Wikipedia talk:Cleanup sorting

message: 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)
replies: text: We can just transclude all the categories into the same WikiProject. Alba 15:45, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Leveraging WikiProjects 

message: * 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)
thread_title:  Interfacing with others: [[User:Gnome (Bot)]] 

message: 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)
thread_title: Interfacing with others: [[User:Mathbot]] 

message: Check this, will you, Beland? Alba 21:47, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks good to me. -- Beland 03:46, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments on the template

message: ====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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Some more notes

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Off-topic links

message: 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)
thread_title: Progress report

message: 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)
thread_title: Usability: excellent

message: 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)
thread_title: Wikification: Houston, we have a problem

message: * 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)
thread_title: False positives list

message: 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)
thread_title: Extension: need to check for other sections to create

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

text: 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)
replies: text:  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)
thread_title:  Sections: He's dead, Jim 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Latest round of updates

message: 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)
thread_title: Geography

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Category for bot-PNA pages

message: 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)
replies: text: A convenient way to compare section sizes is to do a "dif" on a Pearle edit compared to an earlier version.  For instance,  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)
thread_title: Possible improvements to bot

message: 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)
thread_title:  Current template for modifying PNA subpages 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Summary needed

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Military 

message: 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  or styleguide or somesuch? >Radiant< 17:04, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  Implemented 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Education 

message: 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)
thread_title: Organized labour

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