Help:Gardening

Contents
Quick tasks (under 1 minute)
About a minute
Under 5 minutes
5+ minutes
High use pages
Admin
Table of Tasks
Gardening with Bots
Other definitions
Related Task Pages
Copied from Gardener's Dashboard
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A wiki is like a garden and individual pages and articles are like the plants in the garden. If the garden is not prepared and kept in good working order, no single plant can succeed. The same applies to wikis. The best article in the world cannot sustain itself within a wiki if the wiki as a whole isn't cared for.

Gardening involves an active participation of all editors in the caring USApedia's content.

We, therefore, lovingly refer to anyone who has the proclivity, initiative, desire, and ability to care for a wiki (in whatever form) as a "Gardener". This page is dedicated to the Gardeners of USApedia and provides a location where gardeners can identify and coordinate their actions.

Any editor can become a gardener.

Key characteristics of gardeners:

• Work on more than one page
• Seeks out information to fix errors or omissions in articles they didn't create
• Leaves comments on talk pages
• Helps users improve their pages by appropriate use of templates, wiki links, naming conventions and the like.
• Look at Recent Changes
• Attempts to connect articles together using {{Navbox}}es, Categories, and Wikification
• Merges duplicate articles
• Seeks to continually improve their understanding of the wiki infrastructure from the overall wiki interface to templates, categories, and files.

Quick tasks (under 1 minute)

Double redirects

Double redirects are pages which redirect to other redirect pages. To fix a double redirect:

1. Review the list of Double redirects

2. Pick a double redirect to fix (see example below)

Version history (edit) →‎ Help:Version history →‎ Help:Article history

3. Copy the name of the final page to the right

In our example, the would be Help:Article history

4. Click on the "(edit)" link after the left most item

In our example, Version history (edit)

5. Paste the name of the final in between the [[ ]]

In our example, you would change #Redirect [[Voluntary Leave Transfer]] to #Redirect [[Voluntary Leave Transfer]]

6. In the Edit summary, say "fixed double redirect."

7. Return to step 1, as your time permits, to fix other double redirects

Create a redirect

• ensuring different variants of a name (plural, capitalization, etc.) all point to the same location
• Common misspellings
• alternative terms
• improving the chance that when someone uses the search box, they will find a relevant article

Creation

Redirects can be created, on new or existing pages, in two ways:

• using Visual editor
• in enhanced editor
  • with the Editing toolbar's Advanced Tools
  • manually (see below)

#Redirect [[page name you want to redirect to]]

Example:

• The TOC page redirects visitors to the Help:Table of contents page.
• When a visitor goes to the TOC page, there are instructions at the top of the page to automatically send visitors to the Help:Table of contents page instead. Those instructions are #Redirect [[Help:Table of contents]].
• When the visitor arrives at the Help:Table of contents page via the TOC redirect, they will see "(Redirected from TOC)" under the page title.

Add categories to Uncategorized Files

Per USApedia file guidelines, each file on USApedia should have at least one category assigned to it. However, compliance on this front is limited. Many of the files on USApedia need categories added.

To add categories to files:

1. Go to the uncategorized files list.
2. Click on a file from the list.
3. Determine what main category the file belongs:
   • Category:Images
   • Category:PDFs
   • Category:Videos
4. See if you can also identify a subcategory for each file from the list at the top of each Category list. For PDF and Microsoft Office files, you will probably need to click the file icon to see what is in the file before you can figure out its sub-category.
5. On the file's page in USApedia, click the Edit tab, just as if you were editing a regular USApedia article
6. Add one or more categories using the format [[Category:<category name>]]. S

About a minute

Add an acronym

• Acronyms needed adding
• Go to the Acronyms page. If an article exists, check if the redirect has been created. If not, please create the redirect.

Respond to a talk page

• Respond to a talk page

Wikify

Wikify refers to adding "internal links" to articles, which helps integrate the article into the whole of USApedia. Some of the places to start include:

• Any page you are viewing that you feel should have a link
• A Random page
• Dead end page that does not link to other pages in USApedia

File:Wikify.mp4

New pages

Review list of New Pages by:

• Look for redundancy with existing articles
• Ensure titles comply with naming conventions.
• Help connect these articles with other articles and add links to these pages from other appropriate articles
• Where applicable, add one or more navigation boxes to the bottom of the page.
• Add categories
  • Note that making sure navigation boxes that are going to be added to many pages are categorized might be a quick way to get lots of uncategorized pages categorized.

Recent changes

• Look over recent comments on Talk pages and provide your input on the situation.

Under 5 minutes

Merge articles

Main page: Help:Merging

• Merge two articles
• Merging one article into another

Stub

• Expand a stub
• Create a page, even a stub page, from the list of:
  • wanted pages
  • redirects to non-existing pages

Short pages

• Expand a short page.

Long pages

• Long pages - Look for content that can be broken out into its own page and other ways to shorten the page.

Orphaned pages

• Add a link to an Orphaned page on another related USApedia page.
• Review Recent Changes, especially look a edits of users who have not yet created their User page.

High use pages

• Most linked-to pages
• Pages with the most revisions

Admin

Review:

• Articles marked to be deleted
• Files marked to be renamed

Table of Tasks

Task	General Description of what is needed
Welcoming committee	Email a new user after they create an account. Add to the log of emailed new users after you email them.
Patrol the Special:NewPages	Does the article follow our USApedia:Naming conventions? Take a look at the article...does it have wiki links? If not, add some. Does it generally follow good wiki article practices (an opening summary, then sections, logos/images on the right)? If not, consider working with the original author to move it in that direction.
Avoiding redirects	When you notice a wiki link that takes you to a page via a Redirect, go back and fix the wiki link so it sends the user directly to the page instead of via the redirect.
Wanted Pages	Use the Wanted Pages special page to identify non-existent pages that have the most inbound links and start a short stub article. Try to source your material.
Search	Use search list as a guide for ensuring most searched for terms have pages.
Dead-End Pages	Connect Dead-end pages to other pages.
Merge Pages	Watch Category:All articles to be merged and assist in merges if no one offers any objections in the discussion.

Gardening Templates

See USApedia:Maintenance for a listing of templates.

Other definitions

• For a slightly humorous look at the role of gardening on a wiki, see Wikipedia's page called: Wikipedia:WikiGnome.
• Socialtext's wiki gardening tips

Related Task Pages

• Lists of common misspellings

Copied from Gardener's Dashboard

Pages that Need Wikification

To learn more about this topic, see: Wikification

• Dead-end pages do not link to other pages in USApedia.
• Orphaned pages are not linked from or transcluded into other pages in USApedia.

Checking recent changes

There are a few Gardeners should look for when checking Recent Changes:

• Review the edits of users who have not yet created their User page.
• If someone has not created their user page, suggest in their user page's talk page, that they create their user page

Special Pages

• Short Pages
• Long Pages
• Broken Redirects
• Deadend Pages

Recent Talk

• Talk
• Template talk
• Help talk
• USApedia talk