User:Hersfold/Adopt/Cleanup
 | This is a lesson for User:Hersfold's adoption program. You are welcome to edit this page if you notice any errors or have any additional information to add, but as a courtesy, please notify Hersfold if you make any major changes to avoid any possible confusion between him and his adoptee(s). Thanks! |
Cleanup patrol
[edit]In order to clearly and efficiently provide as much information as possible, Wikipedia has several editing guidelines to ensure that articles are kept neat and easy-to-read. The Manual of Style groups these guidelines into a sort of user's guide to editing Wikipedia. It outlines how to properly structure articles, and how to take care of the little nuances of English grammar in certain situations (where and how to use punctuation, whether to use American, Australian, British, Canadian, or some other dialect of English, etc.). Other policies and guidelines refer to how that information is to be presented. The Five Pillars of Wikipedia state that all information should be presented neutrally, and as such the Neutral Point of View, or NPOV policy is one of the most important within the project. Most pages on Wikipedia adhere to these policies and guidelines. For those that don't, we have cleanup.
WP:CLEANUP is a very large project with (currently) the third largest, and possibly oldest, backlog in the project, beaten out in size only by articles lacking sources and articles with unsourced statements. Pages get added to the cleanup category when an editor adds a cleanup template to the page. These templates point out to editors and casual readers that there is a problem with the page, and as such can't be relied upon to be completely accurate or even legible. Editors are constantly needed to work on these pages to resolve immediate problems to help improve things. This can be as simple as doing some basic copyediting for grammar or spelling, or re-wording sentences to remove bias, or in extreme cases completely re-writing entire articles.
While tedious, such cleanup patrols are essential to keeping Wikipedia running smoothly. The Manual of Style and WP:CLEANUP both give details on how to do all that.