Wikipedia talk:Dead-end pages

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Archives:

Archive 1 - to Feb 2006
Archive 2 - Feb 2006 - Apr 2007
Archive 3 - May 2007 - June 2007

[edit] Archived

I have archived all the posts to Archive 3, as this page was getting long. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 06:49, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] DeadBot Control

I am moving DeadBot to a dedicated server, and with it, I am adding a new method of control to it. This will allow anyone to get the bot to do various tasks, including the DEP list tasks. It is based on an IRC bot. Anyone interested should read User:DeadBot/irc. Ask me on that pages talk page, with your irc nick (you must be registered), and I will add you to the Approved group so you can run the dep part of the bot. Thanks! Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 06:52, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pages Still On List

I noticed many pages are still on the dead-end pages, only now they're marked as something like "unreferenced", or whatever else is still wrong with it. Are these remaining issues not the object of another project? The main page mentions to "Please remove from the list any pages which are no longer dead-end." Wikipedia:Dead-end_pages, but if this many people aren't, I'm thinking maybe there's a good reason for it -- so I won't remove anything else from the list unless I'm certain it's still the right thing to do. Spazure 04:57, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

A cleanup template on a page doesn't really count as a link... Also, octopuses 05:00, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

I didn't think it did. I'm talking about stuff that has had wikilinks added into the text, but still needs to cite some sources, add a photo, or perhaps other wikification. See Andy_Lee_(footballer/_manager) for an example. Spazure 07:18, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Feel free to remove, as long as it is tagged with the appropriate cleanup tags. This is the project exclusively for dead end pages. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 09:49, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Holdovers

I've cleared out most of Whitejay's holdovers. If anyone wants to take a stab at what's left, I'd appreciate the help. --Fabrictramp 18:41, 11 July 2007 (UTC) (formerly Kathy A.)

[edit] Two pages complete

This is fantastic! There must have been a big boom to the number of people working here lately (maybe because of a great ad someone made...), and both G-K and D-F are empty. I just finished off the D-F, and i'm going to be doing some work on U-Z. I'm going to try and get A-C done by the end of the day. What's next? U-Z has just over 100 entries, L-O is about 450, and P-T is about 800-900. What's the next page to be worked on? Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 01:43, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

A-C done. Now there is only 3 pages to go, we have L-O, P-T, and U-Z. U-Z is the smallest, followed by L-O, and P-T is the largest. I'm going to do some work on U-Z tonight. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 02:07, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

I did quite a bit of work on A-K with AWB. Once I figured out all the great things it can do by right-clicking, the speed really went up. :) --Fabrictramp 13:54, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Ahh, that explains it. I'm thinking of getting AWB soon, so then it should really speed up. (By any chance, could you tell me what you were right-clicking, and where that was? I've never seen a function for DEP) Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 22:08, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Nothing really DEP specific, but lots of generally useful tools. Right-clicking in the edit window brings up a menu with lots of options (fix whitespace, add DEFAULTSORT & wikify tags, etc.) It also brings up a "paste special" drop down, where you can have a list of 10 or so things to paste in. I throw in my most used tags (primarysources, uncat, notability, refimprove, context etc.), so with about a half dozen mouse clicks I have an article tagged to the gills. Throw in a few links, make the subject bold, and use the find feature to get rid of the more common formatting issues.

The other tool I use a lot for DEP is Twinkle. Makes the prods and AfDs fast and easy. Between the two, I can make quite a bit of progress on pages in short order.--Fabrictramp 00:07, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm, that seems like a great idea. I already use Twinkle, which does make AfD's and especially speedies quite easy. I also have a tagger script that allows me to click a button, and type in a tag to add to the top or bottom. Makes addings tags so much easier. AWB is of course ideal, but I don't have the necessary 500 mainspace edits. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 00:26, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

It is possible to make proposing for deletion too easy.-- it is the last resort for articles that cannot be merged or improved.DGG (talk) 03:48, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Header template

I have changed the complicated header code on each page to a template:

It is located at Wikipedia:Dead-end pages/Header.

I created a template so merging/splitting pages (the L-O and P-T are huge) in the future should be easy. Any comments/etc are welcome. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 22:21, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Schedule

DeadBot is running on a temporary host, and will run every 12 hours. It will run at 6 AM and 6 PM NZST (GMT+12). Is this fine, or does anyone have any complaints/concerns/suggestions. Thanks! Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 05:34, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Is it therefore still necessary to remove items manually from the list?DGG (talk) 03:49, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Not redlinks, redirects, or pages moved to wiktionary. Anything else is still necessary. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 10:49, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

After getting edit conflicts with deadbot twice in a day, I wonder if once a day is enough... --Alvestrand 20:44, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm, i'll change it over tonight and see what happens. It shouldnt make much of a difference. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 21:25, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Requests for verification

Please see: Wikipedia:Requests for verification

A proposal designed as a process similar to {{prod}} to delete articles without sources if no sources are provided in 30 days.

It reads:

This page has been listed in Category:Requests for verification.
It has been suggested that this article might not meet Wikipedia's core content policies Verifiability and/or No original research. If references are not cited within a month, the disputed information will be removed.

If you can address this concern by sourcing please edit this page and do so. You may remove this message if you reference the article.

The article may be deleted if this message remains in place for 30 days. (This message was added: 14 June 2008.)

If you created the article, please don't take offense. Instead, improve the article so that it is acceptable according to Verifiability and/or No original research.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)

Some editors see this as necessary to improve Wikipedia as a whole and assert that this idea is supported by policy, and others see this as a negative thing for the project with the potential of loss of articles that could be easily sourced.

I would encourage your comments in that page's talk or Mailing list thread on this proposal WikiEN-l: Proposed "prod" for articles with no sources

Signed Jeepday (talk) 14:11, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

As Jeepday's friendly opponent on this, I'd encourage discussion there too. No point in opening the debate at another place as well. DGG (talk) 02:19, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

You realise this would affect a huge proportion of stubs? Many of them have no sources. Although I do believe this should be implemented, it should be made to only affect non-stubs. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 23:15, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New database dump available.

There's a new database dump out, from about a week ago. I've tried for a couple of days to extract it, but I just don't have the room on my computer. Anyone want to take a stab at regenerating the list?--Fabrictramp 21:35, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

~~Third day was the charm, apparently. I've got it extracted now, and will run AWB on it tonight.~~ --Fabrictramp 16:05, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Or not. Multiple extraction efforts have given me a bad end of file each time -- AWB gives up and complains after 4 - 60 articles found.--Fabrictramp 18:41, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Are you using bzip2? Also, octopuses 03:27, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, and it finished with an I/O error. Tried again in Safe Mode, just to make sure nothing running in the background was causing trouble, and I got the same error. Several other programs failed also. At this spot I'm chalking it up to running on a 5 year old machine that probably doesn't have enough oomph to get it done.--Fabrictramp 14:30, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Since no one has stepped up and regenerated the list, I've been going through some of the new pages and added maint tags, including {{deadend}}. Anyone who wants to keep working on the project can find them in Category:Dead-end pages --Fabrictramp 15:39, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Are there really nobody who has disk for a dump and AWB installed who can do this? I would, but I don't run IE on my fast systems... --Alvestrand 11:31, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I couldn't get the latest version of AWB to run.... it's too bad there's not an easier way to do this. Also, octopuses 12:51, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I did (finally!) get the file extracted without errors on my Mac. (It decompresses to 11.6 Gb, if any one is interested.) Now I need to think of a way to transfer it to a PC at work, then cross my fingers and hope I have enough oomph for AWB to process it. If only I'd waited a couple of months for the Intel machines to come out before buying this Mac, and I could run AWB at home. sigh --Fabrictramp 19:17, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I was surprised to find that AWB actually ran on my Windows laptop. Am currently generating the list - so let's see where we end up in this turtle race :-) --Alvestrand 09:09, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Uploaded (as one page, 6100+ entries) to User:Alvestrand/DEPdump. Some sorting weirdness - Aa sorted at the end of the alphabet.... ~~now back to work; I'm happy if someone else does the copy/paste.~~ --Alvestrand 10:15, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Never mind - I did it. Now it's deadbot's turn. --Alvestrand 11:24, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lists of personal names

Some may not be aware of this, but lists of names in various languages which also provide their meanings are eligible to be transwikied to Wiktionary. This should be accomplished before they are deleted from Wikipedia. Askari Mark (Talk) 21:52, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New database dump uploaded

I've uploaded the pages with the July 17 database dump.

This means that we need to do a scan to remove all the pages that have been fixed between July 17 and now - sorry 'bout that, but it seems hard to avoid it.

It was GREAT to see all the pages so empty! --Alvestrand 11:25, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Awesome! Thanks!! However, this brings up a question. The dump I downloaded yesterday was from August 5. Should I continue to work on getting that one processed? --Fabrictramp 14:26, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

What?! You mean we can't rest on our laurels ... for, say, oh, about a year? ;-) It does sure feel good to see the lists empty rather than growing steadily larger. Askari Mark (Talk) 16:16, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Laurels aren't too comfortable to sit on. The branches stick you in all the wrong places. ;-) --Fabrictramp 16:42, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Last I looked, the August 5 dump hadn't completed, which was why I went for the July 17 one. If you can get the August 5 dump processed - go for it! (BTW - this dump is considerably shorter than past dumps... we're making progress against the flood...) --Alvestrand 22:52, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

The August 5 dump is still in progress, but the file we use is done and available. I'm making turtle-speed progress on it, but if any one wants to beat me in this race, feel free. :) --Fabrictramp 16:44, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking of assisting here as next to each page it said what needed to be done, but now it does not, so how does one know what needs to be done? Trainra 02:35, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Did you mean the comments on each line like "notability", etc? If so, give Deadbot a couple of days to add them back in. --Fabrictramp 16:42, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

A further thought. The main goal (as I understand it) of this project is triage -- the comments just show what an article is already tagged with, not what it really needs. So the best way to see what needs to be done is to click on the article and take a look at it. After a dozen or so you'll get really fast at evaluation.--Fabrictramp 16:47, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Got the August 5 dump uploaded. Turned out the problems I had before were from bad sectors on my external hard drive. A reformat put everything right. --Fabrictramp 16:02, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Great. DeadBot is also back online, and should be operating fully now. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 06:39, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Page regeneration

I've regenerated the list from the most recent database dump, and I've got the preliminary list up at my sandbox. Any reason not to move it here? (I'm still removing redlinks manually, as deadbot is taking a wikibreak last I checked.) --Fabrictramp 16:08, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Update on the regen: I finished removing all the redlinks as of last night (more have popped up, but that's just less work for us, right?) This regen has 3687 pages after redlink removal -- about a thousand less than last time. Good work! Since deadbot is on wikibreak, if I move the regen here, we'll lose the comments deadbot put in. Is that enough of a problem to prevent the move? Thoughts? --Fabrictramp 15:29, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Deadbot's around - its edit summaries seem to say that it's not updating anything, though. Just upload the stuff! --Alvestrand 17:16, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Will do! --Fabrictramp 17:23, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Looks like you're right, Deadbot is indeed on the job. Whew! --Fabrictramp 20:24, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Deadbot update: it looks like Deadbot isn't looking at P or later for some reason. That explains why I didn't think it was working -- it wasn't removing redlinks there. I left a note for TheFearow, but he's on wikibreak so I don't expect a change soon. We'll just have to remove redlinks manually from the last few letters for now. --Fabrictramp 22:38, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Category Killing

Mind killing the June category? It has been cleared. July should be able to be killed soon. Thanks! Spryde 10:59, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Has June been empty for four days yet? For some reason I had in my head we couldn't request a deletion until tomorrow, but I could be wrong. :) --Fabrictramp 14:11, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh, didn't know about that policy. I am just going through the categories cleaning things up and as soon as it is clean, I ask for deletion. I am new to this particular project so I am not too sure of the rules. Spryde 14:29, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I would assume we wouldn't roll back if we linked it in correctly to other articles. Spryde 14:29, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I just tagged June with a speedy tag, then I cleaned out the last entry in July and put a comment in to speedy it on 9/26 (yeah, that's more than 4 days, but I miscounted, and it's not a big enough deal to go back and change it.) --Fabrictramp 20:17, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Updating this page

What is the procedure for updating this page when a list page has been moved thus making the current list page simply a redirect page. Example Medical universities in the former Soviet Union Dbiel ^(Talk) 04:25, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

DeadBot will delete the redirects. If the new page still doesn't contain links, the next database dump will pick it up again. I'd say "don't worry about it" - there's plenty of other articles to work on, and it WILL come back if needed. --Alvestrand 05:32, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. Since I was the one that moved the page, I needed to clean up the double redirects (which I did) and was checking the other pages linking to it, which brought me here. I will simply leave it to the Bot to remove the link to the new redirect page. Dbiel ^(Talk) 05:40, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] November 2007 regeneration

I've been working on the latest database dump to regenerate the pages, with only limited success. After multiple tries on multiple computers, I'm thinking there's a flaw in the dump. (Always stops at the same spot, and the first time the dump was posted it had a status of "failed".) However, I did get about 4000 articles on the list, despite the problems.

I've combined the new (partial) list with the current one so that we don't lose articles on the current list that really shouldn't drop off. The down side to combining is that the few that should drop off won't, but those are easy to deal with. I'll start posting the combined list in a few minutes. Enjoy!--Fabrictramp 14:49, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks - well done! --Alvestrand 06:12, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome! Looks like Whitejay251 is on wikibreak, so I also took the liberty of putting up a holdover page here. Not as fancy as Whitejay251's, but very fast in AWB. :) --Fabrictramp 00:00, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Second November update

Thanks to User:Stwalkerster for doing the Nov 25 update!

One thing this showed up was that a number of entries with {{wi}} (redirect to wiktionary) showed up (bad), but also a number of entries with {{wikify}} (cleanup needed) that had apparently been missed on previous scans.

Do we need to update the suggested regexp in the instructions, so that we catch the {{wikify}} but not the {{wi}}? Can anyone suggest a better pattern? --Alvestrand (talk) 21:55, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

And if we don't want the pages that have {{wikify}}, we'd need to figure out a way to exclude those articles that have wikify as part of an {{articleissues}} template. One possible way would be to use the list comparer in AWB to exclude anything in [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified]], using the recursive feature to catch all the monthly subcategories. That's a lot of articles, however, and might take a bit of time depending on the servers here and the speed of the processor it's done on.

As for me, I don't really care if the {{wikify}}s are included or not, but I don't think we need the articles tagged for moving to wiktionary on the DEP list. --Fabrictramp (talk) 23:21, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

A little more information on the {{wikify}} overlap. Of the 3295 articles currently in the DEP list, 1243 are also in [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified]] or one of its subcategories, out of a total of 14,772 mainspace articles in [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified]] (or one of its subcategories). On my old, slow computer, it took about 15 minutes to find the overlap, start to finish. Most of that was loading the list of articles to be wikified and filtering out duplicates and non-mainspace articles.--Fabrictramp (talk) 23:54, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Apparently no one has any thoughts on the subject, so I'd say be bold and do whatever you want. *grin* One bright spot -- with the new page patrolling marking system on new pages, there's a lot fewer deadend stuff I'm finding when I load new pages in AWB. Hooray!--Fabrictramp 00:56, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

A very belated opinion.... I like having pages with {{wikify}} included in the DEP list. But I think we should continue to exclude {{wi}}, if we can. --Alvestrand (talk) 19:33, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I was bold and updated the instructions to (hopefully) accomplish that. (Looks like the wikify project could use the help, given the length of their backlog). I also took out the part about the regex's being optional, as no one seems to want those items in the list. Looks like we might get a new update sometime shortly after the first of the year, so we'll see how the instructions work out.--Fabrictramp (talk) 22:22, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] January 2008 update

Alvestrand asked for details, so here they are. The update is generated from the January 3, 2008 dump. Regexes used are exactly as described in the instructions, shouldn't be anything special we need to know (except that the regexes are no longer excluding articles tagged {{wikify}} or with wikify in an {{articleissues}} tag.) Looks like DeadBot's been down for a couple of days, so we'll need to remove redlinks manually until it comes back up.--Fabrictramp (talk) 17:01, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Deadbot

Deadbot's been down for three months now. I sent Matt an email over a month ago, with no reply, so I've made a bot request for a new version of deadbot. --Fabrictramp (talk) 17:47, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Dycebot has done its first run as a replacement for Deadbot. I took a look at a random sampling, and everything looked great. Dycebot will run once a day, which should be plenty.--Fabrictramp (talk) 01:52, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] DyceBot temporary downtime

Just a heads up: I'm on spring break at the moment and have no access to my desktop. I'd left it on, but some idiot school officials appear to have shut it off yesterday. Thus, DyceBot will not run until I'm back on campus on Sunday.--Dycedarg ж 19:32, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] March regeneration

I just finished regenerating the listing from the March 15 database dump, and I'll post the new list throughout the day today. Nothing unusual about this one: 2949 pages (including redlinks), of which 157 are holdovers from the previous list.--Fabrictramp (talk) 13:43, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] placement of the template

This is an editing template, and is not needed to warn user about inadequacies in articles. It should therefore go on the talk page, not the article page. It's a distraction there & I think we would want to minimize the number of templates there. DGG (talk) 00:35, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

But if it goes on the talk page, the link to nickj's tool wouldn't work any more.--Fabrictramp (talk) 13:47, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Cannot the tool be revised to match? DGG (talk) 20:43, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Beats me -- I stink at templates. But my main concern is that the casual user won't see the template (which I do understand is your goal). We get a lot of new editors fixing the deadend pages because they see the tool, see a link to fix it, and do it. {{deadend}} is a part of the article issues template, so if there are a lot of templates on a page, that's always an option. --Fabrictramp (talk) 23:29, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

My opinion: It's needed to warn the user about an inadequacy in the article. The English Wikipedia is doing a ton of these things, all in article space, not talk space. Let's go with the flow. --Alvestrand (talk) 22:32, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

disagree, this is a trivial inadequacy, as compared with things like NPOV & COI. The enWP has a great deal to much of this in article, space, and the flow is towards getting it elsewhere. The presence of these notices interferes with the attention to the important ones. DGG (talk) 04:25, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I could make a good argument that as it's used, COI is much more trivial than deadend. COI tends to get permanently slapped on any article that's been edited by a user with a name similar to the article, and rarely removed. :)

I have to disagree that tags like deadend distract from other tags. Different editors enjoy (and are good at) different tasks. Many wiki-gnomes, myself included, are not comfortable with rewriting major sections of prose. But tag an article saying it needs wikifying, links, or refs, and I'm there. So did those other tags take attention away from NPOV? No, because I wouldn't have tackled that work in the first place. But if those tags got moved to talk pages, I would never have seen them in casual browsing. And probably never gotten sucked into heavy editing -- it was tags like wikify and orphan that got me hooked on editing, and I'm sure I'm not alone.--Fabrictramp (talk) 15:07, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

A further thought. Right now this template is on 1,597 pages. My guess is about 1/4 of those shouldn't have the template, which I had already been planning on working on this morning. How big of a problem is this for you, really?--Fabrictramp (talk) 15:13, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Update. After going through the oldest 200 articles, about 2/3 are already linked and the deadend tag has been removed. I'm sure this percentage will go down as I move to newer articles.--Fabrictramp (talk) 18:43, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Can We Link This down?

I haven't been able to reach the "can we link it" tool at http://can-we-link-it.nickj.org/ for 2 days. Is the site down? --Alvestrand (talk) 07:16, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I haven't tried in the last couple of days, but it's been hit and miss for me for a while. I'll go a couple of days without being able to connect, then have no problems for a week, then I can't connect again.--Fabrictramp (talk) 14:21, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] June 1 regeneration

I've regenerated the pages based on the May 27 database dump. This time I did a second pass to get rid of more of the wiktionary redirects. There have been some changes to the AWB database scanner, and some pages in the DEP category seem to have been missed. I'm working through a list of pages with the {{deadend}} tag that should be added into this list, so the lists may get slightly larger over the next couple of weeks as I manually add those lines.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 17:58, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

As it will take me a good while to work through all the entries that were left off, I've added them as a new section of User:Fabrictramp/DEP--Fabrictramp | talk to me 23:54, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

After a good night's sleep, I figured out a more elegant (and faster) way to incorporate the extra pages. They're all in the main list now. I didn't preserve any Dycebot comments, because Dycebot will happily re-add them tonight, but I did preserve manual comments.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 14:23, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Just a note: DyceBot did not edit properly last night because you added colons to the beginning of every article name. I changed the regex to ignore colons if they are there, so it will not be a problem in the future.--Dycedarg ж 21:05, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I wish AWB was consistent in the way it makes lists. (One module adds the colons, another doesn't). Thanks for figuring it out and making the change!--Fabrictramp | talk to me 21:15, 4 June 2008 (UTC)