User:Brad101/redundancy

I've noticed too much redundancy in various cleanup projects that attempt to bring articles inline to wikipedia standards for clarity and appearance. Some observations so far:

• WP:DEP and WP:WWF almost duplicate the same process of finding articles out of sorts and making sure they receive interwiki links, formatting and are checked for copyright violations. The only glaring difference is that DEP's do not receive any sort of tag to alert an article as a DEP. Current DEP lists are generated offline and quickly fall out of date.

• WP:CLEAN seems to be a general dumping ground for all articles with problems ranging from minor to major. Most of what I see in those particular articles also land under WP:WWF. Articles that are only tagged with {{cleanup}} do not become known (or seen by) to the other projects and vice versa. This possibly explains why WP:CLEAN has a 17,000 + page backlog of articles.

• WP:WWF has over 7000 pages currently. Adding WP:CLEAN to this gives about 24,000 pages needing attention. Some articles carry both the wikify and the cleanup tags so this amount could be a few thousand less.

• Projects that seem to have a specific purpose such as categories, linkless, references, wikify, redlinks etc are operating effectively in their own right.

Possible solutions

There has to be a more consolidated approach to articles not up to standards where various projects and members aren't duplicating efforts and unaware of what another project is doing.

• A DEP is a good starting point for a bot to mark the article to Wikify. Wikipedians doing manual work on DEP should concentrate on WP:WWF instead. From there articles can be tagged for other issues unless a bot can recognize the major ones.
• Phase out the {{cleanup}} and the {{cleanup-date}} tags as they are too generic in description and basically duplicate the {{wikify}} tag. All generic cleanup tags are converted to wikify tags. There are many cleanup tags with a much more specific message that can be used.
• All maintenance tags should eventually be turned into dated tags to keep the FIFO system going that has worked very well with those tags already converted.