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2015 Community Wishlist Survey

2015-11-25

‎Categories: moving already endorsed proposals to 2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Categories

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Revision as of 00:16, 25 November 2015

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==Categories==

==Categories==

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===

Making

categories

more

friendly:

enable

HotCat

by

all,

but

with pending revisions ===

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''Already

endorsed

proposals

can

be

seen

at

[[2015

Community

Wishlist

Survey/Categories]].''

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New editors often, in my experience, remark how difficult it is to tag (categorize) things on Wikipedia compared to Facebook and other modern sites. We have a useful tool, [[:en:Wikipedia:HotCat]], but there is no consensus from the community to enable it by default, as people are afraid of newbies messing up categories. The best solution I have, therefore, is to try to use some form of pending revisions with HotCat: enable it by default, but with pending revisions for new editors/anons. --[[User:Piotrus|Piotrus]] ([[User talk:Piotrus|talk]]) 05:11, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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:Seems impossible to me to get community consensus for anything related to pending revisions really.. As much as I would like to see it. —[[User:TheDJ|TheDJ]] ([[User talk:TheDJ|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/TheDJ|contribs]]) 07:39, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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::A somewhat related request is to have such a thing in VisualEditor ([[phab:T52239]]). [[User:Orlodrim|Orlodrim]] ([[User talk:Orlodrim|talk]]) 22:07, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

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:{{Endorsement}} Anything that would make categories less mysterious. [[User:Ottawahitech|Ottawahitech]] ([[User talk:Ottawahitech|talk]]) 15:45, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

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:{{oppose}} In reference libraries, the categorization of books is made only by the most senior librarians, because it is hard. Categorization on Wikipedia needs experience and it does not have to be "easy". Making HotCat a default for everyone would cause various problems. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it's not Facebook. --[[User:Pxos|Pxos]] ([[User talk:Pxos|talk]]) 01:54, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

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:Concur with Pxos. Wikipedia categorisation is a surprisingly deep and complicated topic. HotCat is powerful and useful for experienced users, but perhaps not good to expose so prominently to those who don't know what they're doing. I would also point out that the VisualEditor now has some much improved categorisation tools (if slightly buried in the top right menu). [[User:the wub|the wub]] [[User_talk:The wub|"?!"]] 23:56, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

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=== Add checklist/filter functionality to articles/categories ===

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Consider a category, for example [[:en:Category:United States company stubs]], plagued with spammy articles. Currently there is no way to collaboratively (or for oneself) mark which articles have been reviewed for, let's say, notability or such. It would be much easier to do clean up drives and such if we would have a way to quickly toggle on and off some filters. For example, each article could have a checklist of "has been checked for notability/neutrality/etc." (the community should be able to create such assessment categories, probably tied to common cleanup issues). An editor with some flag/permission (or just an autoconfirmed editor, perhaps) could check the article after a review. This could be made visible to article's readers, increasing their trust in it (see my proposal above), and would be very useful for cleanup drives, as I could try to filter the category for not-reviewed articles. It would be in essence a non-invasive pending changes feature, but more nuanced. --[[User:Piotrus|Piotrus]] ([[User talk:Piotrus|talk]]) 05:34, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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:{{endorsement}} --[[User:Edgars2007|Edgars2007]] ([[User talk:Edgars2007|talk]]) 05:52, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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:{{endorsement}} I can see this being very useful in backlog-clearing and maintenance categories. [[User:Fluffernutter|Fluffernutter]] ([[User talk:Fluffernutter|talk]]) 17:25, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

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=== Contains this text but not in this category or its (n-level) descendants ===

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I'd love to have a way to search for file pages (and category pages) that contain a particular piece of text but are not in a particular category or its n-level descendants. These would, of course, be likely candidates to add to that category or one of its subcategories. It would be especially nice if it would somehow feed into VFC; for that purpose, if it can't be worked out from the VFC end, it would be possible to add a temporary maintenance category to the pages found in such a search, and then VFC could be triggered off of that category.

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This would benefit people trying to categorize poorly categorized photos. Right now, you typically have to look through an awful lot of correctly categorized photos in the course of doing work like this. - [[User:Jmabel|Jmabel]] ([[User talk:Jmabel|talk]]) 23:03, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

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* {{Endorsement}} I do quite a bit of categorisation and would welcome this. [[User:WereSpielChequers|WereSpielChequers]] ([[User talk:WereSpielChequers|talk]]) 19:36, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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* Comment: very recently we got „Deepcat“, developed by Wikimedia Deutschland, at de-wiki (details at [[:de:Hilfe:Suche/Deepcat]]). It’s still in beta status AFAIK, and somewhat limited to max 70 sub-categories and n_max=15 (levels) for performance reasons. Can be prefixed with “-” to invert. I don’t know whether it is or will be available on other wikis as well, but it looks as if it might already serve the functionality you ask for. —[[User:MisterSynergy|MisterSynergy]] ([[User talk:MisterSynergy|talk]]) 20:57, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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=== Create a tool to auto-populate categories through Wikidata/other wiki comparison ===

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Currently, when a new category is created, even if it is linked to Wikidata and other language categories, there is no easy way to generate a list of articles that exist on a given wiki that should be populated with it. And even when someone has a list of such articles, they have to manually tag them. I'd like to see a tool that generates such lists, and allows populating categories with as much ease as Commons [[:commons:Help:Gadget-Cat-a-lot]]. See also a related discussion at [[w:Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_141#Is_there_a_way_to_auto-populate_categories_through_Wikidata.2Fother_wiki_comparison.3F]]. --[[User:Piotrus|Piotrus]] ([[User talk:Piotrus|talk]]) 05:15, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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:If we add articles to categories based on wikidata properties then we have the job of continuing to synchronise wikidata and the category and what do we do with manual changes to the category. Better to go to dynamic lists (i.e. generated on-the-fly each time) based on wikidata queries instead. This allows much more complicated cross domain lists than we would ever want to do with a category. [[User:Filceolaire|Filceolaire]] ([[User talk:Filceolaire|talk]]) 06:15, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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:: I do not know of any tool that could create such a list, but if somebody wants to move articles from one category to another, this person could use the [[:bg:МедияУики:Gadget-CategoryMaster.js|Category Master]]. At the moment the tool only has a user interface as input channel, but it could surely be made to work on lists of articles. There are screenshots, showing its usage [[:bg:Уикипедия:Категориен майстор|here]]. [[:bg:Потребител беседа:Borislav|Borislav]] and [[:bg:Потребител беседа:V111P|V111P]] can help with the technical details. --[[User:Лорд Бъмбъри|Lord Bumbury]] ([[User talk:Лорд Бъмбъри|talk]]) 10:53, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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:Different Wikipedia languages have very different needs for categories, and not just based on size of Wikipedia. English language wikipedia has categories for churches in particular English counties, Wikimedia Commons has individual categories for thousands of English churches. Xhosa language Wikipedia might not even need a category for churches in England. [[User:WereSpielChequers|WereSpielChequers]] ([[User talk:WereSpielChequers|talk]]) 19:05, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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::And then comes the category depth... Xhosa language Wikipedia could probably create category "Churches in United Kingdom" and take enwiki category with depth=10, lets say. --[[User:Edgars2007|Edgars2007]] ([[User talk:Edgars2007|talk]]) 19:32, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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* {{endorsed}} The key to this, I think, is the use of a property such as [[:d:Property:P360]] to describe in Wikidata terms what a category contains, similar to the way that if the wikidata item for a list article has a description coded in this way, then Magnus's Reasonator viewer for Wikidata can automatically show a list of corresponding Wikidata items -- see eg Reasonator's presentation of [https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q15832361&lang=en item Q15832361] (List of female engineers). There are a couple of wrinkles that would need to be added for a Wikipedia category version: firstly, only include items for which there are actually articles in that language. So the category for English churches in Xhosa wiki might not be very long. Secondly, exclude any items that match the criteria for subcategories that exist on that wiki. So for an English county on en-wiki there might be sub-categories for churches in each of the major towns in that county -- the top level category would exclude churches in any of those towns. On a different wiki, with fewer English churches, there would probably be fewer subcategories; so the tool would therefore be putting more of the articles which did exist into the county-level category. All this would follow solely from what subcategories were defined for a particular wiki, and the wikidata description of the inclusion criteria for those categories.

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: The tool should probably be human-assisting, rather than fully automatic. I could see it highlighting a list of possible additions to the category, but giving the user to check or uncheck any of them before finalising the process. A second mode could suggest possible removals from the category, for any of the items that matched subcategory criteria. This would give a powerful tool for splitting categories, assisting the user to appropriately populate newly created subcategories. All of which I think could be very useful on Wikipedia right now; and the same system in future might be even more useful on Commons, once the structured-data machine-interpretable description of the topics depicted in images starts to become possible. [[User:Jheald|Jheald]] ([[User talk:Jheald|talk]]) 01:09, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

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: If this is being worked on it'll need a thorough product-level discussion about how to do this and how it interacts with other efforts like structured data for Commons. --[[User:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)|Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)]] ([[User talk:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)|talk]]) 14:20, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

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*'''Comment''' There is a bot, namely [[User:Rezabot]], in Persian Wikipedia that does the same task based on categories on English Wikipedia. It's an old bot and seems to be stable right now. I ping the operator [[User:Yamaha5]] himself to explain more. [[User:4nn1l2|4nn1l2]] ([[User talk:4nn1l2|talk]]) 15:39, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

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*'''Comment''' I discussed more than one year ago this idea with a user on itWiki. We agreed it was possible, but not really urgent. it was not worth the effort to be implemented on that local level. On a platform such as itWiki I would say it is something that it is better to wait until it is stable before adopting it. That does not mean it is useless, I am just saying that there are platforms that will take bigger advantages even from a beta versions, whilst others with higher maintenance activity can simply wait. If there are really many platforms that are lacking a proper categorization structere, than I guess it is an urgent tool.--[[User:Alexmar983|Alexmar983]] ([[User talk:Alexmar983|talk]]) 18:44, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

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=== UI to display category members by timestamp ===

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fr.wikipedia.org has hundreds of pages that contain lists of recent articles by portal ([//fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sp%C3%A9cial:Pages_li%C3%A9es/Mod%C3%A8le:Articles_r%C3%A9cents&hidetrans=0&hidelinks=1&hideredirs=1&hideimages=1 all these pages], plus some updated by other bots). This is the main way new articles can be reviewed by users interested in a specific domain.

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Each portal has a tracking category, so this is certainly something that MediaWiki could support in a generic way. Ideally, there would be a special page to list the last ''n'' members of a category that can be included into others (like [[Special:PrefixIndex]]).

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Note: MediaWiki already tracks these timestamps and makes them available through the API, but this request is not as simple as providing a UI for this. Based on the feedback received for bots, two additional constraints are that:

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* changing the defaultsort should not reset the timestamp ;

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* a quickly reverted removal of the category should not reset the timestamp.

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[[User:Orlodrim|Orlodrim]] ([[User talk:Orlodrim|talk]]) 18:45, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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:NB: Lists maintained by bots are used in different ways. Some users read the wikiproject page from time to time, while others the lists to there watchlist. Thus, a complementary feature request is [[#Add a Category watchlist]], but both features are needed to replace bot-maintained lists of recent articles (for very large portals, not all users would want to watch a category with tens of new articles every day). [[User:Orlodrim|Orlodrim]] ([[User talk:Orlodrim|talk]]) 19:30, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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*{{Endorsement}} [[User:Toto Azéro|Toto Azéro]] [[User talk:Toto Azéro|follow the guide !]] 17:53, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

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*{{Endorsement}} and see below. [[User:Jheald|Jheald]] ([[User talk:Jheald|talk]]) 12:49, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

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==== Options to show categories sorted in further different ways ====

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Developing from the above, it would more generally be good to be able to show categories ordered in ways other than their default sort-ordering. As well as sort by "last modification" date suggested above, on Commons it would be nice to be able to sort by date of upload, or date of underlying media creation, or date depicted in media, or by an extensible mechanism to be able to specify per-category that media in that category might have a particular sort key or keys (eg original page number), different from the original sort order. [[User:Jheald|Jheald]] ([[User talk:Jheald|talk]]) 12:49, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

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=== Tools for dealing with citations of withdrawn academic journal articles ===

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Please see [https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-August/082810.htm this thread] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_26#Creating_a_bot_to_search_Wikipedia_for_retracted_papers this archived discussion].

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I was thinking of a tool that would let users input a variety of ways of referring to the retracted articles, such as DOI numbers ([[User:Peaceray|Peaceray]] is an expert in these). The tool would accept multiple inputs simultaneously, such as all 64 articles that were retracted in a batch. The tool would return to the user a list of all articles in which those references are used as citations, and highlight the paragraphs of the article where the citations are used. This would, I hope, greatly improve the efficiency of the workflow for dealing with retracted journal articles. Hopefully the tool could work across multiple wikis and languages. --[[User:Pine|Pine]][[User talk:Pine|✉]] 05:23, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

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*{{Endorsement}} This wouldn't affect many articles but it would greatly improve the quality of the project of retracted articles could be easily identified and flagged so readers know they are no longer reliable. [[User:Davidwr|Davidwr]]/[[User talk:Davidwr|talk]] 05:44, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

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=== Category suggestions based on filename, description and location ===

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For many users and especially for beginners it is hard to quickly find appropriate categories for files. To support the user i suggest to develop an algorithm that is suggesting such categories by checking the filename, the description and location of the file against already available files, categories and galleries in Commons. Even Wikidata and Wikipedia could be included. Having such an algorithm the UploadWizard could be enhanced to suggest categories for uploaded files. Furthermore, we could generate a maintenance list or even a game to enrich already uploaded but uncategorized files. --[[User:Aschroet|Aschroet]] ([[User talk:Aschroet|talk]]) 18:56, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

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* {{endorsed}} -- [[User:the wub|the wub]] [[User_talk:The wub|"?!"]] 00:03, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

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=== Numerical sorting ===

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Names containing numerals (or with numeric sort-keys) are presently sorted in alphabetical/ASCII order, apparently being treated like any other character: for example “100” comes before “17” but after “10”. This makes a mess of categories for things with serial numbers, like asteroids and street addresses, unless they’re given sort-keys with zero-padded numbers—very tedious. Would it be possible to parse names for sorting by reading any consecutive numerals as digits of a decimal number, instead of just character-by-character, so as to sort by numeric value instead? Even my antique Mac’s ''Finder'' does something like this with file and directory names, so it can’t be that hard! ;) [[User:Odysseus1479|Odysseus1479]] ([[User talk:Odysseus1479|talk]]) 05:12, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

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::''Afterthought:'' this could also be helpful in sortable tables. Sorry not to have mentioned this before the suggestion was put in the category section. But I guess a low-level sorting module could be invoked by various different higher-level ones.[[User:Odysseus1479|Odysseus1479]] ([[User talk:Odysseus1479|talk]]) 08:20, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

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*{{Endorsement}} --[[User:Klaus Eifert|Klaus Eifert]] ([[User talk:Klaus Eifert|talk]]) 13:34, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

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* {{Endorsement}} -- [[User:Juetho|Juetho]] ([[User talk:Juetho|talk]]) 13:25, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

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*{{Endorsement}}--[[User:Alexmar983|Alexmar983]] ([[User talk:Alexmar983|talk]]) 22:53, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

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* {{Endorsement}} -- [[User:the wub|the wub]] [[User_talk:The wub|"?!"]] 00:06, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

==Commons==

==Commons==