Category talk:Articles needing cleanup

message: See discussion at Wikipedia talk:Cleanup. -- Beland 07:00, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Concern over cleanup rate

message: So I just terminated March 2005.  Do I delete the page now or what exactly?  Kaisershatner 20:43, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I figured it out, I think, at WP:CSD it says four days of being empty is the standard.  Kaisershatner 14:10, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Deleting a page

message: The number of articles with dated cleanup tags has gone up by around a thousand in a month, but the percentage of articles with cleanup tags has remained more or less the same. Seems articles in need of cleanup (or are detected as such) are added at the same rate as new articles! However, if May ends up being anything like April that might change--there's a ridiculous number of articles in need of cleanup that are tagged for April. 2442! S'crazy! Tamarkot 22:53, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: A curiosity

message: We tagged 2200 articles for cleanup in eight days???  Ideogram 19:05, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No.  Pearle didn't do a sweep through  tagged articles through early June, so a bunch of articles piled up in :Category:Wikipedia cleanup, and then we got them all dropped in here at once.  That said, we did tag 2900 articles in under a month; this whole accelerating rate of growth thing could get problematic sort of quickly if it keeps up.  --RobthTalk 04:42, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I noticed that Pearle wasn't doing anything, so I put Alphachimpbot to work. He flagged something like over 1500 articles in the last 5 days. That's why it suddenly looks bad. --Alphachimp talk 05:44, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  2200 articles??? 

message: I've written a bot, User:CbmBOT, that will automatically calculate how many articles there are remaining for each month and output the wikitable code. Currently it doesn't automatically update the page (it's pending approval on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval), but I've been using the output to update the table.
I don't know if people from this talk page would have any sway either way, but if so, please let me know what you think (ie. on the RfA page). –Dvandersluis 04:17, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: nah, this is a good venue. There just aren't enough changes or questions here for anyone to really pay attention. Alphachimp talk 17:32, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of Articles Remaining table 

message: An editor just added stuff saying don't just delete {cleanup} but replace it with {cleaned} (which leaves a box on it and puts the page in :Category:Pages in need of review).  This doesn't seem to have been discussed and seems like not too good a procedure.  We don't need extra process for the 18,000 pages needing cleaning; we need to clean them.  I'm removing the changes for now. -R. S. Shaw 19:30, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. –Dvandersluis 12:43, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  {cleaned} tag etc 

message: The main problem is that people tend to overuse the cleanup tag for articles that are correct and make sense to almost all users. At this rate, there will be millions of backlogged articles. I say scrap the tag and make editors DIY. Someone dedicated to making your day a little bit better! 14:07, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree; there are lots of articles tagged for cleanup that have obvious problems.  Articles that are actually OK are the easy ones to deal with - just remove the tag and request that anyone re-adding it clarify why they think it is necessary. -- Beland (talk) 01:06, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  God Help Us! 

message: It seems that some months have gone up in numbers, rather than down.  People must be adding tags for older dates in order to get their article to the backlog quicker.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mynameisnotpj (talk • contribs) 11:57, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Increase in cleanup articles? 

message: Month         	# of Articles
June 2006     	
July 2006     	
August 2006   	
September 2006	
October 2006  	
November 2006 	
December 2006 	
January 2007  	
February 2007 	
March 2007    	
April 2007    	
May 2007      	
June 2007     	
July 2007     	
August 2007   	
September 2007	
October 2007  	
November 2007 	
December 2007 	
January 2008  	
February 2008 	
March 2008    	
April 2008    	
May 2008      	
June 2008     	
Total:        	
Note: the total is off because some templates place articles into general category, but not monthly categories. Renata (talk) 02:12, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Auto generated category statistics

message: Why is there such a significant increase in pages needing cleanup from 30000+ to 60000+?Wai Hong (talk) 06:41, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The format of the page changed sometime between the bot running on July 3rd and 4th, the result of which being that each Cleanup from X category now has two links to it (the category text itself and the + symbol before it). The bot was just looking for links in the form of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cleanup_from_[month]_[year]", and was thus pulling in each category twice, which is why the stats were all doubled. The bot has been fixed now and I re-ran it, as well, so the stats should once again be accurate. —Daniel Vandersluis(talk) 16:17, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Jump in pages needing cleanup

message: Is there any way to tell who has been cleaning up these articles and removing them from the Cleanup lists? Unschool (talk) 04:21, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who's doing the work? 

message: You might have noticed that the bot hasn't been updating the page for the last few days. While the bot has actually been running, for some reason its edits haven't made it through to wikipedia. I have updated the bot so that it works again, and have run it for today; normal execution should resume tomorrow morning.
Note that I have also moved the bot over to run on StatisticianBot. This change was supposed to occur when StatistianBot was approved but I never got around to making the change; however, now that I've been working on the bot, I transferred the task over. This won't have any affect on the task other than the username differing. —Daniel Vandersluis(talk) 21:51, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bot back up and running 

message: Does anybody know why we have both :Category:Articles needing cleanup and :Category:Wikipedia articles needing cleanup? Are they duplicate categories populated by different templates? - Eureka Lott 20:23, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes they are. I have merged them from today. Rich Farmbrough, 21:58, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Duplicate? 

message: Hi, I don't know if this is the right place to write, because no-one has posted here since 2011, but.. how do we choose which tags get articles listed in cleanup, and who chooses them? "Neutral"/"verify" do not, for instance, but "bare urls" does. I ask because I would be in favour of getting the "bare urls" tag to send articles to a different place. I am looking for articles to do a more thorough cleanup (for example, what used to be called wikify) as these are the articles that make the encyclopaedia look worse. I understand that bare urls are a problem which need to be fixed but I don't see them as cleanup jobs in the same category. And yet so many of the articles listed here are simply bare url problems, more so as time goes on, it seems. It makes it harder to find articles needing more serious cleanup, and skews the stats about the cleanup backlog. Is there any way this can be changed? If people agree, of course.. Jdcooper (talk) 21:19, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bare urls 

message: This is ridiculous. There are 20,000 articles needing cleanup. That's insane. There's backlogs from TEN YEARS AGO! How is this possible? I feel like nobody is even checking this list- just tagging and tagging, without ever fixing anything. There's not even that many in the super-long-time-ago sections, which means that nobody is checking this at a good rate. I drilled through about 10 articles in about two hours. Most of them are near fixed, just need to remove the tag and do a little bit of rephrasing and CE. Insane.--9563rj (talk) 05:03, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, it's a big backlog, but I seem to remember it being around 25,000 just a few months ago, so it's falling gradually. What do you suggest? Jdcooper (talk) 20:39, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  One thing that could help a lot is to find articles that only need copy editing for grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. The Guild of Copy Editors is looking for more articles to feed its work queue. If that's the only problem, changing the tag from  to  will move it over and get an article fixed faster. -- Beland (talk) 16:54, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Beland, that's a good idea. I tagged a few of the oldest cleanup candidates like that last night. What exactly are the Guild's criteria for articles that come within their area? I remember getting a dressing down from someone a few years ago for sending something to  that was apparently not in a good enough state... Jdcooper (talk) 09:12, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Heh, I've gotten a similar dressing down. 8) It depends on the editor, of course, but the ones that are most picky don't want to get any articles that have other major problems that could cause the text to change, whether that's NPOV problems or even just referencing to be done. What I generally do is only use  if there are no other problem tags that have been or should be applied. -- Beland (talk) 16:27, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, Guild coordinator here. You've got it right. Broadly speaking, we don't want to spend our time editing articles when there are underlying issues (like copyright vios, unreferenced BLPs, proposed for deletion, etc.) that mean the improved text would be unlikely to stick around. Also, the tag would be useless if it was added to any article that was less than perfect, since a large majority of articles (including good and featured articles) could have their prose improved in some way. (We have a Requests page that is designed for people who have an article they especially care about and want to see extra polished.) I'd urge you to take this conversation to our talk page, since, as  notes, we are running low on tagged articles, and no doubt many articles could be switched from "cleanup" to "copy edit" tags. Also, we could always use a reminder to be polite when discussing the use of the copy edit tag with other editors.  Tdslk (talk) 19:49, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Crazy backlog