Wikipedia:Orphan

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The Orphanage is dedicated to clearing the immense backlog of orphaned articles and images. There are thousands of articles and images on Wikipedia with few or no links to them. While it may seem simple at first, de-orphaning is a difficult task, and this project aims to make it easier.

Building the web is a big part of Wikipedia, so join in the project and give those articles a home!

Goals and scope

The Orphanage aims to clear the backlog of orphaned articles on Wikipedia, so that all articles can be found by a series of links from the Main Page. In addition to this, however, the project also aims to make the process of de-orphaning easier. Through collaborating with other projects, providing information, and above all helping editors to cooperate, the Orphanage will make the task of de-orphaning a little less daunting.

There were, on last count, over 29,000 orphaned articles on Wikipedia. This is over 1% of the total articles, and an incredible amount to work on, so we need your help. While de-orphaning an article is a simple idea, it is often a difficult task, so the more editors we have to help, the better.

What is an orphan?

Well, here's our definition. Each of these four types are undesirable, and we'd like to build the web to the point that they are all non-existent.

• Orphaned article, an article with less than three incoming links which meet the criteria below.

• An Isolated article could be defined as an article that cannot be reached via a series of links from the Main Page.

• An Orphaned image is an image that is not used by any article.

• A walled garden is a group of articles that only link to each other. It is, in effect, an orphaned group of articles.

What can I do to help?

Surely you're wondering what you can do to help our cause. De-orphaning an article is a good way to start.

Step 1: Finding an orphaned article

Lists of orphaned articles can be found in the following places (in order of priority):

• Category:Orphaned articles from September 2008 - This category holds the latest articles marked as orphans. Our goal is to try to de-orphan newly-tagged orphans as soon as possible, and then work in reverse-chronological order through the backlog.
• Category:Orphaned articles, to find orphans from prior months.
• Category:Attempted de-orphan. This category holds articles which someone has tried to de-orphan, but was unsuccessful. These can be ignored in favor of orphans which have not yet been attempted.
• Special:Lonelypages. This is a periodically updated page which lists articles with absolutely no incoming links. It is being patrolled by a bot, and shouldn't require human attention, but it is listed here for reference.

Step 2: Finding related articles

If the article already has an {{orphan}} or {{do-attempt}} tag, then you can follow the hyperlinked words "related articles", which will take you to a Google sitesearch of en.wikipedia.org. This will produce any articles which mention the orphaned article without linking to it.

If this doesn't help, then a little more research is required. First, read the article. Then, follow some likely-looking outgoing links from the orphan to other articles, and do a Web-wide Google search for the article topic. Doing these will give you a much better idea of what it relates to. Not only will it probably give you information you can use to add meaningful links from other articles, but it will probably give you enough info to flesh out and improve the orphan itself. (This is, after all, the main purpose of the 'pedia.)

Step 3: Adding links

When you find an appropriate parent, insert a meaningful link to the orphaned article.

When adding a link to an orphaned article, please use this edit summary:

Adding link to orphaned article, Wikiproject Orphanage: [[WP:ORPHAN|You can help!]]

Step 4: Remove the orphan template

Once the article has three or more links that fit the #Criteria below, remove the {{orphan}} tag with this edit summary:

Successfully de-orphaned! Wikiproject Orphanage: [[WP:ORPHAN|You can help!]]

What if I can't de-orphan it?

Replace the {{orphan}} tag with a {{do-attempt}} tag. (See #Templates, below)

In this case, please use the following edit summary on the orphaned article when converting to the {{do-attempt}} tag:

Unsuccesful de-orphan attempt, Wikiproject Orphanage: [[WP:ORPHAN|You can help!]]

Adding an article to the list

Although a bot regularly checks articles to see if they are orphaned, you can help too. When reading an article, you can check what other pages link to it by clicking "What links here" in the toolbox. You will then be provided with a list of pages that link to that article. Following the criteria below, you can add the {{orphan}} template to the top of the page, marking it as an orphan.

Criteria

• An article is orphaned if fewer than three other articles link to it.
• For the purposes of this definition, disambiguation pages and redirects (including soft redirects) are not articles. Ideally, disambiguation pages should be orphaned. Please do not place the {{orphan}} template on disambiguation pages.
• These criteria only apply in the main article namespace.

When counting the number of links to an article, count only the links that come from other articles. This excludes links from:

• Any namespaces except the main article space, i.e. those articles without a Foo: prefix (e.g. Wikipedia:Bar, User:X, etc.) (see WP:Namespace)
• Disambiguation pages
• Redirects
• Any list articles, eg. List of XYZ, or Year in articles, e.g. 2008 in Foo

Deorphaning a page isn't just about removing it from the backlog, it is about building the web, and integrating the page into Wikipedia. Ideally, every page should be accessible through a chain of article links from the main page.

Participants

To add yourself to the list of participants, please edit this section and add {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/table|Your Username|Active}} to the bottom of the list.

Templates

• {{orphan}} - A template to be put directly on the article if it has two or fewer links from other articles.
  
• {{do-attempt|date=September 2008|att=September 2008}} - A template that should be used to replace the orphan template once you have unsuccessfully attempted to de-orphan the article. Leave "date" as the date on the original orphan template (if one exists), and set "att" to equal the month and year you attempted to de-orphan the article.
• {{articleissues|do-attempt=September 2008|orphan=September 2008}} - If there are other issue tags (notability, refimprov, wikify, etc.) on the page, consider consolidating them into one box with {{articleissues}}. Read the specs first to familiarize yourself with it, although it's pretty straightforward. (Needs both the orphan AND do-attempt parameters in order to categorize the article properly!)
• {{Template:User Wikipedia Orphan}} - The userbox for this project.
  
• {{Template:Welcome de-orphaner}} - A welcoming template to encourage new de-orphaners.
• {{Template:Welcome de-orphaner2}} - A slightly different welcoming template.

See also

• Wikipedia:Drawing attention to new pages
• Wikipedia:Build the web
• Wikipedia:Walled garden
• Category:Orphaned articles
• Category:Orphaned fairuse images
• Special:Lonelypages
• Special:Unusedimages

Obsolete Orphan Lists

These are kept for historical purposes only. They are no longer used.

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Articles orphaned without redirects - List of orphans from a 2003 database dump
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Orphaned Articles - List of articles from a 2004 database dump