Wikipedia:Elements of Style improvement project

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Jump to: navigation, search

Active Wiki Fixup Projects +/-
Must be active, systematic, have lists, & need help.

Bad links - A new page highlighting mangled links in Oct. 29 dump.
Most wanted articles - Help create the most popular "red links". Updated from Oct. 20 dump.
Disambiguation pages with links - Updated from the 2005-10-20 database dump with lots of work.
Commons:Untagged_images - Untagged images on the Commons.
Most visited articles - Based on page views, to be made into featured articles.
Shortpages - Possibly broken, possibly stubs, but definitely too short. Updated 9 Sept.
Templates with red links - By special request. Updated as of the Sept 9 dump.
Linkrot - Fix broken links to external websites. Updated from Sept. 9 dump.
Punctuation - Fix missing punctuation. Round 2 for Sep '05!
Blank pages - Updated from Sept. 9 dump.
Elements of Style improvement project Improve diction and style.
Duplicated sections - An experimental list of articles with possible duplicate sections.
User categorisation - Help replace unwieldy, unsorted lists with a robust categorisation system.
Dead-end pages - Just updated (20 Sep 2005); articles that need wikification and other help.
Broken categories - For your inspection, a fresh list of malformed categories.
Missing articles - Wikipedia is not as complete as you might think!
Most wanted stubs - Help add to the shortest stubs with the most links.
Transwiki log cleanup - Help resolve the list of articles that have been transwikied to Wikipedia's sister projects. Dictionary definitions, recipes, how-tos, etc. need to be checked for possible merging or deletion.
Stub sorting - Sort stubs into topical categories so editors can locate and expand stubs on subjects they are interested in. Remove stub notices attached to non-stub articles.
Image sleuthing - A convivial club investigating the origin and copyright and licence terms for unverified images.
Main - Inactive - Mini

Many common phrases are tedious or unclear. This page attempts to list some replacements that are nearly universally applicable. Your help is needed in implementing these improvements on individual article pages, and in making suggestions for new improvements.

[edit]

List of suggested improvements

In The Elements of Style, Strunk has a list of commonly used phrases where words can be omitted.

Use the associated Google search to find the individual articles in need of improvement. Note that Google's index may be slightly out of date.

  • "The question as to whether" --> replace with "whether"
  • "Used for _____ purposes" --> replace with "_____" (example: "used for recreational purposes" --> "used for recreation")
  • "Owing to the fact that" --> replace with "because"
  • "Because of the fact that" --> replace with "because"
  • "Regarded as being" --> replace with "regarded as"
  • "Consider ___ as" --> replace with "Consider ___"
  • "In regards to" --> replace with "in regard to"
  • "In spite of the fact that" --> replace with "in spite of" or "though" or "although" or "despite"
    • Wikipedia search (283 hits)
    • (Please note: unlike any of the rest of the suggestions currently (28 October 2005) on this page, changing "in spite of the fact that" to "in spite of" or "despite" requires a *further* change in the construction sentence to be correct.The change takes the following pattern: "In spite of the fact that he needed the money..." becomes "Despite his needing the money..." or "Despite his having needed the money..."; the subject pronoun becomes a possessive and the verb changes to a gerund (or to the compound 'having' followed by the past participle.) Changing it to "although" or "though" works without further changes, however.)
[edit]

Sources

  • The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White is a popular guide to English writing (a version of the book can be read online here). Part III of The Elements of Style is "Elementary Principles of Composition." It gives many guidelines for producing clear, concise works. (Namesake of this project.)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Elements_of_Style_improvement_project"
Personal tools