Last Week in Pleiades

Complete lists of new and updated content items appear at the bottom of this post. Items in this series are tagged lastweek.

Review status

Pleiades has an active community of volunteer contributors, reviewers, and editors. As of this date, 75 of them have seen at least one of their contributions published on the website. As always, a list of editors, reviewers, and published contributors may be found on the credits page.

In the  past week, we have published 57 new and updated content items. The number of items still pending review stands at 731, down from over 1,000 three weeks ago. Editors are working with contributors privately to bring several of these into publication-ready status, and the rest are waiting their turn in line. There are also about 100 comments that users have attached to content items that need attention by the editors. We will continue our near-weekly practice of holding review parties until the backlog is cleared, working first with places, names, and locations submitted by community members and then turning to comments.

The next review party is scheduled for 12 August 2013. More reviewers are eagerly sought. We offer glory, honor, satisfaction, and masthead credit for your efforts; write to pleiades.admin@nyu.edu to volunteer.

Event listings

Speaking of review parties... if you drill down to the individual article for one of these events on the blog, you'll find that it differs from our regular blog posts (a.k.a. "news items" in the parlance of our website framework). We're using "event" content items for the review parties, rather than "news items." That means that the date and time information is encoded in them explicitly. You'll find convenient ical and vcal download links for such events so you can get them into your calendar easily. This approach has also allowed us to enable an "Upcoming Events" listing, which you'll see in the right-hand sidebar in various places around the site (though not on place, location, or name pages, where we think it's just too much clutter). You should see it to the right on this page, if you're reading it on the blog.

On the blog

As always, the most recent blog posts appear at the top of the Pleiades News Blog main page. This week, we added a "Subscribe" portlet on the right-hand side of the blog. It provides convenient links whereby you can subscribe to updates via RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and daily email digest (the latter courtesy of Google Feedburner). To enable the Facebook, Twitter, and email options, we had to set up corresponding accounts on those services. Separate blog posts went out yesterday about Facebook and Twitter.