Community Portal

Welcome to the Community Portal. This is the place to find out what is happening on Wikipedia. Learn what tasks need to be done, what groups there are to join, and get or post news about recent events or current activities taking place on Wikipedia.

Community bulletin board

Post your Wikipedia-related news and announcements here!

Volume 4, Issue 19 — 2008-05-09 Sister Projects Interview: Wikiversity WikiWorld: "They Might Be Giants" News and notes: Board elections, milestones Wikipedia in the News Dispatches: Featured content from schools and universities Features and admins Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News The Report on Lengthy Litigation Archives·Newsroom·Tip line·Single-page·Subscribe Episode 48: Interview w/Jimbo Wales May 8, 2008 An interview with Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation about recent Board restructuring, BLP, “Arbcom” equivalent for content and more. The next episode will be recorded 00:00 UTC Saturday May 10! To jump in on the fun, join us on skype Onsite · Offsite Subscription · Feedback Talk to us on skype! It's NotTheWikipediaWeekly Next Skypecast: TBD (details/sign up) Latest: Episode 15 (May 9th) Split into four parts: 1 2 3 4

Notices

• Please read and comment on the Wikipedia:Contribute where qualified essay.
• A proposal for a Guidance Committee has been started; please discuss.
• A new essay, Wikipedia:Common sense and decision making has been started which is designed to outline the role that common sense plays in even the most basic of decisions that are made on Wikipedia.
• Are you involved in the development of a major subject? Is the subject covered well in Wikipedia's tables of contents? If not, then access to the subject material may not yet be optimized. See Lists of basic topics and Lists of topics to check the coverage of the subject that interests you.
• There is a suggestion to reform the guidelines regarding gender-neutral language on Wikipedia going on at the manual of style's talk page.
• A poll on whether to change the requirements for granting new editors certain additional rights, after a certain time and/or certain number of edits ("autoconfirm"), is going on at Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed Proposal/Poll‎
• The five oldest subcategories in Category:Accuracy disputes have fewer than 5 articles left to be resolved. Your input can go a long way into improving this backlog.
• Only two Core Biographies remain below B-class: Cai Lun and Sun Tzu! Help bring these articles up to acceptable quality.
• Please comment on a proposed flagged revisions implementation.
• Washington, DC, 17 May 2008. If you are in town, consider attending a meet-up: see Wikipedia:Meetup/DC 4.
• There is a proposal to reform the "In The News" section on the main page. Please visit Wikipedia:In The News 2.0 to add your input.
• An effort for the standardisation of message boxes in image and category space has started at Template talk:Imbox and Template talk:Cmbox respectively; editors are requested to comment on the proposed style.
• Graphics Lab needs people who can do graphics work, especially people with artistic SVG skills, but all are welcome to try their hand at any requests.

New project pages seeking contributors

Discussions

Discussions in the following areas have requested wider attention:

See also

Wikizine · In the media · News · Announcements · Mailing lists · Meetups

Help out

Wikipedia is, by number of articles, the largest encyclopedia ever to exist. However, many articles are stubs, or otherwise need attention. If you like, go ahead, be bold, and jump right in. If you aren't ready to fly solo, you can participate in a Collaboration.

Things to do

• Respond to a request for comment, Wikiquette alert or provide a third opinion.
• Adopt a basic topic list, to help develop and maintain a table of contents to a major subject on Wikipedia.
• Give a requested editor review.
• Can you draw or take pictures? Make a requested image.
• Peer review or give feedback on some articles.
• Make recommendations on articles listed at Good article review.
• Respond to the Reward board or Bounty board.
• Are you good at photo editing? Then try cleaning up some of these images, or helping out at the Graphics Lab.
• Can you use GIS tools? Help make requested maps.
• Can you communicate in another language? There are articles that need translation into English. You can also proofread a translation.
• Let SuggestBot suggest pages for you to improve.
• Update pages with old (ref or note template) citations to the new references format.
• Patrol new pages and help improving new articles.
• Visit the Award Center and take the challenge of improving an article.

Fix-up projects

Here are some tasks you can do:

• Wikify: Don Angell, Sergio Berlioz, Gene Clark, Maravilla, Alhamiri, Backlog...
• Cleanup: Tourism in the United States, List of music prodigies, Harry T. Burn, 1990 in association football, Software quality, Purwokerto, Backlog...
• Stubs: 1928 in radio, Capitalist Roader, Cable box (outside), CEVNI, Ajeeb, Academic institution, 112, More...
• Verify: Language demographics of Quebec, Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, Pirates in popular culture, Pat Sharp, Angel, Backlog...
• Update: British Columbia Highway 99A, Australian Senate, Ansari X Prize, BBC One, Bright House Networks, More...
• Neutrality: E. Lee Spence, History of Latinos and Hispanics in the United States, Cod, Jack Dann, Liang-Jie Zhang, Backlog...
• Copyedit: Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha, OC Transpo Route 95, Naidu, Sorcerer Hunters, Gienger, More...
• Merge: Mendez Middle School, Elgin tablets, Alma High School (Arkansas), Institute of Scientific Instrumentation, Backlog...
• Style: Evolution of belief, CD-R, Gladiators (British TV show), Mercer County Park, Henry V (play), More...
• Expand: Bone Against Steel, Jed Buchwald, 1593 in music, Dan Balz, 1962 NFL Draft, The Artist at Work, 1975 Minnesota Twins season, 4G, Michael Curry, More...
• Requests: List of gelechiid genera: Q, Jonathan Lade More...
• Mediation Cabal: Anti-Americanism, Michael Rutter, John Bowlby, Jeremiah Wright sermon controversy, or help mediate an open case!
• Cleanup backlogs - Review recent overhauls - Active fixup projects - Maintenance projects - Maintenance COTW: be merged

Not sure where to report a certain type of problem with article content? If it exists, it's probably listed at Wikipedia:Maintenance.

Collaborations

To improve the quality of articles that are short or lacking in detail, Wikipedia's community organizes collaborations to expand articles.

Core Topics Collaboration

The Core Topics Collaboration of the Fortnight works to improve essential Wikipedia topics. The current collaboration is Boat.

A boat is a watercraft designed to float or plane on water, and provide transport over it. Usually this water will be inland (lakes) or in protected coastal areas. However, boats such as the whaleboat were historically designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment. In naval terms, a boat is something small enough to be carried aboard another vessel (a ship). Some boats too large for the naval definition include the Great Lakes freighter, riverboat, narrowboat and ferryboat. Modern submarines can also be called boats, despite their underwater capabilities and size. This may be because the first submarines could be carried by a ship and were not capable of making independent offshore passages. Boats may be used by the military or other government interests, or for research or commercial purposes; but regardless of size, a vessel in private, non-commercial usage is almost certainly a boat.

You can help pick the next Core Topic collaboration article.

Other collaborations

Active improvement teams

Maintenance

Help clear up the backlog of articles to be merged! Merging is the process combining two (or sometimes more) articles into a new article, or adding the content of one article to another. You'll need to be familiar with the associated templates. Before you begin, you need to know the details of merging and moving pages. After you read that, you're ready to begin consolidating and improving articles!

WikiProjects

WikiProjects are ongoing team efforts to improve articles having to do with a particular subject, and to manage the logistics of that topic. Hundreds exist—examine the master list to find one that interests you. They are separate from, though may work with, Collaborations.

Language translation

Wikipedia is not just in English. Versions exist in many different languages. To fill in some of the English Wikipedia's gaps, we translate articles from other languages into English. You can view a list of articles that need translation from any language, or, in a few cases, by only one language (this is only available for the more popular languages).

Collaborations by topic

Guidelines, help, and resources

Wikipedia has many help pages, policies, and departments. Here are some of the most general. For a comprehensive list of Wikipedia's departments, see the Wikipedia department directory.

Help

• Wikipedia help – Browse help pages
• Where to ask questions

Editing

• The Manual of Style guidelines and tutorial
• How to edit a page
• Contributing
• How to write a great article
• Where to find information for articles
• A list of template messages
• What special pages are
• Tools for editing
• Request newspapers or magazines

Policies and guidelines

Wikipedia has many established policies, guidelines, conventions, and traditions. This is a very brief sampling of some of the most important; for more information, see the main policies and guidelines page. Policies and guidelines apply both to articles and how to work with fellow editors. For easy access, the shortcuts to the pages are also listed.

Article standards

Working with others

Resources

New user information

Introduction · Sandbox · Help · Adoption · What Wikipedia is not · Glossary · Account benefits · Planning school assignments

Ways to communicate

Contact (overview) · Discussion pages · Mailing lists · IRC chat · Meetups · User pages · Requests for comment · Public watchlists · Regional notice boards · Administrators' noticeboard · Requests for article feedback · Local Embassy

Community support groups and programs

Welcoming committee · Editor assistance · Wiki-adoption · Birthday Committee · Harmonious editing club · Kindness Campaign · Reach out · Stress alerts · Wikipedia awards program · Dept. of Fun · One featured article per quarter · Missing encyclopedic articles

Common procedures

Featured content · Good articles · Requests for feedback · Deleting a page (full policy) · Moving a page (naming policies) · Protecting a page (full policy) · Reverting a page · Administrator nominations (summaries) · Category-based access

How to resolve conflicts

Stay cool! · Be nice to newcomers · Alert others · Dispute resolution · Arbitration policy

Community information

About Wikipedia · Goings-on · About Wikimedia · Wikipedians · Wiki-adoption · Donations · Administrators · Babel · Culture · Games · Humor · Mottoes

Related communities

Tip of the day...

There are three basic steps to building a topic list for Wikipedia: the first is to search Wikipedia to make sure it doesn't already have a list on the subject. The second step is to hunt down every word you can find on the subject, from your own memory, books, web directories, dictionaries, etc. Surround each term with double square brackets, and save the page. Because Wikipedia has become so extensive, don't be surprised if most or even all of the links turn out blue (those are live links, each leading to an article on Wikipedia). Dead-end links are red, but don't remove them, because they show what articles Wikipedia is missing — anyone can click on a red link to create an article on that topic. The third step is checking each live article in the list for links to related topics. When you find one, add it to the list.

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