Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Wikignoming
 | This page is part of the Military history WikiProject's online Academy, and contains instructions, recommendations, or suggestions for editors working on military history articles. While it is not one of the project's formal guidelines, editors are encouraged to consider the advice presented here in the course of their editing work. |
What is a WikiGnome? edit
On Wikipedia, a WikiGnome is a Wikipedian who makes small but constructive changes to an article, often in a relatively narrow scope in which they have specialized. These changes are not necessarily minor edits. Examples of what WikiGnomes can do include:
- Fixing spelling, grammar, and punctuation
- Repairing broken links and links to disambiguation pages or creating plausible redirects (e.g. Banjul (Gambia) doesn't link to Banjul)
- Adding relevant, useful and focused wikilinks, improving the clarity of piped links, and reducing overlinking
- Adding relevant categories
- Adding reliable references to unsourced statements
- Filling in missing parameters of templates (e.g. infoboxes or reference templates)
- Fixing Wiki markup
- Adding missing entries to list articles
- Clarifying the text of an article with examples or other factoids (e.g. A captured Panther was used... => A captured German Panther tank was used...)
What can I do for the Military History WikiProject? edit
Due to the nature of military history, WikiGnomes can be very helpful to our project. Besides the tasks mentioned in the previous section, there are more specific, gnomish tasks which have to be done for the project. Examples include:
- Citing statistics. This can be troop counts, casualty rates, number of tanks/planes/ships, which appear in almost every battle article.
- Citing quotes. Military history is very old, and have created memorable quotes, which have to be cited. For example, "Nuts" (Anthony McAuliffe).
- Filling in infoboxes. We have them for biographies, battles, wars, weapons, vehicles, decorations etc. The individual pages' infoboxes are sometimes not complete. You can help by adding information to relevant fields of an infobox.
- Adding sections to an article. A war or battle can have several phases which are distinct. Having them in different sections can help readers navigate to the section they want to read from the table of contents.
- Adding alternative names. Different countries and regions, especially opposing sides in a conflict can have alternative names for a battle (e.g. Battle of Sharpsburg vs. Battle of Antietam in the American Civil War). A WikiGnome can make sure that the naming of battles is consistent.
How to identify WikiGnomes edit
The master list of Wikipedians who wish to advertise their status as WikiGnomes is at Category:Wikipedian WikiGnomes. To self advertise, you can:
- Add a userbox: {{User wikipedia/WikiGnome}}, which automatically puts you in the WikiGnome category
- Categorize your page without a userbox by adding [[Category:Wikipedian WikiGnomes|{{PAGENAME}}]] to your userpage
- Display a mushroom at the top of their userpage {{Wikipedia:WikiGnome/topicon}}. To make use of the two optional parameters, the horizontal and vertical positions respectively, the default coordinates are (30, 8). You may also add "alt=yes" to get a small image of the gnome pictured to the right as a topicon.
- Write a sentence or two on your userpage to indicate that you are a WikiGnome.