Wikipedia talk:Cleanup/Archive 5

Introduction. Beginning an article with a definition
A quick trawl through the top 200 New Articles revealed ten articles, 5%, where the author plunges straight into a description of the topic, sometimes a very specialized description, without setting the context. This would seem to be about the average proportion at any time.

See for instance JHOVE or Starting fluid. Similarly articles on Bill Belichick and Troy Brown do not actually reveal what sport they are involved with. Or again, the article, Fossil, Inc. does not identify the country. (ok, I do know that Texas is in the USA but it is not always obvious and Wikipedia is supposed to world wide.)  Or another example, Functional leadership model has no context whatsoever. There seems to be a need for another section to Clean Up to deal with articles that are OK but need a quick, terse, sentence at the beginning to state clearly what the article is about. If the concensus should be to create such a section I am offering to help organize itping 06:15, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Missing Listings
The entire listing for June 28 seems to be missing! Can someone please restore it? Jam2k 13:46, Jul 18, 2004 (UTC)

Category malfunction
I am seeing lots of articles in Category:Cleanup that when I click on them, think they are not actually in that category. (They think they are in Category:Wikipedia cleanup, which is where they are supposed to be.) Is anyone else seeing this? It's been this way for weeks now, and I've been unable to fix it. -- Beland 13:08, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Not sure if this is the cause, but I've seen a similar thing: if some page (hereinafter "the including page") includes a template that includes a link or a category, and the template is changed after the last time the including page is changed, to remove the link and/or category, then the target of the link will still show the including page on its "What links here", and the category will still show the including page as being a member. This state of affairs persists until the including page is edited again. (I'm too lazy to report this as a MediaWiki bug, which it clearly is - when a template is changed, everything that includes it ought to have its links, etc, re-computed.) Noel (talk) 19:14, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

WikiProject Grammar
I suppose this is a branch aspect of cleanup, but see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Grammar more about my proposal for this project. -- AllyUnion (talk) 05:30, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Multiple tags
Small usage issue here. I just implemented the new proposal in a page I came across: Tonio Selwart. Initially I put two cleanup tags on adjacent lines, but the visible result was that the boxes appeared without intervening space (they shared a border), and they have different widths. Perhaps the comment in the box "It's OK to use in combination with any of the above tags" can address the suggestion to include a blank line between them, and could the boxes be designed with the same width? David Brooks 18:19, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * I think the best solution would probably be to include in the Template definitions themselves a small top and/or bottom margin outside the bounding box. Also, it would be nice if the margins on the sides were uniform, so if you use multiple tags, the lines on the sides line up neatly. -- Beland 20:58, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Copyedit page
Can the articles-by-date be reinstated - useful for those of us who do not wish to scroll through all the possibilities.212.85.6.26 14:28, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Man, oh man
I realise this page needed a cleanup itself - a thorough shakeup, in fact - but I have to say that it now takes ten times as long to list an article as needing clean-up, and ten times as long to find ones that have been listed. Before it was possible to skim down the page and find three or four items and tidy them up all within an hour or so. Now it takes nearly that long just to hunt down exactly what needs to be done with one article. Sorry, but I'm not a fan of the "improvements". The vfd page was reorganised well, with separate talk pages linked into one main article. The same thing here would have been logical.

And no, I didn't comment when the shake-up was being planned, because I didn't know one was - there was no indication in the article itself - perhaps a little note at the top saying "Organisation of this article is imminent - see discussion on the talk page" might hve been helpful. Grutness|hello? 00:21, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Cleanup pages
A combined list of recent additions is needed - by heading or otherwise. Otherwise it is too time consuming to go through all the pages to find something which one can contribute to.

Also - Wikipedia cleanup page and talk page appear under every heading, including the one on articles of dubious importance.212.85.6.26 18:27, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Clean up reversion
Suggestion:

As Wikipedia is a democratic set up perhaps people could revert to the date system if they find it easier to use/alert others to potential problems.

If the stop on adding new queries by date is a temporary one while there is a reworking in progress, there should be a note to that effect.