Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot

Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team aims to work toward a set of articles suitable for release in print, CD, DVD, or some combination. To that end, Wikipedia articles are assessed by categorizing their talk pages by quality and importance. A bot visits those categories every three days and collects the articles present there into lists; see the index.

This page describes the output of the bot, as well as how to set up the categories for a given subject (for example, chemistry, military history, music, etc.), for the bot to visit them and collect the information into lists.

Output
The following are generated automatically by the bot every 3 days or so:
 *  Foobar articles by quality  – an article list similar to a worklist, organised by assessment then by importance, then alphabetically (example). It includes a link to both the current version of the article and the version found on the day of the last assessment change.  A table listing 500 articles is around 100 kB, so for large projects, the table may be automatically split into subpages, as is done at Military history. It may also show the comments left for that article, if your Project banner is set up to do this.
 * Statistical summary – shows how many, how many , and similar articles are assessed for a project (example). This summary can be conveniently "pasted" into a project page, as is done at Version 0.5.
 * Log – this records all changes since the last run. Unexpected changes, such as downgrading an article, or raising it more than two assessment classes at once, are shown in bold (example). The maximum size of the log file is approximately 100,000 bytes. Daily changes will be appended to the log until it reaches 100k, at which point the oldest entries will be overwritten. If the current run will be larger than 100k, it will split the update into multiple parts, and the next day's log will start from scratch. All updates will still be available through the History tab.

Setting up for the bot
First, verify that you have a WikiProject as described at WikiProject Council/Proposals.

If your WikiProject is interested in using the bot to generate the above information, you need to do the following:
 * 1) Create a "by quality" category named after the subject area (Foobar), such as Category:Foobar articles by quality. This should have subcategories such as Category:A-Class Foobar articles, Category:B-Class Foobar articles, etc. (example). Usually these have a hyphen, and a capital C in Class.  Place the main Category:Foobar articles by quality in  for the bot to detect it. The categories described above can be created with the help of this page or with AWB using a supplied plugin.
 * 2) * Optionally, articles may also be rated by importance, sometimes called priority. In order for the bot to collect the importance assessments, a new "by importance" category is needed, with subcategories for "Top-importance", "High-importance", etc. (example). For historical reasons, the word "importance" must be lowercase. Place the "by importance" category in.
 * 3) Create or adapt a project template similar to one used by Version 1.0 Editorial Team, WP1.0. An easy way to do this is by using . For more complex work, have a look at the templates used by the Military History project, WPMILHIST, and the Beatles WikiProject, WikiProject Beatles. For a sample code of how to detect comments subpages, see Biography WikiProject's template, WikiProject Biography.
 * 4) Tag a few article talk pages using the template, and include appropriate assessments and a sample comment (if you're using this feature). Before browsing away from the articles' talk pages, though, double-check that appropriate categories appear on the talk page.  These taggings will provide some test data, so you can check that everything is working.
 * 5) Wait until the bot does its daily run, or visit this web form and run "Manual update" right away.  You should see a new row for your project in the table in the main index.  The bot will also generate the other output automatically; after it does, check that the tagged talk pages have appeared as expected before assessing the rest of your project's pages.

Maintaining the lists
Once the bot is working, to build the list of articles in a project you simply add information to the article talk pages. On each article talk page you add the project template. Optionally, you include the quality assessment. Check the log periodically to check that no one is vandalizing your work. Hopefully you now have a useful collection of data for your project!

If you have any problems, please contact us.