AmtWiki:Cleanup

This page documents the process behind AmtWiki cleanup. The concept covers cleanup issues including page layout, wikification, spelling, grammar and typographical errors, and tone. All users are welcome to help edit or fix any page that has been marked for cleanup. Please remove the appropriate tag(s) from the article after cleaning it, if you feel that you have completed the task. Please also consider documenting improvements on the article's talk page or in edit summaries for the benefit of other editors.

If you've arrived at this page from a link on a {{cleanup}} template that someone placed on an article, it was most likely placed because the article does not meet one or more of AmtWiki's standards on content and style. The advice on this page should help editors to effectively clean up any article.

What needs cleanup?

It depends on what the problem is. Articles that are too short and missing basic information should be tagged as stubs. Pages that should be deleted should be added to Articles for deletion.

For everything else, you should use the cleanup tag. For example:

• You aren't sure whether something should be merged, deleted, or expanded.
• Needs formatting, proofreading, or rephrasing in comprehensible English.
• Multiple overlapping problems.
• The article is very short and might need removal or merging with a broader article

Adding cleanup tag

To tag an article for cleanup, add the following template at the top of the page:

{{cleanup
|reason=
|date=
}}

For reason, you should summarize the key issues that need to be fixed on the page. Listings on Wikipedia:Cleanup should be as brief but specific as possible, and just let the editors there know what kind of work the article needs. (Saying an article "needs work" is completely uninformative.) Keep in mind that editors who see the attention tag are not mind-readers; if you have any comments necessary to explaining what needs to be done or how to do it, you should add them to the article's talk page.

For date, put the month and year that the template was placed (e.g. "April 2016").

Fixing articles

Fixing the problems with an article may involve:

• Deleting problem content (nonsense, personal essays/opinions in improper places, accuracy problems, or severe unedited bias) by paring down content until nothing objectionable remains.
• Reformatting a raw text dump by wikifying the page, rewording with better style, verifying for accuracy, or weeding for useless or unremarkable information.
• Merging the article with a larger page, if the content is not expansive enough to merit its own page.
• Request for expansion of a stub, if the content is underdeveloped.
• Request for expansion of a non-stub, in a long-term reworking of an entire article. This is a longer process than a simple cleanup, and usually involves adding large amount of new content. See Amtwiki:Request for expansion for details.
• Request for deletion, if the article is eligible for deletion, by moving the article to Amtwiki:Articles for deletion.

De-listing cleaned articles

Once you believe an article is clean, de-list by deleting the cleanup tag from the article. This causes the article to be removed from Category:Articles needing cleanup. As a courtesy, you might want to leave a comment on the talk page of the person who identified it as needing cleanup; if there is much update activity going on or any controversy happening, you might first propose de-listing on the article's talk page.