Please don't say you're at a loss for something to do on Wikipedia today. There is far too much that needs to be fixed for that! Wikipedia's broad concept of cleanup includes most tasks to improve articles once they have been created. Any time you need a break from writing new articles, you'll find plenty of work waiting for you on existing ones.
Work on Wikipedia is self-directed. You can create your own tasks or look into the wide variety of projects and processes for improving and maintaining Wikipedia content in particular areas. You can almost always find someone else who is interested in working in the same areas as you are.
In this chapter, we'll talk about some of the available cleanup tasks and the collaborative projects that have been set up for maintaining articles. We'll also introduce processes, the review structures that have been set up to allow interested editors to discuss articles and perform certain formal tasks. Processes are the practical implementation of policies and provide a structure for day-to-day work. We'll discuss two of the biggest processes: deleting articles and promoting good content. The activities described in this chapter are at the heart of the collaborative editing and article improvement that make Wikipedia work.
If you see a message with a yellow bar at the beginning of an article, along with the icon of a broom chasing out the dust, that's a tag indicating the article needs to be cleaned up. Although the majority of articles could be improved—after all, Wikipedia is never finished—some are clearly in more desperate need of help than others. These neglected articles require cleanup.
Cleanup is simply the general term for improving articles. The vast majority of tasks on Wikipedia fall under this broad heading: Sourcing, formatting, rewriting, and linking are all cleanup tasks. Although anyone is free to work on any task at any time, Wikipedia has developed a variety of mechanisms to sort out articles in need of help, so editors can find them and address cleanup issues more easily. In this section, we'll describe the basic mechanism for identifying and flagging articles as needing help, and then we'll discuss the broad categories of issues and how to find articles with these issues.
Spending at least some time on cleanup tasks is helpful for any Wikipedian. Working on articles that need to be cleaned up reveals the kinds of problems that Wikipedia faces, and dealing with similar issues and problems in a number of articles is an excellent way to learn Wikipedia style and develop proficiency at encyclopedic writing (and by extension, any type of writing). Cleanup is also one of the best ways to contribute; Wikipedia always has a tremendous backlog of cleanup needing to be done. Thoroughly improving a poorly written article can also be immensely satisfying: You can always compare the before and after versions of the article from the page history to see just how much you accomplished.
Most people start volunteering by exploring and trying out small cleanup jobs. Try different kinds of editing tasks to see what suits you. The authors of this book have different tasks they like to do on Wikipedia: Phoebe likes merging and fact-checking, whereas Charles prefers creating redirects. Many people end up focusing on one or two tasks—copyediting or referencing, for instance. As described in "Projects: Working to Improve Content" on Projects: Working to Improve Content, many of these tasks have dedicated WikiProjects where groups of interested editors work on them: WikiProject League of Copyeditors (shortcut WP:LoCE) caters to those interested in stylistic editing, whereas WikiProject Fact and Reference Check (shortcut WP:FACT) is for fact-checkers.
When editors encounter articles that need to be cleaned up, they have two options: They can immediately fix the problems, or they can flag the article with a message describing the problem for another editor to clean up later. Once articles have been flagged, other editors can then systematically work their way through all the ones tagged as having a particular issue.
These flags or tags are the cleanup messages you'll see at the top of many articles. They are produced by templates, small pieces of code that can be included on pages to produce standardized messages. As noted in Chapter 5, to add a template to a page, you simply enclose the name of the template in double curly brackets and place it on the page where you want it to appear.
For instance, you can find the generic cleanup template at [[Template:Cleanup]]. To flag an article as needing cleanup using this template, insert this code at the very top of the article:
{{cleanup}}This will create the message shown in Figure 7-1.
If an article has several issues, multiple cleanup templates may be stacked on top of each other. An editor may also replace a general cleanup message with a more specific message as the particular issue becomes clear: For instance, if the article needs to be rewritten for clarity, you would flag it with the {{confusing}} template instead of the more general {{cleanup}} template. Template messages now exist for most conceivable problems. The long list of cleanup messages is available at [[Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup]] (shortcut WP:TC); we also list some of these templates in the sections that follow.
If an editor fixes an article so the cleanup message is no longer needed, he or she can remove the template message by simply editing the page and removing the template tag. If the editor only partially addresses the problem, he or she may remove only the appropriate template message if more than one has been added to the article or add a note on the talk page detailing what's been done and what's left to do. Although an editor sometimes forgets to remove a template when cleaning up an article, be careful about removing templates if you aren't sure all the issues have been addressed because content-related templates also serve as warnings to readers.
Most cleanup templates can also be dated, so you can see how long an article has been in need of cleanup. For the general cleanup tag, adding a date looks like this:
{{cleanup|date=November 2007}}This tag adds the date to the template message and sorts the article into a cleanup-by-month category.
Although the cleanup process is thus somewhat subjective—no hard and fast rules on when to add any particular template exist, and anyone can add or remove templates—using the template message system allows several different editors (who may otherwise never be in touch) to clean up an article using a loose process and helps readers know when an article has problems.
Adding a cleanup message to an article will automatically place the article in an associated cleanup category. This way editors can easily find all the articles tagged as needing a certain kind of cleanup; they can simply go to the category and get to work. For instance, articles tagged with {{cleanup}} are placed in [[Category:All pages needing cleanup]]. Articles tagged with a dated cleanup tag are automatically sorted into a cleanup-by-month category as well (in the example above, [[Category:Cleanup from November 2007]]), so those with older tags can be worked on first. This also makes the large cleanup category more manageable. If you edit out the template to remove it, the article will automatically be removed from the cleanup category.
Of course, flagging articles is easier than actually cleaning them up. This is reflected in some of the large cleanup categories. These categories have backlogs—large numbers of articles awaiting attention. Wikipedia's rapid growth has perhaps made this inevitable. Because there is so much to do, adding a template for every issue isn't really helpful, as this may, in fact, mask an article's worst issues; if a quick edit can resolve the problem, instead of adding a template, go ahead and fix it (the sofixit principle described in Chapter 13). Make sure, however, that you flag the biggest issues if you can't fix them right away. As of early 2008, roughly 31,000 articles are in [[Category:All pages needing cleanup]]. Working in this category can be overwhelming; on the other hand, 31,000 represents less than 2 percent of the total number of articles on Wikipedia at this time.