FPCArchivistBot (talk · contribs)

Operator: Aristeas (talk · contributions · Statistics · Recent activity · block log · User rights log · uploads · Global account information) (assign permissions)

Bot’s tasks for which permission is being sought:

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 completed nominations for 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) these categories and links them to each other so that they can be found and browsed by starting from the candidate archive category.

Automatic or manually assisted: The bot is started manually and directed to the FPC log page(s) for a month or year, then it automatically processes all entries on that page/these pages. If it cannot clearly assign a nomination to a specific type category or subject category, it puts the nomination into a maintenance category so that editors can later assign the appropriate categories manually. (The operator will take care of this.)

Edit type: Runs intermittently, only when started by the operator. The bot will gradually process all the old log pages; this will deliberately be spread over a few weeks so that users are not bothered by the changes; after that, this task is complete and the bot will be inactive.

Maximum edit rate: 5 edits per minute.

Bot flag requested: Yes. It would be great if the bot could get the bot flag, so users could hide the changes from their watchlists.

Other flags requested: It would be even more important and really great if sooner or later the bot could get the autopatrolled flag. Of course I will patrol the first 100 edits and will check samples after processing each log page to rule out any errors, but sooner or later it would be great if it would not be necessary to patrol every single edit.

Programming language(s): Python, based on the Pywikibot framework. I have developed the code which analyzes nominations and adds archival categories to them for FPCBot, as part of its official task to close and archive the featured picture nominations, and in discussion with interested featured picture regulars. The new bot uses similar code, but I have expanded it with many additional tests and checks in order to be able to cope with any kind of variations and possible errors in old nominations.

Test run: I have instructed the bot to process the first five nominations from the log page for December 2025. Because these were the first nominations from that year which have been processed by the bot, it had to create a lot of candidate archive categories for that year; if the bot would continue it would mostly edit the nomination pages themselves and only create additional categories for other results or subjects as needed.

– Aristeas (talk) 16:01, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Support would be useful I think.--Prototyperspective (talk) 15:49, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
•  Support It would indeed --Julesvernex2 (talk) 15:51, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
•  Support --Yann (talk) 17:29, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
•  Support -- Giles Laurent (talk) 17:43, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
•  Support - We've had several discussions recently about trends in the Featured Picture Nominations process, and several in the past, which have been limited by our current recordkeeping system. It's simply been difficult to parse a long log page to count nominations, promotions, failures, etc., which is necessary for tracking said trends. I suspect this would also be helpful in development of the Picture of the Year tools, or at least to debug their output, which typically includes a couple mistakes each year. Much appreciation to Aristeas for jumping on this idea and turning it into something sustainable! — Rhododendrites ^talk |  00:35, 28 February 2026 (UTC)
• To estimate the extent of the task: There are 313 FPC log pages from November 2004 to December 2025, containing about 45.200 inclusions of nomination subpages. The bot will make one edit per nomination subpage to add the archive categories. The number of archive categories varies depending on the diversity of the results and subjects of the nominations each year, but there will be between 20 and 40 categories per year that the bot creates, for a total of about 630 new categories. This brings us to about 45.830 edits in total for this task. – Aristeas (talk) 14:15, 4 March 2026 (UTC)
• To see what the result will look like for each year, please take a look at the main category for the current year. – Aristeas (talk) 09:42, 8 March 2026 (UTC)
•  Support I find old FPC nominations, including the unsuccessful ones, extremely valuable, as their discussions offer many insights and learning opportunities. Until now, accessing these older nominations - especially those that were not successful - has been quite cumbersome. The new archive categories make it much easier to locate and explore specific types of nominations. For this reason, I believe it would be highly beneficial if the proposed bot could add these categories to the older nominations, greatly improving accessibility and research for the community. -- Radomianin (talk) 14:14, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

There appears to be consensus to approve this. --Krd 06:20, 13 March 2026 (UTC)