Wikipedia talk:Maintenance

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Dori, why wouldn't there be any more accidents? I still use the old format and it is still located in the same place on the left panel. - Tεxτurε 23:54, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Because you now get a confirmation page before the page is protected asking "Do you really want to protect this page?". You have to type in a reason for protecting it in the same way you do when deleting pages. Angela. 21:42, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Very nice. I haven't protected anything since that change. - Tεxτurε 21:44, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Reducing the need for maintenance

As a would-be good citizen of Wikipedia, I take a look at the list of "new" articles now and again, and frequently see suspicious-sounding stuff posted by people who are mere IP numbers. Much more often than not, the articles turn out to be puerile: pranks, vanity pages, etc. So I stick a "speedy deletion" thingie on them, and then some sysop/administrator notices this and deletes the article. I quickly tire of this and I bet the sysops do too.

By requiring contributors to register, you/we would indeed miss some worthwhile additions (and of course would not assure immunity from the activities of half-wits). But I suggest that on balance this requirement would be a good thing: those potential contributors whose attention-span is sufficient for writing, editing, proofing, etc. can surely get an ID and remember both it and its password. Or if this seems too "draconian" [why?], then at least stop the non-logged-in from creating new pages. How about it? Hoary 05:50, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Duplication with Wikipedia:Cleaning department

There seems to be a certain amount of duplication between here and WP:CD, e.g. for the VfD and Feature Page candidates. It's true that CD has fallen somewhat into desuetude, but I'm hoping to revive it. I didn't move any content from here into the appropriate entries over there, but if CD takes off I would propose that we do so, and list things only in one place or the other (perhaps with a brief mention and a cross-link). Noel (talk) 22:34, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New procedure for featured articles?

Does #4 still apply? Don't we just the discussion on the nomination page now? Rad Racer | Talk 03:56, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

  1. If a week has gone by after the last objection was withdrawn, or a week after the nomination was listed, and the article has received two or more seconds, or voices of support, move the discussion to the section Recently added to Featured articles and add a line that states Added by ~~~~, so we know when and by whom a page was added to FA.
  2. Add the article to the list at Featured articles or pictures
  3. Remove the optional nomination boilerplate from the article, if the nominator chose to use it.
  4. Copy the discussion and paste it into the talk page for the article, and add the {{msg:featured}} tag to the top of the talk page.
Per User:Raul654, this procedure in general is not up to date. Rad Racer | Talk 04:07, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] FIFO on backlogs

(Moved from Village Pump (proposals))

The "Category:Articles that need to be wikified" category recently was bot sorted into wikify by date categories, and previously the cleanup tag was sorted into cleanup by date. The process seems to work well, since any AfDs or prods that shouldn't be worked on get taken care of before they reach the end of the dates, and it also allows time for the orginial writer to fix it before the professionals are brought in. I propose that the bot that did this category, or another one like it, sort all the cleanup backlogs by date. Currently I think the ones that should be sorted are:

I don't know how many people work in these categories, but if we can focus their work on the articles that aren't going to be deleted or fixed by their orignial authors it would get rid of allot of wasted work, nad help everyone focus on the category that is the furthist behind in work. I would talk dirrectly to the bot owner, but wanted to propose it first here.--Rayc 19:22, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

This sounds good to me in a general way, but I think for content issues like sources, verification, and neutrality, it might be more useful to break up the logs by priority as in Category:To do, by priority. I'm no expert, but it seems like a bot should be able to fetch the number of incoming links pretty easily.
Would it be possible to sort by different systems (alphabetical, by date, by priority) in parallel? That would be most useful. Melchoir 20:23, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Sometimes the incoming links get inflated by templates, but that would be useful as well. I was more concerned about the load this would put on the servers (perhaps upwards of 50,000 edits) and whether it was worth it. Anyone know where to put up bot job proposals? I'll also see if Bluemoose wants to work on this.--Rayc 8 April 2006 (UTC)
If you want to get into the mechanics of implementation, I have no clue, but I think User:Beland's the one to ask. Melchoir 22:29, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


Yeah, Pearle is the bot doing the sorting, and I am the owner. (General bot requests go on Wikipedia:Bot requests, for the record, but I can handle this one.)

  • Category:Pages needing attention - This is actually in the process of being purged and merged with the cleanup queue. At the same time, it is being recycled to feature articles from a variety of maintenance queues, sorted by topic.

You're right that sorting by date will probably help some with motivation and distributing workload. I think sorting by topic will probably also help increase the number of people working on each queue. "By priority" queues are somewhat problematic. In order to avoid the server load issues, I've been generating those offline, but they are resource-intensive and I've recently run out of storage space to continue doing this. (See Meta:Toolserver/Reports.) But having by-date and by-topic will still be a big improvement, and probably actually sufficient for the time being. (Especially if we actually get some of the backlogs to start shrinking again.)

These are large and I will try to sort them by date, subject to community approval:

Others...

  • Category:Category needed - Despite having a large number of articles in it, this category has been cleaned out all the way up to "P". Categorization can go very quickly; a small number of editors could actually clean up this category in a few days if they made a concerted effort.
  • Category:Copy to Wiktionary - This should actually be taken care of by a bot.
  • Category:Articles to be expanded - This one is large and probably deserves to be sorted by date, but on the other hand, these tags are expected to sit around indefinitely, not unlike stubs. And though there are something like 300,000 stubs, they are not sorted by date. People work on them not so much because they are old, but because they are on an interesting or important topic.
  • Category:Articles to be split - This one is a little small; I'm not sure it's worth sorting by date.

I don't have a lot of time at the moment, and the WP:PNA reorganization will require some time to settle down. But all I really need to do is copy some code and change a few words. To make this process go faster though, if anyone who agrees with the proposal wants to mention it on the various categories that will be affected, I can check back and make sure there is no community objection before implementation rolls forward. -- Beland 05:46, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I've left a note on the categories effected. The sad thing is that some of their talk pages didn't even exist, so I don't know who works in them. Some also were try to do topic subcats, which the wikiprojects should really create. If I wasn't busy, I would be bold and create empty *Category:Foo articles related to wikiproject Foo in all the backlogs. --Rayc 21:48, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
I help out with Category:Wikipedia articles that need their importance to be explained, but I'm not sure if it's big enough to be worth sorting by date. Many of the things are really old, so I think it would be rather spread out with small categories for the months. I prefer working on it by letter with the focus letter instead, but I don't really care. --Rory096(block) 22:42, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of periodic tasks

The list of tasks on Wikipedia:Maintenance does not seem to include a lot of the more mundane things that need to happen to keep the place running (adding new date headers to various VP pages, etc.) and doesn't include a list of the users or bots who typically do any of these tasks. I think it would be useful to keep a more or less complete list of the periodic (mostly daily) tasks that are done. I'm willing to start a table at Wikipedia:Maintenance/tasklist. Comments? -- Rick Block (talk) 00:41, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I've started a list. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:36, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup by subject matter

Rayc has suggested splitting large cleanup categories by date. It seems to me that splitting them up by general subject matter would make more sense. For cleanup tasks such as updating, adding context, and verifying facts, only those familiar with the subject matter of an article would be tempted to work on it. Thus, it seems better to have things like Category:Science articles needing context, Category:Mathematics articles needing context, Category:History articles needing context, etc. The only downside I can see is a ridiculous proliferation of such categories as happened with stubs. - dcljr (talk) 00:47, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New technique for date sensitive information

user:Scott McNay and I worked out a pretty sophisticated template (template:update after) that can be used as a marker for content that is known to require updating at some future date. For example, this could be used for political officeholders whose term will expire. The template is invisible until the appointed date, and then adds a visible [update needed] indicator (which links to Wikipedia:Updating information). There is no maintenance required to make the mechanism work. The template has been written. The only thing lacking is a consensus to start broadly using it, presumably instead of the wikipedia:as of technique. Please comment on this proposal at Wikipedia talk:Updating information. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:24, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Update to Template:Update_after

I've made changes to Template:Update after (it now links to Category:Wikipedia articles in need of updating and As of), and made significant changes to the documentation at Template:Update_after (including documenting the built-in ability to add a comment, and a changes in where it's allowable to be used); please review, and provide comments at Template talk:Update after if you think any are appropriate. Thanks! --Scott McNay 04:09, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New task

Category:Missing middle or first names. Can we add this to the task lists? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 04:39, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

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