Community bulletin board

2010-10-04 News and notes: German chapter remodeled to meet Foundation requirements, and more In the news: Spanish police pursues BLP vandals, Jimbo interviewed, advice for experts and spammers Book review: Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia, by Joseph Reagle WikiProject report: Hot topics with WikiProject Volcanoes Features and admins: Milestone: 2,500th featured picture Arbitration report: Tricky and Lengthy Dispute Resolution Technology report: Code reviewers, October Engineering update, brief news About·Archives·Single-page·Newsroom·Suggestions Centralized discussion RFC: Should football be WP:DAB'd for all codes when the code is first mentioned in the intro? Discussion: Links to PDF files are identifiable by an icon, isn't it time to introduce this for other non-HTML formats such as Word (.doc), Excel (.xls), etc.? RfC: Should it be good practice to add a "gloss" when adding a reference to an article? RfC: Should users be prohibited from removing a block notice while the block is in effect? Discussion: Should our policy on article ownership contain a section about featured articles? RfC on userspace "vandalism sandboxes". Straw poll on the creation of a new noticeboard for revision deletion requests. RfC: Retiring the term 'meatpuppetry' in sock policy and using 'external soliciting' instead. Discussion: Should featured list criterion 3b, which deals with requirements for stand-alone lists, be modified or removed? Discussion: We have 23,197 articles to investigate for potential copyright violations. We're blanking approximately 10,000 of them with a 'bot. What to do with the remaining 13,000? Discussion: Should the help landing page be replaced with something much simpler? A draft redesign is in progress.

Notices

• The Public Policy Initiative is recruiting Wikipedians for an assessment testing team, to help test out our trial assessment system (a more detailed rating system compatible with the standard Wikipedia 1.0 system). Team members will test the consistency of the metric and look for discrepancies between Wikipedian assessment and subject matter expert assessment. This work will play a crucial role in the evaluation of the public policy project and could lead to valuable insight as the foundation and community begin to work toward improving assessment within Wikipedia. Please check out the project assessment page or contact ARoth (Public Policy Initiative) for more info.

Project pages seeking contributors

Discussions

Discussions in the following areas have requested wider attention:

Help out

Wikipedia is, by number of articles, the largest encyclopedia ever to exist. However, many articles are stubs, or otherwise need attention. If you like, go ahead, be bold, and jump right in. If you are not ready to fly solo, you can participate in a Collaboration.

Things to do

General tasks

• Patrol new pages and help improve new articles.
• Category:Wikipedia backlog always needs attention.
• Assess articles by quality or by importance—pick a topic of interest and grade according to that WikiProject's scale. (See links from article talk pages.)
• Adopt a basic topic list (Outline), to help develop and maintain a table of contents to a major subject on Wikipedia.
• Let SuggestBot suggest pages for you to improve.
• Update pages with old (ref or note template) citations to the new references format.
• Do you have a historical perspective? Articles slanted towards recent events might need to be looked at with a new eye.

Commenting

• Respond to a request for comment, Wikiquette alert or provide a third opinion.
• Give a requested editor review.
• Peer review or give feedback on some articles.
• Comment at Featured portal candidates and Portals at peer review.
• Make recommendations on articles listed at Good article reassessment.
• Respond to the Reward board or Bounty board.

Special skills

• Can you draw or take pictures? Make a requested image.
• Are you good at photo editing? Then try cleaning up some of these images, or helping out at the Graphics Lab.
• Can you use GIS tools? Help make requested maps.
• Can you communicate in another language? There are articles that need translation into English. You can also proofread a translation.

Fix-up projects

Open tasks

Here are some tasks you can do:

• Wikify: Abd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri, Raking the Ashes, Soorya Krishnamoorthy, Timeline of PlayStation 3 SKUs, Affinity chromatography, More...
• Copyedit: Jump drive, Stock duration, Pitoes, a village of Barroso, Mandaue City College, Langroya, More...
• Update: Homeland Security Advisory Council, District 13: Ultimatum, Zeugma (city), AOL Radio, Space tourism, More...
• Style: Shit Like That, Honda Fireblade, Mordheim, Jeremy Rees, Modern US endurance UAVs, More...
• Translation: Abdeya, Al-Arabi (magazine), Prekmurians, Eliseyev Emporium (Saint Petersburg), Church of Our Lady the Merciful, More...
• Cleanup: February Shadows, Per aspera ad astra, Uroboros -With the Proof in the Name of Living...- At Nippon Budokan, Nanstallon United Youth Football Club, Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses, More...
• Verify: O'Rahilly's historical model, Salonpas, Glorious Revolution, Shapash (Canaanite goddess), Fyodor Dostoyevsky, More...
• Neutrality: Edgewater, Colorado, Domestic violence in Australia, National Students Union of India, Life review, 2channel, More...
• Original research: Objectivity (philosophy), George Burton Drake, List of Network Ten slogans, Hinduism in Canada, Bear (film), More...
• Merge: Soffit, Kzin, List of protected areas of Peru, Protected areas of Peru, Sandbox Studios, More...
• Split: Underwater habitat, Bryde's whale, V-CAM, Nokta, WSEN, More...
• Stubs: Jim O'Neil, Interstate 90 Business, Semperoncis, Morgan Knabe, Zvi Bar, More...
• Expand: 2010 Michigan Wolverines football team, Ivan Marchuk, The Seven Year Itch (play), Joshua Hobson, Samantha Lawson, More...
• Article Incubator: Ric Horner, Google Technology User Groups, Swimman, Tau Omega Mu Fraternity and its Ladies' Circle, SE&CR Diagram 960 PMV, More...
• Article deletion discussions: Philippines, Medicine, Ngayong Nandito Ka, Service-oriented Software Engineering, Film, More...
• Article Requests: Tourism in Jamaica, Suze Groeneweg, Banking in Japan, Mayo scissors, Fauna of Kenya, More...
• Image Requests: Imran Farooq, Long-whiskered Owlet, Renault R40, Kulhar, Institute for Works of Religion, More...
• Mediation Cabal: Time, Deshastha Brahmin, List of the busiest airports in Europe, Yavne, Sipuleucel-T, Chiropractic, Genetic algorithms, Rajendra K. Pachauri, Keio University, Restoring Honor rally, Treaties of Bautzen and Merseburg, or Help mediate an open case!

Not sure where to report a certain type of problem with article content? If it exists, it is probably listed at Wikipedia:Maintenance.

Purge

Collaborations

To improve the quality of articles that are short or lacking in detail, Wikipedia's community organizes collaborations to expand articles.

Collaborations by topic

Other collaborations

Active improvement teams

• Countering systemic bias
• Version 1.0
• Spam fighting team
• Categorization projects
• Spotlight

WikiProjects

WikiProjects are ongoing team efforts to improve articles having to do with a particular subject, and to manage the logistics of that topic. Hundreds exist—examine the master list to find one that interests you.

Language translation

Wikipedia is not just in English. Versions exist in many different languages. To fill in some of the English Wikipedia's gaps, we translate articles from other languages into English. You can view a list of articles that need translation from any language, or, in a few cases, by only one language (this is only available for the more popular languages).

Guidelines, help & resources

Wikipedia has many help pages, policies, and departments. Here are some of the most general. For a comprehensive list of Wikipedia's departments, see the Wikipedia department directory.

Help

• Wikipedia help contents – Browse help pages
• Help desk
• Where to ask questions

Editing

• The Manual of Style guidelines and tutorial
• How to edit a page
• Contributing
• How to write a great article
• A list of free online resources for research
• A list of template messages
• What special pages are
• Tools for editing
• Request newspapers or magazines

Policies and guidelines

Wikipedia has many established policies, guidelines, conventions, and traditions. This is a very brief sampling of some of the most important; for more information, see the main policies and guidelines page. Policies and guidelines apply to both articles and how to work with fellow editors. For easy access, the shortcuts to the pages are also listed.

Article standards

Working with others

Resources

New user information

Introduction · Sandbox · Help · Adoption · What Wikipedia is not · Glossary · Account benefits · Planning school assignments · New contributors' help page · FAQ

Ways to communicate

Contact (overview) · Discussion pages · Mailing lists · IRC chat · Meetups · User pages · Requests for comment · Public watchlists · Regional notice boards · Administrators' noticeboard · Requests for article feedback · Local Embassy

Community support groups and programs

Welcoming committee · Editor assistance · Wiki-adoption · Birthday Committee · Harmonious editing club · Wikipedia awards program · Dept. of Fun · Missing encyclopedic articles

Common procedures

Featured content · Good articles · Requests for feedback · Deleting a page (full policy) · Moving a page (naming policies) · Protecting a page (full policy) · Reverting a page · Administrator nominations (summaries) · Category-based access

How to resolve conflicts

Stay cool! · Be nice to newcomers · Alert others · Dispute resolution · Arbitration policy

Community information

About Wikipedia · Goings-on · About Wikimedia · Wikipedians · Wiki-adoption · Donations · Merchandise · Administrators · Babel · Culture · Games · Humor · Mottoes

Related communities

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You can limit Google searches to Wikipedia with site:en.wikipedia.org.

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