Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories/uncategorized

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[edit] cat-progress template and uncatstubs

I notice that the uncatstubs have reappeared on {{categorization progress}} (doubtless partly my fault, for populating 'em with the articles already tagged with both "uncat" and a sorted stub type). I have distinctly mixed feelings about this, since while it's obviously desirable that those be given permcats, there's the question of whether articles with no categories whatsoever, and articles with topic-specific stubcats, should be essentially treated alike, of which this seems suggestive. In other words, if someone decides to tag all the "uncategorised stubs" in the database, (with stub cats and nothing else, of which there's a stonkingly large number), would all work on the entirely categorised articles cease while people worked on those? (Or ran around in circles tearing their hair out at now having 60,000 articles on their "worklist".) I've attempted to refactor the template somewhat, but my preference would be for that data to be moved out into an entirely separate template for the sake of clarity. However, I'll content myself to follow whatever the consensus is among the "consumers" of this resource. Alai 01:21, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

I really like moving out the uncategorized stubs. It makes the uncat task more managable, and keeps more people motivated. Stubs ARE in the category tree, so if someone really wanted to find out all there was about a subject, they would look at the stubs. Scarykitty 01:34, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
I have mixed feelings about this. In part, this is because I tremble at Alaibot's power to dump 60K articles on the backlog. On the other hand, I don't mind having a limited amount of uncategorized stubs to work on and ideally, these should be properly categorized eventually. The taskforce currently seems to be working at a furious Stakhanov pace so we can handle a bit of extra work. In fact, if we get too good at this and find ourselves working on the May uncats by say mid-May, then we'll actually be very inefficient because we'll be working on freshly tagged articles that haven't had the chance of being categorized by random editors. Pascal.Tesson 02:17, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
(To Pascal) I'd love to get to May uncats by May! Then we'd be "caught up" and the workload would be much easier. Also, the idea that it's okay to let random editors eventually categorize articles is a somewhat dangerous mindset to some. I'd say as far as categorizing is concerned, the sooner the better. →EdGl 02:28, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Maybe I'm just overly giddy from the quick handling of the February backlog and I'm just not hearing the faint giggle of Alaibot just waiting to double the backlog size when we least expect it! Pascal.Tesson 02:43, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Let me first of all clarify that I'm not holding the 60,000 permcatless stubs over anyone's head as any sort of threat. :) I'm not going to do this until the existing backlog's greatly reduced, there's a fresh db dump to get the data (which will be at least another month away) and there's willingness/enthusiasm at this project, or better yet at topic-specific versions thereof, per earlier discussion on uncat-albums, uncat-people, etc. (If the Python code decides to override me and do it anyway, Skynet-like as someone just wryly observed at BRFA, then apologies in advance...) But sorted stubs are clearly starting to find their way into these categories anyway, and there's a deep well of same to be dipped into, should people increase the rate at which they're stub-tagging uncat articles, or tagging existing stubs with uncat. Alai 03:17, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't think anyone in this taskforce is oblivious to the fact that we're facing an infinite task and although it's nice to not be reminded too gruesomely of this, I'm sure our nerves can handle a fatter backlog. Note also that your bot is facing competition from a trial bot AlexNewArtBot (talk · contribs) that's roaming Newpages. (and that bot has the annoying habit of placing the uncat tag on top...) Pascal.Tesson 03:28, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, there's the part that's infinite (at least until the community makes it a tad harder to create new pages, maybe), and the part that's "merely" a finite but distinctly large backlog. I'm open to suggestions as to how to help manage the latter; I could crunch some numbers from the last db dump by topic to see if that's a worthwhile route to pursue eithe rvia the wikiprojects, or just to organise things topically for this task force. I noticed AlexNewArtBot; currently it seems to be confining itself to just logging articles in project space, and not tagging any articles at all. Alai 03:57, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) ah yes, AlexNewArtBot hasn't tagged an article in two weeks [1]. In any case, back to the main topic, feel free to experiment with the db dump and we'll let you know if it becomes too depressing but I can definitely see "by project" subcats. For one thing it makes sense to have people categorize articles that they are most competent to categorize. Maybe we could advertise at the pump that you're offering this for projects that are interested. Pascal.Tesson 04:09, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Alai, I think it's entirely up to you, because I think it'll come down to either doing your prevcat thing or the stub categorizing =). →EdGl 04:30, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

OK, here's a breakdown of all the stub-cat trees with at least 1000 articles with no other categories: User:Alai/uncatstubhier. If any of these are a) of interest to anyone here as a somewhat more focused resource, or b) things you can twist the arm of a related WikiProject into looking at, then let me know and I'll create and populate a corresponding category. Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that the "people" types might be too big or broad, given the "modest" degree of interest shown by the (equally big and broad) bios WPJ. OTOH, there's a clear pattern to catting people that may make it of some value. OTOH, music cats may be worth looking at, given the success of Cat:uncategorised albums. Alai 20:15, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

My uneducated guess is that country-specific uncategorized stubs would be of interest to country-specific projects. I'll try to contact WikiProject India for instance and see what they think. It's a fairly active project I think, and they're probably more efficient at categorizing villages of Andra Pradesh than most of the people involved in the task force right now. By the way, could you get the stats for other country-specific stub cats? Pascal.Tesson 05:20, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WP India

Yup, it would definately help us to know which all articles are uncategorised. Can the bot also make other intelligent decisions to classify it under an India-specific workgroup? =Nichalp «Talk»= 09:55, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

  • Insofar as they correspond to stub types, and insofar as the articles are tagged as such, yes. Which seems to be to a fair degree. Would you like a list, a single cleanup category, or a hierarchy of same? Alai 22:03, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
Please also specify if you want ketchup with your fries. Alaibot is that good. :-) Pascal.Tesson 22:05, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Germany

I have been doing the stub sort and categorization manually, a bot would be really helpful. STTW (talk) 06:59, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

  • Not sure I can quite do that yet (beyond on occasion being able to populate stub types from the (other) categories). The idea is rather, populating a cleanup category with articles with no categories at all; and populating per-topic cleanup cats for those with only stub categories. Would the latter be useful? i.e. something like Cat:uncategorised Germany articles. Alai 23:58, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
  • OK, they're both done deals. Test population of 50 in each. Alai 04:48, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Italy

I’d certainly be interested in an equivalent for Italy. Thanks. —Ian Spackman 07:03, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Having at looked at the French example, it does strike me that it would be very useful if it could be arranged heirachically, as mentioned above, subcategorized by stub types. —Ian Spackman 06:56, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Sure, could do that. Would you like one for every stub type, or do you have a particular division in mind? ("People", "places" and "other" would be the obvious places to start.) Alai 06:48, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
I shall have to think about that before responding definitively, but I think fine-grained rather than coarse. Taking the “people example” it would be quicker to work through a set of saints or footballers or artists rather than one where you you could never predict whether the next one up was going to be a poet or a pornstar. Could you easily do a sample run using evey stub type? It would would need to be more than 50 to make sense: say 300 samples? If so it might help other ‘big’ projects work out what was useful. I am not at all clear how well-stubbed the uncategorized stubs are. —Ian Spackman 19:30, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I see the logic of that to a point, but there's 63 sub-categories of Cat:Italy stubs, and many of them are pretty small to start with. As there's only about 450 in total, and around 100 people, I'm inclined to just go ahead with the three I mentioned. If we were tackling all saints, or all footballers, rather than per country, that might be more significant numbers... Alai 18:00, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I would guess that quite a few of the pages in Category:Uncategorised Italian geography articles have actually been categorised ‘through the backdoor’. Changes I made recently to the 110 or so {{Province of X}} templates (e.g. {{Province of Udine}}) mean that communes including them now automatically get categorised properly. However, since the articles themselves haven’t been edited, the Category:Uncategorised Italian geography articles invocations have not been touched. I don’t know how often the bot runs to update the category invocation, but it would probably be a good idea to do it fairly soon. (I am assuming, of course, that it knows how to remove the category as well as how to add it!)—Ian Spackman 09:32, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

  • It doesn't. :) This wouldn't be mind-blowingly difficult to add, admittedly, but template-populated categories aren't caught at all by the pywikipediabot category framework, and there's the additional fuzziness of determining which categories are sufficient to indicate the removal of the uncat-cat (e.g. not stub cats, maintenance, or tangential to their Italian-geographicalness). For the sakes of 80 articles, it'd be easier just to run AWB over 'em, really. Alai 03:56, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    • OK, thanks for the reply. Cheers —Ian Spackman 08:24, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Pharmacology

There's been no discussion on the Talk page, but no objections either, and FWIW I think this would be very helpful. If possible, I'd like to see this happen. Fvasconcellos (t·c) 17:22, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dregs at the months end

This is a fascinating project. I wish I'd discovered it earlier (I found it through Pascal.Tesson's RfA!). I've done a few for the April lot (now down to around 30). Unfortunately, most of those are articles in a really bad state. I'm wary of spending time categorising articles until they are at least good enough to not get deleted at some point, but I saw some discussion above that some sort of categorisation can help get articles noticed and improved. It is best just to do rough-and-ready, broad categorisation, and hope for the best? Or shall I move on to helping out with May's lot? :-) Well, I'm actually going on wiki-break soon, so maybe that will be June's lot? Carcharoth 17:12, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Oh, and as far as subject-specific "only categorised as stubs" areas go, there are probably a few I'd be interested in. Is there a list anywhere? Any history of science, or science ones? Carcharoth 17:25, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
As I always say: spare the {{prod}}, spoil the article.  ;-) But yeah, it's probably a good idea to go ahead and categorize the dregs at least broadly, while applying either {{stub}}, some deletion procedure, and/or the appropriate cleanup tags. Ideally, every article should be categorized in a specific fashion across a few categories, but if there's not enough information there, you gotta work with what you have. On the topic of uncategorized stub finding, I think Alai would be a good one to ask for a list of articles in subjects of your choice, as he's got some nice tools. Alternatively, pointing AutoWikiBrowser at a stub category and just skipping the articles with Category tags works too, although it's quite inefficient unless you're using a database dump. RTucker 17:30, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I've just discovered uncategorised categories in the May lot! I love categorising categories - it's subtly different from categorising articles. <rubs hands in glee> :-) Carcharoth 17:24, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

C'mon, don't take all the fun ones for yourself ;-) RTucker 17:30, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
OK. I'll take F-R, and you can have the rest (all four of them!)... LOL! Seriously, I'll leave a few for others to do. Carcharoth 17:39, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
No worries... any uncat work is good uncat work.  :-) RTucker 17:48, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. I got stuck on the first one... Category:Free images of public domain art. First, it is empty. Second, its an image category. Can't remember whether Wikipedia still has image categories. And free images of public domain art - isn't that title a bit, um, redundant? Carcharoth 17:41, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Public domain art is like public domain music: the actual "source code" of it is public domain, but the performance (or photograph) requires a fair amount of professional skill and is thus copyrightable. So, you can (and probably do!) have non-free images of public domain art out there.  :-) RTucker 17:48, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I also cleared two articles out of Category:Free software games and put in a soft redirect to Category:Free video games. I think they are the same thing, right? Carcharoth 17:51, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I'd agree with that. RTucker 17:59, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

To answer Carcharoth's question above: a few weeks ago Alai and I started discussing the possibility of creating these project-specific categories for uncategorized stubs. Alai ran a few tests on the dump and here's an interesting list of the number of uncategorized articles for each non-trivial stub category, i.e. every stub category that has at least one stub sub-category. The experiment so far has been a bit dissapointing and little work has been done on the Germany, France, Italy categories but I suppose one has to wait until someone from the relevant wikiproject gets interested in cleaning those up. But if anyone is interested in having Alaibot populate another one of these, I'm sure Alai will be more than happy to oblige. As for dealing with the low-quality articles, it's always a judgment call: if you can't see the article ever having any sort of value, then sure, prod, speedy, afd, etc. But if it's just in bad need of attention, then it's particularly important to categorize it as well as you can: that's one way to ensure that the article will get some visibility. For instance, if you have a crappy biography for a subject that does meet WP:BIO, it's particularly unwise to categorize it solely in a category that is never used for browsing like Category:Living people. If you do that, then the bot will view the article as being categorized but the article will still be in uncategorized oblivion for all practical purposes. Similarly, if you hit uncategorized album articles (and boy are there a lot of these) then please create the artist-specific category if it does not exist because categorizing it as 2003 albums is not that helpful. Pascal.Tesson 22:06, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I'm very much in favour of topic-specific uncat resources (to be populated from stub cats, or as Pascal says, quite evidently inadequate cats such as the above). I do want to first check that there's the "demand", though, either from WPJ natives, or from specialists at this task force.
I've just started on the first batch of taggings from the latest db dump: around 3000 of those that are new, but also relatively long (2000 characters or more). So for those that want to cherry-pick relatively "decent" articles, now might be a good time... Alai 03:45, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] previously categorised, last db dump

I've uploaded another version of the "previously categorised" list: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Categories/uncategorized/previous-June. I've added it as an "alternative task" to the front page: feel free to determine priority on that. Alai 02:06, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cleaned up May 2007

I've cleaned up May 2007. There was nearly 500 items :) --Gary King 02:08, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

It would help if people checked what Gary King has done, the majority of categories he's added are far too broad and in some cases incorrect. I was tempted to wholesale revert, but at least some of the categories added are ok. —Xezbeth 12:45, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Sorry about that, I'll be more specific in the next round. --Gary King 18:02, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
By the way, good job doing so many so fast. I wouldn't have reverted so many earlier if I had more time, but keeping the tag on really is preferable to some of the broader categories. —Xezbeth 18:59, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Yep, sounds good. I've fixed the May 2007 ones and some of the June 2007 ones. I'll continue down on 'B' soon. --Gary King 22:53, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Uncategorized Musical Groups

I think we should have this category so that people can easily identify non-notable bands that infest Wikipedia and deal with them accordingly. If somebody created one let me know.--Lenticel (talk) 02:34, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

I was bold and created it, noting in the edit summary to refine it as needed, 'cause it probably will. And in a few days, unless I hear different, I think my boldness will extend to creating Category:Uncategorised India articles. --Ebyabe 00:27, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
I suggest posting a note on talk pages of the relevant projects, encouraging them to clear out "their" uncat cat.--Fisherjs 14:48, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Neverending Battle

It seems that no matter how many articles we categorize, more uncat articles takes its place. Sigh... Its just like fighting a horde of army ants--Lenticel (talk) 03:59, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

he he he... There's hope though. At some point in May we almost ran out of articles to categorize but I (and I suspect a few others) sort of moved on to other things after that. Still, the backlog was over 20K at some point so anything below 10K is already quite an achievement. Pascal.Tesson 04:59, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Healthcare Today

I've added some basic categories to Healthcare Today, but I can't seem to locate a precise category. It's a healthcare news magazine aimed at healthcare professionals, and as such it seems to fall between categories for "Health magazine" aimed at laypeople and "Medical journals" aimed at specialists. I'm very new to the categorising game, so assistance appreciated! Espresso Addict 05:48, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi Espresso Addict. Category:Health magazines and Category:Medical journals are both sub-categories of Category:Health publications so I'd suggest using the higher category initially. You could leave a note on the article's discussion page asking anyone familiar with the magazine to choose whichever of these is the most appropriate category. Maybe also mention it on the talk page of the article's creator, though they don't appear to be a very active contributor. Keep up the good work! Gimboid13 08:38, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, Gimboid13, that's an excellent idea! I've been realising that the categorise backlog is there for a reason -- most of the articles I looked over were very hard to decide where to place. Espresso Addict 09:10, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mandatory New Article Categorization

Some people here might be interested in the Village Pump Discussion. Stardust8212 12:39, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Our own wikiproject barnstar

I think we should have our very own barnstar. I want to propose one myself but I do not have the required graphics skills. Anyway, my idea for its design is a minor barnstar tuck inside a folder. Like this one:

replace paper with barnstar
replace paper with barnstar

It will be a good motivation tool for our wikiproject and our sister project Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories.--Lenticel (talk) 16:16, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me. I'm no graphics maven myself, but we could ask people who have 'form' in that area. Alai 03:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)


How about something like this? If you really want the star inside the folder I can tweak it some more tomorrow. Cheers, Her Pegship (tis herself) 04:53, 29 July 2007 (UTC)


UPDATE: it seems that there's a category barnstar already Image:Category Barnstar.png. Sorry User:Pegship, I've seem to have forgotten this request.--Lenticel (talk) 00:22, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Help with Place of birth

How should Place of birth be categorized? I've been looking for the right place but can't figure it out. The only category I can think of could be something in Geography, but it's not quite right. Any ideas? --Mysdaao 00:41, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly. Perhaps something similar to Nationality or something in a subcat of Category:Human migration? Geography sounds like it might work too though. Stardust8212 01:46, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
How about Category:Birthdays?--Fisherjs 06:56, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
Pascal.Tesson has categorized it in Category:Nationality law and Category:Human migration, which I think will be fine. Thanks for the help. --Mysdaao 17:49, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How to get Uncategorized pages with only stub categories

I have been categorizing pages related to India but I think still several pages exist under stubs category only so is there a way to know which all pages have only stub categories and not normal categories as these pages needs to be put under proper category. Vjdchauhan 13:40, 30 July 2007 (UTC).

I've been meaning to do something on this very matter, but other things (and my short li'l span of attention) have intervened. I'll drop a note at Wikiproject India when I've done this. Alai 23:12, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Some new progress Alai? Vjdchauhan 19:54, 2 September 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Uncategorised stubs by topic-of-the-month?

Not unrelatedly to the above, there's been intermittent discussion on setting up Cat:uncategorised -topic- stubs, generally in cases where the Wikiproject on "-topic-" has expressed in interest in categorising them (or has been prodded and had its arm twisted into doing so). However, it occurs to me that there's another way of going about this: we could pick a "topic of the month" (or however long), populate an "uncategorised stubs" category for that, and work on those, in parallel with the main 'totally uncategorised' category. What do people thing? And if there's any enthusiasm for this, any nominations for a topic? Alai 23:25, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Uncategorized and Template:Uncategorizedstub should match

Currently, {{Uncategorized}} is a small box like this:

This article is uncategorized.
Please categorize this article to list it with similar articles.

On the other hand, {{uncategorizedstub}} looks like this:

This article is uncategorized.
Please help improve this article by adding it to one or more categories, in addition to a stub category. (how?) Please remove this tag after categorizing, but not before.
This article has been tagged since date.

I see no reason why these templates should be different. I prefer the first one, but if consnsus goes the other way - I prefer that they match. Od Mishehu 09:01, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

  • They're so different because the former was radically revised fairly recently, due to attracting some "too big" ire, and I gather that {{uncatstub}} was missed. Since {{uncat}} is the more heavily used, and it's been apparently stable at the new version, I'd also suggest revising the -stub version to be smaller, and otherwise more similar (but retaining some indication of the distinction). Alai 18:11, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How's it Going?

Sorry for my inactivity this past month or so; I've been pretty busy and will probably continue to be busy for a while. Just wanted to check and make sure this task force is still alive and kicking. Who's still workin' 'round here? →EdGl 22:05, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Yep, still here and plugging away slowly. Progress seems to have slowed but the last hundred or so of June's list went reasonably quickly. Gimboid13 22:30, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I have to confess I've pretty much stopped working on this since getting sysop rights (thus getting access to another bunch of interesting backlogs). I may return at some point because this is pretty interesting stuff but it's kind of depressing to see that it's back up to 12K after being close to zero just a few months ago. Pascal.Tesson 23:08, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm here as well. I think a lot of people left either when the backlog was low or when it became high again. We've been keeping the backlog steady at around 11,000 for the past month or so. If more people join or return, we can make better progress. --Mysdaao talk 12:05, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
I am to a very small degree trying to do a little as well. Right now, I'm primarily doing assessments so that projects know certain articles relate to them, but I am at least finding a few articles that are at best poorly, if at all, categorized in the process and categorizing them. John Carter 14:05, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
I have only been on the project a few weeks and I have made a modest contribution but I am sure I could be quicker, I am using AWB to give me a worklist but then it often takes an awfully long time to find the right categories - anyone got any tips for quick look-up or is it just something that comes with experience? • nancy • 07:14, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
My main suggestion would be to cherry-pick shamelessly. No-one has the entire category tree in their head -- and if anyone is getting close, I suggest they get out more. :) If you're familiar with an area, whether through prior knowledge, or past experience in similar catting, or you're in the mood to trawl the category structure to look for a category, then all well and good. If not, skip that article; chances are, someone else will have much less trouble with it. On the actual "trawling", a useful technique is to open another window or tab at a general category, and use the "[+]" tabs to browse for a more specific category. Alai 19:43, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the advice; will hit "ignore" with much less guilt now! Have also found that adding a second monitor to my PC makes things so much easier to manage. • nancy • 17:41, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
The backlog's being inflated in part by the apparently single-handed efforts of one anon, who keeps tagging sorted stubs with {{uncat}}, and what's worse, reverting {{uncatstub}} back to {{uncat}}, and twiddling the dates, in a way that seems to basically just accomplish wholesale "churning". There's currently over 3000 of these, which is a drop in the ocean compared to the total of uncategorised stubs "in the wild". Realistically, I still think we'll only be able tackle these if we start doing it on a per-topic basis, which is both inherently more efficient, and more likely to get topic editors working on categories. (It may ultimately help with the "main" uncategorised backlog, too, but that won't be as easy to automated.) Alai 18:04, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Deleted but back again

Category:Uncategorized from June 2007 was deleted on August 23, 2007 it is back with 15 pages in it as of today, all but one are templates. Dbiel (Talk) 01:50, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Error in the hints and tips

Hints and tips #3 tells us to avoid very large categories like Category:Living people. However, I think that's incorrect. All biographies of living people should be in the Category:Living people, to mark them as WP:BLP and so they show up on Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living people. I'm pretty sure I'm correct, so I'll go ahead and change this. — Ksero (leave me a message, things I've done) 09:21, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I've done the change. Do you think the wording could be misconstrued to mean that biographies should only be in the Living people category, and that you shouldn't add more specific categories? — Ksero (leave me a message, things I've done) 09:28, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
No, it says to avoid adding only such categories. I've undone the change, since it seems to be based entirely on that misreading, and drifts off into biographies as a special case (which is all very well, but off-topic here), and left scope for such confusion entirely intact. Cat:2001 albums is an entirely sensible category (moreso, many would suggest, than Cat:living people, but it's not so great as the sum total of categorisation. I've added some emphasis and preamble to try to address this. (If and when we get to uncategorised-by-topic cleanup on a meaningful scale, we can add more detailed advice to each without it becoming unmanageably large. Uncatted people being a important case in point, but there seemed to be an epic lack of interest when I floated that at WP:WPBIO.) Alai 19:42, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Any reason not to use Category:Uncategorized pages?

I was using Category:Uncategorized pages for categorizing, and got all of the A's out of the way, but then I found this WikiProject, and also read in the Category itself that it might be better to use Category:Category needed instead. Is there any reason for this other than the size of CAT:U? Does it mess up the bots or something? Any help would be appreciated, until then I'll just continue to work on CAT:U. Thanks! TheCoolestDude 20:44, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't understand what you mean; the goal of this wikiproject is to work on (and hopefully clear) CAT:NOCAT. In other works, help the wikiproject work on the category :]. By the way, new talk sections should be added to te bottom of the page. This should probably be moved. →EdGl 02:49, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
Moved, and I have another question. In case of "occupation by country" categories, should subjects be categorized according to the country of residence of the birth country? Thanks! TheCoolestDude 20:01, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure. I think you can put both. →EdGl 20:24, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
All right, thanks for your help. TheCoolestDude 19:40, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
Cat:category needed is essentially just a top-level container for all of the various other "uncategorised categories". No articles should appear in it directly: no standard templates populates it, so if they do, it's because someone has added that category explicitly. Alai 05:20, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Line graph?

You know what would be cool, is if all the data for uncategorized articles over time could be put in a line graph. So if there was a spike this week, it would be really apparent, and we'd all feel motivated to help out extra. I dunno, that bar graph just doesn't really do it for me. (Sorry if this isn't a very constructive use of Talk...) --Gueneverey (talk) 05:02, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to say so, but it sounds like more work than it's worth. I agree that it would be motivating, but for me, it's motivating enough to see an empty uncategorized section (such as no more A articles on December 2007, etc.) --Gary King (talk) 01:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Metabolic type" article

There's an article called Metabolic type that was automatically labled by a bot for needing categorization. After looking into it a bit, it seems to me that it would be better if it were just used as a redirect to Metabolic typing, a subject closely-relating to the term "Metabolic type" itself. The article is only one sentence long, so I think it would be better to simply stick with Metabolic typing and make Metabolic type a redirect, perhaps further integrating the actual term "metabolic type" into the bigger article.

Does that seem like a good idea? Any input from others about this idea would be appreciated, as I don't have a whole lot of experience with this kind of thing and wouldn't want to just jump into rather more unfamiliar territory without asking someone else first. TIA! JamieS93 (talk) 18:29, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't know much about the topic itself to advise on this but if you feel strongly about it you could be bold and simply redirect the page, if someone reverts you then discuss with them. If you don't feel too bold then you could try tagging the article for merging with {{mergeto}} and {{mergefrom}} or simply suggest the redirect on the talk page. Just make sure to keep an eye on the page and if there's agreement or no objections then perform the merge. The best people to ask about a merge are usually the people that wrote the original articles. I'd probably just go ahead and do it, I don't think it's very controversial and it's not like you're doing anything that can't be fixed by two clicks. Hope that helps, good luck. Stardust8212 18:37, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
I was going to write that I agree with Stardust8212 that merging should be done, but I see that you've already merged them. You did it exactly as I would've. --Mysdaao talk 20:49, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
Thanks so much Stardust8212 and Mysdaao! I had went ahead and made the merging edit a few hours ago, since, as you said it isn't something that can't be reverted and talked about, per the BRD cycle; it's nice to hear that was the right thing to do. I tend to be on the very-cautious-but-bold end, but I just didn't want to range into the reckless end. Thanks again! --JamieS93 (talk) 23:49, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Possible copywrite vio

Hi, I need Admin help. I was adding cats to UNCAT tagged pages today and got to this one, NATO CIS Services Agency, created by a newbie. The content appeared to be a cut/paste from somewhere else, and it was, so I followed these instructions. When I went back to work on UNCAT tagged pages, I came to this one, Astra Owners Club, created by a newbie. This content also appeared like a cut/paste from somewhere else, and I found the a match here, but I didn't find a copywrite at the bottom of the web page. Can you check this out? I'm not sure if I handled either of these situations just right, so let me know. Thanks Rosiestephenson (talk) 02:27, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm not an admin but the page you linked does appear to have a copyright notice at the bottom. I recommend tagging both pages with {{db-cv}} and including the link to the website is was copied from. An admin will then review it and likely delete it. For more info on speedy deletions of this type of article check out WP:SPEEDY. Stardust8212 02:34, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks Stardust. Rosiestephenson (talk) 06:35, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Lists of people needing categorization by birth or death

I've compiled three lists of people needing categorization by birth or death (as of mid-March 2008):

Any help gratefully received in adding the appropriate categories to these! Dsp13 (talk) 23:48, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Dsp13, you should consider putting this on the project page, in the Task section, under Alternative tasks (or create your own subsection). Thanks for making these very useful lists :] ~EdGl 16:08, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
Is it an acceptable outcome of this that many will be sorted into year of birth missing and year of birth unknown categories? I expect many of these will not have the necessary information for specific categorization listed in the article. It does seem like a good task, I've been wondering if there's a way to find articles that are only listed in upper level categories, such as Category:Living people, and this seems like it will catch many of those. Stardust8212 17:30, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
That's exactly what I'd do in such cases. If there's wide interest in this task, perhaps we should populate corresponding cleanup categories, for greater convenience? Alai (talk) 07:10, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Useful Templates?

User:Od Mishehu has some potentially useful templates on his user page pertaining to this task force. (They're for user talk pages.) ~EdGl 22:58, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] HotCat

I've added HotCat to the list of special tools on the page. It's a useful script by User:TheDJ I've just found. It puts buttons on the bottom of a page to quickly add, remove or change categories. It also automatically removes {{uncategorization}} tags when a category is added. It's fairly new, so it has some limitations right now. You can only add one category at a time, you can't add a sorting to a category, and you can't add any information to the edit summary. But I've found it very useful, and I suggest everyone try it out. --Mysdaao talk 23:36, 28 April 2008 (UTC)