Wikipedia talk:Cleanup process/Archive 2

Headings on Wikipedia:Cleanup
How is it decided when to move an article down between "newer," "new," "old" etc? Pakaran 00:59, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yes, what he said. Is there a system going on that we don't know about, or is it entirely made up as it goes along? If the latter, then what conclusions am I supposed to be able to draw from the fact that some article is listed as "fairly new" instead of "somewhat new"? Onebyone 04:59, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I just removed a listing from the "very very new" section that was fixed on the 14th of December. So the headers are very very misleading. I'm going to start adding daily sub-headers. This will act both as an experiment in cleanup process, and as a mental trick on myself so that by paying more attention to the page, I'll clean up more articles... Onebyone 01:59, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

New advice
I've just added a large section of advice:


 * It's based on less than a week of concentrated work on cleanup, but I spent that time deliberately trying to figure out how to make cleanup work harder. Thus, there are mistakes in my advice.
 * It's already quite long. I don't think it should be too much longer, and if anyone thinks of a good way to say similar things in less space, please fix it.
 * Please modify it to make it better, and discuss it here. The overall objective, I think, is to encourage people to treat cleanup as a personal challenge to fix everything on it as thoroughly as possible.
 * If anyone thinks it's a complete load of garbage, move it here to the talk page so that we can sort it out and then put something more sensible back on the process page later.

Onebyone 04:06, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Oh yes, and I should point out that I think we need a better-defined process for the following reasons:


 * Jiang recently removed a large wadge of entries to cut the page size down. Most of them had already been fixed, but hadn't been delisted. I think we need more advice on how to delist things, so that most things on cleanup do actually need cleaning up, and so that almost everything on cleanup gets cleaned up.
 * Of the entries removed, some were complete garbage, including some I have listed on VfD and which have so far received no votes to keep. Thus in those cases, cleanup has actually prevented an article being dealt with which should have been deleted weeks or months ago. This is a Bad Thing.
 * If we want to encourage more people to read cleanup (just as so many people currently read VfD), it can't do any harm to have written evidence that we're pulling in the same direction and that the process does work. A fair amount of what I'm calling "my" advice is just my observation of things which people already do, and which IMO work well.

Onebyone 04:16, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for writing this Onebyone. It looks great. I wonder if it might be worth having a summary of it on the Cleanup page itself in case people don't come to this page? Angela. 22:08, Jan 6, 2004 (UTC)


 * If we can make it really really short, yes. User:Jiang is snapping at the heels of Cleanup to keep it under 30k... If we get it right, just changing the text around the existing link to Cleanup process might be enough to get those who are interested to follow the link. Onebyone 23:08, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)


 * Having said that, I've just read your rather fine summary on Wikipedia maintenance, and I think that or something like it would be well worth having on the cleanup page. Onebyone 23:25, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Cleanup template?
Well, as people probably know, a template exists for inserting a cleanup boilerplate, automagically adding the pages to the cleanup category, too. Skimming the instructions and this talk page, I cannot see whether a consensus has been reached on whether to use that thing or not. I recently added it to the G36 sub-stub, for example.

So, should one use this or not? Discuss. -- towo from a host far, far away.

Substubs
User:Mike Storm is attempting to alter the cleanup routine by advocating the user of substubs. see substub and Wikipedia talk:substub He is also being very aggressive on this, and I have reported him for being so; see Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/User:Mike Storm. Dunc_Harris|&#9786; 21:54, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)