Talk:QuickCategories

pending commands

@Ash Crow and Strakhov: I’ve just reset some commands in batches of yours which were stuck in the “pending” state (should be run soon, but for some reason – most likely a bug in the tool – it never happened) to the default “planned” state. Specifically, these ones:

• batch #38 by Ash Crow
• batch #40 by Ash Crow
• batch #40 by Ash Crow (again)
• batch #41 by Ash Crow
• batch #42 by Ash Crow
• batch #43 by Ash Crow
• batch #44 by Ash Crow
• batch #115 by Strakhov
• batch #128 by Strakhov
• batch #129 by Strakhov
• batch #170 by Strakhov

You might want to run some of these commands again to make sure they’re properly settled – hopefully they’ll work correctly now. Sorry for the inconvenience. --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 11:32, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll give it a look! Strakhov (talk) 11:36, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Hi, those batches were mostly each time the previous one without the blocking line (which I treated by hand then, which permitted me to see that the problem was protected categories), so running them again is useless. -Ash Crow (talk) 07:01, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Feature request

Hey Lucas, thank you for this awesome tool! I do have an idea, how to make it even more useful but no clue how easy or hard it would be to implement this. Since batch category jobs are quite often created with PetScan, would it be possible create a batch here using a PagePile id? That would make life so much easier. What do you think, feasible? Cheers, --MB-one (talk) 12:11, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

@MB-one: I assume you mean the actions would be the same for each page? That should be possible, though I’m not very familiar with the PagePile system – do you perhaps have an example link or something? --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 11:34, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes, the action would have to be the same for each page/file/category. Unfortunately, I can't provide much information on the inner workings of PagePile either. You can find example page piles at https://tools.wmflabs.org/pagepile/?menu=recent.

Cheers --MB-one (talk) 19:34, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

@MB-one: This is now available at toolforge:quickcategories/batch/new/pagepile, please try it out! I’ll send a pull request to Magnus to add a link from the PagePile tool as well. --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 12:05, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Works great. Thank you! --MB-one (talk) 13:51, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

No sort key support

This would actually be the most interesting part for me. I can query the database for possibly wrong/missing sort keys, choose new ones based on some pattern matching but I haven't got a tool to replace them. So I'm looking forward to support for this. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 16:25, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

@Matěj Suchánek: thanks, that’s good to know! I’ve had sort key support on my to-do list for a while, but thought it wouldn’t be a very useful feature and therefore not a high priority. It’ll probably be at least a few more days before I have the time to work on it, but I can already show you what I’ve planned:

+Category:Cat#sort key

add with this sort key but only if no category link present

+Category:Cat##sort key

add with this sort key, or add sort key to existing category link if it doesn’t have one

+Category:cat###sort key

add with this sort key, or add/replace sort key of existing category link

-Category:cat#sort key

remove category link but only if it has this sort key

What do you think? I figured that the ## case would probably be the most common one (assuming that, if there already is a sort key, it might be better than what the user would add), but it sounds like you would use the ### case instead. --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 11:29, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. It looks great to me and I like that the user will need to explicitly specify the prerequisites. Unless I'm missing something, there should be also a possibility to remove just the sort key and leave the category with the default one.

In fact, I'm more likely to use ##. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:29, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

To remove the sort key, you’d use ### without a sort key behind it (i. e. with an empty sort key). I’ll make sure the tool does the right thing in that case (i. e. not [[Category:Foo|]], because I have no idea what the pipe trick does to category links.) --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 21:42, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

@Matěj Suchánek: Sort key support is available now! --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 22:31, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

Very nice, thank you! I'm currently too busy to start testing and using it but I promise I will provide you with soem feedback soon. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:39, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

wiki read-only

Hi @Lucas Werkmeister:, first of all, thanks for this awesome tool! I was for some time looking for something similar and was glad to find QuickCategories. Unfortunately, I caused some trouble. One status of the tasks of my job #393 was "wiki read-only", which seemed to have stopped the whole batch job. At the moment I'm not able to see which of the categories is actually affected as:

• going to page two of the tasks causes an internal server error
• changing the limit as per url parameter doesn't seem to be possible.

Can you help me with that? Thanks a lot, --Tomukas (talk) 16:15, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

@Tomukas: Thanks for the bug report! I’ve fixed the issue when viewing the second page – it was display-only, and the tool automatically resumed the batch after half an hour and retried the failed command (that’s why it now shows 101 commands instead of 100), so there’s nothing more you need to do :) --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 17:43, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Solving redirects

Hello @Lucas Werkmeister:! As we talked yesterday, it would be interesting to have a method to solve redirect, so we can add categories to the actual article or to the redirection. Thanks! -Theklan (talk) 08:38, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

@Theklan: So in the Telegram discussion, our idea was to make this a per-page option, so that you could decide for each command (page + actions) whether a redirect should be resolved or not. But I’ve looked a bit into how the API deals with redirects now, and it looks like this would be easier to implement if it’s an option for the entire batch: either all the commands in a batch resolve redirects, or none of them do. Do you think that would also work? (I suspect that would be easier to use, too – a separate checkbox with a helpful label, rather than some more ASCII syntax in the input field.) --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 22:05, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

I think it should work, yes. -Theklan (talk) 22:24, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

@Theklan: So it took me a bit longer, but this is implemented now. I went for the original idea after all (! before a title) – making the flag per-batch didn’t simplify the code as much as I’d thought, and I didn’t like the reduced flexibility. --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 15:19, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Great! I'll solve some redirects soon and I will write you if I find any problem (but I don't expect to find anything!). -Theklan (talk) 15:52, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Sortkeys

Any way to keep sortkeys when removing a category and adding another? In this batch, I'd rather had the sortkey preserved when moving to the subcategory. 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 11:05, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

"Removal all" command

This might be a bit niche or out of scope for this tool, but it would be very helpful to be able to specify a command to remove all categories, followed by several additions. For example (assuming asterisks aren't allowed in category names): -Category:*|+Category:Very cute cats. The specific use case I'm thinking of is when clearly out frequently diffused categories that are sometimes filled with lots of low-quality logos. They're often tagging with stuff like "Technology", "Science", "Innovative" and so on, so it's not possible to move them to a new category in one go with Cat-a-lot.

Hopefully that makes sense, and thank you for making such a great tool. :) Perryprog (talk) 23:34, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure asterisks are allowed in category names, but "|-*" would solve this problem. 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 23:36, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Another thing I just realized: in a perfectly ideal world, being able to remove all categories that do or don't match a regex (or just a string), and then adding additional ones from there would be really great. Obviously that's much more difficult (time wise) to implement. Perryprog (talk) 23:57, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

And for what it's worth, this isn't totally undoable with VisualFileChange—I just made a profile (source here) that seems to do OK with some over-the-top regex replacements. Perryprog (talk) 00:31, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Fails on Telugu wikipedia

@User:Lucas Werkmeister,batch did not work. Can you help?--Arjunaraoc (talk) 05:55, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

@Arjunaraoc As far as I can tell, you created the batch but never ran it – make sure to press one of the buttons at the bottom (either run the commands on the current page, or run the whole batch in the background). Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 12:14, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

@Lucas Werkmeister Thanks for your quick response. I tried running in background and it worked. Sorry to have bothered you. Arjunaraoc (talk) 13:05, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Earlier batches in a series of batches did not run

@User:Lucas Werkmeister I submitted several batches one after another and found only the last batch executed, even after waiting for 7 hours. If a queued feature is supported, it will be helpful. last batch which was run successfully. Earlier batch which did not run, but status says 'done'.--Arjunaraoc (talk) 00:42, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

@Arjunaraoc When the status says “done”, but in teal instead of green, it means that no edit was necessary: in the case of batch #4217, which removes categories, that means the target page wasn’t in the category to begin with, as far as the tool could tell at least. (The tool can’t change categories added via templates, and doesn’t take subcategories into account: it only edits category links directly on the page.) The “done” badge for an individual edit also links to the permalink of the page as the tool saw it: for example, te:Category:అనంతసాగరం మండలంలోని గ్రామాలు, as of te:Special:PermanentLink/2241797, wasn’t in te:Category:శ్రీ పొట్టి శ్రీరాములు నెల్లూరు జిల్లా మండలాలు‎, and as far as I can tell from looking at the category’s source code myself, that’s correct. So the batch did run, there just wasn’t anything to do as far as the tool could tell. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 01:33, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

@Lucas Werkmeister, Ok. I might have made a mistake. If there is real change, it would be good to flag it. I I will try series of batches again and report if there is problem. Arjunaraoc (talk) 01:38, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Trimming category names

@Lucas Werkmeister, I have one feature request for the tool: it should be able to trim the category name when removing, e.g. Also remove Category:_Bla when asked to remove Category:Bla. MediaWiki already handles the 2 identically and some users consider it mode readable to leave a space after the namespace. Strainu (talk) 09:10, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

@Strainu: I wasn’t aware of that, thanks! It should recognize such category links when adding or removing categories now. (But newly added categories should still be added as the user specified them, except that spaces will be replaced with underscores. I hope that makes sense.) Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 13:47, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Confirmed working, thanks a lot for the quick implementation! Strainu (talk) 16:51, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Not accessible & does it work with Petscan?

Interesting tool, if it can do what I think it does it seems underused/underrated but that is for good reasons:

• Could you change it so that one can use it from one page instead of having to go to the query services and use its outputs? Petscan is used so much because it's all on one page and the first/simple use quite self-explanatory. One would enter a query at the top (the query service page could get embedded or this functionality be added to the Wikidata query page) and it would automatically use or enter its outputs.
• This could later be improved further by simplifying the queries use query templates where one only replaces some variables / enters something into input fields.
• Is this an alternative solution to this issue https://github.com/magnusmanske/petscan_rs/issues/173 ? I didn't understand the reply to the "#Feature request" about PetScan above. In the tool it says "Create a new pile in another tool" with a link to petscan but nowhere in petscan do I see any "PagePile ID". Can this be used with Petscan? If so, please add accessible instructions on how including a link to petscan in the info page. Like the suggestions above, I think it would also be better if this was integrated with petscan directly so this functionality is added to petscan (or petscan is embedded here with the PPID automatically being used). In Petscan I only see the petscan id (psid). Note that one issue is that often there are unrelated items in categories and currently it's not possible to easily identify the cause so maybe there should be some warning about this and maybe better support to identify and exclude these.
• Why can one not see the query used for batches in the batches pages?

Prototyperspective (talk) 13:34, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective: Thanks for the input!

• Regarding points 1, 2 and 4: I feel like you’re focusing a bit too much on the query service integration? In my eyes, that’s only one way to use the tool – the input format is intentionally very simple and general so that people can generate the batches in whatever way they want. I put together the query workflow with someone else (don’t quite remember who they were, sorry) years ago at some event (I think it was the evening before the 2019 WikidataCon) and put it on the wiki page for documentation and further reference, but I don’t know if anyone is actually still using these queries. (Maybe that’s a fault with the documentation and it should be made clearer?) I don’t actually use the tool myself very often, so I’d always appreciate it if other users added their workflow on the documentation page. If it turns out that the query workflow really is widespread and maybe even often uses the same queries, I could consider integrating into the tool more, sure – but at the moment I have no idea where the tool’s input comes from, so (regarding point 4) it can’t be shown either.
• Regarding point 3: I think it should be possible, yes – PagePile is one of the format options in PetScan’s output tab. (If you select it, you’ll be redirected to the PagePile tool after clicking the “Do it!” button.) And on PagePile, you then have the option to “use this PagePile in [dropdown]”, where one of the options is QuickCategories and will take you to that tool. Documenting this better is a fair point, sure. (Maybe you have a realistic example suggestion for a PetScan query + categorization that I can try to implement and take screenshots along the way?)

Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 18:08, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

I can confirm that PetsScan + PagePile + QuickCategories is well integrated and an easy workflow.

And I haven't tried Query + QuickCategories but I've used queries in PetScan (and then PagePile and QuickCategories) and it works fine. Pere prlpz (talk) 20:00, 23 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your explanations. I basically just think even if the tool is theoretically simple and straightforward to use, the way the documentation and integration is currently only a tiny percentage of the most technically versed users are ever going to give it a try. What could help are things like an easy 5 step example way to use the tool and/or integration with Petscan so that one can use the tool with the click of a self-explanatory button there.

There's many examples and I don't have a good one here but one example is categorizing files into an unidentified xyz cat...for example I'd like to categorize the subset of files that are actually diagrams into c:Category:Diagrams in unspecified languages via a petscan like this. One could also use a deepcat search + catalot but maybe petscan would be the better route. Currently, it doesn't seem to be due to showing lots of offtopic files with no way to easily see why those files are included – see issue #182. It could work for other cases; sadly I don't have a good example but hypothetically if one wanted to create a cat Milk Way galaxy over unidentified country, one could use this query. Another idea would be to adjust this scan so as to add files to c:Category:AI-generated images by unidentified software but once again Petscan doesn't appear to work properly or is missing a feature to see why files are included in the results which really is key to many applications/uses of it. This link should show why a file that shouldn't be in the results is in it using a hacky FastCCI way but it doesn't; no idea why that file for example is in the result and it's like this for most scans I do with petscan, making the tool rather useless, so if you or Pere prlpz know more about that please let me know or comment at #171. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:20, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Removing categories

Does it only work when the category is there? Web-julio (talk) 06:01, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

I don’t know what you expect removing a category to do when the category isn’t there? Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 07:02, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Because when I just created a new specific child category (e.g. in an intersection), I want to fulfill it without the files or pages directly in the general (grand)parent categories, so either I replace or add, depending if the page already has the parent or not. Web-julio (talk) 10:42, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

@Web-julio: Okay, I’m not sure I fully understand you but I think I have the answer you want – if you specify SomePage|+Category:ChildCategory|-Category:ParentCategory, this will add the child category, and remove the parent category if it’s present; if the parent category isn’t present, the child category will still be added. Does that answer your question? Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 21:23, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

It worked now. Maybe I was doing something wrong the first time I tried. Also can you check ptwiki? It doesn't recognize Categoria:, only Category:. Web-julio (talk) 17:01, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

@Web-julio: When creating batches, only Category: is supported, as mentioned in § Submitting batches. But when editing the page it should use the translated namespace name (example). Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 22:01, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

Request for comments: Watchlist behavior

Currently, QuickCategories obeys your Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist preference: if you have that preference enabled, all the pages you edit through QuickCategories will end up on your watchlist. It would be possible to change this, so that QuickCategories never changes your watchlist (by adding watchlist=nochange to the API request, as @Stjn requested for another of my tools the other day). Should I make this change?

I tried to check some other mass-editing tools for comparison but didn’t find much. Cat-a-lot, where I also copied the “should this edit be marked as minor?” logic from, apparently has a setting for watchlist behavior; if I’m reading the code correctly, it defaults to watchlist=preferences (i.e. obey the Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist preference).

Thoughts welcome :) Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 21:12, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

To clarify, I think tools that are supposed to be used by non-automated users for mass edits should take care not to put stuff in watchlist, at least not without a warning/option. I have ‘Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist’ preference to track pages I actually edited, not pages I edited with tools. I have never used Cat-a-lot from my own account but it looks from the code like it allows changing the preference. I’m fine with it being a preference, what I think tools should not do is mass watchlist without an alternative. stjn^[ru] 21:21, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

In general I’m not a big fan of preferences in tools (because of the added maintenance cost), but in this case it would very straightforwardly map to an underlying API option (and if the API option is ever removed, I can just remove the preference and wash my hands of any guilt), and QuickCategories already has a few other preferences (making an additional preference easier to implement). So I could probably live with this here. (But I’ll wait a bit to see if anyone else has comments here.) Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 21:31, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

I used to have Cat-a-lot on the default, which matched my preference at the time to add all edited pages to my watchlist. This quickly ballooned the size of my watchlist with files I didn't care about, so I turned it off. I still haven't fully cleared those files out of my watchlist because it'd be too much of a pain, so I'm still removing files as they come up. Default off would be preferred. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 21:39, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

I’ve now deployed a new version of the tool that adds a preference for watchlist behavior – though I still kept the default behavior the same as before (i.e. obey the on-wiki preference), as I think that’s less surprising. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 18:27, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

As far as I know, the tool hasn't added anything to my whatchlist... is because I changed something in the preferences? Theklan (talk) 19:24, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Do you have the Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist preference turned on? I don’t think it’s turned on by default. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 22:03, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

That seems to be the usual behaviour for most tools (quickstatements and cat-a-lot among them).

A workaround is to set a different account to use automated tools. I think the bot or account policies in most projects allows this. If changing accounts is not convenient, inactivating the option in preferences before using a mass editing tool is quite fast. Pere prlpz (talk) 19:57, 23 August 2025 (UTC)

Calling Quickcategories from url or bot

Quickstatements can be called from an url, which sometimes is fairly convenient for me.

I can't find a way to call Quickcategories from an url or to call it from a Python script. Is there a way? If it isn't it would be a nice feature to add. Pere prlpz (talk) 11:50, 12 July 2025 (UTC)

@Pere prlpz: If you want to perform the same actions on a set of pages, you can use the PagePile mode, which recently got URL parameters for the actions and title (T397320). Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 14:17, 12 July 2025 (UTC)

That's not applicable to the problem I'm facing (because I'm doing different actions for different articles) but it can be useful in the future.

For now I'll stick to creating instructions in a text file and copy-pasting them to QuickCategories, which is a pretty workable workaround.Pere prlpz (talk) 16:59, 12 July 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, that’s probably the best option for now then. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 17:03, 12 July 2025 (UTC)

Feature suggestion: different summary for each command

That's just a feature suggestions: It would be nice for me to be able to put a different summary for each edition. For example, the syntax could be just adding # and the text of the summary after the command, and that summary would override (or be added to) the general summary. Pere prlpz (talk) 19:52, 23 August 2025 (UTC)

The syntax can’t be that because # is already used to customize the sort key. And I’m not yet convinced that this is useful, to be honest… can you give some examples, maybe? Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 17:26, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

https://quickcategories.toolforge.org/, doesn't seem to actually exist.

Since a while, the url answers the error message "https://quickcategories.toolforge.org/, doesn't seem to actually exist".

Until a few hours ago (or less) it worked fine. Pere prlpz (talk) 18:05, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

It seems to be working again. Pere prlpz (talk) 18:30, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Feature request: Adding/removing templates

Would it be feasible to add (or remove) templates with this tool? I am aware, that template parameters can make this pretty complex. But maybe it would be possible to handle simple templates without the need to use parameters like {{Wikidata Infobox}} or {{Personality rights}}? MB-one (talk) 10:38, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

Even without parameters, there’s at least one other complication, which is the position of the template. For categories, that’s not as important (the main concern is keeping the wikitext tidy, so QuickCategories adds new categories after the last existing category link), but for templates it’s usually quite significant. Even the two examples you gave go in different places – Wikidata Infobox goes at the top of the category, while Personality rights usually goes after Information AFAIK. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 11:37, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

Support creating new pages

I've tried to use this tool to create a category tree for diffusion, but currently the tool refuses to perform edits to non-existing pages, showing a "page missing" yellow error badge. Would it be possible to support some syntax to tell the tool the user does want it to add the categories even if the page does not yet exist? Maybe something like a leading + at the start of the line, or a !! to kind of follow the pattern with the #s. --~~ Waldyrious (talk) 18:01, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

@Waldyrious: Interesting use case… that should be possible, sure. I’m wondering a bit about the syntax – looking at it now, I actually feel like ! was a poor choice six years ago: that’s a legal title character! So I assume pages like !Women Art Revolution just can’t be edited with QuickCategories, which seems bad.

Does this even need to be a per-page choice? I don’t mind storing it as such in the backend, but maybe it would be better to just have two checkboxes for the whole batch in the user interface: “☑ resolve redirects” and “☐ create pages that don’t exist yet”. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 18:54, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps more to the point… as far as I can tell from the database, nobody has ever used the ! prefix to mean “I would like to not resolve redirects”. The last batch where command_page_resolve_redirects IS NULL is #665, which was also the last batch before I implemented following redirects by default. So I might as well scrap that ill-advised syntax, and by all appearances, literally nobody would miss it. Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 18:56, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Hmm, good point. Right now I can't think of a reason to want to control it per-page, so a checkbox would work, yeah. And glad to hear the ! syntax can be retired! It definitely sounds like a good idea to move both these features to be checkboxes :) Waldyrious (talk) 18:58, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Eh, after looking a bit more into it, I realized that the checkboxes make things awkward for the “export page titles and commands (like QuickCategories input)” mode. I think I’ll go with per-page syntax after all – but it can be both less ambiguous and more readable, by taking advantage of the fact that titles can’t contain # characters, and making the input something like:

Page A|+Category:A
Page B#noredirect|+Category:B
Page C#maycreate|+Category:C
Page D#noredirect,createonly|+Category:D

With an optional list of flags after the #. (The flag names can be related to the parameters of the action=edit API – which has redirect=, recreate=, createonly=, nocreate= – but given that the QuickCategories defaults differ from the API defaults, some amount of fudging will be necessary. I haven’t yet decided if I want redirect=no or redirect=False or noredirect or whatever.) Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 19:31, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. FWIW, considering the readability and immediate intuitiveness of the current syntax (even to those who don't know the API parameter names), I would perhaps recommend having sensible behavior as the default, requiring no extra parameters (following redirects, creating pages if needed), and allowing self-evident flags like "noredirect" and "nocreate". Additional flags ("createonly", "recreate") may be too obscure use cases to implement support for without user demand, and the positive variants ("redirect", "maycreate") would be unnecessary since they'd be the defaults. All this is assuming I guessed right what all those flags mean — I didn't check so I'm going by what their names seem to suggest 😅 Waldyrious (talk) 19:40, 26 December 2025 (UTC)

@Waldyrious: I agree that the defaults should be sensible, but I don’t agree that "maycreate" should be the default – I implemented the current “page missing” error type for a reason :P IMHO if a page doesn’t exist, it’s more likely to be due to a mistake (e.g. a typo in the page title, or someone accidentally targeting the wrong wiki), so creating new pages should require explicit user input. (That said, I suppose the per-page syntax doesn’t rule out the checkboxes – the checkboxes can always act as a default for the per-page flags, so that the individual flags are rarely if ever needed.) Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 16:58, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

Fair enough — it makes sense that the choice that has consequences should require explicit confirmation, and the inert option should be the default. I would indeed appreciate if checkboxes were added as an alternative to the textual markers, as that avoids having to recreate the commands in case one forgot to include that marker. Waldyrious (talk) 18:51, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

@Waldyrious: Should be deployed now, please try it out :) Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 18:57, 11 January 2026 (UTC)

It might be broken... On https://quickcategories.toolforge.org/, I'm getting "Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application." Smasongarrison (talk) 02:30, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

@Smasongarrison: I can’t reproduce that error, though I found another error in the logs that’s now hopefully fixed – is it working better now? Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 13:12, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm also getting a 500 server error. Interestingly, it only appears if I open the page while logged in. In a private browser window, or in a separate browser, the UI loads normally. Waldyrious (talk) 16:26, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

Ah, oops, that’s because of the new OAuth consumer (the error message says “No approved grant was found for that authorization token”). You’ll have to log in again; as a temporary workaround, you can try to go to /logout, but I’ll try to implement a better solution. (Note that logging out also clears your preferences, if you had any.) Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 17:06, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

@Waldyrious, @Smasongarrison: Should work better now (you’ll have to log in again but at least there shouldn’t be an internal error anymore). Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 17:16, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks!! Smasongarrison (talk) 20:20, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

Broken since 2026-04-01

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T421991

Moved to new section as it’s unrelated to the previous one. --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 11:26, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Since Wednesday (Apr. 1st), I'm getting the same "HTTP 500 Internal Server Error", when trying to access QuickCategories (https://quickcategories.toolforge.org/) while being logged in. When logged out, I do see the main surface but obviously can't make edits. Tested both on Chrome Version 146.0.7680.178 and Edge Version 146.0.3856.84 on Windows 11 24H2 Build 26100.8117. Any ideas? MB-one (talk) 09:38, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

@MB-one This is due to T421991, I’ll deploy a quick fix. --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 11:27, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Should be fixed for now, though it means the feature to display notifications is broken, so users will have to watch out themselves that they aren’t being complained at over edits on wikis they don’t regularly visit (which was the original motivation for adding the notification display). Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 11:36, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

It does work again. Thanks! MB-one (talk) 09:13, 6 April 2026 (UTC)