Wikipedia talk:Dusty articles

	Database analysis (inactive)
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Database analysis, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.Database analysisWikipedia:WikiProject Database analysisTemplate:WikiProject Database analysisDatabase analysis articles

This page was nominated for deletion on 9 July 2016. The result of the discussion was Keep.

I see a remarkable amount of material here that never had any sources, some of which seem no more than dicdefs. DGG (talk) 20:48, 2 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

To keep this list partially updated, I suggest that if someone edits an article from this list, they can then remove it from the list. This can be called "dusting" :) I just dusted the first. --Zvika (talk) 19:11, 14 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm planning to do regular updates of the page, so "dusted" articles will be removed daily anyway. Wronkiew (talk) 23:55, 14 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that Wikipedia:Dusty articles's usefulness is considerably diluted by lists. "List of school districts" and "List of colonial governors" take up more than half the page (permalink). While I suppose school districts can change, I think it is safe to say the list of 17th century governors is fairly static. Perhaps this page would benefit from also excluding Category:Lists? We could probably create Wikipedia:Dusty lists if needed. —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 22:07, 14 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How about grouping pages so only the dustiest in the series shows up in the list? Wronkiew (talk) 23:55, 14 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, sure, that would be cool, too. I was just thinking that, since the code that generated this page already excludes dab pages, adding an additional category to the exclusion criteria should be almost trivial. Consolidating entries for lists might not be so easy to do. • Thinking about it, even given the consolidation trick, I still think it might be useful to "Dusty articles" be a separate thing than "Dusty lists". Maybe "Dusty disambiguation pages", too. Or one big "Dusty pages" list with sections for each. Articles aren't really the same thing as list pages, so treating them separately would be useful, I think. That way, someone who wants to focus on one type, can. —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 02:41, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have proposed a bot to update this list on a daily basis. On the upside, it will be kept up to date so we will have a ready supply of articles to dust. On the downside, any changes made to the list will be removed when it is updated. The proposal is at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DustyBot. Please let me know if you have any comments or concerns. Wronkiew (talk) 23:55, 14 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is a great idea.. but I imagine that a lot of articles may even be getting missed off this list which have only been subjected to bot edits since 2005. In particular, any biographical articles (which are most important to keep accurate) will have been added to Category:Living people in 2006, and any article with an autoformatted date will have probably had it removed by now; many probably by a bot. Could the list somehow be changed to use the last edit not marked as a bot edit? BigBlueFish (talk) 12:29, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's a non-trivial change. The dataset that I'm working with (already over 1 GB in size) only has the most recent edit, which includes bot edits. If you have any ideas for how to get the most recent non-bot edit for each article, let me know. Wronkiew (talk) 01:31, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Why do we have pages on here that are only days old? Kevin Rutherford (talk) 00:59, 22 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I need to update the index. It might take a few days before this is fixed. Wronkiew (talk) 04:55, 22 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Is the dusty articles updating disabled? It looks like the page hasn't updated since February, and I've tried clearing the cache. For example, I made an edit to Storehouse plc which is still on the list, and there are a few redlink articles on the list as well. Dialectric (talk) 22:34, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There seem to be an awful lot of surname articles in the list, which are disambiguation pages in all but name. Is there a way to extend the non-inclusion rule about dabs to cover these? ∴ ZX95 ^[discuss] 21:09, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Most of these are WP:SIA. I have no idea if any one is even watching this but if possible could they be excluded? BlueworldSpeccie (talk) 18:09, 7 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've been doing work on WP:DUSTY articles and am finding that WP:SIA are well-deserving of love. A quick search usually turns up one or more entries that need to be added. The same would probably hold for WP:DISAMBIG if they were included again. ~Kvng (talk) 18:16, 25 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This hasn't been updated since June... can anyone kick the index to get it working again? PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 16:47, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

+1 ~Kvng (talk) 23:32, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I also found this list useful.Dialectric (talk) 01:30, 3 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

still not updated... which is a shame, as it is a useful list.....! 198.102.219.143 (talk) 18:14, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I was just snooping around, isn't this functionally equivalent to Wikipedia:Database_reports/Forgotten_articles? It looks like it's currently handled weekly by user:Community Tech bot, just to a list of 500 instead of 100-ish. What about redirecting WP:DUSTY to that and dumping this page? Pinging @GeoffreyT2000 and DGG: you two were involved in this page's MFD in July, what are your thoughts? 170.178.234.233 (talk) 16:24, 27 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

One of the unsolved problems at WP is that of updating, and we should support making the problem more visible. I think a list to which one can add comments is preferable to a database report. But this list is merely selected recent items from db reports and is therefore useless. I did not realize that atthe MfD. (BTW, the report seems to also be including disam pages, though it is supposed to be programmed to ignore them. ) DGG ( talk ) 15:36, 28 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed those, I think the issue with those disambiguation pages is that they don't have a template that says they're disambiguation in a way the script was designed to read. I imagine the guy running that bot could add more templates to the automatic ignore set to fix that. I figured nobody at the MFD knew about that database report (I stumbled across it by pure chance), but I'm not bold enough to march this back to another deletion discussion so soon. Another alternate way that I think reviving this page might work is to transclude that database report into this page, then add a second section with a manually-driven table to hold articles that got the dust knocked off but still need idle eyes to look at, with a small bot to wipe old and undated entries to it to keep it from overflowing.170.178.234.233 (talk) 16:51, 28 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's been a slow day at work for me, so I just manually went through that database report and created a fresh list of the 100 dustiest articles in Wikipedia, excluding Set Index articles and lists that look like such at a glance. I will say that I've developed a new appreciation of bots from this exercise.... 170.178.234.233 (talk) 18:11, 28 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Database_reports/Forgotten_articles looks like a useful alternative. Thanks for pointing this out. ~Kvng (talk) 00:34, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The project shows "inactive" but there is activity so actually (maybe) "semi-active". I just "dusted"

• Ramtil oil: Updated here. Otr500 (talk) 04:05, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Otr500: the page you had added the entry to was designed to hold nothing but the date a bot had last updated the list of dusty articles, so it looked a little weird after the cache purged; I undid your revision to repair that date, but you can go right ahead and make a new section on the main page if you want to show newly-dusted articles here. Right now WP:Dusty is basically a zombie, so now's a perfect time to improve the page design. I'd say just add a new section on the page itself instead of messing with the sub-pages, which can probably be deleted since the bot that used to operate here has long been dead. 107.182.202.15 (talk) 22:42, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I thought that was the wrong place but had 5 mins to leave for work. Did get some action going though --LOL. I will look at this when I can but if someone wants to start the page work I will see if I can add some articles to it. Otr500 (talk) 02:45, 24 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I just modified the page so all the information is on it, rather than in the two subpages that used to be handled by the now-dead bots. Would a registered user please list WP:Dusty_articles/List and WP:Dusty_articles/Updated at WP:MFD? The instructions for an unregistered user is to post a request on the talkpage over there, but that page is currently semi-protected so I can't add a request, and the same goes for the talkpage of the admin that protected it. 170.178.234.233 (talk) 21:33, 18 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]