Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Orphanage/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

WikiProject or organization - please pick one

If you look at Category:Wikipedian organizations, you'll see that the only WikiProject listed there is the overarching WikiProject Council. If you want to be a WikiProject (it doesn't appear that you're following the normal process, which would be to post at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals, by the way), then please remove the categorization of "organization", to be consistent with all other WikiProjects that don't so label themselves. On the other hand, if you want to be an organization and not a WikiProject, please change your name. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:14, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

I think deorphaning certainly deserves its own WikiProject. Most of the other organizations focus on recent changes or additions to WP, such as vandalism, new users, typos and so on. Deorphaning is a massive task, not dissimilar to wikification and has a backlog even larger than that project's. I think we certainly meet the criteria, and I am considering proposing the formation of a deorphaning WikiProject, unless anyone has any objections. Davidovic 00:51, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Number of Links

How many links is appropriate before an article could be considered de-orphaned? Is one too few?Lex Kitten 08:35, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I could imagine an article would not be orphaned if it had several articles linking to it (like 10 maybe). Cheers,JetLover (Report a mistake) 22:56, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

The difficulty here is that, for many of these articles, it is difficult to find even one article to link to it. Most of them are stubs, and thus there is very little information that can be linked. 10 links seems impossible to me, for an article such as Battoni or Benrus type I. Lex Kitten 00:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Would it be appropriate to have a level of importance, based on how many links an article has? Or to ahve a different number of links for articles based on the article contence. A basic stub could require less articles, for instance.

Also, are we including links from lists? or only in-article links? Lex Kitten 00:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

The number of appropriate links contained in George Dod Armstrongis a least 6 which is more than the criteria of only 3 so why is it orphaned? Thanks anyone. Daytrivia (talk) 01:18, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Hi Daytrivia. It's marked as an orphan because it only has one link from another article, and that's a disambiguation page. Check out What links here for the article namespace. Also, we don't consider disambiguation pages as valid links per the criteria. --JaGa^talk 01:26, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

(Well, now the article has one valid link, since I added him to the Mendham Borough, New Jersey article.) --JaGa^talk 01:30, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Hey thanks for the clarfication and the link. Incidently, I am trying to find out if one of two 1910 murder victims Amzi Armstrong were related to George. Thanks again. Daytrivia (talk) 01:42, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Debate

I am proposing to turn the deorphaning team into WikiProject Deorphan. Any opinions on this change are welcome, and please feel free to voice your support or opposition to this change ether here or here.

• Currently the deorphaning team is an organization. Most other organizations focus on problems that are easily fixed. The recent changes patrol, for example, is a simple concept. The user merely goes to the recent changes page, identifies vandalism, and reverts it. Deorphaning a page, on the other hand, is often quite a difficult task.
• Deorphaning is similar to wikification, in that we have a massive backlog of articles to deorphan, and that to deorphan a page, you don't really need to know about the subject. Wikification has its own project, so why not deorphaning?
• Organizations rarely need more than one page, and do not usually need a strong structure, organizations such as Typo illustrate this. Deorphaning, in my opinion, requires a strong structure and good categorization, similar to that of the wikification project.
• As I am not sure about what organizations are allowed to do, I am hesitant to add guides on how to deorphan a page well, and other useful information for newcomers. There are extensive guides on what WikiProjects can consist of, and what actions they can perform.
• All in all, I think that this team needs more structure in the way it operates, and I think that becoming a WikiProject would help us with that.

Please feel free to state your opinion. Thank you. Davidovic 01:56, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Orphan classification

As you can see from the new WikiProject page I've made a distinction between orphaned and lonely articles. My reasoning for this is that there was really no distinction as to what makes an article an orphan. Obviously an article with absolutely no links to it would be classified as an orphan, but what of an article with, say, five links to it? The problem with many orphaned articles is that there is simply no way to add links to them in other articles, except for in lists. Another problem is that while it may be possible to add two or three links to them, it may be difficult to add more than that. I've come up with a way to change this, but it's by no means definitive, and we could probably benefit from some discussion on the issue. At the moment, I've got the following definitions:

• An orphan has 0 to 2 in-articles links, excluding links from lists, talk, Wikipedia pages and so on.
• A lonely article has from 3 to 6 links to it, 50% of which may be from lists, but links from talk, Wikipedia pages etc. are excluded.
• Once an article has 7 or more links to it, it may be de-orphaned.

These figures are, of course, open for discussion, but I think they're fair. It can be quite hard to get more than 3 links to some articles, let alone 6.

This distinction would allow for better work on the backlog, too. If half of the currently orphaned articles were tagged as lonely, instead, we could concentrate on the orphaned articles.

In addition to these figures, I think that we might be able to make templates to add to articles that we have tried' to deorphan. The idea behind this would be that if one tried to de-orphan an article, but could only find one article to add a meaningful link to it from, they could then add a template to the article, or the talk page, that would replace the pre-existing orphan template. The template would have an added line saying that someone had attempted to de-orphan the article on a certain date. While not changing the category, this template would improve efficiency, because if all the articles in June 2006 had a template saying that someone tried to de-orphan them a month ago, noone would waste time trying to de-orphan them again.

I have a bunch of other ideas that relate to this project, but we shouldn't try to do too much too quickly, so tell me what you think about these ideas, and we'll see what happens. Thanks. Davidovic 05:09, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Excellent work on organising the project page, Davidovic. Hopefully a well formatted and informative project page will help new members learn their way around, and make de-orhpaning easier!

The introduction of "lonely" pages should allow us to concentrait on the orphans that need us most! Berachyah may only have a few links, but thats still better than Benposta.

Adding a "tried to de-orphan" tag would be really useful. It's almost impossible to find links for an article like Battoni, untill the article is expanded. But at the moment, without a way to tell other Orphanage Project members, we'll all just keep going through these articles and getting no where. It would be great if we could work out a way to sort out the pages that have been "tried" on the project page, or to-do list, so that members can see even before they go there, that these pages can't be de-orphaned. And, obviously, we'll need a way to put these pages up for review every now and then, incase they can be de-orphaned =)

Lex Kitten 09:47, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

{{Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/do-attempt|date=June 2006|user=Example|att=October 2007}}. "Date" should be the date on the original orphan tag. "User" should (obviously) be your username. "Att" should be the month and year that you made the attempt to de-orphan the article. Please note that this template should be placed only on articles that you have tried extremely hard to de-orphan. Thanks. Davidovic 11:49, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

That looks great. Thats really going to come in handy on those darn geographical stubs >.< Now, we just need to work out a system of alerting members to go back and check these articles can't be de-orphaned after a period of time...Lex Kitten 11:58, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

• {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/do-talk}} - This should be placed on every orphaned article's talk page. Davidovic 12:54, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Attracting New Members

At the moment, this project seems pretty small, and not largely active. We're really going to need to attract new members if we're going to stay afloat and help those orphans!

Any proposals on how to do this?Lex Kitten 12:00, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Make more noticeable notices asking for help on orphaned articles. That's how I found this project. Freenaulij 03:46, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Prevention of Orphaned Articles

Is it possible to make it known to the majority of wikipedia editors, that when they make an article, they should make sure other articles link to it? This would make sure not so many orphan articles are created. Freenaulij 03:56, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Personally I don't think this would work. I've been an editor here for a while, and Wikipedia has tought me some things, and one is this: people don't read the rules or suggestions. They remove the sandbox header, they test edit in articles, they create pages about non notable people and things, all right in front of them. Cheers,JetLover (Report a mistake) 04:03, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Thats a good idea Freenaulij, though I agree with JetLover it'd be hard to do. People create so many annoying geographical stubs, just to create articles... but then don't link them to anything! It's pointless. =( Lex Kitten (talk) 09:27, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Templates and stuff

Can I ask you not to use these templates unless they are moved into the template namespace.

On the idea of "lonely pages" - even having orphans marked is contentious,since it's not an inherent flaw of the article or indeed the encyclopedia.

Perhaps a scan could list lonely pages to a temp page and they could then be looked at.

Rich Farmbrough, 22:32 13 November 2007 (GMT).

Lonely templates

I was thinking, it seems to be convention to place the orphan template at the top of an article. Lonely articles don't need links as much as orphaned articles do, so I was wondering if we should maybe put the lonely template at the bottom of the article as opposed to the top. Any thoughts on this? Davidovic 09:37, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Convention is that all maint templates except stub, and sometimes uncat go at the top. There is good reason to put all or most of them at the bottom, or indeed on the talk page (this sometimes happens) but that's not generally where they're looked for at the moment. Rich Farmbrough, 08:53 6 December 2007 (GMT).

Do-orphan

Apart from the pic, what is the difference between {{Do-orphan}} and {{Orphan}}? There are enough template variants already... Rich Farmbrough, 17:13 5 December 2007 (GMT).

The difference is very minor, and it might actually be worthwhile scrapping the do-orphan template. It's just a slight difference in wording really, "very few to no" instead of "few to no" links. Davidovic 05:49, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

OK I'm canonicalising do- to Orphan, which will probably orphan do-orphan. :} Rich Farmbrough, 08:56 6 December 2007 (GMT).

Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles

I've recently started going through some of the lists from the mostly-inactive project at Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles, and clearing out non-orphans / tagging orphans. Should that sort of work be abandoned (as the lists are horribly out of date), or brought under the umbrella of this project, or what? -- Avocado (talk) 23:53, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Russian analogue

Have you ever seen this tool? Mashiah (talk) 22:54, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

th3 best way to clear out this problem

Is to redefine orpha as having no articles linking to it at all. otherwise it becomes a matter of reworking too large a portion of Wikipedia to manage. There is no particular reason for many topics why there should be a particular number of links to it-- DGG (talk) 21:24, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

As long as that counts only mainspace non-redirect articles, I'd support it. I don't think WP space or talkspace links or redirects should count (although "good" links to a page that redirects to the orphan should.) -- Avocado (talk) 22:20, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I have to oppose this. The whole point of this project is building the web. What kind of web is it if an article only has one other article linking to it? Yes, for some topics it is harder than others to get the number of incoming wikilinks up above two (see the orphan criteria), but I think that is more of a reflection of the need to create/expand other related articles on those topics, rather than an overstatement of what an orphan is. The current goal of getting three links to each article has already been reduced from the original goal, which was to have at least six links to each article. Lowering the bar further just says that we've given up on building the web on those topics, and I am not yet ready to give up on these articles.--Aervanath's signature is boring 19:09, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

By the way, Avocado, the current criteria already set out in detail what kind of links should be accepted as valid links.--Aervanath's signature is boring 19:09, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm extrememly inactive at the moment, but I thought I might offer my opinion here. The large portion of my work on this project was defining exactly what we wanted to do when deorphaning, and I wrote/rewrote a large portion of the project page. I feel that it is counter-intuitive to reduce the amount of links required to deorphan. This task should not be undertaken for the sole purpose of removing the orphan tag from an article - indeed, removing the tag may not even be possible for some articles. This project is about building the web, and helping Wikipedia become the best that it can be. Davidovic 11:32, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Year in Topic Links?

Do links form "Year in [topic]" articles count as article links or list links for the purposes of this project? Thanks. -- Avocado (talk) 13:39, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I would count them as list links.--Aervanath's signature is boring 20:00, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Just FYI, it appears that there's a bot that's removing Orphan tags from articles with a certain # of article-space links, regardless of whether the links are from lists or what.... -- Avocado (talk) 01:05, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Noted. I know about the bot, but I hadn't thought about the list issue. I've posted a note on the bot's talk page to see what's going on with that. Have you seen any orphan tags that it's removed inappropriately?--Aervanath's signature is boring 15:29, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

This edit is what brought it to my attention. -- Avocado (talk) 16:04, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

It's been taken care of. I clarified the criteria, too.--Aervanath's signature is boring 08:00, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Geographical stubs

I imagine there are a lot of these in this backlog. If they can be fitted into a template like Template:Šibenik-Knin, is that enough to de-orphan them? Or is it like a link from a list?Cricketgirl (talk) 08:16, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I think that would qualify, since then all the ones with the same template would be linking to each other, thus meeting the criteria of at least three incoming mainspace links. However, if none of the stubs are linked to from other articles, then you get a walled garden, which is also not desirable, but is slightly better as far as building the web goes.--Aervanath's signature is boring 17:28, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Unified orphan/de-orphan process

Right now there are several separate places to go to find orphaned articles. Special:Lonelypages has a dynamic list of 1000 orphaned pages, Category:Orphaned articles lists articles with the {{orphan}} tag, and Wikipedia:Orphaned articles lists articles that were marked as orphaned by a datadump analysis in 2004. I would propose that Lonelypages can be left alone by regular editors, a bot can go through and tag them much more efficiently than we can. I believe there is a bot already doing this, but I'm not sure which one. The articles referred to from WP:orphaned articles can be gone through and tagged with {{orphan}}, thus placing them into Category:Orphaned articles. At that point, we all have a unified place to work from, Category:Orphaned articles. So I think that would be a good way of getting us all on the same page. Thoughts? Comments? Concerns? Insults?--Aervanath's signature is boring 21:46, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I've been working now and then on whittling down Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles (WOA). Since the list is close to being 4 years old, it's chock full of false positives. So, my objective in working on the list is to get it down to genuine orphans and making sure that those all have the {{orphan}} tag. (If you look at the table on the WOA page, all those letters in gold have been completely weeded through relatively recently). My long term vision has been that when all letters are done, to consolidate them into a single list which can be stored as a WikiProject Orphanage subpage with a title something along the lines of "Long-standing Orphans". (The purpose for the list being for those articles that are exceedingly difficult to de-orphan yet are notable enough to avoid deletion).

So, yes, I do believe that working towards a unified orphanage is a good goal. The question I have is whether a long-standing list as I've been envisioning would be useful or interesting to anyone other than me, or should we tag the list an {{archive}} and let it be abandoned when unification is complete? Whitejay²⁵¹ 23:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I support a unified orphanage, and getting a bot to tag pages at Special:Lonelypages. I doubt a lot of users don't use Category:Orphaned articles for orphaned articles.

@Whitejay251: I think it would be good to tag Wikipedia:Orphaned articles with {{archive}} when the unification is complete.--Lights (talk) 14:08, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I propose making a small step towards unifying it now: move Wikipedia:Orphaned articles to a sub-page of WikiProject Orphanage, and make it a redirect to the Orphanage. Obviously we would add a prominent link to it on the Project page so that people could still find it. Once that list is cleaned out, we can mark it with {{archive}}, and keep a less-prominent link to it from the project page for historical purposes.

Separate from that, I'm going to spruce up the "What can I do to help?" section a bit and emphasize WHERE orphaned articles can be found, in this order of priority:

• 1)Wikipedia:Orphaned articles
• 2)Category:Orphaned articles
• 3)Special:Lonelypages.--Aervanath's signature is boring 15:41, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I've discovered that User:Addbot is already patrolling Special:Lonelypages, so that's already taken care of.--Aervanath's signature is boring 18:27, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't see any reason not to bring anything under one umbrella either. I've been working on whittling down the Orphaned Articles lists too -- tagging the ones that are still orphaned and clearing the ones that aren't. I like Whitejay's idea about long-standing orphans -- these have been orphaned for almost 4 years.

Special:Lonelypages only lists articles with no links whatsoever, right? (I.e. it doesn't list articles with links from userspace and WP-space, etc.) So maybe it would also be a good idea to get someone with the know-how to process a newer DB dump to generate current lists of untagged orphans to sort through, and we could use a supervised bot to tag them. -- Avocado (talk) 19:07, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I think there is already a bot doing that, but I don't know which one.--Aervanath's signature is boring 18:54, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

FYI, I'm being bold and moving the WP:Orphaned articles page so it'll be a subage of the WikiProject: Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Orphaned Articles. I'll edit the project page to reflect that.--Aervanath's signature is boring 04:39, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Do-attempt in Orphaned list

I'm new to the de-orphaning process, but willing to do my best at helping, but wouldn't it be useful if attempted de-orphans would be removed from the standard orphaned articles list, being "problem-children" that are hard to place in a family, so to speak? That would give a better idea of how many articles haven't been attempted yet, i think. Also i think quite a number of orphaned pages are not up to WP standard at all and could go straight to AfD. I understand that building a web is the goal, but the backlog is so massive that i think we should seperate the ones we tried and failed from the ones we didn't try yet, just to make some progress with the backlog. I mean 14 subscribed participants against almost 30,000 orphans, that's almost impossible! Either we get more people to help or we should focus on untried orphans and remove the failed attempts from that list, imho. Shoombooly (talk) 21:02, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I believe the {{do-attempt}} template accomplishes that. Don't be afraid to be bold and AFD longstanding orphans (or merge / redirect where appropriate). Once the lists are pruned, the long-time orphans at Orphaned Articles will probably be particularly good candidates for that. -- Avocado (talk) 21:41, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd be bolder if AfD wasn't such a pain in the ass to do for each and every article (unless someone could help me automate that - i'm relatively new to this and do everything by hand). I still think failed attempts that aren't AfD should be removed from the list of orphans, though. Shoombooly (talk) 22:59, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

As Avocado said, changing the {{orphan}} tag to a {{do-attempt}} removes the article from the regular category, Category:Orphaned articles and moves it to a specific sub-category, Category:Attempted de-orphan, so it's quite easy to avoid going over the same ground. However, I would oppose any effort to mass-nominate any articles for AFD, just because they're orphaned, or even because they're "below WP-standard" (depending on what that means). If they're below standard, then improve them. I wouldn't necessarily call myself an inclusionist, but I've only seen a few orphans that genuinely don't deserve their own article. I've PROD'ed or speedy'd the few that deserved it, for whatever reason. But the whole reason there is no AFD-bot is that no bot or automated process can determine things like notability or verifiability. Most of these orphans are orphans simply because the articles which should link to them just haven't been written yet. This says more about the incomplete nature of Wikipedia than the article itself. By all means, nom an article for AFD, PROD, or speedy delete if it's unimprovable, but being an orphan is not and should not be a valid criterion for deletion.--Aervanath's signature is boring 06:52, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Also, don't let yourself get overwhelmed by the size of the task. Yes, there are 30,000 orphans. But some of them are phony orphans, having been de-orphaned already, but still carrying the tag. JL-Bot is working through those. Also, there are more than just the 14 listed participants working through the articles. Avocado and User:Whitejay251 are the most active de-orphaners that I can see right now, and neither has added their names to the official list.

A third thing to consider: Wikipedia has no deadline. If we don't get through all 30,000 by the end of the month, year, decade, so what? We do what we can, as much as we can, as fast as we can. Insert corny old saying here: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."--Aervanath's signature is boring 07:16, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I'm not de-orphaning, just pruning and tagging, since those ancient lists are 90% false positives, which isn't very useful. Much as I'd like to take credit for work I'm not doing.... ;-) -- Avocado (talk) 15:37, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, your work is definitely appreciated, Avocado, whatever it is.

But my point was, anyway, that we shoudn't be overwhelmed by how much there is to do and how few there are to do it. I was doing some math in my head today thinking about it. Let's say we have 30,000 orphaned articles, which I think is actually a little high, since it includes lots of phony orphans. Let's say that we have 10 (at least) reasonably dedicated de-orphaners. Lets say each of us takes a whack at five articles a day (which doesn't take that long), which results in some of them being de-orphaned and some being switched to a {{do-attempt}} category for later. Ten de-orphaners times five articles equals 50 articles per day. Still not a huge amount of progress. But then that means 350 articles a week...1400 articles every month...16,800 articles per year. That's more than half the load! So if we can get people doing just a few de-orphans a day, then we could be caught up with this in under 2 years. If we could get more than that, wonderful, it'll get done even faster. But my original point still stands: It's an elephant, so you can't eat it all it once. But you can do it one bite at a time. --Aervanath's signature is boring 17:45, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Point taken Aervanath, but this elephant we're eating is growing as we eat is, with about 1500-2000 a month, if i'm not mistaken :) Anyway, we should hire more de-orphaners! Because i'm relatively new i did not know the D-O's got moved to the D-O-list after all, perhaps there's a delay that made me not see it (i checked from Category:Orphaned articles). While there is no deadline, it would be nice if we could at least try to match the monthly rate of growth of the list, meaning that at the end of the month no new orphans for that monthly list exist. Shoombooly (talk) 21:43, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Getting more people in would certainly be nice! I do think that at some point we will catch up enough so that we're finally into "real-time" de-orphaning (i.e. zero backlog). But it might take a few years.

As for the category thing, yes, there is a bit of a delay. I guess category-updating isn't that high on the priority queue for the servers, so it can take several minutes sometimes before they disappear from the category once you've removed them. That confused the heck out of me when I was adding {{do-attempt}} functionality to the {{articleissues}} template! I kept going back and re-working it, when all I had to do was wait and let the server catch up to itself! Patience, grasshopper!--Aervanath's signature is boring 06:15, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

I should add, Shoombooly, that I do appreciate your enthusiasm. If we get more de-orphaners with that sort of gung-ho thinking, we'll be done tomorrow. :)--Aervanath's signature is boring 06:18, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, in my inexperience, I noticed people are protective of "their" articles. When adding a link of the Cherokee withcraft tradition to the main Cherokee article, someone removed my link noting that it was "unsupported and false" information, which makes me wonder that if that were the case, why didn't he/she just afd the article...must have touched a nerve there. Still, i readded, because i feel a cherokee tradition belongs on the cherokee page. Any thoughts? Shoombooly (talk) 20:13, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Seems legit to me, too. Seems odd to say something is unsupported and false when all you did was add a link to the see-also section.--Aervanath's signature is boring 23:14, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

We'll see where this goes, it started a discussion on the talk page. Shoombooly (talk) 19:07, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

[Sport] at [Year] Olympics

Do Articles of that type count as lists or articles for orphanage purposes? Thanks. -- Avocado (talk) 14:08, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

If you mean like Weightlifting at the 1920 Summer Olympics, then I would call it an article.--Aervanath's signature is boring 10:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

orphans from 2003 Database dump

Hey, I found an old list of orphans (formerly buried in the history of Wikipedia:Articles orphaned without redirects, now moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Articles orphaned without redirects. I think most of them have already been de-orphaned, redirected, or turned into disambiguation or list pages, but I already found 2 orphans on the list. I don't think it'll take long to prune down that list, but I think that should probably be our priority first, even before the 2004 dump.--Aervanath's signature is boring 19:56, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I suggest we actually focus on de-orphaning May 2008 and June 2008, doing so will greatly improve the overall quality of wikipedia, as it seems a lot of those new orphans can be speedied without second thought (i had 6 of them deleted in the last 24h). Quite a few new articles are related to current events, so de-orphaning them would help people find them. Also, it would mean no new backlog. Shoombooly (talk) 20:00, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea. Additionally, if an article's been orphaned for that long, it's probably not that crucial of an article, so we can take our time on it. What do you think, Avocado? (Or anyone else, actually, but Avocado seems to be the only other editor watching this page at the moment.)--Aervanath's signature is boring 11:47, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

That's a good point. I'm just enjoying pruning these lists.  ;-) I suspect that when I'm done with the new list there will be under 300 articles on it. Most of them are not already tagged, so I guess when I'm tagging the new ones they're dropping into this month's orphan category. Do you want me to stop the pruning so that they won't clog that up? -- Avocado (talk) 12:38, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

No, keep tagging them. That way everything will be in CAT:ORPHAN, which is what we hoped for in the first place. :) --Aervanath's signature is boring 02:54, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I'll gladly move on to pruning that once I'm done with the section of Orphaned Articles I'm currently in the middle of, so that the dedicated de-orphaners don't have to wade through too many false-positives. Do we have an approximate count of current state of the list?

BTW, I noticed that there's a link on the Orphaned Articles page to a SQL script for generating new lists from DB dumps. That would be a great way to generate a fresh list of currently untagged orphans for a bot to run through if we want to track them down. I'd actually volunteer to run it, but my computer can't handle a database that big. --Avocado (talk) 20:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

OK, taking a closer look, it looks like the list is meant to be of articles that have links only via redirects to them. It's not clear whether that means the only pages linking to them are redirects or whether the only links are to pages that redirect to them (the latter do count as links for orphanage purposes, right?)

Also, I generated a table of the article counts for each section of the page. -- Avocado (talk) 21:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I think originally those articles were ones that were completely orphaned, and didn't have any redirects pointing to them either. As for the updated database dump idea, I found out that User:SoxBot actually already does have the task of tagging articles as orphans. I've left a message on the operator's talk page asking how he goes about finding the orphans. Depending on how he does it, we may not have to after all.--Aervanath's signature is boring 06:28, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Spiffy. Let me know what the response is! -- Avocado (talk) 12:38, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

User:Addshore has filed a Bot Request for Approval asking permission to add this task to User:Addbot. The discussion on that is here. I've already commented in support on the Orphanage's behalf.--Aervanath's signature is boring 02:44, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Awesome! I hope they're able to get their hands on a DB dump too. Should we be concerned about AWB's criteria being less strict than WP:O's? -- Avocado (talk) 03:48, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I doubt it. I'm pretty sure he already knows the criteria.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 12:24, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

{{geo-orphan}}

I based {{geo-orphan}} on the {{orphan}} tag as something to use for orphaned articles about towns, villages, etc. I created it for FritzpollBot, but do you guys think that's something we should do as well? The 2004 dump filtered the CDP/town orphans into its own page, so obviously editors in the past thought it was a good idea. I might also create a {{do-attempt-geo}} for future use, depending on if it catches on.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 12:31, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Well it looks like they will make a bot add 2 million towns, so um, lots of work to do i guess...Shoombooly (talk) 20:34, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, 2 million was the absolute max. The way the discussion is heading now, it's going to be far less than that. Probably still in the thousands or tens of thousands, so, still high, but it'll be over the course of a year or so, so it won't hit us all at once. Anyway, I guess you have no objections to using {{geo-orphan}} and {{do-attempt-geo}} for the geographical orphans? Since so many are going to be created, I'd rather have them off in a separate place by themselves for the various country/region WikiProjects to deal with. Which gives me an idea, actually: what if we requested a bot to run through Category:All orphaned articles and create lists of orphans by WikiProject? That way we could post those lists to the relevant WikiProjects and make our job a little bit easier by getting people with specific knowledge in that subject to help de-orphan those articles. They'll probably be able to do it better than we could.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 02:35, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Getting a sort by WikiProject seems like a great idea to me. Those with specific knowledge would also be able to better judge when merges/redirects would be more appropriate or if the notability threshold fails. My head nearly explodes when thinking about how many of those chemistry or biology orphans are probably already dealt with in another article that has a name nowhere near what the orphan is called. Whitejay²⁵¹ 06:11, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't use scripts or tools to edit, so could you make the template names a little smaller? {{doa-geo}} and {{geo-o}} would be less typing for me, i'm old fashioned. Otherwise no objections.Shoombooly (talk) 11:14, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I don't use scripts or tools either. I use IE7, and most of the scripts only work on Firefox, and sometimes Opera. But, sure, I'll make them simpler. By the time you read this, your links should be blue.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 04:09, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Done. I created a bunch of other redirects for {{orphan}},{{do-attempt}}, and their "geo" counterparts. You can check each of their "what links here" pages to see them all, and pick which one you like better. (You'll have to click "Hide transclusions" and "Hide links" to clear the other stuff out so you're only looking at re-directs.)--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 04:31, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

The listing of orphans by WikiProject is in the process of being done already, it seems: User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:54, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Cool. There's already at least one wikiproject (Wisconsin) that would like a listing of orphaned places under their purview (discussion going on here) -- Avocado (talk) 19:07, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Also, do you think there's any use in sorting out bio-orphans? -- Avocado (talk) 19:58, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Possibly, yes. They are the worst. Shoombooly (talk) 20:38, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

I did a draft of merging geo-orphan back into orphan (just use a parameter to differentiate, though geo-orphan would still be a wrapper for this). Is this worth pursuing? geo-orphan isn't much used, are there plans for it, or would it be better to change the couple dozen uses of the tag back to orphan and do away with it. (see template talk:orphan#Merging geo-orphan code into this template) Is there anyplace else this ought to be mentioned? Zodon (talk) 12:01, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Re-factor priorities section on project page

Based on our discussion above, I'm going to remove the 2004 orphan list from the project page, and list the Category:Orphaned articles from June 2008 as the first priority. Any objections?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 12:37, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Don't remove it completely, tuck it away a bit. But as you can see, just keeping up with current orphans is a hell of a job. I think i'm driving the admins nuts with my speedy deletion requests. (All but one were deleted, though, and that one should still be imho) Shoombooly (talk) 20:36, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I put the 2003 and 2004 lists at the bottom in a section by themselves. I wouldn't worry about driving the admins nuts...that's what they volunteered for! :) I've run across a few articles that needed deleting, too, including one that got to AFD before the author agreed to speedy it. But if we each do a bunch a day, we'll get there! Sometimes the orphan tag's been put there by mistake, or sometimes links'll get added before you get there! I was de-orphaning one article last night, and when I'd finished I found an incoming link that hadn't been there when I started, and that I hadn't put there.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 02:17, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Lists and disambiguation pages aren't orphans

I've clarified in the criteria that lists and disambiguation pages can't be orphans. Ideally, ALL disambiguation pages should be orphans, really. As for lists, I doubt there are very many lists that are going to get linked to from more than one article, if that. Or should we make a different standard for lists?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 03:27, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

After giving the issue some thought, I've come to the conclusion that lists are very different beasts than disambigs and that how we treat their potential status as orphans ought to differ from each other. I think the key difference is how much time will be spent by the end user on a list vs. a disambig. As the purpose of a disambig is to direct the reader on to the correct place, they're not going to spend much time there: ideally less than a minute. What I see as the purpose of lists, on the other hand, is to facilitate the exploratory browsing of Wikipedia. I'm sure most of us can attest that one can spend hours with a well constructed list. Hence there ought to be ways to discover lists, beyond coincidentally stumbling upon them. If we are going to rely on people finding lists through typing in a search box the way in which they are often titled seems counter-intuitive. So I don't think unlinked-to lists should be excluded from being orphans by definition. The reason disambigs have been given this status in the past is that a link to a disambig page will, in the vast majority of the time, be better served by a link straight to the intended article. It's hard to imagine a case where this is the case for lists.Whitejay²⁵¹ 09:11, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Agreed with Whitejay's reasoning.Shoombooly (talk) 11:15, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I tentatively agree. Perhaps the criteria for lists should be different than for articles? E.g. perhaps links from lists should count as links to lists, or perhaps they don't need as many links? -- Avocado (talk) 13:44, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Ok, let's find a way to have all disambiguation pages moved off the orphan list then, shall we? Shoombooly (talk) 00:05, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Hm, I'd been removing them anyway, since those were the instructions on the Orphaned Articles page. Have people been tagging them as orphans? As Aervanath mentioned, DABs should be orphans. -- Avocado (talk) 03:14, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, as for disambiguation pages, there's been a consensus for a long time that those SHOULD be orphans, so I guess no trouble there. However, for lists, I guess I do agree with Whitejay's reasoning, too. Should we keep the standards for orphaned lists the same as orphaned articles, or lower it? Originally, I had the feeling that they might only ever be linked to from one article, so the "three-link" standard was a bit high, but I'm pretty open. I'm definitely against raising the standard, so the question is, what should be the standard for lists to be de-orphaned? One incoming link, or two, or three?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 04:38, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

I know disambig pages should be orphans, but i don't think they should be tagged as being orphans, some bots are tagging them anyway. Unnecessary tagging is not desirable.Shoombooly (talk) 05:33, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, should've been more clear. I meant that disambig pages should be orphans, so we shouldn't be adding the orphan tag to them, since the tag asks people to add links TO the page, which is exactly what we don't want. What's your opinion on the orphaned lists? One, two or three incoming links?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 06:10, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

For lists, at least one but preferably more than one, depends on the list. If we agree on no tags on disambig pages, then someone should inform the bot operators, because the bots keep tagging them if you remove them.Shoombooly (talk) 16:06, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

There are two bots that I know of that add orphan tags, Addbot and SoxBot. Is it one of those or a different one (or both)?

As for the lists, I guess we should just leave it at three, then. I guess in building the web we should try to get the lists all linked up, too. No pressing reason to change the standard there, I guess. I should remember the text of my own essay: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:38, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Soxbot and Addbot it is. Who's going to instruct them?Shoombooly (talk) 19:11, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

 Done--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:13, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Not quite done, see SoxRed's reply... Shoombooly (talk) 00:22, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Long lists

I noticed a somewhat specialized case, which might warrant a small revision of the orphan criteria. Suggestion for consideration -

• Sections of a long list (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (long lists)), other than the first or entry section should not be considered orphans; or at least links from lists should be counted in deciding whether such list sections are orphans.

For example, the various subsections of the long lists List of subjects in Gray's Anatomy: Alphabetical, or List of aircraft manufacturers only have incoming links from each-other.

The normal criteria for orphan status make sense for the lead section, but the remaining sections are only separate articles because of technical limitations (logically it is all one list). Building the web would seem to be served by making links to the whole list, but not clear that additional links to parts of the list will be beneficial. (Could impede further editing of the list if sublists need to be split or merged.) So it doesn't make sense to label them all as orphans. Thoughts? Zodon (talk) 06:25, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Are timelines lists?

E.g. Timeline of Afghanistan (November 2001) or Timeline of the September 11, 2001 attacks.... or does it depend on how the timeline is constructed? (I.e. the former is more article-like and the latter more list-like) -- Avocado (talk) 15:25, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Borderline, but I would go with the "duck rule": if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck, and acts like a duck, then it's probably a duck. The first one looks like an article, so I would call it an article. The second one looks like a list, so it's a list.

(Or we could go by McCarthyist rules: if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck, and acts like a duck, then it's a Communist until proven otherwise.)--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 06:17, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

There are Communist articles on Wikipedia?!? Shut it down, and bring in Jimbo for interrogation! -- Avocado (talk) 13:29, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Rubbish articles

Question: when you come accross a rubbish page, like a page advertising a person or company without encyclopedic value, do you tag it for speedy deletion or do you afd/prod it? Shoombooly (talk) 20:11, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

If it clearly meets any of the CSD criteria, speedy it. Otherwise prod (or AFD is prod is not an option). -- Avocado (talk) 20:29, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm asking since i come accross a number of articles that should've been speedied but were put up for prod. I'm guessing people are instinctively careful, and not as bold as is sometimes needed. We de-orphaners come accross a lot of rubbish, so we should have a common view on it i suppose.Shoombooly (talk) 20:34, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Just go by what the speedy, prod, and afd criteria say. There's really nothing I can add to what Avocado said.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:34, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

As for having a common view of it, I think the criteria are pretty specific already. Not really much more I can think of to specify without getting too much instruction creep. If you come across articles that you think should've been speedied, then just add the speedy tag above the PROD tag. --Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:51, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

I figured that was the way to go. I think i pissed off a good number of companies by having their pages deleted. I guess if they hadn't registered to WP with their company name, i would tend to notice advertising less :P Shall we try this month to have half the orphans we had at the end of last month? Shoombooly (talk) 19:41, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Links from portals?

Are we counting links form portals as mainspace links? Thanks. -- Avocado (talk) 19:15, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

No. ONLY mainspace links matter. No other namespace qualifies. The other namespaces are extra. The mainspace IS the encyclopedia. That's what we're concerned with.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 20:41, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorting orphans by project

Looks like there's a new bot that does this sort of thing. Shall we request a run? -- Avocado (talk) 19:19, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Sure, although I'm stumped as to as to ask for them to run on which WikiProject first. I would guess Chemistry or the other sciences, since those are the ones which require more specific knowledge to de-orphan.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 20:43, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

It actually looks to me from the results he links to that he can list all tagged articles assigned to any wikiproject. If that's not the case, we could probably ask around on the talk pages of projects that we think are heavily represented (like Biography) or need specialist attention (like Chemistry) whether they'd be interested in a collaboration. -- Avocado (talk) 23:20, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikibreak

Hey all, I'm going on vacation until July 16. I haven't abandoned the project, I'm just traveling! I'll be back de-orphaning like crazy then! See you in July!--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:06, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Criteria

I would like to add to the "Criteria" section of this project page that links to "See also" sections do not de-orphan an article since this does not build the web. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 03:02, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I oppose this as there seems no practical benefit. See also sections exist precisely for this purpose of linking related topics. They are a common feature of articles and this proposal is therefore contrary to general consensus. Colonel Warden (talk) 11:13, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I would also oppose this. See Also sections are used for browsing (or at least I use them) as part of the "web". Adding this criterion would also significantly increase (as in triple, quadruple, or more) the time required to evaluate whether or not an article is an orphan. Not to mention we already have problems with people removing orphan tags because they don't understand the criteria -- I think this would severely exacerbate that problem and make the criteria more difficult to explain briefly. -- Avocado (talk) 14:42, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I also oppose, since I think that "See also" sections do build the web.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 14:36, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

disambiguation hatnotes?

The criteria currently state that links from disambiguation pages don't count as valid de-orphaning links. However, sometimes there is no disambiguation page, but there is a disambig hatnote such as {{dablink}}, {{otheruses}} or {{For}}. For an example, see the current version of One by One. Now, since hatnotes are right up at the top of the page, in a pretty visible position, it could be argued that these links build the web at least as much as a link in a See also section, which we've already decided counts as a valid incoming link. On the other hand, it is a "disambiguation" section, not an inline link or a See also link, and therefore the links therein may not be relevant to the context of the article, which means readers might only click on them if they ended up on the wrong article, making the section only as good as a disambiguation page. I'm leaning towards counting them as valid incoming links, because I think there's a good chance of people clicking through from one similarly-titled article to another. However, I wanted to ask you guys before I specified that in the criteria.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 19:42, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, I think it could go either way... I'd lean towards allowing them mostly because criteria like that make it a lot more difficult to evaluate an article's orphan status simply by looking at the "what links here" list -- which, I know, is not a particularly good reason.  ;-) -- Avocado (talk) 20:47, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

It may not be the best reason in the world, but it does help tip the scales in the direction I was leaning in anyway. I'll make the change.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 01:38, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, looking at the criteria again, there's nothing in there that bars the use of hatnote links, so I guess we're good already. Looks like a brought up a case of WP:AINT. :) --Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 01:46, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

De-orphaning tool

I found an easy way to de-orphan. When keyboard shortcuts are on, you can click the shortcut 'x' (Alt-shift-x for Mozilla) for a random article, and if the article looks skimpy, use the shortcut 'j' for "What links here". I am also workng on a bot that does this all for you, and then reports a page to you if it is likely to be an orphan. ManishEarth^Talk 09:37, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Hey Manish, welcome to the Orphanage! I'm glad of your enthusiasm here, but there are already several bots that find orphans for us. What we really need right now is help de-orphaning the orphans that we already know about, not finding more! There is a huge backlog in Category:Orphaned articles, so our main focus here is going through the orphans there and placing incoming links in related articles until they meet the Criteria. Of course, if that side of the project doesn't appeal to you, then finding the orphans for those of us who like de-orphaning is welcome as well. Happy de-orphaning!--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 11:28, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. But, if there is a need of finding orphans, I found a tool that is quite easy to use. Download the Snap links extension for Firefox. This tool allows you to open multiple links by selecting them with a click-dragged rectangle from right-clicking. Then, go to Category:Stubs(As most orphans are stubs) and select many links at one go. Open 'what links here' on all of them by using the keyboard shortcut. You can check hundreds of pages in a minute. Anyways, I am currently de-orphaning articles. Thanks again- ManishEarth^Talk 10:47, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Categories

Why don't the orphan categories show up on their member pages? I believe they once did. I can't really think of a negative, and if I came across an article of interest to me with such a category, I might make a quick attempt to link it somewhere. With the huge backlog, I would think even a small chance of random editors helping out would be desired. — TAnthony^Talk 06:03, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, for an article to get put in CAT:ORPHAN, it needs to be tagged with an {{orphan}} template, which usually goes right at the top of the article. So it's not really necessary to have both. Also, the general practice right now is that the only categories that should be presented to the average reader are the ones that are related to the article by topic. Categories such as orphaned articles, deadend articles, or articles needing cleanup are generally hidden.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 15:41, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

FWIW, you can edit your prefs to display hidden (maintenance) categories alongside other cats. -- Avocado (talk) 19:29, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Neat, hadn't noticed that before, thanks for the info -Hunting dog (talk) 19:57, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

De-orphaning tool 2

I am working on a de-orphaning tool that allows you to de-orphan a page without lifting a finger (Maybe one...). It adds a tab to the cactions bar, and when clicked, it opens a wikipedia search in a new window, finds the urls of the pages that have its name in them, and wikifys the words in the page that are the same as the page you are de-orphaning. It finally reports how many pages were changed, and asks you if it is satisfactory. If not, it adds the 'do-orphan' tag. At the moment, it is nearly finished, but I just need to add some bits to make it user-friendly. You can see it at User:Manishearth/orphantabs.js.
ManishEarth^Talk 06:05, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I am on a wikibreak now, and the script wont be completed for a while

Sounds cool, and very useful! I'm not well-versed in javascript, so I'm not sure from the code if the tool gives the user a veto over what gets wiki-linked and what not. It shouldn't automatically wikilink every possible instance, because there are going to be some times when it shouldn't be wikilinked. Please let us know when it's ready to be tested, I'd love to try it out! Cheers, --Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 16:11, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

I've used regexps to find if the page name is not part of another word and not already part of a link. Also, ill set a variable in the custom configuration that will ask the user if it should be replaced or not. This can be turned off if you want. At the end, it will show the amount of pages that it linked, and wil ask you if it should be de-orphaned or if the {{do-attempt }} tag should be added. ManishEarth^Talk 12:06, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Pure awesomeness. Can't wait to test it out.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:28, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

AND FINALLY! IT WORKS! Unfortunately, its still not user-friendly, but that is a small matter. It'll be finished soon! Could someone give me a list of ALL the orphan templates? (Including attempt templates) Thanks! ManishEarth^Talk 13:23, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, right now the only ones are {{orphan}}, {{do-attempt}}, {{geo-orphan}} and {{do-attempt-geo}}. However, do-attempt is probably going to be merged into orphan soon, and the other two are almost unused. I've been wondering if they're really necessary.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:56, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

What if I add a template "do-attempt-script", which basically says that the de-orphaning was attempted through a script (Meaning that it is harder to completely de-orphan. Also, can someone tell me the edit summaries required while de-orphaning? Thanks, ManishEarth^Talk 14:08, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Never mind, I found the summaries. ManishEarth^Talk 14:15, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Can anyone suggest some names for it? ManishEarth^Talk 13:53, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Almost complete: Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Articles orphaned without redirects

This page had 3500 articles that had been orphaned since 2003. We're now down to under 150 articles (more than 95% complete). All of the remaining articles have been tagged and most can be found in orphan categories from June 2008 - August 2008. Let's get that number down to 0! -- Avocado (talk) 16:41, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Rock on! (Aervanath happy dance!)--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 13:10, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

WP:FRIENDLY

The Friendly user-script for Firefox now supports both {{orphan}} and {{do-attempt}}. To activate it, just go to Special:Preferences, go to the Gadgets menu, check the box marked "Friendly", and clear your cache. Alternatively, follow the directions at WP:FRIENDLY to install it in your monobook.js file and customize it. Should make our jobs just that much easier.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:41, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

De-orphaning library of congress subarticles

I was directed to post this suggestion here:

I was just reading up on the Library of Congress, saw the tag about deorphaning the classification pages (like Library of Congress Classification:Class Q -- Science), and logged in (I try not to...too addictive...) to remove the tag because I can't imagine that there would be any reason for anything in the entire universe except the other Library of Congress classification articles to link to it. This and its siblings are very, very specific-purpose articles. I think that labeling these is counterproductive in that they'll never be cleared. It just doesn't make sense for some classes of articles to be forcibly de-orphaned IMHO. And I'll bet that there are plenty of other similar cases. Thanks. Elf | Talk 23:43, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

In this case, at least, I have to disagree, Elf. For one thing, the group of articles you are talking about are not, in my opinion, encyclopedic (see WP:NOTDIRECTORY), and so I will be nominating them for deletion after I finish writing this. However, if they were encyclopedic and were unlikely to be de-orphaned, then it would not be too much work to group all of those articles into a navbox template and thus de-orphan them quite easily.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 15:26, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Your excuse that Wikipedia is not a directory is not applicable to these articles, which are well within the study of Library Science just like any established library classification scheme. Your claim that these are orphans is also inapplicable as long as any look at "What links here" bears fruit. These articles have survived deletion attacks before. Eclecticology (talk) 18:30, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The fact that they are orphans has no bearing on whether or not they are eligible for inclusion in the encylopedia. Also, since there is only one article that links to the Library of Congress Classification:Class Q -- Science article that is not either a disambiguation page or a list, then it certainly does meet the orphan criteria.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:39, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Merging do-attempt into orphan

I have proposed merging {{do-attempt}}'s functionality into {{orphan}}. Please comment at Template talk:Orphan#Do-attempt merge. Thanks!--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 03:34, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

The merge has been completed. Don't worry about do-attempt any more, guys!--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 17:54, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

de-orphaning "considered harmful" (and the ultimate de-orphaning tool)

There's a problem with calling for de-orphaning: the simplest way to fix an "orphaned" article about a minor "beat" writer is to add a link to that article to the general Beat Generation article. But people like myself who have been working on those general articles, don't see how it's an improvement to have thousands of links to minor examples. Possibly, if this is a good idea at all, what would be needed is a separate list article (something like: List of New Wave bands and artists) but as it stands, you're calling for people to add lots of "junk" links to the main articles.

And I submit that the ultimate "de-orphaning tool" exists already, it's right there in the side bar of every page: "What links here". If you think about links as bi-directional, then that article about a minor beat writer isn't orphaned as long as it contains a link to Beat Generation. There's already a way to find it, why is it so important to add another one? -- Doom (talk) 14:02, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

As for adding a useless link to such a general article, yes, those should not be the kinds of links we are using to de-orphan articles. All links should follow Wikipedia:Only make links that are relevant to the context. However, as far being as the "ultimate de-orphaning tool", "What links here" is rather lacking. It's unordered, and the link to it is rather small. I rather doubt there is even a significant minority of readers who browse Wikipedia using this function. And even if there is a minority, the majority still do not browse this way. By placing relevant links in appropriate places, de-orphaning builds the web and makes it easier for our readers to navigate through "the sum of human knowledge".--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 16:07, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

It's all very well to say that we shouldn't create "useless links", but think about the logic of the situation: my claim is that the set of things worth writing about is wider than the set of things worth linking to. It's okay to have links flowing from small matters up to large ones, they don't have to start at the top and work down. Another way of putting this is that knowledge is not inherently hierarchical. -- Doom (talk) 23:51, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

If knowledge is not inherently hierarchical, then it doesn't make much sense to talk about starting at the top and working down, does it? :-P

Seriously, though, yes, I'm not going to link from a very general topic, for example, Science, to something very specific, like Glaucosoma hebraicum, because it's not directly relevant. However, I disagree with you that the set of things worth linking to is necessarily smaller than the set of things worth writing about. I also don't think this is something which is empirically determinable. Wikipedia is growing constantly, and it is not growing in a steady and consistent manner. I think it is perfectly normal that some articles are going to be created which are a little bit isolated. However, this does not mean that they will be orphaned forever, nor that we should stop trying to bring them into the web through the creation of relevant links.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 01:46, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

The ultimate de-orphaning script is here(albeit just a test version)

I have finally finished writing a de-orphaning script. Add importScript(User:Manishearth/orphantabs.js) to your monobook js page to use it, and then purge your cache (Shift+Click Refresh for Firefox). A tab should come next to the usual tabs(edit, discussion) on any page saying "de-orphan complete". Click it and type the name of the page you want to de-orphan. Then, you just have to sit and wait while it wikifies each window with the orphaned page name. It will tell you the total number of pages linking to it (in article namespaces), and will ask you if you want to de-orphan or do-attempt it. It will then tag it and notify you when de-orphaning is over. Tell me of any bugs on my talk page. Also, can anyone suggest a name for it? ManishEarth^Talk 09:29, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Three is too many

If a topic just barely scrapes past WP:GNG there is no reason to expect three other topics to link to it. For example, an album may be reviewed in two or three magazines and qualify for inclusion but I don't think it would need links except from the band and maybe some lists like 2008 in noseflute music. Juzhong (talk) 09:05, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

The orphan criteria are not inclusion criteria. There is no sense that something is worth less as an article if it has less than three incoming links. The criteria are there to help us build the web. Putting an {{orphan}} tag on an article simply notifies editors that they should attempt to add links to these articles.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 04:52, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Criteria II

I don't know how much of an implementation headache it would be to change it, but at least one bot is removing orphan tags on articles that are lk'd only from a single template that appears on at least 3 articles. This has the consequence that no episode of a show is an orphan, and no holder of an office is an orphan, if the show or office uses an episode template (and at least 3 episodes have articles) or a holders-of-the-office template (and at least 3 bio'd people have held the office). This would seem to defeat the purpose of orphan tagging.
--Jerzy•t 03:06, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Why? Such an article is still linked to from multiple articles. Why would the fact that such links are from a template matter? They still build the web which is the whole point behind the orphans project. -- JLaTondre (talk) 18:18, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree with JLaTondre. This has been brought up before (I can't remember quite where), and there was agreement that those sorts of links to count towards building the web.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:40, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Lonelypages is BACK - and then some

By borrowing heavily from mashiah's far superior code for the Russian wiki, I've created pages on the toolserver to replace Special:Lonelypages:

• Lonelypages This page gives you access to every single orphan in the English Wikipedia, per our own criteria. It also gives you the ability to filter the list, so if you want to look at all orphans with two links that bear an {{orphan}} template, you can do that. The list is updated once daily.
• Untagged Orphans This page is for those who want to put the {{orphan}} template on pages that are orphans but aren't tagged yet. It consists of a list of 5,000 orphans from Lonelypages that is automatically re-checked for orphan status every 15 minutes. Furthermore, you can force a manual update to make sure the items in the list are still orphans. Good for bots or AutoWikiBrowser.
• Adopted Orphans This is a list of all articles that are tagged as orphans but have three or more valid links. Lists are not counted as valid. All this needs is for someone to go through and remove the orphan tags. Like Untagged Orphans, it can be updated on command and offers a bot- or AWB-friendly list for download.

Currently, there are 757,391 orphans in Wikipedia, and 225,300 of them have zero links (that is, when lists and chronological articles are not counted as valid links - otherwise, the number is 133,753).

One word of warning: the toolserver holds a copy of the Wikipedia database, and is usually within a second of being synchronized with Wikipedia. From time to time, though, it falls behind, leading to a "replication lag". My scripts analyze the toolserver's copy of Wikipedia, so "Update" is only up-to-the-second if there's no replication lag. Each page listed above cites the current replag, so you'll know if there's any problems at the moment.

If anyone has questions, or finds a bug, or would like guidance on setting up AWB to use the lists, let me know! --JaGa^talk 21:51, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Looks great. With respect to removing the orphan tags, my bot (JL-Bot) is approved to do that, but during the approval process it was requested to set the threshold at 4 links which is one more than the "Adopted Orphans" list. Given that the main issue was detecting disambig pages and I believe this list is doing a better job at that, I'm fine switching over to your list assuming there is no objection from the project. -- JLaTondre (talk) 22:34, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

I made the Adopted Orphans page with your bot in mind. I'm hoping the "at least three valid links" criteria is acceptable because I don't count any "List of ..." or chronological articles as valid links. --JaGa^talk 23:07, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Oh, and any disambiguation page with an orphan tag automatically makes the list - since it's OK for a disambig to have zero links - and links from disambiguation pages are not counted as "valid links" in my formula. --JaGa^talk 23:13, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

This is phenomenally useful. Great job! One tweak: When you submit a query to Lonelypages or Adopted Orphans, could the page display the total number. For example, where it says "Showing below up to 500 results starting with #501.", could this be changed to "Showing below up to 500 results starting with #501. Total: ####" or something like that? Also, why is Untagged Orphans limited to 5000? Why not the whole thing? (I'm going to guess performance reasons, in which case I understand.)--Aervanath (talk) 05:08, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks much for the comments, Aervanath. Performance is the answer to both questions. Thanks to the magic of SQL LIMIT queries, I can show you the first 500 in a list of, say, 600,000 orphans fairly quickly. If I also do a COUNT query to get a total count - determine exactly how many one- and two-link untagged orphans the page will display, for instance - page load performance drops off several seconds. What I could do is have the page mention how many orphans of so-and-so type were found during the last update, which would give you a ballpark figure, but the number would always be higher than the number that you can actually see in the page, because my page filters out articles up for deletion and articles that have been edited since the last update (to avoid false positives on the tagged/untagged front etc.). --JaGa^talk 16:49, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

My bot excluded named list, date, and disambig pages already. However, since you exclude disambig pages based upon category, that is definitely a better approach. I've made the changes to use your list. I'll give it to Monday & if there is no objection by then, I'll start using it. -- JLaTondre (talk) 16:58, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

@JaGa: The counts weren't a big deal, really: just something that would be nice to have. Even a guesstimated figure (like the last COUNT query) would be nice; with the numbers we're talking about, I don't think anybody's going to complain if you say there are 777,893 and actually there are 787,009. :)--Aervanath (talk) 18:38, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Putting toolserver links on project page

Would anyone object if I placed links to Lonelypages and Untagged orphans on the project page? I was also thinking of taking out the link to Special:Lonelypages since it's no longer being updated. --JaGa^talk 23:48, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Policy on article tags

See Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Policy on Article Tags, where I have a right go at this project and my understanding of its intentions with respect to tagging articles. --Tagishsimon (talk) 04:06, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Signpost coverage

BTW, anyone see this? Ragesoss did some pretty amazing analysis of the data I provided him - maybe it will attract some new members. --JaGa^talk 23:53, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw that. Pretty cool.--Aervanath (talk) 06:02, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Orphans by topic

It might be easier for users to tackle de-orphaning tasks if there was a way to get a list of orphans by topic. If one knows something about an area, they may be better able to de-orphan articles (already know what the article is about and know likely related topics). Is there a way to get a list of orphans within subcategories of a category, or orphans in a particular WikiProject?

If many of the orphans have WikiProjects indicated, it might be nice to have categories that contained all the orphans tagged with each WikiProject. Then WikiProject pages could link to the appropriate category (under todo items, e.g.) Which would help publicize building the web, and might get more participants. Thanks. Zodon (talk) 05:37, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

That's a good idea. I'll look into it - but I'm not yet certain how the code would work out. --JaGa^talk 22:42, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

This came up before, but I didn't really follow through. With JaGa's figures, it's become an extremely good idea, though. See #Sorting_orphans_by_project, above.--Aervanath (talk) 09:58, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Don't know how I missed the other discussion. That tool is not as useful as what I was hoping for, since it only updates every few months (so probably only useful shortly after the listing comes out, and doesn't give the feeling of accomplishment that prompt feedback gives.) Zodon (talk) 02:58, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but it is better than nothing. If you can find something better, that'd be awesome, though.--Aervanath (talk) 06:01, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Here's a not-ready-for-primetime page I put together using WikiProject Biology as an example (and another for WikiProject Chemistry). It's based on Lonelypages, so it'd be updated daily. It would need more work before I released it - and I might be able to make it update on command - but what do you think? Could we sell this to other projects? BTW, it wouldn't work in this form for WikiProject Biography - they have over 160,000 orphans(!!) and it would take too long to sort by title. --JaGa^talk 19:33, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Neat.

• I would guess that other projects might be interested. Quite a number of projects have requested Cleanup listings from the User:WolterBot (the bot that generates the reports mentioned in the thread above).

Even if other projects aren't interested, having lists by project/subject here might make de-orphaning less daunting. (I took a look at one of the chronological orphan listings, but recognized nothing. While it could be an educational adventure to dive into something I know nothing about, I feel more confident and motivated dealing with material in areas I know/care something about.)

Good point, will deal with below. --JaGa^talk 06:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

• Is sorting by title necessary? Certainly it makes for a neater output, but I would think one is more likely to just dive into such a listing to try to de-orphan things, rather than to find a particular entry. No particular reason we have to start with "A" to do the cleanup. (Looking at lonelypages one of the things I wished was that it didn't start the listing with all the punctuation articles. Would like to be able to at least start with words, or have a way to get a random start point for a listing, so I am not likely to duplicate what other's are working on.) So if it makes updates faster/takes less resources, might drop alphabetization (or make it optional).

I prefer sorting, because it gives one a sense of progress (yes, I just finished all the An- articles!). Otherwise you just feel adrift. I'm going to keep sorting if I can but am willing to abandon it if I must. --JaGa^talk 06:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

One other way to get a topic which I didn't think of above was stub type.

• Do you have any feel for whether most of the orphans are associated with a topic? (i.e. will the topic lists cover a fair proportion of the orphans, or will they just cover the edges and leave out a vast undifferentiated sea of orphans?)

No clue. --JaGa^talk 06:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

• Could it easily be adapted to handle taskforces also? (e.g. based on a category)? (e.g. project biography especially might benefit from splitting into smaller chunks). Zodon (talk) 22:56, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Good idea, see below. --JaGa^talk 06:02, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

WolterBot Listing for orphans

Would it be worth requesting a listing for orphans from the WalterBot, like the Cleanup list for Notability? Evidently that type of listing requires a manual request (How to get report by cleanup type rather than by project). Not sure how useful the cleanup listing would be (might be too big?), and it sounds like it may be a while before a new database dump comes out. So not sure it is worth doing, but thought I would mention the possibility. Because it would be more up to date and not rely on orphan tags, JaGa's tool seems more useful, but don't know how much work it will be to get it to release form. Zodon (talk) 23:25, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Outdated instructions

The instructions at What if I can't de-orphan it?, saying to replace {{orphan}} with {{do-attempt}}, are outdated; {{do-attempt}} has been redirected to {{orphan}}. Should I just remove the whole section? rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:18, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I think you're right. Aervanath did the merge, so I'd like to hear his input, but I'd say yes. --JaGa^talk 18:16, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I tried to update the instructions to match the documentation for orphan. Seems might be worth keeping the instructions once updated. Zodon (talk) 21:53, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I forgot to update this page when I merged it. We still want that section, but the instructions will be different. (Even though it actually works the same way with the old instructions.)--Aervanath (talk) 03:15, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I've updated the instructions in the template section, too.--Aervanath (talk) 03:25, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Deleting an image

Is there anyway I can delete an image I previously uploaded? It's not being used on any articles. (It's been orphaned for a few years, I assumed WP would have deleted it by now.) JimmmyThePiep (talk) 01:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

If you're the original uploader, you can insert {{db-G7}} in the page, for the "Author requests deletion" category of speedy deletion. --JaGa^talk 01:58, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Who's editing organism species articles?

And what organisms? Plants? Animals? Bacteria? Single-celled photosynthetic non-vascular eukaryotes, whatever, please let me know, since I've been told you are editing all orphans by adding links. --KP Botany (talk) 09:53, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Everybody Wikipedia:Ownership of articles also Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide#Inter-WikiProject coordination Zodon (talk) 20:44, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

In other words, you are supplying the tags for other editors, so the other editors who are actually editing the articles should have been first consulted about their usefulness. I edit the plant articles. Your tags are not useful. --KP Botany (talk) 21:00, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Another idea

Another compromise might be this: if an editor thinks it's absolutely impossible for an article to meet the 3-link threshold, then just move the tag to the talk page. That way it'll still be there, so we can find it, but it won't be on the reader-facing page where some people think it's clutter. I think any article with zero links should still have it on the article (if there's NO OTHER PAGE which could POSSIBLY link to it, that probably does indicate a problem with the article), but if it has one or two links, with no possibility of there being any more, it could be moved to the talk page. The bot could be modified to check the talk page first before adding a tag.--Aervanath (talk) 07:15, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure how complicated this would be for the bot-operators, but it could work. If course, if the bot were only tagging zero-link orphans, it wouldn't have to check the talk page - there would have to be a tag on the article. --JaGa^talk 07:38, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Well I am planning on just running the bot on the list of No in comming article links. This way no one should complain as 0 links from the article space IS without a doubt an orphan.6 ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 07:58, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I posted requests for discussion.

Discussion and note here. --KP Botany (talk) 04:23, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Build the web merge discussion

Since this project seems to make extensive reference to WP:BUILD, I thought it worth noting that that essay was merged into WP:Manual of Style (links) in January 2009. There now (February 2009) appears to be a considerable goings on about whether WP:BUILD should be restored (see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (links), and the temporarily restored talk for WP:BUILD). Just thought I would mention it in case project members were interested and not aware. Zodon (talk) 06:37, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I was in the "interested and not aware" category. :) --JaGa^talk 11:09, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Question

Could someone from the orphanage please take a look at this as I am unsure of the answer. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 18:47, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

What is the relevance of this?

I write exclusively about U.S. soccer, particularily bios. Some team pages have lists of "notable players" which is limited to a handful of top guys who had an impact on that team. Other articles have recaps of notable games, such as championships. These articles will typically list the goalscorers. However, if a defender or goalkeeper is not among the handful of a team's "notable players" and never scored a goal in an important game, then they will never be mentioned in another wikipedia article. However, they will be in the appropriate league, team and player position categories. Here are a few examples: Eric Levin, Frank Booth (soccer) and Mike Hunter (soccer) So, you have added an irrelevant "orphan" banner to dozens of player bios. That banner will now sit on those pages for all eternity. Thanks Mohrflies (talk) 09:19, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Not all eternity. I was able to get a link to Mike Hunter from his high school. Eric Levin could get a link from the Davey Ferguson article when/if it gets created. Frank Booth, not so sure, but maybe something will become obvious if the bio gets expanded some day. I know it's frustrating, but an article that isn't linked by any others will get very low traffic. The tag serves to let editors know what articles we need to try to bring into the web. Also, we're only tagging articles with zero article links. So if you can get a single article link, take the tag off, and it won't be replaced any time soon. --JaGa^talk 10:10, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Counting redirects?

I just deorphaned Tardebigge Lake - by discovering that it is known in other articles as Tardebigge Reservoir. It now has 2 links from articles and 1 link from a template - but they're all through the redirect. Will the bot re-label the article or not? --Alvestrand (talk) 13:09, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

It certainly shouldn't relabel the article, I'll get the bot operator to respond here and tell us.--Aervanath (talk) 15:34, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

It won't. The toolserver scripts take links via redirects into account. --JaGa^talk 21:04, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Orphan definition for long lists

I am retrieving this item from the archive since I am not clear of it's status. I made this proposal a week ago, but nobody responded so far. What is the protocol for changes to the definition of orphan? Thought I should wait for more than a week before assuming lack of response equals consent. (Not in a rush, but didn't want it to be totally lost). Thanks. Zodon (talk) 08:14, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Long lists

I noticed a somewhat specialized case, which might warrant a small revision of the orphan criteria. Suggestion for consideration -

• Sections of a long list (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (long lists)), other than the first or entry section should not be considered orphans; or at least links from lists should be counted in deciding whether such list sections are orphans.

For example, the various subsections of the long lists List of subjects in Gray's Anatomy: Alphabetical, or List of aircraft manufacturers only have incoming links from each-other.

The normal criteria for orphan status make sense for the lead section, but the remaining sections are only separate articles because of technical limitations (logically it is all one list). Building the web would seem to be served by making links to the whole list, but not clear that additional links to parts of the list will be beneficial. (Could impede further editing of the list if sublists need to be split or merged.) So it doesn't make sense to label them all as orphans. Thoughts? Zodon (talk) 06:25, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I think we should give articles like this a pass, but I don't know of any way to single them out. We could lobby for the creation of a hidden category for "broken out lists" or something like that, which I could then filter out from the orphan tables. Such a category would be an improvement to the encyclopedia, from a maintenance standpoint, and not just an aid to our project. --JaGa^talk 12:07, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

JaGa's right that these articles should be given a pass. They shouldn't be tagged by the bots, anyway, because they do all link to each other, and we're trying to limit our tagging to just zero-link orphans for now. (See #Proposed current criteria, above.)--Aervanath (talk) 16:59, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Not trying to rush things, but I added the exclusion to the criteria, rephrased it a little to (hopefully) clarify

• Sections of a long list (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (long lists)), other than the first or entry section are not orphans as long as they are linked from the entry section.

Thanks. Zodon (talk) 23:34, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Addbot is back!

Just like to announce to the Orphanage that I just spent the last hourish remaking User:Addbot's orphaning stuff :P. The bot now uses the handy new pages made by JAGA :). The bot now tags about 15-20 Orphans a miniute (when running). Take a look at its contribs if you want :). And if you see anything going wrong please tell me :P. Thanks everyone that made this possible or bugged me. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 12:23, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Awesome. :)--Aervanath (talk) 17:10, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

All zero link orphans on the pedia are now tagged. Thats over 100,000 by the bot. It will continue to run from the lists tagging when new articles are found. The last article to be tagged was this one --·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 09:47, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

That's great! This marks a new beginning for the Orphanage. Thanks so much for your help and for sticking with it through it all. --JaGa^talk 05:00, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

That's just great. Useless spam on thousands more pages. Way to go. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:58, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

I was under the impression that addbot was stopped until the various discussions going on here had reached some conclusion about how to define orphans, how to deal with projects that use categories rather than lists, etc. Looking back I guess that was just my impression of what I thought would be prudent and politic to do, rather than something that was explicitly stated.

Though addbot is approved, please consider pausing it until either there is some kind of conclusion on these matters, or a predetermined time limit passes. At least then folks won't be complaining about it adding tags back if they are removed. Zodon (talk) 22:27, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

No, bots don't work by consensus. They just do whatever crapping up the Wikipedia they want. Yup, useless span on a hundred thousand pages, that will be removed when Wikiproject orphan members make bogus links like the example Addbot's owner pointed me to earlier? Does it bother anyone here that they links were wrong? Nope. Just spam articles. --KP Botany (talk) 05:20, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Tag on talk page

I just made this suggestion at a link provided by the bot. I am pretty much in accord with the statements objecting to this bot operation on biota articles. I think the 'orphan tag' should go on the talk page, especially for the biota articles. How this advantages the reader has not been answered AKAIK. Is there any reason not to do this? cygnis insignis 11:18, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

As the tag links to a wikiproject, this one, rather than to a policy or guidelines page, it probably should go on the talk page. I think that is certain rare cases it could benefit biota articles, such as one that was placed earlier on a higher level taxon. But, on species articles, no, it's no benefit, and I don't see that editors in this project are editing biota articles. --KP Botany (talk) 11:27, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I am all for a change such as this. Would make pages look more tidy. One down side to this is the ammount of other things it would affect. Programs such as Huggle, WP:AWB, Bots User Scripts e.t.c. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 11:30, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

The orphan tag is a maintenance template, like {{deadend}}, {{uncat}} and {{unref}}. These should be on the article page because moving them to the talk page will make them largely ignored. --JaGa^talk 18:49, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

It definitely shouldnt be ignored, but per User:cygnis insignis for biota articles at least, the tag should go to the talk page. For example, see Horsfieldia kingii recently tagged as orphan. It is unlikely that this page will be linked to from more than one or two pages. The tag is unhelpful on the main article page for biota related articles. prashanthns (talk) 06:07, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

What about navboxes? I see Horsfieldia mentions three species: H. amygdalina, H. kingii, and H. prainii. If there was a navbox titled "Plants of genus Horsfieldia", and the other articles were created, that would be three links - one from the genera article, and two from the other species. And this would not be a change just to satisfy the Orphanage; navigation between articles would be improved, and, IMHO, the genera pages would look better with a navbox than they do currently with their long lists of articles. Really, the issue of orphan tags regarding taxo stubs isn't an example of what's wrong with orphan tagging; it's an example of how this project can help another project identify isolated articles and find ways to integrate them into the web. --JaGa^talk 06:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

And where would this navbox go? It goes on the genus page, and you're assuming all of the species have articles, they won't necessarily, because one primary mission is endangered, threatened, rare, ethnobotanical species first. These get a stub, then a tag bigger than the article that makes it hard to read the article, because this project wants to crack the whip and force people to link first?

And, precisely how are you telling us these orphans exist? Like we don't know? They have stub tags, and we get a list from a bot.

We already identified the isolated articles, and we've already found a useful way to integrate them into their appropriate and useful places without making redundant navoboxes that repeat the taxoboxes, and redundantly listing all species on every page of every other species. So, there are 600 or some species of Senecio, every single one of them should have a link to every single other species on their page so that your personal wikilinking plan can work? No.

You want to tell plant editors how to edit plant articles, become a plant editor and gain consensus among plant editors. No, every species in Wikipedia will not have a list of every species in its genus on every page just to inanely link everything. The species links to the genus through the taxobox, and, except in the case of extraordinarily large genera, the genus page may hae a list of species, all hopefully linked, and that is where the one link to the obscure species will properly be.

Go right ahead and propose that all species pages have navoboxes with lists of all species in the genus on every page in addition to taxoboxes at WP:ToL.

A good chuckle, though. Try editing a plant article, or creating one, then figure out how they actually work, then figure out how to improve them instead of just junking them up to serve the singular vision of this particular wiki project. --KP Botany (talk) 08:19, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

You don't have to implement my suggestion if you don't want to - although, if you did, I would be interested in helping create the navboxes. The point is, even the humblest article in Wikipedia can be brought into the web. --JaGa^talk 17:11, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Creating navboxes isn't exactly rocket science. I'd be willing to help out in that area as well.--Aervanath (talk) 07:08, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

The articles are on the web, they return as search results in all search engines when users of internet search engines look for the species article.

Maybe if you gave me an example, I could understand what you think would be useful, and not simply clutter up the article. Remember that obscure species will likely have a line or two of text and a taxobox. The orphan tag crowds the text out already, why would a navobox not do the same? Say I have a genus with 1500 species. Every article on a species of that genus, no matter how obscure, would contain links within it to the other 1499 species? How does this add navigation ease, information, usability, readability or anything? Why would I link an obscure herbaceous species of a plant endemic to serpentine soils in New World deserts to another obscure species, a tree form, endemic to western facing lava slopes of Central African mountains at elevations above 1500m? Now, I have a dozen such African species, and each article about one of these species will contain 1499 links to all other species of this genus?

Why is this better than my simply linking all the obscure species to their genus on a list, and including only the related species on the species page? Not the related by genus species, stuck and lost in the midst of the 1499 other species, but in a list of all species with the same form occupying different elevations in similar habitats with a related evolutionary history?

This last is what plant articles do: they attempt to honor the research of experts, botanists, horticulturists, ecologists, and included links to species whose relationships have been established by the experts, as opposed to creating original and creative links just to non-orphan an article.

In other words, by using reliable, verifiable research, we write and link plant articles according to the research that has been done, not according to our own original research, and a master plan to include 1499 links to other articles in every article. --KP Botany (talk) 08:27, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

I also think that it would be better to put the orphan tag on talk pages rather than the main page. "Orphan" is a concept relevant to editors but not casual readers. --Ben Kovitz (talk) 13:08, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Links from lists

The issue of navboxes raises an interesting point. Why does a transcluded template count as a valid link, but a list does not? Unlike templates, lists are supposed to provide additional information and commentary on the subject. In addition, navboxes create a misleading impression of the level of connectedness of the article. In KP's example, you'd have 1500 links coming into the article (1499 species + one from the genus article)...good luck trying to figure out whether anything else links to one of the articles. Now counting a list as a valid link has two advantages - one is that it makes it easier to de-orphan the article in a meaningful way, and the other is that it allows you to add meaningful commentary, linking species by region or ecological affinities. Guettarda (talk) 18:40, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

WP:Orphanage appears to be purely quantity, not quality. It doesn't seem to matter if the links are valid, useful, encyclopedia, only that the links are there. In other words, the goal is to trash the encyclopedia with links that make it useless.

Good point that you could not even navigate the page links to see if they were useful with 1500. What a waste.--KP Botany (talk) 20:04, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (links)

In general, do create links to:

• relevant connections to the subject of another article that will help readers to understand the current article more fully ....
• articles with relevant information, through references (Example: "see Fourier series for relevant background"). Linking items in a list of examples makes them easier to reference as well.
• technical terms, ....
• explicit articles when word usage may be confusing to a non-native speaker....
• articles of geographic places that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers or that in the context may be confused with places that have a similar or identical name.

--KP Botany (talk) 20:22, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Removing the links from lists exclusion would simplify the criteria, and make fewer special cases. For instance the #Orphan definition for long lists would no longer need to be mentioned as a special case (since all the links to the sub-components of a long list would be considered links). Zodon (talk) 23:14, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

What are the stats? How many 0 link orphans are there that are linked to by lists vs. ones not linked to by lists, likewise for 1 link orphans and 2 link orphans? (Or whatever stats can reasonably get on list vs no-list). Trying to get an idea how big a set of articles talking about here. Zodon (talk) 23:19, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, anyone who has created a FL has probably created a lot of "orphans", simply because you can't get a list promoted if there are too many redlinks. Now, in many cases it would be worth identifying these 'semi-orphans' simply because there's probably a good chance that they weren't created with the idea of "building the web". But at the same time, it seems like they have more in common with "one link orphans" than with no-link orphans.

I don't know much about stats or how to generate them, but it does seem like this would create something more consistent. And, btw, while I strongly dislike the appearance and placement of orphan tags, I support the idea of doing whatever we can to de-orphan articles. At the very least, I would like it if there were some way to minimise the template (or move it to the bottom of the page) if you have done your best to de-orphan an article, but found no relevant links. Guettarda (talk) 06:34, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Please see Template_talk:Orphan#Proposed_usage_change. As far as I can tell that did not make the template move, also if all other maintenance templates go on the article why should this tag be any different? ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 16:59, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Suggestion - no-link orphans tag

Looking at some of the articles it seems that individual named entities (people, species, etc.) can be difficult to introduce links to that aren't on lists. (e.g., People who's position makes them notable, but who don't have enough notable actions to make them stand out from the crowd - minor politicians, musicians who's career is primarily in a large performing group, yet another yellow compositae).

In addition, various users seem dissatisfied by the current orphan criteria and the tagging of orphan articles. (Tags that remain forever, difficulty providing 3 meaningful links to an article in some topics.)

Here is a suggestion of a possible approach to tagging articles which might help:

• Have the bot just tagging articles that have no incoming article links (i.e. no lists, 0 article links) (I believe that was what the bot was doing already, but document that on the bot's page to make it clearer.)
• Tag with a custom tag to indicate that the article has no links (a variant of the orphan tag).

Then the minimum that would be required to get rid of the tag would be introducing one link on a list. (Which would assure that the tag would not be reintroduced.)

Of course the no-links tag would also link to information about orphans, etc. so the author could become aware of the idea of building the web. The interested editor who wanted to help be sure the article was widely seen might go the whole nine yards and introduce 3 or more non-list links. But even if they didn't, introducing one link would help reduce the 100,000+(?) article back-log of neediest articles, and help ensure against duplicate and lost articles.

1. It wouldn't be too hard to introduce links on relevant lists that would include the problem items I have seen. (e.g. list of senators from such and such a state, list of species in the genus so and so.)
2. This would not preclude human editors from introducing orphan tags as they see fit.
3. I am not suggesting that the bot's approval be narrowed so that it could not in the future introduce general orphan tags (e.g. when all the zero-link orphans had been dealt with). But for now refraining from tagging other sorts of orphans might be politic.
4. Implementation detail: The no-link orphan tag could be implemented using an argument to orphan to customize it's appearance, by using a separate template, or using a separate template that is implemented by passing a parameter to orphan. (I suspect a separate template as a wrapper might be less confusing to users, but using the orphan template might be easier for various tools to handle(?))
   1. If a separate template, nolinks template would be of the same sort as the orphan tag, so presumably would have to follow the same restrictions on location.
5. These individual named entities may be more likely to be recognized by their name than other articles are. (So more likely to be looked up by it, or found in a list or category describing them, as compared to articles about an entity that has no unique name.)
6. The lonelypages tool will still let those who are interested in building the web and de-orphaning to a higher number of links do so. (And hopefully by inclusion of topic centered versions on wikiproject pages, other editors will be inspired to help identify duplicate articles and build the web in their area of interest.) Zodon (talk) 11:37, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

1. There's a lot I like about this proposal. It would remove controversy, and also give us a chance to work through our greatly-enlarged backlog. But, Addbot has already tagged about 50,000 zero-link orphans, not to mention all the other orphans in the backlog. I don't think we want to have a do-over on that. So we're going to have to work with what we've got. I'm thinking we should change the rules on tagging/de-tagging while leaving the definition of an orphan intact. Perhaps, instead of three links to remove a tag, make it two. JL-Bot looks at Adopted orphans and removes the tag from successfully de-orphaned articles. I could lower the bar for tag removal.
2. I would also like to point out that although we need to come up with a compromise that eases the burden on taxo articles, that shouldn't be our only concern. The main purpose of this project is to encourage the integration of articles into the web. Our policies should be aimed at that goal first and foremost; if we lower the standards too much, the bigger picture suffers.
3. Another possibility: we could consider this a project in its first stage of a long-range mission. In this first stage, we only tag zero-link orphans (which is exactly what Addbot has been doing, as you correctly guessed) and we remove tags from all orphans with at least one article link. We could state on the project page that the standards will be raised when we climb out of the backlog, but for now, if you've got a single non-list article link, the tag will be removed for you by a bot. --JaGa^talk 07:09, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I like option 3 and think it would make sense. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 17:49, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I would also ratify that idea. The massive amount of zero-linked orphans is plenty for the project to work on, and it is probably not much use fretting about articles that have one or two incoming links when we still have thousands of articles with none. If we ever get to the point where we run out of zero-linked articles, then we can start working on the ones with one link. If you look up the talk page, you will see that originally the goal was actually SIX incoming links; as Wikipedia has grown, and the backlog gotten bigger, our standards have gotten lower. I think this is the recognition of the humongous nature of the task. We set our starting ideals high, but we do have to keep a practical idea of what we can accomplish.--Aervanath (talk) 06:50, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Since addbot has gone ahead and tagged all the orphans, how about changing the orphan tag itself to say no articles link here. That would make the criteria clearer (and be consistent with the glossary). Then if at some future date the project wanted to tag loneley pages, they could use a separate template for that.

I think rewording the orphan tag would be a good idea - if we do decide on this course of action. --JaGa^talk 05:36, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Before removing orphan tags on articles with more than one link, please consider recording what articles were involved (making the categories into lists), especially for those where a de-orphan attempt has been made. There may be useful information in what categories/projects have clusters of hard to de-orphan articles. Zodon (talk) 22:33, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Maybe we could collect the data and put it into a subpage of this project. --JaGa^talk 19:12, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

I put this report together: Do-attempt orphans. It holds all one- and two- link orphans (the ones that would get their tags removed) that were categorized as do-attempt as of Feb 24, 2009. There are 230 such articles, unless I'm missing something. This is a static list; it will not change over time. --JaGa^talk 08:00, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

articles ... and images?

I notice the top of the project page says "the Orphanage is dedicated to clearing the immense backlog of orphaned articles and images". Now, there really isn't anything going on here at all regarding orphaned images. Should we remove " and images"? --JaGa^talk 07:18, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

The orphan image categories are listed on the see also in Wikipedia:Orphan and here. Seems like the categories, templates, etc. dealing with them are worth providing links to (just because similar/related concept, even if nobody here is actively working on them). No opinion about whether should be listed in the lead of project page. Zodon (talk) 06:47, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

De-tagging change

If no one objects, I will change Adopted orphans to include any orphan that has at least one article link. This would cause JL-Bot to remove the orphan tags from all one- and two- link orphans on its next run - about 13,000 articles. We appear to have consensus in #Suggestion - no-link orphans tag to make this change, now that I've assembled the list of do-attempt articles that would have their orphan tags removed. --JaGa^talk 19:40, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Were most of these originally tagged by a bot? If they were tagged by people, not so sure about removing the tags (prefer avoiding bot battling human editors). Zodon (talk) 07:55, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

No, the only bot-tagging has been by Addbot, and that's only zero-link orphans. The reasons I want to remove the tags from one- and two- link orphans:

1. It would focus this project solely on the zero-link backlog, which should be our top priority. If we expand our scope later, Lonelypages can re-identify all one- and two- link orphans, not just the small portion identified by users.
2. I like the idea of a fresh start. Many of those one- and two- link orphans have been around for some time.
3. We could change the {{orphan}} template to say zero links instead of "few or no", and Addshore's talk page shows we need to clarify this template best we can.
4. Compromise. I view the "tag the zero-link orphans only" policy as our act of good faith to address the concerns of those who don't want orphan tags to sit on pages indefinitely.

--JaGa^talk 18:47, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Tag placement

Note: I'm breaking this conversation off into its own section --JaGa^talk 23:22, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Why must your tag be at the top of articles? The fact that the article is an orphan is so far from the most important piece of information about it. There's no policy requiring tags to be at the top of the page. It is practice to do so for tags we actually need - COI or POV or whatever - things which readers should know before they read the article. Readers do not need to know it is an orphan. Moving the tag location to the foot of the page means - in my view - the page is no longer disfigured by your project advert, and I can cope with it remaining there for the next few years, as on many articles it inevitably will. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:58, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

That's a different discussion. This is about whether to remove the orphan tags from articles with one or two links. --JaGa^talk 21:58, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, since I've asked it in the wrong place, you should of course feel no compulsion whatsoever to answer, if that's more convenient for you. Heaven forbid that you actually care enough to respond. --Tagishsimon

Actually, this question has been answered several times. It's a maintenance template, intended to be noticed. --JaGa^talk 23:22, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Slight change of template

Please see my proposed template change to try and make the template slightly shorter and easier to understand. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 20:40, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

No problem here. --JaGa^talk 05:49, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Controlled flight into ground

I was saddened to see that this project's spam-bot is sufficiently ill-mannered to think it knows better than editors whether {{orphan}} should or should not stay on a page.

In a situation in which the bot has added the tag and an editor has removed it because, for instance, the editor believes that you'll not in a month of sunday's find suitable other articles from which to link to it ... to see the bot re-add it is a very very depressing display of project megalomania.

As several previous discussions on this page note, the need to inform the world that the article is an orphan is dubious in the extreme: insisting that the label stay in perpetuity is just plain wrong.

Whilst I very much support the aims of this project, I'm deeply deeply disappointed by the lack of thought and consultation on article tagging entered into by project participants. I do not think you have anything like earned a mandate to mass tag orphan articles; I see no evidence whatsoever that you considered the propriety of your actions before tagging; and I deplore your current "damn the torpedoes" mind-set. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:26, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

The bot is not really anything to do with the project and was started seperatly. Also the bot is not intelligent so it does not know if the page is going to take "month of sunday's" to find a link to from the article space. The bot is simple, if it fits the criteria it will be tagged, if it doesn't it will be untagged. If you think there is a way in which the bot could improve that is practical then please suggest it on my talk page and I will be happy to implement it. Any tag the bot adds is a fact (it doesnt have any incomming links from articles) there really is no dispute over this and really the tag should stay or it should be fixed. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 22:46, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

It is not rocket science to haave your bot keep a log of pages it has tagged, and to prevent it from tagging the same page twice. That's a very basic element in preventing bot versus human edit wars.

Your contention that "there really is no dispute over this and really the tag should stay or it should be fixed" is self evident nonsense. There clearly is dispute over the use of the tag in article space. And your underlying assumption that an orphan article is in some way broken so that it needs to be fixed flies in the face of a rational estimation that an otherwise perfectly serviceable article is unlikely in any estimable timescale likely to get an incoming link. I'm sorry but your answer illustrates only too welll the lack of thought being given to the wielding of your tool and the similar lack of thought being given to the placement of the tag on so many articles. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:53, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Many articles become orphans, then get links and then these links get removed or deleted. If the bot were to keep track of a list of articles it had edited the bot would end up missing many articles. There is a dispute over the use of the tags in the article space, long conversations have gone on and in the end the tag stayed in the article space.

Again yes there is little thought for the tags as there does not need to be. If links<1 then tag. The tag is not to say that the article is broken but saying that it can be improved. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 23:02, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

To be frank I'm deeply disturbed that someone seemingly incapable of better analysis of the situation is in control of a bot at all. Please don't take this as a personal attack, merely my blunt reaction to such a disgraceful response. If I understand you correctly, you're saying "my stupid bot knows better than you". I beg to differ. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:13, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

I can't see how you reach that conclusion from Addshore's words. Regardless, please try to keep it civil. Words like incapable, disgraceful, and stupid are entirely unnecessary. --JaGa^talk 00:46, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

As I understand Tagishmon's previous comment, it's not about the bot not taking careful thought, it's about a lack of thought in deciding how the bot will behave. Much annoyance is being created, first by the bot, and now by what appears to be ignoring of people's complaints. Would you be so kind as to halt the bot and wait to redeploy it until a better system has been discussed and agreed upon? —Ben Kovitz (talk) 23:41, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Most of the objections come from two sources:

1. Editors who dislike the concept of tagging orphans, period, and have opposed this project every step of the way.
2. Editors who are confused about the difference between deadend articles and orphans. (See User talk:Addshore)

Happily, you don't fall into either category. But I think you should be careful about "much annoyance", since almost all of it comes from these two sources. So, let's start anew. What articles are we concerned about, considering that the bot only tags articles with zero links from the article namespace? --JaGa^talk 00:38, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

In addition to the problems that Addshore noted with having a list of articles to not re-tag, it would be hard to accommodate consensus in such a system. Using an orphan tag that can be made less obtrusive (either condense it to one line, or hide it entirely) - as suggested in #Suggestions for improvement: and which I expanded on in #Combining hidden tags and tag on talk page would allow greater access to re-tagging decisions. Zodon (talk) 06:38, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

I first became annoyed by the tag on Definitions of mathematics. The inspiration for that article is to end the long-running edit war over the first paragraph of Mathematics, by linking someplace else to show all the opposing ideas on one page. However, Definitions of mathematics is brand-new and still very crude. Linking from the first paragraph of Mathematics right now would likely set off more edit wars and get people further entrenched in their attempts to put their favorite definition in the most prominent spot. It won't be long until Definitions of mathematics will "naturally" de-orphan, but right now the tag is just a distraction to new editors. A bot can't know about stuff like that, but human editors can.

Since looking into the matter, I have also grown concerned that the most common suggestion for how to fix this and all other problems with the bot seems to have been ignored. That suggestion is: please put the tag on the talk page, not the article page. As many have pointed out, "orphan" is not a problem with an article that a casual reader needs to be concerned about; putting it on the article page disparages the article unnecessarily, quite differently from {{POV}} and the like.

I've asked how the decision to reject putting the tag on the talk page was made. Addshore pointed me here: Template_talk:Orphan#Proposed_usage_change. That shows that people proposed this suggestion six months ago, but it doesn't tell how the decision was made. If you read the many posts here, I think you will find that it is not true that the people who are upset are simply opposed to tagging orphans; many want orphans tagged, but on the talk page, not the article page. Even if people oppose what you're doing, that is no reason to ignore their annoyance. I am feeling more annoyed because I'm thinking that I and the other people are getting the run-around. I am wondering if the bot was started without consensus. At this point, the issue is less about tagging and more about a loss of trust and respect.

Would you please temporarily halt the bot to allow discussion of how the bot should operate?

—Ben Kovitz (talk) 10:57, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

If something is commonly suggested doesn't mean it is most workable, etc. (Many suggesters may not be taking into account difficulty of implementing various methods - revising AWB and all the other tools that use cleanup tags, getting a broad enough consensus to move a cleanup tag to the talk page, ...)

Seems like several folks come and give suggestions of a way could do it, without offering feedback/comparisons on why this or that method is better. (e.g. of the people who have come suggesting put it on the talk page, how many have offered feedback on why they favor that over the hidden tags, or the combination of hidden tag plus talk page tag).

(How much of the apparent ignoring is being done by the suggesters ignoring suggestions other than thiers? How much of the apparent ignoring is being done by those who suggest without volunteering to implement their suggestions?)

Seems that "put it on talk page" is a difficult solution (both technically and in terms of Wikipedia policy/consensus), and it isn't clear that it offers significant benefits over some of the other solutions. (Which doesn't mean that other options don't have problems, but if that approach seems more favorable, might help to explain why.) Zodon (talk) 12:46, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for answering my question so directly, Zodon! :) I was not aware that it's technologically more difficult to put the tag on a talk page than on an article page. A difficulty with technical feasibility was mentioned briefly on Template_talk:Orphan#Proposed_usage_change but not explored. I was not aware of issues with other tools. I thought it was a matter of changing maybe one line of code. If technological feasibility is really the obstacle (and not genuine disagreement about where we want to put the tag—I don't really know, especially since you brought up general Wikipedia policy), I am willing to look into modifying the code or writing a special bot. (The "ignoring" I was referring to was the answers that don't answer the question. I think that's what's been stirring up the feeling of being given the run-around.) —Ben Kovitz (talk) 13:18, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Just to be clear: I didn't mind the entire project until my complaints with one single type of tagging were 100% ignored by this project, the bot's owner, and the bot owner board. Now I think it's a completely worthless piece of spam on articles, put there by a project that is doing nothing to improve the situation.

I offered up some orphan plant species articles. Have they been de-orphaned by members of this project? No.

The bot owner gave some examples of articles de-orphaned, so I clicked on the link and came across an article that had been bogusly de-orphaned.

So, here we have it: the members of this project can't de-orphan the articles and aren't even bothering to try. People de-orphaning the articles are doing it bogusly.

Oh, and the bot owner thinks computer programming produced "random" results. The retrial run after fixing a glitch consisted of the bot respamming plant species articles. --KP Botany (talk) 07:09, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

If people was to talk about a change of template (which I really dont mind if it happens) then I suggest you use the template talk page, not here. Also I did not say "my stupid bot knows better than you" in any way. I said totally the opposite. Bots are just a serious of if statments, If this do this if not this do this, It is hard to accommodate human knowledge of orphan tagging into the bot. Also all programs can produce "random" results of some description, hasn't a computer program ever done something you did not want it to do? ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 07:50, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

KP, you've been ignored because almost every message you've placed here has been uncivil. I think it's a real credit to the members of this project that you haven't been able to start any flame wars. You're welcome to participate in these discussions in a civil manner. But if you're just going to make accusations and try to disrupt discussions, you'll be ignored. --JaGa^talk 09:48, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Would it be a more widely acceptable solution to have the bot just add the articles to the orphaned articles category instead of leaving the tag? Does the tag itself get the attention of orphan-fixers, or does the cat? -- Mufka ^{(u) (t) (c)} 11:25, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

I (who has never seen this project before the bot started tagging) am the proof that the tag helps make people aware of the problem. Which might lead to improvement. But the comments on the bot talking page are the proof a lot of people don't understand the meaning of the tag. Several commented that the articles contained a) references or b) external links and the tag was wrongly placed. Since some of them are even editors, I am pretty sure a lot of noneditors won't understand the tag too. Main problem is people don't read long sentences I guess. ;-) --Windharp (talk) 15:03, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. The project mostly uses categories like Category:Orphaned articles from February 2009, which is added to the article by the template. The tag isn't just for this project; it's a maintenance template we use to make editors aware of the need for articles to link to each other. And I think Windharp points out a problem we need to deal with; the template needs to be re-written for clarity. But first we have to decide on our tagging policy. --JaGa^talk 18:18, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Does consensus exist for the use of this particular template? I ask here only because you all are most likely to know where this consensus was established and the history of the template and the talk page don't indicate any discussions. -- Mufka ^{(u) (t) (c)} 18:39, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

There's also Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Addbot 16 where Addbot was approved to add {{orphan}} tags to the top of articles for zero-link orphans only, and considering that AutoWikiBrowser automatically adds orphan tags to pages along with {{wikify}}, {{uncategorised}}, and {{stub}}, there must be approval for that somewhere. (And note that AWB is not really a bot but a semi-automated wiki browser, so editors without bot approval can use it.) The point is, this is a maintenance tag, intended to be noticed. Many editors don't realize the importance of having articles link to each other, so this is an especially important tag. --JaGa^talk 22:07, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Template talk:orphan suggests to me that there has never been consensus for the use of the template in article space. This project in effect turns consensus on its head, arguing that it can tag because people have in the past, and because there is no consensus for preventing the tagging. Were all projects sufficiently incontinent to follow that example, we would have all sorts of very messy, well meant cruft to wade through before we get to read the article (which was the purpose in the first place ... you know, serve the end user, not the sectional interest?) --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:45, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

I wonder if the intention to be noticed is really meant for the passing editor. Tags like {{unreferenced}} are important to the passing editor because it is an indication that the article is a collection of information that is not supported by anything. The orphan tag seems like it is more relevant to those looking to tinker in the background and therefore a hidden method might serve the purpose just as well. If the majority of users are just readers, I can see how some tags just end up confusing people. If a visible tag is preferred, perhaps a small one like the protection tags would be a good compromise. In response to Tagishsimon's consensus comment above, consensus can exist even if no formal discussion has taken place as is very basically illustrated here. This tenuous type of consensus generally involves widespread practice with no clear source of the practice or organized effort behind it. Formal discussion only occurs in such cases when someone challenges it. If this is to be the start of a formal dispute over consensus, it should be done via RFC at Template talk:orphan. -- Mufka ^{(u) (t) (c)} 00:43, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

outdent

On consensus, there have been discussions, the result of which was no consensus such as at Template_talk:Orphan#Proposed_usage_change, village pump 1, and village pump 2 . But since the status quo is that {{orphan}} has been used in article space, that's taken as "no consensus for moving to talk pages" rather than "no consensus for its use in article space". Perhaps it is just too much to ask proponents of a way to doing things to consider if it is really the best way. As you say, {{unreferenced}}, or as I've said elsewhere, {{POV}} are important and clearly should be at the top of the article. {{orphan}} is a maintenance advert, as unwelcome as would adverts for "Add a geo-tag" or "fill in some red links" or "fix broken red links", all of which build the web as much as this project and have projects or initiatives dedicated to them.

For me, the strong principle is that we serve the reader first and ourselves second. And that translates to, we give them access to the text of the article as soon as we can. And that means we should provide health warnings, if they are needed, and then the article. And then we can deliver other information - as we do with stub noticers, at the foot of the article.

For me, there is no reason except the granstanding of this project for the insistence that the tag must be at the top of the article and, as you'll have observed, it's making me a very annoyed wikipedian. --01:48, 26 February 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tagishsimon (talk • contribs)

Additional response to KP Botany. Recently a lot of time has been spent with keeping up with discussions, thinking about how to improve things and discussing here. So people have had less time to deal with things like actually de-orphaning articles.

Hard to see how your comments have been "100% ignored" when there has been considerable discussion here and elsewhere of how to handle those cases which you and others brought up.

Tag can be useful to the passing reader/editor. If one knows that nothing links here, one may be more suspicious that this might be a duplicate article, or that there may be other similar articles. (Of course that depends on context, one might not think much of it if an article about an obscure topic has no links to it). So prudence may suggest hunting for other articles on the topic. Having few links to it will not ensure that it is little read/reviewed/etc., but having at least a few links probably improves the chances.

Of course as an editor, if one comes across an orphan in an area one knows, or about a topic one is interested in, the urge to get the article noticed/linked (and to prevent formation of duplicate articles) is incentive to try to do something about the orphan status.

I find the tags easy to ignore, just as when reading sites with lots of banners or advertising, etc. If material is in a standard location with a standard format (as the cleanup boxes are), then one can look at them if desired, otherwise I just tune them out. Introducing another location (e.g. at bottom of article), with different formatting to distinguish it from the other tags would introduce more clutter than leaving it in standard form. Many articles have cleanup boxes like this, which often stay on for years - consider the backlog at POV, etc. Being yet another box in the standard place is easier to ignore than something new and different. (This doesn't mean I oppose the minimized or hidden option mentioned in another thread - just that the default state should be a regular notice, and only in special cases and after consideration by human editors should it be hidden). Zodon (talk) 02:29, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

When you add the standard tags (cleanup, POV, unreferenced, etc.), you are saying that there's something wrong with the article. You tell the reader "take this with a grain of salt". Anyone who regularly uses Wikipedia learns that. An orphan tag says nothing about the article...it says something about all other articles. Using an "article issues" box undermines the credibility of the article. That does not serve the goal of "building an encylopaedia". Guettarda (talk) 02:45, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

So much vitriole, and so many tags, yet no editing. The argument would not be used that someone was rude, therefore their complaint that someone vandalized an article with an inappropriate page move should be ignored. If it's wrong, it's wrong, and if you're using any excuse to ignore it, that's all you got: excuses. WP:Orphan isn't editing plant species orphans. They don't even know how to set up a search to find useful articles to link them from--the suggestion was to color-code flowers, include links to 1499 other species in every species of a genera (making every single link just about the most worthless link spam thought of), and other pointless edits. The offered link to what was done coughed up bogus links that had to be undone.

What a monumental waste of time. The project is spitting their banner everywhere on article space. No one understands it. It blocks reading the article. Not even the project members can show good linkage or suggestions. And, instead of making links the wine is, "Oh, KP, you're rude, so we won't link, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah." Then removing the stupid orphan tag if even you won't link (and can't). --KP Botany (talk) 05:14, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

So what should be our current criteria and final goal?

Proposed current criteria

Practically speaking, this is the order we should be going in when we de-orphan:

1. Articles with absolutely no incoming links from anywhere (i.e. not even from other namespaces)
2. Articles with no incoming links from article space
3. Articles with no incoming "qualifying" links

Once we've hit all those, then we can start on those with only one "valid" link, then two, and so on. Is there any objection to this sort of "order of operations" for the project? Also, this would also be binding on the bots as well: they wouldn't be tagging articles that would be more than one step up the order from the point the project is working on.--Aervanath (talk) 07:26, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, of course I'm on board with this. One thing I'd like to point out: Addbot is only approved to tag orphans with no incoming links from article space (level #2). Would we want to request tagging orphans with no incoming "qualifying" links (level #3, for instance an article with a single link from a "List of ..." article)? If so, when? --JaGa^talk 11:15, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I think that we would not want to start tagging those links by bot until we've gotten caught up with Step 1. Strictly looking at it from a WP:O perspective, we don't need to have the bot tagging faster than we can de-orphan. However, part of the function of the orphan tags was to let people know that they were orphaned, so people could help us de-orphan. I guess that hasn't been happening, so maybe it's not a huge deal if we limit the bots to just the step we're currently working on.--Aervanath (talk) 16:48, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Let's stick with what we've got for now, then. --JaGa^talk 20:31, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Proposed final goal

This is much less of an urgent topic, but it's something that should be discussed again now. What should be our ultimate goal for the orphan criteria? When the project was first organized, there was a distinction between orphans, with 0-2 links, and "lonely" pages, with 3-5 links. Eventually, the "lonely" designation was done away with, and we ended up with the current criteria of 0-2 incoming links. Now that we've realized that even a good number of orphans to even one link is going to be a sizeable chore, it's obvious that we're going to have lower our current standards (see above). However, that begs the question of what our final goal actual is. The numbers of incoming links picked originally seem to be essentially arbitrary. Is there a systematic, non-arbitrary way to decide on an optimal minimum number of links? Or is this something which we should leave deliberately vaque, and just say that we're trying to progressively raise our standards as time goes on?--Aervanath (talk) 07:26, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

One bit of data that we've never had before is the fact that 750,000+ articles fail our current criteria. So I'm thinking the criteria is too high - I'd vote for making our long-term goal at least two links. I like the idea of keeping a long term goal, so when Joe New User comes to our project to find out how to get the tag off his freshly minted page, he'd know he only needs one article link to have the tag removed, but if he never wants to see the tag on the page again, he should try for at least two links. Fact of life, most people will do the minimum required to get the tag removed, so let's provide at least a little incentive to go for two. --JaGa^talk 11:58, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable to me.--Aervanath (talk) 16:50, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

No, this is bullshit, until one of you comes up with a sensible, encyclopedic useful linking (and, no, colors and numbers of petals lists won't work) things like obscure species stubs. Not even your link in the template searching google can come up with more than one link, to the genus, and then, in some cases, that will require 300000 byte articles. What is this, take over Wikipedia central? Why don't you just deorphan the articles? Oh, wait, I saw what that meant, putting in a bunch of nonsense links from foodstuffs to every article related to the country of origin. You're not improving an encyclopedia by putting in every link that is possible, you're actually trashing it. --KP Botany (talk) 08:03, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

There is indeed danger of doing serious harm to the encyclopedia by introducing lots of gratuitous links, including gratuitous text to contain those links. Clutter—consuming readers' attention with unimportant or irrelevant text—is bad, and especially bad for an encyclopedia. Perhaps the problem here is not having an orphan tag, but having a bot place the orphan tag. Tags should be added thoughtfully, and that requires some human discretion. (BTW, as annoyed as some folks are, please keep it civil.) —Ben Kovitz (talk) 13:21, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Put civilly, then, we would like to see demonstrations that a) this project is not a perverse incentive to add links where they are inappropriate b) that there is any evidence that all articles that you tag can be linked to according to the rules the project comes up with. KP Botany, when /she has calmed down, may be able to provide evidence on the question of perverse incentive. S/he has already made a reasonable case with respect to species. Further, the project should consider, at the very least, seeking to understand the relationship between tags and tagging: other projects use and less intrusive means to manage their workload, such as non-display tags which build category trees (imagine: categories of orphans relating to subject) or simple lists. The project should explain why it, amongst all other projects, is blessed with in-article space advertising. I note the members of this project who are "happy with fewer than three links". I see little or no evidence that they know what they're talking about: no evidence just unfounded opinion. It's a great shame. --Tagishsimon (talk) 08:50, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I like the definition "fewer than three links is an orphan". If an article has only one link to it, even that should, in ordinary cases, be fixed by editing other articles. However, there's no doubt that the orphan tags are causing a nuisance. Simple solution: put the orphan tag on the talk page instead of the main page. Then you can raise the bar to where it really should be, without causing a nuisance. —Ben Kovitz (talk) 19:19, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

See Template_talk:Orphan#Proposed_usage_change ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 19:32, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

From the signpost article giving the distribution of orphans Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-01-31/Orphans, the current criterion of 3 links includes almost 30% of the articles as orphans.

• 225,546 - no links from other articles, including
  • 133,515 - no links
  • 92,031 - List links only
• bit under 250,000 - have 1 link (eyeball from graph)
• about 220,000 - have 2 links (eyeball from graph)
• about 175,000 - have 3 links (eyeball from graph)

The signpost article on growth study Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-08-11/Growth study suggests that the number of links from complete to incomplete (stub and red links) is a significant measure in relation to growth of wikipedia. (Observing that the ratio was steady at 1.8 for a while, more recently has fallen to 1.4, but as long as stays above 1 growth likely to continue.) Most of changes mentioned were in terms of red links, no statistics given about stub links.

It seems likely that stubs would be at least as heavily represented in the less linked categories as non-stubs. Seems likely that by introducing links to the least-linked would tend to increase the linkage ratio. Zodon (talk) 08:28, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

There probably is some theory out there to guide the selection. Perhaps asking in some of the projects related to theory of networks, mathematics, theory of computation or information theory would yield some useful references/perspective. The articles on Wikipedia growth might be another place to start. Zodon (talk) 08:28, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Stop tagging taxa stubs as orphans

That's enough. They're stubs. By the nature of stubs that's all they are is stubs. They're orphans, they're underreferenced, they have few links to from other articles, that's it. They're stubs. When the tag is more text than the article itself it's just a bull shit tag. So stop it. And if a human editor reverts you, don't make the bot go back and do it again. I have work to do on plant articles, none of which should be reverting bots. Stop. --KP Botany (talk) 23:05, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

In fact, just back off of organisms completely unless and until you've discussed the usefulness of these tags with organism articles. Many of the articles will be orphans, because the intent is to have articles on all named organisms. These are already linked at the appropriate level in their taxoboxes, and may not need any additional links from other articles, because this may just be crowding lists of other articles into the genus article, the family article, the order article, depending upon whether the article is on a species or genus and a plant or an animal. This doesn't make for readability or usefulness. So, discuss this first with the human editors of the articles. Maybe it would be useful, but, until then, cut it out. --KP Botany (talk) 23:09, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Just to clarify - orphans has nothing to do with how many links an article has to other articles - it is how many links other articles make to this article. So it is not redundant with stub (stub status does not imply orphan, or vice-versa). (From post above and some of your edit summaries, appears that might not be clear.)

This forum is not about a bot. It looks like the actions you are objecting to are by User:Addbot. So the portions of your suggestion relating to modifications to how the bot operates (e.g. that it not re-introduce orphan tags) might be better addressed there. (The underlying goals, etc. of course are apropos here.)

It appears that some of the articles you are referring to are not linked to even by their genus article (e.g. Aspidistra nicolai, Arabis kennedyae) If there are no links to the article, makes it much harder to find (and more likely that somebody will duplicate effort). Zodon (talk) 00:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Not all genus articles have lists of all species, some genera have hundreds of species. If a tag takes up more room than the article, it's pointless, and if a bot is adding it, then the bot's operator says to post here, and you say post there, that's just wikibullshit. No, the orphan tag at the top of the article is NOT helpful. And, yes, I know what "what links here" means, I just put "to" rather than from above. --KP Botany (talk) 00:44, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry you feel that the orphan tag is not pretty. However, instead of just removing the tag, why not actually address the problem? If there are other articles which should link to the article, even if only through a template, why not add the links? Until then, "please discuss with the human editors first" sounds a lot like a feeling of WikiProject ownership of articles. The whole point of the orphan tag is to help you realize that these articles aren't linked to by any others. If you want the bot to stop adding tags, then add links to the article. We're trying to make the encyclopedia more navigable for our readers. Removing the tag without addressing the problem is pointless.--Aervanath (talk) 07:56, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I'm sorry, why don't I, instead of volunteering to write the articles I want to write do the work you order for me? Because I'm not interested in your project. Add the links yourself, instead of the tag if you feel they should be linked. I will simply spend my time reverting the tag, until I get blocked for edit warring with this idiotic bot that is doing nothing but irritating editors and putting tags on articles that don't belong. You think I'm too stupid to realize that a stub about a plant species isn't linked in a mile long list to its genus, its family, its order, its class, its APG clade? If I add three links, linking each species to the only probably links, its hierarchial ranks, my edits will be reverted by humans as inappropriate and unnecessary listing in the article. Duh.

So, thank you for telling me I should edit war with the human editors in order to stop a bot from doing crap that it should not have been programmed to do in the first place. --KP Botany (talk) 08:26, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

And cut the navigation for readers crap out, my adding links to articles that will be reverted, and your adding a pointless tag, does not do anything for the reader at all. --KP Botany (talk) 08:27, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Don't come to my talk page and tell me to be civil when you are trying to force me to do editing that you want done. Okay, here you are, you've created a project, now you want to do work. Well, do the work, go ahead and edit the plant species articles that have been tagged as orphans. Addbot's programmers says that is your intention, so go for it.

Provide three links from other articles, appropriate links, usable to readers, to these articles:

• Arabis kennedyae
• Aspidistra yingjiangensis
• Logfia gallica
• Dicoria canescens
• Mikania millei

When you get done hit the next couple thousand plant stubs about obscure species. Add three worthwhile links to all of them, then, go ahead and come to my user talk page and tell me to be civil, because certainly, trying to force a volunteer to do editing you want done is the utmost of incivility. --KP Botany (talk) 08:52, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I see no need to pay attention to you until you decide to be civil and try to come to a consensus instead of issuing ultimatums. See Bantman's post below for an example of how this might work.--Aervanath (talk) 07:06, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

This is an important issue

I see the tone of this particular discussion has been a bit less than totally friendly. Nonetheless, KB Botany raises an important point that should not be ignored.

The point here, and I believe it has been raised earlier, is that the set of topics worth writing about is indeed larger than the set of articles worth broadly linking to. KP Botany's obscure plants are a perfect example - linking to those stubs is only relevant in the context of the next article up the taxa chain, but sometimes the lists become so long as to be a detraction, not an enhancement, of the article. In fact, this is what categories are for - so a reader can see groupings of articles without a long and unwieldy list being developed in the main namespace.

I think the editors on this project recognize that some articles don't deserve to be linked to much or at all. Instead the position has been put forth that the orphan tag is merely informational in these cases. I have to agree with KB Botany that in these cases te tags are distracting and detract from the quality of the tagged articles. Furthermore, based on this project's description and main project page, the mere existence of the tag strongly encourages "correction", even if the solution (overlinking to an obscure article that deserves no links) is worse than the problem. The fact is, if something becomes significant later (say, one of KB's plants is discovered to cure cancer), links will naturally follow - in the meantime we risk forcing significance on an insignificant topic.

Suggestions for improvement:

• Create an (invisible) "orphan-OK" tag. You could apply this tag when a subject is obscure enough that it seems OK for 0-2 articles to link to it. This would:
  • Prevent forced over-linking to obscure topics
  • Protect those topics from re-tagging by bots
  • Allow for maintenance going forward by maintaining a way to index orphaned articles that have been checked out and are acceptable as orphans
• Count categories as links. Categories are really the most appropriate way to group articles, rather than lists or excessive linking. For example, an obscure plant might be found in New Zealand, and be edible. It would then belong to Category:Flora of New Zealand and Category:Edible plants. This allows a reader a good way to find the article. If the plant is not a significant example within any one of its categories, there is no reason it should show up in the articles Plants of New Zealand, Plant, or Edible plants - in fact there is a good reason it should not show up in those articles. Could you imagine a Plants of New Zealand article listing every plant species found in New Zealand??? It would be impossible to read or use, and impossible to maintain.

Thanks for reading. Bantman (talk) 19:33, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks much for your civil discussion. A couple of thoughts:

• I think an orphan-OK tag would be readily abused by people who don't want to see the tag but don't want to de-orphan either.
• I don't think categorization really fulfills WP:BUILD. Also, counting categories as links would pretty much make this project a sub project of Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories/uncategorized.
• I think the best solution is a separation between what is an orphan and what gets the orphan tag - that is, we may consider anything with less than 3 article links an orphan, but we tag a subset. The question is, where do we draw the line? --JaGa^talk 06:02, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

To respond to your points:

• I don't think an orphan-OK tag would be abused. Anyone worried enough about how a tag looks on a page or set of pages he is working on, presumably also has an interest in making any links that he feels are appropriate to "his" article(s). It takes someone knowledgeable in the subject matter to definitively say an orphan is OK as such. Regardless, appropriate language in the tag itself should alleviate this concern - of course, assuming good faith as we must. (What you may be hinting at is a bad-faith effort to kill all orphan tags, a de facto war on this project - for which there are of course other more appropriate channels.)
• Your second bullet sounds a little proprietary - there is no reason this project shouldn't be a subproject of the uncategorized project, if that achieves the goal better. As for WP:BUILD, I quote: "relevant connections to the subject of another article that will help readers to understand the current article more fully" (emphasis added). Just to pick an article from the talk page, linking to George Dod Armstrong from the article about Mendham Borough, New Jersey doesn't help readers of the Mendham article understand anything more fully. Suggesting that all articles could enhance the understanding of at least three other articles is, at best, a giant leap of faith. As I'm sure you've experienced trying to de-orphan articles, it is simply not true of all articles in a practical sense. On the other hand, categories are enhanced by the addition of any article that fits that category. The ultimate goal of this project should be enhancing the pedia, not willy-nilly linking for the sake of upping an arbitrary count.
• I don't understand your third bullet. Are you suggesting not tagging at all some articles you'd consider to be orphans? I think because of some of the other issues discussed on this page (notably bots) it'd be best to have an alternate invisible tag like the orphan-OK tag I suggested, than leave them untagged and therefore targets for re-tagging.

Bantman (talk) 17:19, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

On orphan-ok tag (or just providing a parameter to make the orphan tag not show, which seems to be the same thing), could be implemented by supplying a reason (e.g. orphan|hide=speciesstub (or geographystub, biographystub)). The set of "reasons" that would actually hide the tag would be defined by the template (with invalid arguments it would show as orphan tag). Then if want to check for appropriate use - check the items using the arguments, if you see a bunch of articles from "wikiproject Underwater basket weaving" tagged as speciesstubs, you might want to check what is going on. (New reason tags would of course be defined by consensus, with associated categories/projects/whatever.)

Also such a tag/parameter could be checked against other article characteristics. If the article class gets to be above a certain level (e.g. an "A" class articles might warrant more than one link?), or there are a bunch of other maintenance templates, or whatever, then it might be re-evaluated for whether the hide parameter is still warranted (or remove hide parameter by bot and human re-evaluate whether can't be linked to). Zodon (talk) 08:37, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Proposal to this effect made at Template talk:Orphan#Proposal - add deorphan attempt option that hides message box Zodon (talk) 22:43, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Combining hidden tags and tag on talk page

Proposal: How about combining the hidden orphan tag on the article page idea with the #Tag on talk page idea. That is, if an article has a hidden orphan tag, then a bot could add a tag to the talk page indicating that the page is an orphan, etc.

• The hidden tag on the article page would -
  • categorize the page correctly (as compared to categorizing the talk page)
  • continue to work with the tools that use orphan tags (assuming implement hiding by using one or more arguments to the orphan template)
  • be consistent in location with other cleanup tags by being on article page (even if the appearance is different) (So wouldn't run into problems that suggestion of moving to talk page has run into).
  • the hide parameter could provide information about the de-orphan attempt - indicate that some human has looked at this and tried to come up with a connection. (e.g. WikiProject involved, why the page should be an orphan, optionally a bot could tag with date of attempted de-orphan, etc.) This information might be useful for later de-orphan attempts (e.g. another wikiproject might have reasonable links).

• The tag on the talk page
  • would be similar to other project/etc. tags
  • would provide the information about orphan less obtrusively (it is there if you want it, but not push those with aesthetic concerns about orphan tag towards overlinking).
  • could be largely managed automatically (add/remove by bot as appropriate)
  • could be implemented separately, at a later date (hiding could be done now giving prompt remedy to some of the issues mentioned here, add tag on talk pages when somebody has time to do up a tag and find an appropriate bot to manage it.)

Zodon (talk) 23:09, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Message box - small option being considered

Came across this discussion Template talk:Expand-section#More subtle style of a more subtle style for another article message box. Looks like it may be a while before the underlying code is included in {{ambox}}, and how it might work when it comes to template stacking, etc. remains to be seen. But since some object to the orphan template as being too obtrusive, thought might be of interest as another alternative to those already suggested here. Zodon (talk) 21:46, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

NOW we're getting to the heart of the matter

OK. We've got this huge list of 750,000+ orphaned articles. What do we do with it? I can fairly easily create Lonelypages sub-lists, like this one that only shows orphans that are members of WikiProject Biology (via the {{Biology}} template link). I could also create lists of orphans that belong to a certain category.

But before I go into a coding frenzy, I'd like to put together a plan that consistently makes sense for our project and others.

1. What do we want, to make our own de-orphaning easier?
2. What can we give to other projects that would be useful for them?

Ideally, I want to create a single page that can meet everyone's needs. For instance, the Biology page I created just accepts a parameter naming the project's membership template. Change the URL to http://toolserver.org/~jason/orphans_by_project.php?template=WikiProject_Baseball and you've got the list for WikiProject Baseball. (A whopping 2,678 orphans I might add)

The page works fine for WikiProject Biology. It's a bit large for WikiProject Baseball. And WikiProject Biography? Forget it. 160,000+ orphans.

So should we go for smaller lists, perhaps based on certain categories, as Zodon suggested? I'm not sure. I'd like to get input from members of other projects. They may not even want orphan lists, for all I know.

And, what do we want? Is there a way to sub-divide Lonelypages to make it more manageable/enjoyable? If we did create sub-lists for ourselves, what do we choose and how would we present those lists on the WikiProject Orphanage page?

I'm open to suggestions. --JaGa^talk 06:40, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I tried it out a bit on WPMED (3000+ orphans) and WP Computing (5000+ orphans).

Just a quick thought of an addition - maybe add Link to "what links here" (covering article namespace) next to each item. (Or even a button that will open the article and what links here in separate tabs - if that is easy to do.) Zodon (talk) 10:47, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I think that the functionality you've added for sorting orphans by WikiProject is good; we can spam the different WikiProject pages and see who cares. I think another useful tool would be if that functionality could be widened so that one could find all the orphans that are in any arbitrary category, i.e. Category:The_Wire_writers (to pick a completely random sub-category, I found it by clicking around on Category:Categories). Then you could just go to the categories that you know something about (or want to learn about) and de-orphan as you go. It would give us a better idea of which topics have more orphans. (If the tool could also do a complete survey and do an orphans-by-category census every month or so, that'd be a help as well.)--Aervanath (talk) 13:39, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I think you're right, Aervanath. A template-page and a category-page should cover about everything. And the "What links here" thing shouldn't be difficult to put in. --JaGa^talk 18:48, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Does it handle redirects to project templates? i.e., If I give it WPMED it also finds pages that used a redirect to that template? (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:WPMED&hidetrans=1&hidelinks=1)

Yep. --JaGa^talk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I created a template {{lonelypages}} to make it easier to create links to the tool. (Just trying to help out, feel free to modify/etc. if not the way want to do it.) Example of use: {{lonelypages|WP Medicine|project=WPMED}}

I like. Very much. I think this could be the way we sell orphan lists to other projects. BUT let's not do any distributing yet; I'm still working on the page. --JaGa^talk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

As far as how to present this here, I was looking for some kind of template that would produce a listing by wikiproject. (Provide it with a template, it applies it to each wikiproject designator and spits out the result in a table or list.) Haven't found such yet. Without something like that, doing any kind of listing by project here might be more trouble than it's worth.

Maybe we could just make a "best of" list or something. --JaGa^talk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Is there a way to (easily) get it to tell how many items (were) in a list? (e.g. in a way that could be included on this project page, or on other project pages). (Not a high priority idea, doesn't have to be too up to date, but could be handy.) Zodon (talk) 00:14, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I avoid count queries when I can, due to performance. Maybe, but like you say, low priority. --JaGa^talk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

If it was easy to provide an option to get a topical list that could be put into AWB (or a bot), that might be useful too. (I haven't used AWB much, but it occurred to me that adding the what links here might mess up extracting links for other uses.) 00:31, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I already do this for Untagged orphans, but I don't think it's necessary for Lonelypages lists. De-orphaning is not a task I consider bot- or AWB- doable. Orphan tagging, on the other hand, is the quintessential bot task. --JaGa^talk 02:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Or quintessential vandalism. I think you have to demonstrate that such tags have any real utility. The 6,763 articles tagged in November 2006 probably think that the tags have served, for the last couple of years, only to disfigure the articles on which they've been placed. I really would wish this project to measure the depletion rate of articles tagged in the subcategories of Category:Orphaned articles before adding more such tags. Whereas building the encyclopedia is important - something we have a shared interest in doing - I really think the prime purpose of articles is to be read. The most important thing about an article should not be an orphan message. At best, if you must tag, please consider placing tags at the foot, rather than the head of the article. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:41, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Orphaned articles are, almost by definition, the least-read articles in the encyclopedia, so I don't think we're going to be inconveniencing that many readers. If it's the only tag on the article, then it doesn't take up much space, either, before you get to the actual text. If it isn't the only tag, then that's why we have {{article issues}}, to condense the tags. Any way you look at it, the orphan tags are a minor inconvenience.--Aervanath (talk) 17:10, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. Orphans are not by definition less read. They may in fact be less read, but that's an empirical question. Presumably, one could checked to see if the pages marked as orphans are under-utilized, but I don't think you can assume that they are. By the way, I only came here because a page I watch was tagged as orphan, and I added links to it from two other pages as a result. Just one more point of data for your empirical investigations. Cnilep (talk) 16:55, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

(Outdent) OK, I've revamped Lonelypages to now accept template and/or cat parameters. The template has to be in the article's talk page, but the category can be in the article or the talk page (to accommodate Zodon's excellent idea concerning taskforce categories). So now:

• You want to look at all orphans in WikiProject Rock music? http://toolserver.org/~jason/Lonelypages.php?limit=500&link0=y&link1=y&link2=y&templateFilter=none&template=WikiProject_Rock_music
• You want to look at all orphans under the watchful eye of the Arts and Entertainment Work Group (meaning orphans in Category:Arts and entertainment work group articles)? http://toolserver.org/~jason/Lonelypages.php?limit=500&link0=y&link1=y&link2=y&templateFilter=none&cat=Arts_and_entertainment_work_group_articles
• You want to look at all two-link orphans in WikiProject Physics that bear an orphan tag? http://toolserver.org/~jason/Lonelypages.php?limit=500&link2=y&templateFilter=tagged&template=Physics

For the record, Lonelypages can accept both a template and a cat tag in the same request, but I recommend against this most of the time, since page render performance has been poor for this scenario. But there may be times when it is useful. Zodon, would you be interested in tweaking your template to fit the new Lonelypages? --JaGa^talk 22:13, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

[Note: the following item was composed before I saw JaGa's post above (22:13). So it relates to the items preceding that post. Zodon]

Thanks JaGa.

I added a note to the template indicating that the tool is not ready for release yet (just in case anybody stumbles on the template).

I only just noticed the related topics link on the orphan template, assume something like that might also be on the listing tool.

In case it wasn't clear - I was not suggesting that a count be included in the listing, but rather that there be a separate query that could produce just a count. (Which could be updated on an infrequent basis - might be handy for keeping track of project status, address some of Tagishsimon's concerns about tracking, etc.) Zodon (talk) 22:33, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Lonelypages template

I have partially updated the lonelypages template, it now recognizes the category= parameter. At the moment it won't let you use both category and project (take a little more tweaking to fix that) Would it be better to not support that usage for performance reasons? I will see about adding parameters to control article selection (tagged or not, number of links, etc.). Zodon (talk) 23:30, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! I would be A-OK with not allowing use of both parameters for a single query in your template. I almost didn't make it possible for LP itself, but I decided to go ahead so we'd have it if we realize later we need it. --JaGa^talk 23:35, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I am a little unclear about what the priorityOnly parameter does. I think it means that when it is yes, count links from lists when deciding whether to list something as an orphan. Is that right? The description on the page sounds sort of like do not list things that have at least one link from a list. (i.e. something with just one link, that being from a list, would not be included) Thanks. Zodon (talk) 23:57, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

It is very confusing, and I apologize for that. If priorityOnly is "y", LP will only display orphans that have no list/chronological links. It doesn't affect how LP counts orphan links, it only affects which orphans LP decides to display. So an article with zero mainspace links and one "List of ..." link is stored as a zero-link orphan, but is not displayed if priorityOnly is "y". Under no circumstances would that article be displayed as a one-link orphan. --JaGa^talk 00:30, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Thank you JaGa, think I understand it now. I added a parameter (on_lists) to the template. Please take a look at the description on {{lonelypages}} and see if you think it is clear and I described it right (and fix or suggest changes as needed). (on_lists=hide translates to priorityOnly=y, any other value of on_lists is ignored). I used a different parameter name to try to make it easier to describe, but we can change it if the description isn't clear.

I might add a couple more parameters, but think the template is mostly done. As far as I know it works. I hope people here will test it a bit. Once the underlying tool is ready to be released we can remove the draft warning from the template documentation and announce it's availability. Zodon (talk) 09:40, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Wow, this is nice. A template never even occurred to me. So far, it's been testing out perfectly, and I think the documentation covers everything and is clear. I was glad to see you didn't add the offset parameter - that would just slow page rendering down even more. Does anyone have any ideas on how to contact every project with an offer of this template? I asked at the WikiProject Council but as yet have received no reply. --JaGa^talk 17:29, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Couldn't think of any reason the offset parameter would be useful, so wasn't figuring to include it. If it would slow things down - even better to leave it out.

I've also been toying with idea of template that will give links to articles in a WikiProject by importance (using the categories).

Don't know about publicity - could try dropping a note to the Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/About and see if they willing to include a mention of the tool? Zodon (talk) 00:50, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Looks like addbot may be able to publicize this to WikiProjects (when the tool is ready). (see task 19) Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 25#WikiProject/Taskforce Spammer. Zodon (talk) 09:38, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Lonelypages by importance

Started another template that groups links by importance {{Lonelypages by importance}}, thought it might help for projects (like some of the biography taskforces) that have a lot of orphans. Still pretty rough, but here's a sample.

Medicine orphans by importance: {{Lonelypages by importance|category=medicine}} Zodon (talk) 07:54, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

This is another great template. You're putting stuff together that I wasn't even aware was possible. I think projects will like both of your templates - if we can figure out how to tell them about the templates, and if we can survive the current stormy weather. --JaGa^talk 19:38, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I tested this template some more, seems to be working okay. As far as I know, both this template and the basic lonelypages template are ready for use, as soon as you say the underlying tool is ready, we can start publicizing them.

On publicity, might be good to start slow - link on the project page, and mention at other wikiprojects we part of. (So we can iron out remaining bugs, etc.) Zodon (talk) 09:12, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Template:Newpagelinks

Just found this template {{Newpagelinks}}, since special lonelypages isn't updated, it might be worth replacing that part of the template with link to lonelypages tool. Zodon (talk) 06:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Nifty. Yeah, makes sense - Special:Lonelypages is dead. Do you think there'd be any harm with using a link0=y and priorityOnly=y restricted link? I don't think we'll ever run out of those. And leave templateFilter unset, or ...? --JaGa^talk 06:52, 16 February 2009 (UTC)