Forum:Routine maintenance

Alright, I've had enough. For more than year, I've been doing the image maintenance more or less all on my own, and after more than 3000 images I'm getting sick of it.

Except for a few people, nobody categorizes the images. The damn user page images are the worst; aside from being totally useless for the site, they make up more than 10% of this site's total images by now, next to nobody categorizes them and next to nobody is seemingly capable of putting "User" in front of their name so they don't clog up the image link auto-complete.

I'm no longer going to take care of the images on my own. I'm getting close to the point where I'll simply make the license tags categorize the images in Category:Fallout 3 images etc and delete all user page images which are not properly categorized and named.

Images aside, helping with the site maintenance in general is part of being an administrator in my opinion; yet I seem to be the only one monitoring pages like Special:UncategorizedPages, Special:UncategorizedImages, Special:BrokenRedirects or Special:DoubleRedirects. Every time I'm away for a few days, all of these build up with nobody taking care of them.

So, what's the problem? Are people not aware what needs doing? Do we need an admin noticeboard? Any suggestions what can be done to remedy the situation? Or is it too convenient to dump it all on me?

/rant -- Porter21 (talk) 10:28, February 18, 2010 (UTC)
 * I do check and fix these from time to time, although not as systematically as you. I'll try to help out with images more often from now on. Ausir(talk) 10:38, February 18, 2010 (UTC)


 * It'd be appreciated, but to be quite honest I think the other admins should help out with that kind of stuff as well. What's draining and putting wear on one or two people would be far less annoying if spread across a bigger group of people. And I know that you at least patrol the new pages, another thing nobody else seems to be doing. -- Porter21 (talk) 10:44, February 18, 2010 (UTC)
 * You know, the Upload image popup never explicitly asks for a category. Maybe editing both the editing page itself and the popup that appears in the edit toolbar to include a bit that says "Insert Category" (with a helpful "Example: If the image is going to be on a user page, use Category:User page images!") would get more people to enter categories. Nitty Tok. 05:12, March 21, 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, I added something like what you suggest to Special:Upload a while back. Modifying the popup in such a manner is unfortunately beyond what we can do as far as I'm aware; we could add a message to remind people of categorizing the image, but without adding the ability to enter the category directly in the popup it'd be of little use I think. -- Porter21 (talk) 09:31, April 11, 2010 (UTC)

Improvements
Since I now have the major rant off my chest, a few constructive suggestions. We could make an admin page, where people can both report vandals etc and which has a list of routine maintenance tasks which need doing, similar to how the progress tables on project pages work. The maintenance stuff doesn't need to be checked more than once a day (since most of the pages only update once a day), so people could simply sign them off when they've checked them and it'd be easy for other admins to see whether or not a given task has already been taken care of for the day. Something like:

-- Porter21 (talk) 10:58, February 18, 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, I'll speak for myself, but I'm sure it goes for at least a few of the other admins here: I seriously don't know what all needs doing. Or how to do it. Or how it should be done. This is the first and only wiki I've been a participant in, and I started editing because the trivia sections bugged me. So, here's what I think: I'd be happy to take on some maintenance duties. I'm sure others would, too. But, you (Porter) will have to tutor us through the tasks before we can just keep it up on our own. Also, I would suggest that individual admins take on certain tasks as their "job." A notice board is a good idea, too, so that we can all keep up to some degree. But having a task to take a special interest in is good motivation. Also, it means that one admin can learn images, one redirects, etc. So, the rest of us can have somebody else to ask besides you as time goes on.


 * A little training, a little assigning of ongoing tasks, and an admin notice board to communicate about it all? How 'bout it?--Gothemasticator 11:08, February 18, 2010 (UTC)
 * 'Nother thought: With FNV coming up, getting more us trained would be really good, as would increasing specialization among admins. Too many of us just troll the recent changes page. A lot of what we do is undoing. It'd be great, for instance, if each of us took just one day a week as our day to go through the recent changes page. That alone could set us free to spend more time doing other maintenance and continuing the ongoing projects.--Gothemasticator 11:20, February 18, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I realized that most people likely simply do not know about the tasks half way through writing my rant. I had to get it off my chest though :) FNV coming up is one the reasons I've brought this up - at the height of FO3 activity I was spending an hour or two a day doing this maintenance stuff and I'm not all that keen on going through that again, plus (without wanting to sound arrogant) I usually have more interesting things on my plate I'd rather spend my time doing.
 * Generally, most relevant maintenance pages can be found in the first section of Special:SpecialPages ("Maintenance reports"). These reports are automatically created by the wiki software once a day. Some of them are not terribly important and do not really need admin action, others only need checking every once in a while. The ones I've listed in the table above are the ones which I check regularly because they either can only be addressed by admins or because they are frequently populated with new pages.
 * I can write up what I'm usually doing with the pages listed there and what underlying issues they point to (e.g. pages which pop up on Special:UncategorizedPages are usually either new and need the whole "new page" checking routine, or it points to someone deleting a portion of the page which means it might have been vandalism). If people want to specialize in certain tasks, they're welcome to - I'd suggest that any given task would be taken on by a group of people instead of only a single user. Some tasks cause a higher workload than others (e.g. "Uncategorized images" - my favourite - and "New pages" are the ones which require the most frequent checking) and some are more specialized than others (e.g. for checking "New pages", you need to be familiar with standard page layouts and you need to know how our categorization system works).
 * The admin noticeboard is an idea I've had on my mind for a while; the major reason why I haven't created one is that I'm not sure whether admins would actually check it regularly, to be honest, and I was afraid it'd end up similar to the Community portal which barely anyone ever uses (at least that's my impression). -- Porter21 (talk) 12:08, February 18, 2010 (UTC)


 * I've created The Vault:Maintenance manual which lists the most frequent maintenance tasks and how to address them. Feel free to add to it as you see fit. -- Porter21 (talk) 23:00, March 3, 2010 (UTC)

The maintaenance manual page is quite nice. Thank you. I suggest adding the table above to every administrator's user page - changed as follows: Check out the result on my own user page. Nice, huh?--Gothemasticator 02:43, March 21, 2010 (UTC)


 * It's a nice idea :) You could make it into a template, that way it'd be easier to use and maintain. -- Porter21 (talk) 09:31, April 11, 2010 (UTC)

Revisited
Alright, a little feedback from regarding the development in the last 2.5 months. More people have been helping out with the routine maintenance stuff and it's definitely become better in most areas, which is much appreciated :) One thing could still be improved though: patrolling new pages. The backlog there had grown to around 150 pages in my absense.

I'm bringing it up because it'll make our lives a lot easier when FNV comes around if we can get used to doing this properly. I'm sure some of you check new pages every now and then; unfortunately next to nobody marks the pages (s)he has checked as "patrolled". To do so, you need to open the page via Special:NewPages; you then get a little link in the bottom right corner of the article with which you can mark it as patrolled. Unpatrolled pages are marked in yellow on Special:NewPages, so it's easy to spot them. The advantage of doing this is that you save another admin the effort of checking the page as well; after all, you've already done it.

Another reason why patrolling the new pages is important is that articles tend to grow in the fashion they were created: If they are messy and contain lots of irrelevant info from the start, people are much more likely to add more irrelevant and messy stuff. Patrolling the new articles saves us the effort of having to clean them up later when they've grown into a humongous mess. -- Porter21 (talk) 18:18, May 2, 2010 (UTC)


 * Guess that didn't hold up for too long. 200+ uncategorized images currently... -- Porter21 (talk) 13:19, July 22, 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, it's summer vacation time, lots of people are not that active because they're away. Ausir(talk) 13:44, July 22, 2010 (UTC)
 * The current queue has been building up since the end of May, so vacation time is only partly an excuse. -- Porter21 (talk) 14:05, July 22, 2010 (UTC)