Wikipedia talk:Featured topics/count

Minor quibble really but...
The counts differ by one :/ - rst20xx (talk) 14:38, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * ...and I just added up all the numbers given for each topic at Featured topics and got 387 :/ - rst20xx (talk) 14:45, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * You forgot to subtract the two in two topics listed on the page. Zginder 2008-07-17T15:38Z (UTC)
 * Ahh yes, duh! But anyway, that still doesn't explain the 386 - rst20xx (talk) 19:36, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, I didn't know this so that explains it. I'll add a note on the page fix it - rst20xx (talk) 19:39, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Count needs updating...
to reflect the fact that Degrassi: The Next Generation (season 7) is now featured, and that Wikipedia:Featured topics/Seasons of Degrassi: The Next Generation has every article featured. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 19:19, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Done - rst20xx (talk) 14:37, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Updating automatic counts
I'm working on fixing some of the article count discrepancies right now so some numbers may look a little funny until the servers process the job queue and I re-fix. Hang tight, should just take a few hours. Franamax (talk) 02:54, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Update: I was able to fix one more of the erroneous category pagecounts. There are still some errors which very much seem to be rooted in the database tables. I've asked for some help on this, it's late where I am, so I will try to address this tomorrow. Of the 5 problems I found, 2 are fixed - not that those fixes improve the numeric accuracy of this page yet! Franamax (talk) 09:14, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Just following up, since the software fix is now in effect for category counts. If PAGESINCATEGORY doesn't match the actual count, just viewing the category will now correct the count (if there's less than 200 members in the category). You might need to purge or make a null edit to the page containing the PAGESINCATEGORY function to get it to update.
 * And it looks to me like you guys have totally abandoned the categorization scheme we were trying to debug. Can they be CFD'ed just to clean things up? Franamax (talk) 01:03, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh yes, I forgot about that! I'll do that soon! Err yeah, we came up with a new category system for Good topics not long after our discussion. Sorry if you feel like you wasted your time, though IMO your helping us was still very beneficial as you came some way to fixing that problem at that time, and we've learnt a lot about the reliability of the system (answer: should now be reliable, wasn't before) - rst20xx (talk) 01:15, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * It wasn't a waste of time at all - I learned more about the software and I got a change made to MediaWiki!! In geek terms, that's Olympic gold :) ("Olympic gold" may be a trademark of the IOC) Very much worth it, and the fix applies to all of the WMF wikis. We done good! :) Franamax (talk) 01:37, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh, did that fix actually only come about because of this?!? I missed that! In that case, yes, nice work! (Quick question though: what's this about "less than 200 members in the category"?) rst20xx (talk) 01:54, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, your problem led directly to an upgrade of MediaWiki. I chased down the location of the DB errors, and Simetrical astutely noticed that when viewing a category with less than 200 members (so that the contents are all shown on one page), the correct count is available - so by adding 5 lines or so of code, the count can be corrected if it's wrong. The key there is that it only applies to categories where all the contents show up on the first page, i.e. there is no "Next 200" link showing. However, I'm chasing Simetrical over their even better idea of recounting categories periodically, which would have to be done on the servers. Franamax (talk) 02:06, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Ah okay, thanks, that would be most helpful - rst20xx (talk) 15:44, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Things to keep an eye on
Sometimes when a topic is being made, the topic will for most of the making process slip into the wrong categories (good instead of featured categories or vice versa). (Tip to help alievate this: If it's a good topic, update the article milestones on the GAs first. If it's a featured topic, update the FAs first. Still, even doing that isn't completely foolproof) And the job queue then takes a good while to correct this problem and move the pages back to the right cats, so there's a temporary discrepancy in terms of the numbers. Basically I think that this is very manageable and only temporary but it may still be worth keeping an eye on, so I've started this section just for that.

So, currently going wrong (I'll strike these as they fix themselves):
 * Various hurricanes from Category 5 Pacific hurricanes (currently 9 I think), and also Hydrogen (the page was vandalised) are in Category:Low-importance Featured topics articles instead of Category:High-importance Featured topics articles (remove these 10 and we have 69 in this cat, which is right. Not going to work out if Category:High-importance Featured topics articles is right until this has sorted itself) - rst20xx (talk) 01:47, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Category 5 Pacific hurricanes is in Category:Wikipedia Good topics instead of Category:Wikipedia featured topics - rst20xx (talk) 01:47, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Adriatic campaign of 1807–1814 is currently in Category:Wikipedia fully featured topics (ditto) - rst20xx (talk) 01:47, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * List of alumni of Jesus College, Oxford is in Low instead of High - rst20xx (talk) 14:29, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Aston Villa, Jesus College Oxford, Physical geography of Somerset and The Simpsons (season 1) are now wrongly in the fully featured category. The last of these should be good, and the others featured - rst20xx (talk) 14:29, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Right, I have been over everything, and found and corrected a few errors (the recently created Template:ArticleHistory/testcases was throwing the numbers off by one so things needed to be adjusted for it). After a thorough examination, I can now say that all the counts are right, apart from the 3 FTs and 1 GT being in the FFT category, and the 1 FT being in the GT category, all of which are noted above - rst20xx (talk) 01:43, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Key visual novels is now in the FFT cat instead of the GT cat... argh - rst20xx (talk) 10:37, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
 * You know, I just made a bunch of null edits that fixed all of them. How unexpected... rst20xx (talk) 10:41, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Accurate counting
Alright, in ref to this change, I've launched you on a new course with some code tricks. They look OK to me, but I would define them as high-risk - I have only 80% confidence they will be useful and not harmful. Revert as you wish. However I'm 95% confident my changes won't adversely affect your objectives. Question: I thought pages that are edited to be in a different category are meant to "actually" change in 24 hours (if you know what I mean by this), but this seems not to be happening. How long might it take?!? rst20xx (talk) 17:51, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I've stolen some code from Ultraexactzz, which you can now see (in the edit window) at the top of the page - this makes a hidden forced update ("purge") of all the categories you're trying to count on this page, every time you click on this page. In theory, this updates the page-counts in each category.
 * And I've added a clickable-link to "Update counts" - the net result should be that viewing this page forces category counts to be updated, and clicking "Update" makes this page regenerate - whereupon those updated category counts now get shown here. From my recent conversations, the PAGESINCATEGORY keyword doesn't show a new number until the page (i.e. this page) gets edited or purged.
 * My changes should be "low-harm" - although I would be interested in how many places this (Ft/c) page gets transcluded where people might be clicking on it.
 * And sorry if this seems impenetrably complex, because, well, it is... If my changes seem to make things work funny, or if you are nervous about them at all, please just revert them! Franamax (talk) 02:37, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * No, that all looks good, thanks. The cunning trickle purge stuff is just what we need. This page is only used by Featured topics so no worrys there. Good topics/count is just an editable bit of text, no clever stuff, so nothing to worry about there either - rst20xx (talk) 15:16, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, certain changes are updated via the job queue. The actual time for this to happen depends on the length of the queue, which you can see at Special:Statistics. It is 150,250 as I write, which is not too bad.
 * However, we are still emerging from the recent "special period" when the whole site hung. Looking at the sysadmin log, I see the latest entry is about the job queue having not been working correctly. I have no idea if this relates to your problem, but it seeems plausible that some update jobs may have been stalled or lost. For that matter, I think site statistics are still disabled, so the queue length might not be current either. You may need to go around and purge various pages to get things back in sync. Franamax (talk) 18:15, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm, well I have been purging pages, but I guess all we can do is keep an eye on it. That's a plausible explanation as to why it's slower than usual, thanks - rst20xx (talk) 20:15, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Looking at the log for today, it seems to me that it's just being very, very slooow - rst20xx (talk) 13:55, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Bot updated?
I'm curious why these pages aren't bot updated on a regular interval with proper formatting. I would think that would be more efficient and I'm certain that someone like could whip up a bot to update these pages if you give him details of how they are updated... Technical 13 (talk) 05:21, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Another option for keeping these mostly up to date automatically would be to categorize all of the pages that are being counted and using the   magic word... Technical 13 (talk) 01:31, 5 January 2014 (UTC)