Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Newsletter/Archive 49

Volume IL, Issue 49, August 11, 2024
←(Previous issues) 45 · 46 · 47 · 48 · 49 →


The Hurricane Herald: October 2024 edition

The Hurricane Herald is the semi-regular newsletter of WikiProject Tropical Cyclones. The newsletter aims to provide in summary the recent activities and developments of the WikiProject, in addition to global tropical cyclone activity. The Hurricane Herald has been running since its first edition ran on June 4, 2006. If you wish to receive or discontinue your subscription to this newsletter, please visit the mailing list. This issue of The Hurricane Herald covers all project-related events this year, plus future goals. This edition's editors and authors is Hurricanehink. Please visit this page and bookmark any suggestions of interest to you. This will help improve the newsletter and other cyclone-related articles. Past editions can be viewed here.

WikiProject Tropical Cyclones: News & Developments

  • When Tropical Storm Alberto formed in June of this year, there was a large discussion involving members of the project, as well as input from the Wikipedia community at large, with a Administrator's noticeboard discussion, and a discussion on the season article's talk page, over the current storm section. For more than a decade, and possibly longer, the tradition was to have current storm information included in the season articles, as well as if a storm had its own article. That meant that, for years, articles were meticulously kept up to date, but perhaps that meant editors were more focused on being the first to update the storm position/intensity, rather than adding more important information. We ended up getting a great trial when Hurricane Beryl ripped through the Caribbean and United Stats last month, causing 64 deaths and billions in damage. If you haven't read the article, I encourage you to check it out. The article is well-sourced, thorough, and very informative, thanks to 85 different editors adding information that will last the test of time, rather than rushing to add current information that will soon be outdated. This editor has been on Wikipedia long enough to see articles barely getting updated with any kind of source. It appears that this discussion led to a much better outcome. I'd like to note that I was personally against it, and can see I was wrong.
  • There is still an ongoing effort to replace every track map around the world with the proper color. Longtime editors might remember various discussions updating the colors, and there are occasionally grumpy people online who miss the old colors. That is not an excuse to relitigate the endless discussions that led to the colors being properly compliant. So to do the various editors adding new and old storm track maps, thank you, and please keep up the good work as we expand our coverage to more and more storms.
  • There is an ongoing task force dedicated to the yearly coverage of various weather articles. This includes articles such as Tropical cyclones in 1991. As a long-term project, there should be these types of articles going back to 1900. Having them all be featured articles would be especially useful, as that would require citations, as well as information such as deaths and damage totals for each storm. For a lot of years, that information doesn't exist on Wikipedia. For example, there was a good article review started recently on 1982 Pacific typhoon season, which was once considered pretty good, but it falls short compared to other season articles, lacking impact information or info from various warning centers. Season articles only go back so far, and a lot are incomplete depending on which basin you choose.

New good articles since the last newsletter include:

2005 Atlantic hurricane season topic

The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season will have its one year anniversary in 2025. The season was one of the busiest and most destructive, including the notorious hurricanes Hurricane Katrina and Wilma. There is a collaboration for the various articles in the 2005 season to improve it to a featured topic by its 20 year anniversary. There is an active FAC - Hurricane Cindy (2005) - and recently, several sub-articles were merged into Hurricane Dennis to help improve that article. There are also some discussions involving article mergers on Katrina's talk page.

Deterioation of existing featured/good articles Over the last few years, we have lost several featured and good articles. Among the loss of featured articles include Tropical Storm Allison, hurricanes Danny (1997), Esther, Gloria, Irene, Juan, and Nora, plus the Meteorological history of Hurricane Dean, Numerical weather prediction, and Surface weather analysis. Most of these are quite old, so it makes sense they wouldn't be up to featured status, but that means that 2003 Atlantic hurricane season, the 1997 Pacific hurricane season, and Hurricane Dean are no longer featured topics.

New good articles since the last newsletter include:

WikiProject To-Do

  1. Topic task
  2. Second task
  3. Third task
Featured Content

From 2021 to 2024 the following featured articles were promoted:

From the Main Page: Documents WikiProject related materials that have appeared on the main page from May 2021 to August 2024 in chronological order.

Today's Featured Article/List

New WikiProject Members since the last newsletter

More information can be found here. This list lists members who have joined/rejoined the WikiProject since the release of the last issue. Sorted chronologically.
  1. Example (talk · contribs)

To our new members: welcome to the project, and happy editing! Feel free to check the to-do list at the bottom right of the newsletter for things that you might want to work on. To our veteran members: thank you for your edits and your tireless contributions!

Current assessment table

As of this issue, there are 161 featured articles and 80 featured lists. There are 3 A-class articles, and 1123 good articles. There are only 170 B-class articles, perhaps because because most articles of that quality already passed a GA review. There are 659 C-class articles, 802 start-class articles, and 138 stub-class articles, with 1126 lists, and 0 current articles. These figures mean that slightly more than half of the project is rated a GA or better. Typhoon Warren was the 1000th GA in the project.

About the assessment scale →

Project Goals & Progress

The following is the current progress on the four milestone goals set by the WikiProject as of this publishing. They can be found, updated, at the main WikiProject page.