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Archive 1

Need help with list of uncategorised articles that previously had categories

User:Alai has made a list of articles that previously had categories but lost them because of some reason. A big reason is vandalism, usually very old vandalism even. Help is appreciated since it's a depressingly big list. The list can be found here. Garion96 (talk) 23:39, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Added this to the project page under "another task". →EdGl 01:14, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Hints and tips

Can we copy the section "Hints and tips" in Category:Category needed to this wikiproject and expand it here to create a comprehensive guide. There are some potential items to add, such as :

  • use {{DEFAULTSORT|surname, givenName}} for biography
  • add cleanup/maintenance/stub tags where appropriate

In most cases, we are also the first few editors to read the uncategorized articles, therefore we are kinda at the frontier doing "New-Page Patrol". Hence, we should try to:

  • Check the validity of the article
    • Check if the article qualifies for speedy deletion/prod/afd/merge/redirect, nominate if appropriate
    • If suspicious, check for possible copyright violation

With this section in the wikiproject, I hope we can also exchange tips on how to improve efficiency when doing categorization. I notice some members are very efficient and wonder how they do it ;). Comments? --Vsion 05:15, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Hey, that's perfect. Go right ahead and add that to this project page. In addition, we might need to think up things like an edit summary we could use to sort of advertise the task force (like they have at WP:DLR and the like), and a special template to show which categories fall under our jurisdiction so to speak, like other WikiProjects, and how about a template for user talk pages, in case we need to send a message relevant to the task force to those who participate (like updates, or "welcome to the team", or whatever). Someone else needs to get crackin' at this since I'm supposed to be on WikiBreak! →EdGl 17:50, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
According to Template:DEFAULTSORT the correct syntax is {{DEFAULTSORT:Xxx}} not {{DEFAULTSORT|Xxx}}. Gimboid13 18:25, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
Well either both work or the template description is incorrect. Pascal.Tesson 19:54, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
{{DEFAULTSORT|}} appears to use Template:DEFAULTSORT which calls the "magic word" DEFAULTSORT whereas {{DEFAULTSORT:}} invokes the magic word directly. There's a link in the listings below the edit screen that puts {{DEFAULTSORT:}} on the page you're editing with the cursor placed for entering the sort key. Gimboid13 07:27, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

AWB

This may go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway. There is no saner way I know of than to use AutoWikiBrowser for this sort of thing; it's such a time saver. I ever-so-highly recommend its use.

This has been a unpaid commercial announcement. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

 ;) --Ebyabe 21:00, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I believe you, but the learning curve is proving to be frustrating. My current barrier seems to be when I go to download the file pages_articles.xml.bz2, what downloads is of insignificant size and the transmission does not display any errors of any kind. I've checked all the links for help I could find, and have not gotten anywhere. I'd appreciate any suggestions. Also, even when not trying to explore the 'make list from database dump option,' AWB is frustrating in that 'saves' rarely take due to ... ??? ... servers being overloaded or something? ... Keesiewonder talk 00:30, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I've never used any of the database dump options. I tried, but couldn't figure them out at all. I just use the basic stuff, making a list from the category of one month's worth of uncategorized articles, and going from there. --Ebyabe 12:35, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
Ok; makes me feel a little better. I'm stubborn enough that I do want to figure out the database dump possibilities, but, will opt for a simpler route for now. I may still need your help, though. Thanks for replying. Keesiewonder talk 14:47, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
You're quite welcome; always glad to help. And if you do figure out the databsse thing, then you can explain it to me! :) --Ebyabe 15:16, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Could we have a special attention section?

Like, I was looking through the pile, and found the following:

And my favorite:

Not sure what to do with them, but wanted to document somewhere that they might need looking at. --Ebyabe 21:55, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, see "Articles that need help" section of this project page (second to last section). If you would like to redefine that section, feel free to alter its name (but I think it's exactly what you want). →EdGl 22:24, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
I went ahead and added them to the project (task force) page. →EdGl 03:17, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Don't be afraid to PROD

Normally I don't believe in proposing articles for deletion; I think fixing is more helpful. But I've run across a few really wonky entries whilst going thru the backlog (like The Darthbyte and The Deathbyte), that I did. So if it seems appropriate, add that ole prod tag. My opinion, for what it's worth. :) --Ebyabe 21:03, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

{{db|reason}} work well too! - Ozzykhan 21:10, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Didn't know how the speedy version worked. Not as complicated as I thought. Thanks for the info! :) --Ebyabe 00:56, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Let me second the above comments. Bear in mind that many of these articles are relatively new when tagged, and have had little or no attention since. While they've gotten past the "first line of defence" of newpage-patrollers, they may very well be of various grades of nonsense, spam, honest beginners' errors, and who-knows-what-else. Deletion may well be indicated, or indeed re-filing as in may be in need of all manner of cleanup. Alai 02:27, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

About the stats...

I can't help but be skeptical about the stats. Every time Alai (talk · contribs) and his god-sent bot go through the new database dump we get 10K new uncategorized article so it's not clear that we can really make sense of the average growth per week of the category. Also, I don't have any specific stats but it's clear that a lot of articles get categorized way before we even get a chance to look at them. In any case, I would like to remove that part in the taskforce page just to make it clear that our main focus should not be on speedily categorizing everything but on categorizing everything properly (fast is just a bonus). Thoughts? Pascal.Tesson 16:06, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I was just trying to give an idea about the pace at which we will have to work to clear the initial back log (in a reasonable amount of time). It isn't supposed to be an 'official guideline' of how many article we should do per day. I rather we catergorize more than 5 pages a day, otherwise we'll never get up to speed! I don't have a problem with removing it from the taskforce page.
Just one question though, what do you mean when you say: "but it's clear that a lot of articles get categorized way before we even get a chance to look at them"? - Ozzykhan 16:18, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
I hope you did not take my comment the wrong way. It is nice to have some stats except that I don't think that they are correct. As for that last sentence, I mean that a lot of articles get categorized because editors happen to read the article, see the template and categorize the article. I think most people from the taskforce work on the oldest category (in our case, January) but the category for February is regularly shrinking. My point, I guess, is being a month back in the backlog is not that bad since it also allows us to take advantage of that phenomenon. Pascal.Tesson 17:01, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
I didn't notice that the February list was shrinking! That would make the stats incorrect (not to mention some of the other generalizations I made)! - Ozzykhan 18:06, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

stubs

When categorizing, is it adequate to leave the article in a couple of stub categories rather than "full" categories? See Rest of the world for an example. Of course a part of me wants to {{prod}} this article as well ... but I've resisted that so far. Thanks for your thoughts. --Keesiewonder talk 12:23, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Please also categorize the article in full categories. Since if the article gets larger, people remove the stub tags (without adding categories) and the article is totally uncategorised again. Also, without looking at the article in question, don't be shy in general using prod. Garion96 (talk) 13:24, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
Ah ... makes perfect sense now; thanks for your reply. I did go ahead and prod that article, plus notified two different users, albeit ones who aren't very active. Oh ... and put it in a real category too. Keesiewonder talk 13:47, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
You've been busy. :) Garion96 (talk) 17:11, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
Depends what you mean by "adequate". In the long run, as Garion says, all articles should be in all appropriate "permanent" categories, in addition to whatever stub categories they belong in (while they're stubs). In the shorter term... I'd suggest using your own judgement as to what's the best use of your own editorial effort. If an article looks likely to be deleted, or is so short or lacking in context as to be hard to properly categorise, you might conclude that it's a more profitable to move on to other articles, and deal with that one later if necessary. There's also the option of adding appropriate stub tags, and changing {{uncat}} to {{uncatstub}}. Alai 22:46, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Video game people

Not sure if others were frustrated by categorizing people who have developed, produced etc. video games. Most video game occupations were under Category:Video game development, which was not very intuitive. So I created Category:Video game people and moved the occupations, designer, producer, musician etc. Scarykitty 16:04, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Cabej

Previous categorised: update

Here's a new version of the list: Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories/uncategorized/previous-April. (I've "projectised" it, rather than leaving it in userspace.) Don't be too alarmed at the larger number of sections: I've made them 10-entry, since 20 seemed to be somewhat over-large chunks. Please do give feedback on the format of the list: if I can improve its utility, I'll give it a go. Specifically, all of these had a category (whether "permanent", stubcat, or just maintenance) on 6th February, but none at all on the 1st April. Alai 04:26, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

(moved from project page)

Question: Is there a good method for doing this? Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types has a great list that you can use as a jumping-off point; does something similar exist for categories? (posted by Strangerer, moved by →EdGl)

  • Not as far as I know. Trouble is there's too many permanent categories, and there's no centralised co-ordination of their creation. (Both those things are becoming increasingly true of stub types, come to that.) Of course, /ST may be of some use in finding categories, since almost every stub type has a corresponding permcat, or at least makes a feasible place to start navigating the category hierarchy. (Though not a comnplete one, since things like Category:Living people and Category:Births by year have no stub equivalent.) Alai 14:36, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Uncat + stub

I noticed in the latest db dump there were aroiund 1000 articles tagged with both {{uncat}} and some sorted stub template. If no-one objects, I'm going to retag these all with {{uncatstub}}, per previous discussions about enabling prioritisation of the completely uncatted cases. Alai 14:03, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Recruitment idea

OK...I see the value in prioritizing Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories/uncategorized/previous-April and as I've started working on it, I've noticed some things. First of all, there are lots of articles that were previously categorized with Category:Derived from Catholic Encyclopedia but that cat was deleted (CFD) so I'm wondering if anyone has asked for help over at WP:CATHOLIC. Same goes for all the articles that had Category:Jewish Encyclopedia (CFD) and the folks over at WP:JUDAISM. They might want to chip in on this task (God knows we need the assistance). Before I ask there, just wanted to check if anyone has asked for help from topical Projects? --Fisherjs 20:17, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Knowingly or not, you made a great pun: using the phrase "God knows" when talking about religion... anyway, back on track, I think it's a great idea; it certainly wouldn't hurt. →EdGl 23:03, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Ideally, all WikiProjects would be looking at categorisation of "their" articles, but in practice many don't seem too bothered. This is of course understandable in many ways, since it's not every editor that necessarily wants to be trawling through every "low grade" article, even if it's in their subject area, or that's interested in categorisation at all, indeed. But a great example of a "local" categorisation resource that seems to work very well is Category:Uncategorised albums. My experience is that if one feeds a batch of articles in there, the albumistas are over 'em like the proberbial rash. If every reasonably large and active WPJ were to have such a resource, and to be making finite progress in working through it, it'd be an enormous boon. It's also easy to populate such per-topic categories with the copious numbers of "uncategorised stubs" that are rolling around, and it'd spare them going into a more generic cleanup cat. So if anyone is in a WikiProject that seems a good candidate for setting up a "categorisation task force", is on nodding terms with such, or just fancies their chances cold-calling, I'd encourage them to do so. And if there's any takers, I can bot-populate such categories to get the ball rolling. Alai 23:18, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
That (bot population) would be great for Category:Uncategorised people, with those from Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography doing this section of dirty work for us. →EdGl 02:44, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
I wonder also if people are intimidated by categories. When enticing projects, we should link to whatever the best guide to categorizing is (I can root around for it if no one has a favorite link for newbies. In this project, I see lots of Category:Musical groups - is there a project for that. Also Companies and Video games If we could get some interest in those, it would be a great help Scarykitty 04:47, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
"The best guide to categorizing"? I'm pretty sure this is just up to personal preference; everyone probably has different ways of doing it that is easiest for them. I'm interested in the methods others use for categorization... for me it varies by article. Sometimes I remember a relevant category off the top of my head and just use that and move on. Other times I can find a key word or two and go to that/those article(s), which are most likely "parent articles", and find out what categories they belong to. And sometimes, I type in a category in the search box and keep doing that until I find the category I have in mind, if it exists (if it doesn't, go broader). I know this is semi-off track, and maybe we could put this in a separate header, but I would like to explore this (methods of categorization) with all of you, and see how everyone does it. Perhaps a subpage could me made with all the different methods. That would, like Scarykitty mentioned, serve as a "how-to" guide in order to bring in otherwise hesitant participants. →EdGl 22:42, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Another good one to contact would be WikiProject India. I've seen so many stublets for stuff in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu that sometimes it makes my head spin. Or something. I think I may be absorbing the geography of India by osmosis. But I digress. Back to categorizing... :) --Ebyabe 23:36, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Don't forget to remove the tag

I've noticed that some articles have had appropriate categories added, but the uncategorized tag is still in the article. I'm going thru with AWB and removing where appropriate. Also finding odd categories or ones without brackets, and fixing them. But just remember, folks, when y'all put in the categories, make sure the tag goes bye-bye. Yours in tediousness! ;) --Ebyabe 23:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)


Tag placement: on talk page?

Talking of removing the tag... I recently got this message on my bot's talk page, suggesting for the reasons given (and disputed) in this discussion that maintenance tags should be placed on talk pages. I mention this here lest any of the people "processing" these taggings have a view on this. Alai 04:09, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Please do tell this nice man that until a wider discussion takes place there's quite simply no reason to do this. Especially since your bot is smart enough to place the uncat tag at the bottom of the page where it's not jumping in your face. Uncategorized articles are a problem as they are lost in oblivion. The tag jumps in the face of people who read the article? Well that's a good thing, it encourages people to fix the problem and people should remember that a lot of people never read talk pages at all. Besides, any article that has a serious cleanup/maintenance tag should be considered as low quality and it's only normal to tell our readers "Hey, we know this page sucks." 17:06, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Note: I've also let this user know how I feel. Pascal.Tesson 17:29, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Also replied on his talk. →EdGl 18:18, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Please see Template talk:Uncategorized#Place on the talk page You will notice that I raised this issue a year ago on that page. I suggest that we carry on the discussion there and not on my user page so that the history of the discussion is closer to the relevent template and will be easier to find in future. --Philip Baird Shearer 19:00, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Uncategorized articles with prod tag

As they are going to be deleted anyway, I'd rather not waste my time categorizing these articles when I could spend it categorizing articles that are going to remain here. If we come across an uncategorized article that we feel should be deleted and apply the prod tag on, or see an uncategorized article with a prod tag already on it, then how about we remove the uncategorized tag, but keep the article on our watchlist just in case? Then, when they are eventually deleted, we can remove them from our watchlists and that would be that. This would greatly decrease the number of articles we would have to categorize (since hundreds of entries would be eliminated from the "category needed by month" categories), and it would shift our focus to more meaningful articles (I say this because when I use the prod tag and put them on my watchlist, I see people categorizing them. Not that it's a bad thing, but I don't feel it's necessary.) So who's in favor of this? If concensus is for it, then I will certainly do it as I think it's best. I anticipate your opinions. →EdGl 22:15, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm probably one of those you've seen categorize prod articles. I do this in hopes that the article will be seen by those who may care about it enough to improve it or perhaps even elevate it to a speedy delete. My assumption is that an uncategorized article is seen by few and a categorized one is seen by more. Not all (but probably most) prod articles end up being deleted. Perhaps there is a way to siphon the uncategorized prod articles off in to their own list ... Or maybe you can just skip over them, leaving the uncategorized tag ... Keesiewonder talk 00:42, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Ideally (although I'll admit I'm often too lazy to do it myself) we should categorize prod'ed articles so that, as Keesie suggests, they get some fair chance of being noticed at all. In doubt, you can always use some high level category. But in any case, articles that you propose for deletion should be kept on your watchlist. Pascal.Tesson 00:56, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
1. My assumption is that an uncategorized article is seen by few and a categorized one is seen by more. I'd say this has little to no effect. 2. Perhaps there is a way to siphon the uncategorized prod articles off in to their own list I was actually thinking about this. But what would we call it (both the category and the template used to put articles in the category)? I think it would be pretty awkward, along the lines of Category:Uncategorized articles proposed for deletion. I don't know... we could... 3. Or maybe you can just skip over them, leaving the uncategorized tag I feel that this "clogs up" the Uncategorized by Month categories, by leaving virtually worthless prodded articles in the mix. I personally like to skip over them when categorizing uncategorized articles and move on to more worthwile ones. 4. But in any case, articles that you propose for deletion should be kept on your watchlist. Yes, definitely. →EdGl 01:43, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Thinking it through I think putting the prod articles in a separate category wouldn't be much better than simply removing the uncategorized tag. If someone isn't watching to change it back to the normal category after the prod is removed then it will sit in that category and never get worked on. I personally don't have too much of a problem with seeing a prod tag at the top of the page and hitting the back button. I also don't think they really clog the categories up too much since theoretically they're only there for five days (though usually its 7-8). I agree about categories not getting more views as well, I don't suspect a lot of people troll categories to see if anything new pops up in them. Stardust8212 02:07, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
The "holding pen category" idea seems very workable to me. It could be populated from {{uncatprod}}, on the same pattern as {{uncat}} and {{uncatstub}}. Personally I don't think that just removing the tag is too bad an option either; if it gets deleted or reworked, then problem solved; worst case is that it gets unprodded, uncatted, and re-enters CAT:NOCAT later on. Hardly a disaster, and much less wasted effort than categorising multiple articles that do get deleted. I'm also skeptical about article-space categories being of benefit as a cleanup resource; if that's the hope, an actual maintenance tag might be of more benefit. Alai 02:58, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to try and rephrase my intended point. An uncategorized article with a prod tag pretty much means the article -- and the uncategorized template with it -- will be deleted. In other words, as far as we (Uncategorized Task Force Members) are concerned, the article is "getting categorized" (in reality, it's being deleted) automagically! This is why I say I want to remove the "uncategorized" tag, place the article on my watchlist just in case the prod is contested, and move on to the next article that needs categorization. Basically, I would be more than happy to do this, but on the other hand I would be more than happy to leave them alone for the sake of those who prefer I don't. Does anyone mind, that is the question. And although Stardust is right in that it's not much of an inconvenience, my preferences still stand =). →EdGl 02:45, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

cat-progress template and uncatstubs

I notice that the uncatstubs have reappeared on {{categorization progress}} (doubtless partly my fault, for populating 'em with the articles already tagged with both "uncat" and a sorted stub type). I have distinctly mixed feelings about this, since while it's obviously desirable that those be given permcats, there's the question of whether articles with no categories whatsoever, and articles with topic-specific stubcats, should be essentially treated alike, of which this seems suggestive. In other words, if someone decides to tag all the "uncategorised stubs" in the database, (with stub cats and nothing else, of which there's a stonkingly large number), would all work on the entirely categorised articles cease while people worked on those? (Or ran around in circles tearing their hair out at now having 60,000 articles on their "worklist".) I've attempted to refactor the template somewhat, but my preference would be for that data to be moved out into an entirely separate template for the sake of clarity. However, I'll content myself to follow whatever the consensus is among the "consumers" of this resource. Alai 01:21, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

I really like moving out the uncategorized stubs. It makes the uncat task more managable, and keeps more people motivated. Stubs ARE in the category tree, so if someone really wanted to find out all there was about a subject, they would look at the stubs. Scarykitty 01:34, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
I have mixed feelings about this. In part, this is because I tremble at Alaibot's power to dump 60K articles on the backlog. On the other hand, I don't mind having a limited amount of uncategorized stubs to work on and ideally, these should be properly categorized eventually. The taskforce currently seems to be working at a furious Stakhanov pace so we can handle a bit of extra work. In fact, if we get too good at this and find ourselves working on the May uncats by say mid-May, then we'll actually be very inefficient because we'll be working on freshly tagged articles that haven't had the chance of being categorized by random editors. Pascal.Tesson 02:17, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
(To Pascal) I'd love to get to May uncats by May! Then we'd be "caught up" and the workload would be much easier. Also, the idea that it's okay to let random editors eventually categorize articles is a somewhat dangerous mindset to some. I'd say as far as categorizing is concerned, the sooner the better. →EdGl 02:28, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Maybe I'm just overly giddy from the quick handling of the February backlog and I'm just not hearing the faint giggle of Alaibot just waiting to double the backlog size when we least expect it! Pascal.Tesson 02:43, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Let me first of all clarify that I'm not holding the 60,000 permcatless stubs over anyone's head as any sort of threat. :) I'm not going to do this until the existing backlog's greatly reduced, there's a fresh db dump to get the data (which will be at least another month away) and there's willingness/enthusiasm at this project, or better yet at topic-specific versions thereof, per earlier discussion on uncat-albums, uncat-people, etc. (If the Python code decides to override me and do it anyway, Skynet-like as someone just wryly observed at BRFA, then apologies in advance...) But sorted stubs are clearly starting to find their way into these categories anyway, and there's a deep well of same to be dipped into, should people increase the rate at which they're stub-tagging uncat articles, or tagging existing stubs with uncat. Alai 03:17, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't think anyone in this taskforce is oblivious to the fact that we're facing an infinite task and although it's nice to not be reminded too gruesomely of this, I'm sure our nerves can handle a fatter backlog. Note also that your bot is facing competition from a trial bot AlexNewArtBot (talk · contribs) that's roaming Newpages. (and that bot has the annoying habit of placing the uncat tag on top...) Pascal.Tesson 03:28, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, there's the part that's infinite (at least until the community makes it a tad harder to create new pages, maybe), and the part that's "merely" a finite but distinctly large backlog. I'm open to suggestions as to how to help manage the latter; I could crunch some numbers from the last db dump by topic to see if that's a worthwhile route to pursue eithe rvia the wikiprojects, or just to organise things topically for this task force. I noticed AlexNewArtBot; currently it seems to be confining itself to just logging articles in project space, and not tagging any articles at all. Alai 03:57, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) ah yes, AlexNewArtBot hasn't tagged an article in two weeks [1]. In any case, back to the main topic, feel free to experiment with the db dump and we'll let you know if it becomes too depressing but I can definitely see "by project" subcats. For one thing it makes sense to have people categorize articles that they are most competent to categorize. Maybe we could advertise at the pump that you're offering this for projects that are interested. Pascal.Tesson 04:09, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
Alai, I think it's entirely up to you, because I think it'll come down to either doing your prevcat thing or the stub categorizing =). →EdGl 04:30, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

OK, here's a breakdown of all the stub-cat trees with at least 1000 articles with no other categories: User:Alai/uncatstubhier. If any of these are a) of interest to anyone here as a somewhat more focused resource, or b) things you can twist the arm of a related WikiProject into looking at, then let me know and I'll create and populate a corresponding category. Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that the "people" types might be too big or broad, given the "modest" degree of interest shown by the (equally big and broad) bios WPJ. OTOH, there's a clear pattern to catting people that may make it of some value. OTOH, music cats may be worth looking at, given the success of Category:Uncategorised albums. Alai 20:15, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

My uneducated guess is that country-specific uncategorized stubs would be of interest to country-specific projects. I'll try to contact WikiProject India for instance and see what they think. It's a fairly active project I think, and they're probably more efficient at categorizing villages of Andra Pradesh than most of the people involved in the task force right now. By the way, could you get the stats for other country-specific stub cats? Pascal.Tesson 05:20, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

WP India

Yup, it would definately help us to know which all articles are uncategorised. Can the bot also make other intelligent decisions to classify it under an India-specific workgroup? =Nichalp «Talk»= 09:55, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

  • Insofar as they correspond to stub types, and insofar as the articles are tagged as such, yes. Which seems to be to a fair degree. Would you like a list, a single cleanup category, or a hierarchy of same? Alai 22:03, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
Please also specify if you want ketchup with your fries. Alaibot is that good. :-) Pascal.Tesson 22:05, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Germany

I have been doing the stub sort and categorization manually, a bot would be really helpful. STTW (talk) 06:59, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

  • Not sure I can quite do that yet (beyond on occasion being able to populate stub types from the (other) categories). The idea is rather, populating a cleanup category with articles with no categories at all; and populating per-topic cleanup cats for those with only stub categories. Would the latter be useful? i.e. something like Category:Uncategorised German articles. Alai 23:58, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Italy

I’d certainly be interested in an equivalent for Italy. Thanks. —Ian Spackman 07:03, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Having at looked at the French example, it does strike me that it would be very useful if it could be arranged heirachically, as mentioned above, subcategorized by stub types. —Ian Spackman 06:56, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Sure, could do that. Would you like one for every stub type, or do you have a particular division in mind? ("People", "places" and "other" would be the obvious places to start.) Alai 06:48, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
I shall have to think about that before responding definitively, but I think fine-grained rather than coarse. Taking the “people example” it would be quicker to work through a set of saints or footballers or artists rather than one where you you could never predict whether the next one up was going to be a poet or a pornstar. Could you easily do a sample run using evey stub type? It would would need to be more than 50 to make sense: say 300 samples? If so it might help other ‘big’ projects work out what was useful. I am not at all clear how well-stubbed the uncategorized stubs are. —Ian Spackman 19:30, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I see the logic of that to a point, but there's 63 sub-categories of Category:Italy stubs, and many of them are pretty small to start with. As there's only about 450 in total, and around 100 people, I'm inclined to just go ahead with the three I mentioned. If we were tackling all saints, or all footballers, rather than per country, that might be more significant numbers... Alai 18:00, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I would guess that quite a few of the pages in Category:Uncategorised Italian geography articles have actually been categorised ‘through the backdoor’. Changes I made recently to the 110 or so {{Province of X}} templates (e.g. {{Province of Udine}}) mean that communes including them now automatically get categorised properly. However, since the articles themselves haven’t been edited, the Category:Uncategorised Italian geography articles invocations have not been touched. I don’t know how often the bot runs to update the category invocation, but it would probably be a good idea to do it fairly soon. (I am assuming, of course, that it knows how to remove the category as well as how to add it!)—Ian Spackman 09:32, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

  • It doesn't. :) This wouldn't be mind-blowingly difficult to add, admittedly, but template-populated categories aren't caught at all by the pywikipediabot category framework, and there's the additional fuzziness of determining which categories are sufficient to indicate the removal of the uncat-cat (e.g. not stub cats, maintenance, or tangential to their Italian-geographicalness). For the sakes of 80 articles, it'd be easier just to run AWB over 'em, really. Alai 03:56, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Pharmacology

There's been no discussion on the Talk page, but no objections either, and FWIW I think this would be very helpful. If possible, I'd like to see this happen. Fvasconcellos (t·c) 17:22, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Dregs at the months end

This is a fascinating project. I wish I'd discovered it earlier (I found it through Pascal.Tesson's RfA!). I've done a few for the April lot (now down to around 30). Unfortunately, most of those are articles in a really bad state. I'm wary of spending time categorising articles until they are at least good enough to not get deleted at some point, but I saw some discussion above that some sort of categorisation can help get articles noticed and improved. It is best just to do rough-and-ready, broad categorisation, and hope for the best? Or shall I move on to helping out with May's lot? :-) Well, I'm actually going on wiki-break soon, so maybe that will be June's lot? Carcharoth 17:12, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Oh, and as far as subject-specific "only categorised as stubs" areas go, there are probably a few I'd be interested in. Is there a list anywhere? Any history of science, or science ones? Carcharoth 17:25, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
As I always say: spare the {{prod}}, spoil the article.  ;-) But yeah, it's probably a good idea to go ahead and categorize the dregs at least broadly, while applying either {{stub}}, some deletion procedure, and/or the appropriate cleanup tags. Ideally, every article should be categorized in a specific fashion across a few categories, but if there's not enough information there, you gotta work with what you have. On the topic of uncategorized stub finding, I think Alai would be a good one to ask for a list of articles in subjects of your choice, as he's got some nice tools. Alternatively, pointing AutoWikiBrowser at a stub category and just skipping the articles with Category tags works too, although it's quite inefficient unless you're using a database dump. RTucker 17:30, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I've just discovered uncategorised categories in the May lot! I love categorising categories - it's subtly different from categorising articles. <rubs hands in glee> :-) Carcharoth 17:24, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

C'mon, don't take all the fun ones for yourself ;-) RTucker 17:30, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
OK. I'll take F-R, and you can have the rest (all four of them!)... LOL! Seriously, I'll leave a few for others to do. Carcharoth 17:39, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
No worries... any uncat work is good uncat work.  :-) RTucker 17:48, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. I got stuck on the first one... Category:Free images of public domain art. First, it is empty. Second, its an image category. Can't remember whether Wikipedia still has image categories. And free images of public domain art - isn't that title a bit, um, redundant? Carcharoth 17:41, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Public domain art is like public domain music: the actual "source code" of it is public domain, but the performance (or photograph) requires a fair amount of professional skill and is thus copyrightable. So, you can (and probably do!) have non-free images of public domain art out there.  :-) RTucker 17:48, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I also cleared two articles out of Category:Free software games and put in a soft redirect to Category:Free video games. I think they are the same thing, right? Carcharoth 17:51, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I'd agree with that. RTucker 17:59, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

To answer Carcharoth's question above: a few weeks ago Alai and I started discussing the possibility of creating these project-specific categories for uncategorized stubs. Alai ran a few tests on the dump and here's an interesting list of the number of uncategorized articles for each non-trivial stub category, i.e. every stub category that has at least one stub sub-category. The experiment so far has been a bit dissapointing and little work has been done on the Germany, France, Italy categories but I suppose one has to wait until someone from the relevant wikiproject gets interested in cleaning those up. But if anyone is interested in having Alaibot populate another one of these, I'm sure Alai will be more than happy to oblige. As for dealing with the low-quality articles, it's always a judgment call: if you can't see the article ever having any sort of value, then sure, prod, speedy, afd, etc. But if it's just in bad need of attention, then it's particularly important to categorize it as well as you can: that's one way to ensure that the article will get some visibility. For instance, if you have a crappy biography for a subject that does meet WP:BIO, it's particularly unwise to categorize it solely in a category that is never used for browsing like Category:Living people. If you do that, then the bot will view the article as being categorized but the article will still be in uncategorized oblivion for all practical purposes. Similarly, if you hit uncategorized album articles (and boy are there a lot of these) then please create the artist-specific category if it does not exist because categorizing it as 2003 albums is not that helpful. Pascal.Tesson 22:06, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I'm very much in favour of topic-specific uncat resources (to be populated from stub cats, or as Pascal says, quite evidently inadequate cats such as the above). I do want to first check that there's the "demand", though, either from WPJ natives, or from specialists at this task force.
I've just started on the first batch of taggings from the latest db dump: around 3000 of those that are new, but also relatively long (2000 characters or more). So for those that want to cherry-pick relatively "decent" articles, now might be a good time... Alai 03:45, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

previously categorised, last db dump

I've uploaded another version of the "previously categorised" list: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Categories/uncategorized/previous-June. I've added it as an "alternative task" to the front page: feel free to determine priority on that. Alai 02:06, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Cleaned up May 2007

I've cleaned up May 2007. There was nearly 500 items :) --Gary King 02:08, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

It would help if people checked what Gary King has done, the majority of categories he's added are far too broad and in some cases incorrect. I was tempted to wholesale revert, but at least some of the categories added are ok. —Xezbeth 12:45, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Sorry about that, I'll be more specific in the next round. --Gary King 18:02, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
By the way, good job doing so many so fast. I wouldn't have reverted so many earlier if I had more time, but keeping the tag on really is preferable to some of the broader categories. —Xezbeth 18:59, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
Yep, sounds good. I've fixed the May 2007 ones and some of the June 2007 ones. I'll continue down on 'B' soon. --Gary King 22:53, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Uncategorized Musical Groups

I think we should have this category so that people can easily identify non-notable bands that infest Wikipedia and deal with them accordingly. If somebody created one let me know.--Lenticel (talk) 02:34, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

I was bold and created it, noting in the edit summary to refine it as needed, 'cause it probably will. And in a few days, unless I hear different, I think my boldness will extend to creating Category:Uncategorised India articles. --Ebyabe 00:27, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
I suggest posting a note on talk pages of the relevant projects, encouraging them to clear out "their" uncat cat.--Fisherjs 14:48, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Neverending Battle

It seems that no matter how many articles we categorize, more uncat articles takes its place. Sigh... Its just like fighting a horde of army ants--Lenticel (talk) 03:59, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

he he he... There's hope though. At some point in May we almost ran out of articles to categorize but I (and I suspect a few others) sort of moved on to other things after that. Still, the backlog was over 20K at some point so anything below 10K is already quite an achievement. Pascal.Tesson 04:59, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Healthcare Today

I've added some basic categories to Healthcare Today, but I can't seem to locate a precise category. It's a healthcare news magazine aimed at healthcare professionals, and as such it seems to fall between categories for "Health magazine" aimed at laypeople and "Medical journals" aimed at specialists. I'm very new to the categorising game, so assistance appreciated! Espresso Addict 05:48, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi Espresso Addict. Category:Health magazines and Category:Medical journals are both sub-categories of Category:Health publications so I'd suggest using the higher category initially. You could leave a note on the article's discussion page asking anyone familiar with the magazine to choose whichever of these is the most appropriate category. Maybe also mention it on the talk page of the article's creator, though they don't appear to be a very active contributor. Keep up the good work! Gimboid13 08:38, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, Gimboid13, that's an excellent idea! I've been realising that the categorise backlog is there for a reason -- most of the articles I looked over were very hard to decide where to place. Espresso Addict 09:10, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Mandatory New Article Categorization

Some people here might be interested in the Village Pump Discussion. Stardust8212 12:39, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Our own wikiproject barnstar

I think we should have our very own barnstar. I want to propose one myself but I do not have the required graphics skills. Anyway, my idea for its design is a minor barnstar tuck inside a folder. Like this one:

replace paper with barnstar

It will be a good motivation tool for our wikiproject and our sister project Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories.--Lenticel (talk) 16:16, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me. I'm no graphics maven myself, but we could ask people who have 'form' in that area. Alai 03:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)


How about something like this? If you really want the star inside the folder I can tweak it some more tomorrow. Cheers, Her Pegship (tis herself) 04:53, 29 July 2007 (UTC)


UPDATE: it seems that there's a category barnstar already Image:Category Barnstar.png. Sorry User:Pegship, I've seem to have forgotten this request.--Lenticel (talk) 00:22, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Help with Place of birth

How should Place of birth be categorized? I've been looking for the right place but can't figure it out. The only category I can think of could be something in Geography, but it's not quite right. Any ideas? --Mysdaao 00:41, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly. Perhaps something similar to Nationality or something in a subcat of Category:Human migration? Geography sounds like it might work too though. Stardust8212 01:46, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
How about Category:Birthdays?--Fisherjs 06:56, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
Pascal.Tesson has categorized it in Category:Nationality law and Category:Human migration, which I think will be fine. Thanks for the help. --Mysdaao 17:49, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

How to get Uncategorized pages with only stub categories

I have been categorizing pages related to India but I think still several pages exist under stubs category only so is there a way to know which all pages have only stub categories and not normal categories as these pages needs to be put under proper category. Vjdchauhan 13:40, 30 July 2007 (UTC).

I've been meaning to do something on this very matter, but other things (and my short li'l span of attention) have intervened. I'll drop a note at Wikiproject India when I've done this. Alai 23:12, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Some new progress Alai? Vjdchauhan 19:54, 2 September 2007 (UTC).

Uncategorised stubs by topic-of-the-month?

Not unrelatedly to the above, there's been intermittent discussion on setting up Category:Uncategorised -topic- stubs, generally in cases where the Wikiproject on "-topic-" has expressed in interest in categorising them (or has been prodded and had its arm twisted into doing so). However, it occurs to me that there's another way of going about this: we could pick a "topic of the month" (or however long), populate an "uncategorised stubs" category for that, and work on those, in parallel with the main 'totally uncategorised' category. What do people thing? And if there's any enthusiasm for this, any nominations for a topic? Alai 23:25, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Template:Uncategorized and Template:Uncategorizedstub should match

Currently, {{Uncategorized}} is a small box like this:

This article is uncategorized.
Please categorize this article to list it with similar articles.

On the other hand, {{uncategorizedstub}} looks like this:

This article is uncategorized.
Please help improve this article by adding it to one or more categories, in addition to a stub category. (how?) Please remove this tag after categorizing, but not before.
This article has been tagged since date.

I see no reason why these templates should be different. I prefer the first one, but if consnsus goes the other way - I prefer that they match. Od Mishehu 09:01, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

  • They're so different because the former was radically revised fairly recently, due to attracting some "too big" ire, and I gather that {{uncatstub}} was missed. Since {{uncat}} is the more heavily used, and it's been apparently stable at the new version, I'd also suggest revising the -stub version to be smaller, and otherwise more similar (but retaining some indication of the distinction). Alai 18:11, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

How's it Going?

Sorry for my inactivity this past month or so; I've been pretty busy and will probably continue to be busy for a while. Just wanted to check and make sure this task force is still alive and kicking. Who's still workin' 'round here? →EdGl 22:05, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Yep, still here and plugging away slowly. Progress seems to have slowed but the last hundred or so of June's list went reasonably quickly. Gimboid13 22:30, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I have to confess I've pretty much stopped working on this since getting sysop rights (thus getting access to another bunch of interesting backlogs). I may return at some point because this is pretty interesting stuff but it's kind of depressing to see that it's back up to 12K after being close to zero just a few months ago. Pascal.Tesson 23:08, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm here as well. I think a lot of people left either when the backlog was low or when it became high again. We've been keeping the backlog steady at around 11,000 for the past month or so. If more people join or return, we can make better progress. --Mysdaao talk 12:05, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
I am to a very small degree trying to do a little as well. Right now, I'm primarily doing assessments so that projects know certain articles relate to them, but I am at least finding a few articles that are at best poorly, if at all, categorized in the process and categorizing them. John Carter 14:05, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
I have only been on the project a few weeks and I have made a modest contribution but I am sure I could be quicker, I am using AWB to give me a worklist but then it often takes an awfully long time to find the right categories - anyone got any tips for quick look-up or is it just something that comes with experience? • nancy • 07:14, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
My main suggestion would be to cherry-pick shamelessly. No-one has the entire category tree in their head -- and if anyone is getting close, I suggest they get out more. :) If you're familiar with an area, whether through prior knowledge, or past experience in similar catting, or you're in the mood to trawl the category structure to look for a category, then all well and good. If not, skip that article; chances are, someone else will have much less trouble with it. On the actual "trawling", a useful technique is to open another window or tab at a general category, and use the "[+]" tabs to browse for a more specific category. Alai 19:43, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the advice; will hit "ignore" with much less guilt now! Have also found that adding a second monitor to my PC makes things so much easier to manage. • nancy • 17:41, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
The backlog's being inflated in part by the apparently single-handed efforts of one anon, who keeps tagging sorted stubs with {{uncat}}, and what's worse, reverting {{uncatstub}} back to {{uncat}}, and twiddling the dates, in a way that seems to basically just accomplish wholesale "churning". There's currently over 3000 of these, which is a drop in the ocean compared to the total of uncategorised stubs "in the wild". Realistically, I still think we'll only be able tackle these if we start doing it on a per-topic basis, which is both inherently more efficient, and more likely to get topic editors working on categories. (It may ultimately help with the "main" uncategorised backlog, too, but that won't be as easy to automated.) Alai 18:04, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Deleted but back again

Category:Uncategorized from June 2007 was deleted on August 23, 2007 it is back with 15 pages in it as of today, all but one are templates. Dbiel (Talk) 01:50, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Error in the hints and tips

Hints and tips #3 tells us to avoid very large categories like Category:Living people. However, I think that's incorrect. All biographies of living people should be in the Category:Living people, to mark them as WP:BLP and so they show up on Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living people. I'm pretty sure I'm correct, so I'll go ahead and change this. — Ksero (leave me a message, things I've done) 09:21, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I've done the change. Do you think the wording could be misconstrued to mean that biographies should only be in the Living people category, and that you shouldn't add more specific categories? — Ksero (leave me a message, things I've done) 09:28, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
No, it says to avoid adding only such categories. I've undone the change, since it seems to be based entirely on that misreading, and drifts off into biographies as a special case (which is all very well, but off-topic here), and left scope for such confusion entirely intact. Category:2001 albums is an entirely sensible category (moreso, many would suggest, than Category:Living people, but it's not so great as the sum total of categorisation. I've added some emphasis and preamble to try to address this. (If and when we get to uncategorised-by-topic cleanup on a meaningful scale, we can add more detailed advice to each without it becoming unmanageably large. Uncatted people being a important case in point, but there seemed to be an epic lack of interest when I floated that at WP:WPBIO.) Alai 19:42, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Any reason not to use Category:Uncategorized pages?

I was using Category:Uncategorized pages for categorizing, and got all of the A's out of the way, but then I found this WikiProject, and also read in the Category itself that it might be better to use Category:Category needed instead. Is there any reason for this other than the size of CAT:U? Does it mess up the bots or something? Any help would be appreciated, until then I'll just continue to work on CAT:U. Thanks! TheCoolestDude 20:44, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't understand what you mean; the goal of this wikiproject is to work on (and hopefully clear) CAT:NOCAT. In other works, help the wikiproject work on the category :]. By the way, new talk sections should be added to te bottom of the page. This should probably be moved. →EdGl 02:49, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
Moved, and I have another question. In case of "occupation by country" categories, should subjects be categorized according to the country of residence of the birth country? Thanks! TheCoolestDude 20:01, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure. I think you can put both. →EdGl 20:24, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
All right, thanks for your help. TheCoolestDude 19:40, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
Category:Category needed is essentially just a top-level container for all of the various other "uncategorised categories". No articles should appear in it directly: no standard templates populates it, so if they do, it's because someone has added that category explicitly. Alai 05:20, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Line graph?

You know what would be cool, is if all the data for uncategorized articles over time could be put in a line graph. So if there was a spike this week, it would be really apparent, and we'd all feel motivated to help out extra. I dunno, that bar graph just doesn't really do it for me. (Sorry if this isn't a very constructive use of Talk...) --Gueneverey (talk) 05:02, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to say so, but it sounds like more work than it's worth. I agree that it would be motivating, but for me, it's motivating enough to see an empty uncategorized section (such as no more A articles on December 2007, etc.) --Gary King (talk) 01:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

"Metabolic type" article

There's an article called Metabolic type that was automatically labled by a bot for needing categorization. After looking into it a bit, it seems to me that it would be better if it were just used as a redirect to Metabolic typing, a subject closely-relating to the term "Metabolic type" itself. The article is only one sentence long, so I think it would be better to simply stick with Metabolic typing and make Metabolic type a redirect, perhaps further integrating the actual term "metabolic type" into the bigger article.

Does that seem like a good idea? Any input from others about this idea would be appreciated, as I don't have a whole lot of experience with this kind of thing and wouldn't want to just jump into rather more unfamiliar territory without asking someone else first. TIA! JamieS93 (talk) 18:29, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't know much about the topic itself to advise on this but if you feel strongly about it you could be bold and simply redirect the page, if someone reverts you then discuss with them. If you don't feel too bold then you could try tagging the article for merging with {{mergeto}} and {{mergefrom}} or simply suggest the redirect on the talk page. Just make sure to keep an eye on the page and if there's agreement or no objections then perform the merge. The best people to ask about a merge are usually the people that wrote the original articles. I'd probably just go ahead and do it, I don't think it's very controversial and it's not like you're doing anything that can't be fixed by two clicks. Hope that helps, good luck. Stardust8212 18:37, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
I was going to write that I agree with Stardust8212 that merging should be done, but I see that you've already merged them. You did it exactly as I would've. --Mysdaao talk 20:49, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
Thanks so much Stardust8212 and Mysdaao! I had went ahead and made the merging edit a few hours ago, since, as you said it isn't something that can't be reverted and talked about, per the BRD cycle; it's nice to hear that was the right thing to do. I tend to be on the very-cautious-but-bold end, but I just didn't want to range into the reckless end. Thanks again! --JamieS93 (talk) 23:49, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Possible copywrite vio

Hi, I need Admin help. I was adding cats to UNCAT tagged pages today and got to this one, NATO CIS Services Agency, created by a newbie. The content appeared to be a cut/paste from somewhere else, and it was, so I followed these instructions. When I went back to work on UNCAT tagged pages, I came to this one, Astra Owners Club, created by a newbie. This content also appeared like a cut/paste from somewhere else, and I found the a match here, but I didn't find a copywrite at the bottom of the web page. Can you check this out? I'm not sure if I handled either of these situations just right, so let me know. Thanks Rosiestephenson (talk) 02:27, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm not an admin but the page you linked does appear to have a copyright notice at the bottom. I recommend tagging both pages with {{db-cv}} and including the link to the website is was copied from. An admin will then review it and likely delete it. For more info on speedy deletions of this type of article check out WP:SPEEDY. Stardust8212 02:34, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks Stardust. Rosiestephenson (talk) 06:35, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Lists of people needing categorization by birth or death

I've compiled three lists of people needing categorization by birth or death (as of mid-March 2008):

Any help gratefully received in adding the appropriate categories to these! Dsp13 (talk) 23:48, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Dsp13, you should consider putting this on the project page, in the Task section, under Alternative tasks (or create your own subsection). Thanks for making these very useful lists :] ~EdGl 16:08, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
Is it an acceptable outcome of this that many will be sorted into year of birth missing and year of birth unknown categories? I expect many of these will not have the necessary information for specific categorization listed in the article. It does seem like a good task, I've been wondering if there's a way to find articles that are only listed in upper level categories, such as Category:Living people, and this seems like it will catch many of those. Stardust8212 17:30, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
That's exactly what I'd do in such cases. If there's wide interest in this task, perhaps we should populate corresponding cleanup categories, for greater convenience? Alai (talk) 07:10, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, not sure why I didn't notice people's answers here. I'll put this on the page as you suggest, ~EdGl Stardust, you're right that most just go in year of birth missing or unknown - and also that it tends to catch people who are inadequately categorized in other ways. Dsp13 (talk) 16:26, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Useful Templates?

User:Od Mishehu has some potentially useful templates on his user page pertaining to this task force. (They're for user talk pages.) ~EdGl 22:58, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

HotCat

I've added HotCat to the list of special tools on the page. It's a useful script by User:TheDJ I've just found. It puts buttons on the bottom of a page to quickly add, remove or change categories. It also automatically removes {{uncategorization}} tags when a category is added. It's fairly new, so it has some limitations right now. You can only add one category at a time, you can't add a sorting to a category, and you can't add any information to the edit summary. But I've found it very useful, and I suggest everyone try it out. --Mysdaao talk 23:36, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Canada

I'd like to create a subcategory for uncategorized Canadian articles, as Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada has recently been discussing ways to improve our cleanup and improvement processes. So I just wanted to ask: is there a special process to follow for creating a new subcategory the way there is for new stub types, or can I just go ahead and do it? Bearcat (talk) 20:41, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Bueller? Bearcat (talk) 03:51, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Uncategorized people

Anyone else working on this group? If so, message me if you want to work on an article together. Or let me know if I can help you. --THE FOUNDERS INTENT TALK 22:17, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Tagging Uncategorized Articles with Bot

Hey, I am in the process of devoloping a bot that will (if approved) go though the recent changes feed and look to see if new articles are stubs. I was wondering if you guys would care if I added the {{uncategorized}} tag too or if that would overload your capacity to deal with new uncategorized articles. Thanks, --Nn123645 (talk) 18:29, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Wasn't there already a bot which did this? Admittedly I haven't categorized articles in a while, but I think it would a good thing if a bot does this. At least then we catch them all and we know how many articles there are still to do. Garion96 (talk) 18:47, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Wouldn't it be better for the current backlog to be cut down before adding more articles to it? The backlog will never be empty because new, uncategorized articles are created every day, so perhaps we should focus on the current backlog before adding new articles to it. Gary King (talk) 19:32, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
There are month subcategories, if necessary you could even make week subcategories. Garion96 (talk) 20:26, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Not adding articles to the uncategorized category won't make the problem go away. Whether the articles are tagged or not they still need categorization. --Nn123645 (talk) 18:19, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
User:Alaibot previously did most of the automated tagging, I don't know how often the task is run though, the last few thousand edits don't seem to include it but that was only about a week's work for that bot. I don't see a problem with adding the tag by another bot, assuming you're not stepping on User:Alai's toes, the sooner the tag is added the more likely it is that some user who may not even know about this project will learn to add categories, not tagging the article won't fix the problem and this project handles it's backlog pretty quickly so I don't think that's a major concern. Stardust8212 20:09, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Alaibot usually handles this and does an excellent job. No offense but I don't really see the point of having a new bot when Alai's has proven time and again that it does things right. His bot works from the database dumps so it's not bound to the special page, it places the tag at the bottom of the article (which is helpful for us gnomes), it can send articles to specialized subcategories when a relevant stub-tag is in place. Pichpich (talk) 14:43, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
My bot works from the IRC feed and tags articles 12 hours after they have been created and thus is too not bound to the special page. I currently run User:UnCatBot which does go through the special page. This bot is not intended to replace Aalibot, its merely a live way to tag pages. My BRFA for this task is open here. --Nn123645 (talk) 18:19, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on this? --Nn123645 (talk) 04:11, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Copying to another wiki

I am working on Glacading and it has a {{Copy to Wiktionary}} template already on it. I think I should just remove the uncat template the bot put there since it is moving anyway. Awaiting comment before I do it. --Sultec (talk) 04:39, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I think removing the un cat template might be unnecessary. The page is still un-categorized so technically it should still be there. ·Add§hore· Talk/Cont 16:06, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

*Sight*

Yesterday, there were around 500 uncategorized articles, and now, there are almost 3,000...any encouraging words? Victor Lopes (talk) 02:04, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

If you're looking for someone to blame, it's Alaibot! See User_talk:Alai#Running_out_of_articles_to_categorize. But that's how it's supposed to work. The project takes bites out of the backlog then it's time for the bots to repopulate the backlog. By the way, Alaibot's run is not over: he's done A through K and is currently working on the L's [2] so you can expect around 6000 articles by the end of the run. Pichpich (talk) 02:24, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
I know it's the bot's "fault". But that's the job it's supposed to be doing. Well, I guess this is a neverending job, right? Because the number of people working here increases in a lower rate than the number of newcomers who create uncat pages. This is something that calls my attention: I am able to categorize at least 15 articles in one single hour. 99 more people (2/3 of the members of this task force) and the backlog would reach zero within a day or two. I'm aware that people have a lot to do beyond editing Wikipedia. We should create a special "let's categorize all articles!" day, just as they have created a "Gnome day" or something, in which people were supposed to click in the "random page" link and improve the page they were taken to. Victor Lopes (talk) 02:53, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
I was thinking somewhere along the lines of "categorize all articles" day, and sending to messages to all the "participants" listed on the project page reminding them to contribute (unless they already are!). Unfortunately I haven't been helping out for a long while, which is sad because I started this whole thing... I should come back... time is such an issue though. ~EdGl (talk) 04:29, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
Don't be too pessimistic Victor. The rate of article creation is at best stable and probably going down slightly and if you look at the history of the backlog the worst is behind us. When the bots started populating the backlog two years ago there were at least 30000 uncategorized articles floating out there and most were not new articles. Nowadays we're down to facing the stream of new articles and although it is a never-ending task, we are not losing the race. It's also important to realize that many articles are being categorized by people who aren't part of the project but simply stumble upon the various articles as they browse Wikipedia. In particular, this means that when the backlog is big (as it is today) it shrinks at a faster rate. I don't think that a "Let's categorize" day would work but one might hope to draw more people in the project by describing it to the Signpost. Pichpich (talk) 13:09, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
Now up to S, with about 2000 left to process. (Some of these will be instead thrown into Category:Stubs, however.) This has taken a little longer than usual, in part because of the sie of the worklist, and in part because of some bad luck in the number of edit conflicts the bot's had, after each of which I've had to manually restart.
In turn I'll "blame" Pascal.Tesson, for reminding me that this was overdue to be done. (My bad for not doing it earlier, which is probably bad for morale when such a large catchup occurs. Typically I do it when there's a db dump, but those have been on hold for quite a while, and I missed one or two before that, for various reasons.) Pichpich is quite correct that this has proved to be quite manageable, if something of a treadmill. It depends on the good graces of those willing to keep up with the new, careless or downright spammer editors creating the stream of uncategorised articles. There's the alternative of having the software force categorisation, but that's starting to sound like a "perennial proposal" at this stage. Alai (talk) 18:40, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
Not only is it a perennial proposal but I believe it's a stupid proposal! A good portion of uncategorized articles are stubs written by newbies and it's not a bad idea to let the categorization be done by people who know a bit about the category system. Forcing categorization is unfriendly to newbies (not to mention potentially confusing and frustrating) and it can result in poor categorization. Of course everybody in the project feels like Sisyphus but then again, we all knew that when we signed up. :-) Pichpich (talk) 18:48, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
OK, maybe I've sounded much like a dreamer. I know the backlog will hardly reach zero, and is even less likely to stay under 100 articles. I guess I'll just keep on doing my job here. As long as we don't get 30.000 uncat articles like years ago, I don't think I'll have a heart attack =) Victor Lopes (talk) 19:57, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
Pich, that seems a *tad* harsh, but I won't deny there's some truth to it. It comes down in part to where one judges the best place to put the slider bar as regards the balance between convenience and accessibility by the newbs (and trolls, and the slap-dash, frankly), vs. the amount of after the fact cleanup we're expecting/hoping the "regulars" will do. But I guess we're drifting somewhat away from the particular topic at hand. (Another crash, and still on S, btw...) Victor, it's indeed not likely to even stay under 1000 for very long: that number of new articles gets created in a matter of days, so unless they happen to categorised very quickly, the backlog will tend towards that order of magnitude. Alai (talk) 20:05, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
Speaking of perennial, that slider bar is certainly the ultimate perennial debate! Pichpich (talk) 23:26, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Just wanted to point out to Victor Lopes (and anyone else who got discouraged after Alaibot's run) that, as expected, the rate of categorization is currently around 300/day. This is normal: article creators notice that their article has been tagged and they're chipping in. Once we get down to maybe 1500 articles or so, the categorization will be almost exclusively the work of the project but until then, the backlog will shrink relatively fast. Pichpich (talk) 20:57, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Flakey template.

The rendering of {{categorization progress}}, which to be honest has been erratic at the best of times, seems to have entirely broken now. Anyone any ideas how to fix? Alai (talk) 17:35, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Yup. It should be rewritten entirely but I'm too lazy to learn the syntax for generating these graphs. Now believe it or not, I manage to have it render correctly by... get this... adding a space here and there or replacing "From 0" to "From 5" which does not affect the actual graph rendered but somehow makes the template render properly. This is the old "open the window then close the window and see if it helps" joke. Pichpich (talk) 18:36, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
He he... Just tried to use that same trick but I keep failing. Interesting challenge if anyone wants to appreciate the absurdity: start from this revision [3] which renders properly and try to change any digit of the backlog data such that the preview renders properly. I'll take a few minutes tonight to rewrite the whole thing from scratch using other progress templates... Pichpich (talk) 18:51, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, that's what I'd found before: seemingly random or meaningless changes can break or fix it, on no discernible pattern. Good luck with the rewrite! Alai (talk) 00:11, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
I experimented with other progress templates. They all suffer the same problem. Since there's no template being used within the template (besides the a priori harmless {{Tnavbar-header}}) I'm suspecting that this might be a wiki-software bug. And in fact when you try to modify some of the earliest versions in the history, you get the same problems. It's a bugzilla matter. Pichpich (talk) 22:46, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
D'oh. How annoying. Thanks for trying, all the same! Alai (talk) 20:29, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
Ok, I tried again, failed miserably and, out of frustration, wrote the first piece of lousy wikisyntax that gave something vaguely readable. It's awful but at least the numbers are up to date. I encourage everybody to take a stab at prettifying it but this will have to do for now... (By the way, I think the problem is with the timeline package but I don't think it's worth bothering the developer, whoever that is.) Pichpich (talk) 04:37, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

I was helping with a bit of categorization yesterday, and last I saw there were about 792 articles in the Dec 08 backlog. It's now up to 900+ articles (even after purging the page), so at least 100 were added to the category just recently. I'm presuming it's probably the work of a partially malfunctioning bot(s). Since I'm not really aware of which bots do uncat tagging, does anybody know which one could be causing it? Jamie☆S93 16:25, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

That's my fault I'm afraid. I was trying to get the uncategorised specialpages cleared out more quickly (so we could get to articles further along in the alphabet: I knew we probably wouldn't have time to categorise them all before the bot refreshed the pages) and I thought that we were meant to put those articles in there, when they were created in December. I won't do it again. Will putting 'uncat' on the pages be okay? T@nn (talk) 12:01, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Assertion: An incorrectly categorized article is an uncategorized article

The categories "Computing" and "Software" have only the one or two articles defining the topics; all else is in subcategories. Categorizing an article as "Computing" or "Software" is no more correct that categorizing it "Fundamental". In the particular case of Category:Application software that category page (please look) begins with an outline of most of that category's subcategories. Using that outline, clicking on an entry, you're at the category page and can quickly see if there are more detailed categories (for example, many categories have a corresponding "Free" category"). I tried to make it easy for categorizers (and easy for me to clean up articles dumped there or in "Software"!!).

I have a request/suggestion - that categorizers and HotCat heed {{catdiffuse}}. HotCat should not recommend such categories, but instead should prompt the categorizer to look at the categories subcategories.

Thanks for listening (reading). (and, if you're wondering, yes - over the past several years I've recategorized hundreds of articles dumped in top level computing categories and I'm sure that I got many wrong) tooold (talk) 18:45, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Glad to know that someone is watching over software. I tend to categorize people articles first these days, but there was a time where I was one of those dumping articles into Software just out of ignorance. But I tried to include the check category tag. I agree that Hotcat, awesome as it is, may be tempting categorizers into being less precise. Scarykitty (talk) 03:42, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
There are two possible takes on this. It's clear that articles categorized in overly broad category are, for all practical purposes, still uncategorized. However, they will get noticed since there are people (like Rwwww) who are nice enough to do that cleanup. In that sense, it's not that bad a failure and it's still better than dumping the article in a wrong category. My advice to Rwwww: when you do this cleanup, check who put the article in that category. If it's a newbie, let it go. If it's someone doing categorization work, contact them directly to explain how counter-productive this is. I've kept an eye on the clearing of this backlog ever since bots began populating it. Every now and then, the project is plagued by an overzealous editor who's more worried about the level of the backlog than the proper categorization of articles. I won't name names but this is a big problem and it needs to be noticed as soon as possible: once articles are categorized in a single cat that nobody ever cleans up (say Category:Living people) then they're not picked up by the bots and they'll remain uncategorized until someone stumbles across the article by chance. For many articles, this means never. In that sense, I'd rather let HotCat allow this, if only to catch potential problems. Pascal.Tesson (talk) 02:37, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
Speaking for Rwwww, he does not feel "nice enough". He is often a grump at being thought of as a free cataloging resource. Most of the time he will trade one good category for the one bad category but he will not, in general, research all the categories that might apply. He feels that one good for one bad is an improvement without doing damage and that is as much as you get for free given the scope of the problem with the "Computing", "Software", and "Application software" categories.
I do have another suggestion. Locating a correct category is time consuming and categorytree, while some help, still, for most categories, requires both paging and choosing which subtrees to walk down. Look again, please, at Category:Application software. That layout, while hand-coded by me, could be generated by categorytree. The rules for generating that display, given some category "X" are:
  • immediate subcategories of X start newlines with the subcategory visually identified (bold/highlighted/...)
  • all lower level subcategories are displayed sequentially on that line without regard to, or identification of, structure level.
  • lower level subcategories appear only once.
  • how many levels down to process, a number specified by the user
Application software was a special case: I could omit parts of category names ("software" for example) and I could chose to omit low level categories ("Free", for example), all to produce a concise display. Never-the-less, a display generated as described above could substantively speed-up searches for categories.tooold (talk) 20:02, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Red Cats

Should articles that have only one red link cat be tagged with an uncat tag or not? Just need to get a general opinion from anyone that reads this. ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 19:06, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Categorization#Look before you leap says "An article should never be left with an uncreated/redlinked category on it. If a category that you want to apply does not already exist under any title, either create it or remove the redlinked category altogether." To answer your question, the nonexistent category should be removed, and then treat it as an uncategorized page by either adding an existing category, or add the tag. --Mysdaao talk 20:30, 23 February 2009 (UTC

How to exclude deleted pages from Google search results?

No response to this question when posted on another talk page. I execute this Google "last 24 hours" search daily: 

   software site:en.wikipedia.org -Afd -company -intitle:jpg -intitle:svg -intitle:png -intitle:"User:" -"Note that books"

Goal is to catch new software articles so that, if uncategorized, I can categorize them (before someone uses HotCat!). Deleted articles are a problem; I don't want to spend time even looking at them but haven't found a way to negate them. The -"Note that books" gets some, but not all (that text was visible on the Google search results screen).

Question is: what can I use to exclude deleted articles from the Google results? The displayed text for a deleted article begins "This page has been deleted. The deletion log ..." but that text is apparently not accessed by Google search. tooold (talk) 06:31, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Would Special:UncategorizedPages and/or toolserver list of uncategorized aritcles suit your needs? ~EdGl (talk) 13:09, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
Special:UncategorizedPages - probably not. I need a search functions for (1) the word "software" and (2) don't show me pages that I've previously looked at (Googles "24 hour" feature).
toolserver. I failed this test, "database error" was all I could generate.tooold (talk) 15:35, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, toolserver is down... I don't know how to help you... sorry. ~EdGl (talk) 15:46, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Where's the backlog gone?

Wondering why the number of uncategorised articles listed here has dropped dramatically over the last few days. Are there really so few uncategorised articles being created? Are they just being categorised extra fast for some reason? Or are they not being identified? - Gimboid13 (talk) 11:03, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

It's probably because User:Alaibot isn't being run (the bot that used to tag thousands of articles at a time basically), and indeed, it last edited on November 22. We should get User:Alai to keep up with us (although Alai hasn't edited since December 13). ~EdGl (talk) 15:01, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
I've been running through Special:UncategorizedPages with User:UnCatBot for awhile now, but since that is cached and updates only once every three days it has a limited affect. You can obtain a list of all uncategorized articles using this toolserver tool. —Nn123645 (talk) 15:31, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
I guess the toolserver tool is down :(. I suppose I can produce a list via the API if you guys really need it. —Nn123645 (talk) 15:34, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, stinks that it's down... ~EdGl (talk) 15:48, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
The disappearance of Alai is a tragedy. I hope he's only on a wikibreak: Alaibot has done great things and few bot operators are as friendly and responsive. And of course he is (I hope it's not was) an excellent editor, admin and participant in community discussions. I've emailed him and got no response but I'm still hopeful that he'll show up eventually. Pascal.Tesson (talk) 18:25, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Be careful what you wish for. :D I've been told by the toolserver admin that the mysql bug preventing my scripts from working will be fixed "imminently", and Addshore has his bot set up to use my scripts for tagging. Once the toolserver is back, there should be lots o' tagging going on. Before the bug, I was seeing around 20,000+ uncategorized articles (including articles with only redlinked categories). --JaGatalk 02:38, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm just that good. ;P --THE FOUNDERS INTENT PRAISE 03:09, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Add template to project page?

Hello, I was wondering if we should add {{Resources for collaboration}} to the project page. It includes "cat needed" and "special:uncat pages" which is part of our scope, plus it provides links to other cleanup projects that could be worked on simultaneously with this one (since almost all the articles we come across here have other maintenance issues). The template seems to uglify/clutter the project page though, so I'm unsure of what to do and would really appreciate your opinions. ~EdGl (talk) 13:39, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Toolserver back up

Hey categorizers, good news -- toolserver is back up. ~EdGl ★ 17:25, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Uncategorized pages

I often go through new articles to add improvement tags and one that I often add is the uncategorized tag. I've also noticed that people watch for pages with this tag and will go to the page, add one category, then remove the uncategorized tag. While adding a category is is helpful, I feel that overall, the page will suffer as now there's no indication to editors that more tags could be added. Maybe a tag like improvecat (similar to the {{refimprove}} tag) can be created to indicate that more categories need to be added. Looking closer, it looks like it's a javascript called HotCat. The creator is looking into making it possible to add more categories but still, I think a new tag would still be useful. The javascript could even replace the uncat tag with the improvecat tag if the user only adds one category. Any thoughts? OlYellerTalktome 17:27, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I've never made a template before but here is my first crack at it. I essentially made a hybrid of the {{uncategorized}} template and the {{refimprove}} template. I invite collaboration here (with comments/suggestions) or there (with edits). After the template is made, I'll look into adding the option to replace the uncat category with the catimprove category to the HotCat script. OlYellerTalktome 18:35, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
The {{catimprove}} template is now in the mainspace. It is also now a part of Friendly for easy tagging. OlYellerTalktome 14:24, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Sudden population of category

The sudden population of Category:Uncategorized from May 2009 is due to the activation of Erik9bot. See Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Erik9bot 8 for more information. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 07:39, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Is the template obsolete now?

The number of (tagged) uncategorized articles fluctuates much more quickly than the template is updated. This is due to the number and quickness of the participants, and the fact that bots often populate the uncat categories in bulk. Should we suspend the use of the template until it's needed again? All we need is a list of the backlogged categories. (Note to newer participants: this template was made when there were multiple months with thousands of uncategorized articles each.) ~EdGl ★ 17:14, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

I suppose that the template is currently useless but I don't think it's obsolete. I'm still hoping that Alai will either return to editing or will give the source code of Alaibot to another operator. Since Alaibot works from the database dumps, it creates huge backlogs and makes the template meaningful. Right now, the cat is being populated by hand or by bots that add only a few hundred articles at a time and there's no point in using the template. Let's just not delete it right now. Pichpich (talk) 16:00, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
My thoughts exactly; I used the word "suspend" because I don't think the template should be deleted, just "set aside" for a while in case we need it again. Is the crude template I made (which is on the top of the page in the other template's place) okay? I want to cater to the desires of the other participants, but you're the only one who has voiced their opinion so far (thanks for that by the way). ~EdGl ★ 16:29, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
You shouldn't complain about the fact that no one complains! :-) Pichpich (talk) 17:12, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
Haha, true. Hmm, should I move my template to Template: space? ~EdGl ★ 17:26, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I fixed the template, to use a self updating box. A little work on the total is needed, irrelevant for this case, but it functions. Rich Farmbrough, 15:51, 31 May 2009 (UTC).

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