Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity/Archive 1

How is this page generated?

Hey Jitse, how do you generate this page? You made me curious. :) Oleg Alexandrov 20:45, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

I suffered an attack of nerdiness, which produced a script that gets info on a daily basis. For instance, for "requested articles" I just get all the articles listed on Wikipedia:Requested articles/mathematics. For the VfD section, I get pages like Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 July 22 and compare with the pages listed on List of mathematical topics (A) and similar.

I am not yet sure how useful it is. It seems impossible to cover all the cases. For instance, pages like Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/KarlSchererRevisited1 are not found because the title does not agree with the title of the article. In fact, I wanted to wait a couple of days before solliciting opinions and looking whether I would continue with it. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 21:16, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Hey fellow nerd, where are the details? What language do you use, how do you upload things? :) Oleg Alexandrov 21:20, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Python and Pywikipedia. Perl's "$‘:$&:$’\n" syntax looks to much like swearing to me ... See [1] for more details than you care to know ;) Jitse Niesen (talk) 21:32, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

PS: Suggestions are welcome, even of the that's-useless-you-should-just-write-articles variety! Jitse Niesen (talk) 21:33, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree about the Perl syntax, I hated it at the beginning too (and still do a little bit). I find your page very helpful. It will get bigger with time though, when you might consider splitting it into subpages. This unless you decide to trim things from time to time. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov 21:47, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

The program only lists the last seven entries, but you can't see it because it has run for only three days. That's quite enough for addicted people; who cares what happened last month? The idea is that I doubt that the portal will be maintained, so a zero-maintenance strategy is needed (well, you can always dream, can't you?) Jitse Niesen (talk) 21:58, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

List of mathematical topics issues

I think you noticed rather large recent changes to the list of mathematical topics from your diff program. I would just like to say that the changes are not as big as they look. These days I mostly bypassed some redirects (if a page was not listed, but a redirect to it was, I replaced the redirect with the actual thing). I also removed some redirects pointing to non-math. (I also removed some redirects to mathematicians, links to physicists, etc).

By the way, do you have any suggestions/feedback to what I have been doing to the list of mathematical topics or what should be done? I am so happy now I am not the only person thinking about it. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov 16:24, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Don't worry, I will protest as soon as you place as much as a dot wrong ;)

I think it is okay to bypass all redirects and collapse all the pipes (i.e., replace [[xxx|yyy]] by [[xxx]] ). I would also remove the red links; I never understood why they were added in the first place. The User:Mathbot/Changes mathlist page is extremely useful.

I don't understand why nepnoc number was removed. It is in Category:Number theory, which is a mathematical theory according to the List of mathematics categories. Do you have a manual override?

Do you detect page moves? For instance, Sixth Term Entrance Paper was recently moved to Sixth Term Examination Paper, and it promptly got filed under the new name in LoMT. I'd like to note in my table that the article moved, as opposed to article 1 being removed and article 2 created. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 17:20, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

I also agree that the red links are not useful (they used to be when there was no bot, and then it would have been useful to list potential new articles). I will deal with those soon.

I indeed put the nepnoc number on my own "blacklist", which I also plan to make public soon. I should not have rushed with that one, but sometimes it happens that articles get deleted but nobody bothers to remove the links.

Now, my bot does not detect page moves. Ideally the page to be moved would be in a math category, and then they would pop in by default. The redirect would need to be removed by hand (by the way, there are now 533 redirects, out of 7990 articles; I am not yet sure it is worth the trouble deciding which ones are good ones and which are not). It is good that your bot will detect page moves. Oleg Alexandrov 20:37, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

My bot does not detect page moves. In fact, I don't know what the best way is to detect page moves, which is why I asked you. Did you get the number 533 by downloading all the 7990 articles or is there a better way? -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 21:25, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

I misinterpreted your statement. Yes, I manged to get that statistics because I have all the math articles on my computer, updated daily (I need that for example when I do spell-checking). I don't know how to do it in a smarter way. I guess there are logs somewhere on Wikipedia one could use, but I don't want to bother. :) Oleg Alexandrov 21:45, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

And by the way, maybe, in addition to recording the articles posted on the list of requested articles, one could also record the articles removed from there. Many freshly created articles might need categorization, clean up, etc. But this if you think it would be helpful and easy to do. Oleg Alexandrov 21:58, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

If you just want the articles removed from "requested articles", that is extremely easy to do, as this is more or less the same as the articles removed from LoMT. In fact, I just did it and it took me probably less time than writing this reply (though with equally big probability, it will turn out that it does not work). I think more useful is a list of articles removed from "requested articles" that have been created, bur this is slightly harder to produce. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 22:18, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

The former is enough, thanks. Most articles removed from the list of requested articles should be fulfillied requests, with one or two red links thrown in. Oleg Alexandrov 23:50, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Good job!

I like it! A prominent link on the math project page would indeed be a good idea. linas 23:41, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Yay, i like it too. This is some pretty potent magic. --MarSch 15:51, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Then be nice enough and visit this page from time to time to do clean up. :) Oleg Alexandrov 15:57, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Logging in

Hey Jitse, did you forget to log in, or your bot just decided to go anonimous? :) I encountered the same problem, the cookie expires every now and then, and so is better to have your bot log in each day to make sure it is never out. Oleg Alexandrov 15:26, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Random article

Hi Jitse. I was wondering if would be a good idea to also list three random articles each day in the current activity page. In this way it will be probabilistically guaranteed that each article gets visited at least every now and then. What do you think?

On other matters, hopefully tomorrow I plan to add to the list of mathematicians the way I added to the list of mathematical topics, by going through categories. The country and dates of birth/death for each mathematician can be obtained from categories too. So expect rich harvest in the current activity in a day or two. :) Oleg Alexandrov 04:33, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

It is not what you asked for, but perhaps you will enjoy it anyway: A random mathematical article. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 22:10, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Nice! If you did it just for me, what a (random) act of kindness! :) Oleg Alexandrov 01:30, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

That's neat! Could we incorporate something like this for the mathematics portal? It'd be neat if there were some sort of argument we could hand to Special:Random (like Special:Random?Category_name would return something random within that category) but I doubt that's a possibility. I'm admittedly [somewhat] new at all of this, so please tell me if my ideas are naive. Thanks! --Kooky | Talk 23:02, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Feel free to publicize the external link wherever you want. It works because I generate a list of all mathematical articles every day. Implementing something like Special:Random?Category_name is not a naive idea, but not a new one either. There seems to be no way to do this without causing too much stress to the servers, unfortunately. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 23:41, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

I figured that server stress might be the case. That is unfortunate. Oh well; I'll use the external link. Take care! -- Kooky | Talk 01:00, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Point (topology)

User:Arthur Rubin wanted Point (topology) to be speedy deleted, I told him it wasn't a candidate for that but I've redirected it to Point. Since this is one of the topics on your list I thought I should let you know. Kappa 13:43, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I also thought that this article was kind of useless. Oleg Alexandrov 17:36, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

The article may be "kind of useless" but at least it's not pointless, since now it points to Point. — Paul August ☎ 17:28, August 30, 2005 (UTC)

okay I think we've had enough pointed comments here Dmharvey File:User dmharvey sig.png Talk 17:43, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

recent math changes page

Like the special:recentchanges but for math only. I kind of remember Oleg saying something which might work this way in relation to the math article lists. Can we have this somewhere, with perhaps the top x changes on this page also? --MarSch 12:43, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

This has been working for ages. See list of mathematical topics. The recent changes was the primary motivation for keeping that list up to date. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 13:50, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Hey, is that a mediawiki feature which works for every list? --MarSch 14:06, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes. You make your list, and then look at the recent changes to articles linked from the list. See again the list of mathematical topics for the syntax.

Would you be interested in maintaining the list of differential geometry topics? I have a tool to spit out articles from a list of categories on some list talk page, and from there one would need to integrate them nicely in the list. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:50, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

I would definately be interested in keeping an eye on such a list. Definately better than alphabetical lists :) I'm trying to get all of them on one big list, but it won't save yet :( --MarSch 14:55, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

See talk:list of differential geometry topics. Going to bed now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:09, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Statistics

Do we have any page that gives the statistics on the math articles? E.g. How many articles, stubs, categories, articles on mathematicians, # of pages needing attention or cleanup, # of math edits in the last 24 hours, etc. If not, do any of you bot masters want to tackle it. It seems like you should already have the machinery in place. -- Fropuff 02:54, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Some of those are provided about by very tool on whose page you are now (thanks to Jitse and Python). I don't see why one would be interested in the edits in the last 24 hours. My bot spits out a list of all articles modified in the last two days, see User:Mathbot/Recent changes, and if you ask me really nice I could count those at the bottom of that list (but again, why?)

About the number of articles needing attention, see the discussion I just started at Wikipedia talk:Pages needing attention/Mathematics. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:19, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Whoops, the numbers are listed on this page already. Don't mind me — I'm blind. -- Fropuff 06:39, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Categories for deletion

The scripts don't seem to be tracking categories for deletion. In particular, Category:Mathematical disambiguation just got nominated for deletion. linas 02:40, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Good point. I've put it on my to do list, perhaps I can modify the scripts to track CfD. In the meantime, there is a box at the top where you can write whatever you want; I put the category there. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 04:32, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Stopped

This page does not seem to have been updated in the last four day. Is there a problem?

Also it might be nice to include Good Article/Feature Article nominations/acceptance/delisting and review. These are generally articles where fairly prompt attention is required to get more mathematics good articles. --Salix alba (talk) 09:49, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Removed articles

I can't quite make sense of "removed articles": there are several articles there that are new, clearly mathematical, and are not redirects, moves, etc. How do these get removed?

Also, I recently recatted some "new articles" e.g. Western Electric rules as clearly being not mathematical -- is there something to do for the remove, or will this be automatic? linas 16:24, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Bot too sensitive

Category:Women mathematicians, etc. were mentioned on CfD May 14, but not nominated for deletion. They nevertheless appear in the listing here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:59, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

You're right. The bot is only as smart as its creator, which is a real problem here! CfD is not that easy to parse, though of course we can do much better. Thanks for the feedback, it's always nice to see that people actually read the stuff. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 06:07, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Would including a search on "==[[" help to get only section headers? I have no idea how you wrote the bot. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:27, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

That would be very easy. Unfortunately, there are often multiple categories listed in a single nomination. I didn't look at all at how these kinds of nominations are formatted, so perhaps that case is also easy to handle. It's just a quick hack because people kept pestering me about it. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 01:31, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Potentially we should be able to check whether they are in Category:Categories for deletion. Which should eliminate false positives. --Salix alba (talk) 20:47, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, that could be very useful (I never saw that category). Am I correct in assuming that every category nominated for deletion and renaming should appear in there? If so, then checking the category would be a much better way then checking the CfD page. Perhaps we should check Category:Categories for discussion instead, which also lists categories nominated for merging or renaming? -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 04:09, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, especially since CfD is free to delete cats proposed for renaming. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:03, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Article alerts

Just a reminder that it's a good idea to give a link to the alerts from the mainpage, or to display them directly.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 09:02, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

I notice that Jitse's bot outperforms ArticleAlertbot. If you want to improve the usefulness of Article Alerts, I suggest that you make a request for a bot to tag relevant categories with the math ratings banner.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 04:09, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

There is general consensus among math editors not to have a bot tag all math articles. The category-based approach of Jitse's bot works perfectly well, and assigning importance and quality ratings must be done by hand. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:43, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Adler and Gessel?

Why did Allan R. Adler and Ira Gessel appear among today's "new articles" even though the articles don't exist and don't appear to have existed in the past? Michael Hardy (talk) 04:46, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Because they were added to the list of mathematicians by hand; see Aubrey Jaffer's contributions. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:22, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Same for Aslam Noor who was added today (diff). -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:24, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

No new updates

There have been no updates to the list of math articles since June 17. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 14:43, 3 July 2015 (UTC)

I've raised it here: Wikipedia:Bot_owners' noticeboard#Jietse's bot.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 18:54, 3 July 2015 (UTC)