Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Less Formal Working Groups

If you’ve been reading your way steadily through this book, you probably already have a good sense that there are no absolute rules in a lot of Wikipedia areas. Groups of editors working together is one of those areas. Such activities can be much less formal than WikiProjects and ongoing, listed collaborations.

Organizations

Wikipedia has a small number of organizations, several of which are mentioned in later chapters of this book. You can see the complete list via the shortcut CAT:ORG. For example, the Wikipedia Typo Department (shortcuts: WP:Typo and WP:Tyop), which began in November 2003, “aims to make Wikipedia look more professional by correcting typos and misspellings.” That organization has no formal members. Instead, a section of the organization’s main page contains pledges by a number of editors; for example, to fix all typos immediately.

One-time Initiatives

Temporary, one-time, initiatives by a group of editors are even more informal than organizations. For example, in late August 2007, a proposal was posted at the Village Pump proposals page (shortcut: WP:VP/PR) to standardize the template messages that appear at the top of article pages. (These are templates indicating that the article needs cleanup, needs to be wikified, has its neutrality disputed, and so.) Within about a month, interested editors had agreed on and implemented changes to all the top-of-page article message templates (sometimes called amboxes), and the initiative was basically ...