User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings


 * For daily reports of deletion proposal, feature article nominations, peer reviews, etc... see Article alerts.
 * For weekly cleanup report, see CleanupWorklistBot.

Many articles are flagged for cleanup. To deal with this backlog, it is reasonable to involve the topical WikiProjects in the cleanup process. Project-specific and workgroup-specific lists of articles flagged for cleanup, across all maintenance categories are in link above. The process is now largely automated and stable; WikiProjects are welcome to request new listings.

The concept
Wikipedia is a work in progress. Not all articles already meet the quality standards expected of an encyclopedia article. For identifying articles with problems, editors can flag them with various cleanup tags, such as unreferenced, uncat, or cleanup, or inline markers like fact. Indeed, a large number of articles have been flagged in this way; about 17% of all articles currently bear a cleanup tag of some kind. In actually performing article cleanup, however, progress has been slow. One reason may be that some articles do not receive wide attention by editors.

Cleanup of articles should, in most cases, best be done by subject-matter experts, or generally by people interested in the specific subject. These people are often organized in WikiProjects.

WikiProjects can receive a listing of all articles with cleanup tags within their project scope. The lists are based on a data snapshot, and are updated at certain intervals (somewhat infrequent, every 1-2 months). Projects can use these lists to work their way through the backlogs, and to monitor the status of their work.

How to obtain a listing
If you are interested in obtaining a listing for your WikiProject, or an individual work group (aka task force, aka subproject) of a project, you can easily subscribe just by adding a template to your project page.


 * Subscribing

Add the template User:WolterBot/Cleanup listing subscription to your project or work group page. Please see the template documentation for details; be sure to specify the correct parameters.

The listing will then be generated automatically. That might however take some days (the bot does not run daily).

In case of problems, leave me a message on |the talk page.


 * Unsubscribing

To unsubscribe from future updates, just remove the template from your project page. This will not delete any existing listings. To delete them, it is probably best to tag them for speedy deletion with db-g6 (CSD G6, uncontroversial housekeeping).


 * Notes

The listings are not directly generated from the live Wiki, but from a database snapshot (see the latest state). They might be slightly outdated therefore; this is a technical restriction that cannot be circumvented at the moment. The next data update will probably be available within the next 2 months; however I'm not sure of details, and do not have any influence on the schedule.

Feedback and suggestions
The concept of maintenance listings is still somewhat new; feedback and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Please leave any comments, for example regarding technical or formatting issues, on the |talk page. Possbile future extensions and improvements are also discussed there.

Tracking
Below you will find a table of WikiProjects for whom I have generated listings, so that you can view some examples.

Note that I do not track statistical data here anymore (percentage of flagged articles). Due to several reasons, statistics generated before June 1 may not be directly comparable with statistics generated afterwards. I may be offering statistics on a project level at a later time.

For further examples of projects and work groups for which cleanup listings have been generated, see.

Details
An article appears in the listings if it matches two criteria:


 * It is assigned to your project. That is, the appropriate WikiProject banner template appears on the article's talk page.
 * It is listed in at least one cleanup category. Cleanup categories are, with some exceptions, all categories listed somewhere in the tree below Category:Wikipedia cleanup.

Some exceptions apply: Not all categories below Category:Wikipedia cleanup are actually cleanup categories, because also categories can be flagged for maintenance, and thus appear in the tree. I've tried to sort these out consistently. If you are missing a cleanup category from the listing, please leave a note.

Note that articles are almost never put manually into a cleanup category, i.e. by adding an explicit category link. Rather, the page is tagged with cleanup templates, which take care of the categorization. For example, unreferenced puts the article into Category:Articles lacking sources and its subcategories.

At this time, the listing includes cleanup categories on the article page only, not those on the talk page. I'm not quite sure whether including talk page categories would be meaningful; if you have an opinion on that, please leave me a note.

For reasons of size (the output is supposed to be posted on in a single MediaWiki page), all parts of the listings that would be longer than 1000 articles are currently suppressed.

As a last remark, the listings are automatically generated, and not verified in detail by me. In particular, I cannot tell why a specific article has been flagged for cleanup, or assigned to your project. If, in good faith, you find that some cleanup tag has been placed in error, just remove it. Also, if you find that an article does not actually belong to your project scope, just remove the project banner from the talk page. If you find that the article is entirely inappropriate for Wikipedia, e.g. because its topic fails the WP:N guideline, you may consider listing it for deletion.

Frequently asked questions

 * When will the reports be updated?

WolterBot usually updates all reports once every 1-2 months. However, there is no fixed schedule as this depends on the availability of database dumps. These are sometimes delayed, or provided only on an irregular schedule (current progress). Unfortunately I don't have an influence on that, nor can I reliably say when the next dump will be available. You might ask at Village pump (technical) to find out more.


 * Can I have the listing for my project generated at (insert custom page name here)?

No. The cleanup listing is always generated on a subpage named "Cleanup listing", relative to your project's page (or wherever you place the subscription template). The reason is that the bot will mercilessly overwrite all content on this page, whenever a data update is posted. By choosing a fixed page name specific to the listings, the probability for unintentional overwrites (or intentional abuse) is reduced.

However, you can easily set up a link or redirect to the cleanup listing from wherever you like.