Wikinews:To-Do List

Deep in the distant past you probably got a Welcome template dropped on your talk page. One of the points it raises is, there are always things to do on Wikinews. As a news site you could write articles until you had worn the tips off your fingers, but there would still be a demand for more. Outside the main namespace where articles go there are also things that may need your attention. A number of these are items that can only be handled by administrators, but that should not stop you looking at the appropriate pages and seeing if you can get involved - or learn what you will have to deal with when you are made an admin. Much of this is "housework", required to keep the site well maintained. The more people go through a few of the following items when they first log on to Wikinews, the less of a backlog will build up.

Archiving
This - regrettably - is one only for administrators. It is a task that fills up recent changes but doesn't seem to achieve much else. Yet, it keeps us from having thousands of articles that are potential vandalism targets.

Admin Alerts
Another one for administrators, but worth keeping an eye on even if you don't have the privilege.

Deletion requests
This is another one for everybody, but there are parts that are admin-only.

Water Cooler
Check the water cooler for new messages and comment on them (or vote if appropriate).

Obituaries
If you're feeling morbid, why not write an obituary for someone who's not actually dead yet? We currently have over obituaries. Please note the obituary must include sourcing from which it is largely verifiable or will be eligible for deletion ten days after being tagged as such.

May need Topic cat
This is a list of category pages that may need the Topic cat template. This task can be done by anyone. There are 590 categories in the list but many are internal categories.

Category:Image issues
This category includes several subcategories which can mostly be attended to by any user (unless they’re protected).
 * Category:Files with no machine-readable author‎ (2143 files)
 * Category:Files with no machine-readable description‎ (2187 files)
 * Category:Files with no machine-readable license‎ (50 files)
 * Category:Files with no machine-readable source‎ (2128 files)

In most cases the file summary page needs a filled out copy of Image info.