Wikipedia talk:Cleanup sorting

Some background and history of proposals can be found at Wikipedia:Cleanup sorting/History.

Leveraging WikiProjects

Is a great idea in general, but doing so successfully will mean structuring the process so as to make it easier for them, in particular in terms of how the sorting categories are constructed. For example, WP:PNA currently had "Military History", "Military history", "Military", and "War" categories, even though there's only a single active WikiProject dealing with all of these. Combining them into a single category may make the sorting scheme less "correct", but would make it much easier for the project to focus on the relevant articles. Kirill Lokshin 13:43, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

We can just transclude all the categories into the same WikiProject. Alba 15:45, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Somehow, I don't think that transcluding a bunch of massive and poorly organized lists into a project will get you quite the reaction you're looking for ;-) Kirill Lokshin 16:30, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Comments from early robot-based implementation

Attention proposal #3: PNA as subject-specific cleanup one-stop shopping

OK, I think all we humans will need to do is purge PNA's existing untagged entries, and set up a few pointers for each section. I will be able to write a bot to take care of the actual sorting of articles.

To be specific, editors will need to:

• Merge and split sections as necessary.Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Mathematical_and_Natural_Sciences#Ecology_and_Agriculture
• List appropriate projects from Wikipedia:List of WikiProjects. If there is no applicable project, you can write a note saying so, or merge with a related section.
• List appropriate categories from Category:Stub categories.
• Remove listings that have been adequately fixed.
• Move any remaining comments to talk pages, making sure that the article is tagged {{XXX-stub}}, {{cleanup}}, {{expand}}, or {{expert}} if appropriate. Also make sure that these articles have been properly categorized in the regular categorization scheme. (E.g. agriculture articles should be in Category:Agriculture or a subcategory, etc.)
• Create empty (unless there are remaining listings to put there) cleanup, expansion, and expert sections for the bot to fill in later.
• List the main category or categories for this topic. The bot will look here in and all subcategories to find any articles that have been tagged.
• Transclude the subpage in the appropriate WikiProject(s).

I did this for the Agriculture section already:

• Agriculture did not have a WikiProject, so I merged it with Ecology, which does.
• Add all the agriculture and ecology stubs and WikiProjects
• Tag one article as an agriculture-stub (only tagged as job-stub) and move the expansion request to its talk page.
• Add World Food Programme to Category:Agriculture, since it wasn't there. Tag it for expansion and move the expansion request to its talk page. Move its entry to the expansion section.
• Three articles have since been fixed, so remove them from the list.

You can see the result at Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Mathematical_and_Natural_Sciences#Ecology_and_Agriculture. I need other people to help do this for the other sections, since I don't have time to do all that work myself. But I'm already working on the sorting and bot code that will be necessary to finish the job. Here's what I am planning on doing:

• {{attention}} will be obsoleted. All of these articles will be re-tagged {{cleanup-date}}.
• All articles tagged for cleanup will continue being auto-tagged by Pearle with {{cleanup-date}}.
• {{expansion}} and {{expert}} tags will remain as-is.
• Any article with a cleanup, expansion, or expert tag, will be added to a list in the appropriate subsection. This list will be automatically updated as tags are added and removed from articles.
• The bot will make a list of tagged articles that have not been allocated to a "leftovers" section.
• Leftovers might just need to be added to the right topical category. For example, if someone created an article on "Rice agriculture" but it wasn't in Category:Agriculture, it wouldn't get auto-listed in the right section.
• If there are a significant number of "leftover" articles on the same subject, a new section could be created, or a "category covered" added to an existing section. For example, if there's a bunch of articles on stars, Category:Stars might be added to the "categories covered" list of the "Astronomy" section. I think the most important thing is that each section be "adopted" by a WikiProject.

If we do it this way, after the initial purge, humans will only have to sort groups of articles, not individual ones. They can also continue tagging and untagging using the existing templates they know and love. And we can also add "minor" cleanup tags to the PNA lists later without creating a whole new class of templates.

-- Beland 03:22, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

A few significant points:

• PNA has a complex structure. The correct page to edit is Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Environment, not Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Mathematical_and_Natural_Sciences#Environment as one would naively assume. It's linked that way in the main PNA page, too. Do we want to keep that structure (probably aids loading time by keeping the pages <32 kb)?

• We should use List of stub categories instead of Category:Stub categories; it's much better organized and contains the links to relevant WikiProjects. In fact, we probably should add back-links to the attention categories at the same time.

• I'm for deprecating {{attention}} but where is the notification on the page of its successful sorting? Is the 'leftover' list the only way to tell if and where page X has been sorted? Will the bot create Category:Agriculture pages needing attention?

• There are a large number of stubs and Wikiprojects not currently covered by PNA. Should some of them be added? Or play that by ear as we see what the leftovers list looks like?

I'll start on the PNA conversion -- anyone with me? Alba 23:46, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

I have taken the liberty of changing the page subject heading in a few cases (Archaeology being the one I first noticed) to use === === format heads as when "included" in the associated WikiProject main page the result was

Pages needing attention and

Archaeology and Anthropology at the same level (as in this example).

I changed it to produce a subhead as below.

Pages needing attention and

Archaeology and Anthropology at the next lower level

Hope I hav'n't spoiled anything. :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 09:48, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me. Let's make sure all PNA sections are at === level or below. Alba 15:01, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Proposal #3 implementation tests

Pearle has updated Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Ecology and Agriculture. (Yay!) Notes and replies:

• You'll need to add the HTML comment <!-- BOT INSERTS CONTENT HERE --> right above the Cleanup line in order for Pearle to update the subpage.
• Yes, Pearle knows that WP:PNA is composed of subpages, and reads from and writes to them accordingly. It would be good to keep them as subpages so that they can be transcluded into affilitated WikiProjects.
• The articles listed are based on a database dump, which in this case is from 26 March 2006. Any changes since then will not be reflected in the lists. (Sorry.)
• Pearle looks at the categories under "Categories covered" and subcategories and grandsubcategories, but no further. Anything more than that seems to drift off-topic. Please let me know if you see off-topic results.
• The list of articles for cleanup is somewhat long (we have a big backlog). Should we make sub-sub-pages for the combined cleanup/expansion/expert list, or leave them as is? Alternatively, we could break PNA into more than four "main" pages.
• No, Pearle does not create any categories. No tags are added or changed when PNA is updated; Pearle creates the list based on existing tags, and that's it.
• Backlinks from List of stub categories sounds like an excellent idea.
• I'm all for adding all stub categories and WikiProjects. Part of the reason the cleanup backlog has gotten so big is that people interested in smaller topics haven't been able to find the articles they are interested in that need them. In some sense, each active WikiProject deserves a PNA subpage, to help it keep track of related articles in need of attention.
• I haven't yet bothered calculating the list of "leftover" articles, since so far we only have one section converted (and thus it would be over 10,000 articles long).
• With regard to articles currently tagged {{attention}}, there's no guarantee that they are currently on PNA, and most articles tagged {{cleanup}} certainly aren't. But yes, the "leftover" list would be the only easy way to see which articles have been left off PNA.

-- Beland 04:19, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Replies to replies:

• I only see one oddity so far: Solar panels on spacecraft. Everything else seems reasonably on target... so no real false positives. But what about false negatives? I'm concerned that some categories may have deeper category trees than others.
• I suspect we'll be rearranging PNA in any case. I really like the idea of having one-stop shopping for lists of problem articles via PNA, but a couple of suggested additional modifiers:
  • Should we include portals as well? I notice WP:ARCHAEO has an associated Portal:Archaeology...
  • Having a seperate page for expert attention may be a good idea anyway, as it would help the article quality gang attract outside experts. It's much easier to be a volunteer if your task list is automatically generated for you and served on a platter. (Well, of course, that's the whole idea behind cleanup sorting anyway.)
• My point on the list/category/whatever was that I wish there was a reverse link from (article X, sorted into PNA/topic Y) to the page (WP:PNA/topic Y). Whether this is a link, a box, a category, or whatever... would this be worthwhile? I'm not sure it's worth the work but it might be nice. Alba 15:34, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean to do with Portals, clean themup or post the cleanup notices in them?

Neither one, just list them as I did on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Astronomy. Alba 21:05, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Are you aware that the link to "Archaeology" PNA page is broken, This is because you have included "Anthropology" in the heading. No I can see why Anthropo9logy in included as candidates for cleanups on the page, but not why it is included in the heading. They are different things. In fact who decides whether a "science" is a "Mathematical and Natural Sciences" or "Social sciences and humanities" as one is the first and the second in the second. :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 15:47, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, we'll have to go back and fix the main PNA page once we've done the conversion. Alba 21:05, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

One more thing now this is begining to find pages to work on - I find the link between Archaeology and Anthropology articles, at least based on the one found so far, very artificial. Just have a look at the mix. As part of Archaeology we would be mystrified if presented with this list to work on. And we would never get to a point of "completion" as many are quite outside our expertise. Can I suggest some sort of Arch & Anth split here, thanks :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 11:48, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Done. There was already an existing Anthropology page (under Social Sciences). The organization of PNA was already overly complex, and during this transition is becoming rather chaotic. -R. S. Shaw 18:24, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

This is looking very promising. -- Visviva 16:39, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

It does look promising. Some points:

1. About half a dozen listings seemed fairly off-topic to me (which I'll post on your talk, Beland), but I would ascribe most of that to quirks or problems of the particular categorizations used. Unless a problem becomes more apparent, I'd suggest no modification. If needed, a fix less severe than eliminating use of grandsubcategories entirely, would be to eliminate them only when the sub-/grandsub-category is listed in a "large" number of supercategories.
2. I like the general approach of Pearle changing only the list (PNA) pages. Keeps the bot simple and modifiable, and keeps it from interfering with the articles directly. Also probably less of a load on the system.
3. Alba, you already have a "reverse link" from the article: the What links here utility in the toolbox on the left will list the referencing PNA page. In most cases this list will be short enough to spot the "Wikipedia:Pages needing attention" entry easily.
4. There seems to be some merit in putting the "Expert attention needed" list onto a separate page, exactly so that that page can be presented to experts who are not necessarily obsessed with fixing zillions of pages. The page will be short (just 3 for the Ecology trial), but that's good. It can be linked to from a Portal or other relevant spot to attract the real experts.
5. The length of the Ecology trial list doesn't seem overly long (in the situation). It's around 100 cleanup pages plus around 15 expand/expert pages. Note with 14000 cleanup tags we'll need 140 PNA pages to keep the list size down around this level (more probably, because of duplicate listings).

Thanks for diving into this, Beland. -R. S. Shaw 21:56, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

---

• Now done: Astronomy, Archaeology/Anthropology, Ecology/Agriculture, Environment, Chemistry/Chemicals. The last is an additional test; we need to know how to deal with sub-topics -- especially since there will be "general science" stubs that don't fit into the listed categories, a group *above* the ones we're testing now.
• Biology is converted. Since I won't touch Mathematics (see below) that leaves only Computer science in the natural science set. Alba 20:49, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Interfacing with others: User:Gnome (Bot)

• Beland, you may want to talk more with User:Eagle 101, whose User:Gnome (Bot) is going to make a go at partially automating the assignment of categories to cleanup pages that need it. Perhaps it should attack your 'leftovers' list? Alba 06:07, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
• (Do so. -- Beland 03:49, 15 April 2006 (UTC))

Interfacing with others: User:Mathbot

It turns out that PNA/Mathematics already has a janitor bot, User:Mathbot. Obviously we should let it continue to do its yeoman's work; should we actively cooperate as well? Alba 00:48, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

• Oof. I'm tempted to skip this one entirely, but I will at some point look at it in detail and think about issues of redundancy, uniformity, and integration... -- Beland 03:49, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Comments on the template

Check this, will you, Beland? Alba 21:47, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Looks good to me. -- Beland 03:46, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

• I'm removing the "experimental redesign" warning; now we can start to put that on the top of the meta-page, I think. I also added wikification and NPOV sections. -- Beland 17:47, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

• No longer an experiment, true, but we need it on the subpages so that I don't get horrified messages from WikiProject maintainers crying "what have you done, you out-of-control maniac! have you discussed this with anyone???" and I say, "yes, over 50 kilobytes' worth". Alba 13:23, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Some more notes

Off-topic links

These were identified as off-topic by R. S. Shaw in the Ecology trial: Collective intelligence, Cuticle (via cats Plant Anat, Botany, Ag), Homo erectus soloensis, Prehensile tail, Polymer fume fever, Scale height, SL-1, Solar panels on spacecraft

Based on these results, I think what I will do is reduce coverage from sub-sub-categories to sub-categories only. There will still be some borderline inclusions, but I think we'll just have to accept those as tangentially related to the topic. Thanks for pointing these out. -- Beland 03:49, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Before long people are going to want better control over what categories feed into a PNA page, I think. The category system is not systematic, and it changes. I think a simple rule like "to sub-sub-cats" isn't going to be too workable. Maybe Pearle can accept some syntax to direct its category inclusion. For instance, it could allow a "Categories covered" entry to be optionally followed by a specifier of how many levels of sub-cats should be included. Like "Category:Ecology {2 levels}" (or whatever syntax you like) meaning that only articles in Ecology and its immediate subcats should be included. The default when unspecified can be whatever seems best, probably {3 levels}. -R. S. Shaw 19:41, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Progress report

OK, Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Mathematical and Natural Sciences is now pretty much being auto-updated. (Thanks so much to everyone who's been helping with the upgrade!) I've skipped mathematics for now, because there's already a bot doing updates for that topic. It's more comprehensive than what Pearle is doing right now. We'll probably want to come back and combine output formats. I suppose we should have links to "how to tag articles for this problem" from Pearle output, and the Mathbot output should probably be made more concise. (Though it might be a good idea to wait a bit and see what format editors prefer.)

Actually, both Mathematics and Computer Science still need manually-listed articles purged. Please leave any articles that still need to be fixed but the bot hasn't picked up on a manually update list, so I can check up on them. (But move comments to talk pages, and remove already-fixed articles.)

The other main pages:

• Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Applied Arts and Sciences
• Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Culture and Fine Arts
• Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Social Sciences and Philosophy

...still need to be purged and converted to the new format. Were any interesting lessons learned from converting the first page? -- Beland 21:38, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Usability: excellent

I think, as far as our goals are concerned, we have a winner. Just looking over the lists for verification purposes, I saw three articles I could (and did!) fix. Having interesting articles to work on really encourages the work. So I'm quite hopeful we'll get a positive response in the coming days.

We've had one request already, to split Archaeology and Anthropology again. There is an Anthropology section under Applied Arts; however, it has no WikiProject, as previously noted. What are we to do?

• Well, if it helps motivate people to fix articles, we can split. (I guess this is an indication that people are actually paying attention and will be helping with cleanup of their favorite topics, yay.) We can either leave the section as "unadopted", or make it "semi-adopted" by a broader WikiProject, like Wikipedia:WikiProject Science. Instead of transcluding the whole page, we can simply put a link that says that this topic has not been "adopted" by any active WikiProject. -- Beland 21:34, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
  • PNA-sorting should not have too much emphasis on WikiProjects, IMO. It's great if a WikiProject aligns with a PNA group, and we should cross-link them. But I think we should generally let WikiProject members decide whether (and where) to transclude PNA pages (although in very clear cases it's fine to be bold).
  • Also, it's still quite useful to have bot-generated PNA lists even where there is currently no relevant WikiProject. People can (and do) access the PNA to find interesting things to fix. The bot-lists are way better than Category:Cleanup; I hated wading through the fancruft and such there; I'm never going back. -R. S. Shaw 19:20, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikification: Houston, we have a problem

Quick perusal of the wikification hits on the Astronomy subpage reveals a large number of false positives. Investigation is warranted. Alba 02:57, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

• I've noticed this problem also, on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Computer science. Excluding the simply out-of-date wikification listings (due to Pearle running off of the 26Mar06 database dump), I've noticed that all of the problem wikification listings I've investigated include one of these tags: wikiquote, wikinews, wikibooks, or wikisource. This suggests that Pearle is seeing "{wiki" and assuming it means "{wikify}". -R. S. Shaw 20:39, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
• That is exactly what was happening. I have revised the algorithm to fix that problem, and also to add articles to be merged and split. Good catch! -- Beland 21:19, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

False positives list

• Astronomy cleanup: Don Sweeney, István Szabó, Objectivist politics
• Astronomy wikification: all incorrect except:
  • Outer space, which belongs under cleanup (false negative)
  • Space capsule
• Astronomy neutrality: Claremont Riding Academy

Similar extremely high false positive rates are found in other wikification sections as well. Alba 03:13, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

• OK, the fix noted in the previous section should fix the wikification problems. The problem with astronomy was a bad link on Portal:Astronomy/Things you can do, which is transcluded into the portal page we have listed. It was causing all articles tagged for wikification to be pulled in. I fixed the link, so these should go away on the next update. -- Beland 21:59, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Extension: need to check for other sections to create

There's a good chance that PNA is currently incomplete. Certainly all the geography-related WikiProjects are not currently covered. We will need to go through the lists of portals and wikiprojects to sure maximum coverage. But that's a task for after we convert the current sets. Alba 03:23, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Sections: He's dead, Jim

Pearle totally killed sectioning. Is this what we want? How will we decide to split up pages? Alba 03:32, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Clarification: There can be only one PNA-sorting group per PNA subpage because the bot will erase everything from the "Cleanup needed" bullet to the end of the page. Thus a case like PNA/Chemistry, which had two sections (Chemistry and Chemicals), will cause loss of all but the first section. I feel I can live with this, but it is important to be aware of it. -R. S. Shaw 20:39, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Too large: Biology, Computer science, and Physics all have >>100 cleanup articles. At what point do we decide to split? How will this be accomplished? Alba 04:08, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

A test: Transport is now done itself as subpages. Can we run this the way you did the science page, with leftovers at the bottom? Alba 15:08, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

• Oops, I should have noticed the Chemistry/Chemicals problem, since I fiddled with that myself. Pearle only tries to auto-update second-level pages. I've turn the Chemicals, History of Science, and all subdivisions of Transport into second-level pages to show what I mean. If second-level sections are getting long enough that they need third-level subsections, it's probably time to consider promoting them top-level sections, listed on WP:PNA directly. Otherwise, the top-level pages are going to be too long. (They are already getting that way, and it's only going to get worse as we add neglected topic areas.) -- Beland 21:50, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Latest round of updates

Wow, that sure did reduce the number of articles to be wikified. And boy are there are lot of articles to be merged. I guess it helps that to-be-wikified articles generally don't have categories yet, and finding overlapping articles in the same category is a common reason that articles get tagged for merger.

I figured out why Quantum electrodynamics wasn't being listed for expansion in the physics section. I had never provided a way for talk pages to "inherit" categories from the corresponding article pages. The fix for this should be implemented, but it makes regeneration take a lot longer. I will do another update as soon as it's debugged and reconstructed, and QED should pop back into the Physics section. (And you should see a raft of talk pages being added to expansion lists everywhere.) Hopefully not too many people are fixing articles and manually removing listings yet (and having them re-added by these incessant bot updates). -- Beland 02:54, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Will the article be listed twice, once for itself and once for its talk page? Or will there be something like Quantum electrodynamics (talk)? Or will just the article be listed? Alba 04:58, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

It gets listed once, as Talk:Quantum electrodynamics, since I wanted to make it clear that this is the page that is flagged for attention. I have just done a test run for talk page inclusion on the Physics section, and it seems to be working well. Boy, there are a lot of talk pages flagged for attention. A new database dump is in progress, so I'll wait a bit to update the other sections so as not to overwrite manual edits with stale data. -- Beland 15:09, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Re Pearle Talk processing: Noticed a problem that "{cleanup taskforce closed|" is being treated as a {cleanup}, even though it is like a deleted {cleanup}. Saw it on this and on another page. Also noticed that <nowiki> is being ignored, but since this will have an effect only very rarely, I suggest not bothering with it. -R. S. Shaw 18:00, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Both should be fixed not in the update that's running today, but the next one. Thanks for noticing those. -- Beland 23:59, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Geography

Note: I have removed Geography from the Applied Arts and Sciences page: it got too big too darn fast. Europe and the Americas still to do. The world is a big place, folks. Alba 21:12, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Category for bot-PNA pages

Should there be a category for the sorting-bot-processed Pages needing attention subpages? It might be useful for humans as well as for Pearle. For humans, it would be a list of all single-topic (lowest-level) pages, which could be convenient for browsing and other purposes. For bots, it might be a way to know which pages should be processed (I don't know how that's driven currently). Because of the latter, the Mathematics PNAs should be excluded, since a different page format is used (a supercat could include both for humans).

If there is to be a cat, it might be best if Pearle generated the [[Category:xxx]] text. This is because other bots and people go around moving such Cat lines to the end of pages. Thus Pearle must put it there, since it always chomps off and replaces the end of these PNA pages. (For an initial version of a page, the human editor would place it there so that Pearle can find it.) A name for the cat might be something like "Wikipedia cleanup sorting pages". -R. S. Shaw 02:59, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Since there are so many of them, I don't think it would be a bad idea... at least I can't think of any objections. Alba 15:11, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Possible improvements to bot

Stub category expansion: It seems tht Pearle does not look for subcategories of stub categories to classify pages. (E.g. Category:Technological company stubs has PNAs which are not listed in PNA/Business, which lists parent cat Category:Company stubs.) Doing this would be desirable since some stub hierarchies are large. It's even safer than normal Category subcat inclusion, since the stub hierarchies are usually pure, so all descendents normally warrant inclusion. -R. S. Shaw 19:34, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Generation date: It might be handy (and clue-in some people) if Pearle emitted the date of the database dump it was working from in front (or behind) its other stuff, e.g. These links were assembled by bot as of 26 Apr 2006. -R. S. Shaw 21:41, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Delta since last update: Now that we've split everything up, it's hard to tell if we're making progress or not. Could Pearle store the number of items in the section from the last run and calculate the delta (plus or minus) since last update, so we know if each section needs more or less attention? Feedback cycles help responses in dynamic systems.... Alba 16:44, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

A convenient way to compare section sizes is to do a "dif" on a Pearle edit compared to an earlier version. For instance, [1] shows 36 vs. 35 cleanup items for Classical Physics. A Pearle-generated delta would only show the difference from the previous Pearle run, which is an arbitrary period (and probably not long enough for real trend-spotting). -R. S. Shaw 17:43, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Current template for modifying PNA subpages

Am confused on how I can go about leveraging the power of this into our new WP:Firefly. Looks like I need to add a subpage called Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Firefly but I wasn't sure if the template under the subhead "Current template for modifying PNA subpages" was the most recent? Thanks! plange 06:54, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Summary needed

I have some interest in helping with this, but the front page needs a summary to outline the current status, instructions and categories. Maurreen 17:51, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the project page is messy and almost stream-of-consciousness. I've added a summary section at the front. I'm sure it can be improved. (Really, the whole page needs splitting and rewriting. Does this even belong as a subpage of Cleanup process?) Please discuss questions, ideas. There are few people active in this area. -R. S. Shaw 04:06, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. The summary helps. I tried doing something like this by hand maybe nine months ago, but I didn't get very far. Maurreen 05:05, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Artists

I'm trying this at Artists subpage. If somebody could check my work, I'd appreciate it. Maurreen 05:05, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

The body for the Artists section you've set up is basically fine, however there's a overall structural aspect to handle. I see that the page Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Culture and Arts as it stands is one big thing with inline sections. This has to become (when fully converted) a series of transcluded (sub)subpages. This is because each topical area has to have its own page, since the bot will replace all content after the first "BOT INSERTS CONTENT HERE".

A straight across setup for this instance would have a page named Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Artists with the wikitext you created, and in place of that text in Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Culture and Arts there would be a transclusion of it, thus: {{Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Artists}}.

I think it might be good if before going too far some thought were given to the structure desired. In particular, how should topical areas be grouped? If you look at the 3 other major areas already done on PNA, you can see there are often 2 nested levels present. For instance, Computing, Health Science, and Transport each have subpages of their own (Anatomy, Medicine, etc). Maybe Culture and Arts doesn't need any, at least for a first cut, but it's something to be aware of.

One note: you removed the "Do not add text below this point" message. It's OK if you make that message non-visible by making it a HTML comment, but it probably should not be removed completely. It's intended to be a message to anybody who happens to edit the PNA/Artists page in the future, say to add a cleanup listing for an article in the old, pre-robot, PNA manner. Below that point it will get thrown away by the bot.

About content: I think you should leave the Portal:Arts out of this topic (and all topics). This is because the portal has too broad a set of categories listed (including poetry, comics, typography, Reggae, ...). You have to check content of portals for problems like this.

Enough for now. -R. S. Shaw 08:55, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

OK, thank you, I'll work on digesting this. Maurreen 14:06, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Hey Maurreen, glad you're on this! I was coming here too to figure out how to leverage this for Biography - was thinking it would be great to have one for each discipline (like you have with Artists), I'll work on doing politicians as another test. plange 03:41, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Maurreen, I did it for you -- I moved it to a fresh page called Arts and Entertainment....plange 03:19, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. This seems a little complicated. Maurreen 04:45, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Now we just have to wait for the bot to run (whenever that is) plange 05:30, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Politicians

I see there's a Politicians page but am unsure if this was converted to the bot process? When was the last time it ran, if so. Also, is it okay if I modify what categories and stubs it's using? This is on behalf of WikiProject Biography...plange 03:47, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

You can tell that it has been converted to new format and that the bot has been run by the bullet lines like "Cleanup needed (updated by bot)". To find when the bot was run, look at the page History for the latest edit by "Pearle" (which is the bot). (I've requested the bot be updated to put the date of the wikipedia image on the page, but that has not happened [yet]). Yes, thoughtful changes to cats and stub-cats would be good. Note the broader the set of cats, the longer and less selective the list will become. -R. S. Shaw 20:03, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, and is it okay to create subsets, i.e. American politicians, when/if the main politicians one gets too big? Also, I would love to be able to transclude just the bot list generated instead of the stuff at top too (that lists all the categories and stubs) - Is that possible? plange 20:06, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Page reorganizations are fine. New pages should always be at the first level under PNA, e.g. PNA/AmerPols; it's okay to transclude them in any hierarchy/nesting you want, despite the first level name, e.g. from within PNA/Politicians. PNA/Politicians doesn't seem too big, but PNA/People is probably way too big now (1300 cleanups), although maybe not much can be done about it.

I'd guess the transclude mechanism can only do whole pages, not sections, in which case you'd be out of luck since the bot requires the cat lists be on the same page as the resulting cleanup lists. (By the way, the new section named "List" you put in is a bit of an experiment. I'd guess the bot won't choke on it, but we won't know until a run is made.) -R. S. Shaw 21:48, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Military

I redid military so we could have a subset of military people -- I followed how the other ones did it, hope that's okay. How do I get the bot to come by the new page? plange 02:51, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Offhand, the changes look ok. To get a bot run, you'll need to contact user:Beland on his talk page. -R. S. Shaw 04:27, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Implemented

Oops, I mistook the lack of talk here for lack of interest, when it in fact seems to mean lack of opposition. If this is actively being used, are there any objections to renaming it (so it's no longer a proposal) and tagging it {{guideline}} or styleguide or somesuch? >Radiant< 17:04, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

It does seem it should be renamed/moved, although to just what isn't clear to me. I think most people come to this from the Wikipedia:Pages needing attention direction (which is where it is implemented), so maybe is should be a subpage of that. (Being a subpage might hide it among the content subpages of WP:PNA, but that doesn't seem like too big a drawback.) Very unclear to me what class it should be labelled as; maybe it would be a guideline, but not sure. -R. S. Shaw 01:49, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

• I'd say move to Wikipedia:Cleanup sorting and tag as {{guideline}} and put it in the maintenance cat. >Radiant< 21:04, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that, Radiant. The body needs considerable revision, which I'll work on but it will take some time. Some of the older stuff I'll put off onto a /History subpage. -R. S. Shaw 23:38, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Education

It appears that this area "Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Education" needs some attention as there is a dupe set generated by the bot?

BTW (and as a "newbie") I've read everything on this talk page but still do not not know whether this "project" is even functioning as planned?

In any case, hope this message is of some help? RCEberwein 22:32, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Education page seems to be fine. I guess you thought there might be a problem because the guideline says there can be only one template-structure per page. The thing is, which needs to be covered, is that pages like /Education just transclude the bot-processed pages, so they in fact have no templates on them. "Functioning as planned": not fully, mainly because not all PNA pages have been converted yet. Most that have been converted are pretty much operational. -R. S. Shaw 21:15, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Organized labour

I have set up an Organized labour sub-page, and plan to include it in the WP:UNION project page after it has been updated. --Bookandcoffee 20:32, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Historical?

It seems that this page has not been edited for a year; it seems to be a proposal that was never implemented. If anybody is still watching this page, would you object to flagging it as {{historical}}?

For a related attempt to generate cleanup listings, seee User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings. --B. Wolterding (talk) 11:24, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

• Flagging it now. --B. Wolterding (talk) 22:41, 16 June 2008 (UTC)