I would like to request a change in the way the -former parameter works in featured.py. Currently if you specify -former, it looks for a category for former featured articles in a wiki, and then follows the same procedure it normally does with finding interwikis to your language, etc etc. This is not the way it should work. Instead, it should do this:
- Find occurences of {{Link FA}} in your wiki, then check if the article in the language specified is in the designated category/has the designated template/whatever. For example, if you go to [[no:Sverige]] and it says {{Link FA|ru}}, it should go to the Russian Wikipedia and check whether or not [[ru:Швеция]] contains the template [[ru:Шаблон:Избранная статья]] (or whatever it checks for, that is already specified).
- If it is in the right category/has the right template/whatever, then do nothing;
- If it is not in the right category/is missing the template/whatever, remove the {{Link FA}}.
This would be much better because:
- the bot would only focus on the articles it needs to focus on (doesn't check hundreds of articles that do not exist in your language),
- the bot could check several languages at the same time (for articles that are featured in many many languages, like [[Esperanto]]),
- it does not rely on a wiki actually having a category for former featured articles (many wikis don't), which is a huge weakness in the current model.
So if anybody is able to fix this, that would be great. Sadly I don't know how to do it myself (if I did I would have).
--
mvh