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This may be slightly off topic for the orphanage, but is there a bot or something that detects and lists walled gardens? Obviously a linkless orphan is a trivial walled garden, which would be flagged as an orphan. Is there something to detect more complex walled gardens.

If there isn't such a tool, what effect would reducing the orphan linkage criteria (e.g. to 0 link only) have on the elimination of walled gardens? (If we require 2 links, that means that walled gardens must be of size at least 3 to avoid being flagged as orphans.) Zodon (talk) 20:51, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

It would help a lot if people would LEAVE RED LINKS if they have a good potential for becoming an article, or even if they don't. I used the search feature on many of the titles of my articles and nearly or more than doubled the links to some of my pages.

A lot of people want their articles to be so aesthetically perfect and they delete all dead links. There would be much more integrity if people were not so neurotic about red links. Daniel Christensen (talk) 19:15, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Hi, Daniel Christensen. How does this issue with red links relate to orphans? I agree that red links in an article are useful, as an idea of needed new articles, but I'm not sure what you mean about people are neurotic about red links. Do you think editors purposefully don't link topics in articles so they won't be red-linked? Or what? And how is that related to orphans? The last few articles I wrote were instantly connected to other articles because they were redlinks in those articles. Is this what you mean? --KP Botany (talk) 07:32, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly what I mean; about articles already being linked. Red links created by the deletion of a page ESPECIALLY should not be removed, for it is obvious that it is a potential article, if it was one already. I've added redlinks to articles before I have created an article and have seen them get removed; people don't like the way red links look, which is understandable, but this is an encyclopedia not an aesthetics convention. Daniel Christensen (talk) 18:38, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Things like nationally known companies should always be made links, regardless of whether or not the article exists. Daniel Christensen (talk) 18:38, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I do agree with you about redlinks, however, that doesn't appear related to the orphan tags, or, rather, I can't figure out the connection. --KP Botany (talk) 18:48, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I'd say the point is, this project is affected by editors' aversion to redlinks. If redlinks were more prevalent, less new articles would be orphans, because they'd be linked as soon as they're created. --JaGa^talk 23:14, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I get it now. Duh. Yes, I do appreciate when articles I create already have a handful of "what links here," in fact, sometimes when I have a few minutes for an article that's what I search for, a red page with a handful of links to. Daniel, thanks for the initial post, this was useful. --KP Botany (talk) 01:26, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

The orphan tool I am making (nearly finished-- now just have to make a documentation for) would eliminate the need for leaving red links. You create a page, use this tool, and voila, you have links!ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 05:28, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

For your interest, User:Para has, at my request, kindly put together a tool showing the daily additions and removals of the ((orphan)) template. The tool is here: http://toolserver.org/~para/orphans/ --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:45, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

FWIW, it looks as if you're doing about the same amount of removal business per day as ((coord missing)), figures for which are here. ((coord missing)) is, of course, hidden as far as the normal user is concerned. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:48, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

As it happens I recently asked if the bot that generates the category tracker at User:MiszaBot/Trackers/CAT:ORPHAN (which is included on the category page ) could also record totals, which was just recently added to: [Revision history of User:MiszaBot/Trackers/CAT:ORPHAN]

But the category tracker doesn't give information on what articles were added/removed from orphan status, which this toolserver tool does.

Maybe should put one or other, or both, or some other summary of progress in more accessible spot. Zodon (talk) 04:19, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Now to get something that automatically tracks the statistics (e.g. monthly benchmarks, orphans as proportion of total number real articles, average progress per (day/month/whatever), etc.) Zodon (talk) 06:13, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I missed it somewhere while reading through this talk page, but can someone explain again why "Our goal is to try to de-orphan newly-tagged orphans as soon as possible, and then work in reverse-chronological order through the backlog." Wouldn't it be better to tackle the old ones first to rid them of the tag that's been there too long? Also I think there should be some more explanation as to the purpose of categorizing de-orphan attempts with the att= parameter, and how this helps with our goal. -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 23:40, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Thoughts on benefit/use of de-orphan attempt.

• Placemarker for those trying to do initial de-orphaning (i.e., indicates that somebody tried it and when), can be sure you won't wind up looking at the same article twice.
• Items that have already been attempted may be a place for those de-orphaners who want an extra challenge.
• Items where de-orphaning was tried quite some time ago may be easier now. (Many items become easier to de-orphan once more articles in related areas have been filled in, for instance a missing genus article.)

With the fresh lot of tagging in February it will be along time waiting for anything before that if people stick to it. Not clear that everyone needs to focus on same bit of the job. Zodon (talk) 06:01, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

The initial logic behind the "reverse chronological order" thing (which is somewhere in the archive, but I can't be bothered to find it right now) was that there was a lot of newly-tagged orphans were not really suitable articles. So the orphan categories were getting clogged up with lots of articles that really should have been tagged for speedy deletion, PROD, or AFD. And those tend to be the newer articles. We were trying to clear out the junk that was coming in so we could actually get to work on the orphans that were actually worth linking to. The hope was that we would eventually be able to get ahead of the flow, and once we could de-orphan or tag for deletion at a higher rate than articles were tagged with the orphan template, then we could start on the backlog. However, that is no longer feasible with the revelation of just how many orphans there are out there. It's not really set in stone, either. As I recall, the original discussion involved three editors, including me, and I'm certainly not going to object to anyone who wants to switch back to going from oldest to newest instead.--Aervanath (talk) 15:54, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm writing a toolserver version of Special:Lonelypages. It's basically finished, but the toolserver is expected to be out of sync with Wikipedia until the end of the month, so I won't be releasing the tool soon. In the meantime, I'd like to pin down exactly what qualifies as list/year articles per the criteria.

I'd appreciate comments on which of the article types below should be excluded from the orphan count:

List articles

• List of articles - such as List of bridges in the United States
• Lists of articles - I found about 200 lists that started like this; some were lists of lists, like Lists of American writers, but others weren't, like Lists of English people

Chronological articles

• Year in articles - such as 1999 in music (4 digit years seem sufficient; there are almost no Year in articles with less than 4 digits)
• Day articles - such as January 8
• Year articles - such as 1999
• non-four digit Year articles - such as 885, 8, 5 BC, 45 BC, etc.

Of course, if anyone knows a more clever way to identify lists - or thinks I've left something out altogether - please bring it up! Thanks! --JaGa^talk 09:06, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Just a note (in case this wasn't previously clear): the above sorts of articles should still be listed as orphans, if there are not sufficient incoming links. It's just that links from those articles shouldn't be counted towards de-orphaning an article. As far as determining what articles are lists and chronological articles that fall within those criteria, I think you've done a good job with the above. Cheers,--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:36, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Right. This question is only concerned with counting incoming links. Thanks for the clarification. --JaGa^talk 19:24, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Some other links not to count:

• Pages ending in (disambig), (disambiguation), (surname), and (name)
• Deaths in pages (example Deaths in 2000)
• Decades in pages (example 1990s in music) - a variation of the Year in ones above

There are bots that tag articles as orphans. You may wish to ask them as well. -- JLaTondre (talk) 23:23, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments.

1. Covered - I exclude links from pages belonging to the hidden All disambiguation pages category
2. Good idea, I'm all for it - funny we don't have a corresponding set of Births in articles
3. I'm a little squeamish about decades. Some decade articles are more articles than lists, such as 1980s in Brazil. But if there's consensus, I'll definitely put that in as well.
4. I'll get in touch with Addbot and Soxbot admins, I probably should've done that from the start. --JaGa^talk 23:51, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I would Love for Special:Lonelypages to be brought back. One thing I would say about a toolserver app i try to make it easily read by a bot :P. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 10:22, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's important that it be bot-compatible, as not many editors are going to want to go through and tag them by hand. Also, I hope that your app will produce a list of ALL orphaned pages; Special:LonelyPages was always limited to 1000 at max, which was not too helpful. Whatever happened to Soxbot? Did it ever resume tagging orphans?--Aervanath talks like a mover, but not a shaker 18:56, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Oh yes, all orphans are available (minus disambigs as well, something that always bugged me about Lonelypages). I think you'll be surprised at just how many orphans are out there. :) --JaGa^talk 19:23, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Be sure to exclude all the articles that use the ((surname)) template, since these are a kind of disambiguation page. Such articles seem to dominate the early entries on the current version of Special:LonelyPages.--ragesoss (talk) 00:37, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

No problem there - the surname template adds articles to the "All disambiguation pages" hidden category, and I filter for that. IMO, the whole disambig thing is what killed Lonelypages - it filled to 1000 with articles that should not have been de-orphaned or tagged. --JaGa^talk 02:24, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, once we have your tool, we should be better off. Let us know when it's active.--Aervanath (talk) 14:56, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

As for lists, many WikiProjects have a list class, so you could consider any article having the template class="assess-list " style="background: #c7b1ff; text-align: center; " | List transcluded onto its talk page as being a list. --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 20:09, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I've been working on an article for some time and have had trouble linking it to other articles. I tagged it with the ((orphan)) article a while back because it had 2 actual links and the rest are disambiguous links, links to lists, or links to users. The list of non-orphaned articles with the orphan tag lists this article because it counts one of the disambiguous links as a real link. The link in question is a link from the only other page on the disambiguous page (For <the other person with the same name>, see <the other person>). My point is, the list being generated isn't picking this up. The pages aren't linked by their subject in any way, only their name. To me, the rule should be that there are three links from other pages that are subject related. I'm going to go back and do my best to just find another link to add to avoid the problem all together but I thought that it was something you might want to check out/be aware of. OlYeller^Talktome 16:58, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

I didn't add the name of the article so that the issue would be discussed and not the article itself. If it's truly important to the point/conversation, let me know and I'll post it. OlYeller^Talktome 17:00, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

The thing is, we have so many orphans with NO links AT ALL that orphans with two links already are way down the priority list, so we're not really bothering tagging them. In fact, I think we may be removing those tags, as if we tagged everything below the three link limit, something like a third of Wikipedia's articles would be tagged, and that's way too much for this project to handle. See the discussions above and in the talk archive for the reasons for this.--Aervanath (talk) 17:49, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Here is an idea: start a WikiProject to place a navbox in every Wikipedia article. In my opinion, navboxes are the best way to de-orphan an article. The typical navbox contains at least several dozen articles, and a single placement provides instantaneous links from all those pages.

In a brief study I did of 10 random articles, 7 of them had one or more navboxes. This does not mean exactly 70% of Wikipedia articles have them, but if that figure were near accurate, there would be close to 860,000 articles lacking them. the three articles I observed that lacked them could have used them.

Since every article fits into one or more categories, every article, likewise, can fit into one or more navboxes. Sebwite (talk) 03:59, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

In my opinion, navboxes should only be put on articles that are listed in the navbox; it's a tool for navigating between subtopics of a larger topic, not a tool for going from <random page> to the topic. If one thinks of a related navbox when seeing the article, I think it's better to link to the main subject of the navbox as a "see also". --Alvestrand (talk) 10:31, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Obviously, a navbox that is placed on a page should list that article, and the article should be relevant to the type of article in that navbox.

The goal of my plan is to:

1.) Find all the articles lacking navboxes

2.) Identify a navbox where the article can be placed. Add the article to that navbox, and add the navbox to that page.

3.) If there is no suitable navbox where the article can be placed, identify other articles that can share a navbox with the one in question, and create a new navbox for the article. New navboxes should resemble well-established categories that are not likely to be deleted. Sebwite (talk) 15:18, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

• Here it is: Proposed WikiProject Navbox. Sebwite (talk) 15:26, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

You're seriously proposing adding a navbox to EVERY article? Sounds like a lot of work, and seems redundant to the category system. I'm not sure it'll be that helpful to this project. -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 22:19, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes I am. It is a great idea because the navbox is one thing that in a single, simple edit provides a large number of links to an article, thereby instantly deorphaning it. It also provides on the page a user-friendly way of finding all the related articles, and not guess, guess, guess in trying to find them or figure out if they even exist.

The overwhelming majority of people who visit Wikipedia do so for read-only purposes, and do not even think of editing. Such people are less familiar with the system, and navboxes help this crowd find what they are looking for. The navboxes are also beneficial to the editing crowd by leading editors to the other articles, and ultimately improving them.

I have created quite a lot of navboxes myself, and placed them in articles that previously did not have them. There are many articles that prior to navbox placement were seldom edited and remained stubs. Once they became home to a navbox, they were instantly edited a lot and greatly improved.

It may be a lot of work to add navboxes to every page. But it is not impossible. If the collection of editors who have worked on the English Wikipedia to this day can write 2,866,545 articles, I don't see how a group of people can place navboxes in 860,000. And I never said it had to be done in one day. In fact, there is no deadline.

Sure, navboxes may be redundant to categories. But Wikipedia:Lists#Purposes of lists states that such redundancy between categories, lists, and templates is

[[necessary. Sebwite (talk) 23:42, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

WP:Set index pages such as England's Looking Glass are a form of disambiguation page and should not have any links, therefor the template ((Orphan)) is not appropriate for such a page. --PBS (talk) 20:55, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

((Orphan)) is a maintenance issue that does not aid our readers. Editorial maintenance issues should be discussed on the talk page not in the article space -- that is why we have talk pages. If someone was to write in plain text at the top of a page "This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. ..." it would be removed as vandalism, and the person who put it there would be told to discuss such issues on the article's talk page. Putting such messages in a box does not alter the fact that it provides no useful information for the reader and is only of use to an editor. --PBS (talk) 20:51, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

This is a duplicate of what you posted at Wikipedia talk:Orphan. Duplicate postings are not helpful for discussion purposes. If you feel a need to call something out on multiple pages, the best thing to do is post it at one page and then put a link to it on the other pages. -- JLaTondre (talk) 20:59, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I followed this link after I posted the other, this would seem to be the better place as it is the project page. (dogs and wagging tails), but the other is specifically about the template so take your pick. --PBS (talk) 23:50, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

But as you have answered at Wikipedia talk:Orphan#This maintenance template should be placed on the talk page lets carry on the conversation there. --PBS (talk) 23:58, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

What is to be gained by labelling Surname pages as orphans? There is unlikely to be any useful link which can be made to the page - they serve a disambiguation-like function - and anyone seeking information on the surname will search, or use "Go", on that name itself. The pages can also be reached via categories. The ((orphan)) tag is ugly and irrelevant on pages such as Addey or Achillini. Please can this project agree that ((surname)) pages should not be tagged as Orphans? I have raised this issue somewhere before, but I can't find where it was, and I don't think anyone replied (perhaps it was the wrong place to raise it!) PamD (talk) 08:26, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Found it: Wikipedia_talk:Orphan#Surname_pages, where one editor replied, supporting my view. I hope it doesn't count as "Forum-shopping" to raise the question here too! PamD (talk) 08:37, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm new here, so I'm not sure what my opinion is worth, but as I've been browsing the 'orphans' I've seen a lot of these...and have no idea what to do to them to get them 'linked in'. I agree that these should not be added to the orphan listings. There's just no good way to get rid of them. They're redirects and should be treated as such. Sabiona (talk) 16:24, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Correct me if i'm wrong, but aren't those supposed to be set index class? (see also User:PBS's post above). If the bot is tagging these kinds of articles, I agree we should make a change to the bot's code. -- œ^™ 00:36, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't believe there is a bot doing orphan tagging anymore. Or at least, Addbot (which is the one I knew about) hasn't in quite awhile. It hasn't even run its other tasks for several months. -- JLaTondre (talk) 22:09, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Check out Wikipedia_talk:Disambiguation_pages_with_links#Toolserver_update_and_question. I originally categorized surname articles as disambigs, but they aren't considered as such. So they're articles, and subject to the orphan rules. Myself, I prefer thinking of them as DABs, but that isn't consensus. We'd have to nail down this surname identity crisis - with agreement across projects (I'm not sure what project is in charge of surnames - Anthroponomy?) - before I make changes in the code. Otherwise I'll be doing a code rewrite every month or so and it isn't easy. --JaGa^talk 08:57, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Er, one person's opinion is not consensus and that is all that is demonstrated there. Despite what he may want, the vast majority of surname pages are nothing more than disambig pages. But for the sake of argument, let's accept them as not dabs and ask ourselves "why should they still be marked as orphans?" I still don't see the point. -- JLaTondre (talk) 20:27, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Right. I agree with you - I'd prefer to mark them as disambigs and have them non-orphan. But just as consensus wasn't defined there (there were other discussions but I haven't found them), it can't be defined solely here, either, because the decision would affect other projects, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Anthroponymy and Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation. I probably should have just left my code as it was, considering surnames to be DABs, but all I can do now is make sure I don't make the same mistake again. So my point is, we need a decision made on a more visible level than this. Perhaps an RFC is in order. --JaGa^talk 11:50, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Disagree. Orphanage does not need to worry about whether surnames should be considered disambigs or not. It need only consider the question as to whether surnames (and name pages in general) should be considered orphans or not. There seems to be general agreement that the shouldn't. The simplest solution is to update the orphan criteria to add an exclusion for name pages the same way there currently is one for disambigs. -- JLaTondre (talk) 14:19, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Oh yes, please! How do we get that done? And then we need a mass cleanup to remove these unnecessary tags from the pages where they've been wrongly placed. PamD (talk) 12:34, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I've been WP:BOLD and amended the criteria at Wikipedia:Orphan#Criteria to follow what seems to be consensus here. PamD (talk) 23:02, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Agree with JLaTondre. Orphanage does not need to worry about whether surnames should be considered disambigs or not. The marking of surname pages or any other pages that aren't disambiguations as orphans (or not) will not affect Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation. -- JHunterJ (talk) 16:35, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

This catscan lists articles in the category Surname having within them ((orphan)). About 612 of them at the time of writing. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:14, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes but a fair number of these are pages about a particular surname, not ((surname)) pages. -- Hebrides (talk) 06:47, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

There's no distinction - the page which lists people of a given surname ought to include content about the name too, as I understand it. But it is unlikely to have any legitimate incoming links, except possibly from related surnames, although it will be found by people searching for the name using "Go" or "Search". PamD (talk) 09:39, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

The orphan criteria has been updated to exclude surname pages (and other set indexes). As most of these pages (example Franklin (surname)) act like disambiguation pages, most of them will not have many direct links so it was felt that there is no need to tag them as orphans. This change was discussed and implemented without objection.

JaGa, who maintains toolserver reports reporting orphan status that are used for tagging and untagging, has been asked to update his orphan reports in accordance with criteria change. He does not want to do that without input from the Disambiguation and Anthroponymy projects. His position appears to be if an article is not an orphan candidate, then it must be a DAB page. As he previously had objections to including surname pages in his DAB reports, he therefore feels he need agreement from other projects.

Everyone else who has commented so far doesn't see it that way. The opinion has been that whether surname pages are or are not DAB pages is irrelevant to whether they are or are not orphan candidates. That surname pages (and other set indexes) can simultaneously be not DAB pages and not orphans. DAB status and orphan status should be treated separately.

To bring this to a resolve, I'm posting this at the Disambiguation, Anthroponymy, and Orphanage projects. To consolidate discussion, I suggest that Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation be used for all responses since JaGa's main concern seems to be about DAB classification.

Links to relevant discussions: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]

If there are any objections, please let's here them. Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 14:14, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree that dab-ness is not the same as orphan-able-ness. Beyond that, though, whether or not surname pages, set indexes, or other non-disambiguation pages are orphan-able is not a disambiguation project discussion. I would suggest consolidating discussion of whether surname articles should be orphan-able in a relevant project: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anthroponymy or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Orphanage. -- JHunterJ (talk) 15:01, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

However, JaGa is making it a Disambiguation project discussion because he will not take Orphanage's opinion alone and insists Disambiguation must agree. Therefore, Disambiguation is a relevant project. -- JLaTondre (talk) 16:05, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Non-objection: Thanks for establishing a consolidated discussion - as long as all the relevant projects/talkpages are alerted, I don't see that it matters where the conversation takes place. I support the view that ((surname)) pages, ((given name)) pages, and ((SIA)) Set indexes are all pages for which incoming links are rarely appropriate (one example being a link from the article on a variant form of a surname), and so should not be considered as ((orphan))s. PamD (talk) 15:18, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

I've also now mentioned this discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Orphan#Surname_pages (the 2nd of JLT's links above). PamD (talk) 15:25, 5 July 2009 (UTC) ... and also at Template_talk:Orphan#.7B.7Btl.7CSurname.7D.7D_pages for good measure. PamD (talk) 15:28, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

The reason that selecting an appropriate place for consolidating a conversation is so that the editors who are watching the appropriate page see the updates in their watchlist and the editors who are only watching other pages (such as this one) see only the pointer to the consolidated discussion, since it's not really what they're watching. -- JHunterJ (talk) 15:40, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Actual discussion

Ok, now that we've finished discussing the discussion on where the discussion is going to be discussed, can we discuss the actual discussion now? :) Anyway, my opinion on this is that the same logic applies to set index articles as to disambiguation pages: they aren't necessarily meant to have any incoming links, so it makes sense to exempt them from the orphan criteria, as we do with disambiguation pages. Cheers, --Aervanath (talk) 16:55, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

It seems there is only one objection, and that objection would be resolved if the dab project pipes in to support the proposal. But the request doesn't really make sense. Other than being a precedent for types of pages that are "validly orphans," it isn't a dab issue. So go with the proposal! (John User:Jwy talk) 18:50, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me eminently sensible that any page whose tag produces a wording that explicitly discourages links to the page should never be tagged as an orphan. Otherwise we get the silly situation where one tag says, "If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change that link to point directly to the intended article." and the other tag says, "Please introduce links to this page from other articles related to it."

Actually, I don't understand why JaGa isn't using the list on MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage, which includes the surname and given name tags in the Set index article templates section at the bottom.

Hebrides (talk) 20:59, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Hello, new user here. I worked on de-orphaning and other maintenance work on a handful of smaller wikis. For surname disambiguation pages, I usually put a small header at the top of the page such as For other uses of "Surname", see [[surname|here]].. Would this work? Aboriginal Noise (talk) 20:58, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Surname pages should not ever be marked as or considered to be orphans. --DThomsen8 (talk) 01:02, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Not sure whether I need to restate my view again, but just in case: surname, given name, and Set Index pages should not be labelled as "orphans", as they are pages to which there should usually be no, or very few, links (there might reasonably be a link from a related name). PamD (talk) 21:54, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Just in case someone out there cares, I've started a log of all the articles I've de-orphaned here. The reason I'm posting this here is because I'm also starting on a "Guide to De-orphaning" of sorts, which will probably just consist of a list of tips and hints, but anyways I'll be accumulating this list as I go and thought others may find it interesting to read. -- œ^™ 03:00, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Sometime soon I'd like to remove inactive members from the list, mostly those that have not edited at all for at least a year, they will be put on the inactive list. Those that have not been active in specifically this area of maintenance will have their status changed to 'inactive'. But I'd much rather prefer it if those editors would change their status themselves. Cheers :) -- œ^™ 03:52, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

 Done If you think your name does not belong on the Inactive list, feel free to move yourself back. We need all the help we can get. Thanks. -- œ^™ 22:28, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

There's an old adage, proven many times over, that as soon as you invent a metric to score performance, people will stop trying to perform and start trying to score.

I've been seeing this in play quite a lot lately with orphan tags. Articles are tagged as orphans because they are insufficiently integrated into the encyclopedia. "Integration" is a nebulous concept, so for operational purposes it is replaced by the metric "number of incoming links". Some people then go around adding low-value links into See also sections, solely so that they can score three or more incoming links, thus allowing them to remove the orphan tag. Unfortunately the addition of these links often degrades the articles to which they are added, and need not imply that the de-orphaned article is any better integrated than it was before.

This morning, for example, I noticed a case where someone has deorphaned Flora of Tubuai by adding links from Tubuai (Austral Islands) (a good, useful link), and the first three bluelinked plant species on the list. Does anyone think this improves the encyclopedia? Personally, I think not.

If we blow this article-scale problem up to encyclopedia-scale, it looks like this: "number of articles de-orphaned" has become a metric by which some people measure their performance in improving Wikipedia, and some of those people are now degrading Wikipedia in order to score highly against that metric.

I see this as a problem. But I don't know what the solution is. Education maybe? Any ideas?

Hesperian 00:18, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Although I don't see much of a problem with the example above, I couldn't agree more that some people just don't put any thought or effort into de-orphaning. But I don't know how else we can drive it into peoples heads to only make RELEVANT links.. it's already stated on the Wikipedia:Orphan#What if I can't de-orphan it? page, maybe we should make it more prominent? -- œ^™ 02:05, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

I tried to add this into the scope, I invite you to add to it your thoughts above or improve upon what I wrote if you can better articulate it and if you wish to help clarify our intention. -- œ^™ 00:53, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Interesting timing, looking at the above section.

As I created Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory today, I realized it would ever be an orphan, and added a comment at its top to say "yeah, it is an orphan, but it is a happy orphan and needs only its one parent, IMO" or some such. In this case, there may well never be another article that NEEDS to link to this notable lab. It ran from 1948 to 2002. It did great work. And it is gone. New articles are very unlikely to link to it. Someone looking for it, however, should be able to find it here.

Another I edited today was American Roentgen Ray Society. It might actually wind up well-linked as notable members have articles that might reasonably point to it.

• I think we need a ((an-orphan-but-happy-with-1-link)), ((an-orphan-but-happy-with-2-links)) (or some non-silly name, just saying) template with a category in it (or maybe just a cat)... a way to mark article successfully deorphaned with fewer-than-desired links. Sure, it is subject to abuse, but the way it is now, I feel confident I am looking at orphan candidates that other people have looked at and decided are fine. - Sinneed (talk) 03:36, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

• Alternate idea (and I may just have missed this) - I find that on articles I edit that are probably ever-orphaned, it saddens me to leave the tag at the top. How about, if an editor thinks the tag is probably a waste of space, we move it to the bottom of the article, simply for aesthetics? - Sinneed (talk) 03:36, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
• Another: How about a simple cat template or cat... maybe orphan-without-a-banner. - Sinneed (talk) 03:36, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Well I'm sure you'll be happy to learn that there is in fact another article that links to the HCL article.. I added a link to it from Timeline of United States inventions.. So it's not an orphan anymore. :) At least not by my standards.. I really do think the definition of an orphan should be changed to just one incoming link.. I don't know why I don't just go ahead and be bold and make the change as I get the impression that not too many people are concerned with orphans so noone will object, but I keep thinking maybe more discussion is warranted. About your template idea, I dunno if it's necessary to create more templates when a much simpler solution would be to just change the definition/criteria. I don't have a problem with editors moving the banner to the bottom of the page, but moving it to the talkpage has been brought up and opposed many times before, so I imagine removing the banner completely and just having a category would be opposed as well. -- œ^™ 05:15, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks on the deorphan. :)

1. I see a fair number of newly-added orphan tags, so something or someone cares. :)

2. I would have to agree with the not-on-the-talk-page thing, I click random-article and edit...if the flags aren't there, they don't exist for me. I do look at the bottom, though, usually, to see the cats.

3. I generally like flags at the top, but if I think it isn't fixable, I feel bad about leaving uglies up.

4. The advantage of the template would be to remove the ones an interested editor thought were complete from the todo list, but still orphaned, so that they would show in our lists... but as you say, I am not sure how much folk care? So maybe not worth it. And besides *I* don't know how to do it, so I am volunteering someone else, which is unkind. - Sinneed (talk) 05:27, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

About point #2, the orphaned articles maintenance category is hidden though.. so only registered users who have that setting set in their user preferences can see the cat. About point #4, the att= parameter of the ((orphan)) template already handles that kinda, in a way, because when applied it removes articles from the monthly category (Category:Orphaned articles from September 2009) and places them into the attempted de-orphaned articles category (Category:Attempted de-orphan from September 2009), yet it still remains in the general all-inclusive category (Category:All orphaned articles). -- œ^™ 05:48, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Is there a way to filter or search the list of orphan articles? With over 100,000 articles on the list, it is rather difficult to find topics I know enough about to know where links should come from. --Pakaraki (talk) 08:12, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Hi Pakaraki. Try using Catscan at http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php – put "en" at top left, a category you know about into the search in category box and then put "All orphaned articles" into the for pages by category box. I chose a depth of 1 in both boxes on the right, to get some results without waiting for hours!

Just as an experiment I tried "1969 births" as my search in category and it returned a list of 280 orphaned pages. Let me know how you get on. Cheers – Hebrides (talk) 13:56, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Hebrides. I used search in category "New Zealand" and for pages by category "Orphaned articles", and got 260 responses. Very useful! However, this seems to depend on the articles being correctly categorised in the first place. I was hoping to be able to filter the Orphaned articles by a text string, but this tool is still useful. --Pakaraki (talk) 21:01, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

In that case, why not do a Google search like

"Southland" "This article is an orphan" site:en.wikipedia.org (gave 46 hits)

intitle:"Southland" "This article is an orphan" site:en.wikipedia.org (gave 5 hits)

intitle:"New Zealand" ~environment "This article is an orphan" site:en.wikipedia.org (gave 16 hits)

Have a look at Google’s advanced search syntax if you’re not familiar with it… -- Hebrides (talk) 21:33, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

You're right - Google is probably the way to go. I was just working along the lines of using Wikimedia tools, but of course there is no need to restrict to those. --Pakaraki (talk) 22:33, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Back in August, Wavelength and I de-orphaned (or merged or deleted) all the orphaned language articles up to July 2009 that we could find. I'm now covering the subsequent months by filtering for titles containing 'language', 'linguistics', or 'dialect'. If I miss anything, please let me know. (For some of the really obscure languages I may only make a single link, but if that's from a higher node in the classification of the language, it will be easy for anyone to find, and so IMO should be good enough.)

How do we prevent orphan tags from being added? Gnau language was tagged in Feb and then again in Nov. A language with 1300 speakers is not likely to be relevant to many other articles; the fact that it's linked from Torricelli languages is probably as much as we can hope for, unless it's expanded or somehow gets in the news. kwami (talk) 00:27, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Addbot_22 ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 17:28, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

As of 5.0.0.1 (released hopefully next week. Now in snapshot in http://toolserver.org/~awb/snapshots) will be correctly tagging Orphans using the definition of "less than 3 incoming links ...". I noticed that the project encourages people to tag articles with NO incoming links. I proposed this update for AWB Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature_requests#Another tweak for orphans. My question is this means that we also UNTAG articles with 1 or 2 incoming links? If yes, I have to slightly modify my request above. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:57, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

I volunteered to cleanup the backlog a bit. Please read my BRFA at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Yobot 11. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:24, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Yobot finished its run tests. Please check the BRFA. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:32, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Is that 3 links from mainspace? I'm wondering because I'm trying to prevent some articles from being repeatedly tagged as orphans. kwami (talk) 20:20, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, 3 links from mainspace to article directly or to its redirects. Redirects themselves don't count. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:01, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Ah, but not to its redirects! One language article, Divehi (Mahl) language, was recently tagged despite having 400 links through redirects. It had recently been moved, and so had only two direct links. (Good thing it was tagged, though, because it was a copy&paste rather than a proper move.) kwami (talk) 21:41, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

This is fixed now. There were two bugs. One in AWB and one in MediaWiki. Everything works fine as of Wed Jan 27. Last thing to do is to force AWB editors to update to 5.0.1.0 which is to be released soon. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:58, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Yobot approved to start fixing. Releasing the new AWB will prevent editors for causing more mistakes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:40, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I know its not a word...

Are there any tools that can assist in finding articles that might be good ones to link to an orphaned articles?--RadioFan (talk) 13:00, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Not that I know of.. but that's part of the fun in de-orphaning, doing the grunt work yourself in tracking down that obscure reference, connecting the dots, expanding certain articles if that's what's needed.. it's what makes de-orphaning enjoyable. If it was automated it would just turn into a mindless menial task. -- œ^™ 19:55, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

According to WP:ORPH, "Currently our priority is to focus on orphans with NO incoming links at all, and it is recommended to only place the ((orphan)) tag if the article has ZERO incoming links from other articles." Should something about this be mentioned in the Template section of the project page, so that people looking at this description of the orphan tag would know about the recommendation? -- JTSchreiber (talk) 05:05, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

You're right, I've made the change. I've also amended it to state that editorial judgment should be used, for situations where it's just not feasible for certain articles to have any incoming links from other articles due to their subject matter (see discussion). -- œ^™ 15:06, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! -- JTSchreiber (talk) 03:44, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

The criteria for deciding an orphan states:only place the ((orphan)) tag if the article has ZERO incoming links from other articles. I have been deorphaning for a fair while now and have left the orphan tag on articles which had just one or two incomming links. However I'm not sure if that is the best thing to do. Wouldn't it be better if I could just remove the tag for 1 link if I cannot possibly hope to ever hit the magic number of three? --Deepak D'Souza (talk) 09:50, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

I would wait. 1 incoming link is unstable sometimes and can become 0 at some point. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:32, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Point taken, but won't the bot come back and tag the article again. I am not arguing for a perfect numerical definition here; just wondering if it would make more sense to remove a tag for 1,2 links. That way there will be less attempted deorphaned articles for those who atempt to deorphan them. Just a thought. --Deepak D'Souza (talk) 16:26, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I think we should be leaving the orphan tag on articles that have only 1 or 2, because as Magioladitis points out, they are unstable, and, identifying the problems of articles on the tops of pages may get more editors interested in doing gnomish kinds of things. Orphan tags doesn't make the content itself look bad, but instead talks about some of the more endemic problems on Wikipedia. The backlog of attempteds doesn't really hurt anyone and anything we can do to give the public a hint of our immense amount of maintenance activities that need to be done helps our public face and recruiting efforts. Sadads (talk) 17:56, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

To second that, all new entries are probably with no incoming links. Moreover, we don't really want bots to tg/detag that often. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:13, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I have to disagree with Magioladitis on this one. (I usually agree with him/her, so this is a surprise.) I don't think the frequency of bots tagging/detagging/retagging really matters. I would say remove the tag once you've inserted at least one incoming link. Why? Because removing the tag removes it from the category of orphaned articles, leaving us to focus on the ones that actually have zero incoming links. Yes, that link may later be removed, causing the bot to retag it as orphaned, at which point it'll be re-added to the category. But honestly, I think that isn't that huge a deal. We have set ourselves a monumental task of de-orphaning all millions of articles on Wikipedia. Does this mean we should stop? Hell no! But we should keep it manageable. First, let's get all articles to have one link to them. Once we've hit that standard, we can move up to aiming for two incoming links, and so on. So, yes, remove the tag if you've successfully added even only one incoming link, and move on to those which have zero links. Incremental success is still success, especially when it's as large a task as we've set ourselves! After all, we're trying to eat an elephant here, so let's just take it one bite at a time, shall we?--Aervanath (talk) 20:10, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Just wanted to say, it's good to see you back at the Orphanage, Aervanath... As for removing the tag after one incoming link.. it all depends on the type of article, just use your best judgement and on a case-by-case basis: if there's a likely chance that the article is not ever going to get more than one link, and you have reason to believe that that incoming link is stable, then by all means remove the tag. Our main goal after all is to reduce the backlog. -- œ^™ 10:38, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

One link though, does not provide significant enough stability or traffic, however, the attempted de-orphan category is perfect for those articles. Why not just put it in the attempted category instead of deleting the tag (as is already suggested/been suggested). Also, I have strongly disagree with the sense that we actually have to empty the category. I would think, the quality of the action is more important then clearing the categories. What does it matter that we have a huge backlog? Sadads (talk) 04:13, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Could the tags be automated, so that they register in different categories depending on the number of main-space links? Absolute orphans vs. near-orphans? That would allow people to concentrate on the more critical cases w/o ignoring the others. I don't know the mechanics, but this might also make it easy for the bot to review the near-orphans in case their link disappears.

I sympathize to some extent. A large number of language articles are unlikely to ever have more than a single link, from the superior node in their classification, and perhaps, eventually, a second link from a sister ethnicity article. That would still count as an orphan in our present scheme, despite the fact that the organization of nested language classification articles makes them easy to locate. Perhaps we could create an invisible tag that would prevent the bot from perpetually retagging such articles as orphans, once we determine that they're adequately linked given their subject? That could be kept track of in a separate 'few-links non-orphan' category, or just kept track of through transclusions of the tag. — kwami (talk) 22:08, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Aervanath, I think most of the orphans have no incoming links anyway and the last year or two we tag only pages with no incoming links anyway. MY bot ran and removed orphan tags from pages with 3 or more incoming links that were still tagged as orphans some months ago. Let's find someone to give us some statistics of tagged pages with 1 or 2 links. Maybe you are right but I think we can do it with some other method than detag and retag. -- Magioladitis ([[User

talk:Magioladitis|talk]]) 08:57, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

This past year I've had pages with 1-2 links repeatedly retagged as orphans, so I don't think it's true that we only tag true orphans. — kwami (talk) 09:35, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

It was a bug in AWB's code which I fixed and then I ran a bot to fix the tags. New version is bug-free. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:51, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

One last bug fixed. rev 7566 wasn't removing orphan tag from non-orphan pages when the tag was inside ((Multiple issues)). -- Magioladitis (talk) 02:39, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Please see "Orphan criteria" below

Hey all, just so everyone knows, I got orphaned articles on the Opentask portion of the community portal! Hopefully that gets some more interest, Sadads (talk) 14:18, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I think that's great. I de-orphaned a couple from the Open Task page (specifically, Gajedi Taal, GE Artesia Bank, and Lee Wilder Thomas) a couple weeks ago, but they are still listed there as orphans. You can't edit the list directly. How are the listed orphans selected? How does the list get modified? Listmeister (talk) 20:39, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

It seems user:flBot, the bot tasked with updating that page is no longer active.. hmmm. -- œ^™ 10:32, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

The following articles seem to form something of a walled garden. They do have outgoing links, but the regional pages generally have no incoming links except from one another. The Japan page also has incoming links from Flags of country subdivisions, List of Japanese flags, and Rising Sun Flag.

• List of Japanese municipal flags
• List of municipal flags of Kyūshū
• List of municipal flags of Chūgoku region
• List of municipal flags of Kansai region
• List of municipal flags of Chūbu region
• List of municipal flags of Kantō region
• List of municipal flags of Tōhoku region
• List of municipal flags of Hokkaidō

I wasn't sure how – or whether – this should be dealt with, but I figured you lot would know. Cnilep (talk) 12:52, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Well the municipal ones are just split from the main "List of Japanese municipal flags" and that one's linked to the outside from "Flags of country subdivisions", so at least there is a way out of the walled garden. I don't think it's necessary to have links going to each municipal page, as long as their parent page has a way out. -- œ^™ 20:31, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

OK, that makes sense to me. Thanks, Cnilep (talk) 07:53, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

The article on arrowords, that word puzzle similar to crosswords, was declared orphaned February 2009. On March 9 2011, I added links to this article, from the articles on crosswords and word search and also from two articles on women's magazines. I also think that I added a link from the article on word games and puzzles. Can some please check as to see whether this article can now be de-orphaned? Many thanks, ACEOREVIVED (talk) 00:21, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Aj

It just seemed to me that the Orphanage and this page [6] (category needed) seemed to have some stuff in common.

I quite like the orphanage - so I've been getting orphans adopted a bit, but tagging the article as a part of a project or category probably helps with an orphan becoming less of an orphan over time.

I don't know if that sort of stuff has been much discussed ? EdwardLane (talk) 13:40, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Another thing that might assist with getting articles out of the orphanage. If the section called category - which currently lists all the articles that are orphans based on date were also listed under different criteria - so based on their other categories.

Orphans that are stubs, or good or physics relates, or whatever

is that possible to add to this list by 'bot' or just be an appropriate s'pecial' page? EdwardLane (talk) 13:03, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

I commented at WP:ORPHAN#criteria and will list it here, possible for no other reason but open wonderment, but also to explore that there are other options and solutions.

• If there is large backlog on orphaned articles, and "there is still discussion (I assume at WP:WikiProject Orphanage) regarding whether to have a more relaxed definition in order to clear the "immense" backlog of orphans", why the complication in solving the problem? As it stands, "This is a strict definition of the term" (orphan), can only be a definition of any kind from a twisted Wikipedia definition. "If" there is a backlog 'and' some desire to solve this problem, then create a solution. An orphan by 'any' definition would be "A person or thing that is without protective affiliation". If there is affiliation of an orphan article to one other article this would be adoption thus the article would no longer be an orphan. If that is the case then maybe another classification, such as Isolated article (or some other appropriate name) might be a solution. This way an article could be "de-orphaned" but still need additional affiliation of two or more articles.

I realize this would be a bold move but I noticed there is a backlog to 2003 which is astounding. With one simple move I would imagine the orphan backlog would be reduced considerably and an issue solved (a non-orphaned—orphan article) to the betterment of Wikipedia. This would also solve a concern of people tagging an article that does have one or two links as orphaned thus rectifying an improper locution.

With ideas and consensus there could be an Orphan article project, and an Isolated (or another appropriate name) article project. The isolated project could be broken down to One link isolated and Two link isolated projects. If an article has one link then surely it can be agreed upon that it is no longer actually orphaned so when an orphaned article is de-orphaned the tag can be removed.

If this is something of interest it will require the Wikipedia Wizards to make it work. I would assume a bot can be utilized to mark a de-orphaned article as a one or two link isolated article. I do not know the possible solutions from this point but I will wager there are those that do. Otr500 (talk) 17:58, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

What I would prefer is to eliminate the complication altogether and officially relax the definition of an orphan to being an article with zero incoming links, where only a single incoming link would be enough to remove the tag, and also include disambiguation pages within the criteria, where a single link from a disambiguation page would count. This I think would drastically reduce the backlog especially if we can get a bot to remove the tag from all those pages that are only linked from a dab page. However this is also a bold move as the 3 link criteria has been the norm for so long I don't know how the community would react, consensus would need to be firm. -- œ^™ 08:02, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

I would agree with officially relaxing the definition as you propose. I run a bot that removes the orphan tag for articles that don't meet the current definition. It would be trivial to change its parameters to meet any new criteria. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:44, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

I don't see much point into breaking this into two separate categories. All that does is move the backlog to a different project, it doesn't actually do anything to solve it or people's concerns over tagging. It's just changes the name. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:44, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

A good set of arguments for any that might be proponents of the 3 link orphan criteria and opposed to improvements

• An article with one link is no longer an orphan. We can call it that but it is erroneous.
• Obviously the current system does not work and a change is needed. This is a fundamental positive concerning Wikipedia.
• Relaxing the criteria would be consistent with actuality. Goal: three links; No link, an orphan, one link, not an orphan.

The reason I suggested a tiered solution: 1)- was for any that might be hesitant to change, it would be an option, 2)- If a goal is to have at least three links then there is actually a need for two categories. I would think a bot could do this such as, "Category:Articles needing additional links", and the "Orphan" tags could be reduced. If this was so would there need to be a maintenance template?

I am just giving suggestions and think any move in a positive direction would be good for Wikipedia. My objection to the current system is logical in that an article that is not an orphan should not be labeled as such. Otr500 (talk) 01:44, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

So should I just go ahead and boldly make the necessary edits to relax the criteria officially changing the definition of an orphan? Or would it be better to start a proposal at the Village Pump first in case a flood of people start coming here to complain? However it's probably more likely that a majority may see this as a welcome change. -- œ^™ 06:35, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Look at the bright side, if you take it to the Village pump, and there is consensus there, it will have more weight against complaints right? I feel it should be a welcome change since an orphan that is not an orphan should be a "no brainer" but you never know. I have been working long hours so I will try to keep abreast. If you need any help just let me know. Otr500 (talk) 10:03, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Okaaay.. it's done. Let's move this discussion to Wikipedia talk:Orphan now. -- œ^™ 06:24, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps I should still announce it at WP:VPP.. I will do that. Hopefully I won't get skewered for being too bold ;P -- œ^™ 06:36, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• Support for bold change. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 10:47, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
• Support this long overdue change, which will get rid of that navel-gazing template from the top of many articles that only serves to distract our readers. I would also support the elimination of visible orphan tags even from genuine orphan articles and just having a hidden category. Unlike other maintenance templates this one doesn't identify any shortcoming of the article where it appears, but of other articles. Phil Bridger (talk) 13:51, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
• Seems like a good change, especially if it lets us concentrate on the worst of the backlog up front. Might be worth recognizing "near orphans" by the old standard, but that's another issue. – Luna Santin (talk) 00:42, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
  • I concur and am especially worried if we forget isolated articles (1 incoming link articles), because the more isolated an article is the harder it will be for people to find the article, and the harder it is to find the article, the less people seeing the article, the less sets of eyes that are going to be Bold enough to actually improve the content. We are having an editor shortage because people don't feel like there are things for them to improve, the encyclopedia is looking more and more complete (amongst other issues), not trying to bring items from the back of Wikipedia closer to the front. In the long run, if we do not continue to work on isolated articles, that means we are not providing means for peole to find content they can improve. I would gladly rather have a large backlog, then to forget that articles are isolated. The less isolated the articles are increases the ease for experts to find gaps and mistakes and fill them, Sadads (talk) 01:15, 12 October 2011 (UTC)
• Support for common sense change. Thank you OE. Comment: Of course I am for the change, as my edits show and consensus supports, but I also have concerns of the repercussions, or I guess we could call it "unintended consequences". On the one hand we have solved an issue but my concerns, along with Sadads, of forgotten isolated articles is valid. I championed a cause that I fear, nay I say! but rather expect, will do just that. This is why I suggested; Category:Articles needing additional links, possibly a hidden category, and possibly a talk page maintenance tag. My reasoning is that a change solved a problem of non-orphaned articles being labeled as orphans, which was misleading, but a follow up would be a move to ensure the intended criteria of three links could be followed. My intention was a more total solution and not a solution with possible consequences. Otr500 (talk) 04:08, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Concerns

I assume everyone just got tied up but with the "orphan" criteria relaxed there are concerns about what is left. There will be an ease in the backlog but another editor also had concerns over the articles that have at least one link (no longer an orphan) but that have less that the three. Ensuring Wikipedia is linked is a good thing. Relaxing the criteria was a good thing, because an orphan (look up the definition) with at least one link is not an orphan, so Wikipedia now at least has a correct definition. Now what about the other articles that are poorly linked (less than three) to other articles? I do not wish to make waves but wish to know what criteria will be in place so that this can be tracked. It seems to me that to fix one problem that creates another is not a good solution but is a trade-off. Otr500 (talk) 13:54, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

I just don't think articles being poorly linked is that big of a problem. Those articles that cannot be linked from more than one other article are usually either obscure or highly specialized topics that usually can ONLY be linked from that one other related article which usually IS highly linked. And anyone seeking that knowledge will eventually reach the poorly linked article because they're more likely to be coming from the highly linked one that deals with that specialized subject (a kind of de-orphaning by proxy I suppose ;P) Also, disambiguation pages are a GREAT way to find obscure, poorly linked articles. However, they only ensure an orphan is found if one randomly stumbles upon it, whereas an article linked from just ONE other related article will usually guarantee that someone interested in the subject WILL eventually find it, and that someone is also the most likely to improve that article. And if that happens our job is done as far as I'm concerned. -- œ^™ 09:06, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I understand your reasoning, which makes sense. Please excuse my exploring, as I attempt to get a handle on this, but does an "extra" category pose any real problems or hard work to implement? The concerns of linking as you explained are duly noted but your comments include words like "eventually", "more likely", "randomly stumbles upon it", "usually guarantee", and "And if that happens our job is done as far as I'm concerned.", which is a lot of supposition in one paragraph. I would imagine that your Wikipedia knowledge is far above the "average" editor so I would like you to consider those "other" editors for a moment. You may not feel it is that big of a problem but apparently it is a problem and would involve discerning a definition of "big". I am glad the orphan criteria was relaxed but is there still a requirement to have at least three links? The orphan tag, while improper, was a way to more easily keep up with the links because articles with only two links were still listed. By relaxing the criteria this was lost. From a research point of view I can certainly see where the up links would suffice but according to my interpretation of some of your words I would have to add eventually and I can also see where going a step further would be a benefit to Wikipedia concerning the aim to "build the web" to enable readers to easily access relevant information on other pages. As you are aware linking is "an important feature of Wikipedia" as long as the links are relevant and helpful in the context. Linking is also a good way to draw attention to new articles so there are many benefits to linking more than just the connection of articles and the ease of navigation. Apparently the link criteria is only a suggestion, "three or more is ideal and will help ensure the article is reachable to readers" but are there not benefits to going a step further. Otr500 (talk) 16:21, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Heh you're right, that is a lot of supposition. :) I don't have a problem with creating a new tracking category for 'isolated' articles, just as long they're not marked with a new kind of 'isolated article' maintenance tag, just adding the category is fine, and at the same time removing the orphan tag. I'm thinking this can be done by a bot, or with AWB. I'm not sure how much work is involved in writing the bot code though as I'm not a programmer. -- œ^™ 05:29, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

That would be something outside of my expertise as I would be lost. I could not imagine an editor, with exceptions for the possible "fly-by tag dropper", wanting a maintenance tag. I would have issues with any tag recommendations. A well referenced article would be within all the standard policies and guideline criteria with a least one link but additional links enhance Wikipedia. Otr500 (talk)

Needed

One bot programmer!!!! Otr500 (talk) 03:25, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Feel like writing up an official request? -- œ^™ 12:04, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

I will look into it. Otr500 (talk) 14:17, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Quite early on, we are told here that a "a hyperlink is the defining feature of a wiki". That is simply not true. The true defining feature of a wiki is that it is a web page that can be edited by any one who reads this. (See the article on wiki; also the article on Ward Cunningham). Also, if this was a reference to hyperlinks being important to Wikipedia, shouldn't the term used here be "wikilink"? ACEOREVIVED (talk) 20:53, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

I've updated the wording to say "the wikilink is one of the important characteristics of a wiki", as I think that is somewhat more accurate. Cheers, --Aervanath (talk) 04:06, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

I was thinking of writing up a new bot regarding orphans. I was originally going to (and did) create a bot to remove orphan tags, but it might, I feel, be unnecessary. Are there any other tasks needed here? Cheers! Feedintm (talk) 04:37, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

"JLaTondre]" commented, "I run a bot that removes the orphan tag for articles that don't meet the current definition. It would be trivial to change its parameters to meet any new criteria.", so I don't know if a bot is needed in that regaed.

Since the criteria was relaxed an article is rightly no longer considered an orphan with one link. The "orphan information page" still defines an orphan as "a page with few or no links from other pages", requiring an update I suppose, but the criteria that "three or more is ideal and will help ensure the article is reachable to readers.", as "an important aspect of building the web", is still in force.

There has been editor concerns that articles with one link but less than three (meaning two) will fall into the cracks. "œ" commented, "I don't have a problem with creating a new tracking category for 'isolated' articles, just as long they're not marked with a new kind of 'isolated article' maintenance tag, just adding the category is fine, and at the same time removing the orphan tag.". "Magioladitis" had concerns that articles with only one link could become orphans again.

It has been suggested that an extra category for articles with less than three link be created. There was discussion concerning the names Category:Isolated articles or Category:Articles needing additional links but apparently with no resolution at this time.

Considering the discussions there is a need for another category and a bot to track and add articles. I have no idea how this would work without a tag unless a hidden category would work. That is where the confusion discussion is at so far and any help would be appreciated. Otr500 (talk) 13:18, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I thought about that, but then a lot of bots could possibly be affected. Other than that, just adding the category to the article in question (hidden category requires ((Wikipedia category|hidden=yes)) in the category page) would be quite an easy task for any bot (my bot's halfway there anyway). I agree if that ever went through, a new tag would not be a good solution. I did look at JL-Bot, and I think there is a difference in my bot and his, that being, I'm not sure if he explicitly checks for disambiguations (also, my bot does 200 pages per minute, and his, I think, does less than that). Like his, however, my bot is also conservative. Cheers! Feedintm (talk) 14:59, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes, my bot checks for disambiguations. And no, it's no longer limited to a specific editing rate uses maxlag (it was originally created before maxlag and when bots were restricted). -- JLaTondre (talk) 15:19, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Cheers! Feedintm (talk) 15:25, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I think a discussion on one of the two names would be a good start and possibly who is more interested in using a bot. I don't guess it would be possible to use one to add and one to delete? We are out of my league on this so if suggestions are good then great but if they are not so good then just remember the first five words of the sentence and all will still be great. I also am not a fan of more tags and is why I wondered about the hidden category and if it would serve a purpose. We have not covered the discussion on if adding disambiguation pages are a good idea. My first thought would be if counting links to disambiguation pages would give a false counting. Otr500 (talk) 22:21, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm new to the Orphan tag and this project, and apologize in advance if the issues that follow have been hashed through previously. (Also apologize if this discussion should be on the Wikipedia_talk:Orphan page.)

It seems to me that there are many short biographical articles that are unlikely to be de-orphaned and probably should not be. If you look at any encyclopedia, especially specialized ones, you'll find relatively short (no more than a few paragraphs) biographies of people who were notable in a particular field, but whose role in any particular event, discovery, etc. may have been no more significant than a large group of other people. These short biographies aren't stubs, its just that a relatively small amount of information about the individual is worthy of an encyclopedia.

Thus, from the point of view of wikipedia, biographical article may be perfectly appropriate, while linking to the biographical article from any other article would be detrimental to other articles. (In many cases the only way to create an article where the person would be appropriately linked would be to artificially create a list of some kind, which doesn't seem particularly desirable.) Though difficult to find by linking, the article can still be found, and may be useful to, a reader who is looking for information about this particular individual.

Having the Orphan stub on such articles isn't, IMO, desirable. It's distracting and suggests to the average reader that there may be something wrong with the article when there isn't. My suggestion, therefore is to add such short biographies to the Wikipedia:Orphan#Articles_that_may_be_difficult_to_de-orphan section of Wikipedia:Orphan.

More generally, shouldn't Wikipedia:Orphan expressly state that editors are encouraged to remove the tag when, in their judgment, article is unlikely to be linked. This may be preferable to simply adding the att= qualifier in such cases. The way I read Wikipedia:Orphan now, however, suggest that an editor would be doing something wrong by removing the tag except in the specific cases listed in Wikipedia:Orphan#Articles_that_may_be_difficult_to_de-orphan. Is there any consensus on when, as a general matter, it's ok to remove tag rather than using att=?

Thanks --Sjsilverman (talk) 19:04, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Re: "creating a list of some kind" Sometimes an added list can significantly enhance an article. While going through the orphan lists, one runs across articles about scientists. The only reasonable thing to link them to is the science that they work in, or the thing they are most known for discovering. Usually there is no such link from their page, nor even a way to put their name into the page in any way that will flow with the article. "One scientist who works in this field is Mit Berkeley" is about the best you could do. If we made a practice of adding a section to science pages like "==Scientists in the field of Wikiology==" we could (a) de-orphan a lot of scientists' biography pages, (b) give a more complete picture of the field, (c) give scientists the credit they deserve, and (d) reinforce the valid sources criterion. Science is discovered by human beings, not wisdom dropped on from on high. Listmeister (talk) 14:34, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Sjsilverman, I've made some changes to WP:CANTDEORPHAN as per your suggestions above. -- œ^™ 11:08, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Specifically, removing "or few" from the first sentence, rationale given here: Template talk:Orphan#Edit request for wording change

Additionally, after looking into the current situation, the wording of the guideline, and so forth, is is possibly true that there ought to be two templates: the current "Orphan" (but with the wording changed, as proposed, from "few or no" to "no"), and a new "Near-orphan" (or something like that) for articles with exactly one or two incoming links. These are pretty different situations, in terms of backlogs and urgency and so forth, so it'd be worthwhile to categorzie them separately. Maybe. Just a thought. Herostratus (talk) 16:11, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

I've made the change and put my reasoning there.--Aervanath (talk) 18:50, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

additional parameters

Input requested on changes I would like to make to the template.

1. the att parameter would keep the article message box but have change in text to show that it has been reviewed.
2. new few parameter would change the wording to few links and add to a different dated category.
3. new incat parameter to show that although orphaned the article is well categorised and will probably never have a link. (Prevent constant re-tagging).

The template sandbox has be edited, some examples and explanation can be found here. Suggestions for improvements and comments on the idea welcome. --Traveler100 (talk) 12:45, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

It has occurred to me that tackling the backlog of orphaned pages by subject as well as by month would be productive, particularly if carried out by someone familiar with the subject. I have therefore created a template that links to results of an existing tool's output. Although this tool has been running for some time I do not think it is known to all WikiProject users. Links can be in-line such as ((WikiProject cleanup group|Orphaned articles|Afghanistan)) giving Orphaned articles in Afghanistan or in the task template such as:

Here are some tasks awaiting attention: Citing sources : Articles lacking in-text citations in Boxing Cleanup : clean-up listing for Boxing Geographical coordinates : All articles needing coordinates in Boxing Orphans : Orphaned articles in Boxing Photo : Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of boxing

Is it worth encouraging others to contribute to this project by placing links of other WikiProject pages? --Traveler100 (talk) 10:28, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

In case project member have not noticed this there is discussion started at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 January 5#Template:Orphan placement discussion.--Traveler100 (talk) 17:01, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Are there any tools for scanning the Orphaned articles categories for articles that now have links to them? --Traveler100 (talk) 14:14, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Here are some suggestions for tools that I think would help this project address the backlog. If anyone knows how these could be written please pass on the proposals.--Traveler100 (talk) 09:04, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

At one point User:Addbot carried out the task of removing any tags on articles with 3 or more links in. I will try and get this section of the bot up and running again soon. If not I will try and create or find a source for such a list. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 01:47, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Right then. GOOD NEWS! I have re written the section of User:Addbot that checks tagged pages to see if they need to be detagged (i.e. they actually have article links in). I am currently doing a first run on Category:Attempted de-orphan. Lets see how many we can weed out! ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 23:14, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

The first run halfed the size of the category from 1440 to 704. The bot removed 736 orphan tags. See User:Addbot/log/orphan which I will keep updated. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 23:40, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Do you think someone could sort orphans into subcategories by type, e.g. biographies, places, etc etc etc, similar to WP:STUBSORT? It would help by allowing editors with specialist areas to focus in on orphans within those areas. Barney the barney barney (talk) 18:00, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Hello! There is a discussion going on about Non-free and orphaned files at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content#Proposed addition: Use in draft articles. I would love to see some of your members contribute to the discussion. I went to WP:O in hopes of finding more details about what constitutes an orphaned file, and was dismayed to find there is NOTHING there specifically on files. I think that what defines an orphaned file should be slightly different than what defines an orphaned article. Thank you to anyone that cares to read and comment on the above linked discussion. Happy editing! Technical 13 (talk) 15:57, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Hi. I'll make this short and quick. I'm still struggling to see how useful this tag is. It's big, it's ugly, and it concerns a very very minor problem that most of the times does not really have a solution. Some articles are simply about subjects that have not been mentioned in any other Wikipedia articles. As the VERY large backlog in this WikiProject makes quite clear. Forcing editors to link them or add them even in places where they are only vaguely relevant is not good practice. Neither does it concern any of the readers, but it's them who have to see the tag first thing on the page. If it was a problem on sources, I would understand, as readers should know about it. But not being linked enough is not that serious of a problem to merit defacing an article.

I propose that the tag itself be moved to the talk page to minimize its impact on the article's readability.

Note that I do not know how this can be accomplished (probably by a bot?) Neither do I really have the time to make this a formal proposal, but I'm simply fed up at seeing it all the time for otherwise perfectly fine articles. What does everyone else think?-- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 01:32, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

I see this has been discussed before in the above subsection. But there weren't enough editor input. I've posted this in the Village Pump.-- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 01:41, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Villages in India, remote places in Bhutan, wide spots in the road in Mali. I've come across many one-sentence articles about these places and have been struggling how to integrate them. So far, I've attempted three ways:

• Create a list page. Did this for the villages in Kaimur district, India.
• Improve the categories and place an incat tag on the article. Did this for several villages in Afghanistan.
• Place a village list on the page of the next-highest administrative district. Ran into problems with this when I tried to put Singha Cho (Bangladesh) in Barura Upazila; my edits were reverted and another editor PROD'ed the article.

How do other people de-orphan village pages? As small as they are, I feel listing them on Wiki is useful and am hesitant to delete these articles, even if they are only a sentence or two. PaintedCarpet (talk) 16:49, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

There used to be a ton of orphans for towns and CDPs in the U.S. Most of those got de-orphaned by creating navigation templates for their counties, linking to all the towns in the county. Then the templates were placed at the bottom of each town article and on the article for the parent administrative area. Maybe the same would be appropriate for the parent administrative divisions of these villages? -- Avocado (talk) 23:57, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi there, I made a list of potential orphans to be linked. See it here. I made it easy to automatically insert the link. The proposed links inlude orphans that already link to the page the proposed link comes from. The logic behind this is this:

Suppose an orphan article George Clooney links to Gravity (film). The string "George Clooney" exists in Gravity (film), and is not yet linked. This is probably the same "George Clooney" as our orphan.

Anyways if you'd like to help, select a hundred or so lines from the page and delete them (so that other people don't go over where you've already been) and move them to your own subpage. The "auto" links helpfully insert the link automatically, (but you'll have to save the changes).

Tell me what you think! -- Tim1357 ^talk|poke 18:57, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi there,

I want to add a "suggestions may be available" section to the Underpopulated_category template. Basically, the template would accept a new argument "intersection" and a newline separated list of categories to intersect. For example, see the proposed change live on Category:Academics from Georgia (country).

Tell me what you think! Tim1357 ^talk|poke 19:39, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello there. I'm one of the participants in WikiProject Orphanage and also in WikiProject Disambiguation. In WP DAB, there's an ongoing monthly challenge to see who can fix the most dab links. I suggest a monthly contest here in WP Orphanage where we do the same thing. This contest would help reduce the long backlog of orphaned articles. In the goals section, it says that its not about keeping score. So, instead of keeping track of who deorphaned the most articles, there could be a goal of how many articles to be deorphaned (properly), but that's an afterthought. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 01:39, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

I started by bot. It checks all pages that are already tagged as orphan. If pages are not orphan anymore it will remove the tag. Moreover, it will add ((Multiple issues)) if 2 or more tags are in the page. I think next step is to extend connectivity by creating pages such as List of... or updating existing pages. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:09, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Do you have a link to more information about this bot? ~KvnG 14:20, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Kvng it is User:Yobot. It uses standard WP:AWB settings. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:15, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Done. Statistics: 117343 pages transcluding ((Orphan)), 43012 inside ((Multiple issues)) and 74331 without since there the sole tag in the page. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:37, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

Is there something that can change the old style ((Multiple issues)) to the new style. You can't add an |att= to the old style. ~KvnG 04:03, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

KvnG I suggest that you do it manually where needed. I was thinking to ask GoingBatty to help me convert old style to new style in the case an orphan tag is included. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:16, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

GoingBatty Category:Pages with multiple issues using deprecated parameters seems to be empty. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:52, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: When my bot request to convert old style to new style was rejected, the code to populate the category was removed, but apparently the category was not. See Template talk:Multiple issues#Convert deprecated parameters to templates?. GoingBatty (talk) 12:38, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Hello members of WikiProject Orphanage, I'm a regular participant of this project. I have been deorphaning articles for quite sometime. I have noticed that day by day the activity of this project members were slowing down. The backlog of Orphan articles are now quite large. It is impossible for few editors to eliminate them. Our project have some enlisted members, half of them are active here. But they haven't shown cooperation with this project for quite sometime. So, my proposal is to start a new backlog drive system. A mass message will be send monthly either by a massmessage sender or by a bot to all the inactive project members talkpage. The message will ask them to cooperate again and in return they will get rewards. Rewards will be given in the form of barnstars. This help to reduce the backlog. Members of this project will get attracted by the reward barnstars and will try to eliminate as much they can.

I expect comments and opinnions from other editors, So that we can reach a conclusion. Thank you. Jim Carter ^(talk) 18:42, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. I can support that idea! Go ahead and start a draft of a competition page, and if you are willing to judge/moderate, that would be awesome! Sadads (talk) 19:14, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Sounds good to me too. Notifying inactive participants is a good start. Where do we find new participants? ~KvnG

Hello @Kvng: and @Sadads: I have informed an admin about this and soon we will have a backlog drive system. The members who will recieve a notification can be seen here. This ((WPORPHANdrive)) will be send (please let me know on my talk page if any change is needed. Thank you. I know we will soon have a good number of new members. Jim Carter ^(talk) 01:53, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for getting the rolling. It is probably better to discuss plans for a backlog drive and notifications here than on your talkpage.

1. I fixed the here link. It was pointed at the mobile version of WP or something.
2. Eliminating the backlog seems like an unrealistic goal for a monthlong drive. Can we choose something more realistic. For instance:
   1. Make a dent in current backlog
   2. Clear backlog through the end of 2009
   3. Deorphan or attempt to deorphan 5000 articles
   4. Participants set their own personal goals when signing up
   5. Don't say anything about goals
3. What is the purpose of singling out November 2008 in the notification?

~KvnG 04:01, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

• Thank you Kvng for the quick reply. Actually my connection is very slow nowadays so I can't keep a watch on my watchlist so I told about my talkpage. Anyway, I think we have to start from the beginning. I have seen recent orphan tagged articles getting de-orphaned quickly but those which are earlier than 2011 are still in the same state. Yes, 5000 articles in two months might work. No purpose of slinging out November 2008 in the notification (I was just testing it) we can change it anytime. I think two month backlog drive can be effective (we can't send them notification of indefined backlog drive). We have to invite new participants by attractive templates like "Come join us!" etc. We have to advertise about this as much as possible. Can someone create a new section about the upcoming backlog system along with the link to join the backlog drive on the main project page? Jim Carter ^(talk) 04:38, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Hello again, I have created a barnstar to award de-orphaners please have a look (((The White Barnstar))) and let me know if any changes are required. Thank you. Jim Carter ^(talk) 00:32, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I agree with Jamesmcmahon0, automation is probably a separate discussion. @Manishearth:, can you please explain what your script does? The way I've been going about it, deorphaning is not a highly rote process. I wonder what I'm missing. ~KvnG 05:10, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

I don't think it works anymore. But when it used to work it used to look for mentions of the page title, and one by one open an edit window for them with the page name linkified. You then have to verify it and move ahead to the next mention of the title. The reason I mentioned AWB is that AWB is already very good at creating edits for a list of pages and then presenting them for review. This was never meant as a replacement of the deorphaning process, but it adds some obvious links and cuts down on deorphaning time. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk}

That sounds like basically the same functionality you get when you click in the Related pages link in the orphan tag. ~KvnG 02:21, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I think we can't use anything like this. This type of scripts or semi automated tools are more vulnerable to face problem than deorphaning articles manually so I  Not done don't support this. Sorry Manishearth. Jim Carter ^(talk) 03:44, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I disagree with Jim Cartar, I think semi-automated tools can be very useful and are definitely applicable to de-orphaning. I'm interested to see what you can come up with@Manishearth: I tried your script but it doesn't seem to be working though. Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 18:46, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

@Jamesmcmahon0: Actually I thought about semi-automated scripts before I proposed the current BLD plan. The problem is, we have more newbie participants than experience one. So they may face problem while intalling the script to there common script page (Since they are not much familiar with scripts). Beside this we have to also keep a keen watch on there contribution so that if any participant try not to assume goodfaith while de-orphaning pages we can quickly revert them. If we use semi-automated tools there are more problems like technical failure etc. So before procceding we have to test the script (Currently it is not working) we have to ask other non-participants to test it and then after a community consensus we can approve that it is fine to use and for that we have to wait for months. So I think we can discuss about this matter after the completion of the ongoing BLD. Thank you. Jim Carter ^(talk) 05:38, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

@Jim Cartar: Firstly no-one would be forced to use any tool that was created. Secondly whether a tool gets made or not has no bearing on the BLD, that's why this was moved to its own section. Obviously it would depend on what Manishearth came up with but from the sounds of it, it would be a semi-automated/manual tool, i.e. it makes/suggests edits, then each one has to be separately reviewed by the editor. Since this is not saving anything automatically, it is not a BOT and would not need consensus. It would be purely personal choice on whether to use it or not, any edits made with it would remain the editors sole responsibility. Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 10:19, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Okay lets see what Manishearth says. Jim Carter ^(talk) 13:38, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Please sign below if you are interested in participating in an orphan backlog drive. Timeframe and technicalities of such a drive are still under discussion. See above. (Note: This is the list of participants for the test de-orphan backlog drive. The original list is here.)

• ~KvnG 05:22, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
• Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 08:08, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
• Stuartyeates (talk) 08:25, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
• Jim Carter ^(talk) 14:02, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
• Mfbjr (talk) 14:28, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
• MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 00:28, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
• Kstueve (talk) 02:10, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
• Adam Kriesberg (talk) 17:14, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
• Molestash (talk) 16:03, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
• User:Gaurav Pruthi Gaurav Pruthi^talk 17:19, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
• FoCuSandLeArN
• DJB3.14 (talk) 20:58, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
• Otr500 (talk) 18:32, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
• SarahStierch (talk) 17:46, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
• TheAMmollusc (talk) 06:36, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
• CaitlinStewart (talk) 13:54, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
• Postcard Cathy (talk)

Hello WP:WPO! Jim came to my talk page yesterday asking for ideas (and a script) to be able to have a scored BLD for this project. As such, I thought about (and slept on) the issue and my thoughts on how such a scoring system would work are along the lines of:

• +1 point for attempting to de-orphan a page (whether successful or not)
• +1 point for de-orphaning a page for each article space link created to it
• +1 bonus point for de-orphaning a page by creating at least three article space links to it

There should also be some kind of accountability system so that people aren't claiming they attempted to deorphan or adding links to pages from pages that have nothing to do with them just for the sake of scoring points to win a virtual trophy that they can display on their userpage. For this, I'm thinking that there should be a "recheck" system in place so that anyone who rechecks a page that someone else already claimed to have done, and finds something out of place (of course AGF), should get a point for that. The person who did the original deorphan attempt should lose that point and there should be a threshold of a certain number of lost points = disqualification from the awards. Before I go on much further, I would like to hear the ideas and thoughts of the other project members on what I've suggested so far. Thanks. — ((U|Technical 13)) ^{(t • e • c)} 14:42, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Good proposal. I'd also recommend giving a point for each rereview. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 14:57, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Interesting idea but what's "a scored BLD"? Mfbjr (talk) 03:21, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

A scored back-log drive (i.e. A competition to encourage people to work on removing the Orphan backlog) Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 09:10, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I had once written this script that made de-orphaning easy. It's one of the worst userscripts that I've ever written (I open tabs instead of using AJAX), but the idea is IMO still valid, and possibly something that can be remade as an AWB plugin. Why not try using that to battle the backlog? I'm not so enthused by simply gamifying the deorphaning process -- it will help, but gamification helps only so much, the process should be made scalable ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 03:40, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

The BLD competition seems like a good idea with a well thought out scoring system. I don't see why that and an automation script have to be at all mutually exclusive though, surely both ideas are worth pursuing regardless of the outcome of the other? Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 09:14, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I would be in favour of going the WP:gadget route rather than the AWB route. With a gadget the tool is open to a much larger range of non-technical users and I see no technical reason that AWB should be required. Stuartyeates (talk) 23:56, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Support Sounds good. Could there be a goal of how many articles to deorphaned in a month, or a monthly list of articles that are the focus of the month? I proposed a monthly challenge here a few months ago, but I didn't hear any responses. By having this script, it will fulfill my previous proposal. Many thanks. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 18:47, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Support Great idea. I like the monthly focus and challenge too. Someone would need to curate that, however. Chris Jefferies (talk) 19:53, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Counter proposal - I support doing a trial BLD to see what kind of dent we can make in the backlog with an effort like this. The effort is not going to live or die based on a scoring system. I propose that we try a low-overhead BLD without scoring.

In my opinion, what's going to make a significant dent in the backlog is recruiting more members for this project. I can see how the visible activity generated by a BLD can raise awareness of WP:ORPHAN and potentially bring in new members. But, perhaps I've underestimated interested in a BLD. Let's start this by collecting names of editors interested in participating in a BLD. We will want such a list no matter how we choose to proceed. ~KvnG 05:22, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

sure, why not --Jtle515 (talk) 05:34, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

• Support- as proposer. Jim Carter ^(talk) 07:40, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
• Support- Sounds good, and worth a try, if you can work out how to automate it all (which sounds daunting to me... so good luck with that). FWIW, my own personal experience was that I signed up on the de-orphaning when WP ran its Backlog Project a few years ago, and kept going for several years (attempting to tackle the oldest month of orphans each time, or the oldest month with only a few entries left in it). I stopped about a year ago... I just ran out of steam... that and more demands from my day job. Perhaps if I knew that my efforts were being logged in a points system, I might have continued. Perhaps. TheAMmollusc (talk) 08:39, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

• Support I'm a fan of the every-other-month drives we do at the Guild of Copy Editors and would happily participate in a de-orphaning drive as well. 174.88.147.216 (talk) 14:11, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
• Support I joined this project after stumbling upon an orphaned article, seeing the tag, and finding that I enjoyed the challenge of de-orphaning. Recently I've fallen off the bandwagon around here but I think this type of BLD is just what I need to re-engage. Onward, I say! Adam Kriesberg (talk) 00:30, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
• Support A functioning scoring system would be necessary... Bots, Perhaps. Mr.Magik-Pants (talk) 19:44, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
• Support A scoring system sounds like quiet the motivator. Sure, why not? lets give it a shot.Osy (talk) 01:36, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
• Support I think this is a beneficial way to get people to add several links to specialized articles that are cut-off from the masses. Great idea. DJB3.14 (talk) 20:30, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
• Support Great idea! it'll give us more motivation to keep on helping wikipedia! I'm quite busy also but i'll try my best to give you guys a hand and eventually get some points^^ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jonathan Tessier (talk • contribs) 17:40, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Hello there. In the subcategories of [[7]], it says that the earliest category is November 2006. However, in the orphaned articles column on the right hand side, it says the earliest is November 2007. Why is the November 2006 category missing from this list? Is there a way to add the November 2006 category to the column? Thank you. MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 23:08, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

@MrLinkinPark333:  Fixed – It took some time to track down, but this edit to Template:Progress box fixed it. – Wbm1058 (talk) 00:22, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: - Awesome. Thank you! MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 00:39, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Kvng please can you clarify it for how much time this test BLD will take place. Because I have to send other participants message (using MMS) about this test BLD and have to ask them to join us. So I was wondering if you can clarify? Suggestions from other participants were also appreciated. Thank you. Jim Carter ^(talk) 03:53, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Month-long BLDs seem to work well. They should not be repeated more than every other month. ~KvnG 15:38, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Okay Kvng I'm going to fix it from 12 April 2014 to 12 May 2014. I will send all the participants a notification about this test BLD as well as a invitation to join it. I was also thinking to create a list of non participant Wikipedians here. We will include non participants whom we know. And then I will send them all a invitation to join us by WP:MMS. Lets see what others think? Jim Carter ^(talk) 16:30, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Ready to send the BLD notification now. But I'm busy today. Will do it tomorrow. Jim Carter ^(talk) 15:19, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Hey there! It seems I've arrived late in the discussions. Where's the backlog drive tally, etc? FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 20:36, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

I participated in the drive, I just didn't have a place to tally the articles. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 14:47, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2014_June_14#Template:Orphan. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:28, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi all,

My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.

One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.

This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:

• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film

• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.

• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.

• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____

• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost

The deadline for submissions is 1st July 2014

For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to:

Project leaflets
Adikhajuria (talk) 18:04, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Looking at my userpage, I can see that WikiProject Orphanage does not have a category for the participants. Should one be created? --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 22:19, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Orphanage for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions, so be sure to sign your answers. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Thanks, Rcsprinter₁₂₃ (natter) @ 17:36, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

I came here after reading Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-10-22/WikiProject_report.

Many biographies on Wikipedia are orphans. Someone might be notable or even famous, but have no noteworthy connection to any top-level concept. In some cases, these people can go into "list of people from X university", but it seems wrong to me to sort people by the school they attended especially when usually that kind of information is stored in categories. What does this project recommend for cleaning up biographies of this sort? Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:24, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Until a definite decision is made about how to de-orphan biographical articles, they could be collected in Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Orphaned articles (shortcut: WP:BIOG/O).

—Wavelength (talk) 18:41, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

You can check these search results and these search results.

—Wavelength (talk) 02:27, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

This search and this search found no results.

—Wavelength (talk) 04:00, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

A de-orphaner can ask "What noteworthy thing(s) did this person do?" or "What noteworthy thing(s) happened to this person?", and then look in the answer for an entity important enough to have its own Wikipedia article.

—Wavelength (talk) 04:43, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

I find that many biographies don't clearly meet notability guidelines. In many cases all I can manage to do in good conscience is to add a ((notability)) tag to the article and add |att= to the ((orphan)) tag. ~KvnG 12:33, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

I have started Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Orphaned articles (shortcut: WP:MED/O) as a holding area for orphaned medical articles. Editors who de-orphan articles may wish to add it to their watchlists.
—Wavelength (talk) 21:25, 18 October 2014 (UTC) and 14:31, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Congratulations on your WikiProject Report in the Signpost!

Evidently, there is much, much more activity on this project than is apparent at first glance. In just one category alone, Category:Orphaned articles from February 2009, the month that articles were tagged by a bot, the backlog has been reduced by 90,000 articles !!! It was at 114,437 in 1 March 2009, and today, 26 October 2014, it's down to 24,940.

Congratulations, de-orphaners! -- Djembayz (talk) 21:49, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Hello everyone! I've been working on a new userscript for this project (details at User:Technical 13/Scripts/OrphanStatus), and I need your help in setting the criteria for the script to make it as useful as possible. I need clarification of exactly what the but the incoming links to the redirects do count clause on redirects means and some discussion on whether or not "List of ..." articles are excluded or not. I did some testing of the script, of which some may need to be re-tagged based on the answer to my need for clarification of "lists", but I will happily take care of that. Thanks and happy deOrphaning! — ((U|Technical 13)) ^{(e • t • c)} 15:14, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

I'd interpret "but the incoming links to the redirects do count" as meaning:

• If FooABC has a redirect from Fooabc, that doesn't in itself count as de-orphaning it
• But if there's a link from an artice (other than a dab page and all the usual exclusions) to the Fooabc redirect then that does count as de-orphaning it.

It seems logical enough: that link is intended for the article, even if it goes via an old/less-used name instead of directly. Is that the sort of answer you were looking for? PamD 20:00, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

• Not exactly what I was hoping for as to what the answer might be, but logical and yes, helpful. Thank you PamD. What about the "List" pages? Do those not count just like disambigs? That is what I'm guessing. :) — ((U|Technical 13)) ^{(e • t • c)} 20:28, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

A link from a List of... page does deorphan an article. See Wikipedia:Orphan#Criteria. ~KvnG

• I don't see List of... pages listed at all on WP:O#C, which is why I was asking for clarification here. I've always considered List of... pages as DAB pages, in which case they would not count towards deorphaning, which is why I wanted to be sure (because the way I've always thought of it is harder to code). Thanks. — ((U|Technical 13)) ^{(e • t • c)} 15:14, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Lists are definitely not the same as disambiguation pages. Anything not mentioned in WP:O#C counts as an incoming link and lists are not mentioned. I will add this clarification to WP:O#C and we'll see if anyone wants to take issue with this reading. ~KvnG 17:18, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

WP:Orphan talk pages links to WP:WikiProject Orphanage, but there doesn't seem to be good info on that page about cleaning up orphaned talk pages. Two examples I've found recently are Talk:Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Talk:SIP connection. These pages were apparently left behind after an article page move. What is the best way to clean up these orphaned talk pages? —danhash (talk) 23:56, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I have added ((merged-to)) and ((merge-from)) notes the the respective talk pages of Session Initiation Protocol and Talk:SIP connection. I think this is the correct way to handle this. I'm not sure this in the scope of our project. Maybe better handled by WP:WPMERGE. ~Kvng (talk) 13:34, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

For the past few months I've been trying to revive the Abandoned Articles WikiProject with little luck. I was wondering that considering the similarities between it and this project, would anyone here be interested in helping, or at least giving some kind of guidance/assistance. AFAIK, I'm quite ironically the only member still active. Imagine that, a WikiProject for Abandoned Articles that just happens to be an Abandoned WikiProject, lol. Thanks.
Uamaol (talk) 15:20, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Hello, WikiProject Orphanage/Archive 2! I'd like to invite you to join the Abandoned Articles WikiProject. We are a group of editors dedicated to bringing "abandoned" articles (ones that haven't been edited in a long time) "back to life", or, if appropriate, merging information or recommending deletion. There is a discussion page for sharing ideas as well as developing and getting tips on improving articles. If you would like to join, simply add your name to the list of members.

Interesting. Looks like some on Wikipedia:Dusty articles are also orphans but not many. ~Kvng (talk) 17:47, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

There have been recent changes to the ((Orphan)) template that affect how orphan categories are maintained. There is existing discussion at Template_talk:Orphan#Att.3D_parameter_broken. These are a bit hard to follow. I'm working to get these changes reverted since they have unexpected or unintended consequences and there did not appear to be a good consensus for the change. I would like to open a discussion here as to whether we'd like to change how the |att= and |few= parameters behave. ~Kvng (talk) 20:33, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Behavior documented at Wikipedia:Orphan#Using_the_att_parameter indicates that adding an |att= parameter moves an article from the Orphaned category to the Attempted de-orphan category. If I understand correctly, 3gg5amp1e would prefer that orphans always be categorized as an orphan by their |date= parameter. ~Kvng (talk) 20:59, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I think 3gg5amp1e's point was that an article tagged with "few=May 2015" should be categorized in Category:Low linked articles from May 2015, not "from whatever the date= parameter says". They'd re-set the "few=" parameter to the "most recently checked" date to avoid looking at the same articles again and again when working on the "oldest" end of the backlog. I didn't see the point in using a parameter other than "date=" for the date by which the article should be categorized; I also wondered whether we shouldn't keep a record of how old the problem really is. I'm not familiar with this WikiProject's workflow, though, and was thinking of similar maintenance templates such as ((unreferenced)) where I tend to take the date as an indication of severity of the problem: If an article has been tagged for a lack of references for a decade and a quick search doesn't find any, it seems likely that none can be found, with implications on whether we should have an article on the topic at all. That obviously is not an issue for ((orphan)), and on second thought I see the advantage in one editor resetting the date so that others won't double-check the same orphaned article. Huon (talk) 21:46, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

• I can't get in depth from my mobike right now, but 3gg5amp1e's request made sense to me. It certainly makes sense for "attempted deorphan from " to point to the last attempt and not the minth it was marked as an orphan, there's really no way to track progress otherwise. — ((U|Technical 13)) (e • t • c) 23:14, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I don't know how the |few= parameter is supposed to work. I entered the conversation when I noticed that the behavior of the |att= parameter had changed. Was the |att= change unintentional? ~Kvng (talk) 02:00, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

• I'd think that it would work the same as few, if it's been reattempted, the date should be updated. Still not home, and still not at computer. I'm also wondering where 3gg5amp1e is and why they're not commenting. — ((U|Technical 13)) (e • t • c) 15:52, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

• OH NO!! What happened to the progress boxes!? I worked really hard in going the few and att boxes to get them all reattempted and finished the few and was only about half way through the att box but now I have NO IDEA which ones I've already done because I was doing them from oldest first and knocking categories off but ALL of those categories are back now. I really don't want to go through thousands of orphans again that I've already looked at and did web searches and stuff to try and find things they related to so I could connect topics. I'm so discouraged and sad. Huon, that was exactly my point. They should be in a category for whenever the last attempt is so that they are in a proper chronological order of attempts and I don't have to waste tons of time on ones I've already done or ones that someone else has done. The change for updating the date should be for both att and few because that's how the backlog works. I don't really care about the original date if they are in one of those subcats to be honest, nor am I offended if they are still in a category that shows the original date. As long as the att and few parameters properly use the last attempt date, I'm completely neutral about the other and if someone else can make use of it to help clear the backlog that is fine. Please restore the categorization fix as soon as possible, so I can get back to work on the backlogs. Thank you. 3gg5amp1e (talk) 12:59, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

There has been no loss of information. once we understand what you need, we should be able to get your workflow working from the point you left it. The changes Techical13 did improved your workflow but were in conflict with the workflow I was using which is documented at Wikipedia:Orphan#Using_the_att_parameter. Basically, I am expecting orphans to be removed from Category:Orphaned_articles_from_August_2008 after I attempt to deorphan and add an |att=June 2015 parameter. I'm afraid even having read the above, I don't understand what you're working on and what the requirements for your workflow are. Can you link to some documentation or specific categories you're working on and how you expect the contents of those categories to behave. ~Kvng (talk) 16:44, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

• So, Kvng, what you're saying is that when you attempt to deorphan an article, on June 3, 2015 that has been an orphan since August of 2008 it should be moved into "Attempted deorphan from August 2008" instead of "Attempted deorphan from June 2015"? That makes absolutely no sense to me. All that I was asking was that when an attempt to deorphan is made, it goes into a category with a date based on when the last attempt to deorphan it was. It was User:Huon that suggested it should always remain in the parent category indicating it has been an orphan since August 2008. Technically, it is still an orphan since then, and your discussion should be with him/her about that, but that makes no difference to me. My workflow just relies on the category for att or few to be the month/year that the last attempt was. 3gg5amp1e (talk) 12:54, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

No, what I want is for an attempted article to be removed from the Orphaned articles from... category. If this does not happen, we don't know which articles in the monthly categories have already been worked on and the workflow goes in a loop. ~Kvng (talk) 13:46, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Also, now that I'm looking at Wikipedia:Orphan#Using_the_att_parameter, it is not working at all as described in that section, but the changes that User:Technical 13 made got it closer to working as described. Currently, |att= and |few= do not take/use a date parameter at all, they only are "if exist" type parameters. That means that "Also, when placing the|att= parameter, it's unnecessary to remove the pre-existing |date= parameter, as they are two separate and distinct parameters that complement each other." is also a lie, since it only uses the |date= parameter (since it is expecting that is the only parameter that contains a date). "This gives editors the added benefit of knowing when the orphan tag was first placed on the article." was Huon's argument. "Note that this does not double-categorize it, the |att= takes precedence and, as was mentioned above, the article is moved to the attempted de-orphan category for that date, so you're not having to revisit the same article twice when browsing through the monthly orphaned articles category." The first part is true (because it only expect there to be one date and it doesn't expect att or few to have any date), but the second part is a complete lie (because it only expect there to be one date and it doesn't expect att or few to have any date) and "so you're not having to revisit the same article twice when browsing through the monthly orphaned articles category." is the part I was trying to get fixed so that it worked as it is suppose to. It looks like the only part of that whole section that is true is the "Note that this does not double-categorize it" part, and to fix the documentation a person only needs to remove the word "not" and restore the template to the way that T13 had fixed it. 3gg5amp1e (talk) 13:06, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

The thing that was not happening after User:Technical 13's change was the article is moved to the attempted de-orphan category for that date. The articles were being added to the attempted de-orphan category for that date but to qualify as having been moved they would need to be removed from the Orphaned articles from... category where they formerly lived. ~Kvng (talk) 13:46, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• Actually, they were moved after his first edit per my request. It was User:Huon's subsequent request that had them added back to the original category as well. So, can his first edit at least be restored so that my workflow will be fixed and then you can discuss the last one with Huon? Please and thank you? 3gg5amp1e (talk) 14:18, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

I'm not a member of this WikiProject, and on second thought from a "workflow" perspective it makes sense to put the articles in an "attempted de-orphan from [most recent attempt date]" category. For other maintenance categories, specifically "articles with topics of unclear notability" or "unreferenced", I tend to use the date of the original tag as an indication of the severity of the problem - if nobody has managed to find references for several years, likely references cannot be found. At least by analogy we may want to keep track of the original "orphaned from" date, too. If the WikiProject members prefer not to put orphans in two categories with different dates, I won't object, though. Huon (talk) 16:11, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• Okay, then can the templates be restored to the point that they were at before T13 (who seems to be on break) made the additional changes to meet your request User:Huon? That's all I need to be able to get back to work (once it filters through the system thingie to go live). thanks. 3gg5amp1e (talk) 17:32, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Should we just restore this version and see if we're all happy or should we wait for Technical 13 or should we find someone else with template expertise to help? ~Kvng (talk) 19:59, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

• This makes me think we should just restore by clicking here. 3gg5amp1e (talk) 13:21, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Since everybody agrees, I have reverted the template to that version. Huon (talk) 19:38, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Ok, that was my guess at a revision with 3gg5amp1e's request and without Huon's. It does not back out all of Technical 13's work. Once backlog is digested I'll let you know if the restored version still works for me. ~Kvng (talk) 22:31, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I've been too busy and away. Do you need anything further from me here? I see that part of my changes have been restored, and I'm glad to see that 3gg5amp1e seems to be happy with that. Any objection to me fixing the grammar for "few" linked ones back to an appropriate wording since "no other articles link to it" is wrong? — ((U|Technical 13)) (e • t • c) 16:08, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Things look good for me. ~Kvng (talk) 13:44, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Please see Template_talk:Orphan#No, or few.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:44, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Why does the WP:ORPHAN shortcut redirect to this WikiProject page? Shouldn't it redirect to the explanation of what an orphan is, as does WP:O and WP:ORPH? I find it illogical that a shortcut directs to a different page than do the abbreviated versions of the same word. – voidxor 19:06, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, it's completely aberrant that this shortcut does not go to the lower-case version of the same page name.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:45, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Assuming there will be no objections, I fixed it. W. P. Uzer (talk) 21:50, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Actually I now see the matter may not be entirely an accident, so there may be objections - revert me if there are. But for now let's make WP/WT:DEORPHAN the shortcuts we advertise. W. P. Uzer (talk) 21:58, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

The October 2008 orphans are all gone ! The one remaining one is on PROD row.

All but about 9 or 10 have been successfully deorphaned, the 9 or 10 being attempt tagged into March 2016. However, the majority of these can probably be easily fixed if we can find someone who knows a bit about Afghanistan geography. Most of them are location stubs for that country.

Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:09, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Nice work. I don't tend to spend too much time trying to deorphan articles about villages. Notability requirements are quite liberal for human settlements so it is likely we will always have orphan stub articles about villages. Also, I don't think we're quite done with 2008. ~Kvng (talk) 17:38, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes meant to say October, but it still feels good! (Have changed the pages in cat stat to December too.) Eno Lirpa (talk) 10:39, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

November 2008 somehow got done too! ~Kvng (talk) 14:27, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

The December 2008s are now down from 400 plus three weeks ago to now just less than 200.

Well done all of us !!

Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:47, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

That's great! Can anyone help with my anxiety about this?

Yep. I have been dreading that one too! I have picked off one or two at random but it feels like moving Everest with a tea spoon. I have picked a few more 2016s for good measure; amazing how many new fresh articles are orphans each month. I was trying to work my up to tackling the big one by getting some psychological feel good wins first! Eno Lirpa (talk) 11:45, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Luckily WP:Eventualism. That you all are doing such good work on this backlog lately, is really exciting! Keep it up (from someone who consistently worked on this backlog a few years ago). You could probably ask someone with AWB to remove orphan tags from no longer orphaned articles in that category -- and it will get something like 5% smaller, I am betting. Sadads (talk) 13:08, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

It would be nice to have the categories we're actively working on freshened to remove already deorphaned articles. That would save me a few clicks per article. I think having this done to Category:Orphaned articles from December 2008, Category:Orphaned articles from January 2009 and Category:Orphaned articles from February 2009 is what we're looking for. I have posted a request to Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser#Request_from_WP:DEORPHAN. ~Kvng (talk) 15:19, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Twenty thousand??? I'm afraid it would take AWB three days several hours to scan that many. You could try asking nicely at WP:VPT, as someone might be able to do a database query that would be much faster. But if my first few minutes of AWB scanning is anything to go by, you aren't going to shrink the category by more than a few percent. -- John of Reading (talk) 15:56, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for taking a crack at this. Although it is disappointing to learn that that this is not going to go away on its own, the point of the exercise for me is to be able to forgo with confidence the step of verifying that each article is still an orphan before attempting to deorphan. ~Kvng (talk) 16:28, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Momentary anxiety relief ? - Admittedly low hanging fruit but I have just managed to knock off 35+ from February 2009. Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:17, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Here's something that makes me feel better: Category:Orphaned articles from February 2009 originally had 114,437 articles. It is now down to 0. ~Kvng (talk) 16:28, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I gave GoingBatty a query, that gives All orphaned articles articles with more than two incoming links, so he's doing that job. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:37, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

@Edgars2007: That query is really great - works much better than running AWB over 100,000 articles. BattyBot is removing a few more orphan tags now. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 02:42, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

I have been away for a few days, and I see now well below 80. Great going folks. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:37, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

May I ask who has made the the progress, and do you have any tips on how you are going about them. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:37, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

I've been doing a few a day. I find targets through the search link in the orphan tag, from wikilinks in the orphaned article or, as a last resort, by searching wikipedia for "list <general topic area of the article>". There are a fair number of articles that cannot be deorphaned because of marginal notability and to these I add the "|att=" parameter and a ((notability)) tag. Ones in this state that already have a longstanding ((notability)) tag, I nominate for deletion. ~Kvng (talk) 14:04, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Kvng. I have been away again. Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:45, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

I have tonight (my time) finished off the December 2008s. I big HURRAH for all of us ! Only 130,000 to go ! Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:45, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Just 17 remain in Category:Orphaned articles from January 2009! Let's push through this so we can put on our big boy/girl pants and dance with Category:Orphaned articles from February 2009!!Ajpolino (talk) 06:09, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

A full HURRAH for January 2009  Done - A small one at least knowing what is now to come for February ! Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:07, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Awesome work guys! After taking a break from this project for a while I'm excited and happy to see it still alive and well. -- œ^™ 07:21, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Well done all. February 2009 will soon drop below the 20,000 mark ! Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:56, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Congratulations! Wish I had more time to work on this, but that number has been lingering for years in the back of my mind :) Sadads (talk) 18:54, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

HURRAH - now down to 19,999. Well done all of us. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:34, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Nice work everybody! I've made a chart. ~Kvng (talk) 14:32, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

Do we know what happened (stopped happening) mid 2013 that reduced the cleanup rate? Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:35, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

My first guess is that most of the dramatic changes are due to changes in the definition of how many incoming links are required to deorphan. We're also experiencing a reducing level of cleanup activity across the board as the population of active editors slowly decreases over the years. ~Kvng (talk) 17:07, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

@Kvng: The active editor thing is not exactly true: we have barely seen a decline (talking 1-2% a year), and the remaining editors have become more in terms of volumes of edits (see https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ and https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/#secondary-graphs-tab ). We just aren't growing at a rate (in terms of editors) to also account for the amount we have to curate (in terms of volume). I can only assume that maintenance tasks are the bulk of the edits that have increased in volume, because those are the ones that can be semi-automated more easily. The main reason that the Orphan Articles queues fall of, in terms of speed of reduction: the editor who created the article is less likely to be around, the obvious articles to link without knowing they are orphaned, get deorphaned quickly, and the easy to remove templates via AWB or bots come off because of the first two reasons at a high volume. If you look at other months in the queue, this is a pretty similar pattern. Sadads (talk) 19:04, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

Another small morale boosting step - another 100 are done - now below 19,900. Well done all. Eno Lirpa (talk) 15:12, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

Another small hurrah. Now just dropped to 19,699 . . . Good work all. Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:04, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Hey all! While trying to de-orphan things, I fairly regularly have to go beg a related WikiProject for help. Oftentimes my calls go unanswered, but sometimes some helpful soul jumps in. I made this award for those times. Feel free to use it or change it as you see fit!

	Adoption Award
	For generously de-orphaning Article name out of the goodness of your heart. I hereby award you the prestigious Adoption Award! Sleep well knowing another orphan has found its place in the encyclopedia!

Ajpolino (talk) 03:35, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Ajpolino. I have meant to say a good idea a few times but kept getting distracted by something else. Have you had any feedback from recipients? Also do you have a template for your begging too? Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:22, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Folks.

I have been doing a bit of deorphaning and I am getting a very small but steady number of reverts by editors (I have not checked but it looks like outside this project) on the grounds that my inclusion in the host article is not notable or important enough. Typically the issue is to the linked-in subject matter. My view is that if there is an article notable enough to exist in its own right then it can be linked in wherever reasonably appropriate, that is the notability of the link is inherited from the article being linked. Hence either the link and the article stay, or the article needs to be taken to AfD and properly adjudicated. I think we should push back on such reverts but if we do I think the project needs a consistent approach rather than each of us tacking each revert one at at time and on our own. Comment? Eno Lirpa (talk) 11:10, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

The first interesting revert I noticed came recently and I successfully pushed back. In my experience reverts are very rare are not often difficult to deal with. Where they do get difficult it's best to leave it or take a similar path of least resistance. A good portion of orphaned articles have marginal notability. I usually just tag them with ((notability)). In the case you mentioned, I would more comprehensively evaluate notability and consider WP:PRODding. ~Kvng (talk) 23:34, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

I may take a bulldog approach but if someone reverts a good faith maintenance edit supported by a project, that has a goal of building an encyclopedia, I revert it as vandalism. Prodding will likely just result in the same editor deprodding with some BS summary, if at all. This is a project so there can be nothing wrong with listing comments here if that happens for more involvement. I would have doubts about the intentions of any editor reverting some stub or start article deorphaning anyway. And "IF" an editor wants to "push" the issue the editor or members of the project can also take it to AFD.Otr500 (talk) 19:42, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Note, this has been cross-posted.

Hello all de-orphaners. Last month Nemo_bis wrote a patch and I pushed it for puppet SWAT deployment. This thing makes the page Special:LonelyPages update once monthly (on the 15th). This will help us find new articles which are orphans, but not marked as such with a template yet. I'm currently going through this month's query and tagging them as much as I can with AWB. This will unfortunately do that the monthly categories will be larger than usual perhaps....Anyways, happy editing! (t) Josve05a (c) 21:32, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

Sorry but I do not quite follow. Do we know which ones are already tagged with an orphan template ? Does eac one have to be checked ? If so, this is a huge amount of work for perhaps a lot of redundant effort. Why cannot algorithm check to see of there is an orphan tag already and indicate as such ? Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:11, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

I do believe it is checking for that, but it is only run once a month (since it is quite an "expencive" and "memory-stealing" query), and it can have been tagged or de-orphaned since. I run AWB on the list once a month and tag 500-1500 article with ((Orphan)), which is why this months cateogry gained ~75% yesterday. (t) Josve05a (c) 20:49, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Well done all. February 2009 will soon drop below the 19,500 mark ! Another 500 almost done in just over one month. Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:37, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Well done all. A small but significant hurrah to all of ourselves. Now down to 19,498. Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:19, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Now down to below 17,500. Well done all. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:04, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

17,140, and I just de-orphaned the last page from March 2008. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 20:52, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Now down to 16,142. Another 1,000+ done. Well done all. Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:02, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

(Kvng. If you have some spare time, any chance of you updating your graph - it might look good again?) Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:08, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

 Done All articles beginning with "A" have now been processed. Well done all. Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:32, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

It's so beautiful. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:26, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

FYI, I have been picking these off randomly (using the button I placed on the category page), not alphabetically. ~Kvng (talk) 14:58, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I am a bit concerned regarding Category:Orphaned articles from August 2017. It looks like there might have been a wayward AWB run here. Eno Lirpa (talk) 16:12, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

• @Eno Lirpa: looking into it. AWB only removes orphan tags once an article has 2 or 3 incoming links. I'll do a pre-parse now. DrStrauss talk 17:40, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
• 26 de-orphaned DrStrauss talk 19:45, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

As per the reconfirmation below of the current long term orphan standard, it looks like thousands have been incorrectly, newly orphan tagged by Rich Farmbrough ? Eno Lirpa (talk) 15:09, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Well done everyone. Another 1000 articles from February 2009 have been processed.

Progress looks like:

We have picked up the pace a little bit recently.

Not sure if the next chart is useful. It either shows we are preferentially cleaning up older orphans before newer ones or people are on average creating more orphans each month at an increasing rate:

(Excluding February 2009 because it is such an outlier.)

Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:29, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

Another 1000 done. Hurrah. Now down to 14,192. Well done all. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:27, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes, amazing progress. Thanks for the pictures Eno. Many of our backlogged months after February 2009 have less than 1000 orphans. Once we get through February 2009, at our current rate (>1000 deorphans per month) we would be taking down the backlog faster than it is being created. But it will take another year or so to get through February 2009... ~Kvng (talk) 14:56, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I've gotten a little distracted by the October 2009 category because it's so small and tempting...once I'm done with that I'll be back to ripping through Feb 09. I know @DrStrauss: identified some particular patterns in subject matter, and had also run a database query listing articles in the category that had incoming links and could be de-tagged immediately. If we hit the low-hanging fruit first, we can significantly reduce the backlog numbers for less overall effort. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:20, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Can DrStrauss share their results here ? Eno Lirpa (talk) 16:18, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I too have found some patterns and have been bulk de-orphaning, for example articles that will readily go into lists that either are missing or already exist and can be added to. Low hanging fruit which once cleared will mean our rate slows down. I have been only looked via normal searches though and not by DB queries. Eno Lirpa (talk) 16:18, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Mm, mostly topic-based stuff like Swiss mountains, historical Italian artists, cricketers created by 02blythed, members of the Nepali legislature, Romanian generals, and lakes in Germany. Lots of those I've been pulling and putting into list-type articles for quick de orphaning. Respectively: List of Italian painters, Results of the Nepalese Constituent Assembly election, 2008, List of Romanian generals. The Swiss mountains are easy because each one usually includes the Alps range that contains it so they can be added there. DrStrauss is working on draftifying the cricketers for review, I think. There's no list of lakes in Germany because there's way too many (although maybe lakes by state could be viable). I'm not big on database queries or AWB so that's just all patterns that he and I noticed, I don't think anyone has done any serious database queries to find official lists of that stuff. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 16:45, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

• @Eno Lirpa: as PMC says, pretty much a small-scale query to identify the top topics which have been identified above. DrStrauss talk 18:13, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Yep me too. I have chipped away at some German lakes by district and by state. Also a lot of Antarctica mountains by mountain range. Also some Pakistani populated places. Once one finds some common articles it is relatively easy. Just finding the pattern in the first place can sometimes be a bit tiresome. Eno Lirpa (talk) 15:15, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Down to 14,000 even in Feb 09! I like the even milestones so getting to do this one was very satisfying for me. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 09:23, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes the evens do look better. Lets see if we can update the progress table regularly around the even round thousands. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:43, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

By the way, I will be on a wikbreak probably until early October 2017. Hopefully I can make up for lost wikitime when I get back. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:43, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Another 1000 processed now just over 13,000. Well done all. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:19, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

I beleive the orphan criteria formerly required multiple (2 or 3) qualifying (non-redirect, non-disambiguation) incoming links. The criteria was at some point revised to require only a single qualifying incoming link. That is the standard that we are currently working to in this project. AWB and other scripts manipulating ((Orphan)) tags should also be adjusted to work to the current criteria. ~Kvng (talk) 20:10, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

• @Kvng: can you get on to the AWB devs? DrStrauss talk 21:33, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I wanted to make sure there was still consensus on this first. I've researched and discovered that a single incoming link has been sufficient to remove ((Orphan)) since September 2009 when OlEnglish made the change. So, we're probably good. ~Kvng (talk) 14:44, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes. The new, now old, standard seems to have not filtered through every where yet. Eno Lirpa (talk) 15:17, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

I would argue that we don't want automated removal of single-link pages: these links might not be sufficiently visible/integreated links. I would think we want a concensus on this in some way. Sadads (talk) 22:07, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Yeah optimally we want to double check that the page that links it isn't a disambig page (not sure if the bot checks for that) or a page that is itself orphaned (not as big a deal but it feels walled-gardeny so I don't like to leave them like that). ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:44, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. The tools need to comply with the criteria, which do already cover such issues, except the walled garden problem, but, as PMC states, this could be a bit tricky and technically is another issue. Eno Lirpa (talk) 15:54, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

That change recommends adding orphan tags, only if there are no incoming links. I don't think says anything about removal of tags. The removal of the phrase was again by Ol'English here, at 06:20, 11 October 2011. This seems to have been a BOLD move, but based on the idea that by redefining the problem we could make it go away (dealing with backlogs by ignoring them is not a solution in my opinion).

Pinging User:Magioladitis since the AWB default of only adding the tag to zero incoming links seems to have been established back in 2009-11 - maybe he can illuminate the history of why <3 is the default now.

There were also systems in place to record "de-orphan attempts".

Personally I think a more sophisticated method of monitoring incoming links might be appropriate these days, and as I said in 2010 " there is no intrinsic reason that some page should not be validly an orphan, and indeed many pages are only linked to from one or more lists." Even so it was today trivial to create two new incoming links for Methuen Water Works, in that era claimed as non-de-orphanable.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:37, 3 September 2017 (UTC).

Rich. Are you going to reverse any of your recent AWB orphan taggings? Eno Lirpa (talk) 15:54, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Probably. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 16:08, 3 September 2017 (UTC).

I support removing ((orphan)) tags on articles with one or more qualifying incoming links. |Few= can be used as an exception for cases where there is more potential. This is not eliminating the backlog through redefinition, it is attacking the most important part of the problem first. If we can first get a single link into every article, we can come back for a second pass an thicken things up. Part of running a successful project is having realistic milestones and creating a feeling of success amongst participants. ~Kvng (talk) 19:10, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Yeah some articles (particularly old semi-stub biographies) are just not great candidates for prose de-orphaning. Like, we have 600 articles on Italian artists from the 16th century, it's not realistic to think that enough of them made an impact on the art world that we can integrate every single one into prose somewhere. A list entry is great because it can, when properly written, sum the person up enough that someone trying to do research on a topic (say, Italian painters :P) can look at the list and find ones that interest them or suit their needs. I'm perfectly happy with list links counting. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:31, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

As of October 2017

Does anyone know if AWB has been sorted to match the long standing revised criteria yet? Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:25, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

Rich. Have you done any clean up? ItApril 2017 still looks very high to me. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:25, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

But I see it is now dropping somewhat? Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:00, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes I am just over 2/3 way through. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:24, 16 October 2017 (UTC).

All done. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:28, 16 October 2017 (UTC).

Thanks Rich. Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:00, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Hi I see this page Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/do-talk-message is still saying that an article needs a minimum of 2 inbound links before it is no longer considered an orphan, when I gather from elsewhere that only one link is required. Should I change this? Also, the s there a bot which reviews orphaned articles and deorphans them if it finds an inbound link? If not that would be very useful. I’m working on 2009 orphans at the moment and at least one in ten us actually no longer an orphan, so a bot would maybe knock 15,000 off the list at a stoke! Mccapra (talk) 18:49, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

Can we delete that completely? Is it still relevant at all? If not, yes, change it to match the definitive criteria. Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:00, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

We can certainly list it at MfD. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:24, 16 October 2017 (UTC).

@Eno Lirpa: after a bit of digging I've found that AWB only removes orphan tags from pages with more than two incoming links. DrStrauss talk 12:46, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks but the problem is AWB seems to add the tag when it should not. Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:00, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

There is an option to restrict orphan tagging to only articles with no links at all in AWB (restrict orphan tagging). DrStrauss talk 13:08, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

I have initiated a discussion at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Orphans, since I think this deserves a wider airing. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:28, 16 October 2017 (UTC).

Side note

Premeditated Chaos and Eno Lirpa may be interested in User:DrStrauss/sandbox 3 which contains a list of all articles with one or more incoming links in the February 2009 orphans category. I was going to de-tag them with AWB but decided against it because a good quarter of them meet deletion criteria. There are 976 of them. DrStrauss talk 13:41, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

DrStrauss

Why does potential deletion stop them being de-orphan-tagged if they are not orphans? This will not affect their deletion outcome? Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:48, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

How did you identify them as being deletion candidates, ie, I would like to see if it is possible to bulk PROD them for example. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:48, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

I think Strauss meant it wasn't worth the effort to de-orphan them if he is just going to CSD/PROD/AfD them. I also think it would be hugely unwise to bulk PROD over 900 articles. The sheer volume would make it super difficult for the usual PROD patrollers to roll through them and de-tag the ones they believe are inappropriate, so I think we'd catch a lot of flak for it. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:24, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Having de-orphan-tagged articles using AWB myself, I can advise that to do 900 plus would only take 40 to 50 minutes on a slow internet connection, so it would not be much of an effort, and I would be happy to do it. Only a quarter of the 900 plus are possible deletes but yes still a lot. I was not thinking of doing them as one lot, but if there are some sets of patterns within the 250 or so then we could do them in separate lots after negotiation with patrollers perhaps. This would still be a lot more efficient I think than doing them manually one at a time. But I would need to know what the patterns are, so if Dr Strauss has done some work already I might be able to leverage off that. Eno Lirpa (talk) 13:46, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• @Eno Lirpa and Premeditated Chaos: yeah, my thought was that half of the orphans (or articles in that category) which I've come across are uncontroversial deletes (most of this month's PRODs for me have been through patrolling Feb '09 orphans. I'm not going to be as active for a few weeks as I'm recovering from an injury so PROD patrollers need not worry! DrStrauss talk 13:35, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I wish you well again. Eno Lirpa (talk) 10:51, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

@Eno Lirpa: @Premeditated Chaos: Kvng

Just for tracking purposes I've created a list of BLPs in the February 2009 orphans category here. It contains 2,314 items.

DrStrauss talk 22:38, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks DrStrauss. Hopefully I can get into more of these bulkish deorphans when I get back to wikiing in early October. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:47, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

@DrStrauss: Can we work through your list and remove the ones that have been deorphaned? --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 05:05, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Sure! DrStrauss talk 08:28, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

I have taken the liberty and striked those no longer a February 2009 orphan. They could still be an orphan, for example, if attempted tagged. At our current rate the list's non strikes will be out of date very quickly... Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:49, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

If useful I can update the strikes every couple of days pretty easily? Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:54, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Well done all. We have cracked 12,000 ie 11,994. The next major visual / psychological milestone beckons ie 10,000! Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:26, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

So February 2009 is still dropping by roughly 1000 per month.

Progress looks like :

Note that in July total orphans was 142,000. It is now 134,000. (Not counting attempteds ~ 1,200, and ~ 400 others(?).) This is down 8,000 in about 4 months, about 2,000 per month. Are we winning? At that rate it will be another 5.5 years before have the only current month to worry about! Eno Lirpa (talk) 01:28, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Generations have gone by without february 2009 ever reaching 0. Seems like it'll be done in an year. Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:58, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

Attempted deorphaning

There has been a big spike in the number of articles marked as attempted deorphans.

I am not sure that just moving large numbers of articles from one orphan category to another is all that helpful to our cause ? Especially, if they are then not quite as visible to us and we have to look in two places ? Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:06, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, it can be useful for an editor to be able to note that they've done their best but found no options, because it means that the next editor doesn't wind up duplicating their work. On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot in the Oct 2017 attempted category that could easily have been tagged for PROD or merge/redirected. I'm also seeing a lot of biographies that could easily be added to "List of people from X" or "List of Xian occupation" type articles for a cheap de-orphan. It looks like Mccapra is plowing through a lot of the orphan categories very quickly, and while I respect the amount of real de-orphaning going on, I'm also not seeing a lot of thought going into the articles being tagged as "attempts". ♠PMC♠ (talk) 14:25, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi. Well as the spike in attempted orphans is basically down to me, I’ll say what I think I’m doing. A couple of months ago I found around 1,800 articles in the attempted deorphan category, most of which I could fairly easily deal with. There were many that had been sitting there for years so I deorphaned them by the hundred. At the same time as sorting out old ones, I added several hundred new ones. My intention has been up update the entire list, clearing off the old and adding new ones for other editors to try. Some are too technical for me to risk, and others are things like random books, minor footballers or defunct computer games. If they’re easy for other editors to clear then great! It’s hard to see what we’re losing. If not, I’ll come back to them in a few months’ time and take a second go at them. With the experience of deorphaning I’ve gained, maybe some I couldn’t tackle in September will seem easy by March.

If other editors find this approach annoying I can simply leave the articles in the main orphan categories where I find them. Personally I’d like to move them into the attempted category because that creates a worklist for me to come back to in a few momths’ time for a second attempt. It’s easier for me to work through attempted categories by the hundred than orphan categories by the thousand, but if this is somehow making things harder for other editors, I’ll stop. Mccapra (talk) 22:50, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

I think the problem is that historically, the "attempted" category has been used for pages where every reasonable attempt has been made and nothing has been found as a plausible link - not simply cases where one editor doesn't know enough to know where to look. I might not know much about football players, but another editor might find them simple to clear out. The "attempted" category provides a holding pen for a small number of "problem cases" so we don't wind up with 5 or 6 difficult ones preventing us from clearing a given monthly category. It also has the benefit of flagging those problem cases for the attention of experienced editors, who might have some ideas about where to de-orphan them.

One editor placing several hundred articles into there from the main orphan cats, to suit their own workflow, can be confusing for everyone else who's used to the typical way of doing things. We no longer have the useful divide between "stuff" and "really hard stuff". Now it's "stuff" and "more stuff".

Would it be possible to look for a user script that could help you add stuff to a custom watchlist or userpage that you could use as a "look at later" kind of list? That way you could still make that distinction for yourself, while preserving the "stuff" vs "hard stuff" distinction for other editors? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 02:11, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Well clearly I am using attempted more than other editors find useful. However most of the existing articles in the attempted category didn’t seem hard to me at all. Also how do we judge when every reasonable attempt has been made to deorphan? If an article has been categorised as an orphan for seven or eight years I’d assume other editors had had a look at it. How does any individual editor know when it’s appropriate to recategorise it as attempted?Mccapra (talk) 07:51, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

There's no hard criteria for setting something as "attempted" - that'd be impossible to determine given the wide breadth of articles in the orphan category. But I think given the attempted category's typical use as a holding pen for difficult pages, it should be a somewhat higher bar than just general unfamiliarity with the topic. Also, it's not really fair to assume that someone else has had a look before you - there are over 100,000 articles in the orphan category and only so many de-orphaners.

Obscure or promo-ish topics may be good candidates for merge or deletion. Lots of bios can be slotted into list articles, or the "notable people" section of their hometown or alma mater. Obscure topics can be checked at a relevant WikiProject. If it's a species article, can the relevant genus (or whatever other taxonomic rank) be quickly created? Is there another language version that could be mined for ideas? Is the article just titled wrong and would have links at the right title? Those kinds of avenues should be explored at least a little before moving something out of the main category as attempted. It takes more time, but I personally see more value in digging deeper before moving something into a separate, much-less-trafficked sub-category where it is even more likely to be ignored than regular orphans are. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 10:41, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

I think I would prefer "attempted" to be a place of very last resort, for an article after strong, multiple attempts to deorphan, merge, and also notability has been considered (eg taken to PROD or AfD if necessary). I am not comfortable with it being used as a workflow tool for individual editors. Each of us can create bookmark folders to manage workflow and come-back-to lists etc. Or keep an edit open sandbox page while we work to build a list of links to come-back-to pages as we work. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:30, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

I think that's a bit too high standard; I think a reasonable one is if an editor has made a strong attempt and checked to make sure it isn't notable (after all how are we to know if multiple attempts have been made, without the attempt being tagged?) More attempts can be made once it is tagged as an attempt. That also matches with the instructions in WP:ORPHAN. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:15, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

My main concern is one of degree. As far as I am aware most deorphaners spend most of their time working through one way or another the main monthly orphan categories. (Happy to be corrected.) When suddenly, not just tens or twenties, but hundreds of articles, get moved out of these monthly categories, then it makes it more difficult, having to look in even more places for potentially analogous articles, especially when many can be readily deorphaned. Eno Lirpa (talk) 14:14, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

I do agree that that's too much. But it's not too big of a deal. Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:24, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

I agree it is not too big a deal. I do think however it is well short of ideal. Eno Lirpa (talk) 11:51, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

I've marked a lot of orphans "attempted" in past years because I thought I had exhausted all options to deorphan. Recently Mccapra has come around and revisited these and seemingly effortlessly deorphaned many of them. My reaction is, "Why didn't I think of that?" Well, I didn't and I assume Mccapra is experiencing the same thing here. It's all good. I appreciate what Mccapra is doing for the project. A belated barnstar is coming your way. ~Kvng (talk) 14:45, 6 December 2017 (UTC)