UDWiki:Maintenance

Much of the wiki does not run itself - human error and deliberate attacks cause a great deal of detritus around the wiki, and much of this requires human intervention to fix.

This page lists the various maintenance tasks around the wiki that can be performed by regular users.

Fixing Broken Redirects

Often a deleted page has other pages that redirect to it, so these pages need to be either redirected to new pages (if applicable), or deleted.

Special:BrokenRedirects is a tool provided by the wiki software to help identify these redirects.

Fixing Double Redirects

Redirects go down only a single layer - if a redirect redirects to another redirect, the wiki won't follow the next redirect in sequence (this is a safety feature in the software to prevent infinite redirect loops). Believe it or not, double redirect do happen naturally - when a page is moved, and there are redirects to the original pages, those redirects become double redirects. These redirects need to be moved to the final target page.

Special:DoubleRedirects is a tool provided by the wiki software to help identify these redirects.

Disambiguating Links

Often, groups pick similar names, or users provide links to locations with the same names. In order to ensure that the link goes to the correct pages, we set up disambiguation pages. However, these pages are merely stopgap measures - the best option is to ensure that each link is edited so it goes to the correct page.

Special:Disambiguations is a tool provided by the wiki software to identify pages that link to disambiguation pages, so that users can change the links to the correct pages.

Finding Speedy Deletion Candidates

Many pages are either blanked, have only small amounts of information, or are otherwise useless pages on the wiki. While browsing the wiki, users should keep an eye out for these sorts of pages, and report them to UDWiki:Moderation/Speedy Deletions for deletion by a sysop.

Several tools exist for this purpose. The most useful one is Special:Shortpages, which lists pages on the wiki by how small they are, but also Special:Unusedimages can be used to find images that aren't linked to anywhere on the wiki. Special:Unusedcategories can be used to find category pages that don't contain any pages, and finally, Special:Newpages is a tool for seeing pages on the wiki by how new they are (and is generally more difficult to spam than Recent Changes).

Wikifying Pages

Users creating pages often don't create every possible link they can on a page. So, in order to improve the web of links, we should try and add relevant links. This also includes such things as categorising pages.

Special:Newpages is also a good tool for this task, but more generally users should simply keep an eye out for words and terms that look like good link candidates.