User talk:Nettrom/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, Nettrom, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Rettetast (talk) 18:36, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

SuggestBot

Hello. I read on this page that you are SuggestBot's caretaker. I wanted to find out when the next suggestions will be posted. Do you have any idea? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Syed Kazim (talk • contribs) 22:14, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

We're making good progress with our data import, it currently looks like we'll be ready around June 1. From then on we should be able to send out suggestions at regular intervals like we've been doing on Norwegian wikipedia, thus getting to both those signed up for one-time suggestions as well as all our regulars. Nettrom (talk) 00:50, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Feedback

Hello, just a suggestion for SuggestBot (hmm. ironic) - Maybe the bot should see if a user edits alot of article in a certain area or city (by geocoordinates on articles) and suggest improving articles about things in these areas - thereby suggesting that the user add to articles which they would be interested in or know about. Ex. I edit Horner Junior High School, James Leitch Elementary School, and Fremont, California alot, so the bot might guess that I live in Fremont (and possibly that I like editing about schools) and suggest I edit Irvington High School. |:-) ~ QwerpQwertus ·_Contact Me_·_Talkback_· 03:33, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

The way SuggestBot is built makes it likely that it'll catch some of those trends in what people edit. One example is comparing edit histories, it'll find other users who've also edited those articles, and because they're likely to have edited additional articles within the same area (because for instance users tend to edit what they know), the bot will recommend some of those to you. With that being said, we are planning to look into if doing additional categorization before recommending articles makes the suggestions "better". So we were thinking along those lines but hadn't thought of geographic data, which is a really cool idea, thanks for suggesting it! Nettrom (talk) 15:40, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

SuggestBot...

is hilarious. :D   JJ (talk) 21:33, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

That's definitely one I'll keep around as an example of things working a little too well :D Thanks for being a good sport and seeing the humour in this! It's now on my list of things to look into for future improvements. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:56, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

SuggestBot feedback

Wow, I have to say that SuggestBot has improved vastly since last time I tried it - It's no longer fixated on my vandalism reversions, and the result is great. Thanks, decltype (talk) 17:50, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

This SuggestBot is scary because it suggests different articles for different people. It is as if it is telling people, don't look up porn stars, sex articles, or Nazi articles because then I, the bot, will embarrass you by suggesting you write on porn or sex or Nazi articles. Please stop this. Gary Calgary 20 August 2010 03:42 UTC —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gary Calgary (talk • contribs) 03:42, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

We have absolutely no knowledge of what articles specific people read on Wikipedia, and can therefore not suggest articles based on what they search for. Instead we look at the articles you've edited, as we also point out in the text surrounding the list of articles we recommend. In the current study we will only post once to your user talk page, so you won't see any more suggestions from us. Also note that your user talk page can be edited like any other Wikipedia article, so feel free to remove our recommendations if you find them bothering. It's your user talk page, so you're the one in charge there. Let me know if I failed to address your concerns. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:29, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Awesome tool! It works just fine, I see, but why not let us specify categories we like? Awesoham (talk) 01:48, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi, that's a good question! Were you thinking about being able to specify the categories of work needed that SuggestBot suggests (e.g. cleanup, merge, etc), topical categories like Category:Psychology, categories within WikiProjects, or maybe something else? We have the first three on our list of ideas. I try to find time to add features and do other types of engineering work while also making research progress, so while I cannot promise any delivery dates they're all things we'll hopefully support somewhere down the line. Sorry I can't give you a better answer, let me know if something's confusing. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:27, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Regular List

I have changed my preference on the SuggestBot Regulars list from once a month to twice a month. - Talk to you later, Presidentman (talk) Random Picture of the Day 14:50, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Error

Hello! The indefinitely blocked user Raven in Orbit is not listed here, yet still he gets the "Articles you might like to edit" feed every month by the SuggestBot. Could you try and figure out why your bot does that and remove him from that list (if there is an invicible one)? /81.232.86.231 (talk) 15:28, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

The user was listed as a regular, but is now removed, thanks for letting me know about this! I've also added a note to check for things like this before posting suggestions in the future, as it's a simple change to make to our software. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:39, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Hey

Thanks for the advice, it really helps, but to be honest, I'm new to this, and I still don't understand how to wikify it with the lay out, it's like I tried uploading the picture of the cover and of course putting up screenshot, and I need to find an easier way to put up with the layouts, can you give me an easy example on how I put up with the layout on the right that has info on it? (comment by SC3nutter (talk) moved here by Nettrom (talk) 13:12, 11 September 2010 (UTC))

Wikifying simply means to look for relevant articles to link to, based on the text in your article. The first sentence of the Retro Force article is "Retro Force is a Shoot-'em up game that is created and published by Psygnosis Ltd." which you can wikify by linking to the Shooter game and SCE Studio Liverpool articles like this: "Retro Force is a [[Shooter game#Shoot 'em up|Shoot-'em up game]] that is created and published by [[SCE Studio Liverpoo|Psygnosis Ltd]]." As WP:EFAQ#LINK explains, all you need to link to an article is the double brackets. I use the pipe symbol ("|") to replace the text used for the link, and that's it.

The layout your talking about is known as an infobox, and there is a particular one for video games available on Template:Infobox video game. I don't know how difficult it is to use as I've never added an infobox to an article, and as I don't usually edit video game articles I do not know what kind of conventions are used in that infobox. Turns out you can experiment with it in the infobox video game sandbox, and there are some test cases available to show examples of how it is used. If it's confusing to you I suggest asking for help on the WikiProject Video games talk page as they'll probably have more knowledge about doing this than me. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:46, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, this really helps, cheers, SC3nutter —Preceding undated comment added 16:19, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

SuggestBot Feedback

Hiya Nettrom, with SuggestBot it's been giving me article suggestions from topics, of which the articles I edited were only those that had issues such as needing wikification for example. It seems the bot analyses every edit, wouldn't it be better if the bot analysed edits that didn't consitute say {{Multiple issues}} or {{cleanup}} to name a few? Since it really isn't analysing real content work. Regards, Ғяіᴆaз'§Đøøм | Champagne? 11:27, 16 September 2010 (UTC) PS. Also if the bot analysed a user's edit summary that would provide a better end-result, so if the edit summary contained tagged, or adding {{one source}} for example it would ignore those contributions. Keep up the good work with the development of the bot and I wish you well in your research. Regards, —Ғяіᴆaз'§Đøøм | Champagne? 11:30, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the comments! We currently filter out minor edits and reverts, because so much of that is work that doesn't really constitute an interest in the article, so they will not contribute to the suggestions you receive. Your examples should probably also be something we check for, so I've made a note to look into that. Similarly to anti-vandal work, it should not be regarded as the kind of edits that define what your interests are. Thanks again for the feedback, it's appreciated, and I look forward to sending you some improved suggestions in the future! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:10, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh ok, you're welcome glad to help :) —Ғяіᴆaз'§Đøøм • Champagne? • 03:44, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup on SuggestBot regulars

No problem. I wish I have time to go through every single one of the user on the list and remove those that are inactive, say no edits for a year or longer. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 20:18, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

I already have a program that goes through the list of regulars, I'll update it so it also lets me know who hasn't been editing in a while. A year should be a good indicator. So no need to do this manually, thanks for giving me the idea! Nettrom (talk) 20:43, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

That's what I thought too, but I don't have the technical abilities to make computers complete tasks for me. Anyways, I removed 2 more off the list because they changed their usernames. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 21:31, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Thank you

I think suggest bot was a great idea.. hopefully, although I have a huge number of photographs I'm uploading and placing, and the other articles I create and edit won't make it impractical! I hope that's not a problem? --Leahtwosaints (talk) 23:44, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

It might lead to some suggestions that makes you wonder what the bot is thinking. We use your contribution history (last 500 edits in main namespace with reverts and minor edits removed) as an indicator of what you find interesting, and in your case that might not truly reflect your interests, leading to suggestions that are not really articles you will edit. I do not think I've come across users who contribute and edit mainly with regards to media (photo/sound/video) on Wikipedia, and the bot might not currently be well-suited for this. I'd be really interested to know what you think about the suggestions, were they good, mostly uninteresting, or somewhere in between? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:35, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

suggestbot

I thought your bot add suggest feedback every week or month, that's sad. Regards.-- ♫Greatorangepumpkin♫ T 13:54, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

You're absolutely right, and I am sorry for not keeping up with my commitments (things have been somewhat hectic here the past few weeks). I'll make sure the suggestions are posted within a few days. We are also going to switch to a template-based configuration system in the near future, and then the bot will run automatically so I won't have the problem of forgetting this again. :) Thanks again for the reminder! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:40, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Christmas Card

File:Wikisanta-no motto.png

Merry Christmas At this festive time, I would like to say a very special thank you to my fellow editors, and take the time to wish you and your loved ones a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. And, in case you can't wait until the big day, I've left you each three special presents, click to unwrap :) Acather96 (talk) 10:10, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

File:Green and Yellow Present.gif

File:Yellow and Red present.gif

File:Blue and Red Present.gif

Happy 10th Anniversary of Wikipedia!

Lotje has bought you a pint! Sharing a pint is a great way to bond with other editors after a day of hard work. Spread the WikiLove by buying someone else a pint, whether it be someone with whom you have collaborated or had disagreements. Cheers!

Spread the good cheer and camaraderie by adding {{subst:WikiPint}} to their talk page with a friendly message. Message received at ~~~~~

Lotje ツ (talk) 15:51, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

re: template`

just wondering if thayt post has to be there all the time. ie- when archivingshould it stay on the main page?Lihaas (talk) 19:34, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, yes and no. If you don't want to have it on your user talk page, you can move it to your user page, or remove it and use the userbox on your user page instead, either of those will make SuggestBot post to your user talk page. You can also create a sub-page in your userpage, e.g. User:Lihaas/SuggestBot and add the config template there, and the suggestions will be posted there instead. Did that help? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 01:31, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

latter may be a good idea, i could do that. So just move the alst message you post as a whole there then?Lihaas (talk) 19:09, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

All you need to move is the template reference, which I added to the top of your user talk page. It looks like this:

{{User:SuggestBot/config
|frequency = once a month
}}

Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:49, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

thanksLihaas (talk) 23:23, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Juve10

Nope, no questions at all, but I just wanted to say thanks. Suggest Box has been great and it has been a great addition to this project. Thanks again Juve10 (talk) 23:09, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

You're most welcome, and thank you for the kind words, I really appreciate that! :) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:43, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks

Thankyou very much! Aaroncrick ^TALK 09:27, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

You're most welcome! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:43, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Note

Just a note to tell you that all your hard work is appreciated. I found The Bot's list a bit overwhelming, but as an avowed (talk page stalker) I will grab an article once in while from my favs. Did Tremper High School today. It is shaping up. ;-) Namaste... Thanks again. — DocOfSoc • Talk • 03:48, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Had a look at the Tremper HS article, great work! And thanks so much for the kind words, they're greatly appreciated! I can understand that getting 36 article suggestions can be a bit overwhelming, sounds like you've found a good way to get around that. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:58, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Ditto DocOfSoc's appreciation. I've been signed up to get the suggestions for a while and enjoy seeing the "customized variety" of articles it suggests. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 12:36, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Suggestion

Hi Nettrom, great with SuggestBot. I'd like to make a few suggestions about which edits SuggestBot uses to make suggestions after analysis. As I work at FFU quite a lot I have to add uploaded files to their relevant article, most of the time that's the only edit I'll ever make to the article. It's giving me suggestions for these articles and I was wondering if you could modify SuggestBot so that edits where a file is added are ignored by the bot? Regards, —Ancient Apparition • Champagne? • 7:01pm • 08:01, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know about this problem! I've started to look into it, as this is clearly edits that appear to affect the suggestions in a negative way. We do filter out minor edits when we recommend articles, but from looking at your contributions it seems clear that calling these edits "minor" wouldn't be appropriate. I've also thought about whether it would be reasonable to use some type of standardized edit comments for those FFU-based edits (as it's easy for us to filter based on edit comments), but don't think that'll solve anything unless the edits are done with tools that'll write all or parts of the edit comments for you. So it does sound like I'll have to see if I can make SuggestBot start to analyse the actual edits that are made. Don't know exactly how much time that will take, but it's doable. :)

Thanks again for pointing out this problem to me. Might be that I'll get in touch when I have a possible solution to ask you to test it. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:10, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Sure thing, well I use the edit summary "Adding image to article". I'd be willing to participate in tests if you want. Thanks for the timely response :) especially considering how busy you are. —Ancient Apparition • Champagne? • 9:11am • 23:11, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Question

How do you type (|)? I know its a stupid question, but " There's no such thing as a stupid question but the're the easiest to answer. " PS: I copy-pasted Abc9100 (talk) 22:40, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

How you type it will depend on the layout of your keyboard. On my standard English/US keyboard, it's the key marked "\", and you hold down the Shift key at the same time to get "|". I don't really know many other keyboard layouts, so it might be that you'll have to google a bit to find the one that's right for your keyboard. If you're wondering about keyboard layouts, I noticed Wikipedia's got a substantial article on the subject. Hope this helps, let me know if it didn't. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:45, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

oh yea, i found it, stupid me, same as yours, shift-and \ |-) -Abc9100 (talk) 01:06, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

Suggest a bot

Hi, I need to know if you or your bot sent me an email this morning and if this did happen I need an explanation of what you or the bot is talking about. Feel free to email me about this. Thank you in advance, --CrohnieGal^Talk 12:04, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Clicking one of the difs removed my talk page from my watchlist. I don't know what is going on with this email so I am taking this to AN/i to see if others are receiving this email. --CrohnieGal^Talk 12:17, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, everything is alright now. The AN/i report helped me out with what it was all about. Again, I feel really stupid about this and I do apologize. Sorry, --CrohnieGal^Talk 13:46, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Hey, no worries, I'm happy to hear it got sorted out. I checked out the AN/i thread about it, and was surprised to learn why this had happened, and I totally understand the confusion it must have created. You were perfectly right in getting in touch with me, sorry that I couldn't respond earlier, it's still kind of early on a Monday morning here. Again, glad to hear it got sorted out, and I hope you find our suggestions useful! Let me know if there's anything else :) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:07, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

SuggestBot

Hey, suggestbot placed its recommendations in my archive. Are you able to fix that? For now I will just copy and past it back into my main area. Ryan Vesey (talk) 15:09, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Ahh, I think I see what I did. Earlier I had the template placed on my talk page. Later I placed it on my user page. Thanks. Ryan Vesey (talk) 16:24, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I see now, you've got the userbox on your user page. Because the config template has priority, the bot ended up posting the suggestions to your archive. I inadvertently moved the config template to your user talk page, but now removed it again. From now on the bot will use the configuration of the userbox, so it'll give you suggestions twice a month on your user talk page (unless you decide to change it). Let me know if there's anything else. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:34, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

SuggestBot on local MediaWiki

Hi, I have recently installed a local intranet based mediawiki instance for my team (at my workplace). Can I get suggestbot working for that wiki ?? Is this piece of code open source ? in public domain ?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by S raghu20 (talk • contribs) 17:18, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

I'll respond to this over on User talk:SuggestBot. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:49, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Using SuggestBot for newcomers

Hello,

I saw your edits on Swedish Wikipedia, and being a Wikimedia Fellow with the job of helping people who have just created their accounts, I wondered if SuggestBot could be modified to suit newcomers as well. Right now, we are among other things testing a new account creation process that asks the newcomers what their interest and their skill is and then give you suggestions based on what you answer. That list and the others are compiled manually based on different to-do lists. Unfortunally, they need to be updated constantly, as the articles are fixed. The point is, to make that solution scalable, it would be good to automatically update those lists. That's where SuggestBot comes in. I noticed that on the user page it says that you previously had a random setting, but that you removed it because nobody used it. Can you make it random, within a specified to-do category, such as stubs? Can you also make it random, within a specified topic? And finally, combine these two?

Best wishes//Hannibal (talk) 13:30, 13 June 2011 (UTC) (who writes here in English, because there are my bosses to consider :-) )

Hi, I thought I'd start out by mentioning that I recently had a fairly long conversation with one of the incoming Summer of Research (SofR) participants, Jtmorgan, about improving the new user experience, and also how SuggestBot could be a part of that. As far as I understand he's planning to work on this as his SofR project, so it would be worthwhile to get in touch with him and coordinate to make sure that we're not duplicating efforts, and also that we get some good research out of it.

That being said, the answers to your three questions are all "yes". We would have to write some solutions to gather the data and keep it up-to-date, and some web services so you can suggest articles to users on demand, but it's all doable.

Wonderful. It's great that several people get the same idea at roughly the same time. Also, fantastic that the thing is doable in a scalable way. I'll contact him soon.//Hannibal (talk) 21:12, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to proceed from here. Maybe you could get in touch with User:Jtmorgan so we can start coordinating? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:22, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Ad:User:SuggestBot

Ad:User:SuggestBot

Is it open source? I am interested in introducing this bot into plwiki. Bulwersator (talk) 16:07, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Hi, unfortunately it's currently not open source. The bot is part of a research project, and we have not yet had the resources available to look into if/how it could be made available. We are running it now on three different Wikipedias (en/no/sv), and if the plwiki community are interested in getting SuggestBot running on plwiki, I'd be happy to collaborate on making that happen (I'd need some help with translations). Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:47, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Is it possible just send me (maybe sb else also will be interested in it) suggestions, even without translating messages? Bulwersator (talk) 13:31, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, if the users on plwiki are OK with that, I'm OK with that too. I'll make a post to the English-speaking part of the plwiki Village Pump and see if there's interest in SuggestBot so things start moving. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:04, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Re:Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

Re:Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

I would like to request it more than two times in month, with stub list switched with clean-up list Bulwersator (talk) 13:29, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

You can actually get it weekly, it's an undocumented feature (try "frequency=weekly"). At the moment we're unable to switch the amount of articles around, but we're working on making some related changes (and adding more controls is on our list of feature requests). Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:13, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
	Thank you for going to all the work to set up SuggestBot, it's amazingly helpful and helps me find which articles I can contribute to the most. pluma (talk) 04:35, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

How to request suggestbot to suggest me article?

I wanna learn how to request suggestbot to suggest me articles to edit? --Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 14:42, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi, as you might have noticed I got SuggestBot to stop by your user talk page and post just this once, so you can see if the suggested articles look interesting. If it turns out you like it and want to get them regularly there are instructions on how to do that on our getting recommendations regularly-page. Let me know if you need any help with anything. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:15, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I have added

{{User:SuggestBot/config |frequency = once a month }} --Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 18:24, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	Good work! Tito Dutta (Send me a message) 18:24, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Replace icons

hello,

is there any setting that changes the icons when that bot suggest articles? You know that icons ahead the article links. Thanks.--♫Greatorangepumpkin♫_Hey^{it's me} 12:03, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi! We haven't made any settings available since we're running a research experiment at the moment. Once the experiment is done, about a month from now, we'll probably add some settings to control the info (based on what our experiment results are). What do you think of the icons? Good, bad, annoying, useful? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:37, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you!

Sillybillypiggy has given you some caramel and a candy apple! Caramel and candy-coated apples are fun Halloween treats, and promote WikiLove on Halloween. Hopefully these have made your Halloween (and the proceeding days) much sweeter. Happy Halloween! If Trick-or-treaters come your way, add {{subst:Halloween apples}} to their talkpage with a spoooooky message!

Thanks for suggest bot it has been really helpful! sillybillypiggy 18:07, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Hey, thanks so much! I'm of course happy to hear that you find SuggestBot useful, thanks for using it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:07, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

For technical prowess…

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		For maintaining a great bot, SuggestBot, that really helps the Community! And for doing it so well… Thanks!!! :-) Benzband (talk) 17:37, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

A cupcake for you!

I just got the suggestions from SuggestBot and was sooo excited to see stuff that I would really enjoy! Thanx!!! :-D ReelAngelGirl (Talk) 19:17, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

A beer for you!

For running an awesome bot, ΔΡΦ (talk) 23:17, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Suggestbot

Hey Nettrom, I'm wondering if I could have some suggestions from suggestbot, but I'm not sure how to sign up to get suggestions, can you help me please? Can you tell me when you've replied, or I might forget

Thanks Maximuman (talk) 19:54, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

That's fine thanks for that, I managed to work it out, thanks for the consideration though Maximuman (talk) 21:33, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

tremstopper

I agree with the merge proposal for Tremstopper.--Design (talk) 10:27, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Short vital articles study

Hi! I see that you are the operator of SuggestBot. I want to tell you about Wikipedia:Short popular vital articles, a study of the nearly 10,000 level 4 Wikipedia:Vital articles under 9,000 bytes but which get a lot of page views. Do you think there may be a way to incorporate the short popular vital articles into SuggestBot's suggestions? Npmay (talk) 22:08, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Hey, sorry about the delay in responding here. I remember looking through your slide deck when the topic was brought up a few months ago, and found it very interesting! Not exactly sure how we can incorporate them, but as we're starting the process on working on what type of articles SuggestBot suggests I'll make sure the vital articles are on our list of things to look at. Thanks for the tip! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:23, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Floyd D. Rose page

Nettrom: I took your advice and did a brief write-up to restore the Floyd D. Rose page. I also added/corrected the links on several pages to direct to the new page so that users would have a reference to his band, Q5. Please let me know if I made any glaring mistakes. Thanks for all your assistance! ColdGrayLight (talk) 01:26, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Minor barnstar
	Thanks for fixing my User Badge for me, just yet another Wikipedia newbie Connor2349 (talk) 00:34, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Hello, Nettrom. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

tausif(talk) 18:32, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you

	The Great Thinker
	I present this barnstar to you as a token for what you have done and what you are doing. Suggest Bot is a valuable asset to wiki. Thank You. Vyom25 (talk) 05:54, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. Have fun!

Stubs Alex Arnold (actor) Fender Katana Fender White Steel Fender Wildwood Fender Jeff Beck Stratocaster Fender Stringmaster Freya Mavor Chillianwala Hungry (Winger song) Jessica Sula Fender J5 Telecaster Queen Street, Oxford Fender Stratocaster XII Fender King Fender Telecaster Thinline Starcaster by Fender 2012 Oldham explosion Squier Deluxe Hot Rails Stratocaster Cream-backed poison frog

Cleanup Kickstarter Stopped note Guitar picking Merge Fender Bass VI Viatical settlement Ibanez Add Sources Fender Toronado Fender Starcaster Seth Lover Wikify Traded Life Policies Longevity insurance Brian Molko Expand Art music Tokyo Broadcasting System List of Gibson players

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. Your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping.

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please tell me on SuggestBot's talk page. Thanks from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker.

P.S. You received these suggestions because your name was listed on the SuggestBot request page. If this was in error, sorry about the confusion. -- SuggestBot (talk) 20:06, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Community portal redesign project

Here is the Meta page I drafted up today (work in progress, obviously). Your comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated! :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 23:17, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

SuggestBot feedback

Hello, Nettrom, see here for your feedback. JZCL 08:52, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

SuggestBot @ Opentask

Looking good! :-) Thank you, Nettrom. Any plans to have the bot refresh the bottom-most four rows as well? I shall continue to refresh these rows manually for the time being. --PFHLai (talk) 03:27, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Yes, I noticed those when I first tested the bot in my sandbox, but I haven't had time to do anything with them yet (there wasn't any mention of them in the FlBot code I've had access to). Those categories appear to require a slightly different approach of either formatting the links or picking the articles. Have scheduled time to look at it tomorrow, might be Wednesday before I have something working. Thanks for keeping them updated in the meantime! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:22, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

You've done a lot of good work to get much of {{Opentask}} refreshed by your bot. You must be hungry now. Have a cookie! :-)

The AfD and Art.Inc. rows were added to the template in response to requests on Wikipedia talk:Community portal/Opentask (here & here, respectively). Maybe the FlBot codes you have pre-date their additions? No need to rush and get the last few rows included. As far as I can recall, Article and Image Requests are always refreshed manually, anyway. Take your time. Thank you again for your good work. Happy coding! Cheers! --PFHLai (talk) 21:43, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

BTW, what do you think of this request: Wikipedia talk:Community portal/Opentask#Assessment backlog ? --PFHLai (talk) 21:52, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the cookie, I appreciate it a lot! :)

I wasn't able to find time to write code yesterday, but finished up the code taking care of updating AfDs a half hour or so ago, so that's now also handled. The article incubator appeared to be of little value, I looked at some random articles from there on Monday, they were mostly stale, so I don't have a problem with that category being gone now. You're right about the last two categories, I looked at some diffs of FlBot's updates earlier this year, and it skipped those also. Great that you'll be keeping those updated!

By the way, SuggestBot's trial period ends later today, so I'll be shutting it down in a few hours and wait until the bot request has been processed. Hopefully it'll be successful and it won't be too long until it is running again.

I looked at the article assessment question. Not against the idea, but I think I would wait a little while. There's a discussion on the Community Portal talk page where some feedback on the redesign and the task list is brought up, so maybe wait until that's been cleared up? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:40, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

• Letting both of you know about some data from the experiment so far. Moving the task list up to the top was great for clicks, but it still didn't seem to affect people's desire to actually edit those articles. I'd like to try making the task list lighter-weight to see if that encourages more clicks and more contribution. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 22:57, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Idea

not sure if you currently do this or not, but how about getting a broad sugges by wikiprojects nad then suggesting articls within that. This was stuff that is interested to the user will be brought to their attention.Lihaas (talk) 04:12, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

There's currently no specific support for WikiProjects in SuggestBot, instead it is only implicit in the sense that if a user works mainly within a WikiProject it is likely that their suggestions will be closely related to that project. I have just finished up interviews with some of our users and although I am not finished analysing them we have noticed that a lot of our users appear to do work related to WikiProjects. Exactly how we will support WikiProjects I currently do not know, but it seems clear that we should support it well in one way or another, e.g. by allowing users to tell us specific WikiProjects that interest them and then receive suggestions mainly within that/those project(s), so it's something that we'll be working on in the coming months. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:05, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Looking good ;)Lihaas (talk) 21:47, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Survey

no problemo, Tom B (talk) 12:30, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Prettified opentask list

Hi Nettrom, I've fiddled with the opentask layout some more in accordance with some of my clicktracking findings (emailed you about it the other day). Here's the version I mocked up in my userspace, and here's how it will look on the Community portal page. I want to make sure this won't break your bot's ability to refresh the tasks or break transclusions of the list on other pages, though. I could always temporarily just transclude my userspace version onto the Community portal and revert the change if it looks like things are going haywire. What do you think?

P.S., will you be at WikiSym? If so, we should catch up in person :) I'm getting into Linz on Sunday afternoon. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:25, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Opentask article selection algorithm

Is it random from the categories? Why not weight the selection by the articles' number of incoming links, e.g. [1] -- that is a good general measure of the urgency of the need for improvement, and also article popularity and familiarity, which should improve the interestingness and clickthrough rate. —Cupco 00:40, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

The current version is just picking article at random (if you're into programming and know Python, you can look at the source code if you want). I did it that way because the previous bot that updated the task list, FlBot, also worked that way and I first wanted a version that works so we could get the bot approval request done.

I'm collaborating with Maryana at the WMF, she has taken the initiative on redesigning the Community Portal (see for instance meta:Research:Community portal redesign). One of the things we have planned to do is alter the algorithms to see how that affects what users do. We are particularly interested in how popularity (views) of articles as well as the current quality affects things (it's mentioned in the project description on meta), but it might be that incoming links is a useful measure as well, so I've made a note to look into that, thanks for the idea! We might also experiment with personalised suggestions as we do have some ideas on how to do that, you're right that it should increase the likelihood of users looking at the article, experiments with SuggestBot showed that it leads to more edits than suggesting random articles.

Thanks again for the ideas, let me know if something was confusing or if you have any other questions related to this. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:06, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Happy to help. Please see also Category talk:Wikipedia backlog#Linked counts to list of articles prioritized by number of incoming links -- which is where that script was described. —Cupco 17:56, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for that link, I was particularly curious about the correlation between inbound links and popularity, which they graphed and calculated and thus saved me a bit of work. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:50, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

why does SuggestBot leave stars and icons on my page?

Hi,

I noticed that on User talk:Hahc21's talk page, SuggestBot doesn't leave all that stuff - the stars and the icons in a huge table. Is there anyway SuggestBot could not leave that stuff on my page and make like Hahc21's? Please?

Thanks, MathewTownsend (talk) 19:39, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

• Also it says at the top of SuggestBot's posts on my page"

We are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot’s recommendations. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information in the consent information sheet.

We have added information about the readership and quality of the suggested articles using a Low/Medium/High scale. For readership the scale goes from Low to High , while for quality the scale goes from Low to High .

However the contact information in the consent information sheet is dead.

I never consented to be part of this "study".

Is there a way I can get the version formated like the one User talk:Hahc21's talk page? MathewTownsend (talk) 21:12, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about not getting to this sooner, I was busy outside of Wikipedia yesterday and therefore couldn't get this taken care of on SuggestBot's talk page. I have updated SuggestBot's configuration so that from now on you will get the version without the icons. Also, sorry to hear the consent info page appeared to be a dead link. I tried it earlier today as well as just now and it worked just fine for me, so I suspect there might have been intermittent network issues or something of that sort.

We (I'm currently a PhD candidate at GroupLens Research) run experiments with SuggestBot from time to time, altering how it works slightly in order to learn more about how it can better help Wikipedia editors find useful things to do. In order to counter the unwanted side-effect that comes with users opting in to be part in these studies, we instead offer an easy way to opt out as participation of course is voluntary. If you know you'd like to be opted out of any future studies we run, let me know. Also, feel free to let me know if anything was unclear or you have any questions about this. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 17:43, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the message. I reformatted the last SuggestBot listing on my page to be the plain version. Just by removing all the icons and stars, I removed nearly 9,000 bytes. People like me are distracted by all that. I never read the SuggestBot suggestions because it was too distracting. others may have this problem too. Also, I don't remember agreeing to be part of a study, though maybe I did! Best wishes, MathewTownsend (talk) 01:39, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Suggestbot suggestion!

Is it possible to create a new section for new suggestions unlike it has been done here? It'll help me to follow the articles I have edited from the suggestions etc! --Tito Dutta (talk) 06:29, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, if you remove the "|replace" parameter in the configuration template, SuggestBot will create a new section every time it posts, rather than replace any existing suggestions. So the configuration template code you have on your talk page becomes:

{{User:SuggestBot/config
|frequency = twice a month
}}

Let me know if there's anything else! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:42, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I have removed replace! Thanks! --Tito Dutta (talk) 18:32, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Chime in?

At Template talk:Opentask-short, I think we've hit on the criteria we want to fill in the short open task template for the onboarding test. :) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:47, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

I have chimed in with some comments. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:26, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Nettrom. You have new messages at Wikipedia_talk:Teahouse.
Message added 05:32, 26 November 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Thought you might be interested or wanna chime in, buddy :) - J-Mo ^{Talk to Me} _{Email Me} 05:32, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Hello, Nettrom. You have new messages at SuggestBot's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Sorry if i'm bothering you with this talkback template but I thought you would like to know that I have left you a question on SuggestBot's talk page. MIVP - Allow us to be of assistance to you. (Maybe a bit of tea for thought?) 21:21, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Barnstar of Diligence

While the Barnstar of Diligence's description of 'in recognition of... community service' says it all due to SuggestBot being a fantastic addition to our community I originally wanted to give you a Barnstar because of how professional you are in handling anything regarding SuggestBot that people bring up. I hope your professionalism continues to be... well... professional. heh heh. Good work Net :) MIVP - Allow us to be of assistance to you. (Maybe a bit of tea for thought?) 22:15, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you much for the flattering words, I greatly appreciate it and am nearly speechless! :) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:47, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	Thanks for SuggestBot! It continues to assist me. Kevin12xd... | speak up | take a peek | email me 23:27, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

SuggestBot not updating

Hey there. It looks like SuggestBot is reverting another bot (correctly?) but isn't updating the actual task list for Template:Opentask-short. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 07:32, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

When I wrote the script to update Template:Opentask-short I failed to foresee that the page might need other pieces of Wiki markup, so SuggestBot simply replaces everything with just the bullet list whenever it runs. Previously this resulted in a no-op so there was no edit saved, now there's of course a change so it'll be saved. I've stopped the cronjob to prevent this from happening and will have an updated script ready in a few hours, hopefully sooner. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:05, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Template:Opentask-short

Hi, could you check this page again please? SuggestBot is editwarring with Lowercase sigmabot by removing the protection template once per hour; if they don't stop soon, we'll have to put it on WP:LAME#Bot wars. I understand that Suggestbot has other responsibilities with this template, so I don't want to protect it fully, and it's definitely not being so disruptive that I'd want to block it. Nyttend (talk) 11:55, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I've stopped SuggestBot from updating Template:Opentask-short until I have a fix in place so it doesn't remove extra markup. It was unfortunately not prepared for the case of having additional markup on the page, resulting in this silly edit war. Thanks for letting me know about it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:08, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. I can't help but laugh at the situation — bot vs. bot edit wars are always funny to me, since there's no other way to have a good-faith edit war :-) Nyttend (talk) 03:01, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry to keep piling on the questions — please see the "Protecting templates used in MediaWiki pages" section of WP:VP/Pr. Basically, I'm nervous about a frequently-seen MediaWiki page transcluding a template that's not fully protected, but of course I don't want to prevent you and your nonadmin-bot from keeping it up to date. Nyttend (talk) 03:44, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

using suggestbot on fa.wiki

Hi, whould please tell me how can i run your bot code on fa.wiki? I want to localize your bot for fa.wiki.I have toolserver acount and my bot is sysops in fa.wiki.Yamaha5 (talk) 19:10, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Hi, and sorry for the delay in responding to this, holiday season break took all of my time. I saw a similar request over on SuggestBot's talk page. Please read what I wrote there, and as I mention I'd be happy to help get SuggestBot running on fa-wiki if there's a bit of interest and someone can help out with translations and such. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:15, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

I will answer you thereYamaha5 (talk) 15:13, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. Have fun!

Stubs Rue du Bac (Paris Métro) Chuck Garric Fender Zone Bass Rancho Cucamonga Quakes Don't Break My Heart Again Forbon Elected (song) Hello Kitty Stratocaster Northwinds Pensa Custom Guitars White Snake (album) Chris Frazier Squier Telecaster Custom Crying in the Rain (Whitesnake song) Nights with Alice Cooper Dirty Diamonds Fender Urge Bass Music of San Marino Conjugated protein

Cleanup Music of Ivory Coast Music of Botswana Eddie Van Halen Merge Lap slide guitar Music of Vanuatu Subharmonic Add Sources Alice Cooper: Brutally Live Fender Jazzmaster I Am the Future Wikify Sunil Lulla St. Joseph's Catholic Church (Moiese, Montana) Dallastown Area Middle School Expand Scale (string instruments) Hug Music of Laos

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. Your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping.

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please tell me on SuggestBot's talk page. Thanks from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 17:19, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Help needed at Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask, please.

Hello, Nettrom and Maryana. Category:All articles that need to be wikified got deleted. Suggestbot cannot post any tasks related to "Add wikilinks" to Opentask, making a hole at the top of Wikipedia:Community portal. I have put in a temporary fix for now. I am supposed to be on wikivacation. Could you two help and take over the fixing, and put in a more long-term solution at {Opentask}, please? Many thanks. --PFHLai (talk) 09:43, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for catching this! I was surprised to see the category got deleted with no apparent explanation, couldn't they have redirected it or referred to the deletion discussion so it's possible to figure out what's been going on? Anyways… it appears to be that WikiProject Wikify is the project where things related to wikification are happening. As far as I can tell from threads on their talk page it looks like {{wikify}} is deleted now, instead they prefer more specific templates (template redirects to a disambiguation page with links to the more specific templates). Articles related to the project are found in Category:All articles covered by WikiProject Wikify, but I'm not sure if claiming they need wikification would be the right thing to do. Maybe we should instead find a replacement task/category to use on {{Opentask}}?

Since this also has implications for SuggestBot's normal suggestion post to users, I'm doubly happy about getting to know about it, so I can figure out what to do there too. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 12:54, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Hello Morten Warncke-Wang! Thank you for the SuggestBot. I really like it and agree to be in the study of SuggestBot. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.88.66.28 (talk) 17:12, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Suggestbot icons

How do I turn on the readership and quality icons when Suggestbot gives me a list of articles? Matthewedwards (talk · contribs) 08:39, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for using SuggestBot, we appreciate that! The way to turn them on is to ask me, which you've already done, and I've updated SuggestBot's configuration so you'll get them the next time around, which should be within the next 12 hours. We're currently getting close to launching some changes to SuggestBot's suggestions, but they'll be featuring readership and quality as well so you won't be missing those. Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:01, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! New-look Suggestions arrived today :) Matthewedwards (talk · contribs) 03:48, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

SuggestBot@huwiki

Hi Nettrom,

by this time I see the outlines of consensus in Hungarian Wikipedia to introduce SuggestBot. What are the next steps?

• a good Hungarian name
• some localizing -- how can we do that?
• can we effect the sections of the suggest? I mean we don't have articles for general "cleanup" but may need other problematic pages listed.
• Is it possible to have a link in section titles? In case a newcomer is not familiar with "stubs" and other problems, the title could lead them to an appropriate page that clarifies.

Would you mind to link your user page or talk page in huwiki to your favourite talk page? Thanks in advance, Bináris (talk) 09:03, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for getting in touch, nice to meet you outside of pywikipedia-l too :) Sorry about the delayed response, I've been out with a cold for a couple of days. I came across the SuggestBot-thread on huwiki (hu:Wikipédia:Kocsmafal (javaslatok)#Suggestbot) a few days ago as I was checking my watchlist there, great to see that initiative happening! Let me comment on your points in order:

• Naming: while having a Hungarian name would be great, my experience with Pywikibot suggests that it's easier to use SuggestBot everywhere. I thought the localized names we have on Norwegian and Swedish Wikipedia were a great idea at the time, but have run into issues with for instance authentication in some of our scripts. I'm working on getting SuggestBot set up on Portuguese Wikipedia at the moment, and have kept the SuggestBot name there.
• The documentation and templates and such can all be localized. I'll probably have time to look at this later this week and can get the pages set up. We tend to localize template parameters (e.g. "frequency" in English, "frekvens" in Norwegian, and "frequência" in Portuguese) and their values, so it makes sense to local users.
• Yes, the task categories are all configurable and something I set up after discussion with local users. We have a different set of categories on all four Wikipedias, as you mention Hungarian doesn't have "cleanup", and for instance in Swedish Wikipedia there is no need for a "wikify" category since they fix those incredibly fast without SuggestBot!
• Yes, section title links are OK, and if parts of the explanatory text in the suggestions also needs rewriting that is also OK. It's important that the suggestion message works for the users of the local wiki.

I've got my user page set up on huwiki, I'll make sure my user talk page is created there too, might link it here since this is the easiest place to get hold of me. Thanks again for getting in touch, looking forward to seeing SuggestBot running on huwiki too! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:15, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! :-) Bináris (talk) 07:30, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

SuggestBot@minwiki

Hi Nettrom,

I'm from minwiki, can you operate your SuggestBot on min.wikipedia.org? Coz we are want to get welcome message to a new user from Special:GettingStarted. Is there any localization have to made? Kind regard,  Ę-oиė  >>>  ™ 11:01, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for asking! Sorry about the delay in responding, I've been sick for a few days and struggling to catch up with my responsibilities. I'm sure we can get SuggestBot set up to update a template of articles for minwiki too, the code behind it is fairly easy to work with. Would it be good if we continued the discussion on the talk page of min:Wikipedia:Kadutaan? Then we can figure out exactly what is needed and how to go proceed. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 21:33, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Oh, I hope you get well soon. I think it's a good idea to talk on min:Project_talk:Kadutaan. See you there. Kind regards,  Ę-oиė  >>>  ™ 09:22, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

SuggestBot@fawiki

Hi, I think you forgot fa.wiki :) here Reza1615 (talk) 21:13, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for the reminder! I hadn't forgot about fawiki, but I forgot to let anyone know what's been going on. I've been working on getting SuggestBot set up on Portuguese Wikipedia and wrote notes on what I've been doing so I know exactly what I need to do to set it up on fawiki (and huwiki too). Getting it set up on ptwiki took longer than I expected, but we seem to be close to finished now. As mentioned above I hope to start the work on getting SuggestBot set up on huwiki and fawiki at the end of this week. So we will get it set up on fawiki as well, sorry about the delays! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 21:25, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Nettrom. You have new messages at Arctic Kangaroo's talk page.
Message added 14:34, 25 March 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Arctic Kangaroo 14:34, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	This is the BEST BOT EVER!! Thanks! Lee Tru. (talk) 23:46, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Totally forgot to respond to this, sorry. Thanks so much, I'm happy to hear you like it! :) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 10:22, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Touching bases

Hey there. Just me. Sometimes, I think we neglect to recognize or express our appreciation for consistency and dedication, opting instead to focus on the vandals and negativity. I hope to bypass any inkling of my own personal complacency or neglect in this area. Your work with the SuggestBot does not go unnoticed. Thanks and best regards, Cindy(talk) 13:17, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

What a wonderful comment, thank you so much! I am of course very happy to hear SuggestBot is appreciated, but I also found your message inspiring. I will make sure I pay it forward and thank someone else for the work they do that's helpful to me. Thanks again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:56, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

SuggestBot@frwiki

Hi, this seems to be great. Is there a way to use it on french wikipédia, too ? Best regards --ManiacParisien (talk) 20:04, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

We've working on branching out to more languages, for instance we plan to support Hungarian and Persian some time soon. Since I speak some French, I've often thought about running it there too since the French Wikipedia is one of the larger ones. Is there a Village Pump on French Wikipedia where I could post and see if there is some interesting of getting it set up? That way I'll get to know that the community think it's okay to have the bot running there too, or if there are specific concerns. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 10:20, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Thanks for the suggestions . . . Stmullin (talk) 21:27, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

You're most welcome, glad to hear they're appreciated, and thanks for the coffee to keep me running :) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 10:21, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikimania 2014 London

Suggestbot is fantastic. I'm organising Wikimania in London in 2014. Would you like to talk about Suggestbot there? As well as Wikimedians, we're hoping to get a lot of the London tech/edtech/big data community along as well, and I suspect that some of them will be VERY interested in what you're doing here... EdSaperia (talk) 12:37, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi, pardon the delay in responding here. Yes, I'd be very much interested in talking about SuggestBot at next year's Wikimania! I've already got some ideas about what to talk about (asking a PhD student about their research tends to do that :) Let me know how to go from here, if you want to take it off-wiki it's possible to email me directly. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:19, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Hiya, maybe you can jot something down here for now? http://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions EdSaperia (talk) 14:54, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. Have fun!

Add sources Fender Jazzmaster Fender Performer Bruce Lee Fender Showmaster Fender Toronado Fender Marauder Cleanup Daytona USA 2 Eddie Van Halen Glenn Tipton Expand Tech 21 Live... In The Still Of The Night The Secret of Moonacre Unencyclopaedic Richie Sambora Wakeboarding Guitar pick

Wikify Johnny Depp Green Goblin in other media John Birch (luthier) Orphan SX SJM I Do Now I Don't Fender '51 Precision Bass Merge Viatical settlement Adelaide Street bus mall Wood flooring Stub Jim Root Telecaster Fender White Steel Dalbergia oliveri Fender Wildwood Fender King Forbon

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. Your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping.

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please tell me on SuggestBot's talk page. Thanks from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 05:33, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Willingness to participate

I visited this link and thought of expressing my willingness in participating in the study mentioned. Let me mention that I am a doctor and not a technical person. Diptanshu^Talk 11:25, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for getting in touch! I stopped by your user and user talk pages and noticed you've added the SuggestBot userbox, thanks for signing up! Getting SuggestBot's suggestions is currently all that is needed to take part in this experiment. We choose to use an opt-out strategy for these kind of experiments primarily because if we did opt-in we would likely get very few participants, and secondly because it only affects SuggestBot's subscribers and tries to improve the bot's functionality.

I am happy to hear you're not a technical person, we like diversity in our user population! Feel free to let me know if you have any questions about SuggestBot and I will do my best to answer them. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 21:37, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

SuggestBot idea

Hello there Nettrom! I find the SuggestBot very useful, but I have an idea for a way to improve it. What if you set it up so that the user could configure where they wanted the suggestions to go? Personally, I'd like to have a sub-page of my Userspace called something like "Suggestions from SuggestBot", or something like that, so it didn't clutter up my talk page and/or archives. What do you think? I appreciate this may be a little bit of work, but it seems like a potential improvement. :) Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 08:31, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi Luke, thanks for using SuggestBot, and I'm happy to hear you find it useful, that's what we're aiming for! Your idea is awesome, and the cool thing is that we already support it! Just move the config template to whatever page in your userspace you want the suggestions to be posted to, and SuggestBot will post them there instead. This is also described on User:SuggestBot/Getting Recommendations Regularly#How to sign up in case you want more info on the different options we offer and how they work. Thanks again for using SuggestBot, we'll do our best to keep sending you useful suggestions! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:02, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

• Ah, perfect :) Thanks for the reply! Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 13:09, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
• A second thought: maybe you could add a twice-a-week update function to it as well? :) Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 13:11, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

SuggestBot is malfunctioning

SuggestBot is going absolutely crazy at the moment, forgetting when it has already posted its suggestions, and then randomly changing the timestamp of the post every now and again. Can you fix this please? Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 13:08, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for getting in touch about this, and sorry about SuggestBot not behaving as it should. I saw your post on SuggestBot's talk page earlier, but didn't have time to look into it yet. What's going on is that SuggestBot has a problem posting suggestions to large pages (this is also mentioned under User:SuggestBot#Current_Status). I've spent some time trying to figure out exactly what's going on, but have yet to find a case where it consistently fails. We do have a temporary band aid in place, in that SuggestBot will check the size of the page and its length exceeds 250kB (256,000 bytes) it won't post, but that means you won't get any suggestions. I'll allocate some time today into looking into what's going on here as your suggestion page might be the test case I've been looking for. And again, sorry about this problem, from what I know it's not something I can easily fix, but as mentioned I also haven't yet found a consistent test case that I can use and have others help out with. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:11, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi again. By using your page as a test case (and again, sorry about the accidental edit that I reverted) I figured out that our use of {{Ntsh}} to get the table sorting working correctly leads to pages taking too long to edit/parse. If I instead switch to using {{Hs}} the problem appears to largely go away. I've fixed SuggestBot's template and its code so it only uses {{Hs}} and also added a fix that'll automatically replace the old template with the new one so the problem will gradually go away over time. I've also updated our databases so you won't incorrectly get another set of suggestions in a few hours, instead they'll show up when they should. Sorry again about this problem, and thanks for helping me find a test case that could help me track it down! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:48, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

• Not a problem :) As this wasn't on my talk page, it wasn't actually a major problem, but it might be for some other users. Glad it's resolved now! Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 21:50, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Research Hackathon

Hi!

Over here at the Evanston, IL research hackathon, I was talking about creating a data set of information on people who have been nominated for administrator status, and also on the process and outcome of that nomination.

Then I noticed your idea for research. In the interests of avoiding duplication I thought I'd drop you a note to see if you're aware of such a data set already existing, and if you would find such a data set useful for your research idea. We're here until about 5:30, 6 CST.

Milara (talk) 17:42, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi! Were you referring to meta:Research:Ideas/Requests for adminship and the retention of long term editors? If so, you should talk to EpochFail, he's the one pushing that idea. I personally don't know of such a dataset, but he might. Actually, he's in the room next door, so I'll ping him physically too. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:51, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi Nettrom! Thanks for passing it on. I don't know how I got referred to you instead of EpochFail. Best, Milara (talk) 22:15, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi Milara! I haven't started pulling any data yet. I'd definitely be interested in working with you on the datasets you described. I'm planning to start hacking on wiki data around 7PM CST. That will be when the Asia & Australia groups are kicking off. If you let me know how far you get, I'll be happy to pick up where you left off. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 19:02, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Poke

Hi, please see User talk:SuggestBot#Malfunctioning bot - blocked. Snowolf ^{How can I help?} 02:38, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the poke, I've shut SuggestBot down and will look into ways of fixing this problem in a few hours. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:44, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

A-Class articles

I just made a rather late reply to your question here. I'd be very interested in the results of your work, as I've been involved in quality assessment on WP for a very long time! Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 05:29, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi and thanks for getting in touch! Sorry about the delay in getting back to you, last week kept me busy all the time. Also, thanks for the link to the old WikiProject Chemicals assessment page, that's some very interesting historical info that I'll keep in mind as I continue my work on article assessment. You also mentioned in your reply on the V1.0 team talk page that there's a historical quirk with the A-class articles and GAs? I'm really curious about that, could you tell me the story? One of the things I'm looking at this time around is the overlap between classes, for instance we might want to join FAs and A-class articles because they're both "complete", and because there's not that many A's one could instead regard them as FACs (and perhaps similarly with B's and GAs). Knowing something about this quirk of A's and GAs could help inform my decisions. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:40, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, I was really busy when your response came in, and things have remained busy since! I wanted to give you a proper answer, which can't be done in five minutes.

The "quirk" as I call it is simply that A-Class was established before GA, and was designed in that context to be a stepping stone to FA. A-Class is complete content-wise, but may require some style or technical changes (the classic being "you need to use an mdash, not a standard dash") to meet the Wikipedia. As I see it, if you got the world expert on topic X to write a "perfect and complete article" on X, and the expert was familiar with the basics of the Wikipedia style guide, you would produce an ideal candidate for a A-Class article. I say candidate, because it wouldn't become A-Class until reviewed by the relevant WikiProject. A-Class, then, means that the subject-experts are happy with the article content, and the article style doesn't have any obvious holes in it. However, you can be sure that if that article goes to WP:FAC, there would be lots of minor technical & style changes requested.

Shortly after we began using the assessment scheme in several WikiProjects, not just chemistry, GA was launched. (I was in fact a supporter at the time - still am - even though at the time it had a lot of critics, and GA was almost killed off after a few months.) GA was initially supposed to be an equivalent of "FA for short articles" but it very quickly switched to be "articles that aren't quite FA but are pretty good anyway". I think the change reflected a need in the community to tag articles that were "getting there", bearing in mind that at that time the chemistry/WP1.0 assessment scheme was just getting going. At that time we didn't even have the assessment bot so all assessment lists were compiled manually - very slow! The approach of GA was different from A-Class, in that articles were reviewed by a general member of the community (e.g., I did a GA review of London, though my expertise is in chemistry). Initially GAs avoided a lot of the technical minutiae of FAC, but inevitably in time many of these things were added in (I suspect partly to improve the credibility of GA). This led to a bifurcation in how articles could develop into FAs from B-Class:

1. WP1.0 path: B-Class --> A-Class ---> FA. Here, subject experts at the WikiProject make sure an article is complete, and then (if they want to spend the time) jump through the necessary hoops for it to become FA.
2. GA path: B-Class --> GA ---> FA An article is improved in general content and style, usually just by one or two people, and becomes mostly complete and is nicely formatted. They then take it to FAC, for what is simply a stricter community review.

The GA path is usually a more workable one for many subject areas where you have articles written mainly by one or two enthusiastic editors; A-Class requires a lot more coordination, since you need at least 3 or 4 editors, all interested in and knowledgeable about the same article. A-Class is much less used, but it is used in places like WP:MILHIST where they have great organization and a longstanding distrust of GA. But generally GA has flourished and it has become an established part of Wikipedia landscape today. The problem with the GA path, however, is that the reviews are often by non-subject-experts, so the comprehensiveness of the content depends on the knowledge and opinion of only the 1 or 2 editors who developed the article. In some cases this is fine, but sometimes there are big gaps in content that would easily be spotted by a WikiProject review. (Occasionally articles even carry on to FA with serious omissions that aren't obvious except to subject experts.

From time to time people ask questions like "which is higher, A or GA?", but in reality they're just different - reflecting the difference between a WikiProject review vs a community review. An A-Class may have great content but be weak on following the rules, whereas a GA often has those reversed.

I hope this answers your question! Walkerma (talk) 05:53, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion bot - Tagged with… Unencyclopaedic

Request to remove the word 'Unencyclopaedic' from this bots vocabulary. There is no such tag. There was a tag, but it caused much heart ache for many editors. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 19:21, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Pardon the delay in responding, I've been thinking about this and wondering how big of an issue it is for our users. As we note in the documentation for the task categories the "Unencyclopaedic" tag is a combination of NPOV and Original Research issues. Based on a spot check I did a few weeks ago, most articles are tagged with a heading/section template that's easy to spot (but some use {{OR}} which can be really difficult to find). So while there isn't necessarily a 1-to-1 mapping between "Tagged with…" and the actual tag, I'm not sure how big of a problem that really is. I could put "NPOV/OR" there, but I'm not sure if the use of acronyms will make it more difficult to understand. Thoughts? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:46, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

Pratyya ^(Hello!) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas2}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Pratyya ^(Hello!) 04:49, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks so much, Merry Xmas to you too! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 11:54, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Just tried "suggestbot"

Dear Nettrom, I just tried "suggestbot" for the first time, and think it is amazing. I've yet to act on it, but looking at the list, I appreciate the work you've done to improve the bot. Thanks! -Darouet (talk) 22:31, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm happy to hear you like it, thanks for trying it out and for getting in touch! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:11, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

@fawiki

Hi, I think you forgot us :( See —Yamaha5 (talk) 21:30, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I did, and I'm sorry about that. It's been a hectic autumn and beginning of winter here and my juggling of tasks has not kept up. I did manage to get fawiki support into our link-recommender on Tool Labs, but I did not find time to finish getting SuggestBot set up. Right now I'm busy working on getting a research paper ready for submission to the ICWSM conference, which has a deadline of Jan 22. Once that has passed, I've decided to allocate the week after to focus on engineering work so I can get fawiki, huwiki, and ruwiki set up with SuggestBot. Again, sorry about the delays, and I'm looking forward to getting it working on fawiki later this month. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:56, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your timeYamaha5 (talk) 21:37, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Gui'tars

Thanks for the support re Taylor Guitars. I think the C.F. Martin & Company article is just as bad, if not worse. Do you agree & endorse a major elimination of free advertising? Regards Tapered (talk) 21:13, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome, and thanks for the pointer to the C.F. Martin article! That article's not terribly good either, I completely agree! I did some quick changes today as I had a few minutes to spare, deleted a section that in my opinion did not fit the article, as well as improving some of the section headings to structure the "Company history" part better. Feel free to work on improving it, the section on models is large and I'm not sure how many of those really need to be there. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:38, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Well, I've gone and done it. Took a serious meataxe to both the Martin and Taylor articles. Have a look! Also please answer @ my talk page. Regards Tapered (talk) 20:48, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

flag in fa.wikipedia

Hi, Your bot now has flag at fa.wikipedia please run it. Thank you for your time Yamaha5 (talk) 14:09, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

@Yamaha5: Thanks for the notification! I have started the bot on fa.wikipedia and will monitor it closely to make sure it works correctly. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:35, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

A Suggestion: In fa.wiki we have many user which their user page is locked like mine! is possible to set bot, if it finds a locked user page leave it! also how can we localize the template with Persian name? only making redirect is ok? Yamaha5 (talk) 06:19, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

instead of {{user:SuggestBot/suggest}} using {{ربات پیشنهاددهنده}} is ok ? fa:الگو:ربات پیشنهاددهنده is redirect Yamaha5 (talk) 06:24, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

I have added tests so SuggestBot leaves locked pages when processing requests. For subscribers (who use {{User:SuggestBot/config}}) it should not be a problem as the template does not need to be removed.

And yes, {{ربات پیشنهاددهنده}} is okay, I have added that to our configuration and tested that it is identified correctly. Thanks for the help! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:06, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	For SuggestBot. Freshman404Talk 02:17, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	THANKS THAANKS THAANKS Husamu-d-din (talk) 21:45, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

suggestbot

Hello! I've wanted to ask if it's possible to start running this bot in ru.wikipedia: as I suppose, it would be helpful there. I could help you with local feedbacks received (and work as a translator) and could help you with the whole process of bot start there - I am a local bureaucrat and that wouldn't cause any problems. Rubin16 (talk) 12:47, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi, sorry about the delay responding to this. If there is interest from the community on Russian Wikipedia, I'm sure we could make that happen. What I usually do is that I post to the Village Pump (or somewhere similar, I noticed some Wikipedias have a specific place for discussions with non-native speakers) and see if there's a group of users who are interested in using it. If there is, I can make a push to get it set up there together with a couple of other Wikipedias that I've promised will get it. Also, one of my collaborators is Russian, so I'll have some local translation help too :) So my question is, is there a particular place on ru.wikipedia where I should post? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:17, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for my delay now, I am on a bsuiness trip... We have an english-speaking village pump (ru:Википедия:Форум/Иноязычный), you can post there and I could translate it to Russian and move to some general forum to attract more interest. Or I can help you with prior translation and posting directly to the general village pump :) Rubin16 (talk) 19:05, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for disturbing again - are there any news about that? Rubin16 (talk) 13:34, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

No need to apologise! I've just been really busy the past few weeks and didn't get around to take care of this. Have now made sure it's on my list of things to get done, I plan to get to it by the end of the day. Thanks for the reminder! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:07, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Just posted to the English-speaking Village Pump you pointed me to: ru:Википедия:Форум/Иноязычный#SuggestBot on Russian Wikipedia? If you don't have time to translate it, let me know, I have a Russian friend I can ask. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:59, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I think that we can summarize a little bit: we have a complete support of your bot (link) :) Rubin16 (talk) 14:27, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the link! I kept track of the comments the first few days and noticed they were largely positive, awesome to see a few more drop in at the end. I'll get to work on this once New Year's rolls along in between other things, then. Thanks for helping out with keeping in touch and translating content. I might ask you a question or two about Russian Wikipedia as I work on this, unless my Russian colleague can help me out. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 11:57, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Ok, waiting for you now :) Never mind to contact me with questions: the best way is a talk page in ru.wiki or wikimail - I don't often check en.wiki :) Rubin16 (talk) 14:00, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

• Hi, Nettrom! Are there any news on possible implementation? :) or are you still busy? Rubin16 (talk) 06:17, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Rubin16: Thanks for getting in touch about this! Things are quite hectic around here, but I've found some time to check up on the status of getting SuggestBot to Russian Wikipedia (as well as Persian, they're both on my list). I'll make a post to SuggestBot's talk page on ruwiki tomorrow about the most important problem to solve right now, which is to figure out categories of articles that SuggestBot should pick from (it always uses a local database of articles so it always suggest articles that need improvement). I have gathered a list of candidates, but users on ruwiki can probably help me find ones that I have missed and decide which ones are most important. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:46, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

ok, thanks! Rubin16 (talk) 04:05, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Hello! I've updated and expanded list of the categories to work on. Just one question: as I see in en.wiki stub-categories are restricted to those that have "-stiu" in their name. For ru.wiki the check could be performed on "Незавершённые статьи" in the category name Rubin16 (talk) 08:43, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the update and for confirming the pattern for Stub-categories. I had seen a similar pattern when I was looking at them, but of course would need a check by a native speaker. I've gathered articles from the categories and will post an update to ruwiki soon. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:06, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

• Hello! I am done with the translation in ru.wiki, the translated version of config.py is here - link. I've forked your repo for this purpose and also shared it with you via bitbucket. Please, write me if any questions will arise Rubin16 (talk) 05:13, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi Rubin16, no questions at the moment, instead a million thanks for the help! I merged your changes to the configuration and ran a test. Have also submitted a bot request so the bot approval process can get started. Thanks again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:30, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi once again. I assigned flag to the bot Rubin16 (talk) 05:01, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

@Rubin16:: Thanks! I did a couple of tests to make sure our code works and it is now running. You should get some suggestions in a few minutes. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:11, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

works great for me! :) so, can I start advertising your bot again? :) Rubin16 (talk) 03:29, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

@Rubin16:: Happy to hear it works, that's awesome! And yeah, feel free to let others know that it's now up and running, thanks! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:04, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi once again! I've got a little complaint :) I don't know why but Suggestbot ignores me and sends no suggestions for a while... I've set a weekly update by {{User:SuggestBot/userbox|частота=еженедельно}} on my user page but got just one initial message from him Rubin16 (talk) 09:23, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

@Rubin16: Complaints are very welcome, but particularly when something is not working the way it should. Sorry about SuggestBot not sending suggestions when it should! I did some testing here, the problem was that our configuration looked for the userbox under its Russian spelling, while in the examples we use "User:SuggestBot/userbox". The result was that it would instead use the default values, which is monthly suggestions. I updated the configuration so it looks for the right template and added an issue to our Bitbucket repository so we can handle localisations as well. Based on what's in our database now you should get some suggestions tomorrow. Thanks again for reporting it, happy I could get it solved! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:47, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

it works now, thanks! Rubin16 (talk) 04:51, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

♥IBCPirates♥

Thank you for making those recommendations for me to edit on my talk page. How do you determine that? →→IBCPirates (talk) 23:38, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi IBCPirates, thanks for using SuggestBot and for getting in touch! Apologies for the delay in responding, I've been terribly busy at the moment getting a research paper ready for the CSCW conference, leaves little time for other things.

Here's how SuggestBot works: It first grabs the most recent articles (Main namespace) you've edited and then finds articles similar to those by using three types of algorithms. It first finds other users who have edited the same articles and collects articles they've edited but you haven't. Secondly it follows the wikilinks from the articles you've edited, gathering the ones that are linked most often. Third it compares the text of the articles you've edited with the rest of the English Wikipedia articles and find the ones that are most similar. From these three sets it filters it through our database of task categories, looking for articles tagged with improvement needs. The 30 that remain after filtering are then sent to you.

I hope that explains it, I can provide more details if necessary. Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks again for using SuggestBot! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 14:03, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask

Heya; apparently SuggestBot should be updating Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask, but doesn't seem to be :/. Any chance you could hit it with a stick? :). Ironholds (talk) 19:34, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

I should probably update the template while this part of SuggestBot is on leave, awaiting being moved to Tool Labs. With the shutdown of the Toolserver, I expired my account there and packed things up, so it's currently not running. At the moment I'm busy chasing a conference submission deadline, so it'll have to wait until after the 23rd. I will have some time to make some adjustments to the code and get it running on Tools Labs then, though, so it should be back in operation before the end of the month. Hope that's not a problem? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 23:56, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Naw, that sounds good :). Let me know if you have any difficulty with Tool Labs - I know people who know people who...so on ;p. Ironholds (talk) 18:54, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello, Nettrom. Any news on this front, please? Thanks. --PFHLai (talk) 11:33, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

@PFHLai: I'm sorry for not getting this done. The main reason is that I'm conflicted about the Community Portal, as it is right now it does not appear to be an effective way to engage editors. Both my own research (which I hope to have published soon) and WMF's click data from the 2012 redesign (meta:Research:Community portal redesign/Opentask#Results) indicates that the portal doesn't really lead to saved edits. The WMF data suggests about 2-3 edits per day come through the portal, which is not a lot given that it gets about 8-10,000 views per day (ref Wiki ViewStats graph of WP:CP).

I'm not sure I have the time to lead a redesign effort of the portal, but I'd be happy to get the conversation started by writing something on the talk page. Then we could see where we go from there? Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:46, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

That's alright, Nettrom. I'll take care of the template manually for now. Thank you for looking into this. Cheers! --PFHLai (talk) 03:26, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

@PFHLai: I wasn't happy about the answer I gave you and having you doing all this manually, so I went ahead and edited the script that updates the task list. It's a simpler version than what we had before in that it only picks articles randomly whereas the previous version used data on article popularity & quality for some of the articles. I've got it ready to run on Tool Labs now, so just let me know and I'll set it to update Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask again. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 20:38, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

That's very nice of you, Nettrom. Please feel free to unleash your bot on WP:OT anytime. Thank you very much. --PFHLai (talk) 10:11, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

No problem, PFHLai! I've now set the bot up to update the list twice every hour. Thanks for taking care of the list manually while SuggestBot was away, and for nudging me to get it working again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 11:05, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Another barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	Thank you so much for your work on m:Research:Ideas/Screening WikiProject Medicine articles for quality/Prediction table. This is going to save me so much time and effort. I really appreciate it! Thank you, WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:33, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Thanks so much! I was tremendously happy to get this started for WP Medicine since doing something like this has been an idea for a long, long time. Glad you like it, am looking forward to learning about your experiences and how we can make it work better! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:50, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

I checked the bottom ten articles yesterday—the ones rated right around 50%—and they were really right about 50% in my opinion. The higher rated ones were of course definitely not stubs.

Would it be both useful and not too much work to see which ones of these get changed (over the next couple of weeks), as a means of validating the probability levels? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:15, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I'm pleasantly surprised that it seems that even a low probability of stub (e.g. around 50%) is still often right. It might be that we can improve the software, I have better data available but did not have the time to use it before the Hackathon. Next time we run it the results should be better (although exactly how much better I do not know).

And yes, I have been thinking about following up on this, both to understand which articles were reassessed, but I think it would also be great if I could discuss some of the articles that weren't reassessed with the WikiProject members, as I'm really curious to understand where the software failed. We could use that feedback to hopefully improve the training of the software as well. And it shouldn't be too much work to do, I have some code from a different project that looks for article reassessments, it should be easy to modify that. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:39, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

I still do a lot of the article assessment for WPMED, and you can always talk to me. WT:MEDA is the official page for such discussions; you're welcome at the main WT:MED page, too. Wouterstomp does a lot of this work, too, and so does CFCF. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:20, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

I've got a false positive for you and User:EpochFail to consider: Henry Ford Health System rated above 95%. It has a lot of tables, but almost no text. It's possible that someone else would rate it as Start-class, but I think I'm leaving it as a Stub. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:44, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Shuvo Roy is another false positive (same type: lots of lists, almost no actual sentences). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:24, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Also Monica Lin Brown. It might be appropriate to ignore anything inside blockquotes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:32, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for doing this! The predictions seem pretty accurate. It would be interesting to see the actually predicted class as well. Can you also do this for other classes? (I assume stubs that aren't stubs were the easiest to start with). Also could you provide the list of redirects that were classified as stubs so we can correct those? --WS (talk) 07:29, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Ooh! Good idea. I've added a new column to the table to include the predicted assessment class. I'll look into making another run to show articles that need re-assessment in other classes. Maybe Nettrom will beat me to it. ;) --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 09:33, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

I think this would be interesting, but it does seem a lot less likely to be accurate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:24, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Automation and improving the slush pile on ENWIKI

I watched caught the Research showcase video today, and it sort of got me thinking. Just some brainstorming here...

One of the places I do quite a bit of editing and reviewing is ENWIKI's article for creation process. If you are not familiar with it, in broad terms, it is an optional path that new editors can use to create article drafts, and wait to have them reviewed before being subjected the the full onslaught of Wikipedia's gatekeeping. Severe problems tend to be caught relatively quickly, but more modest, arguably correctable problems, in theory have a chance to survive.

It is also a somewhat ... err, problematic process. At present, there are roughly two thousand, six hundred new editors who have submitted new articles waiting for some feedback. A third of those have been waiting three weeks or more without having had a word said back to them. Many of the people who wait that long ... will never come back. I often worry that the process is a whisper-chipper for potential new editors.

Most new articles.. the vast majority of new articles, do not survive the process. It is my guess without evidence that most of the associated editors... same result. For the promotional ones, many of which are self-promoting or otherwise interest conflicted, that is probably an okay result. But as a total process result, it concerns me.

Here are some angles on where SuggestBot or similar ML techniques could (I say, handwaving feverishly) perhaps help things a bit:

1. Identify interesting drafts to SuggestBot users and include them in Suggest results, drawing additional eyes to article drafts. Difficulty: Picking out the minority of salvageable drafts.
2. Identify "articles more likely to survive" for the small cadre of AfC reviewers, letting reviewers focus more on articles with survival potential, and less on those with little survival potential.
3. Identify cases where ML could actually provide constructive advice prior to the arrival of a trusted reviewer. (Probably hard.)
4. More general understanding of the AfC slush pile.

Anyway, those are some thoughts that came to mind. Thanks for publicizing your research, and for SuggestBot. Cheers, --j⚛e decker^talk 01:02, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Does SuggestBot have a redlink pool?

Hi, there are some high-value redlinks at Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Thompson-Reuters most cited scientists which I've suggested for Wikipedia talk:Community portal/Opentask#Scientist redlinks. Please see and please do it because starting new articles is fun. Do you have a redlink pool somewhere for SuggestBot? EllenCT (talk) 16:41, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Update, please?

Could you or User:EpochFail run an update on m:Research:Screening WikiProject Medicine articles for quality/Stub prediction table? I've personally gone through the top half or so, and I know a couple of other people have been through parts of the list as well. It would be a little more efficient for me if the ones that they've already updated were taken off the list.

If it's a hassle–really, if it's more than about ten minutes work–then it might not be worth your time, but if it's easy, then I'd appreciate it.

By the way, your predicted percentages are still holding approximately true. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:25, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I had this on my calendar yesterday, but failed to get around to it. Will take care of it later today. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:46, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: The table is now updated. I also created a page with the list of redirects that were identified, in case WP Medicine wants to fix those too, see m:Research:Screening WikiProject Medicine articles for quality. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 23:28, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! I'm starting down the new list. I see that a few more have been added. I have found one copyvio among the recently enlarged articles. Thanks, too, for the redirects list. Cleaning out mislabeled redirects is something I haven't done for over a year, and I can see that it's high time.

I've been thinking about the idea of producing a predicted status for all articles. The line between a long-ish Stub and a weak-ish Start is pretty fuzzy. What might be most useful as a starting point for that is a report only on the articles that are wrong by two classes–not Stubs that are probably Starts, but Stubs that are probably C-class or better, or, in the other direction, C-class articles that are probably Stubs. That would clear out the most significant outdated (or vandalized; it happens) assessments before going on to the much longer list of slightly-off ratings. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:09, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I've cleared the entire redirects list, and blanked it so that anyone visiting the page will know that it's done. Feel free to ping me if future runs find more. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:47, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

One more update, please? I've reached the end of the list. The page currently lists 490 articles, and while some of these are still stubs, more than half of them will go away. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:02, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi WhatamIdoing, I'll take care of the update tomorrow (Oct 30). Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:38, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I have updated both the main table as well as the redirect table, there were ten redirects this time around that you might want to have a look at. Let me know if you there's anything else! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:06, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! I'm halfway through the new ones.

In terms of turning this into a sustainable ongoing task (e.g., the bot updates it periodically and editors go over the ratings), it would be useful to know which ones are newly added and which ones are old. I can look at the color of the link and know that I visited this page recently, but not that one, but nobody except me can know which ones I've already reviewed vs which ones still need to be done. I don't know how much work that would be, or if it's worth it.

User:Dank was interested in seeing how this worked out, with an eye towards seeing whether MILHIST would benefit from a similar re-assessment drive. I think that I've reassessed about 1% of WPMED's articles (about 400) as a result of this list. As I said earlier, the ones that are probably very wrong (rated as stub but predicted as C or higher) are probably the most important ones to review, but the predicted levels were reasonably close to my experience. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:31, 30 October 2014 (UTC)