Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks

The latest run of Special:WantedCategories features a mysterious Category:Temporary Wikipedian userpages, with 245 user talk pages in it, that I can't figure out how it happened. That category was deleted in 2016 and has never been recreated since, and while I didn't check every page in it, the ones I did spotcheck have not been edited by anybody in at least a decade either to add this — and yet, the category seems to be directly declared on the pages rather than being transcluded by a template, so I can't fix this just by removing it from a template. I can't really understand how it even got there, because it wasn't newly added to any pages within the past three days, yet can't have been populated before the past three days because it would have shown up on the WantedCategories report if it had been.

It is worth noting that it's populated entirely by the talk pages of temporarily or permanently blocked former editors whose usernames specifically began with the letter W, if that helps anybody figure out what the honk happened here.

But since I'm not eager to gnome my way through 245 pages to remove this category via AWB, I wanted to ask if anybody else who takes on AWB requests is willing to get this category cleaned out. Bearcat (talk) 16:42, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

Odd, I saw someone else removing this category too. On User talk:Wacuco, it was added with this edit. Maybe it's something to do with the template? HurricaneZeta^C 16:49, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

The clue might be in {{Uw-blockindef}} given that. HurricaneZeta^C 16:51, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

 Done by someone else. HurricaneZeta^C 18:14, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I've finally figured out the culprit here. The pages in it were previously deleted, so the category was empty for a long time because its contents had been deleted — but in recent days an editor has undeleted many of them on the grounds of current WP:DELTALK rules, thus putting them back into the category because it did exist at the time of the original deletion. It also came back again today, this time populated with V usernames instead of W usernames — but it was a lot smaller this time so I just gnomed through it myself instead of soliciting help. Bearcat (talk) 18:50, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

A bot has been set up to remove these categories from restored pages. There is a discussion about these ongoing user talk page restoration edits at VPT. The restorations are causing a variety of page errors to appear, including nonexistent templates and varieties of Linter errors that were eliminated from the English Wikipedia many years ago. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:12, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

Before I close this RfD, could someone please replace uses of {{Page links}} with {{Article links}}? Thanks, voorts (talk/contributions) 23:58, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

 Done except on current user talk pages to avoid sending notifications and an arb case page that I don't know if I can edit. ​ HurricaneZeta^C 00:28, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

...and not on SPI archives since I triggered edit filters there. HurricaneZeta^C 00:30, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

@Toadspike, @Kevin: what's the protocol here for editing SPI archives and arbitration pages? voorts (talk/contributions) 00:45, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Gnoming is one of the acceptable times to edit these sorts of pages. Primefac (talk) 11:43, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

@Voorts@HurricaneZeta I'd say the same about SPI archives. We're usually very strict about not editing them (hence the edit filter), but gnoming should be okay. Toadspike [Talk] 08:29, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

In Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2026_February_19#Category:Companies_of_Turkey_by_year_of_establishment, we also found a necessity to merge to a new decade-level category scheme. However, we don't have such categories for any country in Category:Companies by country and year of establishment. I'd suggest preemptively creating decade- and century-level ones for every country and year that has a category for establishment or disestablishment of companies. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 07:32, 20 February 2026 (UTC)