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Alternatives to PetScan?
There seems to be issues with PetScan. Are there alternatives to it? Regards, Thinker78(talk) 05:07, 19 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Glad to know I wasn’t the only one having issues with it. I thought I must have been using it incorrectly! Best, —
a smart kitten[
meow 09:29, 19 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Cirrus search, despite its limitations, has more features than many editors realise. AWB can also produce lists, even if the user has no intention of editing those pages with AWB. For editors familiar with
SQL, there are
Quarry and {{
Database report}}, though both take far longer to code than PetScan. Of course, we have
WhatLinksHere.
Certes (
talk) 10:28, 19 December 2023 (UTC)reply
I'm constantly getting the
good old ®exp_filter bug (i.e. if PetScan fails, check all the tabs and fields for "®exp_filter") that's still not fixed.
85.76.13.79 (
talk) 12:19, 19 December 2023 (UTC)reply
That bug occurs when one copies the "Link to a pre-filled form...", pastes it into a wikitext or HTML page then views that in a browser (
details).
Certes (
talk) 13:51, 19 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Yes, but it also sometimes happens in other scenarios, too, e.g.:
That is surprising. I've not seen that behaviour before, and it doesn't fit the explanation I gave in the details link above. Perhaps there are multiple related bugs.
Certes (
talk) 14:27, 19 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Since it's happening to me all the time now, I managed to make a quick video to prove that it happens:
https://streamable.com/eltfm4 (link expires in 2 days).
85.76.13.79 (
talk) 14:31, 19 December 2023 (UTC)reply
I'd suggest reposting these details over at
Wikipedia talk:PetScan, and then pinging or user talk messaging its maintainer,
User:Magnus Manske. He edited a month ago and is still an admin, so may still be around. –
Novem Linguae (
talk) 03:46, 21 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Now the situation of Petscan is worse. Can't even access the tool and there is instead some message, "Wikimedia Cloud Services Error. This web service cannot be reached. Please contact a maintainer of this project." Regards, Thinker78(talk) 18:29, 26 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Possible template to expand underfilled categories.
{{
Import from list}}. Sometimes, a list article has more bluelinked entries than a corresponding category. The idea is that this template would be placed on the category page. Thoughts?
Mach61 (
talk) 02:22, 23 December 2023 (UTC)reply
You sort of didn't explain the use of the template. Regards, Thinker78(talk) 18:30, 26 January 2024 (UTC)reply
There are several other loops where A is a subcategory of B and B is a subcategory of A. I've listed them in
User:Certes/Reports/Circular categories. In many cases, A and B are identical: for example,
Category:1939 in gymnastics is a subcategory of itself. Can I assume that these are mistakes and remove them from themselves (except for esoteric metadata such as
Category:Hidden categories which, being a hidden category, is correctly a member of itself)?
Certes (
talk) 23:36, 6 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Thanks for the reply. I just stumbled across
Wikipedia:Database reports/Self-categorized categories, as you kindly linked it in an edit summary which I found when trying to fix something you'd already fixed. I'd spotted two of the three deliberate self-categorisations and will make a note of Noindexed so I don't try to "mend" it. I've applied a few different solutions such as finding better parents or nominating the category for deletion, but will leave it to the experts in future now I know that someone with a clue is on the case.
Certes (
talk) 20:35, 7 January 2024 (UTC)reply
One for the experts is
Category:Colleges affiliated to Bihar Engineering University. It consists of a template, which displays a huge navbox listing colleges that aren't in the category and categorises the category as its own single parent and only child.
Certes (
talk) 20:40, 7 January 2024 (UTC)reply
That one's easy, see
these edits. I only added the cat to two articles because those were the only ones transcluding the navbox that weren't categorised properly. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 22:50, 7 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Returning to my first tangent,
User:Certes/Reports/Circular categories now excludes categories which include themselves. In other words, it only lists loops of length exactly two, though loops of other lengths may also require attention.
Certes (
talk) 20:53, 7 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I've started working slowly through circular category pairs. Does
this sample of edits look helpful, or should I leave it to the experts?
Certes (
talk) 22:25, 7 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Thanks. Some are clear-cut: A is a subset of B but not vice versa. However, most cases have a
Venn diagram with two significant crescents. For example, Animals of Foo and Wildlife of Foo are similar but only the first includes livestock and only the second includes flora. These I have left alone, as neither category link is obviously better than the other, though there is a case for removing both.
Certes (
talk) 18:53, 8 January 2024 (UTC)reply
They both should be subcats of Fauna of Foo. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 21:19, 8 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Really? I'd have thought that Animals was almost synonymous with (and hence redundant to) Fauna.
Wildliferefers to undomesticated animal species, but has come to include all organisms that grow or live wild in an area, so it could be interpreted as another synonym for Fauna or as a wider class including flora etc. which sounds like a parent category rather than a subcat. Perhaps the problem is that many categories lack precise definitions (or that I'm too thick to find them).
Certes (
talk) 22:04, 8 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Sorry, I meant Biota of Foo. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 22:31, 8 January 2024 (UTC)reply
List of all articles of a category and its subcategories?
Dear Categoryographers,
I know how to use
Special:CategoryTree to find the tree of subcategories of a given category. But suppose I just wanted the list of articles that belong to a category or its subcategories? For a high-level category like
Category:Mathematics, it's totally infeasible to construct this by hand from the tree; is there a better way?
Thanks,
JBL (
talk) 19:28, 12 January 2024 (UTC)reply
It sounds like a job for
WP:PETSCAN, but that service seems down at the moment.
DMacks (
talk) 19:35, 12 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Thanks for the quick response. It does seem to be down, but I'll check it again later. FWIW someone else has suggested to me that
https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/massviews/ can also be used for this purpose. --
JBL (
talk) 19:49, 12 January 2024 (UTC)reply
It is not down, it is unstable—one moment up, next time down, five minutes later up. Regards, Thinker78(talk) 21:03, 12 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Beware that some things that look like subcategories aren't. Most Many unexpected categories are subcats of Mathematics by some devious route.
Certes (
talk) 19:53, 12 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Certes, as a person who does not think about categories at all (well, maybe on those occasions when I draft a new article), I'm afraid your comment is a bit obscure -- can you spell your meaning out more for me? (If the wmcloud massviews calculation can be believed (I'm not 100% sure), there are roughly 16,000 articles in Cat:Math and its subcats, so it couldn't really be true that most categories belonged in the Cat:Math tree in that case, right?) --
JBL (
talk) 19:57, 12 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Those articles might not be ones you would expect to find under Mathematics.
Certes (
talk) 21:41, 13 January 2024 (UTC)reply
@
Certes@
JayBeeEll Rather than Most categories are subcats of Mathematics by some devious route., I think what is shown here is that "Most articles are in subcats of Mathematics by some devious route." Not quite the same.
PamD 22:02, 13 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I started finding example surprising subcategories but then noticed that the original query was about articles. "Most" may be an exaggeration, but there are certainly surprising subcats. Some category examples:
These aren't isolated examples; I think a lot of the category tree can be traced back to Mathematics by at least one route where the individual steps are plausible even if the overall effect can be confusing.
Certes (
talk) 22:40, 13 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Ok interesting, thanks. This seems like pretty compelling evidence that the 16,000 or so articles found by
https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/massviews/ are only a small fraction of the total; maybe it has a cutoff for how deep in the tree it looks (though it seems, based on Certes' examples, that even five levels deep is enough to find some stuff pretty distant from the core topic area). --
JBL (
talk) 17:11, 14 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Somehow related
What we desperately need is a flag to say which categories record a strict
is-a relationship and which, although still valuable, record an "is somehow related to" relationship. Then we can have trees limited to is-a links. However, I'm too lazy to spend the rest of my life adding those flags, so I can't really expect anyone else to volunteer either.
Certes (
talk) 17:56, 14 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I would do it for the articles that I work on if it would work reliably, and probably for some others too, but it would indeed be an immense task. · · ·
Peter Southwood(talk): 18:02, 21 January 2024 (UTC)reply
The vagueness of relatedness is a serious shortcoming of the category method. Wikidata handles such questions by separate properties such as "Instance of", "Part of", "Subset of", "Located in", "Author of", "Parent of", "Influenced by", "Employed by", and so forth. I figure supplementing the cat system with a lot of template flags would take forever and a day, whilst cooking up an easier way to look at the tree through WD might take only half the time.
Jim.henderson (
talk) 02:20, 16 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I do not follow WD development closely, but is there a way to do the equivalent of looking a the category listing? On enwiki, we can walk up and down the tree, but last I knew of WD we could walk up from an article ("A is-a B") but not back down ("what else is-a B?").
DMacks (
talk) 02:23, 16 January 2024 (UTC)reply
@
DMacks: A utility to show the Wikidata relationship tree in graphical form was written by
Pintoch (
talk·contribs), I don't recall how it's accessed. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 12:17, 16 January 2024 (UTC)reply
@
Redrose64: hi! I don't remember writing such a tool myself, but I can point you to a few which do that:
the tool it is based on,
Wikidata generic tree, which might be a bit less convenient to use because you need to figure out how to tweak the URL for it to do what you need
I have taken the liberty of separating the last few replies into a new section. The big disadvantage of Wikidata SPARQL queries is that they are command lines. If we don't stay in touch with the ancient command traditions of Unix, DOS, and the like, we quickly forget how to do it. A year or two ago, WD had an "Entity Graph" feature. Click on the three dots to the right of the Q number. This created and ran a query to show every directly related WD item, and the Property that relates them, and some of the secondary (related to related) items if there was space enough in the window. The past few months, it has not worked; it always comes back as "Query is malformed". Seems to me the Entity Graph would be a useful feature, but it has been broken a long time. Perhaps a wide gulf has opened up, between WD and WP editors.
Jim.henderson (
talk) 05:00, 28 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Agree with the last cmt. In general I'm fairly relaxed about what goes into "Category:Cultural depictions of Foo". Btw
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Arts is aws dead as a dornail; only the VA one has much life left.
Johnbod (
talk) 18:43, 11 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Not sure if this is the right place for this, but just wondering about something!
Okay, hi! I'm really new to editing Wikipedia, so I'm sorry if this is totally the wrong place for this or if this is a subject that has already been discussed to death.
I've been using the "
Go to a random page in
Category:All uncategorized pages" link in the
Wikipedia:Task Center to add categories to a bunch of pages (I've probably made a couple of mistakes, I'm sorry if so!) and the majority of the pages coming up are uncategorized Template pages. I wanted to put a dent in this issue so I went to look at
Category:Wikipedia template categories, and it's... really confusing/overwhelming to look at. The Talk page is pretty dead (no new posts there since early 2022), so I came here to ask about it instead. Might there be some way to make this category less overwhelming to view/understand? It could be as easy as more clearly visually separating the first 5 items ("Wikipedia templates by...") from... the huge list of random templates.
I just wanted to raise it because clearly keeping on top of categorizing Templates is a bigger issue than categorizing Articles, and making it easier/more approachable might lead more people to contribute to this task!
Thanks for your time everyone :)
KRKwrites (
talk) 03:07, 20 February 2024 (UTC)reply
@
KRKwrites: Templates are a very mixed bunch,and I think it's probably more important, as well as simpler, to categorise articles. It might be best to just look at the category
Category:All uncategorized pages and pick out the real articles to work on.
PamD 06:54, 20 February 2024 (UTC)reply
And it looks as if
WP:Petscan ignores templates, by default, so searching on "All uncategorized pages" gets 107 hits. (I thought PetScan was something terribly technical until I actually looked at it and found how simple it is to use!)
PamD 07:48, 20 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Fair enough! I'm certainly happy to give Petscan a shot. I was just asking because I was thinking I'd be down to go categorize a bunch of templates if that would be useful, but if categorizing articles would be more helpful I'll do that instead :)
KRKwrites (
talk) 08:05, 20 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Dependent territories
An editor has been actively pursuing against the presence of dependent territories on Wikipedia. A discussion has been started at
Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Macau. Please share your comments to what has happened.
113.52.112.27 (
talk) 14:38, 30 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Quite a few
WP:CFD discussions have been closed as listify and delete, these are listed At
WP:CFDWM. Who can help making this happen?
Marcocapelle (
talk) 06:42, 31 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Propose: Allow individual category members to be annotated with descriptions or comments
I would like to request an option to allow individual category members to be annotated with descriptions or comments so they give clear context or elaboration for any specific entry. This would not only make it clear for the readers to learn why that page name was assigned to that certain category, but it would also save some categories being considered for deletion. For example, consider
Category:Super Bowl MVPs. In this case, it would be better to list the Super Bowls that player's page name ("PAGENAME") received the Super Bowl MVP in parentheses: PAGENAME (#). For example: if PAGENAME was
Troy Aikman who was the
MVP of
Super Bowl XXVII, then it would be like this:
Troy Aikman (
XXVII). Here, this means that Troy Aikman was the
MVP of
Super Bowl XXVII.
The category system does not support that. One alternative is to have a
stand-alone list article. Because it would be a manually-written article, it could be formatted in any way and include whatever details and links are desired. We have a nice table in
Super_Bowl_Most_Valuable_Player_Award#Winners that could be extracted and reformatted (you can already sort it by name if you like). Do we have a category MOS relating to use of a more-detailed/alternately-organized list in the header of a category itself?
Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates for a comparison of these methods.
DMacks (
talk) 18:23, 13 April 2024 (UTC)reply
"
Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates for a comparison of these methods." There are pros and cons to each method, including technical, philosophical, reader-facing, and editor-related ones. Note that the category-as-list comment was added after this response of mine.)
DMacks (
talk) 18:36, 13 April 2024 (UTC)reply
History of instruction changes of Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy