User:TonyTheTiger/bot tagging

I am the Director of WP:WPChi, which has begun tagging articles with ChicagoWikiProject. This is a newly active project. In order to quickly assess all the thousands of articles within the domain of the project I have created a list of categories that I am having a bot tag. A bot is adding the tag to virtually all articles and subcategories that fall under either Category:Chicago or Category:Cook County, Illinois and a few other categories except for some subcategories of Category:Chicago railroads that will likely be manually tagged. As you can see if an article includes the Category:University of Chicago alumni it is tagged. What would make sense is that you might manually change the tag to. This would indicate that only a very select few Chicagoans would attach significance to the subject's role as a Chicagoan. As an encyclopedia, if an article wishes to have such a category, we should provide succinct information on the significance of it in such a way. Let me know if this is a problem. If this is truly a problem, you should consider whether you want this subject to be listed among University of Chicago alumni? If you wish to retain this category affiliation, are you averse to informing readers that the subject has very limited affiliation with Chicago by way of proper use of the tag? Going forward periodically (maybe twice a year) a bot will probably recheck these categories. Eventually, we may have a bot check more routinely. Therefore, the options to you if this is a problem are
 * 1) Manually remove the tag every time it appears (which could be very often in the future). (Not really appropriate for the reason listed in the final paragraph below)
 * 2) Remove the category that the bot is identifying (University of Chicago alumni).
 * 3) Convert the tag to , which I believe is the proper solution.
 * 4) Take action to have the bot abandon the task of autotagging and get people to tag the thousands of articles by hand.

You can see that the bot has helped us get from this 14 April 2007 summary to Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality statistics. The bot has been on hiatus this week but is only about half way through.

In case you are worried, it is in no way a bad reflection on an article to have importance=low tags. Even one of our few importance=top article for WP:WPChi (Talk:Michael Jordan) has a an importance=low tag. Nonetheless, it has become a featured article. Many important articles have importance=low tags from tangentially related projects. Tagging less relevant articles with importance=low should not cause problems and actually should assist in (1) building associations across projects and (2) bringing higher visibility to a subject or project.

A talk page banner is not part of an article. As such is not intended for the reader or for the purpose of appeasing an individual biographical subject. Talk page banners are suppose to provide information for editors. In the case of a project banner, it's purpose is to provide information to project members about the importance, quality and development of an article. A well done banner will place an article properly on a quality scale for all editors and a priority/importance scale for project members. In fact, it will place the article in a category for project members according to these scales. It may also point to underdevelopment by noting photo, infobox, and/or map omissions. In addition, it may point to related projects or support groups that also have an editorial interest in the subject matter. A talk page banner is not really a tool for the regular editors of a page who may or may not be interested in many of the projects that attach a banner to a page. A talk page project banner is for guidance of project members. It is not really appropriate for non-members of a project to make decisions on what information a particular project should assemble for its own purposes in its attempt to improve the encyclopedia.