Wikipedia:Build content to endure

Wikipedia is littered with content that, while once great, has since decayed (much like this statue).

Most content on Wikipedia naturally improves over time. However, this is not always the case, and none of us will be around forever to defend the pages we care most about.

As a general principle, when building something on Wikipedia, envision it 10 years or even 50 or 100 years in the future. This doesn't mean every system must be entirely maintenance free (which would be impossible), but if maintenance is so complicated or tedious that only you would reasonably do it, it's sure to eventually fail.

Overall, Wikipedia is a long-term endeavor, and contributions that survive will have a far greater impact than those that don't. By following these best practices, you will increase the likelihood that pages will endure and retain their quality into the future.

Measures

This section lists measures that can be taken to help prevent content from degrading over time.

• Use hidden text comments and edit notices to warn against tempting but undesirable edits. For instance, set specific criteria for lists that might otherwise accrue cruft, or note next to a controversial element that there is consensus to include it.
• Avoid language likely to become outdated, such as "recently", "currently", "so far", and "soon".
• Use templates such as {{As of}} and {{Update after}} to mark statements that should be updated in the future. Sometimes, code can be employed to help keep content updated — for instance, when noting the contemporary value of a historical monetary figure, use {{Inflation}} rather than just writing out the conversion for the current year.
• Transclude duplicate content instead of copying and pasting it. This ensures that updates or improvements to it will be synced with the page.
• Migrate information to Wikidata, where it can be more easily updated via bulk imports or by a non-English contributor.
• Document templates and other complex pieces of code thoroughly to make them easier to maintain and to revive if they break.
• Use full citations rather than bare URLs to guard against link rot.
• Add incoming links, redirects, and categories to make pages (particularly in the project and template spaces) easy to find so that they are less likely to be recreated by someone unaware of them.
• Protect pagesRequest that pages be protected at an appropriate level to make them as accessible as possible without inviting vandalism.
• Ensure that sectioning reflects due weight, since once a section is added, it tends to get filled out over time. Criticism or controversy sections are particularly dangerous, since they are a magnet for recentist news coverage that is unlikely to be notable long-term.

For broad-scope articles

You successfully nominated an article through good article nomination or tougher featured article candidacy, and now it has a small icon (Good article, Featured article) on top. Unfortunately, for topic that is broad enough so that finding information is not an issue comes with a curse of rotting, especially if it is about a semi-current topic. Therefore, you must take more drastic approach to prevent the article status from being burnt at the dreaded reassessment. For these articles, more drastic approaches can be taken that are otherwise too time-consuming:

• Structure the article to be modular, meaning to plan the sectioning. Sections will get filled up with content over-time, even get split and created in the future once the time comes. Unfortunately, often times, it would be extremely awkward to do so, such as Donald Trump article. Yes, the sections are divided properly, but reorganizing the article would need a herculean effort.
• Concise. Make it short. Shorter article comes with many benefits: read easier, easier maintenance, more modular. Cut your words down. You can make the article more shorter than you might think.
  • Do one step further and break-up into smaller paragraphs. Many people have a tendency to write extremely long paragraph, but this would make readers bored, and maintaining the article much more difficult. For mobile reader, this is literally a wall of text. So, try cutting down your concise article into smaller paragraphs, and you would be surprise by the result.
• Make sure that the reviews are very strict. Islam used to be a featured article, and in the looks of the article and the nomination, it "looks" comprehensive. However, there is many problems with the article that would wreak havoc on its review: criticism section, no mention of current Islamic conflicts, inline references, etc. What is the take-away of this? Make sure that you go a step further than just pass the review—ace it. Make the reviewer impressed. Try to get it reviewed and seek feedback from as much Wikipedians as possible.
• Look at many other articles for inspirations, not just ones that is related to what you are writing. You might find that Climate change organization is worth adapting, while a more obscure Dracophyllum fiordense has a section about species' integration with the environment worth inclusion. Whatever that is, keep in mind that if you omit an aspect of the topic, someone will write about it, and it might not look good as you might wanted.
• Think like Long Now Foundation. Is this info relevant 20 years later? Is adding this would make sense when people landed on Mars? Is this paragraph would serve its job when the building is dismantled? If the article is just too fresh and hot, wait. Adding content then can bog down the article with good-but-not-excellent paragraphs.
• Seek help from many other editors. This would foster collaboration, and may make the article much better than any one can do alone.

By doing so, the article would be the best in class. Your article can literally be the best article about the subject in the world, by a stretch. This measures may make the article status last long into the future and being a lighthouse of sort to aspiring writers around the world, at all time. To quote from User:Vami IV/Completionism, transluded:

See also

• Wikipedia:Recentism – explanatory supplement about imbalanced focus on recent events
• Wikipedia:Nothing is in stone – essay about inevitability of change
• Wikipedia:There is a deadline – essay about preserving cultural heritage
• Wikipedia:Avoid instruction creep – essay about overlong instruction pages
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a work in progress – essay
• Wikipedia:Notability does not degrade over time – essay
• meta:Eventualism – editing philosophy