I don't dispute that CategorizationBot is enormously useful and has accomplished great things for Commons. I'm just saying that the user talkpage notices are a nag and are annoying. Combined with all the other bot and userscript notices, it creates an environment that is better described as "aggressive" and "bitey" than "friendly" or "welcoming". And I don't imagine that I'm the only person who has this opinion. Unfortunately, most of these notices are necessary by policy, but categorization notices aren't. So I think it would be better for CategorizationBot's user talkpage notices to be opt-in rather than opt-out. I'm sorry if I came across as being dismissive of your work. That certainly wasn't my intention. Your work is extremely important to Commons. I just didn't say that because I thought it was obvious :)
Ryan Kaldari
On 2/28/11 1:53 PM, Maarten Dammers wrote:
Hi Ryan,
Op 22-2-2011 21:06, Ryan Kaldari schreef:
Speaking of friendliness on Commons, does CategorizationBot really need to post notices on both the File pages and User Talk pages? Maarten?
Yes. People tend not the notice things left on file pages. This way they do notice.
This seems overly aggressive to me.
Aggressive? What's aggressive? The fact that a user is kindly invited to help out or the message itself? A user is asked to help out because we're always low on people helping out. The message is at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Please_link_images . If you don't like it, be bold and make it a better message.
My categorization project started somewhere in 2008. I was tired on stumbling upon uncategorized files. A lot of great photo's, but impossible to find. So first I wrote something to find all uncategorized files and tag them. Next step was to try to find categories for these images. At some point I started notifying people to try to get them involved. I don't know if it helped, what I do know is that the number of uncategorized files is pretty stable around (100K) and that my bot helped categorize over 200K files (probably even more). The full statistics are at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Multichill/Categorization_stats
The exact workings of the bot and frequently asked questions about the bot are at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CategorizationBot . I try to update this page based on the questions I get. Might be worth reading.
I don't consider it very friendly to dismiss my work as aggresive ;-)
Maarten
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