Obligatory bot data

± This user is in fact a bot. Category:Commons bots#FPCArchivistBot This user is a native Python speaker. This user has been on Wikimedia Commons for 1 month and 29 days 12,000+ This user has made over 12,000 contributions to Commons.

According to the Commons bots policy:

• Operator and contact: Aristeas
• Tasks: Please see the section Tasks below.
• Operation: The bot is started manually and directed to a specific log page, etc., then it automatically processes all entries on that page.
• When: Runs intermittently, only when started by the operator.
• Maximum edit rate: 5 edits per minute.
• Language: Python, based on the Pywikibot framework.

Introduction

You can think of FPCArchivistBot as FPCBot’s little cousin. While FPCBot tirelessly attends to the new featured picture nominations (FPC) – checking their status, counting the votes, and sorting them into the featured picture gallery pages after verification, etc. –, FPCArchivistBot enjoys browsing through nominations from previous years and ensuring their optimal archiving and registration.

In other words, FPCArchivistBot was programmed to perform automatable archival tasks related to old featured picture nominations. These tasks are not part of FPCBot’s remit, as it is supposed to take care of new nominations only, and is already a very extensive bot program that we should not burden with extraneous duties; therefore, the archival work was outsourced to FPCArchivistBot.

Tasks

Currently, there is just a single task (but perhaps more will be added in the future):

1. Add candidate archive categories to closed featured picture nominations and create the respective categories
   As described in this discussion (please see there for more details), closed featured picture nominations were traditionally only archived by including them in a monthly log page. Therefore especially unsuccessful or cancelled nominations can only be found with difficulty, namely by analyzing the linear log pages. However, users are often interested in closed nominations in order to study and discuss the development of the featured pictures project, to compile statistics (cf. e.g.), or to verify the authenticity and completeness of our featured picture galleries. To make it easier to find and evaluate all nominations of a specific period, type, or subject, the bot reads the old log pages, extracts the nominations and adds three specific archival categories to each nomination:
   1. one for the month and year in which the nomination was closed,
   2. one for the type and final status of the nomination,
   3. and one for the subject of the nominated image(s).

Furthermore the bot checks and creates (if necessary) the description pages for these categories and links them to each other so that they can be found and browsed by starting from the candidate archive category.

→ Please see the bot request for details and discussion.

Status: in progress. 17 February 2026 requested; 13 March approved; 17 March started processing … Already done: 2026 (17 March), 2025 (21 March), 2024 (24 March), 2023 (27 March), 2004 (30 March), 2022 (31 March), 2021 (1 April), 2020 (4 April).