User:MarshBot

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This user account is a bot operated by W.marsh (talk). It is not a sock puppet, but rather an automated or semi-automated account for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually. Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it.

Currently, MarshBot just helps out with orphan articles, as described below. If MarshBot screws up, please block ASAP, but turn off the autoblock option or you block my main account too.

[edit] In a nutshell

1. This bot detects articles that have no links to them from other articles, and adds a template informing editors of the article of that fact
2. All proper articles should have incoming links, even if they're works in progress, stubs, etc. Incoming links are important part of how articles are found by readers and editors, and a typical orphan article is literally never edited by non-robots, so presumably few or no live editors see it either.
3. Simply create a few links from other articles to an orphan article to fix this problem, and remove the template.
4. This template is not a criticism, a complaint or a warning, it's just a reminder/suggestion of something that needs to be done so the article is a proper part of Wikipedia. No one is required to deal with creating incoming links, not even the article's creator or active editors of the page.
5. This bot ignores a lot of types of pages that should not have normal incoming links from other articles, such as disambiguation pages, deleted pages, pages proposed for deletion, and so on. If it's not ignoring a page type you think it should, please let me know.

[edit] Exceptions

People have pointed out a few kinds of pages that should not have incoming links. Disambiguation pages, for example, although these are technically not really articles. The bot will ignore any correctly set up disambiguation page (with the {{disambig}} template or one of its cousins on the page). Note that there's no way to automatically tell it's a disambiguation page unless one of those templates is on the page.

The other exception I've seen so far is articles that are meant to be transcluded in other articles. These shouldn't be linked to directly by articles, but they really shouldn't be articles in the first place. If something exists only to be transcluded, it needs to be moved to the template namespace.

Pages that may be moved/removed soon also shouldn't have links until that issue is resolved, this includes articles proposed for deletion or a transwiki (the bot should ignore all of these too). Also, soft redirects (mostly to Wiktionary) are skipped.

Another "exception" is temporary pages, but these should really be created in the article talk namespace, or your user talk namespace.

These are all types of non-articles that happen to exist in the article namespace for technical reasons. If an article is intended to be read as an article, it should have incoming links, no exceptions. Even if the article isn't very good yet, the fastest way to get it improved is to create incoming links, so those articles actually need incoming links the most.

[edit] Tips for de-orphaning articles

1. Make sure the article is under the correct name. Wikipedia articles names involve exact syntax, and our search engine isn't very good, so it's easy to type in a proposed name for an article and never realize it already exists under the "correct" name. See WP:NAME, often simply moving an article to the correct name will mean there will be plenty of incoming links.
2. Do an exhaustive search with Google, checking every article result if need be. Often a phrase will be mentioned in another article, but not wikilinked, and this is easily fixed.
3. Look in other articles in the same category as the orphan article. Could any of them link to this article? What links to those articles? Often this examination will generate the very best leads.
4. Consider any articles that are related (such as ones the orphan article links to), if nothing else you can just add this article to the "see also" section.
5. Consider adding biographical articles to List of people - it's not the optimal solution, but it's a start. Also look through Category:Lists and you'll probably find a list that could include the article.
6. Consider finding a WikiProject, or failing that, an actively edited article, on the same topic as the orphan, and mention the orphan article on the applicable talkpage. Chances are that experienced editors in a given topic will know exactly what to do with even the trickiest of orphan articles.