User blog:AgentMuffin/Special pages and how to use 'em (an' clean em' up too!)

Special pages. They're good to use. So lettuce begin as to with how to be of the usalyzing of the them thems. Shall we? Ladies first.

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Maintenance Reports

 * BrokenRedirects:This is simple, just fix the redirect to link to an existing page. Keep this list as empty as humanely possible. All that's there now is some transcript-related stuff. Nothing much, but someone should get on that; in this case, an admin should delete the redirects outright.
 * DeadendPages:Another even more simpler-er thing here. Add links to these articles. That's it. Try to keep this one empty too so no junk lingers outside of our peripheral vision.
 * DoubleRedirects:Point the first redirect to the final page in the redirect chain. That is, unless it redirects in a loop. We shouldn't have any of those, though.
 * LonelyPages:Link to these pages from other articles. Otherwise, we're just accumulating more pages we don't know about. The unknowns, if you will.
 * FewestRevisions:This is not one of those special pages whose purpose you necessarily want to counteract. Instead of adding revisions to pages in this list, use the list itself as a tool to find some lesser-known articles. Chances are, they're probably stubby or messy.
 * ShortPages:MediaWiki's built-in stub detector. Well, at least I think it's built-in. Either way, this is likely a more comprehensive list than our stub category. This means that you could find some pages that haven't been marked as stubs, but sifting through for them would be hopelessly tedious. Rather than doing that, you could possibly use this as an alternative to the category every once in a while.
 * UncategorizedPages:This, well, really isn't much of an issue. Still, try to have at least one category per page to decrease the number of unknowns. Or just do it to keep the Insights at bay. Whatever works.
 * UnusedCategories:Hoo boy. This is more or less a list of categories to delete. There's a lot of stinky stuff here that we don't want. These categories might just be top-priority category crud, in fact.
 * UnwatchedPages:This seems like a great way to seek out unknowns, and it would be, but there are issues. Here's the deal. I've taken care of this to the best of my abilities, but every article comment left by an anon is listed under T. And of course, article comments have been disabled. The cache is only so big, too, so any entries after the comments can't be accessed. If anyone is willing to use an account to painstakingly add the list to the raw watchlist, then wait for the cache to update and repeat the process, or make a bot to do so somehow, please do it. Otherwise, there's no way we can even use this potentially valuable tool.
 * WantedCategories:Some are good categories that could really use a description. Others are just plain useless. This list is a mixed bag, and it might not be a helpful one anyway.
 * WantedPages:Most of these are just useless anyway. Replacing repetitive redlinks from a list with plain wikitext? Looks like a job for a bot! That is, after someone looks through the whole list just to make sure there is absolutely nothing of potential value. For now, do this stuff manually.

Lists of pages

 * PrefixIndex:Helpful if you want a list of pages starting with a certain string. That's really about it.
 * Disambiguations:This is never too full, but we want it empty. Fix any links in question to point to the intended subject. Oh, and if a bunch of pages say they're linking to a disambig but you can't find the link, a template may be at fault.

More to come.