Changes: Clean-Up

Revision as of 18:56, 25 January 2015

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Cleaning up this wiki. There is a clean-up log on the talk page.

There doesn't seem to have been any admin activity here for some time. There's lots of spam and irrelevant or copied articles. If anyone wants to make this happen please contribute to this page or its talk page.

Fix spacing on home page - they used carriage returns because the headings are images. There must be a better way.
Remove all obvious spam
Check seemingly irrelevant articles and delete if no good defense
Remove copies of wikipedia articles and other web content. Make a links page (?) where links to such articles can go.
Make a coherent site layout using the menus and submenus, categories etc.
Sort out templates and their use on pages. See templates below.
Clean up the about page, incorporate the relevant suggestions in Talk:Aboutand Talk:Village Pump.
Go through the things requiring action on Talk:Wikia_Green.
Check redirects for unnecessary duplicate pages etc.
Sort out spacing on main page.

Templates in Pages

There are some templates being used in a way that seem inappropriate to me. An example is in the Diaper recycling page.

Most of the keywords or links are not relevant to diaper recycling.
They make the page look confusing and messy.
They could well be interpreted as spam keywords by search engines and will definitely dilute the SEO accuracy.

While it could be useful to have lists of links like this, I think they should be in one place, not repeated on many pages. Links from pages should be relevant to those particular pages.

References

A lot of pages don't have references. When the spam and other irrelevant pages are gone it would be good to go through the existing pages and ask authors to add references they drew from to make the page, or to try to find them.

Troubleshooting Pages

Page Deletions

The vast majority of pages I am deleting are clearly irrelevant, but some are less clear. Here are some reasons:

Page title appears relevant (e.g. a make of hybrid car or an article about mining) but the article itself is a general article (usually from wikipedia) and not specialized to the theme of this wiki.
The article is copied from another site with all the internal links of that site converted into Wikia page links which do not exist, spawning loads of new pages, which are clearly not relevant to this wiki.

Wanted Pages

The Wanted pages special page illustrates a lot of the problems in this wiki. E.g. there are 2,237 links to International Standard Serial Number, which has no entry, and the cache for wanted pages (1000 pages!) is full. This looks like a good place to find where the biggest impact on the usability of the site can be had in the shortest time.

Pages With Script Errors

The Pages With Script Errors list has 257 total pages listed. Most of these will go when the cartoon character spammer has been sorted out, but worht checking after. [Checked, now 200]

Redirects

There are 112 broken redirects, and over 1000 redirects in total (the special page's cache only holds 1000 and it's full.) When the spammer pages are gone this may be at a more manageable level, but should be looked into and fixed. Also need to have admin status to fix my own redirect error on the Thinking like a mountain page. (Yambub)

Category Spam

The categories are in such a mess it will probably be most efficient to just delete all the categories and start over. Anyone have a good understanding of how categories work? Loads of templates have been created and seem to be filling all the pages with links to categories that have little to do with the articles they are attached to.

It's not easy to figure out what's happening with these categories, but it's probably a result of copying over thousands of wikipedia pages with what seems to be some kind of mass url conversion from wikipedia to green wiki, Looking at the latest (relevant) page copied: Environmental impact of meat production, the page seems to have been copied verbatim but the links are changed from internal wikipedia links into links to this wiki, regardless of whether the pages exist or not. This then creates "wanted pages", and it seems like this is what Votaw was using as a guide to what pages to add next. I think the categories generate more categories and grow in the same way. The categories get added to templates which Votaw then adds to thousands of pages, and the templates keep growing. How else could Eco-Friendly Grilling get into a category like Calcium hydroxide conservation?

The question is how can we undo all this?

Cleaning Log

Moved this to the talk page.

Relevant Links

These are places where issues or suggestions have been made in the past.

How is Green Wiki different to Wikipedia? see also that page's discussion for work needed.

@@ Line 26: / Line 26: @@
 == Troubleshooting Pages ==
+=== Page Deletions ===
+The vast majority of pages I am deleting are clearly irrelevant, but some are less clear. Here are some reasons:
+* Page title appears relevant (e.g. a make of hybrid car or an article about mining) but the article itself is a general article (usually from wikipedia) and not specialized to the theme of this wiki.
+* The article is copied from another site with all the internal links of that site converted into Wikia page links which do not exist, spawning loads of new pages, which are clearly not relevant to this wiki.
 === Wanted Pages[[Category:Green Cleaning]][[Category:Environmentally Friendly Cleaning]][[Category:Cleaner production]] ===
 The Wanted pages special page illustrates a lot of the problems in this wiki. E.g.  there are 2,237 links to '''International Standard Serial Number, '''which has no entry, and the cache for wanted pages (1000 pages!) is full. This looks like a good place to find where the biggest impact on the usability of the site can be had in the shortest time.