Wikipedia:WikiProject Laundromat

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A list of individual washing machines in Ontario would usually not be appropriate in the article on Ontario.
A list of individual washing machines in Ontario would usually not be appropriate in the article on Ontario.
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WP:LAUNDRY

This project's goal is to reduce the number of laundry lists in Wikipedia articles. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there.

For more information on WikiProjects, please see Wikipedia:WikiProject and Wikipedia:WikiProject/Best practices.

Contents

[edit] Scope

See also: Wikipedia:Embedded list and Wikipedia:Avoid trivia sections in articles

A laundry list is a lengthy item by item enumeration,[1][2] typically in "bullet point" format, often of minutiae. Having lists instead of article text makes Wikipedia worse, not better. They are hard to read, accumulate cruft, and tend to wander from list guidelines. They are a prime example of what Wikipedia is not. The goal of Wikiproject:Laundromat is to scrub laundry lists from articles wherever and whenever they detract from an article's usefulness, and salvage usable content from those laundry lists into readable, encyclopedic text.

[edit] Goals

  1. To identify non-list articles that are overrun with laundry lists. As a rule of thumb, if more than about 30% of a non-list article consists of a laundry list, it may be a problem.
  2. To identify entries in such lists that are nonnotable, nonencyclopedic, and unhelpful, and to remove them from both the list and the article.
  3. To identify entries in such lists that are notable and encyclopedic, and to remove them from the list and incorporate them into the article's main body flow, with appropriate text.

Laundromat is not primarily intended to address NPOV violations, poorly written text, or general style problems, although of course you should feel free to fix those while doing the wash. The goal of Laundromat is specifically to search and destroy laundry lists, and salvage usable content therein and turn it into well-written text.

[edit] Resources

The following resources are useful for labeling articles with potential problems.

[edit] Tasks

[edit] Identifying articles to be cleaned

When you find an article that needs list-cleaning, please add {{cleanup-laundry}} to the article or appropriate section and add an entry in this section.

  • Austrian Nobility - The lists under "Noble Titles" really shouldn't be there.
  • Christ's Hospital - The large list of "Old Blues" at the end, and a couple of other, shorter lists.
  • Hana Zagorová - This article is composed entirely of lists, and is 61 kilobytes long. The lists are lists of the songs by this Czech artist. They are separated into many different headings (over 250) and need to be cleaned up immediately.
  • Nancy Pelosi - has electoral history list that seems insignificant and extraneous and the political platform section, though it has headings and sentences, is little more than a list of sentences that could be reduced to a single paragraph.
  • Dead Rising - almost the entire article is a list in some form or another.
  • Wizard (fantasy) - article has been ruthlessly edited, but about half of it is still a laundry list.
  • Dragon ("In myth" section).
  • Coffee - "Coffee Alternatives" section would be much better as text.
  • 420 (cannabis culture) - whole damn thing
  • History of computer and video games -everything from 1998 on.
  • Viral marketing - everything but the first two sections.
  • Project Gotham Racing 2 - Entire article is composed of laundry lists. Which is sad, because there is a lot to say about this game.
  • Usenet - It's still a "laundry list" if it's tabular form, right?
  • Yojimbo (film) - dreaded trivia section. (fixed by Cop 633 on 2006-11-01)
  • Mona Lisa - "Role in popular culture and avant-garde art" section.
  • Gnome - Popular culture section
  • Red hair - Popular culture, Myths and Legends
  • The Triangle (North Carolina) - almost the entire article
  • Hecht's - massive list of locations
  • Macy's South - again, mostly a list of locations
  • Glucose meter - a bullet-pointed "list of features"
  • National Wrestling Alliance - words fail me. But there are no lists on this page...
  • Basilisks in fantasy fiction and games - the whole thing. Also the equivalent section of Basilisk.
  • Spontaneous human combustion - the article structure is erratic and depends on poorly maintained lists
  • Wii - overlong list of games
  • PS3 - overlong list of games.
  • Cheerleading - famous cheerleaders section should probably go. Punkmorten 20:40, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Go Go Gadgetini's, 6 lists
  • Warren Haynes - lengthy and unsourced list of "Musicians performed with"
  • Ischaemic heart disease - the article is comprised entirely of laundry lists, it reads like a brochure
  • Eurotrash (TV series) - the whole thing is basically one long list of (mostly red) links
  • Heaven's Gate (cult) - A paragraph saying the cult has been parodied on television and movies should be sufficient.
  • Quake III Arena - very list-heavy article, needs serious cleanup
  • Quake 4 - overlong list of weapons, overlong list of gaming events where Quake 4 has been selected as the official game
  • Unrequited love - most of the article, especially references in literature and music
  • Bubi - After I cleaned up the article, the original poster reinserted a list of sub-tribes that are not distinct enough to have anything on Google or in other encyclopedias about them, and also created a list of dynasts and kings that likewise is nothing but a laundry list.
  • Atlantic Ocean - I could be wrong, but the way the "Major ports and harbours" section is done seems messy. Check it out, and if I'm wrong remove the tag. Cheers.
  • Ditson Conductor's Award - list of recipient's needs set up in a table. Possibly by date.
  • TimeSplitters Future Perfect
  • Starwood Festival and WinterStar Symposium - sections entirely comprised of long lists of speakers and performers.
  • History of Berlin - article is largely year-by-year bullet points
  • List of pseudosciences and pseudoscientific concepts- Nearly all list, and probably not NPOV even in conception.
  • Roycemore School - list of teachers at the school, with no information if any of them are, per se, notable
  • Aragon High School - Under the Curriculum section is a long list of classes offered by the school (with no information) that reads like a class registration form.
  • San Mateo High School - Under the Curriculum section is a long list of classes offered by the school (with no information) that reads like a class registration form.
  • Global_Energy_Network_Institute - The current board members section is a detailed list which in my opinion presents too much detail in the context of an encyclopedia article.
  • Cambridge City Council, England - the article is mainly a list of all the current councillors
  • First Lady - at the moment it's a big list of spouses of various heads of state over the last few hundred years, most of whom never used the title First Lady anyway
  • UCSB - there are a bunch of fraternities listed there for no good reason. I think they should be deleted.
  • El Camino High School (South San Francisco) - several lists.
  • Fanta - Contains an extremely large list about everywhere Fanta is distributed and each variety in that area.

[edit] Cleaning in progress

When you have time to start cleaning an article, move it from the above section to here. Other Laundromat members should help with the cleaning and monitor it for a while

  • Information security - Committed to rewriting. Added "Underconstruction". WideClyde 05:53, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Nintendo - Cleaned up, but keeping under "in progress" due to heavy chance of revert war.--SeizureDog 13:12, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Trickster - "Modern day tricksters" section.
  • Omega - not that bad, actually. Just needs a little work.
  • Xbox 360 - Overlong list of third-party games. Currently in revert war with tendentious anon.
  • Art deco - Artist lists and achievements go on and on. Help by adding corrections to my reformatting.Homosexual 12:18, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Organ builder - ugh!
  • Summit Preparatory Charter High School - Article really needs clean up. There are several lists of unencyclopedic material like school staff and class list (not a class registration form). The tone of the article needs to change as well.
  • List of 21st century classical composers - I noticed the tag after viewing Recent changes and figured I could help.

[edit] Cleaning finished

After about a week "in progress", assuming things have settled down, move the article here and note a diff at which the article is in a reasonable state. This should eventually become a subpage.

[edit] Projects

  1. Fantasy Laundromat: Articles connected to fantasy and science fiction tend to collect listcruft. For example, fans of imaginary fantasy author J. Worthington Prufrock will know that he once mentioned a dragon in passing in one book, and will rush over to the Dragon article and add a line to "Dragons in Modern Culture" along the lines of "Famed author J. Worthington Prufrock's Raven Darktalon Blood saga has a Dragon character named Euphemistus."
  2. Trivia Laundromat: Trivia sections are to laundry lists what agar-filled petri dishes are to bacteria.
  3. Link Laundromat: Related to Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam. When cleaning laundry lists of links, use Wikipedia:External links as your guide.

[edit] Similar WikiProjects

Similar WikiProjects are:

[edit] Participants

[edit] Laundryrack

I decided to be a little bolder than usual, and added a template analogous to Template:Cleanup-laundry which I named Template:Cleanup-laundryrack where the suggested solution is to convert an ugly list into a table. This frequently applies to the many articles which list software programs where the lists tend to be annotated as free/proprietary, web-based or not, etc. MaxEnt 01:03, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

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