User:Felix QW/Kabiryani

Cleanup listings

A great way to efficiently find valuable cleanup tasks one is interested in is the bambot listing, which is subdivided by topic and clean-up area:

Not only are such clean-up tasks useful, they are also invaluable for learning how Wikipedia works, since placing such tasks is a primary way for editors to communicate issues with articles. If one is aware of all the possible issues that can arise, one can avoid them when writing or extending one's own articles. This also means, however, that the tag represents merely an editor's opinion on what is wrong with the article. Sometimes, tags are inappropriately placed, such as a "no references" tag on an article that does indeed have references. This usually means one of two things: Either, the editor placing the tag wanted to point out a problem, but the tag doesn't really express the problem he wanted to point out. Or somebody fixed the problem in the meantime, but did not remove the tag. The latter does tend to clog up the maintenance list, so it is important to appreciate eventually when an issue is resolved and then to remove the tag.

There are many different types of issues that are tagged, and Bambot helpfully subdivides them. I'll try to give a quick (subjective) overview:

Changes since last update

This lists the articles that go in and out of the cleanup listings, and is useful for tracking news without going through the entire list. Comparing the in and out numbers also helps to judge whether the cleanup backlog is increasing (bad) or whether it is decreasing (good!). Currently (19 April 2022), we seem to be clearing backlog faster than it accumulates, which is great news!

Biographies of living people

Issues around "BLPs" are listed separately, which is sensible for several reasons. First of all, they are usually considered more urgent, since incorrect information on living people has huge potential impact on the subject's real life. A second connected reason is that Wikipedia policy around living people (see Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons) is much stricter than in other areas, particularly with regards to sourcing of information, and therefore there are differet standards to be applied when addressing th eissues in those articles.

Clarity

The issues in this section are all about resolving ambiguity. They often require some expertise to resolve, since the tagger was unable to do so themselves, or the sentences in question are written in such poor English that it is hard to discern what they are trying to say. An interesting subset are those around ambiguous time (or place); often, editors are a little sloppy and use phrases such as "now", "currently" or "recently", which unintentionally change their meaning over time. What was "recent" in 2008 is now quite a while ago! Those can often be resolved with a little care and diligence.

Content

The issues in this section are in many ways the most interesting ones, since they refer to the actual content or organisation of the encyclopedia and its pages. Most of the tags are self-explanatory, or they refer to a specific process such as Wikipedia:Splitting or Wikipedia:Merging. As a member of WikiProject Merge, I am sometimes involved with merging articles, or determining whether they hould be merged, and this is referred to by the "Merge needed" tag.

General

This is really a catch-all heading; when you get more acquainted with how Wikipedia works, you may be interested in adding categories to newly created articles, and you can find the corresponding clean-up listing here.

Links

Wikipedia has a perennial issue around link rot, leading to dozens of statements sourced only to external webpages that don't work anymore. There are some standard ways to address this problem, and sometimes creativity is required.

Neutrality

In particular around the Wikipedia pages of companies and individuals, but sometimes also elsewhere, there are issues arising from people writing articles with a view towards promoting the subject. This is often messy and confronational, so I wouldn't advise you to dive into this area for no reason. I think for now it is more something to bear in mind when writing content yourself.

References

You have already been exposed to a particularly arduous referencing task, so you know this area quite well. Searching for missing references can be quite fun to work on, but this is rarely so with lists, where one drudges line by line through entries. A special type of issue is the CS1 error, which comes from incorrect values in the citation or reference template. These are usually very easy to fix, but not very interesting. Again, more something to avoid when adding your own references and citations.