Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index/Archive 5

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Making the main stats table 2D

Not so long ago all the stats tables for individual projects have become two-dimensional in the sense of displaying quality vs importance data. Only the main table Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics is still 1D. I am considering making it 2D also. That would make it like the other tables, and would be one fewer subroutine for me to maintain.

Of course, the bigger size of the table could be a problem, but from what I saw, it shows up only at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Work via Wikiprojects and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index as transclusion, and there it could be pushed down or up the page so that its width does not cause problems. Any comments about that? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:13, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Out of curiosity: how would it handle articles that had been given different importance ratings by different projects? Such cases are fairly numerous now. Kirill Lokshin 20:25, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Currently, when counting for the big table, if an article was encountered once in a project, it would be ignored when it is encountered second time in another project. That means obviously that the importance data is not perfectly accurate, but this avoids repetitions (when an article is counted twice). I don't see a good way to take into account that an article has different importance ratings in different projects. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:00, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
I generally find that the higher importance rating is for articles within very specific WikiProjects, which can inflate importance that would be given to that article within a general encyclopedia (which the 1.0 release would be). The lower rating is usually given by a wikiproject that is (theoretically) only peripherally interested in the article. I've been guilty of tagging borderline articles for the attention of a WikiProject, usually on the basis that if that WikiProject won't deal with it, no-one else will. I've seen the film WikiProject 'claim' film sections of articles, which is fair enough, but the importance rating will generally relate only to that section, even if the quality rating is for the article as a whole. What happens when quality ratings differ? Carcharoth 12:34, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

"None importance" in cvg

On Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Computer and video game articles by quality statistics, one of the table headers is "None", which uses {{No-Class}}, but actually refers to Category:Unknown-priority computer and video game articles. Since the statistics page is generated by Mathbot, I didn't just want to change it. Would it be ok for me to go ahead and change that label? JACOPLANE • 2007-01-2 18:03

I'm also not exactly sure what it should be replaced with. {{Needed-Class}} ? JACOPLANE • 2007-01-2 18:09
Needed-Class is used by other projects to indicate articles that need to be written. If the text in the table is changed to anything other than None, I would suggest Unknown (or Unk.) similar to the way it says Unassessed in the quality scale. Slambo (Speak) 18:19, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the response. Just to make sure: if I change the label to "Unknown" that won't mess up Mathbot, right? JACOPLANE • 2007-01-2 18:29
My guess is that the next bot run would overwrite the column heading back to what it shows now when it updates the counts in each field. I don't know how much work it would be to make such a change on a project-specific basis (I'm guessing that such a change would be impractical), but if the column label is changed globally... I know in WP:TWP it wouldn't make much difference if it said None or Unknown for that column, but I'm curious about other projects' opinions on this before we advocate such a change. Slambo (Speak) 18:39, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
The bot now treats the "No-importance", "Unknown-importance", "Unassessed-importance", and "Unassigned-importance" as if they were synonymous. That can be changed of course, if there are good reasons for that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:30, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Disambig Pages

Why are there two different templates for the same thing? (Template:Dab-Class and Template:Disambig-Class) Cbrown1023 18:21, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

They're both unofficial—the assessment system doesn't keep track of disambiguation pages—so it doesn't matter too much. I supect we can redirect one to the other with no ill effects. Kirill Lokshin 19:58, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

WP China

Anyone else noticed the monstrous maze of categories created by WP China? For example: Category:Stub-Class China-related articles of High-importance.

Should anyone be in the mood for a mass CFD or indeed a spot of rogue adminship there's a target for you... --kingboyk 19:30, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Eh, unless they're causing problems, I wouldn't bother. If the project in question finds them useful, I see no reason to get rid of them. Kirill Lokshin 19:37, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
I'll bet you a dollar they don't actually find them useful ;) Seemed like a good idea at the time though no doubt.
Seriously, I think it gives the assessment scheme a bad name if it's seen to grow to such ludicrous proportions. Just my 2c. You can have the other 98c later. --kingboyk 19:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
We ought to ask the project about it, at the least.
(Obviously, though, I'm a bit biased; I have my own reasons for not wanting people to start taking an axe to assessment categories. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 19:49, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Their problem, I'd say. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:44, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
'oly 'hit, you guys are insane. :) Titoxd(?!?) 05:52, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Canada template problem

This template has a variable "type", which allows the item to be labeled a temple/list/category. But it doesn't work if its assessed NA-class. See Talk:Lieutenant Governors of Nova Scotia for it working, and Template talk:St. John's landmarks for it not working. Any ideas? - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 01:05, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Trial category intersection

For those wanting to intersect importance and rating (eg. to find all the unassessed top-importance articles in a WikiProject), a trial Category Intersection system is at http://aerik.com/wikintersections.php. Please don't overload it! :-) See Wikipedia talk:Category intersection for details of the person who set that up. Carcharoth 16:04, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh $*%&!! "I'm using a copy of the relevant tables from November, so this isn't live data" - forget that, but hassle whoever can get this system up and running. It would be really good. See what I did at Category:Unassessed Tolkien articles. Carcharoth 16:13, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
Nice. Cbrown1023 18:54, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
The developers are somewhat aware of this work: [1]. Titoxd(?!?) 19:37, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
Would this intersection feature be that useful for this project? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:43, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
It would generate a link for every row/column intersection in the individual project stats tables. WP India asked for that previously, didn't they? Titoxd(?!?) 05:53, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
And WP China seem to be doing by hand (see a few sections above). Carcharoth 23:23, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
The reason I want this is that if you look at the stats box currently transcluded at the top right on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Middle-earth, you can see that we made an initial pass over the ~1200 articles to find around 330 that are of top, high and mid importance. Most of the other 870 or so are of low importance or perma-stubs that will be merged. Picking out these articles as a priority was easier than assessing them at the same time, though with hindsight assessing both importance and class at the same time would have been best. Anyway, the situation yesterday was that we had 969 unassessed articles, and I wanted to pick out from those the ones that had been rated important, without wasting time by clicking on the already assessed ones. I eventually did a manual intersection using Excel to compare lists from the unassessed category and the importance category. The result was the lists at Wikipedia:WikiProject Middle-earth/Assessment/Current work. I would have much preferred not to do those lists manually (it only took 30 minutes or so), as an intersection would allow people to work on the same dynamically generated intersection without needing to manually update a list. Also, I could have used Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Tolkien articles by quality/1, but this was out-of-date as assessment work had been done that day. Working from the categories was the only option other than waiting for the bot to update the list. This type of set-up probably only applies to WikiProjects with large number of articles needing to be organised, and with large numbers of stubs, and needing to pull out a core set of articles. WikiProject Biography springs to mind. Look at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Biography articles by quality statistics. They've pulled out 200 top-importance articles. But say that they eventually have another, lower tier of 1000 mid-importance articles (I know they've deprecated that, but this is an example). If there were 1000 unassessed mid-importance articles, how would they be separated from the 133177 other unassessed articles? How would someone find those 1000 articles that one person had labelled as of mid-importance, to enable them to assess these mid-importance articles? Maybe the Film WikiProject is a better example. See Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Film articles by quality statistics. Now, can you see why someone might want to find out what the 52 high-importance stubs are, and work on getting them up to start level at least? Or the seven top-importance Good Articles, and work on improving those. Do you see what I mean by these examples? If your bot could provide links to those numbers, that would be so awesome. It could even just link to right section of the list here, if you can organise those lists by sections, rather than cut into the 45 lists at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Film articles by quality. The list is not ideal though, as that is only updated daily. A dynamically generated category intersection would still be best, as it automatically updates as people work on assessing articles. Carcharoth 11:29, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
To pull out a single suggestion from that rather long post, is it possible to get the bot to add div-id tags to label the points where the following transitions are in the list: FA-top, FA-high, FA-mid, FA-low, FA-unknown, A-top, A-high, etc (for all 35 permutations down to unassessed-unknown)? Then, when it writes the number into the table, it would do it in the form [[PAGENAME#FA-top|NUMBER]], but put no link if the number was 0. That sounds terribly complicated, doesn't it, especially as PAGENAME varies depending on where the cut-off point between pages is. Don't worry, I'm sure Category Intersection won't be that far away, and I don't mind doing manual intersections for now, waiting a day and copying off the list after the bot updates. Carcharoth 02:50, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
OK, so if I understand it correctly, the category intersection thing does not yet work. It will be rather simple to modify the stats table to have links to the intersections, I will work on it when that tool comes live. You are right in that the div-id tags looks like it would be complicated to implement, and the fact that it would be just a temporary solution makes me even more reluctant to work on it. Will it take long until the category intersection thing works? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:13, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I wouldn't like to say. Single unified log-in and stable versions are touted as the big things that developers are working on at the moment. After that, I don't really know. I would hazard a guess at anything from a few months to a few years, depending on what time the developers have free (and I don't know any developers, this is just from memories of what I've read elsewhere). It is possible that technical problems delay it indefinitely, but I really, really hope not. There is meta:DynamicPageList (installed on WikiNews), and meta:DynamicPageList2 (intended for WikiNews), but those are not (yet) available on en-Wikipedia. Carcharoth 12:43, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi - sorry to take awhile to get over here. The issue is entirely performance. The implementation of category intersection I'm testing may have good enough performance for en, but honestly, I think it's probably borderline. Performance is why DPL isn't installed on en, too (conjecture on my part, but from a point of some knowledge - the SQL DPL uses get's really bogged down with large datasets). I think we're right there though - I'm not a full fledged developer; this is my first only real contribution to the codebase, but I think everyone thinks I'm on the right track. I'm going to collect more data with this test script, and also write one that uses Lucene. I'm sorry though - I don't have solid plans to update the data; it took me awhile to download and then build the table I'm using for testing.--Aerik 17:25, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Bot missed an article?

Does the bot often miss articles? It seemed to miss Elvish languages. I assessed it here at 21:32 on 21 January 2007. The bot updated the list Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Tolkien articles by quality/1 with this edit at 22:20 on 22 January 2007, but the article is still listed as unassessed? Anything to worry about? Carcharoth 23:21, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

There are two templates on that page, so it appears in both categories. The bot went with the unassessed as that is where it would likely get more attention. Cbrown1023 01:12, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
ROTFL! I've come across that before. So easy to miss that. At least I'll know next time! Any way to scan for duplicate templates? Carcharoth 02:42, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Bot down for today

... due to scheduled computer network downtime at my work. The bot should run tomorrow as usual. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:04, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Quarter million articles assessed!

I see that we have finally made it to 250,000 articles assessed! Not bad for about 8 months work. Hats off to all of those hard working people across 300+ projects, as well as to Oleg for his patience and dedication! We should celebrate and publicise this achievement. Walkerma 07:20, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Caribbean unassessed articles category

The statistics page for the Caribbean WikiProject links "Unassessed" to the empty Category:Unassessed-Class Caribbean articles, but it should link to Category:Unassessed Caribbean articles, which is where the unassessed articles actually are. I've tried changing the link by hand, but mathbot changed it back with the next update. Anyone know how to fix this? Jwillbur 21:33, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Those two categories were duplicating each other. In that case, the bot links to whichever it finds first. I deleted one of them and now the bot links to the other one. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:19, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Bot rename

I created a new bot account, WP 1.0 bot which I am considering using instead of Mathbot to update the WP 1.0 pages. That because updating these pages takes so many edits that Mathbot's supposedly mathematical edits can barely be seen in its contributions.

Nothing should change but the bot name. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:28, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

We'll probably need to update all the places where Mathbot is explicitly named as updating the statistics; but that shouldn't be a problem.
Please don't forget to clear the new bot account with the approval board before moving operations to it, incidentally. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 22:33, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
I am now asking for approval at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WP 1.0 bot‎. I could not find any places where mathbot is mentioned by name, but perhaps I did not know where to look. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:41, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
OK, mathbot was mentioned at Wikipedia:Release Version and I fixed that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:51, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Comments are welcome at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WP 1.0 bot on the frequency of bot runs. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:22, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

new WP 1.0 bot performance

seems a tad slower if that is possible. Quite a bit of slippage from the first days updates! :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 13:49, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Per the discussion at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WP 1.0 bot I had the bot edit a page every 10 seconds only, instead of every 5 seconds.
In a sense, that it takes longer and longer to update pages makes sense, we are talking a number of articles which is good fraction of a million. My proposal would be to run the bot every other day only. People who are impatient can occasionally run the cgi script which does things on demand, although it seems that it dies out half-way for very large projects. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:18, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
Well, I still don't completely understand why the read requests have to hold off for two seconds, as these barely registered on the radar for the 18K hits/sec Wikipedia has been getting. Perhaps cutting the delay to 1 sec (or perhaps even 0.5 sec) would be all right? (I still don't like the added constraint for write time, though, but that's a different issue altogether.) Titoxd(?!?) 02:24, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
The bot was fetching wikicode every 2 seconds and the contents of categories every second. I now made the bot fetch wikicode every second too. Let's see if that helps. I'd be kind of reluctant to fetch things faster. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:27, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Problem with bot?

Is there something wrong with the bot? It is adding articles to the LGBT log as being unassessed, but most of them already are. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 20:10, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

That was a bug, sorry. It was affecting the log only, not the lists themselves. I fixed it now. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:08, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Strange reporting of renames

It seems like the bot is reporting the new name of the page for both the old and new ones, resulting in a bunch of log entries like "X renamed to X"; here, for example. Kirill Lokshin 21:06, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

So one more bug. Last week I made a lot of changes to the script to make it much easier to translate to to other Wikipedia languages. I tested the code (carefully, I thought) but some bugs crept in anyway. I fixed this now. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:26, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Using WP1.0 Bot for GAs

Please read this proposal and leave comments. Thanks, Walkerma 05:01, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

This project was renamed, and this is now handled by Category:Video game articles by quality. The category is listed to be deleted, but I want to make sure you're all done with it first. What's is the correct way to remove this from assesment? Please respond on my talk page ... -- Prove It (talk) 15:05, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, all you need to is delete Category:Computer and video game articles by quality, Category:Computer and video game articles by importance, Category:Computer and video game articles with comments, all the pages in that category, and all the subpages in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Computer and video game articles by quality. Since you guys wanted the rename so badly, I guess you've go to do all that cleanup. :) I will reply on your talk page too. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:48, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I was afraid of that. So is there any fast way to delete a bunch of subpages at once? -- Prove It (talk) 02:55, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think so. You guys wanted the rename, you've got to delete the old names (39 of them, see here). Sorry. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:00, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Proposal to run the bot every 48 hours

For at least two days the bot took around or more than 36 hours to run. I think that we arrived at a time when we should run the bot once every two days instead of every day. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:08, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd support that. Or would it be possible to clone the bot and have one just hit the big ones (MILHIST, WPBIO, Album, France, Australia, Film, India, Computer & Video Game) and the other hit the rest?↔NMajdantalk 23:00, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
I thought of this too. But then it would not be possible to compute the total number of articles. Well, that can be accomplished by saving things to disk, etc. But I doubt it would be worth the trouble, I think updating the lists every other day should keep things reasonably up to date. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:21, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Ok, that makes sense. Go for it, if you haven't already.↔NMajdantalk 14:54, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Due to no objections, the bot has been running every other day for the last few days. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Removing the importance part from our projects assessments

The importance rating has cause enough controversy and is not being used to its full potential in the Aircraft project. What would be the easiest way of removing this part from our assessment profile. Can we just delete the related categories and remove the code from the project banner? What will the bot do after this is done? - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 21:26, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

The above will be enough, the bot won't complain. However, the "Importance:None" column will still show up in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Aircraft articles by quality statistics, as you see now in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Military history articles by quality statistics. Hope that helps. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Something broken or I missed a change?

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/The KLF articles by quality log hasn't been updated in some weeks and it looks like we dropped off the Index too. Has something broken or has there been a change in my absence? --kingboyk 22:52, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

That's really strange. I can't see any reason why it wouldn't show up; perhaps Oleg can spot something I'm missing. Kirill Lokshin 10:57, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Oleg? --kingboyk 18:36, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry. I noticed your comment above only this morning, but did not have time to reply. The problem seems to be that while Category:The KLF articles by quality has at the bottom the Category: Wikipedia 1.0 assessments, when actually browsing Category: Wikipedia 1.0 assessments one could not find Category:The KLF articles by quality in there. This sounds paradoxal, but this happens every now and then with pages/categories which have not been edited for a while.
I did a dummy edit to Category:The KLF articles by quality to make it pop up in the base category, reran the bot, and now it showed up in the index.
KLF is one of our oldest projects. It is quite likely that other projects whose categories have not been edited for a while will start disappearing. Something to keep an eye on. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:41, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
No need to apologise Oleg, and thanks ever so much for sorting that out. Just one of those quirks I guess :) Cheers and thanks again. (And yes, if anyone else comes complaining of the same thing we know what to look for now :)) --kingboyk 10:44, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

This page needs a TOC

Can this page be divided up with a {{CompactTOC}}? It'll make looking through it a bit easier, if people are looking to do so. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 22:09, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

It needs to be archived. Something I can handle later unless somebody else does it before.↔NMajdantalk 04:41, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I guess I should clarify, it's not the talk page that I think could use a TOC but Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 04:47, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, there is only one section there, called "See also". Not much for a TOC, right? :) Actually the whole page is a big fat TOC already, all it has is a list of lists. I don't see how adding a TOC would help. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:52, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Ok then. I just hate having to scroll,scroll,scroll,scroll,scroll down, oops too far, scroll up, to find the projects under, say, "M". - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 17:29, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
That's correct. But what we need then is not a TOC per se, but rather sections, in other words, the table may need to be split into subtables, for each letter in the alphabet, and each subtable placed into its own section. That should not be hard to implement, I can do it if there is good support for this. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:40, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Yes, please, that would be very helpful.--DorisHノート 22:08, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Wouldn't ID divs or spans work? As in having <span id="B"></span> before the first B item, etc, and {{CompactTOC}} (or better {{CompactTOC8}}) at the top? It would work inside the table, see for example Towns of Alberta#T. --Qyd 21:48, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

New Projects are not having their stats created

I've added a few projects, one Category:Rotorcraft articles by quality two and a half days ago, the others Category:Red Bull Air Race World Series articles by quality and Category:Gliding articles by quality more recently, and their statistics pages have yet to be created by the bot. They are using the same project banner as the aviation project, {{WPAVIATION}}, in the same way that the Military history project uses the same banner for all its projects. Could someone look over them to see if I missed something that the bot looks for in order to "do its thing". Thanks. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 05:36, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Aha! Rotorcraft just got done. I guess it just takes a lot longer than it used to to begin updates. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 05:52, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Stats

To help out with Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Assessment/Assessment Drive could the bot tally up the total of assessed articles? I'm trying to encourage folks to focus on how much they've achieved, not the bogus unassessed number (bogus because nearly 40,000 living person articles - and lord knows how many bios about dead people - don't have any {{WPBiography}} tag). --kingboyk 13:56, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, the total number of assessed articles is the total number of articles minus the number of unassessed ones. The latter two numbers are in the stats already. I could modify the code generating the stats to print in addition the total of assessed articles also, but then that number will be printed out for each of the 400 projects stats. I can do that if people think that would be helpful overall for the projects. Otherwise as a solution specific to your project one could write a bot to read the current stats, do the subtraction, and post that number in a place where you guys could easily see. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:04, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
I know how to do the maths Oleg, but I prefer to have machines do these things for me :) We're talking pretty big numbers at WPBio, and at some other Projects. I was thinking a line could be added to the Stats table to complement the (bogus) unassessed count. I'm happy to wait and see if other projects think this would be useful before you decide. Thanks for the reply, as always. --kingboyk 19:38, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
I am for it. It is a good statistic to have and more reflective of a WikiProject.↔NMajdantalk 19:40, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
OK, I will work on this in the weekend. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:15, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree that it would be helpful. The first thing I do when I look at a stats list is subtract unassessed from total to work out this number - it would be nice to have this actually displayed. Thanks, Walkerma 04:23, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I did not get to that in the weekend, and I am very consumed by the real life this week. I'll try to do it this coming weekend. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:57, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
OK, I added the assessed row, as seen at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/African military history articles by quality statistics. Later today when the bot runs will add that row to all stats tables. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:10, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
Thank you Oleg! Much appreciated. --kingboyk 15:31, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot and article class

I have a question about Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Numismatic articles by quality statistics. Pages in this project now have a category class, template, dab, etc. These new classes can be found at Category:WikiProject Numismatics articles. Do you think you can upgrade the bot to identify these classes? Thanks. --ChoChoPK (球球PK) (talk | contrib) 08:09, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

The bot is currently hard coded to accept only FA-Class, GA-Class, A-Class, B-Class, Stub-Class, and Unassessed-Class. The problem with Category-Class is that it contains categories, not articles, which would need special treatment in my code. The problem with new classes in general is that the bot needs to be told for each one how to sort it in the table relative to the other classes.
All in all, taking into account that there are more than 400 projects, and my code is being translated to other language Wikipedia too, I am very reluctant to expand the code to support project specific needs. Perhaps there are other ways you guys can keep track of those categories? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:24, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
I understand your difficulty. If I simply add rows to the table, which link to the proper categories, and question marks in place of the count, would you have your bot leave that part alone (a temporary solution for the moment). --ChoChoPK (球球PK) (talk | contrib) 15:35, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, the statistics table is recreated each time so any changes are overwritten. What you suggest would not be easy to implement. It would require the bot to first read the table, then decide based on some kind of algorithm what to keep and what to overwrite, and then write back the table. Definitely not impossible, but it would make the code much too complicated I think. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:25, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
These parameters (list, disambig, etc.) are quite distinct from quality classes. I would suggest writing a separate bot to produce this kind of information. This bot might, perhaps, be able to post this type of category information into the /comments subpage, and then WP1.0 Bot would put the information into the main table. Alternatively, you may want to keep such pages out of the main table altogether, and have the new bot produce its own listing of non-article pages, organised by category. If you can get something like this working, please share it with us, because I know others would be interested. Cheers, Walkerma 03:22, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
I have something like that working here. It's not hard to implement from Oleg's framework. It would be much easier if each attribute had a category assigned to it. CMummert · talk 12:44, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
That looks very nice- thanks for sharing it! It shows how projects can tailor their output. We may want to use your bot for Version 0.7, where we have existing categories such as history, maths, natural sciences, etc., which are not readable by WP 1.0 bot. Thanks, Walkerma 21:57, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
CMummert, how about showing some code? :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:57, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
Here it is: [2]. It would need some editing to be useful for other people, but the idea is extremely simple. CMummert · talk 00:10, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

FA-Class article count

I believe that somewhere, 17 articles as FA class when they are not. According to Wikipedia:Featured articles there are 1307, but according to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics there are 1324. Can the bot be programmed to catch this? Or is this just a problem for the project's involved to correct?- Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 00:14, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I think I can guess the reason for at least some of the discrepancy. When a FA gets first listed, its assessment is clear, and it will probably get upgraded to FA-Class immediately. When a FA gets delisted, the project tags may get left at FA for some time after delisting. I don't think this matters too much - I'm glad the numbers are so close! It shows that pretty much all of our FAs are being tracked by one WikiProject or another!
I just made a list from Wikipedia:Featured articles using AWB, and it gives 1307 mainspace links from that page that are true article listings Meanwhile, Category:Wikipedia featured articles gives 1303 mainspace article talk pages. The difference is with the following:
  1. 1 − 2 + 3 − 4 + · · ·
  2. Flag of Portugal
  3. George VI of the United Kingdom
  4. The Notorious B.I.G.
Unfortunately I can't get a list of the FAs found by the 1.0 Bot directly.
I think it would be a bad idea to try and get this bot to make checks of this sort, because I think bots should have a clear purpose. This bot is so busy it takes 36 hours to complete one cycle, so we don't want to burden it with more tasks. It's also got a lot of code, we don't want to make it any more complicated. However, I think it might be worth a check to make sure it's not double counting anything, stuff like that. Is there some may to get a list of the FAs it is finding? Or is this what Category:Wikipedia featured articles is supposed to be? Thanks, Walkerma 01:20, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
I love this last paragraph (about not making the code more complicated, one can always hide behind that :) Now, the bot does not overcount, it keeps a global hash making sure that in the total stats each article shows up only once. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:00, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
Sure it would be possible to get a list of the articles that the WP 1.0 bot counts - fetch a list of all subcategories of Category:FA-Class_articles and then fetch the contents of those categories. Oleg has released the code for WP 1.0 bot, so this would only take a few extra lines of perl. The following works for me:
  my $Root_category = 'FA-Class_articles';
  my @tmp_cats;
  my @tmp_articles;

  &fetch_articles_cats($Root_category, \@tmp_cats, \@tmp_articles);

  my $cat;
  my @tmp_cats2;
  my %FeaturedArticles;
  my $featured_article;
  foreach $cat  (@tmp_cats) {
    print "fetch 2 $cat\n";
    &fetch_articles_cats($cat, \@tmp_cats2, \@tmp_articles);
    foreach $featured_article ( @tmp_articles) { $FeaturedArticles{$featured_article} =1;}
    print "$cat " . (scalar @tmp_articles) . "\n";
  }

  print "Count: " . (scalar keys %FeaturedArticles) . "\n";

I count 1370 featured articles this way. Category:Wikipedia featured articles is added by {{ArticleHistory}} if currentstatus is FA. So by cross referencing it would be easy to make a list of the exceptional articles. CMummert · talk 02:13, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
Here are the impostors this morning:
Talk:Split infinitiveTalk:Floppy disk Talk:Pribor-3B Rifle Talk:National Capital Territory of Delhi Talk:House of Lords Talk:Blast shelter Talk:Get Back Talk:Legia Warszawa Talk:Delphi Talk:Space Race Talk:Elizabethtown, Kentucky Talk:Lech Poznań
Most of them seem be former FAs where the project rating was not changed. Since the list is so short, I'll go through and fix the project ratings to non-FA. So you may have to look at the history to see what the problems were. CMummert · talk 12:15, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
There are periodic checks for the self-consistency of WP:FA, Category:Wikipedia featured articles, and transclusions of Template:Featured article, and similar for WP:FFA and its category. I have seen some projects assign "FA" class to project-specific "selected articles" though I think this is just a misunderstanding. Gimmetrow 21:19, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
The FA-Class tag is also used for featured lists, at least by some projects; that'll cause the numbers not to match up even if everything is consistent. Kirill Lokshin 21:27, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
There are also Wikipedia:Featured images. I think that WP 1.0 bot is likely to include all three in the "FA-class" count, provided that the project puts its rating template on all of them. CMummert · talk 01:14, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Yes, of course, Talk:United States Navy enlisted rates. But there are 230-some featured lists, and the difference mentioned above is less than 70. There are some featured articles without any project tag, too. Gimmetrow 21:36, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Unassessed question

Somehow, my project has two unassessed categories. I think this happened when a bunch of empty categories were deleted awhile ago. Which one does the bot look at? My banner places unassessed articles in Category:Unassessed University of Oklahoma articles but the statistics table links to Category:Unassessed-Class University of Oklahoma articles. I want to make sure I delete the correct one. Thanks.↔NMajdantalk 21:06, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I think the bot should be happy with either one. If you delete one of the unassessed categories, the bot will link to the other one in the stats. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:33, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot is so slow

WP 1.0 bot is so slow. Can you increase the speed of the bot. I read recently that many bots could increase their speeds. Don't remember where I read that, but I just think your bot is going too slow. --Paracit 02:37, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

The bot is slow because it has to do a lot of work (458 projects with thousands of articles each). Currently it does a read request each second and a write request each 10 seconds. I was told to not have it write more often than that.
Also, I'd think that having the bot run every other day is acceptable, no? People who want a quick bot run can do so here. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:14, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
Note that if you run it from the toolserver, the stress on the servers themselves in both reads and writes is reduced; at least that's what I was told a while ago in #wikimedia-tech. I'm not sure about the details, but it may be something to think about. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 04:25, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
Really? I have an account on the toolserver which I could use. But I am kind of skeptical that the toolserver has a more intimate relationship with the main database than other computers on the net. If this were for sure, it would be great. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:34, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
It's not really a database issue (we all know that database replication there sucks); it's more of having a direct connection to the database cluster, bypassing the squid cache servers. Or something like that. However, read and write performance is much higher, AFAIK. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 04:38, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
There are two things to consider. Once is that my script is a resource hog, it can gobble up tens of megabytes of memory (if not more), perhaps taking resources from other programs on the toolserver. Second, and more importantly, from my experience the toolserver can be down every now and then, and even if it is down for a moment, an entire two-day run of the bot is interrupted. But one of these days I'll give it a try moving things to the toolserver, let's see if things become faster. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:57, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

The bot did its last two runs on the toolserver. I can't say if it was faster because neither run was finished. Either the machine was rebooted or the script died or something. I am moving it back to my department's machines. I'll also think of ways to make the script faster. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:44, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Make it a class assignment? ;) Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:39, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

AWB script to create article assessment categories

Every so often I find myself creating a new set of assessment categories for a WP Biography workgroup. It's a dull and repetitive task, so yesterday I knocked up a script in the shape of an AWB plugin to do the job. It's not a bot, it just asks the user for some config info, creates a category list which it adds to the AWB list, and then fills in the categories with some boilerplate text. User can review the text before save and is always in full control.

The plugin should ship with the next version of AWB, and source code (VB.net) is in the AWB subversion repository. Please try it!

Some examples created with this tool: Category:Biography (baronets) articles by quality, Category:Biography (peerage) articles by quality, Category:Biography (peerage) articles by priority. --kingboyk 12:54, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

There is also my script, at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Generate categories which has been working for a while. But that one requires admin privileges. So it's nice to have the AWB alternative. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:37, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
Bah, didn't know about that. Oh well, as you say there's an alt for non-admins now :) --kingboyk 14:38, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Intersections etc on WP1.0 bot

The first two comments here were pasted from Oleg's talk page by TimNelson

More ideas:

  • Could you generate a page that lists the 10 pages in Wikipedia with the most WikiProjects attached?
  • Could you make it so that it lists the 10 Wikipedia projects that have the most overlap, but no common task force? Eg. if WP Biography and WP Mathematics have a lot of overlap, but no common task force, it might be an indication that a Mathematicians Biography task force should be set up.

-- TimNelson 09:53, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, these are good suggestions. But I have rather little time for coding for the moment, and if I had more, more pressing tasks would be making WP 1.0 bot faster, introducing a table of contents in the index (as requested at WT:1.0/I), and a few others. I can work on this, but it may take me a few weeks to get to it. You can also try to raise this at WT:1.0/I. There are a few perl programmers there who could implement this. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:05, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
  • I'm another one who's come here wondering what had happened to the bot for the Wine Project ;-/ but after the obligatory thanks for doing this in the first place, and bearing in mind the above comments about time, I thuoght I'd do a 'me too' on the original intersection idea - and specifically on the Stubs line (if that helps at all with server load), for the purpose of prioritising stub killing. A few weeks ago the Wikiwino stubs were distributed something like 2 Top, 55 High, 300 Mid, 700 Low (something like that anyway), and I ended up doing a quick and dirty VLOOKUP + filter in Excel to identify the Top and High priorities. If a filter for those stubs was a single click away, I'm sure it would help with stub killing. But having the table showing stubs ticking away is great for morale ;-) - thanks again FlagSteward 20:41, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
It seems to me like what you're talking about is (possibly) a different task. Can I point out m:CatScan, which currently doesn't update from English Wikipedia due to lack of hardware. Possibly you could contact the owner of CatScan and offer money for additional hardware or something -- I dunno. But I'd be interested in seeing CatScan going, for much the same reasons.
-- TimNelson 10:30, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Or you could create a category structure like this Category:India articles by quality and importance on your banner that would give you a category such as this, Category:Stub-Class India articles of Top-importance. Let me know if I need to explain further. Regards, Ganeshk (talk) 14:33, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Interwiki on statistics page

The French Wikipedia now has about 13,000 articles assessed. Is it possible to add an interwiki link to this stats page from Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics? I'm hesitating because I know that page is edited daily by the bot. Can we add a noinclude section that the bot will ignore? I hope other languages will take off with bot assessments like the English & French, and if so we will want to have interwiki links. We could also use such a section to add the page to a category. Walkerma 05:50, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Nice to know the French are doing well. :) Tomorrow I'll modify the bot code to allow a section which the bot won't overwrite. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:39, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
I modified the code so that text after a bot tag in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics will not be modified. I also added the "fr" link at the bottom. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:17, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! I also appreciate your fixing the Hungarian link as well, I'd assumed they'd given up or something! Good to see things under way there, too. Cheers, Walkerma 05:02, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Why non bot run?

What's wrong with the bot? Many projects haven't had a run since 7 Apr while others have had two runs since then. It's always the projects at the end of the alphabet that lose out.23:07, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Is the bot simply running out of time to process the later projects? I was under the impression that this shouldn't happen with a two-day run. Or has there been some change made to how it operates?
The lack of updates for nearly a week now is, admittedly, disconcerting. Kirill Lokshin 00:50, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
See the section #WP 1.0 bot is so slow above. I tried to move the bot to the toolserver to make it faster. The results were sad, the bot never finished its run (the toolserver can't be counted to be up and running continuously for two days in a row I think). The bot is back to my school's computer from yesterday night and it's been running well since then. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:12, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Ah, ok; that explains it. (Pretty sad how unreliable the toolserver is, though.) Kirill Lokshin 02:24, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Just as a suggestion, how about maintaining a tidemark as the bot goes through the categories, and then restarting at the tidemark if the last run failed? That way the pain would be shared if there's server problems, and every category would get an update every eg 3 days rather than Aardvarks getting a daily update and Zebras get none at all. Just saying, from the perspective of the Wine project ;-/ FlagSteward 20:45, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
This is a good idea but now that I moved the bot back to the original server, crashes and interruptions should happen very seldom (judging from past history) so I hope there is no need to implement advanced crash recovery. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:29, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Biography articles by quality statistics hasn't been updated for 8 days. Any idea when we might see an update Oleg? (Please don't stress over this, if the answer is "not until next week/month" then c'est la vie :)) --kingboyk 21:56, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
It will get updated today. The biography is last in the list, because it is by far the hugest category. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:29, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Mathematics grading now produces lists by sub-field

Folks here might be interested in what the Maths wikiproject have done with assessment. We have a field parameter which is used to place the article in a sub field, say algebra or geometry. User:CMummert has now written a bot which reads this field and produces field specific lists like Geometry and topology. A similar scheme could be useful for other wiki projects which have very large number of articles. --Salix alba (talk) 16:25, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Dunno if you guys considered this, but you could avoid having to deal with your own bot simply by having the field parameter generate a 1.0-bot-readable category; see, for example, how {{WPMILHIST}} creates assessments for each task force. Kirill Lokshin 16:28, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
The bigger difficulty is that the math project uses a B+ grade but WP 1.0 does not. The bot does a lot more cross indexing that WP 1.0 does. Start with the table and click on any link that isn't a category link to see it in action. CMummert · talk 21:16, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Why would you want an extra grade? --kingboyk 21:47, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
We found there was a very large gap between start and GA classes. B+ is generally those articles which could be considered closest to being put forward as a GA nom. --Salix alba (talk) 23:17, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
I see. Fair enough, of course, but I'd have thought "non-standard" gradings would just give you more work. Perhaps you like work, I don't know :) --kingboyk 23:51, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
That's a fantastic tool, CMummert! OK, Kirill points out one other way to do this, but I think this is a very nice alternative. It's clearly been very well thought out. Would it be possible for us to use this bot for the 1.0 project (outside Math)? We already have ten "fields" (and yes, one of them is Mathematics), the only difference is that our template uses the word "category" instead of "field". I dare say we could do an AWB sweep to change that. I would love to be able to produce a nice list of (say) all of the history articles in Version 0.7. At present all we can do (that I know about) is to use AWB on Category:History Version 0.7 articles and convert it to a list which we can then upload onto a new page. This method was used with Version 0.5 when writing navigation pages. I can imagine that some other WikiProjects may want to use it too - it depends if you're willing to support it. You know that Oleg has his hands full running the WP 1.0 bot.... Thanks, and great work, Walkerma 01:10, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
(lower indent) The Version 0.7 setup is pretty easy to adapt the script to. I uploaded examples at User:VeblenBot/Version_0.7/MainTable and User:VeblenBot/Version_0.7/History (actually, I uploaded the whole table set). I have no objection to maintaining this script - it's under 500 lines of perl and there should be no need to change it once it is set up correctly. Unfortunately its not very modular, so configuring it means editing the source, not writing a config file like the WP 1.0 bot. I don't mind running the script for other projects if they are interested. But I would need to put in a bot request before adding to the current automatic workload. CMummert · talk 03:15, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
Hey, that's amazing! When we set up the category parameter, this was exactly the sort of thing I had in mind! Could you make the bot request? I'm pretty sure others would be interested in using this. Thank you SO much! And I just realised - it's the bot's birthday today - how appropriate! Thank you, Walkerma 04:16, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't really understand the way that the release version tags are set up. There are 0.5 articles and 0.7 articles - should my tables include both? Right now they only include the 0.7 categories. It would help with the request if other people associated with the release version are interested in the tables/lists. And there are some formatting issues I need to take care of.
One reason I am suspicious is that my bot counts 2099 articles but Oleg's bot only counts 2067. I have to figure that out. My list is very thorough, which could account for the difference. Does Oleg's bot ignore NA-Class articles? It also seems to ignore the incorrect tag on Talk:Grateful Dead. CMummert · talk 04:56, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
Everything from Version 0.5 is automatically in Version 0.7, and the template should be set up to say that. As for the discrepancy, there may be some lists that don't show, or something like that. I think that Oleg's bot includes NA-Class. A useful tool is the list-comparer in AWB - I used that a lot to resolve the differences we found when putting together the Version 0.5 listings. You may want to check that things aren't being double counted - not an issue in Maths, but maybe possible if an article has BOTH 0.5 and 0.7 tags on it. Things are in a bit of a state of flux at the moment, we just switched to a new 1.0 template recently, and not everything has been changed over. Also, I haven't checked the log for talk page vandalism recently, but I'll go through that when I get a chance. Many thanks, once again! Walkerma 05:16, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
The bot does not count NA-Class articles. I was not aware of this class until now. Is it a quality or importance class? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:29, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
NA-Class is a quality class for articles that don't fit into the quality system, like year and century pages (19th century). In the math project there is also Image-Class and List-Class, but the {{releaseversion}} template doesn't support those. If I subtract from my list that one exception (Talk:Grateful Dead)) and the NA class articles then my count matches Oleg's count. WP 1.0 bot must not count Grateful Dead because it's in Category:Version 0.7 articles with invalid quality ratings.
I can't run AWB because my home and work computers run Linux, but I manage somehow. CMummert · talk 13:30, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
Since they don't fit into the quality system, then I guess they should not be counted by the bot. By the way, I run Linux at home and work too. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:44, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
Indeed, Oleg, the whole point of NA is that it's not applicable to the assessments system and thus your bot needn't know about it.
I also use that value to turn off the "priority" rating when a {{WPBiography}} has more than one workgroup active with different priority params (and then kludge it by adding the priority categories manually). --kingboyk 14:54, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Interest?

Is there interest here in VeblenBot's tables? There are examples at User:VeblenBot/Version_0.7/MainTable and subpages. If there is interest in doing something with them here, I'll put in a bot request to update them daily. CMummert · talk 13:17, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

If there is good interest in the table, one option could also be to merge CMummert's code into the main WP 1.0 bot code so that all projects could use it. But that of course would need discussion to make sure people agree with that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:19, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I would have no objection to that. The main work that would have to be completed is to find a way to modularize the code to use a per-project configuration file. CMummert · talk 15:50, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I would love for VeblenBot to become a standard tool for the 1.0 project. If it can be incorporated nicely into WP 1.0 Bot, that would be great. If it would be more reliable/efficient to keep them separate, let's do that. Either way, it's a really nice feature, thanks, Walkerma 02:38, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
If there is any project that would like to use the bot, I would be glad to set it up. I need to put in another bot request, though, which means I need to know exactly what is being requested. CMummert · talk 03:09, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
I was just about to post a request here - you must have read my mind! Please go ahead and set up the bot for:
All of these use the same 11 categories, see {{WP1.0}} for a list. With the GA project, the "topic" (equiv. to category) parameter is present in the template, but it has not been used so far, so the 11 individual GA categories are currently empty. Without your bot, these categories provided no useful information, but with your bot it will become worthwhile for people to include the category. Once again, thanks! Walkerma 04:35, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
OK. The table at User:VeblenBot/Version 0.7/MainTable and its subpages should take care of the Release Version project. I'll look into the vital articles project next. Could someone look over the release version pages and let me know if there are any problems? CMummert · talk 15:48, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
This looks excellent to me, I can't see anything wrong! I'm guessing that it needs both importance and quality for the top table - right? We have very few assessed for importance at present. I love the category table. Thank you very much, this is very helpful. Walkerma 04:13, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
I put in a request for this function; I expect it should be approved pretty quickly. CMummert · talk 01:39, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I was inspired by WP:MATH in its organization by fields. I used the Military history project as the model for WP:PHILO because it permits for more than one field. I am wondering if the bot can interface with this set up to produce information by field as the math project does. The banner produces categories for each field. You can view a test page which has displays all options for the banner. This has resulted in these charts for assessment info by field. Greg Bard 02:43, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Short log or temporary archive

Hi. WP:WINE has a bit of a problem at the moment - we like to have the assessment log in some inner HTML on our homepage in order to keep an eye on what other people have been up to recently, but thanks to a stub assessment drive in early March our log is currently running at over 300kb, which is slowing down our home page a little. I appreciate that the logs expire after 3 months, but we can't really wait that long. I've had a bit of a poke round the talk archives here but hadn't found anything to match this problem. I've thought of two options :

Manual kludge

I was wondering if it would be OK if I just set up Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Wine_articles_by_quality_log/Archive, manually cut out everything over a month old, set up a link to the archive from the main log and then deleted it in two months time - would that break the bot horribly? Doesn't need any work on your part, and just gets us out of this temporary hole.

New feature

A more elegant solution that might be useful on many project portals would be a separate 'shortlog' page, that just had the changes since the last botrun, or the last week or something, plus a link to the main log page. I appreciate this option involves extra coding, but I thought I'd float it.....

Of course there is a third option, to delete the log from our homepage for the next few weeks, but I'd only do that if the 'temporary manual archive' option isn't available. FlagSteward 21:58, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

The bot will not be affected no matter what you do. It usually takes the log page as it is and just appends to it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:04, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
OK - I've now set up Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Wine_articles_by_quality_log/Archive to offload 300kb-worth of log ;-/ temporarily. I've appended a note to the end of the log to explain where the old stuff has gone, and a note to the top of the archive explaining where it came from. I hope this is OK - give us a shout if it breaks anything FlagSteward 01:37, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
Unless I'm missing something, there's no need to do that. Just truncate the log. I know it has a header saying in effect "leave this page alone" but that's really only to discourage people disambiguating links. If the log is too long for transclusion you can truncate it; I've done it often enough and the bot doesn't mind. The old revisions stay in the history, so there's really no need to archive it. --kingboyk 11:25, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Small update on the bot

I modified the bot code to fetch the latest history version of articles as suggested a while ago by Titoxd and Salix alba (I remember it was both), by doing a query of the form

[3]

which does a bunch of articles at the same time (five in this case). The bot should be faster as a result, but in the last several days since it's been running I have not noticed great improvements. Well, at least it does not get slower. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:11, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Proposal to make the bot faster

The bot is taking around three days to do the update nowadays, which is not good. I have a proposal. If we remove the "last updated" tag and the date at the bottom of subpages (see here for an example of what I mean), then the bot won't need to update subpages on which no changes happen except the datestamp. The main indeces for each subject would still get their datestamp (like the index Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Aircraft articles by quality of the above subpage). Would people agree with this? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:31, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's a pain, but I think it's worth it for faster updates. The only exception I'd like to see is that entirely new pages should still be done (ie. if they've never been done before). -- TimNelson 00:54, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
They will be done, but the datestamp won't show up in subpages (one can always find the last update date from history). I now implemented this, let's see if it makes the bot faster. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:01, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Bot missed the end of the alphabet AGAIN

on 30 May, the bot didn't make it to the zebras again. Something should be done about the alligators and jackals always getting an update and the sloths and zebras missing out all too often.Rlevse 12:58, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Articles not in categories

I just added the importance scale to a new task force I helped create. But, no articles are being added to the categories. I know this isn't an issue with the bot but I was wondering if anybody else has ran into this issue and what you did to resolve. I was able to resolve one article by simply removing the rating then re-adding it but that is not a solution for hundreds of articles. For instance, Talk:Tulsa Zoo is properly tagged and the correct category (Category:Mid-importance Tulsa articles) is at the bottom. But if you go to that cat, there is nothing in it. Any ideas?↔NMajdantalk 14:21, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, they're there now. Must've been a huge backlog in Wikipedia's queue.↔NMajdantalk 15:58, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot stopped for now due to a problem

I stopped the bot because there is something wrong with the query which finds articles in a given category. For example, consider the large Category:Stub-Class mathematics articles. To find the articles in there, one has to do several consecutive queries, each giving 200 articles. The following query

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php?what=category&cptitle=Stub-Class+mathematics+articles&format=txt&cpfrom=Cl

works, but if you replace "Cl" at the end by "Cm", so instead of giving the articles starting from "Cl" on, give the articles starting from "Cm" on,

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php?what=category&cptitle=Stub-Class+mathematics+articles&format=txt&cpfrom=Cm

the query gives an error. I contacted Yurik about this. Any ideas in what is going on? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:46, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I spent some time looking at the code, but I'm not experienced enough to make any further progress without being able to see the data that query.php gets from the SQL server. I also let Yurik know about it, and there is a note at User_talk:Yurik/Query_API#Categories (copied from VPT) about the issue. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:35, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Query.php is now working correctly on the math-related categories. I don't know what was changed to make it work. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:39, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Yep, the links above work well indeed now. Carl, thanks. I restarted the bot. If anybody notices it behaving oddly, at some point, it just should be blocked. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:31, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

New Stick - Biography (science and academia) articles

Soon after getting restarted it appears the Bot has come to a grinding halt again - this time just after "Biography (science and academia) articles" . thanks. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 09:13, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

I think it is running, see Special:Contributions/WP 1.0_bot. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:02, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
I certainly appears to be I assume you gave it a "bit of a kick". :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 15:29, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
I guess I woke up in the middle of the night, kicked the bot in the butt, and forgot everything by morning. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:33, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

New Stick - Former country articles

And again soon (but not as soon) after getting restarted it appears the Bot has come to a grinding halt again - this time just after "Former country articles". thanks. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 08:22, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Seems to be going again after a short hiatus!. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 12:05, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
Either I was wrong or it has stopped again. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 13:57, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

And once again

The bot has broken at least twice in the last 8 days, and it always restarts with "A", so once again the Aardvarks get updates while the Zebras don't. Result: Aardvarks have had two updates while the rest of us have had zero in eight days. Why can't it restart where it left off when it breaks or do one run A-Z and the next Z-A? Rlevse 10:09, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Restart where it left off. Please. :-) Carcharoth 10:19, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
That would be rather hard to code up I think. The big problem is that the bot doesn't scale anymore, there are almost a million articles to go through every two days. You can always run the bot by hand using this form for the Zebras, but long term something needs to be done to make things more efficient, and I don't know what. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:38, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
For some reason the bot will not update the Biography article count. I've tried running it manually, multiple times, but it always stops around log 440. Why would this happen? --Psychless 18:41, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
One can't run manually the biography articles by quality, since that one is too large, and the server at my school cuts the job after a while. The biography articles are the last, since that list is big. Let's see if it gets updated in a day or two. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:59, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
Ditto the WP:Novels articles, I can't get this to complete either. Probably for the same reason, however it seems to be often just as it is about to finish, which is frustrating. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 08:10, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
  • How about splitting the tasks between multiple bots? The Biography section is probably encountering problems because it is by far the largest. Why not run the bot without the Biography section (is that possible?) and see what happens? If things work again, it is definitely a scale problem. Carcharoth 20:22, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
  • As I recall, running the bot manually doesn't update the master copy does it?Rlevse 20:42, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
Making a couple of bots working in parallel would just increase the server load I believe. Even now the bots run in parallel so to speak, since a complete bot run takes around 3-4 days, and since it runs once in two days at any instance of time two copies of the bot are active.
Let's see if the current two runs get interrupted too. If yes, it means that something needs to be done about it.
And lastly, running the bot manually or doing bots in parallel won't update the global stats, for that a complete run is necessary. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:57, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

New Stick - Military historiography articles

And another occasion (but again not as soon) after getting restarted it appears the Bot has come to a grinding halt at Military historiography articles by quality log. (Nearly at the WP:Novels articles, so near but so far - being selfish of course) :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 09:48, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Aardvarks 3, Zebras 0. I do appreciate all your effort on this, but something needs to be done.Rlevse 10:03, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
The bot did not come to a halt, it is running, see Special:Contributions/WP_1.0_bot. Kevin, the bot can't edit all the time, it has to read information too. That's why you see it pausing every now and then. Hopefully we'll get to the zebras too. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:56, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
Ok, my mistake - but it was thinking for quite a "long" time, hence my error I suppose. Is there a log of it's thinking to watch as there used to be with Mathbot!? :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 15:00, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
The logs are large now and I can't keep them in the public-visible portion of my user account, I don't have enough room there. As a rule of thumb, a large project can take several hours. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:16, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
question--the Scouting project got a bot run today 12/13 Jun GMT, but the log entry is for 10 June, even though the history of the page shows it's real date of 13 June....?? Just curious here.Rlevse 00:51, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
Because the bot has been running for three days so far, that's why. :) Today I made a couple more of changes which should make the bot a bit faster. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:59, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
OK, just curious. Thanks for all your help. Rlevse 10:01, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Log and statistics subpages

Here is a message I left at User talk:Oleg Alexandrov. He told me to raise this issue here. I've also copied his reply here. --ZeroOne (talk | @) 11:55, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Could you modify the bot from using page names such as Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chess articles by quality statistics to using Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chess articles by quality/statistics? That would create handy back links to the statistics and log pages too. Currently those pages do not link to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chess articles by quality which is, in my opinion, more essential than linking to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team which is what they do. --ZeroOne (talk | @) 15:21, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

That is a good idea, but perhaps a bit too late (I wish I thought about it earlier). It would require doing hundreds of moves to fix all the existing pages (in order to be consistent among them). You could try raising this at WT:1.0/I, but I am not sure if it is worth it given the amount of work needed to bring all the existing page in the same naming convention. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:26, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
Agree with Oleg, great idea but lots of work, esp if done by one person. Coordinating help via project coordinators would be a nightmare too. Rlevse 12:13, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
I believe there exist bots that can automatically move pages according to some rules? --ZeroOne (talk | @) 17:22, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
Right. The bigger problem is to synchronize those bots with WP 1.0 bot which runs all the time. Again, it is doable, if people agree it is worth it, we may go for it. I myself am not sure. (Note that bots need supervision too, double redirects may need to be checked, and all for hundreds of pages.) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:56, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
You could stop the WP 1.0 bot for a day or two to allow the other bot to complete its task, couldn't you? It's hardly a critical bot anyway, unlike some vandal protection bots. --ZeroOne (talk | @) 11:17, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
Sure, if there is support for your proposal. Then a move bot needs to be hired too (I don't have one). So let's wait and see what others say. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:04, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Put the flags out!

We have just passed the 1,000,000 articles tagged for assessment. Is this a couse for celebration or for more umph for this Bot??! :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 16:13, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Cool. Only 800,000+ to go.  :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stevietheman (talkcontribs)
Yes, and the great part is that over 700,000 have already been assessed! Walkerma 20:43, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Bot to run every three days

Well, it was bound to happen. In spite of a few optimizations and an increased edit rate (one edit per five seconds), now a bot run takes almost three days (and a good chunk of CPU and memory too). I switched the bot to a run every three days. As before, people who need an instant run can use the online tool. Hope that's fine with people. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:16, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

No problem at all - I would anticipate that the regular schedule would take this route further (4 or 5 days soon) and have got there earlier. However the problem with the requested run remains for those with a large article base like NovelsWikiProject, it just never completes at all. So in our case the "regular" and now less frequent run is the only thing we have. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 07:52, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

API change heads-up

Hi. Few things:

  • I have greatly (i hope) improved the API documentation page at mw:API. Feel free to browse, add examples, correct...
  • Backlinking queries (backlinks, embeddedin, imageusage) are now using a new parameter ??title=xxx, instead of titles=xxx. Titles is still supported, but will be obsolete soon. Please update bots once the main tree goes live.

--Yurik 07:53, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! Our project does not use backlinking queries as far as I am aware, but only category and history queries, but this is good to know. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:18, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Possible way to reduce bot workload

Would it be possible to maintain a list (with a timestamp) of projects that have not had an update in awhile and not run the bot on those projects? For instance, if the bot hits a project that has not had an update to the log it 3-4 runs, it would add that project to a list with the date it was added. Then, when it ran next time, it would not process that project. When it has been 21 or 30 or however many days since it was added to the list, it would then re-run it on that project and see if there has been an update. If not, back on the list, if so, then it goes back to being apart of the normal process. Of course, if somebody from that project wants the bot ran on their project they can either ask here for it to be removed or run the bot manually themselves with the web form. I just went through the A's and there are six projects with no updates the last three bot runs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Ideally, this would knock 75-100 projects off the normal bot run which should save some considerable time. Whether or not its enough to knock the bot run back down to 2 days, I doubt it but at least the bot won't be overloaded and it may hopefully reduce errors and crashes. The bot could still take a quick look at previous assessment counts for these skipped projects to get the overall numbers. Thoughts?↔NMajdantalk 16:57, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

The simplest way to reduce the workload is to remove the biography project, which I think takes a third of the time (and sometimes the bot is having trouble reading those huge categories entirely). Seriously, recently the bot has been pretty stable and I am rather happy with the three-day run.
Also, removing those projects may not affect the performance much, since I think the bot spends most of time in finding the histories of articles which changed and submitting the pages that changed).
If people want this implemented however, I can do it, won't be hard, although I have reservations in how much faster things will become and if the members of the somewhat active projects will be happy with this. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:17, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

Problem with categories and disappearing articles

To continue from here, we are having a problem with articles disappearing from categories, and then from the lists maintained by the bot.

Here's the deal. Talk:Gireum Station is obviously in Category:Stub-Class Korea-related articles, yet when one clicks on that category, the article is nowhere to be found. This is very odd, and some kind of Wikipedia server tricks.

The consequence is that the bot massively removes articles, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Korea-related articles by quality log. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:52, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Seems like something that needs to be asked in higher-level (dev?) discussions, maybe. Girolamo Savonarola 02:54, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Or maybe not. I tried to click on the "next 200" link in Category:Stub-Class Korea-related articles and I get the following link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Stub-Class_Korea-related_articles&from=3%2A

and if you click on "next 200" on the new page, the same link shows up, so one gets an infinite loop, never going beyond the first 200 articles. Something may be wrong with {{WikiProject Korea}} but I can't tell what. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:59, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I've noticed that before but never thought anything of it. It could be the non-alphabetical sorting of these categories that is causing problems here. I'll try removing this feature from {{WikiProject Korea}} and we can see what happens next time the bot runs. PC78 14:51, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

problem with counting

Hi. Is it normal that this page says we have 1610 FAs and 2710 GAs, whereas WP:GA says 1547 and 2744? How often is the bot running? I don't remember us ever having that much FAs.--SidiLemine 11:35, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

The FA count likely includes a fair number of FLs as well, so that's not a surprising discrepancy. I have no idea what's affecting the GA count, but it may very well be a legitimate change, given how rapidly that status can be added or removed. (It may, of course, simply be articles marked as GA-Class without GA tags.) Kirill 12:29, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
FLs! Right, didn't think of that. As for the GAs, as you say it seems possible. Thanks!--SidiLemine 16:42, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Stiffed again?

Are we sure this Bot process hasn't stiffed again, seems to get so far then stop! Maybe wrong but looks that way. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 08:25, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Right, the bot did not finish its run because of some odd error a few days ago. Let's see if the current run goes well. I'll try to think of what is going on. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:08, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
The bot hasn't run on LGBT articles in almost a week - should I be concerned? Should I run it manually? -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 13:48, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
Feel free to run it manually at any time. Apparently now the bot is running well (currently at "I"). I made the script more robust at the place it crashed last time. 15:50, 1 September 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Oleg Alexandrov (talkcontribs)
Well, if it's at "i", I'll let it run to "L" :) -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 17:09, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Zebras not being done again

The bot has only made one full run in the last 12 days, Aug 31. This occurs more and more. Please find a permanent fix.Rlevse 10:53, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

I wonder if we could get a server at the Foundation dedicated to this task - would that be helpful? I think so many people have come to depend on this bot, yet we are still at the mercy of a server on a university campus. (Is that correct?) Personally, I think once a project has a stable set of articles even a monthly run will often be adequate, but I understand that when building a list people want to check things more often. In the meantime, how about renaming the project, WikiProject:Aardvarks and zebras? :) Also, I'd like to thank Oleg once again for being one of the rocks on whom we can depend - he's been helpful and available since this project began in 18 months ago. Thanks for your commitment, resourcefulness and wisdom, Oleg. Walkerma 14:26, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
The stats got updated quite regularly. Is there a particular project which did not get updated?
Recently the bot did not work too well for six days (two runs), but the last time before that it happened was a couple of months ago if I remember. I am fixing bugs as I discover them (the recent problem was that the bot was not robust enough to the server being down for a while). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:49, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
And I'd appreciate any programming help I could get. I'll start a rather demanding job in less than a month and I won't have a very large amount of time if something breaks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:12, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I fixed a silly bug in the code I introduced recently when trying to make the code more robust. The bug was making the bot very slow. I'll have to restart the bot now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:57, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Oleg, I do appreciate all you do. But we depend on this. YOu've a victim of your own success. Compare Aardvark log to the zebra log and you'll see what I mean.Rlevse 22:24, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Heh, you want a fail-safe free service, don't you? :) Seriously, any Perl programmers out there who can help maintain the code? The source code is in a google code repository. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:28, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Fail-safe and free would be nice, but I'd settle for getting updated as often as the Aardvarks; being left out makes me feel unwanted-;).Rlevse 22:30, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
The bot was running perfectly for two months. The recent trouble are because the server was not very stable and the bot did not take that very well. It took a week or so to fix because the bot runs only twice a week and it takes a while to realize it was broken. Also, while the bot is not doing regular updates, it can be ran by hand. Don't you think that's good enough? :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:44, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Oleg, is there any particular thing the code needs? My Perl is a tiny bit rusty, but I'd be glad to help out if I have something to look for or something specific to change. I too have become used to regular updates. Being a Lemur, I'm at least better off than the Zebras :) -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 13:54, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
That would be great. You could start by checking out the code from the google code repository above, downloading Perlwikipedia.pm, and see if the code runs for you. I can also add you as one of the developers (you'd need to give me a gmail address for that). This way, if there are issues with the bot again in the future, perhaps you could help if I am not quick enough. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:44, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

A fix to the zebra problem

I modified the bot code a bit so that each time it starts it goes through the list of projects not alphabetically, but rather in the order of oldest first, meaning that the projects that have not been run for longest time will come first. Hopefully this will put to rest the problem of the projects earlier in the list being run more often. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:38, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Great! Hopefully that means everyone will get done eventually, even when there are a lot of problems. Thanks a lot, Walkerma 03:27, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Outstanding. Also, is there any progress on the idea of have a dedicated server for this at the foundation? That would likely help too.Rlevse 10:53, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
I am actually looking forward to getting the bot off my school's network since I no longer work there. A dedicated server may be too much to ask, but having access to a reasonable stable server with say 100 MB of storage would be nice. Otherwise I'll just make the bot a bit more stable to interruptions and move to the toolserver (hopefully it would perform better there than what it did last time when I tried this). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:32, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
I'll see if we can get help with this. Walkerma 16:00, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Help! My snowman's melting!

Looks like the bot is deleting the index. What's going on? Girolamo Savonarola 02:55, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

A few changes in the API of Query API is confusing the bot. I fixed one of the consequences (">" being replaced by "&gt" recently, but there may be more, like plain & being replaced by &amp;).
I am in the middle of a busy relocation to my new job. I will have no time tomorrow and very little time the day after, and no internet access for a few days at least at the new home. I can't say now when I will look into this problem. If any Perl people are willing to try to fix things, the complete bot source and dependencies (and instructions) are available at a link at User:WP 1.0 bot. The problem is in any code calling the above API (do a grep searching for the lines "query.php" in the bot source code directory and in wikipedia_perl_bot/bin. Sorry can't write more, wife says "lift butt up and pack, it's 10 PM". :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:06, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
Or like the brain would process it:
INT WIKI
MOV UP, BUTT
HLT
INT STAND
CALL PACK
CALL SLEEP
NOP
;) Have fun at the new job! And thanks for everything you've done so far for us. :) Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 19:16, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
Heh Titoxd, my wife found this amusing. :)
I fixed the bot, hopefully, and now it is running again for all the projects. Since recently the bot has been modified to run the projects in the order of oldest first, the bot now starting running from "F", where it stopped last time several days ago when its run got interrupted because of the API change. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:31, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Any way to detect redirects?

It would be nice if the bot could add "(redirect)" to the tables it generates when it encounters an article which is a redirect, to help users remove the wikiproject templates from redirect talk pages. --jacobolus (t) 20:49, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

The bot can't do that, for the reason that it never visits articles, all it does is collecting talk pages from categories. It could be implemented, but would require visiting a million articles each run, which is infeasible. Perhaps anybody else would have any ideas. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:22, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
May be this is better done as a one off job, it does not need to be done every day. Basically you would need to get a list of redirects and a list of assessed articles and find the matches. Theres various ways both lists could be obtained, but they are not trivial. --Salix alba (talk) 07:26, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
I can generate a list of all assessed articles (it will be huge). A list of redirects can be obtained by querying a database dump, I guess. But indeed, this is not something that can be automated and run on a regular basis. Perhaps a big cleanup once a year could be done, if anybody's willing to come up with a list of redirects. But I am not sure overall if the presence of a few redirects is such a big problem. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:48, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
I missed this conversation earlier. It is possible to efficiently tell which pages are redirects using the API (see [4]). Up to 5000 pages can be queried per HTTP request. Given a list of all the assessed articles, this API feature would be straightforward to make a list of assessed redirects. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:35, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Proposal to remove the main biography project from the bot run

See Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team#Proposal to remove the main biography project from the bot run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:04, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Importance: "None"

I think the word "None" in Template:No-Class should be changed to "Unknown". Right now, the label implies that articles in that column of the statistics table have NO importance; in fact, their importance is simply not known.

I realize that if a bot (somehow) uses this label in its data gathering, then the bot code would need to be modified; if so, that seems worth doing, since "Unknown" gives the unwary reader a much better sense of the situation. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:18, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Unknown would assume that it hasn't been assessed. Some pages (generally those which aren't articles) are no importance. Girolamo Savonarola 14:47, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm referring to the table at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Work via Wikiprojects (and smaller tables with the same column and row headings that exist at individual WikiProjects). As best as I can tell, only articles are being included. The statistics are limited to articles where a WikiProject has put their template on the article talk page; there is no reason to believe that WikiProjects are templating talk pages of non-articles.
To give an obvious example of the problem: of the 1864 FAs, the table shows that 755 have an importance of "None". I find it hard to believe that any FA exists on a topic of no importance. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:25, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
Hurricane Irene (2005).
But more seriously, many articles are assessed as "no importance" due to errors in typing the parameters. Template parameters are case sensitive, so |Importance=mid is not the same as |Importance=Mid. I've found many errors like that. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 21:42, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
This is precisely why some of the more sophisticated banners (such as WPMILHIST) have a subsection that contains a #switch parser function in order to align most common spelling variations to the needed one for the template. (Arguably, there perhaps should be a function added to the software to allow the software to do this automatically if so specified in template code.) Girolamo Savonarola 22:00, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
That is not due to the bot but rather to {{No-Class}}. Note that a long word like "Unknown" would make the table columns wider in the stats tables. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:17, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
If the problem is the width of the column heading, then "Unk." or "???" or something else would still be better than "None". -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:31, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
True, but there's another factor at work here. There are, in fact, two different "levels" of importance assessment that feed into "None":
  • "Unknown" - the importance is not currently assessed, but eventually will be
  • "Not applicable" - the importance is not currently assessed, and will not be
I'm not convinced that simply having everything show up as "Unknown" will be an improvement. Kirill 17:12, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
I think "NA" might be better than "none", it wouldn't mislead the way that "none" can. Walkerma 03:57, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
"Importance: ???" and "Importance: N/A" are more explicit, agreed. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 05:15, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Marxism task force

The bot doesn't seem to be compiling the data for the Marxism task force. The chart produced by this template: {{philosophy task force assessment|Marxism}} as can be seen among the Philosophy task force assessments. I'm not sure why it would be different from the rest. Pontiff Greg Bard 23:16, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

The log shows up recently activity. Is there any reason to suspect something is not right? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:40, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
I tagged articles in Category:Marxist theory and then I ran the bot manually. Those articles aren't showing up in the worklist. There should be a bunch more. Pontiff Greg Bard 05:20, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Can you give an example of an article which should show up and does not? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:24, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Cultural hegemony is one example. All of the rest of Category:Marxist theory as well. Pontiff Greg Bard 03:45, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Per the instructions, Talk:Cultural hegemony should be in a Marxism quality category, which in turn should be in the Wikipedia 1.0 category. Try to do this and see what happens. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:30, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot: tweak formatting

Hi. I'd like to request a change be made to the formatting of the statistics generated by the bot, matching this change. This will remove some excessive whitespace after the table when it is transcluded (and remove some redundant bolding). Thanks in advance. --PEJL 19:31, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

That's easy enough to implement. I wonder what people think. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:32, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
Fine by me, although I'm not sure of the necessity. John Carter 16:13, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
It is needed to remove excessive whitespace below the table when transcluded, like at WP:SONG#Progress (which includes the change). --PEJL 16:34, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
Looks good to me. Kirill 21:28, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I modified the bot, as seen in this diff. The change will propagate on the next bot run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:15, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! --PEJL 12:38, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Request for more work

I know it would probably be insanely difficult, but would there be any way to structure the assessments such that for the main articles by quality chart on the page here, the articles contained in a given box could be pointed out. I'm thinking particularly here that it might be useful to be able to click on the box containing stub articles of top importance and seeing exactly which articles are included there. It might make choosing collaboration topics, if nothing else, a lot easier. John Carter 16:13, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm guessing that this would have to be done within the project banner template code, much the way that the current assessment does. So you'd need a whole new set of categorization in addition to the current sets. Although there probably are other ways to do it. The better question is how necessary it would be? I can't imagine a project with an overwhelming number of Top or High importance articles (bc that would cheapen the value of it), and it is unused in many projects altogether anyway. Girolamo Savonarola 21:33, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I guess you are talking about the intersection of two categories (say Top importance & Stub quality). There was a tool somewhere which did that (web-based I think). I don't know how I could implement it as part of the bot. I am also not sure there is a big need for such a thing in the table of stats. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:30, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
Frankly, I'd rather see the two list classes added as proposed above - I think it would be more productive to the projects, and it would require far less work collectively to alter the bot code instead of creating hundreds (if not thousands) of new categories for this proposed change. Girolamo Savonarola 04:28, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I've moved Wikipedia:WikiProject Comics/Article Classification to Wikipedia:WikiProject Comics/Assessment as that seems to be the consensus name for such pages, but I was wondering if that will affect the bot. I have updated most links to the name, the only links I haven't updated are the ones in the bot generated Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Comics articles by quality page and subpages. I can't work out how the bot generates the link to Wikipedia:WikiProject Comics/Article Classification, so I can't work out what parameter or variable I need to change or where that might be. Any help appreciated. Hiding Talk 14:19, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Your change in the index is enough, the bot will read and reflect that change in the subpages at the next run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:50, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
    • Thanks, I thought it would be something like that but wanted to check. Hiding Talk 16:32, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Should I fetch the Magnums?

I've been manually prodding the bot to assess the WP Films task forces, which it's had little trouble doing. However, it seems to stall in the middle of surveying the Stubs (which were 23k at last count), and my browser still shows "Waiting for..." in the status bar, but the tab icon indicates it's given up, and there's no continued building of the page, even after several minutes of waiting for what usually takes ~15 seconds. So is the project size choking the bot? Many thanks, Girolamo Savonarola 20:48, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Just tried it again, last line before it dies is "Getting http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php?what=category&cptitle=Stub-Class+film+articles&format=txt&cpfrom=Love+on+the+Dole&cplimit=500". Girolamo Savonarola 20:55, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
That is not the problem with the bot. Since the interface is web-based, it has to go through the web server, and my guess is that the web server cuts the connection after a while. Therefore, long projects can't run from the online version of the bot.
Now that I fixed my mistake which made the bot not update for the last ten days hopefully there will be less of a need to run the bot by hand using the web interface. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:59, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
Okay, something of that ilk was sorta my second suspicion - I originally tried to test on different computer/browser combinations in the thought that it was the client that was hanging up, but since they all did, the server does seem to be the better culprit. Girolamo Savonarola 03:58, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

14th since Novels

We seem to have some automated process problems again. Novels have not bee updated since the 14th and no major processing appear to be happening at present. Or am I wrong? :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 09:29, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I made a syntax mistake when modifying the cron job back then, that's why it would not run. I should have checked the bot every now and then of course, but did not get to it these days. I fixed that mistake now and started the bot by hand. Hopefully from now on it will run regularly again. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:59, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, always difficult when questioning someone else's truly hard work, which in itself is appreciated by many. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 15:08, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Does this main table include articles in sub-projects twice?

I was wondering whether the numbers on the table on this page count an article twice if both its project and its sub-project have v1.0 tables. How does it work in the case of projects like WikiProject British Royalty, which uses the WikiProject Biography template with a parameter set to "yes" that adds it to both projects? --Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 21:36, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

The bot counts each article only once in the big stats table on WP:I. At least, that's how I think I programmed it. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:36, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
If an article is ranked at different importence levels between two projects, at what importence is it listed in the table? --Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 20:10, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Dab-class

The other article space class that we need to clean up our reports is Dab, Disamb, or Disambig class. Let's get the article space cleaned up in the reports.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 21:51, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Now here's something we really don't need. Aren't disambiguation pages (only if they have talk pages in the first place, not just created to show some banner) just rated under NA-Class? If they are, I don't think we need to start creating a class for every new type of article. It's just making things slightly harder for new users when they start to assess articles. It's always been known: Featured lists and articles under FA, GA, A, B, Start, and Stub under themselves, Lists under {{List-Class}}, and anything else (category, portals, etc) under {{NA-Class}}. That's a simple outline of assessment here, and I really don't think we should make the assessment process even more difficult. Spebi 20:06, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Update the category-making bot to add lists

Should the category-making bot be updated to make a category for list-class articles now that they are a regognised part of the project? --Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 03:14, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Done. Thanks, I forgot about that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:01, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Total number of articles tracked?

The current total of 701,787 is, I assume, the total number of articles with participating WikiProject tags on them (assessed or not). I know there have been updates on this and similar figures in the Wikipedia Signpost, but can anyone here provide a graph of how the total has varied over time? When is the figure likely to hit 1 million? Is it ever likely to catch up with the total number of articles (currently 1,698,947)? Carcharoth 11:46, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

If we could answer such questions we'd make a lot of money on the stock market. :) The bot never kept information about the total number of articles each day. That info is of course contained in the history of the page, but would be a pain to extract.
To keep it simple, this project is less than a year old I think. So perhaps in a year we'll cover all the articles (unless the bot stops working for reasons of scale, that is). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:50, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I (painfully ;)) extracted the numbers from the history page. I used 1 week intervals, here's the simple graph I came up with. Yeah, a year sounds like a good estimate. MahangaTalk to me 15:18, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Ooh. Nice. Could you stick a green solid area under the blue bit to show total number of assessed articles? Carcharoth 18:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I wonder if the total number of articles (that must have been graphed somewhere else already) can be put in as a black solid line up above this solid stuff? :-) Carcharoth 18:17, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
There's a lot of stuff on Wikipedia:Statistics, but no easy way to retrieve that information. I did add the total assessed to the previous graph. That's about the extent of my excel expertise. Hope you like. MahangaTalk to me 20:05, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Very nice to see this, thanks! I can see the effect of Kingboyk's stubs script after August 2006, too! Thanks, Walkerma 21:29, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Bah! It's not a script, it's a finely tuned piece of low level code! <cough> --kingboyk 22:01, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
I'd also like to think that last little surge over the past month is due to WPP:BIO's assessment drive.↔NMajdantalk 19:11, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Actually, NMajdan, I had thought the same thing, I think that assessment drive is having a big impact. Also, the huge surge last August came from WP:BIO joining. Walkerma 21:57, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Next step is to program the bot to generate and update this graph itself. <ow! stop hitting me with that wet trout, Oleg!> :-) Carcharoth 22:53, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Heh. Apparently I'm not the only one who does these kinds of things... Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:15, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Awesome. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:26, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

That's beautiful. Could you update it every month? Pretty please! --kingboyk 22:00, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Update

Here is an updated version. --Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 17:12, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I've now also added the total number of articles. What's interesting is that the number of untagged and unassessed articles stays about the same. We've been tagging and assessing at exactly the same rate that new articles are created. --Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 04:39, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I used the last one in Powerpoint presentations - it's very helpful to have this graphic. Walkerma (talk) 05:25, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
I find the graphic to be fairly disheartening. Those yellow and red regions haven't been getting any smaller. --Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 05:42, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Adding list articles to the bot

Copied over from Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team#NEW_FL_debate, this post by User:TonyTheTiger: I would like to start a discussion about how the quality logs handle article space only. I think we could probably all agree that the quality logs would be improved by adding t(w)o more classes (FL-class and List-class) to handle articlespace contributions. This conversation would avoid all the likely pitfalls of numerous arguments about how to handle all the other spaces. Please contribute to a discussion which will hopefully lead to something being done. Can we agree to simply add these two classes to the reports?

This seems like a reasonable proposal, but it would be a big change to the stats table for the many hundreds of projects using the bot currently - so it should be debated IMHO. I think it would be nice to be able to include FL-class and List-class tags - we even have some in WP:V0.5 and 0.7 that are "invisible" unless you look at the full listing. I have three questions:
  1. Would we simply record these in the logs and "by quality" worklists, and not put them in the stats tables? Or put them everywhere?
  2. Oleg, would this be a simple change in the code, and would you have time to do this? I know you're busy in a new job.
  3. Is there significant support from the WikiProjects for this?
Walkerma 03:54, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Somewhat more generally: would it be possible to have the assessment tables omit any rows for which the corresponding categories do not exist, or which have no articles in them? If that were the case, then it would be possible to add support for optional classes without impacting the projects that did not use them. Kirill 03:56, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
I think what Kirill suggests, having the stats omit empty rows could be the simplest thing to do. I can implement it unless people disagree with adding FL-Class and List-Class. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:16, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Kirill hits the nail on the head here. Several projects have adopted a "FL = FA" criteria for assessment; that is, a Featured list would receive a {{FA-Class}} assessment. Additionally, as others and myself have pointed out in the past, lists are assessable, unlike templates, images, categories et al. As a result, I'd be opposed to adding a catch-all {{List-Class}} which would "steal" (for lack of a better word) assessments from the SSBA system. As for {{FL-Class}}, I have the impression that it would duplicate our pre-existing FA assessment class, but I would not be opposed to a merger of the two into {{Featured-Class}}. That said, these concerns would be made moot by removing unused rows/columns from WikiProject assessment tables. The question comes as to what to do with the global assessment tables, though. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 04:36, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
I've already discussed there why lists are not assessable (at least not by current metrics for articles) and why I don't believe that they need to be. (Do we really need four or five levels of list assessment underneath FL?) I would say that both FL and List are needed, and their existence makes it easy to group and locate all list articles. (Especially useful since not all of them begin with the title "List of". Girolamo Savonarola 04:42, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
GA is not applicable for lists, so we can discard that one. But otherwise, you can assess a list by several parameters, such as completeness (primary criterion), adherence to style guidelines, image availability/licensing, alternate presentation methods (such as timelines and tables) and English conventions. So there are quite a few criteria that WikiProjects currently use to assess lists. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 05:19, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
My hope with my suggestion was to get the article space classes cleaned up enough so that article in that namespace appear as categorized. I think the considerations about how many classes should be added only serve to complicate the issue. I think the only other consideration should be whether we should also add Disambig-class, which I forgot is also in article space. Lets just get article space entries to show up as assessed. Later we can add more classes if necessary.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 14:10, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
I think I we EITHER need to come up with a way to assess lists against some kind of rubric to come up with an SSBA rating, OR we need to introduce List-class. I don't really mind either way, but Tony is right that we need to bring the non-FL lists "into the fold" somehow. Walkerma 04:27, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
I think we could start with just list and FL. Classes could be added later if necessary. Let's just get our accounting right in the "articles by quality log". We may not ever agree on how to assess them. Lets just create list and FL. If there is demand to assess them later we can. What is the SSBA system? Why get hung up on a debate about assessment? Lets just take account of the article space things that we know about. No one is assessing lists. Many are using class=list. Lets get these articles counted.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 22:34, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I agree - I think we need to be pragmatic here. If people are assessing lists with the Stub-to-FA rubric, that's great, and they are showing up on the logs. But many people aren't, and List-Class has become an normal class by convention if not consensus. The fact is that there are likely thousands (if not tens of thousands) of articles which have been tagged as such. And they need to start showing up on the logs one way or another. At the very least, the List class should be added for the purposes of at least keeping these articles trackable. We can argue about the merits of FL and assessing lists under the official rubric at another time, but right now, these articles need to be tracked one way or another. Every day we wait, more information (including inappropriate tag removal) is being lost to the hole in the logs. The rest of these issues, we can debate for however long it takes, but I don't think anyone is in favor of leaving these articles completely in the dark in the meantime. Girolamo Savonarola 23:22, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
Have to agree as well. There are at least 230 projects which have list-class designations, and it doesn't make sense to exclude those articles from the bot. Maybe a two level form (Featured list and other) might work best, but there almost certainly are enough projects using this grade out there to make it necessary. John Carter 23:28, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
I hope this doesn't throw this discussion completely off the topic of the FL and List-classes, but shouldn't we also add in the other classes while we are at it? Every other class is probably not showing up in the logs either and most likely projects don't want to lose pages in other classes to the "hole in the logs". I think it was stated it was possible to have the bot omit empty rows from assessment statistics tables. FunPika 23:58, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
The difference is that most of those other classes are non-article ones. Girolamo Savonarola 03:22, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
OK, I will add List-class for now, as this has least amount of opposition from what I see. Perhaps FL-Class and the other ones need separate discussion.
I hope to implement this by the end of this week. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:59, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
I implemented the addition of List-Class together with the removal of empty rows in the stats (so that projects not using List-Class are not affected by its addition). Here's a sample diff. The change will propagate to all projects once the bot starts a new run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:30, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks a lot, Oleg! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Walkerma (talkcontribs) 02:36, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
An issue that has come up now is how to properly format the first column "Quality" to span the changing number of rows, see this edit. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 19:37, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
This is fixed now, hopefully. It may take a day or more until the change propagates to all projects. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:53, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

FL class

I would like to get article space cleaned up. I will start two separate debates. We should add FL class. I think people have been doing patch jobs with FL=FA commands. Let's just do it right. Thanks for adding list class.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 21:50, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

If we are going to be seperating lists into their own class, I strongly agree that there needs to be a class for FLs. I spend a lot of my time here on lists, and I'd like to be able to see which lists are complete and which still need work. --Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 17:08, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
I am not sure I understand why this did not happen when list class was created.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 02:58, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Well, I personally thing that anything that is Featured should be listed, no matter what. So, having a Feature List class is a must.--Kranar drogin 17:54, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
If we create an FA class, we should also probably create at least one separate lower list class, and maybe turn the existing class into the equivalent of "Unassessed-class Lists?" John Carter 18:09, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
Why doesn't {{FA-Class}} not meet the desired niche? Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 06:04, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
I agree. Lists don't really need a separate quality class, IMO. I think just sticking lists and articles under {{FA-Class}}, there isn't much difference between the two as people think. Spebi 20:01, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough. I guess anything under FA is a completed work and isn't really our focus anyway. I'll keep FL as an option in my projects, but put articles so tagged in with the FAs. --Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 07:39, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
I think there ought to be a FL-class for the bot. I don't see a reason really to make A-list and B-list options. Just my two cents. --Pinkkeith (talk) 20:55, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
I would like to see this incorporated, too. As of right now, FL-rated articles appear to be nonexistent at WikiProject Dartmouth College. Dylan (talk) 12:26, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
The reason that FA-Class is not right is because FA stands for "Featured Article" and lists are not articles. Looking at sports projects, the NFL project specifically, there are 20 some FL's yet only 3 or 4 FA's. In the stats it only shows FA so it seems that there is only 3 featured content in the NFL project when really there is like 28. We have almost 600 featured lists and are promoting something like 35 a month, which means soon FL is going to rival FA. I think the way to incorporate this is like what someone above said, where it is up to the Wikiproject to decide if they use FL or not. I would really like to see this implemented.
Gonzo fan2007 talkcontribs 04:34, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Wait, you mean that although we have the tag and class available for FL and Lists - FL's aren't added to the statistics but Lists are? Thats... strange given that {{FL-Class}} has been taken up and is being used by so many (see Category:FL-Class articles). Nanonic (talk) 21:42, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

1,000,000

Wow, we've just passed one million assessed articles. :-) Kirill 12:36, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

And yet as per this chart, we aren't making any progress against unassessed articles and untracked articles, we're just keeping up with the new ones. Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 15:50, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
Partially because there have only recently been created assessing banners for several projects, like Micronesia, Melanesia, and many of the countries not covered by individual WikiProjects. I've been blindly arrogant and created separate work groups for each extant sovreign state on the planet, and am shortly going to adjust the various relevant regional Project banners to accomodate them. When we've got that accomplished, and when those banners are placed, I hope that we'll see some improvement then. It'll take awhile to adjust all the banners, though. User:Phoenix-wiki is working on the Africa project banner, and I sincerely feel for the amount of work that's going to have to go into that one. John Carter (talk) 15:55, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
So we're going to have wikiprojects without any members that exist solely for the purpose of 1.0 assessment? I guess that makes sense. --Arctic Gnome (talkcontribs) 16:21, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
Well, no. They all have one member so far, me. My obsession with userboxes scares even me sometimes. :) And these aren't Projects per se, but work groups/task forces of extant Projects. They were basically created because of Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa's somewhat untenable scope. Basically, the reason behind it is that there already are projects out there with one "central" member who does most of the orchestration and development, and the separate assessments will allow any individual an opportunity to review the relevant material and, hopefully, improve at least the core article for each nation, knowing a bit more easily what the other related content already does and does not contain. In time, of course, I hope that the tagging will draw more members into the parent projects. But, this way, at least there is a slightly better chance of some of the smaller nations, like say Marshall Islands, which is currently only at Start class, getting a bit more attention than they do today. John Carter (talk) 17:16, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

I have no idea what is going on

I just started a WikiProject (I think), at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deftones, and am in the process of tagging the articles (I think). If someone could have a look at Deftones for instance, and tell me if I'm on the right track, I'd greatly appreciate all the help I can get! I just made the jump from editing sporadically to trying to do something more substantial, so I'm learning by doing and could do with some hand-holding. Thanks in advance, Seegoon (talk) 05:21, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Proposal to run the bot every four days

Well, the time has come again. :) The bot takes a lot to do its runs, I think even more than four days. Three days is not enough any longer, and the way things are now there are often two instances of the bot at any time stepping on each other's feet which slows things down. So, I propose to run the bot every four days instead. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:59, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Fair enough - the bot has over 50% of the English Wikipedia to go through! Projects can survive the wait. Walkerma (talk) 06:12, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Yep, looks fine to me. Kirill 14:01, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
I made a suggestion awhile back. I wish there was a way to have the bot skip inactive projects for a period of time. I would think that would cut back (a little) on the workload.↔NMajdantalk 14:11, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Long term such an algorithm could be hard to maintain and may not add much (the bot goes rather rapidly through inactive projects, since it is smart enough to realize that a page does not change so it should not attempt to edit it -- it is the later which takes most time). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:25, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Agreed, anything to make sure it runs; sometime! It looks like it has stuck again at 9.15 today (again!). :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 14:15, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
OK. The bot will run every month on the following days: 1,5,9,13,17,21,25. So it will have a 5-6 day break at the end of each month before resuming on the 1st of next month (otherwise, if it runs on 29th also, it may run too often, and that can have two bots running at the same time which slows both of them down). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:25, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

That'd be fine if the bot ran fully every four days. Right now the Zebras haven't had a bot run in TWELVE days (since Jan 2). RlevseTalk 01:46, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Go to [5] and run it. --NE2 15:03, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Each time there is an issue or the bot gets overloaded, such things happen. Sorry. One proposal which I also raised earlier is to not have the very large biography articles project, which is largely duplicated by the smaller biography projects (which are still very large by themselves).

I now started a new version of the bot. Hopefully it will get to the zebra soon. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:12, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

If there would be any way to create the biography project statistics page simply by adding together the stats for the work groups, I'd probably support it, if we got to the point that we have enough work groups to cover most of the biography articles. Unfortunately, as it stands, many still aren't assigned or even necessarily relevant to any work groups, but I'll see what I can do regarding that in the near future. John Carter (talk) 16:15, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Maybe you can create a category for "biography articles not assigned to a workgroup", like Category:U.S. road transport articles without a state parameter? Of course it would need a change in the bot's code to look up the quality/importance for each of those. --NE2 16:19, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
If and when I get done with what I'm doing and get access to the template, that sounds like a very good idea. I think it might be workable by the end of the week. I hope. Wish me luck. John Carter (talk) 16:21, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Did I do it wrong?

I created the Wikipedia:WikiProject Elvis Presley in November and ran the tool. I recall, I believe, that the table was updated immediately. However, I just created Wikipedia:WikiProject Tool, ran the tool and nothing. Have I done something wrong? LaraLove 17:50, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I believe you categorised the quality articles wrong. Compare Category:B-Class Tool articles and Category:B-Class Elvis Presley articles.--Peter Andersen (talk) 18:11, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Thank you! It's working now. LaraLove 14:36, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Why is the bot slow?

First several posts taken from User talk:Oleg Alexandrov.

I'm just curious - what's the main source of delay in the bot, that makes it run so slowly? Is it the editing rate, or the download rate, or something else? It seems remarkable to me that it requires three days to complete - how many edits per run does it make? — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:26, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

The bot does one query every 1 second and an edit every 5 seconds. I'll be able to answer the question about how many edits it makes after I get a complete untampered log for a recent time, which would be in five days maybe. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:31, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure if you know about the "maxlag" method of rate limiting.[6] The idea is that you send a parameter with each edit, and if the server lag is too high the server tells you to wait and try again. But if the lag is not too high, there is no need to add an extra delay after each write anymore. I have written some perl code to do this (I needed extra functionality compared to perlwikipedia); you might want to look at it.[7]. The watchlist part seems to be buggy, and the output is ugly, but the editing and maxlag parts work. It's based on some code from my API library.[8] — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:04, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for your suggestion. I'd like to note I have precious little time for programming recently (I do it full time at work too, and when I get some little free time at home it is not the same fun thing anymore :) If you have the time, and would like to experiment with this, I, and all the WP 1.0 participants would be extremely grateful. The bot source code is here, and I can give you commit access to the SVN code base.
Another thing to think about is to be smarter about using query.php to get history versions in a smarter way (that is now done in a batch of 10 articles -- out of a million overall articles! -- which is much slower than category fetch, which is I think in gulps of 400). According to Yurik, one could make one monster POST request for history versions (say a few hundred), which I think would speed things up tremendously. Carl, would you be interested? :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:13, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
I have a small backlog of code to write for the version 0.7 project. Once I finish that, I don't mind looking at the WP 1.0 bot code. I would need to consult with you on a few things, but I can write code. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:45, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
That would be very much appreciated. Thanks! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:07, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Stats problems

The stats for Wikipedia:WikiProject Unionism in Ireland seem a little off and the bot appears to be ignoring anything higher than Start class - see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Unionism in Ireland articles by quality statistics and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Unionism in Ireland articles by quality. Could someone with the technical know how take a look and see if the project assessment is set up correctly? Timrollpickering (talk) 10:11, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

The FA, GA categories are empty, that's why they don't show up. I think there was agreement a while ago that empty categories should not show up in the stats. So just add some articles there, and hopefully the stats will reflect that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:28, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

wikiproject breakbown

would it be difficult to add a simple "number of articles" column to the table in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index? It would be really interesting to see the breakdown of the different wikiprojects.. then you could easily tell the 'big' projects from the 'small' projects. thanks! 131.111.8.97 (talk) 13:21, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

The disadvantage would be that all the table monitors yet is the number of articles tagged, which has less to do with the size of the project as the amount of tagging its done. Also, generally, if any party were to want to do that, all they would have to do is compare the totals for the various projects. However, at this point I can't see how useful it would be. Several projects now take the assessments of a more focused project as their own, by adding that group's categories to their own. The France project now takes the assessments from the Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/French Africa work group, for instance. Those articles very likely would not appear in the list of articles tagged for France. Also, and I am speaking from experience here, several projects have much greater scope than the amount of tagging they have been able to do to date. The WikiProject Biography is probably the one project which hasn't tagged the biggest number of relevant articles, simply given the scope of that project. Any such numbers as you are proposing would probably be both time-consuming for the bot to generate, and less than productive in terms of actually measuring the real scope of a project rather than its amount of tagging to date. John Carter (talk) 14:16, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
i agree it wouldn't measure the size of the project, but how much tagging has been done - which is nevertheless an interesting statistic, isn't it? and i ask because i didn't think it would actually take that much of the bot's time to do (i.e. a single edit to the page regularly).. unless i am mistaken. 82.6.96.66 (talk) 14:55, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Table update

The fact that the bot doesn't get as far as the update to this table, doesn't mean that the time period should be adjusted to reflect the bot "failures". I as much should be reflecting the run frequency and the update intention. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/(Desk) 16:34, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

The instance of the bot from January 14 is still running, doing the biography project, and and consuming 1GB of memory. Even if the biography folks are not ready for it, I suggest we remove the main biography project from the index to save server resources and not strain the Wikipedia database. Would make it much more certain it would actually get to updating the table too. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:02, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
That being the case, you might want to contact User:Kingboyk, who probably understands that project's banner better than anyone else. He might be able to add a few parameters to make it easier to accomplish the above. John Carter (talk) 17:03, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
I used to, but I've not been very active. Kirill and Oleg can do just as good a job, almost certainly better. --kingboyk (talk) 22:59, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
Actually, the instance of the bot from January 18 was in the same situation, stuck fetching the biography articles and consuming another 1GB of memory. I killed both of them, since there's yet a third instance of the bot running from January 21 and the total server memory is only 3GB. So, it won't get to updating the main table again. In short, the bot does not scale to cover the biography project with its half a million articles. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:07, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
(Edit conflict) Could we perhaps persuade the Bio project to accept us running the bot only once a fortnight, or once a month? That would allow all of the other projects to get a turnaround in 3 days or so, except during the time period that the Bio update is running. The wording could be amended to spell out the new arrangement. Walkerma (talk) 17:12, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
What server is this running on now? Do we need to clone the bot to run on a faster server, at least during the WP:Bio run? Walkerma (talk) 17:12, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
The server is the one you got for me, I think it is in France. The server is powerful enough, the issue is that there are just too many articles in the biography stub category, it takes a very long time to retrieve it page by page and sometimes the bot even does not get to the end of it (the pointers to the next page in the category can get messed up in the database if you keep on accessing the category for very many hours). In short, the hardware is not the problem, it is just getting huge categories does not scale. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:00, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
Alternately, and I don't know enough to know if this is feasible, might it be possible to create a Category:Biography articles not yet assigned to a work group, and then run all the various subprojects and that category in succession, maybe creating a way to "add together" all the subproject article ratings at the very end for the main biography banner's statistics? John Carter (talk) 17:17, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
More workgroups would help. Ideally, many more so that the Project resembles to the bot lots of small to medium WPs. Alas, there hasn't been much action on that front.
In the meantime, of course if it's causing problems Bio will have to be run seperately and less often. --kingboyk (talk) 22:59, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
Well, I guess then the best thing to do is create more work groups. There is an extant religious figures proposal which I can try to add to the template eventually, but I think we could probably add more as well. I'm starting a section on the Biography Project talk page to solicit ideas of further reasonable Biography subprojects. Anyone is free to suggest any that they think would be useful. John Carter (talk) 23:04, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

One intermediate solution would be to not count or list the stub and unassessed biography articles (for the main project). Those are mostly assessed automatically anyway, and there is no big need I would argue to know those numbers. That would speed up the bot very much. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:00, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

WP 1.0 Bot behavior with sub-categories

Since the talks of adding additional classifications to the bot have been ongoing for some time with no consensus, I have a question regarding the behavior of the bot that could be a temporary solution. Does the bot go through articles located in a sub-category of a particular classification? For example, if Category:FL-Class medicine articles was a sub-category of Category:List-Class medicine articles, would the bot consider the articles in Category:FL-Class medicine articles as List-Class? If it did, then projects using the FL-Class assessment could at least get the proper statistics with List-Class and FL-Class merged, and still keep separate categories for featured and non-featured lists. What is the current behavior of the bot? If it does not consider sub-categories, could this feature be added? Only one sub-level of categories would need to be processed, so complicated scripting checking for loops would not even be necessary. --Scott Alter 08:35, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

As of now the bot looks three levels deep into categories, from the base Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments, to individual projects (biography, chemistry, etc.) to individual classes of articles (FA, GA, etc.). I would be reluctant to add one more search level unless indeed very much needed (it would make the code maintainance more complex too).
One solution is to have all FL-Class articles show up also in List-Class (there's a trick to do that with templates I think).
About whether to include FL class, again, technically it is very easy, I am just not sure if there is consensus on that or who is in charge of judging if consensus exists. (Does this project have a boss? :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:18, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Um, I'm guessing, considering you're the one who has the ability to do it, and most of the rest aren't, you are in this instance? John Carter (talk) 22:41, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't have an opinion about the merits of having the FL-class in or not. Perhaps Walkerma who's been coordinating the release of WP 1.0 articles can comment on this. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:32, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
Is there likely to be any significant practical impact to bot operations from adding another level? If so, then doing this for FLs really wouldn't be worth it.
Aside from that, would it be possible to have FL mapped to FA for the general statistics? In other words, for a project where FL categories existed, the statistics table would have two rows, one for each of FA and FL; but for the overall table, the FA and FL rows would be merged, minimizing the inaccuracy due to most projects' lack of such ratings. Or would this be too complicated? Kirill 06:04, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Merging FA and FL in the general stats would not be hard, but adding one more search level would be more tricky and would make the code more convoluted. I'd be inclined to do the former, so allowing FL for the projects which use it but adding FA and FL in the global stats table, if that's what people want. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:02, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Rather than making the code any more complex, why not just add the FL-Class to the table and treat it as its own class (which probably only requires 5 extra characters: "FL",). Then, the projects that use (or want to use) FL can do so, and keep separate stats on lists from articles. If a project does not want to use FL, then it simply won't appear in their stats table - like any other unused class. There does not seem to be any blatant opposition to including FL. Many people seem to support inclusion, and a few are indifferent. In the thread above, one person questioned why not just combine them with FA, which I think others have already addressed. With several people supporting FL, a few abstentions, and no opposition, I'd say we have consensus. --Scott Alter 19:08, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
I still believe that it really is not necessary to have two classes to address the same thing (a finished page). I'm much more inclined to rename FA-Class as Featured-Class, and combine both, which would also prevent the code of the WP:1.0 bot from becoming even more convoluted. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:28, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, Category:FL-Class articles was created back in October 2007, so it seems that FL-class is here to stay. The sticking point is whether to bring it within the WP 1.0 bot assessments or not, and it seems Oleg was happy to do this. I support this class being tracked separately because FA and FL are different processes, and at the moment, when trying to work out stats for one or the other, many categories mix them up and that makes things harder. Have a look at Category:FA-Class biography articles and tell me how many are lists and how many are articles. Carcharoth (talk) 22:23, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
Like Oleg said, one way a project can add extra ratings is to duplicate them into two categories. For example, in the mathematics project there are 'B+ class' articles. These are also put in the GA-class category by the talk page template, so the WP bot counts them as GA class in its statistics. But at the project level there is a more specialized bot that knows how to sort them out. Compare project tables vs. the WP 1.0 table (minor differences in counts are because they are generated independently at different times). — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:40, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
Sorry I missed this post before. I don't have strong feelings, since for our article selection process we give FAs the same number of points as FLs. I can see some moderate value in the idea, but it does add yet another line to the tables. It would at least prevent the perennial question, "Why does WP:1.0 have more FAs than WP:FA (Answer - because of the FLs). The idea of FL was raised quite recently, but a common response was that most projects are happy just to tag such lists as FA-Class. Since that time List-Class has become part of the landscape, so maybe the rules have changed a bit. My perception is that a few people really want it, but many people have a mild opposition to the idea, and it's hard to decide on a consensus in such cases. My view: If a significant no. of WikiProjects want it, even a minority, then we should allow it as an option. Those who don't want it won't see the line in their stats tables anyway. Let me ask a few more people. Walkerma (talk) 04:29, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
I'm not really sure we need this level of granularity. {{FA-Class}} indicates that the article has attained the highest quality classification possible for that type of page. If FA-Class is causing some confusion when applied to FL's, we can always rename it it {{Featured-Class}} and achieve the same effect. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 09:28, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
Well then, since the requests for FL keep on coming, and since the opposition is not very strong, perhaps we could add FL-Class. Barring some strong feelings on this in the next several days I could work on it. Then, if people want, I could also implement Kirill's suggestion to merge FA and FL in the global stats. I hope however that people won't want FA and FL to be kept merged or separate on a per-project basis, that would be too much to manage, so we either go with FL split from FA on all projects, or on none of them. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:13, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I'd say Support, overall, there is definitely a groundswell of strong support for the idea from some projects. Walkerma (talk) 06:40, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
...but a common response was that most projects are happy just to tag such lists as FA-Class. This is very much like the Ford Model-T's color. "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." At best, labeling FLs as FA-Class is a hack. WikiProjects use the hack because there were no other alternatives available until just recently. However, the FL-Class has now been added to the official assessment scale, and several WikiProjects are already adopting the FL-Class to their assessments. The bot should be updated to reflect this addition of this new standard class. --Farix (Talk) 15:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
I implemented FL-Class, see here. It will take a few days until the bot will start again, then it will add FL-class articles. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:23, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

How can I request one of these boxes?

I am a member of WP:Elements and I would like to know if it is possible to get a box like this one for the project. Thanks, Nergaal (talk) 22:01, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Can you be specific about what box you are referring to? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:56, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
basically an entry in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index called "Chemical element articles by quality" that links the pages using the template {{Chemical Element}}. Nergaal (talk) 06:08, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
You can go to the index page and follow the link to the instructions from there. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:45, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Format of the stats table

Copied from Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team#Assessment_graph. I also support this proposal. Walkerma (talk) 03:58, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Is there some way to have the list row line up above the assessed row? Because, as it is, there's assessed, list, total. It looks weird. LaraLove 04:46, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

I have to agree with this, as well. Any project which has decided to use the class clearly is going to regard these articles as having already been assessed. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 04:54, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
Done, see here. The changes will propagate to the other projects when the bot does its run. Walkerma, thanks for posting that request here, this is a better place for bot-related discussion. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:59, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks! And how appropriate to use WP:Aesthetics as the example! Walkerma (talk) 18:14, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Adding FL class to a WikiProject's assessment scheme

Is there a step-by-step guide to how to add "FL" class to a WikiProject's assessment scheme? Off-hand, I think the things that would need to be changed are:

  • (a) The project article talk page template would need coding for the FL parameter.
  • (b) The new FL-Class category would need to be created and categorised (where?).
  • (c) The project's assessment documentation would need updating.
  • (d) Existing featured lists would have to be switched from FA to FL class.

I think that's it. Can someone confirm that the bot will automatically pick up such changes and change the pages it updates? I can do (b)-(d) OK. Could someone help out or write a guide for how to do (a)? I would like to implement this for some projects, especially as my recent attempts to use subcategories of Category:FA-Class articles to see how many featured articles some projects have, has been hampered by the featured lists being mixed up with the featured articles. Carcharoth (talk) 01:30, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Having done the same thing myself in the past, all I did was copy the FA class parameters in the existing banner, place the copy right below the original, and alter the FA to FL. I hope that makes sense. I can't find a specific example right now, but if you give me an example of a banner you're considering, I could demonstrate how to do it there. John Carter (talk) 17:23, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Like this? I then created Category:FL-Class dinosaurs articles and categorised and added documentation based on Category:FA-Class dinosaurs articles, and made sure the current featured list now appeared in this category. I couldn't find the project assessment documentation, so I left a note on their talk page. Now I just have to see if the bot will pick up the new category. Carcharoth (talk) 12:15, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to remove the biography articles

Today I logged in to the server running the bot, to discover four instances of the bot running, with the older being 12 days. Here's the deal, the bot does not scale to the entire biography project. I suspect from past experience that as the bot keeps on getting pagefuls of a given category, if that category is huge and gets updated as the bot reads it, the bot may get confused and get into an infinite loop or something. Then we can't get the global stats either.

I propose we remove the biography project from the assessment, or at least, the Stub-Class biography articles, which are a third of a million and which are assessed semi-automatically anyway I think (that an article is a stub does not provide any real assessment value).

Note: the effect of this won't be that large. Very many biography articles are covered within subprojects. Comments? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:37, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Would it be possible to have a separate instance of the bot just to do the Bio articles? Obviously, this would mean that the global stats wouldn't include them; but that's a minor issue. I'm more concerned with keeping projects supported log-wise for as long as possible. Kirill 13:04, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Can we simply get a second bot, perhaps even a clone of WP1.0 Bot? It could perhaps be tweaked to allow for the huge categories. Perhaps it could be run & administered by someone from the WP:Bio project? As for global stats, it should be trivial to get a bot to add the two sets of data together - we could probably get the SelectionBot to do that task if necessary.
On a related theme, Oleg, where does the bot reside these days - did it get relocated onto Emmanuel's server in Europe? Walkerma (talk) 13:40, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
The bot has been on Emmanuel's server in France for a while. Walkerma, thank you, the bot is so greedy recently it would have ruined the university computer I ran it on.
At some point I will then fork the biography articles to its own bot, to be run weekly. I can't promise each of those biography runs will be successful, as, again, the bot seems to be confused with huge categories (and it may not even be bot's fault, the server may be feeding it incorrect data). But it would be better like what is today, I think. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:22, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Including update date

I would like to propose to include the date of when the information in the stat boxes (such as this one) was last updated. The date is already included in the edit summary, but not in the actual box. At this point I am simply looking for feedback regarding whether this is a good idea or not. Thanks.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 15:10, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

The date will show up everywhere where a stat template is transcluded. Many people may not like that. My take is that it is simpler to take a look at the history if you'd like to see the last update date (or even simpler, take a look at the bottom of the page, there is already a datestamp on the bottom of every wikipedia article). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:49, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot trials

I've been working to update a few parts of the WP 1.0 bot code to speed things up. The goal is to get the bot to finish a complete run in two days, rather than four or five. There should be no visible change in the bot's output; the changes are all to the underlying code to access the article data. So there is no new functionality, just faster processing.

The good news is that the new code is ready for heavy testing. I have already been testing it on individual projects by hand, but at some point I need to simply turn it on and let it go. I'm planning to do that sometime in the next few days. The cgi script that allows you to rate one project at a time will still be using the older code.

The new code puts "(test code)" at the end of the edit summary. If you notice any strange behavior in an edit marked that way, please let me know. If all goes well, the new code will replace the old code in a couple weeks. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:08, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

This would be awesomely great! Thanks! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:15, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
The full trial is now underway. If anyone sees something odd, please let me know. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:10, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
And complete, in about 44 hours, including an update of the global stats at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics for the first time since Feb. 14, and including updates to the category structure. I'm going to look through the logs it made during this run for any issues; if you see anything odd in the results, please let me know. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:58, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
Cool! Will this be the regular run from now on? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:00, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
Not quite yet. There are a few minor technical issues I need to fix (for example, two or three of the 1000+ biography pages didn't get uploaded because the database locked for a while overnight last night. I can avoid that problem.). Then I want to do another test run before I make it automatic. Also, I want to give time for any other bugs to be reported. But overall I am happy with this run. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:19, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

I ran the new code a second time; this run took 49 hours. I did fix the issue with database locks - the DB locked 3 times during the test run, but the script just waits them out. So unless anyone has errors to report, I'm ready to set the new code to automatic.

We could hypothetically run the full assessment 3 times per week, but it would be tight. Conservatively, it takes 2.5 days to complete each run. I think 2 full runs per week should be enough, since individual projects can always run it by hand. I was thinking of running the full assessment Sunday and Wednesday. Does that sound reasonable? — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:15, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I set up the crontab to run it Sunday and Wednesday. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:31, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Thought I did it right

I redid the Wikiproject Ohio template to include importance. It works fine as far as I can tell. The problem is that the chart that lists the number of articles by importance and class will not update to show importance even after running the bot manually. It just says "No importance" for all of them. Could someone please take a look at it? Thanks. §tepshep¡Talk to me! 00:18, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

The category needed to be named Category:Ohio articles by importance instead of Category:WikiProject Ohio articles by importance. I fixed that, ran the script, and now the table is correct at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Ohio articles by quality statistics. The rule of thumb is that whatever the statistics page is called, that's what the quality and importance categories should be called. In this case, "Ohio". — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:13, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Totally looked that over. Thanks so much for your help! §tepshep¡Talk to me! 03:16, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Index page shows up blank

There is currently an issue with Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index showing up as a blank page (with 0 bytes of content). This is because the source for that page is too large. Hopefully the bot will be fixed soon to split the data over several pages. The bot is just about to finish a full run, so even though the index is not visible, the individual projects should be correct. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! I saw this yesterday, but thought I just had a browser problem. Walkerma (talk) 06:16, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
I fixed this issue. Now there is Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index2 where the second part of the index resides, with the first part in the old place, Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index. This is a stop-gap measure, more thought needs to be given to how best to split a big index into subindices. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:21, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Project Quality Stats

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Biography articles by quality log, Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log, and Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/WikiProject Illinois_articles_by_quality_log had not been updated for ten days until PeterSymonds ran the bot automatically today. However, although I can see the tables have updated, these pages did not.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 19:33, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

We ran into an issue with the index page (see the previous section). I didn't start a full run because of that, until I have a chance to integrate Oleg's fix into the new WP 1.0 bot code. I should be able to do that this afternoon, but I haven't been able to do it earlier this week. Thanks for the gentle reminder.
I don't know why running the code manually would cause the tables to update but not the log pages. If that happens with the updated code as well, I will be able to diagnose it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 09:14, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot queue

Is there any way to know what projects the bot is currently or planning to work on? I've tried to get Albums updated (haven't been since the 22nd) but the bot seems to stop working once it gets to the Gs in the 29k stub category. It's still has the fun 33k unaccessed category, so I wonder if it's just been queued or it that just too much to ask for? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 06:22, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

The bot does not provide the functionality you are asking for, and I don't know how I would implement it. The bot does not work with very long projects from the web-based interface, the server just cuts it off. For long projects it is better to wait for the scheduled run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:13, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
As Oleg says, the web interface only works for small projects, as there is a time limit for a cgi script to run. The idea of having the bot give more detailed info is good, and I'll make sure it is considered in any updates of the bot code. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:55, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Running the bot by hand does not work

The tool that allows people to run WP 1.0 bot on demand from the web-based interface does not work for the moment. The system administrator on the network it was running on told me it takes too many server resources. I am now looking for a new home for it. In the meantime, the only way to run the bot is through the regular scheduled run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:13, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

The tool is now at http://www.kiwix.org/~oleg/wp/wp10/run_wp10.html. The system administrator there asked me that people don't overuse it. My suggestion is that the tool should be used only for new projects or for small projects. Otherwise it would be better to wait for the standard run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:57, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Does it keep a log of how often it is run? We can probably add some code to throttle it, so that it cannot be run too frequently. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:53, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
It does not keep a log. I would assume it is not used a lot. If it causes problems in the future, I guess we can introduce something to restrict the usage. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:10, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I went on the link and typed in Devon. It appeared to be doing something and at the end said "Done with Category:Devon articles by quality!", but nothing appeared to have happened on Wikipedia regarding Devon. I also tried with Foobar and same as above happened. Meaty♠Weenies (talk) 00:48, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind it works now. I've changed the name of my assessment from "WikiProject Devon" to just "Devon", but WikiProject Devon still appears on the list. Could someone please remove it. Meaty♠Weenies (talk) 01:40, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

How to add a project?

How does a given wikiproject start assessing its articles and getting indexed? I've looked around and can't find any instructions. --Padraic 19:16, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

If you visit Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index, then on top there will be a link to the instructions. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:10, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Oops, thanks. --Padraic 15:22, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Could someone please help out...

the Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases by putting a quality assessment box on their main project page. We aren't very good at working with the 1.0 bot. 20:08, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Is there a trick to getting this to update? I've been assessing for a few days now but the chart doesn't reflect it. --Cdogsimmons (talk) 05:09, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
Essentially, wait until it gets to it. The bot works in alphabetical order, and you can see where it is right now here. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 07:55, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot Error

Hi, I've been trying to get the bot to run for the newly created Category:Lost articles by quality but it keeps giving me the same error over and over again:

Error message is: Could not get_text for Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Lost articles by quality! at /home/oleg/public_html/cgi-bin/wp/modules/bin/perlwikipedia_utils.pl line 93 eval {...} called at /home/oleg/public_html/cgi-bin/wp/modules/bin/perlwikipedia_utils.pl line 82 main::wikipedia_fetch('Perlwikipedia=HASH(0x8b51fd8)', 'Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Lost articles by quality...', 200, 1) called at wp10_routines.pl line 401 main::fetch_list_subpages('Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Lost articles by quality...', 'ARRAY(0x86d3a64)') called at wp10_routines.pl line 182 main::main_wp10_routine('Category:Lost articles by quality') called at /home/oleg/public_html/wp/wp10/run_wp10.cgi line 53 Fetching Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Lost articles by quality.}}

I don't know if it's a problem with the bot or if I did something wrong (most likely the latter) but if anyone could help it would be appreciated. Thanks, Scorpion0422 20:36, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I was able to reproduce the problem. The page Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Lost articles by quality is a redlink, and the bot is complaining about not being able to fetch it. In the past redlinks were not a problem, I don't know what happened later.
The problem is thus in the library the bot calls to get Wikipedia pages. I'll try to dig in there this weekend, and see what is going on. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:02, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
Mmm, now its a bluelink. :) Somehow the bot corrected itself and updated the page. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:04, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm having the same error that occured before. Mine concerns Wikipedia:WikiProject Cape Cod. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 23:05, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

There is something wrong indeed. I'll take a look this weekend. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:25, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
This is fixed. There was an issue in the Perlwikipedia library I was using. Updating to the latest version took care of it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:28, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

List of assessment groups by article number?

Would it be possible to generate a sporadically-updated list of all of the 1.0 groups by some basic statistics like total number of tagged articles, number of unassessed articles, and the like? It would be useful so that we can see which projects clearly have assessment issues, as well as projects which may have a small enough scope to be more useful as task forces of other projects, or - in the case of blatant inactivity - be brought to MfD. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 03:23, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

It would be a pain in the ass with the current framework, as it would pretty much require scraping the statistic pages for each project. It might be better to add this to the new framework being thought about. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:43, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
If the list needed to be kept in sync with the statistics, perhaps. But the actual task is pretty simple; if I have a bit of free time this weekend, I'll put together a script that generates the needed lists. Kirill (prof) 02:11, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
Ok, the results are up at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index/Comparison. Kirill (prof) 17:46, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
Many thanks, Kirill! Maybe we could update this infrequently, perhaps once a quarter or so? Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 22:22, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion

(moved from User_talk:Mathbot) I see Mathbot compiles the tables of article status at Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics.

Right now it links to articles according to either quality or importance. Could it be modified to link to a specific quality and importance? For example, if I'm interested in improved stubs of high importance, I can either click on High (35 of 366 are of stub-class) or on stubs (35 of 3787 are high importance). Or if I want to assess the quality of low-importance articles, I'd have to go through at best 488 low-importance article rather than 14.

I can explain more if that was not clear. Thank you.Headbomb (ταλκ · κοντριβς) 07:05, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I think you are referring to User:WP 1.0 bot rather than mathbot. The feature you request is not supported. I am quite pressed for time recently, and can't implement it, I am also not sure how crucial it is. If you wish, you can try requesting this feature at WT:1.0/I and see if somebody would be willing to implement it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:34, 28 May 2008 (UTC)


I previously suggested to make every sub-section a linked entry so it would be easier to target articles of a specific importance/quality rating, and I'm suggesting it again. I'm currently working on the WikiProject Physics' Projects of the Week, and I've manually reviewed over 2,000 articles in the last week. I've reviewed all articles with an importance rating (and I'm now reviewing all articles according to quality rating. The problem is that I've already rated every article with an importance rating, so now I'm stuck re-reviewing a bunch of articles I've already rated/assessed.

I suggest implementing this feature for two reasons:

  1. It'll help me a great deal.
  2. It'll make it incredibly easier for people to assess the unassessed/unrated articles, and all wikiprojects will benefit from this.
  • In theory we could use category intersection, but it's not giving me any good results. My query could be wrong, though. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 17:47, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
    I agree that this would be a very useful feature. I see Oleg is busy, but I'll be talking a lot with User:CBM soon (he also works on the 1.0 bot), I'll see if the existing bot could be adapted to do something like you suggest. One thing, though - the worklists such as [[9]] do list the articles of any given quality level IN ORDER OF IMPORTANCE. That means (for example) that you can find (on the page I mentioned) all of the top importance Start-Class articles quite easily. Another alternative solution might be to produce off-wiki worklists that are sortable by column - you could very easily locate the sort of information you need with such a table. CBM has produced such things for the 1.0 project, such as this list (produced around February, so it won't include your new assessments!) - though bear in mind that list includes three other importance factors in its ranking, and it's only a test algorithm (still being developed). Just a few thoughts. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 18:03, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
I'll do this at some point when I have time, unless Carl (CBM) gets there before me. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:26, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

New C-Class level

Oleg, CBM, there appears to be enough support for C-Class to warrant introducing this new level into the assessment scheme. This represents the first change to the quality levels since GA-Class was added to the manual scheme in late 2005. Can one of you add the new level into the code for WP1.0 bot?

Having read a LOT of people's ideas and thoughts lately, I'd like us to consider what other features might be added to the bot - or should we simply let others write scripts and bots to achieve the same thing. Should I raise such ideas here? Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 04:46, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

As far as I can remember, there was supposed to be a large overhaul of the WP:1.0 code base sometime soon-ish. We should probably start discussing what features and technical modifications we want to put in there to get the ball rolling. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 07:17, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
Done. This should show up at the next run. I sorted it after B-Class but before Stub-Class.
Yes, Carl plans to rewrite the bot at some point, I am not sure about the timing or details. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:29, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
Re Tixotd, I am planning to start work on the rewrite in July. I'll make sure to announce it here, because I am hoping to get input from non-developers about new features to consider. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:42, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Adding a task force to be assessed

Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine is beginning to create task forces, and we would like to have separate assessments for the task force articles. Our first task force is Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Reproductive medicine task force, with articles to be in Category:Reproductive medicine articles by quality. Our assessment template is all set up for task forces - we just haven't started tagging pages yet, and are intentionally holding off for a few days (so please do not tag any pages yet).

In the mean time, I am trying to set up the bot, but ran into a problem. While trying to manually run the bot, I received the following error message, and the bot subsequently got stuck in a loop:

Fetching Wikipedia:WikiProject Reproductive medicine.
Retrieving http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AWikiProject%20Reproductive%20medicine&action=edit&oldid=section= Sleep 1

Error message is: Could not get_text for Wikipedia:WikiProject Reproductive medicine! at /home/oleg/public_html/cgi-bin/wp/modules/bin/perlwikipedia_utils.pl line 93 eval {...} called at /home/oleg/public_html/cgi-bin/wp/modules/bin/perlwikipedia_utils.pl line 82 main::wikipedia_fetch('Perlwikipedia=HASH(0x86d36ec)', 'Wikipedia:WikiProject Reproductive medicine.wiki', 200, 1) called at wp10_routines.pl line 1350 main::get_wikiproject('Category:Reproductive medicine articles by quality') called at wp10_routines.pl line 290 main::update_index('ARRAY(0x86d37c4)', 'HASH(0x86d392c)', 'HASH(0x86d3914)', 'HASH(0x86d38fc)', 'HASH(0x86d389c)') called at wp10_routines.pl line 145 main::main_wp10_routine('Category:Reproductive medicine articles by quality') called at /home/oleg/public_html/wp/wp10/run_wp10.cgi line 53 Fetching Wikipedia:WikiProject Reproductive medicine. Attempt: 2.

It seems as though the bot is trying to find "Wikipedia:WikiProject Reproductive medicine", which does not exist. Is there a way to tell the bot that this is a task force, and not a project? I see that in the index, the wikiproject link for task forces accurately points to the task force page, but I am unsure where to set this. Thanks. --Scott Alter 10:22, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

There's a problem there indeed. I'll take a look in the weekend. Some API changes which confuse the bot I guess. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:29, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Assessment categories plugin

WPAssessmentCatCreator is a AWB-plugin that can help create the assessment categories required for the WP1.0. In addition to the basic cats, it helps create the non-standard classes such as Template, Category, Redirect etc. I had picked up Kingboyk's version and modified it a bit. There is a generate categories page that does something similar, but it is restricted to administrators. Please let me know your comments and suggestions. Thanks, Ganeshk (talk) 21:18, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Stats table - wikilink numbers with intersection categories

Oleg/CBM, I would like the bot to wikilink the numbers on the stats table with their respective intersection category. See Category:Tamil Nadu articles by quality and importance. This will not add any additional processing time to the bot. It will add the link if the category exists, otherwise it will leave it as a plain-number. This feature would really help in providing easy access to these categories. Can you please add this to the bot? Thanks, Ganeshk (talk) 07:19, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes yes yes yes yes! As I've said before, we need this, as this allows people to target specific class of articles of specific quality.

BTW Ganeshk, could you head over to {{physics}} to make sure that the code you've proposed for the physics banner (I've modified it a bit) is sound? Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 00:30, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

The ability to view the intersection lists (quality/importance) is a feature that is on the todo list for the next version of the WP 1.0 bot code. I will be starting a discussion in July to discuss that project in more detail. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:39, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Thanks Carl. As a workaround, I used Erwin85's CatCount to create something similar at this page. Regards, Ganeshk (talk) 00:50, 23 June 2008 (UTC)


This table is now up to date again.
It is updated by a tool on the toolserver; it will not work if the toolserver is
having problems. If this chart is showing much more than zero,
then the table will be updated slowly or not at all.


That's IMO, the perfect version of the table. Especially if it could be made to handle DAB, Cat, Temp and NA class, as well as NA importance ratings. Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 19:35, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

I like it, just without the percentages. Having an extra column on the tables would ruin pages such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment that depend on the tables being narrow. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 05:28, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

C-Class assessments not working with the MathBot?

Hi, I was setting up the assessment mechanisms this morning for the Catullus WikiProject, and I noticed that the new C-Class assessments are not being counted by the MathBot. They turn up as "Unassessed" instead. It's possible that I made a mistake in setting up the template, but if not, could this be fixed, please? Thanks, all! :) Willow (talk) 19:05, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

My understanding is that C-Class has not been enabled yet in the system, because we are still writing the definitions of exactly what C-Class IS, and also how it will affect the other classes. See this discussion for more detail. Walkerma (talk) 19:07, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
I can confirm that the problem is with the Bot. I made a C-class article with {{physics}} in my sandbox, and it doesn't show up when I run WP 1.0 bot.Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 19:49, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Um, the bot is picking up C-Class assessments already, so the problem is not with the bot. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 20:41, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Since Category:C-Class Catullus articles is empty, the bot does not add its row in the stats table. This kind of behavior was agreed on a while ago. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:36, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

The missing rows are a feature, not a bug! ;) No, the problem was that, on its initial pass, the bot ranked a "C-Class" article as "Unassessed" and included it as such in the table. It got the Importance correct, but not the Class. The problem seems to have fixed itself, however, since I just tried it again and it worked — yeay bot!

Oh, but there was one small glitch in the colors. In Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Catullus articles by quality, both the B- and C-class tags are shown in yellow; shouldn't B-Class articles now be more yellow-green? Anyway, thank you all for your help, :) Willow (talk) 11:24, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

I think you need to change the color of {{C-Class}}. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:35, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
Um, that's weird. It's the only page in which I've seen that problem. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 06:11, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I've tried for Wikipedia:WikiProject Elements to create the C-, List-, FL-, template-class pages but they are empty. This bot also sees them as unassessed. Anybody knowns why? Nergaal (talk) 13:36, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Unrated articles

Unassessed (quality) articles are handled by the bot. Could it be possible to handle the unrated (importance) as well? Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 19:30, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

All moderately interesting information zapped

Is this edit supposed to be an improvement, and if so, how? Or has the bot simply lost its brain? -- Hoary (talk) 23:16, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

There's a problem with the category tree for the WikiProject. The bot is looking for Category:History of photography articles by quality, but the entire tree is at Category:History of photography related articles by quality. Fixing... Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 00:05, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
The bot ran correctly at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/History of photography related articles by quality. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 00:08, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
It did? It hasn't yet undone the deletion in the edit linked to above. -- Hoary (talk) 14:19, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
Because that's the wrong page. The bot has been updating the "History of photography related articles by quality" table for a while, but that page is called "HIstory of photography articles by quality". You can see the bot added the lists to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/History of photography related articles by quality/3. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 17:53, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
Got it.
I'll be busy for the next few hours, but after that I'll get around to fixing it (unless I can twist the arm of my learned friend Pinkville to do it in the meantime). -- Hoary (talk) 23:30, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
Fixed (I think). -- Hoary (talk) 07:01, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Making C-Class "official"

I wanted to check - is everything now OK with the bot for C-Class? I know there were caching and colour issues, but from what I can tell, everything is now OK with the bot. Can we announce it being "official" on Friday? Walkerma (talk) 03:26, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

C-Class works fine for Wikiproject Physics as far as the bot is concerned. Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 03:56, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

New parameter (article type)

Right now the classes supported are: FA, FL, GA, A, B, C, Start, Stub, List, Template, Disambig, Category, NA

However, if one wants to tag an article such as List of mesons as a "List-Class" article, then one loses all information about the quality of the list. You can all think of an example I'm sure. For this reason I propose the creation of a new parameter, which is the type of "article" this way, you could follow the quality of a type of article. I propose this way of categorizing stuff:

The three proposed parameters
Type Quality Importance
Article Featured Top
List A High
Portal Good Mid
Project B Low
Category C
Template Start
Disambig Stub
Image
Needed
NA NA NA
??? ??? ???

The basic assessment table could look like this:

Status of X WikiProject
Articles
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Lists
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Images
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total

While the "full" assessment table could look like this (probably that only the V.1.0 Editorial Team would use this one), but individual WikiProjects would probably sometimes use more than Articles and Lists (templates and categories I would guess, and maybe NA)

Status of X WikiProject
Articles
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Lists
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Templates
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Categories
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Portals
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Projects
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Disambig
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Images
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
Needeed
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
NA
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
???
Top High Mid Low NA ??? Total
F
A
G
B
C
Start
Stub
NA
???
Total
New type

Not only would it allow to gauge the quality of lists and put people more comfortable with tagging an article as a "list" (which is IMO the most important reasons behind this), but it could also interesting stuff such as a bot handling of Featured Portals, help struggling WikiProjects to notice what the "higher rated" WikiProjects do, perhaps even create Featured WikiProjects, help to identify high quality-templates and draw attention to the poorer ones so they can be improved/merged, perhaps even create featured templates, etc...

What say you? Is I insane or is I unto something? Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 04:19, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

In some ways, {{List-Class}} is for WikiProjects who don't want to assess lists using the standard article criteria, for various reasons. I'm not sure this is needed, although others may differ. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 06:58, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
I'll also note that this would probably require a bot to make the first batch of change, as there would be quite a lot. But I still think it's a sound idea nonetheless. If Projects don't want to assess lists, then they can always put NA-Class for quality. Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 12:16, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

I took the initiative of a building a generic WikiProject Banner (located at {{WkP X}}) containing these "type" of articles etc... I also created the X-type template (altought colors could be better). (See User talk:Headbomb/Test Article for examples).

I'm neutral on this proposal. I can see how we could assess qualities for lists and even portal pages, but it seems to me that the quality rating is not applicable for image, disambig, redirect, WikiProject, category and template pages. In working through the Trains project assessments, I've seen one other banner so far that uses a type parameter but I can't recall which project it is at the moment. Slambo (Speak) 10:48, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Well there's the NA-class rating for that. However, for Wikiproject Templates, having a rating for templates might not be a silly idea, a rating for WikiProject might be usefull for WikiProject WikiProjects (if there's one around). Ratings for images seems a bit overkill (especially if you want to establish the difference between a Start-Class and a Stub-class image), but a simpler Featured, A-Class, B-Class, C-class rating system could be of use. How to use the Type, Class, Importance ratings really is up to each Wikiproject. They might not want to assess the quality of their templates, but if they want, then the possibility is there, though this would probably be more useful for internal usage in Wikiprojects than for the WP 1.0 editorial team. Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 13:33, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

FL-Class bug?

Is something wrong with the bot? If you look at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Film awards articles by quality log, the two most recent "removed" articles were actually promoted to FL-Class. Thanks, Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 16:33, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

That is because Category:FL-Class film awards articles was not in Category:Film awards articles by quality, so the bot does not know about it. I put it in, the bot will pick those articles at the next run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:35, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for that! Will check the other task forces as well now... Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 02:58, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

WP Ottawa and WP Toronto not showing up.

Template:OttawaProject and Template:WikiProject Toronto don't seem to work - any ideas? --Padraic 18:11, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Request?

If I want the bot to run here, should I request it here? -- iMatthew T.C. 11:32, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

You can look at WP:1.0/I and the link to the instructions from there. If it does not work, you can write here another message. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:17, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Bot not updating C-class stats?

How to add C-class stats to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Poland-related articles by quality statistics and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Polish military history articles by quality statistics? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:57, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

The {{WikiProject Poland}} template did not contain C-Class; I've taken the liberty of adding it for you, so it should work fine now. Should you wish it, you can add List-Class and FL-Class in the same way. Regards. PC78 (talk) 20:59, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll do so.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 22:07, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Zeros in table

Could it be possible to add them? It's not critical, but it's ugly. Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 16:23, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I think I removed the zeros originally at somebody's suggestion, it was assumed it would look better without them. I can put them back if necessary, it depends what people prefer. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:31, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Hmmm that's weird. Anyway, my reasoning is that it's a bit confusing when nothing is in there. You wonder if the bot got it wrong, or if your categories are set up inadequatly. There needs to be something in the table, if not a 0, then an em dash (although 0 seems more natural, as em dash could be interpreted as "not applicable" or something. Anyway, this ain't a major issue. Headbomb {ταλκWP Physics: PotW} 03:09, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Stopping and starting?

I was replying to this, and I just noticed in the bot's contributions page that it keeps stopping and starting. Have they been doing work on the Kiwix server or something? I'm sure the bot is supposed to be "awake" more than this - does anyone know what is causing this problem? Walkerma (talk) 14:38, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

That the bot pauses, even for hours, is normal. Gathering the data it needs to display takes usually a larger part of its time than actually editing. As long as it proceeds it is OK. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:32, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Last week, a project had assessed so many pages at once (bot tagging) that the server was unable to save the daily log page. I lowered the maximum log length to try to avoid that problem in the future. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:07, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Bot double-entering logs?

See here and here. Thanks, Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 05:45, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

It's no problem - I was running the bot by hand and a second copy started running automatically. I stopped one of them to let the other one work alone. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:04, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Bot not picking up C-class?

The bot does not seem to pick up the assessment of those articles within WP:WINE that were reassessed as C-class; they end up in the unassessed category. Category:C-Class Wine articles exists, and after reading the question from WikiProject Poland above, I added C-class to Template:WikiProject Wine. However, a manual rerun of the bot after the template was updated didn't change anything. Where have I gone wrong? Tomas e (talk) 11:54, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

The category is empty, that's why. It was agreed a while ago that empty categories should not be listed in the stats. Try to add an article there and rerun the bot. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:58, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I added Category:C-Class Wine articles to the talk page of one C-class article (Talk:Gewürztraminer). That article was duly picked up by the bot, and a line with 1 C-class article was created in the table, but the other 60 or so C-class article remain as unassessed. So that apparently didn't do the trick! Tomas e (talk) 16:19, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
You might want to check your template code for the project banner to make certain that it actually codes for the category. Some only pass along previously-specified classes, so if C-Class isn't specified in the banner, it may send it to a default unassessed class. Just a thought. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 06:02, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
The bot seems to show a rather erratic behaviour! Today it had picked up 4 out of 60-something C-class wine article on what I believe was a scheduled rather than manually started run. When I reran it, it picked up 44 more, but left 17 clearly C-class marked in the unassessed class. While this, from a project point of view, seem to mean that the problem is getting smaller and may go away altogether, it does not seem like an ideal bot behaviour to mee... Tomas e (talk) 21:46, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

The category itself only shows 50 pages, not 60. The most likely culprit here is not the bot, it's the m:job queue. It can take a long time for changes to a template to be reflected in all the articles that use the template. One option is to do a null edit on each of the remaining 10 talk pages. Once you're sure all the pages are in the appropriate category, run the bot one time, and it will pick up the changes. But the bot has no way to know about changes pending in the job queue. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:09, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Good to know that a reasonable explanation exists, for what seemed erratic to me! I think I'll just wait it out and do one or two manual runs of the bot until Category:Unassessed Wine articles is empty of C-class articles. Right now 16 of the 18 articles there are actually C-class. Tomas e (talk) 23:24, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
I updated the pages (see Help:Null edit) and ran the bot. It counts 66 C-class articles now. The way the categories are slowly updated after a template edit, even though the pages look like they are updated, is one of the least user-friendly parts of the site. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:00, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes, now they're all in the right place, thanks for that. Tomas e (talk) 08:46, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

C-class colour in assessment lists

When the C-class was added, it looked to me that the colour of the B-class in the assessment tables (those we usually have on project pages) was changed from yellow to yellowish green, with C inheriting the yellow colour. However, it seems that in the assessment lists, B-class is still yellow, i.e., B and C have the same colour. An example can be seen here: Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Wine articles by quality/1, but it looked the same in all other places I checked. I guess the coding for these colours is in the bot, because I don't see them in the templates. It'd be good to have the same colour in both places. Tomas e (talk) 08:46, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

This is still an issue, please see this recent post. I had wondered if this was a caching issue, but it appears not; even this new list (started July 15) is showing the yellow colour (wrong) instead of the desired yellow-green. I don't understand why, because the template is shown as transcluding in, but I wonder if perhaps the colours are hard-coded into the bot or something? Oleg or CBM, do you know the answer for this? Walkerma (talk) 21:12, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
It seems to me that {{Assessment}} overwrites the color set by {{B-Class}}. G.A.S 09:48, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
It does. I see somebody added the {{sort}} function to the template; wasn't the bot supposed to do this to begin with? We could pretty much nuke it, but I don't know if it would actually affect anything. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 05:28, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Counts are off

The "Unassessed" counts reported by the bot in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Russia articles by quality statistics are consistently off; the number shown in Category:Unassessed Russia articles is always ~100 more. I observed this oddity for the past several updates in hopes that the discrepancy was caused by some lag and would eventually go away, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Counts of other categories all seem to be accurate, only "Unassessed" are misbehaving. Could someone take a look into this, please? Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 19:15, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

I think the issue is with pages such as Category_talk:FC_Moskva. These are categorized as Category:Unassessed Russia articles, so they appear on the category count. But the bot ignores pages that are not in the Talk: namespace. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:24, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Ah, I forgot all about those! I'll make sure cats and templates are untagged so they no longer screw up the counts. Thanks much for catching this!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 19:45, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Removing a project

WikiProject Fictional series ceased to exist a long time ago. It and its bot generated assessment pages can be removed. - LA (T) 22:43, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

I have a list of several of these that I'm generating, as I'm currently reviewing every WikiProject on the list. I'll try to remember to post it here for the record! Walkerma (talk) 07:22, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Improvements to the WP 1.0 bot under discussion

Hi, all. As we know, the Version 1.0 Index stores assessments for over 1.7 million articles. Originally, the bot was designed to process about 10,000 articles; we never actually thought that 70% of Wikipedia was going to be covered under some sort of assessment. That has slowly caused the bot to take longer to run, as bot runs that used to last about four hours now take about four days. To make the bot more efficient, changes to the way the bot framework operates are being discussed, and simultaneously, we are discussing which features it might be worthwhile to add as we are recoding everything. We really would like to have your participation at User:WP 1.0 bot/Second generation and its talk page as we do this. Thanks, Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 16:43, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Archiving logs

Hi there. Instead of the logs being truncated when the page size becomes too big, would it be possible to archive older changes? – PeeJay 12:09, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

The older changes are stored in the past versions of the page; this is inconvenient for browsing but the information isn't lost. The next version of the WP 1.0 bot will make it easier to browse and search the logs. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:01, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
Not always. If the log is too huge during a single update, then information is lost and irretrievable. --Millbrooky (talk) 22:42, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Numbers formating

Hello... is there a way the bot can use the {{formatnum:}} magic word with the displayed numbers so that they are easier to read ? 82.248.254.92 (talk) 16:21, 16 August 2008 (UTC).

The next version of the bot will add commas. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:32, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Some pages maintained by User:WP 1.0 bot are showing up as candidates for deletion

See WP:VPT#Pages showing up in CAT:CSD that shouldn't be there. EdJohnston (talk) 19:03, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Never mind. User:Gimmetrow diagnosed it in the above thread. EdJohnston (talk) 19:08, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Help!

After vainly attempting to create an assessment template by myself for Wikipedia:Wikiproject Correction and Detention Facilities I now recognize that I am failing miserably. The template I tried to create is at Template:WikiProject Correction and Detention Facilities. Please, someone throw me a rope before I sink too much deeper into the quicksand! HELP! --Cdogsimmons (talk) 23:32, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

DId some changes. Does it work now? Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 23:48, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I think it's fixed. Thanks. Now I just have to figure out the categories.--Cdogsimmons (talk) 00:18, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Feature request - Good Topics and Wikipedia:Featured topics

Hi, I have a feature request. We're currently in the process of working out how to implement good topics, and we are planning to try and automate topics moving between good and featured status (as the only difference between the two will be that featured topics will require 25% of the articles/lists that make them up to be featured). We have worked out using categories how to automate the moving process, but we still want to be able to see any moving between the two that occurs. Hence, we what a daily log of status changes, a la the sort that the WP 1.0 bot provides. Any featured topics will appear in Category:Wikipedia featured topics and Category:Wikipedia fully featured topics. Any good topics will appear in Category:Wikipedia good topics. So all the bot would need to do is monitor and report any moving between the three categories. This would require the creation of new functionality for the bot, but I suspect this shouldn't be a huge change, as it is extremely similar to the type of task the bot performs at the moment.

Additionally, it might be useful if the bot could monitor any changes in status to articles found in Category:Wikipedia featured topics all articles and its subcategories, or any outright additions of articles/lists to these categories. This way, we can ensure that no-one does something with an article which they shouldn't, such as add an article to a topic without nominating it first, or if an article is demoted below GA and no-one at WP:FT is told. This is essentially the services the bot already provides.

I hope that makes sense, if not I suggest you have a look at the good topics plan I linked above. We're probably hoping to have good topics set up in the next week or two, and I hope that you will be willing to help us in doing this - such help would be much appreciated - rst20xx (talk) 01:08, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, but there is no Category:Wikipedia good topics. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 22:21, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
Your point being....? Anyway, nevermind about the request, we'll do what good articles does - rst20xx (talk) 23:59, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
Can you explain to us how the category structures for FTs and GTs work? Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 19:56, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Sorry I missed this question at the time, but it looks like we may have a partial solution already ready to go. We are proposing that the second generation bot will start to record that an article is GA or FA, in lists like Foo articles by quality - see feature request #12. So if you do what GA does, then once we move to the new bot you will have that display available. What we don't have is a record in the log - would that be needed for your work? Walkerma (talk) 21:19, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

"Current-class" and "Future-class" nominated for deletion (withdrawn)

Resolved
 – Moot.

Both of these templates and their categories have been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 September 8#Future-Class and Current-Class. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 22:19, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Nomination withdrawn. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 23:47, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Problem with C-Class articles

Will someone help me figure out why all the C-Class articles are being categorized as unassessed for the Texas Tech University WikiProject? →Wordbuilder (talk) 19:29, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

This was the reason, fixed now I hope, will take a while for the bot to run and fix the table but categories are correct now. --Stefan talk 06:16, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
I knew I was missing something; just didn't know where. I really appreciate the help. Thanks! →Wordbuilder (talk) 15:28, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Selecting articles of given quality and importance

Wondering if it is possible to be able to modify the reporting table so that one can select articles of a given quality and importance. For example, the table allows prioritisation of activity, but it would be nice to be able to pick on high importance start articles to work on, rather than click all the starts looking manually for importance. This re WP:ARTHA. Heds (talk) 04:17, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean something like this Wikipedia:WikiProject Geology/Assessment? Where you can click inside the box to see only TOP/Start e.g. It is done with lots of extra categories done automatically inside the project template for assessment, how they get the links in the box I do not know, maybe the BOT does that only for geology or maybe it figures it out in some way by how the categories are named, I do not know. --Stefan talk 06:31, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
Yes, exactly like that. Thanks for the reference. Heds (talk) 23:17, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

WP Libertarianism

Hello Wiki Project Libertarianism, a fairly new project, would like to join the assessment scheme. WE have tagged multiple articles and have most of our framework in place. We would like the bot to start looking at our articles and populating our template for us. Our articles are in Category:WikiProject Libertarianism articles and broken up by quality and importance. What do we need to do next? Charles Edward 23:32, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Nintendo

The WikiProject was merged to a task force of WikiProject Video games, and so it would be a good idea to remove it from the listing of projects. Can someone do that? --Izno (talk) 00:22, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Master scorecard of wikiprojects?

Has anyone done any work on listing all wikiprojects by relative size (in terms number of articles in scope)? The question came up on the refdesk --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:11, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index/Comparison has some statistics I put together in June; I'm not aware of anything more recent, unfortunately. Kirill (prof) 00:34, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Is the WP 1.0 bot still running?

I ask because this page hasn't been updated in almost 2 weeks. Thanks! -Drilnoth (talk) 21:08, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

  • Many haven't been updated. Can anyone confirm that it is still out there? Wim van Dorst (talk) 23:21, 12 November 2008 (UTC).
Yes, as a click through to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/WP_1.0_bot quickly demonstrates. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:35, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
Okay... any idea when it should get around to the D&D articles? -Drilnoth (talk) 23:52, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
No. Over the last three days it has done only 500 edits, which looks like a small handful of projects; and there are about 1,500 project (though I'm not sure if the bot services them all) so I think there may be an issue. We'll have to hope that User:Oleg Alexandrov or User:CBM, the operators, happen along, unless you want to contact them directly. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:56, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
I happened to notice this on my wathclist, but it's usually best to contact one of us directly. The bot runs in two ways: automatic runs across all projects, and manual runs of a single project. The edits you are seeing in the contribs are, I think, due to manual runs. The last automatic run died because it had to retry some request too many times when making one edit. I'll have to investigate what caused that. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:27, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. You might want to check the wording at User_talk:WP_1.0_bot which fairly firmly points enquirers here rather than to your talk pages, except in the case of bot malfunctions. But excellent bot work; much thanks for that. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:15, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
I see. I would qualify "stops running" as a malfunction; I need to clarify that page.
In this situation, the problem with the bot is that the spam filter for Wikipedia is broken, and I don't have a workaround just yet. But I will work on it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:19, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
As a temporary workaround, the article comments on pages such as Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Intelligent design articles by quality are no longer transcluded. They are simply linked instead. I will see if there is a way to restore the previous behavior, but it may take some time. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:02, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Any update on this? -Drilnoth (talk) 15:50, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
I ran the bot manually after implementing the workaround of not transcluding the comments pages onto the article lists. The bot finished this afternoon after about 66 hours. So everything seems to be OK. There's not much I can do about the spam filter problem at this point, so the workaround is going to be in place for the immediate future. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:38, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Okay, so it's unlikely that these kinds of tables will be updated soon? -Drilnoth (talk) 21:53, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
That table was updated on Nov. 14 as part of the full manual run, and should continue to be updated regularly. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:55, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

-removed indent-Oh, thanks. Sorry I'd missed it before. -Drilnoth (talk) 21:59, 15 November 2008 (UTC)