There is a bot request to auto-classify stubs as stub-class through the WikiProject talk page banners, and we'd like to know if it's better to use a bot or edit the {{WPBannerMeta}} template to do this. We estimate that 100,000 pages would be affected by this action. Which approach do you prefer?

  • Bot task – The bot would find every page with a stub template but missing a quality rating on its talk page and fill it in with |class=stub. If a WikiProject opts out from auto-classification, the bot would ignore its project banner.
  • Template edit – We would add code to {{WPBannerMeta}} that would detect if the corresponding article contains a stub tag. If the article contains a stub tag and the WPBannerMeta parameter AUTO_DETECT_STUB is set, the project banner's quality rating would default to "stub" instead of "unassessed". The default rating (whether stub or unassessed) would still be overridden by the project banner's class parameter. Pppery has created a prototype of the stub detection code.

We welcome alternative proposals and objections to auto-classifying stubs as such. Please raise these in the "Survey" subsection.

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Survey

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Extended discussion

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@Pppery: what happens to your template if a different wikiproject has already assessed the page (eg as "Start" class) but there is still a stub template. Is is rated as stub? Start? Neither?
  • Bot: can completely skip pages where there is a different rating

--DannyS712 (talk) 06:02, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

In the template case, each wikiproject banner works individually; if the article is tagged as a stub, but project A assesses it as start and project B doesn't have an assessment, then project B will auto-detect it as a stub and report stub class while project A will show its rating as start class. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 11:48, 22 March 2019 (UTC)