Wikipedia:Gnome Week

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GNOME WEEK SHALL RISE AGAIN! June 21 - June 28, 2008. Let's make Wikipedia not suck.
Your garden-variety gnome. He needs your help!
Your garden-variety gnome. He needs your help!

Wikipedia has a problem.

Out of all the articles on Wikipedia, 2,079 are featured articles. 4,298 are good articles. While this is an admirable sum, Wikipedia as a whole contains 2,409,873 articles, and will likely have accumulated more by the time you finish this sentence.

Just how good are these remaining 2,403,000+ 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. The first Gnome Week, therefore, was held from 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 clichéd, if we all work together we can accomplish miracles for the encyclopedia.

Contents

[edit] 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. You can type {{subst:Wikipedia:Gnome Week/Invite}} on potential members' user talk pages to produce the following invitation:

Gnomes, unite!
Hello, Gnome Week! You are invited to participate in Gnome Week, a mass article cleanup drive between October 21 and October 28, 2007.
This week, backlogs will be cleared. Articles will be polished. Typos will be fixed. Bad prose will be edited. Unreferenced articles will be sourced. No article will be safe from our reach! The more people who participate, the better Wikipedia will become as a result.
I would love it if you would participate! - ~~~
Edit message


Starting October 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. If you're not around for the entire week that's fine; every little bit helps.

[edit] Signups

  1. Rosenknospe 14:32, 13 October 2007 (UTC) : I pledge to rectify as many errors, typos, fair use violations as I see during the Gnome Week. (and I'm the first, :p)
  2. shoy 16:51, 16 October 2007 (UTC) : There's a lot of chemistry articles that need working on.
  3. Sure. I haven't used AWB enough recently, time to have a bit of fun with it. Wizardman 17:01, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
  4. Count me in. Thereen 23:30, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
  5. Um. I don't know why I didn't sign up, considering I...started the thing. So. Crystallina 04:22, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
  6. OK. Sounds like a good idea. Cordillera 21:34, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
  7. So I guess I do what I've been doing, only more so. Pigman 16:59, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
  8. I'll do what I can! Yea gnomes! Neranei (talk) 00:34, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
  9. Sounds fun! I'm there... Portia1780 13:59, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
  10. I'll probably work on removing the spam in external links MahangaTalk 05:07, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
  11. I'll do my best! Your Grace Lord Sir Dreamy of Buckland tm 23:54, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
  12. I don't have a lot of time but I'll try. AdamBMorgan 15:41, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
  13. I have no social life, so I guess I'll do this. Paragon12321 03:00, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
  14. As much as I can; I'll look through linked categories. lquilter 03:42, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
  15. BGFMSM 14:59, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
  16. I was only able to edit for two days back in June, I'll finish it now! Marlith T/C 01:40, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] It's over. Now what?

Keep on trucking! Just because the week's over doesn't mean cleanup activity should shut down completely. Vandalism isn't shutting down, and the articles needing cleanup keep coming in. Hopefully this drive opened some eyes to just how much there is to be done. It's an ongoing process, and we need all the help we can get.

The Cleanup Taskforce is a great place to go after Gnome Week (maybe you could clear its backlogs too).

[edit] Responses to anticipated questions

  • This will never work.

There is 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?

We're holding another week of cleanup from October 21 - 28. More information will be posted closer to then.

[edit] Requested articles and backlogs to be gnomed

This page has a backlog that requires the attention of experienced editors.

Please remove this notice when the backlog is cleared.

If you need assistants to help you gnome an article, please feel free to place a request here and indicate what you want help with. When you have finished gnoming the article, please move it to the Completed Requests section. As you fix articles and have them cite their sources, accurate, free of original research, and unbiased, be sure to list them on User:Messedrocker/Stablepedia.


[edit] Outstanding requests from June 2007

  • Queen Mab - I dunno, it seems more notable and important then the current article. Stumbled upon it using Random article, didn't have time to fix it, bringing it here. - G1ggy Talk/Contribs 23:29, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
  • HIV/AIDS in Africa - needs refs, a very important article too. JoeSmack Talk 17:14, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Boar I've visited this article several times in the past weeks. Its still a mess, but should easily be Featured material at some point, Good Article with even some minor fixes. —Gaff ταλκ 01:01, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
  • List of Linux distributions. Tcrow777 01:03, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Canaan - Not in very good shape. Some wiki-code problems, as well as reference issues, and quite long; may require several gnoming and wikification, since it is incorporated from an edition of Britanica in the public domain. ♠TomasBat 02:20, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia:Core topics - 1,000/with problems - Core topics are arguably the most important articles on Wikipedia. This is a nice little list of core topic articles that need a good gnoming, organized by tag problems. There's a little something for everyone in this list; have a go at it! JoeSmack Talk 16:54, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Other backlogs

[edit] Completed requests

  • Word not spelled correctly on following page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal , under entry for William J. Beal it has him listed as bontanist, which is the wrong spelling, it is supposed to be botanist. ....Allen Beal....
  • Olm, may need to have grammar and language checked.bibliomaniac15 An age old question... 01:13, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Special:Contributions/BetacommandBot Hundreds of fair use images marked for deletion by Betacommand's bot. For a large proportion , a fair use rationale is trivial to provide. For some others, the images should be removed from the articles. 70.198.240.139 16:29, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
    • I just checked and Betacommand's got the bot running today to tag orphan images, you'll have to page the history back to June 6 to see the fair use tags. 70.198.240.139 16:35, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Could someone who has British English as his/her mother tongue make the passage "Exile and return" in the article about Cicero more fluid and correct? --Tellervo 10:28, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
    • Has been done by User:Legio_VI_Victrix thisisace 20:57, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

* Also, Emily Osment, in need of expansion, some funky writing. bibliomaniac15 An age old question... 01:13, 12 June 2007 (UTC)