User:AnomieBOT/RandomPage/doc

This template both displays a randomly-chosen page, and instructs AnomieBOT to update that choice periodically.

Usage

Place this template, with the appropriate values for the parameters, on any non-protected page. Do not subst the template, as it will not work substed.

Samples

All parameters:

{{User:AnomieBOT/RandomPage
 | frequency  = 
 | categories = 
 | namespaces = 
 | summary    = 
 | minor      = 
 | botflag    = 
 | template   = 
 | this page  = {{subst:FULLPAGENAME}}
}}

All parameters, with defaults:

{{User:AnomieBOT/RandomPage
 | frequency  = 1 week
 | categories = 
 | namespaces = 0
 | summary    = Automatically updating User:AnomieBOT/RandomPage
 | minor      = no
 | botflag    = no
 | template   = 
 | this page  = {{subst:FULLPAGENAME}}
}}

Parameters

frequency

Specifies how often to update the page selection, for example "1 month" or "10 hours 30 minutes". Recognized time spans are: minute, hour, day, week, month, year. The bot may be late by a few minutes depending on server load, and may enforce a minimum value.

categories

Specifies the categories to process, using a pseudo-template syntax. For example, to select the random article from WikiProject Tulips articles that are Stub, Start, or C class and are High or Top importance, you would do something like this:

 |categories = {{AND
                 |{{OR
                    |Category:Stub-Class Tulip articles
                    |Category:Start-Class Tulip articles
                    |Category:C-Class Tulip articles
                 }}
                 |{{OR
                    |Category:Top-priority Tulip articles
                    |Category:High-priority Tulip articles
                 }}
               }}

Note that these are not real templates, so it doesn't matter that {{AND}} and {{OR}} are actually completely different templates. Recognized pseudo-templates are:

• AND – A candidate article must be in all categories.
• OR – A candidate article must be in any of the categories
• AND NOT – A candidate article must be in the first category given, and must not be in any of the rest.
• SUBCATS – The first parameter specifies the category, and the (optional) second the number of levels of subcategories to load. A candidate article must be in the named category or any of its subcategories (to the depth of the second parameter).

For any talk pages included in the categories, the bot will automatically convert them to the corresponding non-talk page. Thus, trying to get the intersection of Category:Top-priority Tulip articles (which normally contains talk pages) with Category:Articles lacking sources (which normally contains articles) will work as intended.

The complexity of this parameter affects the minimum frequency the bot will enforce for this page. Roughly, the complexity is the sum of the number of members in each processed category divided by 5000, rounded up; thus, using SUBCATS on something with many subcategories will quickly lead to unreasonably large minimums.

namespaces

The article must be in the namespaces specified here. Namespaces are specified by number, separated by commas. The bot automatically considers any non-talk page to be in the same categories as its talk page, so "0,1" is equivalent to just "0". A list of namespace numbers is available at Help:Namespaces.

summary

The edit summary to use when updating the template. The actual page chosen is appended.

minor

If set to "1" or "yes", the edit will be marked as minor and thus will be hidden some people's watchlists.

botflag

If set to "1" or "yes", the edit will be marked as bot and thus will be hidden from Special:RecentChanges and some people's watchlists.

template

Normally, the output of this template is simply the selected article (or an error message). If this parameter is specified, the named template will be transcluded with the page, date, and error parameters specified. You can use this to format the output however you would like.

this page

Must be set to the name of the page the template is on ({{subst:FULLPAGENAME}} is an easy way to do that), or the bot will not visit the page. This is necessary because it turns out people want to transclude their page containing this template in their WikiProject banners, and the bot falls far behind when scanning all 24000 talk pages.

Bot-added parameters

These parameters are automatically updated by the bot.

page

The randomly-selected page.

date

The timestamp the page was randomly selected. If this parameter is removed, the bot will update the page immediately on its next run.

error

If there is something wrong with the parameters, this will be specified with an appropriate error message.

minimum frequency

Specifies the minimum value the bot is enforcing on frequency for this page. If you find this excessively high, try reworking categories to load fewer and smaller categories.

See also

• Category:AnomieBOT RandomPage subscriptions
• User:AnomieBOT/source/tasks/RandomPagePicker.pm