On the English Wikipedia, there are over 2000 WikiProjects to participate in.[1] You can participate in as many as you like, but are you not sure which one to participate in? Well, this essay is for you, dear reader.
Interests
The first thing you should do is to find a WikiProject of your interest. If you are a (diehard) Swiftie, try WikiProject Taylor Swift. Or if you try too hard to catch every Pokémon in Pokémon Go, or you love Pokémon[a], try WikiProject Pokémon. If you hate spam, try WikiProject Spam. There are also generic WikiProjects for you to choose, so what are you waiting for, click that search button to search for a WikiProject!
Anything, but interests
Still here? Great. There are other factors on what WikiProjects to join. But interests should be your first choice, so I would assume you have no interest in what we offer. The first, but tedious method is to create one! There are other ways, like checking for activity, number of GAs/FAs/GTs/FTs, whatever Featured or Good content, whether you know anything about it.
WikiProject creation
So, the first thing you should do is to check for what you are interested in at the box below
and if you fail at it, you can make a WikiProject, nobody’s gonna stop you.[b] The second thing you should do is to look for editors with similar interests. This is the most important step. You must find people who want to work together on the project with you. After all, single-editor projects fail miserably. Be very careful. If your idea is already enveloped into another WikiProject, oops… you might get overwhelmed by the parent WikiProject. Alternatively, you can do a task force (unless you feel your new WikiProject passes some sort of criteria similar to WP:GNG), a smaller variant of the WikiProject.
The first thing you should do in the process of creating one is to propose one
Go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals#Creating a proposal to begin writing.You'll need to list the pages and categories that are key to your proposed group, as well as current WikiProjects that relate to those pages. Then interested users will sign-up to support the project (feel free to advertise this at related projects or pages.) But, do not attempt to make sockpuppets to increase the support votes.[c] While there are no hard rules for what constitutes "sufficient" support, projects that are likely to succeed tend to start with at least 6 to 12 active Wikipedians. Once that threshold is reached, the proposal can be considered successful and the project created (see below). If there is insufficient support to start the project after a few months, the proposal will generally be archived for future reference.
Now you can create it, yay! It’s a walk in the park, like creating an article. However, various tools have been developed to help WikiProjects keep track of pages of interest, which can make it difficult to fully set up.
How to keep track?
There should be some tools to help keep track, which I already explained. Now, it is time to tag some projects.
Notes and references
Notes
References
- ^ "Wikipedia:WikiProject", Wikipedia, 2023-09-12, retrieved 2023-09-13