Popular Pages Bot only supports WikiProjects. For arbitrary categories, try a different tool like Massviews or Treeviews.

Having Popular Pages Bot support categories isn't a bad idea, for those really large categories where clientside solutions aren't feasible. However we've had a lot of issues with Popular Pages Bot as it is lately (T365780) so I'm hesitant to expand functionality based on performance alone for the time being.

I don't see a need to decline this, as it's valid per se, but I don't think it's something we'll be able to work on in the near future.

The new Community Wishlist is slated to launch on July 15, 2024, and this sounds like it'd be a great wish proposal.

@MusikAnimal Interesting, thank you – I didn't know about these tools (ways to make such tools more easily findable and used more would be a separate subject).

Those tools are already nearly doing what I was proposing, they're only missing a few extra data that would probably not be that difficult to also query: the WikiProject quality ratings, the article length, and maybe some extra metadata like article hatnotes, cat sortkey, and subcategory path. Would the right place to request such a change(s) to either or both of these tools be here or somewhere else (if so where)? One could also change the scope and title of this issue to also be about these tools.

Also for the TreeViews tool, sorting by views didn't work (scroll down to Melarsoprol).

As for the Community Wishlist, I have an uncounted large number of often quite useful proposals but I don't see a point of posting them to the Community Wishlist when there is such a big neglection of tech development by WMF which doesn't even necessarily require money to fix as one could also just add banners about a volunteer dev campaign above software-related articles and create badges, leaderboards, etc according to the issues/wishes implemented. I posted this issue because I thought it may be so quick to implement that it may actually get done in under 5 years time. I think one should for example first get tables to display properly on mobile (rotate to fullscreen via button) before any other issues or project ideas I'd submit (I plan to at some point but would rather need to work on raising awareness of the readily possible ways to increase tech development).