Category talk:Articles that need to be wikified/Archive 2

Category redirects?

I always have a hard time finding this category because I can't remember the exact name, confusing it with Category:articles needing to be wikified and stuff like that. I think it would be helpful to new users to create category redirects using {{category redirect}} so this place is easier to find. But for some reason I have it in my mind that you're not supposed to do that except when you really need to. Does anyone think this wouldn't be an ok thing to do? Also, I thought of making a redirect from places like Wikipedia:articles that need to be wikified, another one I frequently accidentally go to, but I also have it in my mind that you shouldn't make redirects across namespaces. Can anyone tell me if I should go ahead and make these redirects? I think if it's not too harmful, it should be done to make Wikipedia as un-frustrating for new users to navigate <edit> as possible. Thanks in advance, delldot | talk 23:06, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I think the bugs relating to category redirects have been fixed. I went ahead and created these as regular redirects. Feel free to do the same with other permutations. -- Beland 00:33, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Help needed

This is not going well, is it? It's a pretty easy task, but it appears not enough people are doing it. If every editor would just do 1 or 2 articles, it would be finished soon enough. Any ideas to get more people involved? Piet 21:07, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

One way I've been advertising the articles needing wikified is using The Category Tree to search for "Articles that need to be wikified" within another category eg. "Anime" or "Computer and video games" and then adding the articles found to associated WikiProject "to do" lists etc. Maybe some other WikiProjects can be brought into this? - Phorque 18:30, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

• I will add wikification to the list of criteria for automatic listing by topic on WP:PNA. This will mean that such listings are associated with a WikiProject, but get updated automatically. -- Beland 00:35, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Non-renewable resources

attempted to wikify, please check and remove wikify if it's ok. --naught101 23:52, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

To be done: add to one or more categories, use == headings instead of =, maybe more links to other articles (where relevant), if possible add ==See also== section, ==External links== section, ==References==. References are important. Piet 09:04, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

• I finished up; tagged as a stub, so new sections will be added as needed later. -- Beland 00:39, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Bluebot

There is some good and bad news about Bluebot tagging articles for wikification. The good news is that articles needing wikification are caught sooner. Besides faster wikification, the original author is more likely to do it himself or herself when articles are tagged quickly, which makes them better contributors and takes some of the load off of the rest of us. The bad news is that copyright violations and deletion candidates are being tagged instead of being reported/nominated. Some copyright violations may be wikified and some might get caught on recent changes, but the vast majority that are posted to Wikipedia are probably going to be sent here because they are rarely wikified when first posted and Bluebot catches them so fast. While an editor might make these mistakes, a bot is certain to make them, unless it is human-assisted or very sophisticated. Also, in some cases the tag is redundant with a cleanup tag. Some might be in conflict with a rewrite or merge tag, but I have not come across any yet. It would be great if Bluebot could be programmed to skip articles with those tags and to remove them from articles that already have both. The faster identification and the fixing of tags might be worth the extra deletion candidates and copyright violations, but we're going to need a lot more people working on wikification to handle them all. -- Kjkolb 05:40, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Bluebot never adds any any tag to an article that already has any kind of tag. Also, it is unfortunate about the copyvios, but the alternative is that nothing happens to them, in which case they will just float about - virtually impossible to find as they are in no category, have no links etc. - until a human eventually finds them and most likely tags them as wikify anyway. I strongly wish it weren't the case that we receive so many articles that are copyvios and of such poor quality, but frustingly this is the situation. I think it is fair to say that bluebots work is merely highlighting this fact. One last thing; I have noticed that a lot of new editors who get a {{wikify}} on their new article proceed to format and remove the tag themselves quite quickly, this will, ultimately (hopefully!), significantly reduce the load on this category. If we had a page that the template linked to with very basic guidlines on how to "wikify" an article, I think it would further help new editors to wikify their own work, as the guidlines at the moment are too long and complicated. thanks Martin 10:41, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Also, note that bluebot only tags articles that have 0 links, which is only a small fraction of new articles. Martin 10:49, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

I guess other people are adding tags after Bluebot, if it doesn't add tags to an already tagged article. Would it be possible, and a good idea, for Bluebot to remove redundant or conflicting tags? I see that you also noticed that some new editors are wikifying the articles themselves quickly, which is definitely a help as I stated before. Also, I agree that the template should link to a simple set of instructions. I can write some up.

Except for the percentage of copyright violations and deletion candidates that are tagged for wikification that would not be tagged by a human, I don't see a downside of using Bluebot. Of course, copyright violations and deletion candidates need to be dealt with, but tagging them puts the responsibility on those doing wikification. Bluebot saves time that would be spent adding tags, identifies articles needing wikification sooner and gets new users to wikify their own articles. Only the amount of time saved by not adding the tags manually is affected by the percentage of articles that are unlinked, which means that using Bluebot is more advantageous if the percentage is large.

I'm not sure that the percentage of new articles with no links is small, though. I just checked new pages and redlinked users created 26 out of the 50 articles I saw. Of those, I checked 15 articles (the rest had already been deleted) for links and found 6 without them. This means 20% of all new articles and 40% of articles created by redlinked users are unlinked in this sample. Since the sample size is tiny and was taken only at one time, the actual percentage could be very far off, and is probably significantly off. However, 55,000 articles were created in January and if only 10% are unlinked, that's still 5,500 articles a month. I think I could make a much more accurate estimation if I took a larger sample and could see deleted articles. Calculating the deletion candidate and copyright violation percentages in all articles, unlinked articles and articles created by redlinked users would be interesting, too. I don't know if I want to spend that much time on it, though. Again, none of this is a downside of using Bluebot. -- Kjkolb 23:58, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Your estimation is probably accurate, but bluebot tags very short articles with no links as stubs, which partially reduces the number of wikifys, and also, many of the no-links articles you looked at would probably have tagged with some kind of deletion template before bluebot got to them (as it only looks at articles when they have disappeared off the first page of newpages). I wouldn't be very comfortable removing templates with a bot, unless we can say for sure that - for example - any article with both a cleanup and wikify tag should always have one or other removed.

Maybe we should create Wikipedia:How to wikify an article, I think it should be as simple as possible, and give some examples, rather than explain things in detail. I'll create it tomorrow if no one beats me to it. Martin 00:27, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Smaller Articles

What are you mean't to do when wikifying smaller articles (ones which are too small to have an introductory paragraph and a decent structure)? Do you just add links, make sure it's tone is like an encyclopedia, and add a stub template, or is there anything else to do? --PhiJ 18:32, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

That's pretty much it, assuming it's not a copyright violation and doesn't need to be deleted. Goes pretty fast with small articles. -- Beland 19:02, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Subcategory ordering

I ordered the subcategories by date by adding a letter after the asterisk in their category links. For example, [[Category:Articles that need to be wikified|*A]]. The newer categories have a lower number in the alphabet, so they come after the older ones. When a new month is created, just add the next letter in the alphabet. The letters will have to be rotated in about 19 months, although you could add a second letter instead. -- Kjkolb 10:43, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

The standard technique for doing this is simply to encode the date in the sortkey. For example, "January 2006" would get the sortkey "2006-01". It's kinda neat and probably easier to maintain that way. -- Beland 05:43, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Avoiding edit conflicts

Now that articles are sorted by date, most wikifying will be concentrated on the oldest articles and the recent ones that have not been sorted yet. You may want to use the {{inuse}} tag to avoid edit conflicts, especially on articles that need a lot of work. -- Kjkolb 17:21, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Progress bar colours

I prefered the old colours... --Tango 19:47, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Does deletion override {{wikify}}?

Many articles here are obvious candidates for deletion. Do we retain the {{wikify}} tag when applying {{prod}}, {{afd}}, {{copyvio}} etc.? I think we should not, as this will save later Wikifiers some mis-clicks on articles that are headed to oblivion, and if deletion fails, {{wikify}} will get mostly re-added anyway (or won't it?) Sandstein 16:18, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I think it is easier to leave the wikify tag in place, so if the article is not deleted it will definately remain tagged, and if it is deleted, well then the problem has gone away. Martin 16:23, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Bot for progress bar?

Is anyone creating a bot to monitor the progress bar? It shouldn't be a difficult implementation. cBuckley (Talk • Contribs) 23:47, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm not a bot, but I don't mind updating every day during the week until someone works out something automated (or as many days as I can manage anyway - it really depends how busy I get with real work ;) ). I can't commit to doing it during the weekend, but I will if I remember/have time! --Ladybirdintheuk 15:04, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Last year is all gone!

What a wonderful sight to wake up to - a progress chart without any 2005 bars. Well done! --Tango 13:22, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately most people gave up after that? January and February have hardly improved in 10 days, I don't suppose March has, and April looks like it will end with even more pages than March. So I'm guessing by the end of the month we'll have 8000 pages, getting close to 1 percent of all articles. We'll better start thinking about something new. More useful than organization per month would be categorization per subject. It is also a lot harder to implement, I guess. I think the only way out of this is to take on the problem at te root, i.e. refuse creation of the article if it doesn't meet certain criteria (like category - links - source), or maybe by passing page creation through a template which forces the creator to do a number of things. It's completely wrong that we allow anyone to create articles that break essential guidelines, make the encyclopedia worse and only keep editors busy. I have given up wikification when I saw the numbers for March, I've done maybe a hundred in total but then I thought there are more useful things to do, like working on relevant and decent articles. But why am I saying all this here? Think I'll go to the Village Pump :-) Piet 16:57, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Most of the articles needed wikifying are better than no article at all (quite a few aren't, of course). The best feature of a wiki is that people can each do a little bit - if we required more work to be done to create an article in the first place it would often just not happen. Wikify-sorting in the same way stub-sorting works might help, but I doubt it will do much, nor would it be necessary, since anyone can wikify an article, you need to actually know the subject to expand it. Maybe we should create a template for user talk pages that says "an article you created has been marked as needing wikifying, please consider doing so, and also do so for future articles you write as you write them" (the wording needs working on, obvious). If we could get the people/bots that add wikify tags to add the user ones too, we might reduce the number of substandard articles being submitted. --Tango 17:47, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

1. Making article creation more difficult: I understand your point. But you must understand that the amount of garbage that can be added to a wiki is infinite while the number of garbagemen is limited. This will become very clear in the next few years and the problem will have to be tackled. But let's close that line – this is not the place.
2. I agree you don't have to know the subject to do the wikification, but it's easier to find motivation for pages that are in your area of interest. Right now, for most of the wfy articles I think "to hell with this", but if there would be a category of history-related articles needing wikification I would probably check it out more. OTOH a glance at the titles can also show you which ones are interesting, so you're probably right.
3. I like your idea of adding a notice to the user page, many new users probably would need only a little bit of encouragement and some guidelines to do it themselves. Any idea what it would involve technically? Suppose users would add a {{wikify-notify}} tag, then a bot could replace it with {{wikify-date}} and immediately add a tag to the user talk page. If part of the users would consequently do it in the first month or so, it would also be more feasible for us to concentrate on the articles that stay in the category for too long because the user ran away or doesn't care. On first sight we only need a new tag and some help from one of the bot parents? Probably the one that is now changing {{wikify}} to {{wikify-date}}. Piet 22:09, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Using this you can look for "-a category-" and then within that "Articles that need to be wikified". Go here to see the History category scanned to a depth of 4 for "Articles that need to be wikified" (with depth 2, because that's how deep it goes.

As for the notify, we could just modify {{wikify}} and add a parameter sp the template would be something like {{wikify-notify|Tree}} to tell a user they need to go back and wikify their article for "Tree". I'll look into making a prototype in my userspace. - Phorque 05:49, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

But we would also need a new tag for the article itself, so the editor adding the tag can choose whether to have the bot notify the page creator; this would not be needed for example when the article has existed for a while and the wikify tag is only for a section. In this case the existing tag could be used and the page creator would not be notified.

As for the category intersect tool: cool, I didn't know it, although several times I've wondered if something like that existed. But in this case it would only work if the article needing wikification has already been put in a stub cat / category, which is often not the case. The link came up with a few useful articles though, thanks. Piet 07:04, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Would it be some non-visible variable that only the bot sees when it categorizes and notifies? Similar to the unsourced images? I have no idea how bots work though. - Phorque 09:27, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I was thinking the tag would be added to the user page by the same person that adds it to the article (and that could either be a person or a bot). Getting a bot to automatically notify users when someone else tags an article would be great, but isn't absolutely necessary. It's not appropriate for all articles, anyway - only ones where the vast majority was added by one person, and only articles that are a few days old. No point doing it for old articles, really. --Tango 10:47, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

That's what I was thinking too. - Phorque (talk · contribs) 20:32, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Here's a first draft: User:Tango/userwikify. Let me know what you think on the talk page. --Tango 13:47, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Most recent progress update

Between the 23rd and 28th April the following changed occured:

January: -15.9% Feburary: -3.3% March: -3.3% April: +10.9% Total: -0.5%

I'm trying to increase the amount of wikifying I'm doing, but that isn't going to change the fact that we're reducing the backlog by less and less and pretty soon it's going to start increasing again. We already know this, of course, I'm just putting some numbers to it. Looking at it more positively - we wikified 240 articles in the last 5 days, plus any that were wikified from April. That's a fair number - if only 206 new articles hadn't been tagged...

One thing I've spotted is that people are tagging and making little improvements to articles that actually just need deleting. Is there any way we can encorage people to be more bold about putting things into afd? --Tango 17:04, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

My policy (although probably a bit too bold) is to just "speedy" the really truly junk articles and reduce copyvio-type articles to my own original sentence (summing up the article) and encourage somebody else to write a real article if they really want to. Haven't had anyone chase me down, and with some of the crap we find in the wikify backlog I'm not at all surprised. - Phorque (talk · contribs) 21:28, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

At this point that's all we can do, yes, but I'd prefer it is those articles never got wikify tags added, just got put up for deletion. Prehaps we should campaign to the new page patrollers about proper use of cleanup tags. --Tango 10:43, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

That would be nice. It might be possible to educate them, since a few users put on a large number of wikify tags. Unfortunately, they seem to do it in spurts, so they may have put dozens or even hundreds of articles in the category before you catch them (one editor added several hundred articles that were almost entirely copyright violations in a very short period of time, it hurts just remembering it). Also, while a small number of people add a lot of the tags, some only do so once or a couple of times and then either don't do it again or don't do it for a long time. However, some editors consistently add the tag to quite a few articles and getting their cooperation would be very helpful.

If you decide to do something about this, it is not just new page/recent changes patrollers you need to take care of. There are also the editors who work on dead-end articles. I think there may be another way that editors find articles to tag for wikification, but I don't know what it is. -- Kjkolb 12:20, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm guilty, so to speak and as a new page patroller, of tagging many pages with the {{wikify}} tags. I usually tag and stub every new page I come across (if relevant), regardless of whether I propose them for deletion, so here's a question: would you rather have tags added *only* if and after the deletion process fails (should that speedy delete, prod, or afd) or is it ok for me to tag pages that I propose for deletion ? From what I can tell the problem seems to be that with new page patrollers who tag bad pages *instead* of going through the deletion process when possible, while I'm tagging bad pages *and* going through the deletion process when possible, but I'm not quite sure what was meant above. Equendil 16:18, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

I'd say that's fine - they'll only be in the category for a week at most if they're deleted, and most wikifying is done on the older articles in the list first, so it shouldn't make any difference. --Tango 16:38, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

March (which is when the explosion of this category started) had about 3000 articles. If I remember well, April had about 1500 articles halfway the month. This means about 100 a day. Since April 15th it appears a lot less articles have been added (600 in two weeks or 40 a day), which might mean that some people have changed their habits, which could be good. Of course I don't really know the reason for this evolution. Piet 13:01, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I've noticed that. I'm not sure why it is... hopefully it's not just that more articles that need wikifying aren't being tagged. I wouldn't want to get through the backlog just because people weren't tagging articles in the first place. --Tango 13:15, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Oh dear...

In the last few days an enormous number of articles have been tagged as needing wikifying, resulting in the number remaining increasing by a few hundred. Also, the March total went up, which probably indicates I made a mistake on it last time, but on the scale of the May increase, it's not significant. We now have over 7000 articles to wikify... Does anyone know why so many articles were added this week? --Tango 16:35, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Don't worry, soon all the articles that need wikifikation will be tagged, then the only new ones will be new articles. At which point we should start to see the categories start to decrease in size quite substantially. Martin 16:51, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

There's been a drive to tag old articles, or something? The increase in the first week of this month has been more than in previous weeks. --Tango 17:20, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps strange corners of Wikipedia have received attention recently? For example: Wikipedia:Dead-end pages consists entirely of articles which need to be wikified. Fake User 06:09, 12 May 2006 (UTC)