Welcome to the home page of WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors.
This WikiProject is dedicated to improving the quality of writing in articles on the English Wikipedia. The Guild welcomes new and experienced editors alike to join our project, participate in its activities, and copy edit Wikipedia articles to make them clear, correct, concise, comprehensible, and consistent; to make them say what they mean and mean what they say.
What we do
The Guild of Copy Editors aims to improve Wikipedia by:
eliminating the backlog of articles marked with the {{copy edit}} template;
to organize backlog elimination drives to encourage active participation in the Guild, and to reduce the copy edit backlog to a manageable level;
to attract competent copy editors to the Guild and improve our level of expertise.
Events
The Guild organizes regular events to help us achieve our goals. These are:
bi-monthly Backlog Elimination Drives, in which Wikipedians earn awards for improving the standard of prose in articles from the backlog;
bi-monthly themed Project Blitzes, similar to Drives but shorter and more focused.
Requests
The Guild maintains a Copy Edit Requests Page, where editors can request copy edits on articles they are working to develop and improve, or want to nominate for Good Article, A-class or Featured Article status. We try to complete requests quickly, but waiting times are variable. We do not guarantee that articles we copy edit will be accepted at review.
The Requests page is not for:
Draft articles awaiting review at AFC, in the Draft namespace or in your user space;
Articles that are currently nominated for deletion at AfD;
Articles that are undergoing rapid development, are the venue for edit-wars, or have other major problems that may result in a copy edit being replaced or reverted. Copy edit requests for the above may be declined after discussion. Also note that the GOCE is not Cleanup.
The Guild of Copy Editors' project coordinators are the designated points of contact for issues concerning the project, and are responsible for maintaining the Guild's internal structure and processes. They coordinate Guild activities, maintain our pages, and organize Drives and Blitzes. They have no authority over article content or editor conduct and have no special powers conferred by their Guild activities.
join our mailing list to get regular newsletters with information about our activities.
Because of the nature of our project, members who copy edit articles listed on our Requests page should have a high level of skill with English spelling, grammar and punctuation. Requests are often being prepared for promotion to Good Article, A-class or Featured Article status, all of which require prose that is clear, concise, and error-free. Good judgement is often required when deciphering the meaning of confusing passages of text and considering how to best clarify it without altering its meaning. If you're not as confident about your skills, you can gain some copy editing experience by working on articles from the backlog of articles needing copy edit.
How you can help
There are 0 articles currently in the backlog.
You can:
Select an article from our Requests page to copy edit. Follow the instructions on that page.
Copy edit a random article from our backlog; see these instructions on our Drives page.
New copy editors
If you're new to copy editing and you want some help, you can ask questions on any of the project's coordinators' talk pages. We'll do our best to help you.
(Category does not exist or has been deleted due to completion of task.)
Started: May 1, 2010 with 8,323 articles
It currently contains 0 articles.
100%
completed (calculated)
Useful links
Here are some links to pages we think you'll find useful for copy editing:
The Manual of Style (MOS). This document defines Wikipedia's "house style". Familiarity with it is essential when editing articles to become Featured Article Candidates (FAC) or Featured List Candidates (FLC).
Wikipedia:Simplified Manual of Style. This is a gentler introduction to Wikipedia's Manual of Style. It covers the most important points of the MOS and has many links to the manual and its sub-pages.
AutoEd is a user script that helps to automatically clean-up articles, and allows for the easy design, use, and customization of user scripts related to automated article cleanup.
reFill – This tool edits bare references and adds elements like titles and dates to bare references.
