How To Join a WikiProject on Wikipedia
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WikiProjects are where groups of people work together on a specific topic. This could be Australian biota, Australian music, jazz, cinema, football. Whatever you can think of, there’s probably a WikiProject dedicated to it. Let’s take a look at WikiProject Australia.
To find this project on Wikipedia, type WP:WikiProject Australia in the search box and click search.
On the WikiProject Australia project page you can see the project's goals. There's also links at the top for a list of articles to improve, a to-do list, a notice board for discussion, and others.
Scrolling down, under sub-projects there is a table of the number of articles covered by this project, ranked by quality and importance. Because this is Project Australia, all of these articles are in some way related to Australia.
Articles rated as Start quality usually need more information or improvements like more references. As the article grows, its quality rating will be adjusted too.
You can see a list of all of the Start quality articles in WikiProject Australia by clicking the number under Total. It will take you here.
Back to WikiProject Australia, under sub-projects, there’s also a list of Wikiprojects related to WikiProject Australia, for example WikiProject Australian Music. This is a similar project, with information on pages relating to Australian music.
There’s also a list of members, where people have added their username and what topics they are interested in improving. You can add yourself to this list by editing the page, adding a # and clicking the signature button.
This will add your username. Click publish changes when you’re done.
If you want to talk to other people interested in this Project, go to the Talk page. Click Talk at the top of the page, and then click Add Topic to start a new topic. You can also scroll down and reply to other conversations and messages already there.
Not every project is active, and even projects like WikiProject Australian Music with lots of members, might not have many currently active members, as people come and go.
But WikiProjects are extremely useful if you have a group of people wanting to work together.
So, if you have some friends wanting to work on Australian Music content, why not use the talk page on WikiProject Australian Music to coordinate your work, as it will allow others to join in too.
But how do you find the project that is right for you. There are two ways.
The first is to go to a Wikipedia article on a topic you’re interested in. Let’s look at this one about the jazz musician Freddy Logan. Click on the Talk page, and above the discussion, you can see a box with WikiProjects this article is related to. There’s WikiProject Biography, WikiProject Australia, and WikiProject Jazz. Let’s look at Jazz.
Just like the WikiProject Australia page, the WikiProject Jazz page has information on article quality, a list of members, and some suggested sources to help in your research. The Talk page here is also quite active, and has several archives of previous discussions which can be browsed.
This would be a good place to get help if you’re working on Wikipedia articles about jazz.
But there is a second way to find WikiProjects. In the search box at the top of Wikipedia, type WP:Project.
This will take you to a page about WikiProjects. Here you can search for projects, or, there are directories if you’d rather browse.
Clicking on the ‘manually curated’ link takes you to this page. Then, if we want to find a project about music, you’d click ‘music’ to find a list of projects by genre, nationality, bands, etc. Clicking on any of these will take us to the project page and then you can join in their community.
You can also create your own projects, and back on the WikiProject page there is information on how to do that.
Happy editing!