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As well as editing, many people at Wikipedia are involved in maintenance tasks. Most of these tasks can be done by any user. For other useful directories, see the navigation bar above.
Maintenance work is a vital part of keeping Wikipedia running optimally. Be careful to avoid creating more maintenance work through instruction creep. Organize when you can, but always keep the big picture in sight: we are here to create an encyclopedia. If you wish to contribute to Wikipedia in ways other than maintenance, please see Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia. Tasks of the most pressing importance can be found at Wikipedia:Backlog.
Things to watch
Reports
Special pages are updated either automatically or on request by the developers.
Offline reports are generated from an offline copy of the Wikipedia database. These reports are always a bit out of date and should not be considered authoritative, but may provide useful guidance as to which articles may benefit from attention in particular areas. They need people with enough hard drive space and expertise to update them occasionally. Many of these reports cannot be updated in the same way that they were in the past, due to changes in the format of the database downloads. Regular editors are also needed to prune already-fixed listings.
Currently updated reports are listed on Template:Active Wiki Fixup Projects (displayed to the right) and are most in need of editors to fix individual pages that are listed on them.
More:
May no longer be necessary:
Deletion
Non-admins can help keep deletion pages clean by resolving discussions. Administrators are needed to actually delete pages. Anyone can nominate pages for deletion. See:
Possible copyright violations
Wikipedia:Copyright problems lists articles which will be deleted if it can not be proven that we have permission to use them under the terms of the GFDL. For pages listed there, you could replace the infringing article's text with new (re-written) content of your own. This must be done on a temp page, so that the original "copyvio version" may be deleted by a sysop. Temp versions should be written at a page like: [[Talk:PAGE NAME/temp]]. If the original turns out not to be a copyvio, these two can be merged. Alternatively, you can write to the copyright owner and check whether they gave permission. You can also ask for permission using the boilerplate request for permission. If someone claims to have permission, but this has not been verified, you can send the confirmation of permission letter to check. If images have been listed, you may want to consider whether these constitute fair use and write the appropriate disclaimers on the image description page. See Wikipedia:Image description page#Fair use rationale for guidance on this.
Maintaining portals
See Wikipedia:Portal for a list of existing portals and associated projects and maintainers.
Foreign language pages
For pages listed on Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English, the Wikipedia:Embassy member of the Wikipedia that relates to the language the article is in should be contacted and invited to move the page to their own Wikipedia or to help translate it. There is also a list of translators at Wikipedia:translation. If you don't know what language the article is in you could use Language recognition chart and if that fails some language recognition web site to find out. If a page remains untranslated after two weeks, or if someone who speaks the language it is written in states that it is not worth translating, then article should be moved from pages needing translation to articles for deletion. The boilerplate text on the article should be changed from {{notenglish}} to {{subst:afd}}.
Welcoming newcomers
Welcome people using one of the standard user greetings or make up your own. Use {{Opentask}} to leave an automatically updated task list on a new user's page. New users can be found by looking for red talk page links on recent changes or by querying the database. Efforts to co-ordinate the activities of welcomers are being made at Wikipedia:Welcoming committee. The {{Opentask}} message gives newcomers some ideas of articles to work on. The tasks listed in this template can be changed at Template:Opentask.
Main page
The Main Page needs regular updating. Only sysops can edit the page itself. See Wikipedia:Editing the main page for links to the relevant templates and further guidance.
Vandalism
Anyone can revert vandalism. See Wikipedia:revert for instructions. If you see any recurrent vandalism, you can list it at Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism. You can also check other listings on that page and follow them up by seeing if the users listed there have made any further vandalism since the listing. Do this typing the url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ followed by the username. Unreverted edits will still have (top) next to them. Sysops may choose to block recurrent vandals, following a warning on the user's talk page using Special:Blockip, or for unlogged-in users clicking the block link next to their IP on recent changes.
The pages linked to from the main page often see the most vandalism, so checking those pages via the links on Editing the Main Page can be a good place to look if you feel like vandal spotting.
See also: Wikipedia:How to spot vandalism
Current events
Not maintenance as such, but Portal:Current events is a page that needs to be updated daily. Please read Wikipedia:How the Current events page works before working on this.
Request and maintenance queues
Here are some tasks you can do:
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Wikify:
The Magical Bag of Mathematical Tricks, The Impossible Dreamers, Samuel Brewer, George Brewer, Arthur Brett,
More...
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Orphans:
West Ham Church School, Edgar Earl Christopher, Sárig es kit kígyó, Fred Oldfield, First Act Custom Shop,
More...
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Copyedit:
Clock ident, Twitch gameplay, Caffeinated alcoholic drinks, SKS Microfinance, Gabriel (missile),
More...
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Update:
2010–2012 Southern United States drought, Jumeirah Lake Towers, Matt Krug, Congleton Town F.C., Madrid system,
More...
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Style:
Anteversion, The Vertebrats, The Iron Heel, Feminist movement, Ravi Varma V,
More...
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Translation:
Rio–São Paulo high-speed rail, Julio César Chaves, Esteban Manuel de Villegas, Diapori, Lemnos, Magyar Televízió,
More...
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Cleanup:
Farsala Trilogy, Dan Mintz, Šest dana juna (album), Mozambique national roller hockey team, Tongan mythology,
More...
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Verify:
The LEAGUE (nonprofit), Charles Gibson, NI Tank, Osteodontornis, Waterloo Tunnel,
More...
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Neutrality:
Nottingham Trent University, School of Art and Design, Network economy, California National Primate Research Center, Ars Amatoria, Indian Mujahideen,
More...
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Original research:
La Dolce Vita, Petrocaribe, Civil religion, Ontario Highway 407, Magic in the Greco-Roman world,
More...
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Merge:
Gaseous fire suppression, Common minimum programme, Artificial kidney, Upper Rhine Plain, Airtecture,
More...
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Split:
WGN-TV, Web 2.0, Extra Credits, Takashi Yanase, Flame of Hope,
More...
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Stubs:
Joaquín Vallejo Arbeláez, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, James M. Garnett, Alayaya, Eric Ward,
More...
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Expand:
Segment tree, Zero (video game magazine), UnrealEd, Regulation and monitoring of pollution, Imed Trabelsi,
More...
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Article Incubator:
Podaa Podi, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (2011 film), Modulus Financial Engineering, Neenyo, Papulankutja Aboriginal artists,
More...
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Article deletion discussions:
Organizations, United States of America, Deletion, Fictional elements, Websites,
More...
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Article Requests:
Banking in Colombia, Johanna Dohnal, Geology of Germany, Poverty in Japan, Katz syndrome,
More...
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Image Requests: Austrobaileya, Umba River (Tanzania), Utsul, North American Lutheran Church, Corydoras geoffroy,
More...
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Mediation Cabal:
ৱিকিপিডিয়া:Mediation Cabal/Opentask
or Help mediate an open case!
For each queue listed below, editors are needed to:
- Rotate individual articles and projects onto Template:Opentasks (shown above) as they are fixed or become stale.
- Publicize neglected lists or consolidate them with active pages
- Remove articles from the listings as they are fixed.
- Actually fix the individual articles that are listed.
Instructions are given on each page.
Disputes
There are many pages in Category:Wikipedia dispute resolution which could use help in resolving various kinds of disputes. Some disputes are easy to resolve - someone needs to propose or implement a compromise (check out the appropriate talk page), or the dispute is over and someone just needs to declare the problem solved. Many disputes between parties can be resolved after uninvolved strangers wander in, read the article in question and the debate so far, and just give common-sense opinions. In rare cases, delicate negotiating skills are needed to bring warring parties to a satisfactory agreement, or administrative powers are needed to ban vandals or uncooperative editors.
The main page to list disputes is Wikipedia:Requests for comment. This is a static listing, and your help is needed to remove old requests, in addition to commenting on current requests.
There are lists of articles in dispute in:
Initial categorization efforts
See also: Wikipedia:Categorization projects (current)
Images with missing articles
Several pages on the web offer their public domain images in a long list. To avoid checking these lists again and again for matching Wikipedia articles, Wikipedia:Images with missing articles has a list of specific images with missing articles. If you see that one of these articles exists, please add the image from the external link, and remove it from the list.
Peer review
Wikipedia:Peer review is designed to solicit comments on articles that have had major work by a single author, or which are going to be submitted to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates. Articles that don't successfully become featured are often referred back to this step.
Editors are needed to:
- Comment on articles listed
- Remove old requests (instructions are on the page itself)
Make a donation
Wikipedia is in constant need of more server capacity, bandwidth and other technical services to keep it running and keep it fast enough to be useful. Financial contributions to our non-profit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, are greatly appreciated. Please see http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
Publicize Wikipedia
See Category:Wikipedia publicity.
Help other users
Even new users can help answer factual questions on the Wikipedia:Reference desk, which serves the same purpose as a reference desk you might find in your local library. (You might also think of it as the Wikipedia version of Yahoo Answers or Windows Live QnA.) You do not have to be an expert on Wikipedia because:
- You can help people find answers in existing Wikipedia articles.
- If you know the answer to a question not answered by Wikipedia, you can assist the questioner and at the same time, add that information to Wikipedia for the benefit of future readers.
- If you do not know the answer to an interesting question, you can research it in non-Wikipedia sources, and then improve Wikipedia for the benefit of the questioner and future readers.
If you already have some experience, your assistance in one of the many Wikipedia help forums, including Wikipedia:Help desk, would be a valuable contribution. You can help Wikipedia grow by helping other people share what they know.
Programmers wanted
Programming skills are especially valuable, to help write useful standalone scripts, or to improve the software that runs Wikipedia.
See also
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