Category talk:Articles with bare URLs for citations

Request for Comments: c: link prefix for Wikimedia Commons

There is a cross-wiki discussion in progress as to whether c: should be enabled globally as an interwiki prefix for links to the Wikimedia Commons. If the proposal gains consensus this will require the deletion or renaming of several pages on the English WIkipedia whose titles begin with "C:", including one or more redirects to this page. Please take a moment to participate in the discussion.
There is also a related discussion on the English Wikipedia at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 February 16#C:ATT to which you are invited to contribute.
Thank you. Thryduulf (talk) 15:38, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Why should it be hidden?

User:Koavf reverted my removal of the magical keyword that hides the category and I'd like to know why.

Most maintenance categories aren't hidden and that's good. Hiding categories should only be done in very rare instances as it hides away content readers and editors might be interested in.

This categories is only set on subcategories so I don't see why unhiding it would be a problem.

--Fixuture (talk) 21:42, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

@Fixuture: I took a look and some are hidden and some aren't. E.g. Category:Articles needing expert attention or Category:Articles containing video clips. Maintenance categories aren't a primary way of navigating the encyclopedia and so won't be of value to most readers--that's why hidden categories exist in the first place. Also, this category does appear on articles but it gets date-stamped by a bot that moves it to subcats. I really don't understand the scenario where hiding it does any harm to anyone: can you explain? ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:18, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf: Yes, but they're of value to some readers and editors and hiding the categories makes it way harder for them to find (or rather to come across) them. In many cases that wouldn't be a problem as hidden categories often wouldn't be of any use for them but in this case people could discover a place for them to get started / help out by carrying out the simple task of fixing the refs of those articles with bare URLs. Imo categories should never be hidden unless there's a good reason for it. However, the category getting added to articles and staying there until the bot time-stamps it might be a good point. So I won't unhide it. --Fixuture (talk) 18:14, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Is this category obsolete?

This category now contains very few of the thousands of articles with bare URL citations in Wikipedia. Would it be possible to automatically update the list of articles in this category so that it remains useful? Jarble (talk) 18:40, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

It's since been filled up by someone using some automation. Though I added that search to the category page in case it gets empty again. There was some objection to tagging articles instead of simply fixing them with Wikipedia:reFill, so perhaps once the backlog is cleared, we'll just use a search instead of categories, since that will be more efficient. -- Beland (talk) 22:10, 23 July 2022 (UTC)