User:FriendlyDalek
About Me[edit]
I've been doing minor edits on Wikipedia anonymously for awhile now, mostly removing vandalism. I created this account to make it easier to participate in discussions and to establish an anchor point for my contributions.
Wiki Help[edit]
Current Activity[edit]
Mostly on hiatus.
Previous Activity[edit]
Cleaning up pollution in help categories[edit]
I've been reading a lot of the help and documentation pages recently, and I've run across a lot of category pollution in the help categories. At first this was confusing to me as I'm sure it is to a lot of new users. There are many user pages listed in the categories, and I would go to these pages expecting to find some helpful or pertinent information. Sometimes the pages would contain helpful information, but it was usually a duplicate of information listed elsewhere. Eventually I realized that the category entries were erroneous and inadvertent.
The errors fall into several (ahem) categories:
- The most common error is when a user attempts to create a link to a category, but inadvertently ends up categorizing their own page. This error is subtle and it's easy to understand why it often goes unnoticed.
- Incorrect:
[[Category:Wikipedia_help]]This categorizes the current page. - Correct:
[[:Category:Wikipedia_help]]This links to the category page.
- Incorrect:
- Another common mistake is for a user to copy a categorized page onto their user page. Since the copied page contains a category, the user's page also gets added to the category.
- Some users create sandbox pages that they use for experimentation or as a temporary workspace for an article. This is fine unless the user adds a category call, because this will then inappropriately categorize the sandbox page.