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WikiProject Orphanage is dedicated to clearing up the immense backlog of orphaned articles. There are thousands of articles and images on Wikipedia with few or no links to them. The value of this project should not be underestimated as the hyperlink is the defining characteristic of a wiki and is indeed what provides Wikipedia with it's ease of quick information retrieval. Plus, if you are new to Wikipedia, de-orphaning articles is a great way to learn a wide variety of useful skills. De-orphaning, when done correctly, will allow you to learn how to navigate within Wikipedia, how to format wikilinks, how to utilize cleanup tags, as well as how to determine an article's notability. Which in turn leads into learning how to look for references, how and when to perform a merge, and how and when to propose an article for deletion. All while learning interesting tidbits of information that you'd probably not find anywhere else!

Building the web is a big part of Wikipedia, so join in the project and give those articles a home!

[edit] Goals and scope

While it may seem simple at first, not every article can be de-orphaned, and de-orphaning can be a difficult task, so this project aims to educate and make it easier. But please remember that de-orphaning is about maintaining and improving the quality of individual articles by integrating them with others in a relevant and meaningful way, it's not about keeping score. The value of de-orphaning is not determined by the number of incoming links you added or how many orphan tags you removed, but rather by the quality of integration. Therefore, the primary goal of the Orphanage is to improve Wikipedia by building the web in a way that enhances the quality of all affected articles.

Note that this project deals primarily with articles rather than images. For orphaned images see Category:Orphaned non-free use Wikipedia files.

Our current aim is to clear the backlog of orphaned articles on Wikipedia, so that all articles can be found by a series of links from the Main Page. Note that an article with categories can be found in this way because it can be reached from other articles that share the category; however categories currently are not counted in the definition of orphan.

The project also aims to make the process of de-orphaning easier. Through collaborating with other projects, providing information, and above all helping editors to cooperate, the Orphanage will make the task of de-orphaning a little less daunting. If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to help us improve in our goal please feel free to leave a message on the talk page.

There were, on last count, 140,016 articles tagged as orphans on Wikipedia. This is over 4% of the total articles, and an incredible amount to work on, so we need your help. As of January 2009^[update], there were over 133,000 articles with NO links from other articles, and many more which fit the less strict definition of an orphan, out of about 2.5 million articles.^[1] While de-orphaning an article is a simple idea, it is often a difficult task, so the more editors we have to help, the better.

[edit] What can I do to help?

Surely you're wondering what you can do to help our cause. De-orphaning an article is a good way to start.

Suggestions for how to de-orphan an article provides information regarding how to find articles that can be linked to orphans and add them.

[edit] Participants

To add yourself to the list of participants, edit this section and add your username to the bottom of the Active list using this format:

{{Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/table|Your Username|Active}}

[edit] Active members

[edit] Inactive list

These members haven't been seen around in a while or are unfortunately no longer involved with WikiProject Orphanage. We hope they'll come back and move themselves to the active list!

[edit] Progress

Summary of tagged orphans (in Category:Orphaned articles)

Note that the bot addbot started tagging orphans in February 2009, which accounts for the large number of orphans tagged that month.

Toolserver list summarizing articles tagged or untagged, courtesy of User:Para.

[edit] Templates

• {{orphan}} - A template to be put directly on the article if it has two or fewer links from other articles satisfying the orphan criteria.
• {{orphan|date=November 2009|att=November 2009}}- Once you have unsuccessfully attempted to de-orphan the article. Leave "date" as the date on the original orphan template (if one exists), and set "att" to equal the month and year you attempted to de-orphan the article.
• {{articleissues|do-attempt=November 2009|orphan=November 2009}} - If there are other issue tags (notability, refimprov, wikify, etc.) on the page, consider consolidating them into one box with {{articleissues}}. Read the specs first to familiarize yourself with it, although it's pretty straightforward. (Needs both the orphan AND do-attempt parameters in order to categorize the article properly!)
• {{Template:User Wikipedia Orphan}} - The userbox for this project.
  
• {{Template:Welcome de-orphaner}} - A welcoming template to encourage new project members.
• {{Template:Welcome de-orphaner2}} - A slightly different welcoming template, to invite de-orphaners to the project.

[edit] Categories

• List of all subpages of this page

[edit] See also

• Build the web
• Drawing attention to new pages
• Lonely pages
• Unused images
• Walled garden
• WikiProject Abandoned Articles
• WikiProject Council/Proposals/Navbox
• WikiProject Integration

[edit] Obsolete orphan lists

These are kept for historical purposes only, they are no longer used:

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Articles orphaned without redirects - List of orphans from a 2003 database dump
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Orphaned Articles - List of articles from a 2004 database dump

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Monitor readership on any Wikipedia page