Consumer Action Taskforce:How to help

Ready to start?

We're building a wiki to document a new generation of consumer exploitation. We focus on the issues that often go unnoticed by review sites, tech press, and traditional consumer protection publications; the ultimate goal is to have an article documenting every time a company has taken part in the anti-ownership, anti-privacy, anti-consumer practices.

Create a new article

There are plenty of articles that need to be written!

Before you jump in, take a look at our Article types page, familiarise yourself with the Editorial Guidelines, as well as our content policies and Style guide.

The MediaWiki article creation process is easy enough, use the create a page link to get some guidance on how to structure your article. Check out our guide to writing your first article and the FAQ if you need more information.

If you ever want to review or explore our policy documents, the Wiki policy index on the sidebar will take you to an overview of all our current official policies. This will be kept updated and will generally be the go-to place for our documentation.

Articles based on videos

Each video in our directory contains valuable information about consumer rights violations Louis has discussed on his channel for the past decade, that needs to be transformed into wiki articles.

We don't expect there to be a clean '1 video = 1 article' translation. The information from the videos should be combined with outside sources to contribute to articles about the incidents, entities, and themes discussed in the video. Please remember to update the video page with links to any articles you write, in order to help us avoid duplication.

At this early stage of the Wiki, don't worry about creating stubs, or starting an article with the intention to allow yourself or someone else to finish it at a later date. Right now our main focus is on putting pen to paper, and getting the Wiki populated. The most vital thing is to include sources to go support the claims made in the article, this will ensure that others can pick up where you left off and continue expanding the page.

In a nutshell:

Go to the Video Directory
Pick a video with a topic that interests you, making sure it fits the criteria to be included in the wiki
Create an article following our content guidelines and formatting policy
Edit the Video Directory with a link to your article.

New articles on issues Louis hasn't covered yet

There are so many issues that would fit in line with our editorial guidelines and content guidelines that Louis has NOT covered on his channel. Find them and post them!.

Improve existing articles

You can help out without looking for new things to add to the wiki. We have a list of articles that need work you can go through and try to improve. Some might need formatting fixes based on our Style guide, others might need some rephrashing to ensure a neutral point of view as per our wiki content policy. Some may just need reference links archived or images added.

Any work you put in toward impoving these articles is valuable, helping to shine a light on consumer exploitation and provide consumers with the information they need to recognize and fight back against new forms of exploitation.

Help maintain the wiki

Correct our mistakes!

As with any Wiki project, reviewing the pages of others is another great help that won't take up too much of your time - checking for grammatical and formatting issues (check the Style guide), ensuring that people are sourcing things properly, adding relevant information, and so on are all essential to the integrity of the Wiki.

Another valuable way you can contribute other that correcting mistakes is alerting others of their existance in case you are now able to make the corrections yourself. USe the templates in the category to mark spots you spot that need attention.

Citation needed - Use this template when an uncited claim is made in an article. See the temlplate page for infomation on usage.
Clarify - Use this template when a claim or statement is unclear and need rephreasing or more information to be useful. See the template page for infomation on usage.
Disputed - Use this template when sources with conflicting conclusions exist for a claim made. See the template page for infomation on usage.
UpdateNeeded - Use this template to indicate a portion of an article is need of an update. See the template page for infomation on usage.

Use templates to mark articles

While the wiki moderators patrol the wiki and will frequently mark articles in need of work, this is something that you can do too! Below are examples of some notices which can be applied to articles: see the full list on the moderator guidelines page.

DeletionRequest You can use the deletion request template to direct attention to a page you think should be deleted from the wiki, due to it being spam, or not meeting the inclusion criteria laid out in the inclusion guidelines. Be sure to provide a reason you think this deletion is warranted in the template and edit notice. If you want to be sure moderators are alerted (eg in case of spam) you can use the discussion pages to mention a moderator, use the discussion pages on their profile (see talk page guidelines for more information), or mention it in the CAT Wiki Discord .

MergeRequest Use the merge request template when you spot two or more redundant pages, which should be merged into a single article. Once again, be sure to provide your reasoning and other relevant page(s) in the template.

Adding a deletion or merge request to a page will automatically put the page in specific categories, which are periodically checked by moderators, who have the permissions neccesary to perform page moves and deletions.

Improve the video directory

While we have tried to sort and pick relevant videos to include in the video directory the proccess involved using automated tools and machine learning to pick the most likely candidates. You can help make sure the page is up to date by:

🔍 Reviewing videos in the directory
✅ Marking irrelevant videos for review
➕ Adding missing relevant videos to the list

Help keep links linking!

When a lot of people work on the same project things fall through the cracks regularly.

Check Special:DoubleRedirects (commonly populated when people move pages) and Special:BrokenRedirects for links that are currently not functioning as they should. Add the {{DeletionRequest}} notice to the pages you think should go to help keep things working as they should. Do the same for any categories here Special:UnusedCategories that seem like they dont belong.

Take a look at Category:Pages_with_broken_file_links and Special:WantedFiles to see if we misspelled a filename on our file list or if a new one needs to be uploaded.

Want to do even more?

If you're really looking to dig in and get your hands dirty, we are also looking for those willing to help moderate the platform. For a whole litany of reasons, we need to be able to enforce a high standard of quality, and be very quick to strike down misinformation or vandalism. Please see the Moderator Guidelines as well as the Mission Statement in order to get an idea of what's involved.

Again, we're delighted to see you here, and we hope you enjoy working with us to build something special!

Have more questions or suggestions?

Join our discord server or leave a message to any of the current moderators in their discussion pages ( how to use talk pages).