Category talk:Maintenance

Where whould I put Category:Noindexed pages?

[Moved from ArchWiki talk:Administrators#Where whould I put Category:Noindexed pages?. — Kynikos (talk) 04:31, 3 October 2015 (UTC)]

Hi, I just created Category:Noindexed pages cause it did not exist before. I hope the text is ok. I just do not know where to put this category. It's uncategorized at the moment. Can someone help please? IMHO we should have a maintainance category or something. --PMay (talk) 19:45, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

You can create Category:Maintenance as a root category, and also add Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls in it, which is the other automatic category listed in Special:WantedCategories. We'll also have to update Help:Style#Category pages, and then in that case those categories should also be added to ArchWiki:Requests#General requests. In case of non-indexed articles, we've never officially approved a policy, but I think we all agree that articles shouldn't be hidden from search engines, with the exception of User pages. The fix for the other category's articles is obvious instead. — Kynikos (talk) 04:09, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Ok - I created and described the categories. Now I dont know what to do with Category:Maintenance. I think it should be linked to an other category. IMHO there should only be a single top level category that is linked nowhere. --PMay (talk) 13:13, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Or do you suggest it should be a true root category? I think wikipedia for example only has one single root category. --PMay (talk) 13:52, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Also added Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls to ArchWiki:Requests#General requests. --PMay (talk) 13:52, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia uses categories for just about anything, including categorization of user pages and users themselves. Up until now, we've used categories only for regular content pages and relied on templates and their WhatLinksHere pages for maintenance. I see only one advantage of maintenance categories over templates so far: there are at least 2 automatically populated categories.

We can simply create another category to contain all former root categories, but is that worth it?

-- Lahwaacz (talk) 14:21, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Nah, root categories are defined in Help:Style#Category pages and that should be enough. Once upon a time the ArchWiki was using manually-created maintenance categories, but we decided to deprecate them in favor of Special:WhatLinksHere pages, which works perfectly fine, so we can use Category:Maintenance only to group automatic tracking categories. MediaWiki is also using mw:Category:Hidden categories, maybe that would be a more fitting name for us? Or maybe a shorter "Category:Tracking"? — Kynikos (talk) 15:25, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Category:Hidden categories is another automatic category collecting categories with the __HIDDENCAT__ magic word and mw:Category:Hidden categories is also a subcategory of mw:Category:Maintenance, so I think that we got it right and consistent :) Lahwaacz (talk) 12:55, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

True, I forgot that magic word, then how much sense would it make to instead apply __HIDDENCAT__ to Category:Noindexed pages and Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls, and use Category:Hidden categories as the root category in place of Category:Maintenance, moving there the style rule specifying that 1) only tracking categories should be hidden, and 2) no categories should be manually added to Category:Hidden categories? After all I think it just looks ugly to see tracking categories in the list at the bottom of an article among the other "normal" categories, and IMO it doesn't give much help at encouraging fixing the issue anyway. — Kynikos (talk) 04:33, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't have an opinion on hiding the tracking categories, but if we do this, admins and maintainers should be advised to enable the "Show hidden categories" option in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering.

As for Category:Maintenance, I think it is a good idea to keep it. In the future, it would be useful for automatically generated report pages from [1] and [2] (regardless if they end up in userspace or not). Actually, ArchWiki:Requests and ArchWiki:Reports could be already added to it so that it does not look empty. Alternatively we could move Category:Maintenance under Category:ArchWiki (or recreate it when needed) and use Category:Hidden categories as the root category instead.

-- Lahwaacz (talk) 13:51, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

+1 to using Category:ArchWiki. -- Alad (talk) 14:01, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

...and +1 to using Category:Maintenance also for automatic reports; in this case I withdraw the hidden category idea, otherwise it gets too complicated. — Kynikos (talk) 03:23, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Description of the group not matching its title

Hello, in this edit the description of this group was changed from "This is the maintenance root category." to "This category groups automatic tracking categories.". The problem with this edit is that it does not match the name of the category anymore. I think it should either be reverted or the category name should be changed to "automatic tracking". IMO the name should not change so it can be used for more than just tracking. --PMay (talk) 11:10, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

I think it's better to solve/implement #Where whould I put Category:Noindexed pages? first, so we know what exactly to write in the description, or whether to rename this category. — Kynikos (talk) 04:38, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

New maintenance categories for tracking flagged pages

As mentioned in Help_talk:Procedures#Deal_with_talk_pages_after_redirecting_a_page_to_another, I think it is a good idea to include a special maintenance category from all article status templates for easier tracking of the flagged pages (pages in a category are sorted, but the Special:WhatLinksHere lists are not).

We need to agree on the category names: we can either device names per-flag (e.g. "Poorly translated pages") or go with uniform scheme (e.g. "Pages flagged with Template:Bad translation"). For some templates we should probably explicitly include "pages or sections" instead of just "pages".

The categories should contain the __HIDDENCAT__ switch to mark themselves as hidden. They should contain a brief explanation text and link to ArchWiki:Requests#General requests for details.

Any other ideas?

-- Lahwaacz (talk) 14:54, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

As I said, I support the idea. I vote for the "uniform" wording, i.e. "pages flagged...", and I agree that we should specify "or sections" where needed. I think we'll have to update at least ArchWiki:Requests#General requests with links to the categories, or at least to Category:Hidden categories, and probably ArchWiki:Contributing should be touched up too. No more ideas for the moment. — Kynikos (talk) 03:02, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

So, I started by creating the categories and modifying templates... -- Lahwaacz (talk) 11:14, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, I've updated ArchWiki:Requests#General requests and ArchWiki:Contributing.

The new categories however now are both under Category:Maintenance and Category:Hidden categories, which in turn is under "Maintenance" itself. I find it a bit redundant: what if we didn't categorize them explicitly instead? They wouldn't appear under Special:UncategorizedCategories anyway. Alternatively we could explicitly categorize them under "Hidden categories".

Then there are a few more templates that could add a hidden category: Template:Dead link, Template:META Error, Template:META Unexplained Status Template and Template:META Missing package. What do you think?

— Kynikos (talk) 04:12, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

I've created two more categories for Template:Broken package link and Template:Dead link, not sure if we need it also for the meta templates. Probably no for "Unexplained Status Template" and probably yes for the other two.

And that's a good point about Special:UncategorizedCategories, so the categories are now only under Category:Hidden categories.

-- Lahwaacz (talk) 17:14, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree about the meta templates, so I've created Category:Pages with broken templates and Category:Pages with missing package links.

Then I've hidden the two automatic Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls and Category:Noindexed pages. Now Category:Maintenance only contains Category:Hidden categories: what if we merged them, thus deleting the former and making the latter a root category? I think we could even rename it with [3], probably "Hidden maintenance categories", just to be very clear about its purpose.

— Kynikos (talk) 04:48, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

I figured we might as well just put them back into Category:Maintenance - I think this is cleaner than "Hidden maintenance categories" because we might want to add also regular pages to the category (e.g. automatic reports/logs mentioned in #Where whould I put Category:Noindexed pages?). The only problem would be if we decided to split the maintenance categories per-language, but let's not complicate things just yet...

I've created Template:Hidden category to mark the hidden categories with a short header, now we should add an explanation of purpose to each maintenance category.

-- Lahwaacz (talk) 21:08, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Um... I've just realized that these categories are breaking Special:UncategorizedPages unfortunately... — Kynikos (talk) 07:18, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Upstream bug that's going nowhere: phabricator:T30145. In the meantime, we could use a script to detect such cases (and automatically fix common cases - uncategorized translations, subpages etc). -- Lahwaacz (talk) 15:52, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Create some hidden categories

For example, Category:Pages or sections flagged with Template:Translateme (简体中文). The reason is that there are pages in various languages in Category:Pages or sections flagged with Template:Translateme, which is not conducive for translators to find pages marked with Template:Translateme (简体中文). -- Blackteahamburger (talk) 01:45, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea. But if the translations will not appear in Category:Pages or sections flagged with Template:Translateme anymore, it should be documented in Template:Translateme#Usage. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 06:49, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

OK! If there are no objections, I will create these categories in two days. -- Blackteahamburger (talk) 08:22, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Category:Pages with dead links etc. cannot simply add language suffixes to create localized versions. Should they be renamed Category:Pages flagged with Template and then create localized versions? -- Blackteahamburger (talk) 03:11, 26 August 2020 (UTC)