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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tim Starling (talk | contribs) at 06:51, 16 March 2003 (more deletions). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Wikipedia:Index>Wikipedia:Pages needing attention.


Of course, every entry on Wikipedia deserves attention. But some entries deserve tender loving attention. If you come across a page that you think needs a lot of work, but have no idea how to approach it, list it here so that others can find it.

This page is very similar to pages like: Requested articles, Current events. However it is more utilitarian than those pages, being intended for the editorial community alone.

You might also want to look at:
  • Wikipedia:Help desk -- like a library help desk: ask questions, get references to Wikipedia articles (not for technical assistance)
  • Wikipedia:Duplicate articles -- a list of articles on the same subject which need to be merged (and instructions on how to do this)

Please date your entries here. This makes it easier to judge when pages no longer need attention.

Stubs

See also the following lists of stubs:

Mere definitions

Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and an article which simply defines a word is useless. Sometimes, those articles can turn into bona fide encyclopedic treatments of a topic; sometimes they should just be deleted.

The above series of definitions do not appear to have been expanded or improved in the six months since February 25. Even the details of where they came from are lost in pre-history. For the most part these definitions appear isolated from their contexts. I know nothing of the theoretical study of hierarchies. Perhaps someone who understands this stuff can bring all this into a single coherent and cohesive article, or possibly scrap some articles completely. Eclecticology 04:00 Aug 30, 2002 (PDT)
Organization is now a reasonable article. Hierarchical tree structure and rooted hierarchical tree structure have now been merged into tree structure: see below. The Anome 08:42 Oct 24, 2002 (UTC)

More than definitions but still stubs

  • Magdeburg rights: currently a collection of bits, without any real coherence or scholarship -- help needed from medieval historians, please!
  • U.S. Politics currently a collection of links to other pages.
  • Comparative Historical
  • Five Points, Manhattan
  • RFC although not itself a stub, this article links to RFC 0823 and a number of similarly titled articles which are, and which should probably be merged with the head article. Before barging ahead with such an undertaking, I thought it better to have the entire question reviewed by someone more familiar with the field. The head article should probably also be renamed to reflect policy about abbreviations and acronyms. Eclecticology 17:22 Sep 13, 2002 (UTC)
    • I'd say keep the RFC stubs. People refer to specific RFC's during discussions about internet stuff and it would be useful to be able to link directly to the specific RFC. Also, as each RFC becomes useful, it will be elaborated on and grow. If all the articles were rolled together, they'd need to be unrolled at some point in the future. TomCerul Feb 21, 2003
  • Food of Brazil - POV and badly written. -phma
  • Pie - The cooking section still needs work
  • Thelonious Monk: much more needs to be written on this great man.
  • Infertility: Stats with unverified origin - needs a lot more work.
  • Japanese proverbs: Not really even a stub, needs the Japanese translating and more content.
  • Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor: Needs much more information to be really useful.
  • Funeral: I have expanded this with brief descriptions of U.S. custom, law, and a discussion of anatomical gifts. What I have written is still fairly stubly. Info regarding other religions and cultures would be a large improvement. -- IHCOYC 17:21 Feb 27, 2003 (UTC)
  • Polish contribution to World War II

Subtly wrong

  • Faraday cage: see Talk:Faraday cage. I think the problem that several contributors mentioned, the confusion of electrostatic shielding and RF shielding, has now been sorted. -- Heron

Atlas Shrugged

Discussion taken from Votes for deletion

  • Atlas Shrugged/United States
    • Basically states that the action in Atlas Shrugged took place in the US. BTW, does every chapter of Atlas Shrugged really require a separate wikipedia entry??? Chas zzz brown 22:25 Nov 2, 2002 (UTC)
    • Holey Moley! There are 209 articles on Atlas Shrugged, including separate articles on each section of each chapter; plus endless stub reference articles such as Atlas Shrugged/Atlantic Ocean and Atlas Shrugged/Food (liverwurst, canapes, and something else). Looks like a project someone started, then (naturally) got tired of. Can't imagine anyone filling out any of the stubs.
      • Can't imagine anyone refactoring this mess either. Ortolan88
  • look kinda interesting to me, be a shame to delete what appears to be a pretty good breakdown of the book Lir 15:55 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)
      • Nobody's really suggesting deleting anything, just commenting on what a mess it is. When little fragments of an article go flying off into their own articles, the reader is not being well served. Here, an important point about the novel, its setting and what it means, has turned into an separate independent article. The article on the novel is made less informative; the separate article is nearly worthless outside the context of the discussion of the novel. I thought reading Ayn Rand was supposed to make one ruthlessly logical. Guess not. Ortolan88
  • This complex of articles about a cult novel needs a lot of work to reduce it from its 209 articles. The only information on Atlas Shrugged/Waiter is that he served drinks. Does that qualify him to be a brain surgeon? Eclecticology

Also (moved from below)

Articles needing a rewrite

Articles that have good information, but need work for some reason

  • A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z -- All these could use some reworking. I've linked them all to each other, but it would be nice to have some common formatting between them. Also, if someone wants to find pictures of all the letters, that would probably be helpful. Information from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica might be a good idea.
  • Ablution -- unless we can (or need to) write a general definition & description, this should be moved to "Ablution in the bible". Yet more from Eason's.
  • Abstract - seems like a very philosophical discussion. Needs some clarification, and extension to arts for instance.
  • Alexandria, Virginia - the data is old and needs updating, and a reference to "Alexandria County" is totally outdated.
  • AT&T - uncertain tone, mis-matched paras, needs tidying.
  • Balloon - could use some more examples. (I moved the cross-ref to hot air balloon to near the beginning, but haven't resolved what got it onto this page. Vicki Rosenzweig)
  • Bead artists: this page is becoming commercial!. olivier 09:51 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC)
  • Belarusian media: NPOV issues
  • Black box - a bit jumbled. Further notes on Talk:Black box
  • Black Sabbath - from the article: and someone else can write 1979 to date
  • Cracow - has a lot of good info, but also has some claims that fall outside the NPOV.
  • E-mail: good information, but should be developed to have a proper history of E-mail, and perspectives on the directions E-mail is evolving: security, for example.
  • Ernest Hemingway: information from several sources to be merged. Copyright issues?
  • Fascism - needs watching for NPOV
  • Golden Globe Award (or the associated list pages, now) - lists of award recipients end at 1993
  • Hammond Organ - seems to impose additional copying restrictions.
  • Hector Camacho - a lot of text, little NPOV
  • Holocene extinction event - more species are needed, and some help with NPOV
  • Human - Genetic similarity with chimps & gorillas appears wrong per this new research: [1] and [2]
  • Imprecise language - no longer in first person, but still needs work
    • Please be more precise. What kind of work? The article looks fine to me.David 13:16 Aug 22, 2002 (PDT)
      • It looks OK to me too. Sometimes these articles are fixed, but nobody thinks to remove the reference from this page. I propose to remove it from this list if nothing more happens about it in the next week. Eclecticology 18:12 Nov 7, 2002 (UTC)
  • Irian Jaya - requires merging and NPOVing
  • Image:KavirajuStampE-3.jpg -- article in image space, pasted from a Geocities page, apparently by the author
  • Martin Luther King Jr. - much more needs to be written, in more depth
  • Mary Kay Letourneau ? Just a bunch of links. I'm not even sure this person should be in Wikipedia at all. Is anyone going to want to look her up in 50 years? Pandora 20:09 Feb 4, 2003 (UTC)
  • G. Gordon Liddy - found it on the requested articles page, so I wrote a stub containing the information I could find, but I couldn't find important facts like his birthdate or birthplace, or the date of publication of his autobiography.
  • Media in Poland - NPOV issues
  • Medical marijuana - I (Tuf-Kat) wrote this, but I really have doubts that I was able to do so neutrally. It needs a lot of work.
    • It looks great and neutral. It's getting a bit big though. Perhaps split it into a study article and a legallity article? TomCerul Feb 21, 2003
  • Milo Burcham and P-80 Shooting Star - need wikification and de-1st personing; the latter needs details about the aircraft
  • Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab - need wikification and watching for NPOV
  • Napoleonic Wars - little more than an extended structure
  • New Imperialism - a dense, POV article with very little to help the reader understand any of the tangential issues.
  • Old Catholic Church - one page, three articles on the same subject. In need for a synthesis...
  • Oliver North - currently just a brief summary. Needs a lot of work.
  • Poet laureate - contains a list and little else that is useful. Should contain the history of the position and the duties or usual actions of the poet laureate.
  • poets - not only are the page titles messed up, very possibly the page itself should be redirected to listing of poets
  • Political philosophy - contains government definition inside, and is actually a quotatation of some (novel-like) lecture
  • Religious aspects of marriage - Larry wanted this article, but I doubt he wanted it quite like this. (Not so bad now that the original has been replaced.)
  • Richard Boyle - jumbled and incomplete
  • Shor's algorithm - half of it is missing
  • Sensory Integration Dysfunction - needs attention from an expert.
  • Sigismund I Jagiello -- at present, this is just bad prosopography. Needs an infusion of context and coherence
  • Solar power satellite -- NPOV issues, possible copyright?
  • Spanish Inquisition-- POV article
  • Stock market - Good article, but entirely US-centric. Needs globalisation in terms and content, and also history section about the development of stock markets.
  • Sugarhill Gang - needs reorganization
  • Tabletop roleplaying games - rename to Tabletop roleplaying game or maybe with a hyphen like Role-playing game.
  • Thirteen Years' War - needs editing and clarification. also, shouldn't have an approstrophe in the title, probably.
  • Tree structure - formed by merging four fragmentary articles. Now has some reasonable content, but needs lots of copyediting and checking for mathematical correctness
  • Thomas Hobbes - too long, probably scanned, no structure
  • Torah Judaism: needs editing for NPOV and proofreading by experts on Judaism
  • Tsherim Soobzokov - POV and incomprehensible to someone who's never heard of him
  • Wends- general re-write and information needs
  • William Jardine - needs paragraphs, formatting, Wikification, summary
  • World War II - There is nothing at all in here about Italian Fascism (other than appearing in a list of the major Axis powers), nor is there anything about Mussolini except a link to his article
  • Zarnowiec - translation problems
  • Zimbabwe - complex issue needing more facts, outdated data corrected
  • Side effect - has only computer definition. Needs medical stuff
    • Well, I cleaned things up and created a beginning of a "medical side effects" article. It does still need work... -- RTC 04:00 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Articles which appear to be highly contentious


Articles containing outdated text

The following articles were drawn from out-of-date public domain texts, such as the 1911 Encyclopedia Anglicana, the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, or the 1881 Household Cyclopedia. Or, they may contain large sections drawn from such texts. In any event, they require fact-checking, modernization, and deletion of anachronisms. (This may be the best way to deal with the flood of dubious material from 62.98. It's a lot more constructive than flame wars.)

  • More articles by 62.98.xx.xx containg Household Cyclopedia material. Added to previously existing articles. Dog



  • Amaranth information looks fine, but needs rewording

Articles of dubious merit, accuracy and/or validity

Articles by known POV writer 24.150.61.63

Files relating to Wikipedia Operations

Files containing prehistoric discussions

Much of the content here is based on long abandoned ideas. Old old hands may have better background to know what should happen to this stuff


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