SuggestBot should only suggest articles that actually need help. To do this we have a set of "task categories" (e.g. "cleanup" or "stub") in SuggestBot's configuration. Each of those task categories corresponds to a specific set of Wikipedia categories. This configuration is unique for each Wikipedia we support. On the English Wikipedia we have eight categories in total and you can read more about them in the (in English).

I now need some help to decide these categories for Russian Wikipedia. Through the language links from English Wikipedia I have found some candidates. Note that grabbing articles from sub-categories is not a problem, either direct sub-categories or restricted by name (for instance our search for stubs is restricted to categories matching "stub" in their name).

I am looking for feedback on how to prioritise these, suggestions for other categories to add to these task categories, and suggestions for task categories that I am missing.

Task category	Wikipedia category	Article count	Notes
Merge	Категория:Википедия:Кандидаты на объединение	511
Stubs	Категория:Незавершённые статьи по темам	380 148	Looking 5 levels down, restricted to categories matching "Незавершённые статьи"
Wikify		23 469
Add sources	Категория:Википедия:Статьи без ссылок на источники , Категория:Википедия:Статьи с утверждениями без источников , and Категория:Википедия:Статьи без ссылок на источники	74 422	Searches immediate sub-categories of the latter two categories, excluding "Википедия:Статьи с сомнительной значимостью"
Expand	Категория:Википедия:Статьи с незавершёнными разделами	15 441
Orphan	Категория:Википедия:Изолированные статьи	23 047	Searches immediate sub-categories.
Objectivity	Категория:Википедия:Статьи, нейтральность которых поставлена под сомнение	1623
Images	Категория:Википедия:Статьи без иллюстраций	46 562
Cleanup	Категория:Википедия:Статьи к переработке	7168
Update	Категория:Википедия:Статьи для обновления	3168
Translation help	Категория:Википедия:Запросы на перевод	5863	Also searches immediate sub-categories.
Reliability	Категория:Википедия:Статьи, достоверность которых требует проверки	5813
Notability	Категория:Википедия:Статьи с сомнительной значимостью	3463

There are some task categories for SuggestBot that I could not find categories for in Russian:

• Cleanup (for general article cleanup)
• Update (an article might need update with newer information or is out-of-date)
• Translation help (articles that have been poorly translated to Russian)

As mentioned, feel free to add suggestions of your own if there are some that I have missed. And again, feedback on which categories to keep and which to drop (for instance there might be a translation category but it has few articles and is well-maintained) is particularly helpful. Regards, Nettrom 18:41, 15 апреля 2014 (UTC) [ ]

@ Rubin16 : Sending you a ping so you get a notice about this discussion, posted as mentioned on enwiki yesterday. Cheers, Nettrom 18:44, 15 апреля 2014 (UTC) [ ]

Gathered article counts Apr 16-17 and added those. Nettrom 15:52, 17 апреля 2014 (UTC) [ ]

When I sort the table by article count I get the sense that there are 6 obvious categories (Stubs, Sources, Images, Wikify, Orphan, and Expand), followed by 5 fairly large categories (Cleanup, Translation, Reliability, Notability, and Update). Objectivity is also quite large, while I'm not sure the Merge category needs SuggestBot (it might be something the Russian Wikipedians want to run a project for instead).

How about we skip the Merge category and have SuggestBot suggest 3 articles from each of the remaining ones? That will give 36 articles per set of suggestions, should be plenty to work with! Pinging Rubin16 just in case, if others have thoughts I'd be happy to hear them! Regards, Nettrom 16:00, 17 апреля 2014 (UTC) [ ]

• User:Nettrom , I completely agree with you to skip merge category :) rubin16 18:53, 17 апреля 2014 (UTC) [ ]

@ Rubin16 : I configured SuggestBot with the 12 larger categories from the table and got it to do a test post in my sandbox, see . Looks ok?

There's a bit of translation work left before it's ready to go (the two templates used for posting, various system messages, parameter names and values). I have a Russian collaborator I'll ask to help me with that, but it should be ready for testing some time next week. Regards, Nettrom 21:55, 20 апреля 2014 (UTC) [ ]

To localise SuggestBot to Russian, several pages needs translation:

Page	Translated?	Notes
Участник:SuggestBot	Yes
Участник:SuggestBot/Шаблоны/Запросы	Yes
Участник:SuggestBot/Шаблоны/Регулярные	Yes
Участник:SuggestBot/Запросы	Yes
Участник:SuggestBot/Регулярные рекомендации	Yes
Участник:SuggestBot/юзербокс	Yes

If any of these pages should be moved to have better localized titles, please do so and I will update SuggestBot's configuration to handle it.

I have uploaded the relevant parts of SuggestBot's configuration to my bitbucket repository, it's a Python file that can be found here: The following parts of the configuration have strings that can be translated to Russian:

Key	Notes
EDIT_COMMENT	The edit comment SuggestBot uses when posting suggestions
REPLACE_COMMENT	Edit comment used when SuggestBot removes a template from a user page, e.g. when the user adds the request template to their user page instead of their talk page.
TEMPLATES	Must be updated if template titles are localized.
CONFIG_TEMPLATES	Same as for TEMPLATES.
TEMPLATE_STOPLIST	Same as for TEMPLATES.
REQUEST_TEMPLATES	Same as for TEMPLATES.
EMPTY_PLACEHOLDER	Used by the bot to save an otherwise empty page after removing the request template.
TEMPLATE_PARAMETERS	Names of template parameters for the "config" and "userbox" templates.
ONCE_MONTHLY	Parameter value for "frequency" to request suggestions once a month.
TWICE_MONTHLY	Parameter value for "frequency" to request suggestions twice a month.
WEEKLY	Parameter value for "frequency" to request suggestions once a week.
RE_YES	Regular expression to match a parameter value of "yes".
RE_NO	Regular expression to match a parameter of "no".

Let me know if there are questions and I will help out! Nettrom 15:48, 26 апреля 2014 (UTC) [ ]

Hello. Could you enable your bot to send the suggestions via wikimail to subscribers who do not want their interests to be public? As for me, I would like to get the suggestions via wikimail as I'm going to do some political editing and I don't want my political interests to be displayed on my talkpage. -- Синкретик / связь / вклад 17:54, 4 октября 2014 (UTC) [ ]

Hi, and thanks for asking! I've scheduled some time to look into that in the coming week, hopefully it should not be too difficult to make possible. In the meantime, if you do not want the bot to post to your talkpage, you can create a subpage in your userspace (e.g. "Участник:Синкретик/suggestions", but if can of course be any name you want) and put either the request or subscription template there, and SuggestBot will put the suggestions there instead. Regards, Nettrom ( обс ) 15:43, 5 октября 2014 (UTC) [ ]

@ Nettrom : hello, is it possible to update this page automatically with SuggestBot? С уважением, Iniquity 20:37, 22 января 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Iniquity : Hello! Yes, having SuggestBot update those lists is definitely possible! On English and Polish Wikipedia we have the bot pick five articles at random from a set of categories, so I'm thinking you'd be okay with doing the same thing here? I went and had a look at the categories that are linked at the bottom of each list, there were a couple of categories that I had some questions about:

Copyedits

There's currently only 4 pages in this category. Is there a different category that contains articles that need copyediting, or will this category fill up? If it continues to be very small, maybe consider a different category altogether?

Original research

This category has subcategories by month and year. What SuggestBot will do in this case is to grab all the articles from all the subcategories and randomly pick five of them.

Lead cleanup

This category is quite small (currently 88 pages), but that might not be a problem (unless someone comes around and fixes all of them).

Add images

We could do the same with this category as we do with "original research" (grab all the articles in the subcategories), or we can skip this category. On the English Wikipedia this category is maintained manually, because there it is difficult to grab a random set of articles. I noticed that here on Russian Wikipedia the subcategories are by subject, and I'm not sure if that complicates picking some articles at random.

The remaining categories should be fine as they all contain plenty of articles: , Update , Stubs , Verify , and Translate .

Let me know your thoughts on the categories I had questions about. Once we have the setup figured out it should be easy to get the bot running since as mentioned it already maintains the list on the English and Polish Wikipedias. Regards, Nettrom ( обс. ) 16:31, 23 января 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Nettrom : thanks for your answer and your questions!

Copyedits

I think we can change it to Nocat ;

Original research

Yep, you are fully right. Grab it all.

Lead cleanup

Is it possible to change it later?

Add images

I have been change it to Linkless .

I have change the ID of stub section to empty section, also. If we will have some problems with categories or if community will want to change this cats, is it possible to change it by request? С уважением, Iniquity 22:06, 24 января 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Iniquity : Thanks for your help with this! I have updated the configuration to reflect the changes you made. And yes, changing the configuration is usually not a problem at all. There are some cases, for instance "add images" on English Wikipedia, where it would require a lot of programming to solve so we skip those, but we can figure that out if there is a problem. BTW, the configuration is a simple JSON file that maps the IDs on the page to the categories used to update them, and you can find . Let me know if there are any questions, if not, I think we should be ready to test this, maybe tomorrow? Regards, Nettrom ( обс. ) 16:21, 25 января 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Nettrom : thanks, again! Yes, we can start to test it tommorow. I have no questions right now :) С уважением, Iniquity 17:08, 25 января 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Iniquity : I've run some tests, the first ones offline to see if there were any problems. I moved one of the </span> tags so the list for "linkless" was updated correctly. Once it was working I had SuggestBot actually save the page and I don't see any obvious problems, here's the diff so you can check.

Is there a community process for approval needed? SuggestBot already has a bot flag here on ruwiki, and from my reading of Википедия:Заявки на статус бота it seems I won't need to apply again to get approval for it to update the opentask page. Regards, Nettrom ( обс. ) 16:26, 26 января 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Nettrom : It's OK for me, I don't see any obvious problems too. Yes, you shouldn't need approval for it, and we can start. С уважением, Iniquity 20:01, 26 января 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Iniquity : Sorry for not being able to get this set up yesterday, but I have now set the bot up to update the task page every hour (at 25 minutes past the hour), similarly to what we do for Polish Wikipedia. If you want it updated more or less often, that's of course possible, just let me know, although every hour is probably often enough. Cheers, Nettrom ( обс. ) 15:34, 28 января 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Nettrom : Thanks a lot for help! I think 1 hour delay is good decision for this template, too. Thanks again:) С уважением, Iniquity 16:41, 29 января 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Nettrom : Hello, may you update the Opentask path: Википедия:Портал сообщества/Задачи -> Википедия:Сообщество/Задачи . Thanks! :) С уважением, Iniquity 06:41, 21 июня 2017 (UTC) [ ]

@ Iniquity : Thanks for getting in touch about this, sorry for not noticing the change and the errors in our logs! I've updated the configuration and SuggestBot has successfully updated the page again, and should keep updating it every hour from now on. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom ( обс. ) 14:37, 21 июня 2017 (UTC) [ ]

На Участник:SuggestBot/Регулярные рекомендации указано с примером, что параметр заменять может быть просто указан словом. На ЛСУ так и сделал: {{User:SuggestBot/userbox|частота=дважды в месяц|заменять}} . Однако очередное обновление бот добавил, а не заменил старое: Обсуждение участника:Neolexx . Это ошибка в документации или баг бота? -- Neolexx ( обс. ) 07:41, 18 февраля 2018 (UTC) [ ]

Hi Neolexx , thanks for reporting this, and sorry to hear this is not working! It sounds like it's a bug with the bot, because the parameter should work the way you describe it. I'll look into it! Regards, Nettrom ( обс. ) 17:46, 18 февраля 2018 (UTC) [ ]

Nettrom . SuggestBot . This page don't update from . This page used in Википедия:Сообщество . Please, fix it. Thanks. Oleg3280 ( обс. ) 11:02, 1 апреля 2020 (UTC) [ ]

Hi Oleg3280 , thanks for letting me know about this! I apologize for not yet having the bot updated to fix this, I should have it running again in about two weeks. Regards, Nettrom ( обс. ) 18:30, 12 апреля 2020 (UTC) [ ]

Oleg3280 : This is now working again with the bot updating the page every hour. Let me know if something seems broken and I'll look into it. Regards, Nettrom ( обс. ) 21:38, 24 апреля 2020 (UTC) [ ]

As I understand, if I tell the bot what categories he must search articles in, he will search only in typed categories. I typed "автомобили по алфавиту", but he also showed me Taiwan boxer and 2 other things not related to cars and not in categories of cars. Is that fixible? (sorry for bad English) JP ( обс ) 16:04, 10 июня 2020 (UTC) [ ]

Hello. I'm afraid that this word misleads newbies: it can create completely wrong impression about what do people do in Wikipedia. ( обс. ) 08:46, 18 июня 2020 (UTC) [ ]

• I agree with you. Wikipedia is serious project, no humor. JP ( обс ) 08:48, 18 июня 2020 (UTC) [ ]

@ Nettrom , hi! :) Can you change plz wikify category from to Категория:Википедия:Статьи с проблемами в оформлении ? С уважением, Iniquity 19:49, 9 мая 2022 (UTC) [ ]

• @ Iniquity : Thanks for letting me know about this! I've updated the wikify category in all the places it's set. The update to the bot's database is running so subscribers will start getting them, and the list of open tasks will use the new configuration starting with the next update in about 45 minutes. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom ( обс. ) 13:47, 12 мая 2022 (UTC) [ ]
  • Thanks! :) С уважением, Iniquity 18:48, 12 мая 2022 (UTC) [ ]