Welcome to the Wikipedia Task Center!
What do Wikipedians do?
If you are looking for a way to help, find a task that suits you, read the appropriate background pages, and be bold.
And if you are here for the fuzzy feeling, stand back and marvel at the range of work that is done daily by other Wikipedians.
Maintenance
Fact-Checking
Sometimes, editors add information without adding sources to back it up. And sometimes sources get old and links no longer work (known as "linkrot"). Your job will be to add sources, verify content, and repair linkrot.
- Fix unsourced statements with Citation Hunt
- Go to a random page in Category:All articles lacking sources
Categorization
Pages need to be put into categories so that the public can more easily find them. Help search the new pages feed and the Uncategorized Pages category in order to find pages to categorize. Add categories to articles with too few categories.
Copy editing
Articles created in a rush often have various grammar or tone issues. Please help fix them to make the article decent for the public.
Note: this task does require a very high level of English writing skill, and is not a recommended task for editors with less than professional proficiency. Editors interested in this task should also familiarise themselves with Wikipedia's Manual of Style.
- Popular low quality articles (top 1000 by pageviews with low ORES article quality predictions)
Random Article Patrol
Random article patrol is a chance to appreciate how good (and how lacking) Wikipedia is. It can be a soothing experience, especially after tedious maintenance tasks. As a bonus, it can be a great training tool to sharpen your knowledge if you're a trivia buff or are scheduled to appear on Jeopardy! Just go to random pages and fix what you can.
Answer an Edit Request
Sometimes, users cannot edit a page because it is protected or they are partially blocked from it, or they should not because they have a conflict of interest with its subject. Review their edit requests, implementing the good ones and rejecting the less-than-good ones.
Anti-Vandalism
Wikipedia gets thousands of edits per day—unfortunately, many of these are vandalism. As a Recent Changes Patroller, you are the first line of defense against such abuse, ensuring that readers of Wikipedia are not faced with vandalized content where they expected to find a useful article.
General Image Maintenance
Uploading images on Wikipedia is a lengthy process and many mistakes are made. Therefore, there are a lot of mistakes that need to be fixed.
Merging and Splitting
Help merge articles by adding a redirect and copying and pasting or help split an article by removing content and pasting it into a new article. When merging, follow attribution rules to ensure copyright compliance.
New Images Patrol
Search the new images feed to find pictures that violate rules and copyright laws and get them deleted.
New Pages Patrol
Some people, either acting in good faith or maliciously, create new articles which aren't suitable for inclusion on Wikipedia. By participating in new article patrol you can ensure that these articles are deleted as soon as possible.
Writing
Expand a Short Article
Help make small articles called stubs more complete by doing more research.
Translate an Article
Article contributions are made in many languages besides English. Helpers are needed to translate and polish translations so that all languages have good coverage of notable topics.
Expand a Broad-topic Article
Improve our coverage on broad-topic articles. It could be as simple as copyediting or adding sources.
(Higher level denotes decreasing broadness)
Create an Article
Create an article on a subject previously unknown to Wikipedia.
Good Articles
Find potentially good articles and work on them for a while to bring them up to a high standard. Then nominate them for Good Article status. You can also review good article nominations and critique them.
Featured Articles
Upgrade articles and work on them for a long time to bring them up to a very high standard, until they deserve to be featured on the main page. Then, get peer review and nominate them for Featured Article status. You can also critique feature article nominations. Obtaining featured article status is considered to be one of the most prized achievements in Wikipedia.
Community
Contribute to Noticeboards
Contribute your opinions to noticeboards in order to have a say in important decisions and help come to consensus on certain issues.
Help Someone
Help a user needing help. You don't have to know everything and you can just answer the questions you know. There is a need for more helpers to help speed up response times.
The Rewards Board
The Rewards Board is a place where anyone can come to either post a task that they want done in exchange for a reward or to fulfill a task in exchange for a reward. The rewards offered are mostly barnstars but some people offer items or money for their tasks.
Conflict Resolution
Providing unbiased commentary is a great chance to improve your Wiki-relations. Instead of debating, you can read the arguments of opposing editors and suggest a compromise that is in Wikipedia’s best interest. By doing so, you will learn a lot about the policies.
Collaborations
This week's article for improvement is:
Wikipedia:Articles for improvement/2024/47/1
Previous selections: Stationery · Slow living · Space Age
This week's backlog of the week is:
See also
| Things to review |
|---|
- Wikipedia:Maintenance – main page where tasks can be found.
- Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask – simple list of article maintenance tasks.
- Wikipedia:Dashboard – for a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests.
- Wikipedia:Reward board – for a listing of jobs with rewards.
Automated lists
- Wikipedia:Backlog – all articles needing cleanup.
- Cleanup needs by WikiProject – pick a topic, then pick an article with a specific type of problem
- Wikipedia:Database reports – various maintenance tasks.
- Template:Category tracker – various maintenance backlogs.
- Special:Specialpages – various maintenance reports.
- New Pages Feed – patrol for vandals and redundancy with existing articles.
- CopyPatrol – for identifying and resolving copyright violations.
- User:SuggestBot – a computer program that tries to help Wikipedia contributors find articles to edit.
Recognition
- Wikipedia:Awards – reward vigorous Wikipedia contributors for their hard work and due diligence.
