Wikipedia talk:PetScan

Currently down

PetScan is currently down, with the exact same error message as the above thread. Does anyone know of a good alternative that isn't manually creating Quarry queries? Suntooooth, it/he (talk/contribs) 12:29, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Yup, can verify ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 13:07, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Still broken if anyone's wondering but hasn't checked. ―Panamitsu (talk) 09:54, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

It's working again now. ―Panamitsu (talk) 21:28, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

But now its not. PMG (talk) 10:02, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Also down here, for more than 24 hours. Does anyone know when/if the service is expected to be restored? JotaCartas (talk) 13:44, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Cirrus search can be surprisingly powerful, though it has annoying limitations. It's worth a look through Help:Searching to see if it can do the job instead. Certes (talk) 08:34, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

The thread from when it broke two weeks ago has been reopened and someone has reported it as down again. - X201 (talk) 14:49, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

PetScan down

Hello there. I guess I'm not the first one, but just in case, I currently see the message below:

404 Not Found
No proxy is configured for this host name. Please see our documentation on Wikitech for more information on configuring a proxy.

Thanks in advance to whoever is able to take care of this! H4stings (talk) 01:27, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

Hi @H4stings I've asked for the interwiki prefix target to be changed: see Help talk:Interwiki linking § PetScan. In the meantime you can get to Petscan at https://petscan.wmcloud.org/. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 09:39, 26 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! It looks like that redirection works now, so everything sounds good. H4stings (talk) 13:13, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

`page_assessments`-related tables?

Hello! Can PetScan support using pap_project_title as well as pa_class and pa_importance?

It is a common request to query by WikiProject as one of the conditions. There are some workarounds, such as querying for the project banner template on the talk page, but this is slow. Is there any way to implement this as a condition in PetScan? Thanks! --𝙵𝚘𝚛 𝙴𝚊𝚌𝚑 ... 𝙽𝚎𝚡𝚝 14:08, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Down?

Has anybody else been having problems with the tool over the past few days? It loads up fine, but then it buffers endlessly when I give it a prompt and never ends up giving me my results. JTtheOG (talk) 00:28, 5 October 2026 (UTC)

I do get results, but it is a lot slower. I run some Petscan queries from a script, and they now take about ten times as long (~2m40s rather than ~10s, for example). But the results do come back. This one just worked for me in the browser - returned ~1700 results, which is expected, though it did take about 4 minutes. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 05:02, 5 October 2026 (UTC)

Whoops. Looks like I should be working on my patience instead. Thanks! JTtheOG (talk) 05:21, 5 October 2026 (UTC)

On a related note, I got this error today, which I had never seen before:

• PetScan is overloaded (50 queries running, 200 waiting): the waiting queue is full. Please try again in a few minutes.

I wonder if some new rate limiting has been put in place, or something. Might also be worth keeping an eye on this thread on Meta-Wiki. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:12, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

Same here. JTtheOG (talk) 18:16, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

Down again?

I'm currently getting this error:

Pool::get_conn timed out after 10s for wiki=enwiki N7fty (they/them · talk) 20:25, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

I've been getting that on and off over the last couple of weeks. The queries will usually work if you're stubborn enough to try several times. Newest error message (last 24 hours) is "Too many results: the categories to include hold more than 1000000 pages". Occurs whenever my query is looking to include Category:Living people as one of the categories. A variation of that message will also appear if a large category is an exclusion. Jevansen (talk) 21:19, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Now the tool doesn't even load up in the first place. :( JTtheOG (talk) 00:48, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

It is a victim of wikitech:Incidents/2026-10-21 PHP security update/Community. It'll be back once PHP has been patched. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 02:07, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

The endless problem of article vs talk page cats

This Petscan query does what I want: all WPMED articles that are in Category:Orphaned articles.

However, I'd like to turn it into a shorter list: only the WPMED articles that are in Category:Orphaned articles and not in Category:Society and medicine task force articles. The first is an article cat; the second is a talk-page cat. I can't find any way to do it. At the moment, this should include orphaned articles such as Hopkins syndrome but exclude (most/properly tagged) BLP articles.

Does anyone know how to do this? I want a link for Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Orphaned articles that other people can click on and it just works. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:34, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Adding a tickbox like the ones on the Templates & Links tab would be a useful enhancement. Otherwise, all I can suggest is creating a pagepile of task force articles and setting Combination to categories not pagepile. (Manual list should also work but wouldn't produce a clickable link, at least not one that will fit on a screen.) Of course, the pagepile isn't going to magically update itself, but a second PetScan link might be able to do that if you can find some way of removing the Talk: prefix from all its entries. Certes (talk) 20:32, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

"some way of removing the Talk: prefix from all its entries" – Changing "Keep namespace" to "Change to page/topic" in the "Other sources" tab's "Namespaces" section does this. --JAAqqO (talk) 22:11, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

You can use this PetScan query (860 articles at the moment), which is automatically updated whenever an {{Orphan}} tag is added or removed. *However*, the downside is that someone needs to update that query's PagePile field every now and then with a new PagePile ID found here to fetch all new articles tagged with {{WikiProject Medicine}} since the previous PagePile ID update. Looking at Medicine articles by quality log, I counted 3, 5, 5, 4, 6, and 15 new articles added to the project over the last 6 days (compared with 62,853 articles in total), so I don't think the link needs to be updated daily. --JAAqqO (talk) 22:11, 28 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for this. How did you create the PagePile? I'd like to document the exact code to put in the next query (or whatever else needs to be done to update the list). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:57, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

The nice folks at BOTREQ have updated the tags on a few hundred articles for me, so the 117650 PagePile is out of date. @JAAqqO, how do you create an updated PagePile? I can't find ordinary documentation on how to use PagePile anywhere. Did you use a manual list, a Quarry query, something else? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:14, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

I normally do one directly from a Petscan. Just select PagePile in the output options in the fifth tab. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 00:23, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

I used PetScan to create a PagePile. As I tried to explain above, you can simply:
1) Click https://petscan.wmcloud.org/?psid=58267751&format=pagepile^[a] to generate a new PagePile ID.
2) Copy that ID into the "PagePile" field in the "Other sources" tab of the other PetScan query: https://petscan.wmcloud.org/?psid=58269990.
3) After updating the ID, click the "Do it!" button.
4) You will now have an updated PetScan URL, like this one: .
^[a] If you ever need to edit that PetScan query, you can remove &format=pagepile from the URL to edit the query, then add &format=pagepile back to the URL to generate a new PagePile ID.
--JAAqqO (talk) 00:13, 2 November 2026 (UTC)

Down?

Tracked in github.com
Issue #213
Resolved

I get this message when trying to access it (not even run any query):

Not found The URL you have requested, https://petscan.toolforge.org/, doesn't seem to actually exist.

If you have reached this page by following a link This URL is managed by the petscan tool, maintained by Magnus Manske.

Perhaps its files are on vacation, or the link you've followed doesn't actually lead somewhere useful?

You might want to look at the list of tools to find what you were looking for. If you're pretty sure this shouldn't be an error, you may wish to notify the tool's maintainers (they are listed above) about the error and how you ended up here.

Is there any information on this? It also might be a problem only on my end. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 14:20, 10 November 2026 (UTC)

I also get a 404 from there (and via https://petscan.wmcloud.org which redirects to there). Certes (talk) 15:04, 10 November 2026 (UTC)

Same here, probably a server issue. Streetr4 (talk) 15:53, 10 November 2026 (UTC)

@Magnus Manske is currently committing code to the petscan_rs repo, so maybe it is something to do with that. Has also been raised as issue 213. The toolforge.org address is new (used to be wmcloud.org), so maybe it is an accidental DNS redirect of some sort. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 15:55, 10 November 2026 (UTC)

Magnus responded to the GitHub ticket that they fixed it, and now it's back up. Looks Fixed. –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:12, 10 November 2026 (UTC)

Issue with filtering by templates on the talkpage

Tracked in github.com
Issue #215
Open

There also appears to be an issue with filtering by templates on the talkpage. For example, this ran fine a few days ago, but is now hanging indefinitely. ARandomName123 (talk)^{Ping me!} 05:08, 12 November 2026 (UTC)

It's been raised as issue 215, so hopefully the regression will be fixed soon. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 05:16, 12 November 2026 (UTC)

@Magnus Manske: This is a major issue that causes me to be unable to filter articles by topic for the ongoing WP:NOV26 unreferenced articles backlog drive. Chorchapu (talk | edits) 14:32, 13 November 2026 (UTC)