Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Orphanage

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[edit] WikiProject or organization - please pick one

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

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

[edit] Number of Links

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

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

[edit] WikiProject Debate

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

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

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

[edit] Orphan classification

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent work on organising the project page, Davidovic. Hopefully a well formatted and informative project page will help new members learn their way around, and make de-orhpaning easier!
The introduction of "lonely" pages should allow us to concentrait on the orphans that need us most! Berachyah may only have a few links, but thats still better than Benposta.
Adding a "tried to de-orphan" tag would be really useful. It's almost impossible to find links for an article like Battoni, untill the article is expanded. But at the moment, without a way to tell other Orphanage Project members, we'll all just keep going through these articles and getting no where. It would be great if we could work out a way to sort out the pages that have been "tried" on the project page, or to-do list, so that members can see even before they go there, that these pages can't be de-orphaned. And, obviously, we'll need a way to put these pages up for review every now and then, incase they can be de-orphaned =)
Lex Kitten 09:47, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
{{Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/do-attempt|date=June 2006|user=Example|att=October 2007}}. "Date" should be the date on the original orphan tag. "User" should (obviously) be your username. "Att" should be the month and year that you made the attempt to de-orphan the article. Please note that this template should be placed only on articles that you have tried extremely hard to de-orphan. Thanks. Davidovic 11:49, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
That looks great. Thats really going to come in handy on those darn geographical stubs >.< Now, we just need to work out a system of alerting members to go back and check these articles can't be de-orphaned after a period of time...Lex Kitten 11:58, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
  • {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/do-talk}} - This should be placed on every orphaned article's talk page. Davidovic 12:54, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Attracting New Members

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

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

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

[edit] Prevention of Orphaned Articles

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

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

[edit] Templates and stuff

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

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

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

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

[edit] Lonely templates

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

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

[edit] Do-orphan

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

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

[edit] Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles

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

[edit] Russian analogue

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

[edit] th3 best way to clear out this problem

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

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

[edit] Year in Topic Links?

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

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

[edit] Geographical stubs

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

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

[edit] Unified orphan/de-orphan process

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

I've been working now and then on whittling down Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles (WOA). Since the list is close to being 4 years old, it's chock full of false positives. So, my objective in working on the list is to get it down to genuine orphans and making sure that those all have the {{orphan}} tag. (If you look at the table on the WOA page, all those letters in gold have been completely weeded through relatively recently). My long term vision has been that when all letters are done, to consolidate them into a single list which can be stored as a WikiProject Orphanage subpage with a title something along the lines of "Long-standing Orphans". (The purpose for the list being for those articles that are exceedingly difficult to de-orphan yet are notable enough to avoid deletion).
So, yes, I do believe that working towards a unified orphanage is a good goal. The question I have is whether a long-standing list as I've been envisioning would be useful or interesting to anyone other than me, or should we tag the list an {{archive}} and let it be abandoned when unification is complete? Whitejay251 23:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
I support a unified orphanage, and getting a bot to tag pages at Special:Lonelypages. I doubt a lot of users don't use Category:Orphaned articles for orphaned articles.
@Whitejay251: I think it would be good to tag Wikipedia:Orphaned articles with {{archive}} when the unification is complete.--Lights (talk) 14:08, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Actually, I propose making a small step towards unifying it now: move Wikipedia:Orphaned articles to a sub-page of WikiProject Orphanage, and make it a redirect to the Orphanage. Obviously we would add a prominent link to it on the Project page so that people could still find it. Once that list is cleaned out, we can mark it with {{archive}}, and keep a less-prominent link to it from the project page for historical purposes.
Separate from that, I'm going to spruce up the "What can I do to help?" section a bit and emphasize WHERE orphaned articles can be found, in this order of priority:
  • 1)Wikipedia:Orphaned articles
  • 2)Category:Orphaned articles
  • 3)Special:Lonelypages.--Aervanath's signature is boring 15:41, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
I've discovered that User:Addbot is already patrolling Special:Lonelypages, so that's already taken care of.--Aervanath's signature is boring 18:27, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
I don't see any reason not to bring anything under one umbrella either. I've been working on whittling down the Orphaned Articles lists too -- tagging the ones that are still orphaned and clearing the ones that aren't. I like Whitejay's idea about long-standing orphans -- these have been orphaned for almost 4 years.
Special:Lonelypages only lists articles with no links whatsoever, right? (I.e. it doesn't list articles with links from userspace and WP-space, etc.) So maybe it would also be a good idea to get someone with the know-how to process a newer DB dump to generate current lists of untagged orphans to sort through, and we could use a supervised bot to tag them. -- Avocado (talk) 19:07, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
I think there is already a bot doing that, but I don't know which one.--Aervanath's signature is boring 18:54, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

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

[edit] Do-attempt in Orphaned list

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

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

[edit] [Sport] at [Year] Olympics

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

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

[edit] orphans from 2003 Database dump

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

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

[edit] {{geo-orphan}}

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

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

[edit] Re-factor priorities section on project page

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

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

[edit] Lists and disambiguation pages aren't orphans

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

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

[edit] Are timelines lists?

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

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

[edit] Rubbish articles

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

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

[edit] Links from portals?

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