Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-07-17/Tips and tricks
What automation can do for you (and your WikiProject)
Over the years, people have designed a variety of tools to save you time and headaches. Most deal with centralizing information in some way so you don't have to look for "all the discussion related to topic X" yourself, but can instead make use of centralized lists. Some are my ideas. Others are from, well, other people. Here is a summary of three of the biggest ones out there.
Article Alerts
Ah
And that's the tedium Article Alerts is designed to tackle.
WikiProject Dance's current Article Alerts listings
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Did you know
Articles for deletion
Proposed deletions
Templates for discussion
Featured article candidates
Good article nominees
Articles to be merged
Articles to be split
Articles for creation
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The same will apply for
If your project doesn't advertise its Article Alerts subscriptions on its front page, it's probably a good idea to start a discussion on the talk page to ask what's up with that and if it should be added. And while you can regularly check the mainpage of a WikiProject for the most recent alerts in most cases, putting the Wikipedia:WikiProject .../Article alerts page on your
Hats off to Hellknowz for coding that bot.
Recognized Content
Similar to the Article Alerts tool above, which focused on finding active discussions,
You can also have lists of DYK blurbs, this time using WikiProject Berbers as an example:
WikiProject Berbers DYK listing
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Transcluding 10 of 19 total |
The full list of customization option is available at
Lastly, just as with Article Alerts, if your project has a standard shortcut (e.g.
Hats off to JLaTondre for coding that bot.
Cleanup listings
This tool I had no part in its development or design. However, like the tools above, CleanupWorklistBot is designed to collect all cleanup-related information for articles within a WikiProject's scope. This one is a bit less straightforward to setup, but luckily most WikiProjects already have been integrated. All you have to do is to browse the list of cleanup listings and find something that you care about. Cheese perhaps? Or maybe human rights?
These listings, unlike the two previous tools, cannot be embedded directly on Wikipedia. Instead, most WikiProjects use {{WikiProject cleanup listing}} to advertise their cleanup listings on their front page, though alternatives exist. You can also put those on your own user page if you want.
Example {{ Human rights .
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A list of articles needing cleanup associated with this project is available. See also the tool's wiki page and the index of WikiProjects. |
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The listings can be viewed alphabetically, by category, downloaded in a .csv file, and the 'History' link shows a graph of the number of cleanup tags over time for the project. The listings are updated weekly on Tuesday, so if you seriously tackle one cleanup category, or systematically go through a set of related articles, you can actually see the difference you're making from week to week!
If you use the box above, you don't need to create new shortcuts for Cleanup Listings. In the case of
Hats off to Bamyers99 for coding that bot.
Final thoughts
There are many other tools out there. Some are
Tips and Tricks is a general editing advice column written by experienced editors. If you have suggestions for a topic, or want to submit your own advice, follow these links and let us know (or comment below)!
Discuss this story
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WikiSalon_Wikipedia_Cleanup_Worklist_Bot.pdf — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk • contribs)