User talk:Nettrom/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

SuggestBot and HTML5

Hello there! I was wondering if you could update SuggestBot to have the tables it posts on user's talk page be HTML5 compliant. I'd be happy to help if you point me to the source code for the script or templates used to make those tables. Currently, I'm seeing a lot of align='right'—align='center'—align='left' where style="text-align: right;"—style="text-align: center;"—style="text-align: left;" would be up-to-date and appropriate. If you could do this, it would fix a huge eyesore for me and a couple other users. Thanks! — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 05:40, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

@Technical 13: Thanks for letting me know about this. I'm a little swamped at the moment, but I've made a note to look into this, should be done some time next week. I suspect it's only a matter of minor changes to SuggestBot's templates to get it taken care of. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:44, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

• If you want to point me to those templates, I'd be happy to make the needed changes. I can edit on-wiki templates (even if I need to submit a specific edit request to a Template editor/Administrator protected page) and I could submit a pull request if it is on BitBucket. I don't mind. If not and you'd rather just do it yourself, I understand and that's not a problem either. Happy editing and thanks for your time! :) — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 16:45, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

@Technical 13: Thanks so much for volunteering, that's much appreciated! I would've pointed you to the templates if it didn't mean I first had to go poke around in SuggestBot's configuration to check which ones are in use, and also inspect the other content elements that are in the configuration. Since that's about 75% of the work to fix the issue, once it was done I might as well go do some copy & paste on the templates and test them.

If you have time to go have a look at the templates and see if there's anything I've missed, that would be great, another pair of eyes is always helpful! There are two templates currently in use: the first one is used for one-time requests, and the other one is used for our subscribers (those who get suggestions periodically). The resulting posts from SuggestBot can be seen here in my sandbox, they're in the same order. Looks like the vertical alignment in the big table is slightly off, that might be due to how images and text is aligned in CSS, if I remember correctly, but as it looks like it's a really small difference I haven't yet allocated time to look into it (if I'll bother). Anyways... thanks again for helping me get these upgraded! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:10, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Admin's Barnstar
	I'v done and people got credit but now ? Zaed.zaman (talk) 04:59, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Stub predictions

Hi Nettrom,

I wanted to give you and User:EpochFail an update on m:Research:Screening WikiProject Medicine articles for quality/Stub prediction table. I'm "done", in the sense that I've checked every page on the list at least once. Overall, I think it was useful. I personally reassessed the class on about 450 articles, and in other cases I kept the class rating but made other adjustments, like adding task forces or removing the WPMED banner altogether. I really appreciated the list of pages that were redirects.

Here are a few complications:

• Does your algorithm use raw file size (vs readable content)? It seems to give high ratings to articles that have a dozen footnotes, but very few sentences.
• Imagine that I checked an article yesterday, and decided that it's still a stub. User:Dank expanded it this morning. The bot runs tonight. When I look at the list tomorrow, there is no way for me to know that it needs to be re-checked. What I see, basically, is that I have visited that URL recently.
• It's fun when you start. It gets boring after a while. Using a rater script is probably essential to getting the job done for mid-size or larger projects.
• Updates don't work as well as the original list. With the updated list, you run into the "I already checked that one" problem, but you also get articles that are unstable. On the most recent list, several of the highest rated articles were being expanded now, appeared spammy or smelled of copyvios, didn't belong to WPMED, or were at AFD. These are articles that are more likely than average to get stubbified, which would render my "new" rating out of date.

I think it might be useful to run through a list like this maybe a couple of times a year, but I don't think that it's a good candidate for an everyday maintenance task. If you were setting up a bot to do this, then you might consider having it run once a month. Every day would be too often to be useful.

And, finally, I could see some value in two other lists:

1. An off-by-two list, to find things rated as Start (for example) but that are at least two classes higher (or lower, I suppose).
2. A list of pages that are probably over-rated (for example, listed as B, but having a greater than 50% chance of being C class or lower).

Thank you both again for doing this. Between all of us, we have probably corrected the ratings on 2% of WPMED's articles this way. I really appreciate it.

Are you interested in doing this for other groups? I don't want to go out and volunteer your time, but a few of the more organized projects might benefit from a list. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:45, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Hi WhatamIdoing, thank you so much for this great feedback! Sorry about the delay in getting back to you. I'm of course happy to hear this has been a useful experiment, but also that there's improvements left to do. Let me respond to a question you had and then I'll move on to future plans, I have some ideas that can hopefully result in some good support tools for WikiProjects.

You asked whether the algorithm uses raw file size. It's a random forest classifier, which we give eleven inputs to (here's a perhaps rather cryptic list of them). We do use the raw length of an article’s wikitext as one of the inputs, it might be better to use an approximation of readable content, I’ll make a note to test that. If my memory of the classifier's scoring of importance is correct, the raw length of the article's wikitext is the #1 feature when it comes to predicting quality, and the number of footnoted references is #2. We did some investigation into the classifier's performance earlier this year for a research paper that'll be presented at a conference in 2015, and one thing I for instance noticed is that it'll flag some articles as C-class that some Wikipedians will rate Start-class. At that time the Start-class criteria contained the phrase "most notably, lacks adequate reliable sources", which I see you changed on Nov 17 (ref this revision). The classifier is a bit of a black box and there will definitely be edge cases it gets wrong, short articles with a good number of references is likely one of them. Hopefully the Revision scoring as a service IEG results in a gold standard labelled set of revisions that we can use to further improve the classifier.

I hope that answers the question. As for future plans and interest in doing this for other groups, the answer is “yes, definitely!” I am currently working on designing a research experiment to finish up my PhD and based on the previous work we have done WikiProjects is probably the right place to build some support tools. A tool that will help projects keep track of candidates for reassessment is one part of that, but I’m also very much interested in understanding more about how projects (or groups of project members) make decisions about which articles to work on, and if there’s an opportunity to build tools to support that. We’ve been experimenting with information about article viewership and quality in SuggestBot’s suggestions since 2011, and my latest research found some interesting results with regards to how article viewership and quality is related to WikiProjects (unfortunately this work isn’t published yet, but I'd be happy to discuss it off-wiki).

Would that be something that WikiProject Medicine might be interested in as well? And are there other projects that you’re in touch with that I could also reach out to? Given its size, I’m quite curious about what MILHIST participants are thinking about this, but of course, only if they’re interested. And I'd be happy to hear about other potential projects I could get in touch with, if you have ideas! I’m thinking I would first reach out with a small set of questions to learn more about the decision process and whether article viewership is something they’re concerned with (or would like to be informed about).

Let me know if this sounds interesting, and please do ask questions or let me know if I’m off on the wrong path. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:00, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Half an answer, so that I can get you some reply this week:

I suspect that readable content will be a better measurement, especially for stubs. The difference may be greater for pharma stubs than anything else, because there are many stubs that have a large number of refs (sometimes more than a dozen) behind just a couple of sentences. The difference may be less obvious in other subjects.

I changed the Start-class description because of a complaint: Article ratings are being sent to new editors via WP:Echo, and "most notably, lacks adequate citations" was being read as "if you have citations, this class should not have been assigned to your article". In broad theory, you must have one (1) citation (need not be inline) per article to leave Start-class. In theory, you need (almost always) one (1) inline citation per ==section== to leave C-class. In practice, some reviewers are much stricter.

More later, WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:47, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Nettrom

Hi, Thanks for helping me unsubscribe. Hope to sign up again in the near future. The suggestbot has been useful for me. Thanks --Nkansahrexford (talk) 22:49, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Help

Can you please configure Suggestbot to suggest articles every 2 days. THANK YOU A.A.Wasif | Talk 10:22, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

@Abdullah Al Wasif: I'm reluctant to change the subscription setup so it allows shorter periods than a week, as the table with suggestions is a fairly large amount of wikitext. We'd rather not write those too often. If you do want suggestions more often, you can use the request template to get them as often as you want. Although that currently formats the suggestions with less information, it can be used several times a day if you want. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:22, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you

I have recently used suggest bot and want to let you know that I find it very helpful. I want to let you know that I appreciate you as its 'caretaker'. Thank you for your work on this bot. Best Regards,

  Bfpage |leave a message  14:33, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Bfpage, I'm happy to hear you find SuggestBot useful, and thanks so much for the kind words! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:45, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Like   Bfpage |leave a message  18:57, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject reports from SuggestBot

Hi Nettrom! I am working on WikiProject X, an effort to overhaul WikiProjects. As part of this, I am interested in developing a scalable approach for generating article worklists. I am very encouraged by the efforts you've made with SuggestBot, especially in the above talk page thread about stub prediction for WikiProject Medicine, and I would be interested in something that would allow any WikiProject to generate these kinds of reports. I was considering just using User:SuggestBot/Requests, but WikiProject categories index a bunch of talk pages, rather than the articles themselves. So would it be possible to come up with some way to make the request feature work for WikiProjects? Thanks, Harej (talk) 17:16, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

@Harej: Thanks for getting in touch, sorry about not being quicker in responding! I've seen WikiProject X pop up here and there and am looking forward to see what you come up with, good support for WikiProjects is in my view a key component to sustained success of Wikipedia. With regards to SuggestBot, it does have undocumented support for seeding it with WikiProject articles. It was developed a while ago to allow easier requests of suggestions for Teahouse visitors, who were asked to copy & paste names of active WikiProjects. You can give it the full category name directly (e.g. Category:WikiProject History articles), and it'll handle the talk pages just fine. An alternative is to give the WikiProject name as a specific parameter, and it'll add " articles" automatically and similarly grab pages from the corresponding category: {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|category1=WikiProject History}} In either case, it will be seeded by up to 256 articles from that category, and it uses the timestamp of when the article was added to the category to sort them with the oldest one first (meaning it assumes that older timestamps are articles in less need of improvement than younger ones).

WikiProject support in SuggestBot has been requested quite a lot by other contributors. One thing we have not implemented is to limit suggested articles to ones within a specific WikiProject. As mentioned above you can seed the suggestions with articles from WikiProject, and since the bot finds similar articles it will likely find other ones within the project as well, but it is free to also suggest other articles. It might therefore not be a great fit for WikiProjects specifically, but could be very useful for individual project members.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have further questions and I'll try to help you out! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 17:47, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Hello! Good to hear that WikiProjects are already supported. Would it be possible to use User:SuggestBot/config, for regular updates, rather than the one-time User:SuggestBot/suggest template, to get the same functionality? Harej (talk) 04:04, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

I also would be interested in having the output be in the table format, rather than just the list. Thanks! Harej (talk) 22:34, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Nettrom, any update on this? (See also parallel discussion on SuggestBot's talk page.) I would be happy to make the change to the code myself, but I cannot find any up-to-date code repositories. Harej (talk) 20:01, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

SuggestBot - Delay, and idea

Greetings, About 22:00 (my local time) I submitted a SB request. It's now 06:30 (overnight) and yet no response from SuggestBot. Idea: can SB send back immediately something like, what number your request is in the Queue? and or Expected wait time? I have only used SB a few times, once it gave back suggestions in 10 minutes, another time it was over 18 hours... Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 11:42, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Hi JoeHebda! I am sorry that we're currently unable to send you any suggestions. SuggestBot relies on Tool Labs to function, and there's currently a system outage. Once Tool Labs is up again, we should be sending you suggestions fairly quickly.

I like the idea of being able to get more information about what is going on with the bot, so I've made a note of that, thanks! Typically there is no queue and suggestions are sent as fast as our algorithms run, but there might be some straightforward way of providing more information. Again, sorry about the service interruption, and thanks for getting in touch! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:36, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Update request

Hi Nettrom,

I saw a note from Harej's WikiProject X about the rev score service, which reminded me: would it be easy to re-populate m:Research:Screening WikiProject Medicine articles for quality/Redirect table for me? I'm looking for a mostly mindless task, and fixing banners on redirects would fit the bill very nicely. (No rush, and I understand if you can't get to it.) Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:21, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Hi WhatamIdoing! I've updated the list as requested. I also wanted to update the main table with most probable non-stubs using an updated prediction library (which the rev score service will also be using), so that we could get an idea of how much better it is in practice (our test data suggests it's much better overall, but might not be for this specific use case). Unfortunately it depends on a couple of other software libraries, so I'm currently waiting to see if those libraries can be installed on Tool Labs. Don't be surprised if I ping you in a few days and ask you to have a look. Also, let me know if there's anything else! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:09, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

I'll be looking forward to it! WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:21, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Hi again WhatamIdoing! I've now also updated the prediction table using our updated prediction library. I noticed there is a large number of articles predicted as Start-class (1,816), so I suspect that our approach need further refining if we are to make this generally available. If I remember correctly you previously suggested that it should list predictions that are not a single class away, which I think is one key filter. I'm also thinking that an article can be listed if the probability is above a certain threshold, and I think there's some reasonably straightforward analysis that can tell us what the right threshold is. Let me know what you think once you've been able to examine the list more closely! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 23:08, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! I'm busy with Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Gradually enabling VisualEditor for new accounts right now, but I'd be happy to have a look when things are a little quieter. That will require more attention than fixing the redirects.  :-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:35, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Oh wow, that's not a particularly quiet place to be, for sure! But no worries, I've got too many projects on my hands at the moment anyway, so take your time. Best of luck with the VE project! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:13, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Article views

Hi, I noticed you edited a page which mentions the average number of views per day of some articles. I would like to have a table with information about the average number of views per day of articles I created (draft is here). Is it possible to add some template which would update this data to the table I created? --Antidiskriminator (talk) 07:39, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Community portal/Opentask

Hi, I'd like to implement such a mechanism on plwiki community portal. Could you set your bot to extract and update several lists from specified categories? ofc I'll take care of usability, consensus and everything else. Tar Lócesilion (queta) 18:32, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi Tar Lócesilion! Yes, I'm sure we can make it work for plwiki as well! The program that SuggestBot uses to update that page was written to support multiple languages from the start. All that should be needed is a page that's similar to Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask, a set of categories to use to update the lists, and how often the page should be updated (here on enwiki it's every 30 mins, but can easily be done less often too, I'm not sure if updating it more often than twice every hour is useful). I went and had a look at the bot rules on plwiki, applying for a bot flag there seems straightforward enough, SuggestBot already has it in 6 languages. So please do get the discussion/consensus process started on plwiki, and let me know what I need to do to help! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:09, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

A third way: Request SuggestBot via Teahouse

Re-posting this message from SB talk page and asking for a status update please.

Greetings, Since I started on WP, I visit Teahouse almost every day. While "exploring" I discovered that SuggestBot requests can be made at this Teahouse page. Click on Get suggestions and follow the instructions. IMO this third way is more user friendly versus the other two request methods. Here is my first draft for update to the start of this page (and the User page).

Start of draft

If you're looking for SuggestBot recommendations, you have these options.

• For a one-time request to try it out, please go to User:SuggestBot/Requests.
• At Teahouse, you can direct SuggestBot to choose article categories based on WikiProject(s) you are interested in. For a self-guided request, go to Teahouse SuggestBot Suggestions, click on Get suggestions and follow the instructions.
• If you would like recommendations regularly sent to your talk page, add yourself to the list of SuggestBot Regulars.

Note

I have only used SB a few times (and BTW this last time with the detail columns is Great!) so the above draft may need to be tweaked. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 14:30, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

ω Awaiting JoeHebda (talk) 17:43, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

* Resolved Thanks. JoeHebda (talk) 17:55, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Proposal: Shaded heading boxes? (for Opentask template)

Greetings Nettrom/Archive 2 The proposal to add shaded heading boxes (at Wikipedia talk:Community portal/Opentask)was introduced on 16:35, 26 September 2015 (UTC). Since that time, the example was updated several times. In addition, I posted at Wikipedia talk:Community portal on 23:51, 27 September 2015 (UTC). Still looking for feedback, discussion & consensus. My concern is the 5,000 page watchers at Community portal & the responses triggered if I am bold and make this change. Please advise of how to proceed. JoeHebda (talk) 14:15, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Replied on Wikipedia talk:Community portal/Opentask. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:22, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

SuggestBot in the french wikipédia?

Hello Nettrom.

Great idea, the SuggestBot!

Do you think your bot could work on the french wikipedia?

I can help if needed.

Cheers.

Trace (talk) 08:37, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Edit - sorry, I was so enthusiastic that I missed the SuggestBot talk page!

I have just been posting there.

Sorry.

Trace (talk) 08:44, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

I replied to you in the french Suggestbot talk page. Cheers. Trace (talk) 17:03, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

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You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:59, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

plwiki step 2

OK, there's consensus, I set 9 categories (links here). This is the page to be updated. I separated them to provide 1. more transclusions without including the layout 2. flexibility: which lists [not] to transclude. As a consequence, eventually, your bot will be able to update several sets that could be used independently from one another. SuggestBot actually has a flag on pl, so this is also done. As for frequency, once per hour is fine. Tar Lócesilion (queta) 18:13, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi Tar Lócesilion, thanks for getting all the "paperwork" taken care of, wonderful for me to see everything ready to go! I'll be working on this today and should have an update for you in a few hours. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:50, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi again Tar Lócesilion! I've been able to patch SuggestBot's script so that it apparently works, ref pl:Wikipedysta:Nettrom/sandbox/suggestions and this diff.

One issue that you might be able to help me with is how to handle pl:Kategoria:Artykuły wymagające uzupełnienia źródeł. Right now I use an adaptation of how we handle some categories here on enwiki. The script grabs all pages (Main & Talk namespaces) from sub-sub-categories because articles are moved into monthly categories. That means it also grabs articles from subcategories of pl:Kategoria:Hasła chemiczne wymagające uzupełnienia źródeł w infoboksie, and there are a couple of categories that get ignored (e.g. pl:Kategoria:Wyniki piłki nożnej wymagające uzupełnienia źródeł). Let me know if that works okay or not.

Also, the code now uses an English edit comment ("Updating list of open tasks..."). If you have a Polish translation the bot can use that. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 01:42, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Great, thanks! I made linkfixes here and there, and everything works, for now. I'll be keeping an eye on sub-categories that contain articles instead of sub-sub-cats. Keep in touch :) Tar Lócesilion (queta) 03:46, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

OK, finally, I think SuggestBot can update the suggestions once per hour. pl:Wikipedia:Sprzątanie Wikipedii/Sugerowane listy - this page is ready, as well as the draft of community portal. Tar Lócesilion (queta) 15:23, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi again Tar Lócesilion, thanks for the help and the updates! Finished up getting things ready, and based on the edit history things are working. I've add the call to SuggestBot's crontab so the page should be updated once every hour. Will monitor it throughout the day and try to fix anything that comes up, and feel free to get in touch if you see something! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:39, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

strange question

Would there be any way for people to submit articles not yet created but desired to the suggestbot and have those suggestions sent out to people as a separate post on talk page? It would simplify the process instead of having to manually check all the way time. And it could update new suggestions in realtime so you would know there are new desired articles. Nice to meet another u Of m guy, i graduated from there in 2003 😊 Very fond memories. Notgoingtotellyou (talk) 21:07, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Snarky Puppy

The lead says further down;

"On January 26, 2014, Snarky Puppy, along with Lalah Hathaway, won a Grammy Award in the Best R&B Performance category for their rendition of the Brenda Russell song "Something" from Family Dinner - Volume 1."

I always think there's an element of peacocking in shoving "award winning", and the like, into leads. But many editors seem to think it needs to be done ASAP, either to capture the reader's fickle attention, or in case someone reaches for the delete button before reading any further! :) --Escape Orbit ^(Talk) 20:04, 20 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for commenting on my IEG proposal

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on my IEG proposal page. I'm a little embarrassed I didn't know about the projects you mentioned, Ekstrand & Riedl (2009) in particular as they addressed much of what I am proposing. At this point I'm not sure exactly where my project extends the work that you and others have already done other than trying to frame the problem in evolutionary terms. But I'll keep working at it and see if I can identify some key differences and highlight them in the proposal.

Evoapps (talk) 16:41, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi Evoapps! I hope my feedback on your proposal came across as constructive, I think you're looking at an interesting problem and I hope that your evolutionary perspective can bring some new thoughts to this side of things. Ekstrand and Riedl's paper does a great job of examining the issue of visualizing the edit history in a meaningful way. As far as I know there is still an opportunity for making progress in this area, particularly when it comes to understanding more about how quality develops over time. I'll send you an email so we can stay in touch! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 00:54, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	Thanks for coming up with a good idea -- your User:SuggestBot! It helped me a lot to find the articles that I like, thanks :) →The Pancake of Heaven! (T  • C  • E) 15:05, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

SuggestBot's messages

Hi, I have got to you a question about work of the SuggestBot. Does suggestbot generate articles also based on my watchlist? Regards. Dawid2009 (talk) 12:57, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

I've responded to this on User talk:SuggestBot#SuggestBot's messages. Replying here to so the archive bot can do its thing as time goes by. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:41, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Re: Suhr Guitars and their letter of intent with Avalanche International

You're right, thank you for the appointment. I already reverted my edition.

Regards, Rachmaninoff (talk) 22:16, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

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Support Flow

Hello Nettrom,

I'm interested in your bot in Persian wikipedia, but my talk pages is Flow, so bot doesn't work in it, can you add support of it to the bot ?

Regards.MohammadtheEditor (talk) 02:40, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi MohammadtheEditor, thanks for being interested in SuggestBot and asking about this! Supporting Flow is on my list of things to add. I am currently working on fixing a bug with our subscriptions, once that is fixed I am thinking Flow should be the next thing I work on. SuggestBot is now on three Wikipedias where some users have Flow (Persian, Norwegian, and French), so it is definitely a feature that I will add. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:49, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	Thank you for managing SuggestBot! It makes my work on improving Wikipedia much easier, and I think it helps a lot of other people, too! Thanks again! —Editor 357 (Talk • Contributions) 16:09, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Editor 357, thanks so much, happy to hear that SuggestBot is useful! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:34, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Glad to brighten your day! I have one question for you: How exactly did you get your talk page to archive automatically? I am having trouble getting my talk page to do just that. Could you please give me advice on how to fix my archival problem/edit my talk page so it works for me? Thanks so much! —Editor 357 ^{(Talk • Contributions)} 17:52, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Never mind, I have figured it out. Thanks anyways! —Editor 357 ^{(Talk • Contributions)} 17:58, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Happy to hear you figured it out! :) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:49, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	For working tirelessly on SuggestBot and it's code, and for bringing it online ASAP when it goes down! Thank you for maximizing SuggestBot's potential, and for sending me and countless others helpful and accurate suggestions! UN$¢_Łuke_1Ø21Repørts 13:44, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi UN$¢_Łuke_1Ø21, thanks so much for the barnstar and the kind words, really appreciate that! Also happy to hear that SuggestBot is working well for you, I'm hoping to be able to continue improving it in the future. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:27, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost barnstar

		The Signpost Barnstar
		For contributing to multiple Signpost "Recent research" reports in 2016. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! --Pine✉ 02:29, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Pine, thank you so much for the barnstar! Hope you are having a Merry Christmas, and all the best for the New Year as well! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 22:04, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Please improve SuggestBot

SuggestBot should check Google to see if the only way to contribute to the page is by using copyvios. Those pages should be removed from the list before they are sent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by David Dylan (talk • contribs) 13:46, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Hi David Dylan, thanks for getting in touch and for bringing up an interesting idea! I am not sure I understand how this problem manifests itself, and therefore don't really know if it can be solved either. Do you have an example article that you were suggested where this was a problem? Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:41, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

This is the problem. SuggestBot brought me to that page, and the following list was deleted due to copyvios. However, it is more a matter of the copyright implications of verifiable lists, now that I think of it. (David Dylan (talk) 22:58, 19 January 2017 (UTC))

Question

Hi, do you can create page for suggestions to me from SuggestBot? I am having hard time get this thing. best wishes. Dawid2009 (talk) 10:57, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi Dawid2009, sorry to hear SuggestBot isn't working as you want it to. I see that it has recently posted several times to User talk:Dawid2009/Archive 3, so I am a bit confused. Do you want a page like User talk:Dawid2009/Suggestions that you can use just for SuggestBot? Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:36, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I do. Exacly it.

@Dawid2009: I went ahead and created the page for you. Let me know if there's anything else! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 17:20, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Proposal: Add three missing blocks to the Help out section

See Wikipedia talk:Community portal#Archive_18. I truly hope that another three sections "Create these articles", "Represent a worldwide view" and "Add historical information" can be added to Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask.--RekishiEJ (talk) 08:08, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, I've responded on the Community Portal's talk page. Posting a short response here so this thread can be archived when necessary. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:42, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I sincerely hope that these three blocks will be added.--RekishiEJ (talk) 13:19, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Thanks a lot for the answer at EpochFail's page. Wikipedians have asked this question repeatedly over years and I had a sense that somehow it had become answerable with the availability of new tools. You pieced it together and now I get to see interesting information which no one has seen before, and also we have a general solution to the problem. I will write this entire process out somewhere, and I also plan to share these results. Thanks for commenting on the problem and finding a solution - this is very interesting. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:52, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi Blue Rasberry , thanks so much for the coffee! I literally went and got myself a cup shortly afterwards, actually. Very happy to hear I was able to help you get the data you needed! I used the Wikidata Query Service for similar things when I was investigating the categories of articles in WP:MED that get Low-importance ratings, so when I read your description I knew I could combine some of the queries I had already used. Then it's easy to download a dataset for further processing like you did. Thanks again for the coffee, and by the way, also thanks for the great feedback on our work with importance predictions in WP:MED, much appreciated! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:39, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Discussion

Hello, Nettrom. You have new messages at Wikipedia talk:Database reports.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Your opinion/suggestion would be appreciated a lot! Thanks :-) —usernamekiran(talk) 19:44, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Section Created by Bot

Got the bot working :) Bobo.03 (talk) 02:28, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Gettingstarted adding links

Template:Gettingstarted adding links has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 07:37, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	For SuggestBot. This is a genius idea. Cheers, FriyMan Per aspera ad astra 15:26, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

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A barnstar for you!

	The Admin's Barnstar
	Lolo Rhino41179 (talk) 19:00, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Admin's Barnstar
	That the American way Rhino41179 (talk) 19:14, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

An odd apology

Hi.
I never saw your photo in the original size, I only saw the thumbnail. And all this time I thought you had a ponytail. I even pinged you once as "cool guy with a ponytail" or something like that ({{u|Nettrom|cool guy with a ponytail}}). But I realised now that it is somebody else's hairs. My ping at that time might have looked inappropriate. I apologise for that. I hope you understand my mistake. Sorry again. —usernamekiran(talk) 11:14, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

Hey Usernamekiran! I can see how one might think I have a ponytail. No harm done, but thank you for your apology, it's appreciated :) Hope you're having a happy holiday season! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:11, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I still think you are very cool though. :)
Also, nothing special at all about christmas. I am a Hindu, from India. We have a public holidy on 25th though. And in past 3-4 years, there are online sales mostly termed as "new year sale", the products are from the same manufacturation batch of the sale nearing xmas/black friday/thanksgiving i think. I hope you had a good xmas. See you around. —usernamekiran(talk) 11:20, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

No apologies needed

There are no apologies needed for the removal of the SuggestBot I am not that worried about it! This is a little overwhelming to me but I am slowly learning what I need to! OhioGirl42986 01:54, 12 January 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by OhioGirl42986 (talk • contribs)

Question about SuggestBot

Hello, I am from Thai Wikipedia. I would like to use SuggestBot to update open task for the local Community Portal, however my programming skill is miserably terrible. So I would like to ask how can I use the bot? Thanks! --Horus (talk) 06:04, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi Horus! In addition to the Community Portal here on the English Wikipedia, SuggestBot also updates two others: Russian and Polish. This means that it should not be too much work to do it for Thai Wikipedia as well. Does the Thai Wikipedia already have a Community Portal page? Also, I see that there's a bot approval process mentioned on วิกิพีเดีย:บอต and that a request should be added to the appropriate section of วิกิพีเดีย:บอต/ขออนุญาตใช้งานบอต. I can do that once I know more and we're ready to move forward.

If you're not familiar with it, the way updating the list of open tasks works is that each section of the page has an associated category (or set of categories). For example, here on English the section "Fix spelling and grammar" is connected to Category:All articles needing copy edit. The bot then randomly selects five articles from that category when it updates the list. I might need a bit of help finding good categories on Thai Wikipedia. When I've been setting this up on other Wikipedias, I worked with community members to find categories that have a reasonably large number of articles (e.g. a few hundred or so) as that helps make sure there's some variation in the articles that are selected. Can I get in touch with you if I need some help with that? Let me know, and I'm sure we can make this happen! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 04:07, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Wonderful! It would not be possible if I handle this alone. Right now I have started a discussion to select the categories to form open tasks. I will be in touch later once there is conclusion. You are welcome to contact me before that both in Thai and English Wikipedia. --Horus (talk) 05:31, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

---

Hello again! I have concluded open task to list in the community portal including: th:หมวดหมู่:หน้าที่ต้องการความช่วยเหลือ, th:หมวดหมู่:บทความที่ขาดแหล่งอ้างอิง, th:หมวดหมู่:บทความที่ยังไม่สมบูรณ์, th:หมวดหมู่:บทความวิกิพีเดียทั้งหมดที่ต้องการปรับ, th:หมวดหมู่:ตรวจภาษา, th:หมวดหมู่:บทความที่ไม่ได้อธิบายความสำคัญ, th:หมวดหมู่:บทความที่มีลิงก์เสีย, th:หมวดหมู่:ตรวจแก้รูปแบบ and th:หมวดหมู่:หน้าที่ยังไม่ได้จัดหมวดหมู่. Please inform me from time to time about the progress or if you have any questions. Thank you. --Horus (talk) 12:26, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Hi again Horus, and sorry for leaving this without a response for almost two weeks! I should have time to get started on this during the coming weekend. Once I start working on it, I'll probably create a test page in my userspace on thwiki. There's probably going to be some questions as I go along, and I'll ping you there. Looking forward to getting this working! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:14, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

SuggestBot

Hi Nettrom!

A french user, Danfarid133, would like to receive contributions from your bot, but it doesn't seem to work anymore on frwiki since one month. Is that normal? Thank you in advance. Lofhi (talk) 23:07, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

Hi Lofhi, thank you for getting in touch about this! Looks like SuggestBot has not been working on frwiki since late December. That is definitely not how it should be. I investigated the problem and found that we had an issue with how Catégorie:Article au ton publicitaire is organized, we didn't pick up the articles in that category correctly. Once I fixed our configuration and updated our database, the bot seems to be working as it should again. Thanks again for getting in touch about this so I could fix it! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:28, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the patch Nettrom, but it seems that the bot has encountered a new problem, it hasn't done anything since February 18th? Edit : oh, you know about it [1]. Lofhi (talk) 17:44, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

@Lofhi: Thanks for keeping an eye on this and getting in touch! The reason why it looks like the bot isn't working is that it sent suggestions to all subscribers on the 18th, and it won't send new ones until the 25th since the shortest subscription period is weekly. Because the bot was down for so long, everyone got their suggestions on the same day, and that makes it look like the bot isn't working. I did a test request to my sandbox page for suggestions to make sure that requests are handled correctly, and the bot will service those quickly (here's the diff, 5 minute delay between requesting and posting). I'm working on getting some improvements to our logging so I can notice if the bot stops working again, we both don't want it to not work for a month :-) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:57, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Mea culpa. Thank you for your corrections, I will inform the user who wanted to read the suggestions of the bot, that everything works. Thanks again! Lofhi (talk) 19:03, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Balloon

File:Balao.png	Appreciated help!
	Thank you for your help! Higginsal (talk) 23:43, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

SuggestBot at th

Hi. Your bot request at Thai Wikipedia has been approved. Thank you for helping us there. --Lerdsuwa (talk) 16:08, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

SuggestBot

Sorry that the filter blocked the bot again. I will look into it quickly and make sure it's not happening again. --Horus (talk) 10:11, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Hi Horus, thanks for keeping an eye out for that and looking into it! Let me know if there's anything needed from me. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:10, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Need help!

Hi! I came in your userpage through SuggestBot's user page. I am actually new here in Wikipedia so i need help. First question how can i create a bot like SuggestBot? I am interested on making one. And how can i ban/block users who are violating the terms and conditions of Wikipedia by editing childish way or more and last question how can i delete some articles which hasnt been verified since beginning. Looking forward to your answers :) -{User|Sirshak9927} Sirshak9927 (talk) 09:58, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Hi Sirshak9927, thanks for stopping by! I'm not really qualified to help you out with the last two questions, so I recommend you visit the Teahouse and ask them there. The Teahouse hosts are great people and I'm sure you'll get some good answers!

When it comes to writing a bot, I recommend reading up on it on Wikipedia:Bots, as there's a bit of policy and process related to creating one. While that means it takes a while to get a bot running, it also means that the bots are doing what they should and there are processes in place in case something goes wrong. On the technical side, we preferred to go with Python for SuggestBot, so it's built on top of the Pywikibot framework. Hope that helps you get started! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:39, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

A cheeseburger for you!

Just giving' out tasty cheeseburgers. Want some? HorsesARENiceRide me to my talk page 06:07, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

I like cheeseburgers, thanks so much! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:40, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Help

How do I get SuggestBot to stop recommending articles about Indian soap operas? I don't recall ever editing articles like that. Help would be enjoyed. lol. UNSC Luke 1021 (talk) 17:46, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Notice

I have left a message on SuggestBot's talk page, please read it. Kpgjhpjm (talk) 02:22, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks

Hi Nettrom, Thank you so much for the suggestions. will try to edit as much as I could. Good day. RaRaBa (talk) 06:27, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Hi RaRaBa, thanks for stopping by and using SuggestBot! You're most welcome, hope many of the suggestions were interesting to you. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:46, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks Nettrom for sharing the useful links on my talk page. Have a great day. Nat.Account (talk) 06:33, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

	The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
	Thank you for your help. Nat.Account (talk) 06:33, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

Hey Nat.Account, thank you so much! And thank you for using SuggestBot, glad to hear you found it to be useful! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:31, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

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aspects of article quality

Hi Nettrom, just heard you have developed a machine learning program to quantify article quality and wanted to give a few suggestions on quality markers:

• no citations in lead
• balanced sections and paragraphs
• even spacing of citations within paragraphs and throughout article

Placement of citations are interesting. I would give higher weight to citations in the first section and also higher weight to citations at the top of each section and of each paragraph.

But, since you are using machine learning, it would be best to just feed in measurements of citation location and spacing, number of paragraphs per section and number of sentences per paragraph, etc and let the machine find the best fit.

Seahawk01 (talk) 01:34, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

The presence or absence of citations in the introduction is nearly meaningless. Except for certain particularly critical items (a shorter list than WP:MINREF), it's just a stylistic or aesthetic choice. See WP:CITELEAD. The same is often the case for the distribution of citations within paragraphs. Sometimes, one sentence requires multiple citations; other times, whole paragraphs require none. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:32, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Hi WhatamIdoing, thanks for the input. Maybe I'm just imposing my own tastes on what makes a good article. I was following WP:WHENNOTCITE in suggesting that there should be a limited amount of citations in the lead. In terms of citations for the rest of the article, I was thinking that too many might be a marker for bad quality (WP:Citation overkill).

But, what I think is more interesting is just measuring the distribution and placement of citations and letting the machine learning algorithms figure it out. Seahawk01 (talk) 23:16, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Different people take different approaches. I think the most obvious group in favor of fully cited introductions is the Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Translation task force. Translators frequently translate only the lead. You probably wouldn't want to say that those articles are worse just because they have copied citations to the lead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:34, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Hi WhatamIdoing, another idea is to cluster articles before running a machine learning algorithm on them. This would take care of your "different people use different approaches" objection. For example, the style of an article describing a mainstream movie must be very different from one classifying plants. You could cluster based on a readability score.

In general, I think the more care you put into defining metrics before running any algorithm, the better results you get.

Also, sorry Nettrom for hijacking your page for this discussion! Seahawk01 (talk) 00:23, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Turn off SuggestBot

I am smart enough to be able to add suggestbot, but I am not smart enough to know how to get rid of it. Can anyone tell me how to get rid of suggestbot? Thanks. Geographyinitiative (talk) 02:01, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Hi Geographyinitiative! To unsubscribe you'll need to delete the template from your talk page, and then SuggestBot marks you as unsubscribed next time it goes through and updates its subscription list. Since that's all that's needed, I went ahead and did it for you, as seen in this diff. Thanks for using SuggestBot! You're of course welcome to resubscribe any time you like, and if you find that you want a single set of suggestions and nothing more, how to do that is described on this page. Let me know if there's anything! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:34, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Autoconfirmed article creation trial

Hi, Nettrom 🙂

I was looking for information about when have started the article creation restriction, and thanks to this page and this one I founded out that it appeared at the begining of April 2006, the date on which appears the authorization 'Create article' (Allows user to create a new article) that is, from the first day, restricted to registered users.

From what I understood in your article Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed article creation trial/Post-trial Research Report, it looks like this is something that was not done before.

Would you be so kind as to tell me where is the point I probably did not understand ? Article creation was not limited to users with autoconfirmed status before ? If then, what was the meaning of the 'Create article' authorization ? It would be very nice from you to enlighten my darkness !

Best regards, Nonaphile (My talk page) -- Preceding comment added by Nonaphile 14:49, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

• @Nonaphile: Hi, thanks for asking about this. If I understand the history around this correctly, the "Create article" authorization you mention comes from restricting article creations to registered users. That was launched as an "experiment" in December 2005, but is an experiment that has never ended. There's more about this and links to the announcement email and Signpost coverage in the second paragraph of the introduction in the post-ACTRIAL report. Prior to that "experiment", anonymous users could create articles, since then they haven't been able to.

I hope that answers your question! If not, let me know and I will try to explain, or see if I can find someone who has more knowledge about these things. And apologies for not replying in French, my French is still very basic. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:44, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

• Hi @Nettrom: thank you very much for your answer, despite my bad understanding! ! My English is not much better than what you say about your French, I'm afraid, and I did not read the whole article with enough attention when I came across what seemed to me an impossibility somewhere. In addition, I am new here and I had not yet assimilated the difference between registered users and autoconfirmed users. Now all is clear, and I'm so sorry for my thoughtlessness ! Thank you again very much for your kindness. Regards, Nonaphile (My talk page) 18:22, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

A beer for you!

Cheers!! Usedtobecool (talk) 15:09, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

WP:CEN is now open!

To all interested parties: Now that it has a proper shortcut, the current events noticeboard has now officially opened for discussion!

WP:CEN came about as an idea I explored through a request for comment that closed last March. Recent research has re-opened the debate on Wikipedia's role in a changing faster-paced internet. Questions of WP:NOTNEWS and WP:Recentism are still floating around. That being said, there are still plenty of articles to write and hopefully this noticeboard can positively contribute to that critical process.

Thank you for your participation in the RFC, and I hope to see you at WP:CEN soon! –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 19:10, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

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NPP Queue Count

Is s53463__actrial_p.npp_queue_size something that's publicly viewable? I'm curious about the difficulty of adding a count of articles that are in the queue which are over 90 days old (i.e. past the index point) but can't seem to find the data to use myself. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:03, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

@Barkeep49: The table is publicly accessible in the sense that anyone with a Toolforge account should be able to query it. It might also be accessible from Quarry, but I'm unsure if Quarry can access the tools database server. When it comes to the source code behind it, that's this Python script, where you can also find the SQL query that calculates it (lines 50–57).

I wrote this SQL query that adds the number of indexable articles to the count (only counting non-redirects like the original query). It runs a bit slower than the original query, but that's because there isn't as far as I know a quick and easy way to get article creation time. Instead, we grab the timestamp of the first edit in the revision table, which takes a few seconds. I'm sure I can spend a half hour to modify the table and script to also log this information moving forward, if that's something you and/or the NPP folks find useful? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:24, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Nettrom, this is all super helpful. Just to make sure I understand so if I want to see the table I should get a Toolforge account? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:27, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Barkeep49 I just remembered that if you're looking for the data in that table there is also this tab-separated file, which is updated once a day (whereas the table itself is updated four times a day). That's a bit easier than getting a Toolforge account ;) If you want to run the SQL query I wrote on Quarry to get the count, you can log in there with your Wikimedia account and fork the query to run it. So there are some options here that don't require Toolforge access. Hope that's helpful! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:39, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Nettrom, thanks for all this. I think ultimately forking the Quarry query is going to get me to where I need to go but having the tab file is interesting as well. Big picture what I'm wondering about is adding a second line to Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog chart showing the number of articles that are 90 days or older in the queue as those are the ones that become indexed and are higher priority as they are potentially introducing problematic data into the wider world. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:44, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Suggestbot for SqWiki

Hello, Nettrom! (... or Morten, if you like. :P )

I'm an admin at the Albanian Wikipedia and I continuously lurk on the EnWiki looking for tech things "to steal" for our community. :P I saw your bot at action at one of the users' talk pages and was very surprised by it. Suggestions are the latest trends on every website these days but Wikimedia has always been a bit old-fashioned in that way. In fact, I've spent quite some time teaching newbies how to get around Wikipedia and the hardest thing for them to understand is always this "old fashion" Wikimedia has in its projects. The not so sophisticated GUI, dealing with code, the way discussions work with talkpages and signatures... Everything seems like a bit too much for the basic social media user where everything I've mentioned above is a bit different. I've gone so far as to make the ping template at our community resemble the Facebook way of mentioning someone {{@|Name}} to facilitate this whole process. So I'm always on the lookout for features like these and was very happy of finding your bot. Can we also get it to run at our community?

Also, if I might be allowed to make some suggestions...

We're a small community compared to EnWiki. Unfortunately, the community feeling is not that strong in SqWiki. People rarely spend time looking after the tech/help/category pages, our WikiProjects are rarely active in the true sense of the word and there is not much discussion going on on the users' talkpages except for the casual editwars there may arise. As an admin, I'm always trying to build on this aspect - Lately I created more than 200 templates for barnstars and we'll try to install the WikiLove extension soon. - so I thought maybe Suggestbot could help in this direction too? Can it be made possible to suggest other things besides articles? Like WikiProjects or categories someone may be interested? Or suggest fixing categories, templates, help and project pages? Maybe even have some extra-features for admins suggesting pages with lint errors to be fixed or system messages that need maintenance? Basically find work (fine-tuning its frequency so it won't look overwhelming) for everyone to do according to their preferences in all namespaces and more. This would give way for people to engage with their community, help the community by raising its tech quality and basically make the whole experience much more fun for everyone involved.

I also say these things because many times I've found myself wanting to pass some time at Wikipedia but not knowing what really to do. As I focus more on the tech side than the mainspace, it would be nice having something like Suggestbot finding work for me periodically. Also, many times I know what needs to be done but it looks too much adding a whole new project to the already filled projects' queue I'm working on. However, if work was distributed slowly, one task at a time, it would make the acceptance of it more easy, another reason where Suggestbot could help.

I'm sorry for the long post but I very much enjoyed the idea of a suggestion's robot and wanted to give some insight on how the situation is on smaller wikis and how the Suggestbot may help with them. Maybe I'm overly evaluating the bot's potential but I think finding work easily according to one's preferences should be one of the core features of MediaWiki these days (as finding articles to read is). - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:57, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm sorry to bother but maybe you have forgotten to read my post? Just wanted to let you know that I'm still interested in an answer. :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 21:09, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi Klein Muçi, thanks for getting in touch about this! No need to apologize for reminding me, a gentle reminder is perfectly appropriate. I appreciate your patience with me on this, and I'm sorry it's taken so long to get back to you!

First of all, thanks for the work that you're doing with helping make SqWiki successful! It sounds like you've been finding some good ways to make the user experience easier for newcomers, and making barnstar templates available means there are wiki-ways to thank people for their contributions. That's really important work that you're doing, and I want to acknowledge that!

When it comes to your question about making SuggestBot work on SqWiki, I think that's possible but the bot currently has a few requirements that may or may not be met. It's currently relying on categories of articles needing specific improvements (e.g. All pages needing cleanup here on enwiki) because otherwise it might recommend articles that don't really need improvements. Does SqWiki have those, and if it does, do those categories have a reasonable number of articles in them? (If not, it might be possible that I modify SuggestBot to bypass that requirement, but that could take a while to make happen) Apart from that requirement, I'm usually looking for community interest, meaning that I'd like to see some discussion on SqWiki where multiple people would like to see the bot come to their wiki.

I like your idea about making SuggestBot also suggest other things besides articles, I can see that being useful both to give some focus on the "behind the scenes" things that go on (e.g. templates, WikiProjects), and also to make it easier for those who are interested in those things find ways to contribute. At the moment, SuggestBot is solely about suggesting articles, so it might require some substantial rewriting to also suggest other things, but I like this idea!

Thanks again for getting in touch, and for the reminder. Let me know if there are maintenance categories on SqWiki, and if there's been some community discussion about SuggestBot already. If not, then I suggest the next step is to have that discussion, and let me know if there are questions about the bot and I'll try to stop by and answer those. And thanks again for your work with making SqWiki successful! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:51, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply and kind words! :) I am sure we do have all the accompanying categories needed for the citation module to work because I've created those myself. All the categories listed here. They work very good, have a high number of articles on them and have been a source of finding work to do for some of our users who have started correcting the problems with the citations. That would have been a great starting point for the bot in our project had it had the possibility to deal with some of the details I mentioned above but I do understand now that things like that could require much effort from your part and wouldn't be an easy thing. We do have other categories similar to that (and to what you mention) but unfortunately the number of articles on them is too low (if any). Templates do exist to put articles on them but they're either not programmed to categorize articles on which they are used or haven't been used much. I'll try to open a discussion on our village pump about the subject where I mention Suggestbot and the changes needed to happen in the community for it to work properly. I'll set it up as a voting process so if we do find some volunteers to help with the categories, there will no more voting processes needed for the bot to be approved when the time comes. I'll come back here soon with the link to the discussion. - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:01, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

About Suggestbot in the Greek wikipedia.

Dear user, i think you remember me, when i asked you to take your bot in the Greek Wikipedia. The result from the discussion there was generally positive, i suggest you to temporally try the bot there to see if it works well. I await your reply, Eni vak (speak) 23:12, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

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Looking for data people

Hi Nettrom,

We have a data question at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles/RFC on pharmaceutical drug prices. We'd like to know whether this is a reasonable/non-misleading use of this database (and if it's not, then how we could do it better). Most of the folks involved are solid editors, but we're not data geeks. If you're interested, please help us figure out the best way to improve Wikipedia's drug articles.

I think I'll also post a request at the m:Research:Newsletter (which is on Meta, so I fixed the link in your global user page). Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:47, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Suggestbot — bringing the Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask functionality to the WP:Task Center

Hi Nettrom! As the operator of Suggestbot, which is listed as updating the pages at Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask (although seems to no longer be doing so), we would very much appreciate your thoughts at Wikipedia_talk:Task_Center#Add_example_articles?. Sdkb (talk) 15:15, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Starter kit for smaller wikis

Hello, and greetings! As part of a Starter kit project for smaller wikis, there is a work-in-progress guide around Bots & Tools here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits/Starter_kit/Bots_and_Tools. I'm reaching out with a few questions, as there is a mention of the SuggestBot on this page in the list of useful bots section:

• Is it okay to have the bot listed in that section? Are there any concerns?
• Would you be okay with folks from smaller wikis reaching out to you for help, and would you be willing to list your preferred method of contact under "Bot owner contact"?
• Is there anything like a note or reminder related to the bot that you would like to add in the "description" column?

Additionally, if you have a suggestion for any other bots or tools currently on the list which should not be there and those that are not there and should be there, I would love to know about them—looking forward to your input! Srishti (talk) 08:01, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Question on stub expansions from suggestion list

Hi, hope you're doing well.

I'm fairly new and I have been working on stub articles that I received using the suggestion bot. I'm pretty sure I have been doing enough to remove the stub/needs expansion tags, however, if you have a few minutes, could you check them out?

I have one article, Water Mears in the DKY nomination process, so I'm sure it's fine. I have recently expanded (all journalists) Russell Carollo, Marjie Lundstrom, and Alan Miller.(Apologies for not knowing how to add links to them in a talk page) 

I just don't understand the process; is there some kind of checking system that shows updates? Maybe I'm being too skittish, but I don't want to leave a mess for someone to clean up, behind me.

Thanks! Mollifiednow (talk) 02:03, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

SuggestBot in bnwiki

Hello, Nettrom. I have seen that suggestbot is not in bn.wikipedia.org. I currently thinking to put it on bnwiki. I am here to get permitted and also some suggestion to contribute or maintain the source codes. Hope you are going to help me. Thanks. Waiting for your reply. A. Shohag (ping_me||Talk) 07:26, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi ShohagS, thank you for reaching out about this! And thank you also for your patience with me getting back to you, I wish I could've been writing this sooner. I'm hopeful that we can bring SuggestBot to Bengali Wikipedia! It's been a while since the bot got set up on another wiki, so the process might need some adaptations to how things are set up now. Let's try to sketch this out and make changes as needed along the way!

I think the process can be split into two parts, the things that are done on the Wiki and those that are done on GitHub. On-wiki, I've generally done something like this:

1. A discussion on the Village Pump (or similar) about the bot. Are there other users interested in having it running, and perhaps who would subscribe to get suggestions? I'm not requiring sign-up from people, instead I'm looking for general consensus that the bot is welcome there.
2. Setting up the bot user page. I can take care of that, I typically use a smaller version of the English one and refer to the English as a source for things like current status and recent changes.
3. Request for approval: I dug around on Bengali Wikipedia and found their bot approval page. I can take care of starting that process.
4. Translation of documentation pages. When we brought SuggestBot to Russian Wikipedia, I made a list of the six pages that needed translation and posted it to a thread on SuggestBot's Russian user talk page. Using the current English version of the pages as a starting point is likely the way to go.
5. Identifying task categories to use for suggestions. SuggestBot only recommends articles that have been tagged by the community as in need of improvement, and uses categories to identify those articles. Here on English there are four categories that go into the notion of "improving sources", Category:All articles lacking sources is one of them. Given that Bengali Wikipedia has almost 100,000 articles, I'm guessing that it also has categories like that? Typically I look for categories that have a reasonable number of articles in them so the bot doesn't run out of articles to recommend, I'm thinking 500+ is probably fine.

On GitHub it's the configuration file that needs updating. Most of it is translation of phrases (e.g. the edit comment the bot uses), localization of template parameters, etc. The tasks dictionary is where the configuration of the categories of articles go, so that doesn't need updating until we have all of those. Since I don't understand Bengali, I'll be needing some help with those translations :)

Hopefully this covers things and we can start to get moving on this. I'm sure there are questions, please do let me know what they are! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:24, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you very much. If you see at our bot approval page as you mentioned bn:উইকিপিডিয়া:বট/অনুমোদনের_অনুরোধ#পরামর্শবট. The first one titled পরামর্শবট is actually requested by me as an bengali of suggestbot.

In bnwiki almost half of the articles with problems, although I found almost 22 thousand in count because not being patrolled perfectly. While I was trying to reach you through User:SSethi (WMF), I started making my own SuggestBot which has simple and some basic ideas of SuggestBot. My work is almost done. Here, the way you are make your bot work, It may not work that way as there is no category similar to Category:All articles lacking sources in bnwiki.

So, I request you to let me do that in my own way. If anyhow I find that you need to be forwarded in bnwiki, I will try to make those changes as I am studying the source code from github and notify you. I hope, you understand that I don't to waste those work I made during reaching you. And let me know your opinion. Waiting with regards. ~ A. Shohag (ping_me or Talk) 08:06, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

@ShohagS: That makes sense to me, and I'll be happy to bring Suggestbot in if that's needed. With regards to building off of the bot, I'm not sure how much you've dug into the history of it and its design decisions. I thought I'd mention that one great place to start is the 2006 research paper about it: SuggestBot: Using Intelligent Task Routing to Help People Find Work in Wikipedia It does a great job of describing how it's put together and discusses some of the reasons for why it's built the way it is (e.g. how the filtering of articles to those that need improvement came to be). Good luck, and let me know if you have questions! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:27, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you very much for being so helpful. That paper is really being helpful for me. I will ask you If I got into any problem. ~ A. Shohag (ping_me or Talk) 04:52, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

Suggesting a good model

Hello, Nettrom. I wondered whether SuggestBot could be tweaked to meet the need described at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 33#A tool to help find a good/featured article companion for non-featured articles (maybe on a user talk page rather than in the article). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:55, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

SuggestBot on plwiki

Hello. Sorry to bother you, but the SuggestBot doesn't update a rubric on plwikipedia for quite a few months. Look at the infobox rubric; it says none, while in fact there is plenty to choose from: pl:Kategoria:Artykuły bez infoboksu. Thanks in advance for fixing it. Cheers, Tufor (talk) 16:55, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi Tufor, I'm sorry it's taken so long to get back to you! Thank you so much for letting me know about this. Things have been busy around here, but I'll be digging into this problem this coming weekend (November 14 or maybe sooner) and find out why the bot doesn't work with those infobox articles. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:20, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi again Tufor, I dug into it and found that this issue was introduced when I worked on improving the code back in April. In that process I accidentally removed the part that also grabs all talk pages in a category, which is why it wouldn't find any of these infobox-related pages. It's now been put back, and as you can see from this diff the infobox section is now again populated. Thanks again for reporting this so I could fix it! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 01:35, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

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Suggest bot stalled?

Hi Nettrom

I used Suggestbot very successfully on my Talk Page on 5 March and having worked on many of the pages it highlighted, I tried to activate it again on 28 March (and again on 29 March, thinking I might have got something wrong). It has still not fired up so I'm now wondering if there is something amiss? Mike Turnbull (talk) 10:37, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Working again today, thanks. Apologies if I used the wrong Talk Page for my enquiry. Mike Turnbull (talk) 10:41, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Mike Turnbull : No apology necessary, asking me here is perfectly appropriate! And thank you so much for getting in touch about this! It's because of your message that I went and checked up on the bot and got it restarted, I just didn't have the time to reply to let you know yesterday. Thanks also for using SuggestBot, happy to see it still being used! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:22, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Hello Nettrom, I haven't been able to activate SB either. I tried one-time request and Teahouse/WikiProject request first on my talk page and then on a sub-page, and all four attempts didn't work. Did I make any mistakes? Cordially, History DMZ ^{(HQ) † (wire)} 09:38, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

@History DMZ: I'm sorry to hear that it's not working, and thanks so much for letting me know about it! I'm investigating the issue, so far I've found that the bot had crashed, hence why you didn't get any suggestions. Hopefully it'll stop by with some suggestions in a few minutes, but if not it's because I'm still working on fixing it. Thanks again for reporting this! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:54, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

Thank you very much Nettrom, SB has left me recommendations in both my talk page and the sub-page approx. 30 minutes after your reply. Looks like you fixed it. Keep up the good work History DMZ ^{(HQ) † (wire)} 22:28, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Special Barnstar
	Guitars are awesome and so are you :) FloppyDawg (talk) 23:45, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Suggestbot and forgotten articles

Hi Morten. I hope you are doing well. I was thinking, would it be technically possible to include the articles from WP:Forgotten Articles in suggestions? That is, obviously the articles based on editor's pattern, and requested suggestions. From my personal experience, I have observed that a lot of articles from that list get neglected again. Maybe including them in bot's recommendation might make them active again. What do you think? —usernamekiran (talk) 05:43, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

That is actually awesome and a good idea as well that will help New members To become well grounded in Wikipedia. Destiny div (talk) 23:28, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Marital life of our people now a days

I humble wish to make a discussion because of my ability to do so .and what I want to discus is about the rate of increase in the family life of our people .Where their is too much of hatred and divorce so my problem now is that if this continues we night lose our culture of good home .so what do we do to solve this so that our next generation won't think is a culture Destiny div (talk) 23:35, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Smile

Hello Nettrom, Eduemoni↑talk↓ has given you a shinning smiling star! You see, these things promote WikiLove and hopefully this has made your day better. Spread the Shinning Smiling Star whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or someone putting up with some stick at this time. Enjoy!

That's true Destiny div (talk) 23:36, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

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Should I add pending article to suggestbot and how ?

That is actually awesome and a good idea as well that will help New members To become well grounded in Wikipedia. Destiny div (talk) 23:28, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Hello dear Nettrom, may I ask something about suggest bot. I'm new on wikipedia. I did translated one page to Turkish to English. And one moderator did writing changes on it and it looks waiting for review, should i add it to suggest bot ? There is page; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Ya%C5%9Far_Vurdem and turkish page is here (original source) ; https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%C5%9Far_Vurdem

Best regards — Preceding unsigned comment added by Peacesaa (talk • contribs) 19:47, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

NPP backlog database isn't updating

I noticed that the NPP backlog chart isn't being updated, and I believe that the issue may be with your database. I downloaded the .tsv file from the link provided at User_talk:Nettrom/Archive_2#NPP_Queue_Count and its last entry is from 9 February. Thanks for all your work on this very useful tool. (t · c) buidhe 07:08, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Buidhe, thanks for letting me know about this! I looked into this and can confirm that we don't have data past 9 February, just as you mention. I'll make some updates to things to make this work again. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:03, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

I've put in a temporary fix to get the updates going again, and the database is now updated every six hours as it used to be. I'll do some more maintenance in the near future as well to make sure this is good to go for another few years. Thanks again for reporting this, @Buidhe! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:40, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing it! (t · c) buidhe 16:41, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Tons of suggestbot entries

Greetings. I was replying to User:SilverMatsu, who has received tons of suggestbot entries (4 archives worth). Is there a way to suppress excess messaging? That is a lot of work to lay on an editor. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 01:00, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm watching this space; it's fine to reply here. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 09:43, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Ancheta Wis, thanks for reaching out and asking about this! There are different ways to use SuggestBot with different options and possibilities. SilverMatsu is using the template to request a single set of suggestions, a feature that hasn't been designed to be used extensively. There's also the option to subscribe and get them periodically, where one can tell the bot to replace any existing set of suggestions so there's only a single set on the page at a given time. For both subscribers and users who request a single set, we allow the template to be put on any subpage in user space in case they don't want the suggestions on their talk page. Apart from that, we leave it to the user to maintain their pages in the way they see fit, e.g. to use an archiving bot like SilverMatsu also does, but we do have some safeguards in place for subscribers: the bot doesn't post if the page is large, and it'll stop trying to post if the user has stopped editing for a while. For single requests, we treat them as the user really wanting suggestions, meaning that those safeguards are not in place. I hope this helps, happy to hear feedback or additional questions about any of this! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 13:45, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

تشکر

شما کاربر خوب ویکی پدیا هستید از طرف meidano در وپ فارسی — Preceding unsigned comment added by Meidano (talk • contribs) 04:43, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for editing that page. I realized that I literally could not read that correctly. Now I am a bit ashamed. 0xDeadbeef 15:55, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

@0xDeadbeef: Oh, no worries! That sentence was confusing me too, I’m glad our editing resulted in something that’s easier to read. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:20, 7 August 2022 (UTC)