User:Dragons flight/AFD summary

This is an experimental attempt to create an alternative interface to AFD (articles for deletion) by using a bot to analyze and summarize active AFDs. At present, I consider this to be good enough to be useful, though it can still generate a variety of errors, so take the counts with a grain of salt. I would appreciate feedback on the talk page. Thanks. Dragons flight 15:13, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Subpages

 * All - All current AFDs
 * New - The most recent three days ordered newest first
 * Few votes - AFDs with fewer than 5 votes
 * Controversial - AFD with 50-80% delete after at least 5 votes
 * Contested - AFDs with at least one keep and one non-nominator delete vote
 * Uncontested - AFDs which have not been contested
 * Many votes - AFDs with at least 15 votes
 * Atypical votes - AFDs with at least 5 votes in categories other than Keep/Delete/Merge

For a bot that summarizes WP:PROD nominations, see WP:PRODSUM.

Description
The bot operates by looking at the bolded text on signed lines in an AFD, and attempting to interpret what it finds there. Failure to sign, failure to bold, or distributing a vote over several paragraphs are all good ways to confuse it right now and do result in miscounts. However, it does appear that most people are fairly uniform in how they express their opinions.

Each subpage presented here contains a list of AFDs that were still open at the time the parser was last run, which presently will be once every two hours. These have been grouped into the categories described in the list above. A given AFD can appear in several different categories if it meets the requirements of each (e.g. Few Votes and Uncontested).

The typical entry reports:


 * The name of the AFD (i.e. everything after "Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/")
 * The estimated number of "votes" cast (excluding "comments")
 * The percentage of votes favoring deletion. This is calculated as the sum of votes as "delete", "speedy delete", or "redirect" over the total number of votes which are not "comment" or "other".
 * The number of votes in the categories of:
 * delete (includes synonyms like destroy, annihilate, BJAODN etc.)
 * keep (includes cleanup, improve, etc.)
 * merge
 * move (i.e. rename, transwiki, etc.)
 * redirect
 * comment (i.e. no vote, question, etc.)
 * other - includes each time the parser found a signed line with bolded text but wasn't able to interpret what it meant.
 * Votes marked as "speedy" are indicated with a plus sign, so that Delete = 5+3 indicates 5 delete votes and 3 speedy delete votes, for a total of 8 delete votes.

Coloring
The items in the table are colored in the following way:

Known bugs and issues

 * Since the parser looks for signed lines (determined by a link to User space), a vote which is distributed over many lines or a signature that lacks a link to user space will cause it to behave in unexpected ways usually resulting a vote being overlooked.


 * Votes containing multiple options e.g. "Keep, Merge, Delete, or Redirect - Mr. Indecisive" will often be recorded based on the first command the parser recognizes.


 * AFDs containing additional third level " === " headers will do strange things to the parser often leading to multiple entries in the table. As third level headers should only contain the header for the AFD itself, I would appreciate it if people clean these up when they occur.


 * Some complex negative instructions like "Please, I do not want you to delete this" are read opposite to their intended meaning. The most common inversions, "do not delete", "don't delete" are correctly read as keep votes however.


 * Including multiple AFD instances on the same page (i.e. Articles_for_deletion/JustSpeed) will result in unexpected behavior.


 * The parser looks for bolded text in the nomination itself, but if it finds none or does not understand what it finds, then the nomination is counted as a delete vote.


 * There is no provision for identifying AFDs where multiple articles are being considered on the same AFD page.


 * In rare cases a parser failure will cause an entire day worth of AFDs to be omitted from the tables. In most case a failure notice will be given.


 * Some closed AFD will be listed as if they were still open if the closer deviated significantly from the standard header message for closing AFDs.