Archive:The Big Cleanup

Tester sign-up

Add your name below if you've been doing testing.

• Larry Sanger

Some examples

A complete list of articles that make use of the Article Checklist can be found at Category:Checklisted Articles.

Informal notes for testers

This is not a complete instruction page for The Big Cleanup (yet). It's mainly a set of instructions for people who want to help test out the concepts behind The Big Cleanup and The Article Checklist.

If you want to help test the system, and give feedback, please "cleanup" and add the checklist to 5-10 articles and report back here about your experience.

Here's one way to do it:

• Pick an article, e.g., from Special:Allpages. Note, we'll go through our articles more systematically (probably alphabetically), but first let's do some informal testing.

• Complete these steps, which can be found at The Article Checklist:
  • Bold the article title, if necessary.
  • Remove all unused (red) templates, category tags, images, and interwiki links. It might be a good idea to copy the templates and images to the talk page for people to reinsert later.
  • Add workgroup category tag(s). Note, the checklist will allow you to say "I don't know what the categories should be." Also note, you must use only the workgroup categories listed under Citizendium Pilot:Discipline Workgroups. For other workgroups, that have no appropriate workgroup, use Category:Needs Workgroup.
  • Add (or remove) the CZ Live tag as appropriate. Note: remove "CZ Live" if no significant changes have been made to an article. Removing unused templates, etc., are not significant changes. For purposes of this exercise, let's define "significant changes" as at least three changes in three different places to the wording of an article. Deletions count as changes. Any new article, even if a stub, is automatically "CZ Live".
  • Check the "Content is from Wikipedia?" box if the article is sourced from Wikipedia. NOTE: if this is the only edit that you make to an article, you have to make some small edit in the article text box as well (e.g., add a space at the end of a line--it won't show up). Otherwise your change won't be saved. Doublecheck at the bottom of the page that there's a link to Wikipedia.

• Add Template:Checklist to the article's talk page, and complete the Article Checklist. Essential instructions for doing so are on Citizendium Pilot:The Article Checklist. It's pretty easy.

Here is the checklist template you can copy and paste:

{{checklist
|                 abc = 
|                cat1 = 
|                cat2 = 
|                cat3 = 
|           cat_check = 
|              status = 
|         underlinked = 
|             cleanup = 
|                  by = 
}}

Suggestions

Particularly if you have been doing some testing, please give feedback here. Are there Article Checklist fields that you'd like to see added? Would you like to see new categories tracked? New things to put in the checklist?

Questions?

Please list any questions you have below, and Larry (or someone) will answer them.

What if I don't know what category to put an article in?

Choose the one that seems most likely to you, and then make sure that on the checklist you set cat_check to "yes" (so, one line in the checklist template looks like this:

cat_check = y

If none of the categories look right, then add Category:Needs Workgroup to the article.

An article is not linked from other expected articles not because the links were not made, but because those other articles do not exist yet. Expected links from existing articles instead exist. Does such an article qualify as underlinked? --Nereo Preto 14:19, 8 March 2007 (CST)

Yes, it does. The point of tracking "underlinked" articles is that we want to encourage the development of the important conceptual pathways, as it were, to our relatively specialized articles. The more of these "in demand" articles we create, the more sense CZ will make to the end user. "Underlinked" articles are a superset of orphaned articles (articles to which no other articles link), but reason for caring about the concept is roughly the same.