Category talk:Category needed/Archive 1

As a new user, I am eager to help manage Wikipedia. What can I do here to help with categories? -- CaptainXel

I have emptied this category as of today. Please feel free to let me know if it is filling again. -- Rachel 01:10, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

I've edited and cleaned out this category now. There were about 100 articles, but now there are 4 (that cannot be removed due to the fact that these page list the template.) --Gary King 04:37, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Cleaned up again; several dozen pages, I guess.

Once we categorized an article can we remove it's template? Deathawk 00:20, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

If you feel that it's been properly categoried, yes. Sometime people put the template on articles that have top level categories that need to be push down to the lowest level, like football_(soccer) -> football teams in north england (I don't know if these cats exist, it's just a example) --Rayc 05:42, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

This category still needs more cleanup. Please help and contribute to this category! I feel like I'm the only one here. Thanks! --Gary King 04:40, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

It does feel that way now and then doesn't it. But the list is getting smaller. Slowly.... :) Garion96 (talk) 15:39, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm here too, but I usually wikify the articles and check the original contributor's edit history for uncategorized articles and do those while I'm at it. So I don't always get a lot of the tagged ones done, but I'm working at it. There's just a ton of uncategorized articles, and more every day. NickelShoe 03:51, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Just found this page. I'll try to help with the fight. :) Defkkon 01:48, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I've been trying to catagorize some links, but could use some help! mellery 18:37, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Would it be helpful if I created a list of long articles with lots of links that dont have a category? Martin 11:18, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I guess so. But it would be more work to remove a done article from that list. Now it's just rm the uncat tag. Wouldn't it be possible to have all uncat articles tagged with the {{uncat}} tag. At least that way one can see some progress. Or would that just be too big? How much if wikipedia is categorized btw? Garion96 (talk) 04:51, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't know if a list would be worth the effort. Categorization isn't all that labor-intensive, so it seems like the energy would be better spent actually categorizing articles. But I don't really know.

As far as how much is uncategorized--it's a lot. A really inadequate sample of five random articles gave one uncategorized. And we get a lot of new uncategorized articles every day, is the thing. NickelShoe 05:56, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Creating the list is very easy, also, it would only include long+wikified articles (i.e. ignores all the stubs and rubbish), but it was only a thought. If anyone decides this is a good idea then drop a note on my talk page, thanks. Martin 11:34, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

I would like said list. Long articles are the ones that really need categories, becasue they are the biggest loss when people can't find them. Also they are likly to be older. -Ravedave 15:12, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

See User:Bluemoose/Uncategorised good articles. thanks Martin 17:05, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Flippin sweet, thank you Mr.Moose may your antlers never fall off. - Ravedave 18:08, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Today I fixed a typo where every page that had Template:MiniAWFP would show as needing a category. Many of the pages still appear in this category and may continue to do so until updated. -- Reinyday, 01:22, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

For some categories of people by nationality (for example, Category:Economists by nationality), there exist categories for both British and English fill-in-the-blanks. This seems odd to me; if someone is British but not English, wouldn't there be other subcategories of British in which to file them? Should British just be a holding category for subcategories, or what? And should both the British and English categories be under Fill-in-the-blanks by nationality, or just British?--ragesoss 05:06, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

In those cases, the "English...", "Welsh...", and "Scottish..." categories should just be subcategories of the "British fill-in-the-blanks" category, which is the only one that should be in the "Fill-in-the-blanks by nationality" category. (I suppose there might be categories dealing with specific historical periods where this wouldn't apply.) People can go directly into a "British..." category as well, since it's sometimes hard to determine whether they should be in one of the more specific subcategories. Aitch Eye 06:58, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I hereby declare that I own W through Z, because it's nice to have a task that isn't impossible (i.e. keeping the whole category clean). Anyone else wanna stake a letter or two? Melchoir 22:23, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Well I don't like the term "own" on Wikipedia, but that's another rant entirely. Anyway, you've inspired me, I've gone through the D's and will go through the E's soon, and see how keeping up with new additions there goes. I agree, keeping things like this managed work better if a lot of people take a small bite out of the job. --W.marsh 00:09, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Okay, bad wording; you know what I mean! Melchoir 01:12, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I must confess to being a guerrilla categorizer, I pick articles from the list that aren't in the focus letter grouping !--Yendor1958 09:45, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

As am I, although in my case it's because usually the letter in question is empty by the time I get there. Reyk 06:01, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Yendor: Me too! :) Gflores^Talk 20:09, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

On the other hand, now that the category is clean, perhaps it isn't impossible to keep it that way. Melchoir 23:43, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I just wonder if anyone thought about the irony of a category for things that need a category...hmmm... :) —This unsigned comment was added by 156.12.68.116 (talk • contribs) . 14:45, 29 March 2006

If somebody hadn't noticed, it must be because it is blindingly obvious. ;) Celcius 11:34, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Okay, an editor has been adding pages to this category en masse, totally within process and I have talked with him about it and he wants to continue. I'm impressed at the work being done to keep the backlog managed even with that going on, it's probably harder work than when myself and another editor cleared the backlog about 2 months ago.

Anyway, what I think we should discuss is the purpose of this category. Is it a place for all uncategorized pages? Is it a place where editors can request an article be categorized, and have a reasonable expectation that it will be done within a few days? The latter is similar to the {{stub}} tag right now, where it will be sorted seemingly within a few hours. Whereas, without people making herculean efforts here, the current backlog can't really be handled with items being added by bot.

And I think it would be nice if this category could be kept basically empty, and requests handled quickly. To that end, I think we should create a new category for pages where categorization isn't specifically being requested, rather, a user is using a bot to tag many pages as uncategorized in general. A logical name would be Category:Uncategorized pages. Category:Category needed could become just for specific requests, and hopefully between myself and the other people interested, we could keep it managed.

Thoughts? And again, I'm not calling out the editor using the bot, like I say I have no problem with that... we just might want to think about doing things a bit more efficiently. --W.marsh 03:32, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't sound unreasonable, although the templates will need to be changed accordingly. Whenever I spot an uncategorised page, I stick {{uncat}} on it. Now that AWB can create lists from special pages, it's my intention to go through Special:Uncategorizedpages every so often and bung the {{uncat}} template on. I'm sure other users will do the same, so I think the relevant category - whether it's this one or Category:Uncategorized pages - will see a considerable growth in the near future. Waggers 21:24, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I think that all pages without categories should be giving the {uncat} tag. That way, any bored editors (like me!) can spend some time reducing the list. If it is getting unmanagable, then perhaps we should split it by month, like the {cleanup} and {wikify} lists Bluap 14:24, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, you're probably right. But really we should require the people who actually create these zillions of articles to add a category when they're submitting the article... they're generally pretty good at it, they just don't realize they need to do it. --W.marsh 14:26, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

For me, part of the problem witht this category is that some articles are so desperate for a cleanup that it's almost impossible to find a category. Perhaps it would be handy if the {{uncat}} tag wouldn't be on articles needing wikification or cleanup. The downside of that I guess is that some people find those articles through the categories and clean them up. Garion96 (talk) 14:38, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Replying to Bluap - you do realise you can just look at Special:Uncategorizedpages, don't you? It's unfeasibly depressing, so I don't ... I work through Category:Category needed instead, leaving out the few I can't work out what to do with (though usually adding a {{context}} if it's complete gibberish). --JennyRad 16:38, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I didn't realise that. The link from the Community Portal comes here... Bluap 17:43, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Is it undesireable to put the {{catneeded}} tag on stubs, or should I keep doing this? I thought that perhaps it is implied that a stub needs categories added, though categorisation is a rather cliquey thing in my eyes, that is, akin to stub sorting. Apologies if I'm touching a nerve, just voicing my opinion to explain my reasons for asking. BigNate37_T·C 23:56, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

It is absolutely okay to put {{uncat}} on stubs, and is even recommended. Every Wikipedia article, stub or not, should have a category. See guidelines at Wikipedia:Categorization, Wikipedia:Articles for creation and Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles. --Elonka 00:32, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

What about articles that are categorized as stubs? For example, I was working on categorizing Darth Tater. Is the toys stubs category sufficient? Lawilkin 15:35, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

In that case, I would add another category than just a stub category, yes. Either put {{uncat}} on it, or put it in root categories like Category:Toys and Category:Star Wars. Though my guess is that if you dig a bit, I'm sure there will be categories for Star Wars satire and/or Star Wars toys somewhere. Or in other words: The stub category may keep an article out of the "Special" list that flags "articles without categories", but it's not a longterm solution. Ultimately, the article should be expanded past a stub, and it will need to be eventually categorized anyway. Putting {{uncat}} on it alerts other editors who enjoy categorizing (like me, heh) that an article needs help. If you're looking for a hard and fast answer though like, "Should every single stub article also have "uncat" on it?" I'd say no, that would be overkill, and a waste of someone's time to go through marking stub articles uncategorized. If they were interested in that kind of routine endeavor, I'd say instead to find the root category for that stub (like Category:Toys), and then put that category on each of the stubs, rather than taking the time to flag each and every one with {{uncat}}. But if you just happen to be working on one particular stub, and notice that it doesn't have categories yet, and you're not sure what categories to put on it, then sure, flag it as uncategorized. --Elonka 23:05, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Remember that stub tags are never intended to be permanent. Over at WP:WSS we talk about stub categories and "permcats". It is important that a stub gets both a stub category and a permanent category, as when it is expanded, some editors will simply remove the stub tag without noting whether a new permanent category is needed to replace it. Grutness...wha? 22:15, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

The size of an article does not in any way affect the number of categories it belongs to. Also, the {{uncat}} template is used (ironically) for categorizing the page. What do you think would happen if we stopped putting {{Unreferenced}} on stubs? I'd say that on any page you see there should be at least one non-hidden category. --vgmddg (look | talk | do) 23:15, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

There is now a specific template for this: Template:Uncategorized stub. -- œ^™ 03:46, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

I've identified this project as a candidate for material to be analyzed by Wikipedia Integration methodology. Please feel welcome to offer suggestions and feedback. WP:ʃ Cwolfsheep 16:49, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

What categories are we putting on articles.Geo. 18:32, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

If you're able to enlist enough people to get involved, perhaps the most effective way to keep this category under control would be to divide up letters: say, one person might be responsible for A and B, another for C and D, and on and so forth, then each person would check in as often as they feasibly could (say, somewhere between once a week to once a day) to categorize whatever was new under their letters. It would certainly be more manageable, and get done a lot faster. Bearcat 02:26, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree; thus far, I've been working on the letters P, Q, and U-Z. Thinking about T, but not sure if I'm up to it just now. By the way, someone has been making excellent progress in the last 24 hours or so -- the tally is now at 583. -- Visviva 05:27, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, we have been sort of doing that informally it looks like. Maybe we could do like a board where you can sign up for a letter like:

• A: Recury
• B: SomeoneElse

...etc. Recury 14:53, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

We've tried this before but kind of lost steam... anyway I'm doing "F" right now. Will probably pick up some more if other people get going. --W.marsh 01:25, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I've been catting a few. It would be nice if there was a page comparing articles up for deletion with this category. That way we could concentrate on articles likely to be here next week. Yomangani 11:48, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I like this idea, and actually enjoy seeing who else is helping on which letter (like I'd been helping out with U-Z too, until that got knocked down, at which point I switched to K, which every so often I'm actually able to keep clean <grin>). I also once tracked down someone who was working on the upstream of one of the letters (he was working on the "K" articles at Orphaned Pages) to thank him for the teamwork. W.Marsh, when you said that it was tried before, can you point to where? I was recently chatting with some other new users and trying to get them to team together to attack "M", but it's tough to get enthusiasm going when there's so little feedback. Sometimes I wonder if we would do better by switching to the "date" system that's used with wikify and cleanup, so we can see which pages have been accidentally languishing here for months. It would also be nice if we could figure out some way of racking up "points" for it, like, "This person helped categorize 25 articles today," or maybe a "Categorization barnstar" for "Categorized 100 articles this month" or "Most categorized articles in July" or something. Get a competition/reward system going, and there'd be more motivation to help out. :) --Elonka 15:58, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

See the above section this talk page, "Breaking it up" for where we talked about this. Shortly after that, myself and another Wikipedian went nuts and did about 1,000 categorizations in 2 days, and there really were 0 articles in this category! Anyway, I don't think breaking it up by date is needed, since we do get to everything within 2-3 weeks... it's just that 100+ items are added every day. I think it would be nice if someone made a formal area at the top of this page or somewhere where we could "sign up" for which letters we were going to handle... I'm currently doing E, F and G. --W.marsh 16:18, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm having a go at A, B, C...I didn't look at this talk page for ages but it seems like we all think the same way! -- ben 16:06, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm doing Z back to T - occasionally hitting the end of T before something pops up further down. Yomangani 16:25, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, I had a go at making a little board at the top of this page. Feel free to make it prettier if you know how. Recury 16:29, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks... I trust someone will pretty it up eventually, I'm not good at that kind of stuff. One other thing, we might consider "promoting" the project by using an edit summary like: Adding categorization ([[Category:Category needed|You can help!]])

I know it's cheesy, but it might get more people involved. --W.marsh 16:35, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

It'll be a good idea if we take ourselves off when we aren't actively working on the letters (walking the dog, eating, that type of thing...life I think it's called). Yomangani 16:45, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I was thinking it would be a more long term thing, like if you've been working on a letter for a week or two then you sign up for it. Recury 16:56, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

But we'll have it finished by the weekend ;)... (down to 486 at the stroke of midnight UTC). Yomangani 00:12, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

K is done. And wow, great progress! Almost down to one page.  :) --Elonka 17:32, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

What a rush: below 200 now! I think I'll do this more often too... I've been adding the ((nocat)) tag quite a bit recently while on newpage patrol, so thought I'd try to help clean up the mess. Definitely better than TV to pass the time in any case (off work today because of the heatwave). SB_Johnny | ^talk 18:02, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Just a note on this: it's not working. The same people have been listed on the same letters for over a week now. SB_Johnny | ^talk 15:22, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Sure it is. What did you expect to happen? Recury 16:17, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

While going through quite a few articles today, I noticed that there were quite a few uncategorised albums (even more of these pop up on new page patrol). I went ahead and made Category:Uncategorised albums, and announced it on WP:ALBUMS.

I think in order to make catting easier (and remove the distractions of the vast number of these pages), maybe it would be good to also have Category:Uncategorised bands, and Category:Uncategorised companies?

The reason I'm for the idea is that these articles are often of questionable notability, and the music-related categories probably belong in one of the hundreds of genre, band, and album-related categories. Since there are clearly knowledgeable people about in the related projects, it might be better for them to have them in one place, and certainly better for Newpage patrollers, etc., to have a sensible place to put them. SB_Johnny | ^talk 14:13, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I dunno, let's see what happens when/if we clear the backlog. If we can actually get a group going to keep this category relatively empty, I don't think subcategories would really be needed. Categories like Category:2006 albums, Category:Musical groups and so on basically serve this purpose anyway (articles dropped in them probably need better categorization, but there's a decent placeholder category until then) so I think maybe creating more "category needed" layers would just add another confusing element to the whole thing that might not really be needed. --W.marsh 17:39, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Since I know nothing about the categories and the trees of categories, I prefer to leave it to the experts to categorize them. In that order, I add a tag that the article is uncat. What is sad is I have received a warning from a user on my talk page that asked me to not place tags like I do. This thus means that I will not continue to tag these articles and they will stay uncategorized for the rest of their life or am I mistaken? Please answer me here or on my user page. Lincher 01:37, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I would just keep on tagging them. That's more preferable than the fact that the article will dissappear again in the one million plus articles uncategorised. If you want to find categories, great! But if you don't feel like it, or don't know enough about categories, than tagging works too. I do the same when I don't feel like categorizing (and I do both categorizing and tagging a lot). Garion96 (talk) 01:50, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, they do tend to get categorised sooner or later :). Best way to learn the cats is to work on adding them (such as working to categorise the pages in this category!) It's actually a good way to get an insight into the structure of wikipedia as a whole, as categories are how the whole thing "hangs together".

To figure out what category to use, look for wikilinks in the article that lead to closely related articles, and see what category those are in. Or just take a guess and hit preview, and see if the link is blue. If not, go a bit more general, then look at the subcategories to find something more specific. It's actually fun once you get the hang of it. SB_Johnny | ^talk 01:54, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the support. I already got the hang of helping people with the GA process and the missing encyclopedia articles process so just tagging will be the best I can offer ... for now. Lincher 02:39, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

There's absolutely nothing wrong with adding pages to this category so long as you in good faith think they need categorization. Even if you add a ton. It would be kind of nice if people didn't, since we'd be able to keep up with our work much more easilly, but like someone said above, all pages have to get categorized eventually. --W.marsh 03:11, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

BTW, keep in mind that if there's a stub tag on the article, you probably don't need to add the tag. SB_Johnny | ^talk 09:46, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure about that one actually. Because if an article grows, the stub tag is removed but (almost always) without adding categories to the article. Garion96 (talk) 10:00, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

That's true, best not to rely on the person destubbing it checking there is a category (of course the best thing is to add a category rather than a {{uncat}}). Yomangani 10:41, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I haven't seen that much actually, but then a majority of the pages I work on (outside of newpage and cleanups) come under WP:TOL, where categorisation is a preferred pass-time activity for many members there :). SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:42, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

What do people think about the use of {{catneeded}} on pages that are already in a category, but where the tagger is unsure whether it should be in the category or thinks it should be in other categories as well? I was assuming that tagging the pages to a "best guess" category would flag them up to the people interested in those categories, who would then recategorize if necessary, but I've seen the {{catneeded}} tag being put on pages where there is already a category. I've created an alternative template {{checkcategory}} which I think would be a good solution. Let me know what you think (or point me in the right direction if I've missed something obvious). Yomangani 11:27, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

There's a category page for it now at Category:Category needs checking so if you come across any you aren't really sure about tag them with {{checkcategory}} or {{checkcat}} Yomangani 13:51, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Also, maybe this could be when there's a mild dispute about what categories to include/not include on an article, which does happen occasionally. --W.marsh 14:04, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Good idea. Hopefully we can get people to start using it. Recury 14:12, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

For your information. BD2412 has made a proposal to change the software to require inclusion of categories in all non-redirect pages in the article, image, template, portal, and category space. See Wikipedia:Enforce inclusion of categories for more details. Garion96 (talk) 22:51, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps a frustrating idea since this category is emptying out but would it be handy if a bot searches through wikipedia and tags all uncategorised articles and categories with {{uncat}}. At least this way, when all are tagged and done, we only have to worry about new articles and articles where categories are removed. See also Wikipedia:Enforce inclusion of categories. We do have the Special:Uncategorized pages but that's not that handy since updating takes a while and it only shows the first thousand articles. Btw, I don't have a bot and don't know that much about them, so it also depends if it is technically possible to do this. Garion96 (talk) 03:07, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, totally forgot about this section here. Garion96 (talk) 03:10, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Someone used to run a bot like this actually, but they apparently stopped. I dunno. It could definently be written quite easilly (I can help you set it up if you really want)... but it would just have to load all 1 million+ articles... which would take something like 2 months of continuous operation! A better solution might be just to hit Special:Newpages every day or so. But ultimately that's a backwards and less useful method of just implimenting what should be a basic feature of article creation: warning if no categories are present in a new article. --W.marsh 03:14, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Couldn't a bot read Special:Uncategorized pages fully (not just a thousand articles) and tag articles still without categories? I like the idea of warning if no categories are present and (if the editor still insists on no categories) add the uncat tag. But that only works for new articles, not for the many older articles uncategorised. Garion96 (talk) 03:21, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, it could use the special page (that's actually what the earlier bot did). But it would take a long too, since that only lists 1,000 pages, and only refreshes periodically. --W.marsh 03:25, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps Bluemoose has an idea. He gets User:Bluemoose/Uncategorised good articles from a database dump I think. Perhaps it's also possible to filter all uncategorised articles out from the dump and feed that list into the bot. At least that way the bot wouldn't have to go through all the million+ articles. But if it is 50.000 articles or something like that uncategorised (gawd, I hope not), then it still would be a too huge job. Frustrating.... Garion96 (talk) 03:39, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I have considered it before, but I always thought a bot doing a job like this would cause more trouble than it would solve, after all populating a category with 10s of thousands of pages is probably an overkill. I would be happy to do the bot work, it would certainly need wide community support, considering it would be such a massive task. Martin 15:48, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Well...it would get my support of course. Cause at least that way we will only have new articles to worry about. (After we categorize thousands of articles anyway). Especially if Wikipedia:Enforce inclusion of categories succeeds. I also think/hope many users have articles on theit watchlists and will categorize the articles when they see the {{uncat}} tag appearing. So how do we get wide community support on this? Link this page to the village pump or file an 'RFC on policy and conventions'. Garion96 (talk) 20:17, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

No one has objected to User:MarshBot which does a similar job, and has put 10,000+ articles in Category:Orphaned articles so far. It's been my experience that people happening upon an article are more likely to de-orphan it than categorize it, for whatever reason... I guess creating links is somewhat easier task. Most categorizations are done by a small group of people, most de-orphaning seems to be done by the community at large. But still, if the categorize tag goes up quickly, the chances are greater that the creator will see it... so adding the tag would be good, I think. --W.marsh 20:38, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Someone Kimchi.sg has wisely suggested in another discussion that a bot could categories such articles by date, as we now do with cleanup tags... I would also tag images, templates and portals, as these should all be categorized (of course the bot doing the tagging would have to add the appropriate noinclude tags). bd2412 T 18:12, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

If we get a bot to add pages to this category, we have to categorize them per date as well, because the category will grow very rapidly. I think it would work well, the big advantage is that the community will work on many tagged articles while the people working here can concentrate on the oldest ones. Right now I sometimes fix articles minutes after they've been tagged and there's a good chance someone else would have done it maybe a few days later.

Date categorization worked really well for Category:Articles that need to be wikified, which – although growing slowly – is not exploding like it was 6 months ago – before the date categorization. In fact I think it's now growing slower than the total number of articles.

A few questions

• Is there any reason an article does not need a category, apart from redirects?
• Is it really that easy for a bot to add this tag? Example, a typed stub is not accepted as a category (although technically it is one), but there are other templates that do put the article in a valid category (ex. {{Template:World War I}}). I'm not an expert in bot programming, what exactly would the bot test before adding the "uncategorized" tag?

-- Piet 08:20, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I would certainly be more happy about doing the bot work if we are doing by date. In answer to your questions; I imagine there is probably some crazy reason for some article somewhere not to have a category (maybe temporary sub-pages for example), but on the whole all articles should be categorised. Templates adding categories does add a complication (if that is the only category the article has), although I'm sure there is a policy/guideline somewhere saying that templates should not be used to add categories, apart from maintainence categories of course. Martin 10:33, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't know of any policy to that effect (no categorization by template); if you can find it, please share. -- Visviva 12:09, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

1. One class of article that is normally categorized by template only are the disambiguation pages.
2. I think this has to be a two-stage process: first, a list of uncategorized pages is drawn up based on the database dump; second, the bot goes through the list and scans the live public-side page of each article to see if it is *currently* categorized. The bot needs to do a live scan anyway to verify that the article has not been categorized since the dump. If it scans the article (non-edit) page, it won't be fooled by templates, but will have to be trained to ignore categories containing words like "cleanup","wikify","stub",etc.

The first step, incidentally, is fairly easy though time-consuming... I'm running a script right now on the 8/16 dump that should generate a full list of uncategorized pages. Unfortunately I forgot to tell it to ignore articles that contain "schooldis","namedis",etc., so the output will be a little buggy this time around. -- Visviva 12:09, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi guys, I just wanted to say that I am helping out, although I don't particularly want to claim a letter... I enjoy finding cats for the foreign sounding articles, whereas finding cats for pop-culture articles leaves me cold. If this means that I'm taking the fun out of it for others, let me know, and I'll grit my teeth and pick a letter even if it is full of 'boring' stuff! I'm trying to do perhaps 10 a day. --Sepa 12:09, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure that any catagorization, as long as it's well done, is greatly appreciated. Don't grit your teeth, just keep up the good work! JesseW, the juggling janitor 00:38, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

10 a day sounds great! I wish we could get more people doing that, no matter what system that they want to use. Sometimes I'll pick a letter, sometimes I'll pick a theme. Like maybe I'll pick names that sound Indian, if I want to concentrate on those topics. Or I'll look for techie words, or people over subjects, or military hardware... And sometimes I'll just go by whatever makes the columns come out even, so I have a "goal" to shoot for.  ;) Pick whatever sounds fun to you, and go for it. All help is appreciated.  :) --Elonka 03:24, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I have made a proposal that articles be categorized as they are stub sorted. I would appreaciate feedback. The proposal can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting#Categorization proposal. Thanks! — Reinyday, 23:54, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Is the wanted category "Buildings in Bucharest" necessary? There already exists a category entitled "Buildings and Structures in Bucharest". Thank you. thor01 17:15, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Is the currently wanted category "Aircraft manufactured by" redundant to the currently existing category "Aircraft by manufacturer"? If so, should it be removed from the wanted categories list?thor01 17:28, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Is the currently wanted category Stub redundant with the currently existing category Stubs? If so, should Stub be deleted from the wanted categories list?thor01 17:37, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Isn't the currently wanted category "articles needing sources redundant with the current active category "articles lacking sources"?. It seems to me that they are the same thing. Does "lacking" sources refer to having NO sources, as opposed to "needing additional" sources?

thor01 19:58, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I think you're asking in the wrong place. Yes, this category says "Category needed", but it's about articles that need categories, not requests for the categories themselves. I recommend asking at some place like WP:CFD or Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories), where they regularly debate new category names. --Elonka 06:30, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

• Please see Category:Articles lacking sources or Category:Articles with unsourced statements. — Reinyday, 21:37, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I've been trying to keep A-G clean for the last weeks, yesterday evening I got all the way to H and this morning there are well over 200 articles in A alone. Since the actual number of uncategorized articles is way bigger than the number in this category, there can be hunderds of new articles in a few hours which makes working per letter a bit frustrating. So I think we have to get around to categorizing per month and have a bot do the categorizing and tagging. Piet 07:04, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Here you go: Template:Uncat-date Martin 08:50, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

My apologies about the massive increase in the letter "A". I've been working my way through Special:Uncategorizedpages with AWB. If I could have distributed the letters a bit more evenly, I would have, but the way it seems to work, it only shows the first thousand uncategorized pages, and then that list "sticks" for a few days until it resets. So I've been churning through the "A"s that are in that first thousand (I think I did about 250 today), trying to get caught up so that we can get further into the alphabet on the next reset. It's slow going, since I'm also keeping an eye out for prods and stub-sorting. If anyone else wants to help, feel free.  :) --Elonka 10:21, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I didn't unclaim the letters because I got depressed or anything, I just want to work by date and not by letter. At least that way if you clear something it doesn't come back :-) In fact I think we can delete the letter list at the top now. Piet 10:27, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I completely agree -- having a specific (even if temporary) goal is much more motivating than a list that often seems to be growing faster than I'm pulling articles out of it. Now that we've got the "date" template, I'll set AWB to tag accordingly. --Elonka 10:31, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I've changed the AWB code so it converts to and uses the new by-date template, so it the next version it will do it all automatically anyway. Martin 10:38, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

As mentioned above I have made a by-date template (like the wikify and cleanup ones), use {{Uncat-date|{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}}} to apply it. I have my bot currently converting a to the new template, I'll have it finished soon, it will be a good idea to get that done before end of tomorrow (i.e. new month, September). The main page will need to be updated with details of the new template. Martin 09:27, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Scuse me, is it really necessary to have a by-date categorization. It will not only be not necessary, it will also slow down in the categorization process. It is much better to dedicate time to creating a bot that will add the uncat tag than to have the Uncat-date thing. Lincher 18:28, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Plus, the backlog is so small that it is almost unnecessary. Lincher 18:29, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Well plenty of others seem to think it is a good idea, and it has been very successfull in other areas (e.g. wikify). Clearly it does not slow down categorisation. Martin 18:31, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

If we keep it up this way, it might be unncessary. But since still so many articles are out there uncategorised I don't think it is. But slowing down? How could this template slow things down? Garion96 (talk) 21:49, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Possibly it wasn't realised that a bot would do any extra work, if that is the case then it's probably my fault for not explaining it properly. Martin 21:55, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Hey guys, I really like what you're doing with the bot and going through the uncategorised pages... I know it's made it huge, but at least we now have a hope of catching all the uncat pages, and at the same time have a strategy for making us feel that the list is manageable through the dates!. Thanks for putting the effort in...--Sepa 12:44, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

'Twas a pleasure, on the wikify page they have a rather flashy progress chart thingy, see Template:Wikification progress, someone could copy it if so desired. Martin 12:48, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Rather strangely, despite the demand for it on this page, and the clear benefits it offers, the by month template has been nominated for deletion, please see Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2006_August_30#Template:Uncat-date. Martin 18:40, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Gee, that was fast. It only exists since today and already up for deletion.... Garion96 (talk) 20:20, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi all,

I've put up a list of about 10,000 pages lacking explicit categories here: User:Visviva/Uncat/Demo. Don't know if it's helpful or just discouraging :-) ... The list is drawn from a query of the first 34 million lines of the Aug 16 database dump. If folks think it might be useful I can run the script over the full database dump; maybe I can even preserve the encoding next time.

If you do use the list for anything, please note that it contains quite a few red herrings -- articles that are categorized through templates still show up as "uncategorized," since the categories don't appear in the wikitext.

I'm interested in using this kind of data to set up topical lists of uncategorized pages, along the lines of (and perhaps as part of) Wikipedia:Pages needing attention. I've been working on a program to perform a similar task for Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting -- however, I find that uncategorized pages as a group are much tougher to sort than are deletion candidates (strange, no?) Thoughts or assistance would be welcome. -- Visviva 20:12, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I guess we categorise faster than I thought. Of the five I checked from that list all were already categorised. Garion96 (talk) 20:21, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I may be able to offer some assistance, as I have made software that scans the database dump, it is bundled with WP:AWB. It can scan the whole 6.5 Gb dump in a few minutes, I have used it before to search for uncategorised articles. The source code is available as well, if you are interested. Martin 21:32, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Full speed ahead, I think we're doing great.  :) As for the "template" articles, such as disambig pages, what I've been doing is throwing a separate "subst:" on the template to expand it, to get the category to show up. Or if it's a template which for some reason should never be "subst:"-ed, I'm manually re-adding the category to the page, so that it won't show up on our sweeps. --Elonka 05:22, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

The template can now be added as {{Uncategorized}} (which puts the article in the main category) or {{Uncategorized|September 2006}} (which puts it in the by-date category). This is more simple than having 2 seperate templates, and otherwise doesn't make any difference. Martin 12:15, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Though I think it's good to have a bot attempting to keep on top of uncategorized articles, I have to note that I have, from time to time, stumbled across both (a) articles that have been uncategorized for weeks at a time, and (b) articles that have had categories accidentally removed in the process of vandalism or an edit snafu, and not immediately replaced. Does anybody think it would be possible and/or a good idea to put in a request for a feature upgrade by which this category would automatically be applied to any article that gets saved without a category on it? Bearcat 23:45, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

See this proposal Wikipedia:Enforce inclusion of categories. Garion96 (talk) 00:55, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Come, look, weep. And August isn't even one-third of the way finished yet. I'm beginning to think WP:EIC isn't such a bad idea after all. Crystallina 13:28, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

I didnt expect august to be finished before september was up, the way it looks now it should be finished well before then. This is quite encouraging. Certainly articles are being categorised much faster with the new system (plus I "advertised" this project in a few places). Martin 13:53, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Who would dare to make an estimate as to the true number of uncategorized pages? Probably tens of thousands. Right now it would be good to concentrate on tagging many articles, so the category better reflects reality. Of course this will mean the category will become huge, but at least we won't be fooling ourselves. And just maybe we'll succeed in reducing the total number of uncategorized pages :-) Anyway, the bigger the category, the more people will probably come and help out. Piet 14:09, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Very roughly speaking there are in the region of 50,000 uncategorised articles (sounds bad, but it's not). Unfortunately this ignores the fact that many many articles are categorised purely by their stub template. Though at least these can be categorised fairly easily, as they are already grouped by subject. At some point I'll work on getting some accurate numbers. Martin 14:13, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Out of interest, how did you get than number? It seems difficult to me because for example a cleanup tag will also put the article into a category, and those aren't valid for us either. But 50,000 indeed would be very good, less than 0.5 percent of the total. Piet 14:59, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

I have just been scanning the database dump, but yes, there are some complications in doing it this way. Realistically, the only way to get an exact number would be to get one of the developers to directly query the database (after all, someone does update the uncategorised special page every few days). One other thing I have noticed is that quite a lot of the articles my bot has tagged as needing categories have very quickly been categorised by the creator of the article (sometimes within minutes). Martin 21:32, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

I just hope that August gets finished before the October articles start. Of course, some of the ones in there are doozies. Crystallina 01:12, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

50.000 is not that bad. If I compare it to Category:Articles that need to be wikified which has about 8000 articles. Putting a category is much easier (faster) than to wikify an article. It's also nice that the creator of the articles put categories on the article when they see the uncat tag. I was indeed hoping for that. Garion96 (talk) 01:30, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Oh my, that is terrible. Still, we just hit 1/3 of the way through August, which I suppose is good. It is depressing that 5 days into the month there is already more articles in September than there ever were in August. --Sepa 20:32, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

No, it's okay. September could become really big and might take a while to clean up, but until a few weeks ago most articles simply didn't make it into this category. We should get this category full and Special:UncategorizedPages empty. Piet | Talk 07:21, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree, I'd like to see Special:Uncategorizedpages empty, or at least with a more even cross-section of the alphabet, rather than just "A"s and "B"s" in its top thousand. At the moment at least, we're up to the "C"s, which is the highest I've ever seen it, so I think we're making great progress.  :) Perhaps we can also make a list of those people who are putting the most effort into the categorization project, so that we can hand out barnstars once we get on top of the problem? --Elonka 18:11, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Is it possible that a bot tags all articles from Special:UncategorizedPages? But maybe with a restriction of 100 articles every day so we're not flooded. That way the subcategories would fill up slowly. Well, slowly... 3000 articles per month on top of the ones that are added manually... Piet | Talk 20:07, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

If such a bot were created, I'd like to see it work on the full thousand (or the entire database, if possible). I think it's more important to identify all of the uncategorized articles, than to keep our workload low.  ;) Also, I've found that once an article is tagged with {{uncat}}, it's just as likely (often more likely) to be categorized by other editors, than to wait for us. That way we'd only have to worry about the difficult/abandoned cases. --Elonka 20:41, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I've found that too, which is encouraging. Potentially I could tag every article in just one month, but I thought it would probably be better to do about 5,000 per month, so the categories were more managable. Martin 21:29, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Honestly, I'd rather they just get tagged as soon as possible so they can get categorized as soon as possible. Crystallina 17:43, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't put 50.000 articles in one month, it'll be depressing. It doesn't matter if it takes a few months to tag all articles, after all the situation has existed for years. Piet | Talk 10:18, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with tagging them all. At least that way we know where we stand. Then the only additions will be new articles. Plus, like Elonka said, other editors will notice that an article needs a category. Garion96 (talk) 10:36, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

As of the db dump at the end of last month, there were 29,049 mainspace, non-redirect pages with no category at all. What's the current thinking on how faster these should be "emptied" into the uncategorised temp-cat? Alai 06:34, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

As of 7 September, there are 6800 articles in the subcategories... 4800 in September. Maybe we should categorize by week :-) Piet | Talk 07:31, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Working on it. Although we've got the next stub sorting dump, so my time will be split. Crystallina 02:03, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Would it be of any use to create a uncat-bio sub category?--Rayc 03:10, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Are the subcategories created manually or by the sortbot? Upon creation, it would be better to put in the mother category as for example [[Category:Category needed|200610]] so they are sorted correctly. Piet | Talk 12:58, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

I've been working on this recently, but I've noticed that there isn't much discussion and that the progress isn't being updated. Are people still chipping away at this, or is everyone too demoralized now that the true scope of the task has been revealed? johnpseudo 16:23, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Well several of us are still chipping away at Category:Uncategorized from September 2006. Marasmusine 17:54, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I've been putting in many many hours, mostly in scanning Special:Uncategorizedpages and ensuring that everything there is tagged with {{uncat}} or at least some other type of stub template. However, since it only updates twice a week (if that often) and only lists 1000 articles at a time, and since Wikipedia is growing so fast, sometimes I feel like we're just barely treading water. I think we need to make a stronger push for a technical solution, such as automatically tagging any uncategorized article with uncat, or perhaps even preventing new pages from being created unless they first have a category. --Elonka 20:02, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I can have MarshBot help by adding {{uncat}} too as it goes through orphaned articles (which are often uncategorized). It would probably be 400-500 or so articles a week, that the bot was going to edit anyway. --W.marsh 20:48, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't infinite; the number of articles will stop growing eventually. Even Jimbo says that we should be concentrating more now on making existing articles better rather than expanding Wikipedia's scope. I'm sure eventually policies will be put in place to limit the creation of new articles, at which point this project will start to make a lot more gains. I'm sure it's still quite a ways off, but there is hope. Recury 20:25, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

This seems an a somewhat odd place for a general discussion: wouldn't Wikipedia:Categorization, or Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories in theory be more appropriate? I should be able to generate a list of articles from each database dump, if that would help people; either those lacking any category at all, or excluding the various maintenance categories (if people let me know which to omit). In the first instance, the easiest thing to produce would be a Great Honking Big List. Probably I should wait until after the next db dump to do that, since one produced right now would be a fortnight out of date, so might be annoyingly inaccurate. I could also adapt my bot to add "uncat" (or others could do likewise, in line with Recury, given the above list as input).

I've also been touting around the idea of producing lists of "semi-categorised" articles: that is, articles categorised (or stub-tagged) as a "blah", where "blahs" are expected to placed in a "by foo" and a "by bar" category, but aren't. Would the "users" of this category be receptive to that, either in general, or in any particular cases that springs to anyone's mind? Alai 03:10, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

There are quite a few people working on categorization; there isn't really an organized 'project' per se but it's more people than some WikiProjects have. I don't feel we're treading water. A good deal of the articles were barely touched before the bots caught them. So there's basically a large backlog of articles that were uncategorized before, and then a steady trickle of new uncategorized articles. This huge backlog is what's making up the bulk of the tagged articles. Once the it's taken care of, the trickle should be fine to deal with. Crystallina 02:58, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Just wanted to say that I've been travelling a lot, so haven't been able to help out... but I'm with you in spirit, I promise!! Keep up the great work.--Sepa 23:26, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

I have cross posted this to Wikipedia talk:Categorization.

I have noticed a few users "categorising" articles by simply adding stub tags, (often replacing the {{uncategorised}} tag with a stub). Can we formally add a sentence explicitly explaining that a stub tag (or any maintenance tag) does not categorise an article (in an encyclopedic sense), despite the fact that it does add a category.

Please reply at Wikipedia_talk:Categorization#stubs_and_categories. thanks Martin 14:48, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry if this has been mentioned before and I've missed it. I suggest adding a point to this section suggesting that, especially for articles that have been around for a while, it might be worth checking their history to see if any previous categorisation has been removed, either accidentally or through vandalism. I've been working on categorising Australian articles over the last few days and I've noticed a few that had their categories removed by vandals. Gimboid13 05:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Makes sense to me, especially for pages that look suspiciously good otherwise. Recury 16:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. If a page looks long and otherwise well-formatted, but it's missing categories (and especially if it's got a "household name" title), I routinely check the history to see if there's an earlier version that I need to revert to. In 90% of the cases, there is, though sometimes categories may have been removed other ways, such as if a stub tag was removed without categories being added, or maybe a {{hndis}} tag got deleted when somebody removed redlinks off a disambig page. --Elonka 04:34, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I ran an offline db query last night for the first 1000 uncategorised articles, which got me up to "F"; I've bot-populated most of these into the December category. (I've skipped some, since I'm avoiding tagging anything that looks even vaguely like another cleanup tag (any one-line template transclusion, in fact), for the time being.) Not too bad, I thought... until I ran the query for the whole list, which ran to 26,949. (Owch.) Shall I go ahead and tag all these into the December category? At what rate? I don't want to reduce the whole effort to dispirited sobbing, after all... (Some of these may have been tagged with uncat since the time of the dump, anyway, it must be said.) Alai 16:01, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Tag them all ASAP. johnpseudo 17:09, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I recently checked (and corrected) number of uncategorized articles - and also noticed that many of them had previously been categorized. Some vandal had removed the categories, then a bot had added the uncat tags. I do not know how this automatic retagging could be avoided, but in general, if article is at least three months old, it usually has had a category. - Skysmith 19:33, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that's clearly a risk; of course, it's one way to discover the vandalism... (My bot won't be tagging anything that hasn't been uncategorised for a matters of days, though, due to the delay in the whole db dump shenanigans, so it'd be vandalism that's already "slipped past" speedy reversion.) If I can work out a way to determine page-age without access to the edit history (which I don't readily, and perhaps feasibly, have), I'll have my bot skip these, and perhaps make a list of them someplace. OTOH, they might get tagged by someone/thing else in the meantime... Alai 20:14, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Anyway, tag them all I'd say. Someone will notice if the tag is inappropriate. 27,000 is not too bad, they'll be gone by the time spring arrives :-) Piet | Talk 21:50, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Brainwave: I can approximate date fairly closely from the page_id. On that basis, something like 14,365 have existed before October, and 11290 before September. Looking at a random sampling, many of these in fact seem to have never to have had categories; they may simply not at any point been tagged for category cleanup. Just to be on the safe side, however, I'll start with those created in October and November, which should keep my bot busy for a while (never mind everyone else). In an ideal world, someone with 800GB and the inclination for some XML coding could traverse the whole history and find all the categories these articles ever had, of course... Alai 23:02, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

From your data, does it mean that there are 3075 uncat articles created in September, or about 100 uncat new articles per day on average? This means that if the project categorize about 100 articles per day, we would be breaking even; if we do more than 100 per day, we are clearing the backlog eventually. You guys have been clearing the backlog at a much faster rate. This sounds like good news, ;) --Vsion 00:40, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

It's a bit worse than that, as that's not counting articles from September tagged with {{uncat}} and since categorised, as they all have been by now. The ~9000 articles from November currently without a category, plus the 4000 in the uncat|Nov cleanup category are probably closer to the mark. (Then again, some of the Novembers may also be 'catchup' from earlier.) Alai 01:29, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm also in favor of just tagging them now and getting them over with. 27,000 is much less, in fact, than I was expecting. Crystallina 04:12, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, if it makes you feel better to feel worse: this could be a significant undercount, if there are many articles in cleanup categories, only; and if sorted stubs keep being tagged with "uncat", it's likely to be a lot higher. Once I work out a robust, automated way to tell what's a "maintenance" category and what's not, I may have counts of those too. Alai 05:25, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

After some painfully extensive number crunching (I think perhaps my query needs some more optimisation...), I've made a list of all the stub categories with at least a thousand non-permcatted articles, in that cartegory and all its descendants: it's been uploaded to here. What I'd like to know is, would any of these make good per-topic category cleanup resources, on the pattern of Category:Uncategorised albums and the like? If anyone has a personal interest in, or liking for tackling a particular topic, would they be willing to tackle such a maintenance category? Or, does anyone know of particular wikiprojects that would have an interest in such work on "their" articles? Alai 19:03, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Alai... I think that if you can do it easily it's worth doing, as we can then flag the stubs up to a wikiproject and they may just doing something... but they can't do anything if we don't divide the stubs up! Just my tuppence...--Sepa 19:11, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Following the earlier discussion, I've compiled a list of the articles that were uncategorised at the time of the last db dump, but that were categorised in either of the two October dumps: User:Alai/oldcats. No guarantees as to whether they're currently uncategorised, or how useful the old cats were, or how far back they are in the edit history... Alai 04:22, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! This list is very interesting and useful. Out of the 10 articles I sampled, 4 had removed categories, 3 had removed the uncategorized tag but hadn't added categories, and the other three consisted of an article with a broken category link, one that never had an uncat. template, and one new article (possible recreation after deletion). There are definitely a lot of high-traffic articles on this list that need attention. johnpseudo 04:41, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

On the basis that these aren't likely to be "short-term" vandalism, perhaps these should just be tagged too: but with a different template, to indicate its previously categorised status to the cleaner-up. And perhaps also feeding into a different cleanup category? Say, Category:Previously categorised articles, or something to that effect? Alai 15:14, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Good idea if that could also include pages with categories that have been deleted for one reason or another - Skysmith 18:08, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

That's a good point, though in that case, the action is a little different; rather than find old categories, and revert to/restore them, find the old category, and then come up with a replacement. Alai 18:22, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

OK, I've created this as {{previouslycategorised}} (AKA, {{previouslycategorized}}, {{prevcat}}) / Category:Previously categorised) and I'm populating it from the above list. Once that's done, I'll have completed a "first pass" through the cats in the last dump with no categories, but skipping those with template transclusions. Still have to work out exactly how to handle those... Alai 20:46, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

There's some discussion/reaction to this on my talk page, and the 'bot's talk page. If anyone's working on these, they might want to comment (preferably here, for the sakes of keeping the discussion in a logically centralised place) on the merits and demerits of this scheme. If it's not worth the candle, it would be simpler from my point of view just to tag them all as {{uncat}}, without regard to history. Alai 02:40, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

I've had a request to put the template at the bottom of articles, rather than the top. Only reason I'd been doing it that way was a received impression that was the most common method on those already tagged, but I'm easy either way. Does anyone have a preference? If not, I'll start doing it the other way... Alai 00:51, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it matters either way. I prefer top for tags, but I don't think there is a set way to do it. RobJ1981 01:06, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I think top is more common. The argument in this case, of course, is that when editing the article to add categories, they'll go at the bottom, so it's a convenience to be able to remove the tag from there, too. Alai 01:15, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Top placement is most common, but on reflection I think bottom placement is probably best. This is more like {{stub}} than {{verify}}... it isn't something that the general audience is going to care about. We need to warn readers up-front when an article has been identified as unverified, original research, or POV, since that directly affects the article's information value. On the other hand, we don't really need to warn readers up-front that the article has been identified as not having a category. -- Visviva 02:10, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

That's true, it has little value for readers... apart from the terminally bewildered, who might be wondering "where are the categories, then?" :) OK, I'll switch over to at-bottom, then... Alai 02:17, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

From a very practical perspective, it's more convenient to have them at the bottom when doing categorization because categories are added at the bottom anyways. Pascal.Tesson 19:13, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

It is my strong opinion to have the tags on the bottom, because like Pascal Tesson said, the categories go at the bottom, and it's easier to replace the template with a category rather than scrolling up and down. —EdGl 02:41, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Ideally tags should go after categories, then the cleanup-cats don't obfuscate the real cats. This is of course irrelevant with this partcular tag! Rich Farmbrough, 12:17 21 December 2006 (GMT).

I've suggested at Template talk:Categorization progress that we might better split up the progress chart totals into those in the main uncat-by-month categories, and those in uncat-stubs-by-month, per the rationale of splitting them in the first place. Anyone have a strong feeling either way? Alai 21:22, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't see any reason for splitting stubs and articles since the work is exactly the same, and it has to be done anyway. The main thing is being able to select the oldest pages. I would put it all together again per month. Piet | Talk 23:47, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I think it was fairly clear from the earlier discussion that not everyone sees the priorities in that manner (while no-one sought to argue that the work didn't need to be done). But just to clarify, I wasn't talking about combining the per-month totals, and I'd be against doing so, as an unreasonable loss of information. Alai 00:10, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 20:02, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't mind subcategories for cleanup. I think they can be useful at times. But having uncategorized by month, uncategorized by subject, and a cryptic "Uncategorized" which apparently doesn't connect to the others is a bit overkill. Plus it makes the categorization progress bar graphs completely skewed. I liked the by-month system myself, but I'm not going to throw a tantrum if it changes. But it'd be nice to have more order. Crystallina 22:18, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

It's a little ad hoc, there's no denying. But I think that certain by-subject cats are useful, because they work well in practice: the Category:Uncategorised albums seem a good example. OTOH, some seem rather pointless... I created Category:Uncategorised people experimentally with a few hundred bio-stubs, and it seems to have grown hugely since... but with no signs of anyone actively working on emptying these. (In theory you'd think this one might work, given the large and loud wikiproject on biographies, but given how broad that is, it may not be of much actual benefit.) The by-month categories I don't think serve much of a strictly utilitarian purpose, but they do seem to be good for morale... Alai 04:16, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I find the Category:Uncategorised people useful and I've been working on categorizing alot of those people, even if it's only by year of birth/death. Lugnuts 10:36, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Honestly, I see no use for it either. Let's just do it by date and be done with it. --Woohookitty^Woohoo! 10:58, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry Lugnuts, I wasn't aware of that; it just seems to be filling much faster than it's being emptied, so it wasn't at all clear there was any progress at all. But if there's anyone working on these at all, that wouldn't otherwise be tackling "generic uncategorised cleanup", then in my opinion they're useful. In the long term, once the existing backlog of completely uncatted articles is cleared (fingers crossed), then per-subject ultimately makes more sense, especially as regards tackling stub-sorted and partially categorised articles. (For example, articles already categorised as people, but missing birth/living/death, nationality or occupation categories.) Alai 18:38, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree, some of them are useful. The one that springs to mind first is uncategorized albums; it's impossible to tell which artists have an albums category and which don't. The thing is that they seem to be mushrooming out of control without consistency. Crystallina 03:17, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

The alleged practice is to create by-artist categories for every such -- even those that made one album, and have long since become defunct. While I'm not sure how sensible this is, the album wikiproject seem fairly set on it. If one doesn't want to do that, a release date and genre category would probably be sufficient, though. Alai 04:00, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Reading over my last reply it seemed a bit unclear. The "Uncategorized X" categories seem to be mushrooming, not album categories. I like album categories, within reason. Crystallina 03:23, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Six such by-topic cats is "mushrooming out of control"? (That's why I assumed you must have been talking about the album cats...) I might be biased, having created several of these (in some cases with more success than others), but if they're being "emptied", and especially if they're not just being emptied by "the usual suspects" (as is clearly the case for the albums, for example), then they're clearly useful. Nor do I see what harm or cost is being incurred. Alai 06:55, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Just wondering, are the majority of you working on the uncategorized stubs from November or the non-stub uncategorized December articles? Sue H. Ping 15:57, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm working on the November stubs before moving onto December non-stub. Marasmusine 23:03, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm working on December articles but I generally try to categorize stubs if I run into them while sorting, unless I can't think of a category offhand. Crystallina 03:22, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to think that the "non-stubs" are the higher priority, since the stubs will have a per-topic category of some sort (which isn't to say that they're properly/fully categorised, by any means), whereas those in the main "uncat cats" have no by-topic categorisation whatsoever, making them only in the "maintenance system" only. Though I must admit I'm far from sure that's many people's, which is in part why I hestitate to start tagging the sorted-stubs-with-no-permcat backlog, which is even larger, and I'd hate to see grown wikipedians cry... Alai 07:24, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I would suggest that this ambivalence is proof that we'd be better off with a single per-month categorization. I haven't been that active on categorization since we killed the October monster but I thought it was kind of nice and friendly when we all worked on the same category. Pascal.Tesson 01:27, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree. I have been mostly categorizing the December non-stubs, but I'm worried that if we continue putting the non-stubs on a higher priority, there will become a tremendous backlog of stubs without a permanent category. Sue H. Ping (talk • contribs) 01:39, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Personally I'm not in the least ambivalent, and think it proves more that progress bars have a powerful effect on people's thinking. If different editors have different views, then the merit of the current system is that people are free to make an informed decision for themselves either way. There is a tremendous backlog of stubs without a permanent category, but there's a pretty large one of articles with no category whatsoever, and I think it's very evident which of these is the more "uncategorised". (Larger than the progress bar indicates, since it's not been possible to do much tagging of them due to the lack of database dumps in the last six weeks.) Please recall that the mass-tagging of the former in with the latter is what caused the complaints (perhaps due to people feeling they were being shoehorning into dealing with articles already having a per-topic categorisation?), which is what led to the split in the first place. Going back to "lumping everythinbg together whether you like it or not" seems a step backwards to me. Certainly I would be far from happy to bot-populate stubs into a "coalesced" category while both backlogs are as large as they are. (I'm hesistant enough about doing so currently.) On the plus side, the progress appears to be pretty considerable, and if it continues, the backlog should be cleared entirely within a relatively small number of months. Alai 07:31, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I suppose so. I think there should be two separate categories per month and the completely uncategorized articles are of a higher priority; however, maybe all of us should focus on a single category at a time. This way, we'll eliminate each category quicker and our morale would be boosted by the category's removal from the progress bar. Personally, it makes me feel better when the category I am working on is being quickly eliminated with the help of other Wikipedians. Sue H. Ping (talk • contribs) 16:57, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Having made some code tweaks to deal with template-populated categories, I've just finished bot-tagging the last of the uncategorised articles from the Nov. 30 db dump -- or as much as I'm ever likely to, at least, there's bound to be a few I haven't taken account of by way of articles that have been moved, protected, tagged with other cleanup resources, etc. Currently I'm hitting what's in the special page, which refreshed today (yay). So roughly speaking, the current categorisation backlog is what's in the December and January subcats, plus whatever's been created (or indeed de-categorised) in the time since. Those I won't be able to do anything about until there's a fresh database dump -- which could happen at any moment, or else not occur for weeks, since it's currently not really on its "normal" cycle. When that happens, we that happens we should have a clearer idea of the rate of progress. Alai 22:35, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Can somebody make a userbox for those who work on categorizing uncategorized articles? I spend the majority of my time on Wikipedia doing this, and would like to reflect that on my userbox page. Thanks in advance. →EdGl 17:45, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

• Is {{User WikiProject Categories}} close enough? Or were you looking for something more specific? Alai 03:35, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I would like a more specific one, just for dealing with Category:Category needed. →EdGl 03:39, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

OK, how's this? {{User wikipedia/Uncat}} Alai 03:56, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I suppose it would be nice to have a category of Wikipedians that work on uncat articles. It's always hard to know who's part of that team. Pascal.Tesson 03:59, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Done, and added to the UB. Category:Wikipedians working on uncategorized articles. Alai 04:59, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I like it, thanks for making it =) →EdGl 04:14, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Looking at the extensive discussion associated with this task I was wondering if anyone had considered forming a wikiproject. Seemed like a good time to ask... Stardust8212 04:16, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Wouldn't that be pretty much re-inventing Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories? Or would it be beneficial to have a more specific descendent WPJ, for this task only? Alai 04:35, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not terribly familiar with that wikiproject so I guess I can't answer that but as someone who had just started working on this task and seeing all the (apparent) organization and discussion going into the project it just seemed like the sort of thing that would fall into some sort of wikiproject. That's why I asked, that's all. Stardust8212 04:46, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Hmm, a more specific WikiProject sounds like a good idea to me, since I of course only work on this part of WikiProject Categories. Wanna start it up with me, Stardust? Naturally, one would be able to be in both WikiProjects. I think I will propose this idea on the talk page of Wikiproject Categories. That seems like a good place to start. →EdGl 04:49, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I've never started a project before but I'd be happy to help if I could. I also am only interested in this aspect of categories. Stardust8212 04:55, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories. While I'm wating for replies there, I'll read up on how to start a WikiProject! Going to bed now, though.. →EdGl 05:07, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I'm not sure that there's much point in a separate project. After all, this talk page is basically playing the same role, isn't it? Pascal.Tesson 16:13, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Me neither, after some thought. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories for my full answer. (and add your thoughts and opinions!) →EdGl 18:55, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

That does sound like a better plan. Stardust8212 19:11, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Yup. All further discussion should be at the other talk page now, thanks! →EdGl 19:25, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I've crunched some numbers from the recent db dump, and were 20,916 uncategorised articles at the time of that dump. (Supposedly the 24th, probably actually the 27th: I'll check timestamps later.) As some of these are very short, I'll probably tag some of these with {{stub}} instead (if WSS and BRFA have no objection), so that hopefully at least they get stub-sorted some time soon. (I'll be quite happy to run a sweep at a later date for stubs with no non-stub categories, when people want to tackle that as a priority.) About 5000, if we semi-arbitarily take 500 bytes as the "stub cut-off". Currently, I'm tagging a batch of longer articles into uncat-Jan. Alai 06:31, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

How utterly depressing... Thanks for doing the bot work though, I would have thought that it was a reasonable objective to shoot for less than 1% of uncategorized articles. But it would seem that even this modest target is just out of reach. Pascal.Tesson 04:03, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I must confess that it's worse than I thought it would be. If that's the true figure, it implies that the "uncategorised article rate" is something like 2,500 per week, which is going to be a challenge to keep up with, much less make swift inroads into the backlogs; and indeed is less than the refresh rate at the special page (it coughs up 1000 articles every three days). So the hiatus in both the db dumps and the special page refreshes has hidden the backlog for a while, and made dealing with it that much more difficult. One can hope that a significant chunk will get dealt with via other channels: deletion, "endogenous" fixing, other maintenance resources. (I've already had complaints about "careless" bot-edits tagging user-pages... which weren't actually user pages until after the bot dealt with them. Nonetheless an indication that these aren't all 'real' articles, though it's hard to get a good idea of the proportion in the short run.) Alai 04:52, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

If the rate of growth of uncategorized articles is really 2500 a week, then it will indeed be hard to clear the backlog although the current taskforce is probably categorizing well over a thousand a week. But thanks in part to your work, some articles are tagged very early in their wiki-life and have a greater chance of being categorized in any case by the article's creator. Also, although the backlog is 20K+ articles, it's still a two-month backlog and even that is something of an accomplishment. Pascal.Tesson 23:09, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I think it is certainly over 1000 a week, not least as I've been tagging more than that just from the special page, and still the total seems (or seemed...) to be trending downwards. And indeed, I'm hoping that some of the above will "disappear" either sometime before, or shortly after I get around to tagging them, without necessarily the great uncat wagon having to catch up with all of them. Hopefully without too many people yelling at me in the process. I think it's probably doable, but it's going to require pretty sustained effort. BTW, just to cover my "authorisation" bases, I've filed a task approval request at BRFA on tagging the li'l 'uns with {{stub}}, so if anyone has any thoughts on that... Alai 00:58, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

As tagging uncategorised articles that had had categories previously into a separate cleanup category had somewhat "mixed" reviews when I did it last time, and at the request of one user, I've instead just uploaded the list of same as a file User:Alai/prevcat-Jan07. I've added the removed categories to the page this time. If it would be more useful in a different format, or filtered in some particular way, do let me know. Alai 01:28, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks.  :) For me, what would be most helpful would be a simple list with each article on a single line, along with a link to its history. In most cases all that's needed for these is a quick glance at the history to see where the vandalism took place, then I check the diff and revert to an earlier version. --Elonka 01:49, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

What'm I, a OneClick(TM) service? :) OK, how's this version: User:Alai/prevcat-Jan07b? Alai 03:07, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

And again, after the most recent database dump: Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories/uncategorized/previous-April. Alai 05:07, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Any plans to produce an update on this list? I have seen some articles recently tagged as uncat but they simply lost their cat due to vandalism.--Fisherjs 07:15, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

If you, like me, have noticed a lot of non-profit organizations in the uncategorized articles, you might want to weigh in on my proposed renmaing of 4 categories to match usual conventions. Non-profit organizations based in Foo. Weigh in at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 April 9 Scarykitty 03:49, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

I've cleaned up every item in May 2007. That was nearly 500 :) --Gary King 02:07, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Mandatory categorization of new articles. --Eliyak T·C 08:40, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Please see: Wikipedia:Requests for verification

A proposal designed as a process similar to {{prod}} to delete articles without sources if no sources are provided in 30 days.

It reads:

Some editors see this as necessary to improve Wikipedia as a whole and assert that this idea is supported by policy, and others see this as a negative thing for the project with the potential of loss of articles that could be easily sourced.

I would encourage your comments in that page's talk or Mailing list thread on this proposal WikiEN-l: Proposed "prod" for articles with no sources

Signed Jeepday (talk) 14:08, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Is this really a backlog with only two months of articles?--BirgitteSB 20:10, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Yep. I mean. There are 7900 articles listed that don't have categories. If that isn't a backlog, nothing is. --Woohookitty^Woohoo! 09:29, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

The point for analysis is 'What is the typical inflow/outflow of uncategorized articles?' Based on historical data reported on the main page, 7900 does not seem to be an excessive number of uncategorized articles.Cander0000 (talk) 02:55, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Exactly altough 7900 articles may seem like a lot to some people, it seems to be continually handled without backlogging. As for the comment that "if [7900] is isn't a backlog, nothing is"; you might want to check out WP:BL for several examples with 10,000 articles and some others with over a year backlogged. The worst is probablyCategory:Articles lacking sources, where "June 2006" has been the oldest month being worked on since May 2007. Now that is a backlog.--BirgitteSB 21:32, 2 January 2008 (UTC)