Wikipedia talk:Special:WantedCategories

Before creating categories generated on Special:Wantedcategories, please note:
Some of the redlinked categories have been deleted, but links to them exist on discussion pages or other non-article items, which is why they appear to be wanted. There may be a good reason why they are redlinked. Please check the deletion logs or "What links here" for each category before (re-)creating it. Cheers! Pegship 00:02, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Purpose

What is the meaning or need of the page? Would like to help, but not sure of need/purpose. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BigGuyC (talk • contribs) 21:11, 1 January (UTC)^<diff>

It is basically a cached list of the most populous red categories in the system. Red categories are categories listed on a page somewhere, but that do not exist as an actual category object. Red categories do no great harm that I know of, but they also do no real good. Categories are, for the most part, for navigation. Red categories really do not help much in this, and are thus mostly useless.

So the point is to take the useless red category and figure out what to do with it. Options include:

1) Building out the red category if you think it will make a useful category. This involves figuring out how the new category should be parented, and whether it should have any notes at the top, or should consist only of the partents.

2) Remove red category links from the entries. If you do not see a use for the category, or it is a duplicate of an existing category, clean up the individual entries. In the case of a duplicate category already existing, this simply involves repointing each entry to the appropriate cat. If there is no appropriate real cat, and you do not see much long term use for the category, then just remove the red category from the entries.

3) Do nothing. I personally am very, very hesitant to touch things in the User space, for instance, and will tend to shrug and move on to the next item rather than trying to clean up red cats on other people's user pages. - TexasAndroid 20:40, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Red categories are discouraged per WP:REDNOT. You've pretty much got it - as far as option 3 goes it really depends. With obvious newbies who don't know what they're doing then I don't feel too bad about significant reconstruction of their user page with user boxes and Wikipedian categories to set them on their way. If the user has not edited for a while (say a year plus, it depends) then I don't feel too bad about quoting WP:USERNOCAT to at the very least add colons to disable categories on their sandboxes etc. I'll steer clear of active editors' user pages in the main, but occasionally raise an issue on their talk page if it's a significant thing, and they usually are happy to see minor typos corrected directly (the capitalisation of iso15924 script Babels is a common one, eg Cyrl rather than cyrl).Le Deluge (talk) 23:00, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Updates

How often is this page updated? -AMK152 23:33, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Instantly, I believe. Special pages, annotated by the Special:, are created by the Wikipedia software on demand (ie. every time someone accesses it). Click this link for more details. Daniel.Bryant 01:06, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Less often than that. Weekly if your lucky (it's currently 16 days old). Rich Farmbrough, 12:24 21 December 2006 (GMT).

As of March 2017 the underlying query to list up to 5000 categories has been running once every three days just after 7am UTC, I'm not sure if the frequency varies depending on how much work is being done on it as that was during the marathon effort led by User:BrownHairedGirl which saw it go down from >15k to <4k in a matter of weeks. However the test of whether members of the 5000 have been processed or not is done on demand. Le Deluge (talk) 23:00, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

B class

There is still an existing request on the Wanted categories cached list for Category:B stubs (#92 on the list). This category was apparently rejected some time ago, according to one of the 3 links to the non-existent category page. Please advise. Badbilltucker 21:12, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Requests for categories that currently exist

Should category names which currently exist and which match or nearly match currently requested category names be posted here regularly? I've found many already on the first page of the November 3, 2006 Wanted categories list. In particular, they are #'s 4,10,35,50,62,65,83,88,99,100,110,120,171,174,176,177,188,193,195,201 and 203. 4,10,62 & 83 are identical. robertjohnsonrj 02:45, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I think one way to remove them from the list is to go to the redlinked cat, find "what links here" and edit those articles to conform to the existing category, rather than creating (or re-creating) something that has a good reason not to exist. Just a thought. Pegship 12:26, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Please add a disclaimer to this page

Many of the categories listed on this page have been deleted following CFD or SFD processes. This page should either be renamed (or removed) or at least show a warning against simply recreating deleted material. A few months back an editor recreated many hundreds of categories that had already been deleted for good reason simply because he found this page. We need to address this situation. Valentinian ^{(talk) / (contribs)} 15:21, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Strongly agree. I assume a rename, or a change to the "canned text" to disclaimerify it, would be a matter of asking a dev nicely to do so (though I assume this would be the logical place to discuss it first). Alai 23:32, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

If I may ask, why weren't the references to these categories deleted from the articles when whoever was the admionistrator who did this deleted the catgories? Isn't he supposed to do that? Debresser (talk) 16:24, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Category differentiation?

Would it be possible to filter out the categories with Wikipedian or User in them? They're primarily user-page related, and it'd be nice to have the wanted categories be primarily article-related. Maybe put them on a separate page, so they can be more specfically examined? I think it would be a big help to separate the two kinds of categories, imho. :) -Ebyabe 14:24, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Invisible articles in categories?

At least it seems that way for some of them. The following categories consistently appear on the list, but are always empty:

• Category:Stub
• Category:Historical stubs
• Category:Substubs
• Category:Movie stubs
• Category:Buildings and structures stubs
• Category:Corporation stubs
• Category:Computer and video game stubs
• Category:Ireland-related stubs
• Category:US geography stubs
• Category:Math stubs
• Category:Russia-related stubs
• Category:Christianity-related stubs
• Category:India-related stubs
• Category:Station stubs
• Category:UK geography stubs
• Category:Danish stubs
• Category:Israel-related stubs
• Category:Election related stubs

Could someone figure out what's happening, 'cause it's kinda freaky. -Ebyabe 15:30, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

They must be linked to from old talk pages. These categories have all be renamed by WP:WSS. The correct category names are:

• Category:Stubs
• Category:History stubs
• Category:Substubs (no longer exists either. Deleted by WP:SFD, and please don't recreate it)
• Category:Film stubs
• Category:Building and structure stubs
• Category:Company stubs
• Category:Video game stubs
• Category:Ireland stubs
• Category:United States geography stubs
• Category:Mathematics stubs
• Category:Russia stubs
• Category:Christianity stubs
• Category:India stubs
• Category:Broadcasting stubs
• Category:United Kingdom geography stubs
• Category:Denmark stubs
• Category:Israel stubs
• Category:Election stubs

The links haven't been updated by bot since it will mess up some old logged discussions regarding the category names, so in order to update them, we'd need to check every case by hand to avoid this problem. Valentinian ^{T / C} 16:18, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I think I maybe have an idea. I looked at What links here for Category:Stub, since that's the worst (with 41 members). There's mentions of it on a bunch of talk pages. That might be why it's not showing in the category, as the pages aren't categorized with that category, only refer to it. But only certain pages types must be being counted. That would make more sense.

I've been working on these on-and-off for over a week, and seeing those categories keep cropping up with nothing in them was driving me crazy. Well, crazy-er. Now I can maybe fix 'em. :) -Ebyabe 16:28, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

I've made a post to to WP:WSS [1] One of our active members is a bot operator so perhaps he can convert the lot to < code > < nowiki > form. Valentinian ^{T / C} 16:31, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Category of redlinked categories

Could somebody create a "Category of broken categories" (or "Category of redlinked categories")? I'm serious. I would be willing to put in some serious work on emtying such a category. Debresser (talk) 16:28, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

What would the inclusion criteria for such a category be? i.e. what are you defining as a "broken" category? --Pascal666 (talk) 17:14, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

A redlinked category (see name of this section). Debresser (talk) 17:55, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

And that is different from this list how? --Pascal666 (talk) 18:05, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

This is a list of the 1000 most redlinked categories. I meant a category, not a list. And not just the 1000 mostly found, but all of them. Debresser (talk) 18:09, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

See the Village Pump proposal I made. Debresser (talk) 18:16, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

A page (including a category) gets added to a category based on the content of that page. You have to create the page to add it to a category, at which point it exists and is thus no longer red-linked. The best you can ever hope for, without major changes to MediaWiki (and this is not the place to make such a request), is a list. --Pascal666 (talk) 18:26, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

The technical side of things is something I don't know anything about, as I am not a programmer. But I do understand what you mean. Nevertheless, that list could be completed. Debresser (talk) 22:35, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

User:Pascal666/cats --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 09:14, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

List empty for the last week or so ?

No Wanted categories. Has someone been very busy or is something not working correctly? --Traveler100 (talk) 16:29, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

How

How do I add a request to the Wanted categories page ? and how does it not wiki link ?--Jim Sweeney (talk) 15:43, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

This is a special page which just lists categories that are "wanted" merely because someone has linked to the category from an article somewhere. But per WP:REDNOT you should only really add a category link if the category exists or you create it yourself. So just be WP:BOLD! Le Deluge (talk) 23:00, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Processing the list

Just in case it's useful to someone, here's how I hack together a list of the not-yet-done SWC in Excel. First you need to know that you can get the full list (limited to 5000) at this link so either View Source (Ctrl-U) or use view-source:https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WantedCategories&limit=5000 to get the underlying HTML. About 50 lines down you'll find the start of the actual data, enclosed in <li>....</li> tags. Start selecting from the first <li for 5000 lines or however many it is down to the last </li> and copy them. Then select cell A1 of a new sheet in Excel and paste - you should now have 5000 rows of text, each starting and ending with li tags. Then in cell B1 put :

=IF(ISERROR(FIND("<del>",A1)),MID(A1,FIND(CHAR(34)&">",A1,30)+2,999),"zz")

and in cell C1 put :

=IF(B1<>"zz","Category:"&TRIM(LEFT(B1,FIND("</a>",B1)-1)),"")

Then select B1 and C1 and drag them down to row 5000 (or whatever).
Then select columns A:C and sort on column B. You'll then have an alphabetical list in column C of the ones that are as yet undone. It's not perfect - non-Latin characters sort to the bottom, and I paste into a text editor to convert the HTML characters - but it's convenient. Once the spreadsheet is set up then all you have to do is to paste the HTML into cell A1 again and sort.Le Deluge (talk) 23:00, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Excluding usercatredlinks

I am looking into the possibility of modifying this tool so that it omits usercat redlinks which are a venerable tradition at Wikipedia but which interfere with use of this tool. For example, I have asked User:Trappist the monk about it. Anythingyouwant (talk) 23:56, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Question about a previously deleted category

I've read the deletion logs from back in 2008 or thereabouts, when the Wikipedian WikiElves category was deleted. It's been almost 10 years now... I can't understand how that was deleted then when now, there's a Wikipedian Youtubers category and even a category for editors with a good sense of humor ;o . Since I'm a Wikielf myself, I would love to see that category reinstated (and be a part of), but I'm hesitant to do so since it was once there but is no longer ;o . Any thoughts on this ;*0 ??? Hope I'm asking this in the right place ;p heh.... anyways, cheers ^_^ ~ Hanyou23 (talk) 21:51, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

User:Qwerfjkl/scripts/hideUnwantedCategories

In case anyone finds this helpful. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:33, 23 June 2024 (UTC)