Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Old

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[edit] VFD

Several articles have been "speedy deleted" while they were on VFD. Are their VFD discussions archived in the same way as the others? Joyous 00:48, Dec 18, 2004 (UTC)

I have always done so. - SimonP 02:38, Dec 18, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] 2005

I propose to simply link to the day subpages instead of transcluding them here. The page is so huge it crashes my browser. Comments? dbenbenn | talk 18:43, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I've had the server crashing when I try to load this page for the past several days. The only VfD closing I've been able to do is on the main VfD page (for speedy deletes). Have you guys been experiencing the same, or is it just my browser? --Deathphoenix 15:11, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I've had the same problem. This is a good idea. I'm going to be bold and do it so we can get the page back under control. I'd rather revert to transclusion someday but for now we need to make the process work. Rossami (talk) 16:32, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, Rossami. Two points, though:
  1. User:AllyUnion's bot will have to be updated, and might get confused. We'll see what it does tonight.
  2. A workaround, which I've been using for a while, is to never actually load this page anyway. I just edit it to see what the oldest open day is, then load that day.
dbenbenn | talk 16:39, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
In the meantime, we can convert the bot output by hand if we must. A single day hopefully won't lock up the entire page. Rossami (talk)
Ah, thanks for the workaround, dbenbenn. I was wondering if the old page works that way. --Deathphoenix 18:14, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Discussions of specific VfDs?

Hey fellow VFD/Oldsters,

I don't know if there is a place to discuss these things, but what do you think about Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Mi Último Adiós? A lot of the votes are for Transwiki to WikiSource, but during the VfD, it seems people have added other material so the article now is about the poem, but also includes the poem itself. Is it possible to Keep the article but move the poem to WikiSource? Or perhaps you have other suggestions (or will solve this VfD for me). Thanks, --Deathphoenix 19:00, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That's a judgment call for the deciding admin and is exactly why they are supposed to exercise discretion and, at times, to ignore the result that would come of strict vote-counting. Your proposed solution is entirely acceptable and is the reason that the closers are supposed to evaluate the comments and their order in context of the changes to the article during and since the discussion period. If you think it might be controversial, though, just skip that one for now. I hope to have some time this weekend to help work off the backlog. Rossami (talk) 19:59, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your thoughts, Rossami. I think what I'll do is spawn off a subarticle, Mi Último Adiós/Poem, and submit that for a Transwiki. --Deathphoenix 00:38, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Suppressing closed discussions

Korath just showed me how to suppress the display of discussions which have already been closed (that is, those which have the blue box behind them).

  1. If you are still using the monobook style (the default), edit your monobook.css page.
    • If you are using the classic style, edit standard.css instead.
  2. Type .vfd { display:none; } into the page and save it.

Unintended consequences:

  • This might also suppress the VfD header on articles which have been nominated for deletion (if the nomination box also uses "class=vfd"). It will still be visible in edit-mode but will not show in the regular view. (This has not been a problem in any of the recent versions of VfD/AFD tag.)
  • This will suppress the entire discussion even when you want to find it. For example,
    • when the article is renominated and you want to evaluate what was said in the prior discussion
    • when the article is kept and you want to follow through the link on the Talk page
    • when searching for the old nomination to see if a recreated article is eligible for speedy
    • if/when someone inappropriately marks a discussion as "closed" while it's still on the main VfD page.
  • A few discussions which were closed over a week ago will not be suppressed because we were using "id=vfd" instead of "class=vfd" in the closing header. (Again, this has not been a problem recently.)
Rossami (talk) 18:15, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Updated. By the way, you can temporarily undo this option simply switching to another skin in your preferences. Then refresh the page with the deletion discussion and you will see the full discussion including the headers. Rossami (talk) 20:03, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

There is now an even more flexible option for Firefox users. See R3m0t's script for wpvfdhide which allows you to hide and unhide the closed discussions at will. Rossami (talk) 4 July 2005 08:42 (UTC)

Another option, which I suggested below, and which requires no work from users, would be to have a bot perodically move closed discussions to the bottom of the page. So far I did not get any feedback on this, whether positive or negative, so I would wonder what people think. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 08:35, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
Why not bot-move to a separate page, keeping subpage-link and result? See my remarks on this issue on Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion#Subsetting_AfD. Rd232 talk 12:56, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New subpage proposal: "Complex discussions"

There are two categories of unresolved vfd discussions: those that no admin has got around to, and those that no admin has managed to decide one way or the other. The second category keeps us from deleting date pages from this page, and wastes time while admins go through some long pages to search for the unresolved ones, and each of us decide we can't resolve them, for whatever reason. Could we maybe list that category on a separate page? That is, if a few admins go through a day's vfd, and all of them decide not to deal with a particular discussion, we can put it on that page, and when a particularly bold/thick-skinned/drunk admin comes by, maybe they can tackle one or two of the "complex discussion" sets. I did one (Islamic fascism) and I'm already getting flak for it, not willing to do more for another day or two. I don't have a good name for my proposed subpage. moink 11:50, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ongoing discussions: Libertarian capitalism

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Libertarian capitalism

Is there a reason why the above is still in the Ongoing discussions section? I was tempted to just close the discussion and remove it from the page because the discussion has become stale, but I want to make sure I'm not missing something that happened long before I started working here. --Deathphoenix 21:06, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

  • Done. Thanks, Rossami. --Deathphoenix 18:40, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Transwiki queue

From just a quick check, I've noticed that Scheiße, NEET, Pantology, Eivind, Gay for the stay, and Kjetil have all been transwikied to Wiktionary, and presumably should now be deleted and removed from the queue. Others on the list have been deleted already (red links) or have been redirected (like Meliorist, Agricultura, Neubauten) so I think that means they can be removed from the list, too. The three two remaining Wiktionary ones are Gay for the stay, which looks like it was never closed properly and tagged (so I'll transwiki in a minute), and Nahuatl dictionary and List of Japanese given names, which are lists and much more complex to transwiki. --Dmcdevit 23:40, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC) [Just did gay for the stay, too, and it can be deleted.]

Done. Thanks. Rossami (talk) 14:00, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Conlon has been transwikied and awaits deletion. --Dmcdevit 2 July 2005 19:29 (UTC)
Resolved. Rossami (talk) 5 July 2005 23:12 (UTC)

On a related note, Wikipedia:Yogananda Image Gallery is in the transwiki queue awaiting a move to the commons (see the vfd ruling). However, all of the images appear to be tagged as fair use. As the commons policy states: "since the commons does not accept fair use content this image will need to be deleted." What is to be done? --Dmcdevit 18:56, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Oh yes, this has been resolved too. --Dmcdevit July 5, 2005 23:18 (UTC)

[edit] Question about how to tell if all the debates in a page have been closed

Hi. I am not an admin, but ran into this page and have a question. Here's the page

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 August 6

for VfD discussions that day. All the discussions there are closed by one admin or another. The way I learned this is by going down on this very long page screenful after screenful and carefully examining all the entries for the characteristic color background of a closed discussion. And my question is: is this how things are done? Or is there a quicker way of figuring out if all the VfD discussions for a day are closed? Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 03:11, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

I haven't found an automated way of doing this, no. Although I scroll down at speed now, and just keep my eye on the left hand edge of the 'editable' area and watch for breaks in the double-line that should be there for a closed debate. -Splash 03:27, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
Actually R3m0t has an "autovfdhide" greasemonkey script that can be found here. It's useful for the older pages that are mostly done. (But only when I bother to switch over to Firefox.) Dmcdevit·t 03:39, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
Cool, thanks. I was thinking of something much more complicated. I should learn to use javascript. :) Oleg Alexandrov 04:23, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
Korath also developed a way to autohide using a stylesheet. This technique works in all browsers (I think). See #Suppressing closed discussions above. Rossami (talk) 12:43, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wonder if it is useful to count the open discussions

I wrote a small and silly perl script to post on Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Old the number of open discussions left for each day which need to be closed by an admin. If their number is less than 10, links to the actual discussions are provided. See the link for the example (uploaded by my bot).

I wonder if this could be considered useful. If yes, I could run such a bot periodically, say every hour or two. Of course no matter what interval one chooses for updating this, the information will be obsolete if some discussions are closed in the meantime. But still, I wonder if there are any comments on the use of a thing like that or not. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 04:09, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Personally, I think that's great! We already have that middle section of the page, but that has to be populated by hand and sometimes, I'm sure, debates don't go there before a date gets archived. It too is often (at least) hours out of date and can be tedious to populate anyway. Although with the human version those debates can be removed, it really wouldn't seem like much of a problem to click a link, see it closed, and carry on by. -Splash 04:24, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Speaking as the maintainer for VFD Bot, I'm greatly concerned over whether or not VFD Bot will trip over MathBot's edits and stats. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:04, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Very good point. From what I see, your bot adds a new line each day, of the form:

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 August 14

My bot can obviously confuse your bot. However, I would think though that it would not be that hard to modify your bot; it would just need to be aware that such a line has some other content after a whitepspace. The big question is whether it is worth it. And that's what this discussion is about. Oleg Alexandrov 16:20, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Yes, but the thing is that it scans for the previous day, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 August 13, then adds the new day. Python's regular expression support is not as flexible as Perl's so... it gives me some concern... --AllyUnion (talk) 19:00, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Taking a look at my Python code...
 fivedaysago_vfdtag = '* [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/' + fivedaysago.strftime('%Y %B ') +
 str(int(fivedaysago.strftime('%d'))) + ']]'
 
 sixdaysago_vfdtag = '* [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/' + sixdaysago.strftime('%Y %B ') + 
 str(int(sixdaysago.strftime('%d'))) + ']]'
 
 vfdold = vfdold.replace(sixdaysago_vfdtag, sixdaysago_vfdtag + '\n' + fivedaysago_vfdtag, 1)
It will be looking for "* Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 August 13" then it will replace it with "* Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 August 14\n* Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 August 13". It may screw up... I still don't know for certain. --AllyUnion (talk) 19:05, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

I think that in Perl things would be indeed simpler to implement. I can take upon myself the task of adding new links to this page. From what I gather, this page should contain links older than five days, so for example, today the link to

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 August 15

would need to come in here. How does that sound? Oleg Alexandrov 19:12, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Hey AllyUnion, where are you? Oleg Alexandrov 20:07, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
While I certainly don't mind you taking over the maintainance, it's just that I'm very use to having VFD Bot maintain this page. You can certainly go ahead and add the stats, if you like. --AllyUnion (talk) 17:24, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Do either of these two bots remove the days that have 0 discussions left, or does that still require manual intervention? -Splash 05:38, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

I did not implement this so far because of the comment:

<!-- Please note that the deletion process has changed considerably over time--please make sure you are familiar with the current Wikipedia:Deletion process NOTICE: Before removing a VFD day subpage, please make sure you review ALL of the discussions of that day and ensure the closed discussion is accurate. --> in Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Old. If you want the bot to remove days with no empty discussion, that can be easily taken care of. Oleg Alexandrov 15:32, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

At present we eyeball the day log to check that there are no open discussions. Yes, it's tedious and probably not as reliable as script-based records, but it's probably good to have redundancy--both methods. So removing the fully closed day logs from the list of old VfD day logs would probably not be desirable. --Tony SidawayTalk 17:29, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

? I just meant from the list of "debates older than 5 days". At present, someone cleans that up periodically and moves the done days to the archive. I was just wondering if the bots removed the bullet points for done-days. I don't mean deleting the subpages or anythgin. -Splash 20:19, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
That's the same list Tony is talking about. Right now, we do a final check on the list by hand to confirm that all the debates really were closed. Then it's a trivial two edits (one cut-and-paste) to move the bullet from the /Old page to the Archived debates page. A script for those two edits doesn't seem worth the trouble. The other way to interpret your suggestion is that the bot will determine that all the debates were closed. I'm not sure I trust a bot to do that properly. A manual review still seems preferable. Rossami (talk) 13:19, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Ok, I'm fine with that. I've lately been doing some of the review-and-removes myself, which was why I asked. -Splash 00:18, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

I am rather new here so I don't know what to say. As soon as you guys reach a decision on how to do things, and if you need to automate more stuff, just let me know. (Always willing to write one more silly script. :) Oleg Alexandrov 23:44, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Is your bot working, AllyUnion?-Splash 23:41, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

The server it was running on was brought down on that day. Since then, I've moved the files for the bot to a different server, and have created AFD Bot as a replacement. --AllyUnion (talk) 06:29, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Number of open discussions, on demand

I modified a bit the bot displaying the number of open discussions. Now it will not update hourly, but rather, when requested by clicking a link. I still don't know how useful this counting of open discussions is, but I surely I had fun writing the code. :) Oleg Alexandrov 02:41, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Well, as a not-admin, I certainly find it useful. I can only close keep-debates and there's more likely to some of those left where the number of open debates is higher. Rather than scroll the list (or work out Greasemonkey), I can let you do the graft for me! :) Splash 03:03, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
The bot is not working for now. There is a mixture of "votes for deletion" and "articles for deletion" in the page, which confuses it. I will fix it in a short while. Oleg Alexandrov 16:50, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
Bot is back in business. Oleg Alexandrov 19:43, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
I just closed a bunch of debates on August 27, but this diff suggests something odd happened. Just thought I'd let you know. -Splash 01:43, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
I saw the same thing. I have no idea what is going on. If my script had a bug giving incorrect results, it would at least give the same (wrong) result if run twice in a row. My best guess is that the servers are playing tricks with us. Maybe they are out of sink and one server serves an older page while another one a newer page. Very strange. Oleg Alexandrov 01:54, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
When the number of open discussion is rather low, say around 10, it would be instructive to actually count how many discussions are open and compare with what the bot gives. I tried counting now, but 65 is too big a number for me so I lost count after a while. :) Oleg Alexandrov 01:57, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
I am the last refresh to the main page. It counts 52 open on August 26 (it was being fooled in part by a missing {{{vb}}}). However, at a pretty accurate human count, which I have double-checked, there are 59 open debates. If that helps at all... -Splash 02:52, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Hi Splash. I figured out what happened. If you look at the source of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 August 26 you will see a mixture of "Votes for deletion", "Articles for deletion" and "Pages for deletion". Now, normally only one of these must be present. I knew that because of the recent mess we have both "Votes" and "Articles". Seeing in addition "Pages" on top of everything was a complete surprise. I will fix my script tomorrow. And let us hope that people will settle on one of the three versions eventually. Oleg Alexandrov 04:23, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

Fixed now. I counted by hand that at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 August 26 now there are exactly 29 open discussions. By the way, now my script also give the number of closed discussions and the total number of discussions. They are counted independently. If the total does not equal the sum of open and closed, and if the total is not the same as in the table of contents of a given page (for example, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 August 26) then there is a problem. Oleg Alexandrov 17:15, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
Excellent! I think the changeover to Articles for Deletion is nearly complete now, but there're going to be a few days when the rapid changing back-and-forth betwee A, P and V will be in effect at /Old. The open/closed/total thing is handy: but at the moment it only appears on the bot-progress page rather than on the project page. Is this deliberate? (unsigned post by Splash)
OK, I now put the same thing in the project page. Note that my script still gets confused if a section is duplicate, as the one I removed. My script does not count the duplicate section twice, so then in the TOC one may have one more discussion than as counted by the script. This is because Wikipedia uses a different syntax for duplicate section. If this turns out to be a problem in the future, I will deal with it. Oleg Alexandrov 20:57, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Mathbot inaccuracies?

Mathbot is wrong sometimes. Do we know why? It kept telling me there was one open September 11th debate, and pointed me to a closed debate. I refreshed the page cache, ran it again a couple of times, and then it told me there were two open discussions, and pointed me to two closed ones! This is still better than having to do it manually, but if we could figure out what's confusing the poor mathbot it would make our lives a little easier. moink 11:09, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Also, what am I supposed to do when this happens? I just went through Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 September 11 carefully and verified that all debates are closed. I can delete the link to that day's subpage, but will Mathbot just add it back later? I don't want other closers to have to go through the page like I did; it took some time that could be used closing more debates. moink 11:21, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
It hasn't happened yet so I'm pretty sure mathbot won't readd listings after they've been removed it. I think it only works with the listings that are currently on the page and I assume that the miscounts and stuff are due to cache issues. Jtkiefer T | @ | C ----- 16:19, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
Right, mathbot will not add add back links removed from this page, it works only with existing links. I would like to know myself why the bot still shows some discussions to be open when they are closed. If it happens in the future again, I will try to debug it. (It could be some incorrect syntax in that debate which confuses it, or indeed server cache issues.) Thank you for pointing this out. Oleg Alexandrov 16:36, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, Oleg! Mathbot is a great help. I'll mention it here again if I see it again, with specific pointers to the debates. moink 19:17, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

It has happened again - Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 September 28 (1 open / 108 closed / 109 total discussions; Open: 1) - the debate is closed. – ABCD✉ 03:22, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

The reason may be that, instead of using {{subst:at}} ... {{subst:ab}}, the closer used {{at}} ... {{ab}} – ABCD✉ 03:36, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
ABCD, you are very right. My bot needs the text "boiler plate afd..." to declare a discussion closed. This one shows up with {subst:at} but not with simply {at}. I can patch up my bot to look at {at} too, but these days I don't have a reliable internet connection, so I don't know when I will get to it. In the meantime, one should use {subst:at} instead of {at}, which is the best practice anyway. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 10:32, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] ABCD's goodies

Many of you know I guess that ABCD has a lot of javascript code in his User:ABCD/monobook.js which does a lot of things for you when closing AFD discussions. The situation being that closing AFD is more and more of work, I would guess that every bit of automation would help.

I always (well, almost) dreamed of having somebody automatically insert the "{subst:at} and {subst:ab} for me when closing an afd discussion, and I stripped ABCD's code to the very bare minimum allowing it to do that. In case you never used ABCD's goodies and were too intimidated by all that javascript, maybe you could try my stripped down User:Oleg Alexandrov/monobook.js. It should do no more than adding a tab to the top/very right part of the edit window, which when pushed upon would insert the above strings. That tab would become visible only when in edit mode closing an afd discussion. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:44, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

I have reduced the script even more:
/* <pre><nowiki> */

// cut an paste all the test below in your USER/monobook.js to create a tab to insert {{subst:at}} {{subst:ab}} when editing an afd discussion function closeafd(){ var txt = document.editform.wpTextbox1; txt.value = "{{subst:at}}\n" + txt.value + "\n{{subst:ab}}\n"; } function addATB(){ if(!/^Editing Wikipedia:(Articles|Votes|Pages) for deletion/.test(document.title)) return; var tabs = document.getElementById('p-cactions').getElementsByTagName('ul')[0]; var na = document.createElement('a'); na.href = 'javascript:closeafd()'; na.appendChild(document.createTextNode(':atb')); var li = document.createElement('li'); li.appendChild(na); tabs.appendChild(li); } if (window.addEventListener) window.addEventListener("load",addATB,false); else if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent("onload",addATB); /* </nowiki></pre> */

– ABCD✉ 02:54, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sorting the daily afd lists

Curently, articles nominamed for deletion are listed by day; for example, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 October 3. The entries in such a list are not sorted in any particular manner, rather they show up in the order articles were nominated for deletion as the day goes by.

After 5 days, as we know, each such list is moved to AFD/old. I wonder if, at this stange, it would be useful to have several sections in the daily list. I would think of four sections. First section, listing articles which more likely will end up being deleted, second section articles for which the consensus is not that clear, third section with articles which more likely will be kept, and lastly, the fourth section being afd discussions which are already closed. I would think that such a split into sections would save some time to people closing discussions.

I could run a bot to update this list say hourly, and after all discussions for a day are closed, I could restore the original format of the list. I wonder if there are any comments on this. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 12:21, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I would prefer not to. It implies (quite strongly) prejudging the outcome of the debate before human intervention, based purely on the numbers. Although it might often get it right, it would provide another stick to beat admins over the head with if they close a debate counter to the section in which it might appear. I would, however, appreciate alphabetizing the list, so that when I go through it to find some particular debate or to remove some for relisting it's quicker. -Splashtalk 15:53, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
When an admin gets hit over the head because it went the against the wishes of a bot, truly the age of machines has arrived. :) I was thinking of puting in the "most likely keep" section articles for which more than 50% of the votes are keep, and in the "most likely delete" section articles for which more than 80%-90% of the votes are delete. Everything else would go in the "no clear consensus" section. But I see your point.
Alphabetizing would be easy enough to implement. How about also separating the closed discussions from the ones still open? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:04, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
Done with alphabetizing, see for example Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 October 11. I will run this bot everyday shortly after AllyUnion's bot adds a new entry to afd/old. I still look forward to feedback about my proposal about separating the open discussions from the closed discussions, and more views on splitting open discussions in sections depending on how likely they are to close with a certain outcome. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:35, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion#Subsetting_AfD. Rd232 talk 12:57, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Please do not alphabetize the lists; this is pointless. --SPUI (talk) 20:37, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

I got a message from AllyUnion on my talk page asking to not alphabetize the AFD lists, as it changes the order in which the articles were nominated for deletion for a given day. That's a good point. Wonder what people think. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:52, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
Once the day is closed, I don't see any relevance to the order in which they were nominated. Having them alphabetcal makes some things fractionally easier, so we might as well do it. Does it interfere with some other bot actions, or something? The time of nomination is (should) still be available from the timestamps if they're needed for something specific. -Splashtalk 23:25, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] The backlog tag

I readded it and frankly, I think it needs to be permanent. The problem (as we saw) is that when you remove it, less people see the link so then there is less of a chance of it being done. I think the tag has been off for 2 weeks and we're back to having 6 days listed. We had 1 listed when it was removed. Let's just keep it on here, I say. --Woohookitty(cat scratches) 11:39, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

  • Don't worry, I'll make sure the backlog is gone once I return. =D - Cheers, Mailer Diablo 01:51, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
    • ) I still think it's a good idea to just keep the tag. I mean what does it hurt? --Woohookitty(cat scratches) 11:12, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bot does not work

mathbot which has been giving some statistics about how many afd discussions are still open for a given day will not work today and tomorrow. The server on which it is hosted is down, and unless the system administrators come to work on Sunday, which is not likely, the script will not work until the server is restarted on Monday. Sorry. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:27, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Right now, it is working in the sense that it runs, but it gives the wrong results. For the current top entry, it's listing three open AfD's, but when I click on the three links, they're all closed. --RoySmith 13:18, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
I am working on it now. It is good if the entries from Wikipedia :Articles for deletion/Old are not removed in the meantime. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:37, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
Done. My bot was confused by the fact that those particular afd disussions had subsections in them. That bug is fixed now.
Also, after doing this fix on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2005 November 26, the number of total discussions as shown by the bot became equal to the number of total discussions in the toc of that afd day. My bot's info was right, while the toc info was wrong, that because somebody used ===Section=== instead of ====Subsection==== when subsectioning a particular afd discussion.
Please let me know if in the future you see more discrepancies. The html generated by the wiki engine is more complicated than I though. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:04, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] An alternative interface to AFD

See Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion#AFD summaries. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:53, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Automating AfD closing

Regular debate closers, I have written a script that automates the closing of AfD debates. Please have a look and try it out, and let me know of any bugs or changes you would like. I'm a Javascript novice, but I'll do the best I can to help. :) Johnleemk | Talk 05:48, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mathbot old AFD summary

(copied from my talk page. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:12, 23 July 2006 (UTC))

It might be helpful to increase the number of discussions that are directly linked when the the number gets low, from 10 to 15 or 20, so we don't have to scroll through 200 to find a handful. —Centrx→talk • 23:28, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

Good idea. I did that. Let us see if there are any comments/disagreements about this. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:12, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
Totally support increase to 20. I've been wanting this for a while, but just never got around to suggesting it :) Petros471 10:26, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
Unless it server-sapping could you up that to 30? I find they get cleared much more quickly when they are listed individually, and it is often a lot quickier to get it down to 30 than to pick off the difficult ones from the last 25 or so. Yomanganitalk 17:29, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
OK. If people complain I will scale this back. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:24, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Days Taken Off Early?

What's the correct thing to do if a day's been taken off the list of days with still-unclosed debates before all the debates are closed? At the moment, for instance, 27 September 2006 is no longer listed, but at least one discussion hasn't been closed yet. Do we relist the day as active? Post a notice on the AN and ask an admin to close the debate? What? The Literate Engineer 03:09, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

I think the best thing would be to relist the day on this page, and drop a note to whoever removed the log page asking them to be a bit more careful in future :) If one particular debate is really old then a note on AN might be appropriate, but please only use that for extreme cases as AN is crowded enough as it is. Petros471 10:12, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the advice. The Literate Engineer 02:58, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
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