Wikipedia:Gnome Week

Your garden-variety gnome. He needs your help!

Wikipedia has a problem.

Out of all the articles on Wikipedia, 1412 (as of May 28, 2007) are featured articles. 2249 are good articles. While this is an admirable sum, Wikipedia as a whole contains over 1,800,000 articles, and will likely have accumulated more by the time you finish this sentence.

Just how good are these remaining 1,790,000+ articles? Many people have asked this question. Their results are not pretty. A quick tour of Wikipedia's articles will reveal many articles that are poorly written, misspelled, needing wikification, unreferenced, uncategorized, or even completely unsalvageable.

People take this in many different ways. Some believe Wikipedia is failing. Some see it as part of a grand analogy. Some are part of the problem.

And some try to fix it. They are known as WikiGnomes. While their edits are not generally received with fanfare or applause, their contributions are invaluable. They keep the encyclopedia from spiraling into chaos. They find and fix those badly written walls of text. They keep vandals from turning every article into typewriter salad.

Their contributions are admirable, but they are outnumbered. Wikipedia is growing far faster than anybody can possibly hope to keep up with. For every article that gets fixed, ten more are created that need fixing, and eight or nine of these disappear into the void, often going years before anybody bothers to edit them. Wikipedia's backlogs are many thousands of articles strong and getting bigger every day.

This is a clearly severe problem, one that is devastating Wikipedia's credibility as a usable reference work. This problem, however, is neither insurmountable or irreversible. We can fix it. All we need is the time.

That time has come.

In the spirit of creative holidays, June 21 has been designated International Gnome Day. I propose to take this a step further and have a full Gnome Week, from Thursday, June 21, 2007 to Thursday, June 28, 2007.

This week will essentially be a mass drive to clean up Wikipedia's act. Backlogs will be cleared, articles will be polished, typos will be fixed, bad prose will be edited, unreferenced articles will be sourced, and articles needing deletion will be proposed for it. No article will be safe from our reach. The more people who participate, the better Wikipedia will become as a result. The sky's the limit.

Participants are encouraged (but certainly not required) to keep a running total of articles they've improved, so at the end we can get a rough estimate of how much we've done. At the risk of sounding cliche, if we all work together we can accomplish miracles for the encyclopedia.

How to participate

If you know of any editors who may be interested in this product, let them know! (Within boundaries, of course.) The more people participating, the better off Wikipedia will be at the end of the month.

Starting June 21, hit the ground running! Polish up as many articles as you can, get as many people involved as you can. You can find these articles anywhere - backlogs, Random Article, project categories - anything's fair game for improvement. If you want, leave an edit summary like "Cleanup for [[Wikipedia:Gnome Week|Gnome Week]] cleanup drive - you can help!" to let more people know about the project.

Responses to anticipated questions

This will never work.

Only one way to find out, isn't there?

But what about article creation? That's important too!

Article creation is indeed very important. By no means do I intend to put down any of the commendable work of article writers. Without them, we wouldn't have an encyclopedia in the first place. However, creating new articles doesn't solve the problem of the hundreds of thousands of existing articles that need work. Besides, cleanup and article writing aren't mutually exclusive. Just ask User:Kevin Myers, who did a stunning job with the formerly unreferenced stub Crawford expedition.

And what about counter-vandalism? Vandals aren't just going to roll over for a week.

Counter-vandalism is extremely important and if that's where you spend most of your time, by all means keep it up. After all, we could clean up everything there is to clean up but if vandals run amok on the rest, there's no point.

What about deletion?

Deletion should go as it usually does, although proposed deletion will probably be even more important (in uncontroversial cases, of course) so AfD doesn't get flooded.

Sounds great! How can I sign up?

Glad you like it. Signups are below.

Signups

Crystallina 23:32, 28 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Tλε Rαnδоm Eδι τ оr 01:10, 1 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
CJ 11:52, 1 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Boracay Bill 06:08, 3 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This is great! I will try to find time for articles in need. Blackjack48 ♠^t ♣^c 01:04, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
JoeSmack ^Talk 01:16, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Danaman5 Let's do it.
ZOUAVMAN LE ZOUAVE totally up for it!
ssepp^(talk) 07:16, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• The Giant Puffin • 08:12, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
--~~Vaishu2 09:06, 5 June 2007 (UTC) I've almost been grounded from using the computer so I'm not making any promises. But I'll do what I can - something is better than nothing.~~ I'm so sorry I've got to back out - but 21^st to god-knows-when will be test time at school and I'll have to study. Maybe some other time.[reply]
Wai Hong. I've actually been doing this for quite some time. I've helped to cleanup articles from Sept 2005. I'm also particularly interested in cleaning up Malaysian-related articles since I'm Malaysian.Wai Hong 12:07, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
--Wwjd333 12:40, 5 June 2007 (UTC)I will do anything possible to help[reply]
CloudNine 07:29, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Deletion Quality 16:03, 6 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]