SpongeBob Wiki:Maintenance

Maintenance refers to the ongoing tasks involved in helping to keep the wiki clean, up to date and ensuring that our content is in-line with policy. Users are encouraged to continuously contribute to areas of maintenance which meet their interests and capabilities. However, some tasks are assigned to administrators, who help keep the wiki clean from vandalism by blocking troublesome editors. Certain basic maintenance tasks may also be assigned to a bot, which is able to edit a large number of pages in a short space of time.

Please remember that basic maintenance edits, such as fixing a link or correcting a spelling mistake, should be marked as a minor edit.

We would like to thank the Super Mario Wiki for writing the original policy page.

Main Page
The Main Page is an important way to welcome visitors to the wiki, and invite them to further explore our community by providing them with news, community notices, links to useful pages, and more.

The Main Page has three dynamic sections that present rotating and up-to-date information to visitors. Instead of editing the main page itself, we modify these sections using templates. Certain rules are required for updating each of these templates, which are explained in the section below. Anyone is free to update these templates when necessary. Finally, it is recommended that all templates with bullet points for info should contain around &#190;-1&#189; lines per bullet point.

Featured articles should contain the first 4-6 lines of information from the current featured article. A thumbnail of the article's main image should also be displayed.
 * Featured article

This template consists of four interesting SpongeBob SquarePants facts. The first line of info should be accompanied with an image, no bigger than 150px thumbnailed. Please link and bold the character or game relating to the subject of each line, so guests and users alike are prompted to see more information in the article itself.
 * Did you know

This is the the template that shows up-to-date news of the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise. In four lines, the info should be about a mix of the following:
 * News


 * New announcements of upcoming media.
 * Release dates.
 * Announcements that a game or other form of media has just been released.
 * Relevant promotional events or developments.

Whenever a worthy piece of news is revealed, it should be placed at the top of the list. The last line (containing the oldest piece of news) should then be removed.

The first line of info should be accompanied with an image, no bigger than 150px within a thumbnail. Please link and bold the character or game relating to the subject of each line, so guests and users alike are prompted to see more information in the article itself.

File maintenance
Images, as well as audio and video files, are essential to provide examples about what articles are detailing in words. All articles should use at least one image, with the exception of implied or unseen subjects. Various maintenance tasks may be required for the file itself (such as issues with quality and categorization), the use of the file on pages, or the request for the uploading of additional files where required. Files should also closely follow the image use policy, and new revisions to files may only be uploaded by autoconfirmed users.

Written content
The following maintenance issues concern the actual written content of an article. Content should be free from spelling/grammatical errors, be of a decent length and containing all available information, as well as following the wiki's writing guidelines.

General article maintenance
Maintenance that doesn't specifically concern the article's written content or files.

Other maintenance
This section covers miscellaneous maintenance tasks which do not fit into the above sections.

Administrative maintenance
Administrators (also named "admins" or "sysops") are promoted users who are given additional tools, which assist in maintaining the upkeep of the wiki. All admins have the ability to counter vandalism on the wiki by blocking troublesome editors, reverting detrimental edits by using the "rollback" feature, and hiding inappropriate edits if required. Administrators are also able to delete entire pages and images when necessary.

Regular users are also able to assist the admins in various ways. Unnecessary pages and images may be tagged with delete so it appears in the deletion category, which administrators frequently check.