How to deal with old categorizations?

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@Theleekycauldron @Sdrqaz @ProcrastinatingReader @ONUnicorn @Legoktm (pinging everybody who participated in the original BRFA). I'm starting to think about the next steps. I've got all the pending nominations getting correctly tagged. Now I need to figure out what to do when a pending nomination is closed (promoted or rejected). One possibility is to go around and remove the tags. Another would be to just leave them. A third would be to replace them with monthly aggregated categories similar to Category:Passed DYK nominations from February 2023. I'm kind of leaning towards the monthly aggregates. I'd appreciate any input you folks might have. -- RoySmith (talk) 02:33, 8 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

Hi, Roy. The point of the bot was to make prep builders' lives easier when following the balance restrictions (at least that's how I interpreted it, as a simplification). Of the three options, leaving them alone doesn't seem viable: being part of "[[Category:Pending DYK x" would be misleading once it's closed and would mean that builders would be looking through that category for nominations that can be promoted and encountering false positives. I'm curious why you would want to do monthly aggregated categories. Are you intending it to be as an archive/record-keeping practice? That seems to be a bit more work than simply removing them, either in coding the bot to create those categories and populate them, or making changes to the DYK nomination template (admittedly more unlikely). Sdrqaz (talk) 04:59, 8 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
That was certainly the original point, yes. But it occurs to me that there might be value in keeping the historical categories, which would allow people to ask questions like, "Show me all the biographies we ran in 2023". I'm not committed to that, but wanted to explore the idea before the next round of code writing. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:03, 8 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
I'd say do what Tamzin did on {{DYKsmirk}}: leave the tags for future reference, but make them non-category-diffusing after a nomination has been closed. Seems like the best option on all fronts. theleekycauldron (talkcontribs) (she/her) 06:32, 9 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
Hmmm, that might work. Wiki template syntax is truly an abomination that makes my head hurt, but I'll see what I can figure out. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:26, 9 February 2023 (UTC)Reply
  • Oh my. If I've parsed this gibberish correctly, the relevant part of {{DYKsmirk}} is:
<includeonly>
  {{#switch:
    {{lc:{{{nocat|no}}}}}
    |true
    |yes
    |y
    |1=
    |#default={{if in page
               |%[%[Category:....ed DYK nominations
               |
               |{{category handler|template=[[Category:Pending DYK nominations with potential quirky hooks]]}}
              }}
  }}
</includeonly>

It is mind-boggling that a top-10 website is built on this stuff.