" 

 == Progress report: Country outlines == 

 Development has been slow but continuous: 

  has done a fantastic job on the images for the awards we'll be using for our project's collaborations and contests.  We now have 3 awards: a medal, a trophy, and a race ribbon.  They all look tight.  The trophy needs a small adjustment, but other than that, all 3 award images are complete and ready to use to create awards with. 

 Spartaz has warned us of (threatened to take) G4 (speedy delete) action if we run a competition that resembles the previously deleted Awards Center page.  So whatever we do, any contests we run must differ substantially from the methods used there.   

 One type of competition I've been exploring is edit racing.  I'm in the process of working the bugs out of this concept - the first race didn't work as expected - you see, because we only had an award for first place, the opponent didn't think it worthwhile to continue once it was clear who the winner would be.  And since editors are in different time zones and usually need to start the race at different times, we need to base winning on personal start times - he who completes his assigned edits in the least time (rather than first), wins.  And last but not least is quality control.  What good is winning if your edits are ripe with errors?  So I'll be exploring possibilities such as using a referee (whoever is overseeing a particular race), having participants watching each other for errors to knock them back, etc.  I'm not sure yet. 

  has been applying his bot expertise to filling in blanks in the country outlines (the population and area entries).  I'm amazed at the number of edits he pumps out each day on a myriad of projects - ours makes up but a small time slice of his activity, and yet he has saved us many hours of manual work.  Perhaps we should look into how he gets so much done.  ) 

  has chosen to work on one outline at a time, and is taking on Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.  He also has been keen on noticing and reporting design issues pertaining to the whole set of country outlines.  Keep up the good work! 

  has been filling in the names of capitals, and is our first race winner.  Check out the award on his user pages. 

 As you probably know, this project has expanded to include working on any and all sets of pages that are linked to from the country outlines.  Once the set of country outlines go live (in article space), traffic will likely increase for all the links included on them.  The quality and usefulness of those pages will reflect heavily on the country outlines (the outlines, which are essentially lists of links, are only as good as the links they present), and therefore we've branched out to solve the biggest problems with those as well.  So far, we've taken on: 
 * The creation of disambiguation pages for country adjectivals (""German"", ""French"", ""Taiwanese"", etc.  About half done.)  
 * The clean-up of the CIA World Factbook statistics on the ""demographics of"" country pages.  We've been renaming those sections to provide a key string that AWB can use for targetting (for skipping and filtering).  Once that's done, we'll be able to break the clean-up down into simple AWB search/replace tasks, because we'll be able to target just those pages that include the CIA stuff. 
 * Renaming the ""Cuisine of"" articles to their adjectival forms (""Chinese cuisine"", ""Italian cuisine"", etc.) 

  and  have been helping out with the ""demographics of"" pages mentioned above. 

 And we have a couple speed addicts (addicted to wiki-velocity, not drugs)... 

 Both  and  prefer (and excel at) simple AWB search/replaces. Robert hasn't actually joined our team yet, but he has been helping out quite a bit from the sidelines (via the WP:AWB/Tasks page.  Unfortunately, there has recently been a non-AWB chore that has been holding things up on the AWB front - an edit to all the the headings which had to be reverted before too many new edits were made, because any new edits would make the reversion more difficult.  The headings have been restored, so now the way is clear for AWB operations, and there are many search/replace tasks in the queue.  AWB assignmen