User:SuggestBot/Requests

This page explains how to try SuggestBot out by making it send you suggestions only once. We use a template for this because it is relatively easy to use, while also making us able to automate the process of sending out suggestions. As this document will explain, it also provides you with the possibility to influence what pages the suggestions are based on. SuggestBot removes the template automatically at the same time as it sends you the suggestions, thus ensuring that you only get suggestions once. If you are wondering what SuggestBot is and how it works, please see SuggestBot.

How you make SuggestBot send you suggestions depends on what you already have done:

If you haven't already edited any pages you need to tell SuggestBot what you're interested in.
If you have already edited pages you may:
- get suggestions based on the pages you've edited, or
- get suggestions based on a specific set of pages.

Should anything in this documentation be confusing or unclear, we appreciate questions and suggestions for improvements on our talk page.

Suggestions based on the pages you've edited

This is the way SuggestBot usually works: it fetches your last few hundred edits and suggests articles that are similar and in need of improvement. To get such a set of suggestions, add the following code to your user talk page:

{{User:SuggestBot/suggest}}

Normally you will add the code to your user talk page. For example, if your user name is "MyName", add the code to User talk:MyName. If you have other user pages, you can add the code there. For example, you may have created a subpage called "To Do" to save a list of things you want to do on Wikipedia. In that case, you can add the code to User:MyName/To Do. Then the suggestions will be posted to your "To Do" page instead of your talk page.

We look for users who have added the template code at regular intervals, so you should get the suggestions fairly quickly, usually within about fifteen minutes.

Suggestions based on specific pages

You can tell SuggestBot exactly which pages it should base its suggestions on, which gives you the opportunity to potentially receive a set of suggestions limited to a certain area of interest. If you do this the bot will not look at your recent edits and can therefore end up suggesting articles you've recently edited, but it will not suggest any of the articles you've specified.

As an example, let's assume you are interested in World War I and World War II. Wikipedia has specific pages about these subjects, so we can specify that SuggestBot should use these as the basis of the suggestions by listing them in the template code separated by "|", like this:

{{User:SuggestBot/suggest|World War I|World War II}}

Unfortunately SuggestBot does not work very well with such a low number of pages, which is why we have also made it possible to specify names of Wikipedia categories, which it will then fetch page titles from. Going back to our example using World War I & II, we can use the fact that Wikipedia also has categories about these subjects (Category:World War I and Category:World War II) and tell SuggestBot to use all the articles from these categories:

{{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:World War I|Category:World War II}}

SuggestBot will use up to 128 pages from the listed categories and post suggestions based on those. It does not look at subcategories, so if a category has a subcategory you are interested in you will also have to list the subcategory. It is of course also possible to mix pages and categories in the listing, like this:

{{User:SuggestBot/suggest|World War I|World War II|Category:Politics of World War II}}

In summary the template code consists of the name of the template ("User:SuggestBot/suggest") followed by either "|" (a vertical bar) and the title of a page, or "|" and the title of a category, as many times as necessary. If you want a more formal definition you can expand the section below.

Formal definition in Backus–Naur form

    suggestion = "{{" TemplateName [ Pages ] "}}"
  TemplateName = "User:SuggestBot/suggest"
         Pages = { "|" PageOrCategory }
PageorCategory = PageTitle | CategoryTitle
// PageTitle is the title of a page, e.g. "World War I"
// CategoryTitle is the title of a category including "Category:", e.g. "Category:World War I"