User talk:SuggestBot

If you're looking for recommendations, please go to User:SuggestBot/Requests.

Feedback on recommendations is welcome below. I move older feedback to User:SuggestBot/FeedbackArchive every so often. Thanks for caring enough to leave a note. -- ForteTuba 11:19, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Brain Overload

The bot gave me some good links to look at, although about 1/3rd were brain-related, which I can only assume had something to do with the fact that several of my recent edits were to change a bunch of redirects based on the Nintendo DS "Brain Training" game. Besides that, it did a pretty good job given it didn't have a large list of contributions to work from. Confusing Manifestation 12:14, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

One of its recommendation strategies is text-based matching, very search-engine like. I can easily imagine how it would get overwhelmed by seeing the word "Brain" in multiple article titles. Sometimes this works great at finding useful similar articles, other times not so much. Thanks for the feedback. -- ForteTuba 15:57, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Innovation

First off, SuggestBot is one of the most innovative Wiki Bots I've seen. Second, I enjoyed fixing some of the articles suggested. One suggestion, though, is that (because I do a lot of vandalism reversion) perhaps minor edits, small edits, and edits marked with "rv" should be ignored when determining articles. Otherwise, you end up with some crazy suggestions. Porphyric Hemophiliac § 18:39, 26 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the nice words, it felt like an interesting thing to try and I'm glad you got some value out of it. As for edits being ignored, it tries to ignore "rv" edits. Minor edits didn't seem to help in offline testing, but enough people have asked for them that when I build the new, improved SuggestBot, I'm going to have an option for filtering them that people can try with and without. It's a good idea--I've noticed that people who do vandalism reversion get a lot of bogus stuff (in particular, they tend to get popular/controversial articles). Thanks again. -- ForteTuba 17:08, 27 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yay!

These suggestions have been hugely useful for me. You deserve a cookie. æle ✆ 2006-05-27t14:35z

Sweet, like the cookie -- I'm glad they helped you out. -- ForteTuba 17:09, 27 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

RfA

I notcied that you've left messages for Cool3 on his talk page, so I thought you mihgt want to vote in his RfA at WP:RFA. ShortJason 15:13, 27 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is a bot account that posts suggested articles to edit; I don't generally have special insight into the people who use the bot and don't feel plugged-in enough to the admin process to have useful opinions to contribute. Thanks for the invite, though. -- ForteTuba 17:18, 27 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestions

Thanks for the suggestions - mostly inpiring, even if somewhat haphazardly. Presumably because I've done so much of the work on the Handcolouring article, I ended up with a bizarre array of articles with the word "hand" in them: :Hand tool, Hand jive, First hand, Right Hand of Doom, I Kiss Your Hand, Madame,...! But I find this slightly random element fun, and it leads me to some subjects that I otherwise might not have looked at. Thanks again. Pinkville 20:40, 30 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the text-based recommender has a bad habit of getting wrapped around an axle, but I'm glad you got something out of it. Thanks for the feedback. -- ForteTuba 02:42, 31 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Programming

What language is this written in? I'm a basic-level programmer, and I'd be interested in looking at the source if that's okay with you. --Mathwizard1232 04:39, 1 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback & thanks

Hi Enjoyed the experience of working with SuggestBot - very challenging in places. Some suggestions very appropriate, one or two a bit wide of the mark. Detailed feedback on User:Ballista/SuggestBot - Thanks - Ballista 20:18, 3 June 2006 (UTC) (P.S.: I'm queuing for another go!) - Ballista 20:20, 3 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sweet. I am still intending to follow up on your comments, I just have finishing a dissertation by July 1 as a #1 priority right now. -- ForteTuba 13:19, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again

Just had a look at the latest bunch of suggestions - mostly good stuff, thanks. My own fault - it sent me Uusikaupunki back again! I'll rootle through these, as I go, interleaving it with my other editing agenda. As before, I'll provide feedback when finished but I'll try to do a running feedback, this time, on User:Ballista/SuggestBot. - Ballista 07:58, 11 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure if it will work...

...Because I do a lot of work on disambiguation and RC patrol, but always worth a try :o) E Asterion ^{u talking to me?} 10:02, 11 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

True enough. It tries to be smart about rv edits, but not very smart. Someday I want to let people give a list of articles that truly represents them, rather than just what they've edited -- but it's so easy for potential users to just give their name... -- ForteTuba 13:20, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestions

Thanks very much for this - for the most part, my first batch were absolutely perfect. Is there any reason it doesn't do non-existent articles that need writing, though? Rebecca 03:06, 12 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The recommender looks at article text and edit histories as ways to find things you might like. Problematic with nonexistent articles, although I can imagine doing a different kind of text matching for that. Several people have asked, enough that it might be fun to do. Thanks for the postitive feedback and the suggestion. -- ForteTuba 13:18, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

improvements

Very good bot! very good idea! Suggestions for improvement, have a filter for articles that should not be used to figure out what I'm editing. Filter on Vandalproof, rv, Revert to revision and all other simmilar texts that is given when doing vandal reverts. Second suggestion, make me be able to run it, I.e. I can click a link that will generate a new page now when I want it, not sure what you need to run this thing, it would be best if it was run on one of the wikiservers but and not sure how slow it is, but still I think it should be part of wikipedia to have a [[special:Suggest/user]] . Stefan 11:43, 12 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It tries to be smart about rv, but not too smart. (Better, probably, to just let peope paste in some text with wikilinks if they want to be more precise.) I also really want it to run live -- I tried to get a toolserver account but was ignored for months. So, for now it is what it is. But I agree that giving suggestions right when people are interested would be killer. Thanks for the ideas. -- ForteTuba 13:22, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My set of suggestions

Mine were a real mixed bag... But then again, I usually don't spend much time in one area except for my translations. That's what's so odd about it: It was mostly correct in giving me a lot of political articles, especially relating to Brazil and the U.S., but it also gave me Mermaid Man (I rarely edit fictional characters, and certainly not Spongebob Squarepants. I don't know what word could have triggered it) and a few other odd choices. It didn't give me anything for Portugal, a major area of my concentration, nor any kooky conspiracy theories (though I work on those pages much less often.) How does it use subject matter or categories to suggest articles, I wonder?

Thanks for providing such a creative bot, by the way. It was helpful. Perhaps I'll try it again in a month. Grand master ka 07:13, 13 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Glad you liked it. It uses three algorithms:

matching text of article titles you've edited against text of all articles needing work.
comparing your editing patterns to those of other users and suggesting things similar others have edited that you haven't yet.
following links from pages you've edited and looking "in that neighborhood" for pages that are often linked to (but not too often).

The algos are not perfect, and that would be a fine next direction to go in developing it. Not sure what caused the anomalies you saw above, it doesn't log quite enough detail about the suggestion process to say. Still, glad it was of some use and feel free to come back and be a repeat customer. -- ForteTuba 13:16, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Time to wait

How long do I usually have to wait before SuggestBot suggest some articles for me? Wizrdwarts (T|C) 22:10, 16 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

These days, while I'm trying to finish a thesis, I only think about SB once a week. I'd like it to be in an automatic mode, where people get suggestions right away (when they're most interested!) but it's not polished enough for that yet. Sorry about the delay. -- ForteTuba 13:13, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yay!

Thanks for the suggestions! Many of them were excellent and I am now happily editing away. However, I am not sure how I got Shlomo Moussaieff as I am not Jewish, haven't looked at any Jewish articles, and rarely edit biography pages. Most of the suggestions were very good, however. cøøkiə Ξ _(talk) 16:57, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Cool, glad you found some of them useful. For some reason it's currently picking only random suggestions for the WIKIFY articles, I may have messed up last time I grabbed a list of them. -- ForteTuba 19:21, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks

Thanks for this useful tool. I was familiar with some of my suggestions, but there are some new things there to occupy my time -- and it's just nice to be given a list of articles as something to focus on. I wonder if you might consider separating true stubs from section stubs, though. For example, under stubs SuggestBot recommended speciation, which is at a significantly different stage of development than Ophiomorus tridactylus. Just a suggestion. Thanks again. -- bcasterline • talk 19:24, 23 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome. And throwing out section stubs (or, making them a separate category) would probably be smart, that's a good idea. -- ForteTuba 12:51, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What a bizzare list....

Thanks for the suggestions. Some of them make sense to me, others don't. All in all, the list of suggestions seems a little bizzare. There are a couple of articles on the list about places in Kent, England; I know virtually nothing about Kent or anything in it, and, to my knowledge, have never edited an article about Kent (maybe reverting vandalism or cleaning up grammer). My interests are fairly broad though (which might explain the bizzare list), so I suppose I'll learn alot about Kent while editing the articles on the list. ;) ONUnicorn 19:41, 23 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback. I've been wondering if it gets confused by "wide" profiles where people work on a lot of different kinds of things, and wondering what a good way to deal with it would be. No answers yet, though. -- ForteTuba 12:50, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wow

I just got my recommended articles, and just have to say "wow": SuggestBot picked a great mix of articles for me- gaming, history, music, military, all in the range of what I feel capable of editing and all of interest to me.

If you need any help with the project(graphics, mass notifications, etc), just ask: I'll do what I can!

If Wikimoney was still around, I'd donate all of mine to this!

EvocativeIntrigue _{TALK has smiled at you! Smiles promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by smiling to someone else, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Smile to others by adding {{subst:smile}}, {{subst:smile2}} or {{subst:smile3}} to their talk page with a friendly message. Happy editing!}

EvocativeIntrigue _{TALK | EMAIL} 23:00, 23 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, thanks for the entuhsiastic support. For now, it's staying low and slow until I can put some time into implementing suggestions I've gotten over the past two months, but thanks for the offer of help. :) -- ForteTuba 12:53, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nice bot!

I'd like to say how good this bot is, it handed me suggestions on ALL the topics i'm in to. Programming, gaming, electronics, data compression and more! i'm very happy with your bot, it didn't suggest anything irrelevant either. As for improvements: i have none, your bot is perfect as-is. keep up the good work. MichaelBillington 01:48, 24 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have to add my $0.02 and say that I really enjoyed your bot's suggestions. Thanks for your hard work. Ifnord 17:12, 25 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to both of you, glad they were useful. -- ForteTuba 12:53, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting suggestions

well it seems the Stubs list is pretty close. I give the Merge list 2/3. Unfortunately on the Add Sources list I'm already on record for one of the suggestions saying "If you know any sources please add them!" so that's a bit of a downer.... The Expand section is a total puzzle, I don't see how SuggestBot came up with me expanding any of those articles. If it uses different rules for this section they aren't very good at measuring my interests/ability to expand articles (if it followed the same rules as it used to pick stubs it would have been a more worthwhile list).

It's a shame there are so many railway stations on the stubs side I really am only interested in the ones near where I live, as part of being interested in that area (rather than the topic of railway infrastructure). I guess this comes down to the railway articles being categorised as railway articles, but not being categorised for where they are geographically. That is a categorisation issue not a suggestbot issue I guess. Garrie 22:29, 25 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's not perfect as far as ruling out articles that people have edited in the past (although it tries). The expand and verify lists are both troublesome because there are relatively few articles with those tags compared to others---so it has less to choose from when making suggestions. Finally, with the railways, it looks like there was probably a very prolific editor of Aus railway articles. One of the algorithms looks for people who have edited similar things to you, and recommends articles they have edited, so you got a bunch of those recommended. Thanks for the feedback, this is useful to know. -- ForteTuba 12:58, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

2 more cents - eliminate duplicate suggestions?

Thanks for the latest round of suggestions. With a lot more edit history to work from, these look like better suggestions than the last round was. I've been doing a bunch of special:random article copyediting lately, so getting mostly topics based on my more serious editing is a nice tribute. Of course, the test will be whether I actually go edit them.

True enough -- it's easy to say "look, people like it" from comments, but actual behavior is more of a gold standard of being useful.

Could you add a way for the bot to recognize that my talk page already had a suggestion list from it and discard duplicates. It might be able to do this by just discarding anything wikilinked in other talk page sections with its auto-generated header. I got resuggested three articles that I turned down last time. GRBerry 21:55, 27 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, after my first pass review this looks like a set more in line with my editing tastes. Having more edit history evidence for the bot to work with is helpful. GRBerry 02:24, 28 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Cool that it was useful. As for not re-suggesting articles, that's probably a good idea and not hard to implement. I didn't picture repeat customers, but it definitely has some. -- ForteTuba 00:37, 2 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback

I'm back; I just got my second SB list after going through most of the articles it listed last time. I noticed this time, though, that I got quite a few pages that were in the last list but I hadn't edited in the newer list- is this a known fault/purposeful logic?

Still, nice bot!

EVOCATIVEINTRIGUE TALKTOME | EMAILME | IMPROVEME 22:45, 27 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Seeing this immediately after my feedback is certainly intriguing. So here is some more detailed analysis. I was about 6 weeks between suggestion sets, with a large chunk of unsuggested editing in between, and got three repeat suggestions. User:EvocativeIntrigue was about 4 days between suggestion sets, with what looks like primarily doing SuggestBot suggestions in between, and got six repeat suggestions. GRBerry 00:31, 28 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That was a bad pun (sorry, had to)! It was odd, but not really major: I'll probably actually work on those articles now! EVOCATIVEINTRIGUE TALKTOME | EMAILME | IMPROVEME 02:42, 1 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Having two people point removing dups in short order is pretty compelling. I worry a little that it will run out of things to suggest, but that's easy enough to fix by doing some arbitrary penalizing of previously suggested items without throwing them out of the list entirely. I'm just glad it was mostly able not to re-suggested articles you did edit, I get occasional reports that it suggests edited articles. Not useful. -- ForteTuba 00:39, 2 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Great!

This bot found some articles that I can really improve! There is one article listed that doesn't exist, though. Nate 13:11, 2 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Cool, glad you found some useful suggestions out of it. It sometimes will recommend nonexistent articles -- the links-based recommender will sometimes spit out an article that's not there, and because it runs off of relatively old DB dumps, sometimes articles get deleted in the meantime. FWIW, some people really like the idea of getting suggestions for articles that don't yet exist. I haven't implemented that yet but I hope to someday. -- ForteTuba 16:38, 5 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How about more frequent suggestions??

I got suggestions from SuggestBot once after my request. Can I get regular suggestions, say monthly? It would be a hassle to make a request everytime. --theorb 10:08, 4 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For now, you need to request when you want more -- but that's a good suggestion, and one that wouldn't be too hard to implement. Would it be okay if it just appended them (rather than trying to fiddle through the text on user talk pages trying to replace old ones)? -- ForteTuba 16:41, 5 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hilary Duff

Sorry... I dont know this is vandalism, i feel so sorry...

) I'll not do this anymore... and its Hilary Duff, not Hillary Duff
D thanks... i'll read wikipedia rules now.

carful abour remcommending merges and splits

Hate to say this, but .. please be careful about recommending merges and splits. I've recently had to deal with a crew of well-intentioned but otherwise clueless editors who threw themselves into several article splits, one rather large. Unfortunately, the articles were incorrectly tagged by yet someone else who was not an expert in the field. A fair amount of damage was done before the error was caught; I fixed one case, but the other one (scalar) remains a disaster. I first heard about suggestbot when I noticed it had listed an article from quantum field theory (good lord!) I'd just cleaned up as a suggested task for a non-physicist (when pigs have wings!) I know these points should be "obvious", but appearently, some editors have more energy than common sense. linas 02:04, 7 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, one thing SuggestBot can't do is ensure that people do a great job of editing -- it can only find articles it thinks a given person is interested in, and it can only do that by looking at articles people edit. If someone does some cleanup on physics articles, SB might decide that quantum field theory is related to their interests. The long-term answer for SB is probably letting people do a better job of specifiying what they're interested in. Just grabbing their edit history is simple (and reasonably effective) but has known problems with picking up edits that aren't directly in a person's field of expertise. There are worlds where you try to match ability, authority, and responsibility, but that's not so much Wikipedia's game right now as far as I can see. -- ForteTuba 14:27, 16 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation

Would it be possible for the bot to disregard all edits with the edit summary: "Disambiguation pages disambiguated (and maintaining). You can help!"

Because all the members of the Disambiguation project end up getting really random suggestions.

Thanks! --Dakart 04:37, 11 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Useful suggestion, thanks. I'm hoping to do some coding in a couple of weeks and one of the primary goals is to do a better job of ignoring edits that aren't indicators of interest. It's useful to know about particular problems like this because they can easily be put in in an ad hoc way. -- ForteTuba 14:28, 16 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is this possible ?

Currently the SuggestBot creates a list of suggestions and posts this to the User:talk:pages Would it be possible to create a page on first request User:Username/Suggestbot, then leave a message on the talk page linking to the list. SuggestBot could then post updates monthly or quarterly to the list, leave another message when it happens. Gnangarra 08:54, 11 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Freakishly Accurate Suggestion

Hey there. I am currently (very slowly) rewriting and expanding the David Tonkin article and, to my surprise, find that SuggestBot has suggested expanding that very article. Not that SuggestBot has politely but firmly suggested that I get my backside into gear and complete the rewrite I better do it. Cheers --Roisterer 11:38, 11 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Getting global?

Some curious users of it.wiki are wondering whether SuggestBot can work on wikis in languages different from English. Is there any chance? How difficult would be setting it up? Let me join the congratulation chorus. Thank you. --Paginazero 08:42, 12 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]