Editing, fixing and defending Wikipedia.

  • Where we intend to show the various kinds of activity on which Wikipedia depends.
  • Intended to recruit more Copy-editors, WikiGnomes and Anti-vandals.
  • You can explore the links below to find new things to do and the documentation to help you on your way.

Fixing things big and small - Enter the WikiGnomes

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WikiGnomes work behind the scenes of a wiki, tying up little loose ends and making things run more smoothly. Examples of WikiGnome-like behavior include fixing typos, correcting poor grammar, creating redirects, adding categories, and repairing broken links.

They are the wiki version of the mythical Menehunes of Hawai'i - little people who go around and fix things when no-one's looking.

Finding things to fix

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The following pages have a huge list of things needing fixing. Use whichever you prefer.

Stub tagging and sorting

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Fixing layout, adding images etc. - touch of a WikiFairy

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A great deal of work is in fixing tables, adding hatnotes and footers, adding images and sound files and improving the layout. You can compare an article with a Featured article from the same category to see how it should ideally look.

Tools for the WikiGnome

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There are dozens of tools that you can try out.

Copy Editing

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Copy editing is the process of making improvements to an article to make it clear, correct, concise, comprehensible, and consistent; make it say what it means, and mean what it says. The Manual of Style is a common reference.

Edit just the articles you like

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Suggestions for you - SuggestBot

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SuggestBot can send you a little list of articles to work on. By default it will base its suggestions on your contributions. You can however tell it what categories or articles you would prefer to work on.

Working on specific topics - Wikiprojects

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  • Standard topics have a Wikiproject page. They are a good option if only a few topics interest you.
  • See for example the Ancient philosophy wikiproject.
  • Pick up articles to work on from the lists of articles that are stubs, have a low quality rating or otherwise need attention.

Create and expanding articles

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Creating articles - filling in the gaps

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Expand or update articles

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Translate to and from Wikipedia in other languages

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Developing an article to a Good or Featured article level

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The idea is not to push an article to Featured Article status, but rather to improve its Quality. See the essay 100,000 feature-quality articles which explains this point of view and gives some ideas on how to do that.

Use the article assessment table or the list of vital articles to find articles to work on.

(Articles assessed as part of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team's Work via WikiProjects scheme. A list of participating projects along with their statistics can be found in the Index of subjects. Article assessments by WikiProject can be found on the corresponding Wikiproject page or on Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments. Articles are assessed by Quality and importance. FYI, the tables of the great Bot WP 1.0 bot can also be found here. )

Writing Good articles

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Nominating and Reviewing Good articles

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Patrolling and WikiPolicing

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  • A small but significant number of users are trolls and vandals.
  • Defend content from damage - do not waste energy on getting even with trolls and vandals.
  • Silently gnore trolls, revert vandalism and stay out of POV wars.
  • Do not involve admins unless necessary.

Anti-vandalism

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Countering vandalism is one of the core tasks of Wikipedia. See links on the right for more details.

Page patrolling

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Deleting articles

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Rule of thumb for notability

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The following are nearly always notable. However you may want to be precise - see the subject-specific guidelines on the right.

  • All places - cities, districts, villages, etc.
  • Team sports - all pro athletes, along with their leagues, managers and competitions
  • Individual sports - criteria are very sport specific
  • All educational institutions (except primary schools that don't go up to grade 9 or 10)
  • Commercial film directors, musicians and writers (and all their films and albums and books with at least one review.)
  • Publicly traded companies
  • University professors and academics

Definitely not speedy delete

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  • How-to articles
  • Essay articles
  • Expansion of A7 to include books, software, and/or other products
  • Neologisms
  • Unsourced articles

The WereSpielChequers guide to deletion

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Researching and fact checking

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For most topics, a Google search throws up a couple of good articles on reliable online news sources. But sometimes you need to dig deeper.

Requests for comment and Dispute resolution

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Not very interesting, but we should mention the WikiElves who work behind the scenes at Wikipedia on user problems like RfA, RFCN, and AfD. You can hop over to any of the Noticeboards and knock yourself out. Besides this, there is also the administrative work of creating new categories and templates, protecting and unprotecting pages and speedy deletes.

Help and Documentation

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Read the documentation

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Wikipedia is extremely well documented, but it is difficult to find the documentation. The documentation given below is a good starting point. You can easily find the necessary document by doing an advanced search in Help space or Wikipedia space or simply a Google search.

Learn the ropes

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Still have questions?

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  • Wikipedia:Teahouse - friendly environment for new users
  • WP:CHAT - this is live IRC chat - note that there are several Wikipedia channels
  • The various Wikiproject talk pages (if they are active enough) can give subject-specific expert advice.