CANCELED FROM SIGNPOST PER MY REQUEST.
Organizing Wikipedia
- By R6MaY89, January 23 2006
Every day, many hard working Wikipedians complete mundane and repetitive, but essential tasks to improve the encyclopedia: categorization and sorting. This past week, sorting was completed on the stub category Category:US_school_stubs after 3 weeks of changes to thousands of American school articles. Every US school article that was a stub (the vast majority of the school articles) was redefined to fit under new categories and templates based on state and other categories to improve the accessibility of the encyclopedia. This will allow viewers of the encyclopedia to browse schools by state and other important characterists rather than just by country. This is very important to fulfilling Wikipedia's goal of efficient organization to the material it contains.
Hundreds of projects like this are going on right now on the Stub Sorting WikiProject and the dedicated volunteers there need your help. Many would-be-editors get turned off from Wikipedia because it seems as though everything they would like to contribute to has already been fulfilled. If you would like to help out with the encyclopedia, but don't feel that you have the ability to put a lot of time into researching and rewriting, just check out some of the Active Wiki Fixup Projects (shown at right). You just may find that you are exactly what Wikipedia needs.
Stub Sorting was abolished in the German Wikipedia. It is now considered a waste of time and a distration from more serious work such as writing an encyclopedia.