Wikipedia talk:Article alerts

Notice of minor change to Module:RfD

I trust that this edit to a template comment is not a breaking change. wbm1058 (talk) 03:25, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Shouldn't do anything. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:48, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: I can go further. Since the first letter of a page name is case-insensitive, not only does the change not break anything, it cannot break anything; and moreover is, other than the purely cosmetic change, completely pointless. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:31, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Redrose64, no, not pointless, or I wouldn't have made the change. The MediaWiki system may be case insensitive regarding the first letter, because it's been coded to be that way. However, the Lua Module:String is not case-insensitive with regards to the first character of the string passed into it. I had to make this edit to get Template:R from move/except to behave the way I wanted it to. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:06, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Proposed changes to RM templates

Would it affect AAlertsBot if some requested moves had a new parameter after the title(s)? For example:

---

Single-move RM

{{requested move/dated|NewTitle|protected=yes}}

---

Multi-move RM

{{requested move/dated|multiple=yes|current1=A|new1=B|current2=C|new2=D|protected=yes}}

---

I have drafted some changes to Module:Requested move and {{Requested move/dated}} so that {{subst:RM}} will automatically check current and proposed titles for page protection (admin or template-editor) and, if found, add a |protected= parameter to the resulting {{requested move/dated}} in new requested moves. See Template talk:Requested move#Detecting and showing page protection for more info and sandbox links.

I did a small test to see if this would cause any issue with AAlertBot by adding |protected=yes to one existing RM. The article alert was added as usual. SilverLocust 💬 20:53, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning this. It should not cause issues, no. When parsing templates, the bot generally looks for expected parameters and ignores everything else. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 21:30, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Updating the bot

I changed my name from User:Otuọcha to User:SafariScribe. I want it be updated in WP:WikiProject Nigeria. I did that here but was reverted by the bot obviously because it's not in the list. Pls update. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 07:21, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I set the pages your corrected above to re-retrieve on the next run. I'm not 100% sure it will do it correctly for closed pages, because this isn't really something the bot knows how to do. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 09:13, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

@SafariScribe: If a page is built by a bot (such as all of the Article Alerts reports) it's pointless editing them because on its next run the bot will always rebuild the page according to data that it retrieves from other pages. Therefore, you need to identify those other pages, amend those, and the bot will copy the information to the report on its next run. For example, the entry under Featured article candidates for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is built using info from Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie/archive1. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:12, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

@Redrose64 Thanks for the advice. I really thought as much! Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 13:16, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

"the bot will copy the information to the report on its next run" For Article Alerts, this is true only for data that the bot is going to re-retrieve. It doesn't recheck pages it has already seen if their status doesn't change and content isn't normally expected to change. For example, once an article is in AfD and the bot reads the nominator's information, it won't try to read it again - the nominator is "never" going to change. This is also because there would be many, many more pages to check each run and 99.9% of the time it's redundant. And it gets more and more expensive for things like revision history. Rarely, there is a bug or someone screws up a process and some pages have wrong data. More often, re-retrieving data actually breaks due to things like vandalism or conflicts with later process changes. So the bot will only re-retrieve pages if specifically prompted by User:AAlertBot/RegetPages. And pages that are closed can no longer retrieve some information at all. In archives, however, old entries won't be changed at all - so one can manually replace things there. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 13:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

AAlertBot has not updated pages since 9 April 2024

According to Special:Contributions/AAlertBot, the bot has not updated alert pages since 9 April 2024. Cunard (talk) 09:53, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

@Headbomb: —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 11:15, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

I came here to flag this as well... GiantSnowman 16:53, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Right, I got overwhelmed at work. I'll get on it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:41, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for fixing the bot! Cunard (talk) 05:08, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks guys. Is there any web location where the diagnostics output of the bot could be seen, so maybe it would encourage others to submit bug fixes? --Joy (talk) 07:42, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

There are internal log files, but they contain a massive amount of info and aren't online. There is Wikipedia:Article_alerts/Log mostly for on-Wiki things that may or may not need fixing. The Wikipedia:Article_alerts/Status page is where the active run is "recorded". Of course, if the bot crashes in some other way or can't post to wiki, there wouldn't be anything to see. I'm not sure what caused this run to fail (Headbomb would need to send me the log), but it was before it started processing and thus probably a network error. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 14:36, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Indeed this is likely a network error due a pending update on windows or somesuch. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:58, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Would be nice if the code and the logs were made available, so we don't run into a https://xkcd.com/2347/ situation :) --Joy (talk) 11:22, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, there's a pretty big bus factor here. That said, Headbomb does have the full code. And the code is "full" full, that is, the entire bot can be run with that code and doesn't really require anything you couldn't easily install. I have also been meaning to move towards open-sourcing it, but it needs several major things changed for that and I don't have that much time. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 12:00, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

The bot does not appear to have run today. Thryduulf (talk) 11:49, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. @Headbomb: No log page edit, so it crashed early/before doing anything? —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 19:08, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Power shortage during the night I think. I'll run now. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:19, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Question about why an article is showing up on alerts

Hello, I was curious if anyone could tell me why History of Wahhabism is showing up on Wikipedia:WikiProject Countries/Article alerts. The page doesn't seem to have the WPCountries template or Infobox country, which are the two items included in the alert. Some items from Wikipedia:WikiProject Former countries/Article alerts also end up on the Countries page, but it doesn't seem to have that banner either. Thanks very much, CMD (talk) 07:52, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

It is because it has an {{Infobox country}} in History_of_Wahhabism#Formation_of_Kingdom_of_Saudi_Arabia. (This isn't great, because infoboxes generally represent the subject and it helps catch articles that are likely missing otherwise. Granted, this is not likely true for countries infobox, because all are likely accounted for.) I suppose same is true for former countries looking at couple examples. Perhaps the subscription doesn't need the infobox? —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 09:07, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, I've never seen Infobox country that truncated so I didn't recognise it. CMD (talk) 02:27, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

No alerts since 30 June 2024

@Headbomb bot status shows as crashed. Mackensen (talk) 12:02, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

Is Template:GTCmain still used?

Template:GTCmain has no documentation and no transclusions. Is it still used, if it was ever used? If it is no longer used, I plan to send it to TFD. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:24, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Seems like no one has written any doc. According to Wikipedia:Featured_and_good_topic_candidates/Nomination_procedure, GTCmain is used. Here is an example of it being used recently. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 17:17, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Have you asked at Wikipedia talk:Featured topics, that being the talk page for Wikipedia:Good topics? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:02, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

I had not, since the template's documentation says to post here, but I have done so now. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:52, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

The doc has a boilerplate message from Wikipedia:Article alerts/Bot use warning, which isn't intended to mean that this is the primary point of discussion, but that this page should be informed when a discussion occurs elsewhere concerning changes to the template. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:47, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi, saw your post at WP:FT; yes it is still used. Since HellKnowz already gave an example and reason, what else are you looking for? Its only used during an active GT nomination, of which there are sometimes many and sometimes none. Currently there are none (there's a supplementary nomination, but that's seperate). Aza24 (talk) 05:45, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the responses. Some basic documentation would be helpful. What do the parameters do? A link to Wikipedia talk:Featured topics would apparently be helpful. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:54, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Vital articles bug?

Since October 17, alerts for vital articles have not been being added, which makes me suspect there is some bug/error. Does anyone know what's happening? Sdkb ^talk 18:25, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Something about vital-articles must have changed. See also User_talk:JL-Bot#Vital_articles_reports_empty

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:57, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

It was likely this change based on the date. -- JLaTondre (talk) 23:27, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

It seems that there is no single category with all vital articles or a category with all articles in its subcategories. They are instead in sub-subcategories, i.e. Category:Vital articles by level by quality has Category:Level-1 vital articles by quality which has Category:FA-Class level-1 vital articles, which has pages. And similar to other "top" categories. Unfortunately, the bot cannot do more than one level of subcategory parsing (which by itself is a workaround for projects that don't have a banner or place all their articles in a single category). To fix this, I would need to implement recursive category scanned, so I can't really fix this for now. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 19:06, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Courtesy pinging @MSGJ. Can we roll back whatever change has caused this until we address the issue? Sdkb ^talk 20:52, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

And is there a reason we can't just have an additional Category:All Wikipedia vital articles with all pages? —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 21:13, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

According to the subscription list, the main VA alerts only goes down to level 3. Sdkb ^talk 21:17, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

I assume the main subscription at Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Article alerts wants all articles regardless of level? This is the problematic entry as far as I understand. Then there are 3 more subscriptions for levels 1, 2 and 3. I believe I can handle those with (1 level deep) subcategories, e.g. level 3 would use Category:Level-3_vital_articles_by_quality and collect from the 7 subcategories. These are probably fixable straight away. But I believe you are the one who added these subscriptions? So I guess whatever list you need/want to be included. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 22:13, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Article alerts for all five levels would be overwhelming, as there are 50,000 articles by level 5. I believe when I implemented it that level 3 created the right balance. Whatever functionality we had is the functionality that should be restored — it's on those who made breaking changes to figure out what was impacted and fix that. Sdkb ^talk 22:58, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

But didn't Category:Vital articles by quality have subcategories that directly in total contained all pages before? Was it intended only up to level 3? That is what Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Article alerts was subscribed to. Take for example October 12 and Katy Perry - that's a level 5. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 23:18, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps I'm misremembering, then. It appears there were also multiple alert lists. Sdkb ^talk 18:42, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Alerts are running again for Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles/Article alerts (all), Wikipedia:Vital articles/Article alerts (L3), Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4/Article alerts (L4) and Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/Article alerts (L5). I wonder if it would make sense to have Wikipedia:Vital articles/Article alerts changed to Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/3/Article alerts for consistency? —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 10:25, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes please, moving to /Level/3/ would be a good change. It obviously got missed when we created the landing page at the base page. Then perhaps the "all" list could move to Wikipedia:Vital articles/Article alerts? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:03, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

That would not be a problem to implement. Do you want it for all vital articles or just levels 1, 2 and 3? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:56, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

As far as I understand, just the category for all pages. But see clarification above in case I misunderstand. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 22:13, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

@MSGJ: Can you please undelete the Category:All Wikipedia vital articles category and set it to be directly populated by all vital articles? —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 13:43, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes. This will need a change to Module:Banner shell which I will do at next sync — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:19, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

 Done — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:29, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 10:25, 10 November 2024 (UTC)