Little Thetford on the map!

*Little Thetford looking south-west

Along with Bob Young, I will be giving a talk at the Library, 6 The Cloisters, Ely, Cambridgeshire, CB7 4ZH on Friday 11 February between 10:30 and noon on the subject Little Thetford: Two square miles of history. Tickets are available at the door for 2.50 GBP. Geologist Bob will introduce the talk which I will present.

The Little Thetford Wikipedia article was published on the Wikipedia front page today. Some of you may know I edit Wikipedia articles under the pseudonym Senra. Little Thetford started out as a stub article on 30 May 2010; very little content as shown here. Using the village website as a starting off point, I began researching the two square mile Cambridgeshire village and was hooked. I learned rapidly that, although it is easy for anyone to edit Wikipedia pages, the content you produce must be substantiated from reliable sources, otherwise it gets quickly removed by another editor. Following a couple of months in a steep learning curve, I submitted the article through the Wikipedia peer-review process eventually gaining featured article status on 27 July 2010. The article was finally published on the front page today. The English Wikipedia has around 3 million articles of which 3,000 reach featured status. My other articles are listed here.

Every Wikipedia article has a status ranging from stub through Good Article to Featured Article. Wikipedia does not publish the status of every article. To see such status, create a free Wikipedia account. The Wikipedia community value anonymity highly so you do not need to use your real name or a regular email address; a free hotmail address for example is fine. Once registered, you can see an articles status just below the title line. As an example, Wikipedia's article on Blooms' taxonomy is a start-class article which simply means it has not been submitted through the Wikipedia peer-review process.

Yes I know this has nothing to do with the PTLLS course, but if I cannot be proud for one day, when can I be?

*Photo © 2010 John Parish