Category talk:All pages needing cleanup

Cluttered Categories

All these cleanup categories mixed with normal categories of pages are making the categories less synoptic and more cluttered. it also makes the categories less encyclopedic, because categories that don't have to do with the subject of the article are listed.

Can the cleanup-categories be split up into a separate listing?

E.g. at the bottom of a page, instead of:

 Categories: Articles lacking sources from December 2006 | All articles lacking sources | Articles with unsourced statements since January 2007 |
 All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | Articles to be expanded since January 2007 |
 All articles to be expanded | Serial ATA

Make it like this:

 Categories: Serial ATA
 
 Maintanance-categories: Articles lacking sources from December 2006 | All articles lacking sources | Articles with unsourced statements since
 January 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | Articles to be expanded since
 January 2007 | All articles to be expanded

Would be really nice to do that, because maintenance categories are more and more used making the normal category listings more and more cluttered.

Lodev 14:00, 13 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

fully agree - editorial stuff has nothing to do with the content or of-the-minute current content of the wikipedia. 62.178.193.144 21:03, 16 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Article in this category but has no cleanup tag?

Any idea why Milton Keynes is in this category (according to its category line!) but {{cleanup}} doesn't appear anywhere in the text? --John Maynard Friedman 18:10, 29 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

................ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.30.81.125 (talk) 19:05, 3 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We all need to

We all need to put full effort in cleaning up pages on wikipedia. I think we should start some sort of HUGE cleanup on here.Y5nthon5a (talk) 23:22, 28 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can I have my alpha soup in italics please

Regardez-vous the following excerpt from head of article:

This is a "tracking category", a category intended to build and maintain a list of pages primarily for the sake of the list itself.

This category exists primarily as an aid to bots and other automated processes.

Good grief! Who writes this stuff?! What weird Alice in Wonderland logic is it that inspires us to inform people that we create lists for the purpose of list creation. When I read that the category is also designed to assist bots and automated processes, it reminds me of the Australian story about the automation of our lighthouses. The reporter was told concerning the most remote of these, that there was now only one man and a dog there. Why the dog? - the reporter asked. To protect the man, came the answer. And what does the man do? Answer: Feed the dog.

I had not realized that Artificial Intelligence had achieved the point where an automated piece of software gets a cup of coffee, settles down and looks at a page on a computer screen, scrolling up and down. If this is true, then perhaps said “bot [or] other automated process” might care to click the Discussion Tab and join in the frivolity going on here.

Really, WP is full of this kind of geek boy wankery. It is ironical that amateur editors from the hoi polloi can create vast oceans of the most arcane text for what is presumably a “people’s encyclopedia”. About 2 thirds of all the material in the burgeoning volumes of administrative material could be ditched, and if the remaining third were to be put into English instead of Bizarro Unix, we ordinary punters might be able to make sense of it. The main irony of the whole thing is that the main purpose of this page is to assist in “cleaning up” articles, with regard to making them easier to understand.

Just think about it. A user comes to this page, and is summarily informed that the page he / she is looking at is something called a “tracking category”. Does he or she need to know that? No, they don’t. Then they are given the Riddle of the Sphinx – ahh, grasshopper, this category is a list designed for list design purposes. Yes, the door was always meant for you, and now … I am going to close it. Now, whatever this rubbish is intended to mean, does someone interested in fixing up articles need to know that the lists created here are for the glorious purposes of list creation. Does this make the user any the wiser? Does it help them become better editors? Does it not, rather, confuse and irritate them? Because that’s what it does to me.

And lastly, we are then told that bots read this divine list and it is for the benefit of our overlord automated pieces of software that it is presented here. And here I was thinking that it was for flesh and blood editors like well… like yours truly.

It is bad enough that every single WP operation has to be written down like it was Def Con 4 or something, and masticated a thousand times, so that EVERY conceivable aspect is drowned in list after list of priorities and procedures, atomised to the point of OCD alarm bell ringing status. But then at the end of it we find this kind of sheer bull shit. Give us a break. You want users to clean up articles? 90% of the articles on these lists would be in better shape than the kind of geek boy self-indulgence displayed in these and hundreds of other pages. Physician, heal thyself!

And this is no isolated example. Just about every one of these WP pages is written like the Kabala. I am going to see if there is any worthwhile feedback on this matter, and then I am going to introduce a wonderful, wonderful thing – a breath of fresh air, and a couple of concise sentences to replace the ones there. They will read something like

Here is a list of articles that need to be cleaned up. Pick one and do your best.

Won’t that shock the shamans and masticators in your midst? Myles325a (talk) 05:54, 29 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Text added as requested. Much simpler to add than to write the above essay.... Rich Farmbrough, 21:40, 23 August 2010 (UTC).[reply]

Broken Link?

While I was viewing pages that needed cleaning up, I was at Mu-, but when I clicked the (previous 200) link it took me back to Ma- rather than Mo-. 05:39, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

New to editing

Hey everyone! I am fairly new to Wikipedia and wanted to help by moving articles that are definitions to the Wikionary pages. Does anyone have a resource or the time to explain this? Thanks so much! Chefmikesf (talk) 22:11, 28 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]