Wikipedia:Gnome Week

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Wikipedia has a problem.

Out of all the articles on the English Wikipedia, 6,621 are featured articles. 40,551 are good articles. While this is an admirable sum, Wikipedia as a whole contains 6,912,806 articles, and more are added each hour.

Just how good are these remaining 6,865,000+ articles? Many people have asked this question. Their results are not pretty. A quick tour of Wikipedia's articles will reveal articles that are poorly written, misspelled, needing wikification, unreferenced, uncategorized, or even completely unsalvageable.

People take this in different ways. Some believe Wikipedia is failing. Some see it as part of a grand analogy. Some are part of the problem.

And some try to fix it. They are known as WikiGnomes. While their edits are not generally received with fanfare or applause, their contributions are invaluable. They keep the encyclopedia from spiraling into chaos. They find and fix those badly written walls of text. They keep vandals from turning every article into typewriter salad.

Their contributions are admirable, but they are outnumbered. Wikipedia is growing. For every article that gets fixed, more are created that need fixing, and some of these go years before anyone edits them. Wikipedia's backlogs are thousands of articles strong.

This is clearly a problem, one that could harm Wikipedia's credibility as a usable reference work. This problem, however, is neither insurmountable nor irreversible. We can fix it. All we need is the time.

That time has come.

In the spirit of creative holidays, June 21 has been designated International Gnome Day.^[1] The first Gnome Week was held from June 21, 2007 to Thursday, June 28, 2007.

This occasion is essentially a mass drive to clean up Wikipedia's act. Backlogs are cleared, articles polished, typos fixed, bad prose edited, unreferenced articles sourced, and articles needing deletion are proposed for it. No article is safe from our reach. The more people who participate, the better Wikipedia will become as a result. The sky's the limit.

Participants are encouraged (but certainly not required) to keep a running total of articles they've improved, so we can get a rough estimate of how much we've done. At the risk of sounding clichéd, if we all work together we can accomplish miracles for the encyclopedia.