Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index/Archive 3

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Archive 10

/Comments and page moves

I've been reading up today on the use of the /Comments pages, but there's still one problem I don't see addressed. What happens when a page is renamed through the Move action? I've seen many cases where todolists are orphaned at the old page name until they are manually moved to the new location; this is easy to spot through the red links on the talk page, but what mechanisms are there for detecting orphaned /Comments pages? On the project banners that I've looked at, the orphaned comments would just seem to disappear because the category isn't included any more on the talk page (since Talk:NEWPAGENAME/Comments doesn't exist yet, even though Talk:OLDPAGENAME/Comments remains). Slambo (Speak) 19:04, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

If a page is moved /Todo and /Comments get orphaned, unfortunately. There's not a great deal we can do about it, I think, so I guess WikiProject representatives must vigilantly check the logs. --kingboyk 20:40, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Overall statistics

Two issues that we might want to consider:

The combined article counts are becoming increasingly inaccurate, because any article tagged by multiple projects is counted twice (or more!). Is there any way we can resolve this (possibly contingent on having much faster database access for Mathbot, but I'd like to know if this is practical even in that case)?
At Wikimania, Anthere asked if we could put together consolidated statistics across broad subject areas, which might each include multiple projects. Is there any way we can leverage the existing system to do this, or will it need to be done by hand?

Kirill Lokshin 14:17, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

It is rather easy to make sure everything is counted once only. I see a problem only when an article is assessed differently by different projects (for example, if The Beatles is assessed A-Class by the Beatles wikiproject and B-class by people wikiproject -- hypothetically). I will work on it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:14, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Funny you should use The Beatles as an example, as yesterday I amended {{WPKLF}} and will today tackle {{WPBeatles}} in the same way. What I've done and will do follows on from the work of MilHist and Biography, and that is adding extra parameters and conditional code to assess our articles for - and expose that an article is within the scope of - other projects. I'm using the same assessment for each article (thereby negating the problem you mention) but allowing different importance levels for each project. See Talk:Last Train to Trancentral (shared with WikiProject songs and WikiProject electronic music) or Talk:Bill Drummond (shared with WPBiography and which transcludes the living persons bio warning) for examples. --kingboyk 09:45, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I modified the script so that no article is counted twice in doing the global stats. Hopefully it works as expected. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:09, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Oleg, you are truly amazing. I'll buy you a new wand for Christmas! Walkerma 03:14, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Assessment should not be part of Wikiproject ownership

... or maybe it should. I have just begun understanding this and thinking about it, so forgive me if I am blundering into a topic that has already been beaten to death here by people who understand this better.

Example. If WP:Novels and WP:Bio both own the Norbert Novelist entry, then not only do they bring both their "ownership" templates to the talk page (which is a good thing), they also bring their assessment tags to the same article. These tags might disagree, out of laziness or because the projects have different ambitions or criteria. My question: is this is a bug or a feature? One could argue for both answers. Especially, one could argue that this is a carefully thought out feature that forces both projects to reach consensus about the state of the Norbert Novelist article. But currently this situation seems more an artefact of the template structure than anything else. (There is the added problem of not being able to count this article in a tally of "all Wikiprojects by quality".)

Should not the assessment come in a separate template called "WikiProject-goodness"? Also, the stub, GA, and FA assessments are already there, as part of external information. So what we really would need is a way to tag articles as B-class etc. This way, several WikiProject (yes, that includes the fledgling WikiProject:Nominative Determinism and WikiProject:Aliterations) could subsume Norbert Novelist under their banners without having to coordinate their assessments.

A concrete example that highlights the problem is Talk:Australia and weapons of mass destruction. This is marked externally as a GA, but the MilHist project lists it as unassessed. If assessment weren't part of the project template, this would be no problem.

Note that this idea does not prevent a project template to override an external (project-neutral) assessment. It would be easy to have a project insist on a different grade for a particular article, and we could even get automatic lists of such controversies. Arbor 09:29, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I think the more active WikiProjects have moved away from declaring "ownership" towards concentrating on "within scope" (which I think is, for large projects whose scope covers articles it's participants have never touched, a good thing), but your point still stands. The problem you highlight does exist, although as you'll see in the above thread I've hopefully overcome this for WikiProject The KLF and will shortly do the same for WikiProject The Beatles. --kingboyk 09:48, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

The major problem with proposals like this is that the combined template would still need to produce all of the project-specific categories, which means that every project would be editing it. Considering how many pages it would be on, that would be a maintenance disaster. Kirill Lokshin 15:24, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Not really in our case; we're not such a large Project, and I'll assess on behalf of the other Projects too. We have a much stricter scope so "claim" our articles to the maximum extent that a WikiProject is allowed to so claim! :) (In other words, don't make too much of a fuss Kirill, as the new template is in my sandbox ready to go! :P) --kingboyk 15:30, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I wasn't talking about your template, but rather about the general "WikiProject-goodness" idea. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Kirill Lokshin 15:33, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

If didn't projects want to rate an article differently or not rate it, so what?Rlevse 02:40, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Help with template code

Could somebody with less jaded eyes help me fix the following code? (You'll need to look at it in edit mode).

<!---------------------------- start of article importance box -------------------------->
{{ #switch: A 
| Cat | cat | Dab | dab | Template | template | na | NA= |=<center>
{{{!}}style="text-align:center;"
{{!}}-
{{!}} {{ #switch: Top 
| top | Top | high | High | mid | Mid | low | Low = {{Top-Class}}
| Na | na | NaIxxx= style="background: #ddd; text-align: center;" {{!}} Unknown }}
{{!}}-
{{!}} style="align:left;font-size:90%;" {{!}} {{ #switch: Top 
| top | Top =  ''This article has<br>been rated as<br>Top importance
| high | High = ''This article has<br>been rated as<br>High importance
| mid | Mid =  ''This article has<br>been rated as<br>Mid importance
| low | Low =  ''This article has<br>been rated as<br>Low importance
| NA | na = ''This article does<br>not need to be<br>importance rated
| NaIxxx = ''This article<br>has not been<br>rated
}} on the<br> [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_The_Beatles/Article_Classification#Article_importance_grading_scheme|importance scale]].''
{{!}}} </center>  }}
<!---------------------------- end of article importance box ---------------------------->

This is subst'd code, with a class value of A and an importance of Top. With class=A and importance=Top, we ought to get the importance box displayed but we don't. I think the problem might be in the outer (class) conditional, but after a day of this work all I see is curly brackets! :) HELP!, Please Please Me! --kingboyk 17:27, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

~~Hmm, don't you need an actual parameter to check in the switch statement? Kirill Lokshin 17:58, 13 August 2006 (UTC)~~

Never mind, I just realized it's already subst'ed. Kirill Lokshin 17:59, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, you've got sets of triple braces in there, which is almost certainly a bad thing; but trying to debug subst:ed parserFunction code is almost impossible. Where's the original for this thing? Kirill Lokshin 18:02, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

{{WPBeatles}}, which appears to be working in all regards apart from this one issue. --kingboyk 18:07, 13 August 2006 (UTC) PS You're right about the extra presumably erroneous bracket(

{{!}}}

) but I've just tried without it in my sandbox and it doesn't seem to make any difference! :P --kingboyk 18:10, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

This subst'd code doesn't work either, I'd expect it to display "article":

{{ #switch: A | Cat | cat = category | Dab | dab = disambiguation page | Template | template = template | NA | na = page |=article}}

--kingboyk 18:32, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I think I've fixed all the bugs with you switch statements; you should use #default as a catch-all rather than leaving things blank.

Might I also suggest—in a very polite and gentle manner—that the code is getting a bit too complicated? ;-) Kirill Lokshin 18:38, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

You can suggest all you like Kirill, but I can't guarantee how much notice will be taken ;-) Thanks ever so much for that; I didn't know #default had to be used. --kingboyk 19:00, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

While we're on the help subject, I have 2 things I've been wondering -- 1) how do I say "if something does not equal A or B"? I'd like to not show the comments line if it's rated FA or GA.... 2) I started trying to do the class categories for task forces and it ended up putting every article in bio under the Arts and Entertainment work group class categories. I quickly reverted it but I put the code in my sandbox. What did I do wrong? I did it for the a&e-work-group plange 19:16, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I hacked a way of doing a similar thing... and since you gave me a barnstar I'll tell you ;) I wanted to have an "if a=x or b=y or c=z then". I check for equality on each string and assign a value of 1 if True, I do this for each string I'm checking, and add the results together. If the result is >=1, I have a match. Now, no doubt some bright spark will show me how to do it without resorting to a hack!

Yours is easier though, I would have thought. Doesn't this psuedocode do it?: switch class FA|GA=|everything else=

By the way plange, since we're online: I've modified {{WPKLF}} and {{WPBeatles}} to replace {{WPBiography}} on our articles. Have a look at Talk:Jimmy_Cauty (KLF) and Talk:George Harrison (Beatles). --kingboyk 19:32, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Cool (on template combining) -- on psuedocode, thanks! I'll give that a try, I haven't worked too much with switches so will try it :-) plange 20:11, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, just thought of a problem, though, with the template combining, is that they won't show up now on our worklist and class categories? Or will they? plange 20:13, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Check the talk pages I showed you and examine the categories! :) --kingboyk 20:27, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

You da man! plange 21:09, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

General note: I think what you did is fine for these projects, because they are so specialized, but as a general rule, I don't think it's a good idea, in fact the opposite is what I'd like to see, i.e. our project template does this for the child projects instead, like Wikiproject Writers, etc., would get a blurb in our template instead... plange 21:12, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps so, if they're biographical Projects. The two Projects I'm involved with though are of course music Projects, and we overlap with many other Projects - bio, album, song, film, other music projects. Only a small portion of our articles are biographies. (Not disagreeing with you, just expanding upon the point :)). --kingboyk 09:34, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

(unindent) anyone have any ideas for my #2 problem above? plange 20:22, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

If nobody else fixes it I'll attend to it plange, but only when I've finished the WPBeatles assessments (what a dull dull job it is!). --kingboyk 10:08, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Problems with August 13 run?

There is no log for the Rail transport articles from last night. Was there a problem with the bot? AdThanksVance. Slambo (Speak) 11:03, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Looking at the history[1], you last had a visit from Mathbot about 24 hours ago. His contribs[2] show that he's still busy on the latest run, so expect to see your logs updated a little later. I've suggested to Oleg that he start the run earlier in the morning because it's taking quite a few hours now. --kingboyk 11:14, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I've noticed that too, they used to be done when I got up in the am, but the last few days they've taken a little longer due to the additional projects that have joined in.Rlevse 11:37, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

~~I'm now wondering if the bot has barfed on the WPBiography lists (over 50,000 now) as he hasn't made a WP1.0 related edit for a couple of hours :( --kingboyk 12:44, 14 August 2006 (UTC)~~

Oleg tells me it's still running, but Bio is taking a long time. --kingboyk 16:17, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I'll place this here rather than in an old thread where it might get lost: Oleg, I've had an idea for making the process a bit faster: perhaps you could do the Biography run in a seperate process/cron job concurrently with the other runs? Would that be as easy as it sounds or would there be issues with logs and stats? --kingboyk 11:44, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Another idea I've suggested on Oleg's user talk - which I like better - is having Mathbot just count the number of articles in Category:Unassessed biography articles and not process them. The category itself serves as a "articles needing assessment" worklist, and by counting the category we'd still get stats. (Moving thread here Oleg). --kingboyk 16:17, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I think that would work for all the projects, actually. We're not really gaining anything by listing pages of unassessed articles; and the "unassessed" status is meant to be strictly temporary in any case (even if the volume means that it will take some time to go through them all). Kirill Lokshin 16:20, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

This sounds like a great idea. I will remove unassessed articles from the list (unless there are any objections). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:22, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me! Walkerma 17:03, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

No huge objection to them not being listed for any Project I suppose, provided it doesn't result in less assessing getting done. So, I would put in a big font at the bottom of each worksheet and index page the number of unassessed articles and a link to that Project's unassessed category.

That said, I've found the logging of new, unassessed articles to be very helpful (lets me find new articles for stubbing, project log, etc). I'd turn it off for the big Projects (Bio, Albums, perhaps some others) but I'd be sad to lose this feature from the smaller projects I represent. --kingboyk 17:09, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

to check for new unassessed articles, I just go into the cat itself.Rlevse 18:05, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps you're lucky enough to have an empty unassessed cat :) Also, categories don't show up on watchlists. --kingboyk 18:27, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I have to agree with Kingboyk. I find the logging of new article creations extremely useful, and it almost ensures that every article is going to be assessed quickly, at least in my project. Perhaps just running "big" projects as a different thread would do the job? Tito xd^(?!?) 20:03, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Good points. I guess the biography project is the only one causing trouble. I will run it as a separate project, starting hopefully tonight. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:34, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Running the biography project as a separate thread causes other problems, the script can't compute the total statistics at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics (which needs all projects). For now I chose to modify the script so that it just does the biography articles last, after all other projects. Any other ideas? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:53, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I have no experience with bots, but maybe a WikiProjectBot. I don't know if all these WikiProjects are taking away from the main purpose of Mathbot. But would it be worthwhile to have a bot dedicated to WikiProjects? I mean, the number of WikiProjects is only going to increase.--NMajdan•talk 03:41, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot for WP1.0 runs as a different process, I understand. --kingboyk 10:06, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I think running WPBio last is a very good idea Oleg. I'd also be tempted not to build pages listing all the unassessed articles for that Project. It will be well over 100,000 articles by the end of the week. (I'm about 2/3 through my run). --kingboyk 10:06, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Bug in songs log

Every day, Mathbot says:

2 + 2=5 (song) (talk) removed, was in Unassessed

But this article does not exist and has never existed. It's somehow getting confused with the article 2 + 2 = 5 (song). --kingboyk 14:32, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I will look into that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:34, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I fixed this. Today the log may still show that (wrong) message, but from tomorrow everything should be fine (let me know if it is not).

I noticed at least two other requests somewhere on this page. I did not forget about them, will work on those within a few days. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:41, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

New template

I've created a new template for linking to the worksheets, logs and stats - {{WP1}}. Usage notes are at Template talk:WP1. --kingboyk 17:04, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

When a list gets much shorter

I've split The Beatles articles out into subtopics. As a result, The Beatles articles by quality has gone from 2 pages to 1, leaving stale pages Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality/2 and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality/2. I'll ~~delete it~~ redirect them but maybe Mathbot could be programmed to ~~blank or mark for speedy deletion~~ redirect such pages? --kingboyk 11:45, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Beatles articles all assessed

I've been working flat out on this all week, and - hooray - they're all assessed (Index · Statistics · Log). A new article was added overnight which denied me the satisfaction of seeing the "Unassessed" row disappear, but hopefully tommorow it will be gone! :) Thanks again to Oleg for making this all possible. --kingboyk 12:46, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Heh, very nice. (Now if you'd said that you had all the Bio articles done, then I'd be really impressed ;-) Kirill Lokshin 12:52, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, we've done that too: (Index · Statistics · Log) Tito xd^(?!?) 04:03, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Well done and thanks! Walkerma 05:10, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

The /Comments feature

How do I populate the comments field of the worklist? I know I can directly insert comments on the worklist page, but is there an attribute on the Wikiprojects banner that can be used? I know that Wikiproject Biographies does this but I dont know how yet. I do see that that have a Comments subpage on the article's talk page (such as Talk:Abraham Lincoln/Comments) but I tried this and it did not work. Any help would be appreciated.--NMajdan•talk 16:18, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Yep, this feature is not documented. Would be nice if somebody would modify Template:Class parameter or some other reference tagging template to include the /Comments feature, and then document that in the instructions. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:23, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I tried this over at Talk:Dan Cody/Comments yesterday, but it was not picked up by the bot during last night's update.--NMajdan•talk 16:26, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

On a side note, this article in included in both WikiProject Biographies and WikiProject College football. I read above that this may cause a conflict unless a solution has been presented that is not on this page.--NMajdan•talk 16:36, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't cause any conflict whatsoever, but the /Comments will be transcluded onto the articles by quality page of both Projects. If the Comments relate to work of one specific WikiProject and aren't of a more general nature what I have done is such cases is make a note at the top of the comment saying which "Comments from WikiProject The Beatles". I've edited Talk:Dan Cody/Comments with an example of this. --kingboyk 16:49, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Have a look at {{WPBeatles}}, for some code by User:Lar which checks for the existence of a subpage. If the /Comments subpage exists, the talk page is added to Category:The Beatles articles with comments which belongs to Category:The Beatles articles by quality. Presumably if you implement the same scheme, replacing "The Beatles" of course, the bot should pick it up. --kingboyk 16:46, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

NMajdan, sorry I didn't answer you earlier on my talk page-- I'm actually working on implementing this again for another project that just started and asked for my help (Virginia) and so I will document what I do tonight and post that as a "how-to"... plange 17:21, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

That would be very helpful. {{WPBiography}} does not utilize that check for existance logic that {{WPBeatles}} uses but it is still picked up by the bot. Maybe, the one I added was skipped over by the bot and will get picked up tonight. We'll see.--NMajdan•talk 17:54, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I think it does (in fact myself and Lar are namechecked at the top) :

{{#ifexist:{{FULLPAGENAME}}/Comments

[[Category:Biography articles with comments|{{PAGENAME}}]]

|}}<!--

-->}}

Also Category:Biography articles with comments exists and is populated. --kingboyk 18:05, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

The template in question is {{WikiProject College football}}, correct? --kingboyk 18:10, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that is the template. The article I commented did appear in Category:Biography articles with comments. Does that category need to be created for WikiProject College football for the bot to pick of /Comments?--NMajdan•talk 18:27, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes it does. If I get a chance later I'll see if I can do it for you. --kingboyk 18:33, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I went ahead and created it, Category:College football articles with comments. Please take a look at it to make sure it'll work. I placed it in Category:College football articles by quality as was stated above.--NMajdan•talk 18:40, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Would be nice to have all this documented in the instructions. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:08, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Don't worry, that's what I said I was going to do tonight (above)-- am at work right now, so can only take quick peeks in here until then :-) plange 20:12, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Okay, added instructions. Let me know if it needs more explanation plange 03:42, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I've done all I thought I had to and it is still not working. I created the Articles w/ Comments category and added to the WikiProject template. I have a comment on talk that is being picked up by WPBiography but not WP College Football. If you have time, please take a look and see if I'm forgetting something. Thanks.--NMajdan•talk 23:09, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

You'd also need to produce Category:College football articles with comments, no? Kirill Lokshin 23:12, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

What do you mean produce? As you can see, that category exists. And I have the code in the banner template that has that category: {{#ifexist:{{FULLPAGENAME}}/Comments |[[Category:Biography articles with comments|{{PAGENAME}}]] |}} }}--NMajdan•talk 00:52, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but the template code is only generating Category:Biography articles with comments; it needs to also generate Category:College football articles with comments. Kirill Lokshin 00:54, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Un. Believable. Can't believe I missed that. Thanks. We'll see how it goes tonight.--NMajdan•talk 01:31, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

To help with this I've placed the /Comments code from {{WPBeatles}} into Template:Comments transclusion for use in the same fashion as Template:Class parameter. Would somebody care to test it? --kingboyk 21:30, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Belfast

I've been out of the loop a bit here and a lot of stuff has changed (and gotten way more awesomer!!! but it means maybe I'm confused and stuff). Mal asked me for some help with comments regarding Belfast. I thought I knew what i was doing... maybe not. I looked in the Belfast project banner box ({{WPBelfast}}) and it looked right to me. I put a test comment on Titanic: Talk:RMS_Titanic/Comments which was not picked up by the last mathbot run.... Talk:Kenneth Branagh/Comments on the other hand is being picked up by both Belfast and Biography tables, as you can see here. Wait another day? I think the comments category is set up right... Ideas? ++Lar: t/c 17:20, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Now it picked it up. [3] I doubt it is bot's fault, there would be no reason why it would pick one article from a category while refusing to pick another one from the same category. Could be server issues. Anyway, it works now. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:28, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I doubt it's the bots fault either! I suspect user error (points at self). I just would like to know what error. :) ++Lar: t/c 18:03, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Numbers as first column in quality stats

Hullo Oleg. I was thinking about adding numbers to WikiProject Aircraft's article quality list. (Similar to a numerical list, with the first row having 1, the second 2, the third 3, and so forth.) I would do this manually, but I'm sure it could be done much more easily with a bot, and Mathbot might erase my work anyway.

Could you add those numbers easily using Mathbot? Ingoolemo ^talk 00:24, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

If people think it is worth adding numbers to the rows in the table, I can do it. But what would be the advantage of that? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:29, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

For projects with large numbers of articles, it would be easy to get at-a-glance statistics for the total number of articles in a particular category, total number of articles tagged, etc. Ingoolemo ^talk 02:33, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't seem much use to this as it doesn't break totals down anyway, it only provides a total which we already know. I also think the http jumps are distracting and ugly.Rlevse 02:38, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I suppose I'll repeat my question from above: do projects with large numbers of articles actually use the generated tables? Or is everything done via talk page tags & categories, with the only benefit of the central parsing being the log & statistics? Kirill Lokshin 02:51, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I use it for biography --- plange 03:09, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Really? I would have thought that one, in particular, would be nearly useless, as it's 80? (90? 100?) pages now, so it would be impossible to actually find anything there. Oh well; I guess you learn something new every day! ;-) Kirill Lokshin 03:46, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, I probably only use the first 8 or so pages-- the ones that have been assessed, to see what comments have been left, etc. For instance, on some FAs I left notes on which ones no longer met FA criteria so that I can go back and nominate them for FAR. I didn't want to flood the FAR process so am doing the nomination one at a time. I'm especially using the ones that are now divided by work group as they're more manageable. I'd say that the unassessed ones though are useless in the worklist. plange 04:19, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Interesting. If the main reason to look at the table is to see the comments, might we be able to get the addition of new comments recorded in the log? (Or, if we want to be a bit more sophisticated, have the bot maintain a list at, say, Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Biography articles by quality comments that would be a simple list of links to the comment subpages; then, using Special:Recentchangeslinked on that page would produce an output of any changed comments.) Kirill Lokshin 04:24, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

(unindent) - not sure I follow, but it sounds like you're saying to navigate through a category tree to find the pages with comments? We already have this, but it's not in a nice table where I can see them all in one spot, plus not ranked by quality class... With the worklist I can go straight to the top (FAs) and see how they're doing in one glance, etc... plange 04:39, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Also, I find myself using them for odd things-- like when I was trying to find an example of a B-class with no importance assessment. Like last night when I was trying to create all the workgroup categories for importance I needed to find articles that had a Mid and was already marked for a work group, or failing that, browsing the main list for ones I could see were Mid (or whatever) that I knew would be in a work group so I could tag them and get the redlink to create the category. Don't forget I'm a WP noob so am probably doing things weird to get certain things done :-) plange 04:45, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I use the tables a lot for 1.0 work, and I that will grow a lot in the future. I'm usually looking for things like A-Class Arts articles that aren't GAs. I can see the value in having a number or primary key in the table, but it's not essential for what I do. Walkerma 04:52, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I refer to the tables too, and not just for WikiProjects I'm involved in. --kingboyk 10:03, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I use the table listings.Rlevse 10:45, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Version column

How do we populate the version column in the worklist? I see there's one, and our Wikipedia:Core biographies is interested in this column as we just set up an index for Biography (core) articles that contains our 200 picks for 1.0 and we'd like to record which have been nominated or accepted for 0.5, etc. - is that possible? plange 04:02, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Ideally, we'd be able to populate that based on the {{V0.5}} tag on the article; but actually doing so might be too complicated. Kirill Lokshin 04:14, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I was curious because it looks like it already has some code in place to pull this in since it has {{{version}}} next to each entry in the worklist... Oleg? plange 05:20, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

I think that's actually an undefined "version" parameter being output from the template that forms each row of the table. Kirill Lokshin 05:23, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Originally, we had planned to do it, but I don't think anyone ever got around to it... would it be too hard, Oleg? Tito xd^(?!?) 06:58, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

I can work on that. To clarify, you would like the bot to read the "Version 0.5" articles, and not only to use them to create Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Version 0.5 articles by quality but also to fill in the "version" column at the other lists, is that right?

By the way, note that currently the lists written out by bot don't even contain a version field, see a sample row in a table: {{assessment | page=[[Gettysburg Address]] [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gettysburg_Address&oldid=66188649 ] | date=[[July 27]], [[2006]] | class={{FA-Class}} | importance={{Top-Class}} | comments= }} So the first thing to do would be to add a blank

version=""

field, and later fill it in, if available, from V0.5. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:16, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

It would be great if it could pick up {{0.5 nom}}, {{V0.5}}, {{V1.0}} and {{V1.0 nom}} and fill that column in with which it is (0.5 nom, etc). I'm not sure what you mean about it not containing a version field because I see one here, unless you mean something different? plange 15:24, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it is there, but that is added by default by {{assessment}}. If you edit that page, you will see that there is no mention at all of "version". Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:16, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Oh, then how do I use the {{assessment}} template so version will show up? Does that go on the talk page? Sorry if I'm asking stupid questions I just don't want to ask you to do something if there's already a mechanism available I didn't know about that will take care of it plange 19:52, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

The bot will do that. My point is that there should be two steps, first to actually initialize the version field, and second, to fill it in from V0.5 or the other ones if available. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:53, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Makes sense. Would that be too much of a hassle? Tito xd^(?!?) 20:04, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Today I modified the script to add the extra "version" field, as well as move the importance field so that it shows up in wikicode in the same position as in the generated html. [4] I will wait until tomorrow when this change will propagate through the lists, and then will work on actually filling in the empty version field (it did not have to be done in two steps like this, but would be easier to avoid bugs this way). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:21, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Awesome! So should we go ahead and start putting the relevant 0.5 and 1.0 tags on the Talk pages? Is that how it will pull them? plange 02:29, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

The tags should already be there, no? That's where the 0.5 worklist is coming from, anyways; I'm assuming we're going to try and read these fields the same way, rather than creating a new set of tags. Kirill Lokshin 03:06, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Yep, tags are there. The bot will just visit all the version categories (Category:Wikipedia Version 0.5, Category:Version 0.5 Nominees, etc) and read the version info which will be added into the version field in all the lists (that will be implemented tomorrow). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:10, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The KLF articles by quality

Yikes! Any idea what's gone wrong with this page? --kingboyk 13:57, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Don't you mean, "What the F*** is going on"? It looks like the "Version #" change is giving a problem, and the comments disappeared as well. Walkerma 14:11, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

rofl!

I'd better roll it back then, as that project uses inline comments not transclusion and I don't want to lose them. For reference, then, the broken version is here. --kingboyk 14:13, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Ooops, I was sure I tested the damn code. I guess I miscalculated something as far as inline comments are concerned. Any other project experienced problems? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:44, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I fixed the above bug. I for some reason assumed that the pipe "|" character will never show up in the comments, and that it may confuse the bot if it does show up. Sorry.

I implemented the version thing, see the diff at the chemistry articles [5].

I also finally taught the bot to not add in hundreds of pages of unassessed biography articles, as requested by Kingboyk. Note that even with that change, the biography articles (which still need to be read from categories and counted) are a hog, and sooner or later that could be an issue. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:00, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Oleg! I'd been meaning to ask you about seeing if Unassessed could be skipped too because they're not needed in the index. Thanks for doing this! Is that why it ran already? plange 01:03, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Yep, it ran already, but only for testing, at biography articles (and chemistry). Will run again tonight in usual mode. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:21, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Cool, am very excited! plange 01:25, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

That's fantastic! This is what we dreamed of having back when we first mooted the idea. Now we can see at a glance which A-Class articles from any given project need nominating. Thanks you SO much! Walkerma 02:04, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Another lovely job Oleg, thank you. --kingboyk 10:38, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Biography log

This entry came up on the biography log, and I don't know if it's a bug or something to do with the tag changing when the bot was running, perhaps:

Pauline Brailsford (talk) removed, was in Unassessed

The article has never been deleted nor the tag removed. See history and this diff. Category seems to be fine (Category:Stub-Class biography articles). --kingboyk 11:32, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I can't tell what is going on. Hopefully it was a one time glitch either connected to the changes to the code or to chaging the tag when the bot was running, as you mention above. Let us see if such behaviour happens again. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:48, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Actually it's been happening for awhile now... plange 03:42, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

With just that article or others? If others, links please? --kingboyk 06:58, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Categorising the Mathbot-produced pages

To save me doing it manually would you be willing, Oleg, to have the bot place the index, log and statistics pages into the WikiProject's category and/or the WikiProject's articles by quality category? (Inside noinclude tags). I'm only asking because the last time I wasted hours doing a similar job you knocked up a script in a few minutes to do the same thing :) --kingboyk 16:07, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

If this happens, please use the article quality category rather than the main project one; for larger projects, the assessment pages will overwhelm the (presumably important for navigation) main category ;-) Kirill Lokshin 16:10, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Just to add I don't want every assessment page categorised, just the first page (which is the articles by quality log for smaller projects, and the index for larger ones). --kingboyk 16:13, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I added the categories, see Category:Adelaide articles by quality. The effect will be seen in other projects when the bot runs tomorrow. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:26, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

You da man Oleg! 3 cheers! :) --kingboyk 06:58, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Proposal

I'd like to suggest a proposal for help with others who might want to start projects. Is it possiblt to standardise some generic code snippits that people can add to their WPProject templates, which have different functionality.. such as adding assessment of categories, code for adding the comments. It could have some generic code with a variable such as:

[[Category:WikiProject {{{PROJECTNAME}}} articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:WikiProject {{{PROJECTNAME}}}]]

.. etc.

Or maybe this could be automated in some way..? --Mal 20:35, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I think there's actually a template that someone (Titoxd?) put together that does something like this; but, like any boilerplate, it tends to be somewhat inflexible for cases other than the nominal one. Kirill Lokshin 20:51, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

OK thanks. Boilerplate was the word I was looking for. I'm very rusty when it comes to coding it seems! --Mal 20:56, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

The instructions give some help here, there are templates you can subst: into your project banner box to give you starting points for certain functions. ++Lar: t/c 22:10, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Lar - I'm kinda jumping in feet first (as usual!), wanting it done today, if not yesterday! Learning on the way of course. So thanks everyone for your patience and willful help! :) --Mal 04:36, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Importance

I'm not sure where the best place to post this is, but I'm sure someone more involved in WP1 than me can move it to a suitable spot if need be :)

User:Slim Virgin has expressed some concerns about the importance= field. We've been discussing it at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Biography#Tagging_BLPs and I think the Wikipedia 1.0 team ought to be aware of the discussions. Possibilities for WPBio include abandoning importance or, perhaps, on a WP1 scale, renaming it "priority". --kingboyk 08:51, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much for alerting us to this. I think several projects are using this quite happily, including chemistry, where people don't get so emotionally attached as they do with pop stars etc. We should encourage the use of "priority" in cases where that is appropriate and helpful. Other projects may (as with WP:BIO) choose simply to tag the top-importance ones. I don't think we should remove importance completely from the scheme, or we will hear from a lot of angry people who have laboriously tagged around 13,000 articles for importance! Each WikiProject should make its own decision. Walkerma 03:28, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

I think we have a certain amount of consensus around the following scheme for WPBio (but note that Slim hasn't been heard back from yet) -

Retain the existing importance ratings, but use them only for the workgroups
Rename the importance parameter and categories to "priority"
For the main Bio lists, just assess the core articles (which will use core=yes)

How does that sound? If it sounds OK, Oleg would you be willing to have the bot pick up "articles by priority" instead of "by importance"?

It might be a little late to ask other Projects to change, but I'd prefer using priority= universally, as a semantic change only. --kingboyk 10:19, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Isn't changing Importance to Priority going to be a fair bit of work to accomplish? Aren't there a lot of templates, categories and bits of automation to change (how it's displayed, even if the parm itself doesn't change)? I'm not sure I support a change like that just because of semantics, I don't see the benefit here at all, sorry. ++Lar: t/c 13:40, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

As I recall, we debated this before - some people liked priority, others didn't- and we decided to leave it up to the individual WikiProjects. For the list I set up I changed over to priority. We need to check that the documentation offers both. Walkerma 13:44, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

It's not that I don't like it, I just don't want to get WP:BIO/WP1 into trouble when there is certain amount of paranoia going round about living people bios. If I don't change it the result might be that WPBio can't use the parameter at all. I'llo change the template, should be trivial for Mathbot to recognise Biography by priority rather than importance, I expect User:Plange will update our instructions, AWB can sort out reparameterising, and I can ask somebody with a recategoring bot to migrate the categories. Yes, a lot of work (only for WPBio), but is there an alternative?

BTW folks please chip in at that thread I posted the link to. You don't have to be on the WPBio members list to contribute! --kingboyk 16:00, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

I very much want to keep using importance; so I'm for each project being able to use importance or priority as I see the need for both.Rlevse 10:05, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Me too. And, I don't propose to change the meaning in any substantial way, it's merely to try and avoid complaints from living persons flooding into the Foundation office. Updating our template is on my todo list for today. --kingboyk 10:11, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I've updated the template (one small bug to fix, and changes still to apply to WPBeatles and KLF). I've also reprogrammed my bot to change non-null importance= params to priority=. Hopefully we'll get the categories sorted out today. And even more hopefully, Oleg upon his return won't mind supporting "by priority" cats. Fingers crossed! :) --kingboyk 10:09, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I've been tagging a good chunk of articles related to Wikipedia: WikiProject Ethiopia, & I've been using the importance rating all along. But I've been trying to apply an objective criteria for importance -- for example, numbers of people when it came to town & cities or languages & ethnic groups -- although I adjusted up a step when knew that wide-spread interest existed about the subject. And I'll admit that I've probably underrated the importance of all of these articles. Then again, I'm now at the point where I can't find an objective critereon to measure a subject ("National anthem? WTF? Who even knows more of their own national anthem than the freaking first stanza?") so I'm leaving those articles unrated until I learn of some guideline for what gets included in version 1.0 & what gets excluded. -- llywrch 03:06, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a good plan. I think you're not alone in having trouble assessing importance - it's not so hard for a small project like WP:KLF but get above a few hundred articles and it's quite tricky. Congrats on getting this far! --kingboyk 10:09, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Category name requirement?

So... am I right in assuming that because I created Category:U.S. road transport articles by quality, the wikiproject it's looking for is Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. road transport? And that I should have created Category:U.S. Roads articles by quality instead? (which sounds... odd.) —Rob (talk) 05:24, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the bot guesses the name from the articles by quality category. No big deal though - I've just redirected Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. road transport to Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads. Sorted. --kingboyk 08:08, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Odd Mathbot output?

Its probably something I've done (ie: added the template with incorrect syntax), but I was wondering if someone could take a look at the latest output from the Mathbot on the Belfast Project here.

The entry I'm referring to is the comments for the Stub article Belfast Harbour Police. It references the article Belfast, Mpumalanga and its talk page for some reason. I note that it is entry number 39 (the Belfast Harbour Police article is entry number 38), and it looks like the text for the comment has been filled with the output for the next row of the table. --Mal 07:05, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Could be related to a move of the article pages (the Main and Talk pages were moved, but the /Comments page wasn't). --Mal 19:07, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Not sure but as per my talk we'll have to wait until Sir Oleg returns :) --kingboyk 07:12, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

B plus articles

I'm increasingly finding a need for a B+ category, these are articles which are close but not quite at GA status, and those which have either been delisted from GA. Pi is a typical example better than your average B-class article but not quite making the GA grade. There seem to be quite a lot of maths articles which fall into this cat Knot theory, Fractal, Chaos theory, Number, Statistics, Matrix (mathematics). Could the indexing bot cope with such a thing? --Salix alba (talk) 18:56, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I think at this point it would be very tricky to introduce new general classes right across Wikipedia- part of the value of the current assessment scheme is that it's really simple for a diverse and/or inexperienced group to work with. However, for any particular WikiProject such as Maths to have their own sub-classes, I think that is an excellent idea. The elegant approach you describe here provides a simple yet powerful solution to the problem. It even allows for the possibility of the bot having extra classes in the future. Great work! Walkerma 03:56, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

No need as far as I'm concerned. If an article isn't GA, it's B. (B-class is pretty good, make no mistake!). Has the GA badge or could get it and is approaching FA standard, it's A. With 4 grades already for good to excellent articles I don't feel any need to expand the gradings. --kingboyk 07:12, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Unassessed article category very, very long...

Are there any plans to provide an "unassessed worklist"? Category:Unassessed_U.S._road_transport_articles contains about 900 articles, and this doesn't include most of the sub-WPs in Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads. As it is, the articles are displayed 200 at a time, and most people would skip most of the first 300 or so. —Rob (talk) 04:42, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it's done automatically but you need to have the unassessed category visible to the bot like the A/Stub/etc classes are. I'll fix it for you now. --kingboyk 07:05, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Done. Would you consider changing the wording of all your templates to "this article is within the scope of..." instead of "part of"? It's more editor friendly to concentrate on scope than "ownership", I think. --kingboyk 07:13, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Sure, I don't see the harm in that. —Rob (talk) 13:21, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

The "Needed" class

Is anyone using the Needed class in article assessments? I remember seeing talk of it a while ago, but I don't see any examples of it in use. I'm wondering now because an editor tagged Talk:Bishops Lydeard railway station as Stub class, but the article has not yet been created, which leads me to believe that Needed class would be more appropriate. We haven't implemented Needed class yet in WP Trains. AdThanksVance. Slambo (Speak) 11:34, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I finally took the time to peruse the archives and found the discussion that I had remembered seeing. WP Trains has a list of articles that we could easily use as a proof-of-concept for the Needed class, and {{TrainsWikiProject}} already supports class=needed (there isn't a category for it yet, but creating one is trivial). With the {{#ifexist:}} function, we could easily have the template automatically update to unassessed class as soon as the article is created. Any objections to trying it out this weekend with a handful of WP Trains articles? Slambo (Speak) 02:26, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

If I remember rightly, the feeling here was that it was a nice idea which was likely to be frustrated by the talk pages getting speedy deleted. Thus, as far as I'm concerned, you're welcome to try it but don't be surprised if it doesn't work :) I like the coding idea by the way, very clever! --kingboyk 08:22, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I've added the category to the template if the user puts "class=needed", but I'll need to wait until I've got more time later tonight or tomorrow before adding all the #ifexist mojo. What I plan for the template is this:

Ifexist {{PAGENAME}}, then use the class parameter as currently implemented
else display {{Needed-Class}} and add the article to the needed category.

Once the template changes are in place, then I'll start adding it to some of the articles listed on our "to be written" list. Slambo (Speak) 11:13, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I just took a look at WP:CSD G8, and it's already got an exception in it for "notes that would help in creating an article". It seems to me that a project banner with the appropriate assessment tags and categories would count for this exception; in this case, the project banner would serve to point editors toward a group of other editors who are knowledgeable in the topic and may have pertinent references for the specific article. Slambo (Speak) 19:01, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

In theory, yes, but you've heard of rouge admins haven't you? :) I put various notes onto talk pages of redlinked articles saying such things as "when this article gets created, make sure it's added to category x" etc and they almost without (or totally without) exception got zapped :) I still reckon it's worth a try though (and perhaps you could make the template display a "please don't delete me because..." notice?) Let us know when you have some in place, I'd like to take a look. --kingboyk 19:04, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

You're an admin, just restore it, with a summary of "this talk contains needed information for the good article that will eventually be created here" or similar. ++Lar: t/c 19:11, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

That's assuming that the deletion is noticed. I quite like the "don't delete me please" message idea :) Or perhaps it could say "make my day punk"? :P --kingboyk 19:14, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Ah yes, very Rougelike. I'm just happy nobody's tried to use the red brush on me yet (or at least I haven't seen it yet). B-) Actually, I went over there to see if there was any discussion on this, but their archives are (understandably) so much longer. I think project banners that already include importance rankings (which I plan to implement in WP Trains after further discussion with the subprojects) will likely fare better against such redness. Anyway, if dinner doesn't take too long to make and serve tonight, I should have a start on this before bed. Slambo (Speak) 19:15, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I've added the ifexist mojo to the banner and it appears to be working so far. I tagged five of the pages listed on our Write list that had links to more information. One interesting side effect that I discovered has to do with deleting pages. Another admin deleted the local copy of Image:Wilcoxpos2.jpg since the image is now on commons with the same file name. The talk page stayed behind, and as soon as the image was deleted, it showed up in the Needed class category. I deleted that talk page, and the category will (presumably) update soon. Oh, and before you go looking for it, the article that started this whole thing for me today, Bishops Lydeard railway station, now exists and is expanding. Slambo (Speak) 23:55, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Any update on this? --kingboyk 10:30, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

This should be of interest: {{Db-botnomain}}, and the currently redlink {{Db-botnomainreviewed}}. You could add the latter to all needed-class talk pages to avoid them getting deleted. See Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MetsBot 2 for background. --kingboyk 12:42, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Advice

I need some balanced advice on a problem I am having with two editors on a article I tagged as being part of the Northern Ireland Project.

Their concerns are twofold: ownership and cluttering of the talk page.

My rationale is that the article falls within the scope of the NI WikiProject. At the time Wikipedia:WikiProject Ireland did not exist, but has now been created by one of the people involved in the discussion on the talk page (copied, by the look of it, from either the Belfast Project or the NI Project).

Recently an editor made these changes to the template for the NI Project. Realising that the bot was about to start work on the job (looking on the Mathbot contributions list, it had got to NASCAR), I reverted the edits the quickest way I could see - by using the "rollback vandal" option.

I don't have a lot of time today, but .. talking of time, I think this whole campaign is a waste of it! But that's my personal opinion, and that is why I have made this request. I had pointed the two editors to this page, but I can't see that they have used it yet.

I'd appreciate it if some of you have a look at the discussion as I feel its already blown out of proportion. The discussion and relevant talk page is this one: Talk:Ogham. --Mal 09:29, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

If the article's within scope you have a right to put it there. It might be best to avoid getting into deep discussion about it though? I definitely agree you should trim the template - looks like you based it on the Beatles template which probably isn't the best of ideas, as that's one big ugly template (but used on a small number of articles with a tight community == doesn't get complaints). You can make yours smaller without losing any of the info I think.

Also, there's a new template that can go to the top of talk pages so people can click straight to the table of contents and they don't even have to look at the stuff at the top of the page. I forget the name. --kingboyk 09:45, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Looks like I was too late to revert the changes. The NI articles log has just went from 1,080 down to zero. :/

I have said that I would be willing to look at the template next week, but one of the guys has taken the thing into his own hands despite this, and this is the result.

If you do find out the name of that other new template, please let me know so I can consider it for use in the NI Project. I'm not sure I should really give it much consideration simply because of two editors' opinions regarding one talk page though. Cheers anyway.

Are you back from the work you were doing now mate? --Mal 09:59, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Well don't worry about it Mal, just revert the articles by quality to the last good version for now (mathbot doesn't mind!) and he'll pick them all up again tommorow and rebuild the list.

I've finished the high priority part of my plugin, yes, but I need a break... have been working crazy hard on it. --kingboyk 10:07, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Yup that's what I was thinking... assuming someone doesn't changge the template again before the bot gets around to the joblist.

You deserve a break! Hopefully now that you have one section done, the others should more or less fall into place. :)

Oh - you might be interested in a question I asked Oleg here. --Mal 10:24, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

No rest for the wicked Mal! I had an idea for another killer feature (supporting the bog-standard WikiProject templates with an additional user-configurable plugin) which I'm working on right now :)

I don't think the speed of Mathbot is a current concern, but you make a good point and it would probably be wise to address the issue before it does become a problem! I imagine Oleg has some changes afoot as Mathbot has just done an update out of hours :) (hopefully it's WPBiography's "priority" categories!) --kingboyk 14:54, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Biography (arts and entertainment) articles by quality log

There seems to be a problem with this one, in that the articles on the list are getting "added" every day. --kingboyk 11:07, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

I fixed that one (the bot could not locate the subpages of that project since in Perl the parentheses are treated in a special way when doing pattern matching). I will deal with the importance/priority thing outlined above on this page in a few days. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:27, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Oleg, sterling work as always. --kingboyk 16:12, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Run time length

Hi Oleg. I was looking at the contributions page of your Mathbot and I started wondering about the time it takes the bot to process all of the jobs its does. The number of projects now using the bot seems to be increasing almost exponentially! Last month I seem to remember that the whole lot would be finished maybe by 5 am. This morning at 7:32 am (GMT) it had reached fig for Figure skating articles by quality log. Should the number of projects using the bot increase at the same rate, surely there will be a conflict with the (automated?) schedule: the bot won't have finished its jobs by the time it comes to starting the process again (midnight?).

I don't know if this is indeed a problem waiting to happen, or if you've accounted for the possibility. The immediate solution I can think of is to split the bot into two (or more) concurrent processes: 1—M and N—Z or something. I hope this is helpful to you, and I'm curious as to your thoughts in any case.

Keep up the good work by the way! :)

Cheers, --Mal 06:50, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Indeed today's run didn't even seem to start until 09:22, 19 September 2006 (UTC) and even then progress is "very" slow. Is there something "up". :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 10:23, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

That today's run started so late is weird indeed. Could be server problems, or something on my local machine. Let us see if it happens again.

In general, there is not much which can be done about the fact that it takes longer and longer for the bot to run. If I make two concurrent processes, it won't be able to calculate the total statistics, at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics. Now the bot sleeps for 5 seconds between any two tasks, I can make it sleep less, but that could increase the server load.

All in all, the script just can't scale, as the amount of work it has to do is much bigger (and will be growing) than it was imagined. Suggestions? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:57, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Do you do WPBiography at the end, or seperately, Oleg? How long is a run taking? (I still maintain that it's not actually a problem until it takes more than 24 hours :)). --kingboyk 14:59, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

The biography is done last, but not separately. If done separately, the script won't be able to calculate the global stats. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:10, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Couldn't 2 scripts run in parallel and write their stats/article lists out to a text file, for processing at the end by whichever script is last standing? --kingboyk 15:13, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes they could. But that won't change the fact that more work == more server strain. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:56, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Can you prioritize and drop the less important tasks, if it runs out of time? JRSpriggs 07:12, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Can't think of a solution for that Oleg, until such time as Mediawiki supports showing changes in category membership (which would be a really great feature of course). I guess we're back to thinking about getting direct database access aren't we? --kingboyk 10:30, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

What about alternating days: 0-9 to M the first day and N to Z the second day etc..? --Mal 18:19, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Tagging talk pages and assessing articles

You've probably already been "spammed" about this, as I've just written to all WikiProjects I think that it can help, but anyway - I worked hard on this so I may as well share it with as many folks as I can:

Hi. If you still have work to do tagging talk pages and assessing articles, my AWB plugin might be of interest to you.

The plugin has two main modes of operation:

Tagging talk pages, great for high-speed tagging
Assessments mode, for reviewing articles (pictured)

As of the current version, WikiProjects with simple "generic" templates are supported by the plugin without the need for any special programatic support by me.

For more information see:

Hope that helps. If you have any questions or find any bugs please let me know on the plugin's talk page. --Kingboyk 15:05, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Sounds very useful. Maybe you should put a guide on this in Wikipedia space, and link to it from Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot? Thanks, Walkerma 16:07, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Milestone imminent

It looks as if we are close to reaching the great milestone of 100,000 articles assessed. I think we should celebrate this with press releases to WP:SIGN and the community portal, and perhaps even see if they want to put out a press release to the outside media (newspapers and the like). I'm not saying the New York Times will cover it, but some outside Wikipedia - particularly librarians - will be interested to hear about these efforts. What do others think? Walkerma 16:10, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

We're already over 100,000. And since 62,000+ are stubs, that doesn't say very much except: "We've analyzed 100,000 articles and 2/3s barely talk about the subject matter." I could see it as a recruitment tool to analyze the rest of the articles, or get people to work on stubs instead of nit-picking if it should be "two-thirds" or "two thirds" for weeks. On already good (or B) articles. --MECU≈talk 18:27, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I think it should be mentioned in the Signpost, at least. So what if most of the assessments are Stubs? The average article on Wikipedia is below the standard we should expect, but it's improving every day. We have nothing to hide. --kingboyk 18:30, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

I suspect that the proportion of stubs is rather higher than our statistics would indicate, because a project will naturally tend to tag its most important articles first and leave more obscure tags till last. That doesn't bother me, I think already projects have found the system useful for spotting stubs on key topics and also possible GAs or FAs. It's also fantastic for Wikipedia 1.0, it offers us the potential for a really big release next year of articles that are all B-Class or above (we already have over 10,000 articles of that quality). Anyway, I posted this in the Signpost, as well as things here and this. Please edit any of these if I've messed anything up. Walkerma 04:40, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Request: allow "Template:xx-Class" to create direct links

This is a somewhat technical request: Check out Wikipedia:WikiProject Filmmaking - scroll down 2 or 3 screens, on the right side there is a yellow bar and at the bottom of this bar there is a list of filmmaking articles by quality - with the total numbers in each category, and links to these quality classes (FA: 3, A: 2, GA: 7 etc.). Problem is, the links (FA, A, GA etc.) link to the general page Category:FA-Class articles instead of the much more relevant page Category:FA-Class Filmmaking articles. I've tried fixing it myself, but it boils down to the template pages Template:FA-Class to Template:Stub-Class allowing a parameter to be passed ("which project") that it will link through. I was send here because I heard this is the correct place to ask sometbody if this is correct, and how to do it exactly, since "passing parameters" can sometimes be a tricky matter. Thanks! :-) Peter S. 09:20, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't quite know how to say. It is of course possible to modify the bot to link to the more relevant category when creating Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Filmmaking articles by quality statistics (if that's what you ar referring to). But is it really worth it? I would doubt if it is worth to make FA, Start, and Stub to be links to start with. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:21, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

It could be handy. The stats page is now being transcluded on some project pages, for example on the maths assesment, it would be nice if they could link to the project specific cats so people can easily look at what the articles are, follow the principal of least suprise. --Salix alba (talk) 17:15, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

p.s. Did mathbot have a much needed day off today? --Salix alba (talk) 17:15, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Can somebody help me here and do the change, as I don't know how to do it exactly. Thanks Peter S. 19:19, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Template:Stub-Class etc could be modified to have a parameter which specified part of the name of the category, this could be done without messing up the template for other users. The problem then becomes how that parameter would be set. For this it would really needs mathbots assistance as the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Filmmaking articles by quality statistics is automatically generated. Either the stats pages could have a parameter which is in turn passed through to Stub-Class or it sets the appropriate directory by default. There might be some esoteric way of using {{PAGENAME}} but I'd advise against it as it would have far reaching consequences. --Salix alba (talk) 19:51, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Salix alba, thanks for your helpful suggestions. I will modify the stats generation to link to the appropriate category in a few days. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:02, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Great, thanks! Peter S. 15:36, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

I tried to look into this matter and I arrived at Salix alba's conclussions above. The {{FA-Class}} template needs to be modified to take an optional category parameter. If that parameter is not set, it falls back to Category:FA-Class articles, otherwise, if the paramter is for example, Category:FA-Class film articles, then of course the category link will be set to Category:FA-Class film articles. Anybody knows how to use conditional expressions in templates as above? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:35, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

This is where the meta:ParserFunctions comes in. Basically if you have {{#if:{{{category|}}}|[[:Category:{{{category}}}]]|[[:Category:FA-Class]]}} in the template then if the category parameter is specified then it will link the article in the specifed cat otherwise it will link to the default. --Salix alba (talk) 12:35, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the example. I implemented the linking, see Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Adelaide articles by quality statistics. Now the bot is running updating all the articles. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:10, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Fantastic stuff, thanks a lot, Oleg! :-) Peter S. 15:16, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

I recently added the Bangladesh project to the bot list. But it does not seem to be working. Could you please check and let me know why? - Ganeshk (talk) 23:20, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I think it's just that the bot didn't run last night (see comment immed. prior to this post!). I checked and you seem to have everything done correctly, we just have to wait for the bot to run, hopefully tonight. If it doesn't show up when the bot runs I'll investigate. Good to see another important subject area using the bot! Walkerma 03:15, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for checking. - Ganeshk (talk) 03:23, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Bot has some problems

Sory for not replying earlier to the above. The bot indeed seems to be broken. I suspect most likely it is because the syntax of categories changed recently (see for example Category:Mathematics; those plus signs and stuff). The changes are not enough for a person to get confused, but unfortunately they are enough for a bot. :) I will work on fixing that, hopefully tonight (in 12 hours). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:14, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

That changed some time ago Oleg. Also, is it not possible to turn the new formatting off in the skin file? --kingboyk 15:17, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

You are right. A (tiny) syntax change in Wikipedia categories is indeed to blame, but not the (+) thing. I fixed bot's code now to reflect that change and now it works. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:32, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, Oleg! We really appreciate the bot and its creator. Walkerma 15:33, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Other Classes??

Do you think it would be possible for the bot to count how many articles as a whole you have? Also, do you think it would be possible for the bot to count articles how have different classess from the normal Stub, Start... Like for our project we have Future, Template, Cat, Disambig, List, and NA. It would help if these were counted also. Please respond below this post to see what you think about adding those classes (or your project specific classes). Cbrown1023 14:56, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, the bot should already be giving an overall count; that's what the "Total" is in the statistics. As far as counting non-standard classes, I suspect that would be more trouble than it's worth, as the bot would then have to be programmed with the additional classes on a per-project basis. Kirill Lokshin 16:03, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, there are not that many classess templates (see Category:Classification templates). Cbrown1023 16:31, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

It's beyond the scope of WP1, but of course WPs are using the bot's list for more than just WP1 anyway. Personally I agree with Kirill that it's likely to be more trouble than it's worth - more work for Oleg, more bot complexity, not much gain. --kingboyk 10:38, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

I've created a new template, {{Log}}, to put at the top of log pages produced by my bot, as I've found that folks come along and try to disambiguate links. This also happens on the Mathbot log pages quite often, so perhaps Oleg you'd want to have Mathbot use this template too (inside a noinclude)? --kingboyk 13:52, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't quite see the value of such a note. If somebody knows what a log is (the extrement of a computer program :) that person most like won't touch it. Besides, it matters little if people modify the logs, as each day the bot adds a new day and deletes the oldest day, so any modifications (or any content at all) will eventually expire from it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:57, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

The value is that I don't waste my time reverting changes, which I've had to do twice today already. Alternatively, could you wrap the log inside a bot tag? Then I could add the template myself to the logs which are on my watchlist. --kingboyk 11:15, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Good points. I did that, see [6]. I chose to insert {{log}} rather than putting in bot tags, as that is simpler to implement. When the bot run tonight it will update the logs to all projects that way. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:16, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Oleg, much appreciated. --kingboyk 09:36, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Sub-cats

Hello, I looked at {{WPBeatles}} and found that the banner categorizes the ratings (FA, A etc.) by sub-group (Paul, John etc). Does Mathbot recurse all these sub-categories and update the main project statistic (WP Beatles)? How is it working? Please advise. Regards, Ganeshk (talk) 15:53, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

kingboyk, where art thou? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:39, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

It's coded to put the articles onto seperate lists unless they have "also-beatles=yes", which puts them onto the main Beatles list too. It wasn't a popular idea on this page when I introduced it and frankly they were probably right - it seems like a bit of a waste of time now :)

WPBio uses a similar approach for workgroups, and there the idea has a lot more merit. With such a large project it makes sense to have seperate worklists I think. Does that answer the question? --kingboyk 09:38, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes. It answered my question. Thanks! Ganeshk (talk) 21:57, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Bug?

I don't know. I got two other reports on my talk page about that kind of behavior too. Now I ran the bot again (without any changes in the code!) and it added that article as a GA article [10].

I doubt it is bot's fault, as then such weird behavior would be more frequent and more reproducible. My guess is that when you retag an article (B-class => GA-class) it disappears from the B-class category but it takes a while for the server to put it in the GA-class category, or otherwise the server feeds the bot a stale (cached) version of the categories.

I tried to make sure the latter does not happen by asking for a web page with a no-cache option, but you can't know if the server obeys you or not.

Other ideas? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:22, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

I've seen delays like that, but the article has usually appeared back in the log the next day. Walkerma 18:51, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot placing cats

Currently when Mathbot picks up a new project/categories it places them into the appropriate cat like Category:GA-Class articles. Would it make sense to adjust things so its entry includes the piped placement [[Category:GA-Class articles|Organized Labour]] so all articles don’t get clumped under the “G” letter? (and "S" for the Stub-class, etc.) I would think it means just stripping the standard “GA-Class” text off the cat name… (but I don’t really know what I’m talking about. :) --Bookandcoffee 19:24, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Putting articles in categories is not bot's job, that is accomplished by people who review individual articles. The bot only reads the categories. I hope that the wizzards who implemented the tags for evaluating articles ({{WPBeatles}}, etc.) have any suggestions about that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:24, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Sorry - I'm not sure how to describe this. It's edits like these [11] [12] [13] that I was wondering about. All these Categories get clumped into the "S" letter in the Category:Start-Class articles--Bookandcoffee 03:35, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I had forgotten about those. Will do. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:46, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I modified my script to pipe the categories from now on as suggested above. Now the bot is adding pipes to already existing categories. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:46, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Cool! Thank you. --Bookandcoffee 16:58, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Maths stub class articles

For some reason articles in Category:Stub-Class mathematics articles were not included in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Mathematics articles by quality today and marked as removed in the log. I guess some small bug. --Salix alba (talk) 11:50, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Hit a bunch of B-Class military history articles as well, and probably some from other projects; the total count dropped by a few thousand articles today! ;-) Kirill Lokshin 12:25, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Must be catching, as Werdnabot went crazy yesterday (as you know Kirill). --kingboyk 12:28, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

I made my script more robust to server errors today (it will attempt several times to refetch categories which are returned as empty). I hope that will help. Let us see. I think these are all server errors, and ultimately the work the bot does needs (I think) to be done without HTTP requests which are not reliable. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:26, 19 October 2006 (UTC)