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Community Tech/Popular pages bot

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The Popular pages bot project aims to help WikiProject contributors gain deeper understanding about which article pages are popular among readers. The bot posts monthly updates of the most read pages within a WikiProject for the previous calendar month, the pageviews, the article's assessment and its importance. An example report can be found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spiders/Popular_pages

This page documents a project the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team has worked on or declined in the past. Technical work on this project is complete.

We invite you to join the discussion on the talk page. You may track this project's progress on T141154.

The popular pages report for Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders
Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T141154

This project was based on the 9th ranked request in the 2016 Community Wishlist to Fix Mr.Z-bot's popular pages report. The bot has been re-written with a few changes and enhancements.

How it works

  • General info
  • Reports
    • The bot operates via the account User:Community_Tech_bot
    • The bot will post up to 1,000 articles per WikiProject, but the total amount is customizable per project in the config.
    • The bot begins updating the 3rd day of every calendar month for the previous months' data. The bot may take up to 2 weeks to post all updates, given the size of some WikiProjects. After all WikiProjects have been updated the bot updates the table on User:Community Tech bot/Popular_pages.
    • When posting an update, the bot clears the entire contents of the page below the first header before posting the new data.
  • Data sources
    • The bot pulls pageview data from the Pageview API and includes data from both desktop web, mobile web, and mobile app, combining redirect pageviews (e.g. views to w:Obama are added to w:Barack Obama in the table.)
    • The bot pulls article assessment and importance data from the PageAssessments extension.


Rationale

This project was selected by Community Tech because it was ranked #9 in the 2016 Community Wishlist. The original bot, Mr.Z-bot was written by English Wikipedia admin Mr.Z-man but stopped operating in mid-2016. The reports was helpful for many WikiProjects and its absence was a hindrance on their work.

Report a bug or problem

Please report any issues with the bot or reports on User talk:Community Tech bot.

Troubleshooting

If a project is not updating as expected, try the following:

  • Make sure the project "Name" is correct. It may have been renamed or merged into another project. You can check whether the name is correct by putting it in the "Project" field at Special:PageAssessments. You can also enter the title of an article to see which projects it belongs to.
  • Make sure the report page has at least one section heading. The bot only writes to section 1 of the page. The lead section may be customized. If there are no sections at all, the bot will ignore the page.
  • Please also check the pageviews of the Popular Pages report itself. If no one is reading it, it might be best to remove it from the bot's configuration to save resources. Note you can use the Massviews tool to get the same information in real-time, though there is a cap of 20,000 pages. To use Massviews, enter the URL of the relevant category for the WikiProject. Most wikis such as English Wikipedia put assessments on talk pages, so you'll want to use the "Use subject page instead of talk page" option as well. For instance, for English Wikipedia's WikiProject Algae, you would use Category:WikiProject Algae articles. For this example, this link should show the most-viewed pages for the previous month for WikiProject Algae.
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