Wikipedia:WikiProject/Best practices
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This page describes the best practices recommended for leading a WikiProject.
Contents |
Main Project Page
Tips for writing your main project page:
Scope and goals
Be as specific as possible: it will help potential contributors decide to join. But leave the door open for new ideas and discussions.
For example:
Project: Communicate Goal: to facilitate communicating in English, and specifically on the internet in the most clear and concise way possible. Scope: many aspects of the English language, including grammar, how to list your sources for an article, how to quote someone, how not to quote someone; NOT: not to be concerned with computer language at all, (so no directions on how to link to another site, or that sort of thing)
How to help
Clearly explain what kind of contributions are expected from visitors. Encourage contributions from everyone, even those that are new to the subject (they can do reviews and check readability).
Tools
Clearly explain what collaboration tools are used by the WikiProject. Depending on the scope and goals, you may want to use one of the following:
- article of the week for the project
- templates: standard text that can be inserted in any article easily; for example: infobox
- Wikipedia:to-do list: to keep track of what needs to be done on which article
We'll be coming at this from two levels: 1) We need articles; And perhaps a start, would be the pros and cons of continuing adaptation of the English language (favoured position) as against 'proper' grammar and punctuation. (refs to history but elaboration not needed) 2) From almost the opposite direction; There are many small but important rules of grammar;The above line is a lower boundary line, being just a tad too trivial and impertinent (sic ;-) )
- a need to show that it is a rule, and not just a preference, or a fashion of the times
- the details; ie. when to use a colon, a comma, and a semi-colon
How to attract contributors (Advertise!)
The best way to attract contributors is to advertise your project in the talk page of relevant articles. You can do that by inserting your project notice template, or by mentioning your WikiProject in the to-do list of the article.
Take a look at some other WikiProject notices.
How to recognize contributions
There are different ways to recognize contributions:
- List of participants, i.e. of committed wikipedians
- Guest book, i.e. list of sympathetic wikipedians
- Report on progress regularly
- Manually list the major contributions you have received
Project Sample
It has been proposed that every WikiProject choose a single article which represents what the Project members hope each article will eventually look like, so that interested onlookers can see where a Project is heading. If this project is ready to choose such an article, please do so and link to it after the Project name at Wikipedia:WikiProject. If there are no articles ready for this yet, you may wish to focus as a group on an article which is close and/or will be relatively easy to research.