Category talk:Category redirects

Bot request

Is there any bot on Wikimedia Commons that maintains the category redirects? / Fred Chess 10:36, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I could do it if needed. Drini 18:47, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Orgilobot does this as of this date. -Mak 00:01, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Is anybody or anybot still maintaining this at the moment? Quite a few of the subcats don't seem to be empty. - Dammit 10:12, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Completely agree ...

I just posted a bot request on en:WP:Bot Request as I keep faling on non-empty categories ...

BenAllard (talk) 20:09, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

BenAllard, why are you asking at en wikipedia? What do they have to do with this? A couple of weeks ago there was a request to clean out this cat at Commons:Bots/Requests. I wrote a bot and cleaned out this cat (source). Now some other people are also running this bot and there's a request to have a regular bot running around at Commons:Bots/Requests for flags#Category redirect bot. Multichill (talk) 20:17, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for replying quickly, i simply did not found that page, and lot of the (wrong) links are from en:, so, they are also concerned ... Will have a look at your code, thanks for the link BenAllard (talk) 21:35, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

As far as I understood your code, it's actually only touching at [[Commons:]] ... The problem I faced was being thrown to the deprecated catgories from other WP ... Is there any way to have a global bot, or should I post a request on each WP projects ? BenAllard (talk) 16:31, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Are you talking about links from a wikipedia category to a commons category which is a redirect category? For example if Category:Automobiles points to Category:Cars. This is on my todo list for commonscat (source). I have an bot-flagged account on every wikipedia and my bot is also global so i can have it work on every wikipedia. Multichill (talk) 17:03, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

That's exactly what I meant ! Nice to hear that you plan to looks at it. If you need some help, thought ... drop a line ... BenAllard (talk) 19:27, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Two systems

At the moment we have two systems for redirecting:

1. Hard redirects ( #REDIRECT[<target>] ) categorized in Category:Hash mark redirected categories
2. Soft redirects ( {{Category redirect|<target>}} ) categorized in Category:Category redirects

I am thinking about turning all the hard redirects into soft redirects. This makes it more easy to maintain (the non empty categories will show up in Category:Non-empty category redirects) and wont keep the fact that an image is in a redirect category obscured for the user. Multichill (talk) 20:11, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

I support that. Awhile ago converted about half of Category:Hash mark redirected categories, but I wanted to wait a bit before doing the other half in case there were any major complaints (since I kinda decided it on my own). No complaints, except one, which I agree with. And since {{Category redirect}} doesn't allow self categorization unlike hard redirects where #REDIRECT[[Category:Name]] and #REDIRECT[[:Category:Name]] make a difference, we should add the category if it doesn't contain the ':'. That was something I didn't think about assuming all redirects shouldn't be categorized anyway. Some of these redirects should probably just be deleted as they're not really needed and cause more probables by existing (not being a red link, tools like HotCat.js showing them in the drop down, etc.) Rocket000 (talk) 00:32, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Categories not showing up in Non-empty category redirects

I recently moved some categories (e.g. in Category:Districts of Belarus the individual district categories from "XYZ district" to "XYZ District"), then a bot came and added the soft-redirect template e.g. 14 h after the move occurred. Normally, this would result in the old name appearing as a subcategory of the new name and the old category would be listed at Category:Non-empty category redirects. And from there another bot e.g. Steinsplitter, or User:JuTa, or me, moved items to the new place.

So, I would say within 4 h to 18 h the new categories contain the old as subcategory, a fact some users, e.g. User:J. Patrick Fischer [1] and User:Bjung [2] seem not to be aware of. And within 12 h to 48 h all renaming tasks are done.

But now there seems to be a software bug, e.g. related to the XYZ Province categories in Category:Provinces of Cuba, where the soft-redirect bot came ca 5h after the move occurred. But the old categories don't show up at non-empty nor as subcategory of the new.

I just fixed Artemisa by hand, by manually adding the new category to the old [3], then using cat-a-lot. The other Cuban provinces are still broken. I leave them so someone can analyze the problem. There could be many more, so just fixing here by hand is not helping to find the cause and address the wider issue. But maybe test-cases could be constructed. Tamawashi (talk) 05:44, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi, a null-edit would "push" the old cat into "non empty category redirects". But thats not realy neccessary, you can enter (or copy&paste) the new category name at the top of the "cat a lot" interface (press enter). You should change your preferences (at the bottom) of the cat a lot interface and enable the categories and pages. Otherwise you leave the subcategories in the old cat (as I noticed yesterday). regards. --JuTa 10:29, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

PS: And you don't nee to wait for the bot creating the category redirect. You can set this yourself directly after your move. Just follow the "redirected from ..." link at the to i.e. into a new tab, edit the resulting page an enter {{Category redirect|new category name}}, afterwards you can directly start the cat a lot activity. That would reuuce the time of empty new categories from hours or days to minutes or seconds. --JuTa 10:35, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Anyway, the result is that several categories that were fine before Tamawashi's renames are a mess now. That's what happens when one blindly trusts bots and renames categories mindlessly. Does the bot normally corrects backlinks on Commons and update Wikidata links too? If not, Tamawashi will still have to fix that. — Bjung (talk) 16:13, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

@User:JuTa - I enabled categories and pages already. But what does not work is typing the target by hand. The cat-a-lot then becomes invisible in my browser. I will try a null edit. But that would have to happen after the first bot went through.

@User:Bjung - cool down. The categories are randomly named "Foo Bar", "Bar of Foo", "Foo (bar)", "Foo (Bar)" and child categories sometimes do not follow the parent categories, e.g. Category:Cultural heritage monuments in Slawharad District existed within Category:Slawharad district. Technical errors of the software are the fault of the software. Tamawashi (talk) 21:04, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Update: Today Category:Province of Camagüey showed up at Non-empty category redirects, without having a new edit. I then moved the content as described above. Also categories that I moved yesterday showed up. So the software error is occurring randomly from my knowledge, and is randomly corrected. Tamawashi (talk) 22:00, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

@Tamawashi: I never lost my "cool". I'm not supposed to applaud a new contributor who doesn't know what he's doing but insists he's right. Blaming software for lack of care for Commons usability is too easy. The contents in Category:Liège Province are still not right after 4 days and it's too long. Software glitch or not, that is unacceptable and sends a bad message about Commons reliability. If you rename a category, you have to manually make sure that it completes ok, otherwise the "wiki" way of improving repositories fails. — Bjung (talk) 17:23, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

How can I delete an empty category?

En-wiki has a speedy delete process for deleting empty categories. What is the delete process here on commons? Batternut (talk) 14:24, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

It seems a similar process exists on commons, eg tagging with Template:Bad name and also page Commons:Categories for discussion. Batternut (talk) 11:26, 15 November 2017 (UTC)