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Maintenance work is a vital part of keeping Wikipedia running optimally. Be careful to avoid creating more maintenance work through instruction creep. Organize when you can, but always keep the big picture in sight: we're here to create an encyclopedia.
Collaborative cleanup projects
These are groups of people that get together to try to fix certain aspects of Wikipedia. Join them!
Things to watch
Reports
Special pages are updated either automatically or on request by the developers.
Offline reports are generated from an offline copy of the Wikipedia database. These reports are always a bit out of date and should not be considered authoritative, but may provide useful guidance as to which articles may benefit from attention in particular areas. They need people with enough hard drive space and expertise to update them occasionally. Many of these reports cannot be updated in the same way that they were in the past, due to changes in the format of the database downloads. Regular editors are also needed to prune already-fixed listings.
Currently updated reports are listed on Template:Active Wiki Fixup Projects (displayed to the right) and are most in need of editors to fix individual pages that are listed on them.
| Active Wiki Fixup Projects |
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Leading the charge in the War on Error!
Must be active, systematic, have lists, & need help. |
| Writing |
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| Other |
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More:
May no longer be necessary:
Link Analysis Database
A Link Analysis Database is created by running a set of scripts on a MySQL database into which a Wikipedia database dump has been loaded. It can be used to generate among others the reports dealing with articles and links to and from them below. Instructions on how to construct a Link Analysis Database can be found here.
Deletion
Non-admins can help keep deletion pages clean by resolving discussions. Administrators are needed to actually delete pages. Anyone can nominate pages for deletion. See:
Possible copyright violations
Wikipedia:Copyright problems lists articles which will be deleted if it can not be proven that we have permission to use them under the terms of the GFDL. For pages listed there, you could replace the infringing article's text with new (re-written) content of your own. This must be done on a temp page, so that the original "copyvio version" may be deleted by a sysop. Temp versions should be written at a page like: [[Talk:PAGE NAME/temp]]. If the original turns out not to be a copyvio, these two can be merged. Alternatively, you can write to the copyright owner and check whether they gave permission. You can also ask for permission using the boilerplate request for permission. If someone claims to have permission, but this has not been verified, you can send the confirmation of permission letter to check. If images have been listed, you may want to consider whether these constitute fair use and write the appropriate disclaimers on the image description page. See Wikipedia:Image description page#Fair use rationale for guidance on this.
Maintaining portals
See Wikipedia:Portal for a list of existing portals and associated projects and maintainers.
Foreign language pages
For pages listed on Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English, the Wikipedia:Embassy member of the Wikipedia that relates to the language the article is in should be contacted and invited to move the page to their own Wikipedia or to help translate it. There is also a list of translators at Wikipedia:translation. If you don't know what language the article is in you could use Language recognition chart and if that fails some language recognition web site to find out. If a page remains untranslated after two weeks, or if someone who speaks the language it is written in states that it is not worth translating, then article should be moved from pages needing translation to articles for deletion. The boilerplate text on the article should be changed from {{notenglish}} to {{subst:afd}}.
Welcoming newcomers
Welcome people using one of the standard user greetings or make up your own. Use {{Opentask}} to leave an automatically updated task list on a new user's page. New users can be found by looking for red talk page links on recent changes or by querying the database. Efforts to co-ordinate the activities of welcomers are being made at Wikipedia:Welcoming committee. The {{Opentask}} message gives newcomers some ideas of articles to work on. The tasks listed in this template can be changed at Template:Opentask.
Main page
The Main Page needs regular updating. Only sysops can edit the page itself. See Wikipedia:Editing the main page for links to the relevant templates and further guidance.
Vandalism
Anyone can revert vandalism. See Wikipedia:revert for instructions. If you see any recurrent vandalism, you can list it at Wikipedia:vandalism in progress. You can also check other listings on that page and follow them up by seeing if the users listed there have made any further vandalism since the listing. Do this typing the url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ followed by the username. Unreverted edits will still have (top) next to them. Sysops may choose to block recurrent vandals, following a warning on the user's talk page using Special:Blockip, or for unlogged-in users clicking the block link next to their IP on recent changes.
The pages linked to from the main page often see the most vandalism, so checking those pages via the links on Editing the Main Page can be a good place to look if you feel like vandal spotting.
See also: Wikipedia:How to spot vandalism
Current events
Not maintenance as such, but Current events is a page that needs to be updated daily. Please read Wikipedia:How the Current events page works before working on this.
Request and maintenance queues
Here are some tasks you can do:
- Wikify: Roger Chao, Malaria vaccine, Keyascii, Inje University, Superhero fiction, Ainu music, Dzata ruins, Promethians, Queers & Allies, More..
- Cleanup: Tommy Franks, Excite, Turkmen People's Party, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, Yoruba twins, Sichuan invasion, Rastafarian movement in the United States, More...
- Stubs: Orphan structure, Groove Family Cyco, Lexical density, International Organization, EZCorp, More...
- Verify: Phosphorylase, Łan, Johannite, Mystery (fiction), Bechtel, Peugeot 605, Tong Seal, More..
- Update: Communications in Spain, Employment in Hong Kong, United States v. Emerson, Internet in Chile, Incidents during the Hajj, Economy of Costa Rica, Gun politics in Finland, More...
- Neutrality: American Free Press, Implications of nanotechnology, Mursi, Johann Friedrich Struensee, Race and crime, Vulnerability (computing), Christian Hebraist, Barnsdall Art Park, More...
- Copyedit: Szczebrzeszyn, House of Siracusa, Spheres (TV series), Os Lusíadas, Treaty of Shimoda, Slava Polunin, Savage Dragon, Trauma surgery, More...
- Merge: Unicode scripts, Music of Cuba, Gardiner's Sign List, Chronology of PlayStation games, Jewish population, Scanner art, List of compositions for piano and orchestra, More...
- Style: Mississippi Highway Patrol, Valivitta Thevar, Nuke (gaming), Digital ticket, The Eyes of the Overworld, Renewable energy development, Moravian mission at Shekomeko, More...
- Expand: Toyota Canada Inc., Auburn Lull, Gabriel Barletta, Literary adaptation, Ophiel, Simon Kimbangu, Piety, Elective surgery, Maoricrater explorata, Muhammad Ayyub, Panzano Observatory, Akasen, More...
- Requests: You Make Me Feel Brand New, Marcus Tregoning, Zebes, Distomatosis, Abgar VI bar Ma'nu, Tsukuhara syndrome, Christiane Mercelis, Octacalcium phosphate, Lepus tibetanus, Cameloid, More...
- Articles to be split: Differential GPS post-processing, Confidence trick, University of Leicester, MV Abegweit, List of characters from Family Guy, More...
- Mediation Cabal: Manual of Style, or Help mediate an open case!
For each queue listed below, editors are needed to:
- Rotate individual articles and projects onto Template:Opentasks (shown above) as they are fixed or become stale.
- Publicize neglected lists or consolidate them with active pages
- Remove articles from the listings as they are fixed.
- Actually fix the individual articles that are listed.
Instructions are given on each page.
Disputes
There are many pages in Category:Wikipedia dispute resolution which could use help in resolving various kinds of disputes. Some disputes are easy to resolve - someone needs to propose or implement a compromise (check out the appropriate talk page), or the dispute is over and someone just needs to declare the problem solved. Many disputes between parties can be resolved after uninvolved strangers wander in, read the article in question and the debate so far, and just give common-sense opinions. In rare cases, delicate negotiating skills are needed to bring warring parties to a satisfactory agreement, or administrative powers are needed to ban vandals or uncooperative editors.
The main page to list disputes is Wikipedia:Requests for comment. This is a static listing, and your help is needed to remove old requests, in addition to commenting on current requests.
There are lists of articles in dispute in:
Initial categorization efforts
See also: Wikipedia:Categorization projects (current)
Images with missing articles
Several pages on the web offer their public domain images in a long list. To avoid checking these lists again and again for matching Wikipedia articles, Wikipedia:Images with missing articles has a list of specific images with missing articles. If you see that one of these articles exists, please add the image from the external link, and remove it from the list.
Discussions
Village pump
The village pump is not a place for lasting discussions, so anything older than 7 days from the date of the last comment are moved to an archive page below each of the Village pump's sections. These discussions will be kept in that archive for 7 more days. During this period (or before) the discussion can be moved to a relevant talk page in the article, Wikipedia or template namespace or to the user talk page of the user who started the discussion. For example, if a question about copyright was asked, and this is likely to be asked again, move the question to Wikipedia talk:copyrights. It may also be summarised, or refactored, if appropriate. If discussions are moved elsewhere, the links to where they have moved to should remain in the summarised section until the village pump is next cleaned.
After 7 days in the archive, the discussion will be permanently removed, although it will still be available from the history.
Often people ask things on the village pump that should have been asked at the Wikipedia:Reference desk. These should be moved. Leave behind a link in the same location the question was such as
Surveys
There is a list of current surveys that needs to be maintained by adding any current polls, moving closed polls to the closed polls section, and updating the results of polls once they are closed.
Talk pages
Talk pages are useful. 50,000 words on the topic might not be. Many articles have excessive numbers of talk page archives. While these provide an interesting history to the development of the article, they are next to useless for someone new to the article wanting to know what the past discussion was about. New Imperialism, for example, currently has 15 archives. It would be far more useful to have a summary of these that would be readable by a newcomer. See the archives of the VfD talk page for examples of how the previous discussion was summarised. An alternative to summarising the discussion is to split the archives by topic rather than purely chronologically. Look at User talk:Daniel C. Boyer/undelete and Talk:AKFD for examples of this. Wikipedia:Refactoring explains other alternatives to just archiving a talk page. See also how to archive a talk page
Peer review
Wikipedia:Peer review is designed to solicit comments on articles that have had major work by a single author, or which are going to be submitted to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates. Articles that don't successfully become featured are often referred back to this step.
Editors are needed to:
- Comment on articles listed
- Remove old requests (instructions are on the page itself)
See also
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