Wikipedia:Wiki workflow
Wiki categorisation is used not only to organise articles not only for the readers, but also to organise them based on their current state, and the current work that needs to be done to them. Administrators and other readers who have an ongoing interest in maintaining and refining the content can then look to the categories containing article requiring work done in their own area of interest.
Once the work has been completed to a satisfactory level in each of its defficient areas it is removed from that category, and in many cases may be moved into another category if a sequence of processes are needing to be done to it in a specific order by different roles. This kind of "movement" from one category to another based on the kind of tasks needing to be done to an article is called workflow and is used in most organisational and project management contexts. Similar concepts are also used in distributed computing environments so that many processors can work together on large jobs with minimal communications between each other being required.
The Wikipeida project uses hundreds of articles and categories to manage the vast workflow involved in mantaining so many articles, here are some example categories making up Wikipedia's workflow:
- Articles actively undergoing construction
- Articles copied to Wikibooks in need of cleanup
- Articles for speedy deletion
- Articles needing Chinese script
- Articles that are way too long
- Articles with confusing statements
- Articles with broken links
Obviously these are all oriented toward presentation and publication due to the nature of the Wikipedia project's work, but the general idea can apply easily to any manner of organisation. Its the general concept of creating an idea or collection of goals as an article and categorising it based on the roles and processes which are currently required to act on it. Each role which acts on it can then remove it from their category and add it to the next roles category who needs to work on it. Many organisations and projects using wiki's to collaborate on their documents and other content are moving a wide variety of content into their wiki environment so that it can benefit from this method of organised workflow.
- Related articles
- Category:Wikipedia administration - Articles relating to the many threads of Wikipedia administration
- Wikipedia:Categorization projects (current) - Wikipedia's current wiki-workflow categories
- Categorization - Article about categoriation in Wikipedia
- Workflow - Article on the general concept of workflow