What is Refactoring?

Refactoring is a process of rewriting with the aim of improving a text's readability or structure whilst retaining the original meaning. The aim of refactoring is to make past pages more accessible, readable and useful.

The term "refactoring" is used in programming to describe cleaning up of source code. However, the same principles can apply to any text. Refactoring can mean rewriting or reorganising the text completely or radically, sometimes dramatically shortening it, but in a way that preserves all the important, relevant content. Unlike code refactoring, there is no objective measure on a wiki to see if you have the changed the meaning. Other wikis dispute the use of the term "refactoring", calling the nomenclature unhelpful and prefer to call this "editing". According to Wiki:WhatIsReworking∞, refactoring and reworking may not be the same thing. On Wikipedia, however, the term "refactoring" is often used to mean any changes to a talk page that improve the readability of it.

You should be aiming to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, have less redundancy and less information overload. Think what the page is about and remove anything superfluous that would not help future editors to the page. Do not discard useful information; if something is important but irrelevant, move it somewhere more appropriate. A good place to start can be your own contributions. If you've asked a question, and it has been answered, try summarising the outcome.

Refactoring a page does not have to be as complex as rewriting it. A page can be more readable simply by grouping related topics together. Most talk pages will be chronological. You don't need to keep this structure. Perhaps a page would be clearer if split into a list of for and against arguments.

Source: Wikipedia, Refactoring∞

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