Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Article namespace checklist: Difference between revisions

This page in a nutshell: This checklist defines the minimum effort and provide a quick reference to assist editors with reviewing. New page revieweres are not required to perform these checks, but if they can't, it's best to leave the reviewing of a particular page to a reviewer who can .

These are the few basic checks that all new page reviewers should perform on each article they review. The checklist below will help ensure that our new articles are quickly improved, and not lost in the shuffle.

• Does the article qualify for speedy deletion? If the article matches any of these criteria, mark the page for speedy deletion by adding the appropriate template to the top of the page.
• Does the article belong on Wikipedia? An article may qualify for deletion if it has obvious notability problems, is a content fork, or suffers from any other common reasons for deletion. First, consider the steps listed at WP:BEFORE. Then, if you believe that the article is not salvageable, either propose it for deletion or nominate it for deletion, whichever is more appropriate.

• Does the article have an appropriate title? Titles should conform to the standards at WP:TITLE. If the title is inappropriate, it may be necessary to move the article to a more appropriate title. Common errors are capitalizing every word in the title, not capitalizing proper nouns, and including honorifics, academic titles, and postnominals.
• Is the article very short? If so, it may be a stub. Either add {{Stub}} to the article, or (even better) find a more specific stub-sorting template to use at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types.

• Is the article referenced? References are essential to Wikipedia articles. If the article is unreferenced or poorly referenced, you may be able to improve the article by adding better references. Otherwise, add appropriate tag(s) to the top of the article (see collapsed box to the right).
• Is the article categorized? If the article is not assigned to any categories, either add {{Uncategorized}} to the very bottom of the article, or add some appropriate categories to the bottom of the article. It is usually fairly easy to find two or three appropriate categories. If the subject is a living person, it must be categorized in Category:Living people.
• Do other articles link to this article? Click the "What links here?" link (in the Toolbox, left margin) to see how many articles link to the article you're patrolling. If the article has no incoming links (from actual articles, excluding disambiguation pages and pages in other namespaces like User talk, Talk, Wikipedia, etc.) add {{Orphan}} to the top of the page. Conversely, if the article has few or no links to other articles, add {{Deadend}} to the top.
• Are there versions of the article in other languages? Look below "Languages" in the left-hand sidebar. It may be that, even without translation, the existence of a fuller version with references in another language suggests that, rather than tag an unpromising stub for deletion, it could be tagged with an "Expand" template such as {{Expand Spanish}}.
• Is the article properly formatted? If the article lacks a proper lead section, add {{lead missing}} or {{lead too short}} to the top of the page. If the article uses HTML markup instead of wiki markup, add {{cleanup-HTML}}. If the citation style is messy, confusing or inconsistent, add {{citation style}} or {{format footnotes}}.
• Does the article have grammar or spelling mistakes? If so, either fix the mistakes or add {{Copyedit}}.
• Does the article have any other glaring issues? Try to fix them. If you can't, then check Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup for any appropriate cleanup tags that might need to be applied to the article.

• Don't be discouraged by the number of things that need to be checked. As you become more familiar with patrolling, you will no longer need to "check" for such things, but instead you begin to spot them instinctively.
• It's preferable to include dates in your cleanup tags, for instance: {{Unreferenced|date=July 2024}}; or you can use {{subst:dated|Unreferenced}}, which becomes the same thing. This helps to quickly track how long an article has suffered from a particular issue.
• If there are more than three cleanup tags at the top of an article, it's generally preferable to condense the cleanup tags using the {{Multiple issues}} template.
• Tools exist to help speed up and automate the process of adding cleanup tags to articles, nominating articles for deletion, and tagging articles for speedy deletion. The most popular include Twinkle and AutoWikiBrowser.
• New page patrollers are highly encouraged to patrol the oldest pages in the queue first (i.e. patrol from the back of the queue). It is often considered disruptive for new page patrollers to add cleanup tags and/or propose the deletion of articles that are only a few minutes old.
• There are a lot of new pages created every day! New page patrollers are encouraged to fix as many issues as they practically can, and add cleanup tags for any issues that haven't been addressed.
• Familiarize yourself with the common outcomes for deletion discussions to get a better idea of which articles are usually deleted and which are usually kept.