Help:Maintenance: Difference between revisions

This document was originally written by someone like you, who thought it could save you some time to get to full speed (like the time you'd use to write your detailed, well thought and argumented plan - too late?).

To become a full grown maintainer it is fundamental to get acquainted with [[how the FlightGear project works]]. It's probably less obvious to do than it seems, it'll take time and time spent [[Forum communication|living the community]].

While reading those documents, it's a good idea getting in the mood of checking if anything can be changed, fixed, made clearer. This is a good exercise. Doing some random maintenance while exploring the wiki will help in gaining confidence with both the project and how the wiki is organized. Mistakes are around the corners, but maintainers will keep an (hopeful) eye on you, so don't be too shy, and if in doubt better to ask than forget.

This message is important not just as a reference for the future - actually, most of them won't be read anymore - as much as a message to let other maintainers know what you're doing ''now''.

It's a lot of condensed data, and at first you might want to concentrate only on few articles that you're following. You can do that by putting it into your [[Special:Watchlist]], by clicking the star at the top right, next to the search textfield. Not only any edit on such articles will appear in that list, but it will appear in '''bold''' in RecentChanges.

More on tracking changes at [[mw:Help:Tracking changes]]. (In case you're curious, that was an ''interwiki'' link, i.e. a link to another wiki project. When you see something you'd like to know better, you can safely "edit" the article to see the source, closing the page or going back will prevent any actual editing.)

Another valuable tool, that you might already know if you were a good contributor, is [[Special:CategoryTree]]. It will allow you to have an overview of the categories and their organization. This is possibly the most discussed aspect of the wiki, so once you see it, you might feel the urge of just changing everything as if that was your home directory in your computer.

Chill down, you can't do that: a) [[#Limitations of MediaWiki|it's technically almost impossible]]; b) it needs to be discussed with the more experienced maintainers.

 

The current structure is described in detail below, but in general there should be an Articles category, where all the text content is available, and Files, where the binaries are (probably just images). The other are technical categories, for which the use should be self-explanatory.

With only few hours of the above, you should be up and running. Here's briefly explained what you can already do. Note that you're ''by no means'' asked to do all the following. Any help will be appreciated.

Checking [[Special:RecentChanges|Recent Changes]] you might find an entry marked with an '''N''', meaning that a new article has been created. Go and see if it fits the wiki (e.g. doesn't talk about the user's dog), if the title could be made clearer, or formatting could be improved... in brief, check its quality. There are no guidelines about it

Moreover, check if it is [[Help:Categories|categorized]] in the most specific category available, especially if it is ''not'' categorized at all! This one, though, might be a task that needs a bit more expertise, particularly for development related articles.

If the new article was made by a new contributor, you might want to leave some hints on his/her talk page to avoid the repeating of any mistake (like forgetting the summary). Needless to say, remember to be nice: that contributor probably did the best he/she could. In fact, you might also consider just thanking them for their addition.

It's not hard to see that those higher importance articles are of course the most visited ones, that is, of course the [[:Category:Portals]] and all the pages linked there. Try to use them as a user, see if some topics are missing or if it is out of date. If the topic is suitable for you, try to fix that even by searching and asking on the forum about latest updates. Do you see why maintaining documentation is the best way to get into a project?

Other than the portals, another page that needs to stay up to date is [[Frequently asked questions]]. Try to remove, or at least [[Help:Templates#Different types of templates|signal with a template]], questions that you presume asked no more that frequently. Also, by following the forum you should be able to know what really are the FAQs, so consider adding them if missing. In the answers, try to point to existing articles instead of duplicating information (see [[#Some guiding principles|below]]).

this should be a guide for categorizing articles, and possibly explain particular uses of the particular ones.

MediaWiki doesn't support (at least natively) the use of categories like tags, that is, the use of two or more unrelated categories that combine to make a particular one. This happens because ''when browsing'' the categories you can't combine them. So one should always use the most particular category that is possible.