Category talk:Articles needing cleanup

2004-2005
++(plus renaming page) +(plus central listing)

Concern over cleanup rate
See discussion at Wikipedia talk:Cleanup. -- Beland 07:00, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Deleting a page
So I just terminated March 2005. Do I delete the page now or what exactly? Kaisershatner 20:43, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I figured it out, I think, at WP:CSD it says four days of being empty is the standard. Kaisershatner 14:10, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

A curiosity
The number of articles with dated cleanup tags has gone up by around a thousand in a month, but the percentage of articles with cleanup tags has remained more or less the same. Seems articles in need of cleanup (or are detected as such) are added at the same rate as new articles! However, if May ends up being anything like April that might change--there's a ridiculous number of articles in need of cleanup that are tagged for April. 2442! S'crazy! Tamarkot 22:53, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

2200 articles???
We tagged 2200 articles for cleanup in eight days??? Ideogram 19:05, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
 * No. Pearle didn't do a sweep through cleanup-date tagged articles through early June, so a bunch of articles piled up in Category:Wikipedia cleanup, and then we got them all dropped in here at once.  That said, we did tag 2900 articles in under a month; this whole accelerating rate of growth thing could get problematic sort of quickly if it keeps up.  --RobthTalk 04:42, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I noticed that Pearle wasn't doing anything, so I put Alphachimpbot to work. He flagged something like over 1500 articles in the last 5 days. That's why it suddenly looks bad. -- Alphachimp  talk  05:44, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Number of Articles Remaining table
I've written a bot, User:CbmBOT, that will automatically calculate how many articles there are remaining for each month and output the wikitable code. Currently it doesn't automatically update the page (it's pending approval on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval), but I've been using the output to update the table.

I don't know if people from this talk page would have any sway either way, but if so, please let me know what you think (ie. on the RfA page). –Dvandersluis 04:17, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
 * nah, this is a good venue. There just aren't enough changes or questions here for anyone to really pay attention. Alphachimp  talk  17:32, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Cleanup/month subpages
I don't think it's a good idea to include the counts from those pages in the table because: –Dvandersluis 02:14, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) We never have before, nor do we do so for any other month (other than the recently-added June 2005)
 * 2) We don't know what has been cleaned up and what hasn't; pages that are marked are obviously marked for cleanup until completed, these pages are not concrete.


 * I basically agree, but then the Cleanup/June page probably shouldn't be in the Category:Cleanup from June 2005.
 * More importantly, we shouldn't be attempting to count the "Music cleanup by month" articles, which is being promoted by a hidden comment. If the Music cleanup people want them counted here, they should just have their template include their articles in both "Music cleanup by month" and "Cleanup by month" subcategories.  -R. S. Shaw 05:34, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd suggest for just that: The subpages shouldn't be included in the category. In fact, CbmBOT ignores them completely when rebuilding the table. In terms of the Music cleanup articles, it seems to be that people want them in the category (as shown by edits when they are ignored/skipped) – classifying them as both would be a good compromise. Comments? –Dvandersluis 13:50, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

{cleaned} tag etc
An editor just added stuff saying don't just delete {cleanup} but replace it with {cleaned} (which leaves a box on it and puts the page in Category:Pages in need of review). This doesn't seem to have been discussed and seems like not too good a procedure. We don't need extra process for the 18,000 pages needing cleaning; we need to clean them. I'm removing the changes for now. -R. S. Shaw 19:30, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Agreed. –Dvandersluis 12:43, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

percentage
0.00% ?

If that's mathematically correct, it'd be better to say "less than 0.01%" --Espoo 09:19, 2 December 2006 (UTC)


 * The problem was due to Special:Statistics, which CbmBOT gets the total number of articles from. It seems that before the update on November 24, some wording on that page changed, which caused the bot not to be able to parse the total number of articles properly. I've fixed it now.
 * As an aside, I also put in a check that will use "less than 0.01%", rather than "0.00%" if it ever really is under 0.01%.
 * –Dvandersluis 14:18, 4 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for fixing that. Wouldn't it be possible for the bot to also state the daily changing total of all pages it uses to calculate the result? I.e. now "19,675 articles were tagged for cleanup, or 1.30% of the English Wikipedia's current total of 1,516,146 articles." Most people do not understand percentages well, especially small ones, and the huge total helps people see the true nature i.e. small relative size of the problem. Thanks! --Espoo 17:15, 4 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I've implemented that now, it'll start with tomorrow's update. –Dvandersluis 16:01, 5 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks! --Espoo 12:03, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

God Help Us!
The main problem is that people tend to overuse the cleanup tag for articles that are correct and make sense to almost all users. At this rate, there will be millions of backlogged articles. I say scrap the tag and make editors DIY. Someone dedicated to making your day a little bit better! 14:07, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I disagree; there are lots of articles tagged for cleanup that have obvious problems. Articles that are actually OK are the easy ones to deal with - just remove the tag and request that anyone re-adding it clarify why they think it is necessary. -- Beland (talk) 01:06, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Increase in cleanup articles?
It seems that some months have gone up in numbers, rather than down. People must be adding tags for older dates in order to get their article to the backlog quicker. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mynameisnotpj (talk • contribs) 11:57, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Auto generated category statistics
Note: the total is off because some templates place articles into general category, but not monthly categories. Renata (talk) 02:12, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Jump in pages needing cleanup
Why is there such a significant increase in pages needing cleanup from 30000+ to 60000+?Wai Hong (talk) 06:41, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
 * The format of the page changed sometime between the bot running on July 3rd and 4th, the result of which being that each Cleanup from X category now has two links to it (the category text itself and the + symbol before it). The bot was just looking for links in the form of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cleanup_from_[month]_[year]", and was thus pulling in each category twice, which is why the stats were all doubled. The bot has been fixed now and I re-ran it, as well, so the stats should once again be accurate. &mdash;Daniel Vandersluis(talk) 16:17, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Who's doing the work?
Is there any way to tell who has been cleaning up these articles and removing them from the Cleanup lists? Unschool (talk) 04:21, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Bot back up and running
You might have noticed that the bot hasn't been updating the page for the last few days. While the bot has actually been running, for some reason its edits haven't made it through to wikipedia. I have updated the bot so that it works again, and have run it for today; normal execution should resume tomorrow morning.

Note that I have also moved the bot over to run on StatisticianBot. This change was supposed to occur when StatistianBot was approved but I never got around to making the change; however, now that I've been working on the bot, I transferred the task over. This won't have any affect on the task other than the username differing. &mdash;Daniel Vandersluis(talk) 21:51, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Duplicate?
Does anybody know why we have both Category:Articles needing cleanup and Category:Wikipedia articles needing cleanup? Are they duplicate categories populated by different templates? - Eureka Lott 20:23, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes they are. I have merged them from today. Rich Farmbrough, 21:58, 29 June 2011 (UTC).

What happened?
Suddenly there are a bunch of old entries (like 2006) showing up in the monthly categories? I think it jumped from like 47,000 total to 55,000 total? RJFJR (talk) 04:28, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * And now they're gone again! (I refreshed my browser and they appeared, I left this message and they disappeared!) RJFJR (talk) 04:29, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * This probably had to do with yesterday's merge somehow. Although I don't know how. Wouldn't worry about it. Debresser (talk) 08:12, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, the disappearing is kinda interesting, though. Hitting a different cache somewhere I expect. Rich Farmbrough, 09:58, 30 June 2011 (UTC).


 * They are back now. What merge? RJFJR (talk) 10:00, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * What merge? See section above this one.
 * I remember looking yesterday at the November and December 2006 categories. I do not think any categories have been added or, nor that the number of article has jumped miraculously. Debresser (talk) 16:40, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I only read the first date stamp in the previous section and saw it was from 2010 and ignored it without realizing the second one was dated 2011. How were they merged?  Template change? RJFJR (talk) 06:27, 1 July 2011 (UTC)
 * By making Category:Wikipedia articles needing cleanup a soft redirect. Debresser (talk) 06:43, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Bare urls
Hi, I don't know if this is the right place to write, because no-one has posted here since 2011, but.. how do we choose which tags get articles listed in cleanup, and who chooses them? "Neutral"/"verify" do not, for instance, but "bare urls" does. I ask because I would be in favour of getting the "bare urls" tag to send articles to a different place. I am looking for articles to do a more thorough cleanup (for example, what used to be called wikify) as these are the articles that make the encyclopaedia look worse. I understand that bare urls are a problem which need to be fixed but I don't see them as cleanup jobs in the same category. And yet so many of the articles listed here are simply bare url problems, more so as time goes on, it seems. It makes it harder to find articles needing more serious cleanup, and skews the stats about the cleanup backlog. Is there any way this can be changed? If people agree, of course.. Jdcooper (talk) 21:19, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Crazy backlog
This is ridiculous. There are 20,000 articles needing cleanup. That's insane. There's backlogs from TEN YEARS AGO! How is this possible? I feel like nobody is even checking this list- just tagging and tagging, without ever fixing anything. There's not even that many in the super-long-time-ago sections, which means that nobody is checking this at a good rate. I drilled through about 10 articles in about two hours. Most of them are near fixed, just need to remove the tag and do a little bit of rephrasing and CE. Insane.--9563rj (talk) 05:03, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's a big backlog, but I seem to remember it being around 25,000 just a few months ago, so it's falling gradually. What do you suggest? Jdcooper (talk) 20:39, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
 * One thing that could help a lot is to find articles that only need copy editing for grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. The Guild of Copy Editors is looking for more articles to feed its work queue. If that's the only problem, changing the tag from cleanup to copyedit will move it over and get an article fixed faster. -- Beland (talk) 16:54, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi Beland, that's a good idea. I tagged a few of the oldest cleanup candidates like that last night. What exactly are the Guild's criteria for articles that come within their area? I remember getting a dressing down from someone a few years ago for sending something to copyedit that was apparently not in a good enough state... Jdcooper (talk) 09:12, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Heh, I've gotten a similar dressing down. 8) It depends on the editor, of course, but the ones that are most picky don't want to get any articles that have other major problems that could cause the text to change, whether that's NPOV problems or even just referencing to be done. What I generally do is only use copyedit if there are no other problem tags that have been or should be applied. -- Beland (talk) 16:27, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi, Guild coordinator here. You've got it right. Broadly speaking, we don't want to spend our time editing articles when there are underlying issues (like copyright vios, unreferenced BLPs, proposed for deletion, etc.) that mean the improved text would be unlikely to stick around. Also, the tag would be useless if it was added to any article that was less than perfect, since a large majority of articles (including good and featured articles) could have their prose improved in some way. (We have a Requests page that is designed for people who have an article they especially care about and want to see extra polished.) I'd urge you to take this conversation to our talk page, since, as notes, we are running low on tagged articles, and no doubt many articles could be switched from "cleanup" to "copy edit" tags. Also, we could always use a reminder to be polite when discussing the use of the copy edit tag with other editors.  Tdslk (talk) 19:49, 3 June 2020 (UTC)