Wikipedia:Administrators' guide/Cleaning backlogs

Wikipedia is a backlog, in and out. There's always plenty of work to do as an admin, and the best way to find an endless supply is via the noticeboards.

List of noticeboards

For a full list of noticeboards, see Wikipedia:Noticeboards

The following noticeboards are those that do or might require administrator attention.

Administrators' noticeboards

• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard (WP:AN) – for anything that affects administrators; General announcements, discussion of administration methods, ban proposals, block reviews, and backlog notices
• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents (WP:AN/I) – reports of incidents requiring admin intervention
• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring (WP:AN/EW) – reports of edit warriors and violations of the three-revert rule
• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure (WP:AN/RFC) – requests to have uninvolved administrators assess, summarize, and formally close a discussion

Urgent matters

These noticeboards fill up quickly, and usually involve matters that require immediate administrator intervention in the form of blocks, page protection, or deletion.

• Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism (WP:AIV) – reports of vandalism requiring immediate administrator intervention
• Wikipedia:Requests for page protection (WP:RFPP) – reports of disruption to pages that may require protection as a preventive measure, or templates that are of high-risk due to high transclusion count
• Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention (WP:UAA) – reports of usernames that are such blatant and serious problems that they may need to be immediately blocked

Deletion

The following venues (not necessarily referred to as a noticeboard) are primarily for discussion of pages or items that might require deletion or merging.

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (WP:AfD)
• Wikipedia:Templates for discussion (WP:TfD)
• Wikipedia:Files for discussion (WP:FfD)
• Wikipedia:Categories for discussion (WP:CfD)
• Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion (WP:RfD)
• Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion (WP:MfD)

Other

• Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations (WP:SPI) – requests that we investigate whether two or more Wikipedia accounts are being abusively operated by the same person
• Wikipedia:Requests for permissions (WP:PERM) – requests changes in user access levels
• Wikipedia:Requested moves (WP:RM) – retitling (moving) of pages that may require an admin to delete the target page to make way for the move
• Wikipedia:Copyright problems (WP:CP) – reports of possible copyright problems that may require admins to delete revisions from the page history, or the page altogether
• Wikipedia:Requests for history merge (WP:RFHM)
• Wikipedia:Edit filter noticeboard (WP:EFN) – coordination and discussion of edit filter use and management
• Wikipedia:Edit filter/Requested (WP:EFR)

How to respond to reports

Every noticeboard differs in some way. Specific instructions for any given noticeboard may be found at the /Administrator instructions subpage. If such page exists, you will see a link to it at the top-right of the noticeboard page. For instance, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Administrator instructions (notice the link to this page at the top-right of WP:AfD).

Instructions are sometimes also found in the edit notice.

Semi-automation

Working at some noticeboards can involve repetitive tasks, for which there are some useful scripts to expedite your work.