Wikipedia:Collaborations

"WP:CO" redirects here. For the page on overuse of citations, see Wikipedia:Citation overkill. For content ownership policy, see Wikipedia:Ownership of content. For common outcomes at articles for deletion, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Common outcomes.

To improve the quality of articles that are short or lacking in detail, Wikipedia's community takes part in collaboration to expand and improve articles. A collaboration on an article may be chosen by a group of users interested in the topic (WikiProjects) for a period of time (a week, fortnight, or month) or random editors coming together under Wikipedia's principle of collaborative editing. The Bold–refine process describes a collaborative editing cycle.

Collaboration takes place in all areas. Organised collaborations may take place on specific topics or subjects (e.g. cinema, cryptography, or science), and regional focuses (e.g. India or Africa). These organised collaborations are set up in conjunction with related WikiProjects or WikiPortals. Some have taken on other functional areas, such as translations of foreign-language articles, or book reporting. A few even focus on Wikipedia maintenance issues, rather than substantive additions. Collaborations can also range in the scope and aim of their work—most attempt to raise articles from stub level to comprehensive articles, while others attempt to polish larger articles until they reach featured status.

Collaborating on Wikipedia

One of the attractions of Wikipedia is that editing is collaborative. Anyone may edit an article, and anyone may edit another person's edits. Therefore, more than one person is able to contribute to an article, which has the advantages that the article may be developed more quickly than if it were just one person writing it, and the article has the experience of many contributors.

Creating a new collaboration

1. Create the main collaboration page at Wikipedia:Collaborationname. (See Starting a new page)
2. Create an outline on your collaboration page:
   • Most collaborations have the following content: introductory overview text; Template:COTWs; a notice of the current collaborations; links to subpages listing previous collaborations and failed nominations; selection process rules; directions for nominating articles; the list of nominees; a list of the templates used by the collaboration; and a list of relevant collaborations on other projects.
3. Identify topical areas within the scope of your collaboration:
   • A good way to do this is to copy the listings of Special:Whatlinkshere for the most important articles related to your project.
4. If possible, link to a sample article to let other Wikipedians see what the collaboration hopes to achieve.
5. Advertise!
   • Create a collaboration notice template, and insert it at the top of the article page in case of "current notices" and the talk page for nominated collaborations.
   • Post a notice at the Village Pump to alert potential new members.
     • You could also notify any appropriate WikiProject
   • Look at the history of contributors to articles that fall within your collaboration's topical area. Many of them might consider joining your collaboration if you leave a message on their talk page.
   • Find prospective members on IRC at Libera Chat in the general #wikipedia-en ^connect discussion channel.
6. Collaborate!

Templates

See Category:Wikipedia collaboration templates for collaboration templates

Most collaborations use templates to mark the current collaboration and candidates for future collaborations. The template marking the current collaboration should be placed at the top of the article in question. If a collaboration project is abandoned or neglected (such as left for twice as long as an article is scheduled to be current), the template should be removed from the current article and the collaboration marked as {{WikiProject status|inactive}}.

Candidacy templates should be on the talk page. As talk page templates these candidacy ones should use the Coffee Roll format established at Template standardisation, or be incorporated into a WikiProject template.

See also

Show COTWs (top navbox)

• Wikipedia:Articles for improvement
• Wikipedia:Editing Weekend
• Wikipedia:Collaboration first
• {{CotM}} - talkpage template for Collaborations of the Month