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Candidates for speedy deletion

Status Won't be implemented
Description It would be interesting to see if there is interest in covering Speedy deletions. Granted most of what is sent there is crap and would be deleted without hours, but mayhap we could keep this in mind with a later revision of AAbot (possibly with admin rights), as discussed here.
Requested by Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 09:11, 19 February 2009 (UTC)


I don't think that this can reasonably be implemented. Most speedy candidates are deleted within hours, if not minutes, much too fast for the bot to capture them. Once they're deleted, they no longer appear in the categories for all I know, so even with admin rights there's not much to be done. --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:07, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia categories in need of attention (and subcategories)

Status Won't be implemented (though possibly an addition to WolterBot.)
Description Category:Wikipedia categories in need of attention and its subcategories could be covered by AAbot. Might have an initial explosion of activity however, since there are a lot of them in the "underpopulated" category.
Requested by Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 09:37, 19 February 2009 (UTC)


To me, this seems more like a cleanup category. There's no defined workflow and no defined end date; and I don't know for how long these tags would stay on the categories. Any experience? --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:04, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
None at all. I only know that "in need of attention" usually means it doesn't get any unless WikiProject Categories run through them, and they need all the help they can. And BTW, I only mean to cover the actual categories in there, not the articles in the categories. For example if category Category:Hockey is part of Category:Wikipedia categories in need of attention or one of its four sub-cats (Underpopulated categories, Very large categories, Overpopulated stub categories, Categories lacking a description), then a message would appear in Article alerts.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 20:59, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
Maybe the cleanup listing is a better place for this.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 03:33, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
I'll treat is as a possible addition to WolterBot. --B. Wolterding (talk) 21:06, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Contracted form for banners

Status Won't be implemented
Description A few WikiProjects like to include important information on particular articles (e.g. AfD, FAC, ...) displayed in their project banner to maximise publicity. This would require a contracted form with only certain components visible.
Requested by MartinMsgj 07:52, 23 February 2009 (UTC)


If you're speaking of having a "mini alerts" solely for AFD/RfC/etc... transcluded in the banner, I really doubt this is appropriate. There would be a reasonable alternative however, which would be to link to the the article alerts from the banner with a small message such as "WikiProject Foobar subscribes to Article alerts. Click here to see today's article alerts for WikiProject Foobar." Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 09:46, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
"I really doubt this is appropriate" - why do you say that? It seems that it would not be hard to produce a page with a subset of the components. Martinmsgj 09:50, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
What I mean is that a project with 3,000 articles in its scope doing means that there would be 3,000 talk pages which would include text mostly unrelated to the article. For example, if an article in WikiProject Physics such as BRST Quantization is being nominated for FA, then it doesn't make much sense that the talk page at Isaac Newton, and every other article in the scope of WikiProject Physics knows about it. Especially since less intrusive methods can be employed, such as giving a link to the articles alerts for the project, rather than transcluding them. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 10:09, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
I know that this feature sounds like a good idea, but it isn't. The Article Alerts pages should never be transcluded into project banners. As to "why", the short answer is that it causes technical problems. The long answer has been discussed before. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:36, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Cleanup/POV/cites etc.? If so...

Status Won't be implemented (see however User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings)
Description Is there an alert process covering cleanup/POV/cites needed etc.? If so, please consider implementing them for GA & GAN. far less likely to be needed for FA and FAC?
Requested by Ling.Nut (talk—WP:3IAR) 04:33, 26 February 2009 (UTC)


Consider User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings instead. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:42, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
I went there and asked about this... thanks!Ling.Nut (talk—WP:3IAR) 05:34, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
A task for WolterBot. Report is currently being generated. --B. Wolterding (talk) 20:42, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Alerting projects when articles are tagged with the banner

Status Won't be implemented
Description It would be nice to have it alert the project whenever a new article was tagged with the project's banner.
Requested by Wrad (talk) 22:11, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


I think this is somewhat outside the scope of this bot. Especially since bot runs can add 1000s+ articles in one day (although these are usually once in a blue moon events). You can check the WP 1.0 logs, and perhaps ask for a seperate bot to build a "new article" list at WP:BOTREQ. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 22:23, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
On the other hand, I can definitely see how this would be useful to have in the alerts and it could automatically be rolled out to all subscribing wikiprojects on once, so adoption of the "new articles notice" would be really high. Perhaps AAbot could use the WP 1.0 logs? Two new section could be added, one "New articles" and the other "Removed articles". Then we could have "Assesment improved", "Assessment lowered", as well as "Renamed/Moved articles". I rather like the idea, and we'd just have to make it clear that these are not updated on a daily basis, but rather depend on User:WP 1.0 bot. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 22:38, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
As Headbomb already said, this fall outside the bot's scope. It's also a problem on the technical side - in particular for project banners, there's no way of determining from the database when they have been added. So the only possibility is to keep track of all article-project relationships (these are millions) and see when something changes. That's what the WP 1.0 bot does, with lots of effort. I think that the WP1.0 bot has recently been rewritten, or at least it was announced that it would be rewritten; I'm not sure about the current status, but maybe it already has the feature you want. I would leave the feature there; let's not build dependencies between bots where they can be avoided. --B. Wolterding (talk) 01:16, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Moving the "About this report" section below the "Alerts" section or removing the "About this report" section

Status Withdrawn
Description I understand this is a new tool, and you want to appeal to everyone, but when I click on Article alerts, I want them there, not having to scroll down to find them. Because there is no table of contents, this is even harder. The Alerts section should be put up top because that is what the users subscribed to the alerts for. They know what it can do, they want to see the actual alerts, and scrolling down is annoying. Not all browsers are extremely wide to accomadate this. Thankyou
Requested by  The Windler talk  00:58, 21 March 2009 (UTC)


If it bothers you that much couldn't you just transclude the alerts on a user subpage and not worry about them? I think if someone is looking at the actual "/Article alerts" subpage they should be told what to expect/what the bot supports. That section also lets me know when support is added for new items, because it would get added to the list. §hepTalk 02:17, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Then why not move it below the actual alerts?  The Windler talk  02:28, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
Because then you end up wrapping the alerts in other information. §hepTalk 02:33, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
What do you mean?  The Windler talk  02:42, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
If the project takes full advantage of the features, moving the columns below the alerts would wrap up the alerts. See [1] for what I mean. §hepTalk 02:52, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
I don't see any difference.  The Windler talk  03:41, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
??? Instead of "Header-Description-Alerts" you would have "Header-Alerts-Description". §hepTalk 03:44, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
So whats the big deal. If wrapping is the problem, use <br clear=all> but perhaps we need another opinion. How would you transclud it anyway?  The Windler talk  03:48, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
"So whats the big deal." That's what I've been asking. :D You transclude it just like anything else. {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Blah/Article alerts}} §hepTalk 04:09, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
But then I still have to scroll down to get to the alerts. Thats why we should move the alerts above to the very top, minus a header. I don't have the luxury of a big screen and therefore, I have to scroll down this long list that is informative yes, but not what I wanted to see. I wanted to see the alerts, straight away. Thats what the page is for anyway. If we subscribed, then we know what it does, it's written all over the page Wikipedia:Article alerts, all you need to know about the process behind it. What the article alerts page should be is the actual alerts.  The Windler talk  04:16, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
No you don't? You shouldn't have to scroll at all. What alerts are you talking about specifically? §hepTalk 04:18, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
Any one of the alerts pages made by the bot. For example, I go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Ohio/Article alerts, and the most bottom line I see, is Featured article candidates. I have to scroll down, to get to the actual alerts. I don't want to see about the report. I want to see the alerts. Straight away, it is a burden to scroll. Perhaps a simple solution is to keep the /Article alerts page as it is and have the alerts section transcluded to a page for example Wikipedia:WikiProject Ohio/Article alerts/Raw and then you can see the alerts just by themselves no heading, no about. Just the minor heading of Proposed deletion: blah blah. Then also, you can transclude it onto a template, such as {{WPRU Announcements}}.  The Windler talk  04:31, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

(←) You can already do that. See below: §hepTalk 04:33, 21 March 2009 (UTC) {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Ohio/Article alerts}}

He, he. Amazing, thankyou.  The Windler talk  04:36, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
... §hepTalk 04:38, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
You can archive/decline this section now, I withdraw my proposal.  The Windler talk  04:47, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Category:Recently revised

Status Declined
Description At first I thought Category:Recently revised was more in the scope of B.Wolterding's cleanup listing, but the temporary character of this "workflow" suggest that it is more suitable for AABot than the cleanup listing. Also since this is set up in a category, it should be fairly straightfoward to add to Article Alerts
Requested by Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 09:27, 19 February 2009 (UTC)


It's not quite clear to me why this has a "temporary character" - the list is quite short, maybe because the tag is largely unknown, but is someone systematically updating/removing these tags? How long would they stay on an article? --B. Wolterding (talk) 17:22, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
Absolutely no idea. The "recently revised" tag strikes me as temporary character because if you read this, then in theory this tag was placed not too long ago. But it could be that these tags are all 250+ years old. Let's see how the category changes in the next few weeks. Right now there is 49 entries in it. If it changes, then we'll know its at least active-ish. Or maybe one of the bots could add parameters such as date=November2009 to the templates, leave it to Wolterbot. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 20:59, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
Category has been overhauled to use "date" parameters. I think it's Wolterbot friendly.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:19, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Custom categories

Status On hold
Description Could the bot be extended include custom categories? For example say WP Chemistry is interested in monitoring a hypothetical what is covered by the "Chemist biography taskforce" (from the Biography banner) and "History of Chemistry taskforce" (from the History of Science banner). It would then add something like |extracats=Chemist biography articles, History of Chemistry taskforce articles" to the subscription template.
Requested by Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:18, 6 March 2009 (UTC)


This can actually be done with the current version. Simply create a new category ("Articles watched by WikiProject Chemistry" or similar), and modify the corresponding project banners so that articles are sent to this category. There are millions of possibilities of combining these articles, and I think that categorization is much more flexible here than adapting the bot to any possible situation one could think of. --B. Wolterding (talk) 01:37, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Not quite sure what exactly it is you mean by that, but modifying banners can be a real PITA, and many project uses the metabanner. I don't know what exactly the change would be to AAbot, but extending it to cover more than one category doesn't seem all that hard. Could be done in two steps a) Retrieve article list from the categories, b) remove duplicates. But again I don't know how it works, so I could be dead wrong about the hardness of implementing this.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 01:45, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Of course this is technically possible, but I would have to modify all my SQL statements that retrieve articles for projects (and there are quite a few). But also, I feel that this would open Pandora's box. There are just too many possible combinations - include articles that have a project tag A, or are in category B, but exclude those in C, except when... etc.etc. In my opinion, the clean solution is to require users to fill a category, that's easy to understand, and can be modified by projects at any time without requiring bot changes. --B. Wolterding (talk) 01:59, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Alright, let's put this on hold for now, and see if other people request it or have problems with shoving everything in a single category.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 07:19, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Transwiki

Status Won't be implemented (but possibly a task for WolterBot)
Description Would it be possible to cover articles that get put into the first 7 or so categories here?
Requested by §hepTalk 00:52, 8 March 2009 (UTC)


Technically that would be possible, but to me these seem rather like long-term cleanup categories. I just picked some articles from there, and they seem to date back to at least October last year. --B. Wolterding (talk) 01:40, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
A task for Wolterbot?Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 01:45, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Maybe yes. In fact, all you have to do is to place these categories in Category:Wikipedia cleanup categories, and WolterBot will automatically pick them up, once it gets a new dump. --B. Wolterding (talk) 01:53, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Okay. Thanks, §hepTalk 20:30, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Make bot more watchlist friendly

Status Won't be implemented
Description I have the physics article alert page on my watch list. Currently the only information I received is (Updating Article Alerts). This is not that useful to me since the list is updated almost everyday anyway. I suggest that each article that is added to the list have its own update and description. (An example is: Jello is added to FA.) The extra couple clicks it takes to get this information now makes the watchlist feature not near as useful as it can be. An alternative idea is to have a longer summary.
Requested by TStein (talk) 14:58, 27 March 2009 (UTC)


Well individual summaries gives a lot of edits for the very active projects, so that's a no. Better edits summaries should be possible however. There's a limit of 255 characters, so they can't be too explicit. But a good middle could be achieved such as +2 PROD, -1 PROD, +3 AFD, +4 GAN, -2 RM, +1 DYK for example.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 16:34, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Very active projects may have a fair amount of edits, but that does not invalidate my request, IMO. First by self-similarity, the number of projects for which this option is useful is probably much larger then for those for which it would be a burden. Second, for those projects for which it would be a burden, there is not as much incentive to watch the page. (Just checking the main page everyday for diffs will get the same results, since it is going to change every day.) Third, what really is the worst case scenario here? I can't imagine it being much worse than 20 or so a day. The watchlist has an option to fold all of the posts under one main post that you can expand by clicking on an arrow. (This should be the default imho). Fourth why can't it be an option for the sites that want it. For me at least this option will make the bot quite a bit more useful. TStein (talk) 19:01, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
Another option that may work is PROD:(+Jello,+SPAM,-Son of Sam);AFD(+Albert Einstein). There are a number of options that can be used to fit it under 255 characters and still get 10 or more articles listed. My guess is that 10 or more articles would cover a lot of use cases. TStein (talk) 19:12, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
In the meantime, you can use diffs to get the best summary possible. It's what I personally do.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 05:49, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm not convinced. This all seems like a large effort to implement, as there are hundreds of different types of changes that might be announced in the edit summary. On the other hand, it would be a lot of effort for almost no effect - as clicking on the "diff" link will already today give you almost the same functionality. When using WP:POPUPS, you don't even need to click on the diff link, a mouse-over suffices. --B. Wolterding (talk) 22:13, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Ok, I can see that. It is easy for me to say that the gain is worth the effort when I don't go through the effort. I was unaware of WP:POPUPS. It sounds like a really great script at least in principle. If it works for slow connections then it makes this feature request mute. Diffs by itself is not near as good since you still have to take the time to wait for the page to load then scan through the non-reader friendly diffs (diffs are not made to be summaries) then click back and wait for the page to reload, then scan back to find out where on the watch list you were. It doesn't take that much time, but when you are trying to go through a list of 30 or more articles it can be irritating enough not to bother to click. TStein (talk)

Processing dust bunnies

Status Won't be implemented (see however User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings)
Description Would it be possible to parse the list of dusty articles and post alerts accordingly? Same goes for orphans—I realize there are quite a few of them, but if alerts could be posted at least about the most recent ones, that could be helpful. Yet another possible alert feed could be set for most recent dead-end pages.
Requested by Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 13:14, April 2, 2009 (UTC)


I think these both are not really workflows - entries do not get "closed" after some time; rather these are lengthy (and dusty?) backlogs that would let the alert lists grow too long. I don't think they should be covered by ArticleAlertbot. See however User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for a bot that covers the dead-end pages backlog, among others. (It does however not cover the "dusty pages" backlog at this time - one might debate whether this is really a "cleanup category".) --B. Wolterding (talk) 22:09, 3 April 2009 (UTC)


New Articles reporting

Status Won't be implemented
Description The bot would look for new articles that are tagged with a specific Wikiproject and report them. This would help in easier assessing and faster maintenance.
Requested by Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 00:07, 26 July 2009 (UTC)


Won't be implemented. This is are already covered in the WP 1.0 logs. If you have a question about them, I can give you some pointers however. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:03, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

download article as EPub

Status Invalid
Description Summary: allow users to download articles converted into the EPub format

We can currently download Wikipedia articles as PDF. Of course, this is a very useful format. However, with the emergence and growing popularity of e-books and e-book readers, such as the Sony Reader or Kindle, of many different form factors, it might be a good "future-proofing" feature to allow users to download articles converted into the EPub format. Of course, many e-book readers can also view PDFs, but they tend not to offer the best viewing experience due to small screen sizes.

Requested by Quillaja (talk) 23:31, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


This request does not seem to be related to Article Alerts. You might try WP:VP instead. --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:16, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team release version selections

Would it be possible to include in the bot a listing of the various articles of the project that have been included or are being considered for inclusion in one or more release versions of wikipedia?

Status Won't be implemented
Description Including those articles relevant to the project which have been or are considered for being included in on or more of the release versions of wikipedia. It would help out the 1.0 team a lot if the various relevant projects knew which of their articles were included in the release versions.
Requested by John Carter (talk) 21:30, 1 March 2009 (UTC)


Might be possible on the technical side - but what I wonder is the following: Article alerts are meant to be display articles that need (temporary) attention, with some kind of well-defined end date. (An AfD for example is closed after 5 days or so; a GA nomination closes after some time as well.) The release versions of Wikipedia, on the other hand, are supposed to stay. For distribution of rather static lists, it might be better to use other means. (See e.g. User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for cleanup-flagged articles.) The alerts lists would fill up otherwise and lose their main function. --B. Wolterding (talk) 22:07, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Good point, thank you. Would it be possible to limit the lists to those articles "on hold" (generally for quality reasons) or being considered for inclusion? Often times, articles in either group are important enough, but may be lacking in some other way and be most in need of attention. John Carter (talk) 22:19, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Where would I find these articles? --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:19, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Add well-formatted archive of previous events

Status Won't be implemented
Description Add a permanent archive like this one from WP:CL - i.e. a list of articles together with a short bunch of links to previous notable events (e.g. AfD, DRV, AfD 2, ...).

This would need to respect grandfathered or human-added links (e.g. VfDs from back when they were called that) and increment the number appropriately (e.g. for 2nd AfD).

Requested by Sai Emrys ¿? ✍ 21:58, 25 October 2009 (UTC)


This "archive feature" was discussed already a while ago - and I decided not to implement it. In particular, the bot does not honour any manual additions or modifications to its output pages. This by design, not by accident, and it has proven to be quite efficient. --B. Wolterding (talk) 23:25, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Blanking detection

Status Won't be implemented
Description Add page blanking / blank-with-redirect to detected events
Requested by Sai Emrys ¿?✍ 22:17, 25 October 2009 (UTC)


List articles where expert attention is requested

Status Won't be implemented
Description The {{expert}} and {{expert-subject}} tags are quite useful but they only are added to a category with no further sorting by topic. The bot could thus generate a listing with all articles that are tagged with these tags and post them to the WikiProjects in question. For example, if one tags an article about a professional wrestler with {{expert}}, the bot could add the article to the listing generated for WP:PW.
Requested by SoWhy 20:47, 11 February 2010 (UTC)


Won't implement. This is covered by the Cleanup Listings.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 22:08, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
Except that Wolterbot is dead. Rd232 talk 11:19, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
Wolterbot ran yesterday. Also ArticleAlertbot is coded by B. Wolterding, which runs Wolterbot, so yeah... Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:51, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
Hurray! Long live Wolterbot. I've updated the news. Rd232 talk 12:14, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
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