Category talk:Articles needing additional categories

Transcluded discussions

I'm assembling topical discussions from various talk pages and archives here, to help myself and others get up to speed on the rationale for, and the backlog problems with, this category. wbm1058 (talk) 22:36, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Purpose of this maintenance category

I'm not sure if this is the best place to bring up this issue but I can't think of a better place. I often go through new articles to add improvement tags and one that I often add is the uncategorized tag. I've also noticed that people watch for pages with this tag and will go to the page, add one category, then remove the uncategorized tag. While adding a category is is helpful, I feel that overall, the page will suffer as now there's no indication to editors that mroe tags could be added. Any thoughts? Maybe a tag like improvecat can be created to indicate that more categories need to be added. OlYeller^Talktome 17:07, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I would mention this at /uncategorized, the task force dedicated to categorizing uncategorized articles. We do have Category:Better category needed, but I agree that it may be useful to have {{catimprove}} similar to {{refimprove}}. Unfortunately, due to haste or uncertainty, sometimes we (meaning those at WP:UNCAT) don't always do the best job at categorizing. ~EdGl ★ 17:18, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Looking closer, it looks like it's a javascript called HotCat. The creator is looking into making it possible to add more categories but still, I think a new tag would still be useful. The javascript could even replace the uncat tag with the improvecat tag if the user only adds one category. Thanks for the help. I'll go post this over there as well. OlYeller^Talktome 17:19, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Many of the articles I come across with the "uncat" tag are so poorly written that they don't identify key characteristics of the subject, and because of that I can only fit it into one category. Also, it's possible that an article would only need one category. In these situations, automatically adding the "catimprove" tag would not be desirable. That said, it would be easy to simply remove the tag manually, and I would probably support your proposed HotCat feature. ~EdGl ★ 18:20, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Good points. I've never made a template before but here is my first crack at it. I essentially made a hybrid of the uncategorized template and the refimprove template. I invite collaboration here or there. After the template is made, I'll look into adding the option to replace the uncat category with the catimprove category to the HotCat script. OlYeller^Talktome 18:35, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

The {{catimprove}} template is now in the mainspace. It is also now a part of Friendly for easy tagging. OlYeller^Talktome 14:24, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

I noted a discrepancy between the title of this template ("Improve categories") and the text, which only deals with adding categories. This led to me moving the template, but it was suggested to rather have a discussion here. Now I'm wondering what's the intended purpose of this template? Is it only to ask for additional categories to be added, an improvement of the existing categories (e.g. moving into appropriate subcategories) or for both, as applicable? This would be important to know to figure out which changes have to be done to this template. Thanks, --The Evil IP address (talk) 18:08, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I have always used this template to denote an article needing improvement of categories, like more specific ones, or just simply additional categories. So it's both. The text should be adapted slightly to reflect that. Although the text has been the same since the creation of this template in March 2009: This article needs additional categories. I'd propose: This article needs additional or more specific categories. Debresser (talk) 18:41, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

I definitely don't think "improve" implies "suck" as The Evil IP address stated in the move summary. I do think that the template was previously misleading so I changed the text to what Debresser suggested.

On a side note, we should probably get Twinkle to change its description of the template for page patrollers. OlYeller21^Talktome 18:31, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your edit to the text of the template. Debresser (talk) 16:05, 31 December 2011 (UTC)

Backlog

Just a reminder to everyone, especially now that the "uncategorized articles" queue is down to just a few hundred articles, that we also need to deal with Category:Articles needing additional categories. That seems to have fallen behind somehow; while I've been trying to whittle down that backlog by removing the {{cat improve}} tag from articles that don't really need it, as of right now it's still backlogged all the way back to September 2010. Could we all try to spend some time on that queue as well over the next few weeks? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 20:46, 4 July 2011 (UTC) We have a problem with the Category:Articles needing additional categories queue, and I wanted to generate some discussion about how best to deal with it.

The problem, put simply, is that although I've taken on a little bit of management in the past couple of weeks, nobody else ever deals with it at all and I'm not willing or able to deal with it all by myself. There's a backlog of over 2,700 articles, dating at this point all the way back to November 2010 — and it isn't a queue that we can or should dismiss as a low priority, because for a variety of reasons, some of the articles in that queue are actually true uncats and some others just don't belong there at all. For one thing, User:SoxBot frequently removes the uncat tag from articles which have "categories" but fails to distinguish properly between true content categories and hidden maintenance categories that don't count as real categorization, with the result that I've frequently been forced to use the catimprove tag on articles that were more properly tagged as uncats just to keep the bot from inappropriately detagging them again — and for another, some other users who do manual tagging just incorrectly apply the catimprove tag to practically every article they touch regardless of whether it actually needs more categories or not.

So, put simply, we have to start really dealing with that queue. So my question is, how do we actually want to do that?

1. Leave everything exactly as it is, but commit to start actually dealing with the Category:Articles needing additional categories queue. The thing about this option is that it only works if we actually follow through on that commitment; if we continue to let it just stagnate as a backlog that nobody ever actually deals with, then we haven't solved the problem.
2. Collapse the "uncategorized articles", "uncategorized stubs" and "articles needing additional categories" queues into a single "articles that aren't sufficiently categorized" queue. This would have the benefit of keeping all of the project's work in one spot instead of dividing it up into three different piles. I know that traditionally they've been viewed as being three different priority levels, but frankly that's bullpuckey — for one thing, as I've already noted, a significant number of the articles in the "additional categories" queue are actually full uncats. And for another, there isn't actually any discernible or legitimate difference in priority between an article with no categories on it at all, one with a stub template but no content categories and one whose only content category is Category:Living people; they're all equal in priority.
3. Set a target whereby any backlogged monthly "additional categories" queue older than X number of months gets culled, such that any existing categories would be removed so that the page can be swapped back into the uncats queue. This would certainly not be my preference, because it verges on being disruptive, but I'm certainly willing to consider doing it anyway if the backlog doesn't start getting dealt with through more productive means.

The bottom line, however, is that we cannot ignore the queue or deem it to be a low priority; one way or another, it needs to be dealt with. Bearcat (talk) 04:04, 20 July 2011 (UTC) Category:Articles needing additional categories Now has a backlog of 2000 articles. Boleyn (talk) 14:08, 1 April 2013 (UTC) Once again, a reminder to everyone involved in this project that we must also deal with Category:Articles needing additional categories. That category is currently backlogged all the way to August of last year. Bearcat (talk) 06:04, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

YET AGAIN a reminder to everyone involved in this project that we MUST also deal with Category:Articles needing additional categories. That category is currently backlogged more than a year, with only three months having been cleared out since the last time I posted a reminder ten months ago. Bearcat (talk) 02:19, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

As of now, the backlog is 3,100 articles. – wbm1058 (talk) 22:36, 23 April 2017 (UTC)