Wiki maintenance

On Wikipedia there are the content creation, and then there is the organizational work. Content creators should try to do as much of the organizational work as they can and remember to, but some always remains undone.

The forces of chaos must be held back on an ongoing basis. When users add new pages etc. they are rarely acquainted with how to use a wiki, and how the specific one of concern is organized etc. Secondly, trying to get users to correctly categorize pages or wikify links etc. every single time they make changes is a lost cause.

The Wiki curation team Development Team helps with this. This page is a resource for the team and other wiki users including a list of standard routines and practices that are followed for maintaining good structure around this particular wiki, as well as some useful tools to make them easier.

Issue Listings
The following pages are useful lists that track areas for improvement all around the wiki. Most of them can be seen in Special pages. (You should be able to see a link to Special pages on the Toolbox panel on the left side of your screen.) In a nutshell, we should aim to clean up these listings as often as we can.


 * Redirects: Broken Redirects, Double Redirects
 * Problematic pages: Dead-end Pages, Orphaned Pages, Long Pages, Short Pages
 * Uncategorized content (see Using Categories for more information on how to deal with these properly): Categories, Files, Pages, Templates
 * Unused content: Categories, Files, Templates
 * Wanted content: Categories, Files, Pages, Templates
 * Tagged articles: Pages to merge, Requests, Candidates for speedy deletion

The following categories contain possibly relevant pages that need better integration into the wiki:


 * Notes
 * Links

Pages to monitor
The following pages should be checked every now and then to make sure that proper structure is maintained throughout the wiki.


 * Categories
 * Category Tree
 * Disambiguations
 * List of Redirects
 * New Files
 * Recent Changes
 * Under construction

Tagging
The following templates are used for tagging articles that could be improved.


 * Wanted
 * Stub and Linkstub
 * Merge to and Merge from
 * Under construction
 * Delete

Here are other useful templates for managing content:


 * The Warn template is used for cautionary messages to readers.
 * The Tip template is used for emphasizing helpful information.

Useful tools

 * What links here - If you'd like to find out what other pages on the wiki link to a certain page, click What links here in the Toolbox panel on the left side of the screen. This should provide you with more context when making decisions about a page's content and relevance.


 * Watching Pages - for monitoring changes to certain pages

Bots
There are a lot of free open source bots that may help. You need to have the right user rights to run a bot.

Gadgets
Click "my preferences". When we have the gadget feature setup you will see a tab that says "gadgets". Click it to check out the gadgets available on the wiki and what they can do.

=Useful tips and tricks an reading on how we use the WikiMedia software=


 * Capitalization matters. Category:Steam_Engine is not the same category as Category:Steam_engine.  Same deal for page titles.


 * The current approach to organizing things on the OSE wike depends on categorization.

-To put a page in a category, add to the top of the page.

- To create a subcategory within another category, simply go to the subcategory-to-be page, click edit and add to the page.

- Pages can be in as many different categories as you wish.

- Categories are created automatically whenever you put a page more than one page in a category.

The wikimedia software used for OSE is the same open source software used on wikipedia. It looks simple but it is a vast and powerful piece of software with many built in tools and the capacity to plugin more.

At http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Category and similar pages on the mediawiki metawiki, you can find good information on nearly anything you want to do.

user levels
You may be interested in how the wikimeda software does user privilege management. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:User_rights http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Assigning_permissions http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bureaucrat (especially the template at the bottom of the page which lists the different user permission levels)

= See also =

Wiki instructions