Wikipedia talk:Featured articles/mismatches

First run
Woohoo! Awesome, thanks to everyone who made this happen. I am guessing that these two talk pages are those mentioned earlier by DrKay as the "rogue" entries. I will go in to those archives to see if I can break those links. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  16:13, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * oh well, that didn't work because then the errors show at Category:Article history templates with errors. I'll leave this to the experts, otherwise we might just note those two pages as exceptions.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  16:22, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

The report doesn't list the page names correctly because they are unexpected outside mainspace. They are: I couldn't figure out where the cats are being generated from. -- Green  C  16:20, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Template_talk:Article_history/Archive_5
 * Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_League_of_Copyeditors/Archive_4


 * See my post above ... you can see that by removing the |current status = FA, I just moved the error from one place to another. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  16:23, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Requested a new template feature: Template_talk:Article_history -- Green  C  16:36, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * The second one comes from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject League of Copyeditors/Archive 4; maybe you all can figure out how to break those links without introducing an error at Category:Article history templates with errors. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  16:38, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Will try this. -- Green  C  16:56, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * And same here. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  17:33, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

New report
,, , and - per request of Hog Farm a new report is generated for Featured Articles similar to  Good articles/mismatches. It will run weekly, but whatever you prefer - it takes less than 30 seconds to complete, from Toolforge automatically via cron. Any questions or problems let me know. -- Green  C  16:17, 4 December 2021 (UTC)


 * "In Category:Featured articles but not on Wikipedia:Featured articles" and "In Wikipedia:Featured articles but not in Category:Featured articles" are showing articles that the bot hasn't processed yet. The other stuff should be cleaned up: I will fix the bypassed redirects. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  16:20, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Is there is a good date/time to run the report? -- Green  C  16:23, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Check what time of day User:FACbot runs, and make sure to run after that. On the other hand, anyone likely to be watching this page will know where those errors come from. Even if you alter the time of day you run, we will still get errors. For example, Nikkimaria delisted those six yesterday around 02:00 UTC, so they will stay un-FACbot-ified for the remainder of today at least.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  16:32, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * (FACbot) should be in on this conversation. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  16:41, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Nikkimaria almost always does her FAR run on Friday or Saturday, so coordinating which day of the week to run this report may be one solution. I am not convinced we need these three times a week, so setting it to one day a week (say for example, Tuesday) would alert the Coords to be sure to get their promote/archive and delists done not on that day or the day before. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  16:42, 4 December 2021 (UTC)


 * The FACBot runs the fac run twice a day, at 00:05 and 12:05 UTC. The far run is daily, at 00:15. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  19:28, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Would it work, then, to have this run on Mondays or Tuesdays at 00:30 ?? Sandy Georgia (Talk)  19:48, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
 * OK Monday 00:30 UTC -- Green  C  03:25, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Changed to 12:30 FACbot appears to make most edits during the noon-time run, should help reduce any false positives. -- Green  C  23:20, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
 * wonderful !! Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  14:31, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Robert Howard Hodgkin
I have checked everything I know to check, and can’t find the error at Robert Howard Hodgkin; everything looks to be in order. I believe Hog Farm is traveling; might you have a look? Sandy Georgia (Talk)  14:26, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't see any error either. DrKay (talk) 14:36, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * can you see anything that might be causing this one to show? Sandy Georgia (Talk)  14:42, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Was able to take a quick look, and couldn't see anything either. Only thing I could think of would be if the entry at WP:FA contained an exotic non-standard character of some flavor, but that seems unlikely. Hog Farm Talk 14:44, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Interesting. Where did they come from, and how could we have known? Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  16:27, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I guess if this comes up again, we can just retype the article name on the FA page and see if it goes away the next week. Hog Farm Talk 16:28, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * added the entry here, maybe they remember doing something out of the ordinary with that. Hog Farm Talk 16:29, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Fixed. Computers know :) Second time it happened. Something in the FA process is adding the same hidden characters. -- Green  C  16:30, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Weird. My best guess is that it comes from the subst’d template that creates the nomination page ??    I don’t think it could be related to FACbot, but worth checking. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  16:58, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * That might be it - the newly promoted FAs are added to WP:FA by the promoting coordinator; if the heading is adding special characters and the coordinator copies from the header and then pastes that into WP:FA, that would explain where the characters are coming from. Hog Farm Talk 17:04, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * But Ian Rose promoted the other one (Featured article candidates/Piano Sonata No. 31 (Beethoven)/archive1), so that points away from something Buidhe is doing. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  17:01, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I've definitely copied from the FAC before, but I'll be careful not to do that in the future if that's causing the problem. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  18:00, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Buidhe, if that is a problem, it's only because something in the article name is malformed for some other reason. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  18:11, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Queried VPT. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  17:16, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Also, in case they can think of any oddity in how the FAC was created. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  17:35, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * There was a left-to-right mark before the first letter. Software sometimes inserts it to ensure text is displayed left-to-right if it happens to be placed in a right-to-left context. If you omit the initial character when you copy-paste a page heading and type it manually instead then you can probably avoid it. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:41, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * The same text with an LTR (left-to-right) character was also pasted here (I removed it). That can happen when copying text from some behind-the-scenes pages like a history or a contributions page. However, I don't recall getting the problem with an article name. Johnuniq (talk) 23:19, 3 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Omitting the first character when copy-pasting may help no matter where you copy from. If you copy-paste something to the "Characters" field at https://r12a.github.io/app-conversion (not a Wikimedia-related site) and click "View in Uniview" then you can see the names of characters including non-displayed characters. Clicking the name gives more information about the character. PrimeHunter (talk) 05:43, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Hey, my thinking on this is the report did what it should, uncover hidden problems. It looks like the source of the problem can be varied and there is no smoking gun - could be user-side software or wiki-side context with no one person or procedure at fault. I don't think much is to be done but be aware of ghost mismatches caused by hidden characters. If it looks like there are a lot we can revisit with more forensics, or bots can always be made to search and destroy if justified by volume. -- Green  C  07:11, 4 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Yes, it seems that the bot has served a purpose beyond that for which it was intended, and we can just correct these when/if they recur by retyping the article name at WP:FA and anywhere else the Coord added it (such as Goings-on). Sandy Georgia (Talk)  14:04, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Bot stalled ?
the bot last ran on January 3 ? Regards, Sandy Georgia (Talk)  07:02, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Yup. There were changes to the layout of Featured articles which broke the bot's parser and aborted when it couldn't get > 6000 results. It's update to the new layout and working again. I made a couple changes:
 * If it can't parse > 6000 from Featured articles instead of silently aborting it will post an error message.
 * The parser can work with the new and old layout.
 * -- Green  C  16:12, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you GreenC; were those changes the ones that made starting here?  Making sure Sdkb is aware of this page … Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  16:19, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Appears so. Changes to the page will be needed sometimes no fault of Sdkb. I think the solution above is the best we can do. The equiv GA page has been stable for years which a couple bots parse. Green  C  16:46, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

FAR ?
That looks like it needs to go to FAR for a procedural delist? Ron Hamence with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 --> Ron Hamence This report is coming in handy. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  12:48, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
 * PS, for anyone who may not know, or reads this in the future, the procedural FAR (Featured article review/Ron Hamence with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948/archive1) allows for a record to be left on article talk and in FA archives (FAR in this case), and for the FAR Coords and FACBot to do the work of updating the talk page, etc. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  18:58, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Also, just to keep a record of the steps needed, often in cases like this, one finds someone already tinkered with the article history, and it needs to be fixed: Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  19:35, 31 January 2022 (UTC)