Training modules/dashboard/slides/12213-topics-to-avoid

Topics to avoid

There are also a handful of existing topics that you should avoid:

• Topics with well-known or political disagreements about them. If there is widespread public disagreement about a topic, there is also probably widespread disagreement on Wikimedia projects. These kinds of topics, ranging from the Israel-Palestine Conflict to Alternative Medicine or Scientology, may accidentally expose the new contributors to aggressive editors or long-standing disputes.
• Topics with very active recent edit histories ( for a tutorial on reading Page histories, see: this help page for interpreting page histories). This article might be currently of interest to active editors.
• Topics about living people, especially if those people are directly affiliated with sponsor organizations or are not well-documented by reliable periodicals. Biographies of living people articles undergo additional scrutiny by other Wikimedia community members.

Avoiding high-conflict or high activity pages helps new contributors avoid creating content that might be rapidly removed from Wikipedia articles or creating content that may accidentally lead the new contributor into conflict-situations created by passionate editors.