Wikipedia talk:Cleanup/Archive 4

This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Cleanup. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

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Ridiculous cleanup request

User:131.165.63.132 thought it would be nice to list Jew as needing cleanup. This article is, of course, an accruation of many sequential edits, and the listing is entirely inappropriate. I have removed it, if only for the reason that {{msg:cleanup}} was not left on the page in question. JFW | T@lk 23:20, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I think this listing was reasonable, and I'm not sure this is ridiculous or inappropriate.

In the last 7 days, the article has undergone more than 250 edits -- the preponderance of them by User:IZAK, who has been adding new material daily -- most recently a section about Anwar Sadat being pro-Nazi (see Talk:Jew for more on that). If you look at the recent page history: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Jew&action=history&limit=250&offset=0 -- and at the difference between the article a week ago and now: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Jew&diff=0&oldid=3183484 -- the article has undergone siginificant changes in content and structure, and I think it has strayed away from NPOV.

I think it needs a few people with a variety of POVs to review the changes and work on the article. If there is a "less inappropriate" place to do that than Cleanup, I'm all for it. Thanks, BCorr|Брайен 23:52, Apr 21, 2004 (UTC)

This should be mediated and/or blocked, but not listed for cleanup. I am also dubious whether the IZAK-related debate was the cause of User:131.165.63.132 listing this for cleanup. JFW | T@lk 00:01, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

My only motivation was to draw someones attention to the fact that somthing has to be done. Sorry if it was the wrong place. 131.165.63.132 09:23, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't see anything wrong with listing jew here. If it needs work, then this is the place for it to be listed. Cleanup does not need to apply only to very new or undeveloped articles. Angela . 20:28, Apr 22, 2004 (UTC)

Hmm. I think for an article with a large number of people with divergent views working on it, the series of changes has been contentious, but with surprisingly little acrimony. The problem with putting it on cleanup right now is that, it seems to me, the last thing we want to do right now is get someone in there making structural changes that might mask the ongoing substantive changes. I, for one, want to get in there and do some cleanup, maybe move some content to more appropriate articles, but I've been largely hanging back because right now it's like trying to edit the contents of a blender while it runs. -- Jmabel 23:33, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Markup (esp. tables)

How do you all feel about cleaning up old <table> markup and converting it to the new markup? Is this being organized already? I thought about organizing a manual cleanup effort by making a group of pages with links, all tied together under the banner of "Wikipedia:Table Squad" or similar. But maybe the conversion is something that can be automated safely? I can see other kinds of candidates for markup cleanup, too. —LarryGilbert 17:31, 2004 Apr 24 (UTC)

There was some discussion of this on meta. There is a bot which can do it, but some felt the tables should not be changed and users should have the choice which of the two formats they use. Angela . 19:38, Apr 24, 2004 (UTC)

dic definition

I've added a couple articles to the list because they were nothing more than a dictionary definition. Is this the right place to be putting them, and is "dic definition" the best way to refer to them? Sam Spade 05:07, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes, you can list them here and I think "dic definition" is fine. You could also transwiki them to the English Wiktionary or list them at Wikipedia:Things to be moved to Wiktionary if you feel they have no place on Wikipedia and can not be improved. Angela . 07:27, May 11, 2004 (UTC)

Cleaning this talk page

How often should messages on this page be allowed to stay? Some of the messages here are months old and have already been discussed. Maybe we should have a rule such as "messages that are months old and/or have been discussed completely should be deleted from this page. Otherwise, we're going to have year-old messages and suchlike here. Anyone else have a thought? Astarael 20:02, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

It might be better to archive or summarise rather than just delete. See Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page. Angel a. 14:09, May 24, 2004 (UTC)

Another suggestion

What if we have a policy that if you add a page to this list, then you should find one that you can fix and remove it? It's not up to me to decide these things, and this probably wouldn't work as I can't see any real way to enforce it, but it's an idea. — Braaropolis | Talk 01:32, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

You could certainly suggest people do that, but I wouldn't support enforcing it. Also, I don't think you expect the removal of one to come at the same time as the listing of one. People are probably listing things there at a time they can't be bothered fixing it themselves, which is hardly the best time to ask them to fix something else. Like when it's 4am. Angela. 4am, 25 May 2004 (BST)

Perhaps you wouldn't need to necessarily remove something at the same time as you add something...you would just come back later and remove something. Because by all accounts the Cleanup page is rather massive. If someone removed something for every time they added something, then the page would never get bigger, would it? And if you look at the page history, a vast majority of the edits are adding to the page, while only a few people ever bother to remove anything. And you wouldn't have to fix something, if you could find something that someone fixed that you could remove. Sorry if I'm being troublesome, but I always have plenty of ideas about pretty much everything on this site if anyone wants to hear them. — Braaropolis | Talk 04:26, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't think you're being troublesome; I think it's a good idea to suggest this somewhere, probably in the intro to the page. Angela . 11:39, May 26, 2004 (UTC)

Cleanup Category

Why don't we make a cleanup category. Pages needing cleanup would be put in the cleanup category. They would automatically show up on the cleanup page, and once they were cleaned up, they would be removed from the cleanup category, automatically removing them from the cleanup page. Pages would no longer be sorted by the date they were added to cleanup, but how important is that really? --Caliper 04:51, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Pretty important if one reads Cleanup regularly. Without sorting by date, one needs to consult the history or muddle through a (mostly) aplhabetized list to try to figure out what's been added since one last checked Cleanup. Plus, Category listings don't add context for what needs to be done; listings on Cleanup do (well, usually). -Sean Curtin 05:00, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

That's a good point, but we could simply write what needs to be done on the talk page so people would could look there. That's no more difficult. --Caliper 05:15, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It does divide things betwen two pages, though: the category and the talk page. If you've got a Category on your watchlist, you aren't informed if anything is added to or removed from the category. If the information about the pages needing cleanup is on the talk page, nobody's going to check the Category page first, which removes the whole point of creating a cateory. -Sean Curtin 07:10, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I think enough pages are added to Cleanup that you can assume if you havn't checked Wikipedia for an entire hour (God forbid) there will be something new. As for splitting it up into two pages, I don't think that's a problem; it would simply make the cleanup page neater. But if nobody weighs in on my side soon, I'll drop the issue. --Caliper 18:05, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Lots of cleanup articles contain the {{cleanup}} template, so I went ahead and added the category there. They'll eventually show up. Or, at least, new ones will. It would still be a good idea to add reasons to the cleanup page. --ssd 05:37, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

{{cleanup}} is now ONLY putting the articles into the Cleanup category. The comment that used to go on the top of the pages is missing. Please restore this. Rick K 06:27, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)

Someone explained to me at the bottom of my talk page that it has been decided that the {{cleanup}} tag is no longer going to be used. I'm not sure who decided this, where it was decided, or why the decision was made, but... yea. --Caliper 06:35, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Where is the source for {{cleanup}} ? How can I edit that if I need to? Rick K 06:45, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)

It's at Template:Cleanup. If you see a message like {{whatever}}, it will be editable at either [[MediaWiki:whatever]] or [[Template:whatever]] (usually MediaWiki: for the interface and Template: for user-created messages). Angela . 01:57, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Spam Filter?

When I attempted a save just now, I received a message that "the spam filter" will not let me save. When someone has sorted this out, will you please move the following to the page itself? Thanks. -- Jmabel 18:29, Jun 18, 2004 (UTC)

Grow (game) - Was on Vfd, no consensus was reached on deletion, but consensus was reached that if it is to be kept it needs work. See its talk page for details. -- Jmabel 18:29, Jun 18, 2004 (UTC)

I've copied this to the page and replied to the spam filter problem at Wikipedia talk:Village pump. Angela . 05:23, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Cleanup Crisis

There's getting to be a slight Wikipedia:Cleanup crisis, not least because the many hundreds of wretched articles uncovered by User:Topbanana/Reports such as User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains no links are coming to the surface and being added to Wikipedia:Cleanup probably faster than they're being cleared up. All additional contributions to the cleanup and removal from Wikipedia:Cleanup of items which have been sorted, is most humbly sought. (It's okay - only handsfull are being added; most are sorted out without recourse to a cleanup listing.) --Tagishsimon

Perhaps it would help if you had an automatically maintained alphabeized list that has entries automatically added and removed when the cleanup notice is added and removed? If you'd like that, just get someone to add Category:Cleanup to Template:cleanup and it's there! I would have done that this morning, except that the template article seems to be stuck. --ssd 22:38, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The cleanup message is though seldomly used, and I am among those who very seldomly put {cleanup} on the pages I list. There are several reasons for this, one is that it's often obvious that an article needs cleaup. ✏ Sverdrup 23:00, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia has an enormous amount of unwikified, truly poorly written articles, and they're being added with an increasing rate. I think we should have a monthly great cleanup day. On the great cleanup day, everybody should put petty talk page arguments and original article-writing to the side and instead work frenetically to get as many pages off cleanup as possible. Fredrik (talk) 23:30, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I second that. blankfaze | ?? 08:25, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea as well. Now that the template has Category:Cleanup in it, at the end of your month, we'll have a nice long list to work on. Assuming, that is, people don't wipe out the list before the month is over. 8-> --ssd 11:23, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

That's a good idea. Don't know how well it would work, but worth a shot. [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 13:00, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've been rather busy recently, but once I begin to have some more free time on my hands, I pledge to go through and clean up as many articles that are on Cleanup as I can :) Dysprosia 05:50, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I do a daily cleaning of Cleanup, checking each article after a week, two weeks, a month, and two months to see if it has been adequately dealt with. Before I started this in early March, Cleanup was over 90KB in size. After a throughout scouring it was brought down to less than 32KB and since March has been slowly growing and is now about 52KB. This is still much smaller than it was for the first months of this year, and I think we can wait for a while before another overhaul of the system is needed. Far worse is Pages Needing Attention, this page is massive and gets little attention. Much of what is on it has already been fixed, but the rest are pages in great need of aid, but very often people with specific expertise are needed. - SimonP 14:14, Jun 18, 2004 (UTC)

SimonP, your link to "Pages Needing Attention" above goes to an article on "Peptide nucleic acid". The correct page (as of this writing) is Wikipedia:Pages needing attention. I didn't boldly change it myself because I don't know the history of these pages, but I thought you (and anyone reading this) should know. -- Jeff Q 16:38, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

My own practice agree with those of ✏ Sverdrup. Indeed I've never linked an article to Cleanup, though I could easily add a hundred or more that I know of in areas that I know well that contain gross inaccuracies or which contain information I think of dubious validity, are very POV, or just very poor. So I fix up what I can but most fixups lead to me discovering even more bad articles when I start checking links to the articles I fix up, far more than I can handle quickly. Some articles take a lot of time to clean up. Perhaps we should all start adding every such article to Cleanup and and declare a moritorium on all new articles until the Cleanup queue is empty? jallan 18:49, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Whatever happened to Limit comments to a few words only? Charles Matthews 10:09, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I Cleaned Up the Too Short Article

but it's still a stub.

--BKHal2007 03:15, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)BKHal2007

Reducing the size of the page

How about moving articles over a month old to a subpage? This page is huge and frequently accessed - a bad combo. ··gracefool |☺ 08:21, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I moved your comment to the bottom of the page, because otherwise it'd get buried amidst a pile of old comments (hope you don't mind!). I think it'd be wise to keep it as it is for the moment, unless we start to get strange things happening, as with VFD (and to a lesser extent, FAC). The process seems to work pretty well, with most things placed here getting cleaned up eventually. My main problem with archiving things after a month is that it'd overwhelm the Leftovers page (which, at the moment, is able to be kept relatively under control) - and thus lead to less articles being cleaned up. Ambi 09:11, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Having a page which is hard to edit in most browsers (and slow to edit in all browsers) also leads to less articles being cleaned up. ··gracefool |☺ 23:17, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Use of the Cleanup category

The Cleanup category addition was a good idea, IMO, but has caused a division of articles that need cleanup into those listed in this page /vs/ those listed on the Cleanup category page. As an ordinary editor interested in cleaning up, it's not clear to me whether I should be reading this page, or the Cleanup category page; and as an ordinary editor who wants to add the Cleanup tag to an article, it's not clear whether just adding the tag (and some notes on that article's Discussion page) is sufficient, or whether I also have to come here and add it to the list. Tempshill 23:56, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Archived

Just so everyone knows, I have archived this page again, up to April 12th. It can all be found on Wikipedia talk:Cleanup/archive3. — Braaropolis | Talk 03:33, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Cleanup splitup.

Due to the cleanup page getting really huge (was 139kb), I have now split cleanup up by month. The previous months July and August are now in their own subpages. Norm 01:41, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Even without acceleration of work on individual entries, it is reasonable to hope that that will keep us under 32K -- until about next weekend. (I.e., Aug 29, 30, and 31, thru the beginnings of the 8th, add up to 31 KB as of this hour; so the current scheme exceeds 32 KB around the 11th or 12th, Saturday or Sunday.)

3-day-block scheme: Move entries out to "start of Sept" (or whatever current month) page on a 3-day cycle:
- one 3-day block every 3 days at midnite UTC normally,
- two 3-day blocks on the 3rd day when necessary, and
- skip moving any until 6th day if the headroom gets comfy enough;
- This would probably let us keep at least 9 days on the main page most of the time, and at least 6 days all the time.
4-day-block scheme: Move entries out to "start of current month" page on a 4-day cycle:
- one 4-day block every 4 days normally,
- two 4-day blocks on the 4rd day when necessary, and
- skip moving any until 8th day if the headroom gets comfy enough;
- This would probably let us keep at least 8 days on the main page most of the time, and at least 4 days all the time.
Aug is 71 KB and July is 35; IMO, those are tolerable, since the traffic on them is surely much less. But there could be a demand for breaking even past months into 10-day pages. (And 8 times a year, one 11-day one.)
In implementing any non-panic-mode scheme, it helps to realize that you can still quickly determine the size of the page when it's less than the high 20s:
- Click on edit (whole page, not section)
- Copy the whole page's Wiki-markup.
- Paste a second copy after the first.
- Preview the edit.
- Divide the size given by 2.
- Close the window, or back up to viewing the page, without saving it.

--Jerzy (t) 07:25, 2004 Sep 8 (UTC)

35 KB just now. --Jerzy (t) 00:13, 2004 Sep 12 (UTC)

Daily reorganization

It seems like this page gets reogranized daily. Whenever somebody DOES reorg the page, please make sure to edit the Template:Cleanup so that the edit link goes to the right section of the page. Rick K 22:27, Sep 9, 2004 (UTC)

Should I bother anymore?

Following links through various articles I came to a page, Kaikohe. It had on it {{cleanup}}. Sure enough, it needed a fair bit of attention, so I duly improved it as requested, and added some information I ferreted out myself. I also removed the template as requested, and saved the page. Then I went to Cleanup to remove the listing for Kaikohe and shock horror, discovered the following *Kaikohe - New Zealand place, needs wikifying and copy editing & checking for copyvio. Well hell, after my efforts I'm not too enthused about finding it hadn't already been checked for copyvio. Why doesn't the template make it clear copyvio needs to be checked? In fact, why didn't the person who listed the article on cleanup check it out before listing it anyway? Mutter mutter. Moriori 03:04, Sep 29, 2004 (UTC)