RationalWiki:Project Whitewash

Project Whitewash is a loosely organized attempt to encourage and organize efforts to do the very important, but very tedious, jobs that will make our wiki more presentable, professional and useful. These are not official proclamations or putdowns of any contributions or contributors, but rather another way that any motivated editor can help make our wiki the best it can be.

Scope
The scope of our project covers any large scale meta-task whose purpose is the improvement of the presentation, content, or organization of existing material. This can include things like categories, proper namespace usage, template use, portal creation, site publicity, site guidelines and standards, article improvements, and many other things I won't be able to think of.

Important project links

 * RationalWiki:What is a RationalWiki article?
 * Articles needing RWification
 * High priority articles need attention
 * Proposed best of RationalWiki list
 * Categories.
 * Uncategorised Pages
 * Dead-end Pages
 * Orphaned Pages
 * Writing redlinked articles

Current project goals
This is the meat of the project:


 * Fixing red links in articles by creating articles, fixing mispellings of existing links, redirecting to either CP or WP where appropriate, and removing uneccessary links completely.  If the red link is to a subject RW doesn't need to cover, either direct it to WP or remove the link.
 * Moving articles from main namespace that are better off in other namespaces. Please read here first: Namespace Cleanup
 * Organizing the various guideline and community standard pages and discussions to as few pages as we possibly can.
 * Identify articles that need to be rewritten or added to based on What is a RationalWiki article?. Add the category to these articles. The list of such articles is here: Category:Articles needing RWification.
 * Identify articles that should be high priority for our site to tackle but are missing or poorly constructed. Put these articles in the category. See the existing list here: Category:High priority.
 * Build up our many stubs into fine RW articles. Articles that are short, but relatively complete, should have the "stub" template changed to "nostub".
 * Identify some of the best written articles that exemplify what Rationalwiki is about and add them to Proposed best of RationalWiki
 * Clean up and remove irrelevant and unhelpful Categories.  Catgeories should simplify research and navigation around RW, and should ideally be a single word.   If it can't be a single word, think hard before adding it, as it's probably not a category but an article.
 * Categorise uncategorised pages
 * Add links to dead-end pages, otherwise known as "undeadening".
 * De-orphanise lonely pages with no friends, known as "delonelyisification"
 * Writing articles that are currently redlinked, i.e. articles which are referenced here at RationalWIki, but do not exist - or remove the redlink if an article is unlikely.
 * Clean up redirects
 * Remove empty categories
 * Adding the defaultsort template to articles about people:

Why the name whitewash?
In honor of the fact that much of what we will do will involve moving pages, deleting redirects and unneeded articles, and many such activities. Such things, even when totally transparent, will be used by some people to claim we are hiding things. So why not embrace it now?

To participate, just add your name below
--Signed by  Elassint the Great Hi! 12:39, 23 November 2007 (EST)
 * Tmtoulouse 09:56, 7 July 2007 (CDT)
 * Linus (plot evil tech) 10:31, 7 July 2007 (CDT)
 * human  13:04, 7 July 2007 (CDT)
 *  AKjeldsen Godspeed! 13:08, 8 July 2007 (CDT)
 * --PalMD-Goatspeed! 13:48, 8 July 2007 (CDT)
 * ויִכִּ נתֶּר ֶפּ רֶ תֵּ ר  שְׁלֹום!
 * - Icewedge 13:41, 30 July 2007 (CDT)
 * --Bob_M (talk) 09:44, 5 August 2007 (CDT)
 * --Pinto's5150 12:19, 6 August 2007 (CDT)
 * Doggedpersistance  12:42, 6 August 2007 (CDT)
 * transResident Transfan form! 17:29, 7 August 2007 (CDT)
 * -- ♠ ŖєuĻєəux ♠say wнäτ? 21:53, 15 August 2007 (CDT) (Better late than ....)
 * Sterileblah, blah, blah 16:03, 23 August 2007 (CDT) (I kinda do some of this stuff anyway.)
 * ThunderkatzHo! 15:13, 25 August 2007 (CDT)
 * --TimS 13:42, 14 September 2007 (MDT)
 * Offeep 18:01, 26 September 2007 (EDT)
 * Slink 04:38, 19 October 2007 (EDT)
 * a i r <font color=#234567>d <font color=#89abcd>i <font color=#ef0123>s <font color=#456789>h 04:05, 23 November 2007 (EST)
 * Uchiha KATON! 02:08, 5 March 2008 (EST)
 * Secret Squirrel 20:10, 17 March 2008 (EDT)
 * WaitingforGodot 15:30, 4 July 2008 (EDT)
 * Pear 12:02, 19 July 2008 (EDT)
 * Speakerface punx 11:37, 1 October 2008 (EDT)
 * <font color="#000099">Worm (<font color="#000099">t  14:46, 5 January 2009 (EST)
 * The Foxhole Atheist 12:55, 24 February 2009 (EST)
 * Mega 10:16, 11 April 2009 (EDT)

Userboxen
Any participant who wants to can put this userbox on their user page:

Oh, come on, are we that desperate? Nice UXB, by the way. <font color="#DD00DD" face="comic sans ms">human <font color="#00AA00">be in 22:47, 5 October 2007 (EDT)