Template talk:Short pages monitor

Add "Long monitored short pages" category
To aid in removing this template from articles that have been expanded to the point that they are no longer "very short", it would be useful to have it add a category when the article becomes sufficiently long.

I have created Category:Long monitored short pages for this purpose. While the main point of this template is to keep legitimately short articles off Special:Shortpages, and it thus only needs to be used on pages smaller than about 120 characters, I have conservatively set the threshold at 1000 characters for now.

Replacing the template code with the following will accomplish this:

Thanks Gurch (talk) 19:23, 22 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Hey, welcome back! ✅ . Smart idea. I don't know how Category:Monitored short pages is used or how quickly pages in Category:Long monitored short pages are going to be processed, but would it make sense to automatically remove Category:Monitored short pages if the page grows large enough? Amalthea  19:39, 22 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Very short articles (smaller than around 120 characters) that are nevertheless legitimate articles have added to them. This adds a hidden comment to the article that increases its size by about 200 characters, and adds it to Category:Monitored short pages for tracking purposes. The reason for all this is so that the articles don't show up on Special:Shortpages, which in turn allows that page to be used to find other very short pages that might be problematic (whether new, or the result of mass content removal from an existing page). Without this system, Special:Shortpages would not be very useful. Automatically removing Category:Monitored short pages probably isn't that useful because once the article gets long enough,  and its accompanying comment should be removed from the page altogether, since they no longer have any place in the article. This new category just makes maintenance easier, since nobody wants to hunt through a category of 10,000 pages just to find the ones that are largest.


 * Pages in Category:Long monitored short pages will be processed whenever I get around to it, since I'm the only one who knows about the category at the moment. It's not an urgent issue, since isn't doing any harm just sitting on the page on its own. The main reason I'm bothering to do it at all is that if a tiny, formerly 120-character-or-less article has reached over 1000 characters, something dramatic has happened to the page and while it's often been fleshed out into an acceptable article, sometimes it's because of a copy-paste or other mass of unformatted text that someone dumped on the page. Given that the  system was already in place, this is a convenient way of finding such pages when they might otherwise go unnoticed. Thanks Gurch (talk) 21:25, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I have the 1000+ category almost empty, and it should be close to empty within a few days. In order to keep going, I've just now added code to add a second oversize category for pages 901-1000 characters long. - TexasAndroid (talk) 13:57, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Categories for 901 - 1000 and 801 - 900 were added a while back, and have since been cleaned out. I've just now added one more for 701 - 800 characters.  I'm in no rush to clean it out, but this at least gives me onw more thing to choose from when I'm looking for things to do. :) - TexasAndroid (talk) 15:54, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Change PAGENAME to FULLPAGENAME
editprotected In case this is ever useful on non article pages, please change PAGENAME to FULLPAGENAME.

I have quickly checked what links here, and although I did not check the actual User and User_talk uses, there seems to be one possibly correct attempt to use this on non-article pages: Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/ (although if a redirect can be protected this should just be a protected redirect to Wikipedia talk:Article wizard, just like any other talk page corresponding to a redirected article). Mark Hurd (talk) 05:55, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Done. --Closedmouth (talk) 15:59, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Use a parameter instead of filling up with comment
See Renounce edit. It appears that there is a long comment added only to the page size idly. I think that the template could have a parameter, say, to give that effect. -DePiep (talk) 11:49, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Not really. The main reason for the Long Comment template, which also happens to place this template onto pages, is to push pages down the list of Short Pages on the short pages reports.  And those reports only count the pre-transcluded size of the pages in question.  So, one way or another, a couple of hundred characters need to be added to a page in order to drop the page well out of the range of the report.  Simply adding a parameter to this template would add maybe 10-20 characters, far less than is needed to be useful. - TexasAndroid (talk) 16:19, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Need to define and possibly rethink this template
It is long past time for a discussion about what this template is for and when it is supposed to be used.

The instructions at Template:Long comment (actually Template:Long comment/doc) say, "Use on very short articles (smaller than about 120 characters) which are legitimately that short, for example very short disambiguation pages or articles consisting only of ." Questions:


 * 1) The instructions at Template:Long comment say that this template is intended for articles smaller than about 120 characters. It is frequently added to articles over 220 bytes. As of this writing, at Special:ShortPages the 1000th smallest article is 231 bytes and the 10,000th smallest article is 290 bytes. At the 10,000th smallest article, the "next nnn" link is disabled, but by hacking the URL, Special:ShortPages continues all the way to the largest pages, viz. largest articles shows that at this moment, the 4,803,354th smallest article is the largest article in English Wikipedia, at 801,990 bytes. (It was the 4,803,311th smallest article when I started this posting. By tomorrow, the largest article in English Wikipedia will probably not be on this link.) The addition of does not remove an article from Special:ShortPages, but it may push it beyond the first 10,000. So the question is, what is the size above which this template should not be added?
 * 2) What does this template signify? Does it signify that the page is good enough for Wikipedia that it shouldn't be deleted? Does it mean that the page meets basic Wikipedia style criteria? Does it mean that the article has met a bare minimum level of quality but needs more work? Recently, the template was added to E20 Norr when this article was in gross violation of MOSDAB. It lacked an introductory line ("E20 Norr may refer to:"); it had bold that didn't belong; it had more than one blue link per entry; descriptions were offset by hyphen not comma; entries ended with periods. (This disambiguation was subsequently cleaned up.) Was it appropriate to add to this page?
 * 3) How does this help Wikipedia? Is the purpose to cause articles that some editor has blessed as being worthy of keeping to not be listed among the 10,000 shortest articles? This may not always be feasible, because with careful monitoring of new small pages, it should be possible to have far fewer than 10,000 short articles that haven't been blessed for keeping. For example, right now, the 100th shortest article is KMMK-LP at 223 bytes, and I believe this article is worthy of keeping. In fact, with the addition of the dates or years of the station's operation, it could stay like that forever as far as I'm concerned.
 * 4) Wikipedia generally uses templates to say that something is wrong with an article, such as, , , , etc. We also have templates to say that an article has met various high standards, such as . We don't usually use templates to say that an article has met a bare minimum level of quality but has not met a high standard. So, is anomalous and not the way other article quality templates work. Given that, should  be retained, or should we find some other solution to whatever "problem" it is supposed to address?
 * 5) Should be used to replace long comments in short articles, such as Burnham Park ?
 * 6) What is the criterion for removing from an article?

On December 19–27, 2015, Dcirovic edited of almost 40,000 pages, almost all redirects disambiguations, to insert. This more than doubled the number of pages in Category:Monitored short pages. (It appears that the approach was to edit the pages in Special:ShortPages, starting with the smallest, and ending at 223 bytes, inserting the and comment.) Whatever the merits of this massive activity, it spotlights the need to discuss these questions and provide better instructions for Wikipedia editors on the use of. —Anomalocaris (talk) 23:13, 31 January 2016 (UTC) [Edited again, my apologies to Dcirovic and the Wikipedia community, I meant disambiguations, not redirects.] —Anomalocaris (talk) 02:26, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I haven't worked on short pages for a long time, but from memory the point of adding a long comment was to say "I've looked at this article, made sure it complies with the relevant MOS and notability guidelines, and don't think it will be expanded any time soon, so I'm making it artificially longer so that smaller articles that haven't been checked will appear at the top of the list." As far as I'm concerned, if Dcirovic added long comments without touching the articles, all 40,000 additions should be reverted. --Closedmouth (talk) 00:37, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
 * That is an accurate description of the purpose of the "LongComment" template. If I remember correctly, we originally created it to get the soft-redirects to Wiktionary off the list.  (Regular redirects generally didn't need LongComment because they were excluded from the ShortPages list by other means.)  I can't think of any valid reason why redirects (whether hard or soft) should be on that list now.  So unless there's something we're missing, I would agree that the addition of this template to redirects should be reverted.  Rossami (talk) 01:08, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
 * User:Rossami and User:Closedmouth, clarification and apology, as noted above, I meant disambiguations, not redirects. —Anomalocaris (talk) 02:26, 1 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Risking to sound like the proverbial elephant in the china shop, I think there are simpler was to keep short disambiguation pages of the list. Or perhaps we don't need that list. Debresser (talk) 18:19, 1 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I've reviewed a random sample of Dcirovic's mass change: nothing suspicious, nothing to see here, move on. Whatever was the use of Category:Monitored short pages, it is as useful now. --Kubanczyk (talk) 18:49, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Kubanczyk: This doesn't explain what Category:Monitored short pages is supposed to do, or address any of the questions. Dcirovic's editing was done without paying attention to the articles as they were edited. As noted above, the template was added to E20 Norr when this article was in gross violation of MOSDAB. It lacked an introductory line ("E20 Norr may refer to:"); it had bold that didn't belong; it had more than one blue link per entry; descriptions were offset by hyphen not comma; entries ended with periods. Was it appropriate to add to this page? If so, what does this template signify and how does it help Wikipedia? —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:24, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

I think all of these silly templates (,, etc.) should be killed. We have Special:ShortPages and Special:NewPages and Special:RecentChanges and Special:Watchlist. Which use-cases are missing that require these templates? An article's page length should be reported as accurately as possible. If we're intentionally padding an article's reported page size in order to manipulate query results, there's a deeper underlying issue that's not being properly addressed. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:48, 4 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree with MZMcBride. —Anomalocaris (talk) 19:53, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

I'll try to come in tomorrow when I have more time and respond more specifically to the comments above, but the general idea of the "Long Comment" templates is to allow articles, mostly disambiguations, as it ends up being, to be pushed way down the Short Pages report. This allows the first page (or 2 or 3) of the report to be used to quickly catch a variety of inappropriate short pages. It's a signal vs noise issue. The pages that get tagged meet a bare minimum level of quality, and do not need further attention from short pages partrollers. Most often they are short disambiguations that are pretty much fine as they are.

Without the Long Comment template, or some other way to push pages down the list, the noise of these pages that do not need patroller attention quickly floods out most usefullness of the report, IMHO.

The Short Pages Monitor was added a good while later after the Long Comment stuff was already in use. I'll have to dig around to see what the original logic for it was, but my memory was that it was not my idea, or desire, for it originally, but rather someone else had a purpose for it. That said I have tended to find the category associated with it useful to find pages that still have the template, but are no longer "short" These are often disambigs that have had a lot added to them. For these I generally just remove the old monitor template and long comment. But on occasion there have also been info dumps on disambigs and other oddities that required cleanup. - TexasAndroid (talk) 22:47, 15 February 2016 (UTC)


 * User:TexasAndroid: Random disambiguation pages often need cleanup. Most of my last 1000 edits have been of disambiguation pages that needed cleanup. I approached each page not knowing what I would find, and most of the time, I found a page needing cleanup. And most of these pages didn't have a Short Pages Monitor. So if Short Pages Monitor pages are no more likely to need cleanup than any other page, it's not helpful as a source of pages needing cleanup. If it isn't useful for anything we should get rid of it. —Anomalocaris (talk) 22:14, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Very short new article: edit filter 98
Noting the edit summary of a newly created 6-byte-long "short page":
 * 15:40, 30 November 2018 +6‎  N Ø̋ ‎ (←Created page with 'HUPPED') (Tag: very short new article)

"very short new article" is specified by filter 98. That filter has been in use since March 2009. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:03, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Noting that this example was tagged  one minute after creation. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:15, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Bot request for approval
I have an open bot request for a bot which will automatically manage the "long comment / short pages" system. See Bots/Requests for approval/Bot1058 5, and feel free to comment either here or there. Thanks, wbm1058 (talk) 03:00, 1 December 2018 (UTC)
 * See also the fairly recent discussion at – wbm1058 (talk) 11:46, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Line break handling
Can somebody please reduce the line breaking in this template? See Operation Conifer, as an example of the excessive amount of whitespace.--Nev&eacute;–selbert 02:29, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 03:49, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

Add by default to DAB pages?
It's possible I'm overlooking something but to me it seems that the main uses of Special:ShortPages are catching vandalism and checking whether low-content pages can either be expanded or nominated for speedy deletion. At the moment, though, it's almost exclusively DAB pages, save the first few, and since most DAB pages are supposed to be short, and short ones aren't necessarily more likely to require cleanup than long ones, I think the ShortPages page would be more useful if there were some way to automatically remove them (by tweaking its code or including this template in the various disambiguation templates by default). ─ ReconditeRodent « talk · contribs » 20:26, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I will interject on this discussion that the issue of disambiguation pages appearing on ShortPages was fixed back in January 2016. This did not affect set indices nor lists of lists as they were deemed different from dabs in certain aspects. See also Template:Long comment. Jalen Folf   (talk)  05:12, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * The magic word  is a behavior switch which controls this behavior. It marks a page as a disambiguation page, adds it to Special:DisambiguationPages and places inward links in Special:DisambiguationPageLinks. See mw:Extension:Disambiguator.  Template:Disambiguation (technical details) internally uses Dmbox, and look at the source code for Template:Dmbox to see that it sets the magic word. Apparently Template:Set index article doesn't internally set the magic word. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:54, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Relevant discussion: Template talk:Dmbox. —⁠andrybak (talk) 13:23, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
 * – wbm1058 (talk) 15:17, 5 December 2019 (UTC)