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:
1. 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).
2. If it is in the right category/has the right template/whatever, then
do nothing;
3. If it is not in the right category/is missing the template/whatever,
remove the {{Link FA}}.
This would be much better because:
1. 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),
2. the bot could check several languages at the same time (for articles
that are featured in many many languages, like [[Esperanto]]),
3. 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
Jon Harald Søby <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jon_Harald_S%C3%B8by>