cleaning up more developed articles as it had before. However, no one has wanted to take over the effort. One of the things we hope to do on September 1 is get the CHICOTW going again (possibly focussing on Top-importance Chicago articles and the Featured Topic Drive).
  • I speculate that most people who are affiliated with the project are also affiliated with other projects. For example, IvoShandor was a very productive editor who is currently on another sabbatical from WP. He lists three projects as interests. I had hoped he would take over the COTW because he did a lot of work on articles that benefited our project because one of his projects is WP:ILLINOIS. I suspect many Chicago project members consider other projects including Illinois important to them. People have limited time.
• I'm new, how do I get involved in the project, what can I do?
  • The current focus is on our featured topic drive. Thus, I would love to see new people contribute to helping Crown Fountain, Cloud Gate, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, BP Pedestrian Bridge, Millennium Park, and or any other related article pursue FA status. Finding facts, checking facts, checking grammar, checking MOS, helping peer reviews, etc. would all be helpful for these articles. Many other great articles need to be created. A quick look at List of Registered Historic Places in Chicago, and List of Chicago Landmarks might be a place to start looking for new article creation. The former could use some picture taking. Only six of the 31 articles voted to be Top-importance Chicago articles are even WP:GA status, so you can jump in and clean up any of those. Watch and participate at WP:CHIDISCUSS and WP:CHIR to help the project make decisions. We are also trying to get an A-Class review set up. As this gets going, the project has many GA-Class Chicago articles that will need nominators to shepherd them up the quality scale as well as reviewers to guide the process. Also, we can use help with our assessments in general because we have many unassessed articles.
• You are noted as the 'manager/director' of the project; what responsibilities does this give you?
  • I currently oversee the election of our Top-importance Chicago articles, maintain our centralized discussion board, maintain Portal:Chicago, oversee WP:CHIFTD, maintain WP:CHIGA and WP:CHIFC to keep everybody up to date on our recent production. Now that we have such an extensive and varied repository of Category:GA-Class Chicago articles, I am trying to set up A-Class review to help coordinate continuous improvement of these articles. I attempt to respond to queries at WT:CHICAGO, and I formerly ran the WP:CHICOTW. I was never elected and just decide to be WP:BOLD and start making changes to the project. I have assumed overall responsibility for all tasks undertaken by the Project, for other Coordinators are assigned to specific areas, for members assisting the project, and for bots performing tasks on behalf of the project. On September 1, I hope to be able to depend on others to share many of these responsibilities.
• It appears you are the leading contributor to the project, have you at any time felt that you needed more help?
  • Yes, that is why we have the new September 1 initiative. Stepping outside my role as director and into my role as WP contributor, I would say that I am like everyone else. I would like it if everyone would drop any non-essential tasks they are doing and help make my favorite topics into WP:FAs. I have a lot of articles I would like to have improved. However, I am pretty satisfied to see new production come as it is from various individuals. I think the project members have been less active than would be optimal in improving WP:FACs. However, few of the recent project FACs have been collaborations within the project so that may just be a natural result of people contributing time doing what they are interested in. Recently, the PR process has been improved so getting feedback eslwhere has been working out. As director, I would like to have a team of people doing things. I would hope to get help at A-Class review as it gets up and running. If it works out well maybe we can get a project peer review going. We need a lot of help assessing articles. I am going to need more help nominating and selecting future Top-importance articles. I also wish I could get some assistance converting List of Chicago Landmarks to List of Registered Historic Places in Chicago style format.
• Could you summarize what sets the project apart from other North American WikiProjects?*Could you summarise what sets the project apart from other North American WikiProjects?
  • I don't think our project is or should be much different from most other projects that operate under WP:CITY. One thing that is different is that as a city project we use a bot to tag the articles related to our geographic area. Thus, compared to WP:NYC, WP:WLA and WP:HOU, which are the other largest American cities, we are about ten times as big in terms of articles claimed within the project. Another difference from most other projects is that we vote on our Category:Top-importance Chicago articles, which we keep at 0.2% of the articles in the project. I think I just chose the first 15 or so myself and then we started voting. The first significant turnout occurred for the selection of the 21st through 25th articles. We also had a good turnout where we chose 26 through 38. Notice the future 32nd through 38th Top-importance articles have been determined by consensus within the group to be Magnificent Mile, Haymarket Riot, Daniel Burnham, Chicago River, Lake Shore Drive, Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago), and Chicago Tribune as the project grows. Otherwise, I don't think that there is much different about our project and those of other cities.