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

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
Category:Candidates for speedy deletion (CAT:CSD) – pages tagged for speedy deletion
Category:All articles proposed for deletion (CAT:ALLPROD) – pages tagged for proposed deletion
Note also CAT:BLPPROD for BLP-specific PROD articles

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.

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.