Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 17

This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Bot requests. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current main page.

Archive 10

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Archive 15

Article spelling

Can someone make a bot that can 'read' through an article and decide what spelling it appears to be using? For example if it mainly uses British spellings of words, one would conclude that the article is using British English and place such a tag at the top of the article (see my proposal at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (spelling)#A proposal to make spelling use clearer). It could give the percentages of words using each spelling as an output. It's difficult for a human to do this because reading takes time, and it's hard to find words that indicate the spelling being used. A list of most such words would be necessary for creating the bot, of course (see e.g. WP:MOSS for a short list), which I'm sure would be available somewhere. Just a British/American version would be a good start, as those are the main two varieties when it comes to spelling (and most familiar; if I said an article was written in New Zealand English many wouldn't know whether that was closer to British or American). Richard001 (talk) 22:19, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

If you can find a Free/Open source dictionary I'd be willing to give a try to add to the readability tool. —Dispenser (talk) 22:34, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't know anything about FLOSS dictionaries unfortunately. I thought there might be something at the spelling differences article, though I can't see anything relevant. What about the one Firefox uses though, wouldn't that be a free one? The Google results I'm getting don't look very good either, and I'm not sure I'll know if I have the right thing if I find it, so it's probably best left to someone else. Richard001 (talk) 22:58, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Somewhat similar, Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SpellCheckerBot which makes use of the aspell library. I'll look into seeing if that provides dialect differentiation. —Dispenser (talk) 23:34, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I got something running which uses ispell. It and Firefox use the same dictionaries as they are incorrectly identifying spelling. Example from spelling differences shows: barmy, quin, grotty, and haulier are incorrectly British spellings, grody, filet, and boogeyman are invalid American spellings, and the charivari does not exist in the language. I had pondered if we could have wiki lists for the different spellings, but that's of the point of wiktionary. However, they aren't classifying words as well as we need. Its using categories but many words lack categories, words like mum and mom have links to each other using the {{wikt:template:qualifier}} with the region but no categories indicating that. With these issues it looks like this wont be happening at least now. Though it would be cool to see graphs indicating colloquial, informal, and language (loanwords) usage in articles. —Dispenser (talk) 07:23, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

WP:CFDS

Resolved

I realize that there are multiple bots already performing tasks on this page, but I was wondering how the BAG feels about one more. Basically, I have already been moving categories using AWB, and after clicking "save" 100-200 times, it gets a bit repetitious. Since AWB has the necessary functions already programmed in, I would not have to do any programming (good, considering I know nothing more than some VB.NET, not enough to make a bot). Obviously there may be room for another bot, as if there weren't, I (a non-bot) would not have been able to get in an edit. My ultimate question, what is the likelihood of the BAG giving a bot flag to such a bot account? --Vox Rationis (Talk | contribs) 22:29, 12 January 2008

see WP:CFDW β^_command 04:40, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Only problem is that WP:CFDW is fully protected! Thus, only admins can get the bots to do the work? And for me, that would mean bugging an admin to getting it posted every time there is a change (daily). --Vox Rationis (Talk | contribs) 15:46, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

talk to an admin who is involved with CFD as they are willing to do that too. β^_command 02:35, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

...so...user posts on WP:CFDS, another user posts for admin to move, admin (being busy, as admins are) takes a while to get around to it, posts it to WP:CFDW. Bot turns on, and makes the move. 4 steps....or...User posts on WP:CFDS, I run AWB in bot mode, and make the move. 2 steps. My question is not how to do it under the current system. I know that. I can read policy pages. My question is "what is the likelihood of getting a bot approval for this?" I wouldn't want to rush into a Request for Approval without knowing first that there is a good chance of getting approved. So far, I have only had the answer of an IP address, whose (no offense) only edit has been that reply. --Vox Rationis (Talk | contribs) 02:58, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

You would not get approved, just ask an admin to make CFDS part of the daily CFD updates. User post to CFDS, admin closes and posts to CFDW. end of story. β^_command 03:01, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I really don't mean to seem like I am pestering, but I must ask, why? Wouldn't this fall under WP:IAR? Why would the BAG not want a simple semi-automated bot, doing something that I've done several times already, in an ever so slighty easier way, without affecting the nature of the process, et cetera, et cetera. WP:CFDW has not seen much action over the past few days, and I am not the only one who has done these edits themselves using AWB. As I see it, my proposal would solve these problems. The only change would be me not clicking the "save" button 100 times. What ever happened to WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY? I like to do as much as I can by myself, and so, to me, it wouldnt feel right to bug an admin to do tasks for me, when it would seem easier for me to do them myself (and mediawiki software does not restrict me from doing so). So then, maybe my question is, "why not?" Sorry if I seem pestering, but the more I think of it, the more it seems trivial, considering the number of AWB bots out there already.--Vox Rationis (Talk | contribs) 04:41, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Plain and simple, CFDW is the proper place to handle the issue. there are already plenty of bots that do CFD work. there is a reason that CFD is protected. its a bot control center. we dont want people messing with the bots. Like I said just ask an admin who is involved with CFD to add CFDS to their daily task. (its no big deal. admins are glad to handle this). β^_command 04:46, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

This is the place for requesting others to run a bot. But yes the answer to your question is highly likely. 207.6.245.26 (talk) 05:17, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

"This is an appropriate place to simply put ideas for bots" (quote from top of page).--Vox Rationis (Talk | contribs) 15:47, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

A search request

I'm pretty sure this is work for a bot. I was wondering if a bot would be able to search Category:Green Bay Packers articles by quality to see which pages have {{dyktalk}} on them and then give me a list of those articles. I think there is only about 6 or 7 articles that do but there are 960 articles in the category and it would be a lot of work to search by hand. Thanks in advance!
Gonzo fan2007 ^{talk ♦ contribs} 23:16, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Talk:Ade Schwammel, Talk:Merv Pregulman, and Talk:Jack Clancy. Mønobi 00:27, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you!
Gonzo fan2007 ^{talk ♦ contribs} 01:57, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

WPCHINA

Is it possible for someone to assess Category:Unassessed China-related articles (tagged {{WPCHINA}}) by both class and importance? Thanks. Maork (talk) 11:23, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Mexico tagging request

Request that {{WikiProject Mexico|class=|importance=}} be added to the talk page of all articles not currently containing it from the following categories.

This is annoying and uncalled for. Please use a WikiProject sub page to list categories and discuss the details of a particular request. -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 03:25, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

This page was revised earlier to state that subpages shouldn't be used anymore, so I followed that guideline which is still in place above. Personally, given the length of the proposal, I would have kept it as a subpage myself, but this page currently says to list them directly on the page. The categories chosen were all specifically relevant to the nation, although I can't be sure how big many of them were. Those categories which dealt with content involving other states I didn't list and went through item-by-item myself. I have no doubt there was a lot of overlap, but the staggering number of categories made the possibility of going through them all problematic. John Carter (talk) 14:50, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Let me know when you do; I was working on that. SQL ^{Query me!} 03:27, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, I got the full list from history, and, I'm running the requested task. SQL ^{Query me!} 04:07, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Athens tagging

Anyone? _{El Greco}^(talk) 17:14, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

I modified your original request to remove the "somethings", which aren't necessarily required. It can take a few days for a request to be answered, though, particularly when the bot operators are doing something else. John Carter (talk) 17:35, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

No problem then. I'm in no rush. _{El Greco}^(talk) 17:38, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Doing it myself, as your request is older than any of mine will be. John Carter (talk) 20:54, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

So does nobody check this page then, because I was really excited and hoping to see the bot? Thanks though. If you see this message in time, what category haven't you done yet so I can also chime in. _{El Greco}^(talk) 00:09, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

No, they do check the pages. You'll note the huge number of Mexico articles that just got tagged, somewhere around 4000. It's just a matter of when people come to look at the page, and right now the bot operators are probably busy elsewhere. Right now, I've gotten through Category:Areas of Athens and its subcats, Category:Buildings and structures of Athens and its subcats, and Category:Culture of Athens, and am now into Cateory:Sport in Athens. If you wanted to start at the other end and we could both work our way to the middle, that'd probably be the best way to go. John Carter (talk) 00:12, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Ok sounds good. I'll start from Category:Transport in Athens and work up from their towards the middle, or whatever I can get to tonight. _{El Greco}^(talk) 00:16, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, I took care of Category:Transport in Athens and subcats, Category:Streets in Athens, Category:Squares in Athens, Category:Mayors of Athens, Category:Metics in Athens, and Category:Kings of Athens, but not Category:Ancient Athenians and Category:People from Athens. _{El Greco}^(talk) 01:46, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I tried to do this, but for some reason AWB crashes when doing this. β^_command 17:15, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Are you going to try again? _{El Greco}^(talk) 23:53, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Im waiting for a response from the AWB devs to figure out what the problem is. when that is solved Ill clear this out. β^_command 00:54, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I hope the problem is figured out and solved. _{El Greco}^(talk) 02:16, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Request for possible new bot, if such is required

One of the problems several WikiProjects have is keeping up with the new articles relevant to their project constatly being created. The only way I know how to easily see which new articles haven't been tagged is to go through them and see which haven't been tagged, which can be problematic. This proposal, I think, might help alleviate those concerns, if it is possible.
The WikiProjects in question can tag the talk pages of categories they believe contain items all of which will be relevant to their project. Category:Luxembourg's articles should all be relevant to that nation, for example.
Would there be any way to have a bot run through articles in categories which have already been tagged as directly relevant to a given project and place the appropriate banner on the talk pages of those articles which don't yet have the project banners?
If yes, then I can encourage several of the projects to tag categories for use in this function. I realize it is potentially a staggering task, but it is the only way I can think of for projects to keep track of newly created articles relevant to their project that they aren't necessarily informed of. Thank you for any and all responses. John Carter (talk) 15:09, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

SatyrBot's WikiProject Services provides what you need, new page handling.--Balloonguy (talk) 17:37, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Automobiles bot

This bot would tag pages with the project template.... and also note links to any GA/FA's the article went through. Anyone know how to code it?? --Solumeiras ^talk 17:15, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

What categories need tagged? Mønobi 02:56, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Clans of Scotland

Hello Bot requests team, I was wondering if someone would be able to run a bot through Category:Scottish clans and ALL (I've checked) its subcategories and tag the talk pages with the project banner - Template:WikiProject Clans of Scotland? This would mean editting in {{WikiProject Clans of Scotland|class=|importance=}} to the top of talk pages as standard. If there are any questions, please feel free to ask me. -- Jza84 · (talk) 15:18, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

It probably would be easiest to list the subcategories anyway. People can, after all, potentially create new ones or recategorize them later, and listing the ones you want tagged ensures that there isn't any question later about whether you meant a given category or not. John Carter (talk) 15:37, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

OK, no problem. The subcategories are:

Category:Scottish chiefs, Category:Scoto-Norman clans, Category:Clan Comyn, Category:Clan Grant, Category:Clan Campbell, Category:Clan Bruce, Category:Clan Bruce (Ghana), Category:Clan Comyn, Category:Clan Donald, Category:Clan Fraser, Category:Clan Grant, Category:Clan Henderson, Category:Clan MacDougall, Category:Clan Napier.

Does that help? -- Jza84 · (talk) 15:48, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Running.... SQL ^{Query me!} 05:10, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Done SQL ^{Query me!} 06:04, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Apostrophes in decades

Hi all - I think it would be a useful addition to WP's "punctuation police" to have a bot regularly removing apostrophes from decades. I for one get annoyed reading of things that occurred "in the 1920's and 1930's" and the like, and I think it would be a pretty simple to program a bot to look for "the 19?0's" and remove the apostrophe. Grutness...wha? 09:30, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

If referring to something belonging to the one year 1960, "1960's" is proper. A semiautomated bot could help an editor find improper usage. Can "the 1960's" be proper usage (note "the")? -- SEWilco (talk) 15:27, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't think so, which is why I specified that in the rquest. There is an indie rock band called "The 1990's", but that would be the only exception to the rule AFAIK. In any case, any exceptions would be so few and far between that a "please notify if wrong" note would probably see virtually no action. Grutness...wha? 03:02, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

EditorBot

I'm bringing this here because it got archived before anyone listened to me. How bout a bot that creates articles on French towns with insee and the fr Wikipedia as a source? Editorofthewiki (talk) 19:51, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Apparently no bot operator/coder is interested. β^_command 19:55, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Could you get someone interested? I would do it myself if I knew a darn thing about creating bots. Since we have articles on all US and Italian towns why not French? Editorofthewiki (talk) 20:29, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

if people are not interested there is nothing that can be done to force them into doing it. β^_command 22:34, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

You can't force them, but you can suggest it. I know some burecrats would like this idea if they knew about it. Editorofthewiki (talk) 22:45, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Its the way the page auto-archiving is handled a single reply will start the archive timer on the thread. Some of the good ideas die before I get around to reading them due to this :(. Anyway, if you find some good machine parseable datasets I'd be willing to lend some help. Of course that's the hardest part. —Dispenser (talk) 03:32, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

AfD relisting bot

I think I proposed this a while ago to no avail, but... I and other admins closing WP:AFD discussions would really appreciate a bot that automatically relists discussions that have been tagged with the {{relist}} template. Doing it manually is a bother, particularly since the large AfD pages take quite some time to load. Thanks, Sandstein (talk) 21:20, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Redirects

Many times a user wiki-links a common term that is actually a redirect to the primary spelling. This is fine, so long as the redirect isn't turned into a disambig or article about the actual common term. While we have a bot that goes through and corrects double redirects, I'm wondering if a bot that went through and pointed articles at the redirect target, might reduce the redirect aging issue. It should only do it for article-space wikilinks that point at redirects. I'm not seeing any issue, since the re-linking would be hidden thanks to wiki-markeup magic MBisanz ^talk 05:44, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Please see WP:REDIRECT if its not broken, dont fix it. β^_command 17:57, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Okey, makes sense since that policy has consensus. And don't worry, I wasn't proposing it would save any resources. The scanning and editing alone would've outweighed the benefit of fewer page loads. MBisanz ^talk 18:16, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

On the same subject, why is the talk page of a redirected article not automatically redirected? We have to place a page move request and wait, wait. Please create a robot that will immediately move the talk page of a renamed/redirected article. Thanks. Emmanuelm (talk) 16:46, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

That is not a simple fix. BCBot has run into these when tagging images. the fix is not always simple, and please talk to the users who do this. β^_command 17:20, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

On yet a similar note, why don't we have bot, or part of AWB, that redirect (and name) of links to their correct name. An example would be changing Gamecube → GameCube, SONY → Sony (Correct Capitalization), and Encyclopaedia Britannica → Encyclopædia Britannica (unicode name). The primary purpose here would be to make sure the correct title are used for links. —Dispenser (talk) 03:14, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

AWB has an option for typo corrections. You can recommend additions at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos. -- JLaTondre 03:22, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

I just added some to the new area, it doesn't seem to work. Which is good for typo fixing not good for this. I've already put in a feature request for collaborative regex setting but seeing as how the simpler request are still linger on a few months afterwards I doubt it'll be added. —Dispenser (talk) 10:03, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikiproject Cricket

Hello there! I am asking for a bot to tag all articles in Category:Cricketers by nationality and its sub categories with {{WP Cricket|class=|importance=}} as long as the tag doesn't already exist. There are some glaring ommissions in the coverage of the wikiprojects tag, including some current players and coaches from the top teams in the world, despite some of the articles being quite well developed. It would be very much appreciated, thank you!

Ill get a full list of sub cats for you to double check, then ill tag them all. β^_command 17:03, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

see User:BetacommandBot/Sandbox 3 and remove any that should not get tagged. β^_command 16:45, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Wrestling portal

Could a bot add {{Portal|Professional wrestling|break=yes}} to all the articles in Category:WikiProject Professional wrestling articles? TJ Spyke 01:14, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Where at on the page?. β^_command 01:34, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

In the external links section of the article. For articles without an external links section, just near the bottom of the page (or whatever is easier for the bot). TJ Spyke 02:16, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Category bot

Hi. I'm looking for bot script that automatically scans and moves pages from categories marked with {{categoryredirect}} to the correct category. I'm planning to run such a bot on id.wiki. I asked User:selket to share the bot script, but still no answer. He owns User:Selketbot which the only bot I know so far that run such a program. Can anyone help me? borgx ^(talk) 01:58, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

You might be interested in m:category.py. Mønobi 03:00, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

No promises, but, I'm experimenting with doing this... SQL ^{Query me!} 06:25, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

It would probably make sense to manually approve a category rename, since category pages aren't protected. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:38, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Cleaning up the use of Australian Biography templates

In order to clean up the confused use of three templates for the different Dictionary of Australian Biography and Australian Dictionary of Biography, a migration of wrong uses away from {{Australian Dictionary of Biography}} has been done, mainly manually it seems (my former request was archived).

Now I request the help of a bot to replace all remaining uses of the abbreviated template name "ADB" to the proper "Australian Dictionary of Biography" in order to avoid future confusion. Please replace " {{ADB|" with "{{Australian Dictionary of Biography|" in the less than 200 articles that still use the short form. Thanks in advance! -- Matthead DisOuß 16:14, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Transclusion bot?

I’m not sure if this is possible . . . probably because I’m not entirely clear on how these bots operate. Would it be possible for a bot to continuously (or at intervals) look through the Articles for deletion Logs and place a Transclusion of any deletion discussions for articles that are tagged with Template:Contemporary music on a subpage of WikiProject Contemporary music? Because of the highly specialist nature of these pages, and because there are relatively few of them it would be very helpful for all concerned if a bot could compile these discussions for us. Thanks, --S.dedalus (talk) 00:09, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Have you tried setup up a global watchlist? You use Special:Recentchangeslinked on a page that has all the pages you wish to watch. Examples: Wikipedia:WikiProject Pokémon/index and Wikipedia:WikiProject The Simpsons/Watchlist. —Dispenser (talk) 00:59, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Well that might do it for me if I can overcome my profound dislike of watch lists. :-P Oh, I just found what I was thinking of. WikiProject Deletion sorting handles this question. I guess better I’d propose this there instead. Thanks for your help. --S.dedalus (talk) 01:54, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Replacement of deprecated templates

If it would be possible to replace the current {{WikiProject Chad}} and {{WikiProject South Africa}} on talk pages with {{AfricaProject|class=|importance=|Chad=yes}} and {{AfricaProject|class=|importance=|South Africa=yes}}, respectively, retaining any existing assessment information from either, it would be very much appreciated. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 19:02, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

If these projects are considered inactive or subsumed, then soft redirect these banner templates to {{AfricaProject}} rather than expending hundreds of database write requests in changing them. If these projects ever start up again the banners can be easily separated out again. I have done the Chad one - let me know if you think this is ok. Happy‑melon 19:07, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Right. I was thinking you could have {{WikiProject South Africa}} contain {{AfricaProject|South Africa=yes|class={{{class|}}}|importance={{{importance|}}}|nested={{{nested|}}} ... }} and so forth. No bot needed. Gimmetrow 19:13, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

I forgot nested! That's pretty important :D. But yes, as you can see at {{WikiProject Chad}} this is exactly what I've done, and what you can do for all the others. You might want to check the wording outside the <onlyinclude> tags - I'm not sure I've summarised the situation correctly. Happy‑melon 19:29, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Mis-categorization fix

Can a bot please deal with Category:Articles needing coordinates from January 08? The pages there all have {{Locateme|date=January 08}}, and the 08 needs to be fixed to 2008. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 06:23, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Request for category list

I know that this will be questioned, but it would really help for the new Africa project banner to have a list of all the subcats of Category:Africa. Please place the content at User:John Carter/Africa categories. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 16:58, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

running. β^_command 17:00, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much. I knew it would be huge, but at least now I can arrange the per-country tagging requests in the future more easily. John Carter (talk) 14:56, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

that is only two levels down. After that it branches waaay too much. if you want deeper checks of individual categories Ill gladly do that. β^_command 15:01, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Alphabetizing 'see also' sections and 'disambiguation' pages

It would be useful if a bot could automatically alphabetize 'see also' sections and disambiguation pages. Disambiguation pages would be a little more complicated on account of the different subheadings - each subheading should probably be in the proper alphabetical order and each item under each subheading should also. Do you think this is doable? It's a drag to do manually. ----Seans Potato Business 23:12, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that's a good idea but some pages have non-latin characters in see also and disambiguation. --Jay ^{Lights! Camera! Action!} 16:20, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Well, the bot could just group these together at the bottom or end of each list or sublist. If there are common non-Latin characters that keep re-occurring, and a reasonable order could be ascribed, then maybe they can also be put in order and appended to the ends of the Latin lists. ----Seans Potato Business 21:00, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

its doable, if you can point me to a large see also or disambig that needs fixed I could get started. β^_command 21:06, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Some "see also" sections are intentionally arranged in some non-alphabetic way. Would also need care handling dab pages of people with middle names. Add the issues about diacritics and piped links, and I don't think this is a good candidate for an automatic bot. Gimmetrow 21:19, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

What's a 'dab page'? What has it go to do with middle names?

With a piped link, the bot simply takes the name after the pipe, and in the case of diacritics (had to look that word up and I don't recall every having seen one), then they can either go before or after the relevant position. Suppose * was a diacritic. Then [*crab paste] would go after [crab apple] but before [cupboard].

One to start with might be POP but a real bot could probably just go to all the disambiguation pages using the list of disambiguation pages. ----Seans Potato Business 22:42, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the wiki lingo. A dab page is a disambiguation page. If we were looking at "John Doe (disambiguation)", how should we order "John B. Doe (actor)", "John Bob Doe (accountant)", "John Bob Doe (singer)", "Jack (John) Doe (actor)", "Johnny Doe (actor)", "Johann Doe, Jr.", "Johann Doe, III" and "Jean Doe (football)"? Yes, there are rules for sorting, but they can also be organized thematically, and usually the most important or most common use comes first. (By the way, I run a script which sorts lists on a WP: page, so I have some experience with the technical issues of this task.) Gimmetrow 23:24, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Convert pages to use infobox

Most of the articles linked from this template use some sort of hand-made infobox thing. It is just awful. Could a bot be created that converts the articles to the correct infobox? Timneu22 (talk) 14:47, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Cant you just make Template:Sailing dinghies and skiffs redirect to Template:Infobox Sailboat Specifications? --Jay ^{Lights! Camera! Action!} 16:20, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

No. one is a navbox, one is an infobox. All the items listed in the navbox should be using the infobox, but many have the hand-made thing that I mention. Timneu22 (talk) 00:44, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Fixing comments after sections for the new preprocessor

See M:Talk:Migration to the new preprocessor #problem with comments on the same line as section headings. Can someone create a bot to fix all headings edited by User:Anchor Link Bot? Specifically I want a bot that adds a new line between the end of a heading and Anchor Link Bot's comment. The bot made over 9,000 edits so I don't particularly want to fix them by hand. Graham87 02:25, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

This is no longer necessary, I've changed the parser. -- Tim Starling (talk) 09:43, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Requests for Adminship Tallying

Please see also This discussion. The question has arisen as to whether it would be possible to have a Bot that counts Support, Oppose, and Neutral !votes for a candidate for Adminship, then updates a tally on that page showing the counts. A bot exists which updates a report on all RfAs, but we were thinking of a bot that would add an inline tally for each individual RfA. The tallys for current RfAs are plaintext, and are updated manually by whichever editor feels the need to do so. Thanks in advance, UltraExactZZ ^Claims~ Evidence 20:41, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Not a good idea. the current method works fine. β^_command 00:11, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

No worries - it came up in discussion, so I thought I'd ask the question. Thanks for the quick response. UltraExactZZ ^Claims~ Evidence 02:12, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps you could convince someone to have some conditional code written to the one of the bot-generated reports so the page could be transcluded with an optional parameter. If that parameter were present, then the template would only generate a table with the vote counts for the one user it matched. Then every RFA could have something like {{User:Tangotango/RfA Analysis/Report|user=Whoever}} (or the equivalent for the other report). Whoever closes it would have to replace this with the final tally, but nobody would have to update it during the live RFA. Gimmetrow 09:38, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Songs articles without samples

Category:Song articles missing an audio sample lists all the song articles that do not have an audio sample. This is indicated by the lack of | Audio sample? = yes in the infobox. However, some songs do have a sample, but either | Audio sample? = yes has not been added to the box, or the box still says | Audio sample? = no (either scenario will add the article to the category). Can someone make a bot that can detect if the article contains any the templates {{extra musicsample}}, {{listen}}, or {{Multi-listen item}} and then add | Audio sample? = yes to the infobox?--Esprit15d • talk • contribs 18:22, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Edit Summary

I would like help creating a bot that would automatically remind people, who miss more than 10 edit summaries a day with this message template: {{Summary}}. It would also edit the edit summary - (is this possible?) and add: "Added to __________" <--- (section name they added to)) or something else. Hopefully someone can help out! - Milk's Favorite Cookie 22:44, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Editing an edit summary is not possible. What about people who are working on stuff a lot in their own userspace, or developing essays and so forth of which they are the only main editor at the time? 204.244.60.114 (talk) 01:49, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

BTW: not directly related to bots and edit summaries, but I want all talk page edits to be signed automatically, unless the user specifically ticks a checkbox not to do this for this very edit. -- Matthead Discuß 01:54, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Bot to change column heading

Within the scope of WikiProject Formula One, there are 803 race report articles, each of which contains a results table with a standard set of columns. A recent discussion at WP:F1 has decided that one of the column titles should be changed from "Team" to "Constructor". Rather than edit all 803 articles manually(!) we thought it would be more efficient to get a bot to make the change. I can provide further details (e.g. list of articles to be edited, exact change to be made) if someone is interested in taking up the task. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 00:14, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

~~I could probably do this, given some sample articles and a few more details. Gimmetrow 00:16, 26 January 2008 (UTC)~~ I'm not going to be able to do this, so if anyone else wants the task, please contact User talk:DH85868993. Gimmetrow 06:15, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Athens tagging

Anyone? _{El Greco}^(talk) 17:14, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

I modified your original request to remove the "somethings", which aren't necessarily required. It can take a few days for a request to be answered, though, particularly when the bot operators are doing something else. John Carter (talk) 17:35, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

No problem then. I'm in no rush. _{El Greco}^(talk) 17:38, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Doing it myself, as your request is older than any of mine will be. John Carter (talk) 20:54, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

So does nobody check this page then, because I was really excited and hoping to see the bot? Thanks though. If you see this message in time, what category haven't you done yet so I can also chime in. _{El Greco}^(talk) 00:09, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

No, they do check the pages. You'll note the huge number of Mexico articles that just got tagged, somewhere around 4000. It's just a matter of when people come to look at the page, and right now the bot operators are probably busy elsewhere. Right now, I've gotten through Category:Areas of Athens and its subcats, Category:Buildings and structures of Athens and its subcats, and Category:Culture of Athens, and am now into Cateory:Sport in Athens. If you wanted to start at the other end and we could both work our way to the middle, that'd probably be the best way to go. John Carter (talk) 00:12, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Ok sounds good. I'll start from Category:Transport in Athens and work up from their towards the middle, or whatever I can get to tonight. _{El Greco}^(talk) 00:16, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, I took care of Category:Transport in Athens and subcats, Category:Streets in Athens, Category:Squares in Athens, Category:Mayors of Athens, Category:Metics in Athens, and Category:Kings of Athens, but not Category:Ancient Athenians and Category:People from Athens. _{El Greco}^(talk) 01:46, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I tried to do this, but for some reason AWB crashes when doing this. β^_command 17:15, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Are you going to try again? _{El Greco}^(talk) 23:53, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Im waiting for a response from the AWB devs to figure out what the problem is. when that is solved Ill clear this out. β^_command 00:54, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I hope the problem is figured out and solved. _{El Greco}^(talk) 02:16, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Did this get fixed? _{El Greco}^(talk) 00:56, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Fixing image tag

Hello... It was recently brought to my attention that a bot that I help operate has been using a template syntax that is broken in with the new preprocessor. We've changed the bot so that all future uploads will be correct, but we're wondering if someone would be willing to help fix the past uploads. Essentially, the task boils down to scanning these images and replacing

{{self|GFDL-no-disclaimers|cc-by-sa-3.0{{!}}[[Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation]]}}

with:

{{GFDL-no-disclaimers}}
{{cc-by-sa-3.0|[[Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation]]}}

Anyone able to help us with this? AndrewGNF (talk) 18:59, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Taking care of it. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:07, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Tax protester/Request for comment

Please follow the (now undeleted) redirect to Talk:Tax protester/Request for comment/RfC, so the cross-name-space redirect can be properly "speedied". All refererences, even on user talk pages, must be redirected. My IE is broken, or I'd do it myself, using AWB. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 17:17, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Done. Hope I didn't break anything. Happy‑melon 17:35, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

I've re-done it a bit differently. Cheers! bd2412 T 18:57, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Automatic archival for WP:GL/IMPROVE

We'd like a bot tasked to automatically archive sections that are marked with the {{Resolved}} template in Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Images to improve. -- I. Pankonin Review me! 01:04, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Im beta testing a tool that does that. do you have a time related boundry also? β^_command 01:07, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

We'd like the resolved sections to stay for 3 days if possible and then be archived daily. -- I. Pankonin Review me! 01:11, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

What about stale comments, (sections without comments after without recent activity). β^_command 01:37, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, could you archive those a week after being tagged with the {{Stale}} template? -- I. Pankonin Review me! 01:51, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

User:MiszaBot is also currently undergoing a rewrite to do this.↔NMajdan•talk 03:07, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

User:jaytur1/Wiki points/list

Can somebody make a bot that undoes any edits on User:jaytur1/Wiki points/list that is not made by that bot or me? --Jay ^{Lights! Camera! Action!} 16:20, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Not possible while remaining within the boundaries of the Three-revert rule. Why would you want to, anyway - who would want to edit a user subpage often enough to require automatic reversion? Happy‑melon 21:06, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

3RR doesn't apply to edits to one's own subpage, no? Anyway, if you run a bot on your own account, one trick is to use a .js page (like Wikipoints.js), which could only be edited by you or admins. Gimmetrow 21:25, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

There's nothing in WP:3RR to say there's anywhere it doesn't apply. In general it's not the precise details of the action that matters, but the spirit - if you knowingly and deliberately reverse the same change to the Wiki three times in 24 hours, no matter where you do it or how justified you think you are (with a handful of exceptions - WP:BLP etc), you get burnt for it. Simple as that. The only reason someone would make an edit to another user's subpage is if they thought the change was genuinely necessary - that means you need to look at the change carefully and make sure that you're not doing something you shouldn't, and that the change genuinely isn't needed. Automatically reverting such changes before any human has the chance to look at them is not the correct way to react. Happy‑melon 21:52, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Actually, WP:3RR#Exceptions mentions editing one's own user subpages, but I think it would help more to know why exactly the user wants this? If it's to eliminate vandalism, using a .js page would work. But I don't see much vandalism on that page; I see User:Maelgwnbot removing a semi-protection logo from a non-protected page. If that's the problem, then the solution is either that the logo shouldn't be there, or the page could be semi-protected. Gimmetrow 04:42, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, what I meant to say was there's nowhere you're completely safe from 3RR - even in your own userspace if you revert someone removing BLP etc, you can get it. As I say, it's the spirit that matters. Anyway, any reverting bot isn't reverting in its own userspace so this partial exception doesn't apply. Happy‑melon 13:53, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

OK Can somebody write me a .js script? It's an online database that I dont want messed with, but it's to do with WikiPoints. --Jay ^{Lights! Camera! Action!} 18:21, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

So I have User:jaytur1/Wiki points.js insted of User:jaytur1/Wiki points/list, and only I (and admins) can edit it? --Jay ^{Lights! Camera! Action!} 19:36, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

That's correct. Any page that ends with ".js" or ".css" is assumed to be code, and therefore dangerous if edited by other than the owner or an admin, because it's quite common for other editors to import or copy user scripts and css code from others. It doesn't matter what the actual text on the page is - the system assumes it is (or could become) code. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:55, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I tried to do that but it's not as good. --Jay --G T C-- 16:23, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Kaliningrad-Königsberg

As Königsberg is a proper article now, all remaining [[Kaliningrad|Königsberg]] should be replaced. Thanks in advance. -- Matthead Discuß 01:01, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

I think I got them all.--Dycedarg ж 09:30, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

User talk page header for anonymous IP addresses

I have proposed at Wikipedia:IPtalk proposal to add the following template at the top of long user talk pages for anonymous IP addresses:

User:Shalom/Drafts and archives/Template:IPtalk

A bot may be programmed to do this, if the following two issues can be resolved:

How will the bot select only long pages? It would be a massive waste of resources for the bot to add this template to every anonymous user talk page.
Can the bot add this template without disrupting users? Normally any edits to a talk page will trigger a "new messages" banner, but someone suggested that bots can be programmed not to do this.

For more information, please read Wikipedia:IPtalk proposal. Thank you. Shalom (Hello • Peace) 20:12, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

I know that for number 2 to happen it would require a bot flag from a bureaucrat, which if the bot passes BRFA won't be hard to get. Compwhiz II^(Talk)_(Contribs) 21:03, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

1) Use a select query on the toolserver to select all user talk page like x.x.x.x with a size above a certain threshold. 2) Get a bot flag and mark the edit as minor. In short I guess the hardest part is passing the BRFA. --Erwin85 (talk) 21:28, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Instead of querying every single IP talk page, which would be a waste of resources, toolserver or not, you could simply scan IP talk pages that appear in recent changes. Some IP talk pages may be massive, but have had no edits since 2004 or 2005. It's a waste to tag a page like that. Mønobi 23:15, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

In this case I think it would also be a good idea for the bot to maintain a log of pages it has added the template too, so it isn't querying commonly edited IP pages every time they show up forever.--Dycedarg ж 00:37, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm working on this. I need to know how larger (in bytes) the page should be before adding the notice. Mønobi 02:47, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I'd say graph the size of the talk pages, and WAG it from there... --Auto ^{(talk / contribs)} 01:47, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

References

As a result of this discussion, I'm guessing that the Wikipedia:Geographic references templates will be replaced by standard references. These templates are used in tens of thousands of US place articles, many of which have no reference sections, because the GRs link elsewhere. If the conversion takes place, could someone write a bot to add ==References==<br>{{reflist}} to all articles that have GR templates but no references section? One note, by the way: if this is done, it should be ensured that the reference sections go above the external links sections. Nyttend (talk) 16:42, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Ive got a tool that adds ref sections to articles that have <ref> but no ref sections. β^_command 16:45, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

The thing is that the template would simply be something like {{GR|2}}; there wouldn't be any refs in the text itself, since subst-ing isn't going to be done. Would this still work? Nyttend (talk) 17:51, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm just about to offer the code to replace the template with a switched set of standard refs. Placing the ref tags inside the template will enable them to display correctly without any changes to the articlepages, but the reference numbering will be broken per the well-known bug. What will be necessary is to replace all instances of {{GR|#}} with <ref>{{GR|#}}</ref>, so that we can move the ref tags outside the template and thereby avoid numbering inconsistencies. If someone is interested in doing that, the migration shouldn't be too painful. Happy‑melon 19:09, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Linking to my new username

I've just changed my username from Cedar-Guardian to Cedrus-Libani. But I intend to remove the redirect. Could a bot change all links to User:Cedar-Guardian or User talk:Cedar-Guardian to my new username, while keeping the same signature? Thank you. CG (talk) 06:44, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

I have free time I can do that manually, for you. --Jay ^Tur ₁ (Contribs) 08:41, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

It's not needed on normal links only redirects. --Jay ^Tur ₁ (Contribs) 08:55, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Done Redirects. --Jay ^Tur ₁ (Contribs) 09:04, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

But I'm intending to delete my old username Cedar-Guardian, that's why I would like to change all links. CG (talk) 15:38, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

We have re-directs for a reason. When changing usernames you dont delete the redirects. β^_command 15:40, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

m:Right to vanish warns that old signatures on previous comments should not be changed, when a user changes his name. Quoting the language from that document, "Your work, including 'signatures' (text indicating your authorship of comments) on all but your own user and talk pages, will usually not be changed or removed. To change these would be a major source of disruption."

Not only should the old signatures be left unchanged, but your point about the redirects is puzzling. Unless there is an off-wiki security issue, there is usually no reason to undo the redirect from your old user name to the new one. If for some reason you want no-one to know of the connection between the accounts, you would be better advised to start completely from scratch, something that you haven't done. EdJohnston (talk) 17:44, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Need to populate a new list for Wikipedia:Bots/Status

Resolved

– I asked the help desk and somebody did it.

I'm working on replacing Wikipedia:Bots/Status with a more intuitive system of templates that are cleaner, easier to use, and standard so that they could more easily be controlled by bots.

The foundation for the new system is over at User:Zenwhat/Sandbox. It's all finished, pretty much. The list just needs to be populated and the information proofread and verified.

I was going to start adding stuff manually by hand, but it occurred to me how much of a blatant waste of time it would be since it could be automated in a matter of minutes.

So, that's what I need ANYBODY to do:

Pull the information from the table Wikipedia:Bots/Status
Populate the table at User:Zenwhat/Sandbox using Template:Botstatus. The six parameters of the template correspond to each column of information.
If a column of information is left blank, please output "Unknown".
The exception to #3 is if the BRFA link is left blank. If the BRFA is left blank, then don't add "Unknown." Just don't add that parameter and the template will automatically generate Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BOTNAME in the sixth column.

This is automated editing, so shouldn't require any bot approval. If you need to wipe the existing list in order to create it, that's OK too.

Also, don't worry if it's not precise. I know that to fix stuff like putting the date in standard form, I'll probably have to do all that by hand. I just need the basic information wrapped within the template, so that it's easier to work with. ☯ Zenwhat (talk) 10:07, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

The Box (TV channel)

This article used to be about a UK TV station. It was moved to The Box (UK TV channel) due to their being a New Zealand TV channel with the same name. As a results, there are dozens of articles that link to The Box. Could a bot change all links to The Box (TV channel) to The Box (UK TV channel)? TJ Spyke 03:32, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Please read the section #Correct redirects above, particularly the first wikilink. We don't correct single redirects. (Example: bunch of links in articles A1, A2, A3, etc., that point to B, which is now a redirect to article C. There is no need to point links in A1, A2, A3, etc. directly to C.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:46, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it seems that when The Box (TV channel) was moved to The Box (UK TV channel) it was made a redirect to the disambiguation page The Box, not a redirect to The Box (UK TV channel), so all the links pointing to it need to be disambiguated. I'll take care of it.--Dycedarg ж 22:34, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Done--Dycedarg ж 23:06, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. When the article was moved, it didn't really seem neutral for The Box (TV channel) to redirect to the UK one when there are two TV channels with the name. TJ Spyke 02:48, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Red links in a WikiProject

I was wondering if someone could make a bot to search every article in a WikiProject {{WikiProject Oregon}} for red links. I think there is a similar one for the entire encyclopedia. Then the output would be something like:

Red link article name
Article name(s) containing the red link [1] [2] [3] [4]
Number of articles that link to the red linked article

This would help to find high priority red links, as well as find instances of mis-titled links that may just need adjustment to become blue links, or even a need to standardize some red links that may have varying titles but really are the same thing. Thanks. Aboutmovies (talk) 23:04, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

I can do this, but first: For the second part, would you only want names from articles in the WikiProject? And also, what subpage would you like the results dumped to?--Dycedarg ж 18:48, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

1) I would want all articles that link to the red link, that way it would be obvious if there was a disambiguous issue. 2) How about here Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/redlinks. Keeps it simple. Thanks. Let me know if you need any other clarifications. Aboutmovies (talk) 18:58, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

OK, I should have it done for you some time later today.--Dycedarg ж 23:13, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Great. Thanks for the help. Aboutmovies (talk) 02:37, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Done Sorry about the delay, some other stuff came up that I had to take care of. Also, your project has a few more articles than I had anticipated and running the bot took a while.--Dycedarg ж 02:53, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I also had to split the list between multiple pages due to its size. The resulting pages are still rather long, so you may want to split them further.Additionally, the script was supposed to prevent duplication of the links, but it may not have worked perfectly and there are too many results for me to go through and check right now. But I don't think there are any duplicates.--Dycedarg ж 02:56, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Tabulation of data on articles within a category

Hi. Would anyone be able to generate for us a statistical table that shows key aspects about the articles in a category? The table would show, for any applicable articles within the category: article name and as much as is relevant/feasible: type of page protection, moves/RM, number of reverts, 3RR requests/results, RfC or 3PO and tags such as Disputed. Please let me know on my Talk if you might be able to create the table. Here's a prototype of the table that we've started to do manually. (FYI, the categories sought include Category:Israel and Category:Palestine, for this Wikiproject.) Thanks very much. Please reply to my talk if possible, HG | Talk 10:19, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Would anyone be willing to say something about the feasibility of this request? No commitment to do it. Thanks. HG | Talk 20:24, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

COI Bot

Frequently a person or company will decide they deserve an article on Wikipedia. They'll create an account in the form of "company x" or "John D" and then create an article "Company X Inc." and "John Delorean". I'm looking for a bot that would scan NewPages and output a list to WP:COIN or WP:COIN/Bot that lists article that have 4 or more characters in the same order as the creating username. So Ryan Youens created by User:RyanYouens will be picked up, but the hypothetical article MANS BIZ created by User:MBisanz wouldn't be picked up. Its sorta like Coren's Search Bot, only without the tagging aspect. MBisanz ^talk 09:45, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

User:AlexNewArtBot/COISearchResult perhaps? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:48, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Good idea, but you're ten months too late :P The string-matching function may be a little different from what you describe, though. Gracenotes^T § 17:49, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Though it does pretty much like what you describe (and a bit more, it does the same for added links). COIBot tries to match as big as possible fragments between username and domain added/username and page edited. If that results in a two-way overlap of more than 25% (intricate mechanism), an alert is logged. Hope this helps. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 19:03, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Bingo, thats what I was hoping for. MBisanz ^talk 19:37, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

In case you have more questions, the bot and I are on IRC, #wikipedia-spam-t, though here or on my talkpage is also fine. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 19:56, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Removal of data for a named reference

When we are talking about ref... We should have a bot that check for the removal of named refs and if that removal leaves any <ref name="aname" /> tags that subsequently break with "Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named facts_and_figures". It is a common problem that can be confusing for the less experienced users and at times remain for in articles for weeks on end. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:47, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

What would be the easiest way for a bot to come up with a list of articles where this problem exists? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:33, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

I think you can only do it by tracking the recent changes for actual removing of the "parent named ref". If you know that, you can check a page for "remaining" <ref name"" /> with the same name and either tag, categorize or auto fix. Perhaps there is a way to track the actual error as well, but I'll have to ask the devs for that I think. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:54, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

I have made a bugzilla feature request for a Special page that would list pages that have encountered such errors. bug #12930 No ETA on such things though of course :D --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:25, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Correct redirects

Hello. Can someone program a bot to correct some redirect links for me? Though I'd like to know if I can list a couple of those right here. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 03:38, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

In general, redirects are left as is, per WP:Redirect#Do not change links to redirects that are not broken. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:56, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Haro (anime) currently redirects to the character, who appears in its an anime and manga, not just an anime. Am I supposed to go to WP:RFD? Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 21:51, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

If you have a problem with a particular redirect, go ahead and change it to something more correct, if that seems clearly better to you, and see what happens. If someone else disagrees, yes, go to WP:RFD if you can't work it out. Or go to WP:RFD if you have good reason to believe the change would be controversial. Or point the redirect to a disambiguation page and let the reader decide.

More to the point (for the purposes of this page), if you don't have a bunch of redirects that need changing, this isn't a bot issue. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:26, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Here are the pages that link to Haro (anime). Does this count as a bunch? I'd do it manually, but it's time-consuming, and quite a bother if I may add. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 05:43, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Don't understand. There are a bunch of pages (let's say A1, A2, A3, A4, ... ) that have links to B, a redirect, that points to article C. You don't like B (the redirect) pointing to C. You can change that with a single edit - to change C to point to D, a new disambiguation page). Now while A1, A2, A3, etc., continue to links that point to B, someone clicking on the links there will be redirected to D. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:45, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

So I'm on my own. Well, I do have some time available. Thanks anyway, Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 18:48, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

You're on your own to do something that you've not explained (a) needs to be done (as noted above, single redirects should not be changed) or (b) can't be done by simply changing an existing redirect. Why don't you do a couple of edits and then provide diffs here, if you're having trouble explaining why you think you need to do what you're planning to do? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:31, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Western Sahara tagging

Request that the articles in the categories below each get tagged with the following template: {{AfricaProject|class=|importance=|Western Sahara=yes|Western Sahara-importance=}}:

Category:Western Sahara, Category:Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Category:Politics of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Category:Elections in the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Category:Presidents of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Category:Prime Ministers of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Category:Buildings and structures in Western Sahara, Category:Communications in Western Sahara, Category:Sahrawi culture, Category:Religion in Western Sahara, Category:Sahrawi music, Category:Economy of Western Sahara, Category:Education in Western Sahara, Category:Environment of Western Sahara, Category:Geography of Western Sahara, Category:Landforms of Western Sahara, Category:Settlements in Western Sahara, Category:Cities in Western Sahara, Category:Government of Western Sahara, Category:History of Western Sahara, Category:Sahara conflict, Category:Organizations based in Western Sahara, Category:Sahrawi people, Category:Sahrawi society, Category:Ethnic groups in Western Sahara, Category:Sahrawi tribes, Category:Sports in Western Sahara, Category:Transport in Western Sahara, Category:Western Sahara stubs. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 15:24, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Ill get to this when BCBot is unblocked. β^_command 15:56, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

I can take this one, BC.

John Carter, do you want the bot to attempt an automatic assessment of each article? EG: Look for "Stub" tags, "FA" or "GA" ratings? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 16:48, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

That would work fine. If you can do it, and apparently you can, that would be wonderful. John Carter (talk) 17:06, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Let me know if I can help with anything else. -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 17:49, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Assess as stub is stub template exists on article page

Resolved

– ↔NMajdan•talk 18:33, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

A recent run by BCBot slammed our WikiProject with thousands of unassessed articles after having less than a hundred for months. BCBot has already assessed the articles that were assessed from another project. Any way I can get a bot run on Category:Unassessed college football articles that will automatically assess articles "Stub" class if they contain some form of stub template on the main article page?↔NMajdan•talk 17:58, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Is there a bot for this? Bueller?↔NMajdan•talk 19:52, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

If you could give me a list or something of stub templates I'd be happy to look into this. Unless anyone else wants to. --Erwin85 (talk) 21:42, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there's no adequate list of stub articles. There is Category:College football stubs and its subcats, but that list is not all of the stubs. You can go through that list of if the {{WikiProject College football}} banner exists, assess it as a stub (do not add banner to articles that don't have it). But there are certain player position stub cats that aren't in this list. You could probably go through Category:American football biography stubs and its subcats and, again, if the WikiProject banner already exists, assess it as a stub. I don't think that would cause an issue since the banner is already on the article's talk page. These categories contain articles that are not relevant to the college football WikiProject (for instance, a stub article on a coach who coached professionally but never collegiately). Sorry, typing stream of thought. Go through the two categories above and their subcats, and if the above banner already exists assess as stub. Do not add the banner to any article.↔NMajdan•talk 22:10, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

It would also be handy if whatever bot processes this request could remove the |importance={low|mid|high|} parameter from whatever banner it edits as this parameter has been deprecated by the project. I'm trying to hold off any real involved manual assessing until this bot runs. Thanks.↔NMajdan•talk 19:29, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Anybody?↔NMajdan•talk 04:16, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I know, I'm being annoying/persistent. In addition to the request to tag articles as stubs if they are in a stub cat, I'm going through some articles and I'm seeing many that are not assessed for WP:CFB but are assessed for other projects. I thought BCBot took care of this last week? Anyway I can get another run of this?↔NMajdan•talk 21:31, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Anybody?↔NMajdan•talk 15:57, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Bueller?↔NMajdan•talk 16:38, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Haha. ^Avruchtalk 21:16, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Summary: Maybe re-summarizing my request will get it going. Run the bot that assesses articles that have been assessed by other projects on Category:Unassessed college football articles. Run a bot through Category:College football stubs and Category:American football biography stubs and if the WikiProject College football banner already exists, then assess as stub. Do not add any articles in the categories to the WikiProject. Thanks.↔NMajdan•talk 19:14, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Guess that didn't help.↔NMajdan•talk 14:33, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Nmajden, SatyrBot may be able to help with this. The way I have the bot set up, it will start with articles that have the WikiProject template. Then it takes each article and looks at what templates are transcluded in main-space. If there are any "-stub}}" templates, it will rate the article a stub. That means even if the article has "biography-stub" but not "amfoot-bio-stub", it will still get rated that way. Is that okay? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 20:10, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I don't see an issue with that. Just as long as it doesn't add anything to the Project, which you say it does not. Thanks.↔NMajdan•talk 15:19, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

It's been pointed out to me that the bot is making a small error, so I'm doing some fixing. I may not get to this project today, but if not, tomorrow :) -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 15:49, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Very minor fix. I'm back on this :) -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 16:12, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

What is your bot doing? Says its assessing but it looks like it is improperly adding WikiProjectBannerShell instead. Again, thanks for doing this (when you do get around to it). I've been waiting awhile.↔NMajdan•talk 20:25, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

That's exactly what it's doing - an error in programming. I'm working on it :) -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 21:12, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I might have some work for Satyrbot ;-/ (requested in the appropriate place) I've also proposed a slightly different assessment bot over on the Talk page if anyone has thoughts on it. FlagSteward (talk) 14:11, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Linking categories for foo albums and foo songs

I think it would be nice to link the categories of Foo albums and Foo songs. Example Category:Tracy Chapman albums and Category:Tracy Chapman songs. There's overwhelming precedent to keep eponymous categories to a minimum. That makes sense but people browsing these categories would probably like to flip from one to the other. For an example of what I think would be nice see my edits to Category:Beck albums and Category:Beck songs. Sure, small task. But worthwhile I think. I suppose this could be done through AWB or some author semi-automated script or other method but a bot would be able to maintain this in the future. Pichpich (talk) 04:37, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Bot to populate a category of undercategorized articles

Another proposed bot task. There was talk sometime ago at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject_Categories/uncategorized#Dregs_at_the_months_end to use Alaibot (talk · contribs) (or some other bot) to populate a category of undercategorized articles. A whole bunch of articles are categorized solely in categories which are not intended for browsing, such as Category:Living people, Category:XXXX births, Category:XXXX deaths or Category:XXXX albums. These articles are often lost in Wikipedia neverland and it would be nice to identify them for cleanup purposes. There are probably thousands of these articles and there's really no rush in identifying them all in one go but a bot could periodically add a few hundred to something like Category:Undercategorized albums or Category:Undercategorized people so that the relevant WikiProjects could fix them. Pichpich (talk) 17:54, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Not having enough categories need not be a problem; see also the essay Wikipedia:Do not write articles using categories. What would be the exact criteria for the classification "undercategorized"? Articles which have categories, but which are common classifications which communicate no meaningful communication? (Birth years, death dates, etc., as you mentioned.) We do have a bot, UnCatBot (talk · contribs), that goes around and tags uncategorized articles, though. Gracenotes^T § 18:05, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

The uncategorized bots (UnCatBot, Alaibot, Betacommandbot all chip in at various times), as you say, pick up only articles with no categories. Alaibot was used a few times to do something a bit smarter: identify articles who only have stub-categories. What I'm proposing here is a variant of the latter. I'm not looking for an exact criterion for undercategorized but it should be easy to identify articles who are solely categorized as XXXX albums and/or foo-album-stub. Throw these in undercaegorized albums. Then identify articles who are solely categorized as XXXX births, deaths, living people (maybe even foo-country people) and throw these in undercategorized people. I suppose we could do something equivalent for films, songs, books so long as the relevant wikiprojects are interested. Pichpich (talk) 18:33, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Easy one

Easy one: can some friendly bot populate Category:Sega arcade games? This should simply be the intersection of Category:Arcade games and Category:Sega games. CatScan says there are 129 of them in depth 1, which should do for now (maybe go to depth 2 for the Sega games category since there are subcats like Category:OutRun. Thanks, Pichpich (talk) 00:01, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Done --Auto ^{(talk / contribs)} 05:12, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Pichpich (talk) 16:59, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Need to change "Homobasidiomycetes" to "Agaricomycetes"

OK, I want to change the taxon "Homobasidiomycetes" to the more current Agaricomycetes in articles on fungi (the former already redirects to the latter), but it's used in so many taxoboxes that according to Special:Whatlinkshere/Homobasidiomycetes, there are some 270 pages that need to be changed. Clearly, I need some kind of automated assistant to do this. Can anybody set up a bot account for me to do this, or run one of their own bots to make this change? Thanks, Peter G Werner (talk) 18:58, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Try WP:AWB, should take less than an hour or so once you get the settings correct. MBisanz ^talk 06:14, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Compwhiz II^(Talk)_(Contribs) 00:14, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Done Compwhiz II^(Talk)_(Contribs) 00:47, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Auto tagging request

Request that the articles in the following categories be tagged with the following banner: {{ChristianityWikiProject|class=|importance=|indian-work-group=yes}}

Thank you. John Carter (talk) 18:05, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Compwhiz II^(Talk)_(Contribs) 01:16, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Not done Sorry, Just not up for tedious work like that, even with AWB. Compwhiz II^(Talk)_(Contribs) 01:28, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Done β^_command 18:18, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Bot tagging request

Request that the talk pages of articles in the following categories be tagged with {{WPReligion|class=|importance=|Interfaith=yes|InterfaithImp=}}:

Thank you. John Carter (talk) 17:59, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Done β^_command 18:43, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Here's one

Just a thought: wondering if there was a bot able to change incorrectly marked [<insert page name here>]] and [[<insert page name here>] to [[<insert page name here>]]. I've noticed this a lot around here recently. Editorofthewiki (talk) 21:30, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Anything that uses the general fixes feature of AWB. — Dispenser 22:30, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

However, it would be infeasible to...wait...I may be able to generate a list with the SQL query select page_title, el_to from page, externallinks where el_from=page_id and el_to like "%[\[\]]%"; - but I'm not sure if that regex is correct. Then editors would be able to fix them. --uǝʌǝs ʎʇɹnoɟ ʇs(st47) 21:20, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Web pywikipedia scripts

I have constructed a minimal web-based variant of pywikipedia. It can run pywikipedia scripts with little modification. Would anybody like their script(s) to be ported to this framework? — Dispenser 20:16, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Hmn, sounds interesting. I'm not familiar with the toolserver, other than that it does a huge number of useful things, this potentially among them. Am I correct in assessing the advantages as increased database access speed and the ability to run scripts on a continuous basis? Would edits remain logged to the account of, say, MelonBot, or would they be logged to your account? And I assume it goes without saying that you need the submission of python sourcecode so you can check it before converting...? Happy‑melon 20:41, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

While your assumption about the toolserver are all correct and it indeed runs many bots, this isn't a bot. It, however, allows users to run bot scripts which the results are returned in a web form which allows users to submit edits as their own. This is useful for some scripts like reflinks, which can be tested on the Mary Barksdale article. — Dispenser 22:18, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

“

The toolserver's database is read-only — tools can't directly update Wikimedia pages — so toolserver tools tend to be report-oriented.

”

— m:Toolserver/Introduction

Am I correct in assessing the advantages as increased database access speed : Actually, I believe that this is wrong. You *can* use MySQL to access the replicated databases, but this is a read-only access, and SQL requests are not completely implemented in pywikipedia; If you plan to use pywikipedia the normal way, i.e. querying pages from the servers, the access is external, i.e. not much faster than querying from your computer/the server you're using.

NicDumZ ~ 07:41, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

This is a different implementation of pywikipedia. I've only written parts as they are needed with the aim of a small code footprint for quicker audibility and faster start up time, at the moment it imports only 2 libraries and has 230 lines of code. Compare this to the stock wikipedia.py which imports 20ish libraries and has 5740 lines of code. Few functions are implemented which is the reason scripts need modification. I have unimplemented code right now that will take advantage of the read-only replication servers that the Toolserver has access to. But this request is just asking if there any pywikipedia scripts that people want ported to the Toolserver in an interactive way. — Dispenser 15:42, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Cleanup deleted links

Since they wre deleted, I'd like for a bot to remove every instance of {{TNTF}}, {{TNTF2}}, {{TrollWarning}} and this category from Wikipedia. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 16:10, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Done, using AWB. Cheers, Black Falcon ^(Talk) 16:39, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Help with diffusing

Trying to clean up Category:Professional associations by diffusing when appropriate. Could a bot remove the redundant Category:Professional associations from every member of the following categories

Please do not do the same for the other subcategories for now: I've only checked the three above for correctness. Thank you. Pichpich (talk) 00:04, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Only 24 pages in common. I can do this with AWB for you.--Fabrictramp (talk) 00:24, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Done--Fabrictramp (talk) 00:45, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Pichpich (talk) 00:46, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Reparing wikilinks with # bookmarks when the section name has been changed

About a year ago, I did a lot of editing due to a municipal reform in Denmark. Many municipalities were edited, and in most of those, I wrote some text with this wikilink: Municipalities of Denmark#Municipality Reform 2007. That's fine, it used to work, however, the section name has now been changed to Municipalities of Denmark#Municipal Reform 2007. So I would like a bot to go through and fix those. I'm guessing this has been an issue before on other pages so a bot probably already exists that can do it, right? -Lilac Soul ^{(talk • contribs • count)} ^{• I'm watching this page so just reply to me right here!} 22:28, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Done--Dycedarg ж 00:00, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Splendid, thank you very much! -Lilac Soul ^{(talk • contribs • count)} ^{• I'm watching this page so just reply to me right here!} 00:14, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

You could also have inserted an anchor with the old section name just before the section heading. See Help:Link#Section linking (anchors). PrimeHunter (talk) 00:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I thought of that, but there weren't really all that many links to change and the more unnecessary code sitting around in an article the more annoying it becomes to edit it.--Dycedarg ж 00:45, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Article classification within Formula One project

Hello,

Is it possible for a bot to find any article with {{F1-stub}} in the article mainspace, and produce the following statement in the article's talkpage if not already there -- {{WikiProject Formula One|class=stub}} ?

I am manually classifying these articles, and this will simply make a multitude of obvious stubs (there are many) faster and easier to classify.

Please let me know. Guroadrunner (talk) 03:31, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Doing...--Dycedarg ж 03:47, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Done--Dycedarg ж 04:07, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Guroadrunner (talk) 05:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Cleanup deleted links

Since they wre deleted, I'd like for a bot to remove every instance of {{TNTF}}, {{TNTF2}}, {{TrollWarning}} and this category from Wikipedia. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 16:10, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Done, using AWB. Cheers, Black Falcon ^(Talk) 16:39, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Help with diffusing

Trying to clean up Category:Professional associations by diffusing when appropriate. Could a bot remove the redundant Category:Professional associations from every member of the following categories

Please do not do the same for the other subcategories for now: I've only checked the three above for correctness. Thank you. Pichpich (talk) 00:04, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Only 24 pages in common. I can do this with AWB for you.--Fabrictramp (talk) 00:24, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Done--Fabrictramp (talk) 00:45, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Pichpich (talk) 00:46, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Reparing wikilinks with # bookmarks when the section name has been changed

About a year ago, I did a lot of editing due to a municipal reform in Denmark. Many municipalities were edited, and in most of those, I wrote some text with this wikilink: Municipalities of Denmark#Municipality Reform 2007. That's fine, it used to work, however, the section name has now been changed to Municipalities of Denmark#Municipal Reform 2007. So I would like a bot to go through and fix those. I'm guessing this has been an issue before on other pages so a bot probably already exists that can do it, right? -Lilac Soul ^{(talk • contribs • count)} ^{• I'm watching this page so just reply to me right here!} 22:28, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Done--Dycedarg ж 00:00, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Splendid, thank you very much! -Lilac Soul ^{(talk • contribs • count)} ^{• I'm watching this page so just reply to me right here!} 00:14, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

You could also have inserted an anchor with the old section name just before the section heading. See Help:Link#Section linking (anchors). PrimeHunter (talk) 00:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I thought of that, but there weren't really all that many links to change and the more unnecessary code sitting around in an article the more annoying it becomes to edit it.--Dycedarg ж 00:45, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Article classification within Formula One project

Hello,

Is it possible for a bot to find any article with {{F1-stub}} in the article mainspace, and produce the following statement in the article's talkpage if not already there -- {{WikiProject Formula One|class=stub}} ?

I am manually classifying these articles, and this will simply make a multitude of obvious stubs (there are many) faster and easier to classify.

Please let me know. Guroadrunner (talk) 03:31, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Doing...--Dycedarg ж 03:47, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Done--Dycedarg ж 04:07, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Guroadrunner (talk) 05:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Requesting lists of Top-importance articles

I think it would help us all if it were possible to point out to various projects and other collaborations which articles that fall within their scope are currently assessed as Stub or Start class and also as Top importance by some project, their own or not. Would there be any way of getting a list of the Stub-Class/Top-importance and Start-Class/Top-importance articles according to the current assessments? I could then break it down so that many/most projects would see which articles they deal with might be good potential collaborations. John Carter (talk) 19:25, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

you might be intrested in WP:DABS or WP:BABS β^_command 20:13, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Bot needed to repair mistakes of unauthorized bot

Please see archived ANI thread for details. In short, Gary King (talk · contribs) used what seems to be an unauthorized AWB-bot to categorize articles in the uncategorized articles backlog. However, the resulting categorization suffers from serious problems: overly broad categories, incorrect categories, failure to recognize articles that need to be sent to some deletion process, etc. In short: all these articles should be returned to the backlog. I have suggested two solutions: use a bot to rollback all the categorization done by this bot or create a temporary Category:Categorization needs to be redone (or something like that) and populate it by identifying the edits of Gary King's bot. The latter solution is probably better since rolling back the edits of the bot will return articles to maintenance categories that have since been deleted such as Category:Uncategorized from December 2007. I know that this will be a bit of a headache but we need an automated way of fixing this. We're talking about at least a thousand, maybe two thousand articles so doing this manually is not an option, and categorization of uncategorized articles is an important filter of junk and one of the most effective ways of making sure that articles are not lost in Wikipedia nowhere land. Pichpich (talk) 16:54, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

It looks as if he's reversed himself, although that's still probably an unauthorized bot. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 17:06, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

(ec)Mr King seems to have spent most of yesterday undoing his original edits. I don't know if he's done all of them, but he appears to be making a good-faith effort to undo any damage he caused. If bot-work is still needed to fix this, let us know. Happy‑melon 17:10, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Actually, he started and we asked him to stop, precisely because it was still an unauthorized bot. I've asked for his input so that we can have a better understanding of how extensive was his undo. Pichpich (talk) 17:12, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I undid only a couple of articles, not all of them. Gary King (talk) 17:30, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

A few points:

(a) It is unclear when User:Gary King started categorizing using this method. There may be a pre-2008 batch that need review.
(b) Spot checking these, not all of the categories are wrong. To avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I suggest leaving existing tags and adding something like Pichpich suggested.
(c) I clearly define "a couple" differently than User:Gary King. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 17:34, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Userspace errors

User:MZMcBride created a list here User:MZMcBride/Sandbox 8 of all pages in the userspace that don't have a registered user associated with them. i.e there is no User:X in Special:Listusers for page User:X/sandox. This is generally frowned upon since these pages don't have a user who they belong to. There is somewhat of a consensus at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Page_move_.2F_delete_cleanup that this task would be too lengthy to manage by hand. So I'm filing the following bot request:

Phase 1

A bot should scan the page history of each page, and move it to the userspace of the editor who has made more than 50% of the edits, so long as that user is also the page creator. If a person has made more than 50% of edits and is NOT the creator, it should be outputed to a special list. Restricted pasges such as monobook.js should result in the creating user receiving a notice to their talk page that this page will be deleted in so many days, as only admins would be able to access it.

Phase 2

All remaining pages should be scanned, and the creating user and anyone whose made more than 33% of the edits should be notified that this page will be deleted on X date and that they should copy any information they need from it or go to page Y and explain why the page should be kept.

This should deal with 90%+ of these pages and leave the really tough ones, like those where the creator is a bot or an IP address (old days), etc for admins to deal with by hand. MBisanz ^talk 06:14, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Just a note, a lot of these may be from renames and usurps, might be a good idea to leave those types intact. SQL ^{Query me!} 06:23, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Ahh, nevermind, that page excludes all redirects. SQL ^{Query me!} 06:26, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

A or An

Hello. I was wondering if there is a bot that searches for the use of "a" when it should be "an". If not could someone make a bot for me? Thanks 55david (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 01:43, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Doesn't really seem like a 'Big Deal' to me. Q ^{T C} 02:46, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

To expand on my previous comment, the logic for a bot that could follow the nuances of the English language as to be accurate and not cause more harm then good would be 'rather hard' to do. Q ^{T C} 03:56, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

With this, as with all similar things like typo-correcting bots, it would have to be semi-automated and closely monitored. In other words, it would find possible edits to be made one by one and put up a diff for you to look at, and you would have to look at it and approve it before it would be made.--Dycedarg ж 17:49, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for answering I would willing to check over each edit a semi-automated bot would make. Considering this how hard would the programming be? 55david (talk) 23:18, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

I've come to the conclusion that this would make the most sense as a plugin for AutoWikiBrowser. That way one could fix a vs an at the same time as fixing typos and applying the other general fixes that AWB does automatically. It would also make programming it much easier. However, to gain authorization to use AWB you need 500 mainspace edits, which you don't have at present. If you don't find someone to make this for you as an independent program, I would encourage you to stick around until you have that many edits and then request access to AWB. When you've done that, just drop a note on my talkpage and I'll write the plugin for you.--Dycedarg ж 22:38, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Ok thanks for the answers Ill try and request AWB after I edit a bit more.55david t 03:20, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Template:Deletable image-caption

Template:Deletable image-caption is used when an image is listed for deletion for whatever reason, mostly nowadays for lack of fairuse rationales. However, while people often fix the rationales, the article pages still list the images as being for deletion. Is it possible for a bot to check the image this is captioned in and if there is no longer a problem with the image, remove it? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:04, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Template:Area code footer

Per the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Area_code_footer, could someone program their bot to move Template:Area code footer to the "External links" section of every article it is transcluded in? An "External links" section will need to be created in most articles. If the bot could also place wikilinks to List of NANP area codes and North American Numbering Plan in the "See also section" of each article, that would be helpful.
Thank you,
--JKeene (talk) 23:21, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

I have begun this process manually. 20 or so down, maybe 100 some odd to go.
--JKeene (talk) 16:49, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Category:PD-AM-exempt

Most of the images in this category are not {{PD-AM-exempt}} and some of them have got also problem with source. Who can help to tag them as No-license and No-source? Alex Spade (talk) 12:29, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Exceptions:

Alex Spade (talk) 12:29, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Declined There are 34 images in this category, and a number of circumstances that need to be checked for. I strongly encourage you to handle this manually. --Auto ^{(talk / contribs)} 14:40, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

What's problem? I've checked all - they are not official symbols and signs. As I know, En-wiki has got license/source check bot, but I don't know its nick. The work is extremly simple - all exept five images are not PD-AM-exempt. Stike {{PD-AM-exempt}} and its aliases, put {{subst:nld}} on all exept five and {{subst:nsd}} if source is missing. Alex Spade (talk) 16:40, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

If you took the time to check them all, why didn't you just tag them as you went? Happy‑melon 17:03, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I can check and retag them images, but notifing of uploaders is very tiresomely. Alex Spade (talk) 17:15, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Ok. I've put subst:nld on problem images. If some bot will notify uploader, it will be good. Alex Spade (talk) 08:34, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Deadbot replacement

Deadbot has been offline for 3 months now, and we're sorely missing it at DEP. We'd dearly love a bot that could handle a few (hopefully!) simple tasks Deadbot used to do:

Remove items in the DEP lists* that are redlinked, redirects, or transwikied.
Add notation after items that are prodded or AfD'd, without removing comments inserted manually by project members. (Deadbot accomplished this by inserting a special comment on notations it added, and would only add notations on items that either had the special Deadbot comment or had nothing after the final ]] in the item.)
(optional) add a notation for items tagged with {{merge}} and/or {{notability}}, including if that tag was found as part of the {{articleissues}} template, again without removing manual comments.

To see how Deadbot was marking the pages, take a look at this diff. You may notice that Deadbot was also adding notations for unref, uncat, etc. Nice, but definitely low priority for the project.

Deadbot used to run twice a day, but even running twice a week would be enormously helpful to the project. We're drowning with the manual maintenance of the list.

*Lists are found at Wikipedia:Dead-end pages/A-C, Wikipedia:Dead-end pages/D-F, Wikipedia:Dead-end pages/G-K, Wikipedia:Dead-end pages/L-O, Wikipedia:Dead-end pages/P-T, and Wikipedia:Dead-end pages/U-Z

Thanks!--Fabrictramp (talk) 15:34, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I could do this, but due to my current lack of free time I doubt it will be done before the weekend sometime.--Dycedarg ж 01:57, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Anything would be great -- we've already been without the bot for three months, we can wait a while longer. :) --Fabrictramp (talk) 14:53, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Just for clarification: You said above that you don't want the bot to erase manual comments by editors. So would it be preferable in such instances for the bot to place it's comment before the manual comments, after them, or not at all?--Dycedarg ж 00:05, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

The old Deadbot wasn't putting any comment on lines with manual comments (but it would remove the line if it was a redlink or redirect). That was fine, or placing auto comments after manual ones would work, too. Which ever is easier.--Fabrictramp (talk) 00:48, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I finished it. I ended up making a template for the bot's comments, as that was easiest and I wanted it done tonight. Also, I set it to comment after manual comments. I took it for a test run in my sandbox (which I edited to mimic a DEP page with every instance the bot's looking for on it) and it looks to be operating properly. If you could take a look at these diffs, [1] and [2] (the second one was after I modified the comments it had left to make sure it was overwriting itself properly), and let me know if you want any minor tweaks, I can set it to work on the real thing. I was thinking of running it once a day. By the way, you can edit the comment template it's using if you want to; as long as the parameter names stay the same it won't affect anything.--Dycedarg ж 07:44, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Wowser! Great job! One comment, though. In this diff it looks like the bot is duplicating its own comments. (See the line for Julie Birch, Asphalt, etc.--Fabrictramp (talk) 19:56, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

You're right. I had screwed up the regex, and it failed to overwrite its comments. I fixed it though, and the second diff I linked to is the time after I fixed it and reverted the bad edit and it worked. This is why I tested it in my sandbox first. All the kinks should be worked out now.--Dycedarg ж 23:55, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Last version in your sandbox looks fabulous. Thanks!--Fabrictramp (talk) 23:59, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

OK then, I'm setting the bot to work on the actual DEP pages now.--Dycedarg ж 00:06, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

CfD tagging needed

I would be very grateful if a friendly bot operator could tag the 220 or so categories listed at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 February 25#Category:American bassoonists by genre and similar categories. The appropriate template for "Fooian barplayers by genre" would appear to be {{subst:cfm|Fooian barplayers|Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 February 25#Category:American bassoonists by genre and similar categories}}, but I suspect someone here has done this type of thing before and so knows what to do anyway! Please let me know if there's a problem, or if this is the wrong place to ask. Many thanks, Bencherlite ^Talk 01:35, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

<cough> Anyone interested? Bencherlite ^Talk 18:41, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, DyceBot. Bencherlite ^Talk 20:33, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Your welcome. I had been going to mark this as done, but wasn't quite finished yet. Or rather, I had finished the tagging, but the link got screwed up and I was fixing it. Anyway, it should be done now.--Dycedarg ж 21:29, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Specialised anti-vandal bot

Hi there. The page on Evolution has a long-term problem with a serial vandal who replaces the entire article with a large chunk of the bible eg diff and diff. This has been going on, with about a hundred sockpuppet accounts list, for over a year. Would it be possible to write a bot to watch for this specific edit to this specific page and revert it as soon as it occurs? Tim Vickers (talk) 18:21, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

has simi-protection been tried? β^_command 18:52, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

The page is permanently semi-protected, the vandal registers a set of accounts from an IP, waits until they can edit the page and then uses a set of 3-5 throwaway accounts to vandalise the article and its talk page. So far we've hardblocked a few IPs, but they just seem to move to another. I'm hoping that if they are unable to vandalise the main article, they will lose interest. Tim Vickers (talk) 19:08, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Is anybody interested in doing this? Tim Vickers (talk) 18:07, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Talk to Cobi - maybe he'll be willing to add some specialised heuristics to ClueBot. Happy‑melon 18:11, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Done - ClueBot will revert anyone replacing the Evolution article with that. -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 01:59, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Category autopatrol bot?

User:Ardfern has recently created at my last count 530 of the standard Category:YEAR in COUNTRY categories. Since I don't want to personally patrol every last one of them, and since they are all valid categories, and since I vouch for his creations, I was hoping someone could create a bot to go through and patrol them all to help clear the backlog. --Hemlock Martinis (talk) 20:20, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

And don't forget to run that same bot to autopatrol the gazillion stubs of Blofeld of SPECTRE (talk · contribs) and AlbertHerring (talk · contribs)... I still don't understand why they were denied a bot account. Pichpich (talk) 20:24, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Ah, Blofeld of SPECTRE. I'm tempted to nominate him for adminship just so his creations become autopatrolled. I just saw AlbertHerring's creations and yes, he needs some autopatrolling badly.

Anyways, I have a few more. Dimadick (talk · contribs) has been creating 204 categories about elections and political parties as well as an early smattering of valid categories I have personally looked through. Good Olfactory (talk · contribs) has created 401 categories of religious people by country. All are valid and conform to our naming conventions. Plasma east (talk · contribs) has created 341 categories relating to transportation, including rail transport and aerospace museums. 16@r (talk · contribs) has created 82 categories relating to telecommunications, television and the Internet.

I personally vouch for all the categories created by these editors and encourage the creation or implementation of a bot to quickly patrol their category creations so that we may be better able to hack our way through the backlog. --Hemlock Martinis (talk) 20:45, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Accepted --Auto ^{(talk / contribs)} 21:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Adminship Thanks for the thought but of course I was suggested for adminship well over a year and a half ago and I turned it down although I could use some of the admin tools certainly. I've put in ten times more edits that many admins on here, but I prefer to contribute purely encyclopedically and not get too tied down with debates and administrative which often makes me feel bad about wikipedia when some people are uncivil etc, I'm sure you know what I mean! ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 19:18, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Ah, as I asked for a bot to create all the French municipalities a while ago and no one listened, I too must be added to the category of mass creation of French communes. If only someone would have listened to me...

Oh, and I'd love to be an admin!Editor of the wiki 19:40, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Done I finished this a few days ago as a one-time pass. If somebody can go through the channels to get a page setup for a regular pass, I'm willing to go through the bot approval process for it. --Auto ^{(talk / contribs)} 01:34, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Second request for undoing bot changes

Hi. Anytime now, the previous thread will be archived. So I'm taking the liberty of renewing this important request:

Please see archived ANI thread for details. In short, Gary King (talk · contribs) used what seems to be an unauthorized AWB-bot to categorize articles in the uncategorized articles backlog. However, the resulting categorization suffers from serious problems: overly broad categories, incorrect categories, failure to recognize articles that need to be sent to some deletion process, etc. In short: all these articles should be returned to the backlog. I have suggested two solutions: use a bot to rollback all the categorization done by this bot or create a temporary Category:Categorization needs to be redone (or something like that) and populate it by identifying the edits of Gary King's bot. The latter solution is probably better since rolling back the edits of the bot will return articles to maintenance categories that have since been deleted such as Category:Uncategorized from December 2007. I know that this will be a bit of a headache but we need an automated way of fixing this. We're talking about at least a thousand, maybe two thousand articles so doing this manually is not an option, and categorization of uncategorized articles is an important filter of junk and one of the most effective ways of making sure that articles are not lost in Wikipedia nowhere land.

The fact is that Gary King has undone only a handful of these automatic categorizations. I know this might be a bit more work than the usual bot requests presented here but we could really use the help. Thank you, Pichpich (talk) 21:16, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Extra note: there's no question that Gary King did all this with perfectly good intentions. It's also clear that he knows how to exploit AWB so one solution is to grant him permission to run what would amount to an unauthorized bot for a short while. I'm sure that he wouldn't mind repairing the damage himself but we specifically asked him not to because of the authorization issues. Pichpich (talk) 21:19, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Assisted editing tools do not require bot approval. As long as he keeps editing rate down (about 4 a minute is the typically used criteria) & manually reviews all edits before committing, there is no need for him to get a bot approval or for you to discourage him from fixing it. In fact, assisted editing seems a much better solution to this problem than a bot. -- JLaTondre (talk) 22:54, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Reposting request to link categories for foo albums and foo songs

Two weeks ago, I posted a request which got no feedback at all. No offense taken for being ignored of course, but since I still think it would be a valuable task and one that should be easy enough to do automatically, I'm taking the liberty of reposting it. If it's a silly idea, then by all means let me know! Pichpich (talk) 02:40, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I think it would be nice to link the categories of Foo albums and Foo songs. Example Category:Tracy Chapman albums and Category:Tracy Chapman songs. There's overwhelming precedent to keep eponymous categories to a minimum. That makes sense but people browsing these categories would probably like to flip from one to the other. For an example of what I think would be nice see my edits to Category:Beck albums and Category:Beck songs. Sure, small task. But worthwhile I think. I suppose this could be done through AWB or some author semi-automated script or other method but a bot would be able to maintain this in the future. Pichpich (talk) 04:37, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Bot help for fixing redirects, in preparation for some template moves/renaming

Please see Wikipedia:Requested moves#Incomplete and contested proposals - re: proposed changes/moves of usage of {{Scientology}} and {{Scientology}} and {{WikiProject Scientology}}. Your help/expertise in finding some quick way to fix the redirects of {{Scientology}}, to directly instead be to {{WikiProject Scientology}}, would be greatly appreciated. Cirt (talk) 21:29, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

bypassing redirect now β^_command 21:40, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, let me know what we should do when that's done? Cirt (talk) 21:50, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Done β^_command 21:51, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

What about these ? Cirt (talk) 22:10, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I just replaced template useage not every inline link to it. those few should be done with AWB and its disambig function. β^_command 22:17, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Well can someone else do that too? I'm not familiar with that. Cirt (talk) 22:26, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain I got all the links to it that are not on pages within the bounds of WikiProject Scientology itself (I assume its members know what they're doing with regards to links to their own pages) or on talk or archive pages. You should be able to perform the move now.--Dycedarg ж 02:32, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. Just to clear up the "what links here" even more, I'll remove this thread as well. Cirt (talk) 03:57, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Vanishing users

In the past (and this week), we've had users who invoke the WP:RTV, have their accounts renamed to something vanish-ish like Vanished User or Hiding, etc. They then use that new name to go and refactor all occurences of their real life or former user name to that. I've seen at least a couple instances where it breaks the formatting of a conversation, etc. So would it be possible to get a VanishBot. Basically a person who wants to vanish, puts in a request to be renamed, etc. Once their renamed, the bot would go around and refactor all the occurances, using their contribution history and some sort of google/mediawiki search filter. This seems like a cleaner and more formal alternative to the rather adhoc and messy current system. MBisanz ^talk 18:39, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't see how this could work for non-standard and changing signatures, but it might be worth a try. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 17:11, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

The only way it could work at all, for anyone who has ever changed their signature, would be for them to provide the code for every single variation on their signature they've ever used. For some people, that could be rather difficult and/or time consuming.--Dycedarg ж 08:52, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Well obviously a user would have to provide all the non-standard sigs they've edited under. For me that would be like 5, for Jimbo, 1, if they really want to vanish, they'll be motivated to make sure they have given all versions. MBisanz ^talk 09:01, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Changing all your old signatures is highly discouraged by some language over at meta's page about Right to Vanish, where they use the word 'disruption':

Work on the project - Your work, including 'signatures' (text indicating your authorship of comments) on all but your own user and talk pages, will usually not be changed or removed. To change these would be a major source of disruption. Individual revisions of individual pages that contain personally identifying information may be oversighted instead.

An experienced user might easily have over 5,000 talk page edits, and you'd send a bot crawling through archives to change all of those? Doesn't appear justified, and the case is nowhere near the same urgency as oversight. EdJohnston (talk) 16:04, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Yea, Meta's RTV seems to be treated by the en-pedia community as more a guidline than hard policy. And since some users will insist on re-editting when the leave, I figured a bot would just make it easier. Sinc a rename requires a crat to OK it, I don't see why use of this bot couldn't also require crat approval on an indiviudal basis. MBisanz ^talk 01:55, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

ADB to Australian Dictionary of Biography

Relisting: Please replace all "{{ADB|" with "{{Australian Dictionary of Biography|" in the less than 200 articles that still use the short form which was/is subject to confusion among Australian Dictionary of Biography, Dictionary of Australian Biography and Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, and the templates used for them. Thanks in advance! -- Matthead Discuß 18:48, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Working now -- maelgwn - talk 07:09, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Done -- maelgwn - talk 07:48, 18 March 2008 (UTC)