ArchWiki:Maintenance Team - ArchWiki

# ArchWiki:Maintenance Team

From ArchWiki

Related articles

- ArchWiki:Administrators
- ArchWiki:Maintainers
- Help:Style
- ArchWiki:Requests
- ArchWiki:Contributing

The Maintenance Team is ArchWiki's official group of users whose goal is supervising and fixing the edits that are made every day to the articles in the wiki.

## How to join

Official Maintainers are usually chosen by the Administrators among the most active and collaborative users of the wiki, and personally invited to participate in the team. You can also explicitly present yourself as a candidate by contacting one of the Administrators. Maintainers belong to a particular group of wiki users with special rights. Administrators are implicit members of the team.

Common requisites for becoming a Maintainer are:

- Familiarity with how this team is organized and how its members work with each other (see #Workflow); will to collaborate and discuss with the other Maintainers.
- Some free time and the commitment to contribute regularly enough.
- Patience, accuracy and tidiness.
- Experience in wiki editing and good knowledge of wiki syntax.
- Good knowledge of the structure of the ArchWiki and its style rules.
- Sufficient knowledge of Arch Linux and the subjects treated in the articles, or willingness to do some research or discuss with the edits' authors when fixing content-related issues.

If you are interested in joining the team, you can start making yourself visible to the community by helping with the common tasks, in particular contributing to the discussions that take place in the various talk pages.

Once elected, members should add their username to ArchWiki:Maintainers and also add a special tag in their user page: `[[ArchWiki:Maintainers|ArchWiki Maintainer]]`.

## Workflow

This article or section is out of date.

Reason: The workflow is being reorganized in the talk page, and the new guidelines are already progressively being applied in practice. (Discuss in ArchWiki talk:Maintenance Team#)

The supervision of the edits made to the wiki can be accomplished in two complementary stages: #Recent changes patrolling and #Report solving. The former stage is where the problems are found and reported, while the latter is where they are finally processed and solved.

You can engage in one of the two tasks, or even in both if you want, keeping in mind that patrolling the recent changes obviously requires a more constant commitment, while fixing the reports is much more flexible and can be done whenever you find some time.

### Recent changes patrolling

There are two main ways you can patrol the recent changes:

- Visiting Special:RecentChanges at regular intervals, checking all the edits that have been made since the previous visit.
- Subscribing to the Special:RecentChanges Atom feed and checking the edits as soon as you find some time.

For each edit, or group of edits made to the same page, you should assess if it is questionable, according to your experience and knowledge, also taking into account the list of the most frequent problems.

- If you think the edit requires a quick fix that you can perform immediately, just do it.
- If instead the edit is questionable but you cannot fix it, you should look if it has already been reported in ArchWiki:Reports:
  - If not, add it to the table describing the problem in the Notes field; note that the table distinguishes between content and style-related reports with the Type field: if an edit has both content and style problems, mark it as content.
    - As an alternative, you may decide to add the report directly in ArchWiki talk:Reports, still checking that it is not there yet.
  - In case the edit has already been reported, see if you can add useful details to the accompanying note or discussion.

Tip: Make patrolling easier by taking the following steps:

- Enable the Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist setting under Preferences > Recent changes > Advanced options.
- Quickly add reports to ArchWiki:Reports with a dedicated script (e.g. Wiki Monkey's Patrol or Patrol Lite).
- Add ArchWiki:Reports to your watchlist or subscribe to the edit history and talk page Atom feeds.
- To follow your watched articles using a feed reader, use the Atom link in the left column of your watchlist page.

### Report solving

ArchWiki:Reports is the reference page for addressing maintenance problems. When working there, you should first choose one of the listed reports, also reading the accompanying patrol's note:

- If you think you can fix the report, just do it and remove the entry from the table. Read also #Common problems and solutions.
- If otherwise you feel it is better to contact the author of the edit, write him a message in his talk page, or send him an email in order to request an explanation or discuss further; then add a discussion in ArchWiki talk:Reports as a reminder and delete the report from ArchWiki:Reports.
- If instead you think the problem deserves a discussion with the other members of the team, start it in ArchWiki talk:Reports and delete the report from ArchWiki:Reports.

The problems treated in ArchWiki talk:Reports will be solved when the related discussions reach definitive solutions.

Tip:

- Prefer trying to fix the oldest reports
- Prefer fixing content-related over style-related issues.
- You may consider using an editor assistant (e.g. Wiki Monkey's Editor configuration) in order to solve some common style issues automatically.

## Common problems and solutions

The following are the most common problems that recent changes patrols can find and report, with brief tips for possible fixes.

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: it may be useful to add more examples. (Discuss in ArchWiki talk:Maintenance Team#)

### Content-related

- Removal of useful content: undo or contact the author.
- Unexplained modification or removal of content: contact the author.
- Major modification (usually in a single bulky edit) without sufficient explanation: contact the author.

### Style-related

- Signature, credits, personal observations in articles: undo or move to talk page.
- Start headings from level 1: move all sections up 1 level.
- Uncategorized new article: add category and fix header.
- Improper use of templates: fix according to Help:Style.
- Addition of installation instructions: undo or comply with Help:Style.

## General requests

Inaccurate content
  Pages flagged with Template:Accuracy.
Outdated content
  Pages flagged with Template:Out of date.
Obsolete pages
  Pages flagged with Template:Archive.
Irrelevant or unhelpful content
  Pages flagged with Template:Remove.
Incomplete content
  Pages flagged with Template:Expansion.
Content with language or style issues
  Pages flagged with Template:Style.
Non-standard laptop pages
  Pages flagged with Template:Laptop style.
Duplicate effort or overlapping scope
  Pages flagged with Template:Merge.
Misleading names
  Pages flagged with Template:Move.
Poor translations
  Pages flagged with Template:Bad translation (deprecated).
Incomplete translations
  Pages flagged with Template:Translateme. See also ArchWiki Translation Team.
Incomplete content
  Pages flagged with Template:Stub (deprecated).
Deprecated titles
  Pages flagged with Template:Redirect.
Dead or broken links
  Pages flagged with Template:Dead link. Should be repaired or replaced.
Templates with an undefined parameter
  Pages automatically flagged with Template:META Error
Unexplained presence of an article status template
  Pages automatically flagged with Template:META Unexplained Status Template.
Application listed without links to packages
  Pages automatically flagged with Template:META Missing package.
Misspelled or deprecated templates
  Need to fix template or change to new template.
Noindexed pages
  Automatic tracking category.
Duplicate arguments in template calls
  Automatic tracking category.

Also note that Special:WantedCategories can show additional automatic tracking categories.

### Problem redirects

Note: Redirects should not point to other sites and ones that do sometimes erroneously show up on these pages.

- Special:BrokenRedirects
- Special:DoubleRedirects

### Broken package links

ArchWiki contains many broken links to packages not found either in official repositories or AUR, which is the result of packages being merged, split or removed from the repositories. All pages in the main namespace are regularly checked by a bot, which checks all instances of AUR, Grp and Pkg templates, tries to automatically update them and marks them with Template:Broken package link when it is not possible to update them automatically.

To fix a broken package link, do not simply remove the reference to the packages from the wiki, do some research first:

- Search the package database (`pacman -Ss`) and AUR, it is possible that the package was merged/renamed.
- If looking for a specific file, for example a binary that was part of the package, pkgfile might do the trick.
- If unsure, mark the page or section with an appropriate status template rather than completely removing the reference to the package.

To help with manual updates, each "broken package link" template provides a hint:

- "invalid number of template parameters" – All AUR, Grp and Pkg templates take exactly one parameter, but the wikitext specified more (or none). In most cases the excesive parameters should be moved to the surrounding text, or removed if already there.
- "replaced with [other package]" – The package was renamed or merged into another, which specifies the old package name in the replaces array. In most cases the old package should be simply replaced with the new one and surrounding text updated accordingly.
- "archived in aur-mirror" – Marks old AUR3 packages, which were not submitted to AUR4, or were deleted since then. You may consider resubmitting them to the AUR if interested in maintaining them.
- "package not found" – Default hint when none of the above applies.

All pages with broken package links are tracked in Category:Pages with broken package links. There is also an automatic report page at User:Lahwaacz.bot/Reports/archpkgs.

Note: The bot updates only package links, but not the text around them, which is too context-sensitive. For example, in [1] the AUR link was changed to Pkg, but the surrounding text still says that the package is in AUR. These instances can be fixed and "future-proofed" by simply removing the surrounding description of where the package is; see also Help:Style#Package management instructions. We currently have no means of automatically tracking this kind of problems, suggestions are welcome.

## See also

- Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol

Category:

- ArchWiki

Hidden categories:

- Pages or sections flagged with Template:Out of date
- Pages or sections flagged with Template:Expansion