Template talk:Information/author processing

Categories

What is the sense of the 3600 images in Category:Author matching Creator template, Creator template not used and around 600 of related red categories. Is there anyway to get them resolved in the near future ? --Foroa (talk) 13:31, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

We want files to use the relevant Creator template if possible. See Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2012/08#Automatic_usage_of_creator_template. Rd232 (talk) 16:37, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, I have my doubts on it. I had to create already 20 such cats as it dominated the Special:WantedCategories, and an important part of the creators change name for all sorts of reasons. I guess that you will equally create a hell of a maintenance job with that feature, there are about 4000 images waiting for you. Will your have a bot creating all the maintenance cats for around 600 of related red categories ?. --Foroa (talk) 17:10, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

I did and do not intend any of the redlinked categories to be created; it's not necessary for the maintenance task, since going to the category gives you the list of files in it whether the category exists or not. As I said in the VP discussion, AWB may be best suited to cleaning out the main category; but I don't see it as any more urgent than many other backlogs - it's just another thing which ought to be done one day. That said, I didn't think of it affecting Special:WantedCategories, so if you can see a better way to achieve the same goal of identifying cases where Creator templates should probably be applied, go for it. Rd232 (talk) 18:10, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Some people work almost daily on Special:WantedCategories to trap bad names, novice categorisation people, people that use for example Kirke, Castello, Kunst, ... categories that are then moved to the right categories instead of the general Churches, Castles, art categories. A pity that this list is not updated daily. Of course, when there is too much noise on it, it becomes unusable, why I created the maintenance cats. --Foroa (talk) 18:32, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Since several weeks now, I spend several hours per week creating in Special:WantedCategories those "author matching" categories in order to keep that Special:WantedCategories. It looks as nobody wants or exploits those categories, so I don't intend to spend the rest of my life creating silly categories that basically nobody wants. You either find a solution for it or revert the template. --Foroa (talk) 06:10, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Well I already said I didn't want those categories created. If you can see a better way to handle this, do that, and if you can't and just want to revert it, fine. Rd232 (talk) 10:23, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

I also think Category:Author matching Creator template, Creator template not used category is great, but per author categories are not necessary, and should be removed. --Jarekt (talk) 12:35, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Foroa, I see you have reverted the auto category creation. Shall we delete now empty (or soon to be empty) categories? --Jarekt (talk) 13:36, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Indeed, we reached already around 3500 (red) categories, so it did not stop. It is now at 2300 categories, but a bot to delete the few hundreds of (soon) empty cats would be most appreciated. Thank you. --Foroa (talk) 14:44, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Page deletion can not be done by most bots, since they do not have admin rights - for a good reason. But I will give you a hand with those. AutoWikiBrouser allows pretty fast manual deletions. --Jarekt (talk) 14:58, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

 Done --Jarekt (talk) 15:08, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Good. Many thanks. --Foroa (talk) 16:18, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Deletion too early?

@Jarekt: The backlink list still shows many uses (this tool, which queries directly the database, says more than 31.8 million!). This means that even though the tracking category seemed empty at the time of the deletion, this may be because the pages it should contain simply haven’t got reparsed between the last edit to this page and the date of the deletion. I suggest restoring the template and waiting till the usage count and the category member count becomes equal (and hoping that this number will be zero). Looking at the pace the usage count drops, it will take weeks or even months (maybe a server-side script run could speed it up), but what harm does this template cause in the meantime? —Tacsipacsi (talk) 15:35, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Tacsipacsi, I think the database is off. I think, {{Information}} was the only template calling {{Information/author processing}} when I stopped calling it two months ago. According to this backlink list no other templates call it, and I think it would be very odd for any files to call it directly. I did have {{Information/author processing}} adding Category:Pages using "Information/author processing" template for a while but it did not found any pages. I also tested couple thousand random pages and they all stopped showing the use after purging through null edit. That is why I thought it was safe to delete it. If you still think, that it was premature I can restore it. By the way, Module:Date is also used on gazillion pages, while I suspect it is not used at all since it was replaced with Module:DateI18n in April. --Jarekt (talk) 02:07, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

@Jarekt: There might be templates which contain it only in their <includeonly> part and thus don’t show up in this list, which is less odd. But I also saw people subst’ing templates like {{Information}} (I don’t recall where and exactly what template, but it doesn’t matter: such things happen, so this template is potentially used on a handful of pages; if we wait this change to fully propagate, it’s a perfect way to spot such pages and unsubstitute the template). And I’m more optimistic about when this change will finish propagating: when I first queried the inclusion count (shortly after you added the categorization, so around 23-24 December), it was more than a million more (32.8M+), but it also shrank a hundred thousand pages since yesterday. (And of course if you randomly select some thousand pages, it’s very likely to have no problematic; I don’t expect more than a couple dozens, at most a few hundreds of pages, which you can more than easily miss in your sample.)

I still don’t understand why is it worth deleting this template at all. If it was unused for sure, I wouldn’t bother (I’d say it doesn’t improve, but doesn’t worsen either), but until that, yes, please restore it. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 14:39, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

 Done I undeleted it, and I guess I agree that there is no great need to delete it. --Jarekt (talk) 15:26, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

@Jarekt: Now there are only 90 transclusion backlinks to protected pages, mostly thanks to the SDC bots touching a great number of files. Most of these 90 files are cascade-protected, but some like File:Haplogroup T-M184 tree.png are not, and I’m not sure if they really need to be fully protected. Could you probably go through these manually/semi-automatically and check if this level of protection is really needed (and make null edits to all of them regardless)? I still don’t think the deletion of this template is worth it, but once there are zero usages, I can accept it. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 10:56, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

I touched all those pages (used "Perform batch task" to append an empty line) and they are all gone. I guess nothing transcludes this page now. Time to delete? --Jarekt (talk) 03:03, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

As I said, I don’t think the deletion necessary or even useful, but if you want to delete this, it won’t be more appropriate any time in the future. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 11:57, 6 December 2020 (UTC)