About Me
editI've been doing minor edits on Wikipedia anonymously for awhile now, mostly removing vandalism. I created this account to make it easier to participate in discussions and to establish an anchor point for my contributions.
Wiki Help
editCurrent Activity
editMostly on hiatus.
Previous Activity
editCleaning up pollution in help categories
editI've been reading a lot of the help and documentation pages recently, and I've run across a lot of category pollution in the help categories. At first this was confusing to me as I'm sure it is to a lot of new users. There are many user pages listed in the categories, and I would go to these pages expecting to find some helpful or pertinent information. Sometimes the pages would contain helpful information, but it was usually a duplicate of information listed elsewhere. Eventually I realized that the category entries were erroneous and inadvertent.
The errors fall into several (ahem) categories:
- The most common error is when a user attempts to create a link to a category, but inadvertently ends up categorizing their own page. This error is subtle and it's easy to understand why it often goes unnoticed.
- Incorrect:
[[Category:Wikipedia_help]]This categorizes the current page. - Correct:
[[:Category:Wikipedia_help]]This links to the category page.
- Incorrect:
- Another common mistake is for a user to copy a categorized page onto their user page. Since the copied page contains a category, the user's page also gets added to the category.
- Some users create sandbox pages that they use for experimentation or as a temporary workspace for an article. This is fine unless the user adds a category call, because this will then inappropriately categorize the sandbox page.