Changes: Clean-Up

Latest revision as of 21:04, 25 February 2015

Cleaning up this wiki. There is a clean-up log on the talk page. There is further explanation of the mass page deletion in a blog post: Page Deletions.

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.

Cleaning Log

Moved this to the talk page.

To-Do List

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.
Some category pages need tidying up, e.g. [[::Category:Sustainable living|Sustainable living]] needs items to line up better.

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

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)

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 2: / Line 2: @@
 ''Cleaning up this wiki. There is a clean-up log on the [[Talk:Clean-Up|talk page]]. There is further explanation of the mass page deletion in a blog post: [[User blog:Yambub/Page Deletions|Page Deletions]].''
-{{TOC right}}
 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.
-=== To-Do List ===
+== Cleaning Log ==
+Moved this to the [[Talk:Clean-Up|talk page]].
+== To-Do List ==
 * Fix spacing on home page - they used carriage returns because the headings are images. There must be a better way.
 * Remove all obvious spam
@@ Line 18: / Line 19: @@
 * Check redirects for unnecessary duplicate pages etc.
 * Sort out spacing on main page.
+* Some category pages need tidying up, e.g. [[::Category:Sustainable living|Sustainable living]] needs items to line up better.
-=== Templates in Pages ===
+== 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.
+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.
@@ Line 26: / Line 28: @@
 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 ===
+== 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 ==
 === 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.
@@ Line 40: / Line 41: @@
 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|Thinking like a mountain page]]. (Yambub)
-=== Category Spam ===
+=== Categories ===
+Now the categories have been cleaned up (mostly) we can start to make them useful. Starting with the category page [[::Category:Green Library|Green Library]]. There are dead links and sub-categories. The sub-categories are listed alphabetically, which is less useful than other ways, perhaps. Sub-categories could be books, magazines, websites etc. Note that if a book, it should maybe go under books category, and not green library itself, as that would result in a huge list all randomly sorted. By putting it in books category it automatically appears in green library anyway. Need to find out more and experiment.
-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:Clean-Up|talk page]].
 == Relevant Links ==