Wikipedia:Maintenance
As well as editing, many people at Wikipedia are involved in maintenance tasks. If you are interested in these, you may want to consider joining the Volunteer Fire Department, Cleaning department, Harmonious editing club, Welcoming committee and the Typo team. This page provides some ideas of areas that need maintenance work. Most of these can be done by any user, not just sysops. See also Weeding Wild Wikipedia and list of things to watch and fix.
VfD
There is a common misconception that only sysops can deal with VfD. This is not the case. Over half of the pages listed are never deleted, so at least half the work can be done by non-sysops. The advice in the following two sections applies to VfD, RfD, WP:LfD and IfD, though note that the lag on pages other than main VfD is longer than five days. Details of pages listed for reasons of copyright violation or foreign language are discussed separately.
Pages to be kept
If items have been listed on VfD for more than five days and there is a rough consensus to keep them (particularly if less than 66% have voted to delete), then these can be removed from VfD. The "this is listed on VfD" notice should be removed from the article. If the discussion was occurring on an delete debate page then you should make sure that page carries the boilerplate notice shown on Wikipedia:archived delete debates to say that the result was to keep it. If there was a separate /delete page for the discussion, this might have been linked to from the talk page. In such a case, you should check what the talk page says and update it say "this is a link to an old deletion discussion" or something to make it clear the article is not currently listed for deletion. Make sure the page is listed on Wikipedia:archived delete debates.
Pages to be deleted (sysops only)
Sysops can also deal with items where the consensus is to delete the page after five days. This involved deleting the page, and its talk page. Check the "what links here" and make sure there are no redirects to the deleted page. These need to be deleted if they exist. If the page is being deleted because it should never be an article, then make sure there are no links to that page. If it is being deleted because it currently no good, but it is possible such a page could exist in future, it is ok for the links to stay. If the discussion was occurring on an delete debate page then you should make sure that page carries the boilerplate notice shown on Wikipedia:archived delete debates to say that the result was to delete it. The page should be moved to a /delete subpage, rather than a normal talk page if it isn't already. Make sure the page is listed on Wikipedia:archived delete debates.
Foreign language pages
For pages listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/foreign language, the Wikipedia:Embassy member of the Wikipedia that relates to the language the article is in should be contacted and invited to move the page to their own Wikipedia or to help translate it. If you don't even know what language the article is in you could use Language recognition chart and if that fails some language recognition web site to find out.
Possible copyright violations
Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements lists articles which will be deleted if it can not be proven that we have permission to use them under the terms of the GFDL. For pages listed there, you could replace the infringing article's text with new (re-written) content of your own. This must be done on a temp page, so that the original "copyvio version" may be deleted by a sysop. Temp versions should be written at a page like: [[Talk:PAGE NAME/temp]]. If the original turns out to be not a copyvio, these two can be merged. Alternatively, you can write to the copyright owner check whether they gave permission. You can also ask for permission using the boilerplate request for permission. If someone claims to have permission, but this has not been verified, you can send the confirmation of permission letter to check. If images have been listed, you may want to consider whether these constitute fair use and write the appropriate disclaimers on the image description page. See Wikipedia:Image_description_page#Fair_use_rationale for guidance on this.
When VfD is too big
When VfD is too big (over 70kb especially), long discussions should be moved to /delete subpages of the article's talk page. For example, if England was listed for deletion, the discussion could occur at Talk:England/Delete. Move the discussion to this new page. Add a boilerplate notice from Wikipedia:archived delete debates. Link to it from the article, and optionally from the article's talk page as well. List the page on Wikipedia:archived delete debates.
Village pump
Archiving old discussions
The village pump needs regular archiving. This is something anyone can do, not just sysops. The content can be moved to an archive page. See the Wikipedia:Village pump archive for links to the latest archive. If the most recent one is already 32kb or more, start a new one. It is often better to move discussions to talk page in the Wikipedia namespace, and sometimes the other namespaces rather than putting in the archive. For example, if the question was about copyright, people with the same query in future are more likely to find the discussion if it is at Wikipedia talk:copyrights than if it is in a random village pump archive. If the question is not something likely to come up again and relates to a particular user, you should move it to their talk page, particularly if you think they might not have seen the replies yet. Some discussions can be summarised into one or two sentences in the Requests for help and comments section of the village pump. This is useful for requests that will last longer than the few days things normally stay on the pump.
Whether you move the discussion to an archive or a talk page, add a link at the top of the village pump in the "moved discussion" section saying where you moved it to, and the date it moved. When this list of moved discussions gets too long, archive the list at the end of the Wikipedia:Village pump archive page.
Try not to move active discussions unless they are very long. Try not to remove questions that have not been answered, unless it is unlikely they will ever be answered. The oldest discussions are normally removed first. Not all discussions need to be archived. Some have no lasting value and can be deleted.
Other
Often people ask things on the village pump that should have been asked at the Wikipedia:Reference desk. These should be moved. Leave behind a link in the same location the question was such as
- Question on beetles moved to the Wikipedia:Reference desk originally.
To stop the pump getting too long, it can sometimes be useful to summarise discussions there. See Wikipedia:Refactoring for details on how best to do this.
Talk pages
Talk pages are useful. 50,000 words on the topic might not be. Many articles have excessive numbers of talk page archives. Whilst these provide an interesting history to the development of the article, they are next to useless for someone new to the article wanting to know what the past discussion was about. New Imperialism, for example, currently has 11 archives and creationism has eight. It would be far more useful to have a summary of these that would be readable by a newcomer. Look at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy and Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion for examples of how the previous discussion was summarised. Wikipedia:Refactoring provides further advice on how to do this.
An alternative to summarising the discussion is to split the archives by topic rather than purely chronologically. Look at Talk:Daniel C. Boyer and Talk:AKFD for examples of this.
Welcoming newcomers
Welcome people using one of the standard user greetings or make up your own. Use {{MSG:Opentask}} to leave an automatically updated task list on a new user's page. New users can be found by looking for red talk page links on recent changes.
Main page
Following the guidelines on Wikipedia:Selected Articles on the Main Page, you can suggest pages to be listed on the main page. Sysops can edit the main page to fulfil these suggestions.
Protected pages
Though a log is kept of protected pages, they should still be listed at Wikipedia:protected page as well, as described in the Wikipedia:protection policy. Sometimes people forget to list them and often pages are protected accidentally, so you can check the Wikipedia:protection log to make sure there aren't any pages listed there as being protected that are not mentioned on Wikipedia:protected page. Any missing ones can be added to the temporarily protected pages section.
Vandalism
Anyone can revert vandalism. See Wikipedia:revert for instructions. If you see any recurrent vandalism, you can list it at Wikipedia:vandalism in progress. You can also check other listings on this page and follow them up by seeing if the users listed there have made any further vandalism since the listing. Do this typing the url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/ followed by the username. Unreverted edits will still have (top) next to them. Sysops may chose to block recurrent vandals, following a warning on the user's talk page using Special:Blockip, or for unlogged-in users clicking the block link next to their IP on recent changes.
The pages linked to from the main page often see the most vandalism, so checking the recent changes to page appearing on the main page can be a good place to look if you feel like vandal spotting.
Current events
Not maintenance as such, but Current events is a page that needs to be updated daily. Please read Wikipedia:How the Current events page works before working on this.
Requested articles
Articles which are listed on Wikipedia:Requested articles, and its sub pages, but have already been written should be removed. Before doing this, please check the articles are really articles, and not vandalism. If they are vandalism, list them on Wikipedia:Deleted test, delete them, or rewrite them. Do not remove them from the request list. It is also useful to make sure the new articles you delist are not orphans. See the section below about dealing with orphans.
Orphaned articles
See Special:lonelypages for a list of pages that are "orphans". These pages have nothing linking to them. To fix these, just find an appropriate place in another article to add a link to the orphan page.
Images with missing articles
Several pages on the web offer their public domain images in a long list. To avoid checking these lists again and again for matching Wikipedia articles, Wikipedia:Images with missing articles has a list of specific images with missing articles. If you see that one of these articles exists, please add the image from the external link, and remove it from the list.
Misspellings
There are always spellings that need correcting. Wikipedia:List of common misspellings contains some common ones that you can search for with a search engine. Wikipedia:Typo is a project designed to co-ordinate the efforts of the typo searchers.
Disputes
If a dispute is over, remove it from the Current disputes over articles page. You may need to check with the people involved whether it is really over if you are unsure. People often forget they listed a dispute there, so it is helpful to remind them when you think it might be over.
By checking what links here on Wikipedia:NPOV dispute or Wikipedia:accuracy dispute, you can see which articles have a disputed tag attached. Check whether the articles are still disputed and remove the tag if they are not. You could help by editing the page to remove the POV issues or factual inaccuracies, but make sure you read the talk page first to make sure what you intend to edit hasn't already been decided against.
Cleanup
Wikipedia:cleanup ... Wikipedia:Pages needing attention...
Votes
Wikipedia:List of ongoing votes ...
Articles to be moved
See VfD, Wikipedia:Things to be moved to Wiktionary and the Wikipedia:Transwiki log ...
Brilliant prose
Nominate stuff. Vote on stuff.