User:Alba/Workspace/Cleanup cleanup/Wikipedia:Cleanup

Cleanup on Wikipedia is the process of fixing articles that have substantial content but need fixing in some way -- formatting, grammar, rearrangement, references, or anything else. Any user can easily mark any article for cleanup by adding   or    to the top of the page. The page will be marked as needing cleanup, thus:

Overview of cleanup
Adding the   message will cause the page to be listed immediately in Category:Wikipedia cleanup. After a few days, if the problem is not quickly fixed, automatic bots will sort the page according to the date of its marking, its topic(s) as indicated by its categories, and according to any specific problem tags and templates.

The Wikipedia community tries to clean up articles as fast as possible, and has several communities devoted to maintenance tasks, some of whom accept submissions for cleanup, and all of whom are looking for new members! However, cleanup is an ongoing process. As of 08:31, 9 September 2006 (UTC), 17,703 articles were tagged for cleanup -- which is 1.29% of the English Wikipedia's articles. Due to this backlog, articles may go up to a year without cleanup. Thus, if you can possibly fix the problems you've spotted, be bold and do so!

For more detailed information about how cleanup works, see Cleanup process.

Urgent/complex cleanup list
This list was the original means of listing articles for cleanup. Any user can fix or list articles here when the problems require special or detailed explanation.

The articles below are only a tiny fraction of the articles needing attention. However, unlike Category:Cleanup by month, Pages needing attention, or the category list, this page can't be automatically maintained.

Therefore, after you fix an article listed here, remove the entry from this page. Please help reduce the size of this page by removing listings from previous months that have already been fixed. You may also remove listings that have not been fixed, as long as you move any outstanding comments to the article's talk page, and make sure that the article itself is still tagged for cleanup.

Thank you for helping to clean up Wikipedia!