Hi everyone!
Last week I published a cross-wiki tool to quickly add and remove categories from pages. Since it’s not specific to any wiki, I wasn’t sure where to announce it, and some people suggested this mailing list, so here it is :)
The tool is called QuickCategories [1][2]. It’s similar to the QuickStatements tool for Wikidata [3][4]: you prepare a list of edits in a tabular, textual format – e. g. in a spreadsheet – and then you paste it into the tool to create a batch, which you can then run.
Some page|+Category:Something|+Category:Something else|-Category:Other Other page|+Category:Something|+Category:Something else|-Category:Other
For example, yesterday I used this tool to add [[Category:Tomb in the Panthéon de Paris]] to several Commons categories that I had created earlier (before realizing they should be in this category) [5], and Harmonia Amanda has used it to categorize thousands of sportspeople by their nationality according to Wikidata (e. g. [6]).
Please use the tool responsibly – I’m reasonably confident that it won’t do bad things on the wikitext level (it uses MediaWiki Parser from Hell [7], the same library as EarwigBot [8]), but it can’t decide for you whether a category is appropriate or not. For instance, in the announcement on Commons [9] I had proposed to automatically add [[Category:Politicians of the United Kingdom]] to all Members of Parliament of the United Kingdom according to Wikidata, but it turned out this category may be more debatable than I expected. I still think it should be possible to add this category to some automatically selected people, using a more refined query, but I’ll leave that to people more familiar with UK politics :)
If you have any questions, feel free to reply here or {{ping}} me on-wiki – otherwise, I just hope this is useful to some of you :)
Best regards, Lucas Werkmeister
[1]: https://tools.wmflabs.org/quickcategories/ [2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Lucas_Werkmeister/QuickCategories [3]: https://tools.wmflabs.org/quickstatements/ [4]: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:QuickStatements [5]: https://tools.wmflabs.org/quickcategories/batch/26/ [6]: https://tools.wmflabs.org/quickcategories/batch/25/ [7]: https://github.com/earwig/mwparserfromhell/ [8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EarwigBot [9]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Village_pump&old...