Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories/uncategorized

Other tasks

Traditionally, our primary task has been to clear out the oldest populated uncategorized-by-date-category (which is listed on the top of this page). Here are some other things you can work on:

• Special:UncategorizedTemplates
• Category:Uncategorized pages, divided by month
• Wikipedia:Database reports/All uncategorized articles, all currently uncategorized articles since the last report run (normally daily)
• Wikipedia:Uncategorized biographies of living people, a sibling task force
• Category:Articles needing unspecified expert attention and Category:Miscellaneous articles needing expert attention

Hints and tips

• Consider using an edit summary that links to this page, such as Categorizing article - [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories/uncategorized|You can help!]].
• Take your time: it is more important to ensure a useful, precise categorization of articles than to clear the backlog at high speed. If in doubt, skip it.
• Use the most specific category you can find and remember that an article can often be placed in multiple categories. While even partial categorization is of value, try to avoid placing articles only in very large categories that are not typically used for browsing, such as Category:2001 albums or Category:Living people.
• Look at similar articles to see what categories are available. Clicking on internal links near the beginning of the article is often helpful.
• Articles may not be added to categories that do not exist. You must either create the new category immediately or find one that does exist; an article that is left sitting in redlinked categories will be returned to the uncategorized queue again.
• Articles with only stub categories still need to be included in non-stub categories.
• Some articles with the {{uncat}} tag have already been categorized; simply remove the tag in that case.
• Check if the article needs to undergo one of the deletion processes (speedy/prod/afd), or if merging/redirecting/renaming the article would be appropriate. Also, watch out for articles with copyright violations.
• If an article has both a {{prod}} tag and an {{uncat}} tag, then either categorize it anyway or remove the uncat tag and put it on your watchlist, making sure it gets deleted.
• The search box has a nifty drop-down list feature; use it to your advantage. You can check to see if a category exists without navigating away from the article. Sometimes more than one category shows up after you've typed it in – this may mean the category in question is a parent category, and that there may be a more specific category the article can go into.
• Albums should be categorized by artist, year of release, and genre(s). Same for songs.

Useful links

• Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser, a tool which makes repetitive edits faster
• Wikipedia:HotCat, used for adding, removing, and changing categories
• Category:Uncategorized pages
• Special:Uncategorizedpages
• Wikipedia:Database reports/All uncategorized articles
• Wikipedia:Database reports/Uncategorized categories
• Help:Category
• Template:Categorization progress
• A searchable top level list of categories
• Toolserver list of uncategorized articles