User:TheQ Editor/Adopt/Cleanup

Cleanup is an important part of Wikipedia.

In order to clearly and efficiently provide as much information as possible, Wikipedia has several editing guidelines to ensure that articles are kept neat and easy-to-read. The Manual of Style groups these guidelines into a type of user's guide to editing Wikipedia. It outlines how to properly structure articles, and how to take care of the little nuances of English grammar in certain situations (where and how to use punctuation, whether to use American, Australian, British, Canadian, or some other dialect of English, etc.).

Other policies and guidelines refer to how to present that type of information. The Five Pillars of Wikipedia state that all information should be presented neutrally, and as such the Neutral Point of View, or NPOV policy is a very important policy to keep in mind when editing Wikipedia. Most pages on Wikipedia adhere to these policies and guidelines. For those that don't, we have to clean them up.

Cleanup

WP:CLEANUP is a very large project with (currently) the third largest, and possibly oldest, backlog in the project, beaten out in size only by articles lacking sources and articles with unsourced statements. Pages get added to the cleanup category when an editor adds a cleanup template to the page. These templates point out to editors and casual readers that there is a problem within the page, and as such can't be relied upon to be completely accurate or even legible. Editors are constantly needed to work on these pages to resolve immediate problems to help improve things. This can be as simple as doing some basic copyediting for grammar or spelling, or re-wording sentences to remove bias, or in extreme cases completely re-writing entire articles.

While tedious, such cleanup patrols are essential to keeping Wikipedia running smoothly. The Manual of Style and WP:CLEANUP both give details on how to do all that.

Wikify

In a perfect world, every article has links to other Wikipedia pages. But the world is not perfect and there are many articles without enough wikilinks and we must help by adding them.

Good

A perfect paragraph would be something like this:

Saraya-Jade Bevis (born 17 August 1992) is an English professional wrestler and WWE Diva currently signed with WWE under the ring name Paige, where she is the current WWE Divas Champion in her first reign.

Bad

A paragraph with no wikilinks:

Saraya-Jade Bevis (born 17 August 1992) is an English professional wrestler and WWE Diva currently signed with WWE under the ring name Paige, where she is the current WWE Divas Champion in her first reign.

Very Bad

A paragraph with overlinking

Saraya-Jade Bevis (born 17 August 1992) is an English professional wrestler and WWE Diva currently signed with WWE under the ring name Paige, where she is the current WWE Divas Champion in her first reign.

NPOV

Wikipedia is not an advertisement. We don't want to give readers to think a certain way. For example, "TheQ Editor is really smart" would be biased. It would make readers think in a particular way. You could change it to "TheQ Editor has an IQ level of 104" though. But you would need a reliable source to go with it. We'll cover that in another lesson. Just remember, Wikipedia is about facts, not opinions.

Biased content could also enter an article in a rather sneaky way. An author would insert only positive or negative facts on the article. The content may be written in a neutral way, but the article is missing out on the other side. In this case, let's say an article only has information about how the Dam is producing a lot of electricity and has won many prizes. That would be biased. You would have to enter information that could defame the "thing". For example that the Dam destroyed habitats of 100 species of animals.

Tags

If you come across an article that you think requires Clean Up, simply edit the page and add {{cleanup|reason=|date=}} at the top of the page. The result will end up something like this:

Twinkle is highly recommended for this.