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This may be slightly off topic for the orphanage, but is there a bot or something that detects and lists walled gardens? Obviously a linkless orphan is a trivial walled garden, which would be flagged as an orphan. Is there something to detect more complex walled gardens.
If there isn't such a tool, what effect would reducing the orphan linkage criteria (e.g. to 0 link only) have on the elimination of walled gardens? (If we require 2 links, that means that walled gardens must be of size at least 3 to avoid being flagged as orphans.) Zodon ( talk) 20:51, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
It would help a lot if people would LEAVE RED LINKS if they have a good potential for becoming an article, or even if they don't. I used the search feature on many of the titles of my articles and nearly or more than doubled the links to some of my pages.
A lot of people want their articles to be so aesthetically perfect and they delete all dead links. There would be much more integrity if people were not so neurotic about red links. Daniel Christensen ( talk) 19:15, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
For your interest, User:Para has, at my request, kindly put together a tool showing the daily additions and removals of the {{ orphan}} template. The tool is here: http://toolserver.org/~para/orphans/ -- Tagishsimon (talk) 00:45, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
FWIW, it looks as if you're doing about the same amount of removal business per day as {{ coord missing}}, figures for which are here. {{ coord missing}} is, of course, hidden as far as the normal user is concerned. -- Tagishsimon (talk) 00:48, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
Maybe I missed it somewhere while reading through this talk page, but can someone explain again why "Our goal is to try to de-orphan newly-tagged orphans as soon as possible, and then work in reverse-chronological order through the backlog." Wouldn't it be better to tackle the old ones first to rid them of the tag that's been there too long? Also I think there should be some more explanation as to the purpose of categorizing de-orphan attempts with the att= parameter, and how this helps with our goal. -- OlEnglish ( Talk) 23:40, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
I'm writing a toolserver version of Special:Lonelypages. It's basically finished, but the toolserver is expected to be out of sync with Wikipedia until the end of the month, so I won't be releasing the tool soon. In the meantime, I'd like to pin down exactly what qualifies as list/year articles per the criteria.
I'd appreciate comments on which of the article types below should be excluded from the orphan count:
Of course, if anyone knows a more clever way to identify lists - or thinks I've left something out altogether - please bring it up! Thanks! -- JaGa talk 09:06, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
(disambig)
, (disambiguation)
, (surname)
, and (name)
Be sure to exclude all the articles that use the {{ surname}} template, since these are a kind of disambiguation page. Such articles seem to dominate the early entries on the current version of Special:LonelyPages.-- ragesoss ( talk) 00:37, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
As for lists, many WikiProjects have a list class, so you could consider any article having the template class="assess-list " style="background: #c7b1ff; text-align: center; " | List transcluded onto its talk page as being a list. -- A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 20:09, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
I've been working on an article for some time and have had trouble linking it to other articles. I tagged it with the {{ orphan}} article a while back because it had 2 actual links and the rest are disambiguous links, links to lists, or links to users. The list of non-orphaned articles with the orphan tag lists this article because it counts one of the disambiguous links as a real link. The link in question is a link from the only other page on the disambiguous page (For <the other person with the same name>, see <the other person>). My point is, the list being generated isn't picking this up. The pages aren't linked by their subject in any way, only their name. To me, the rule should be that there are three links from other pages that are subject related. I'm going to go back and do my best to just find another link to add to avoid the problem all together but I thought that it was something you might want to check out/be aware of. OlYeller Talktome 16:58, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Here is an idea: start a WikiProject to place a navbox in every Wikipedia article. In my opinion, navboxes are the best way to de-orphan an article. The typical navbox contains at least several dozen articles, and a single placement provides instantaneous links from all those pages.
In a brief study I did of 10 random articles, 7 of them had one or more navboxes. This does not mean exactly 70% of Wikipedia articles have them, but if that figure were near accurate, there would be close to 860,000 articles lacking them. the three articles I observed that lacked them could have used them.
Since every article fits into one or more categories, every article, likewise, can fit into one or more navboxes. Sebwite ( talk) 03:59, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
[[necessary. Sebwite ( talk) 23:42, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
WP:Set index pages such as England's Looking Glass are a form of disambiguation page and should not have any links, therefor the template {{ Orphan}} is not appropriate for such a page. -- PBS ( talk) 20:55, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
{{ Orphan}} is a maintenance issue that does not aid our readers. Editorial maintenance issues should be discussed on the talk page not in the article space -- that is why we have talk pages. If someone was to write in plain text at the top of a page "This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. ..." it would be removed as vandalism, and the person who put it there would be told to discuss such issues on the article's talk page. Putting such messages in a box does not alter the fact that it provides no useful information for the reader and is only of use to an editor. -- PBS ( talk) 20:51, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
I followed this link after I posted the other, this would seem to be the better place as it is the project page. (dogs and wagging tails), but the other is specifically about the template so take your pick. -- PBS ( talk) 23:50, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
But as you have answered at Wikipedia talk:Orphan#This maintenance template should be placed on the talk page lets carry on the conversation there. -- PBS ( talk) 23:58, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
What is to be gained by labelling Surname pages as orphans? There is unlikely to be any useful link which can be made to the page - they serve a disambiguation-like function - and anyone seeking information on the surname will search, or use "Go", on that name itself. The pages can also be reached via categories. The {{ orphan}} tag is ugly and irrelevant on pages such as Addey or Achillini. Please can this project agree that {{ surname}} pages should not be tagged as Orphans? I have raised this issue somewhere before, but I can't find where it was, and I don't think anyone replied (perhaps it was the wrong place to raise it!) PamD ( talk) 08:26, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
The orphan criteria has been updated to exclude surname pages (and other set indexes). As most of these pages (example Franklin (surname)) act like disambiguation pages, most of them will not have many direct links so it was felt that there is no need to tag them as orphans. This change was discussed and implemented without objection.
JaGa, who maintains toolserver reports reporting orphan status that are used for tagging and untagging, has been asked to update his orphan reports in accordance with criteria change. He does not want to do that without input from the Disambiguation and Anthroponymy projects. His position appears to be if an article is not an orphan candidate, then it must be a DAB page. As he previously had objections to including surname pages in his DAB reports, he therefore feels he need agreement from other projects.
Everyone else who has commented so far doesn't see it that way. The opinion has been that whether surname pages are or are not DAB pages is irrelevant to whether they are or are not orphan candidates. That surname pages (and other set indexes) can simultaneously be not DAB pages and not orphans. DAB status and orphan status should be treated separately.
To bring this to a resolve, I'm posting this at the Disambiguation, Anthroponymy, and Orphanage projects. To consolidate discussion, I suggest that Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation be used for all responses since JaGa's main concern seems to be about DAB classification.
Links to relevant discussions: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]
If there are any objections, please let's here them. Thanks. -- JLaTondre ( talk) 14:14, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
Ok, now that we've finished discussing the discussion on where the discussion is going to be discussed, can we discuss the actual discussion now? :) Anyway, my opinion on this is that the same logic applies to set index articles as to disambiguation pages: they aren't necessarily meant to have any incoming links, so it makes sense to exempt them from the orphan criteria, as we do with disambiguation pages. Cheers, -- Aervanath ( talk) 16:55, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
Not sure whether I need to restate my view again, but just in case: surname, given name, and Set Index pages should not be labelled as "orphans", as they are pages to which there should usually be no, or very few, links (there might reasonably be a link from a related name). PamD ( talk) 21:54, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
Just in case someone out there cares, I've started a log of all the articles I've de-orphaned here. The reason I'm posting this here is because I'm also starting on a "Guide to De-orphaning" of sorts, which will probably just consist of a list of tips and hints, but anyways I'll be accumulating this list as I go and thought others may find it interesting to read. -- œ ™ 03:00, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
Sometime soon I'd like to remove inactive members from the list, mostly those that have not edited at all for at least a year, they will be put on the inactive list. Those that have not been active in specifically this area of maintenance will have their status changed to 'inactive'. But I'd much rather prefer it if those editors would change their status themselves. Cheers :) -- œ ™ 03:52, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
There's an old adage, proven many times over, that as soon as you invent a metric to score performance, people will stop trying to perform and start trying to score.
I've been seeing this in play quite a lot lately with orphan tags. Articles are tagged as orphans because they are insufficiently integrated into the encyclopedia. "Integration" is a nebulous concept, so for operational purposes it is replaced by the metric "number of incoming links". Some people then go around adding low-value links into See also sections, solely so that they can score three or more incoming links, thus allowing them to remove the orphan tag. Unfortunately the addition of these links often degrades the articles to which they are added, and need not imply that the de-orphaned article is any better integrated than it was before.
This morning, for example, I noticed a case where someone has deorphaned Flora of Tubuai by adding links from Tubuai (Austral Islands) (a good, useful link), and the first three bluelinked plant species on the list. Does anyone think this improves the encyclopedia? Personally, I think not.
If we blow this article-scale problem up to encyclopedia-scale, it looks like this: "number of articles de-orphaned" has become a metric by which some people measure their performance in improving Wikipedia, and some of those people are now degrading Wikipedia in order to score highly against that metric.
I see this as a problem. But I don't know what the solution is. Education maybe? Any ideas?
Hesperian 00:18, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Interesting timing, looking at the above section.
As I created Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory today, I realized it would ever be an orphan, and added a comment at its top to say "yeah, it is an orphan, but it is a happy orphan and needs only its one parent, IMO" or some such. In this case, there may well never be another article that NEEDS to link to this notable lab. It ran from 1948 to 2002. It did great work. And it is gone. New articles are very unlikely to link to it. Someone looking for it, however, should be able to find it here.
Another I edited today was American Roentgen Ray Society. It might actually wind up well-linked as notable members have articles that might reasonably point to it.
Thanks on the deorphan. :)
att=
parameter of the {{
orphan}} template already handles that kinda, in a way, because when applied it removes articles from the monthly category (
Category:Orphaned articles from September 2009) and places them into the attempted de-orphaned articles category (
Category:Attempted de-orphan from September 2009), yet it still remains in the general all-inclusive category (
Category:All orphaned articles). --
œ
™ 05:48, 20 September 2009 (UTC)Is there a way to filter or search the list of orphan articles? With over 100,000 articles on the list, it is rather difficult to find topics I know enough about to know where links should come from. -- Pakaraki ( talk) 08:12, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
Back in August, Wavelength and I de-orphaned (or merged or deleted) all the orphaned language articles up to July 2009 that we could find. I'm now covering the subsequent months by filtering for titles containing 'language', 'linguistics', or 'dialect'. If I miss anything, please let me know. (For some of the really obscure languages I may only make a single link, but if that's from a higher node in the classification of the language, it will be easy for anyone to find, and so IMO should be good enough.)
How do we prevent orphan tags from being added? Gnau language was tagged in Feb and then again in Nov. A language with 1300 speakers is not likely to be relevant to many other articles; the fact that it's linked from Torricelli languages is probably as much as we can hope for, unless it's expanded or somehow gets in the news. kwami ( talk) 00:27, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Addbot_22 ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 17:28, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
As of 5.0.0.1 (released hopefully next week. Now in snapshot in http://toolserver.org/~awb/snapshots) will be correctly tagging Orphans using the definition of "less than 3 incoming links ...". I noticed that the project encourages people to tag articles with NO incoming links. I proposed this update for AWB Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature_requests#Another tweak for orphans. My question is this means that we also UNTAG articles with 1 or 2 incoming links? If yes, I have to slightly modify my request above. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:57, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
I volunteered to cleanup the backlog a bit. Please read my BRFA at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Yobot 11. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 13:24, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
Yobot finished its run tests. Please check the BRFA. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 12:32, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, I know its not a word...
Are there any tools that can assist in finding articles that might be good ones to link to an orphaned articles?-- RadioFan ( talk) 13:00, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
According to WP:ORPH, "Currently our priority is to focus on orphans with NO incoming links at all, and it is recommended to only place the {{ orphan}} tag if the article has ZERO incoming links from other articles." Should something about this be mentioned in the Template section of the project page, so that people looking at this description of the orphan tag would know about the recommendation? -- JTSchreiber ( talk) 05:05, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
The criteria for deciding an orphan states:only place the {{orphan}} tag if the article has ZERO incoming links from other articles. I have been deorphaning for a fair while now and have left the orphan tag on articles which had just one or two incomming links. However I'm not sure if that is the best thing to do. Wouldn't it be better if I could just remove the tag for 1 link if I cannot possibly hope to ever hit the magic number of three? -- Deepak D'Souza ( talk) 09:50, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Aervanath, I think most of the orphans have no incoming links anyway and the last year or two we tag only pages with no incoming links anyway. MY bot ran and removed orphan tags from pages with 3 or more incoming links that were still tagged as orphans some months ago. Let's find someone to give us some statistics of tagged pages with 1 or 2 links. Maybe you are right but I think we can do it with some other method than detag and retag. -- Magioladitis ([[User
talk:Magioladitis|talk]]) 08:57, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Hey all, just so everyone knows, I got orphaned articles on the Opentask portion of the community portal! Hopefully that gets some more interest, Sadads ( talk) 14:18, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
The following articles seem to form something of a walled garden. They do have outgoing links, but the regional pages generally have no incoming links except from one another. The Japan page also has incoming links from Flags of country subdivisions, List of Japanese flags, and Rising Sun Flag.
I wasn't sure how – or whether – this should be dealt with, but I figured you lot would know. Cnilep ( talk) 12:52, 4 March 2011 (UTC)
The article on arrowords, that word puzzle similar to crosswords, was declared orphaned February 2009. On March 9 2011, I added links to this article, from the articles on crosswords and word search and also from two articles on women's magazines. I also think that I added a link from the article on word games and puzzles. Can some please check as to see whether this article can now be de-orphaned? Many thanks, ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 00:21, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
Aj
It just seemed to me that the Orphanage and this page [6] (category needed) seemed to have some stuff in common.
I quite like the orphanage - so I've been getting orphans adopted a bit, but tagging the article as a part of a project or category probably helps with an orphan becoming less of an orphan over time.
I don't know if that sort of stuff has been much discussed ? EdwardLane ( talk) 13:40, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
Another thing that might assist with getting articles out of the orphanage. If the section called category - which currently lists all the articles that are orphans based on date were also listed under different criteria - so based on their other categories.
Orphans that are stubs, or good or physics relates, or whatever
is that possible to add to this list by 'bot' or just be an appropriate s'pecial' page? EdwardLane ( talk) 13:03, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
I commented at WP:ORPHAN#criteria and will list it here, possible for no other reason but open wonderment, but also to explore that there are other options and solutions.
I realize this would be a bold move but I noticed there is a backlog to 2003 which is astounding. With one simple move I would imagine the orphan backlog would be reduced considerably and an issue solved (a non-orphaned—orphan article) to the betterment of Wikipedia. This would also solve a concern of people tagging an article that does have one or two links as orphaned thus rectifying an improper locution.
With ideas and consensus there could be an Orphan article project, and an Isolated (or another appropriate name) article project. The isolated project could be broken down to One link isolated and Two link isolated projects. If an article has one link then surely it can be agreed upon that it is no longer actually orphaned so when an orphaned article is de-orphaned the tag can be removed.
If this is something of interest it will require the Wikipedia Wizards to make it work. I would assume a bot can be utilized to mark a de-orphaned article as a one or two link isolated article. I do not know the possible solutions from this point but I will wager there are those that do. Otr500 ( talk) 17:58, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
So should I just go ahead and boldly make the necessary edits to relax the criteria officially changing the definition of an orphan? Or would it be better to start a proposal at the Village Pump first in case a flood of people start coming here to complain? However it's probably more likely that a majority may see this as a welcome change. -- œ ™ 06:35, 4 October 2011 (UTC)
I assume everyone just got tied up but with the "orphan" criteria relaxed there are concerns about what is left. There will be an ease in the backlog but another editor also had concerns over the articles that have at least one link (no longer an orphan) but that have less that the three. Ensuring Wikipedia is linked is a good thing. Relaxing the criteria was a good thing, because an orphan (look up the definition) with at least one link is not an orphan, so Wikipedia now at least has a correct definition. Now what about the other articles that are poorly linked (less than three) to other articles? I do not wish to make waves but wish to know what criteria will be in place so that this can be tracked. It seems to me that to fix one problem that creates another is not a good solution but is a trade-off. Otr500 ( talk) 13:54, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
One bot programmer!!!! Otr500 ( talk) 03:25, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
Quite early on, we are told here that a "a hyperlink is the defining feature of a wiki". That is simply not true. The true defining feature of a wiki is that it is a web page that can be edited by any one who reads this. (See the article on wiki; also the article on Ward Cunningham). Also, if this was a reference to hyperlinks being important to Wikipedia, shouldn't the term used here be "wikilink"? ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 20:53, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
I was thinking of writing up a new bot regarding orphans. I was originally going to (and did) create a bot to remove orphan tags, but it might, I feel, be unnecessary. Are there any other tasks needed here? Cheers! Feedintm ( talk) 04:37, 26 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm new to the Orphan tag and this project, and apologize in advance if the issues that follow have been hashed through previously. (Also apologize if this discussion should be on the Wikipedia_talk:Orphan page.)
It seems to me that there are many short biographical articles that are unlikely to be de-orphaned and probably should not be. If you look at any encyclopedia, especially specialized ones, you'll find relatively short (no more than a few paragraphs) biographies of people who were notable in a particular field, but whose role in any particular event, discovery, etc. may have been no more significant than a large group of other people. These short biographies aren't stubs, its just that a relatively small amount of information about the individual is worthy of an encyclopedia.
Thus, from the point of view of wikipedia, biographical article may be perfectly appropriate, while linking to the biographical article from any other article would be detrimental to other articles. (In many cases the only way to create an article where the person would be appropriately linked would be to artificially create a list of some kind, which doesn't seem particularly desirable.) Though difficult to find by linking, the article can still be found, and may be useful to, a reader who is looking for information about this particular individual.
Having the Orphan stub on such articles isn't, IMO, desirable. It's distracting and suggests to the average reader that there may be something wrong with the article when there isn't. My suggestion, therefore is to add such short biographies to the Wikipedia:Orphan#Articles_that_may_be_difficult_to_de-orphan section of Wikipedia:Orphan.
More generally, shouldn't Wikipedia:Orphan expressly state that editors are encouraged to remove the tag when, in their judgment, article is unlikely to be linked. This may be preferable to simply adding the att= qualifier in such cases. The way I read Wikipedia:Orphan now, however, suggest that an editor would be doing something wrong by removing the tag except in the specific cases listed in Wikipedia:Orphan#Articles_that_may_be_difficult_to_de-orphan. Is there any consensus on when, as a general matter, it's ok to remove tag rather than using att=?
Thanks -- Sjsilverman ( talk) 19:04, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
Specifically, removing "or few" from the first sentence, rationale given here: Template talk:Orphan#Edit request for wording change
Additionally, after looking into the current situation, the wording of the guideline, and so forth, is is possibly true that there ought to be two templates: the current "Orphan" (but with the wording changed, as proposed, from "few or no" to "no"), and a new "Near-orphan" (or something like that) for articles with exactly one or two incoming links. These are pretty different situations, in terms of backlogs and urgency and so forth, so it'd be worthwhile to categorzie them separately. Maybe. Just a thought. Herostratus ( talk) 16:11, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Input requested on changes I would like to make to the template.
The template sandbox has be edited, some examples and explanation can be found here. Suggestions for improvements and comments on the idea welcome. -- Traveler100 ( talk) 12:45, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
It has occurred to me that tackling the backlog of
orphaned pages by subject as well as by month would be productive, particularly if carried out by someone familiar with the subject. I have therefore created a
template that links to results of an existing
tool's output. Although this tool has been running for some time I do not think it is known to all WikiProject users. Links can be in-line such as {{
WikiProject cleanup group|Orphaned articles|Afghanistan}}
giving
Orphaned articles in Afghanistan
or in the task template such as:
|
Here are some tasks awaiting attention:
|
Is it worth encouraging others to contribute to this project by placing links of other WikiProject pages? -- Traveler100 ( talk) 10:28, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
In case project member have not noticed this there is discussion started at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 January 5#Template:Orphan placement discussion.-- Traveler100 ( talk) 17:01, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Are there any tools for scanning the Orphaned articles categories for articles that now have links to them? -- Traveler100 ( talk) 14:14, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Do you think someone could sort orphans into subcategories by type, e.g. biographies, places, etc etc etc, similar to WP:STUBSORT? It would help by allowing editors with specialist areas to focus in on orphans within those areas. Barney the barney barney ( talk) 18:00, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
Hello! There is a discussion going on about Non-free and orphaned files at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content#Proposed addition: Use in draft articles. I would love to see some of your members contribute to the discussion. I went to WP:O in hopes of finding more details about what constitutes an orphaned file, and was dismayed to find there is NOTHING there specifically on files. I think that what defines an orphaned file should be slightly different than what defines an orphaned article. Thank you to anyone that cares to read and comment on the above linked discussion. Happy editing! Technical 13 ( talk) 15:57, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
Hi. I'll make this short and quick. I'm still struggling to see how useful this tag is. It's big, it's ugly, and it concerns a very very minor problem that most of the times does not really have a solution. Some articles are simply about subjects that have not been mentioned in any other Wikipedia articles. As the VERY large backlog in this WikiProject makes quite clear. Forcing editors to link them or add them even in places where they are only vaguely relevant is not good practice. Neither does it concern any of the readers, but it's them who have to see the tag first thing on the page. If it was a problem on sources, I would understand, as readers should know about it. But not being linked enough is not that serious of a problem to merit defacing an article.
I propose that the tag itself be moved to the talk page to minimize its impact on the article's readability.
Note that I do not know how this can be accomplished (probably by a bot?) Neither do I really have the time to make this a formal proposal, but I'm simply fed up at seeing it all the time for otherwise perfectly fine articles. What does everyone else think?-- OBSIDIAN† SOUL 01:32, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
Villages in India, remote places in Bhutan, wide spots in the road in Mali. I've come across many one-sentence articles about these places and have been struggling how to integrate them. So far, I've attempted three ways:
How do other people de-orphan village pages? As small as they are, I feel listing them on Wiki is useful and am hesitant to delete these articles, even if they are only a sentence or two. PaintedCarpet ( talk) 16:49, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Hi there, I made a list of potential orphans to be linked. See it here. I made it easy to automatically insert the link. The proposed links inlude orphans that already link to the page the proposed link comes from. The logic behind this is this:
Suppose an orphan article George Clooney links to Gravity (film). The string "George Clooney" exists in Gravity (film), and is not yet linked. This is probably the same "George Clooney" as our orphan.
Anyways if you'd like to help, select a hundred or so lines from the page and delete them (so that other people don't go over where you've already been) and move them to your own subpage. The "auto" links helpfully insert the link automatically, (but you'll have to save the changes).
Tell me what you think! -- Tim 1357 talk| poke 18:57, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
Hi there,
I want to add a "suggestions may be available" section to the Underpopulated_category template. Basically, the template would accept a new argument "intersection" and a newline separated list of categories to intersect. For example, see the proposed change live on Category:Academics from Georgia (country).
Tell me what you think! Tim 1357 talk| poke 19:39, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
Hello there. I'm one of the participants in WikiProject Orphanage and also in WikiProject Disambiguation. In WP DAB, there's an ongoing monthly challenge to see who can fix the most dab links. I suggest a monthly contest here in WP Orphanage where we do the same thing. This contest would help reduce the long backlog of orphaned articles. In the goals section, it says that its not about keeping score. So, instead of keeping track of who deorphaned the most articles, there could be a goal of how many articles to be deorphaned (properly), but that's an afterthought. MrLinkinPark333 ( talk) 01:39, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
I started by bot. It checks all pages that are already tagged as orphan. If pages are not orphan anymore it will remove the tag. Moreover, it will add {{ Multiple issues}} if 2 or more tags are in the page. I think next step is to extend connectivity by creating pages such as List of... or updating existing pages. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 12:09, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
Done. Statistics: 117343 pages transcluding {{ Orphan}}, 43012 inside {{ Multiple issues}} and 74331 without since there the sole tag in the page. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 22:37, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
Hello members of WikiProject Orphanage, I'm a regular participant of this project. I have been deorphaning articles for quite sometime. I have noticed that day by day the activity of this project members were slowing down. The backlog of Orphan articles are now quite large. It is impossible for few editors to eliminate them. Our project have some enlisted members, half of them are active here. But they haven't shown cooperation with this project for quite sometime. So, my proposal is to start a new backlog drive system. A mass message will be send monthly either by a massmessage sender or by a bot to all the inactive project members talkpage. The message will ask them to cooperate again and in return they will get rewards. Rewards will be given in the form of barnstars. This help to reduce the backlog. Members of this project will get attracted by the reward barnstars and will try to eliminate as much they can.
I expect comments and opinnions from other editors, So that we can reach a conclusion. Thank you. Jim Carter ( talk) 18:42, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
I agree with Jamesmcmahon0, automation is probably a separate discussion. @ Manishearth:, can you please explain what your script does? The way I've been going about it, deorphaning is not a highly rote process. I wonder what I'm missing. ~ KvnG 05:10, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
Okay lets see what Manishearth says. Jim Carter ( talk) 13:38, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
Please sign below if you are interested in participating in an orphan backlog drive. Timeframe and technicalities of such a drive are still under discussion. See above. (Note: This is the list of participants for the test de-orphan backlog drive. The original list is here.)
Hello WP:WPO! Jim came to my talk page yesterday asking for ideas (and a script) to be able to have a scored BLD for this project. As such, I thought about (and slept on) the issue and my thoughts on how such a scoring system would work are along the lines of:
There should also be some kind of accountability system so that people aren't claiming they attempted to deorphan or adding links to pages from pages that have nothing to do with them just for the sake of scoring points to win a virtual trophy that they can display on their userpage. For this, I'm thinking that there should be a "recheck" system in place so that anyone who rechecks a page that someone else already claimed to have done, and finds something out of place (of course AGF), should get a point for that. The person who did the original deorphan attempt should lose that point and there should be a threshold of a certain number of lost points = disqualification from the awards. Before I go on much further, I would like to hear the ideas and thoughts of the other project members on what I've suggested so far. Thanks. — {{U| Technical 13}} ( t • e • c) 14:42, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
Hello there. In the subcategories of [ [7]], it says that the earliest category is November 2006. However, in the orphaned articles column on the right hand side, it says the earliest is November 2007. Why is the November 2006 category missing from this list? Is there a way to add the November 2006 category to the column? Thank you. MrLinkinPark333 ( talk) 23:08, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
Kvng please can you clarify it for how much time this test BLD will take place. Because I have to send other participants message (using MMS) about this test BLD and have to ask them to join us. So I was wondering if you can clarify? Suggestions from other participants were also appreciated. Thank you. Jim Carter ( talk) 03:53, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2014_June_14#Template:Orphan. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 23:28, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
Hi all,
My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.
One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.
This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:
• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film
• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.
• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.
• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____
• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost
The deadline for submissions is 1st July 2014
For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to:
Project leaflets
Adikhajuria (
talk) 18:04, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
Looking at my userpage, I can see that WikiProject Orphanage does not have a category for the participants. Should one be created? -- MrLinkinPark333 ( talk) 22:19, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej ( talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Orphanage for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions, so be sure to sign your answers. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Thanks, Rcsprinter123 (natter) @ 17:36, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I came here after reading Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-10-22/WikiProject_report.
Many biographies on Wikipedia are orphans. Someone might be notable or even famous, but have no noteworthy connection to any top-level concept. In some cases, these people can go into "list of people from X university", but it seems wrong to me to sort people by the school they attended especially when usually that kind of information is stored in categories. What does this project recommend for cleaning up biographies of this sort? Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:24, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
I have started
Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Orphaned articles (shortcut:
WP:MED/O) as a holding area for orphaned medical articles. Editors who de-orphan articles may wish to add it to their watchlists.
—
Wavelength (
talk) 21:25, 18 October 2014 (UTC) and 14:31, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Congratulations on your WikiProject Report in the Signpost!
Evidently, there is much, much more activity on this project than is apparent at first glance. In just one category alone, Category:Orphaned articles from February 2009, the month that articles were tagged by a bot, the backlog has been reduced by 90,000 articles !!! It was at 114,437 in 1 March 2009, and today, 26 October 2014, it's down to 24,940.
Hello everyone! I've been working on a new userscript for this project (details at User:Technical 13/Scripts/OrphanStatus), and I need your help in setting the criteria for the script to make it as useful as possible. I need clarification of exactly what the but the incoming links to the redirects do count clause on redirects means and some discussion on whether or not "List of ..." articles are excluded or not. I did some testing of the script, of which some may need to be re-tagged based on the answer to my need for clarification of "lists", but I will happily take care of that. Thanks and happy deOrphaning! — {{U| Technical 13}} ( e • t • c) 15:14, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
Hello everyone!
You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!
Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.
Harej ( talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
WP:Orphan talk pages links to WP:WikiProject Orphanage, but there doesn't seem to be good info on that page about cleaning up orphaned talk pages. Two examples I've found recently are Talk:Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Talk:SIP connection. These pages were apparently left behind after an article page move. What is the best way to clean up these orphaned talk pages? — danhash ( talk) 23:56, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
For the past few months I've been trying to revive the Abandoned Articles WikiProject with little luck. I was wondering that considering the similarities between it and this project, would anyone here be interested in helping, or at least giving some kind of guidance/assistance.
AFAIK, I'm quite ironically the only member still active.
Imagine that, a WikiProject for Abandoned Articles that just happens to be an Abandoned WikiProject, lol.
Thanks.
Uamaol (
talk) 15:20, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Hello, WikiProject Orphanage/Archive 2! I'd like to invite you to join the Abandoned Articles WikiProject. We are a group of editors dedicated to bringing "abandoned" articles (ones that haven't been edited in a long time) "back to life", or, if appropriate, merging information or recommending deletion. There is a discussion page for sharing ideas as well as developing and getting tips on improving articles. If you would like to join, simply add your name to the list of members. |
There have been recent changes to the {{ Orphan}} template that affect how orphan categories are maintained. There is existing discussion at Template_talk:Orphan#Att.3D_parameter_broken. These are a bit hard to follow. I'm working to get these changes reverted since they have unexpected or unintended consequences and there did not appear to be a good consensus for the change. I would like to open a discussion here as to whether we'd like to change how the |att= and |few= parameters behave. ~ Kvng ( talk) 20:33, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
{{U|
Technical 13}} (
e •
t •
c)
23:14, 17 May 2015 (UTC){{U|
Technical 13}} (
e •
t •
c)
15:52, 18 May 2015 (UTC)|att=
and |few=
do not take/use a date parameter at all, they only are "if exist" type parameters. That means that "Also, when placing theis also a lie, since it only uses the|att=
parameter, it's unnecessary to remove the pre-existing|date=
parameter, as they are two separate and distinct parameters that complement each other."
|date=
parameter (since it is expecting that is the only parameter that contains a date). "This gives editors the added benefit of knowing when the orphan tag was first placed on the article."was Huon's argument.
"Note that this does not double-categorize it, the |att=
takes precedence and, as was mentioned above, the article is moved to the attempted de-orphan category for that date, so you're not having to revisit the same article twice when browsing through the monthly orphaned articles category."
The first part is true (because it only expect there to be one date and it doesn't expect att or few to have any date), but the second part is a complete lie (because it only expect there to be one date and it doesn't expect att or few to have any date) and "so you're not having to revisit the same article twice when browsing through the monthly orphaned articles category."is the part I was trying to get fixed so that it worked as it is suppose to. It looks like the only part of that whole section that is true is the
"Note that this does not double-categorize it"part, and to fix the documentation a person only needs to remove the word "not" and restore the template to the way that T13 had fixed it. 3gg5amp1e ( talk) 13:06, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, I've been too busy and away. Do you need anything further from me here? I see that part of my changes have been restored, and I'm glad to see that 3gg5amp1e seems to be happy with that. Any objection to me fixing the grammar for "few" linked ones back to an appropriate wording since "no other articles link to it" is wrong? — {{U|
Technical 13}} (
e •
t •
c)
16:08, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
Please see Template_talk:Orphan#No, or few. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 11:44, 5 February 2016 (UTC)
Why does the WP:ORPHAN shortcut redirect to this WikiProject page? Shouldn't it redirect to the explanation of what an orphan is, as does WP:O and WP:ORPH? I find it illogical that a shortcut directs to a different page than do the abbreviated versions of the same word. – void xor 19:06, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
The October 2008 orphans are all gone ! The one remaining one is on PROD row.
All but about 9 or 10 have been successfully deorphaned, the 9 or 10 being attempt tagged into March 2016. However, the majority of these can probably be easily fixed if we can find someone who knows a bit about Afghanistan geography. Most of them are location stubs for that country.
Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:09, 17 March 2016 (UTC)
The December 2008s are now down from 400 plus three weeks ago to now just less than 200.
Well done all of us !!
Eno Lirpa ( talk) 13:47, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
I gave GoingBatty a query, that gives All orphaned articles articles with more than two incoming links, so he's doing that job. -- Edgars2007 ( talk/ contribs) 16:37, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
I have been away for a few days, and I see now well below 80. Great going folks. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:37, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
May I ask who has made the the progress, and do you have any tips on how you are going about them. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:37, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
I have tonight (my time) finished off the December 2008s. I big HURRAH for all of us ! Only 130,000 to go ! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:45, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
A full HURRAH for January 2009 Done - A small one at least knowing what is now to come for February ! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 13:07, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Awesome work guys! After taking a break from this project for a while I'm excited and happy to see it still alive and well. -- œ ™ 07:21, 9 August 2016 (UTC)
Well done all. February 2009 will soon drop below the 20,000 mark ! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 13:56, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
HURRAH - now down to 19,999. Well done all of us. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:34, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
Another small morale boosting step - another 100 are done - now below 19,900. Well done all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 15:12, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
Another small hurrah. Now just dropped to 19,699 . . . Good work all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:04, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Hey all! While trying to de-orphan things, I fairly regularly have to go beg a related WikiProject for help. Oftentimes my calls go unanswered, but sometimes some helpful soul jumps in. I made this award for those times. Feel free to use it or change it as you see fit!
Adoption Award | |
For generously de-orphaning Article name out of the goodness of your heart. I hereby award you the prestigious Adoption Award! Sleep well knowing another orphan has found its place in the encyclopedia! |
Ajpolino ( talk) 03:35, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
Folks.
I have been doing a bit of deorphaning and I am getting a very small but steady number of reverts by editors (I have not checked but it looks like outside this project) on the grounds that my inclusion in the host article is not notable or important enough. Typically the issue is to the linked-in subject matter. My view is that if there is an article notable enough to exist in its own right then it can be linked in wherever reasonably appropriate, that is the notability of the link is inherited from the article being linked. Hence either the link and the article stay, or the article needs to be taken to AfD and properly adjudicated. I think we should push back on such reverts but if we do I think the project needs a consistent approach rather than each of us tacking each revert one at at time and on our own. Comment? Eno Lirpa ( talk) 11:10, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
Hello all de-orphaners. Last month Nemo_bis wrote a patch and I pushed it for puppet SWAT deployment. This thing makes the page Special:LonelyPages update once monthly (on the 15th). This will help us find new articles which are orphans, but not marked as such with a template yet. I'm currently going through this month's query and tagging them as much as I can with AWB. This will unfortunately do that the monthly categories will be larger than usual perhaps....Anyways, happy editing! ( t) Josve05a ( c) 21:32, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
Well done all. February 2009 will soon drop below the 19,500 mark ! Another 500 almost done in just over one month. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:37, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
Now down to below 17,500. Well done all.
Eno Lirpa (
talk) 12:04, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
17,140, and I just de-orphaned the last page from March 2008. BlackcurrantTea ( talk) 20:52, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
Now down to 16,142. Another 1,000+ done. Well done all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 13:02, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
Done All articles beginning with "A" have now been processed. Well done all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:32, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
I am a bit concerned regarding Category:Orphaned articles from August 2017. It looks like there might have been a wayward AWB run here. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 16:12, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
As per the reconfirmation below of the current long term orphan standard, it looks like thousands have been incorrectly, newly orphan tagged by Rich Farmbrough ? Eno Lirpa ( talk) 15:09, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
Well done everyone. Another 1000 articles from February 2009 have been processed.
Progress looks like:
We have picked up the pace a little bit recently.
Not sure if the next chart is useful. It either shows we are preferentially cleaning up older orphans before newer ones or people are on average creating more orphans each month at an increasing rate:
(Excluding February 2009 because it is such an outlier.)
Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:29, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
Another 1000 done. Hurrah. Now down to 14,192. Well done all.
Eno Lirpa (
talk) 12:27, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Down to 14,000 even in Feb 09! I like the even milestones so getting to do this one was very satisfying for me. ♠ PMC♠ (talk) 09:23, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
By the way, I will be on a wikbreak probably until early October 2017. Hopefully I can make up for lost wikitime when I get back. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:43, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
Another 1000 processed now just over 13,000. Well done all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:19, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
I beleive the orphan criteria formerly required multiple (2 or 3) qualifying (non-redirect, non-disambiguation) incoming links. The criteria was at some point revised to require only a single qualifying incoming link. That is the standard that we are currently working to in this project. AWB and other scripts manipulating {{ Orphan}} tags should also be adjusted to work to the current criteria. ~ Kvng ( talk) 20:10, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
|Few=
can be used as an exception for cases where there is more potential. This is not eliminating the backlog through redefinition, it is attacking the most important part of the problem first. If we can first get a single link into every article, we can come back for a second pass an thicken things up. Part of running a successful project is having realistic milestones and creating a feeling of success amongst participants. ~
Kvng (
talk) 19:10, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone know if AWB has been sorted to match the long standing revised criteria yet? Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:25, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
Rich. Have you done any clean up? ItApril 2017 still looks very high to me.
Eno Lirpa (
talk) 12:25, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
Hi I see this page Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/do-talk-message is still saying that an article needs a minimum of 2 inbound links before it is no longer considered an orphan, when I gather from elsewhere that only one link is required. Should I change this? Also, the s there a bot which reviews orphaned articles and deorphans them if it finds an inbound link? If not that would be very useful. I’m working on 2009 orphans at the moment and at least one in ten us actually no longer an orphan, so a bot would maybe knock 15,000 off the list at a stoke! Mccapra ( talk) 18:49, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
@ Eno Lirpa: after a bit of digging I've found that AWB only removes orphan tags from pages with more than two incoming links. DrStrauss talk 12:46, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
I have initiated a discussion at
Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Orphans, since I think this deserves a wider airing. All the best:
Rich
Farmbrough, 23:28, 16 October 2017 (UTC).
Premeditated Chaos and Eno Lirpa may be interested in User:DrStrauss/sandbox 3 which contains a list of all articles with one or more incoming links in the February 2009 orphans category. I was going to de-tag them with AWB but decided against it because a good quarter of them meet deletion criteria. There are 976 of them. DrStrauss talk 13:41, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
@ Eno Lirpa: @ Premeditated Chaos: Kvng
Just for tracking purposes I've created a list of BLPs in the February 2009 orphans category here. It contains 2,314 items.
DrStrauss talk 22:38, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Well done all. We have cracked 12,000 ie 11,994. The next major visual / psychological milestone beckons ie 10,000! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:26, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
So February 2009 is still dropping by roughly 1000 per month.
Progress looks like :
Note that in July total orphans was 142,000. It is now 134,000. (Not counting attempteds ~ 1,200, and ~ 400 others(?).) This is down 8,000 in about 4 months, about 2,000 per month. Are we winning? At that rate it will be another 5.5 years before have the only current month to worry about! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 01:28, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
There has been a big spike in the number of articles marked as attempted deorphans.
I am not sure that just moving large numbers of articles from one orphan category to another is all that helpful to our cause ? Especially, if they are then not quite as visible to us and we have to look in two places ? Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:06, 1 December 2017 (UTC)
I think I would prefer "attempted" to be a place of very last resort, for an article after strong, multiple attempts to deorphan, merge, and also notability has been considered (eg taken to PROD or AfD if necessary). I am not comfortable with it being used as a workflow tool for individual editors. Each of us can create bookmark folders to manage workflow and come-back-to lists etc. Or keep an edit open sandbox page while we work to build a list of links to come-back-to pages as we work. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:30, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
I've marked a lot of orphans "attempted" in past years because I thought I had exhausted all options to deorphan. Recently Mccapra has come around and revisited these and seemingly effortlessly deorphaned many of them. My reaction is, "Why didn't I think of that?" Well, I didn't and I assume Mccapra is experiencing the same thing here. It's all good. I appreciate what Mccapra is doing for the project. A belated barnstar is coming your way. ~ Kvng ( talk) 14:45, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
This may be slightly off topic for the orphanage, but is there a bot or something that detects and lists walled gardens? Obviously a linkless orphan is a trivial walled garden, which would be flagged as an orphan. Is there something to detect more complex walled gardens.
If there isn't such a tool, what effect would reducing the orphan linkage criteria (e.g. to 0 link only) have on the elimination of walled gardens? (If we require 2 links, that means that walled gardens must be of size at least 3 to avoid being flagged as orphans.) Zodon ( talk) 20:51, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
It would help a lot if people would LEAVE RED LINKS if they have a good potential for becoming an article, or even if they don't. I used the search feature on many of the titles of my articles and nearly or more than doubled the links to some of my pages.
A lot of people want their articles to be so aesthetically perfect and they delete all dead links. There would be much more integrity if people were not so neurotic about red links. Daniel Christensen ( talk) 19:15, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
For your interest, User:Para has, at my request, kindly put together a tool showing the daily additions and removals of the {{ orphan}} template. The tool is here: http://toolserver.org/~para/orphans/ -- Tagishsimon (talk) 00:45, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
FWIW, it looks as if you're doing about the same amount of removal business per day as {{ coord missing}}, figures for which are here. {{ coord missing}} is, of course, hidden as far as the normal user is concerned. -- Tagishsimon (talk) 00:48, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
Maybe I missed it somewhere while reading through this talk page, but can someone explain again why "Our goal is to try to de-orphan newly-tagged orphans as soon as possible, and then work in reverse-chronological order through the backlog." Wouldn't it be better to tackle the old ones first to rid them of the tag that's been there too long? Also I think there should be some more explanation as to the purpose of categorizing de-orphan attempts with the att= parameter, and how this helps with our goal. -- OlEnglish ( Talk) 23:40, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
I'm writing a toolserver version of Special:Lonelypages. It's basically finished, but the toolserver is expected to be out of sync with Wikipedia until the end of the month, so I won't be releasing the tool soon. In the meantime, I'd like to pin down exactly what qualifies as list/year articles per the criteria.
I'd appreciate comments on which of the article types below should be excluded from the orphan count:
Of course, if anyone knows a more clever way to identify lists - or thinks I've left something out altogether - please bring it up! Thanks! -- JaGa talk 09:06, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
(disambig)
, (disambiguation)
, (surname)
, and (name)
Be sure to exclude all the articles that use the {{ surname}} template, since these are a kind of disambiguation page. Such articles seem to dominate the early entries on the current version of Special:LonelyPages.-- ragesoss ( talk) 00:37, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
As for lists, many WikiProjects have a list class, so you could consider any article having the template class="assess-list " style="background: #c7b1ff; text-align: center; " | List transcluded onto its talk page as being a list. -- A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 20:09, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
I've been working on an article for some time and have had trouble linking it to other articles. I tagged it with the {{ orphan}} article a while back because it had 2 actual links and the rest are disambiguous links, links to lists, or links to users. The list of non-orphaned articles with the orphan tag lists this article because it counts one of the disambiguous links as a real link. The link in question is a link from the only other page on the disambiguous page (For <the other person with the same name>, see <the other person>). My point is, the list being generated isn't picking this up. The pages aren't linked by their subject in any way, only their name. To me, the rule should be that there are three links from other pages that are subject related. I'm going to go back and do my best to just find another link to add to avoid the problem all together but I thought that it was something you might want to check out/be aware of. OlYeller Talktome 16:58, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Here is an idea: start a WikiProject to place a navbox in every Wikipedia article. In my opinion, navboxes are the best way to de-orphan an article. The typical navbox contains at least several dozen articles, and a single placement provides instantaneous links from all those pages.
In a brief study I did of 10 random articles, 7 of them had one or more navboxes. This does not mean exactly 70% of Wikipedia articles have them, but if that figure were near accurate, there would be close to 860,000 articles lacking them. the three articles I observed that lacked them could have used them.
Since every article fits into one or more categories, every article, likewise, can fit into one or more navboxes. Sebwite ( talk) 03:59, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
[[necessary. Sebwite ( talk) 23:42, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
WP:Set index pages such as England's Looking Glass are a form of disambiguation page and should not have any links, therefor the template {{ Orphan}} is not appropriate for such a page. -- PBS ( talk) 20:55, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
{{ Orphan}} is a maintenance issue that does not aid our readers. Editorial maintenance issues should be discussed on the talk page not in the article space -- that is why we have talk pages. If someone was to write in plain text at the top of a page "This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. ..." it would be removed as vandalism, and the person who put it there would be told to discuss such issues on the article's talk page. Putting such messages in a box does not alter the fact that it provides no useful information for the reader and is only of use to an editor. -- PBS ( talk) 20:51, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
I followed this link after I posted the other, this would seem to be the better place as it is the project page. (dogs and wagging tails), but the other is specifically about the template so take your pick. -- PBS ( talk) 23:50, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
But as you have answered at Wikipedia talk:Orphan#This maintenance template should be placed on the talk page lets carry on the conversation there. -- PBS ( talk) 23:58, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
What is to be gained by labelling Surname pages as orphans? There is unlikely to be any useful link which can be made to the page - they serve a disambiguation-like function - and anyone seeking information on the surname will search, or use "Go", on that name itself. The pages can also be reached via categories. The {{ orphan}} tag is ugly and irrelevant on pages such as Addey or Achillini. Please can this project agree that {{ surname}} pages should not be tagged as Orphans? I have raised this issue somewhere before, but I can't find where it was, and I don't think anyone replied (perhaps it was the wrong place to raise it!) PamD ( talk) 08:26, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
The orphan criteria has been updated to exclude surname pages (and other set indexes). As most of these pages (example Franklin (surname)) act like disambiguation pages, most of them will not have many direct links so it was felt that there is no need to tag them as orphans. This change was discussed and implemented without objection.
JaGa, who maintains toolserver reports reporting orphan status that are used for tagging and untagging, has been asked to update his orphan reports in accordance with criteria change. He does not want to do that without input from the Disambiguation and Anthroponymy projects. His position appears to be if an article is not an orphan candidate, then it must be a DAB page. As he previously had objections to including surname pages in his DAB reports, he therefore feels he need agreement from other projects.
Everyone else who has commented so far doesn't see it that way. The opinion has been that whether surname pages are or are not DAB pages is irrelevant to whether they are or are not orphan candidates. That surname pages (and other set indexes) can simultaneously be not DAB pages and not orphans. DAB status and orphan status should be treated separately.
To bring this to a resolve, I'm posting this at the Disambiguation, Anthroponymy, and Orphanage projects. To consolidate discussion, I suggest that Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation be used for all responses since JaGa's main concern seems to be about DAB classification.
Links to relevant discussions: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]
If there are any objections, please let's here them. Thanks. -- JLaTondre ( talk) 14:14, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
Ok, now that we've finished discussing the discussion on where the discussion is going to be discussed, can we discuss the actual discussion now? :) Anyway, my opinion on this is that the same logic applies to set index articles as to disambiguation pages: they aren't necessarily meant to have any incoming links, so it makes sense to exempt them from the orphan criteria, as we do with disambiguation pages. Cheers, -- Aervanath ( talk) 16:55, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
Not sure whether I need to restate my view again, but just in case: surname, given name, and Set Index pages should not be labelled as "orphans", as they are pages to which there should usually be no, or very few, links (there might reasonably be a link from a related name). PamD ( talk) 21:54, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
Just in case someone out there cares, I've started a log of all the articles I've de-orphaned here. The reason I'm posting this here is because I'm also starting on a "Guide to De-orphaning" of sorts, which will probably just consist of a list of tips and hints, but anyways I'll be accumulating this list as I go and thought others may find it interesting to read. -- œ ™ 03:00, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
Sometime soon I'd like to remove inactive members from the list, mostly those that have not edited at all for at least a year, they will be put on the inactive list. Those that have not been active in specifically this area of maintenance will have their status changed to 'inactive'. But I'd much rather prefer it if those editors would change their status themselves. Cheers :) -- œ ™ 03:52, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
There's an old adage, proven many times over, that as soon as you invent a metric to score performance, people will stop trying to perform and start trying to score.
I've been seeing this in play quite a lot lately with orphan tags. Articles are tagged as orphans because they are insufficiently integrated into the encyclopedia. "Integration" is a nebulous concept, so for operational purposes it is replaced by the metric "number of incoming links". Some people then go around adding low-value links into See also sections, solely so that they can score three or more incoming links, thus allowing them to remove the orphan tag. Unfortunately the addition of these links often degrades the articles to which they are added, and need not imply that the de-orphaned article is any better integrated than it was before.
This morning, for example, I noticed a case where someone has deorphaned Flora of Tubuai by adding links from Tubuai (Austral Islands) (a good, useful link), and the first three bluelinked plant species on the list. Does anyone think this improves the encyclopedia? Personally, I think not.
If we blow this article-scale problem up to encyclopedia-scale, it looks like this: "number of articles de-orphaned" has become a metric by which some people measure their performance in improving Wikipedia, and some of those people are now degrading Wikipedia in order to score highly against that metric.
I see this as a problem. But I don't know what the solution is. Education maybe? Any ideas?
Hesperian 00:18, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Interesting timing, looking at the above section.
As I created Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory today, I realized it would ever be an orphan, and added a comment at its top to say "yeah, it is an orphan, but it is a happy orphan and needs only its one parent, IMO" or some such. In this case, there may well never be another article that NEEDS to link to this notable lab. It ran from 1948 to 2002. It did great work. And it is gone. New articles are very unlikely to link to it. Someone looking for it, however, should be able to find it here.
Another I edited today was American Roentgen Ray Society. It might actually wind up well-linked as notable members have articles that might reasonably point to it.
Thanks on the deorphan. :)
att=
parameter of the {{
orphan}} template already handles that kinda, in a way, because when applied it removes articles from the monthly category (
Category:Orphaned articles from September 2009) and places them into the attempted de-orphaned articles category (
Category:Attempted de-orphan from September 2009), yet it still remains in the general all-inclusive category (
Category:All orphaned articles). --
œ
™ 05:48, 20 September 2009 (UTC)Is there a way to filter or search the list of orphan articles? With over 100,000 articles on the list, it is rather difficult to find topics I know enough about to know where links should come from. -- Pakaraki ( talk) 08:12, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
Back in August, Wavelength and I de-orphaned (or merged or deleted) all the orphaned language articles up to July 2009 that we could find. I'm now covering the subsequent months by filtering for titles containing 'language', 'linguistics', or 'dialect'. If I miss anything, please let me know. (For some of the really obscure languages I may only make a single link, but if that's from a higher node in the classification of the language, it will be easy for anyone to find, and so IMO should be good enough.)
How do we prevent orphan tags from being added? Gnau language was tagged in Feb and then again in Nov. A language with 1300 speakers is not likely to be relevant to many other articles; the fact that it's linked from Torricelli languages is probably as much as we can hope for, unless it's expanded or somehow gets in the news. kwami ( talk) 00:27, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Addbot_22 ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 17:28, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
As of 5.0.0.1 (released hopefully next week. Now in snapshot in http://toolserver.org/~awb/snapshots) will be correctly tagging Orphans using the definition of "less than 3 incoming links ...". I noticed that the project encourages people to tag articles with NO incoming links. I proposed this update for AWB Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature_requests#Another tweak for orphans. My question is this means that we also UNTAG articles with 1 or 2 incoming links? If yes, I have to slightly modify my request above. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:57, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
I volunteered to cleanup the backlog a bit. Please read my BRFA at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Yobot 11. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 13:24, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
Yobot finished its run tests. Please check the BRFA. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 12:32, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, I know its not a word...
Are there any tools that can assist in finding articles that might be good ones to link to an orphaned articles?-- RadioFan ( talk) 13:00, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
According to WP:ORPH, "Currently our priority is to focus on orphans with NO incoming links at all, and it is recommended to only place the {{ orphan}} tag if the article has ZERO incoming links from other articles." Should something about this be mentioned in the Template section of the project page, so that people looking at this description of the orphan tag would know about the recommendation? -- JTSchreiber ( talk) 05:05, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
The criteria for deciding an orphan states:only place the {{orphan}} tag if the article has ZERO incoming links from other articles. I have been deorphaning for a fair while now and have left the orphan tag on articles which had just one or two incomming links. However I'm not sure if that is the best thing to do. Wouldn't it be better if I could just remove the tag for 1 link if I cannot possibly hope to ever hit the magic number of three? -- Deepak D'Souza ( talk) 09:50, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Aervanath, I think most of the orphans have no incoming links anyway and the last year or two we tag only pages with no incoming links anyway. MY bot ran and removed orphan tags from pages with 3 or more incoming links that were still tagged as orphans some months ago. Let's find someone to give us some statistics of tagged pages with 1 or 2 links. Maybe you are right but I think we can do it with some other method than detag and retag. -- Magioladitis ([[User
talk:Magioladitis|talk]]) 08:57, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Hey all, just so everyone knows, I got orphaned articles on the Opentask portion of the community portal! Hopefully that gets some more interest, Sadads ( talk) 14:18, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
The following articles seem to form something of a walled garden. They do have outgoing links, but the regional pages generally have no incoming links except from one another. The Japan page also has incoming links from Flags of country subdivisions, List of Japanese flags, and Rising Sun Flag.
I wasn't sure how – or whether – this should be dealt with, but I figured you lot would know. Cnilep ( talk) 12:52, 4 March 2011 (UTC)
The article on arrowords, that word puzzle similar to crosswords, was declared orphaned February 2009. On March 9 2011, I added links to this article, from the articles on crosswords and word search and also from two articles on women's magazines. I also think that I added a link from the article on word games and puzzles. Can some please check as to see whether this article can now be de-orphaned? Many thanks, ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 00:21, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
Aj
It just seemed to me that the Orphanage and this page [6] (category needed) seemed to have some stuff in common.
I quite like the orphanage - so I've been getting orphans adopted a bit, but tagging the article as a part of a project or category probably helps with an orphan becoming less of an orphan over time.
I don't know if that sort of stuff has been much discussed ? EdwardLane ( talk) 13:40, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
Another thing that might assist with getting articles out of the orphanage. If the section called category - which currently lists all the articles that are orphans based on date were also listed under different criteria - so based on their other categories.
Orphans that are stubs, or good or physics relates, or whatever
is that possible to add to this list by 'bot' or just be an appropriate s'pecial' page? EdwardLane ( talk) 13:03, 4 June 2011 (UTC)
I commented at WP:ORPHAN#criteria and will list it here, possible for no other reason but open wonderment, but also to explore that there are other options and solutions.
I realize this would be a bold move but I noticed there is a backlog to 2003 which is astounding. With one simple move I would imagine the orphan backlog would be reduced considerably and an issue solved (a non-orphaned—orphan article) to the betterment of Wikipedia. This would also solve a concern of people tagging an article that does have one or two links as orphaned thus rectifying an improper locution.
With ideas and consensus there could be an Orphan article project, and an Isolated (or another appropriate name) article project. The isolated project could be broken down to One link isolated and Two link isolated projects. If an article has one link then surely it can be agreed upon that it is no longer actually orphaned so when an orphaned article is de-orphaned the tag can be removed.
If this is something of interest it will require the Wikipedia Wizards to make it work. I would assume a bot can be utilized to mark a de-orphaned article as a one or two link isolated article. I do not know the possible solutions from this point but I will wager there are those that do. Otr500 ( talk) 17:58, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
So should I just go ahead and boldly make the necessary edits to relax the criteria officially changing the definition of an orphan? Or would it be better to start a proposal at the Village Pump first in case a flood of people start coming here to complain? However it's probably more likely that a majority may see this as a welcome change. -- œ ™ 06:35, 4 October 2011 (UTC)
I assume everyone just got tied up but with the "orphan" criteria relaxed there are concerns about what is left. There will be an ease in the backlog but another editor also had concerns over the articles that have at least one link (no longer an orphan) but that have less that the three. Ensuring Wikipedia is linked is a good thing. Relaxing the criteria was a good thing, because an orphan (look up the definition) with at least one link is not an orphan, so Wikipedia now at least has a correct definition. Now what about the other articles that are poorly linked (less than three) to other articles? I do not wish to make waves but wish to know what criteria will be in place so that this can be tracked. It seems to me that to fix one problem that creates another is not a good solution but is a trade-off. Otr500 ( talk) 13:54, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
One bot programmer!!!! Otr500 ( talk) 03:25, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
Quite early on, we are told here that a "a hyperlink is the defining feature of a wiki". That is simply not true. The true defining feature of a wiki is that it is a web page that can be edited by any one who reads this. (See the article on wiki; also the article on Ward Cunningham). Also, if this was a reference to hyperlinks being important to Wikipedia, shouldn't the term used here be "wikilink"? ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 20:53, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
I was thinking of writing up a new bot regarding orphans. I was originally going to (and did) create a bot to remove orphan tags, but it might, I feel, be unnecessary. Are there any other tasks needed here? Cheers! Feedintm ( talk) 04:37, 26 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm new to the Orphan tag and this project, and apologize in advance if the issues that follow have been hashed through previously. (Also apologize if this discussion should be on the Wikipedia_talk:Orphan page.)
It seems to me that there are many short biographical articles that are unlikely to be de-orphaned and probably should not be. If you look at any encyclopedia, especially specialized ones, you'll find relatively short (no more than a few paragraphs) biographies of people who were notable in a particular field, but whose role in any particular event, discovery, etc. may have been no more significant than a large group of other people. These short biographies aren't stubs, its just that a relatively small amount of information about the individual is worthy of an encyclopedia.
Thus, from the point of view of wikipedia, biographical article may be perfectly appropriate, while linking to the biographical article from any other article would be detrimental to other articles. (In many cases the only way to create an article where the person would be appropriately linked would be to artificially create a list of some kind, which doesn't seem particularly desirable.) Though difficult to find by linking, the article can still be found, and may be useful to, a reader who is looking for information about this particular individual.
Having the Orphan stub on such articles isn't, IMO, desirable. It's distracting and suggests to the average reader that there may be something wrong with the article when there isn't. My suggestion, therefore is to add such short biographies to the Wikipedia:Orphan#Articles_that_may_be_difficult_to_de-orphan section of Wikipedia:Orphan.
More generally, shouldn't Wikipedia:Orphan expressly state that editors are encouraged to remove the tag when, in their judgment, article is unlikely to be linked. This may be preferable to simply adding the att= qualifier in such cases. The way I read Wikipedia:Orphan now, however, suggest that an editor would be doing something wrong by removing the tag except in the specific cases listed in Wikipedia:Orphan#Articles_that_may_be_difficult_to_de-orphan. Is there any consensus on when, as a general matter, it's ok to remove tag rather than using att=?
Thanks -- Sjsilverman ( talk) 19:04, 13 January 2012 (UTC)
Specifically, removing "or few" from the first sentence, rationale given here: Template talk:Orphan#Edit request for wording change
Additionally, after looking into the current situation, the wording of the guideline, and so forth, is is possibly true that there ought to be two templates: the current "Orphan" (but with the wording changed, as proposed, from "few or no" to "no"), and a new "Near-orphan" (or something like that) for articles with exactly one or two incoming links. These are pretty different situations, in terms of backlogs and urgency and so forth, so it'd be worthwhile to categorzie them separately. Maybe. Just a thought. Herostratus ( talk) 16:11, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
Input requested on changes I would like to make to the template.
The template sandbox has be edited, some examples and explanation can be found here. Suggestions for improvements and comments on the idea welcome. -- Traveler100 ( talk) 12:45, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
It has occurred to me that tackling the backlog of
orphaned pages by subject as well as by month would be productive, particularly if carried out by someone familiar with the subject. I have therefore created a
template that links to results of an existing
tool's output. Although this tool has been running for some time I do not think it is known to all WikiProject users. Links can be in-line such as {{
WikiProject cleanup group|Orphaned articles|Afghanistan}}
giving
Orphaned articles in Afghanistan
or in the task template such as:
|
Here are some tasks awaiting attention:
|
Is it worth encouraging others to contribute to this project by placing links of other WikiProject pages? -- Traveler100 ( talk) 10:28, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
In case project member have not noticed this there is discussion started at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 January 5#Template:Orphan placement discussion.-- Traveler100 ( talk) 17:01, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Are there any tools for scanning the Orphaned articles categories for articles that now have links to them? -- Traveler100 ( talk) 14:14, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
Do you think someone could sort orphans into subcategories by type, e.g. biographies, places, etc etc etc, similar to WP:STUBSORT? It would help by allowing editors with specialist areas to focus in on orphans within those areas. Barney the barney barney ( talk) 18:00, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
Hello! There is a discussion going on about Non-free and orphaned files at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content#Proposed addition: Use in draft articles. I would love to see some of your members contribute to the discussion. I went to WP:O in hopes of finding more details about what constitutes an orphaned file, and was dismayed to find there is NOTHING there specifically on files. I think that what defines an orphaned file should be slightly different than what defines an orphaned article. Thank you to anyone that cares to read and comment on the above linked discussion. Happy editing! Technical 13 ( talk) 15:57, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
Hi. I'll make this short and quick. I'm still struggling to see how useful this tag is. It's big, it's ugly, and it concerns a very very minor problem that most of the times does not really have a solution. Some articles are simply about subjects that have not been mentioned in any other Wikipedia articles. As the VERY large backlog in this WikiProject makes quite clear. Forcing editors to link them or add them even in places where they are only vaguely relevant is not good practice. Neither does it concern any of the readers, but it's them who have to see the tag first thing on the page. If it was a problem on sources, I would understand, as readers should know about it. But not being linked enough is not that serious of a problem to merit defacing an article.
I propose that the tag itself be moved to the talk page to minimize its impact on the article's readability.
Note that I do not know how this can be accomplished (probably by a bot?) Neither do I really have the time to make this a formal proposal, but I'm simply fed up at seeing it all the time for otherwise perfectly fine articles. What does everyone else think?-- OBSIDIAN† SOUL 01:32, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
Villages in India, remote places in Bhutan, wide spots in the road in Mali. I've come across many one-sentence articles about these places and have been struggling how to integrate them. So far, I've attempted three ways:
How do other people de-orphan village pages? As small as they are, I feel listing them on Wiki is useful and am hesitant to delete these articles, even if they are only a sentence or two. PaintedCarpet ( talk) 16:49, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Hi there, I made a list of potential orphans to be linked. See it here. I made it easy to automatically insert the link. The proposed links inlude orphans that already link to the page the proposed link comes from. The logic behind this is this:
Suppose an orphan article George Clooney links to Gravity (film). The string "George Clooney" exists in Gravity (film), and is not yet linked. This is probably the same "George Clooney" as our orphan.
Anyways if you'd like to help, select a hundred or so lines from the page and delete them (so that other people don't go over where you've already been) and move them to your own subpage. The "auto" links helpfully insert the link automatically, (but you'll have to save the changes).
Tell me what you think! -- Tim 1357 talk| poke 18:57, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
Hi there,
I want to add a "suggestions may be available" section to the Underpopulated_category template. Basically, the template would accept a new argument "intersection" and a newline separated list of categories to intersect. For example, see the proposed change live on Category:Academics from Georgia (country).
Tell me what you think! Tim 1357 talk| poke 19:39, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
Hello there. I'm one of the participants in WikiProject Orphanage and also in WikiProject Disambiguation. In WP DAB, there's an ongoing monthly challenge to see who can fix the most dab links. I suggest a monthly contest here in WP Orphanage where we do the same thing. This contest would help reduce the long backlog of orphaned articles. In the goals section, it says that its not about keeping score. So, instead of keeping track of who deorphaned the most articles, there could be a goal of how many articles to be deorphaned (properly), but that's an afterthought. MrLinkinPark333 ( talk) 01:39, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
I started by bot. It checks all pages that are already tagged as orphan. If pages are not orphan anymore it will remove the tag. Moreover, it will add {{ Multiple issues}} if 2 or more tags are in the page. I think next step is to extend connectivity by creating pages such as List of... or updating existing pages. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 12:09, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
Done. Statistics: 117343 pages transcluding {{ Orphan}}, 43012 inside {{ Multiple issues}} and 74331 without since there the sole tag in the page. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 22:37, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
Hello members of WikiProject Orphanage, I'm a regular participant of this project. I have been deorphaning articles for quite sometime. I have noticed that day by day the activity of this project members were slowing down. The backlog of Orphan articles are now quite large. It is impossible for few editors to eliminate them. Our project have some enlisted members, half of them are active here. But they haven't shown cooperation with this project for quite sometime. So, my proposal is to start a new backlog drive system. A mass message will be send monthly either by a massmessage sender or by a bot to all the inactive project members talkpage. The message will ask them to cooperate again and in return they will get rewards. Rewards will be given in the form of barnstars. This help to reduce the backlog. Members of this project will get attracted by the reward barnstars and will try to eliminate as much they can.
I expect comments and opinnions from other editors, So that we can reach a conclusion. Thank you. Jim Carter ( talk) 18:42, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
I agree with Jamesmcmahon0, automation is probably a separate discussion. @ Manishearth:, can you please explain what your script does? The way I've been going about it, deorphaning is not a highly rote process. I wonder what I'm missing. ~ KvnG 05:10, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
Okay lets see what Manishearth says. Jim Carter ( talk) 13:38, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
Please sign below if you are interested in participating in an orphan backlog drive. Timeframe and technicalities of such a drive are still under discussion. See above. (Note: This is the list of participants for the test de-orphan backlog drive. The original list is here.)
Hello WP:WPO! Jim came to my talk page yesterday asking for ideas (and a script) to be able to have a scored BLD for this project. As such, I thought about (and slept on) the issue and my thoughts on how such a scoring system would work are along the lines of:
There should also be some kind of accountability system so that people aren't claiming they attempted to deorphan or adding links to pages from pages that have nothing to do with them just for the sake of scoring points to win a virtual trophy that they can display on their userpage. For this, I'm thinking that there should be a "recheck" system in place so that anyone who rechecks a page that someone else already claimed to have done, and finds something out of place (of course AGF), should get a point for that. The person who did the original deorphan attempt should lose that point and there should be a threshold of a certain number of lost points = disqualification from the awards. Before I go on much further, I would like to hear the ideas and thoughts of the other project members on what I've suggested so far. Thanks. — {{U| Technical 13}} ( t • e • c) 14:42, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
Hello there. In the subcategories of [ [7]], it says that the earliest category is November 2006. However, in the orphaned articles column on the right hand side, it says the earliest is November 2007. Why is the November 2006 category missing from this list? Is there a way to add the November 2006 category to the column? Thank you. MrLinkinPark333 ( talk) 23:08, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
Kvng please can you clarify it for how much time this test BLD will take place. Because I have to send other participants message (using MMS) about this test BLD and have to ask them to join us. So I was wondering if you can clarify? Suggestions from other participants were also appreciated. Thank you. Jim Carter ( talk) 03:53, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2014_June_14#Template:Orphan. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 23:28, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
Hi all,
My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.
One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.
This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:
• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film
• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.
• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.
• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____
• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost
The deadline for submissions is 1st July 2014
For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to:
Project leaflets
Adikhajuria (
talk) 18:04, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
Looking at my userpage, I can see that WikiProject Orphanage does not have a category for the participants. Should one be created? -- MrLinkinPark333 ( talk) 22:19, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej ( talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Orphanage for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions, so be sure to sign your answers. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Thanks, Rcsprinter123 (natter) @ 17:36, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I came here after reading Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-10-22/WikiProject_report.
Many biographies on Wikipedia are orphans. Someone might be notable or even famous, but have no noteworthy connection to any top-level concept. In some cases, these people can go into "list of people from X university", but it seems wrong to me to sort people by the school they attended especially when usually that kind of information is stored in categories. What does this project recommend for cleaning up biographies of this sort? Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:24, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
I have started
Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Orphaned articles (shortcut:
WP:MED/O) as a holding area for orphaned medical articles. Editors who de-orphan articles may wish to add it to their watchlists.
—
Wavelength (
talk) 21:25, 18 October 2014 (UTC) and 14:31, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
Congratulations on your WikiProject Report in the Signpost!
Evidently, there is much, much more activity on this project than is apparent at first glance. In just one category alone, Category:Orphaned articles from February 2009, the month that articles were tagged by a bot, the backlog has been reduced by 90,000 articles !!! It was at 114,437 in 1 March 2009, and today, 26 October 2014, it's down to 24,940.
Hello everyone! I've been working on a new userscript for this project (details at User:Technical 13/Scripts/OrphanStatus), and I need your help in setting the criteria for the script to make it as useful as possible. I need clarification of exactly what the but the incoming links to the redirects do count clause on redirects means and some discussion on whether or not "List of ..." articles are excluded or not. I did some testing of the script, of which some may need to be re-tagged based on the answer to my need for clarification of "lists", but I will happily take care of that. Thanks and happy deOrphaning! — {{U| Technical 13}} ( e • t • c) 15:14, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
Hello everyone!
You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!
Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.
Harej ( talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
WP:Orphan talk pages links to WP:WikiProject Orphanage, but there doesn't seem to be good info on that page about cleaning up orphaned talk pages. Two examples I've found recently are Talk:Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Talk:SIP connection. These pages were apparently left behind after an article page move. What is the best way to clean up these orphaned talk pages? — danhash ( talk) 23:56, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
For the past few months I've been trying to revive the Abandoned Articles WikiProject with little luck. I was wondering that considering the similarities between it and this project, would anyone here be interested in helping, or at least giving some kind of guidance/assistance.
AFAIK, I'm quite ironically the only member still active.
Imagine that, a WikiProject for Abandoned Articles that just happens to be an Abandoned WikiProject, lol.
Thanks.
Uamaol (
talk) 15:20, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Hello, WikiProject Orphanage/Archive 2! I'd like to invite you to join the Abandoned Articles WikiProject. We are a group of editors dedicated to bringing "abandoned" articles (ones that haven't been edited in a long time) "back to life", or, if appropriate, merging information or recommending deletion. There is a discussion page for sharing ideas as well as developing and getting tips on improving articles. If you would like to join, simply add your name to the list of members. |
Orphaned articles
58,650 |
Attempted de-orphan
All articles 343 |
{{ Low linked articles progress}} |
There have been recent changes to the {{ Orphan}} template that affect how orphan categories are maintained. There is existing discussion at Template_talk:Orphan#Att.3D_parameter_broken. These are a bit hard to follow. I'm working to get these changes reverted since they have unexpected or unintended consequences and there did not appear to be a good consensus for the change. I would like to open a discussion here as to whether we'd like to change how the |att= and |few= parameters behave. ~ Kvng ( talk) 20:33, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
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23:14, 17 May 2015 (UTC){{U|
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15:52, 18 May 2015 (UTC)|att=
and |few=
do not take/use a date parameter at all, they only are "if exist" type parameters. That means that "Also, when placing theis also a lie, since it only uses the|att=
parameter, it's unnecessary to remove the pre-existing|date=
parameter, as they are two separate and distinct parameters that complement each other."
|date=
parameter (since it is expecting that is the only parameter that contains a date). "This gives editors the added benefit of knowing when the orphan tag was first placed on the article."was Huon's argument.
"Note that this does not double-categorize it, the |att=
takes precedence and, as was mentioned above, the article is moved to the attempted de-orphan category for that date, so you're not having to revisit the same article twice when browsing through the monthly orphaned articles category."
The first part is true (because it only expect there to be one date and it doesn't expect att or few to have any date), but the second part is a complete lie (because it only expect there to be one date and it doesn't expect att or few to have any date) and "so you're not having to revisit the same article twice when browsing through the monthly orphaned articles category."is the part I was trying to get fixed so that it worked as it is suppose to. It looks like the only part of that whole section that is true is the
"Note that this does not double-categorize it"part, and to fix the documentation a person only needs to remove the word "not" and restore the template to the way that T13 had fixed it. 3gg5amp1e ( talk) 13:06, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Sorry, I've been too busy and away. Do you need anything further from me here? I see that part of my changes have been restored, and I'm glad to see that 3gg5amp1e seems to be happy with that. Any objection to me fixing the grammar for "few" linked ones back to an appropriate wording since "no other articles link to it" is wrong? — {{U|
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Please see Template_talk:Orphan#No, or few. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 11:44, 5 February 2016 (UTC)
Why does the WP:ORPHAN shortcut redirect to this WikiProject page? Shouldn't it redirect to the explanation of what an orphan is, as does WP:O and WP:ORPH? I find it illogical that a shortcut directs to a different page than do the abbreviated versions of the same word. – void xor 19:06, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
The October 2008 orphans are all gone ! The one remaining one is on PROD row.
All but about 9 or 10 have been successfully deorphaned, the 9 or 10 being attempt tagged into March 2016. However, the majority of these can probably be easily fixed if we can find someone who knows a bit about Afghanistan geography. Most of them are location stubs for that country.
Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:09, 17 March 2016 (UTC)
The December 2008s are now down from 400 plus three weeks ago to now just less than 200.
Well done all of us !!
Eno Lirpa ( talk) 13:47, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
I gave GoingBatty a query, that gives All orphaned articles articles with more than two incoming links, so he's doing that job. -- Edgars2007 ( talk/ contribs) 16:37, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
I have been away for a few days, and I see now well below 80. Great going folks. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:37, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
May I ask who has made the the progress, and do you have any tips on how you are going about them. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:37, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
I have tonight (my time) finished off the December 2008s. I big HURRAH for all of us ! Only 130,000 to go ! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:45, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
A full HURRAH for January 2009 Done - A small one at least knowing what is now to come for February ! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 13:07, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Awesome work guys! After taking a break from this project for a while I'm excited and happy to see it still alive and well. -- œ ™ 07:21, 9 August 2016 (UTC)
Well done all. February 2009 will soon drop below the 20,000 mark ! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 13:56, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
HURRAH - now down to 19,999. Well done all of us. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:34, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
Another small morale boosting step - another 100 are done - now below 19,900. Well done all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 15:12, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
Another small hurrah. Now just dropped to 19,699 . . . Good work all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:04, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Hey all! While trying to de-orphan things, I fairly regularly have to go beg a related WikiProject for help. Oftentimes my calls go unanswered, but sometimes some helpful soul jumps in. I made this award for those times. Feel free to use it or change it as you see fit!
Adoption Award | |
For generously de-orphaning Article name out of the goodness of your heart. I hereby award you the prestigious Adoption Award! Sleep well knowing another orphan has found its place in the encyclopedia! |
Ajpolino ( talk) 03:35, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
Folks.
I have been doing a bit of deorphaning and I am getting a very small but steady number of reverts by editors (I have not checked but it looks like outside this project) on the grounds that my inclusion in the host article is not notable or important enough. Typically the issue is to the linked-in subject matter. My view is that if there is an article notable enough to exist in its own right then it can be linked in wherever reasonably appropriate, that is the notability of the link is inherited from the article being linked. Hence either the link and the article stay, or the article needs to be taken to AfD and properly adjudicated. I think we should push back on such reverts but if we do I think the project needs a consistent approach rather than each of us tacking each revert one at at time and on our own. Comment? Eno Lirpa ( talk) 11:10, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
Hello all de-orphaners. Last month Nemo_bis wrote a patch and I pushed it for puppet SWAT deployment. This thing makes the page Special:LonelyPages update once monthly (on the 15th). This will help us find new articles which are orphans, but not marked as such with a template yet. I'm currently going through this month's query and tagging them as much as I can with AWB. This will unfortunately do that the monthly categories will be larger than usual perhaps....Anyways, happy editing! ( t) Josve05a ( c) 21:32, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
Well done all. February 2009 will soon drop below the 19,500 mark ! Another 500 almost done in just over one month. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:37, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
Now down to below 17,500. Well done all.
Eno Lirpa (
talk) 12:04, 13 May 2017 (UTC)
17,140, and I just de-orphaned the last page from March 2008. BlackcurrantTea ( talk) 20:52, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
Now down to 16,142. Another 1,000+ done. Well done all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 13:02, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
Done All articles beginning with "A" have now been processed. Well done all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:32, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
I am a bit concerned regarding Category:Orphaned articles from August 2017. It looks like there might have been a wayward AWB run here. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 16:12, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
As per the reconfirmation below of the current long term orphan standard, it looks like thousands have been incorrectly, newly orphan tagged by Rich Farmbrough ? Eno Lirpa ( talk) 15:09, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
Well done everyone. Another 1000 articles from February 2009 have been processed.
Progress looks like:
We have picked up the pace a little bit recently.
Not sure if the next chart is useful. It either shows we are preferentially cleaning up older orphans before newer ones or people are on average creating more orphans each month at an increasing rate:
(Excluding February 2009 because it is such an outlier.)
Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:29, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
Another 1000 done. Hurrah. Now down to 14,192. Well done all.
Eno Lirpa (
talk) 12:27, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Down to 14,000 even in Feb 09! I like the even milestones so getting to do this one was very satisfying for me. ♠ PMC♠ (talk) 09:23, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
By the way, I will be on a wikbreak probably until early October 2017. Hopefully I can make up for lost wikitime when I get back. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:43, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
Another 1000 processed now just over 13,000. Well done all. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:19, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
I beleive the orphan criteria formerly required multiple (2 or 3) qualifying (non-redirect, non-disambiguation) incoming links. The criteria was at some point revised to require only a single qualifying incoming link. That is the standard that we are currently working to in this project. AWB and other scripts manipulating {{ Orphan}} tags should also be adjusted to work to the current criteria. ~ Kvng ( talk) 20:10, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
|Few=
can be used as an exception for cases where there is more potential. This is not eliminating the backlog through redefinition, it is attacking the most important part of the problem first. If we can first get a single link into every article, we can come back for a second pass an thicken things up. Part of running a successful project is having realistic milestones and creating a feeling of success amongst participants. ~
Kvng (
talk) 19:10, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone know if AWB has been sorted to match the long standing revised criteria yet? Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:25, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
Rich. Have you done any clean up? ItApril 2017 still looks very high to me.
Eno Lirpa (
talk) 12:25, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
Hi I see this page Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/do-talk-message is still saying that an article needs a minimum of 2 inbound links before it is no longer considered an orphan, when I gather from elsewhere that only one link is required. Should I change this? Also, the s there a bot which reviews orphaned articles and deorphans them if it finds an inbound link? If not that would be very useful. I’m working on 2009 orphans at the moment and at least one in ten us actually no longer an orphan, so a bot would maybe knock 15,000 off the list at a stoke! Mccapra ( talk) 18:49, 15 October 2017 (UTC)
@ Eno Lirpa: after a bit of digging I've found that AWB only removes orphan tags from pages with more than two incoming links. DrStrauss talk 12:46, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
I have initiated a discussion at
Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Orphans, since I think this deserves a wider airing. All the best:
Rich
Farmbrough, 23:28, 16 October 2017 (UTC).
Premeditated Chaos and Eno Lirpa may be interested in User:DrStrauss/sandbox 3 which contains a list of all articles with one or more incoming links in the February 2009 orphans category. I was going to de-tag them with AWB but decided against it because a good quarter of them meet deletion criteria. There are 976 of them. DrStrauss talk 13:41, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
@ Eno Lirpa: @ Premeditated Chaos: Kvng
Just for tracking purposes I've created a list of BLPs in the February 2009 orphans category here. It contains 2,314 items.
DrStrauss talk 22:38, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Well done all. We have cracked 12,000 ie 11,994. The next major visual / psychological milestone beckons ie 10,000! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:26, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
So February 2009 is still dropping by roughly 1000 per month.
Progress looks like :
Note that in July total orphans was 142,000. It is now 134,000. (Not counting attempteds ~ 1,200, and ~ 400 others(?).) This is down 8,000 in about 4 months, about 2,000 per month. Are we winning? At that rate it will be another 5.5 years before have the only current month to worry about! Eno Lirpa ( talk) 01:28, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
There has been a big spike in the number of articles marked as attempted deorphans.
I am not sure that just moving large numbers of articles from one orphan category to another is all that helpful to our cause ? Especially, if they are then not quite as visible to us and we have to look in two places ? Eno Lirpa ( talk) 14:06, 1 December 2017 (UTC)
I think I would prefer "attempted" to be a place of very last resort, for an article after strong, multiple attempts to deorphan, merge, and also notability has been considered (eg taken to PROD or AfD if necessary). I am not comfortable with it being used as a workflow tool for individual editors. Each of us can create bookmark folders to manage workflow and come-back-to lists etc. Or keep an edit open sandbox page while we work to build a list of links to come-back-to pages as we work. Eno Lirpa ( talk) 12:30, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
I've marked a lot of orphans "attempted" in past years because I thought I had exhausted all options to deorphan. Recently Mccapra has come around and revisited these and seemingly effortlessly deorphaned many of them. My reaction is, "Why didn't I think of that?" Well, I didn't and I assume Mccapra is experiencing the same thing here. It's all good. I appreciate what Mccapra is doing for the project. A belated barnstar is coming your way. ~ Kvng ( talk) 14:45, 6 December 2017 (UTC)