Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index/Archive 2

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A simple to implement comment scheme

(This section is a continuation of an the earlier discussion at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0_Editorial Team/Index of subjects/Archive 1#WikiProject The Beatles)

Here's something I am thinking of which would be simple to implement and not make my bot run much more than now. The drawback will be that the Beatles list may be harder to load.

Say, you have an article, Piggies. Create a comments subpage on talk: Talk:Piggies/Comments. Transclude it on the talk page Talk:Piggies, wia the text {{Talk:Piggies/Comments}} and categorize Talk:Piggies in Category:Beatles articles which have comments.

Then, my bot will insert the string {{Talk:Piggies/Comments}} in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality, see the Piggies entries at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality/2. That text now is editable both from the list and from the article talk page.

Again, I am very doubtful of any such stuff, but this particular thing will be easy enough to implement, and will not affect any project not caring about this feature. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:07, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Nice idea Oleg, thanks. I'll have a word with Lar about it and get back to you. --kingboyk 09:05, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
Thinking about this at the moment... if we (I) based an addition to our Project template on {{todo}}, it could work quite nicely. {{Talk:Piggies/Comments}} could even go into includeonly tags, so that our WikiProject comments would only appear in the Project's version of the tables; leaving the WP1.0 tables less cluttered but still available for comments directly related to 1.0. Just thinking aloud; still have to decide if it's worth the bother... --kingboyk 09:16, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Yep, think about it and think well. I strongly suspect this feature will go unused. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:58, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

No, I can say with certainty that any decent solution would get used. We have a good number of article comments ready to paste in, as we'd started doing this manually before your great bot came along to do the job. Anyway, watch this space. --kingboyk 16:09, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Steve, if this solution is decent, it WILL get used by some projects. Maybe not the smallest, maybe not the biggest but quite a few. I like what I see so far. My concerns are how much work it is for Oleg to make this work (looks like he already has) and what the impact is on other projects. Before we finalise on a subpage with a new category (which actually would be fairly easy for us to automate the creation of, I think) is this the best way to do it? I fear category explosion, we seem to be adding a LOT of new categories (but tnat's not necessarily bad I guess). So in general I like this and would like to see it explored further and consensus achieved. (I added a level 3 header to make this easier to edit going forward) Thanks Oleg for your efforts! ++Lar: t/c 14:45, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
Oleg, I'm very interested in this possibility of having comments transcluded into the table. I have amended {{V0.5}} such that if an article has been assessed, it reads "This article has been rated as XX-Class on the assessment scale. See comments". The word "comments" links to a subpage called Talk:{{PAGENAME}}/Comments, such as Talk:Piggies/Comments. I created a page a couple of days ago called Talk:Neutron/Comments, but the bot has not picked this up at all. How can I make it such that the bot will read these /Comments pages? Thanks, Walkerma 06:05, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
It did not pick them up as that feature is not implemented yet. That because I did not yet see a consensus on whether filling in the comment field is necessary, and if yes, how exactly it should be done. Once there is agreement on those issues, I will work on it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:47, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

We've also updated {{WPBeatles}} to manipulate /Comments files, and I've set up a few test cases. If you have the time and inclination to have the bot pick them up Oleg, we should be good to go. No rush and no pressure of course :) Cheers. --kingboyk 10:59, 30 June 2006 (UTC) (aforementioned Steve)

For my bot to identify which articles have /Comments subpages those articles need to be categorized in some way. Say, in addition to Category:The Beatles articles by quality and Category:The Beatles articles by importance, also have Category:The Beatles articles with comments or something. Once that's done and there are no objections to using subpages that way I will work on it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:05, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Oleg! I'll see if we want to add that feature at WP:0.5 and also Core Topics, or whether we prefer to do this a different way. Walkerma 15:36, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
Actually any suggestions on how to best implement the comment field are welcome. I can't think of anything except subpages. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:11, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Subpages are fine, as long as the subpage doesn't have to hvae anything special on IT. I haven't sussed out how to force a blank page to have content from within an edit link. If your bot can check for the existance of a subpage when visiting a page in a category could that not work instead of requireing the addition of a new category??? ++Lar: t/c 02:49, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
My bot could check for the existance of subpages. But checking 39266 talk pages (that's the current number of assessed articles) can't be done each day. It is much easier to just visit several tens of categories. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:44, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Lar, you can try a link like this: [1] Titoxd(?!?) 04:11, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
How expensive is it to test for the existance of a subpage, then? Within the template, at render time, it's not too bad I didn't think, for just one page. Can THAT idea be used? That is, generate the table with the same #if logic in it that the talk page template uses to show the subpage if it exists? Or would that be a huge drain on resources at render time for the tables? Also.... 39K pages!! oh my! I guess the work the bot is doing may be beyond what I realised! Will there be a need to run parallel bots? Titoxd, thanks for that link. I was not aware of the action=preload. I will take a look to see if I can come up with a preload that properly seeds the page then. ++Lar: t/c 04:42, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
I don't know how to test for a subpage, unless just fetching it and seeing if it is empty. If one had direct access to the database would be simpler and better obviously.
The work done by bot now is little. It never visits individual articles, only categories. So 39K articles vs say a hundred categories. That's why I would rather have categories for talk pages which have subpages (my bot can create the subpages automatically, so categories could just state the intent that a subpage is desirable). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:14, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Oleg, you may want to look at the funny logic behind the fragile {{exists}}. I'm not entirely sure about having comment pages myself, as they would tend to clutter the talk namespace, and in the strange case that a /Comments page exists already, it can cause some strange issues. Titoxd(?!?) 05:35, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Even if {exists} works, one still may need to use it as many times as you have articles, and that everyday, I think. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:38, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm still not sure if they're the way to go, but thinking about 40,000 page loads a day seems like abuse of the servers. Perhaps asking Yurik to run a direct query for us, but it still seems excessive to me. Titoxd(?!?) 05:48, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
It'll be 100K page loads soon enough, at which point Brion and Tim will ban us all ;-)
More practically, I just did some testing. The preload= action (aside from requiring an extra step of saving the subpage in any case) will treat whatever is passed to it as a template call, and attempt to transclude it; in other words, preload=This will produce the same thing as {{This}}. Furthermore, it breaks off after a whitespace character. I really don't see any way to make it work meaningfully, unless you're willing to use pre-created boilerplate messages for the comments. Kirill Lokshin 06:48, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

<-- A new category is cheap and should be easy to implement. We don't want to stress the servers nor do we want to stress Oleg - evidently one of Wikipedia's prize assets :) - so I personally would be happy to go with the category route. It would be nice if we could find a way of getting new /Comments pages added to a category, but I suspect it will have to be the talk pages themselves which gets added. --kingboyk 08:44, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

"Lar, you can try a link like this: [2] Titoxd(?!?) 04:11, 1 July 2006 (UTC)" Very interesting. The category could go directly onto the comments page then, but it would perhaps be more foolproof to have it on the talk page proper. Still, that's a cool bit of technology you've shown us there :) --kingboyk 12:37, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

The other option would be to have a has-comment=yes line in the template call (a) add text to the banner which includes a link to a comment subpage (which would have to be created separately) and (b) add a category that the bot can pick up. My personal opinion is that this would be too much trouble for too little benefit, but perhaps some projects would be willing to pursue something like this. Kirill Lokshin 06:48, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Our template already does the first part. Adding a category should be trivial. It also sounds like WP0.5 is interested in this technology too. --kingboyk 08:46, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
What I'm not completely internalising is how the new category helps get the comments (on a subpage) married to the right list entry. Is it merely that you test for the existance of the article talk page being both in the category "Unassessed-importance Beatles articles" (or whatever) and also in "Commented Beatles articles" (or whatever) and that this connecting check is faster than a page existance check? Thanks! (as Kingboyk says, we're already testing whether the comment exists within our template, so based on that test, the template can add, or not add, the talk page to a new "comment exists" category with no problem if that's the way to go, no new template parameter is needed) ++Lar: t/c 11:54, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Exactly as you say, I think. Oleg wants to trawl only categories, not test for the existence of the pages. If the bot found a talk page in category "Commented Beatles articles" (or whatever) it would transclude it. --kingboyk 12:39, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

What got decided about Comments? I was curious because I saw that on my assessment list for Firefly a column for version and comments and wasn't sure how to get data in there. I can see this as very useful. I see that I can edit this by hand, but then won't that get wiped out the next night? Didn't want to start doing the subpage thing if that didn't end up getting implemented. Thanks plange 05:51, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

(discussion continued below at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index of subjects#Template:WPBeatles is now transcluding comments)

Needed-Class

Does the bot pick up articles (talk pages) in a {{Needed-Class}} category? --kingboyk 11:21, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Err, you mean the G8 category?  ;-) Kirill Lokshin 12:42, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
Yep, that's the one. A criterion to be used with discretion, I feel :) --kingboyk 12:52, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
You'd be surprised! ;-)
But, to answer your question: I think the bot only picks up the classes from FA to Stub. Most projects don't actually use {{Needed-Class}}, since it's traditionally been difficult to keep track of article-less talk pages. Now that the bot is running, though, I could see {{Needed-Class}} replacing projects' "Requested Articles" lists (provided we can both get the bot to keep track of them and get an exception written into G8 to keep them from being deleted all the time). Thoughts? Kirill Lokshin 12:57, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
Pretty much what I was thinking. The bot is very neat and these automated lists are way easier to maintain than centralised Project pages. I just wish the bot would run twice or more a day :) --kingboyk 12:59, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
Twice a day!? You guys only have a few hundred articles; what do you need so many updated for? ;-)
As far as using this is concerned: can the bot recognize that an article doesn't exist and not try to grab the rated version for the table? Aside from that, I can't see any reason why this wouldn't work. (There is the CSD issue; I'm not sure how strong of an outcry their would be against creating an exception. Something like "... except where the talk page contains a valid WikiProject banner indicating that the article is needed"?) Kirill Lokshin 13:20, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
Oh I'm a twice a day man in many different ways!
CSD: No outcry at all I would have thought. The rule is presumably there to stop unwanted cruft building up; a talk page saying "hey, we need an article here, let's create one" is for the good of the enyclopedia. I would take The KLF approach and simply change the rule, see if anyone reverts it! ;-) --kingboyk 13:28, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
That might work (or might explode horribly in our faces). I would wait until we have a working demo of how it would actually work before making any policy changes, though. Kirill Lokshin 13:32, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

The bot indeed picks up only classes from FA to Stub. Could be easy to make it pick up other classes, but could be harder to detect if those articles are redlinks or not. Updating more than once a day is also easily done, but I don't see the point for now. (PS Today I will start working on splitting the pages into subpages thing.) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:13, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

So is there any interest in working on any of these ideas? Kirill Lokshin 02:46, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Changes to bolding?

Is it just me, or has the algorithm used to select which entries in the log are bolded changed somehow? Previously, anything flagged as "Unassessed" wasn't considered to be on the list, for the purposes of the log; now, moving from unassessed to, say, B-Class will seems to trigger the bolding as a move of more than one grade. Is this intentional? Kirill Lokshin 11:54, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I just noticed the log now records things being added as "Unassessed (No-Class)" as well. Kirill Lokshin 12:25, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial Team/Military_history articles_by_quality_log#June_11.2C_2006 for the log. It was a bug that the bot started adding in "Unassessed" articles as well, but then I though may be it is good to have them in. The "Unassessed (No-Class)" will be from today "Unassessed (No-importance)", so the thing in parentheses is devoted to importance.
In short, now the bot flags as bold changes from unassessed to up at least two positions, as well as changes in importance of more than two positions. I can easily make these not bold if it is thought it would improve readability. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:44, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
For us at WP:V0.5, it helps us to be able to see the unassessed articles (I used it just now to find which ones needed assessments!). However, for chemistry this is less useful until more are tagged. Is there a simple way to switch this option on or off, depending on the preference of the project? Or is that too much work for you, Oleg? If we had to choose, I'd prefer to include the unassessed articles, on the basis that in the longer term this section will be pretty short and useful to know about. I don't have strong feelings, though. Walkerma 16:57, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
As long as the unassessed ones show up at the bottom of the log, it's not a problem, at least from my perspective. It probably is useful for projects which are mostly done with their initial assessments, so we might as well keep it around.
On another note, now that all of the importance ratings are being read, any chance of adding a count of them to the statistics page? Kirill Lokshin 17:06, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
I would think that having the unassessed articles in is more good than bad. Logs are getting rather verbose though, although I don't know if that's because too many changes are happening in general. Any suggestions here about what to bold and what not are appreciated.
I put in the statistics for importance, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chemistry articles by quality statistics. If anybody has any nicer way of having the data appear, please feel free to edit that page (I have it on my watchlist) and I will implement that as general format. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:18, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
I've combined the two into a single table; maybe that's a cleaner layout? Kirill Lokshin 04:28, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Kirill, I have made my script use that layout in all statistics subpages. The changes will propagate when the bot runs in an hour or so. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:37, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Very nice! Would it be possible to omit rows where the count is zero, or is that impossible now? Kirill Lokshin 04:41, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Actually, originally rows with just zeros were omitted, but that made the strange situation where it says "Importance" and then the next line is "Totals" and it is not clear what that "Importance" word is doing there. I could then remove the "Importance" line altogether if no articles are rated by importance, and then there will be mention only of quality. But maybe the zeros in importance will stimulate people into rating things by importance a bit. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:01, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Good point. Maybe omit zeros only if other numbers are present in that "division" (quality or importance) of the table? That would trim out any levels that aren't used while still having the fields there for project that need to be stimulated. Kirill Lokshin 15:09, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Should work now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:13, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
Excellent work! Out of curiosity (and feel free to completely ignore this if you have better things to do), would it be difficult to have the bot generate a combined table of statistics across all projects? In other words, have a central table giving the total numbers of articles rated in each class, regardless of the responsible project? Kirill Lokshin 20:57, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
Will do, say in 3-4 days. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:09, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
Done, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics. The bot is still running, the correct data will hopefully show up when it finishes. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:18, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
Looks very nice; great work! (And we're nearly to 10,000 assessed articles after only a month!) Kirill Lokshin 04:57, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Using noinclude for section headings

Hi Oleg. When the bot makes such pages as Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality, could you have the header (== [[Wikipedia:WikiProject The Beatles]] ==) be wrapped in noinclude tags please? Both the Beatles and KLF articles by quality pages get transcluded, and the header ruins formatting on the host pages. Thanks. --kingboyk 18:34, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Will look into that tomorrow. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:19, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
Well, if decided to wrap the heading in noinclude tags, it should happen for all projects, as I am rather reluctant to have per-project preferences which would complicate the code. Would it be a good idea to have the section heading not be included if the page in question is transcluded on another page? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:52, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
That was my intention, certainly. I don't see why any Project would want a fixed-level header transcluded, and they can always add one of their own choice in the target page if needed. The pages will be too large to transclude onto Wikipedia 1.0 pages. That said, I'll not try to speak for others so if anyone agrees or objects please speak up! :) --kingboyk 09:05, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Done, when the bot finishes updating the pages (in half an hour say) hopefully the change will be seen. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:13, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Oleg. --kingboyk 10:37, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Bot down for today

The UCLA math department computers are down, and consequently mathbot won't update the lists today. Should be back up tomorrow hopefully. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:11, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

New project category added

I just added the assessment categories to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Trains banner {{TrainsWikiProject}}. I went through the current FA and GA lists to sort them into the appropriate classes, so at least those two levels are properly populated. I used the Military history assessment page as the model for the Trains assessment page. Is there anything else I need to do beside work on assessing and sorting those articles in the unassessed category? Slambo (Speak) 16:11, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

We will see tonight (in 10 hours) when the bot runs. :) After that you need to take a look at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index of subjects and see if all looks good. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:08, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels new project added

We should also watch for an entry from Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels, who have set up Category:Novel articles by quality today. Walkerma 18:51, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
Yes thanks for that - I wasn't sure of the correct protocol for getting on board - you have been most helpful. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 15:33, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Template:WPBeatles is now transcluding comments

Probably redundant to the above thread, but moved here from Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Work via Wikiprojects. --kingboyk 08:47, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Just as a note the main WP:Beatles article talk page template {{WPBeatles}} now does the transclusion of comment subpages if they exist so if the bot starts looking for subpages things shold work. We have not shifted our comments over from our old worklist like classification tables to the subpages yet though, so only a few articles have them yet. It also offers to let you edit them from the template. The template also displays the current importance and quality ratings for the article (since those are set from template parms) and sets up the category memberships (which I suspect is now fairly common practice?) Comments welcomed. In particular I am wondering if there is reusable template code to be extracted from ours to use in other projects? just copying it may not work well as it's pretty gnarly code, a lot of nested switches and stuff... ++Lar: t/c 00:45, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Wow, and I thought {{WPMILHIST}} had complicated code! ;-) Kirill Lokshin 01:10, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Being a complete amateur when it comes to templates, I get easily confused, but I did successfully add a simple link to a comments page into the code for {{V0.5}}. By piggybacking on the work of someone who's a real pro at this (Titoxd), I was able to make it only appear on pages that have assessments such as Talk:Neutron. It's not as elegant as the Beatles template, but at least it's simple! (Please fix it as needed, as I said I'm an amateur) Once we get our ideas together on how best to do this I'll add instructions to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Adding to the lists of subjects. Walkerma 01:26, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
By the way, are you planning on creating Category:The Beatles articles with comments so the bot can pick up the comments? Or do you have some other clever way of doing it? Thanks, Walkerma 01:34, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmm... not sure what Oleg had in mind. If he wanted to do it that way, we can certainly oblige. --kingboyk 08:39, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Well, yes, what I had in mind is a category containing all talk pages with /Comments subpages. I think the above name is a good one, as Category:The Beatles articles with comments is similar to Category:The Beatles articles by quality and Category:The Beatles articles by importance. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:53, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
OK. I'll create that category and change the template to add talk pages to the category if it finds them, and report back here when it's working. it's up to your bot then, to transclude (or give a link to, whichever, I like transclude but either is OK) the subpage itself if the talk page has the category... ++Lar: t/c 17:08, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

OK. The Category:The Beatles articles with comments exists and {{WPBeatles}} has been modded to automatically add article talk pages to it if there is a /comments subpage there. Please let me know when you're satisifed (and the bot works the way you want) and I'll look into an AWB run to move our older comments over. I haven't taken the stuff Titoxd suggested about initial population on board yet but I will. ++Lar: t/c 18:12, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Good, thanks! I will modify my script in a day or two to transclude the comments subpage in the comments field. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:25, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Actually I got to it sooner than I thought. Works now, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality/1. By the way, I am very impressed with the wizzardry going on in {{WPBeatles}}, nice job. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:43, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, coming from a wizard such as yourself that means a lot. I am wondering if we should be trying to make some of the logic in that template reusable somehow so people can get the dynamic inclusion and suchlike without having to understand everything we did... I see some other projects doing displays of ratings in their templates but everyone does it differently it looks like. If any other project wants to explore a common template base, please let me know on my talk page... ++Lar: t/c 04:12, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes, thanks Oleg. For which are we more grateful, the /Comments feature or the compliment? Probably the latter, but don't tell anyone! :) --kingboyk 09:42, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
Help, what am I doing wrong? I tried a combo of the Beatles and the 0.5 template and the category does not appear if a Comments page exists. Here's my template {{WPFirefly}} - I put the sentence that gives the link in the areas where the class is being assigned and then the category include code is near the bottom. I put a comment on this page Talk:Firefly (soundtrack) Thanks! plange 05:51, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
Ask Lar on his talk page. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:17, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
A work of genius, Oleg. Seems to be picking up the /Comments pages just fine. Any chance we could have an edit comment link in each uncommented row? (perhaps there should be a protected page with settings, somewhere). Don't really want to get comments directly on the bot-created pages now, I think. --kingboyk 09:28, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, having an edit comment link in each uncommented row will make that link show up in all the projects, which I think may not be a good idea. I'd suggest things rather stay the way they are, first a /Comments page is initialized and then the bot picks it up. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:17, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Could you then possibly have the bot do its stuff on pages such as Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality/1 inside a bot tag? i.e. I could add some instructions outside the bot tag and be confident Mathbot wouldn't zap them? --kingboyk 15:39, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Can you be more specific? I can easily add bot tags, but they will clutter the assessment rows, and I don't yet see a compelling reason for it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:57, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Simply so I can add a permanent header, as already happens at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality:

Page header text<!-- bottag--><!--End front matter. Any text below this line will be overwitten by the bot. Please do not remove or modify this comment in any way. -->Bot text...

It's no big deal though, we can live with people editing the tables directly. --kingboyk 17:09, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I see. I thought you meant something else.

There is an issue here. The number of subpages does not stay fixed, it will increase. What do we do then if more subpages show up? Copy the header from one of the previous subpages? Implementing this feature would require keeping track of more data (read it, save it, and then put it back to the updated pages). Would it be simpler to keep all instructions on the main index page, at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:07, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I think that what Oleg suggests would be better. After all, on Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality/1 there's a link to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality on the top, which could be considered a "back to index" link... Titoxd(?!?) 18:12, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Template:NovelsWikiProject is also now transcluding comments

With many thanks to the WPBeatles guys we have begged, borrowed and stolen! Well sorry just stolen, the fruit of your labours and made it work for us as well. Thanks should go to all envolved. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 10:01, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Nice work, but some of the links (the quality/importance scales, in particular) don't go anywhere useful yet ;-) Kirill Lokshin 16:24, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Due to that page still being very much work in progress - they will go somewhere. Getting the structure ready before the main announcements associated with getting the assessment deptartment page ready. Thanks for the input though. I follow WP:Milhist development's with interest, and appreciation as an ideas factory, thanks. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 22:10, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Yep, thanks to them as well so is Firefly, but I know we're small-fry so it doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things, but we do appreciate it :-) plange 16:25, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
The Beatles project is small-fry too compared to Kirill Lokshin's herculean endeavour :) (Also very small, the other Project I represent: WP:KLF) --kingboyk 16:30, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Neat hiding log! :-) Kirill Lokshin 16:33, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Yep. The military history project shows either that somebody is having an awful lot of fun evaluating ten thousand articles, or that there were awful many battles in history, or both. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:01, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Ten thousand? That's quite unacceptable on our part; we'll have twenty thousand, at least, by the end of the year! ;-) Kirill Lokshin 17:04, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Not as much fun as evaluating 700 hurricanes. :P Titoxd(?!?) 18:09, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Funny bot behavior?

Mathbot seems to have removed ~500 articles; anybody have any ideas why? Nothing seems to have changed as far as the categories or templates are concerned, and the removals appear to be fairly arbitrary. Kirill Lokshin 05:07, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

We at WP:NOVELS have had a couple of examples of this as well. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 07:57, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
There's one marked as removed in Rail transport today too, however, it's due to a page move. Further down the list is the destination page listed as Added. I took a look at a couple of the MilHist listings and found that some of them were also page moves, but one, Ground warfare, had its project banner removed by an editor who suggested a page move (I've restored the banner to that page). Similarly, the project banner was removed on Exit to Eden (I didn't restore the banner there since the edit summary explicity says it was removed), while others like Lirael are the results of page moves. So, I don't think there's a bug in the bot yet, but each of the removed notices needs to be reviewed for accuracy. Slambo (Speak) 11:27, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
There's a few removals that seem normal, but a lot of them (Talk:Normandie-Niemen, Talk:Northern Expedition, etc.) haven't seen any page moves or tag changes, so that can't be the only reason here. Kirill Lokshin 12:44, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
I'd check the template for edits - we had some (good faith) edits at WP:Chem which accidentally caused ALL of our articles to disappear from the bot list. I changed a capital back to a small letter, and they all magically reappeared! Another possibility - check to see if all of the "missing" articles are from the same category, if so, look at that. Walkerma 17:32, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
Nope, I can't see anything that would be different; the categories all match the previous ones. (There were some edits made to the template, though; if the bot isn't using an up-to-date version, that might be the issue. I'll see if they reappear after today's run.) Kirill Lokshin 17:39, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I see nothing strange in my logs about that. Sometimes the server being down for a short while can cause problems, but I tried to make my code robust to that. Such funky behaviour could be rather hard to debug. Let us see if it happens again and if some pattern can be found in what is going on. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:17, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, it seems to be back to normal now. Kirill Lokshin 05:04, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Film articles by quality log

I can't get this page to load in either IE or Firefox. I'm wondering if it's massively large. --kingboyk 12:25, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I've found the same, the page just hangs, I don't even see a "timed out" message. I'm using a college super-fast internet connection, so there is something wrong. Walkerma 17:48, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
It's 1013K in length ;-) Kirill Lokshin 17:51, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
I shortened that log, it loads now. Too many changes were happening and that's why the log was big. If this turns out to be a persistent problem I may need to teach the bot to cut long logs even if that means losing the log info for several weeks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:21, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Oleg. Only problem is, it's got no entries newer than June 20? I wanted to check the impact of a change I made to some WikiProject templates yesterday. (Doesn't really matter because I have feedback the changes were successful). --kingboyk 22:27, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
What I removed was old log. I guess my bot was refusing the update the log recently as it was too big. So, I think you can't verify the change you mentioned. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:55, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
I modified the script to always keep the log under 500KB, as from what Kingboyk is saying it appears that the bot won't even bother to update logs if they are huge, and then we'd rather have a log shorter than one month than a log which can't be written to or read from. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:06, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Importance Ratings not processed by bot?

Why on the stats box is the bot not recording importance for some projects, but is for others? For example Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/College_football_articles_by_quality is not but Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Computer_and_video_game_articles_by_quality is. There are several other projects that are or aren't processed, and I can't tell a difference why. Mecu 18:00, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Category:College football articles by quality is assigned to Category:WikiProject College football articles, which is currently a red link. Category:College football articles by importance appears not to exist. The bot can't pick up what doesn't exist, unless Oleg is even cleverer than I thought! --kingboyk 18:07, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
OK, it's called Category:College Football articles by importance ("College Football" <> "College football"; DIFFERENT CASE). Furthermore, Category:College Football articles by importance belongs to Category:WikiProject College football and not Category:WikiProject College football articles. It's no wonder the bot can't find it! Remember, the bot doesn't (as far as I know) read the talk pages; it has to be able to find the categories so they should be logically named and located. --kingboyk 18:11, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
Okay, so it sounds like I messed up the syntax in Football/football. If I correct this will it be fixed? Or do I also need to change the category heirarchy too? Mecu 18:35, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
I don't know exactly how the bot works and I don't know exactly how it finds the categories. In the absence of Oleg though I'm quite confident that if you have Category:College football articles by quality and Category:College football articles by importance residing in a bluelinked Category:WikiProject College football articles category, the bot will find it :) You might also want to look at Wikipedia:WikiProject/Best_practices#Categorisation which I recently wrote; the categorisation system I detail there seems to work well for most small to medium-sized WikiProjects (probably Kirill's gang have something way more spectacular :P ) --kingboyk 18:44, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
I changed the category of Category:College Football articles by importance to Category:WikiProject College football articles. I'll let it run tonight and see if that works. Thanks. Mecu 18:48, 6 July 2006 (UTC) Addendum: I changed the categorisation on the subcats, but Oleg beat me to deleting Category:College Football articles by importance and creating the new Category:College football articles by importance cat :) --kingboyk 15:05, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
It didn't work. Mecu 12:59, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
"College Football" <> "College football", as above. To a bot "F" and "f" are not the same. Again, I'm not the bot's author so I don't know for sure, but I'd bet a dollar that's it. --kingboyk 14:59, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Much as it pains me to even touch these categories (most of the world knows that football is what you guys call soccer ;)), I've fixed the case of your categorisation. Let the bot run again and see if they get picked up. --kingboyk 15:03, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Yep, I just noticed the same thing. Concurrently with Kingboyk I renamed Category:College Football articles by importance to Category:College football articles by importance (small f) and now it works, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/College football articles by quality/1. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:07, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Yup. Thank you for your help! --Mecu 15:51, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
I think you have way too many articles flagged as "Top" importance. As far as I know, that should be for the absolute core of articles (a mere handful for a Project of your size), and probably wouldn't include awards and individual seasons? I might be wrong... --kingboyk 16:15, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Different projects interpret the importance ratings slightly differently. Given that they're meant to gauge things within a project rather than within Wikipedia as a whole, I don't think it's too much of an issue unless they do things wildly out of sync with everyone else. Kirill Lokshin 16:23, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
We also are having a major discussion about how to rank items Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football. We'll probably have much fewer Top items than 18, but we're still getting organized. --Mecu 17:19, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
Backing up to the original question, it's not listing importance for Rail transport articles because we haven't added those flags/categories yet. I'm working through the quality ratings first, then I plan to discuss the importance rating on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains and create and add the flags and categories. Slambo (Speak) 18:52, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
I think it's a case of do what you can as you can, so that's all fine and dandy I'm sure :) --kingboyk 18:59, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, thought I knew what to do-- I sucessfully got WP:FIREFLY doing this with no prob, but for some reason for WP:WPBIO the importance ratings didn't pick up last night (which would have been the first night after adding this. What did I do wrong? plange 00:48, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
Oops, nevermind. Helps if I add the categories to the project banner! plange 00:56, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Bot count wrong on projects

The bot count of projects is wrong. There are 32 projects, not 30. Rlevse 22:10, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I assume Oleg was just testing the code for that; it's not a number he's had to output before.
(Incidentally, should somebody tell the WikiProject Banksia guys to take the "WikiProject" off the category names? It's inconsistent with the usage everyone else has applied.) Kirill Lokshin 22:29, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
I'll tell Banksia. (what is that anyway-;) Rlevse 22:45, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
It's some kind of plant. I'd never heard of it until I saw the project name; I guess you really do learn something new every day ;-) Kirill Lokshin 22:54, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I was doing a test and forgot to say that in the edit summary. Thought nobody would notice in the five minutes I needed to patch the bot to output the correct number but there are lots of eyes around. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:26, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality log

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality log didn't get written yesterday, despite our other pages being processed as normal. --kingboyk 09:36, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I modified the function which submits to Wikipedia to check if a submitted text indeed got there (usually my script attempts to resubmit if a clear server error happens, but it apears that sometimes the server does not accept the change but does not complain either).
Please let me know if this happens again in the future. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:57, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
Cheers Oleg, will do. --kingboyk 17:24, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Name of page

I think it would be more precise to call this "Index of projects" than "Index of subjects". Maurreen 14:27, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Why not just call it "Index" and avoid the issue entirely? Kirill Lokshin 14:58, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Then the question would be Index of what? Editors, projects,etc. Rlevse 15:30, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, index of subjects sucks. But index of projects is not good either. This is an index of lists of Wikipedia articles, each list a specific area of knowledge. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:36, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
What it is, is an index of WikiProjects that participate in V1.0 and use Oleg's bot, so maybe it should be Index of WikiProjects, for short. Rlevse 19:20, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Index of wikiprojects could be confused with a list showing all wikiprojects (I am sure such a list exists already). I think simply calling it index as Kirill suggests is better, after all, it is the only index of WP1.0, and (as far as I know) the main goal of this project is to create lists of articles. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:42, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
OK, just 'index' is fine with me. Rlevse 20:45, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

OK, will do. Maurreen 17:30, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Maurreen, thanks for the change. If only you could also tell my bot that the change happened. [3] :) But fixed now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:22, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Any suggestions on how to rename Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Adding to the lists of subjects? The purpose of that page is to tell people a few words about what our project is about, and how to create the category trees the bot can pick up the information from. Current name (my idea) doesn't seem nice and I can't think of anything. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:46, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

List ordering

This is really minor but there are a few projects with names that start with "the". Where does the bot get info on what order to put the table in? it might be nice to have "The Beatles" sort to B for example. (The Beatles is the correct name of the band, dropping "The" from the project name would not be a fix). Again, terrifically minor! ++Lar: t/c 13:17, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Fixed. Thanks for pointing this out. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:34, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

The root category

Currently Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments has a bunch of subcategories like this:

   * A-Class articles
   * B-Class articles
   * High-importance articles
   * Low-importance articles
   * Mid-importance articles
   * Non-articles
   * Start-Class articles
   * Stub-Class articles
   * Top-importance articles
   * Unassessed articles
   * Unknown-importance articles

Do they have a purpose to be there? I thought that Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments should only contain "by quality" and "by importance" categories, which in turn would contain "high importance", etc., categories?

I am also thinking those categories may confuse people following the instructions from Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Adding to the lists of subjects and may require them to do more categorization work than necessary. Wonder if there are comments on this.

(And also see unrelated request above about how to best rename Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Adding to the lists of subjects). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:56, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Interesting! I was planning on working on something like that this evening, but I see someone has already started! Now that we have a good number of projects represented, there are valuable data to be mined for used at WP1.0. I would like to set up ten sets of categories (like "A-Class Arts articles") based on our ten top-level categories, and these categories can be shared with projects not using the bot (for which we have article information). (Not sure if we'll need the broad ones that you refer to, we'll have to see) This will allow us to find (say) all of the A-Class Arts articles, and nominate them for the CD releases. To that end I want to create ten metaprojects for WP1.0 that will be read by the bot, called things like "Wikipedia 1.0 Arts articles by quality" and the like- do you mind me doing that? If you give the OK, we can try the Arts one tonight. As for the confusion issue, I think we'll have to see, it seems worth it for the valuable data. Thanks, Walkerma 00:01, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
On our project, we use every one of the above cats, plus some custom ones (such as our prior selected article of the month), so we do need those cats. All of the ones listed above are subcats of quality or importance. Rlevse 00:10, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
In the absence of any objections, I will have a go at this idea tonight, though probably not till after the bot makes its run. Cheers, Walkerma 02:57, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

I slaved over this all day yesterday and also a little this morning, unaware of this thread. Anyway, I've added all existing grading categories to subcategories of Category:Articles by quality. I'm not going to do the same for importance, save for the Physics cats (used as an example in the docs) and the Projects I manage because it's a long and boring job. If others would like to fix up the importance cats that would be great. --kingboyk 11:58, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Also see Wikipedia:Wikipedia 1.0 Arts articles by quality. I tried an {{Allincluded}} at the A-Class category, but it didn't bring in the A-Class articles. However, my main goal was to bring in the A-Class articles from our lists, such as Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WPArts, so we can include information that is otherwise being missed by the bot because the project isn't using it. There are few A-Class, so it's not a lot of work. Thanks for you work! Walkerma 13:50, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Priority vs importance

There has been a long discussion here about the use of the Mathbot quality and importance rating system for Wikiprojects. I think we have convinced the originator of the delete proposal that the Mathbot rating system is pretty much a feature of the Wikipedia Wikiproject landscape and isn't going to go away anytime soon.

However, he/she has raised an issue that is worth considering. The issue is that rating an article's importance is inherently a POV statement that is open to debate and contentiousness. As a compromise, we are thinking of using the word "priority" instead of "importance". On the one hand, this seems like a pretty silly exercise in semantics. However, if this will make people happy, it's worth considering.

We discussed just having the bot change from "importance" to "priority" but that would require convincing the editors of 42 projects that use the Mathbot rating system to make this change.

Faced with a choice of "A" or "B", we are now saying "Both! At our discretion!"

So, the proposal would be that Mathbot could be modified to look for "priority" as well as "importance". The output could then be parameterized to output whatever metric the project template wishes to output. Thus, one project could specify "importance" and "quality" while another could specify "priority" and "quality".

Questions to you:

  1. Is this change easy to do?
  2. Do you agree that this is a reasonable solution?
  3. Would you be willing to make the requested changes?

Thanks for considering this request.

--Richard 19:39, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I am doing just the programming part. If people think this actually is an issue, rather than a single person being unhappy about it, and there is agreement on the proposal above, it should be rather easy to implement it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:26, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
But my personal opinion is that this is indeed a silly exercise in semantics, and would complicate the code and instructions for no good reason. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:29, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
I really like the word "priority," it is a big improvement. It emphasizes the fact that it the rating reflects the work priorities of the project - an article that may be high priority to one project, for example, may be low priority to another. I see Oleg's point that in some ways it's semantics, but I suspect wars have been fought over less! The word importance has caused upset at WP:1.0 as well. I would be happy to make the necessary changes to wording at WP1.0 if Oleg can handle the bot part of it. Walkerma 20:38, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
If some projects end up preferring 'importance' while others 'priority', one needs one more version of {{assessment header}} with 'importance' replaced by 'priority'. And then there should be some per-project preferences of which wording will be prefered, which I'd rather avoid.
Maybe a simpler solution would be to convert everybody to 'priority'. (That would not require renaming existing categories, the bot could easily read both versions). But again, how many people actually feel strongly against 'importance'? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:06, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
I think it is not worth the trouble. A project can rate them using the system as it sees fit. There is a big difference in importance and priority--the founder of xyz is important, but if his article is a FA, is it's priority high to work on? Changing the wording would make the projects have to change their template parameters to match too. Rlevse 20:42, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
We'd have to rename our categories too, ex: "unknown-importance" would have to become "unknown-priority", add since we can do it ourselves, we have to deal with the CFD garbage. This rename really isn't worth the hassle. I am strongly opposed to it, keep it "importance". Rlevse 02:09, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
That what I was saying above, a rename would not be necessary. The bot could read both "unknown-importance" and "unknown-priority". However, it would not be happy to output per project preferences of importance/priority (that would require a table of preferences, extra stuff to be maintained and have people worry about). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:18, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
Solely because of the per-project preferences, it's simpler and easier to leave things the way they are. Rlevse 02:59, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
As above, importance and priority are very different. If we can't easily track both we must leave it as is. --kingboyk 10:25, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Archive

This talk page starts jun 21, where's the old stuff? Rlevse 03:01, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

The link got broken during the page move from Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index of subjects to Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index. Fixed now (the archive link on top of this page is blue now). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:37, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

Catholicism Project rename

The Catholicism Wikiproject recently renamed itself (from Wikipedia:WikiProject Catholicism 101 to Wikipedia:WikiProject Catholicism), and I was wondering if any work needs to be done here in order to keep everything working with the assessment. —Mira 08:56, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

You changed the name in the index, from there it will propagate in the lists. So as far the assessment is concerned, nothing more needs to be done. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:20, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
Great, thank you. —Mira 20:54, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

26 July Bot Run

What happenned with the 26 July bot run? I did lots of changes last night for the Scouting project and they didn't show up. The Military History project's didn't change either. Rlevse 09:56, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

My fault, I was messing up with the script yesterday and forgot to turn off the debugging flag (which makes the bot run on a single chosen project only). The bot is running in normal mode now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:48, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

"By importance" categories

Something curious: I know MathBot catches articles that get entirely removed from the "by quality" categories, but it doesn't seem to do the same for the "by importance" ones. In other words, if an article's importance rating is removed (such that it is no longer present in any of the "by importance" sub-categories), the bot will still pick it up at the last valid importance rating it saw for it. Kirill Lokshin 04:53, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Right, the bot keeps the last importance rating. I did that because at the chemistry lists they had some importance cells in the table before there was a system of using categories for importance, and I did not want that data to be lost. I can easily modify the bot to not keep last importance rating if that would be considered beneficial. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:46, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, everyone using the importance ratings is doing it through categories now, so it should be quite safe to have it update completely automatically. It's a rather minor issue, though. Kirill Lokshin 05:17, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
If I recall, I went and added the original chemistry importance data into the talk-page templates, so nothing should be lost at this point if you switch things. Walkerma 05:28, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
OK, I modified my script to not copy over old importance ratings and stick to what is in categories only. Let us see how it goes tomorrow. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:41, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Navigation links

Dear Mathbot, When you create pages such as Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality/1 which aren't the last, numerically, for that Project, could you add a link at top and bottom to the next page please? (Next Page). Also, I wonder if you might be able to place all of the pages being created into a category or categories (perhaps into the "Projectname by quality" category even?). Have a word with Oleg about it would you? Cheers bot. --kingboyk 16:07, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

We'll see what can be done. Mathbot 17:08, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
that would be a nice feature, I've noticed the same thing.Rlevse 10:59, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I added those navigation links to the top of the page, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality/1 (will put it at the bottom too).

Now, is it really necessary to categorize all those subpages? I would think that that click which would bring you to the category could as well be used to bring you to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The Beatles articles by quality where all the pages are listed with a lot of other info. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:10, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Oleg. Well, I find myself clicking on what links here and having to take longer steps than are necessary to navigate around these pages. I think we need something to improve navigation. Anyone else care to comment? --kingboyk 17:44, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Question about the "extra" columns

I have a question about the table each project get. In Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Aircraft articles by quality, what is the purpose of the "Version" column, and the "Comments" column? I would assume comments is where you may talk about what the article needs to improve or why its rated as A, B, etc, but what happens if you edit the page to put a comment in and the article is re-classified? Will the comment be erased by Mathbot? Is there a place to put a comment so that Mathbot will automaticaly add it in or move it with the re-classed article? Thank you - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 07:16, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I think Mathbot remembers the comment even if the article is reclassified: we'll have to wait for Oleg to reply on that score. However, there is a more foolproof method - see the above thread about the Beatles template now transcluding comments. Basically, a talk page can have a /Comments page and Mathbot will, if properly configured as above, pick up the presence of the Comments page and transclude it. --kingboyk 10:14, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, the bot remembers comments even if it reclassifies or moves an entry. I agree that /Comments is a better way of doing things, but that feature is not really documented and kind of tricky to implement. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:24, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Intructions getting complicated

I would think that this addition unnecessarily complicates the instructions (which already are complicated enough). Comments? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:24, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

It probably needs a copyedit to be clearer ({{sofixit}}) but I think it's worth noting, otherwise I or someone else have to go along and fix these things. It took me more than a whole working day this time. --kingboyk 15:32, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree that Tito's edit is an improvement, but now the instructions have 7 steps instead of 4, and at least to me some of those steps are vital for the bot to do its job, while other ones are barely relevant.

Really, is the desire to add extra "navigational" categories worth adding more burden on the users? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:24, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

So says a programmer of a bot! :) Those of us who take care of organisational matters might think the new points very important :P I think we needn't worry they're too complicated, presumably a WikiProject will always be using their most technically-savvy member to set this up and we haven't had any problems yet. Perhaps could prefix those extra instructions with "Optional but recommended" or something? --kingboyk 16:43, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I wrote a script to automatically add things like Category:A-Class Adelaide-related articles to Category:A-Class articles (see [4]). It will run everyday. That makes it not necessary for people to follow the extra instructions. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:46, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Lol! Wish I'd thought of asking you to do it, could have saved a day of hard labour (/me sighs and curses). Unfortunately the one you've chosen is not such a great example because I already put it in Category:A-Class Australia articles which belongs to Category:A-Class articles. --kingboyk 17:50, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I figured it out it is not a great example, but it would be too hard for the bot to figure out that kind of fine details. Here are better examples. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:59, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

And yes, it took me under half an hour to write the script (basically start in Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments and go two levels up). The power of automation at work. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:59, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
I hate you and love you at the same time, Oleg. Is that possible? :) --kingboyk 18:16, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
Minor point, but we now have both Category:Unassessed articles and Category:Unassessed-Class articles. Kirill Lokshin 19:51, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. I had noticed that earlier in the day too. I deleted Category:Unassessed articles and left in Category:Unassessed-Class articles (the latter continues the same pattern as other classes, A-Class, B-Class, etc. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:23, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
These edits ([5] and [6]) aren't correct, Oleg. Don't know if it's a bug or if I have the comments cats in the wrong place. --kingboyk 21:15, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
That was a bug. I fixed it now. Thanks for letting me know and for fixing some miscategorizations. I fixed a couple too, and I think none are left. Hope all is right now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:46, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Frequency of bot runs

Now we have over 50 projects using the bot, and our practices have gained wide acceptance, I think we should at least consider having the bot run twice a day. Comments? --kingboyk 18:18, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

On a separate, but related, issue, how long does the bot take to run? It starts at 0300 UTC, but it has been taking a while lately... Titoxd(?!?) 18:24, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
As of now, it takes 2 hours and 43 minutes from start to finish. But that includes a break of 5 seconds between page downloads/uploads, and breaks of 1 second between getting the contents of any category, all that to not overwhelm the server.
I don't see much value in having the bot run twice a day (easy to do of course). After a while all wikiprojects willing to sign up with us will do so, and the amount of daily activity would be relatively low. Would not be efficient to run the bot that often I think. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:58, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I wonder if you might consider starting the run earlier in the morning now that it's taking several hours to complete, Oleg? --kingboyk 09:42, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

9 Aug bot run

The bot didn't run last night, 9 Aug.Rlevse 10:13, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes it did, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment log. The night of August 9 did not come yet, at least not where I am. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:21, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Scouting articles by quality statistics, there is no change last night in the history. if the bot runs and no project articles changed ratings, I take it this file will not show a edit history update? It usually runs 0300-0500 UTC my time, so when I get it up in the am, there's usually an update visible. Rlevse 15:30, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
That's what I've seen; but there should still be an edit to the corresponding log with something like "No changes on this day." Kirill Lokshin 15:32, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, there's a no changes entry. Thanks. Now I know what to look for. Rlevse 15:35, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
You can also put Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Scouting articles by quality on your watchlist. Even if no changes happen, the date of the bottom of that page will be changed. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:43, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Logs

Some of the logs (Biography and Songs) haven't been written, presumably (again) because of size. This is no doubt due to some idiot (me) tagging thousands of articles a day. Any chance you could fix the logging please Oleg? (Log in smaller chunks, log to multiple pages, whatever). --kingboyk 17:09, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Umm, yeah. I think tagging ~10,000 articles at once might be a wee bit problematic. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 17:22, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Biography did update last night at 3:30 EST... We're now at 23K! plange 17:29, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Oh, sorry, you meant the log itself, yep, that's blank. plange 17:31, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't know what can be done about it. If the log is 10,000 articles for a day, the bot can either not submit it at all, or just cut it, and submit say a quarter of the log for a day rather than the entire thing.

I don't think it is worth implementing the feature that the log is split into multiple subpages. It would complicate the code, and mass tagging of articles in one day would be rare events (preferably to be avoided). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:28, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Yep, I don't think it's a big deal to lose out for one day or several days until it settles down... It is an unusual event to tag that many in a day plange 18:32, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps if the log is large discard the new entries but just log the changes? --kingboyk 21:07, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Would be too much trouble to implement that I would think. It would require first creating the log, then checking its size, then eliminating the "additions" lines. Maybe one could instead limit oneself to adding say only 2-5 thousand articles per day, or otherwise not mind logs being blanked? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:13, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
A handful of lines of code Oleg, I think:
function LogIt(Message, VerboseYN)
if VerboseYN then
LogLong.Write(Message)
end if
LogShort.Write(Message)
end function
// do business as usual, writing to LogIt function instead of directly to logfile
if LogLong.Size > MaximumSizeAllowed then Upload("Truncated Log" + LogShort) else Upload(LogLong)
--kingboyk 17:02, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
It won't work that they due to how the code was written, but it can be done rather simply. I will work on it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:14, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
Also, adding 10,000 articles per day slows down the bot dramatically, and other projects are updated much later in the day. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:15, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I think we're going to increasingly run into issues of scale here; the Biography tagging (which is responsible for the sudden surge in article numbers) is actually going quite slowly, as it needs to cover at least ~200,000 articles before it's done. Kirill Lokshin 22:22, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
As you know Kirill, Category:Living people contains over 100,000 articles. I've tagged some 30,000 now without any serious complaints and with several thank you messages, so I aim to complete that task (not least because of the {{Blp}} message that comes with it). At this time though I'm not going to trawl through the Dead people category and, certainly, will actively refrain from doing so if it's going to cause problems for anyone else involved in this great project. --kingboyk 16:58, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm quite aware of that; if I recall correctly, I was the one to suggest that the tagging start from that category. I have absolutely no objections to what you're doing; the problems here simply indicate that we need to find a better technical approach, not that the WikiProjects need to alter their behavior. Kirill Lokshin 17:04, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, you are guilty as charged - that's what the "As you know" was referring to :) --kingboyk 17:07, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
This may present signifcant problems. The current bot framework may not even be the way to go anymore. Such a huge number of articles could be managed only by direct database access I believe. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:47, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Something like that may actually be possible to arrange now; the reactions to this program at Wikimania were quite positive. We'd presumably need to come up with something more concrete in terms of what we need, though. Kirill Lokshin 22:53, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
I have a feeling this can be done only by extending the database schema. I'll ask in Wikitech-l the specifics of the current plans surrounding stable versions, and try to make something to fix this on MediaWiki. Titoxd(?!?) 23:02, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
This kind of thing will be enabled after Stable Versions are enabled, after the Board elections. The SVN branch indicates that it will allow for a "type" of assessment field, so we will probably be able to do it. A few details remain to be seen, though... like who is going to assess articles? Sysops? Those with in a special validator group? Who is going to add to those groups? Oooh... I think we need to be really sure what to do before asking more about this. Titoxd(?!?) 00:29, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, maybe we're talking about different things here. Are you thinking about adding the assessments into the database itself? I was under the impression that we were merely discussing a way to make the bot run faster/more reliably for a large number of articles (something like toolserver, perhaps, only with actual access to en:). Kirill Lokshin 00:38, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
That's what indeed I was thinking about. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:47, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, you wouldn't need any table modifications, just faster readonly access to the MW tables. Alternatively (a little slower because of the Mediawiki layer but still a great improvement I would think) would be if Mathbot had the honour of running on the Wikimedia server. --kingboyk 16:56, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Thinking about it, provided the assessments are a seperate script/cronjob so Mathbot isn't prevented from doing other work whilst it's working on these, does it matter how long the job takes provided it's less than 24 hours? (Assuming of course that there's no complaint from the owner of the machine Mathbot runs on). --kingboyk 09:44, 12 August 2006 (UTC) (see also some comments above)

The work Mathbot does on the WP project is independent than any other jobs it does. There is no problem with the machine the bot is running on (my personal work PC) as it takes very few resources (fetch a page here, submit one there, do some info merging, and with pauses of several seconds between any of these).
However, if the bot starts taking more than 12-18 hours to go through all WP1.0 tables, that means we may need a faster solution. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:53, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Comment conflict

This hasn't happened yet, but someone pointed out to me the possibility that eventually there could be a case where 2 wikiprojects are using the comments feature on the Talk template and so they are both sharing the /Comments page that mathbot crawls. It probably isn't an issue, as presumably one project's comments are just as valid with another project, but wasn't sure what others thought about this? plange 17:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Considering the extremely small number of projects using the /Comments pages, I don't think this is a practical problem. When it does come up, though, perhaps they can fight it out for our entertainment? ;-) Kirill Lokshin 17:39, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Oh but it has already come up: Some of WP:BEATLES' /Comments have been transcluded onto the Biography lists. I got around it by simply noting at the top of the comments page which Project made the comments. I don't think any more elegant solution is needed. --kingboyk 21:06, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Actually, that isn't a bug. It's a feature! :D Titoxd(?!?) 06:00, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Factor out logs of certain Wikiproject:Novels pages?

I haven't seen how you bot works, but it seems to me that it should be easy to construct logs pages under the Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels pages by category, no? To be concrete, I was starting to dream up an assessment system for the fledgling Wikipedia: WikiProject A Song of Ice and Fire (this is a series of fantasy novels), only to have all "our" pages subsumed under the Wikipedia: WikiProject Novels, including it's spiffy assessment system. What I would like now would be a table of only the pages organised under the Category:A Song of Ice and Fire, but with their Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels quality scales. This would help us make a more focussed contribution and avoid the need to have two parallel assessment systems. What is more, this seems to be a factorisation that other projects would benefit from. All assuming that you only have to add logic corresponding to "and requestedCategory isIn category(currentpage)" to your code somewhere, otherwise it's too much hassle. Arbor 10:19, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I would think that the simplest way of doing that would be to modify the WikiProject Novels assesment template (Template:NovelsWikiProject) so that certain articles show up not only in Category:A-Class novel articles but also in Category:A-Class A Song of Ice and Fire articles, with the latter also a subcategory of Category:A Song of Ice and Fire articles by quality. Then no changes to the bot would be necessary, and you will get the sublist of articles you are only intersted in. Template:V0.5 has, for example, some kind of categorization mechanism.
Another solution would be of course to modify the bot as you suggest. If there is enough interest from the community and there are good arguments for why this would be better than the above tagging, I could implement it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:30, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
The tagging would certainly seem to be the most obvious way to approach this. We already have the various "task force" tags being used by the larger project; there's no reason why a similar setup couldn't be employed for the sub-projects of Novels. Kirill Lokshin 15:32, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
But are the task force articles divided by the assessment scale? plange 15:36, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
There's no need to do that, though; all that's being asked is a copy of the main project's ratings under a different set of categories, which would be trivial. (Copy the main switch block into the task force block in the template and rename the categories. As long as only one "class" parameter is desired, everything works perfectly.) Kirill Lokshin 15:40, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Yep, that's what I was thinking they meant-- I think it's a good idea. I might modify our bio one to do that...plange 15:59, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Sounds like a good solution to me too. --kingboyk 16:06, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Kirill, as we talked about before, this situation is going to arise a lot in the future, as with Australia/Adelaide, and with the biography project too. Could we design a generic template that could work for multiple WikiProjects, and clearly linked as an example at /Using the bot? (I say "we" but I wouldn't know where to start.) Could you adapt the MilHist template to read something like "Project #1 and Project #2"? Could it be done in such a way that if Project 2 is undefined it would remain blank ready for a second project to be added? I think we've seen how most projects quite naturally copy what's available and working, so I think people would use it. IMHO we don't want to have WikiProjects on Science, Biology, Plants and Banksia all with their own separate templates on the same talk page. Walkerma 03:23, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

And, as I said before, I don't think this is a good idea; in fact, for a variety of practical reasons, I think this is a very bad idea. Kirill Lokshin 03:26, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
But note also this discussion about reducing the visual size of the templates, which is a somewhat related issue. Kirill Lokshin 03:27, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Gosh, I must've been tired! Sorry about that! I thought you liked the multiproject template idea for monther/daughter projects! What's the solution to this problem (it's beyond my limited technical skills so I defer to your opinion)? Do we just stick to multiple templates? Walkerma 03:29, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, I think looking at this from the viewpoint of templates is the entirely wrong approach. Templates are easy to deal with; what's hard is combining the projects themselves. I cannot think of any good way to approach this other than an informal encouragement of the task-force-fication of smaller/narrower projects into larger/broader ones, as appropriate; doing this on the template level without corresponding changes in the projects' relationships risks massive hostility on the part of the projects being "merged" this way. Kirill Lokshin 03:34, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I remember you saying that, and I agree projects need their independence. I thought it would be possible to show multiple projects in one template, without any sense of merging them, as you do with your task forces at (e.g.) Talk:Battle of Blenheim. I imagined seeing WikiProject Biology, Plants, Banksia in place of British, Dutch & French task forces. You could maybe put "Science" in place of WikiProject:Military History. You're right, the projects would need to agree to share like that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Walkerma (talk • contribs)
It would be possible, if they agreed to it. One thing to note, though: in the discussion I linked to above, we're considering—with no apparent objections—hiding the task force lines inside a show/hide bar. In our case, this isn't really problematic, because the main influx of new members to the task forces comes from the central project. In cases where the "task forces" are actually entirely independent sub-projects, however, this won't be the case; and said sub-projects will be quite understandably against any reduction of their own capability to advertise. Kirill Lokshin 03:46, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
OK, thanks for the clarification - at least that's an option we can offer if the need arises. If you can think of some better solutions, please post them! I'm just waiting for the first tirade about talk page template/category spam destroying Wikipedia.... Thanks, Walkerma 03:52, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
I suspect that, if that comes up, it'll be directed towards WP:WPBIO, simply because the extent of their tagging will soon outgrow all the other projects put together. I haven't seen any real complaints so far, though (at least not to the tagging/categorization itself). Kirill Lokshin 03:55, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Should we stop tagging bios, or at least go more slowly? plange 06:30, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
As long as things are going OK, I don't see any reason to stop, you're doing great work! I suspect with your the biographies, separate templates are probably just fine, and with that approach I also think that no one should mind. I foresee more of a problem between active child/inactive parent projects. Any ideas on handling such conflicts are of course welcome! Walkerma 07:14, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

(unindent) - Don't know -- I've actually been unsuccessful in enticing the child projects to merge with bio as a task force, BTW... oh well, I tried! :-) plange 07:53, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

As a general rule, a project will never agree to merge with a parent that's smaller, less active, or seems less organized than itself; but even then, there are some smaller projects which adamantly refuse to consider the issue. Just keep growing and creating task forces; eventually—once WP:WPBIO becomes the central place for all bio discussions—you should find it easier to absorb such inactive projects that remain. (It's possible, of course, that some active ones will choose to stay independent, but there's no really good way to prevent that, in my experience.) Kirill Lokshin 14:07, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

[I am the one who started this thread.] Thanks for all the responses so far. I learned a lot already. There seems to be a general discussion about the hierarchies and rivalries between WikiProjects which I think is interesting but would rather like to avoid under this heading. So, to get back to my original suggestion, and please forgive my ignorance: The suggestion to "modify" the WP:Novels template would involve copying and renaming said template and then modify it? Would the articles in question then receive both templates? Or should the original WP:Novels itself template be modified centrally? I think I understand how that would work, but this latter approach does not seem to scale very well... Arbor 18:28, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, both are possible, but the second approach would actually be cleaner, since it wouldn't involve any new templates. What you'd need to do is convince the Novels project (which shouldn't be too hard, I would think) to add a new parameter to their template, which you would set on the relevant talk pages as Song-of-Ice-and-Fire-task-force=yes. This parameter would then display a line in the main novels banner linking to the project (see {{WPMILHIST}} for how this works), and would also create copies of the grading categories matching the specific project name. Again, the technical aspects are fairly trivial, but you (meaning the two projects involved) need to discuss the issue and come to a consensus that this approach would be mutually acceptable. Kirill Lokshin 18:33, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Thank you. But wouldn't this explode? We are only a single, crufty subset of WP:Novels. Already at 20 (say) daughter WikiProjects the template (and the required coordination with the mother project) would be difficult to manage. I understand the sentiment of taking care of this problem only if there are ever 20 such daughter projects, so maybe I am focussing too much on building infrastructure where there is no need for it. (Still, it seems to be even cleaner to bully Mathbot into producing these things automagically.) But for me it's fine to take the template-approach and reconvene when there actually is a problem. Arbor 18:47, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
As I said, see {{WPMILHIST}}; we have 20+ (and growing!) task forces, and a bunch of other parameters. You just need to make sure you have some people experienced with complex templates to maintain the thing, which shouldn't be too hard to arrange. Kirill Lokshin 18:50, 12 August 2006 (UTC)