User talk:SuggestBot/Archive 3
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Feedback from Philosopher
I probably mess up your results because I'm a combination of "my edits are narrowly targeted and planned ahead of time" and "totally spontaneous" (for that reason, I marked interested - I may get bored). Speaking of which, I must have done some editing of Intelligent Design articles recently - though I don't recall having done so, offhand. I did go through and re-assess all of the articles that weren't really stubs, even if I'm "not interested" in them, bumping one up to C-class! --Philosopher Let us reason together. 04:07, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
Key: 
- interesting, I may work on it, I'm definitely going to improve it significantly; 
Unlikely that I'll expand it, not interesting; 
Don't know why it's on the list, not a stub/cleanup/etc.
Feedback from Crisco 1492
Using the above template use, as it looks more useful.
3 columns of or or
- has the article been 'well' picked (do I know why?); i.e. do I see why it is in the category it is
- am I interested in it
- Do I plan on doing something with the article?
- Admittedly, my editing patterns can be schizophrenic (see my list of DYKs for a demonstration), and I can sorta-kinda tell why most of these were suggested, although they are definitely not something I'd see in regular editing. The Japanese railroads seem to be drawn from my creation of Extermination of Evil and my expansion of Burlington and Missouri River Railroad. I can kinda see where the India articles are coming from, by I only have interest in ethnic groups; biographies of individuals are a bit harder to research for me, so I'm not that into it. The Indonesia articles are right on the money (thankfully no athletes) as most of my work is in that area. All-in-all, a fairly decent suggestions list and enough to keep me busy until the next run. It appears this is the only bot that performs original research and synthesis Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:28, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks for taking the time to give us this feedback! We've been getting a fair amount of feedback lately, and I'm starting to get a good understanding of where to go to improve the suggestions. As you describe in your comment, editing diverse articles tends to confuse SuggestBot a bit. From what I could tell, most of the articles you've marked as not good suggestions are either low-scoring ones, or articles found by comparing other editors to you, a method that's somewhat more serendipitous than the other two we use, and sometimes it ends up getting it wrong. There's also always the question of whether we can find a good suggestion that's tagged with needing work, and sometimes the bot makes less than optimal choices on those.
- I'm of course happy to hear that there were some good suggestions that'll keep you busy. With the feedback from you and others I hope to be able to make sure you get even better ones in the future. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:30, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
Feedback from EpicWikipedian
Just giving you some suggestions on how to make SuggestBot better.
1. Can you introduce an option for SuggestBot to post on the talk page more than twice a month? Because I edit very frequently and a lot of things can happen in the timespace of two weeks. Maybe once a week will do.
2. Can you introduce a parameter for SuggestBot to make new suggestions starting with a level 3 header (i.e.===Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot===)? For instance:
If you want the bot to start recommendations with a level 3 header:
{{User:SuggestBot/config
|frequency = once a week
|replace
|level 3
}}
If you don't want the bot to start recommendations with a level 3 header:
{{User:SuggestBot/config
|frequency = once a week
|replace
}}
3. I think you should merge "Stubs" with "Expand" because they are pretty much the same thing. Also, you should introduce an "Add Images" recommendation section into SuggestBot posts. For instance:
Anyways, thank you for listening and I hope that you will implement some of these ideas in the near future. EpicWikipedian (talk) 15:32, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
- Hey, thanks for the suggestions! Regarding the first one, you can actually set frequency to "once a week" and get them once a week. Since we have limited resources we currently don't announce that it's possible to get them more often than twice a month.
- Having an option to control the heading level of the suggestions is good. I've added it to my list, and I think it's a nice little feature that I'll get around to fairly soon. Once I've got it working I'll let you know so you can try it out.
- You bring up a good point about stubs and articles marked as needing expansion, and having a category for articles in need of images sounds like a good idea. We have a few other categories that could also be added, so I'll see what I can do about it, there might be a fairly large overhaul coming up. Thanks again, and let me know if you have any questions! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:48, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
Love the new format, question
I love the new format of the SuggestBot requests! But I was wondering, is there any way to run a viewership comparison like that on a set list(e.g. on a WikiProject, taskforce, or category's listings)? It could be good to know that so-and-so article is getting many more pageviews than the others like it, so maybe it should be fixed up first. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 02:32, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
- Hi there, sorry about not getting back to you sooner, SuggestBot's kept me busy fixing various things. While we don't currently have a solution available that can do this, we've been discussing it in our research group a few times, and I'll bring it up again today and see what we can do about it. As you mention it's the kind of information that can be useful for WikiProjects or a taskforce, and that's why were interested. I'll get back to you in a day or two once I know more. Also, very happy to hear you like the new format, thanks! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:18, 18 October 2011 (UTC)
- Hi again. Sorry for talking a while to respond to this. I did discuss this with some of my colleagues, and we're definitely interested in seeing if we can build something that can be useful for a WikiProject or a taskforce. Since we're a research group at a university (GroupLens Research) we'd like to try to do it scientifically though, so it might take a little while to get it done. Is there a particular WikiProject or taskforce you're a part of that might be interested? Would be great to have a few people to discuss ideas with, there might be other things we can do besides just readership data. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:02, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
- It was originally mostly-idle curiosity, but ... It would be really cool to have something like that for WikiProject Iowa and for our Government and Communities workgroups. Many of our articles don't get all that many eyes on them, since we are a small state, but there are some which get quite a bit of attention, and not always the obvious articles. If there was some way to see which ones are getting the most pageviews, relatively speaking, it could be useful. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 03:23, 8 November 2011 (UTC)
- Again, sorry about the delays. We're very much interested in building some tools for WikiProject Iowa, and we have a student who wants to take on the project starting next semester. In the meantime I could perhaps stop by the project's talk page and initiate a discussion with some thoughts/ideas about what we're able to do, and see which of those appear most useful to project members? We've developed a nice selection of technology here, so it will be interesting to see how those can be made to fit how WikiProjects work. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:26, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
More feedback from SA
Hi just letting you know that this has worked well for me again, except for a few, all are pages that I would be happy to edit. It even has predicted which Tank is my favorite... Are you sure that this bot doen't read minds?R <laughter />... :) Starfleet Academy "Live long and prosper." 00:06, 29 October 2011 (UTC)
- Hey, glad to hear it's working well! I'll add another vote to the "SuggestBot reads minds" ballot, maybe there's some truth to it? Heh! :) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:55, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
Feedback 2
SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. Have fun!
- I don't see how they were added to the list. This is a lot more than last time I posted (I skipped the previous month as I had done some disambig fixes for computers for the disambig contest and I knew it would skew last month's results). However, I don't understand this months. The only disambig contests I've done are with video games and anime/manga. I guess I could see why Justis Bolding was added as there was 1 video game she worked on, but that is so incidental the WikiProject wouldn't even cover it. It's just something someone might have on their resume to enhance it. It doesn't make them a part of the video game industry or culture.Actually....maybe some of the computer ones are related to my edits on CERO? That's the only thing I can think of. If so, then those shouldn't be added. Video games and general software stuff and the people who are of interest in each are generally 2 different types of people.
- These I can see why they were suggested as they are on the periferary of what I work on, but not really a part of what I'm interested in.- - These ones are closer to the articles I work on, but I'm not particularly interested in them.
- - - These are the best matches overall.∞陣内Jinnai 22:15, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
- Hey, thanks for taking the time to rate the suggestions again! I'm sorry to see that so many of the articles were either totally unrelated or far-out peripheral. Looking at our logs I see that many of the articles you found uninteresting come through editors who are similar to you, meaning they're indirectly related to you. Sometimes it leads to good suggestions (R-15 (novel series) and Heaven's Memo Pad), sometimes it fails (Paul Parker (singer)) (and those three articles were ranked 1, 3, and 2, respectively). The computer-related articles were also found this way. Our suggestions are also somewhat hindered by the fact that we only use articles that are tagged with needing work, and that we filter out some of the previous suggestions to make sure we don't suggest the same boring article over and over again.
- Hope that explain some of the challenges we're facing when making the suggestions. We've lately been discussing making some changes to how articles are selected and your feedback is definitely helping us with that. Unfortunately I can't promise when changes will happen, but we are working on it. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:46, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Feedback
Hmm, is there a way we can customize our article list received? So it's all pages, say, from the tropical cyclone WikiProject? Thanks! HurricaneFan25 14:13, 29 October 2011 (UTC)
- Right now there isn't, but this kind of idea has been on our list for a while, so it's good to see that some of our users are interested in it. One of the tasks on my to-do list is to look into possibly making some changes to how we choose articles, and I'll make sure this kind of feature is considered too. Thanks for bringing it up! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:02, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
- On the subject of customization, I recently participated in the Guild of Copy-Editors backlog elimination drive and the articles I edited for the drive affected the bot's suggestions. Because it was only a month-long project, is there a way I could ask the bot to ignore a certain month (September 2011)? The first set of suggestions I got was excellent, but they have been skewed since and I'm hoping that I'll be able to use it again. Thanks, Sesamehoneytart 18:22, 5 November 2011 (UTC)
- Yea, I participate in FACs and disambig contest. When I do the former its more on a case-by-case basis and I try to look for stuff I'm normally not interested in. I don't know if it includes non-Wikispace edits. If so, there should be a way to filter them. For the latter, maybe a way to filter for that too.∞陣内Jinnai 22:19, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
- Good thoughts and ideas here! I've been pondering on Sesamehoneytart's idea about ignoring months (or date ranges), and hope to figure out a way to do it that's not too complicated for our users. Jotted down some notes, and it looks like I've got an idea that should work.
- With regards to Jinnai's FAC work: SuggestBot currently only looks at contributions in the main namespace, so it should only count an FAC if you make non-reverting, non-minor edits to the article itself. The disambiguation contest might be more of a problem though. I've made a note that we should look at edit comments for disambiguation work, and if I remember correctly most users leave a comment where "disambig" is mentioned, so we can filter out those? At the same time I have made a note to look into whether we can easily allow users to specify keywords to filter out comments with, so I'll be looking into that too.
Feedback from Benzband
SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. Have fun!
- - I don't see how they were added to the list. I do not want to edit them.
- - These I can see why they were suggested as they are on the periferary of what I work on, but not really a part of what I'm interested in. This includes general wikify-ing tasks that i like doing at random.
- - These ones are closer to the articles I work on, but I'm not particularly interested in them.
- - These are OK matches.
- - Cheese…
Feedback format copied off Jinnai. Also, if SuggestBot didn't do to well for me, it's probably more because of my editing habits than anything else. Thanks! - Benzband (talk) 17:41, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
- Here is a different overview, based on wether i actually edited the proposed pages or not:
Done 23 articles
Not done 11 articles
- From this i can see the bot did a rather good job after all… Thanks! (and i'm on a permanent subscription now ;) - Benzband (talk) 17:25, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
- Hey, thanks for taking the time to give the feedback! I went through our logs and could not find obvious answers to why the suggestions weren't really good. You mention that your edit habits might lead to it struggling a bit, and I suspect that's the case. The bot appears to work best when many of the articles are related, e.g. about similar subjects. Based on the similarity rankings many of the articles ought to be relevant, while some of those you scored low were more clearly not good selections. On the other hand, I was happy to see you found many articles to edit, that's partly what we aim to do.
- I hope we'll be able to send you even more useful suggestions in the future as we continue to work on making SuggestBot work better. Thanks again for taking the time to send the feedback, thanks for signing up, and also thanks so much for the barnstar, that was a very welcome surprise for me! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 02:22, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
A brownie for you!
|
This is for treating the Wikipedia with such a good functionality!
Man this should be folk wisdom - something everyone should know about! DharavSolanki (talk) 14:25, 22 November 2011 (UTC) |
- Hi, thanks for stopping by to send us some love, very much appreciated! Hopefully SuggestBot will some day be easier to use and available to everyone. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 02:33, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Suggestion
The bot seems to give me suggestions based on pages I edit using Reflinks and articles for creation submissions I move into the mainspace and other semi-automated script tasks. Is there a way to filter out such edits so that users get suggestions that reflect their interests? —James (Talk • Contribs) • 1:47pm • 03:47, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
- First of all, sorry about the late response, and thanks for pointing out this problem! We currently don't have a system for users to specify ways of filtering out edits that are not interesting (e.g. by a blacklist of articles or keywords for filtering on edit comments), but that's one thing we're looking into. As I just mentioned in the section below this one, we are also very much interested in improving our current filtering mechanism, we do try to catch most of the anti-vandal work and tools/scripts, so we'll be looking into that and see if we can add reflinks and AFC work to that too. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:32, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
Suggestions
Hi, I have just received some suggestions after requesting them.
One of the problems i found was that, since i am a vandal fighter using huggle/other tools, i think those articles are being taken into consideration. i would personally prefer if articles edited via vandal tools are kept out of the suggestion. PS: i haven't edited too many articles without them so there may not be suggestions for me.Still, wanted to try this Bot.
Arnavchaudhary (talk) 20:06, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks for trying SuggestBot, and thanks for letting us know about this! We do try to filter out anti-vandal work, precisely because it's the kind of edits that do not identify an interest in the articles. From what you describe it appears that we should look closely at improving the filtering. We recently got some comments about disambiguation work, and in the section above this one is a mention of other work that we ought to not use for recommendations, so it's on our list of things to do. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:28, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
- I'll just add that i do a lot of wikify/cleanup work in parallel to editing articles i have an interest in, and those are taken into account which makes many of the suggestions not too interesting (except for maybe a bit of wikify/cleanup… :) However i don't see how you could find a way 'round this problem as i don't use any specific tools for it (apart from Twinkle and Provelt, which aren't specific). benzband (talk) 10:54, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
- If you use scripts or automated programs to assist your editing, the bot will filter out edits based on the edit summary (eg. if you have "WP:TW" or "WP:HG", those edits will be ignored), as for common tasks like wikification, if your edit summary contains something like "Wikif(ying/ied)" or "Cleanup" then those will be ignored. —James (Talk • Contribs) • 3:48pm • 05:48, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
Suggestion
It should also look at what you spend a lot of time doing. Rather than telling me what articles to expand-when I dislike expanding articles and never do it-it should tell me what articles to create-which I do much more frequently! Other than this...it's a great bot, although needs tweaking because not all of the suggestions were relevant to me! — Preceding unsigned comment added by RDN1F (talk • contribs) 19:19, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
- Hi, thanks for the comments! I understand the wish to not see the articles to expand, and on our ToDo list is figuring out ways to give our users more control over the articles that are displayed. Currently I'm not sure what we end up with, since we think there is also some value in being reminded that there are other types of work needed in Wikipedia. I'll make sure to remember your comment when we're discussing it though, it's valuable input to us. We're also working on figuring out ways to make sure the suggestions are more relevant, it's something both we and many of our users have mentioned, just like you now. So there should be some interesting changes coming in the next few months. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:49, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
Datestamp
I have signed up for a regular SuggestBot feed. Can I get a date somewhere prominent (top?) so I know when I received it? --Greenmaven (talk) 13:27, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
- Hmm… the bot signs all its posts, for instance the last one you got ends with "-- SuggestBot (talk) 12:37, 21 December 2011 (UTC)" (not sure if the date/time is different if you have different time zone settings). If you have the suggestion page on your watchlist, it's usually shown on a day-by-day basis, with time of each/the last edit to a page, so you can find it that way. I'm not sure if those are sufficient? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:57, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
- To see that I have to scroll to the bottom. I was thinking of a larger font size, perhaps at the end of the header line. Then one can glance at it and say - "Ok that's still the old one" or "Ah! The new one - how exciting!" --Greenmaven (talk) 00:08, 24 December 2011 (UTC)
- Hmm, that sounds like a way to solve the problem, and I see that the Signpost also datestamps its headers, so we'd be similar to them if we did it that way. It requires a bit of work, though, because we also need to correctly handle replacement of existing suggestions, so I don't know when we'll get around to making it happen, but I've added it to my list, thanks! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:50, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
A cup of coffee for you!
|
I need to share one with you... because your suggestions keep me up all night! Cocoaguy ここがいい 03:43, 30 December 2011 (UTC) |
- Dang, failed to notice this earlier, sorry about that. Thanks so much for the coffee, it's one of the things we love around here, and I'm glad to hear the suggestions are useful! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:40, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
Vandalism software linked to recomendations
My suggestion were mostly correct. However some came up that i just would never edit. My thought is this come from when i use Igloo vandalism software. Is there a way to stop the bot looking at edits made with this software when recommending articles. Edinburgh Wanderer 21:04, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
- We try to filter out typical tool-based edits (reverts, anti-vandal work, AWB, HotCat, etc...) and we also disregard minor edits. Judging by the edit comments that Igloo leaves when reverting they should already be filtered out by SuggestBot, so I'll create some test cases and make sure we're also filtering those out correctly. Thanks for letting me know about that! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:20, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
- I've now checked this, both using a sample of reverts you've done with Igloo from your last 250 edits, and also by test runs with SuggestBot. From what I can find, SuggestBot correctly filters out the reverts, at least all done with Igloo. If you find this happens again, I think it might be useful if I get to know which suggested articles you think come from these kind of edits, so I can also check our logs to see if there are discrepancies there. I do know that some suggestions appear somewhat or completely unrelated because we only recommend articles that are tagged as in need of improvements, which every now and then means we'll have to do random suggestions since none of the similar ones are tagged.
- For instance Multiregional origin of modern humans, Economy of Cambodia & Ugandan English. I don't edit in any of those fields so it has to be something to do with the vandalism software.21:33, 17 February 2012 (UTC)Edinburgh Wanderer
- It turns out that we currently do not disregard "wikify" and "cleanup". After investigating a sample of edits with those comments it looks to me like they both provide good signal, in other words they work well for identifying edits that not necessarily reflect an interest in the article while not resulting in filtering out too much. Thus we'll probably start filtering those out shortly, it's now on my ToDo list. Thanks for the idea! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:44, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
- Edinburgh Wanderer, I had a look at our logs, and the last two articles you mentioned (as well as another "Economy of…"-article) are just poor suggestions. Because we only use articles that are tagged as in need of improvement we sometimes end up selecting articles that are not very much related to what you've previously edited.
- When it comes to Multiregional origin of modern humans, that article was found by looking for editors who are similar to you, which is known to sometimes look like it just pulls articles randomly out of a hat (again, combining it with our need to only suggest articles that need work might also affect it). We're aware of these issues but haven't yet had the resources to look carefully at how to best solve them. We do make sure that you don't get the same suggestions twice in a row, though, so you might never see these again. Sorry that I can't offer you a proper solution right now. Let me know if anything was unclear or if you have any questions. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:02, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
Categories?
Hi, quick question: does SB look for uncategorized pages? Because if it doesn't then that could be another section. Helpful to those with HC! :D Starfleet Academy Hail ML 01:44, 8 Mar, 2012 UTC
- No, we currently only look for articles within a given set of categories that define them as in need of improvement (stubs, add sources, cleanup, etc). Suggesting uncategorised pages sounds like a good idea, similar to orphan and newly created pages (ideas that have been brought up earlier). We've had discussions on our end about changing the suggestion posts, I'll make sure it's brought up again and there's many ideas on the table suggesting there's room for improvement here. Thanks for the idea! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:58, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
My suggestions
No problems. The suggestions were perfectly reasonable and gave me a bit more focus for my editing. Will use again. I even liked the fact that it threw up a couple of articles that I would never have looked at otherwise. I would like to be able to specify my activity type more effectively: stub expansion is my preferred task. Tigerboy1966 (talk) 14:22, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry about not responding to this much sooner. Thought I'd drop in and note that we're working on improving the ability to control the recommendations, e.g., tell it that you'd like mostly stubs (as also mentioned in the discussion about categories). Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:37, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
Export?
I hope I'm not violating etiquette with this question: can the bot be exported to another wiki? We have a small (~15,000 article) sci-fi wiki, and I feel this would dove-tail well with our 50-some strong active membership. Please let me know.--Revanche (talk) 05:05, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
- Much to the contrary, I welcome questions like these! Unfortunately I don't have very positive answers right now. The bot is tailored towards fairly large Wikipedias, and I am unsure how much work it will be to change that. We are also very limited in our resources. Nonetheless, I think it's worth keeping in mind as a long-term goal, and we'll also discuss it in our next meeting. Will get back you to in a couple of days or so. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:53, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
- Hi again, sorry about this taking a while, things have been quite chaotic. As I mentioned in my previous answer, SuggestBot is currently quite Wikipedia-specific, but we are definitely interested in seeing if it's possible to branch out to your community. Would they for instance be interested in us trying out a few things to better understand how the bot impacts how users work? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:54, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
A bit of praise
Just FYI, I saw suggest bot working on another user's talk page and decided to try it out. I have to say, the first round of suggestions were spot on, with a good mix of articles I am interested in, as well as some others that I hadn't thought about, but am now looking forward to reading/working on. Good job, at least as far as I am concerned! Quinn ░ RAIN 17:58, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks for the positive comments, I'm very happy to hear you found them useful, and hope that we can continue to do so! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:04, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
Sauce pls
Where can I get the source code? user:BrxBrx 15:52, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
- I'm sorry,but we haven't yet made the source code easily available. One of our long term goals is to make SuggestBot into an open source software project. Given the limited resources we have it's difficult to tell when that goal is reached, though. If there are questions about how it works or how some of the technology can be applied to other sites, let me know and I'll do my best to help you out. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:32, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
Are minor edits used to target suggestions?
For those of us who do much vandalism-fighting, it would be nice if they weren't used (or if there was an option for them not to be used, since some people may be using the minor-edit flag for other types of edits). My minor edits are rather random... Thanks! Allens (talk | contribs) 17:48, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
- The bot ignores minor edits, and also checks the edit comments for tool signatures (e.g., reverts and AWB) and ignores those. There's one exception to that rule, and that is if all your last 500 main namespace edits are minor edits, then it'll use as many of those it can. We plan to change the way the bot looks for edits at some point in the near future, to make it more likely that it finds proper article edits. It'll still ignore minor edits and reverts and stuff, of course. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:37, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
Can you give me a list of articles to edit?
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Mir Almaat 1 S1 (talk • contribs) 13:11, 29 April 2012
- From SuggestBot's userpage:
- For a one-time post to your user talk page, add your name to the request list
- To receive recommendations at regular intervals see the instructions on how to sign up
- And don't forget to sign sign your posts using four tildes ~~~~ —(talk page stalker) benzband (talk) 12:08, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
Export?
I hope I'm not violating etiquette with this question: can the bot be exported to another wiki? We have a small (~15,000 article) sci-fi wiki, and I feel this would dove-tail well with our 50-some strong active membership. Please let me know.--Revanche (talk) 05:05, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
- Much to the contrary, I welcome questions like these! Unfortunately I don't have very positive answers right now. The bot is tailored towards fairly large Wikipedias, and I am unsure how much work it will be to change that. We are also very limited in our resources. Nonetheless, I think it's worth keeping in mind as a long-term goal, and we'll also discuss it in our next meeting. Will get back you to in a couple of days or so. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:53, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
- Hi again, sorry about this taking a while, things have been quite chaotic. As I mentioned in my previous answer, SuggestBot is currently quite Wikipedia-specific, but we are definitely interested in seeing if it's possible to branch out to your community. Would they for instance be interested in us trying out a few things to better understand how the bot impacts how users work? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:54, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks for reviving the thread! I'm sorry about being slow with responding here, my time has lately needed to be focused on writing a couple of research papers, so I keep failing to keep up on many other fronts. Happy to hear that the owner is receptive to suggestions. I think we're mostly concerned about things related to running experiments with SuggestBot on the site, since little is known about how something like this bot works in a community outside of Wikipedia. E.g. would the community be open to us sending suggestions unsolicited to users? I'll have more time to look at this in about two weeks, at that point I might be able to come up with some more solid ideas and questions. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:37, 18 April 2012 (UTC)
- I'm of infinite patience on this. I'd be happy to see it, but not to the point you feel rushed.
- I believe I may be mis-understanding you: when you say unsolicited, do you mean any registered editor could be approached with a SuggestBot suggestion? Do you mean you wish to directly approach editors with questions about their use of the extension? I'll stand by for those ideas and questions. Thank you!--Revanche (talk) 20:06, 18 April 2012 (UTC)
- Dang, time flies by faster than I though, it's nearly June already, May wasn't any less busy than April, I see. Sorry again about not participating in this more regularly, I'm stopping by here to make sure it doesn't get deleted again. I plan on discussing this topic with my advisers shortly and see how we can make it fit into our plans.
- Just to elaborate on unsolicited suggestions, we're thinking that to run a proper experiment we would have to send suggestions without asking the users to sign up, like they do here on Wikipedia, because if we use a sign up process we'll get a self-selection effect (the users who sign up may or may not be different from the average user). That kind of idea might not fare well with the users, depending on the community and how welcome they are to being experimented with. :) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:02, 24 May 2012 (UTC)
Reference adding suggestion
I want some football article suggestions for adding references references. I would love to add it if you suggest. ZZ47 (talk) 10:27, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
- I've added you to our list, but it might take a day or so before I can get SuggestBot to send them to you as it's currently catching up on sending out suggestions to our regulars. It currently only suggests three articles out of the "Need sources" category, but it also suggests a bunch of stubs, which I believe are likely to also need sources in addition to more content. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:12, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
Suggestions, please
Please suggest. Thanks.
Legolover26 (talk) 01:48, 24 May 2012 (UTC)
- I added you to our request list, and will make sure SuggestBot stops by as soon as possible. We're currently pretty busy catching up, so it might take a day or so before you get them. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:54, 24 May 2012 (UTC)
Copyedit tags?
Hi. Does SuggestBot pick up articles with copyedit tags (either alone or in {{multiple issues}})? As a member of the GOCE, I'd love to have some suggestions on articles to copyedit. I'm also wondering on the articles needing references - if you're only going by "unreferenced" currently, you might want to also put in ones with both "notability" and "refimprove". Allens (talk | contribs) 12:04, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
- Hi, thanks for getting in touch about this! When it come to the articles in need of copy edit, I thought we might have those as part of what we call "cleanup", but I found that this is not the case. From what I could tell after looking at our configuration and browsing some categories, we don't suggest articles in need of copy edit at all. One of the things we're working on is how to make it easier for our users to control what SuggestBot suggests, and I'll make sure articles for copy editing is included in that.
- I also looked closely at where we pick articles in need of sources, and found out that we weren't picking up the additional categories you mentioned. Now that they're added it'll be about a week before we check again, but they'll get added, thanks so much for pointing me towards those! Let me know if there's anything. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:27, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
Just received my first suggestion
And about died when I saw Rape pornography is listed among the other articles LOL I have no idea what I have edited that would suggest I would enjoy editing that article. The other suggestions are pretty much spot on, thank you. Krystaleen (talk) 15:36, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
- I'm sorry to hear that, I would definitely be pretty shocked by that suggestion as well, thanks for being a good sport about it! Some of the articles SuggestBot ends up suggesting are fairly unrelated to a user's interests, and this is a perfect example of that. I checked our logs, and that was also the case this time. This particular article was found by looking for articles edited by users who appear to be like you, but it was also not a very highly ranked article. Since SuggestBot only suggests articles that are listed as in need of work, it might end up picking one of those articles that aren't really related to what you've been doing. Again, sorry about this. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:36, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
- That's okay, just wanted to let you know. Thanks for explaining what happened too, I was like "Did they check my browsing history too?" LOL just kidding. Thanks again! Krystaleen (talk) 03:38, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
No suggestions yet
Hello, I've subscribed for suggestions awhile ago and there is no update in my talk page. Let me know when changes occur. Thanks! Nashu2k 13:54, 25 May 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nashu2k (talk • contribs)
- Hey, sorry about the delay, we've been having some problems over the past week and have been busy catching up with things. This has led to our request list being further delayed. I've got the bot going through the first half of the requests now, so you should see the suggestions posted to your talk page in the next couple of hours or so. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:16, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
Very minor suggestion
When it gives out the messages, icons like [[File:Green cross.svg|15 px]], it should as [[File:Green cross.svg|15 px|alt=|link=]]. extra999 (talk) 01:54, 1 June 2012 (UTC)
- Ah, I hadn't thought carefully about those options when I wrote the code for it. I've now added alt-text where appropriate and made sure the images don't link. Thanks for pointing that out to me! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:45, 1 June 2012 (UTC)
Will we be informed when results are in?
I like the new feature where suggestbot gives you some idea how much a page is visited. It helps me choose where to spend my time more wisely. When the study you are running is over will those of us enrolled automatically get a notice so we can read it? I'm kind of a numbers junkie, and I love reading those things. :) Thanks. Tlqk56 (talk) 19:04, 13 June 2012 (UTC)
- First of all, I'm happy to hear you find the info useful, that's what we aimed for! I've made a note to let you know when we've got our results published and I plan to post a note on your user talk page when that happens. Usually we publish at computer science conferences, so it will likely be early 2013 before we have a paper accepted anywhere. Then there's maybe a couple of months more before the actual conference. If you're on Twitter our research lab has an account where we tend to post about accepted papers, talks at conferences, etc, and we also publish many of our papers on our website. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:32, 13 June 2012 (UTC)
Suggestion
SuggestBot should expand its scope, currently it gives suggestions only articles. For example, if a user has been making lots of contributions in portals then it should also give links to portals. Or does this happen, what do you think? extra999 (talk) 07:21, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
- Hey, thanks for the idea! It's been on our list for a while, but in the context of WikiProjects. One could imagine SuggestBot telling a user "You seem to edit many articles within the scope of Portal X" (or "WikiProject Y") and ask if the user wants to join the project or look at the portal for more work to do. I'll look into it to see how feasible this kind of feature is (one issue is how to figure out membership), and make sure it stays on our list of enhancements. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:31, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
Specific Articles
Hi,
I really enjoy using SuggestBot because it is really helpful. I just have one suggestion, when I edit one article I get suggestions from articles that have a similar name but nothing to do with the article I edited. For example, if I edit a Tracy Beaker article I get suggestions from an article named Dick Tracy. Is there a way to narrow it down to articles that do have something to do with the article I want. Androzaniamy (talk) 10:18, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
- I'm happy to hear you find SuggestBot useful, thanks! The short answer to your question is "maybe". One of the features of SuggestBot is that it will only suggest articles that have been tagged with a work template. Sometimes we are unable to find a similar article within a given category of work (e.g. "Merge") and will have to resort to picking an article at random. This might result in an article that doesn't interest you.
- Other times we pick articles that appear related to you based on our metrics of similarity but which don't actually match. Your example of Tracy Beaker leading to a recommendation of Dick Tracy is a good one. We currently use three different ways of calculating similarity and each has its quirks. One of the things I'll be working on is to see if we can alter the way SuggestBot finds the articles to suggest to you in such a way that they all appear more relevant, but that again might lead to fewer serendipitous suggestions which some users might dislike. Either way, we're working on it, and I hope it'll be for the better. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:58, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Suggestions
Hey, thanks! I'll make sure SuggestBot gets the oil in portions so everything keeps running smoothly, looks good so far *knocks on wood* Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:43, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
An award for you !
|
The platinum banana for the most original and surprising Robot |
| Always a pleasure to receive news from you. Best, Caleb Crabb 09:32, 26 July 2012 (UTC) |
- That's awesome! Thanks so much, for both the award and for using SuggestBot, we appreciate that! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:45, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
Question about readership
I've been (pleasantly) surprised by the high readership marks given a lot of the recommendations I receive. I really didn't expect anyone was reading the type of articles I generally work on. I'd love more info on how those designations are arrived at. Is there a specific number of readers over time for each catagory, or what? Thanks. I always look forward to its suggestions, even though sometimes I don't have time to get to many of them. Tlqk56 (talk) 19:23, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks for getting in touch, I'm of course happy to hear you appreciate the bot's suggestions, thanks for using it!
- To calculate the readership we get view data for each suggested article from stats.grok.se and calculate a daily average over the two weeks prior to the day the suggestion gets posted. Because SuggestBot only suggests articles in need of work, the limits for low-to-medium and medium-to-high are fairly low. We sampled some of the articles in our database and calculated their readership so we could find a way to split the whole database in three fairly even parts, otherwise we would get most articles marked "low" which would not be very helpful. This led us to choose what we have now, where less than 2 views/day is "low", between 2 and 7 views/day is "medium", and above 7 is "high".
- Compared to some of the fairly popular articles on Wikipedia the articles we suggest can be called "not very popular", but at least I would be more than happy to learn that an article I worked on was viewed about 60 (or 200) times a month. I hope that explains it, let me know if something was confusing or if there's anything else! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:32, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
Read count
I've seen other people mentioning a read count/rating of some sort in the suggestions but for some reason the suggestions I've gotten have never included such a thing, do I need to opt-in or something? Thanks in advance!Krystaleen 17:37, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
- We've been running a research experiment with SuggestBot for a while. Some of our users have gotten various types of additional information about the suggested articles, while one group of users have not seen any because we needed a control group to compare with. Since we're done gathering data for that experiment I changed the settings in our database so next time you get suggestions (should be about four days from now, I think) you should also get some additional icons indicating how often a suggested article is read as well as what our assessment of the article quality is. Hope that helps, let me know if there's anything else. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:14, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
- Thank you. I was wondering about that since like a month ago and finally decided to ask. Thanks again for the wonderful bot, it's been very useful!--Krystaleen 02:36, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Odd suggestion
Query: Why did SuggestBot recently make the suggestion of adding source to Fungus, when that is a featured article with countless sources already listed? What triggered the suggestion? --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:21, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
- Hi, good question! From what I can tell it came from suggesting articles from a category (Category:All articles with unsourced statements) that also includes articles with {{Citation needed}}, Fungus is one of those. I looked at a handful of the articles in that category and noticed that those that do not have additional templates added look like no additional work is needed, so it's not a good category for us to use. Said category was added by me by mistake after a user asked us what templates we used to look for articles marked "Add sources" and suggested a couple of additions. I went back in our talk page archive and found the post, examined the associated categories, and changed our configuration so the problem should go away. Thanks for noticing it and letting me know about it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:06, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Suggestion item added to wrong page (not my talk page)
Hi. The newest "Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot" posting was added incorrectly. Instead of being appended to my talk page, it was appended to a separate page (User:Richwales/Tabs/TalkBanner), which I transclude at the top of my talk page. Any idea why this happened? Can the problem please be fixed? I moved the posting to where it should have been put to begin with, but I don't want to have to keep doing that every time. — Richwales 01:07, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
- Sorry about that. I had the configuration template in the wrong place. I've moved it onto my talk page now, so I assume the problem will not reoccur. — Richwales 05:32, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
- Hi, I'm of course happy to hear you figured it out, sorry about the confusion it must've caused. Moving the template to your talk page does solve the issue, I checked our system just to be sure that it has picked it up correctly and it has, so next time it should be posted there. I've also made a note about this problem, it might be possible for us to easily resolve the template transclusions (e.g. that it in your case would resolve to your talk page and not the sub-page). Thanks for bringing it to my attention and also thanks for using SuggestBot, appreciate it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:23, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
- There are a lot of user page / talk page tools being used nowadays that, I assume, were developed in a simpler time when few users had anything more than a simple user page and a simple user talk page. So it didn't really surprise me when I realized that the SuggestBot template would always assume the postings should go on the same page as the template.
- Along similar lines, I recently discovered (to my dismay) that most userboxes which invoke categories also assume they are always going to be put on a user's main user page (and not on a subpage). Since I realized it would be a hopeless task to get a zillion userbox authors to fix their creations to find the main user page, I ended up shuffling my subpages so as to make my separate userbox page into my main user page!
- I suppose it's conceivable that someone out there just might be intentionally diverting SuggestBot postings into a separate subpage, rather than putting them in their main user talk page. So you might want to hold off on making that change — possibly check to see where other people are filing their SuggestBot postings, and talk to users who seem to be receiving them into a subpage to see what they really want. — Richwales 19:24, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
- About 20% of our users intentionally put the template somewhere else than their user talk page. When I worked on implementing the support for the template we wanted it to work that way since some users had asked if it was possible to not have them posted on their user talk page. The only time the posts don't go to the same page is if you put it on your user page, then they end up (not surprisingly) on your user talk page. :)
- If/when I look into it, I'll only try to figure out a way to handle nested transclusions, e.g. if the SuggestBot template is transcluded on "User:Example/Header", and then that header is transcluded on "User talk:Example" (similar to your set-up). In that case we should resolve the nested transclusion to "User talk:Example" and thus ignore "User:Example/Header". Not yet sure how feasible it is, will have to look more into it. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:00, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
Study
I would like to be in this study, please.--Lucky102 (talk) 20:31, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
- Hello and thanks for volunteering! I should probably update SuggestBot's user page and our templates since we're just about done with the current study. There's another one coming up fairly soon, though, based on what we've learned from the current one. In most cases we are experimenting with SuggestBot's suggestions to those editors who have signed up to receive suggestions regularly. If you'd like to sign up for those there's instructions on how to do so here. I'd be happy to help you getting it set up if necessary and let me know if you have any questions. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:10, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
- Great, thanks for signing up! You should get the first round of suggestions posted to your user talk page in about seven hours or so, we send suggestions twice a day, and then once a month (actually every 28 days) after that. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or concerns. Thanks again for signing up! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:41, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
why does SuggestBot leave stars and icons on my page?
Hi,
I noticed that on User talk:Hahc21's talk page, SuggestBot doesn't leave all that stuff - the stars and the icons in a huge table. Is there anyway SuggestBot could not leave that stuff on my page and make like Hahc21's? Please?
Thanks, MathewTownsend (talk) 19:39, 16 September 2012 (UTC)
- Also it says at the top of SuggestBot's posts on my page"
We are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot’s recommendations. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information in the consent information sheet.
We have added information about the readership and quality of the suggested articles using a Low/Medium/High scale. For readership the scale goes from Low 
to High 
, while for quality the scale goes from Low 
to High 
.
- However the contact information in the consent information sheet[dead link] is dead.
- I never consented to be part of this "study". MathewTownsend (talk) 21:06, 16 September 2012 (UTC)
- Just adding a note that this question was answered on my talk page, so MiszaBot can archive it when it's time. Nettrom (talk) 17:05, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
Suggestions
My suggestions have nothing for the olympics/paralimpics...considering i updated a whole bunch there should be some. Lihaas (talk) 12:22, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
- You bring up a very good point and I've looked into the issue. We keep a database of articles tagged with different types of work (cleanup, merge, wikify, etc...) that is used when articles are suggested. I ran a few queries against it and saw that there's quite a number of articles in our database with either "Olympic" or "Paralympic" in the title, so that's probably not the problem. Instead I think the lack of these articles comes from the fact that we only look at your last 500 article (Main namespace) edits when we look for what articles interest you. When I looked through your contribution history I saw that there's quite a lot of variation. Right now we don't use multiple edits to the same article, nor the amount of content added/edited, as a way to identify stronger interest in some articles. Instead we just collapse it into a single edit. So I think what is going on here is a combination of our current system not correctly picking up your interest in those articles (perhaps we overestimate your interest in other articles), maybe in combination with the suggestion process leading to an overwhelming number of other articles.
- Based on the feedback we got from the user interviews we did earlier this year (again, thanks for taking the time to respond to our questions) we see that it's necessary to improve the way we identify what an editor is interested in, so that's something I'll be working on in the coming months.
- Hope this explains the issue, sorry I couldn't find a more definite answer. Let me know if something is confusing or if you have any questions about anything, I'll do my best to help! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:51, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
I am so lonely...
Hi SuggestBot! How's tricks? Please help me. At the stage of completing 11 months on Wikipedia, I have nothing much to do on Wikipedia. Please suggest anything. Anything suitable for me. My interests are Indian history, Indian soap opera and a bit of mythology. Thank you. --Tamravidhir (Jiva is Shiva!) 15:13, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
- I took the liberty to tell the bot to go post suggestions on your user talk page. The suggestions are based on your recent edit history. We have a template system set up so you can request these any time you like, all you need to do is add the following template code to your user talk page (see our request page for detailed instructions):
{{User:SuggestBot/suggest}}
- Keep in mind that you can also list articles and categories in the request template if you would like suggestions based on other articles, e.g. if you want to focus on Indian soap operas you could feed it the list of actors found in Category:Indian soap opera actors, like this:
{{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:Indian soap opera actors}}
- Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions and I'll do my best to help you out! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:02, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
Thank you --Tamravidhir (Jiva is Shiva!) 16:15, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
Other languages
Are there any plans to expand this into other languages? I am thinking specifically Portuguese. GoEThe (talk) 14:21, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
- I'd very much like to see SuggestBot available in more languages, although we haven't made concrete plans. Since we already have it running in the Norwegian and Swedish Wikipedias, everything is in place to have it running elsewhere too. Do you know if other users in Portuguese Wikipedia would be interested in getting SuggestBot running there? If there's a small base of users who would like to get suggestions regularly (e.g. every week/two weeks/month) and who could help out with translating the documentation, I'd be happy to start work on getting it set up there. I could perhaps post a message to pt:Wikipédia:Esplanada/geral and see if there's interest? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:45, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks for your reply! I think there might be some interest there. We are talking about rehabilitating the WikiProjects and one of the things we are interested in is to find automated ways for users, particularly new users, to get a list of tasks they can do, so that maintenance of WikiProjects is easier. Looking into this, I stumbled upon SuggestBot, which I think would be very close to what is needed. The page you mentioned would be the appropriate page. If you do post there, let me now and I will help translate back and forth from portuguese. Cheers, GoEThe (talk) 10:56, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
Having SB drop his suggestions in a custom page
Greetings Nettrom / Suggestbot.
Is it possible that I would be able to get Suggestbot to send his weekly suggestions to this custom made sandbox rather than on my talk page or would that be a limitation? Many thanks. MIVP - Allow us to be of assistance to you. (Maybe a bit of tea for thought?) 21:18, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
- Hi, and thanks for being one of our users! Getting the suggestions posted to your sandbox is very much possible. I just added the config template to your SuggestBot sandbox page and you're all set! This approach is described in the last row of the table in User:SuggestBot/Getting Recommendations Regularly#How to sign up. We of course do not mind our users letting others know about SuggestBot by having the userbox, so we have a system where they are still able to get the suggestions posted to a sub-page. Thanks again for using SuggestBot, please let me know if you have any other questions! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:51, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
Template:Opentask-short
could you have this bot add a category to this template, inside of some <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags? this will keep it out of the list of uncategorized templates. Frietjes (talk) 00:01, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
- Hi, further to the above post regarding Template:Opentask-short - please see WP:VPT#New Extension:GettingStarted and User talk:Σ/Archive/2012/December#Lowercast sigmabot error: two bots are edit-warring here. Is there any chance of a resolution, one way or the other? --Redrose64 (talk) 09:59, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
- I'll be fixing the editwarring issue ASAP, it's a bug in the program (I've stopped the bot from editing the template for now, though). Will also look into whether there's additional categories the template should be added to in addition to the one added by the semi-protection template, to prevent it from being uncategorised. Thanks to you both for letting me know about these issues, sorry about causing them! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:18, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Code
fa.wikipedia
Hi Mr Suggest Bot:). if i ask you to give me this code for running in fawiki you accepted? if you do this, is very helpful for fawiki. thanks.:)Mahdi talk 12:09, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
- Hi, and thanks for being interested in SuggestBot in other languages! Sorry about the delay in responding to this request, the holiday season demanded much of my time so I didn't get around to keeping up with all things Wikipedia.
- We currently do not share the code, but I hope to be able to do more of that over the course of the year as we are interested in making it easier for others to use it, or help improve the bot. We are very much interested in seeing SuggestBot expand to other languages, and I'll be working on that in the coming weeks. With a bit of help translating documentation and such we should be able to get the bot running on fa-wiki as well. Does fa-wiki have a Village Pump where I can post to see if there's some interest from other people? I just like to get an idea if it's something that many users would use.
- Let me know and we'll figure out how to go from here. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:07, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
- Hi, Thank you for your response. here is the fa.wiki's Village Pump. As I know there is some users who are interested to use this bot and they asked me to localizing this bot for fa.wiki and because of that I sent you a message. please tell me which page or document should we translate? we will help you in this work's part.have good new year :), yours- Yamaha5 (talk) 15:12, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks for the link to the fa.wiki Village Pump, I have just posted there to see if there are questions or concerns about it. Hopefully the community thinks it's a good idea, so I can start importing data and getting things set up here. I think it might be around February 1 before I have time to get to that. Once data is imported and I am ready for testing I will let you know which pages I will need help translating (it's documentation and a template). Let me know if there's anything! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:00, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
hu.wikipedia
Is is possible to run it in Hungarian Wikipedia? What does it need: someone who port the code, or just translation? I can translate but I cannot code. You may ask about the interests here: hu:Wikipédia:Kocsmafal_(javaslatok) (with "uj szakasz+"). Misibacsi (talk) 07:38, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
- Hi, and thanks for asking! Yes, it should be possible to get it running in Hungarian as well. I'll post to the Village Pump and ask for interest. The only things I'll be needing help with is translation of documentation and perhaps help with understanding which categories of tasks (e.g. "add sources", "stubs") are used in Hungarian Wikipedia, and which of them it would be most useful to suggest articles from. Will head on over to hu-WP and get the Village Pump post taken care of now. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:04, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
Hello, I think there is enough interested editors in Hungarian Wikipedia: hu:Wikipédia:Kocsmafal (javaslatok)#Suggestbot. I guess I can help in text translation, just tell me how. Misibacsi (talk) 06:56, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
Doesn't seem to work
I tried placing {{User:SuggestBot/suggest}} on my usertalk page, but it's been almost a full day and I didn't get anything. The only issue I can think of is that I didn't give the line its own header. Could that be a problem? -- YPNYPN ✡ 21:56, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks for notifying me about this! I was unable to get to it yesterday, but checked up on it now. You do not need to have a section header for the template, instead the problem was that the program handling the request queue had crashed. Tried restarting it now, but see that we have a bug making it crash again, so I'll be looking into it. In the meantime I'll process the queue manually, you should see the suggestions on your user talk page shortly. Let me know if there's anything else! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 13:03, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
How to stop receiving suggestions
Hi, I'd like to stop receiving suggestions from the SuggestBot. How do I do that? Thanks, AFisch99 (talk) 15:44, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
- You had a SuggestBot template, requesting suggestions, on your talk page. I've commented it out, so the suggestions should stop now. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 18:07, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
- As Philosopher mentions, all that's needed is to remove the template and it'll stop automatically. I've checked our systems and you're no longer listed as receiving suggestions. Thanks for using SuggestBot, I hope it was useful and that we'll see you again! And thanks to Philosopher for the help with this, appreciate it! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:46, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
A heads up
I added a SuggestBot template at User:Ongepotchket/Suggestions and have not yet received them. Thanks. :) --Ongepotchket (talk) 08:30, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks for letting me know! The bot had stopped responding to requests. I've restarted it, and it now seems to run correctly, you should have the suggestions in a few minutes. Will investigate what caused it and see if there's something I can do about it. Thanks again! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:43, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
No plus signs
I saw SuggestBot's message on another user's page make an entry with colorful plus signs grading the urgency, but when I got my message, it was just a plain text without any urgency grading. That user uses User:SuggestBot/config, but without any parameter that would explain the difference, while I used User:SuggestBot/suggest. Is the default different? — Sebastian 15:46, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
- Hi, and thanks again for being interested in SuggestBot! Yes, the default is different. We have been running a research experiment where we add information to the suggestions posts. One of the variants has the plus signs you mention, another has information on viewership and predicted quality (here's an example showing what that looks like), a control group gets them without any added information, and so on. Users who sign up to receive suggestions at regular intervals are randomly assigned to a specific group and then get a specific variant of the suggestion post. Since we stopped gathering data from that experiment a while ago we allow users to get a specific variant of the suggestion post as they like, though, since it's just a matter of fiddling with SuggestBot's configuration on our end.
- The research experiment aimed to figure out which message was better, but we didn't find a clear answer. Therefore we haven't changed the format of the suggestions when users use User:SuggestBot/suggest to get suggestions. We have lately been working on a redesigned format of the suggestions, which we hope to launch in a few weeks.
- Let me know if there's anything else about SuggestBot I can help you out with! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:08, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks again for your prompt and extensive reply. I'm sorry I missed the experiment. Did you include a questionnaire? If you're still collecting feedback: I prefer having information at one glance. I like the people icon, but combining it with the stars requires an extra mental step to figure out which articles are most urgent. As a starting point, allow me use to what motivates me to edit articles: I want to help readers. That lends itself to a graphic representation of readers needing help. One way to do this would be to use the people icon and color it more reddish with decreasing article quality (expressing their frustration, if you will). Two pink people are intuitively similar in urgency as one red one. Just a suggestion. (But isn't suggestions what this bot is all about? ;-) — Sebastian 16:28, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
- Again, sorry about the delay, and thanks again for your comments. We did ask some of our users to answer a questionnaire, and while we're no longer collecting data for that specifically, I always welcome feedback on how SuggestBot works and ideas for how it could work better!
- You bring up a good point about having to combine viewership and quality to figure out which articles might need the most attention. The idea of having a coloured icon is a good one, it's on my list of things to look into as we're now about to roll out a new design for the suggestions. In the new one we currently have viewership and quality separate, but we report the actual number of average views per day. It's in a table with sortable columns, so it's easy to make it show the most viewed articles at the top. I'm not sure if there's space for a column summarising the two, but I'll look into it.
Commons
Do you think you could run this bot on Commons? Maybe for places to take pictures of or tasks to do? Mono 00:27, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
- Dang, sorry about dropping the ball on this! I made a note about your idea shortly after I saw this, then totally forgot to reply to it. A SuggestBot for Commons sounds like a cool idea. Not sure to what extent the current SuggestBot could work there, or whether there might be some really cool features that it could have to make it work much better on Commons. For now I've made a note of the idea, it might be that we would want to follow up on it later when we have some manpower as it does sound like an interesting research project. Thanks for mentioning it, and again, sorry about the lack of follow-up! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 21:42, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
Testing new design
Sure, sign me up! And thanks for all the suggestions over the years :) Matthewedwards (talk · contribs) 02:34, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks to both of you for signing up! I've posted on each of your talk pages with links to individual pages with suggestions and survey. Get in touch if there's anything! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 15:25, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
I would also like to help out. :) Arctic Kangaroo 17:41, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
- Fantastic, thanks! I've posted on your user talk page with a link to the suggestions and the survey. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 18:00, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
I'm up for it.--Mjs1991 (talk) 04:54, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
Yep me too, cheers! Basket Feudalist 15:20, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks much to both of you! Posted on your user talk pages with links to the page w/suggestions and the survey. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:59, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
me too :) DrunkSquirrel (talk) 22:51, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
Sing me up. Stuartyeates (talk) 08:29, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
Sure, I'll try it out! Ethraen (talk) 14:55, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
- This is great, thanks everyone! Have now posted links to suggestions and survey on each of your user talk pages. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:56, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
Sign me up as well please! -download ׀ talk 19:12, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
- Awesome, thanks! Posted a link to the suggestions and the survey on your user talk page. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:50, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
I'll do it too. - Camyoung54 talk 00:05, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
- Great, thanks much! Posted link to your user talk page. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:52, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
Another volunteer here :) Rushton2010 (talk) 01:07, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
Count me in please.--ukexpat (talk) 12:51, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Ooh! C'mon! Pick me! Ooh! Diego (talk) 13:24, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
- You should now all have gotten links on your user talk pages, thanks so much for participating, awesome! And Diego Moya, fun comic, liked it! :) Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:44, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
- I'd be happy to help test the new SuggestBot design. --Thomprod (talk) 21:50, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
- Sure. W·n·C? 07:22, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
Sorry, Nettrom, but I don't think I've got the link on my talk page yet. Thanks, Tary123 (talk) 08:45, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
- No, I've had no link either Rushton2010 (talk) 11:18, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks for catching that! Had a busy day yesterday, so I failed to properly pick up everyone. As far as I can tell from checking now everyone has been counted and gotten links on their user talk pages. Thanks everyone for participating, appreciate it tremendously! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 14:30, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
- I'd like to test it as well Jnorwood1972 (talk) 14:52, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
- Sorry about the late response, I was planning on getting to this last Friday and get things set up for you, but got distracted by some SuggestBot issues. Because we have already gotten a good number of responses, I'll be working on launching the new design this week, meaning that every user who has signed up to get suggestions regularly will see it. So thanks for being interested in testing it, you should be able to see it before the end of the week if all goes well! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:05, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
A kitten for you!
SuggestBot is great!
Thanks, Anand (talk page) 18:31, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
|
The Technical Barnstar |
| This is a very good bot. Thanks! Thus Spake Lee Tru. 19:18, 17 May 2013 (UTC) |
- Happy to hear it works great for you. Thanks so much for the barnstar, much appreciated! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:05, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
|
The Special Barnstar |
| Excellent changes! The new design is much much better! -- Tito Dutta (contact) 17:48, 23 May 2013 (UTC) |
- In addition
I was checking the suggestions User_talk:Titodutta#Articles_you_might_like_to_edit.2C_from_SuggestBot. I can not understand what does "Images 
" mean! --Tito Dutta (contact) 18:01, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks so much for the barnstar, happy to hear you like the new design! Let me try to explain what the
means.
- For each of the suggested articles, we look at its content to try to determine if it can be improved. There are five specific things we look for: amount of content, number of citations, number of section headings, number of wikilinks, and finally number of images. If we find that the article needs improvement, we add an in a given column for that specific article. So the in the "Images" column means the article could do with another illustrative image or two. If you place your mouse pointer over the it should also tell you this, e.g. "Please add more images" for the "Images" column.
- We added these to make it easier to see how specific articles can be improved. Since the columns are sortable you can reorder the table to show you articles that need specific tasks. Our approach isn't perfect, of course, so there might be cases where it fails to mark an article that needs work, or where it marks one in a way that it doesn't. Then again, SuggestBot is about suggestions of things to work on, allowing you to make the decision about what to do :)
- Let me know if that helped explaining what the means. I'll soon get a description of this up on SuggestBot's user page with an image, explaining all the parts of the new design. And please let me know if there's other things about SuggestBot I can help you with! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:22, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
- Excellent detailed reply. I was going to write in the barnstar message, then refrained, the developers who made recent notification changes and removed orange bar suddenly should see the new design of SuggestBot's template to understand what is actually a positive and helpful change!
Anyway, that was a bit confusing. In case if you allow me here are some feedback (mostly unhelpful, I guess)
- Example article
- Subarnarekha (film)
Suggestbot's suggestion was
| Views/Day | Quality | Title | Content | Headings | Images | Links | Sources | Tagged with… |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 39 | 
|
Subarnarekha (film) (talk) | 
|
|
|
|
|
Stub |
- Issues
- There is one image Non free, it is just not possible to collect any free image or add any other image there! Similar issues in few more suggestions too.
- "Quality" is redundant to "Content". When you say the article is stub, it immediately means more content need to be added.
- "Headings" is inaccurate too. Unless more content is added, more content can not be created. Currently headings are fine.
- "Links" assessment is not correct too. Wikilinks are properly added in the article.
But, really the recent changes are very helpful. I have made some changes in the suggestion. Note, these are my own opinion, I can understand some of these might be impossible (specially the MoS errors I have mentioned), still—
| Title | Content | Quality | Maintenance tags | Views/Day | Headings | Images | Links | Sources | Dablink | MoS error | Major issue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subarnarekha (film) | 5,826 bytes |
|
{{Refimprove}}, 2 inline {{Citation needed}} (not applicable, for example) | 39 |  7 sections |
1 image NF | 14 wikilinks (did not count, rough guess) | 3 citations 0 dead links | 1 (Fix) (not applicable, for example) | 2 (WP:ORDER, MOS:HEAD) (not applicable, for example) | add sources Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
--Tito Dutta (contact) 22:02, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
- This is great feedback for us, thank you so much for taking the time to share it! I really appreciate your design suggestion, there are some cool ideas there that I'd be curious to see if we can implement.
- The issues you bring up are good criticism. When it comes to how some of these tasks (perhaps in particular content, wikilinks, and headings) relate to the "Tagged with…" column, you're right that there is redundancy for some of them. We have "Stubs", "Wikify", and "Add sources" in that column, where the first two will most of the time mean content needs to be added. Similarly "Add sources" duplicates our "Sources" column, and sometimes we fail to flag it as needed. We considered combining both the specific tasks with the cleanup tags, but failed to figure out a way to do it that would be really useful. Switching to, or adding, information about which specific cleanup tags are applied could be the way to go, I like that part of your design. You're also right about the issue with "Headings" and "Wikilinks" being related to the amount of content in the article. I've made a note to look into that particular problem to see if our technology can adapt to it.
- Thanks also for pointing out the problem with an image being available but non-free. It would perhaps be useful if we had an interface that allow our users to mark tasks, for instance with "Done", "Not needed", or write a comment about it. We've been thinking about adding some interactivity to SuggestBot, and that might just be the use case that allows for it. I've noted all of these things so we keep it in mind as we evaluate the current design and how we can improve it in the future. Thanks again for the good comments and also for the awesome design sketch, much appreciated! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:19, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
Images column
I think your "images" column needs some adjustment. Jim Van Fossen is a stub/start biography (ranked as a "start-class" on the talk page, but with a stub template on the article at the time o assessment by SuggestBot) with the appropriate number of images - one, a portrait in the inobox. Why was it tagged as needing image help? Perhaps the infobox or the length of the election table's code conused the bot? – Philosopher Let us reason together. 07:02, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks for the feedback, you bring up good points! We currently do not consider article length when suggesting the image, wikilinks, or section tasks, which might in practice put the bar too high for many articles (resulting in us suggesting adding images to articles that don't really need them). As I mentioned in my comments to Tito Dutta in the thread above, I plan to look into that problem (in that case it was the wikilinks and section tasks that had the problem, I'll add images to the list). On a higher level, it's also about trying to get away from only talking about "add more content to the article" as the way to improve it. We're experimenting with it to see how it works, adding some specific task suggestions, and feedback like this is very important. Maybe in the long term we find that there needs to be a way of flagging articles as not really needing improvement, for instance it appears to me that articles like Jim Van Fossen are more or less about as complete as they reasonably can be, meaning the stub flag isn't really helpful either. It could be that there are easy ways to identify these kinds of articles, which allows SuggestBot to be smarter about it, or it could be that we have ways of adding interactivity to the suggestion posts allowing users to flag/comment on them. In the meantime, thanks again for the important and useful feedback, it's much appreciated! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 23:12, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
Long SuggestBot message, no actual suggestions??
I'm confused — yesterday on my User Talk page there was a long SuggestBot message, similar to the kind that normally accompanies the suggestions, but there were no suggestions. Was this omission in error, or were you simply posting an explanation of the new design in advance of posting actual suggestions? Lawikitejana (talk) 17:57, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
- The new format of the suggestion posts is a fairly radical change. Where we earlier had separate sections with bold-faced headings, we now use a large table. I checked your user talk page and there is a post there that uses the new format: this link should go directly there
- Since we made a lot of changes we also added a sub-section below the table which explains what we've done. It's a fairly large amount of text, so I suspect that might have pushed the table off the screen. I hope I've been able to resolve the confusion, please do get in touch if there are questions about anything. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 19:12, 31 May 2013 (UTC)
Puzzled
Hi, recently I have been requesting SuggestBot to suggest articles related to Singapore butterflies for me to edit by placing {{User:SuggestBot/suggest|Category:Butterflies of Singapore}} on my talk page. However, it keeps on suggesting articles which are either not related to the topic, or articles about butterflies not in the category. Could I know how this one-time suggestion works? Cheers. Arctic Kangaroo (✉ • ✎) 08:26, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks for getting in touch! I am sorry to hear the results aren't as good as you wanted, and will of course do my best to explain how this works. When you supply a category (or specific articles) in the template, it tells SuggestBot that you want to use those as the basis for its suggestions. In other words, it defines the set of articles that are in your "interest profile". The bot will then search for any article that is similar to those, before it pick articles that are tagged with the cleanup templates we use in our suggestions.
- When it comes to suggesting articles within a specific category like Category:Butterflies of Singapore, there are currently two drawbacks. First is that the bot does not restrict its results to that category, and the second is that articles in that category might not be tagged with the cleanup templates we use. Regarding those issues, I see that it would perhaps be more useful if SuggestBot could limit itself to articles from that category, and if it cannot find articles tagged with cleanup templates, either provide you with a helpful message or perhaps even better, a list of articles from that category that might require improvements. I see it as quite related to the WikiProject suggestions mentioned in the thread below (which I'll respond to shortly), that in some cases it would be good if one could tell SuggestBot to limit itself to suggesting articles from a specific category (or set of categories).
- I hope that made this less confusing, let me know if you still have questions and I'll do my best to help you out. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:04, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
- Hi Nettrom, thanks for taking the trouble to reply to my query. But is there any way to "restrict" the bot? Arctic Kangaroo (✉ • ✎) 13:09, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
Some suggestions
I was suggested some pages to edit yesterday. I did find it helpful and Thank you for making & taking care of such a bot. Now to the main topic for which I came here. Some articles which SuggestBot had recommended but I had no interest in editing them were - Moskovskaya Line, Institut Kultury (Minsk Metro), Park Chelyuskintsev (Minsk Metro), Ploshchad Lenina (Minsk Metro) and 2012 Novak Djokovic tennis season. I think, the Minsk Metro articles were recommend because of my edits to 2 newly created Minsk Metro station which I had actually made while reviewing them. I have no interest in these. Let me tell you what I think you must do.
1. Make a list of all WikiProjects (excluding those which are specifically for Wikipedia related topics/issues) at a subpage of User:SuggestBot, in the same way as at Wikipedia:Feedback request service.
2. Now it's time to communicate with those people who want SuggestBot to recommend articles.
- Tell them that if you add your User name below the specific WikiProject / topic in the list, you will be suggested articles accordingly besides some other articles. And if not, a general list of articles requiring attention from editors will be suggested.
3. Now make the required changes in SuggestBot's configuration so that almost 75% articles suggested are from the topics user's want. All the articles will surely have been tagged with at-least one WikiProject on it's talk page. Those articles can be recommended which have been rated & added to the category Stub-class, Star-class, C-class or B-class.
I believe that if this method is followed, it would be better. I hope that these suggestions were useful to you. Thanks. Regards. - Jayadevp13 05:23, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
- Hello Jayadev. Did you see here - User:SuggestBot/Requests - that you can specify pages and categories as a basis for suggestions from SuggestBot?
- I agree with you that suggestions based on WikiProjects would be a good idea since many of us work mainly on one or two Wikiprojects and SuggestBot doesn't look at subcategories of a main category.
- Thanks, Anand (talk page) 06:16, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
- Hi Jayadev, and thanks for your comments! I am happy to hear that you found the suggestions generally helpful, that's why we work to keep it running :)
- When it comes to the suggestions related to Minsk and Novak Djokovic, there's unfortunately currently not much else to do than to keep editing pages you are interested in. SuggestBot's way of figuring out what you are interested in has some drawbacks, and one-two edits to pages you just stop by tend to skew the suggestions, as you have seen. We do, however, keep track of what you have gotten suggested recently so that you will not see the same articles in the next few batches of suggestions. This is to prevent you from being suggested the same uninteresting article over and over.
- Your idea of suggesting articles within WikiProjects is good, we see it come up from time to time but have unfortunately not yet been able to work on it. It is similar to the thread above about getting suggestions that are more limited in scope. One thing I can say for sure is that when it's done, you won't have to sign up on a list, because we used to do SuggestBot's signup that way and it's difficult to maintain, instead I suspect we would handle it using parameters to the SuggestBot template.
- As Anand mentions, you can get suggestions based on, but not limited to, specific WikiProjects by using the one-time suggestion template. But that's just a workaround, which might not work too well, and I agree with you and Anand that being able to define specific WikiProjects as more interesting and get suggestions from those would be more useful. So it's on my list of things to work on, but unfortunately I cannot say when we'll get around to working on it. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:54, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
A barnstar for you!
|
|
The Special Barnstar |
| I love the new format!!! Panpog1 (talk) 01:20, 6 June 2013 (UTC) |
- I'm happy to hear you like the changes we made, thanks so much for the barnstar! :) Regards, Nettrom (talk) 21:13, 10 June 2013 (UTC)
- Thought I'd say well done too. The new format is excellent, does the template allow us to weight the suggestions - orphans ++, page views+, etc ? EdwardLane (talk) 22:25, 17 June 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks for the positive feedback, glad to hear the new format helps! I'm not sure I understand your question correctly though. When you mention orphan articles, I am thinking you'd want the ability to have more of them, is that correct? About the page views, are you thinking that the suggestions should have more of the popular articles and not so many less popular articles? Please clarify and I'll do my best to give some comprehensible answers :) Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:52, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
- Sorry I didn't spend more time fleshing out my suggestion earlier. The idea was that in the suggest bot template that sits on my page, I wondered whether it was possible to add some parameters for the suggestions that we receive. So given that 30 articles will get suggested, if we could have settings for the final column - a configurable number for each tag - adding up to 30, so sources 5, cleanup 2, expand 7, unencyclopedic 3, merge 1, wikify 1, orphan 5, stub 6 (or any other set so that we choose), rather than you needing to work out what's best on avergage for everyone. I'm quite happy with the values currently there, but expand, merge and sources take more time, and at the moment I have less than last month so I might want to dial those down for a few months, and then dial them right up if I get spare time. There was a second independent idea -attaching parameter settings for "only look at articles that get 1-10 page views a month" (if I wanted to look at the more untended articles), or "only the articles with 100+ page views a month" if I wanted to fix issues with pages that get a lot of attention but still have issues. And if you really fancied getting really silly you could perhaps allow configurations for all the columns, so the suggestions include x marks the spot for at least 10 requiring images, and no more than 15 requiring sources, or whatever. EdwardLane (talk) 09:02, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
Pardon me for pulling this back to the left margin. Thanks for elaborating, turns out we were thinking along the same lines all along! When it comes to number of articles per category, perhaps also which categories we serve articles from, I had that exact same idea when I was finalising setting up the new layout. The idea has been around for a while, it comes up from time to time, but making it happen was partly complicated by our old layout with two columns. It's now all rows in a table, which should make it easier to allow the kind of configurability you describe. As we plan to gather some feedback on the new design later this summer, I'd like to leave the current configuration until after Wikimania, to make sure we know everyone has seen the same thing, and then look into a way of making it more configurable.
When it comes to filtering by popularity and/or the specific tasks, that's not as straightforward for us to do because our current data sources are slower to access. At the moment we only compute those once we've decided which 30 articles to suggest. It might be that I'll solve the popularity data problem as part of a related project I'm working on, so don't be surprised if that shows up all of a sudden. When it comes to the specific tasks it's easy for me to see projects where it would be relevant, but I'm not sure when we'll get around to it. So yeah, some of this is ideas I'll work on figuring out how to do. Thanks again! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 16:05, 21 June 2013 (UTC)