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WikiProject or organization - please pick one

If you look at Category:Wikipedian organizations, you'll see that the only WikiProject listed there is the overarching WikiProject Council. If you want to be a WikiProject (it doesn't appear that you're following the normal process, which would be to post at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals, by the way), then please remove the categorization of "organization", to be consistent with all other WikiProjects that don't so label themselves. On the other hand, if you want to be an organization and not a WikiProject, please change your name. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:14, 13 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think deorphaning certainly deserves its own WikiProject. Most of the other organizations focus on recent changes or additions to WP, such as vandalism, new users, typos and so on. Deorphaning is a massive task, not dissimilar to wikification and has a backlog even larger than that project's. I think we certainly meet the criteria, and I am considering proposing the formation of a deorphaning WikiProject, unless anyone has any objections. Davidovic 00:51, 24 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

How many links is appropriate before an article could be considered de-orphaned? Is one too few?Lex Kitten 08:35, 23 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I could imagine an article would not be orphaned if it had several articles linking to it (like 10 maybe). Cheers,JetLover (Report a mistake) 22:56, 23 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The difficulty here is that, for many of these articles, it is difficult to find even one article to link to it. Most of them are stubs, and thus there is very little information that can be linked. 10 links seems impossible to me, for an article such as Battoni or Benrus type I. Lex Kitten 00:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Would it be appropriate to have a level of importance, based on how many links an article has? Or to ahve a different number of links for articles based on the article contence. A basic stub could require less articles, for instance.
Also, are we including links from lists? or only in-article links? Lex Kitten 00:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The number of appropriate links contained in George Dod Armstrongis a least 6 which is more than the criteria of only 3 so why is it orphaned? Thanks anyone. Daytrivia (talk) 01:18, 16 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Daytrivia. It's marked as an orphan because it only has one link from another article, and that's a disambiguation page. Check out What links here for the article namespace. Also, we don't consider disambiguation pages as valid links per the criteria. --JaGatalk 01:26, 16 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject Debate

I am proposing to turn the deorphaning team into WikiProject Deorphan. Any opinions on this change are welcome, and please feel free to voice your support or opposition to this change ether here or here.

  • Currently the deorphaning team is an organization. Most other organizations focus on problems that are easily fixed. The recent changes patrol, for example, is a simple concept. The user merely goes to the recent changes page, identifies vandalism, and reverts it. Deorphaning a page, on the other hand, is often quite a difficult task.
  • Deorphaning is similar to wikification, in that we have a massive backlog of articles to deorphan, and that to deorphan a page, you don't really need to know about the subject. Wikification has its own project, so why not deorphaning?
  • Organizations rarely need more than one page, and do not usually need a strong structure, organizations such as Typo illustrate this. Deorphaning, in my opinion, requires a strong structure and good categorization, similar to that of the wikification project.
  • As I am not sure about what organizations are allowed to do, I am hesitant to add guides on how to deorphan a page well, and other useful information for newcomers. There are extensive guides on what WikiProjects can consist of, and what actions they can perform.
  • All in all, I think that this team needs more structure in the way it operates, and I think that becoming a WikiProject would help us with that.

Please feel free to state your opinion. Thank you. Davidovic 01:56, 24 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Orphan classification

As you can see from the new WikiProject page I've made a distinction between orphaned and lonely articles. My reasoning for this is that there was really no distinction as to what makes an article an orphan. Obviously an article with absolutely no links to it would be classified as an orphan, but what of an article with, say, five links to it? The problem with many orphaned articles is that there is simply no way to add links to them in other articles, except for in lists. Another problem is that while it may be possible to add two or three links to them, it may be difficult to add more than that. I've come up with a way to change this, but it's by no means definitive, and we could probably benefit from some discussion on the issue. At the moment, I've got the following definitions:

  • An orphan has 0 to 2 in-articles links, excluding links from lists, talk, Wikipedia pages and so on.
  • A lonely article has from 3 to 6 links to it, 50% of which may be from lists, but links from talk, Wikipedia pages etc. are excluded.
  • Once an article has 7 or more links to it, it may be de-orphaned.

These figures are, of course, open for discussion, but I think they're fair. It can be quite hard to get more than 3 links to some articles, let alone 6.

This distinction would allow for better work on the backlog, too. If half of the currently orphaned articles were tagged as lonely, instead, we could concentrate on the orphaned articles.

In addition to these figures, I think that we might be able to make templates to add to articles that we have tried' to deorphan. The idea behind this would be that if one tried to de-orphan an article, but could only find one article to add a meaningful link to it from, they could then add a template to the article, or the talk page, that would replace the pre-existing orphan template. The template would have an added line saying that someone had attempted to de-orphan the article on a certain date. While not changing the category, this template would improve efficiency, because if all the articles in June 2006 had a template saying that someone tried to de-orphan them a month ago, noone would waste time trying to de-orphan them again.

I have a bunch of other ideas that relate to this project, but we shouldn't try to do too much too quickly, so tell me what you think about these ideas, and we'll see what happens. Thanks. Davidovic 05:09, 26 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent work on organising the project page, Davidovic. Hopefully a well formatted and informative project page will help new members learn their way around, and make de-orhpaning easier!
The introduction of "lonely" pages should allow us to concentrait on the orphans that need us most! Berachyah may only have a few links, but thats still better than Benposta.
Adding a "tried to de-orphan" tag would be really useful. It's almost impossible to find links for an article like Battoni, untill the article is expanded. But at the moment, without a way to tell other Orphanage Project members, we'll all just keep going through these articles and getting no where. It would be great if we could work out a way to sort out the pages that have been "tried" on the project page, or to-do list, so that members can see even before they go there, that these pages can't be de-orphaned. And, obviously, we'll need a way to put these pages up for review every now and then, incase they can be de-orphaned =)
Lex Kitten 09:47, 26 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
{{Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/do-attempt|date=June 2006|user=Example|att=October 2007}}. "Date" should be the date on the original orphan tag. "User" should (obviously) be your username. "Att" should be the month and year that you made the attempt to de-orphan the article. Please note that this template should be placed only on articles that you have tried extremely hard to de-orphan. Thanks. Davidovic 11:49, 26 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That looks great. Thats really going to come in handy on those darn geographical stubs >.< Now, we just need to work out a system of alerting members to go back and check these articles can't be de-orphaned after a period of time...Lex Kitten 11:58, 26 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Attracting New Members

At the moment, this project seems pretty small, and not largely active. We're really going to need to attract new members if we're going to stay afloat and help those orphans!

Any proposals on how to do this?Lex Kitten 12:00, 26 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Make more noticeable notices asking for help on orphaned articles. That's how I found this project. Freenaulij 03:46, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Prevention of Orphaned Articles

Is it possible to make it known to the majority of wikipedia editors, that when they make an article, they should make sure other articles link to it? This would make sure not so many orphan articles are created. Freenaulij 03:56, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I don't think this would work. I've been an editor here for a while, and Wikipedia has tought me some things, and one is this: people don't read the rules or suggestions. They remove the sandbox header, they test edit in articles, they create pages about non notable people and things, all right in front of them. Cheers,JetLover (Report a mistake) 04:03, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thats a good idea Freenaulij, though I agree with JetLover it'd be hard to do. People create so many annoying geographical stubs, just to create articles... but then don't link them to anything! It's pointless. =( Lex Kitten (talk) 09:27, 21 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Templates and stuff

Can I ask you not to use these templates unless they are moved into the template namespace.

On the idea of "lonely pages" - even having orphans marked is contentious,since it's not an inherent flaw of the article or indeed the encyclopedia.

Perhaps a scan could list lonely pages to a temp page and they could then be looked at.

Rich Farmbrough, 22:32 13 November 2007 (GMT).

Lonely templates

I was thinking, it seems to be convention to place the orphan template at the top of an article. Lonely articles don't need links as much as orphaned articles do, so I was wondering if we should maybe put the lonely template at the bottom of the article as opposed to the top. Any thoughts on this? Davidovic 09:37, 21 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Convention is that all maint templates except stub, and sometimes uncat go at the top. There is good reason to put all or most of them at the bottom, or indeed on the talk page (this sometimes happens) but that's not generally where they're looked for at the moment. Rich Farmbrough, 08:53 6 December 2007 (GMT).

Do-orphan

Apart from the pic, what is the difference between {{Do-orphan}} and {{Orphan}}? There are enough template variants already... Rich Farmbrough, 17:13 5 December 2007 (GMT).

The difference is very minor, and it might actually be worthwhile scrapping the do-orphan template. It's just a slight difference in wording really, "very few to no" instead of "few to no" links. Davidovic 05:49, 6 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
OK I'm canonicalising do- to Orphan, which will probably orphan do-orphan. :} Rich Farmbrough, 08:56 6 December 2007 (GMT).

Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles

I've recently started going through some of the lists from the mostly-inactive project at Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles, and clearing out non-orphans / tagging orphans. Should that sort of work be abandoned (as the lists are horribly out of date), or brought under the umbrella of this project, or what? -- Avocado (talk) 23:53, 22 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Russian analogue

Have you ever seen this tool? Mashiah (talk) 22:54, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

th3 best way to clear out this problem

Is to redefine orpha as having no articles linking to it at all. otherwise it becomes a matter of reworking too large a portion of Wikipedia to manage. There is no particular reason for many topics why there should be a particular number of links to it-- DGG (talk) 21:24, 2 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As long as that counts only mainspace non-redirect articles, I'd support it. I don't think WP space or talkspace links or redirects should count (although "good" links to a page that redirects to the orphan should.) -- Avocado (talk) 22:20, 2 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I have to oppose this. The whole point of this project is building the web. What kind of web is it if an article only has one other article linking to it? Yes, for some topics it is harder than others to get the number of incoming wikilinks up above two (see the orphan criteria), but I think that is more of a reflection of the need to create/expand other related articles on those topics, rather than an overstatement of what an orphan is. The current goal of getting three links to each article has already been reduced from the original goal, which was to have at least six links to each article. Lowering the bar further just says that we've given up on building the web on those topics, and I am not yet ready to give up on these articles.--Aervanath's signature is boring 19:09, 3 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, Avocado, the current criteria already set out in detail what kind of links should be accepted as valid links.--Aervanath's signature is boring 19:09, 3 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm extrememly inactive at the moment, but I thought I might offer my opinion here. The large portion of my work on this project was defining exactly what we wanted to do when deorphaning, and I wrote/rewrote a large portion of the project page. I feel that it is counter-intuitive to reduce the amount of links required to deorphan. This task should not be undertaken for the sole purpose of removing the orphan tag from an article - indeed, removing the tag may not even be possible for some articles. This project is about building the web, and helping Wikipedia become the best that it can be. Davidovic 11:32, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Year in Topic Links?

Do links form "Year in [topic]" articles count as article links or list links for the purposes of this project? Thanks. -- Avocado (talk) 13:39, 20 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I would count them as list links.--Aervanath's signature is boring 20:00, 20 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Just FYI, it appears that there's a bot that's removing Orphan tags from articles with a certain # of article-space links, regardless of whether the links are from lists or what.... -- Avocado (talk) 01:05, 21 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Noted. I know about the bot, but I hadn't thought about the list issue. I've posted a note on the bot's talk page to see what's going on with that. Have you seen any orphan tags that it's removed inappropriately?--Aervanath's signature is boring 15:29, 21 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This edit is what brought it to my attention. -- Avocado (talk) 16:04, 21 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It's been taken care of. I clarified the criteria, too.--Aervanath's signature is boring 08:00, 23 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Geographical stubs

I imagine there are a lot of these in this backlog. If they can be fitted into a template like Template:Šibenik-Knin, is that enough to de-orphan them? Or is it like a link from a list?Cricketgirl (talk) 08:16, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think that would qualify, since then all the ones with the same template would be linking to each other, thus meeting the criteria of at least three incoming mainspace links. However, if none of the stubs are linked to from other articles, then you get a walled garden, which is also not desirable, but is slightly better as far as building the web goes.--Aervanath's signature is boring 17:28, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unified orphan/de-orphan process

Right now there are several separate places to go to find orphaned articles. Special:Lonelypages has a dynamic list of 1000 orphaned pages, Category:Orphaned articles lists articles with the {{orphan}} tag, and Wikipedia:Orphaned articles lists articles that were marked as orphaned by a datadump analysis in 2004. I would propose that Lonelypages can be left alone by regular editors, a bot can go through and tag them much more efficiently than we can. I believe there is a bot already doing this, but I'm not sure which one. The articles referred to from WP:orphaned articles can be gone through and tagged with {{orphan}}, thus placing them into Category:Orphaned articles. At that point, we all have a unified place to work from, Category:Orphaned articles. So I think that would be a good way of getting us all on the same page. Thoughts? Comments? Concerns? Insults?--Aervanath's signature is boring 21:46, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've been working now and then on whittling down Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles (WOA). Since the list is close to being 4 years old, it's chock full of false positives. So, my objective in working on the list is to get it down to genuine orphans and making sure that those all have the {{orphan}} tag. (If you look at the table on the WOA page, all those letters in gold have been completely weeded through relatively recently). My long term vision has been that when all letters are done, to consolidate them into a single list which can be stored as a WikiProject Orphanage subpage with a title something along the lines of "Long-standing Orphans". (The purpose for the list being for those articles that are exceedingly difficult to de-orphan yet are notable enough to avoid deletion).
So, yes, I do believe that working towards a unified orphanage is a good goal. The question I have is whether a long-standing list as I've been envisioning would be useful or interesting to anyone other than me, or should we tag the list an {{archive}} and let it be abandoned when unification is complete? Whitejay251 23:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I support a unified orphanage, and getting a bot to tag pages at Special:Lonelypages. I doubt a lot of users don't use Category:Orphaned articles for orphaned articles.
@Whitejay251: I think it would be good to tag Wikipedia:Orphaned articles with {{archive}} when the unification is complete.--Lights (talk) 14:08, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I propose making a small step towards unifying it now: move Wikipedia:Orphaned articles to a sub-page of WikiProject Orphanage, and make it a redirect to the Orphanage. Obviously we would add a prominent link to it on the Project page so that people could still find it. Once that list is cleaned out, we can mark it with {{archive}}, and keep a less-prominent link to it from the project page for historical purposes.
Separate from that, I'm going to spruce up the "What can I do to help?" section a bit and emphasize WHERE orphaned articles can be found, in this order of priority:
I've discovered that User:Addbot is already patrolling Special:Lonelypages, so that's already taken care of.--Aervanath's signature is boring 18:27, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see any reason not to bring anything under one umbrella either. I've been working on whittling down the Orphaned Articles lists too -- tagging the ones that are still orphaned and clearing the ones that aren't. I like Whitejay's idea about long-standing orphans -- these have been orphaned for almost 4 years.
Special:Lonelypages only lists articles with no links whatsoever, right? (I.e. it doesn't list articles with links from userspace and WP-space, etc.) So maybe it would also be a good idea to get someone with the know-how to process a newer DB dump to generate current lists of untagged orphans to sort through, and we could use a supervised bot to tag them. -- Avocado (talk) 19:07, 25 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think there is already a bot doing that, but I don't know which one.--Aervanath's signature is boring 18:54, 26 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, I'm being bold and moving the WP:Orphaned articles page so it'll be a subage of the WikiProject: Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Orphaned Articles. I'll edit the project page to reflect that.--Aervanath's signature is boring 04:39, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Do-attempt in Orphaned list

I'm new to the de-orphaning process, but willing to do my best at helping, but wouldn't it be useful if attempted de-orphans would be removed from the standard orphaned articles list, being "problem-children" that are hard to place in a family, so to speak? That would give a better idea of how many articles haven't been attempted yet, i think. Also i think quite a number of orphaned pages are not up to WP standard at all and could go straight to AfD. I understand that building a web is the goal, but the backlog is so massive that i think we should seperate the ones we tried and failed from the ones we didn't try yet, just to make some progress with the backlog. I mean 14 subscribed participants against almost 30,000 orphans, that's almost impossible! Either we get more people to help or we should focus on untried orphans and remove the failed attempts from that list, imho. Shoombooly (talk) 21:02, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the {{do-attempt}} template accomplishes that. Don't be afraid to be bold and AFD longstanding orphans (or merge / redirect where appropriate). Once the lists are pruned, the long-time orphans at Orphaned Articles will probably be particularly good candidates for that. -- Avocado (talk) 21:41, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'd be bolder if AfD wasn't such a pain in the ass to do for each and every article (unless someone could help me automate that - i'm relatively new to this and do everything by hand). I still think failed attempts that aren't AfD should be removed from the list of orphans, though. Shoombooly (talk) 22:59, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
As Avocado said, changing the {{orphan}} tag to a {{do-attempt}} removes the article from the regular category, Category:Orphaned articles and moves it to a specific sub-category, Category:Attempted de-orphan, so it's quite easy to avoid going over the same ground. However, I would oppose any effort to mass-nominate any articles for AFD, just because they're orphaned, or even because they're "below WP-standard" (depending on what that means). If they're below standard, then improve them. I wouldn't necessarily call myself an inclusionist, but I've only seen a few orphans that genuinely don't deserve their own article. I've PROD'ed or speedy'd the few that deserved it, for whatever reason. But the whole reason there is no AFD-bot is that no bot or automated process can determine things like notability or verifiability. Most of these orphans are orphans simply because the articles which should link to them just haven't been written yet. This says more about the incomplete nature of Wikipedia than the article itself. By all means, nom an article for AFD, PROD, or speedy delete if it's unimprovable, but being an orphan is not and should not be a valid criterion for deletion.--Aervanath's signature is boring 06:52, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Also, don't let yourself get overwhelmed by the size of the task. Yes, there are 30,000 orphans. But some of them are phony orphans, having been de-orphaned already, but still carrying the tag. JL-Bot is working through those. Also, there are more than just the 14 listed participants working through the articles. Avocado and User:Whitejay251 are the most active de-orphaners that I can see right now, and neither has added their names to the official list.
A third thing to consider: Wikipedia has no deadline. If we don't get through all 30,000 by the end of the month, year, decade, so what? We do what we can, as much as we can, as fast as we can. Insert corny old saying here: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."--Aervanath's signature is boring 07:16, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I'm not de-orphaning, just pruning and tagging, since those ancient lists are 90% false positives, which isn't very useful. Much as I'd like to take credit for work I'm not doing.... ;-) -- Avocado (talk) 15:37, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, your work is definitely appreciated, Avocado, whatever it is.
But my point was, anyway, that we shoudn't be overwhelmed by how much there is to do and how few there are to do it. I was doing some math in my head today thinking about it. Let's say we have 30,000 orphaned articles, which I think is actually a little high, since it includes lots of phony orphans. Let's say that we have 10 (at least) reasonably dedicated de-orphaners. Lets say each of us takes a whack at five articles a day (which doesn't take that long), which results in some of them being de-orphaned and some being switched to a {{do-attempt}} category for later. Ten de-orphaners times five articles equals 50 articles per day. Still not a huge amount of progress. But then that means 350 articles a week...1400 articles every month...16,800 articles per year. That's more than half the load! So if we can get people doing just a few de-orphans a day, then we could be caught up with this in under 2 years. If we could get more than that, wonderful, it'll get done even faster. But my original point still stands: It's an elephant, so you can't eat it all it once. But you can do it one bite at a time. --Aervanath's signature is boring 17:45, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Point taken Aervanath, but this elephant we're eating is growing as we eat is, with about 1500-2000 a month, if i'm not mistaken :) Anyway, we should hire more de-orphaners! Because i'm relatively new i did not know the D-O's got moved to the D-O-list after all, perhaps there's a delay that made me not see it (i checked from Category:Orphaned articles). While there is no deadline, it would be nice if we could at least try to match the monthly rate of growth of the list, meaning that at the end of the month no new orphans for that monthly list exist. Shoombooly (talk) 21:43, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Getting more people in would certainly be nice! I do think that at some point we will catch up enough so that we're finally into "real-time" de-orphaning (i.e. zero backlog). But it might take a few years.
As for the category thing, yes, there is a bit of a delay. I guess category-updating isn't that high on the priority queue for the servers, so it can take several minutes sometimes before they disappear from the category once you've removed them. That confused the heck out of me when I was adding {{do-attempt}} functionality to the {{articleissues}} template! I kept going back and re-working it, when all I had to do was wait and let the server catch up to itself! Patience, grasshopper!--Aervanath's signature is boring 06:15, 30 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I should add, Shoombooly, that I do appreciate your enthusiasm. If we get more de-orphaners with that sort of gung-ho thinking, we'll be done tomorrow. :)--Aervanath's signature is boring 06:18, 30 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, in my inexperience, I noticed people are protective of "their" articles. When adding a link of the Cherokee withcraft tradition to the main Cherokee article, someone removed my link noting that it was "unsupported and false" information, which makes me wonder that if that were the case, why didn't he/she just afd the article...must have touched a nerve there. Still, i readded, because i feel a cherokee tradition belongs on the cherokee page. Any thoughts? Shoombooly (talk) 20:13, 30 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Seems legit to me, too. Seems odd to say something is unsupported and false when all you did was add a link to the see-also section.--Aervanath's signature is boring 23:14, 30 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
We'll see where this goes, it started a discussion on the talk page. Shoombooly (talk) 19:07, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

[Sport] at [Year] Olympics

Do Articles of that type count as lists or articles for orphanage purposes? Thanks. -- Avocado (talk) 14:08, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If you mean like Weightlifting at the 1920 Summer Olympics, then I would call it an article.--Aervanath's signature is boring 10:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

orphans from 2003 Database dump

Hey, I found an old list of orphans (formerly buried in the history of Wikipedia:Articles orphaned without redirects, now moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Articles orphaned without redirects. I think most of them have already been de-orphaned, redirected, or turned into disambiguation or list pages, but I already found 2 orphans on the list. I don't think it'll take long to prune down that list, but I think that should probably be our priority first, even before the 2004 dump.--Aervanath's signature is boring 19:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest we actually focus on de-orphaning May 2008 and June 2008, doing so will greatly improve the overall quality of wikipedia, as it seems a lot of those new orphans can be speedied without second thought (i had 6 of them deleted in the last 24h). Quite a few new articles are related to current events, so de-orphaning them would help people find them. Also, it would mean no new backlog. Shoombooly (talk) 20:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's not a bad idea. Additionally, if an article's been orphaned for that long, it's probably not that crucial of an article, so we can take our time on it. What do you think, Avocado? (Or anyone else, actually, but Avocado seems to be the only other editor watching this page at the moment.)--Aervanath's signature is boring 11:47, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's a good point. I'm just enjoying pruning these lists.  ;-) I suspect that when I'm done with the new list there will be under 300 articles on it. Most of them are not already tagged, so I guess when I'm tagging the new ones they're dropping into this month's orphan category. Do you want me to stop the pruning so that they won't clog that up? -- Avocado (talk) 12:38, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
No, keep tagging them. That way everything will be in CAT:ORPHAN, which is what we hoped for in the first place. :) --Aervanath's signature is boring 02:54, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'll gladly move on to pruning that once I'm done with the section of Orphaned Articles I'm currently in the middle of, so that the dedicated de-orphaners don't have to wade through too many false-positives. Do we have an approximate count of current state of the list?
BTW, I noticed that there's a link on the Orphaned Articles page to a SQL script for generating new lists from DB dumps. That would be a great way to generate a fresh list of currently untagged orphans for a bot to run through if we want to track them down. I'd actually volunteer to run it, but my computer can't handle a database that big. --Avocado (talk) 20:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
OK, taking a closer look, it looks like the list is meant to be of articles that have links only via redirects to them. It's not clear whether that means the only pages linking to them are redirects or whether the only links are to pages that redirect to them (the latter do count as links for orphanage purposes, right?)
Also, I generated a table of the article counts for each section of the page. -- Avocado (talk) 21:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I think originally those articles were ones that were completely orphaned, and didn't have any redirects pointing to them either. As for the updated database dump idea, I found out that User:SoxBot actually already does have the task of tagging articles as orphans. I've left a message on the operator's talk page asking how he goes about finding the orphans. Depending on how he does it, we may not have to after all.--Aervanath's signature is boring 06:28, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Spiffy. Let me know what the response is! -- Avocado (talk) 12:38, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
User:Addshore has filed a Bot Request for Approval asking permission to add this task to User:Addbot. The discussion on that is here. I've already commented in support on the Orphanage's behalf.--Aervanath's signature is boring 02:44, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Awesome! I hope they're able to get their hands on a DB dump too. Should we be concerned about AWB's criteria being less strict than WP:O's? -- Avocado (talk) 03:48, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt it. I'm pretty sure he already knows the criteria.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 12:24, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

{{geo-orphan}}

I based {{geo-orphan}} on the {{orphan}} tag as something to use for orphaned articles about towns, villages, etc. I created it for FritzpollBot, but do you guys think that's something we should do as well? The 2004 dump filtered the CDP/town orphans into its own page, so obviously editors in the past thought it was a good idea. I might also create a {{do-attempt-geo}} for future use, depending on if it catches on.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 12:31, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well it looks like they will make a bot add 2 million towns, so um, lots of work to do i guess...Shoombooly (talk) 20:34, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, 2 million was the absolute max. The way the discussion is heading now, it's going to be far less than that. Probably still in the thousands or tens of thousands, so, still high, but it'll be over the course of a year or so, so it won't hit us all at once. Anyway, I guess you have no objections to using {{geo-orphan}} and {{do-attempt-geo}} for the geographical orphans? Since so many are going to be created, I'd rather have them off in a separate place by themselves for the various country/region WikiProjects to deal with. Which gives me an idea, actually: what if we requested a bot to run through Category:All orphaned articles and create lists of orphans by WikiProject? That way we could post those lists to the relevant WikiProjects and make our job a little bit easier by getting people with specific knowledge in that subject to help de-orphan those articles. They'll probably be able to do it better than we could.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 02:35, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Getting a sort by WikiProject seems like a great idea to me. Those with specific knowledge would also be able to better judge when merges/redirects would be more appropriate or if the notability threshold fails. My head nearly explodes when thinking about how many of those chemistry or biology orphans are probably already dealt with in another article that has a name nowhere near what the orphan is called. Whitejay251 06:11, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't use scripts or tools to edit, so could you make the template names a little smaller? {{doa-geo}} and {{geo-o}} would be less typing for me, i'm old fashioned. Otherwise no objections.Shoombooly (talk) 11:14, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I don't use scripts or tools either. I use IE7, and most of the scripts only work on Firefox, and sometimes Opera. But, sure, I'll make them simpler. By the time you read this, your links should be blue.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 04:09, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Done. I created a bunch of other redirects for {{orphan}},{{do-attempt}}, and their "geo" counterparts. You can check each of their "what links here" pages to see them all, and pick which one you like better. (You'll have to click "Hide transclusions" and "Hide links" to clear the other stuff out so you're only looking at re-directs.)--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 04:31, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The listing of orphans by WikiProject is in the process of being done already, it seems: User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:54, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Cool. There's already at least one wikiproject (Wisconsin) that would like a listing of orphaned places under their purview (discussion going on here) -- Avocado (talk) 19:07, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Also, do you think there's any use in sorting out bio-orphans? -- Avocado (talk) 19:58, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Possibly, yes. They are the worst. Shoombooly (talk) 20:38, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Re-factor priorities section on project page

Based on our discussion above, I'm going to remove the 2004 orphan list from the project page, and list the Category:Orphaned articles from June 2008 as the first priority. Any objections?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 12:37, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Don't remove it completely, tuck it away a bit. But as you can see, just keeping up with current orphans is a hell of a job. I think i'm driving the admins nuts with my speedy deletion requests. (All but one were deleted, though, and that one should still be imho) Shoombooly (talk) 20:36, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I put the 2003 and 2004 lists at the bottom in a section by themselves. I wouldn't worry about driving the admins nuts...that's what they volunteered for! :) I've run across a few articles that needed deleting, too, including one that got to AFD before the author agreed to speedy it. But if we each do a bunch a day, we'll get there! Sometimes the orphan tag's been put there by mistake, or sometimes links'll get added before you get there! I was de-orphaning one article last night, and when I'd finished I found an incoming link that hadn't been there when I started, and that I hadn't put there.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 02:17, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Lists and disambiguation pages aren't orphans

I've clarified in the criteria that lists and disambiguation pages can't be orphans. Ideally, ALL disambiguation pages should be orphans, really. As for lists, I doubt there are very many lists that are going to get linked to from more than one article, if that. Or should we make a different standard for lists?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 03:27, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

After giving the issue some thought, I've come to the conclusion that lists are very different beasts than disambigs and that how we treat their potential status as orphans ought to differ from each other. I think the key difference is how much time will be spent by the end user on a list vs. a disambig. As the purpose of a disambig is to direct the reader on to the correct place, they're not going to spend much time there: ideally less than a minute. What I see as the purpose of lists, on the other hand, is to facilitate the exploratory browsing of Wikipedia. I'm sure most of us can attest that one can spend hours with a well constructed list. Hence there ought to be ways to discover lists, beyond coincidentally stumbling upon them. If we are going to rely on people finding lists through typing in a search box the way in which they are often titled seems counter-intuitive. So I don't think unlinked-to lists should be excluded from being orphans by definition. The reason disambigs have been given this status in the past is that a link to a disambig page will, in the vast majority of the time, be better served by a link straight to the intended article. It's hard to imagine a case where this is the case for lists.Whitejay251 09:11, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed with Whitejay's reasoning.Shoombooly (talk) 11:15, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I tentatively agree. Perhaps the criteria for lists should be different than for articles? E.g. perhaps links from lists should count as links to lists, or perhaps they don't need as many links? -- Avocado (talk) 13:44, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, let's find a way to have all disambiguation pages moved off the orphan list then, shall we? Shoombooly (talk) 00:05, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Hm, I'd been removing them anyway, since those were the instructions on the Orphaned Articles page. Have people been tagging them as orphans? As Aervanath mentioned, DABs should be orphans. -- Avocado (talk) 03:14, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, as for disambiguation pages, there's been a consensus for a long time that those SHOULD be orphans, so I guess no trouble there. However, for lists, I guess I do agree with Whitejay's reasoning, too. Should we keep the standards for orphaned lists the same as orphaned articles, or lower it? Originally, I had the feeling that they might only ever be linked to from one article, so the "three-link" standard was a bit high, but I'm pretty open. I'm definitely against raising the standard, so the question is, what should be the standard for lists to be de-orphaned? One incoming link, or two, or three?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 04:38, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I know disambig pages should be orphans, but i don't think they should be tagged as being orphans, some bots are tagging them anyway. Unnecessary tagging is not desirable.Shoombooly (talk) 05:33, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, should've been more clear. I meant that disambig pages should be orphans, so we shouldn't be adding the orphan tag to them, since the tag asks people to add links TO the page, which is exactly what we don't want. What's your opinion on the orphaned lists? One, two or three incoming links?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 06:10, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For lists, at least one but preferably more than one, depends on the list. If we agree on no tags on disambig pages, then someone should inform the bot operators, because the bots keep tagging them if you remove them.Shoombooly (talk) 16:06, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There are two bots that I know of that add orphan tags, Addbot and SoxBot. Is it one of those or a different one (or both)?
As for the lists, I guess we should just leave it at three, then. I guess in building the web we should try to get the lists all linked up, too. No pressing reason to change the standard there, I guess. I should remember the text of my own essay: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:38, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Soxbot and Addbot it is. Who's going to instruct them?Shoombooly (talk) 19:11, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
 Done--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:13, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Not quite done, see SoxRed's reply... Shoombooly (talk) 00:22, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Long lists

I noticed a somewhat specialized case, which might warrant a small revision of the orphan criteria. Suggestion for consideration -

  • Sections of a long list (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (long lists)), other than the first or entry section should not be considered orphans; or at least links from lists should be counted in deciding whether such list sections are orphans.

For example, the various subsections of the long lists List of subjects in Gray's Anatomy: Alphabetical, or List of aircraft manufacturers only have incoming links from each-other.

The normal criteria for orphan status make sense for the lead section, but the remaining sections are only separate articles because of technical limitations (logically it is all one list). Building the web would seem to be served by making links to the whole list, but not clear that additional links to parts of the list will be beneficial. (Could impede further editing of the list if sublists need to be split or merged.) So it doesn't make sense to label them all as orphans. Thoughts? Zodon (talk) 06:25, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Are timelines lists?

E.g. Timeline of Afghanistan (November 2001) or Timeline of the September 11, 2001 attacks.... or does it depend on how the timeline is constructed? (I.e. the former is more article-like and the latter more list-like) -- Avocado (talk) 15:25, 4 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Borderline, but I would go with the "duck rule": if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck, and acts like a duck, then it's probably a duck. The first one looks like an article, so I would call it an article. The second one looks like a list, so it's a list.
(Or we could go by McCarthyist rules: if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck, and acts like a duck, then it's a Communist until proven otherwise.)--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 06:17, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There are Communist articles on Wikipedia?!? Shut it down, and bring in Jimbo for interrogation! -- Avocado (talk) 13:29, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Rubbish articles

Question: when you come accross a rubbish page, like a page advertising a person or company without encyclopedic value, do you tag it for speedy deletion or do you afd/prod it? Shoombooly (talk) 20:11, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If it clearly meets any of the CSD criteria, speedy it. Otherwise prod (or AFD is prod is not an option). -- Avocado (talk) 20:29, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm asking since i come accross a number of articles that should've been speedied but were put up for prod. I'm guessing people are instinctively careful, and not as bold as is sometimes needed. We de-orphaners come accross a lot of rubbish, so we should have a common view on it i suppose.Shoombooly (talk) 20:34, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Just go by what the speedy, prod, and afd criteria say. There's really nothing I can add to what Avocado said.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:34, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
As for having a common view of it, I think the criteria are pretty specific already. Not really much more I can think of to specify without getting too much instruction creep. If you come across articles that you think should've been speedied, then just add the speedy tag above the PROD tag. --Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:51, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I figured that was the way to go. I think i pissed off a good number of companies by having their pages deleted. I guess if they hadn't registered to WP with their company name, i would tend to notice advertising less :P Shall we try this month to have half the orphans we had at the end of last month? Shoombooly (talk) 19:41, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Are we counting links form portals as mainspace links? Thanks. -- Avocado (talk) 19:15, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No. ONLY mainspace links matter. No other namespace qualifies. The other namespaces are extra. The mainspace IS the encyclopedia. That's what we're concerned with.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 20:41, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorting orphans by project

Looks like there's a new bot that does this sort of thing. Shall we request a run? -- Avocado (talk) 19:19, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, although I'm stumped as to as to ask for them to run on which WikiProject first. I would guess Chemistry or the other sciences, since those are the ones which require more specific knowledge to de-orphan.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 20:43, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It actually looks to me from the results he links to that he can list all tagged articles assigned to any wikiproject. If that's not the case, we could probably ask around on the talk pages of projects that we think are heavily represented (like Biography) or need specialist attention (like Chemistry) whether they'd be interested in a collaboration. -- Avocado (talk) 23:20, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikibreak

Hey all, I'm going on vacation until July 16. I haven't abandoned the project, I'm just traveling! I'll be back de-orphaning like crazy then! See you in July!--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:06, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Criteria

I would like to add to the "Criteria" section of this project page that links to "See also" sections do not de-orphan an article since this does not build the web. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 03:02, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I oppose this as there seems no practical benefit. See also sections exist precisely for this purpose of linking related topics. They are a common feature of articles and this proposal is therefore contrary to general consensus. Colonel Warden (talk) 11:13, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I would also oppose this. See Also sections are used for browsing (or at least I use them) as part of the "web". Adding this criterion would also significantly increase (as in triple, quadruple, or more) the time required to evaluate whether or not an article is an orphan. Not to mention we already have problems with people removing orphan tags because they don't understand the criteria -- I think this would severely exacerbate that problem and make the criteria more difficult to explain briefly. -- Avocado (talk) 14:42, 22 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I also oppose, since I think that "See also" sections do build the web.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 14:36, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

disambiguation hatnotes?

The criteria currently state that links from disambiguation pages don't count as valid de-orphaning links. However, sometimes there is no disambiguation page, but there is a disambig hatnote such as {{dablink}}, {{otheruses}} or {{For}}. For an example, see the current version of One by One. Now, since hatnotes are right up at the top of the page, in a pretty visible position, it could be argued that these links build the web at least as much as a link in a See also section, which we've already decided counts as a valid incoming link. On the other hand, it is a "disambiguation" section, not an inline link or a See also link, and therefore the links therein may not be relevant to the context of the article, which means readers might only click on them if they ended up on the wrong article, making the section only as good as a disambiguation page. I'm leaning towards counting them as valid incoming links, because I think there's a good chance of people clicking through from one similarly-titled article to another. However, I wanted to ask you guys before I specified that in the criteria.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 19:42, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I think it could go either way... I'd lean towards allowing them mostly because criteria like that make it a lot more difficult to evaluate an article's orphan status simply by looking at the "what links here" list -- which, I know, is not a particularly good reason.  ;-) -- Avocado (talk) 20:47, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It may not be the best reason in the world, but it does help tip the scales in the direction I was leaning in anyway. I'll make the change.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 01:38, 14 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, looking at the criteria again, there's nothing in there that bars the use of hatnote links, so I guess we're good already. Looks like a brought up a case of WP:AINT. :) --Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 01:46, 14 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

De-orphaning tool

I found an easy way to de-orphan. When keyboard shortcuts are on, you can click the shortcut 'x' (Alt-shift-x for Mozilla) for a random article, and if the article looks skimpy, use the shortcut 'j' for "What links here". I am also workng on a bot that does this all for you, and then reports a page to you if it is likely to be an orphan. ManishEarthTalk 09:37, 9 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Manish, welcome to the Orphanage! I'm glad of your enthusiasm here, but there are already several bots that find orphans for us. What we really need right now is help de-orphaning the orphans that we already know about, not finding more! There is a huge backlog in Category:Orphaned articles, so our main focus here is going through the orphans there and placing incoming links in related articles until they meet the Criteria. Of course, if that side of the project doesn't appeal to you, then finding the orphans for those of us who like de-orphaning is welcome as well. Happy de-orphaning!--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 11:28, 9 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. But, if there is a need of finding orphans, I found a tool that is quite easy to use. Download the Snap links extension for Firefox. This tool allows you to open multiple links by selecting them with a click-dragged rectangle from right-clicking. Then, go to Category:Stubs(As most orphans are stubs) and select many links at one go. Open 'what links here' on all of them by using the keyboard shortcut. You can check hundreds of pages in a minute. Anyways, I am currently de-orphaning articles. Thanks again- ManishEarthTalk 10:47, 10 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Categories

Why don't the orphan categories show up on their member pages? I believe they once did. I can't really think of a negative, and if I came across an article of interest to me with such a category, I might make a quick attempt to link it somewhere. With the huge backlog, I would think even a small chance of random editors helping out would be desired. — TAnthonyTalk 06:03, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, for an article to get put in CAT:ORPHAN, it needs to be tagged with an {{orphan}} template, which usually goes right at the top of the article. So it's not really necessary to have both. Also, the general practice right now is that the only categories that should be presented to the average reader are the ones that are related to the article by topic. Categories such as orphaned articles, deadend articles, or articles needing cleanup are generally hidden.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 15:41, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, you can edit your prefs to display hidden (maintenance) categories alongside other cats. -- Avocado (talk) 19:29, 20 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Neat, hadn't noticed that before, thanks for the info -Hunting dog (talk) 19:57, 20 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

De-orphaning tool 2

I am working on a de-orphaning tool that allows you to de-orphan a page without lifting a finger (Maybe one...). It adds a tab to the cactions bar, and when clicked, it opens a wikipedia search in a new window, finds the urls of the pages that have its name in them, and wikifys the words in the page that are the same as the page you are de-orphaning. It finally reports how many pages were changed, and asks you if it is satisfactory. If not, it adds the 'do-orphan' tag. At the moment, it is nearly finished, but I just need to add some bits to make it user-friendly. You can see it at User:Manishearth/orphantabs.js.
ManishEarthTalk 06:05, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, I am on a wikibreak now, and the script wont be completed for a while
Sounds cool, and very useful! I'm not well-versed in javascript, so I'm not sure from the code if the tool gives the user a veto over what gets wiki-linked and what not. It shouldn't automatically wikilink every possible instance, because there are going to be some times when it shouldn't be wikilinked. Please let us know when it's ready to be tested, I'd love to try it out! Cheers, --Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 16:11, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I've used regexps to find if the page name is not part of another word and not already part of a link. Also, ill set a variable in the custom configuration that will ask the user if it should be replaced or not. This can be turned off if you want. At the end, it will show the amount of pages that it linked, and wil ask you if it should be de-orphaned or if the {{do-attempt }} tag should be added. ManishEarthTalk 12:06, 17 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Pure awesomeness. Can't wait to test it out.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:28, 17 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

AND FINALLY! IT WORKS! Unfortunately, its still not user-friendly, but that is a small matter. It'll be finished soon! Could someone give me a list of ALL the orphan templates? (Including attempt templates) Thanks! ManishEarthTalk 13:23, 8 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, right now the only ones are {{orphan}}, {{do-attempt}}, {{geo-orphan}} and {{do-attempt-geo}}. However, do-attempt is probably going to be merged into orphan soon, and the other two are almost unused. I've been wondering if they're really necessary.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:56, 8 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
What if I add a template "do-attempt-script", which basically says that the de-orphaning was attempted through a script (Meaning that it is harder to completely de-orphan. Also, can someone tell me the edit summaries required while de-orphaning? Thanks, ManishEarthTalk 14:08, 9 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Never mind, I found the summaries. ManishEarthTalk 14:15, 9 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Can anyone suggest some names for it? ManishEarthTalk 13:53, 11 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Almost complete: Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Articles orphaned without redirects

This page had 3500 articles that had been orphaned since 2003. We're now down to under 150 articles (more than 95% complete). All of the remaining articles have been tagged and most can be found in orphan categories from June 2008 - August 2008. Let's get that number down to 0! -- Avocado (talk) 16:41, 27 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Rock on! (Aervanath happy dance!)--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:10, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

WP:FRIENDLY

The Friendly user-script for Firefox now supports both {{orphan}} and {{do-attempt}}. To activate it, just go to Special:Preferences, go to the Gadgets menu, check the box marked "Friendly", and clear your cache. Alternatively, follow the directions at WP:FRIENDLY to install it in your monobook.js file and customize it. Should make our jobs just that much easier.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:41, 27 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

De-orphaning library of congress subarticles

I was directed to post this suggestion here:

I was just reading up on the Library of Congress, saw the tag about deorphaning the classification pages (like Library of Congress Classification:Class Q -- Science), and logged in (I try not to...too addictive...) to remove the tag because I can't imagine that there would be any reason for anything in the entire universe except the other Library of Congress classification articles to link to it. This and its siblings are very, very specific-purpose articles. I think that labeling these is counterproductive in that they'll never be cleared. It just doesn't make sense for some classes of articles to be forcibly de-orphaned IMHO. And I'll bet that there are plenty of other similar cases. Thanks. Elf | Talk 23:43, 10 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In this case, at least, I have to disagree, Elf. For one thing, the group of articles you are talking about are not, in my opinion, encyclopedic (see WP:NOTDIRECTORY), and so I will be nominating them for deletion after I finish writing this. However, if they were encyclopedic and were unlikely to be de-orphaned, then it would not be too much work to group all of those articles into a navbox template and thus de-orphan them quite easily.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 15:26, 13 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Your excuse that Wikipedia is not a directory is not applicable to these articles, which are well within the study of Library Science just like any established library classification scheme. Your claim that these are orphans is also inapplicable as long as any look at "What links here" bears fruit. These articles have survived deletion attacks before. Eclecticology (talk) 18:30, 13 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that they are orphans has no bearing on whether or not they are eligible for inclusion in the encylopedia. Also, since there is only one article that links to the Library of Congress Classification:Class Q -- Science article that is not either a disambiguation page or a list, then it certainly does meet the orphan criteria.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:39, 13 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Merging do-attempt into orphan

I have proposed merging {{do-attempt}}'s functionality into {{orphan}}. Please comment at Template talk:Orphan#Do-attempt merge. Thanks!--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 03:34, 24 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The merge has been completed. Don't worry about do-attempt any more, guys!--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:54, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

de-orphaning "considered harmful" (and the ultimate de-orphaning tool)

There's a problem with calling for de-orphaning: the simplest way to fix an "orphaned" article about a minor "beat" writer is to add a link to that article to the general Beat Generation article. But people like myself who have been working on those general articles, don't see how it's an improvement to have thousands of links to minor examples. Possibly, if this is a good idea at all, what would be needed is a separate list article (something like: List of New Wave bands and artists) but as it stands, you're calling for people to add lots of "junk" links to the main articles.

And I submit that the ultimate "de-orphaning tool" exists already, it's right there in the side bar of every page: "What links here". If you think about links as bi-directional, then that article about a minor beat writer isn't orphaned as long as it contains a link to Beat Generation. There's already a way to find it, why is it so important to add another one? -- Doom (talk) 14:02, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As for adding a useless link to such a general article, yes, those should not be the kinds of links we are using to de-orphan articles. All links should follow Wikipedia:Only make links that are relevant to the context. However, as far being as the "ultimate de-orphaning tool", "What links here" is rather lacking. It's unordered, and the link to it is rather small. I rather doubt there is even a significant minority of readers who browse Wikipedia using this function. And even if there is a minority, the majority still do not browse this way. By placing relevant links in appropriate places, de-orphaning builds the web and makes it easier for our readers to navigate through "the sum of human knowledge".--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 16:07, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It's all very well to say that we shouldn't create "useless links", but think about the logic of the situation: my claim is that the set of things worth writing about is wider than the set of things worth linking to. It's okay to have links flowing from small matters up to large ones, they don't have to start at the top and work down. Another way of putting this is that knowledge is not inherently hierarchical. -- Doom (talk) 23:51, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
If knowledge is not inherently hierarchical, then it doesn't make much sense to talk about starting at the top and working down, does it? :-P
Seriously, though, yes, I'm not going to link from a very general topic, for example, Science, to something very specific, like Glaucosoma hebraicum, because it's not directly relevant. However, I disagree with you that the set of things worth linking to is necessarily smaller than the set of things worth writing about. I also don't think this is something which is empirically determinable. Wikipedia is growing constantly, and it is not growing in a steady and consistent manner. I think it is perfectly normal that some articles are going to be created which are a little bit isolated. However, this does not mean that they will be orphaned forever, nor that we should stop trying to bring them into the web through the creation of relevant links.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 01:46, 2 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The ultimate de-orphaning script is here(albeit just a test version)

I have finally finished writing a de-orphaning script. Add importScript(User:Manishearth/orphantabs.js) to your monobook js page to use it, and then purge your cache (Shift+Click Refresh for Firefox). A tab should come next to the usual tabs(edit, discussion) on any page saying "de-orphan complete". Click it and type the name of the page you want to de-orphan. Then, you just have to sit and wait while it wikifies each window with the orphaned page name. It will tell you the total number of pages linking to it (in article namespaces), and will ask you if you want to de-orphan or do-attempt it. It will then tag it and notify you when de-orphaning is over. Tell me of any bugs on my talk page. Also, can anyone suggest a name for it? ManishEarthTalk 09:29, 13 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Three is too many

If a topic just barely scrapes past WP:GNG there is no reason to expect three other topics to link to it. For example, an album may be reviewed in two or three magazines and qualify for inclusion but I don't think it would need links except from the band and maybe some lists like 2008 in noseflute music. Juzhong (talk) 09:05, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The orphan criteria are not inclusion criteria. There is no sense that something is worth less as an article if it has less than three incoming links. The criteria are there to help us build the web. Putting an {{orphan}} tag on an article simply notifies editors that they should attempt to add links to these articles.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 04:52, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Criteria II

I don't know how much of an implementation headache it would be to change it, but at least one bot is removing orphan tags on articles that are lk'd only from a single template that appears on at least 3 articles. This has the consequence that no episode of a show is an orphan, and no holder of an office is an orphan, if the show or office uses an episode template (and at least 3 episodes have articles) or a holders-of-the-office template (and at least 3 bio'd people have held the office). This would seem to defeat the purpose of orphan tagging.
--Jerzy•t 03:06, 4 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why? Such an article is still linked to from multiple articles. Why would the fact that such links are from a template matter? They still build the web which is the whole point behind the orphans project. -- JLaTondre (talk) 18:18, 4 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with JLaTondre. This has been brought up before (I can't remember quite where), and there was agreement that those sorts of links to count towards building the web.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:40, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Bringing back Lonelypages, need input

I'm writing a toolserver version of Special:Lonelypages. It's basically finished, but the toolserver is expected to be out of sync with Wikipedia until the end of the month, so I won't be releasing the tool soon. In the meantime, I'd like to pin down exactly what qualifies as list/year articles per the criteria.

I'd appreciate comments on which of the article types below should be excluded from the orphan count:

List articles
Chronological articles
  • Year in articles - such as 1999 in music (4 digit years seem sufficient; there are almost no Year in articles with less than 4 digits)
  • Day articles - such as January 8
  • Year articles - such as 1999
  • non-four digit Year articles - such as 885, 8, 5 BC, 45 BC, etc.

Of course, if anyone knows a more clever way to identify lists - or thinks I've left something out altogether - please bring it up! Thanks! --JaGatalk 09:06, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just a note (in case this wasn't previously clear): the above sorts of articles should still be listed as orphans, if there are not sufficient incoming links. It's just that links from those articles shouldn't be counted towards de-orphaning an article. As far as determining what articles are lists and chronological articles that fall within those criteria, I think you've done a good job with the above. Cheers,--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:36, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Right. This question is only concerned with counting incoming links. Thanks for the clarification. --JaGatalk 19:24, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Some other links not to count:
  • Pages ending in (disambig), (disambiguation), (surname), and (name)
  • Deaths in pages (example Deaths in 2000)
  • Decades in pages (example 1990s in music) - a variation of the Year in ones above
There are bots that tag articles as orphans. You may wish to ask them as well. -- JLaTondre (talk) 23:23, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the comments.
  1. Covered - I exclude links from pages belonging to the hidden All disambiguation pages category
  2. Good idea, I'm all for it - funny we don't have a corresponding set of Births in articles
  3. I'm a little squeamish about decades. Some decade articles are more articles than lists, such as 1980s in Brazil. But if there's consensus, I'll definitely put that in as well.
  4. I'll get in touch with Addbot and Soxbot admins, I probably should've done that from the start. --JaGatalk 23:51, 8 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I would Love for Special:Lonelypages to be brought back. One thing I would say about a toolserver app i try to make it easily read by a bot :P. ·Add§hore· Talk/Cont 10:22, 14 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it's important that it be bot-compatible, as not many editors are going to want to go through and tag them by hand. Also, I hope that your app will produce a list of ALL orphaned pages; Special:LonelyPages was always limited to 1000 at max, which was not too helpful. Whatever happened to Soxbot? Did it ever resume tagging orphans?--Aervanath talks like a mover, but not a shaker 18:56, 14 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oh yes, all orphans are available (minus disambigs as well, something that always bugged me about Lonelypages). I think you'll be surprised at just how many orphans are out there. :) --JaGatalk 19:23, 14 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Be sure to exclude all the articles that use the {{surname}} template, since these are a kind of disambiguation page. Such articles seem to dominate the early entries on the current version of Special:LonelyPages.--ragesoss (talk) 00:37, 22 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No problem there - the surname template adds articles to the "All disambiguation pages" hidden category, and I filter for that. IMO, the whole disambig thing is what killed Lonelypages - it filled to 1000 with articles that should not have been de-orphaned or tagged. --JaGatalk 02:24, 22 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, once we have your tool, we should be better off. Let us know when it's active.--Aervanath (talk) 14:56, 22 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Lonelypages is BACK - and then some

By borrowing heavily from mashiah's far superior code for the Russian wiki, I've created pages on the toolserver to replace Special:Lonelypages:

  • Lonelypages This page gives you access to every single orphan in the English Wikipedia, per our own criteria. It also gives you the ability to filter the list, so if you want to look at all orphans with two links that bear an {{orphan}} template, you can do that. The list is updated once daily.
  • Untagged Orphans This page is for those who want to put the {{orphan}} template on pages that are orphans but aren't tagged yet. It consists of a list of 5,000 orphans from Lonelypages that is automatically re-checked for orphan status every 15 minutes. Furthermore, you can force a manual update to make sure the items in the list are still orphans. Good for bots or AutoWikiBrowser.
  • Adopted Orphans This is a list of all articles that are tagged as orphans but have three or more valid links. Lists are not counted as valid. All this needs is for someone to go through and remove the orphan tags. Like Untagged Orphans, it can be updated on command and offers a bot- or AWB-friendly list for download.

Currently, there are 757,391 orphans in Wikipedia, and 225,300 of them have zero links (that is, when lists and chronological articles are not counted as valid links - otherwise, the number is 133,753).

One word of warning: the toolserver holds a copy of the Wikipedia database, and is usually within a second of being synchronized with Wikipedia. From time to time, though, it falls behind, leading to a "replication lag". My scripts analyze the toolserver's copy of Wikipedia, so "Update" is only up-to-the-second if there's no replication lag. Each page listed above cites the current replag, so you'll know if there's any problems at the moment.

If anyone has questions, or finds a bug, or would like guidance on setting up AWB to use the lists, let me know! --JaGatalk 21:51, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Looks great. With respect to removing the orphan tags, my bot (JL-Bot) is approved to do that, but during the approval process it was requested to set the threshold at 4 links which is one more than the "Adopted Orphans" list. Given that the main issue was detecting disambig pages and I believe this list is doing a better job at that, I'm fine switching over to your list assuming there is no objection from the project. -- JLaTondre (talk) 22:34, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I made the Adopted Orphans page with your bot in mind. I'm hoping the "at least three valid links" criteria is acceptable because I don't count any "List of ..." or chronological articles as valid links. --JaGatalk 23:07, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, and any disambiguation page with an orphan tag automatically makes the list - since it's OK for a disambig to have zero links - and links from disambiguation pages are not counted as "valid links" in my formula. --JaGatalk 23:13, 29 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This is phenomenally useful. Great job! One tweak: When you submit a query to Lonelypages or Adopted Orphans, could the page display the total number. For example, where it says "Showing below up to 500 results starting with #501.", could this be changed to "Showing below up to 500 results starting with #501. Total: ####" or something like that? Also, why is Untagged Orphans limited to 5000? Why not the whole thing? (I'm going to guess performance reasons, in which case I understand.)--Aervanath (talk) 05:08, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks much for the comments, Aervanath. Performance is the answer to both questions. Thanks to the magic of SQL LIMIT queries, I can show you the first 500 in a list of, say, 600,000 orphans fairly quickly. If I also do a COUNT query to get a total count - determine exactly how many one- and two-link untagged orphans the page will display, for instance - page load performance drops off several seconds. What I could do is have the page mention how many orphans of so-and-so type were found during the last update, which would give you a ballpark figure, but the number would always be higher than the number that you can actually see in the page, because my page filters out articles up for deletion and articles that have been edited since the last update (to avoid false positives on the tagged/untagged front etc.). --JaGatalk 16:49, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
My bot excluded named list, date, and disambig pages already. However, since you exclude disambig pages based upon category, that is definitely a better approach. I've made the changes to use your list. I'll give it to Monday & if there is no objection by then, I'll start using it. -- JLaTondre (talk) 16:58, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
@JaGa: The counts weren't a big deal, really: just something that would be nice to have. Even a guesstimated figure (like the last COUNT query) would be nice; with the numbers we're talking about, I don't think anybody's going to complain if you say there are 777,893 and actually there are 787,009. :)--Aervanath (talk) 18:38, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Putting toolserver links on project page

Would anyone object if I placed links to Lonelypages and Untagged orphans on the project page? I was also thinking of taking out the link to Special:Lonelypages since it's no longer being updated. --JaGatalk 23:48, 2 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Signpost coverage

BTW, anyone see this? Ragesoss did some pretty amazing analysis of the data I provided him - maybe it will attract some new members. --JaGatalk 23:53, 2 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I saw that. Pretty cool.--Aervanath (talk) 06:02, 9 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Orphans by topic

It might be easier for users to tackle de-orphaning tasks if there was a way to get a list of orphans by topic. If one knows something about an area, they may be better able to de-orphan articles (already know what the article is about and know likely related topics). Is there a way to get a list of orphans within subcategories of a category, or orphans in a particular WikiProject?

If many of the orphans have WikiProjects indicated, it might be nice to have categories that contained all the orphans tagged with each WikiProject. Then WikiProject pages could link to the appropriate category (under todo items, e.g.) Which would help publicize building the web, and might get more participants. Thanks. Zodon (talk) 05:37, 3 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good idea. I'll look into it - but I'm not yet certain how the code would work out. --JaGatalk 22:42, 3 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This came up before, but I didn't really follow through. With JaGa's figures, it's become an extremely good idea, though. See #Sorting_orphans_by_project, above.--Aervanath (talk) 09:58, 8 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Don't know how I missed the other discussion. That tool is not as useful as what I was hoping for, since it only updates every few months (so probably only useful shortly after the listing comes out, and doesn't give the feeling of accomplishment that prompt feedback gives.) Zodon (talk) 02:58, 9 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but it is better than nothing. If you can find something better, that'd be awesome, though.--Aervanath (talk) 06:01, 9 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Here's a not-ready-for-primetime page I put together using WikiProject Biology as an example (and another for WikiProject Chemistry). It's based on Lonelypages, so it'd be updated daily. It would need more work before I released it - and I might be able to make it update on command - but what do you think? Could we sell this to other projects? BTW, it wouldn't work in this form for WikiProject Biography - they have over 160,000 orphans(!!) and it would take too long to sort by title. --JaGatalk 19:33, 10 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Neat.
  • I would guess that other projects might be interested. Quite a number of projects have requested Cleanup listings from the User:WolterBot (the bot that generates the reports mentioned in the thread above).
Even if other projects aren't interested, having lists by project/subject here might make de-orphaning less daunting. (I took a look at one of the chronological orphan listings, but recognized nothing. While it could be an educational adventure to dive into something I know nothing about, I feel more confident and motivated dealing with material in areas I know/care something about.)
Good point, will deal with below. --JaGatalk 06:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is sorting by title necessary? Certainly it makes for a neater output, but I would think one is more likely to just dive into such a listing to try to de-orphan things, rather than to find a particular entry. No particular reason we have to start with "A" to do the cleanup. (Looking at lonelypages one of the things I wished was that it didn't start the listing with all the punctuation articles. Would like to be able to at least start with words, or have a way to get a random start point for a listing, so I am not likely to duplicate what other's are working on.) So if it makes updates faster/takes less resources, might drop alphabetization (or make it optional).
I prefer sorting, because it gives one a sense of progress (yes, I just finished all the An- articles!). Otherwise you just feel adrift. I'm going to keep sorting if I can but am willing to abandon it if I must. --JaGatalk 06:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
One other way to get a topic which I didn't think of above was stub type.
  • Do you have any feel for whether most of the orphans are associated with a topic? (i.e. will the topic lists cover a fair proportion of the orphans, or will they just cover the edges and leave out a vast undifferentiated sea of orphans?)
No clue. --JaGatalk 06:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Could it easily be adapted to handle taskforces also? (e.g. based on a category)? (e.g. project biography especially might benefit from splitting into smaller chunks). Zodon (talk) 22:56, 10 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Good idea, see below. --JaGatalk 06:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

WolterBot Listing for orphans

Would it be worth requesting a listing for orphans from the WalterBot, like the Cleanup list for Notability? Evidently that type of listing requires a manual request (How to get report by cleanup type rather than by project). Not sure how useful the cleanup listing would be (might be too big?), and it sounds like it may be a while before a new database dump comes out. So not sure it is worth doing, but thought I would mention the possibility. Because it would be more up to date and not rely on orphan tags, JaGa's tool seems more useful, but don't know how much work it will be to get it to release form. Zodon (talk) 23:25, 10 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Policy on article tags

See Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Policy on Article Tags, where I have a right go at this project and my understanding of its intentions with respect to tagging articles. --Tagishsimon (talk) 04:06, 4 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

NOW we're getting to the heart of the matter

OK. We've got this huge list of 750,000+ orphaned articles. What do we do with it? I can fairly easily create Lonelypages sub-lists, like this one that only shows orphans that are members of WikiProject Biology (via the {{Biology}} template link). I could also create lists of orphans that belong to a certain category.

But before I go into a coding frenzy, I'd like to put together a plan that consistently makes sense for our project and others.

  1. What do we want, to make our own de-orphaning easier?
  2. What can we give to other projects that would be useful for them?

Ideally, I want to create a single page that can meet everyone's needs. For instance, the Biology page I created just accepts a parameter naming the project's membership template. Change the URL to http://toolserver.org/~jason/orphans_by_project.php?template=WikiProject_Baseball and you've got the list for WikiProject Baseball. (A whopping 2,678 orphans I might add)

The page works fine for WikiProject Biology. It's a bit large for WikiProject Baseball. And WikiProject Biography? Forget it. 160,000+ orphans.

So should we go for smaller lists, perhaps based on certain categories, as Zodon suggested? I'm not sure. I'd like to get input from members of other projects. They may not even want orphan lists, for all I know.

And, what do we want? Is there a way to sub-divide Lonelypages to make it more manageable/enjoyable? If we did create sub-lists for ourselves, what do we choose and how would we present those lists on the WikiProject Orphanage page?

I'm open to suggestions. --JaGatalk 06:40, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I tried it out a bit on WPMED (3000+ orphans) and WP Computing (5000+ orphans).
Just a quick thought of an addition - maybe add Link to "what links here" (covering article namespace) next to each item. (Or even a button that will open the article and what links here in separate tabs - if that is easy to do.) Zodon (talk) 10:47, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I think that the functionality you've added for sorting orphans by WikiProject is good; we can spam the different WikiProject pages and see who cares. I think another useful tool would be if that functionality could be widened so that one could find all the orphans that are in any arbitrary category, i.e. Category:The_Wire_writers (to pick a completely random sub-category, I found it by clicking around on Category:Categories). Then you could just go to the categories that you know something about (or want to learn about) and de-orphan as you go. It would give us a better idea of which topics have more orphans. (If the tool could also do a complete survey and do an orphans-by-category census every month or so, that'd be a help as well.)--Aervanath (talk) 13:39, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I think you're right, Aervanath. A template-page and a category-page should cover about everything. And the "What links here" thing shouldn't be difficult to put in. --JaGatalk 18:48, 11 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Does it handle redirects to project templates? i.e., If I give it WPMED it also finds pages that used a redirect to that template? (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:WPMED&hidetrans=1&hidelinks=1)
Yep. --JaGatalk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I created a template {{lonelypages}} to make it easier to create links to the tool. (Just trying to help out, feel free to modify/etc. if not the way want to do it.) Example of use: {{lonelypages|WP Medicine|project=WPMED}}
I like. Very much. I think this could be the way we sell orphan lists to other projects. BUT let's not do any distributing yet; I'm still working on the page. --JaGatalk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
As far as how to present this here, I was looking for some kind of template that would produce a listing by wikiproject. (Provide it with a template, it applies it to each wikiproject designator and spits out the result in a table or list.) Haven't found such yet. Without something like that, doing any kind of listing by project here might be more trouble than it's worth.
Maybe we could just make a "best of" list or something. --JaGatalk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a way to (easily) get it to tell how many items (were) in a list? (e.g. in a way that could be included on this project page, or on other project pages). (Not a high priority idea, doesn't have to be too up to date, but could be handy.) Zodon (talk) 00:14, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I avoid count queries when I can, due to performance. Maybe, but like you say, low priority. --JaGatalk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
If it was easy to provide an option to get a topical list that could be put into AWB (or a bot), that might be useful too. (I haven't used AWB much, but it occurred to me that adding the what links here might mess up extracting links for other uses.) 00:31, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
I already do this for Untagged orphans, but I don't think it's necessary for Lonelypages lists. De-orphaning is not a task I consider bot- or AWB- doable. Orphan tagging, on the other hand, is the quintessential bot task. --JaGatalk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Or quintessential vandalism. I think you have to demonstrate that such tags have any real utility. The 6,763 articles tagged in November 2006 probably think that the tags have served, for the last couple of years, only to disfigure the articles on which they've been placed. I really would wish this project to measure the depletion rate of articles tagged in the subcategories of Category:Orphaned articles before adding more such tags. Whereas building the encyclopedia is important - something we have a shared interest in doing - I really think the prime purpose of articles is to be read. The most important thing about an article should not be an orphan message. At best, if you must tag, please consider placing tags at the foot, rather than the head of the article. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:41, 12 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Orphaned articles are, almost by definition, the least-read articles in the encyclopedia, so I don't think we're going to be inconveniencing that many readers. If it's the only tag on the article, then it doesn't take up much space, either, before you get to the actual text. If it isn't the only tag, then that's why we have {{article issues}}, to condense the tags. Any way you look at it, the orphan tags are a minor inconvenience.--Aervanath (talk) 17:10, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(Outdent) OK, I've revamped Lonelypages to now accept template and/or cat parameters. The template has to be in the article's talk page, but the category can be in the article or the talk page (to accommodate Zodon's excellent idea concerning taskforce categories). So now:

For the record, Lonelypages can accept both a template and a cat tag in the same request, but I recommend against this most of the time, since page render performance has been poor for this scenario. But there may be times when it is useful. Zodon, would you be interested in tweaking your template to fit the new Lonelypages? --JaGatalk 22:13, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

[Note: the following item was composed before I saw JaGa's post above (22:13). So it relates to the items preceding that post. Zodon]
Thanks JaGa.
I added a note to the template indicating that the tool is not ready for release yet (just in case anybody stumbles on the template).
I only just noticed the related topics link on the orphan template, assume something like that might also be on the listing tool.
In case it wasn't clear - I was not suggesting that a count be included in the listing, but rather that there be a separate query that could produce just a count. (Which could be updated on an infrequent basis - might be handy for keeping track of project status, address some of Tagishsimon's concerns about tracking, etc.) Zodon (talk) 22:33, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Lonelypages template

I have partially updated the lonelypages template, it now recognizes the category= parameter. At the moment it won't let you use both category and project (take a little more tweaking to fix that) Would it be better to not support that usage for performance reasons? I will see about adding parameters to control article selection (tagged or not, number of links, etc.). Zodon (talk) 23:30, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! I would be A-OK with not allowing use of both parameters for a single query in your template. I almost didn't make it possible for LP itself, but I decided to go ahead so we'd have it if we realize later we need it. --JaGatalk 23:35, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I am a little unclear about what the priorityOnly parameter does. I think it means that when it is yes, count links from lists when deciding whether to list something as an orphan. Is that right? The description on the page sounds sort of like do not list things that have at least one link from a list. (i.e. something with just one link, that being from a list, would not be included) Thanks. Zodon (talk) 23:57, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It is very confusing, and I apologize for that. If priorityOnly is "y", LP will only display orphans that have no list/chronological links. It doesn't affect how LP counts orphan links, it only affects which orphans LP decides to display. So an article with zero mainspace links and one "List of ..." link is stored as a zero-link orphan, but is not displayed if priorityOnly is "y". Under no circumstances would that article be displayed as a one-link orphan. --JaGatalk 00:30, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you JaGa, think I understand it now. I added a parameter (on_lists) to the template. Please take a look at the description on {{lonelypages}} and see if you think it is clear and I described it right (and fix or suggest changes as needed). (on_lists=hide translates to priorityOnly=y, any other value of on_lists is ignored). I used a different parameter name to try to make it easier to describe, but we can change it if the description isn't clear.
I might add a couple more parameters, but think the template is mostly done. As far as I know it works. I hope people here will test it a bit. Once the underlying tool is ready to be released we can remove the draft warning from the template documentation and announce it's availability. Zodon (talk) 09:40, 15 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, this is nice. A template never even occurred to me. So far, it's been testing out perfectly, and I think the documentation covers everything and is clear. I was glad to see you didn't add the offset parameter - that would just slow page rendering down even more. Does anyone have any ideas on how to contact every project with an offer of this template? I asked at the WikiProject Council but as yet have received no reply. --JaGatalk 17:29, 15 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Couldn't think of any reason the offset parameter would be useful, so wasn't figuring to include it. If it would slow things down - even better to leave it out.
I've also been toying with idea of template that will give links to articles in a WikiProject by importance (using the categories).
Don't know about publicity - could try dropping a note to the Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/About and see if they willing to include a mention of the tool? Zodon (talk) 00:50, 16 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Addbot is back!

Just like to announce to the Orphanage that I just spent the last hourish remaking User:Addbot's orphaning stuff :P. The bot now uses the handy new pages made by JAGA :). The bot now tags about 15-20 Orphans a miniute (when running). Take a look at its contribs if you want :). And if you see anything going wrong please tell me :P. Thanks everyone that made this possible or bugged me. ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 12:23, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Awesome. :)--Aervanath (talk) 17:10, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Outdated instructions

The instructions at What if I can't de-orphan it?, saying to replace {{orphan}} with {{do-attempt}}, are outdated; {{do-attempt}} has been redirected to {{orphan}}. Should I just remove the whole section? rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 17:18, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're right. Aervanath did the merge, so I'd like to hear his input, but I'd say yes. --JaGatalk 18:16, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I tried to update the instructions to match the documentation for orphan. Seems might be worth keeping the instructions once updated. Zodon (talk) 21:53, 13 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I forgot to update this page when I merged it. We still want that section, but the instructions will be different. (Even though it actually works the same way with the old instructions.)--Aervanath (talk) 03:15, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I've updated the instructions in the template section, too.--Aervanath (talk) 03:25, 14 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Stop tagging taxa stubs as orphans

Resolved
 – told to post here, not there, there not here

That's enough. They're stubs. By the nature of stubs that's all they are is stubs. They're orphans, they're underreferenced, they have few links to from other articles, that's it. They're stubs. When the tag is more text than the article itself it's just a bull shit tag. So stop it. And if a human editor reverts you, don't make the bot go back and do it again. I have work to do on plant articles, none of which should be reverting bots. Stop. --KP Botany (talk) 23:05, 15 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In fact, just back off of organisms completely unless and until you've discussed the usefulness of these tags with organism articles. Many of the articles will be orphans, because the intent is to have articles on all named organisms. These are already linked at the appropriate level in their taxoboxes, and may not need any additional links from other articles, because this may just be crowding lists of other articles into the genus article, the family article, the order article, depending upon whether the article is on a species or genus and a plant or an animal. This doesn't make for readability or usefulness. So, discuss this first with the human editors of the articles. Maybe it would be useful, but, until then, cut it out. --KP Botany (talk) 23:09, 15 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Just to clarify - orphans has nothing to do with how many links an article has to other articles - it is how many links other articles make to this article. So it is not redundant with stub (stub status does not imply orphan, or vice-versa). (From post above and some of your edit summaries, appears that might not be clear.)
This forum is not about a bot. It looks like the actions you are objecting to are by User:Addbot. So the portions of your suggestion relating to modifications to how the bot operates (e.g. that it not re-introduce orphan tags) might be better addressed there. (The underlying goals, etc. of course are apropos here.)
It appears that some of the articles you are referring to are not linked to even by their genus article (e.g. Aspidistra nicolai, Arabis kennedyae) If there are no links to the article, makes it much harder to find (and more likely that somebody will duplicate effort). Zodon (talk) 00:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Not all genus articles have lists of all species, some genera have hundreds of species. If a tag takes up more room than the article, it's pointless, and if a bot is adding it, then the bot's operator says to post here, and you say post there, that's just wikibullshit. No, the orphan tag at the top of the article is NOT helpful. And, yes, I know what "what links here" means, I just put "to" rather than from above. --KP Botany (talk) 00:44, 16 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Deleting an image

Is there anyway I can delete an image I previously uploaded? It's not being used on any articles. (It's been orphaned for a few years, I assumed WP would have deleted it by now.) JimmmyThePiep (talk) 01:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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