Fanlore:Gardeners/Tips & Tasks

Gardeners · Tips & Tasks

We recognize that you've become a gardener because you care about Fanlore, and you are already heavily involved. At the same time, we ask you to remember that Fanlore ultimately belongs to fans, and just as importantly, we want fans to feel like the wiki belongs to them. Please keep in mind how your actions could be perceived.

• When making edits, please remember to put a note in the "summary" field, so that all users can see why you made your edit. This can be as short as "fixed typo" or a longer sentence with reference to your reasons.
  • When making lots of small edits, such adding categories or wikilinks, mark them as "minor edits" so they can be easily filtered out.
• When renaming or moving articles, take care to make sure the action is wanted by those most involved in the subject matter. Listen to opinions on talk pages, and try to balance everyone's concerns, or else escalate the matter to the wiki committee. The ideal solution is a consensus.
• Take special care not to impinge on fans' and fandoms' right to define themselves.
• Familiarize yourself with Fanlore Policies, and stay within the spirit and letter of them, or help us revise them!

Additionally:

• Remember that you don't have to deal with every issue yourself. It may be sufficient merely to put a notice box on a page to indicate what sort of editing is needed.
• If it is necessary to delete a page, check to make sure the page is not linked to from other pages. Click on Whatlinkshere on the toolbar. Keep in mind that other websites (outside the wiki) might be linking to the page. If possible and if the page has existed for a while, turn it into a redirect instead of deleting it.
• Select to view only the "Talk" or "User Talk" namespace changes on the Recent Changes list if you want to catch up on recent discussions on the wiki.
• Add potentially controversial articles to your Watch list so you'll be notified if anything untoward happens on them.
• Keep an eye on big changes (big green or red numbers next to page name)
  • If someone added a lot of information to a page, check if it's not all canon information (if that's the case, the page might need the LessCanonMoreFandom template, or some other relevant notice added to the page.
  • If someone deleted a lot of content from the page, you might want to check why. Did they move that content to another page? Were they removing canon content because there was too much of it? Or was it content they didn't agree with and simply deleted it, instead of adding their POV?
• Monitor edits made by new accounts to watch for vandalism and lend a hand to new users.
• If you see a new user (or any user for that matter) create a page that's surprising but interesting to you, or a page you wanted see added to Fanlore for a while now, leave that user a note in their talk page (or the talk page of the article) saying so. Encouragement like that goes a long way!

Regular tasks

In addition to generally keeping the wiki neat and tidy (an impossible task: congratulations, it's ours!), you can keep an eye on the following special pages. It's fine to only deal with an item or two from the list below at a time, and some of these special pages shouldn't actually be entirely empty, but watch for things that can be removed.

• Check the Recent changes list, especially Talk and User Talk pages, to keep up with what's happening on the wiki.
• Check the subcategories listed on Category:Fanlore Gardening, especially
  • Category:Attention Gardeners - articles that have been marked for follow-up. Look through any talk pages to see if the page needs moved, or if other input is needed. Once the task is completed, remove the Attention Gardeners template.
  • Category:Spam - delete spam pages and block the associated accounts.
  • Category:Clean Up - see if there's something that can be done to smooth out the identified pages.
• Orphaned Pages: Orphaned Pages are pages that no one links to. Imagine how lonely they must be! But more importantly, it means that unless someone types in the exact title, they're unlikely to find the page.
• Uncategorized Pages and Uncategorized Files: Uncategorized Page is uncategorized. And that's bad. Except if it's a subpage, since there isn't a decision yet about whether subpages should be added to categories.
• Dead-end pages: Dead end pages don't have any links to other pages within them, meaning anyone who browses there is in grave danger of escaping Fanlore! Don't let this happen.
• Double Redirects: If one redirect leads to another, it makes readers click through an extra page and is just kinda sloppy. Edit them to point to the actual article.
• Broken Redirects: These redirects go to a nonexistent page. Sometimes, it's just a typo and can be fixed easily. Other times, they should be deleted. (See Help:Redirects.)
• Categories: If the number of entries in a category = 1, check to see if there is a different version (spelling, etc) of the same category that has a larger number of members, then edit the entry and fix it if it needs to be changed.
• Sorting: Use defaultsort to change the sort of fandoms beginning with 'The' or 'A'. Please make sure that people and characters (but not fans) are set to sort "Lastname, Firstname" if they have a last name.
• Capitalization: If an article does not hew to our capitalization policy, feel free to move/rename. Make sure it wasn't on purpose, though!
• Write and/or update help pages as needed.