User:OlEnglish/De-orphaned

This is my personal log of all the articles of which I've de-orphaned and removed the orphaned tag. Since I'm starting keeping track late there's many articles I've de-orphaned that aren't listed here but hopefully I can track down the ones I've successfully de-orphaned in the past. This log isn't meant to be a way for me to 'show off' or 'keep score' but rather used for my own personal reference as a means to gauge my progress. A Guide to de-orphaning articles is something I'm brainstorming right now and might complete when I have time (see my replies at User_talk:Wavelength/Archive_2#Orphaned_articles). For the purposes of this list I'm using the criteria of 2 or more links needed for a successful de-orphan, therefore every article listed has 2 or more relevant incoming links but I always try to go for at least 3. I consider Lists, Indexes, and Outlines as eligible to meet the criteria at WP:O and include these when deciding whether to remove the tag. Rarely do I count links from certain disambig and set index pages.

Quality and care first

When de-orphaning I always go for quality over quantity; meaning I never cut corners; if a merge/redirect is required, even for obscure stubs, I take as much time as it takes to properly do the merge; I would research the subject, making sure as much useful content is saved, all backlinks fixed, all redirects tagged, make sure all content is attributed back to it's original author, all relevant tags properly in place on talk pages, all stale tags removed, etc. etc. Despite the time it takes, I believe this quality of care should be taken with every article when performing maintenance tasks, especially such as de-orphaning and merging. When people start 'rushing it', using automated tools when manually could do the job better, or think a certain article 'isn't worth their time' that shows that they don't care as much for professionalism and the readers of this site.

On orphans and notability

The fact that many of the orphans I see have no incoming links at all, and out of 6,928,628 articles are not even mentioned once anywhere on the site, speaks to the notability of said topic, or lack thereof, but can also speak to the incompleteness of Wikipedia, that with 6,928,628 articles there's potentially another million or so that are missing (that would link to said orphan). Google is not the be-all and end-all of notability for an article. We've grown so accustomed to using Google to determine notability that all too often articles on obscure but notable topics get deleted because "no hits on Google!". Google result counts are a meaningless metric anyway. "Google has become the main interface for our whole reality. To be precise: With the Google interface the user gets the impression that the search results imply a kind of totality. In fact, one only sees a small part of what one could see if one also integrates other research tools" as one study put it. We're supposed to be striving for the "sum of all human knowledge" and the somewhat contradicting notability guidelines don't always help towards this goal, as is stated in the last paragraph of WP:DDH. That's not to say any and all articles should be kept, WP:NOT is policy and should always be followed, but too many editors confuse WP:NOT policy and WP:N guideline. Furthermore WP:IAR can and should be invoked in cases where the topic is good for the encyclopedia, and we should always take this into account when determining an orphaned article's notability, and whether it should be kept, merged/redirect, or PROD'ed.

While i'm on the topic of notability.. I have a problem with this mixing of WP:V with WP:GNG.. According to WP:GNG, "A topic is considered to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". I thought reliable sources are meant to VERIFY an article's content ONLY if it's "challenged, or likely to be challenged" (quote from WP:V). That's all fine and dandy to determine an article's notability by its coverage in reliable sources, but once whole articles are starting to get DELETED only because "There's no coverage in reliable sources to satisfy WP:GNG" that's when things are getting out of control.

I also believe in what I term 'universal notability'. That is, what's notable and rightly has an article in one language Wikipedia should also be notable and have an article in every other language Wikipedia. I believe this to be the answer to the problem of WP:Systemic bias.

Articles are added in chronological order, ie. as I go. Latest ones are at the bottom.
As of March 2011 these are all still currently de-orphaned; noone has replaced the orphan tag, and, last I checked, they all still have relevant and useful incoming links. However, so far 4 have been nominated for deletion at AfD, and 1 was PROD'ed. This is why it's so important to only attempt to de-orphan worthy articles that are likely to be kept, otherwise your time will be wasted.
Not included in this log are articles where I've just only removed the orphan tag because the tag was misplaced or where I've deemed the article wasn't an orphan in the first place or probably couldn't get any further incoming links.
Right now I'm working through Category:Orphaned articles from August 2016 (522 left), because these were added by a bot this is a good place to start if you want to find fairly decent articles that would be easy to de-orphan.
I've found that biographies are usually fairly easy to de-orphan as there's a likely chance that the person can be added to a few lists. And although this may be a 'cheap, easy way out' type of de-orphan at least it rids it of the tag without comprising quality of other articles.
Useful for de-orphaning: In addition to Lists don't forget Navboxes, Outlines, and "Index of", "Timeline of" and "Glossary of" types of pages. Also, specifically for bios - there's the births/deaths sections of [Month] [Day] type articles as well as [Year] (if a date is given in the bio), +section for events as well. In some Portals there's a list of "Topics related to".
Watch for stubs that could be merged instead and inappropriate articles that should be prodded.
Watch for duplicates of articles with alternate spellings (there's actually quite a few of these I've come across, a few are listed at the bottom in the merge/redirect section)
Now if every member of WikiProject Orphanage made the effort to de-orphan at least this many articles we could conceivably make a dent in the backlog, which has massively grew since AutoWikiBrowser started automatic tagging of orphans. As long as users only tag articles with ZERO incoming links we'll be fine.

User:OlEnglish/De-orphaned

De-orphaned articles

Orphans that I merged/redirected instead