Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Tools

Here are some of the must-have tools for dealing with Vital Articles. Most tools are available only to registered users due to the use of the common.js page.

Proofreading and copyediting

This list is forked from Wikipedia:User scripts/List#Copy editing. To install them, go to your common.js page and paste their respective importScript.

User:Ohconfucius/script/Common Terms – Delink common terms
User:Ohconfucius/dashes – Format dashes (- – —) per Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Dashes.
User:GorillaWarfare/script/curlies – convert “ ” ‘ ’ to " " ' ' per Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation characters
User:Ohconfucius/EngvarB – convert to a single spelling variety of English per Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English
User:Ohconfucius/script/MOSNUM dates – convert dates to a single format (DMY, MDY, etc.) per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers
Preferences tab > Gadgets > Display links to disambiguation pages in orange — This gadget highlights disambiguation pages in orange, which is useful for catching erroneous wikilinks.

References

These two tools are essential for quickly finding unreliable sources in Vital lists: User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen (appear as icons) and User:Headbomb/unreliable (appear as highlights). They are very easy to use and install: just paste importScript( 'User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen.js]] or importScript( 'User:Headbomb/unreliable.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Headbomb/unreliable.js]] respectively to your common.js page. Although these tools serve the same purpose, they fetch from different lists and thus is useful to use in bundle with each other. See the guides above for further instructions.
- The more the merrier! User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/CiteHighlighter does a similar function to the above: install using importScript('User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/CiteHighlighter.js'); // Backlink: [[User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/CiteHighlighter.js]]
User:BrandonXLF/CitationStyleMarker is a tool that helps highlighting similarly-looking citations that uses different underlying templates (CS1, CS2, CSVAN, CSLSA). This is useful if you want the pages to satisfy consistent citations featured article criterion.
Most probably know about these, but it doesn't hurt to list them: Google Books and Google Scholar. If you don't know either of these, try them! They're a godsend.
If you have registered your account 6 months ago (26 June 2024), cumulatively made 500+ edits, and in last month made 10+ edits, you are eligible for using Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library (direct link). The library would provide you access to paywalled-sources, the most useful of which are JSTOR, ProQuest and Wiley. There are more sources that you can apply to, however, they are restricted and may be so full that your application would be waitlisted.

Copyrights and authorship

WikiBlame is used to find additions or removal of text, by typing it at Search for input box. Unlike many of the above tools, it can be very easily accessed at an article's "View history" tab, in "External tools:" section listed as "Find addition/removal". Launching the tool this way would also help you save time by prefilling some of the input boxes. A more comprehensive manual can be found at User:Flominator/WikiBlame.
Earwig's Copyvio Detector is used to find contents that have been illegally copied from other websites. On Wikipedia, contents need to either be from a freely-licensed source (e.g. NASA) or written by ourselves, as Wikipedia's content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. If you want to read more about the issue, Wikipedia:Copyright violations is for you. The tool is very simple to use as you just need to type the article's title at "Page title:" input box and press Submit.

PetScan

WP:PetScan (direct link), used for scanning and filtering articles within a category, such as those in Category:All Wikipedia vital articles. This is a fairly technical tool to use though, but once you get the hang of it, PetScan is very useful to identify Vital articles for improvement. PetScan manual is available at meta:PetScan/en.

Extracting a list of articles in a specific Vital level:
1. At the "Categories" big input box, paste All Wikipedia level-X vital articles, replacing X with the level‎ that you desire. (The parent list of all of the levels can be found at Category:All Wikipedia vital articles by level)
2. Make sure that "Language" input is set to en (English), and "Project" is set to wikipedia. This is usually filled out by the tool already but it never hurts to check again.
3. Set "Depth" to 5. This will ensure that the tool scans deep to the sub-categories, hence the name.
4. Go to the "Page properties" tab at the top of the page. At the "Namespaces" section, tick the checkbox that said Talk. Because the categories are tagged at the article's talk page, this will ensure that the tool will properly read the input.
5. Go to the "Other sources" tab at the top. At the "Namespaces" section, tick the circle box that said Change to page/topic. This is done so that output to be the articles themselves, not their talk page.
6. Optional: Go to the "Output" tab at the top. Choose the options at the "Format", "Sort", "Sort order", etc. sections as you so desire.
7. Now scroll down and click on the Do it! button. The page will reload as it fetches the category. When the page is fully loaded, scroll down a bit to see the page list.

Get list of pages in the level 3 Vital list that have one or more specific templates (e.g. {{More citations needed}}, {{WikiProject Spaceflight}}). This guide is similar to the first guide, albeit with some changes.
1. At the "Categories" big input box, paste All Wikipedia level-3 vital articles.
2. Make sure that "Language" input is set to en (English), and "Project" is set to wikipedia.
3. Set "Depth" to 5.
4. Go to the "Page properties" tab at the top of the page. At the "Namespaces" section, tick the checkbox that said Talk.
5. Go to the "Templates&Links" tab at the top of the page.
6. At the "Templates" section, paste the exact name of the template without the Template: to a respective input box.
7. Depending on where the templates are placed, tick the checkbox "Use talk pages instead" accordingly. For example, because {{More citations needed}} is tagged directly in the article, the checkbox should be left blank. However, {{WikiProject Spaceflight}} is tagged at the article's talk page, so the checkbox should be ticked.
8. Go to the "Other sources" tab at the top. At the "Namespaces" section, tick the circle box that said Change to page/topic.
9. Optional: Go to the "Output" tab at the top. Choose the options at the "Format", "Sort", "Sort order", etc. sections as you so desire.
10. Now scroll down and click on the Do it! button. Scroll down again to see the list.

Get list of pages that has a page size of less than 30 kilobytes (as done for the WP:30 kB drive):
1. At the "Categories" big input box, paste All Wikipedia level-3 vital articles.
2. Make sure that "Language" input is set to en (English), and "Project" is set to wikipedia.
3. Set "Depth" to 5.
4. Go to the "Page properties" tab at the top of the page. At the "Namespaces" section, tick the checkbox that said Talk.
5. Go to the "Other sources" tab at the top. At the "Namespaces" section, tick the circle box that said Change to page/topic.
6. Go to the "Output" tab at the top. At the "Sort" section, tick the circle box that said by size, and at the "Sort order", tick ascending. Because I want to port the result to wikipedia, at "Format" section I ticked Wiki for the wikitable.
7. Scroll down and click on the Do it! button.
8. Press Ctrl+A for Windows or ⌘ Cmd+A on Mac to select all, and Ctrl+C or ⌘ Cmd+C to copy everything.
9. Now go to a page, create source, press Ctrl+V or ⌘ Cmd+V to paste the table, and click on the pen icon to manipulate the table in Visual Editor.