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Problematic Username Cleanup

Resolved
 – User:DustaBot resumed its previous role. ArakunemTalk 14:28, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Having patrolled the New User Creation log for a while, I've come up with a useful service that a Bot could perform, but not being a programmer, I'll throw it out here:

When a new user creates a problematic username, they often are given the {{uw-username}} warning, which gives them a discussion venue regarding possible changes. That template then places their user page into Category:Wikipedian usernames editors have expressed concern over. So far so good. If the username problem is not resolved, the account may be (and often is) blocked. Unfortunately the user page remains in the above category. Thus it makes it hard to sort through the category to address outstanding issues, as many of them were resolved with a {{usernameblock}}.

So the task for the bot, should you choose to accept it:
1. Parse Category:Wikipedian usernames editors have expressed concern over
2. For each username listed, check to see if the username is indefinitely blocked
3. If so, remove the [[Category:Wikipedian usernames editors have expressed concern over]] from the userpage, thus removing it from the category, leaving only truly open issues in that Cat.

You'll be helping out new-user-patrollers, and as an added bonus, you'll get a pie! ArakunemTalk 19:00, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Help needed…

From Wikipedia:Help desk (thanx to Tnxman307) :

From Portal talk:Bible :
Bonjour,
There is a wrong external link (see this), written « http://www.uni-münster.de/NTTextforschung/KgLSGII08_02_27.pdf » ; it must be corrected as « http://www.uni-muenster.de/NTTextforschung/KgLSGII08_02_27.pdf » ; 39 hand corrections are too much for me. Can somebody ask a literate bot to do it ?… Thanxiz. --Budelberger (talk) 13:27, 4 April 2009 (UTC) ().
Budelberger (talk) 14:07, 8 April 2009 (UTC) ().

Budelberger (talk) 17:49, 8 April 2009 (UTC) ().

 Doing... –xeno (talk) 17:53, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
checkY Done, thank you for your attention to this. If you come across future situations that need menial corrections like this, you may look into learning to use AutoWikiBrowser. Find/replace jobs like this are quite painless. –xeno (talk) 18:39, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
« Magnifical ! » (© Sárközy…) The bot needs 34 minutes to perform it ! (with some cosmetical changes). « AWB » : You know what ? je suis bête, I don't understand nothing. I read the Rules of use : « only registered users » ; Okaye, I am ; « Anyone can be registered, but only if an admin approves your registration » : I can't ; I hate Administrators (except Ezhiki), and They hate me… Thank you very much ! Textual Criticism thanks you too… --Budelberger (talk) 19:29, 8 April 2009 (UTC) (). (P.-S. : What is « painless » is « suicide », not « Find/replace jobs »…)
err ... ok =] but I don't hate you... –xeno (talk) 19:31, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Rail usage

Coding... 01:28, 7 April 2009 (UTC)


Could a bot be applied to put rail usage data in infoboxes at railway station articles in the UK? Simply south (talk) 12:48, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

What would be the source for this information? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 13:04, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Here is the source although if doing the current usage, only the Station Name and 0708 Entries & Exits should be used. If the usage is inserted into the box, it is already referenced. It is just there are over 2000 stations (National Rail). Simply south (talk) 16:23, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
I will do this. I have been writing PHP for a long time but have never written a bot for MediaWiki before, so I will be writing a completely assisted editing-only bot, where all changes must first be approved by me. Control-alt-delete ★ user◾talk◾favs 01:22, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
Well in the space of just over a day, I'm about 50-60% complete with coding this bot and I've been coding it in such a way that it will be able to take similar requests in future without any further coding. I'll report back with an update shortly :) Control-alt-delete ★ user◾talk◾favs 05:03, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
In the infoboxes, Infobox GB station uses usage0708 for the latest and Infoox London station uses railexits0708. Not sure about other infoboxes. Simply south (talk) 14:03, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
The ones I've found are lowusage0708 which outputs the literal number (ie. 123,456) and usage0708 which outputs the number in millions (ie. 0.123 million), plus the London ones which, as you said, use railexists0708. The only issue when to use lowusage0708 and when to use usage0708. For more info on the discussion so far of when to use which, see here: User_talk:Control-alt-delete#Rail_statistics_bot_.288_April_2009.29 Control-alt-delete ★ user◾talk◾favs 21:14, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Files used from Commons

Is there any easy way to get a (partial) list of images used in en.Wikipedia that are hosted on Commons? I can't think of a way. There's certainly no way via the API, is there? – Quadell (talk) 01:20, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Indeed there is. Check out wp_locate_files in User:DustyBot/dustylib.php. Wronkiew (talk) 01:45, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
That doesn't quite seem to answer the question; the question seem to be about locating images, not determining where a known image is located. This API query will give you the necessary information, but you'll have to filter on imagerepository on the client side. Anomie⚔ 01:59, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
Yes, yours is the more complete answer. I assumed he was starting with a known set of images. Wronkiew (talk) 02:25, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

User page design center

All of the links to Wikipedia:User Page Design Center need to be re-targeted to Wikipedia:User page design center (notice the difference in the capitalization), as the page was moved due to a capitalization mistake. See Wikipedia:User Page Design Center (redirect suppressed) and Pages that link to "Wikipedia:User Page Design Center". After the links are re-targeted, Wikipedia:User Page Design Center (the one with the incorrect capitalization) can be deleted per CSD G6. -- IRP ☎ 21:51, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Just turn it into a redirect. It should work fine without a bot needed. – Quadell (talk) 22:25, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
We don't need an unnecessary page just because there are a bunch of old links that point to the wrong location. We can just fix the links and delete the redirect. -- IRP ☎ 22:43, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
I think you should see WP:R2D. FunPika 22:46, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
That's the purpose of redirects, so we don't have to update a bunch of links when a page is moved. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mr.Z-man (talk • contribs) 19:42, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
At most the non-archival links to it (i.e. in Wikipedia & Template space - but not talk pages) should be fixed, but we shouldn't go over talk pages archives to repair this. Just leave the redir in place. –xeno (talk) 19:50, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Film articles needing an infobox

Is it possible for a bot to go through Category:Film articles needing an infobox and draw up a list (to be checked manually) of any articles which transclude an infobox template? I can provide a list of specific infoboxes if need be, but a general check will be sufficient. Cheers! PC78 (talk) 22:23, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Bump. Anyone? PC78 (talk) 09:44, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
 Doing..., I think. Well, letting AWB pre-parse the entire list of 6200 articles (skip if does not contain "{{Infobox"), which should give you a decent list. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 10:17, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
 Done This should be it (a fairly hefty list). - Jarry1250 (t, c) 14:17, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
Blimey. Cheers! PC78 (talk) 14:46, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Vague idea for a bot/technical request

This might be too much to do, and might require a bug request. Essentially, a way for anyone get notified of an MfD/AfD of something on their Watchlist, even if they miss it via Watchlist, as an opt-in method. E.g., you tag a page for xfd on my 'list', I get a notification, even if I'm not the creator of the article. Exposing part of the watchlist may be impossible, but what about someone makes a basic bot that reads each new xfd, checks What Links Here on the article or page in question, and if it sees something like User:Rootology/xfdalert (predefined location, same for everyone) and then notifies the users in question? rootology (C)(T) 16:14, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Replacing project banners

I need a bot to do the following:

  1. Find all talk pages using {{WP Shinto}} and {{Shinto}} and replace them with {{WikiProject Japan|shinto=yes}} while still keeping any |class= and |importance= parameters.
  2. Find all talk pages using {{Jmyth}} and replace them with {{WikiProject Japan|myth=yes}} while still keeping any |class= and |importance= parameters.
  3. Find all talk pages using {{Gaijin tarento}} and replace them with {{WikiProject Japan|gaijin=yes}} while still keeping any |class= and |importance= parameters.
  4. Find all talk pages using {{Project Owarai}} and replace them with {{WikiProject Japan|owarai=yes}} while still keeping any |class= and |importance= parameters.
  5. Find all talk pages using {{WikiProject Japan}} which are using the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= parameters, determine which of the following are listed there, and replace them as appropriate:
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Baseball or baseball (or any capitalization mix), replace with |baseball=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Car or car (or any capitalization mix), replace with |car=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is CJKV or cjkv (or any capitalization mix), replace with |CJKV=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Districts and municipalities or districts and municipalities (or any capitalization mix), replace with |dist-muni=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Gaijin tarento or gaijin tarento (or any capitalization mix), replace with |gaijin=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Military history or Military history (or any capitalization mix), replace with |milhist=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Music or music (or any capitalization mix), replace with |music=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Mythology or mythology (or any capitalization mix), replace with |myth=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Owarai or owarai (or any capitalization mix), replace with |owarai=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Photo or photo (or any capitalization mix), replace with |phototf=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Prefectures or prefectures (or any capitalization mix), replace with |prefectures=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Royalty and nobility or royalty and nobility (or any capitalization mix), replace with |royalty=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Shinto or shinto (or any capitalization mix), replace with |shinto=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Tokyo or tokyo (or any capitalization mix), replace with |tokyo=yes
    • If the |tf=, |tf2=, or |tf3= is Update or update (or any capitalization mix), replace with |update=yes

I hope all that makes sense. Thanks! ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:25, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I can easily enough have AnomieBOT do all this. Would you like redirects to Template:WikiProject Japan replaced with {{WikiProject Japan}} on the pages the bot edits? Also, how would you like it handled if a page has more than one of the above templates with different class/importance ratings? I can also have the bot automatically assess articles it processes as stub (based on the presence of a stub category on the article, if no other assessment is present), disambig, or redirect; and non-articles as na, image, category, portal, template, or project, as appropriate. And for non-articles, I can also have it automatically set importance=na if you'd like. Anomie⚔ 02:42, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Answering your questions in order:
  1. Yes, replacing redirect templates with the main template is fine.
  2. If a page has more than one of the above templates on it with different assessments, please create a list of them on Wikipedia:WikiProject Japan/Assessment/Tag cleanup and we'll go through them by hand.
  3. Automatically assessing them as stubs is fine based on the stub category or template on the article if there is not already an assessment. Same goes for disambig and redirect. Category, portal, template, and project are all assessed automatically, so nothing needs to be done there. If you can have the bot make a list of articles with a class of "na", that would be good, as those need to be gone through to make sure of what they are (there were some assessed that way previously which no longer would be assessed that way). If you can add them to a separate section on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Japan/Assessment/Tag cleanup page, that would be useful.
Please ask for more clarification if something doesn't make sense. Thanks! ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 07:18, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Just noting that this request is still being worked on, so should not be archived. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 20:07, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Still being processed. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 22:04, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
Still being processed. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:12, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
Still being processed. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 18:08, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 28. Sorry it took so long. Anomie⚔ 16:06, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

No problem. I know very well how life can get in the way of things. I appreciate your help on this. :) ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe
One thing I failed to mention was the various redirect templates pointing to {{WikiProject Japan}}: {{Wikiproject Japan}}, {{WPJ}}, {{Wikiproject japan}}, {{WPJAPAN}}, and {{WikiProjectJapan}}. It's fine to leave them as redirects, or replace them with {{WikiProject Japan}}. It all works the same. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:35, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
I thought that was question #1 above? Anomie⚔ 22:01, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
Sorry for the confusion. This in reference to #5 at the top. The bot will need to make sure it knows to look for not only {{WikiProject Japan}}, but also pages using {{Wikiproject Japan}}, {{WPJ}}, {{Wikiproject japan}}, {{WPJAPAN}}, and {{WikiProjectJapan}} (all of which redirect to {{WikiProject Japan}}. Hope that makes sense. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 00:14, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Oh, ok. There are actually two parts to that: fetching the pages, and detecting the banner in the pages. The first is easy, as the API "embeddedin" query automatically does this (in fact, there's no way to make it not do it). AnomieBOT handles the second by querying the list of redirects from the API. Part of the reason it took so long to code this was that I decided to finally abstract the code that does that so I wouldn't have to keep copying it from task to task. Anomie⚔ 02:35, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Works for me. Thanks for your help on this. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 18:57, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Just waiting on the BAG to get around to approving the request. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 17:57, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
Looks like this is mostly completed. Is there anything else which needs to be done on it, Anomie? ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 20:01, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
I was just coming here to post Y Done; the replacing of the first four templates was actually done a good while ago, the rest of the time was going through the remaining WikiProject Japan transclusions to take care of the tf parameters, which finished a few hours ago. It would have been done sooner were it not for database locking issues... Anomie⚔ 20:17, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
Not a problem. I appreciate your help on this issue. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 22:58, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Is there an easy way to generate some sort of list from templates?

This is mainly to help me with maintenance (essentially ensuring that nobody is including false values), and it isn't a big deal if it doesn't get done. I'd like a list of articles that have a reporting mark in {{infobox rail}} or use {{reporting mark}}, along with the value of the parameter (or both if they differ). (See CSX Transportation for an example of both, with reporting mark CSXT.) --NE2 01:07, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Process all articles in four categories

I'd like to see about getting a bot to process all the articles in four categories: Category:Lists of ship commissionings, Category:Lists of ship decommissionings, Category:Lists of shipwrecks by year, and Category:Lists of ship launches. The number of articles in each category ranges from about 85 up to 125. The processing would be as follows:

— Bellhalla (talk) 05:42, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

BRFA filed [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 19:49, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
Oh, slight clarification needed -- what do you want the bot to do when there are, say, both {{shipevents1870}} and {{shipevents|1880}}? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 20:33, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
Get rid of any of the hard-coded year templates, so in that case, remove {{shipevents1870}} but leave {{shipevents|1880}}. Hope this helps. — Bellhalla (talk) 20:38, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Copy to Commons

Would it be possible to get a list of Files in Category:Copy to Wikimedia Commons that:

A) Are lacking a {{Information}} template.
B) That have both {{Copy to Wikimedia Commons}} and {{Should be SVG}}.

Thanks in adavcen, Peachey88 (Talk Page · Contribs) 00:49, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Doing... Mr.Z-man 02:39, 14 April 2009 (UTC)
 Done, the first list is here, the second is here. (Make sure to set your browser encoding to utf-8, some browsers tend to pick a wrong default for text files). If you want them in a different format, let me know, though the first list might be too big for a wiki page. Mr.Z-man 03:20, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Need to add a template to Coca-Cola brands

Could someone please add the template {{Coca-Cola brands}} to all articles in category:Coca-Cola brands? Thank you for your time, --Jeremy (blah blah) 01:59, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

 Doing... with AWB fahadsadah (talk,contribs) 08:39, 14 April 2009 (UTC)
 Done fahadsadah (talk,contribs) 08:53, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

 Deferred AWB

Request to tag articles for WP:NATO

The NATO Wikiproject has just been established (today), and we're looking for someone who would be so kind as to run a bot to tag NATO articles. We have a template Template:WikiProject NATO, and I believe it's properly set up to allow automatic stub tagging. It would be extremely helpful if all of the articles in Category:NATO and its subcategories could be tagged. Thanks so much! Cool3 (talk) 21:30, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

You'll need to provide a specific list of categories. I doubt The Dreamers (film) is in the scope of your project, but Category:NATO contains Category:Military operations involving NATO which contains Category:Wars involving NATO which contains Category:Cold War which contains Category:Cold War rebellions which contains Category:May 1968 in France which contains that article. This sort of thing happens all the time with "and all subcategories". Anomie⚔ 22:37, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
Ah, unfortunate. I will do my best to specify:
I believe that should do it. Also, could whoever runs the bot automatically GAs and FAs as well as Stubs? Thanks so much! Cool3 (talk) 23:05, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
Doing... (in a few minutes) Anomie⚔ 01:09, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
Seems to be Y Done, except for two articles giving MediaWiki:Missing-article (which has been reported at WP:VPT). Anomie⚔ 11:45, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Bot for category comparison

I have no idea whether or not this is feasible, but I thought I'd throw the idea out there. I'm interested in finding a bot that could do the following:

1. Search Category:Disambiguation pages and identify all members of that category meeting both of these criteria:

    • Article name begins with C, K, or W
    • Article name is all in upper case (e.g., KYUU) or is all in upper case except for '(disambiguation)' (e.g., KTAS (disambiguation))

2. From the resulting set, eliminate any article that's a member of Category:Broadcast call sign disambiguation pages

3. Generate a report/subpage listing what's left

If this is possible, and assuming it's not a processor hog, I'd be interested in having this run on a regular basis — preferably monthly, but at least quarterly. Mlaffs (talk) 17:52, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

I think a toolserver tool is called for here, rather than a bot. I'm playing around with it; certainly, it'll be available on-demand (there's no way this is going to hog performance if done correctly). - Jarry1250 (t, c) 17:59, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
Nearly done, just got a few bugs to fix. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 18:13, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
 Done tools:~jarry/callsigns/. I'll happily write in some exceptions if you can suggest them (chemical elements, perhaps?). - Jarry1250 (t, c) 18:26, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
That's just frightening — I'm suitably impressed.
There are a couple of refinements that occurred to me only after seeing the resulting report. In step one, you could add further criteria that the article name (other than '(disambiguation)') is only either three or four characters long and that the article name (again, excluding '(disambiguation)') uses alpha characters only. That would filter out most of the ones that would never get used for a call sign.
Only other change that jumps out at me is that I'd call it Potential Callsign Disambiguation Pages rather than Uncategorised .... If I've been doing my job right, then the vast majority of what the report spits out shouldn't get categorized as such — there may only be a handful of outliers each time where I'll need to either revise the dab template or add them to the category manually, depending on the contents of the page.
Seriously, this is wicked cool for you to have pulled off in only half an hour. Barnstarring you would be easy, but do you have a favorite charity I could donate to, or a hated sports team that I could diss in the comments section of someone's blog? Either would seem a little more meaningful. Mlaffs (talk) 19:11, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
Oh, a barnstar would be just fine. Anyhow, I've only just seen your reply (10 mins before I've got to go), but we'll see how much of that we can do. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 20:18, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
Updates - er- updated. Looking a lot better now. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 20:25, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
Fantastic — that looks exactly like I'd envisioned it would. Thanks again, and don't be shocked if I'm darkening your doorstep again before too long — I have a question about one of the other reports I saw on your page, but I just need to figure out how to ask it correctly. Mlaffs (talk) 20:34, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

The competitive sport content of Swimming has been moved to Swimming (sport), so there are now a large number of articles (guess ~6,000) which contain links to the wrong article.

For pages in the article namespace which currently link to Swimming that are categorised under Category:Swimmers or Category:Swimming competitions (and all subcategories), could a bot correct all these internal wikilinks to [[swimming (sport)|original link text]].

If a list of all articles edited in this way could also be produced, this will allow manual checking - it is felt that a manual check will be significantly less hassle than manually updating all the links.

Additional categories and articles in other namespaces may be added to the criteria post-bot after surveying the remaining pages which continue to link to Swimming.

Yboy83 (talk) 15:27, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Wow, this is honestly an exceptionally huge task. User:Jarry1250/Swimmers would be a useful starting point; I'm going to try to correct the Olympic games articles myself now using AWB. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 15:46, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
Very little input at all - just a single comment on the talk page, then four months later the move made without any further discussion. However note that WP:SPORT has had an item on their to-do list for some time regarding the separation of competitive/sport swimming from other general content, and had that split taken place, all this editing would have followed also. Any suggestions on how to proceed? Perhaps pause this bot request until the article naming issue is sorted? Yboy83 (talk) 17:35, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
I would say that's probably the best bet... The naming discussion is ongoing on at the link above Talk:Human swimming#Limited scope of article. –xeno (talk) 17:46, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
I don't think this is really a bot solution. This really requires human intervention. For example, Zoltán Szilágyi you have only has a link to Swimmer which correctly redirects to Swimming (sport) so a bot would actually make it worse, not better. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 21:04, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Move pages

Could someone please create a simple bot that can move date pages into the portal namespace? July 31, 2005, which is simply transcluded into July 2005, should be at Portal:Current events/2005 July 31. This is already correct for recent dates like Portal:Current events/2009 April 12. Articles in Category:Days in 2005 and Category:Days in 2003 still need to be moved. Thanks, Reywas92Talk 20:16, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

I can certainly do this with Sambot if there is consensus. Could you point me to somewhere where this can be demonstrated? Have the potential problems (e.g. cross-namespace transclusion, problems for mirrors that only mirror the main and template namespaces) been taken into account? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 21:00, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
There is definitly consensus, as all current month articles are transclusions of portal pages, though I'm not sure where a discussion is that I could point to. March 2009 is created by transcluding Portal:Current events/2009 March 1 and so on. Some of the month articles from 2003 and 2005, however, transclude articles of the individual dates (March 1, 2005 to March 2005). Some, including July 2003, have the date information directly on the page. Unless you can have the bot just copy or substitute March 1, 2005 onto March 2005, I think the easiest thing to do would be moving them to Portal to remove these non-articles from the article namespace.
If you look at the edit page for March 2009, you will see that once the dates are in Portal namespace in the Portal:Current events:YEAR MONTH DAY style it will be very simple to transclude them. I don't think this will be a problem for mirrors if the month articles are correctly transcluding the dates. Thank you very much! I will try to be as helpful as I can in you helping me. Reywas92Talk 21:56, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
I doubt many mirrors mirror the portal namespace... I know it is very easy to transclude the pages -- I am less than certain that it is good practice. I'd appreciate some more input from bot operators/interested others... [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 22:49, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Google Books wikifying

I need a bot, which interconnects ISBNs to Google Books:

  1. add URL to existing cite-template
  2. replace Stand-alone ISBNs in references with complete cite-template including the full google books url
  3. add a comment in cite-environment, if a given ISBN is available in fulltext at google books

An archive search in this bot discussion gives a hint to a bot called "gbcite", created by Quandal User:Quadell. But he is not in the active bot list?--Manuel-aa5 (talk) 09:54, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

There is no User:Quandal. Do you mean me? I had a task for my bot Polbot that changed a link to Google books (like http://books.google.com/books?id=f0XcGQAACAAJ&dq=isbn:1405322357&lr=&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=&as_brr=0&as_pt=ALLTYPES ) to a cite like {{cite book|title=Yoga the Path to Holistic Health|author=B. K. S Iyengar|year= 2008 |publisher=Dorling Kindersley Publishing Staff|isbn= 1405322357 |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=f0XcGQAACAAJ}}. But didn't convert an ISBN to a link. Is that what you meant? – Quadell (talk) 13:06, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
Yes! It's from Archive #21.--Manuel-aa5 (talk) 16:13, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
Well, that was my most controversial bot request, and it never got approved. It was trying to do about twenty things at once, though, and I could try to resurrect the non-controversial bits and pieces. I think transforming bare links to Google books or to Amazon.com into full {{cite book}} refs should be doable. Not sure about transforming bare ISBNs into {{cite book}} links. What do other people think? Comments? – Quadell (talk) 16:34, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
Google/Amazon links to ISBN is OK, but ISBN to Google/Amazon is an endorsement of one particular company over others. The reason the Google/Amazon links are made is because they link to relevant sections (or or because the book doesn't have an ISBN identifier or equivalent). Bots can't determine what the relevant section is from an ISBN. However, I wouldn't be opposed to giving a googlebooks link if you are able to make the link go to a specific page (based on what is found in |page= though), providing its freely accessible.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 17:17, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
IMO, bare Google/Amazon/etc link into {{cite book}} or {{citation}} would be good. Bare ISBN into {{cite book}} or {{citation}} would also be good (although how often do people enter a bare ISBN as a citation?), there is no need to use the url parameter at all in that case. I don't see much point in adding a url parameter for Google/Amazon/etc to existing citations, particularly since plain text such as "ISBN 0-7407-4847-5" is automagically converted by the software into a link to Special:BookSources (as it was here). Anomie⚔ 18:53, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
With Google Book Search you can sometimes read the fulltext online (for free). The Standard-ISBN parsing of media wiki brings you only to librarys or bookstores. So an additional URL is absolutly nescessary for open access books.--Manuel-aa5 (talk) 21:16, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
It must be giving different results for you, because for me the second result under "Online databases" is "Find this book at Google Book Search online database". I've also noticed that existing Google Books links in articles frequently do not lead to anything useful, but instead to a page stating that the book has exceeded its viewing limit. Anomie⚔ 00:52, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Announcing a bot run

I am making this announcement in advance due to sensitivities about date manipulation bot runs.

  • Bot run will be by MandelBot
  • Purpose: Author of both templates {{birth-year}} and {{birth-date}} wishes to convert the obsolete birth-year template usage to use the more general birth-date template.
    • Motivation: Birth-year (a function by J JMesserly) that calls Birth-date is obsolete. Since birth-date can now handle this function, this run will convert all instances of usage and request delete. This conversion is fully supported by its author and is regarded as a maintenance procedure to remove obsolete templates. Similarly, it will convert all Death-year to Death-date.

-J JMesserly (talk) 04:12, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Would pages break if you just redirected -year to -date? - Jarry1250 (t, c) 09:21, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
No. This can be verified in the 16-April run of MandelBot [1]. The -year templates (which I wrote and am the only editor on) simply added a parameter and redirected to -date. I have upgraded -date so that this parameter is no longer necessary. My -year templates are now obsolete. This is just a maintenance cleanup operation. -J JMesserly (talk) 17:18, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
The current content of the template is {{birth-date||{{{2|}}}|dt={{{1}}}}}. Is there any reason why it is problematic to leave it as it is? (I have no opinion either way, but there's no need to make 590 edits if it's not needed.) Also, will you be filing a new BRFA? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 18:46, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
In all likelihood I created every single occurances of the 590 uses and I see no use for it. I simply wanted to tidy up after myself. Problematic is an extreme term, but it also is not fair to think of it as pointless tidying either. If the conversion to -date templates is performed, then it is trivial for a contributor to refining the value to a more accurate date by simply adding the month, or month and day. If we leave it in the -year template, the user must somehow find that the -date template is what they need to do what they want. Re permissions- actually the BRFA literally approved this very manipulation.
If you are interested in the coding details of the -date templates, the -year template passed null for parameter 1, display parameter 2 unchanged, and parameter 1 in the dt parameter. The function of the dt parameter is to pass an ISO value through without manipulation. The -date template was upgraded to do the same operation internally when such a value is passed in parameter 1, so the -year template is redundant. Death-year essentially does the same operation with some date math needed for purposes of microformat emission. As with birth-year, -date does the nearly identical operation internally.
If my explanation is unclear, or you see some value to retaining birth and death-year let me know. I don't mind much if you want to keep it- I just don't see the point of retaining what I regard as needless templates that I wouldn't have created in the first place had I been a little more clever in the -date template. If you do want to keep it, I'd like to know what you intend for it. It is possible I could add the functionality into -date templates. -J JMesserly (talk) 23:25, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Firstly, I didn't notice your late addition to the BRFA -- apologies.
Secondly, your point about the ease of refining the date provided is a good one and justifies the change.
Thanks for bringing this here first!
[[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 23:40, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Add "|water-polo=yes" to WP Swimming banners in selected categories

Add "|water-polo=yes" to all {{WP Swimming}} project banners in the categories (including all sub-categories):

with no exceptions. Please also tag category and template talk pages. All talk pages should already contain the project banner (as per recent bot request), though if any are found to be without, please add it. Yboy83 (talk) 20:12, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Coding.... I did the first run, might as well do this one too! Are there likely to be any more such taggings to do? It would be good to do them in the one BRFA if possible. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 00:05, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
This is the only group we've set up so far, but there may be others at a later date, so if you want to write this option into the BRFA to be implemented later, then that's up to you. Thanks, Yboy83 (talk) 07:05, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

A dynamic list for articles with a history of BLP issues

The BLP noticeboard requires editors adding a new section to link to the article their comment is about. It struck me that this presented an opportunity to the technically-minded to write a script to extract all wikilinks to the article namespace from section headings in the history of the noticeboard and present them as a list. We already have a BLP dynamic watchlist in the form of the "related changes" tab at Category:Living people, and a similar system could be used here for BLPs with a proven history of problems, which might be more valuable. The list could be at a subpage of WP:BLP, WP:WPBLP or WP:BLPN, and a bot could update it regularly to keep it relevant and comprehensive. It should not be difficult to code. Any thoughts, volunteers? Skomorokh 21:00, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

I could probably do this (good idea BTW). Looking at the noticeboard, the headings aren't terribly consistent, but it shouldn't be too hard to extract a page name out of it somewhat reliably. A couple questions:
  1. Should it check the categories of the article to see if its really a BLP before adding it to the list?
  2. Should pages stay on the list indefinitely, or should they be removed after a certain amount of time?
-- Mr.Z-man 19:13, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Thanks very much for offering to help! On the first point, it shouldn't be restricted to any particular category, as articles not in Category:Living people are still vulnerable to BLP violation (e.g. Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, Siegenthaler controversy). As for the second point, I think pages should stay on the list indefinitely, as it shouldn't be so long as to be overwhelming, but that could be decided once it's up and running and we can see what works and what does not. Mahalo, Skomorokh 15:05, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Modifying {{val}} parameters: header/footer → prefix/suffix

Per the discussion at Template talk:Val#Header/footer vs. prefix/suffix, we're populating Category:Pages using val header or footer parameters with articles that need revising to use the new (more intuitive) parameter titles. The h and f parameters are being deprecated in favour of p and s. Can we have a bot make a one-time run (or optionally, monitor the category perpetually—we can discuss that) and do the following for each article in that category (i.e. not on pages in User:, Template: or the talk namespaces):

  1. If the parameter h is defined and p is not defined, then relabel h as p (e.g. {{val|123|h=$}} → {{val|123|p=$}}).
  2. If the parameter f is defined and s is not defined, then relabel f as s.
  3. If the parameter h is defined and p is also defined, then leave alone for now (unlikely that many instances will use both h and p, because p is only being introduced now).
  4. If the parameter f is defined and s is also defined, then leave alone for now.
  5. For all capitalization variants of the above (e.g. H instead of h, S instead of s, etc.), convert to the (preferred) lowercase version.

This and related modifications have been tested in userspace at User:TheFeds/template/sandbox1, and result in the expected behaviour. {{Val}} has been modified, so we should be seeing the category grow now. TheFeds 21:13, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Interestingly enough, it looks like there's virtually nothing for a bot to do here...unless the category is going to take longer than a few hours to populate itself. The folks at Template talk:Val felt that we should arrange a bot in advance, but unless this category grows suddenly, it may not be necessary. Stand by: I'll advise if this category grows as expected. TheFeds 14:38, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

This request is withdrawn: it came as a surprise to the template maintainers that there was virtually no usage of those particular template parameters, and accordingly, nothing much for a bot to do. I'll fix this one by hand. TheFeds 06:01, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Request to tag Selected Articles with {{OnThisDay}}

I'm not really sure of how one would go at this, so I'm not going to make any suggestions for how to do it. But what needs to be done is to go through the history of pages like Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/October 31, and find which version existed on October 31 2008/2007/2006/... (if there are multiple version on the same day, use the latest) and then check which articles were bolded (the "Selected anniversaries").

For example, the final revision of Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/October 31 for the year 2008 was this. The selected anniversaries are Halloween, Samhain, Reformation Day, Martin Luther, Leiden University Library, Mount Rushmore, Indira Gandhi, and Singapore Airlines Flight 006. The bot would need to go on the talk page of these articles and tag them with {{OnThisDay|October|31|2008|oldid=248747244}} to produce:

Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:41, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

There would obviously a need to run this daily (on the relevant day) after the initial run.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:42, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
Feedback?Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:18, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
This seems like a good idea in principle. I'd say try it out on a limited number of articles and see if any problems arise. Skomorokh 03:18, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

GeoCities

Yahoo have announced that they'll shortly be pulling the plug on GeoCities. At present WP has over 20000 references to pages on GeoCities. Either WP's going to have an awful lot of dead links or we need a bot to grab the references, put them through WebCite or similar, and replace the references on WP. Any thoughts? Any takers? Bazj (talk) 15:25, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:AN#GeoCities_is_shutting_down. Hopefully WebCiteBOT (talk · contribs) will be up to the task. Skomorokh 15:27, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
Reassured that somebody's on the case. Thanks. Bazj (talk) 15:34, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Request: Bot delete guard

Is it possible to make a bot guard pages that are in the stage of creating? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Betax (talk • contribs) 02:08, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Declined Not a good task for a bot. I suppose it would be possible, but it wouldn't be particularly effective. You could try instead putting {{underconstruction}} on the page, or better yet create the page on your own computer (e.g. in Notepad) and only post it on Wikipedia once you have brought it up to the necessary minimum standards. Anomie⚔ 02:29, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Removal of {{puic}} from captions

When an editor lists an image at Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files, the instructions say to add {{puic}} to the captions of everywhere the image is used. Some editor actually do this, and some don't. When an admin closes the discussion as "keep", he or she should presumably remove the puic notice from captions (although the instructions don't actually say to). Some admins, including me, sometimes forget to remove the notice. So you get articles with image captions that say "This content has an uncertain copyright status and is pending deletion. You can comment on its removal." even when it isn't true.

Could a bot run through Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Puic and remove the template from the captions of images that are not directly linked from WP:PUF or from any of the subpages listed in its holding cell? – Quadell (talk) 03:57, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Bonus point if it's set up to run daily. Extra-special bonus point if it adds puic notices to the captions of images that are currently in discussion. – Quadell (talk) 03:59, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
I'll look at doing this. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 08:43, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
Is it a good enough test to decide that
  • if an image still exists and
  • its PUI entry has been tagged as closed
the image has been kept? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 09:35, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
Sure, that's a good enough test... but it may be more difficult. Some people surround the debate with {{pui top}} and {{pui bottom}}, some people subst the templates, some but {{pui top}} and {{pui bottom}} tags around a whole group of entries, and some don't bother to surround debates with these tags when it's the last debate on the page and they're removing the page from the list in the holding cell. In my opinion it would be easier to determine if the pui page it's on is currently "live" or not. But however you want to do it would be fine. ~~~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by Quadell (talk • contribs) 15:46, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
Well, the multiple tagging is a very tricky circumstance to test for... Is it frequent? Can they be gently educated not to do that?
The real problem is determining if a discussion has been marked as closed or if it's still pending close. I'm currently doing it by looking for the string xfd-closed to determine if a discussion is closed or not.
[[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 15:46, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Sambot 11. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 17:47, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Swimming banner tagging

Could a bot tag all talk pages for Category:Aquatics and all sub-categories with Template:WikiProject Swimming.

Exceptions:

If also possible, could an automatic Stub assessment be made for any articles carrying a stub template.

Thanks in advance, Yboy83 (talk) 09:09, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

These categories, then? (Just to confirm!) Do you want class= copied from other templates on the page? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 15:15, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
For articles that are currently untagged, or tagged but unassessed, I guess this would be a good idea if easily done. Yboy83 (talk) 15:28, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
And yes, all those categories!! Regards, Yboy83 (talk) 15:32, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
Do you want categories and templates to be tagged too? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 15:32, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
Crazy that I was just about to post a reply at the same time you ask this! In response, yes please, and can I add Category:Swimming templates (and sub-cats) for tagging, and a further exception of Category:Surf lifesaving (and sub-cats). Yboy83 (talk) 15:36, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Sambot 7. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 16:13, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
Is this complete now? Any issues we ought to be aware of? The task certainly looks to have tagged a large number of articles with the project banner, and has helped us to uncover some additional articles which were previously uncategorised. Thanks in advance, Yboy83 (talk) 17:39, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Yes, it is complete; there were no issues. Sorry for not notifying you before -- I returned to college yesterday and obviously have been very busy. :-) [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 18:34, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Thanks, however I contest that the task has been completed. A browse through the contents of sub-cats A to C (excl. USA, AUS, CAN) in Category:Swimmers by nationality has found numerous untagged articles and categories. See my user contributions between 20:09 and 20:35 (UTC+1) today for examples. Yboy83 (talk) 19:40, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
Bump. What's the latest on this? Will you be re-running your script to catch all the missed articles? Yboy83 (talk) 19:22, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, I only just saw this. Perhaps you could drop a note to my talk page in future? I'm having difficulty replicating the fault -- can you point me to an article that is currently untagged? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 19:34, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
Here's a sample batch from sub-cats letter S of Category:Swimmers by nationality. Yboy83 (talk) 21:14, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
Hmm, no idea what the fault was -- I'm doing the bot run again now and it's tagging loads of pages it missed the first time round. My only guess is that it was run on the Toolserver when it was in a particularly unstable patch. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 21:57, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
Right, the bot has tagged another thousand or so pages. I can't find any it's missed this time round. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 13:38, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Bot to report users matching certain abuse filters to AIV

As proposed here, a bot could report users matching certain abuse filters directly to WP:AIV. The list of filters to check could be held in a bot subpage, so that admins can update it as needed. The filters would be those for severe abuse or against persistent vandals or sockpuppets, so that they can be detected and blocked rapidly. The report could include the abuse log details. Cenarium (talk) 22:10, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Find and replace

Two rugby league competition (National League One and National League Two) were recently renamed (Championship and Championship 1) and following this the article (Rugby League National Leagues) that covered both National League One and National League Two was moved and then split into two articles (Co-operative Championship and Championship One).

The upshot of this is that there are a number of articles that need fixing. I think the following replacements should do it.

  • [[Rugby league national leagues|National League One]]
  • [[Rugby league national leagues|National League 1]]
  • [[Rugby league national leagues|NL1]]

The above to be replaced with [[Co-operative Championship]]

and

  • [[Rugby league national leagues|National League Two]]
  • [[Rugby league national leagues|National League 2]]
  • [[Rugby league national leagues|NL2]]
  • [[Co-operative Championship|Co-operative Championship 1]]
  • [[Co-operative Championship|Co-operative Championship One]]

all to be replaced with [[Championship One]]

Thank you in advance.GordyB (talk) 12:11, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Find and replace

Two rugby league competition (National League One and National League Two) were recently renamed (Championship and Championship 1) and following this the article (Rugby League National Leagues) that covered both National League One and National League Two was moved and then split into two articles (Co-operative Championship and Championship One).

The upshot of this is that there are a number of articles that need fixing. I think the following replacements should do it.

  • [[Rugby league national leagues|National League One]]
  • [[Rugby league national leagues|National League 1]]
  • [[Rugby league national leagues|NL1]]

The above to be replaced with [[Co-operative Championship]]

and

  • [[Rugby league national leagues|National League Two]]
  • [[Rugby league national leagues|National League 2]]
  • [[Rugby league national leagues|NL2]]
  • [[Co-operative Championship|Co-operative Championship 1]]
  • [[Co-operative Championship|Co-operative Championship One]]

all to be replaced with [[Championship One]]

Thank you in advance.GordyB (talk) 12:11, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Request to tag Selected Articles with {{OnThisDay}}

I'm not really sure of how one would go at this, so I'm not going to make any suggestions for how to do it. But what needs to be done is to go through the history of pages like Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/October 31, and find which version existed on October 31 2008/2007/2006/... (if there are multiple version on the same day, use the latest) and then check which articles were bolded (the "Selected anniversaries").

For example, the final revision of Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/October 31 for the year 2008 was this. The selected anniversaries are Halloween, Samhain, Reformation Day, Martin Luther, Leiden University Library, Mount Rushmore, Indira Gandhi, and Singapore Airlines Flight 006. The bot would need to go on the talk page of these articles and tag them with {{OnThisDay|October|31|2008|oldid=248747244}} to produce:

Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:41, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

There would obviously a need to run this daily (on the relevant day) after the initial run.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:42, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
Feedback?Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:18, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
This seems like a good idea in principle. I'd say try it out on a limited number of articles and see if any problems arise. Skomorokh 03:18, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
Posting a message so this doesn't get archived. I'm aware that this probably isn't the easiest of bots to code, so but having a bot to do this instead of humans would really help. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 10:16, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Substituted template edit request

I am requesting that this edit be made to all of the substituted instances of that template. -- IRP ☎ 20:10, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

It would likely be helpful to have a link to the discussion supporting this change in the template. --ThaddeusB (talk) 20:32, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
Those templates shouldn't be substituted in the first place. The canonical template for that purpose is {{Repeat vandal}}. Cenarium (talk) 21:35, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
Then can we use a bot to unsubstitute all substituted instances of that template? -- IRP ☎ 23:54, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Request at WT:RFA for a CSD report generator/spambot

I'll try to summarize, see the discussion at WT:RFA#CSD_tagging if you want more details. Several new page patrollers asked to receive notifications if an article they tagged for speedy deletion was declined or deleted under a different criteria than the one they requested. Coupled with this is a request for an opt-in service to summarize patrollers' tagging outcomes. This task probably requires an adminbot. Wronkiew (talk) 04:46, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

I would add that I think it would be best to have the report be a weekly report rather than everytime a CSD is declined, or have it set to put the message on a subpage rather than the main user page.---I'm Spartacus! NO! I'm Spartacus! 05:10, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
I think the subpage idea is sound if there's been more than one report of a particular code difference in a day - I recently had a CSD tagger tag an entire football team as non-notable. But if a tagger has tags changed for multiple reasons then its probably worth giving them multiple messages. ϢereSpielChequers 11:12, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
Deletion criteria should be in the deletion log, and the deletion log is accessible to everyone. Why do you think that this would require an adminbot?--Dycedarg ж 19:54, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
I think this requires an adminbot because the history becomes inaccessible when the article is deleted. You could watch recent changes and store anything CSD-related. However, edits made right before the article is deleted might be lost if they're not downloaded fast enough. With an adminbot, you can just watch for newly-tagged articles and review the deleted contributions afterwards. Wronkiew (talk) 00:51, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
For my implementation below, I do not believe that this should be a problem.--Dycedarg ж 04:50, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Another quick question: Do you want the notifications for the first part of the task to be opt in to, or opt out? I'm considering giving this a try, as I haven't had an interesting programming project in a while and I've hit an unusual patch of free time.--Dycedarg ж 20:47, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
I think opt out would wind up being more helpful. I left talkback notices with the taggers for most of my declined speedies in March and April, and got almost no negative reaction (User talk:Dank55/Mar and User talk:Dank55/Apr), so I don't think anyone would be offended by a database of this information, especially when they can opt out. - Dan Dank55 (push to talk) 23:31, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I've decided I would like to give this a try, and to that end have worked out a possible implementation. It would function as follows:

The bot follows the recent changes IRC feed. Edit summaries are scanned to find edits that add CSD tags. Any tagged page is tracked, with every revision's text including the revision where the tag was added being downloaded until the page is deleted or the tag removed. If the page is deleted, the fact that some revisions may not be successfully retrieved before the deletion occurs should be largely inconsequential; in the vast majority of cases the revision containing the original tagging should be successfully downloaded before the deletion occurs, and if the deletion is somehow sufficiently instantaneous as to beat the bot the criteria cited for the tagging is usually in the edit summary for the edit in which the tag was placed. In any case the bot only needs the criteria for the deletion and the criteria for the tagging, the intervening edits should be irrelevant. If the tag is removed, the page will continue to be followed for a reasonable period of time (10 minutes or so I would guess) to ensure the removal was not reverted or the page otherwise retagged. If the page is retagged, the criteria for the retagging is noted alongside the criteria for the original tagging. The bot will continue to follow the page through as many cycles of retagging/tag removal as occur until the page is deleted or the tag left off for greater than the previously mentioned reasonable period of time. If the page is deleted, the criteria cited by every editor who tagged it will be checked against the criteria cited by the deleting admin, and any mismatches will be noted on its list. If the tag is removed permanently, the bot will check whether or not the tag was replaced by a notability notice or by a prod tag as well as whether the article was altered significantly in size since the tagging, and will note that along with every editor who added a tag to the page on its list. (One exception is an A7 page being userfied, such a tagging would be presumed correct.) Once a day, the bot will dump its various lists to a different subpage for every editor (I'm thinking of just putting them in the bot's own userspace), and will then give every editor a friendly notice on their talk page with a link to their subpage, which will contain a list of every misplaced tag and the name of the user or admin who removed the tag the last time it was removed or deleted the page for a reason differing from the one they provided. I think once a day is a good compromise between being too spammy and providing feedback too far after the fact to be of much use.

I was thinking of possibly leaving editors who merely revert a tag's removal off of the list. I doubt most hugglers who revert a creator's or IP's removal of a speedy tag bother to check the validity of the tag, or for that matter read the page at all. Of course, that's not exactly ideal behavior, which is why I'm thinking of just warning them alongside everyone else anyway. I'd appreciate some opinions about this.

In addition to the standard service that will be provided to everyone who does not opt out, I was thinking of having two opt-in services: Firstly, one that additionally puts an alert on a user's talkpage every time a speedy is declined or a page is deleted for a different reason immediately after the event occurs, for people who don't mind spam and want the instant feedback. Second, one that adds to the user's subpage a table that will be maintained with speedy statistics (including correct speedies) on a longterm basis. Everyone else will only have the results from the previous day on their page.

Opting out of the bot's services will require adding your name to a list in the bot's userspace. If you have a nobots template on your talkpage, the bot will refrain from editing it and will place your name on the aforementioned list for you. (In that case it will never look at your talkpage again, to opt back in to it's service you would have to remove your name from its list manually in addition to removing the nobots template.)

You'll note that the above system as outlined assumes that editors will be noting CSD taggings in their edit summaries in some fashion. My reason for this is that the vast majority of taggings are done using one of various automated tools with easily machine readable edit summaries. Those who don't should be encouraged to note what they're doing in some fashion in their edit summaries anyway; I'm going to try to make the regex for that test as flexible as possible (any mention of speedy deletion, CSD, or a link to the CSD page will suffice, the page text will be loaded to confirm the presence of the speedy tag to eliminate any false positives anyway). I don't think it's worth the vast increase in consumed bandwidth checking the text of every edit for tag adding would require just to provide feedback to the minority of editors who don't provide proper edit summaries. It also requires that admins note the criteria for deletions in the deletion log, but it goes without saying that admins should be doing that.

Now, all of that only covers notifications. If you want a permanent, searchable database of everyone's CSD stats for the purposes of informing voters on RFA or somesuch (I believe that's what some people in the original thread were asking for) I could possibly have the bot generate one, but I haven't done something like that on this scale before, and I'm unsure of how much space I have for that sort of thing on my toolserver account. I'll have to look into this.

Of course, all of the above is subject to change. I'd appreciate any and all feedback anyone can think of before I do any actual coding.--Dycedarg ж 04:50, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Brilliant (in the British and American senses). - Dan Dank55 (push to talk) 13:06, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
A few comments/questions:
Why would you need to get and store the full revision text? All you really need is the tagging user, the criterion they used, and perhaps the timestamp. If you do this, you really shouldn't need to download anything as it would all be in the RC feed. You might want to check the templatelinks to verify, though that probably wouldn't be necessary unless you think people might use a different tag than what they claim.
Unless the bot subpages will be presented in table format for people to review them, it would be best to use a real database or a file for storing data for the bot's reference.
If its going to actually leave messages on user talk pages, this should almost certainly be an opt-in system.
-- Mr.Z-man 05:11, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
  • Without the full revision text or at least the diff text, there's no way to accurately keep track of what happens to the tag after the initial tagging. IPs or inexperienced users will remove the tag with no edit summary, people will put the tag back via undo or rollback or twinkle, and the edit summary of a user or admin who removes an improper tag permanently could take any number of forms.
  • The subpages will be in table format for people to review, and unless the second opt in choice is selected will only contain the results of a day's worth of tagging.
  • A variety of people chimed in on the discussion linked above, and the general feeling seemed to be that an opt-out approach would be fine. There's already bots that do things like tell people that an article they wrote was AFD'd or CSD'd and things like that. It's more bot spam, yes, but I'd say it's an important enough issue to justify it. Obviously if further discussion produces a different consensus I'd be fine with that.--Dycedarg ж 05:40, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Why have the bot maintain a list of opt-outs in its userspace? You could just check for nobots tags as needed. Also, you might want get more input about opt-in vs. opt-out by posting to WT:NPP. Wronkiew (talk) 06:13, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
The point of that was primarily to reduce unnecessary bandwidth usage. If I relied solely on the template, I'd have to load the pages of people who've opted out every single time the bot runs, potentially meaning a lot of unnecessary page calls. I suppose the number of calls would probably be insignificant if the number of people was relatively low, especially since I'll be having the bot download the userpages in batches, but my general theory is to make things as efficient as possible so long as it's not overly burdensome to do so. Furthermore this would allow people to opt out of my bot without opting out of all bots that edit talkpages without having to figure out the relatively complicated template syntax involved in doing so using the {{bots}} template. Thanks for the mention of WT:NPP, I hadn't thought of that. I'll post a note there about this now.--Dycedarg ж 17:25, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure about the edit summary thing, most of my speedy noms are manual, and although I do a now put "db" into the summary, and now I also sometimes add the citera (e.g. "db a7"), I never put links in except when using Huggle or NPWatcher, which as I said isn't most of my taggings. I'm not sure if many people are like this? - Kingpin13 (talk) 07:17, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
The regex will, as I said earlier, be as flexible as possible. The word db by itself will be sufficient to have the bot check the page for a tag. If you don't state the criteria in some fashion the bot will be unable to check the edit if it fails to download before deletion, but that's a rather unlikely scenario as it would require a virtually inhuman response time on the part of the deleting admin. In any case, I agree with Dank55 below and recommend using one of the many easy to use tools that automate speedy deletion, if only because it makes life easier for everyone involved (including you).--Dycedarg ж 17:25, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

←WP:Twinkle and most other tools will:

  • mark the page as patrolled (if possible), which makes life easier for the new page patrollers
  • give proper notification to the creator
  • add the proper tag to the page
  • and most important (for me!), give an edit summary that lets me know I don't have to double-check your work. - Dan Dank55 (push to talk) 13:04, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
So how are you going to find if the summary has anything to do with CSD? Are you going to have a list of common summaries? Also, when the bot is checking for the criteria it will actually check what the user added to the page right? Out of interest, how are you planning to find what criteria they used, because a lot of a users (including me (and tools)) use things like {{db-context}}, instead of {{db-a1}}, etc. Will you have another list for all variations?
Also, in regard to using tools, I find that opening up the whole program takes time (although I will if I'm going to be patrolling constantly for a longish length of time), also Twinkle won't work on my browser/cp. However, I manage to do all five things manually :).
Anyways, sorry about all the nagging ;), just curious. Think this is a really good idea and good of you to take it upon yourself to do :). Thanks for your time :) - Kingpin13 (talk) 19:36, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Sort of. The bot will search edit summaries for instances of the words db, csd, variations of the phrases speedy delete/speedy deletion, links to the csd page, and whatever other common themes come up in some random searches of CSD tagging edits I'm going to do over the next few days. And yes, after it finds a likely edit summary it will check the page text to ensure the tag was actually added. The bot will have the full list of every redirect to every csd template and which criteria they represent, and I'll try to ensure it stays up to date if people create more redirects down the road. Don't worry about the appearance of nagging, I appreciate it. The more people ask questions the more likely some break in my logic will be caught now when it's easy to fix.--Dycedarg ж 21:14, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Wow this is moving quickly! My experience like Dan's is that taggers almost always appreciate feedback - especially on those occasions when they can then bring my attention to something that I hadn't noticed which justifies their original tag - so I'd go with opt out. But I'm concerned that a batch system won't work - taggers won't have access to articles deleted under a different speedy, and both they and the admin will have to remember stuff from days ago, I suggest this needs to work in as close to realtime as possible Also there are three things that I would like the system to be able to account for, firstly the admin has the option of deleting under two codes rather than one - either of which could be the one it was tagged for. Secondly the intervening edits can be the reason why a tag was originally correct but after intervening edits the admin was correct to delete it under a different code. Thirdly the tag may have been correct but someone then salvaged it - in the last week I've stubbed and salvaged a copyvio and identified and salvaged a couple of no-context articles. Fiddly thought it might become I think we need a way to decline that the bot recognises as a good tag - could it pickup an edit summary of "decline correct speedy - article now salvaged"? ϢereSpielChequers 23:54, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Agreed that notification needs to come within 24 hours, and 12 hours would be better, or the taggers (and I) are likely to forget key things. If taggers complain about these notifications, you can always switch to talkback notices, which don't "look bad". (On that subject, can anyone build a self-destructing template? Talkback notices would be a lot more popular if they turned invisible or unobtrusive when you clicked on the link.) - Dan Dank55 (push to talk) 02:07, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
The reason for the batches was so that an editor who made multiple mistakes during a single prolonged CSD session wouldn't get a bunch of messages on their talkpage. Upon further consideration it might be a good idea for the bot to issue notices every few hours as opposed to once a day (I can't imagine many people have CSD sessions that last longer than that). I'm trying to strike a balance between being too verbose and not being prompt enough. In any case I intend to have an opt-in list for people who want a notice in real time every time the bot notices a mistake. As for admins deleting with multiple criteria cited: I can have the bot recognize that easily enough, and have it allow any of the criteria cited by the admin to match the criteria cited by the tagger and be considered correct. About the second issue: I was already planning on having the bot note changes between the revision tagged and the revision deleted. The problem is that pages are oftentimes changed after the initial tagging without any meaningful change being made. Authors will do things like add {{hangon}} and other things of that nature that don't alter the proper reasoning for the tagging. There's no good way for the bot to detect when substantive changes have been made as opposed to just superficial ones. So I'm not sure what it can do aside from just noting that changes were made after the tagging but before the deletion under a different criteria, and note whether or not the changes substantially altered the size of the article. As for the third issue: I can set the bot to recognize some situations where the tagging may have been appropriate but deletion did not occur for a reason unrelated to the correctness of the tagging. Such cases could include articles that were userfied, deleted under G7 (I see author request as something that overrides other concerns), redirected , and I could also add some special edit summaries like you suggested to the list as well.--Dycedarg ж 02:39, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

It may be easiest to tie in with the Abuse filter, rather than rely on edit summaries. It already has some filters that operate on csd tags. If it logged all edits that added or removed CSD tags, the bot could process that log. Much more reliable, and probably faster.—Kww(talk) 03:33, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip, it hadn't occurred to me to check if the abuse filter could do that. I'll have to look into that.--Dycedarg ж 04:06, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
Hi Dycedarg, if the bot can pick up some phrase from the edit summary to know that it was a good tag but reality has changed then I think you've cracked the intervening edit problem. As for what message is used there's a template at {{uw-csd}}, but its designed for the declining admin to use. I think this bot could phrase things more neutrally - Hi, basepagename you tagged article with code but user deleted it as code instead/removed the tag with edit summary deletion declined - I like Pokemon. ϢereSpielChequers 07:26, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, I'm going to come up with some custom template or something like that for the bot to use. I'm not sure exactly what the wording will be, but that should be one of the easier things to nail down.--Dycedarg ж 04:06, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

I've thought more about how the bot should go about issuing notices. My current thought is this: Every three hours the bot will issue notices to everyone on its list who has not tagged a page for speedy deletion within the past twenty minutes. If only one or two instances were recorded, the bot will simply note them in its talk page notice and not create a subpage (assuming the second opt-in service outlined above is not requested by the editor in question), it will only create a subpage if there were three or more instances. This way editors will get relatively speedy feedback, they should only receive notices after they have finished their current session of CSD work (which will prevent them from getting multiple notices), the notices will not get overly long, and the creation of subpages will be kept to a minimum. Any thoughts on this new approach?--Dycedarg ж 04:06, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Sounds sensible, when you say "it will [..] create a subpage" do you mean a subpage for the user, so for me User:Kingpin13/CSDreport, or for the bot? (User:BotName/CSDreportforKingpin13) If it's going to be for the user this should almost certainly be opt-in methinks. There seems to be some debate over opt-in or opt-out, but I'll go for opt-in - Kingpin13 (talk) 06:43, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
Any subpages the bot makes would be in the bot's own userspace. It would merely link to the subpage from the notice it would leave on the editor's talkpage. The reason I think opt-out would be fine is that there are already several bots that leave unsolicited messages on talkpages. Any objections I've seen have had to do with a lack of a proper opt-out method (BetacommandBot) or mostly irrelevant messages (the one that warns that a page was put up for AFD warning people who had made only very few edits or only superficial ones to the article they were being warned about). This one serves an important purpose: Feedback helps people be more accurate when they tag things for deletion, and improved accuracy reduces the work the taggers have to do (as well as reducing the possibility of bombing an RFA over incorrect tags), reduces the workload for our sometimes overtasked admin core, and reduces instances of newbie editors being upset by the incorrect tagging of their articles. It's a win-win. If people are upset by the first message they receive, they can opt-out in roughly fifteen seconds and never be bothered again.--Dycedarg ж 14:31, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand the point about needing to notify people if the article was deleted under a different reason than for which it was tagged. This doesn't necessarily mean that the tagger made a mistake and a bot shouldn't be implying they did. Articles can qualify under multiple criteria. -- JLaTondre (talk) 21:48, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, sometimes articles will qualify under multiple criteria, and may be legitimately tagged and deleted under differing criteria. But very often it indicates a problem. If you check various RFAs that failed for CSD tagging problems, mistaken criteria comes up rather often. It is by far better than tagging a page that did not match any criteria, but it is still indicative of a gap in policy knowledge. Since the bot can never be sure that what it's notifying editors of was genuinely a mistake, it will use very neutral language. The warning will simply state that an admin deleted the page under a different criteria, what the criteria was, and direct the user to ask the admin for more information if the user wishes to do so. The whole point of this is to provide more information to editors about how they're doing at CSD, not to condemn or chastise them.--Dycedarg ж 02:04, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

In case people are curious about my progress, I am in the process of coding the bot. Once I've got it mostly written and am sure about my implementation, I'll be starting the BRFA discussion. I'll link to that from here once it's started. Also, I've decided to use regular scans of Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as a backup for when the the tagger doesn't use an edit summary the bot recognizes. It's less precise than I would like but it's the easiest way; in any case I don't think the increase in precision would be worth the overhead the abuse filter method would generate.--Dycedarg ж 06:21, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Also I forgot to mention, in case anyone's curious I've made the account the bot will edit from. It's User:CSDCheckBot. I made it early so it will have time to autoconfirm before I'm ready to test.--Dycedarg ж 06:24, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

BRFA filed--Dycedarg ж 04:46, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Local equivalent of Commons' Crop bot

Category:Non-free Wikipedia file size reduction request is badly backlogged, and onerous to work on manually. There are certain category intersections for which the required crop size is uniform and thus amenable to automation: for example, non-free images that are in the category Category:Book covers tend to be for infobox use at a maximum of 250px wide. A manually-assisted bot could clear out all such requests very quickly I'd wager. Commons has a User:Crop_bot account which does similar things in enabling editors to use jpegtran and ImageMagick, and I'm sure the operator would be willing to have it adopted here. Comments? Suggestions? Skomorokh 20:22, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

I think NeuRobot (task · contribs) does something like this (just approved), but runs automatically. I'm not familiar with Crop_bot, but it sounds good to me. – Quadell (talk) 12:46, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
I tried it, and I like it. If the toolserver operator is willing to run it here, that would be great. – Quadell (talk) 12:54, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply! NeuRobot seems to be a conservative version of what I am suggesting, though the backlog is still rather significant. Any idea how one would go about getting the manually-assisted toolserver bot to work locally? Skomorokh 23:04, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Need about 200 pages created

I want to create about 200 pages, one for each country, that are preloaded with basic text. The only difference between the pages would be the occurrence of the country name. Can I get a bot to do this?

I want a series of articles called "Environment of Foo" (where Foo is a country) in WP space. They will all contain the basic things such an article should have with the only difference being the country name. Once these articles are edited to, say, Start Class they can be migrated manually into article space. Obviously any articles that already exist in article space will not be needed.

Instead of articles being being created organically and anarchically I want to give a little bit of structure to the article creation process. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 10:48, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

If you can create one as a template, we can better see what you're referring to. – Quadell (talk) 12:05, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
I could run this, however I need an example to start from. LegoKontribsTalkM 22:58, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
I have created a template at an info page at Wikipedia:WikiProject Environment/Environment of Foo. Before creating the bulk articles I will get some input form the environment WikiProject. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 05:15, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I am very opposed to this. There is absolutely no need to create about 200 stubs with zero information (if Wikipedia:WikiProject Environment/Environment of Foo#Template will be used. These articles should only be created on a case-by-case basis. Make them one at a time when you know they will be expanded. I know by experience that these articles will not be expanded unless your Wikiproject truly works on each one of them. Even the few that currently exist are in terrible condition.It does no good to just link to the country's articles for Flora, Fauna, Protected areas, and Environmental issues when this article itself will have nothing in it. And what will link to these articles? Will they be added to the county's main article or somewhere else? These are no reason to be looking for a sense of completeness to finish off the ones alreadey created. That sure isn't completeness to have a bunch of stubs that only link to other articles, and that infomation already exists in the articles it will link to. In many cases, it may be much more apprpriate to leave this information in the main country article than to make a new one. And one comment about the proposed template: Do not use

Main article: country

at the top of the article. Just wikilink it in the first sentence. Reywas92Talk 21:55, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely concur with Reywas92. Autocreating sourceless stubs verges on disruptive editing, and certainly isn't a legitimate task for a bot.—Kww(talk) 22:00, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

While I have no opinion on whether these articles would be at all useful, I note that the request is asking for these pages to be created somewhere in project space (probably as subpages of the appropriate WikiProject) with the intention that they would only be moved to article space when they reach "start" class. Anomie⚔ 03:20, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, didn't notice that! Still, it shouldn't be too hard to just copy and paste the template when the project is ready to start working on the next country. Reywas92Talk 13:31, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Because the current Environment of Foo articles are in a terrible state is one of the many reasons to create lots of stub articles in Wikipedia space. They can then be worked on until they are at least a Start Class article. There has been a lack of progress on getting the current Environment of Foo articles to a better standard. The Environment of Foo article will compliment the Economy/Geography/History/Politics of Foo articles and the new environment articles will of course be summarised and linked from the main country page. I take the point about putting {{main|country}} at the head of the article and have edited the template accordingly. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 22:03, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Having them all made en-masse seems like a good way for distributed collaboration. This request seems entirely reasonable. –xeno talk 22:11, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
I agree. I support this request. – Quadell (talk) 22:46, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Distributed collaboration is a good way of describing what I want to achieve. Since the collaboration is done in article Wikipedia namespace there is no harm in starting off with numerous stub articles. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 23:14, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Article namespace or Wikipedia namespace? -- User:Docu
Oops. I mean't Wikipedia namespace. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 01:28, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Cookie botting - find and replace

Yummy!

I retouched File:Choco chip cookie.jpg and uploaded it as a PNG (also removed the white background) and I could use a bot help to replace all the old images superseded by the new one. Also, it seems that someone uploaded a bad version with the same PNG name to wikipedia so the file currently showing on wiki is far worse in quality than the wikicommons file I uploaded. Would appreciate someone fixing this issue as well.
Warm regards, JaakobouChalk Talk 07:14, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I deleted the local png, since the Commons one is superior (and has the local one in its history). The search and replace still needs to be done though. – Quadell (talk) 22:45, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Don't image redirects work or something? --MZMcBride (talk) 22:53, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Note: Image still needs all jpg uses replaced by the PNG file. JaakobouChalk Talk 15:03, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

  • Seems like an unnecessary use of bot/botop/wikimedia resources, these are nearly exclusively used on user talk pages and archives. Just leave the old images in place and point to the new image from the old image page (or redirect as MZM says, if this works). –xeno talk 15:07, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
    • Agreed. The few article-space uses can be handled manually, if necessary. I'm not sure I even agree that this image needs a transparent background, but that's a discussion for elsewhere. Anomie⚔ 15:18, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
      • I agree with the above, though the uses in template-space could use fixing too. There aren't all that many templates that use it though. I doubt if the hundreds of editors with this picture sitting in their talk page archives will care if it gets replaced or not.--Dycedarg ж 17:25, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Restricted image tagging bot

A bot is requested to ensure that bad image tags ({{badimage}}) on image talk pages are kept synchronised with MediaWiki:Bad image list. Thanks. -- zzuuzz (talk) 00:17, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh that's simple. Coding... Xclamation point 00:27, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
Good idea! Amalthea 00:44, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
(ec) BRFA filed. Xclamation point 00:45, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
Y Done Xclamation point 03:44, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

collecting robot

I would like a bot that does the following. Runs periodically to find new articles on a given subject, specified by some string. Once the bot finds all the articles, saves the original link and sends a report to the user. Is that possible? The idea is to follow real-time the appearance of new articles on a given subject.

Your prayers have been answered: User:AlexNewArtBot. Regards, Skomorokh 13:53, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

BLP monitoring bot

Perhaps the biggest WP:BLP problem is the addition of poorly sourced content to articles on living people. Now, while bots cannot tell a good source from a bad one, they should be able to detect when text is added without any references cited (i.e. no <ref> tags). I am wondering if a bot can monitor recent changes, in a manner similar to ClueBot (talk · contribs), and when a chunk of text is added to an article in Category:Living people verify whether or not it included ref tags. As the risk of false positives is high (references may be added without ref tags, and added text could just be templates or metadata rather than contentious claims, for example), the bot would not make any edits to articles. Instead, unreferenced additions would then be reported (this is where it gets hazy), so that non-bot editors can check and see if they are inappropriate. The report could take the form of a dynamic feed or a continually updated list (though the latter might accrue archives of little use). The end result would be a less noisy and more refined version of Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Living_people. Is this something that could be useful? Skomorokh 02:37, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

I think what you're looking for is a script similar to Lupins Anti-Vandal Tool, which will work in the same way, but filter the articles different (i.e. only show edits which add unsourced info to BLPs). - Kingpin13 (talk) 10:28, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
Yes, that is similar to what I am looking for. Do you think this could be done? Regards, Skomorokh 20:17, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
Looking at only diffs that don't add <ref> tags seems far too prone to false positives. You need to come up with metrics that can be effective and have few false positives. (No easy task, I realize.) --MZMcBride (talk) 22:55, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
The idea is that it would reduce the number of false positives from Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Living_people. I don't think there are very many instances of an IP adding say 2kb or more of prose text without ref tags to a BLP that wouldn't be worth investigating. Thanks for the interest, Skomorokh 22:59, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
This could be built as an AbuseFilter rule. Amalthea 00:05, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
That's an interesting suggestion – but would that mean these types of edits would be prevented? Skomorokh 13:51, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
It can also just log, like filter 61 currently does with references removed by new users. Amalthea 14:44, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
That seems like a promising option if the original proposal does not attract a bot operator. Cheers! Skomorokh 19:12, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Bot-assisted assessments for WP:CFB

Similar to Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_20#WP:INDIA_Bot_Assisted_Assessment that was handled by User:Bot0612. Many articles are using Template:WikiProject College football, and are unassessed, but have an assessment in a different project. Could we do the same thing as the WP:India sweep? Make a run through all of Category:Unassessed college football articles, and for any page that has a "class=" rating for another project, assign the College football class to the highest rating in the other project(s)? We have a backlog of over 1000 unassessed articles that we're trying to clean, and I suspect this would take a sizeable bite out of the list. DeFaultRyan 21:43, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

I can certainly do this. It might also be possible to look at the article page and attempt to find stub templates there -- would that be alright? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 23:38, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
FWIW, AnomieBOT does that and more by fetching prop=info|categories. Stubs can be found by checking for any cat matching /^Category:.* stubs$/i, disambiguation pages by checking for Category:All disambiguation pages, and redirects by checking for the "redirect" flag. Anomie⚔ 01:11, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
That all sounds great. DeFaultRyan 05:27, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
If you want to do it, Anomie, go ahead :-) I have the code written already -- your additions would take about three minutes to implement! [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 07:17, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
No, you can go ahead. I was just giving you a suggestion on how you could do it. Anomie⚔ 11:31, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Sambot 13. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 16:44, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

One last thing. Is it possible to also add |auto=yes as well as the class rating for each article that the bot automatcially assesses? It would be nice to keep track of which ones were automatically flagged, for tracking and/or reassessment purposes. Thanks. DeFaultRyan 18:26, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Added. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 18:44, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Y Done. Somewhere in the region of 485 edits made. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 22:23, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Bot to categorize all WP:VG articles as low by default

Resolved
 – Will be handled by User:Xenobot/5 if WP:VG wants this done. –xeno talk 23:39, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Right now there are a massive backlog, massive enough that there are usually more articles created over time than there are enough devoted people to tagging them can handle and as a result the backlog just keeps growing. The task would be a lot simpler if we could have a bot go through and categorize articles that fall under the scope as low by default. Those that would be categorized this way would include: those with no importance tag, those with an importance tag, but nothing after it, those with an importance tag and improper importance listed (ie anything but low, mid, high or top) and all articles with the tag "list=yes". The latter would be per the wikiprojects importance level. Without this I do not believe we have enough staff for the number of articles to ever come close to completing the task.じんない 06:08, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Surely you could do that in the template itself -- having the importance default to "low" unless one of the other ratings is present. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 07:45, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
Also, I don't see any actual discussion of this at WT:VG; there was apparently a brief mention of the idea in the middle of a larger discussion a few months ago, but that seems to have been almost entirely ignored. Anomie⚔ 11:44, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
I'll put it bluntly: I asked a couple times there and a few other places. Each time is was mostly ignored. Sadly the community is like "just go and do it or not" for stuff they don't care about personally. Also, to Sam Korn, while I may be able to do it, I have never designed a bot and am too pressed with RL to do so. It would also be helpful if they could add "screenshot" and "cover" tags if they are missing, but not fill them in.じんない 03:48, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
IMO, auto-tagging page's priority is a bad idea. If a page is already categorized, it makes it much less likely that an informed, but new, user will change it to its correct priority. Far better would be to have the template assume low for stats purpose if no priority is given rather than actually auto-assigning one. --ThaddeusB (talk) 05:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
There's never been a big problem with most articles being raised when they are appropriate. In fact, for another wikiproject, WP:ANIME something similar was done and basically it was said, "if you don't agree, just change it". The idea being that most of the time, most people would agree and any disputes should be resolved in the talk page if possible. Furthemore, defaulting the template to low also makes it harder to find mistakes where someone may have typed "priority=high" or "importance=hugh" when they meant to say "impotance=high". There are a number of people who don't check to make certain their change is reflected accurartly.じんない 06:10, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
The template approach seems better to me. Same effect as the bot task with only a couple edits to the template code. If the template on the talk page had "importance=hugh", then the default wouldn't apply because the importance field would have a value. Gimmetrow 12:59, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
You could add a category to take care of unrecognised arguments. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 13:03, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
  • I can have my bot do this when it's done its current task. In the meantime, please initiate a discussion at WT:VG confirming there is consensus to do this. –xeno talk 12:48, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
    • It shouldn't need a bot. Just have the template default to "low-importance" rather than "unknown-importance". [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 13:03, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
      • Yes, that would work but I think the goal is to get us out of backlog so we can then stay on top of properly categorizing things. Both options should be presented to WT:VG for a decision. –xeno talk 13:05, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
        • Either the bot edits every talk page to make "importance=low", or the template code defaults to that when the importance field is empty. Once either is done, then either you are going to go back and look at every talk page that would be tagged by the bot, or look at every instance where the template defaults due to an empty field. I guess I don't see the substantial difference, other than the bot generates a bunch of edits which may be grouped with some other work, and having the "importance=low" text on the talk page may have some indirect benefit over a default. Or it may not. Gimmetrow 13:12, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
          • I should also point out there is an editor who has taken it upon himself to visit every single instance of the WP VG template, in theory he should be prioritizing them as he goes... –xeno talk 13:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
            • I have been trying to do so in spare time, but the backlog is far too massive for 1 person. The main advantage is to a bot vs. template change is that someone who has the page on their watch list may be notified and update it properly if they see a bot update it. It also adds the field and should in theory (depends upon how it's constructed) correct any bad taggings. That last point is very hard to catch if the template defaults to low unless you are searching the unassessed pages regularly.
            • I have also started a discussion on it. Perhaps now that there is someone willing it may get more traction.じんない 23:23, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

hi ! need assistance to learn & to make one ....

dear friends : i wish to learn how to make a bot ....i'm basically a medico who was a computerscience engineering student , & presently a web site designer with basic knowledge in webdesigning ....& i serve here in wiki too ...so saw sme of te bot's working well in my area so me to wish to learn how to make one & how to make em work ....if someone wants to assist me i would appreciate it ....

regards

pearll's sun--Doctor muthu's muthu wanna talk ? 08:03, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Creating a bot. But please remeber this page is for requests. Not questions. Cheers - Kingpin13 (talk) 16:00, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Can someone help me make a bot?

I was wondering if I could have a bot that could help me with wikipedia. Like for example, if i make an edit that is spelled wrong, then the bot could correct it for me. Or if I need help I could just ask the bot? Get back at me on my talk page kaminski825 (talk) 16:11, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Declined Not a good task for a bot. Decent modern browsers have built-in spell checkers, which takes care of the first. For the second, AI is not really that advanced; you'd be better served by asking for human assistance in the appropriate forum. Anomie⚔ 17:35, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Deleted categories emptying

User:Nick deleted Category:Terrorists persuant to a recent CfD. The subcategories deleted as a result need (around 50-60) to be thusly emptied. Thank you. Sceptre (talk) 22:36, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

The request itself is Possible Possible from a technical standpoint, but is Impossible because, from the looks of it, all of the subcategories you linked to are empty. Did you make a mistake, or are they already cleared? It could also be that I'm mistaken, but I don't think so. It says, "There are no pages or files in this category," and nothing links to them except the CfD log. The Earwig (Talk | Contributions) 02:59, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
Chances are someone with AWB or a pre-approved CfD-implementing bot already took care of it. Anomie⚔ 12:42, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, they were all probably all cleared. Sceptre (talk) 13:47, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Template change in Copy to Wikimedia Commons category

Per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Images and Media#List of files comparison we would like a bot to go though Category:Copy to Wikimedia Commons and replace any file with both {{Copy to Wikimedia Commons}} and {{Should be SVG}} with {{Convert to SVG and copy to Wikimedia Commons}} which is a single consolidated version of both those templates. Peachey88 (Talk Page · Contribs) 03:14, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Coding... Xclamation point 03:44, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
Skimmed the linked discussion. Still don't understand the purpose of going around changing tags. Can you be more explicit? --MZMcBride (talk) 06:54, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
They are put in a seperate category compared to the plain (Move to...) category since they need work (aka conversion to SVG) before they should be transfered over to commons. This also makes it easier for the people transfering the files since they don't have to keep skipping files that are tagged. Peachey88 (Talk Page · Contribs) 07:47, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

:Discussion is being held at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SoxBot 17. Peachey88 (Talk Page · Contribs) 00:45, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Recent deaths tag

I wonder whether a bot could be used to authorise the initiation/ termination of the tag that says that an article is about a person that has died recently, please? I have put my information about this at Wikipedia: Village Pump. The preceding unsigned comment was left by ACEOREVIVED (talk · contribs) on 11:30, May 10, 2009.

Tagging articles in WikiProject Washington

I have 2 requests

1. add our banner {{WikiProject Washington}} to all talk pages of all articles in the category Category:Washington (U.S. state) and all its sub categories

2. add our banner {{WikiProject Washington}} and/or add |class=stub| to the banners off all articles within the category Category:Washington stubs and all its sub categories

EDIT: make sure it only gets stuff in the article talk namespace

--Gold Man60 Talk 02:47, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

I could do this pretty easily... but it's always problematic to process a category "and all its sub categories". You might not want moshing tagged, but it's in Category:Grunge music, in Category:Culture of Seattle, Washington, in Category:Washington (U.S. state) culture, in Category:Washington (U.S. state). If you can be more specific about what to include, I can do this. – Quadell (talk) 18:05, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
My personal favourite subcategory is Category:Grunge songs. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 18:32, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
I shall go about looking through the categories, I never looked down that many sub-categories, thanks --Gold Man60 Talk 00:17, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Convert reference dates

I am looking for a bot to update the date parameters in all the reference tags in the U2 3D article from the ISO 8601 format, to standard U.S. date notation, as per recommendation at {{Citation}}. However, the accessdate parameter should remain in ISO 8601 format, as per the same page. –Dream out loud (talk) 06:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Bots messing with dates are currently extremely controversial, even if they are not actually "delinking". Also, that's one article; a human (possibly script-assisted) should be able to do it easily enough without too much trouble. Anomie⚔ 12:51, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Checking Refs & ELs for Wikipedia "mirrors"

I've noticed when I use search engines to find sources, very often my results are filled with sites that get their information word for word from Wikipedia. Is there a bot that checks our refs and ELs for such sites? If so, which one? If not, could one be made? Thanks! --JBC3 (talk) 03:46, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Hello, you don't actually need a bot to find these. If you know a specific site is a Wikipedia mirror you can find all instances of links to that site by using Special:LinkSearch --ThaddeusB (talk) 19:01, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
Thank you very much! I will look into that! I withdraw this bot request. --JBC3 (talk) 13:57, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Tag articles in Christian films task force

Would a bot please tag all articles in "Category:Christian films" and "Category:Catholic films" for the Christian films task force, by adding |Christian-task-force=yes to Template:Film. See here: (a) a user was planning to do it, but it appears will not be able to, and (b) skip the other sub-categories as we haven't fully defined our scope. Thank you. American Eagle (talk) 02:00, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

It's not a lot (<200 pages), someone can do it with AWB, right? The Earwig (Talk | Contributions) 02:16, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 Done with AWB. Thanks for the note. =) American Eagle (talk) 19:14, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Does this mean that Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/GoblinBot is no longer needed? – Quadell (talk) 17:52, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Indeed. All is in order, and a bot is no longer needed. American Eagle (talk) 14:41, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Simple tagging request

Could {{Vital}} be added to the talk pages of every article on this page which doesn't already have one, excluding nonexistant pages? I'd do it with AWB myself, but it seems kind of pointless to take up that much time when a bot could do it. Thanks! –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 01:30, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Any objection standardizing the template name to {{WikiProject Vital Articles}} first? Also, do you want some empty parameters placeholders and/or to import quality from other project templates on the page, or just the template itself? –xeno talk 14:35, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
I guess that you can; I personally prefer the shorter template names, but it doesn't really matter as long as the former redirects to the latter. Good idea on the empty parameters; just |class= should be good (the project doesn't have an importance parameter) –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 14:40, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
Personally, I think it'd be easier to run AWB on this supervised (hitting "change" on every entry), rather than going through the rigmarole of a RfBA. – Quadell (talk) 12:20, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
There are over 2,000 articles on that list (I think), which would take up a lot of time for a human editor... and aren't there bots already set up to tag all pages in a category with a WikiProject banner? Is this really different enough that a separate BRFA would be needed? All that's different is how the list is generated. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 13:10, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
I'll do it. Anomie⚔ 20:32, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
Thank you! –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 20:36, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
Did you want other projects' class ratings copied, and if so do you want the maximum or minimum in case they differ? Anomie⚔ 20:38, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
Also, you should probably fix the numerous dab links in there, unless you really mean for e.g. Madonna rather than Madonna (entertainer) to be tagged. Anomie⚔ 20:51, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
Sure; I didn't know if you could copy the other classes. I'd go with maximum; typically a few banners will be continually updated and other fall behind, so using the highest-level banner would probably be more up-to-date. For dab pages, it would be best at this point if you could skip them (maybe skip if the project's banner is on the talk page?), but if that isn't feasible I'd just tag the dabs and it can be sorted out later. Updating all the dabs would take quiet awhile with how long that list is. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 20:58, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
You could try asking for help at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation, perhaps someone there would be kind enough to do a run over your page. Anomie⚔ 21:06, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

I've been dabbing the pages there since I saw this subject come up, and I fixed several... but I'm a bit concerned about the list at the moment. Several of the links don't point to what they're supposed to--for instance, Arabian was under "Horses", but of course that's not where the link goes. I changed it to Arabian horse, but I'm sure there are many more like it. And under chemistry there are alternate spellings for many elements, both listed. I think we need to go over them before the bot runs on this. I can do that this weekend. – Quadell (talk) 21:14, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

(P.S. User:Splarka/dabfinder.js is your friend. – Quadell (talk) 21:15, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Good points (and thanks for the link). Anomie, you should probably hold off on this; I can mention it at your talk page when we're ready, if you'd like. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 22:03, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
Sounds like a plan. I guess whoever made that list only paid attention to titles, not content. Anomie⚔ 22:21, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

(Discussion migrated to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Vital Articles#Proposed changes. – Quadell (talk) 22:22, 15 May 2009 (UTC))

Template:WikiProject Russian history removal

Apparently WP:WikiProject Russian history has been merged into WP:WikiProject Russia, so many pages contain both {{WPRUSSIA}} and {{WikiProject Russian history}}. Since {{WikiProject Russian history}} was redirected to {{WPRUSSIA}}, this ends up with two banenrs that are the same. Can a bot be tasked with removing the {{WikiProject Russian History}} banner and if not there already, replacing it with the {{WikiProject Russia}} banner?

76.66.202.139 (talk) 08:32, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

I've counted over 2,000 articles with {{WikiProject Russian History}} on them, but many of those have only {{WikiProject Russian History}} on them, and there's little point fixing the redirects. For the others, however, it seems like a good idea. Doing... The Earwig (Talk | Contributions) 14:08, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
OK, it's possible. Coding... The Earwig (Talk | Contributions) 14:18, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed. There were some complications due to a slightly malformed regex, and because this task is all about regexes, I needed to fix the code. It's better now. Tasked as EarwigBot I's third task, and first BRFA (link. The Earwig (Talk | Contributions) 15:37, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
Y Done. It took a while, but the bot's task now complete. Exactly 430 edits made; see Task 3 logs. The Earwig (Talk | Contributions) 23:33, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Simple parameter replacement

Change any instance in of id Software with idSoftware on any page with {{WikiProject Video games}}. Thanks, MrKIA11 (talk) 18:11, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Why? The article is at id Software, not idSoftware, and always refers to the company as "id Software". Anomie⚔ 01:09, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
Because all of the other task force parameters in {{WikiProject Video games}} are space-less, so to have conformity. MrKIA11 (talk) 12:42, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
So you're asking for any instances of |id Software= to be replaced with |idSoftware=, within {{WikiProject Video games}}? Your original request sounded like you wanted instances of "id Software" replaced with "idSoftware" e.g. on articles. 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 18:46, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
Oh, my mistake. You are correct. MrKIA11 (talk) 19:08, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
Does the template not use categories for its taskforces? It's not difficult to do, but it would be a lot nicer if there was a category that showed what articles had the "id Software" parameter. Otherwise you have to load every article using {{WikiProject Video games}}, and I'm going to estimate that is quite a few articles. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 11:55, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
No we don't use categories, but I thought the point of using a bot would be to go through those quickly. The other option would be to edit the template to see what pages are using the parameter, and do it manually, but I thought a bot would be easier. MrKIA11 (talk) 14:08, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
Well, a bot still needs to work out what pages use the parameter, and it has no other methods than we do to find that information. If a temporary category can be added, I can do a bot run for you. That much is trivial; it is finding the pages that's the interesting part! [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 14:29, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
Well if you want to add {{{id Software|}}} to the end of the template with the other old parameters, I can do the rest. I guess a bot is not the best answer for this situation. MrKIA11 (talk) 14:38, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
Depends how many pages there are :-) I have made the edit -- let's see how many pages it finds. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 15:04, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
I have done the edits on my main account with a script to help me. 84 edits made; all the edits that used the parameter id Software now use idSoftware. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 10:57, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
It's 24069 pages (22273 article talk pages), according to my handy template transclusion counter. Anomie⚔ 21:17, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
Which, for 84 edits, would have been overkill ;-) [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 10:57, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
Thanks. MrKIA11 (talk) 23:10, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
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