Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Chapter 9. WikiProjects and Other Group Efforts

Everything so far in this book has been about you as an individual editor, working on your own, interacting with others only to discuss problems or changes to articles. But editors at Wikipedia also work together in groups, formal or informal. Not only is there strength in numbers, there’s energy and fun. Such group work is one of the things that make Wikipedia as much an online community as it is an encyclopedia.

Most editors edit articles that particularly interest them: articles about television comedy shows; the region where they live; sports; areas of science or technology; history; multiplayer video games; and so on. If you’re one of them, the next natural step is joining a topical area WikiProject—a group of editors working on a collection of articles related to the same topic. Or you may take pleasure in a specific kind of editing: fixing footnotes; improving lead paragraphs; or adding geographical coordinates to articles. There are also WikiProjects for editors with such interests.

Although working in WikiProjects is the most common kind of group effort in Wikipedia, there are others: Collaborations are where a group of editors works on a single article for a week, fortnight, or month, and then turns to the next article they choose, often within a broad topical area. Organizations are less formal and less numerous than WikiProjects. One-time initiatives form and end whenever editors see the need and other editors agree ...