User:Alba/Workspace/Cleanup cleanup/Wikipedia:Cleanup sorting

'To aid in improving article quality, articles needing cleanup are automatically sorted by topic and listed on Pages needing attention. Those topical pages can then be consulted by users interested in particular subject areas, such as members of specific WikiProjects.'

Summary
The approach developed here uses a robot (Pearle) to periodically find pages flagged for cleanup, wikification, etc., sort them by topic, and list them on topical subpages of Pages needing attention ("PNA"). The topical sorting is done by the categories which the articles belong to, and the categories Pearle uses are first manually placed on the topical subpages (or are found from the Portal pages listed there).

Status
Many, but not all, PNA subpages have been converted to the format needed for bot processing and have had the bot process them. The bot is run irregularly, perhaps every month or two depending in part on when sucessful database dumps are acquired. Thus the topical cleanup lists under PNA are generally a bit out-of-date, but still seem quite serviceable.

The PNA subpages still needing to be converted to the new format (and maybe to some extent further reorganized) as of 30 July 06 are those under the Culture and Arts heading on the PNA page.

Some of already-converted subpages still have old listings on them (as well as bot-generated listings). These old (often ancient) listings need eventually to be checked against the articles and as appropriate simply deleted or have their comments moved to the article talk page and perhaps have the article tagged with {cleanup} or something (and then have the listing removed from the PNA subpage).

How to convert a PNA subpage
If there is an existing PNA subpage which is to be directly converted into a single new format topical subpage, the procedure is relatively straightforward. You paste the wikitext of a template into the subpage as described below in. You then find and fill in the names of the appropriate Portals, WikiProjects, normal Categories, and stub Categories into the indicated places in the wikitext.

The reason for the Category links is to guide the bot: pages with {cleanup} etc tags in those categories (or in one or two levels of subcategories of those) will be listed on the subpage. The Portals you enter (if any) are used to get a whole set of such categories from the portal page. One has to be careful adding a portal because they may have too broad a list of categories, which will cause the PNA subpage to have way too many irrelevant cleanup listings.

Since the sorting is driven by categories, the old organization of the PNA subpages may not be what is desirable. It's advisable to reorganize the subpages in such cases, remembering that the aim to get reasonably-sized and reasonably-selective subpages.

Using a template for converting PNA subpages
The wikitext of the following subsection (Current template for conversion) should be used as the pattern for a page to be processed by the bot. Use "[edit]" of the section to obtain the section's wikitext, then paste it into the page being converted. If there are old (pre-robot) PNA listings on the page, move them to the place indicated in the comments of the wikitext, and remove the comment markings just above so that the "To be manually checked" text will be displayed.
 * Don't forget to be sure that the subsection is a subheader or subsubheader, not a full header!
 * When the bot processes the subpage, everything after "Do not add text below this point" will be removed, so there can be only one of these per page.
 * Resources:
 * Category:Portals
 * List_of_WikiProjects
 * WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types
 * Pages needing attention

Current template for conversion

 * Portals
 * Portal:(name)
 * WikiProjects
 * WikiProject (name)
 * Categories covered
 * Category:(name)
 * Stubs
 * Category:(name) stubs

— Do not add text below this point —


 * Cleanup needed
 * (to be updated by bot)
 * Expansion needed
 * (to be updated by bot)
 * Expert attention needed
 * (to be updated by bot)
 * Wikification attention needed
 * (to be updated by bot)
 * Neutrality questioned
 * (to be updated by bot)