While
PetScan is primarily a category search/filter tool, it can also find short Orphan articles that may be candidates for Proposed deletion or Afd. In addition, Petscan is able to extract a small portion of articles from a large category (see Stub-class example below).
The next section contains various examples to produce the list of short articles.
Orphaned articles Orphaned articles from December 2013
At the Output tab, at the Format line, choose Plain text
For Sort, choose by size
Click the Categories tab
Click the Do it! button
At the results text, copy/paste into any notepad editor.
Once you obtain this list of short articles, review and pick articles that might be deletion candidates.
Filter by multiple categories
For a list of orphan articles without sources:
Depth 1
Page properties: Page size < 1000
Pass 1
Orphaned articles
Pass 2
Orphaned articles
All articles lacking sources
Optional:
Orphaned articles Orphaned articles from December 2013 Articles lacking sources from December 2013
Like the above section example, Output: Plain text, and Sort by size.
Filter for specific biographies
For a list of orphan articles about football (soccer) players:
Depth 4
Orphaned articles from September 2023 Association football players
Output: Plain text.
Filter for stub-class articles
For Stub-class articles, here is a PetScan example to create a smaller group of articles from a large category.
Depth: 1 Categories: Stub-Class football in France articles (Note: over 8,000 articles)
Page properties:
Namespaces - add Talk Size - Smaller or equal - 100 ( Results = 247 ) Redirects - No, No, No
Output: HTML or Plain text Sort: by title
Since the Stub class is set on the article's Talk page, review each article for a missing stub tag (to add) if needed; or if the article is improved, remove the stub tag and upgrade to class "Start" or higher.
Filter by biology "species" category
For a list of various biology articles without sources:
Depth 2 or 3
Category:Articles with 'species' microformats Category:Orphaned articles
Like the above section example, Output: Plain text, and Sort by Title.