Wikipedia talk:Maintenance

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[edit] 1

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)

[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 If a week has gone by after the last objection was withdrawn, or a week after the nomination was listed, and the article has received two or more seconds, or voices of support, move the discussion to the section Recently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)

Added – Qxz 17:55, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Most maintenance templates should be placed on the talk page

I have a couple of friends who work in the visual electronic entertainment industry. I now avoid watching anything with them because instead of enjoying the film or television program, they sit there commenting on technical features in the film, lighting, cuts etc. I think that with people who regularly edit Wikipedia articles instead of viewing articles for the information they contain (as most readers do) they view the article for how well put together it is and if it can be improved.

One manifestation of this I have noticed, which in my opinion is the growing tendency, is to add what are editorial comments to the article page instead of on to the talk page. If a person edits an article page and write in plain text. "This page is not good enough it needs more information" the comment will either be moved to the talk page or it will be deleted as vandalism. However if a person puts a template at the top of a page then they feel that is justified (eg {{cleanup-bio}}, but in essence it is contributing nothing more to the article than the plain text does.

There are exceptions to this, for example I think that the {{unreferenced}} placed in a "Reference" section at the bottom of an article, serves a dual purpose. It is a maintenance template but it also adds information that a passing reader of the page (who is not familiar with Wikipeda) needs to know. But a passing reader does not need to know {{wikify}} "This article (or section) may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards." Comments like this should in my opinion be placed on talk page. --Philip Baird Shearer 09:45, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

This has been debated for a while. Your points are all good ones, but there is another side to the argument. Having the tag on the article entices the casual reader to edit the article and improve it, thereby becoming a contributor. Remember that Wikipedia is an entirely voluntary project and every regular contributor has to start somewhere. It's impossible to measure, but I wouldn't be surprised if seeing cleanup tags on articles persuaded quite a large proportion of our 'WikiGnome'-type maintenance-oriented contributors to make their first edit – Qxz 16:14, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:Template standardisation/article#Most maintenance templates should be placed on the talk page copied from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) --Philip Baird Shearer 13:13, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reports

I have become aware that various reports need updating, I am interested in helping. Please list here any reports which you would like updated and I will create some code so they can either easily be generated on the fly by visiting a webpage, or create the neccessary code and have them periodically updated and the result pasted somewhere. Thanks. Lcarsdata 21:05, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Number of visitors?

How could I know that how many visitors does Portal:Medicine have? Thanks in advance! NCurse work 19:11, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Please ask help questions at Wikipedia:Help desk in the future.
However, see Wikipedia:Statistics, specifically Wikipedia talk:Statistics#page views: "This has been suggested many times. That particular feature has been disabled for performance reasons." --Quiddity 19:27, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for the fast reaction! NCurse work 05:01, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Using whatlinkshere rather than categories for maintenance lists

Thread moved from WP:VPR#Using whatlinkshere rather than categories for maintenance lists.

Per Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Maintenance Categories, the numerous maintenance categories many articles accumulate clutter the "real" category listing for the article. The technique used for Template:Update after is to create an invisible link to a non-existent page in Wikipedia space. This same technique could be used for most maintenance templates as well, i.e. rather than add pages to a category that is displayed in the normal list of categories add an invisible link. The pages needing attention can be found from a whatlinkshere query for the linked page. The technique is just as automatic as using a category, but doesn't clutter the category listing with maintenance categories. I suggest we migrate the maintenance templates to a link/whatlinkshere technique. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:30, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

We would need to maintain a lot of lists for these non-existing linked to pages though, sure that can be more or less automated by a bot, but this sounds like a lot of trouble to go though just to replicate what categories already do just for the sake of hiding maintainance related stuff from readers. Which by the way is not nessesarily a good thing, I dare say all editors have started out as readers and I think the more obvious it is to a new would be editor where to click to find more articles in need of fixing the better. --Sherool (talk) 07:37, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
What lists are you talking about that would need to be maintained? Taking one example, articles needing copyediting, with our current category based system we have Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit and subcats per month. Any page tagged with template:copyedit ends up in two maintenance categories, the per month subcat and the global parent category. AFAICT, the subcats are created manually not by a bot (so they show up as subcats). What I'm suggesting is the template add invisible links to two pages, e.g. Wikipedia:Articles needing copy edit/all and a per month subpage, rather than add the article to any categories. The main page would look essentially identical to the existing category page, but with a what links here link (for the "/all" subpage) at the bottom to show all articles. This page could have automatically generated what links here links for the last twelve months as well, without anyone needing to actually create the by-month subpages. I think this scheme would actually take less effort to maintain than what we're doing now. The template adds a big noisy THIS ARTICLE NEEDS COPY EDITING box at the top of the text, so I don't think there's any particular danger readers are going to miss an opportunity to become editors. The only real difference is how other articles also needing copyediting can be found. To address this we could add a visible link (in the big noisy box) to the main "articles needing copy editing" page.
The basic suggestion is to limit categories used in article-space to article-space topics, not maintenance related topics. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:56, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
But then you couldn't link to the maintenance pages themselves without adding the page that was linking to the category. It's a good thing that CAT:CSD's what-links-here is separate from its members, for instance. --ais523 16:58, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Notice in the above I suggested a "/all" subpage for the whatlinkshere. The difference you're talking about is the difference between the main page and any of the subpages. The main page is the equivalent of the category page and would be a completely normal page (with its own whatlinkshere). The "members" are found by whatlinkshere of a subpage. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:05, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

I've implemented a test version of template:copyedit using this technique, please see Wikipedia:Articles needing copy edit. I'd really like some comments on this. If I don't get any comments, I guess I'll just start converting maintenance templates until somebody notices. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:04, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Please see Template:Copyedit/test- I've changed two articles to use this version. It looks no different on an article, but instead of adding the article to two maintenance categories creates invisible references to two non-existent articles (the template links to the page that explains how to find other articles needing copy editing). See, for example, this version of Jose L Torero (using the current template) vs. this version (using the test version of the template). Again, if anyone has any problems with this change, please speak up. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:49, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
If a user inadvertently subst's the template, it won't show up on whatlinkshere. -- But|seriously|folks  04:14, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Actually, it does. The critical link is not the link to the template, but an explicit link added to a non-existent page (which the software keeps track of in the "whatlinkshere" database). This really is effectively identical to a category, except the link is invisible (and you find the "members" from whatlinkshere rather than a category listing). -- Rick Block (talk) 04:18, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

I can think of three issues with the new format. First, as regards the example of Jose L Torero, I'm a little ambivalent about the fact that "copy edit" is no longer piped to Wikipedia:How to copy-edit. I know that the page is still linked via "guide", but the former link is far more prominent. Second, whatlinkshere does not list pages alphabetically. Indeed, I've never been able to figure out what determines the order of 'whatlinkshere' links. Third, although reducing the number of cleanup categories that appear at the bottom of articles improves appearance, it also makes the backlogs less visible. The first issue can be easily fixed and the advantages of less category clutter may outweigh the latter two disadvantages. However, I think it's something that should be considered. Black Falcon (Talk) 04:54, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

  • Changed target of "copy edit" in the template
    I changed this specifically to draw attention to the page that has the links to the 'whatlinkshere' lists (and, as you mention, the "how to copy-edit" page is still linked from the template). The page that is now the target of this link is effectively the same page as the main category page in the current system which isn't directly linked from the existing template, but is the parent category of two categories containing the article (the "by month" and "all"). I could easily change this back, and add links in the template (where I think they belong) to the "by-month" and "all" lists. This might help address your third concern.
  • Ordering of whatlinkshere is not alphabetical
    I don't understand why this is an issue at all (although Alvestrand also brings it up). See reply to Alvestrand, below.
  • Backlogs are less visible
    If I add links to the "by-month" and "all" lists (and set the whatlinkshere count to 500) I think the only difference is you see the backlog listed as a category vs. listed as whatlinkshere output. Currently, the maintenance category is (with monobook) presented potentially very far away from the big noisy box at the top of the article, and the backlog is not at all visible from anything that is directly linked from this box. If you're concerned about making the backlog visible we could include a count of all pages needing maintenance (updated regularly by a bot) on the main page related to the maintenance activity - we could even (not sure I'd recommend this) put the count on a page someplace and transclude the count in the template, so the template might look like this:
 This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone and/or spelling.
You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available, as is general documentation. This article has been tagged since September 2007. Currently, 2160 articles need copy-editing.
Rather than an exact count the transcluded page could contain an order of magnitude indicator ("thousands", "hundreds", "dozens") requiring it to be updated much less frequently (could probably just hardcode it at "thousands" :) ). -- Rick Block (talk) 14:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Navigating in lists of thousands of entries will be harder under this system. And you also need a place to put stuff like the "progress bars" that are on many maintenance cats today. If it is to be workable at all, it needs to be backed by a fairly hefty array of bots, which turn the linked-to pages into real pages with an alphabetized, indexed list of the whatlinkshere. What's the load cost on the Wikipedia servers of that? --Alvestrand 05:45, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Easy one first - in what I'm proposing the main category page is replaced with an exactly equivalent page, for example Wikipedia:Articles needing copy edit would replace Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit. This page is the place for the "progress bars" - and making it a page in wikipedia space rather than a category puts this meta-information where it actually belongs.
Alphabetizing puzzles me. Is anyone browsing lists of "maintenance needed" articles? If you know an article and are wondering whether it's in the list, if you visit it and it's in the list there will be a BIG FREAKING MAINTENANCE box at the top of the article. Is there some reason to want to find all articles starting with "B" that need copy-editing? I haven't looked, but there already may be a bugzilla request for alphabetizing whatlinkshere (and I frankly can't imagine this would be remotely difficult if there's an actual need). To Black Falcon's comment, the list is presented in whatever order the whatlinkshere index has the articles (I think by date of reference unless the database has been rebuilt, and in this case alphabetically). It would be relatively easy to write a bot that would create and update pages with monthly alphabetical lists (I could do this if there's a need), and the server load would be completely unnoticeable, but I'm far from convinced there's any reason to do this. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:51, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I may be peculiar, but I work on some maintenance projects with very long lists, and my way of working is to pick some part of the overall list to work in (my favourite being those that start with "T"). As I work with the lists, I "get to know" the article set - which ones are still there because they're problematic, which ones are new, which ones have somehow come back after being worked on, which ones I've worked on, but don't feel like removing yet because I'm not done.... for that kind of work, a large collection in random order is less useful than a collection that appears in an easily-guessable order. The type of order doesn't matter much - the ability to look at a stable subset of the too-big-for-one-person whole does. --Alvestrand 20:41, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I believe the whatslinkshere order is (at least usually) reproducible so, for example, the articles listed on the third page when looking at 500 a page would be approximately the same (minus any that had been fixed and perhaps sliding the window around a bit due to however many were fixed on previous pages). If you're willing to copy the URL (I don't know what the "from" parameter is on this URL, but it seems to reliably indicate a particular offset in a list that isn't changing much), I suspect you could navigate to approximately the same spot in the list reasonably reliably (unlike, say, Special:Recentchanges or even Special:Newpages). So perhaps you couldn't work on the "T"s, but you could work on the list that shows up when you set the "from" parameter in the URL to your favorite integer (maybe the concatenation of your birth day, month, and year). IMO, the set of articles that show up at "T" is effectively a random set, so any other random set should be just as good (as long as the ordering within the list doesn't change, and I think it doesn't).
This sort of boils down to whether you think there's any advantage in avoiding using categories for this purpose. I think there's a clear advantage (uncluttering the category listing). Assuming you agree this is an advantage, the question becomes: are the current alphabetical lists important enough to preserve that we need to figure out how to preserve them before proceeding with this solution? -- Rick Block (talk) 01:16, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
  • I think Rick's suggestion is reasonable. >Radiant< 09:47, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
  • I agree with Rick's suggestion. Go ahead and make the needed changes.-- Jreferee (Talk) 15:03, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't object, but some more points to think about:

  • In most backlogs, some pages are harder to remove from the backlog than others. In a category, you can navigate to a random letter, then click on a random entry, and get a reasonably random page in the category, and just try several until you find an 'easy' page if you don't feel up to (or can't do) hard backlog clearing. With the WLH method, pages a long way down in the list are harder to navigate to (although not much harder), meaning that the 'hard'-to-unbacklog pages will end up stuck at the front of the list if lots of editors work like this. (Categories are paged by sort-key (effectively alphabetical order); I don't know the meaning of the numbers used to page what-links-here.)
  • Very large categories have their sizes worked out now and again by the software, and these data are stored in Special:Mostlinkedcategories. The equivalent is not possible on the English Wikipedia for pages, because the data are no longer updated (Special:Mostlinkedpages states 'The following information is cached, and was last updated 09:33, 29 December 2006.' and 'Updates for this page are currently disabled. Data here will not presently be refreshed.'). Category:All articles with unsourced statements had 77900 members two days ago; if {{unref}} was changed to use what-links-here format, I can't think of any reasonable way I could have deduced that number without waiting for a database dump or asking a developer to run the query for me.

It's probably worth wondering whether these costs are worth it in exchange for the advetised benefits of such a scheme. --ais523 16:09, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for comments. Per the response to Alvestrand above, if you want a reasonably random selection from the list, I think adding a random integer as the "from" URL parameter gets you someplace fairly random (larger numbers seem to get you further "down" the list). Counting the number of entries in a whatlinkshere list is not very difficult. I don't think there's a builtin way to do it, but it would be almost trivial to write a utility to do this. For any maintenance categories we convert, I'd be willing to have my bot (which I'm currently running daily) figure out the current number of entries in the lists and update the main maintenance page. I suspect we could get someone with a toolserver account to create a tool for this as well. Anyone know how the graphs are currently being generated? -- Rick Block (talk) 01:16, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

I have thought about this problem before, not surprisingly. The "correct" way to deal with it (*) IMHO, is for the software to treat maintenance categories differently, and ideally to have a collapsed container for maint tags, which could be a simple "men at work" triangle (or ! triangle for POV, disputed, global, protected etc.). Rich Farmbrough, 11:17 7 September 2007 (GMT). (* Even better would be to have check-boxen on the edit page. RF.)

Incidentally this would cause breakage to SmackBot (easily avoidable - keep the cats for undated templates) as well as DragonsFlight Category tracker. (In fact the test changes broke SB, because the created a member of the master category, that was a WP page.) Rich Farmbrough, 11:21 7 September 2007 (GMT).
A further thought. There are probably over 250 templates involved in these categories, including redirects. Many of them have been foolishly subst'd in articles and some of those manually or automatically edited. Any such transition will be longer and more painful than might be naively thought - even with the hundred or so I unsubst every month. Rich Farmbrough, 11:27 7 September 2007 (GMT).
I suspect the only realistic way to make the software aware of "maintenance" categories would be to introduce a new namespace that acts just like the category namespace, but with some UI customizability. Given how closely categories can be emulated with whatlinkshere, I'm not sure it would be worth it.
This is an argument for not having categories at all. The bigger question of name-space orthogonality also arises. Rich Farmbrough, 12:42 9 September 2007 (GMT).
I'd rather not keep categories for the undated version(s) of the template(s). I assume it would be possible to change SmackBot to track down undated templates from whatlinkshere (rather than using a category). I'm not sure there are enough comments here to call it community consensus - but if a consensus develops supporting this idea would you be willing to modify SmackBot? I'll ping DragonsFlight about this as well.
Yes the change is easy, once the transition is complete. Rich Farmbrough, 12:42 9 September 2007 (GMT).
I fully realize there are a lot of these categories, and probably a lot of subst'd templates, and (if we do this) that the transition will take some time. On the plus side, since the transition would effectively mean eliminating categories it would be quite easy to tell what articles still need to be edited as part of the transition (i.e. anything left in the category). -- Rick Block (talk) 23:00, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
On the plus side SB has canonicalised many tens of thousands of template instances. Rich Farmbrough, 12:42 9 September 2007 (GMT).

I like the plan, because the list of maintenance categories also bothers me. It will break my bot maintaining Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity, but I can program around it when the transition takes place. Having a week's notice or so (say, on the bot maintainers notice board, because it may affect quite a number of bots) would be appreciated. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 14:33, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Diacritics and such

I'm sorry to see the above section, but I'm already done, alas. I took the liberty of adding to Template:Foreignchar a new tracking cat Wikipedia pages named with diacritics, for I've been running into a fair number of articles (Mainly German named topics, particular cities, towns, regions) which have no redirect page that is accessible from the search bar using the standard letters of the English alphabet. This seems contrary to WP:NAME in most cases, but it seems that a few exceptions have turned into a flood. I also aliased Template:R from title without diacritics (which however linguistically well intentioned is somewhat daunting to recall when one has no interest in linquistics!)— hence since these names are only possible through the wonders of WYSIWIG and the unicode, the {{R to unicode name}} does the same job.

The concern in all of this to me is whether such articles have a clear tagging of the transliterated (non-unicode) names, and whether there are redirect pages for such. Given a character such as the German "β", it is difficult to guess that one might reach the page by typing "ss" instead should one encounter it in text. I suspect there are other problem unicode letters as well, but other than supporting a move to have tighter compliance with WP:NAME, so that only letters that have diacritics that are also members of the 26 letters of the English alphabet be allowed in main page titles, have no other suggestions. That, I think would be best, as the transliterations to "ss" forms have got to be imbedded in thousands of books going back centuries. It would also help to ensure those contributing here that are non-native English users would make sure the redirects are made for the spelling they are familiar with as well. Cheers! // FrankB 03:37, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] hey jerks

i have an issue with wikipedia and its self-imposed power. i heard about a small band in santa fe New mexico called shades of grey. I put all of the information i had in to a article on wikipedia but then some jerk deleted the article because of its lack of "notabilaty" they are jus starting out for goodness sake you high and mighty editors want more than there is for these people so just back off and instead of killing of musicans dreams get a F-ing life. Jesus!!!!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Saxman101 (talk • contribs) 18:13, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I might as well be the one to tell you that they get an article after they have become notable, not while they are just starting out. There are hundreds of websites for publicity, and one reasonably reliable free encyclopedia. DGG (talk) 03:16, 6 May 2008 (UTC)