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&ol…