Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot
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Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team aims to work toward a set of articles suitable for release in print, CD, DVD, or some combination. To that end, Wikipedia articles are assessed by categorizing their talk pages by quality and importance. A bot visits those categories every three days and collects the articles present there into lists; see the index.
This page describes the output of the bot, as well as how to set up the categories for a given subject (for example, chemistry, military history, music, etc.), in order for the bot to visit them and collect the information into lists.
[edit] Output
The following are generated automatically by the bot every 3 days or so:
- [[Foobar articles by quality]] - an article list similar to a worklist, organised by assessment then by importance, then alphabetically (example). It includes a link to both the current version of the article and the version found on the day of the last assessment change. A table listing 500 articles is around 100 kB, so for large projects, the table may be automatically split into subpages, as is done at Military history. It may also show the comments left for that article, if your Project banner is set up to do this.
- Statistical summary - shows how many {{FA-Class}}, how many {{A-Class}}, and similar articles are assessed for a project (example). This summary can be conveniently "pasted" into a project page, as is done at Version 0.5.
- Log - this records all changes since the last run. Unexpected changes, such as downgrading an article, or raising it more than two assessment classes at once, are shown in bold (example).
[edit] Setting up for the bot
If your WikiProject is interested in using the bot to generate the above information, you need to do the following:
- Create a "by quality" category named after the subject area (Foobar), such as Category:Foobar articles by quality. This should have subcategories such as Category:A-Class Foobar articles, Category:B-Class Foobar articles, etc. (example). Usually these have a hyphen, and a capital C in Class. Place the main Category:Foobar articles by quality in Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments for the bot to detect it. The categories described above can be created automatically, using this tool (you must be an administrator to be able to use it) or with AWB using a supplied plugin.
- Optionally, articles may also be rated by importance, sometimes called priority. In order for the bot to collect the importance assessments, a new "by importance" category is needed, with subcategories for "Top-importance", "High-importance", etc. (example). For some reason, the word importance is usually left lower case. Place the "by importance" category in Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments.
- Optionally, an article may have a comments subpage, like Talk:The Beatles/Comments. In order for the bot to transclude those comments in the list, a "with comments" category is needed that should be placed in Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments (example). To autodetect subpages with comments, the project template needs to contain a certain code; that will be discussed at the next step.
- Create or adapt a project template similar to one used by Wikipedia:Version 0.5, {{V0.5}}. An easy way to do this is by using {{class parameter}}. For more complex work, have a look at the templates used by the Military History project, {{WPMILHIST}}, and the Beatles WikiProject, {{WPBeatles}}. For a sample code of how to detect comments subpages, see Biography WikiProject's template, {{WPBiography}}.
- Tag a few article talk pages using the template, and include appropriate assessments and a sample comment (if you're using this feature). Before browsing away from the articles' talk pages, though, double-check that appropriate categories appear on the talk page. If they don't, chances are that you wrote class=start instead of class=Start when tagging - capitalisation matters! These taggings will provide some test data, so you can check that everything is working.
- Wait until the bot does its run (once in every three days), or visit this web form and run the bot right away. You should see a new row for your project in the table in the main index. The bot will also generate the other output automatically; after it does, check that the tagged talk pages have appeared as expected before assessing the rest of your project's pages.
[edit] Maintaining the lists
Once the bot is working you will need to add information to the article talk pages to get a meaningful list. Add the template to the talk page along with the quality assessment for every article you wish to include. Check the log periodically to check that no one is vandalizing your work. Hopefully you now have a useful collection of data for your project!
If you have any problems, please contact us.