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 ?

[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. —The preceding unsigned comment was 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)

[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)