User:SDZeroBot/Category cycles

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This project is aimed at removing unnecessary cyclicities in the category tree. Ideally, per WP:Categorization#Category tree organization, the category tree should resemble a directed acyclic graph as far as possible. Cycles make it intractable for bots to traverse the tree and generally result in bogus output showing up in tools like PetScan. As of September 2020, there were over 4100 cycles. (Edit: Down to 2473 in the January 2021 update!)

If you're interested, it is recommended to work through the pages in order (page 1 onwards), as the cycles have been arranged in ascending order of their length. The smaller cycles would be easier to deal with. Many of the larger cycles probably contain smaller cycles in them, and hence will automatically be broken when you break the smaller ones.

The code used for generating these lists is available here.



Cycles even larger than the ones in the last page exist, but they have been excluded for now.