The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Operator: Alai

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic

Programming Language(s): Python (modification of replace.py from pywikipedia)

Function Summary: Tagging short, uncategorised articles with ((stub))

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): one time run to tag existing backlog; manually re-run as needed thereafter, probably around once per db dump cycle

Edit rate requested: 6 edits per minute (at off-peak hours)

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y

Function Details:

There's a rather huge number of uncategorised articles in the last db dump: over 20,000. By request of the people at CAT:NOCAT, and earlier bot task approval, I'm already tagging these as such. However, since that has a rather large backlog too, and as many of these are very short (for example, over 5,000 of 'em are <= 500 bytes of wiki text), it's probably more pragmatically useful to tag these with ((stub)), rather than with ((uncat)), as they're likely to be tagged that way sooner or later, and as that route will get them into the "by topic category hierarchy" much sooner. The code would be identical, with an extra double-check for length of "live" article, as well as the existing checks for categories having been added. I've already mentioned this at both Wikipedia:WSS and CAT:NOCAT, and I'll of course act in line with what they suggest for length threshold, whether the entire idea is a plan, etc. Alai 17:06, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Obviously I must not be proposing controversial enough tasks... Any chance of this being approved for a run before Special:Uncategorizedpages updates, which will hopefully be tomorrow? I'd like to get as many of these tagged as possible before the disconnect between the live database and the last dump becomes too great, as has endemicly plagued the categorisation cleanup effort. (Note the strong similarity between this and the earlier-approved task, and that this whole category will get re-sorted by hand, so any alleged non-stubs this short will have a person double-check that in due course.) Alai 09:20, 2 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• I second the motion, if that's what's needed to get this going. Cheers, Her Pegship (tis herself) 04:15, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK, this should be OK. Approved for trial. Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Make 50-100 edits or so and post back with diffs. —Mets501 (talk) 19:48, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Alai 02:02, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. —Mets501 (talk) 03:13, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.