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Welcome to the Wikipedia Task Center!
What do Wikipedians do?
If you are looking for a way to help, find a task that suits you, read the appropriate background pages, and be bold.
And if you are here for the fuzzy feeling, stand back and marvel at the range of work that is done daily by other Wikipedians.
Sometimes, editors add information without adding sources to back it up. And sometimes sources get old and links no longer work (known as "linkrot"). Your job will be to add sources, verify content, and repair linkrot.
Pages need to be put into categories so that the public can more easily find them. Help search the new pages feed and the Uncategorized Pages category in order to find pages to categorize. Add categories to articles with too few categories.
Articles created in a rush often have various grammar or tone issues. Please help fix them to make the article decent for the public.
Note: this task does require a very high level of English writing skill, and is not a recommended task for editors with less than professional proficiency. Editors interested in this task should also familiarise themselves with Wikipedia's Manual of Style.
Random article patrol is a chance to appreciate how good (and how lacking) Wikipedia is. It can be a soothing experience, especially after tedious maintenance tasks. As a bonus, it can be a great training tool to sharpen your knowledge if you're a trivia buff or are scheduled to appear on Jeopardy! Just go to random pages and fix what you can.
Sometimes, users cannot edit a page because it is protected or they are partially blocked from it, or they should not because they have a conflict of interest with its subject. Review their edit requests, implementing the good ones and rejecting the less-than-good ones.
Wikipedia gets thousands of edits per day—unfortunately, many of these are vandalism. As a Recent Changes Patroller, you are the first line of defense against such abuse, ensuring that readers of Wikipedia are not faced with vandalized content where they expected to find a useful article.
Uploading images on Wikipedia is a lengthy process and many mistakes are made. Therefore, there are a lot of mistakes that need to be fixed.
Help merge articles by adding a redirect and copying and pasting or help split an article by removing content and pasting it into a new article. When merging, follow attribution rules to ensure copyright compliance.
Search the new images feed to find pictures that violate rules and copyright laws and get them deleted.
Some people, either acting in good faith or maliciously, create new articles which aren't suitable for inclusion on Wikipedia. By participating in new article patrol you can ensure that these articles are deleted as soon as possible.
Help make small articles called stubs more complete by doing more research.
Article contributions are made in many languages besides English. Helpers are needed to translate and polish translations so that all languages have good coverage of notable topics.
Improve our coverage on broad-topic articles. It could be as simple as copyediting or adding sources.
(Higher level denotes decreasing broadness)
Create an article on a subject previously unknown to Wikipedia.
Find potentially good articles and work on them for a while to bring them up to a high standard. Then nominate them for Good Article status. You can also review good article nominations and critique them.
Upgrade articles and work on them for a long time to bring them up to a very high standard, until they deserve to be featured on the main page. Then, get peer review and nominate them for Featured Article status. You can also critique feature article nominations. Obtaining featured article status is considered to be one of the most prized achievements in Wikipedia.
Contribute your opinions to noticeboards in order to have a say in important decisions and help come to consensus on certain issues.
Help a user needing help. You don't have to know everything and you can just answer the questions you know. There is a need for more helpers to help speed up response times.
The Rewards Board is a place where anyone can come to either post a task that they want done in exchange for a reward or to fulfill a task in exchange for a reward. The rewards offered are mostly barnstars but some people offer items or money for their tasks.
Providing unbiased commentary is a great chance to improve your Wiki-relations. Instead of debating, you can read the arguments of opposing editors and suggest a compromise that is in Wikipedia’s best interest. By doing so, you will learn a lot about the policies.
This week's backlog of the week is:
Things to review |
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Automated lists
Recognition