Wikipedia talk:Special:ShortPages

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This is the talk page for the special page at Special:ShortPages. For general information on this and other special pages, see Help:Special page. For recent talk about special pages, see Recentchangeslinked/Specialpages discussion

• Wikipedia talk:Special:ShortPages/Archive 1: 2004 – August 2006; this archive is not full

Contents 1 Protected deleted pages 2 Bot to filter entries from the list 3 Broken? 4 Updates ? 5 Talk pages 6 Family Guy 7 Filtered entries now in the toolserver 8 Articles that are no longer Shortpages 9 Anyone cleaning up the empties? 10 Redirects

[edit] Protected deleted pages

Most of the 15 byte pages are protected deleted pages. Is there a way to filter them out? There are also a bunch of copyright violation pages listed around 40 bytes and up. This is annoying because I want to use this tool to mark stubs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.138.131.212 (talk • contribs)

Yes, I had the same problem, if possible it would be nice if these could be filtered out of the list. --Xyzzyplugh 13:02, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I have found it useful to go through the protected-deleted pages, deleting ones that were fairly recently created but were as a result of a limited re-creation problem that no longer exists after a few days, and using a filler comment on the other ones to remove it from the Shortpages listing. —Centrx→talk • 05:21, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

You could make a template name like {{deleteprotected............................................................................................}} — Omegatron 03:15, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

I handle these regularly, by adding a large comment section to them. So they end up showing up on the list generally the first re-run of the master after they are first salted, but after that those specific pages do not show up again, because they are no longer short, once the long comment is added in. It's not a perfect solution, and I generally have to add the comment to 1 - 3 dozen protected pages each run of the master, but it is, so far, working. - TexasAndroid 13:01, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bot to filter entries from the list

To continue the discussion started above about filtering the list... I have spent quite a bit of time over the week-end going through the list and taking care of entries that should be removed, and came to the same conclusion. I have written a bot that could potentially read the articles listed at Special:Shortpages and filter them out; an example of possible output is at User:Schutz/Shortpages. Please don't look too much at the awful colours, this was a first try, but basically the idea is that everything written on white background should be looked at; pages listed on grey background are pages whose size increased since Special:Shortpages was last cached (likely blanking which has been reversed). Other pages should be self-explanatory.

Since this is a bot, and could potentially be a performance problem, I have asked for approval to run the script at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval.

In the meantime, what do you think ? Any comment ? Schutz 20:20, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

A new version of the page has been cached, so I parsed it again, this time with 500 entries. I thought I improved the colours, but I have clearly failed here. Oh well. At least, it should catch more templates than before, meaning that there remains less pages to look at... Oh, and a nice Year 2000 bug at the top (no consequence, fortunately). Schutz 22:54, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Why did you delete this? It is really useful. —Centrx→talk • 05:19, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Nevermind, it was moved to User:Zorglbot/Shortpages. —Centrx→talk • 00:30, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Congratulations on finding it ;-) Yes, now the bot will generate it automatically once a day, around 2 UTC if I remember well. One thing I still have to do is write regular expressions for catching the "special" disambiguation pages (e.g. {{geodis}}); otherwise, it looks pretty good. Schutz 05:27, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I have just updated the bot with rules for disambiguation pages, and scheduled it to run at 6:00 UTC every day. Results on User:Zorglbot/Shortpages. Schutz 07:13, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Wonderful! :) - TexasAndroid 11:26, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Broken?

No update in two weeks - CrazyRussian talk/email 19:16, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Tim said the Special pages updates were stopped because one of them was taking an extreme amount of time. ...Clearly, they're running again now. —Centrx→talk • 01:03, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Updates ?

It seems that quite a few people are using User:Zorglbot/Shortpages (or maybe it is a coincidence...): all the top 500 short pages have been handled very quickly after Special:Shortpages was recreated. But since the special page is regenerated only every few days, it is rapidly useless once all entries have been handled. While it is a good idea to have this page cached (it takes some time anyway to handle all short pages), it'd be nice if it could be refreshed a bit more often than once every 4 days or so — or at least, if it could be refreshed at predictable intervals. Who's the best person to talk to about this ? Schutz 22:08, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

The special pages are deliberately updated at long intervals because they use server resources heavily and take a long time to complete. This is more of a problem for certain other special pages, but I don't think it is high on the developer's list of things to do. You could go on IRC (Freenode on #wikimedia-tech) and ask them about it. —Centrx→talk • 22:31, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

There has been a few updates in a short time, so I was hopeful, but unfortunately, there has just been 4 days without update. We'll see. Schutz 23:06, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Talk pages

Has anyone figured out a way to hack the URL of this page to get it to display non-articles? On a smaller project, that would be very useful... -- nae'blis 13:02, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Family Guy

Why is this page listed? It's not a short article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by TheBlazikenMaster (talk • contribs) 15:00, June 14, 2007

Special:Shortpages has been functioning in a cached mode since November 2005. As a result, the list is based upon the state of things at the time the cache run was performed instead of providing current data. A quick look through the history for Family Guy shows the article was blanked for roughly one minute earlier today.[1] The article appears to have been detected as being zero length between the blanking and the reversion. --Allen3 ^talk 15:32, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Filtered entries now in the toolserver

Just in case, I wanted to mention here that the bot that parses the list of shortpages and stores the result at User:Zorglbot/Shortpages is now available on the toolserver, either as a static web page or an interactive version. The main advantage is that as long as there is no replication lag on the toolserver, the pages are refreshed every 15 minutes (compared to every few days here !), so if you were using the bot page here previously, please have a look at the new tools. If noone objects on my talk page, the bot that updates this page will be deactivated in the next few days. Suggestions and comments are of course also welcome. Schutz 11:09, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Articles that are no longer Shortpages

These articles are no longer Shortpages. Kathleen.wright5 05:10, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

• 1.Www.google.com Listed as 0 Bytes
• 2.Anaconda 3 Listed as 0 Bytes
• 3.Joshua ben Hananiah Listed as 0 Bytes
• 4.James Crossley Listed as 0 Bytes
• 5.G8 Listed as 12 Bytes

[edit] Anyone cleaning up the empties?

Previously, my bot was tagging all short uncategorised pages as {{stub}}s, including those that were totally blank. I've been subsequently convinced this latter behaviour is a bad idea, so now I'm simply skipping pages of length zero. That might cause a build-up of them here, if they're not being cleared up otherwise. Alternatively, I could perhaps tag them with a distinct {{blanked}} or {{blankpage}} template, or something like that. ("This page erroneously previously blank", as it were...) Thoughts? Alai 20:27, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

The replication lag on the Tools Server is almost caught up (from about a month behind to only 2 days now) for Schutz's Tools Server shortpages tool. When the Tools Server is not as badly lagged as it has been for the last couple of months, the tool gives a nearly real-time look at what are the shortest pages of the project, and lets them be dealt with quite rapidly. There is really no build-up. And even when the TS was massively backed up, the old fashioned Shortpages list is still updated every 3 days or so, and people work it as well. So the blank pages are getting handled, right now, and will be handled even better in the next few days whent he TS finally catches up. End result, I'm not really sure that any such tagging of blank pages is really particularly needed. - TexasAndroid 21:21, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I assume the TS lag isn't a huge issue, since as you say the special pages have been getting updated regularly for the last while. My concern is rather that it may have been masked by them being thrown into Cat:stubs, and cleaned up that way. This will no longer be happening, and people may have gotten out of the habit of using either of the short pages resources. Anyway, for now I'll just keep an eye that it doesn't start growing radically. Alai 17:49, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Redirects

Most of the shortest pages on the lists are redirects with a template on them, so even though most redirects are taken off the list, not all of them are. Is there a way around this problem? Someone the Person (talk) 17:30, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Work off of this report instead. It has twice as many pages, is updated a *lot* more often, is color coded for type of page, and has an interactive version that lets you ignore certain of the types that do show up. - TexasAndroid (talk) 18:32, 26 March 2008 (UTC)