User:Neilc/External links

Project finished

All the 4138 articles that originally had problems have been corrected. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Old content

This page contains a list of articles in the English Wikipedia whose "External links" section is incorrectly capitalized. This list was generated from the Nov. 15 Wikipedia database dump, using software originally written by Kate. Thanks, Kate!

Initially, this list contained 4138 articles. If people lend a hand fixing articles, hopefully we can have them all fixed soon. All links have been fixed by now.

How to help

1. Pick a "subsection" of 10 links from one of the lists below
2. Correct the articles; a list of frequent mistakes is given below. You should make your edit summary the following text: [[User:Neilc/External links|Please help us correct "External links"]]
3. Remove the fixed articles from the list. If you feel like it, GOTO 1

Quick tips for mass editing

1. Use a browser with tabbed browsing like Mozilla Firefox, Click the middle mouse button (normally scroll wheel, or both left+right) on the links to open them in new tabs in the background.
2. Change your wikipedia preferences:
   • Editing
     • Change the edit box rows to something like 10 or 15 so you can see the save page button without scrolling.
     • Tick - Mark all edits minor by default
     • Do not tick - Add pages you edit to your watchlist

Common mistakes

(See the Wikipedia:Manual of Style for guidelines.)

• Like any section title, "External links" should have sentence capitalization (i.e. "External Links" is incorrect). Note that a page with incorrect capitalization for some of its section titles might have incorrect section capitalization elsewhere -- so please check the other section titles as well. In other words, all headings should capitalize the first word, and any proper nouns, but nothing else. For example, "This is a heading" or "This is a Wikipedia heading".
• Incorrect section level: the top-level sections in an article should be wikified at ==
• Incorrect list format: the content of the "External links" section should be an unordered list. If there is a single external link, it should still be in an unordered list — this is to facilate adding new links in the future.

Some external links are in an impromptu "list" where the list elements are separated by newlines (either <br> tags or newlines in the wikicode) — these should be changed to use the standard * notation for unordered lists. It might also be a good idea to alphabetize the list, although I haven't bothered with this myself.

• Personally I don't like articles that have an "External link" section (i.e. singular rather than plural). Aside from sounding awkward, this invites mistakes in the future: someone will inevitably add another link to the article, and they will sometimes forget to add the trailing "s" to the section title. Of course, this is tangential to the main point of this project; the set of erroneous articles does not include every article with a singular ext. links section title.

• I agree that the section should be called "External links" even if there is only one link. However, when I create an external link section with a single link and name it "External links" someone comes in behind me and changes it to "External link". If I see this happen again I will direct the editor to this page. Rsduhamel 07:38, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • The last time i checked the manual of style on this (which was quite a while ago), it listed both as correct (although obviously you can't say link if there's more than one link), so i would say that people shouldn't be changing "links" to "link". — kate.

Contributors

If you've helped fixup incorrect external links, feel free to add your name to the list:

• BesigedB
• BrokenSegue
• Cacophony
• Clawed
• Cookiecaper
• Donar Reiskoffer
• Elf
• Factitious
• Fredrik
• Kizor
• LockeShocke
• Lucky13pjn
• Mailer_diablo
• Marcika
• Marknen
• Matteh
• Neilc
• Neutrality
• RaD Man
• Sarge Baldy
• Zoggie50
• Poweroid
• Lifefeed
• JcMaco
• Walkiped
• nixie
• Stellertony
• Duk
• Mtz206

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!

Lists of erroneous articles

• A - C - all done
• D - G - all done
• H - K - all done
• L - O - all done
• P - S - all done
• T - Z - all done

Other similar initiatives

Kate started a project identical to this one a few months ago. I'm not sure why there are still 5,000 odd pages to be corrected, but certainly most of the culprits were fixed in the previous external links project.