User talk:AllyUnion/Archive14

VFD bot isn't updating VFDL

Hi, the VFD bot hasn't updated WP:VFDL since June 27. I've had to update manually myself for the past four days. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 2 July 2005 05:52 (UTC)

Footnote bot

Wikipedia_talk:Bots#Footnote_bot: I'm writing code in a modified replace.py.[1] Do you have any interesting code fragments? (SEWilco 3 July 2005 23:24 (UTC))

Cabbage Hit

Hi. This is just a note to let you know that I've unprotected and deleted Cabbage Hit, since the troll who created it appears long-gone. The content was "This article has been recreated to protect against recreation vandalism. Please do not unprotect the article. -- AllyUnion (talk) 10:53, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)". If you disagree with my change, feel free to revert. Regards, Stewart Adcock 5 July 2005 11:58 (UTC)

Help desk wikiproject

I have created a new Wikiproject which aims to bring computer veterans and people who need help with software tools they use on Wikipedia together. I'm writing this to you because I saw you on the bot list and wanted to know if you would be willing to help. There is already an open case: WikiProject help desk/20050702 Dmcdevit. The Windows tool that Dmcdevit uses to perform Transwikis has broken since the software upgrade. Triddle July 6, 2005 22:33 (UTC)

Introduction Page

Hi! Sandbot hasn't made an edit to Wikipedia:Introduction since June 27. I found the page in a slightly vandalized condition earlier today and although I restored it the last good version included a modified comment. Do you know if there is a problem with the Bot? See the last Sandbot edit almost 500 edits ago. I guess no one is really watching the page diligently since I left - I'll try to check in on it occasionally. Trödel|talk 7 July 2005 17:32 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply - and thanks for all the work you do on the bots - I am sure many people are feeling the pain without them doing all the cleanup - Have a good day - Trödel|talk 8 July 2005 02:07 (UTC)

sandbox

how long douse my edits say in the sandbox's history. 69.115.115.236 9 July 2005 17:07 (UTC)

Deleting Mr. Horse

I'm a little confused. A few weeks ago I made a "Mr. Horse" article linked to the Ren and Stimpy Show article. The other day I saw that it was being considered for deletion. And therein lies the confusion - I've only been using wikipedia for a few months, and I find it an outstanding source of knowledge. However, not all of the "knowledge" in wikipedia is non-fiction, or, for a lack of a better term, real, i.e., fiction, cartoons, etc., and there are many pages devoted to things that don't, er, actually exist as reality. Since I felt a tiny paragraph on the Ren and Stimpy page didn't do the character justice, I gave the fictional equine his own article, so if anyone had a hankering for some more Mr. Horse, or had something to add, could. I vaguely remember the neologism (to me, anyway) "fancruft" describing the article...in any case, a quick search of wikipedia brought out the following fun fact - Petunia Pig has her own wiki page. Yes, Petunia Pig, fondly remembered by all as Porky Pig's belle. Now, if the fault here is that Mr. Horse is insignificant, fine - but where do you draw the line on how insignificant? If a third-tier character from an accepted, or "classic" cartoon franchise such as Looney Tunes can get her own page, why not Mr. Horse? If I actually delved further, I'm sure I could come up with pages and pages of such "fancruft" about obscure fiction characters - if wikipedia feels that these pages need to go, then so be it, but I just don't see who they're hurting, or why Mr. Horse was targeted specifically. -- thesmokingmonkey 10JUL05

Clarifiying Mr.Horse

Okay, now I understand. I made a second Mr. Horse page, perhaps, and the previous deletion vote came up on the page I made. I understand your role (I think), and I was just looking to clarify my confusion - nothing personal, not trying to rock boats or misbehave. Just trying to improve the encyclopedia and play by the rules. And, by the way, I've moved the "Mr. Horse" page to a new "Ren and Stimpy Show Characters" page. Sorry for the mix-up, and thanks for responding promptly.-- thesmokingmonkey 11JUL05

suggestion for NekoDaemon and similar bots

Hi - When you get NekoDaemon running again, can you change the time it runs? I think it's currently scheduled for 23:00 GMT (if I'm doing my time coversions right), by which time it is already the next day for nearly half the world. If it ran at 11:00 GMT then the next day's entry would be there shortly before the next day starts for folks in a +11:00 timezone. If the timing is also related to a load lull, then perhaps adding the entry a whole day early would be better. Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:26, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

You replied NekoDaemon is scheduled to create a new page exactly one hour before 0:00 UTC, just like VFD Bot. Then it is scheduled to run again at exactly 5-10 minutes before 0:00 UTC to add the pages. Then it updates and closes out the old pages 10 minutes after 0:00 UTC. However, the thing is that when you add a new entry to the page, the system goes by UTC since everything on the Wikipedia is run accordingly to UTC. It doesn't matter if part of the world is already a day ahead, the autolinker for the date runs by Wikipedia time, not by one's local time. --AllyUnion (talk) 06:54, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

The point is that not all CFD users understand that the relevant time is UTC, nor perhaps how to convert from their local time to UTC, nor necessarily what UTC even is (nor that the date transclude is added automatically, which is actually a separate issue that should be addressed, see Wikipedia_talk:Categories_for_deletion#Creating_a_new_day.27s_subpage) and occasionally folks east of Greenwich manually add a day file and the transclude. If NekoDaemon were pushed ahead 12 hours (at least the parts creating the day file and the transclude) someone in, say, Tokyo would never be tempted to do this. They might put their CFD entry in the wrong day's section (and, hence, in the wrong day file), but I don't actually think there's any particular harm this causes. Manually creating a day file with the incorrect name or screwing up the transclude mechanism in some other fashion seems like a much more problematic error condition. Are you thinking there's some harm in creating the day file and the transclude 12 hours earlier? -- Rick Block (talk) 13:35, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

The standard that the Wikipedia uses is to follow Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), simply because that's the easiest. Greenwich Mean Time is not the same as Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), as Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) is not affected by daylight savings. It is far easier to follow and force everyone on UTC than to follow on everyone's individual timezones. Furthermore, as I said before, the link to add the entry should be using the Wikipedia's server time which is based off UTC. The link is an auto-generated link cooresponding to the UTC day, month, and year. The reason for not creating it 12 hours earlier is just to prevent from anyone wreaking 12 hours of vandalism. I rather have a smaller window to assert that the page is fine rather than a lengthly 12 hour window. --AllyUnion (talk) 05:22, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

I fully understand Wikipedia runs on UTC (and the difference between UTC and GMT) and completely agree that it should. I'm still not understanding what the problem is with adding the link 12 hours earlier. Are you suggesting adding entries under the current "local" day rather than the current "UTC" day is vandalism? IMO this is a very, very minor user error. How about if the "active" day article starts with a header like "Please add new entries in this section" (rather than a date), and the bot changes the header to a date as part of making the next day's article active? Doing this I think there would be a small window where either there are two articles with the "add new entries here" header or there is no article with this header (I think I prefer the latter). In any event, I think we should do something to avoid the current situation where someone in Tokyo might think (incorrectly) s/he should add a new link and day article. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:01, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

FlaBot 2

Hey i still need back my FlaBot-Account. So pse switch it on and stop blocking my. I wrote a tool for Interwiki-Links so i need back my Bot. Blocking generating Interwiki in the EN-Wiki means blocking internationalisation in the Wikipedia. Greetings --Flacus 00:18, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

You will have to show me support from a well-established user before I unblock your bot, and the request must be made at Wikipedia talk:Bots. --AllyUnion (talk) 05:27, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

I have support. i nearly daily write with a Bot-Developer and put my ideas and my patches to him .. so he can fix, develop the bot .. i have always the last working Version from CVS so stop blocking my from work. Here is someone working for the wiki. --Flacus 03:32, 15 July 2005 (UTC) I am a will established user .. look at the number of edits i made in german wiki. I nearly daily talk with user of zwibot or Head and a few other german Bot user. You blocked me. You can reactived me .. So pse do it or i have to talk to other about my problem with your art of blocking.

Again, you must have another user post approving your bot operations at Wikipedia talk:Bots. If you feel that I've blocked in error, you may take it up to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. --AllyUnion (talk) 06:59, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Head postet something. i hope thats good and ok for the en-bot-policy ? --Flacus 22:41, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Text

Template:Text has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:Text. Thank you.

• Most of the voting period has elapsed. Little notification is being done. (SEWilco 15:37, 15 July 2005 (UTC))
• Perhaps explanation is needed in Template talk:Text. There is reference to this template in Template talk:Mapquest, so perhaps this is a subtemplate? (SEWilco 15:45, 15 July 2005 (UTC))

SEWilcoBot bot flag

When SEWilcoBot was making its mess of country templates, you expressed concern over it having the bot flag: Wikipedia_talk:Bots#SEWilcoBot. I have now requested the bot flag, and would appreciate if you can make clear whether you still are concerned about it. (SEWilco 15:53, 17 July 2005 (UTC))

Wikimania competition

I thought you might like to know that since a one of you images was one of the most popular WP:FPC nominations this year, I've entered it into the Wikimania Media Competition -- Solipsist 20:41, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

"User talk" bot?

Hello - I was wondering if you had, or were aware of the existence of, a bot that could post the same message to multiple users' talk pages? I am currently helping to organize the L.A. Wiki meetup, and am specifically avoiding using outside sites for mailing list purposes. It seems so un-Wiki-ful to use meetup.com, especially since they charge a fee now. Only users who have signed up would receive the one or two automated User talk messages per month reminding them to vote for a location and to attend. Any help is greatly appreciated. - Eric 23:26, 18 July 2005 (UTC) (Please respond here.)

Just saw the above note; if you have a bot, I would be interested in it as well so I can leave a message to all Mind Benders participants simultaneously, saving me a lot of time. Thanks a lot! Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk 18:56, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Mind Benders

Hello, AllyUnion! I once again turn to you for advice. In Mind Benders, where Round One just completed, one person (ROYGBIV) got the majority of the questions first. Deryck C., another participant, suggests that I inform all users when the page is going up so that every user has a fairer shot at answering the questions first. However, I feel that either way, the advantage is going to the user who logs in first. How do you prevent this from happening in WikiFun, aside from making the questions (insanely) difficult? Thanks! Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk 18:56, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Protecting my user page

Sorry for the annoyance. I'm away for a couple of days; hopefully things will calm down by the time I get back and we can unprotect it. Wish there was a way to watch user talk pages without also watching the user page! FreplySpang (talk) 11:47, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

Plautus arbitration case

It is at Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Plautus satire vs Raul654. Fred Bauder 11:26, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

Sandbot script?

Hi, could I get the script Sandbot runs, to use on my own wiki? --Phroziac (talk) 20:31, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

Stargate SG-1

This is really late, but I was thinking of something else when I editted the SG-1 page. I was wrong. --1pezguy 03:28, August 15, 2005 (UTC)

Abraham Lincoln precedent

User:AllyUnion - I see where you participated in the matter concerning Abraham Lincoln's sexuality that was discussed and voted upon on Talk:Abraham Lincoln. There has been a lengthy and exhausting discussion surrounding this exact same issue at Talk:Elvis Presley and the archived Talk pages as well. Because this has the potential to create a new standard for what is acceptable sources, I thought that you might want to be aware of it.

If the policy consensus you and others arrived at on the Abraham Lincoln issue is set aside in the Presley article it will result in new ones for countless others. I think your group discussion that arrived at a determination of what constituted a proper source should be defined by the Wikipedia community and set as firm policy which would go a long way in helping to substantially reduce the tiresome and repeated edit wars. Thank you for your interest. Please note I have left the same message for others who worked on this matter. Ted Wilkes 20:13, August 18, 2005 (UTC)

vandalism on the Game of Go page

You know when you complained about the size being messed up? It wasn't due to the template, but the template invocation...there is this vandal 67.32.163.29 who deleted portions of the invocation, such that the last parameter specifying size was no longer the 362th parameter, which meant that it was not parsed, and thus used the default size of the image, which happens to be 400x400 for each tile. I initially tried to assume good faith, but I noticed how the vandal only came again when I reverted his edits, and when I posted a message on his talk page and on the edit summary to ask him to stop, not did he not ignore it, he tried to delete my comments on his talk page. Please keep an eye on this. He has a previous history of vandalism too, but apparently no one bothered to warn him previously. -- Natalinasmpf 21:22, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Introduction

Help! All the introductory text above the "local sandbox" seems to have gone missing. I can't figure out if it's your newly revised bot or vandals, and I can't find the right version of the history of the page to revert to.... Mamawrites 08:01, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Nevermind, I figured it out. Sorry to bother you, you look very busy! Mamawrites 08:05, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

re: VFD Bot & Policy discussions

I think that makes sense. The name change doesn't change the fact that this box is a dynamic transclusion. It never becomes "static". Including it in the archive pages adds nothing but creates a potential (admittedly very small) for confusion. If it's still easy to remove via the bot, that would be ideal. If not, I'll do them by hand when I notice them. Thanks. Rossami (talk) 19:09, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

re:Kurando-san

first of all it seems to work great and I got a laugh on the fact that the name is a bit of a play on words, anyway what I was wondering is how often it checks FPC to do the heading moves. Jtkiefer ^{T | @ | C} ----- 01:00, August 22, 2005 (UTC)

Creating a new day's subpage

I fully understand Wikipedia runs on UTC (and the difference between UTC and GMT) and completely agree that it should. I'm still not understanding what the problem is with adding the link 12 hours earlier. Are you suggesting adding entries under the current "local" day rather than the current "UTC" day is vandalism? IMO this is a very, very minor user error. How about if the "active" day article starts with a header like "Please add new entries in this section" (rather than a date), and the bot changes the header to a date as part of making the next day's article active? Doing this I think there would be a small window where either there are two articles with the "add new entries here" header or there is no article with this header (I think I prefer the latter). In any event, I think we should do something to avoid the current situation where someone in Tokyo might think (incorrectly) s/he should add a new link and day article. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:01, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

I apologize for this late reply. I started work and my Wikipedia activity just dropped. The server variables control how something is added to a page. Meaning that it is always auto-linked according to UTC time. It doesn't matter if the other half of the world is a day ahead, the automatic link will always follow UTC time. The concept is illustrated on WP:VFD, where it has "Follow this edit link" The page uses these variables: {{CURRENTYEAR}}, {{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}}, {{CURRENTDAY}}. These variables ALWAYS follow the server settings of UTC time. The full link in wiki text is:

[{{SERVER}}{{localurl:Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/{{CURRENTYEAR}}_{{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}}_{{CURRENTDAY}}|action=edit}} this edit link]

Although CFD does not have this particular link, it should since everything on the Wikipedia should follow UTC time. The reason that it is harmful to add the page 12 hours ahead is due to the confusion over timezones. We won't have any method to clearly judge the order of an entry without UTC time. Entries are always placed with newest at the top. But if someone signs their signature with UTC time, then the entries should be lined up according to UTC time. Placing an entry into one day ahead of the Wikipedia may cause the entries to go out of order. Because then you might have people adding to day after the Wikipedia, when they shouldn't. (They add into August 21st, when the Wikipedia is August 22nd... then you have a confusion over where the entry is placed.) Furthermore, it is not that adding entries into a page 12 hours before is vandalism, it's just that you create a window of opportunity of 12 hours for vandalism... rather than just one hour. I can see the reasoning behind your request for WP:CFD but I strongly believe the project should follow UTC despite any date confusion. It would be, actually, more useful adding the automatic link that says, "Add new entries following this link" or something like that. That would force everyone on the same page and on the correct date. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:08, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Sandbot question

I was just wondering how you can get a bot to perform an automated task, like how sandbot cleans out the sandbox. Thanks, Shardsofmetal 02:40, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Cfd log index

Hi, thanks for having your bot finish the rest of these. I started to do them manually, as I havent coded my bot to do it yet, and it's not approved. I just figured you were on wikibreak or something. Cheers. ∞Who?¿? 19:59, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Kakashi Bot

Heya, Kakashi Bot is running pretty quickly (faster even than the 1req/10s recommended for registered bots), and spamming up WP:RC pretty badly. Could you do these things on one of your flagged bot accounts in future? Thanks. --fvw* 20:03, August 23, 2005 (UTC)

VfD/Old

Hey AllyUnion, so do you trust me to maintain Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Old (adding the daily link and the statistics part)? By the way, your bot does not check if a link already exists, so it creates duplicates. My own bot checks that because it is a bit more sophisticated. So what do you think? I have been wating for an answer since Sunday. Oleg Alexandrov 01:08, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

I very much would like to write everything in Perl for all my bots, in particular, for VFD Bot. It's just that I haven't found any Perl code that easily gets the data from the Wikipedia and parses the wiki code. What I've found is that there is something, but it requires a lot different modules of perl to install for it to function properly. (I gave up in frustration, and stopped using it.) The Python pywikipedia framework gave me a set of nice features to use, but the Perl implementation I've seen hasn't come even close to the features that the Python implementation has.

I would like to very much work with you in writing the code together for VFD Bot, as the stats you place on WP:VFD/Old follows much of the work required to do User:AllyUnion/VFD List. I would very much like to try to keep the maintainance from VFD Bot and have your bot account separated from that work. What do you think? Please reply at my talk page. --AllyUnion (talk) 17:44, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

This is a lot of stuff to reply to. Let us start with the Perl vs Python thing. I use the Perl module Meta:WWW::Mediawiki::Client which indeed needs around six other Perl modules to install. but it is not that bad, I did it several times, on Linux. You are right that the Perl package has only upload/download features, and even those are rather limited.

I don't know how much I could help with the VfD bot if that needs Python programming. Python is a really clean language, but I know it little, and anyway from what I saw it is a bit clumsy to use for text processing, which is all the bots do.

Anyway, if there is anything I could help with while doing Perl programming, just let me know. Oleg Alexandrov 22:51, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Actually, I wrote a small Python script to read in Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Old, and add a link to the VfD page five days ago. It uses regular expressions, so it will not introduce duplicates, and also it will not get confused by my statistics. Could you try out the following script? Before doing that, one would need to have Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Old saved to disk as a file called 'data.txt'. This because I was to lazy for the moment to integrate the pywikipedia framework.

#!/usr/bin/python

from time import gmtime, strftime, time
import re

# read the file [[Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Old]] (for now, call it 'data.txt')
fileHandle = open ( 'data.txt' )
vfdold= fileHandle.read()
fileHandle.close()

# define the five days ago and six days ago links (first is not a regular expression, others are)
day = 60*60*24  # one day 
fivedaysago_vfdtag  = '* [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/' + strftime('%Y %B %d', gmtime(time() - 5*day )) + ']]'
fivedaysago_vfdtag_re  = '\* \[\[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/' + strftime('%Y %B %d', gmtime(time() - 5*day )) + '\]\]'
sixdaysago_vfdtag_re = '(\* \[\[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/' + strftime('%Y %B %d', gmtime(time() - 6*day )) + '\]\].*\n)'

# add the line fivedaysago_vfdtag to vfdold unless this already exists
if not re.search(fivedaysago_vfdtag_re, vfdold):
    pattern = re.compile(sixdaysago_vfdtag_re)
    result=  pattern.search(vfdold).group()
    vfdold = vfdold.replace(result, result + fivedaysago_vfdtag + '\n')

print vfdold

Oleg Alexandrov 02:50, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

I was under the impression you have to compile the regex in Python before using it... All the bot code (For VFD anyway) is currently located here: User:AllyUnion/VFD bot code --AllyUnion (talk) 06:15, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and the section you should look at is en-wp-vfd-old-update.py --AllyUnion (talk) 06:41, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

OK, your new code does not get confused by anything. It works as long as the <!-- Place latest vote day above - Do not remove this line --> tag is present. Nice. I will add the stats today then, and will see if your bot gets indeed confused or not.

About compiling Python regexps before using them, I did for one of then, and not for the other. Seems to work. :) Oleg Alexandrov 15:24, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

Unicodify bot

Well, I'm running it manually, in the sense of checking each edit within minutes. So it hasn't been turned loose. But I'll go ahead and put a notice on the talk page. -- Curps 06:29, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

I have replied at Wikipedia_talk:Bots#User:Curpsbot-unicodify. Can you explain why you are opposed to using literal Unicode Chinese articles in English Wikipedia articles? You can hardly prevent ordinary users from typing in the Chinese name of Yao Ming or Hu Jintao or other Chinese who will be famous in the future, and from now on, with Mediawiki 1.5, all of those edits will be in literal Unicode Chinese characters. -- Curps 02:47, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Nyah!

What's with NekoDaemon's "...Nyah!"? siafu 01:12, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

VFD Bot issues

Sorry to bother you about this, but the following events occurred last night:

1. Uncle G's bot created the VfD page: [2]
2. I added a VfD entry to that page: [3]
3. Seven minutes later, VFD Bot wiped it out: [4]

Just wanted to inform you.

~~ N (t/c) 13:57, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

VFD/PFD

Hi there! A gradual renaming process has started to move "votes for deletion" to "pages for deletion". Would it be possible to modify VFDBot to create the daily page accordingly? Thanks. Radiant_>|< 08:36, August 27, 2005 (UTC)

• See Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion. There's still some discussion going on so feel free to join. I'm not asking that you make changes to the bot immediately, I would simply like to know if it's feasible or a lot of work or anything. Radiant_>|< 08:37, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
  • Consensus would be "Articles for deletion". User:Uncle G is working hard at implementing it, please discuss specifics with him. Radiant_>|< 09:27, August 29, 2005 (UTC)