Wikipedia:WikiProject

Note: Wikipedia WikiProjects are not Wikimedia Sister projects.

A WikiProject is a collection of pages devoted to the management of a specific family of information within Wikipedia. It is not a place to write encyclopedia articles, but a resource to help coordinate and organize article writing. The attached talk pages are a convenient forum for those interested in a particular project. Projects can also have associated Portals.

Regional notice boards also seek to Guide to improving articles a broad category of articles based on geographical regions.

See the complete List of WikiProjects.

Before you begin

Ask yourself this question — is a WikiProject right for what I want to do?

A Wikiproject is designed to facilitate the coordination and documentation of work that is taking place across multiple Wikipedia articles, often involving several Wikipedia users. One of the most important benefits of this cross-article coordination is that it makes it easier to give a group of conceptually related pages similar structures and appearance. However, setting up and using a WikiProject can involve a considerable amount of additional effort and administration. For this reason, it may not be worthwhile to have a WikiProject unless several lengthy and complex articles are involved. If a large number of editors are involved, a WikiProject also helps to coordinate their work more effectively.

Generally, a WikiProject should involve at least 3-5 articles and have at least 5 editors involved before it is really worth the time and effort to set up a Wikiproject structure. If your project doesn't meet these recommended minimum levels, you may wish to consider whether the effort of maintaining a WikiProject page is worth the benefits that you might gain. You may decide to devote your time and effort to just editing articles and communicating on article and user talk pages.

If you have less than the minimum number of editors recommended above, it may still be worth creating a WikiProject if the work being done involves a lot of coordination regarding Terminology, Strategy and other editing guidelines across a large number of articles. In this case, the WikiProject serves as a repository of information that is common to all the articles.

You may find it useful to peruse some of the existing WikiProjects to understand how WikiProjects are used "in the wild". See List of WikiProjects.

If you are not sure: If you have a subject you are passionate about, but you aren't certain if anyone else is interested, then write a brief description of your project on your User page, and a link to it on WikiProject/List of proposed projects. If interest is good, feel free to launch the project; otherwise you may find it more effective to focus your efforts on the articles themselves.

Suggestions for new projects

Read WikiProject best practices for tips on leading a WikiProject.
Create the main project page at Wikipedia:WikiProject projectname. (See Starting a new page)
Create an outline on your project page:
- Add {{subst:WikiProject|projectname}} into your main project page and save. (See Help:Template#subst for details.)
Create your Project's category infrastructure (see WikiProject/Best practices#Categorisation)
Identify pages within the scope of your project:
- A good way to do this is to copy the listings of Whatlinkshere for the most important articles related to your project.
- You will probably want to save a copy of the list on a project status subpage.
Create a project To-do list to focus and coordinate your collaborative efforts.
If possible, link to a sample article to give other Wikipedianss a feel for the project's goals.
Add the new portal to the List of WikiProjects.
Advertise!
- Announce the new project on the Community Portal#Community bulletin board.
- Create a Template_messages/Talk_namespace#WikiProject notices template, and insert it at the top of the talk page of related articles.
- Find prospective members on IRC at Freenode in the general #wikipedia discussion channel.
Collaborate in real-time with other project members using IRC at Freenode. Log into #wikiproject, which was created especially for WikiProject coordination and collaboration.

Guidance for School and University Projects

WikiProjects

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Wikipedia:WikiProject

Before you begin

Suggestions for new projects

See also

Guidance for School and University Projects