Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage/Petscan

Petscan tool
Petscan – Help to de-orphan articles, find shortest articles..

Introduction

Petscan can produce a selected list of orphan articles. The list can be filtered by topics, such as geography, history, sports, science, time, etc. Minimum depth setting is one, however that number may need to be increased to receive more results.

Petscan
Setting	Value	Comment
Depth	2, 3, or 4	Higher depth for more results
Categories	Astronomy Orphaned articles	Minimum of two
Categories	Association football Orphaned articles United Kingdom	Three categories

Examples

Orphan list for a specific country

Petscan - Country
Setting	Value	Comment
Depth	2	Higher depth for more results
Categories	Canada Orphaned articles	Any country
Categories	Africa Orphaned articles	A continent

Orphan list for time

Petscan - Time
Setting	Value	Comment
Depth	4	Higher or lower depth
Categories	Science Orphaned articles from August 2022	A specific category
Categories	January Orphaned articles	A month

Additional functions

At the top Petscan toolbar, click on "Output" tab.

Output plain text

At "Format" line, click "Plain text" button.

Instead of camping at the Petscan results, plain text can be copy/paste into a text editor (Notepad) for off-line update of Orphan articles.

Sort sequence

At "Sort" line, click "default sort" button.

Optional for article order.

Find shortest articles

Many short articles are candidates for Proposed deletion or AfD. Petscan can produce a list using single or multiple categories. For "Output" click on "size" button to Sort smallest articles first.

Petscan - Find short articles
Setting	Value	Comment
Depth	1
Categories	Orphaned articles Orphaned articles from February 2011	A month
Categories	American people stubs	Stub articles

Wikicode

WP:Petscan • Example link

[https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?language=en&project=wikipedia&depth=4&categories=Sports%0D%0AOrphaned%20articles%0D%0ASouth%20Africa&ns%5B0%5D=1&search_max_results=500&interface_language=en&active_tab=&doit= Example link]

Predefined Petscan request

The most basic way to create a frequently used request is to

Generate the request with satisfactory results
Copy the request's entire URL
Paste into "External links" format at the desired location (User, Talk).

For Example: [full-URL-here Petscan-request-name] • Need to use both single ([ and ]) brackets, one space after URL and before request-name