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Bot for another wiki

I'm an admin at the Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL for short), now sometimes called ChoralWiki since it was ported to the wiki system in 2005. The site is a freely accessable archive of choral and solo vocal sheet music by public domain composers and modern composers who wish to release their work to the public. I'm not sure whether this is the correct place for my request for a bot for another wiki so if it isn't I would appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction.

Basically, we over at CPDL would like a bot to mark broken links and do some (fairly simple) find and replace tasks. Of course, I would elaborate on these tasks if someone offers to help. No-one at CPDL has the necessary skill to create a bot and as the user base of Wikipedia is somewhat larger than CPDL, I thought I would ask over here. If there is anyone who has the necessary skill, time and willingness to design a bot for CPDL, I would be very grateful if they would get in touch. Of course, it may be possible for a bot that's currently in use over here at Wikipedia to be adapted for use at CPDL and if that's the case, I'd appreciate it if someone could point me in the direction of that bot's author. Thanks in advance for any help. --Bobnotts talk 15:41, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

You may want to take a look at the Auto-Wiki browser. SQLQuery me! 15:48, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
I wasn't aware that AWB could be easily configured to work outside wikimedia, but I could be wrong. If you're looking for a more powerful solution, I can recommend m:pywikipedia - python is extremely easy to get to grips with and the framework is extremely easy to use for simple or complex tasks. Happy‑melon 16:00, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, I think as long as it's mediawiki, and, using the monobook skin, AWB should be good. SQLQuery me! 16:05, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Thank you very much for your replies. I will definitely check out those tools and see if they do what I want. Regards --Bobnotts talk 22:52, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

COIN Bot 2

I'm looking for a bot that will monitor the feed at Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Requested_edits and post a summary report to a page that will be transcluded to WP:COIN. This will help us respond quicker to users who go to the trouble to not edit a page they have a conflict on. It would need to be run say once every 12 or 24 hours. MBisanz talk 10:37, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Bot Question

I have made a template called The Random Button if you haven't ever heard of it. It is a collection of articles and I edit and update the page each day. But in the future, I will not be able to do this. Can a bot pick a random button article, and give the sneak previews, and update the article automatically? --Nothing444 (talk) 01:03, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Check out User:SuggestBot. He probably can do this or you can adapt his output. MBisanz talk 01:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Archival Bot

I know one has been in the works, but was is the status of any archival bot that recognizes the {{resolved}} template? Any change for a rollout soon? WP:GL is in dire need of one.↔NMajdan•talk 15:13, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

As the operator of Wikipedia's most effective ArchiveBot, you probably need to talk to Misza13 about something like this. The clever automatic show/hide techniques used at WP:ANI might also be worth a look. Happy‑melon 15:29, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
I'll look into ANI's process. I've asked Misza and its still being worked on. Just curious if there was something else out there now. Thanks.↔NMajdan•talk 19:20, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Ive got a beta script that Ive been testing, Ill point it over that way. I just need to know the specifics. βcommand 19:27, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Simple enough. Only archive if it has the {{resolved}} template and archive by month. {{Stale}} requests will be handled manually.↔NMajdan•talk 23:00, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Template-placing bot?

I'm looking, or hoping someone can make, a bot which will place a selected template globally across the talkpages of articles in a given category. I've discovered reams of articles which should have the Canada WikiProject and various subprojects on them and it's just too laborious going through them all placing templates by hand, page by page. Is there a way to automate this? Theoretically the bot should be able to recognize if the template is already present, if not then it would place it. The category that tweaked me off to this is Category:British Columbia school stubs where the template would be {{WikiProject Canada|education=yes|bc=yes}}. Is this at all possible, or am I going to have to recruit chimpanzees? Posted by Skootum1 (talk)

If you have a list of categories where every article should have the template, I can help. SatyrBot can skip the article to see if it already has the project banner, and can automatically assess Stub, GA, or FA. But it does need the cat list. Take a look at some examples, and leave me a note on my talk page if you'd like me to run it. -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 23:14, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Well, for starters, the schools category here with this: {{WikiProject Canada|education=yes|bc=yes}}. But there are other categories I've noticed where a large volume of articles is in need of templates....another is Category:Defunct British Columbia provincial electoral districts where the template would be {{WikiProject Canada|cangov=yes|riding=yes|bc=yes}}. Is it only you that can run the bot or are others permitted to take the reins? I know there's more "bulk templating" cats out there, just in the BC WikiProject alone.....23:56, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Request for name standardization

Hi,

I apologize if this type of question has been asked and and answered before.

Yad Vashem--the central museum, memorial, and education center in Israel for the Holocaust--is cited in many, many articles and sections dealing with the Holocaust, Jewish History, anti-Semitism, etc. The thing is that it sometime it is spelled with upper-case "s": Yad VaShem, and sometimes with lower case "s": Yad Vashem. Both spellings within Wiki do point to the Vashem entry, so that aspect's OK.

But for consistency, especially for all the people who reference Wiki, could all uses of the word within entries be botically standardized to Vshem's?

Thanks,

---Shlishke (talk) 22:15, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Try WP:AWB's google search feature and the find and replace feature. MBisanz talk 22:58, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Orphaned fairuse images bot

A bot that would check if images in the category Category:Orphaned fairuse images (and subcategories) are still orphaned, if they are not orphaned removed them from category. NanohaA'sYuriTalk, My master 18:31, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm looking into this. --Erwin85 (talk) 17:04, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
I've set up a bot to do this. It gets a list of images in Category:All_orphaned_fairuse_images that are used and removes Template:Di-orphaned fair use from those images. It uses the toolserver database to get that list. I've run some test edits. Any suggestions? If not, I'll request approval to run this bot. How often do you want it to run? Daily, weekly etc.? --Erwin85 (talk) 17:41, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't need to be run that often, probably daily. Also from its edits, I can see that it seems to be working fine, and there are no problems that I think need to be addressed. I think it should be ok to go ahead with the approval process. Vivio TestarossaTalk Who 05:42, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Creating a bunch of redirects that are shortcuts

The Editor's index to Wikipedia has a large number of internal anchors (using "span id") so that links can be made to any major topic on the page, rather than to the index as a whole. (With the index being over 3000 lines, a link to just the index page, when answering a specific question, isn't that helpful). These anchors have been hidden; I'd like to make them explicit by using shortcuts.

My plan is to add the shortcuts to the Index page myself (I've done this for major topics starting with "A", as a demo/pilot), but I'd like to get a bot to actually create the redirect pages for these shortcuts. There will be a hundred or two of these. (Details of this idea are discussed at Wikipedia talk:Editor's index to Wikipedia#Proposed approach.)

The only thing that's perhaps a bit unusual is that the proposed shortcuts use the pseudo-namespace "EIW"; this was discussed at Wikipedia talk:Namespace#Procedure for creating a new pseudo-namespace?, and - after a bit of clarification - I believe there was no opposition to this. But I'm going to post a note regarding this proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), so that if there are concerns or alternatives, they can be mentioned (here, preferably).

So, to return to the main question - would someone have a bot that can create these redirects? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:05, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

A bot to create them should be easy. I'd recommend that you (if you haven't already done so) paste a note at the WP:Redirect and WP:RFD talk pages regarding your suggestion. Cross namespace redirects (even pseudo-namespace like CAT:) have been contentious in the past. Posting at those two pages might alleviate someone nominating them for deletion. -- JLaTondre (talk) 19:02, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Done. Thanks for the suggestion. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:53, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Category intersection

I have a quick favor to ask someone with an idle bot. I would like to get a list of the articles in both Category:Baseball players and one of two major maintenance categories, namely Category:All articles lacking sources and Category:All articles with unsourced statements. If the results of the searches could be posted to my userspace, that would be awesome. Thanks, Caknuck (talk) 20:24, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Could you just use CatScan? (I'm getting an error message at the moment when I look at the page - too many users? - but my sense is that this is fairly uncommon.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:57, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
I knew the tool was out there, but I wasn't sure what the name was. Thanks, Caknuck (talk) 22:48, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Template in search of a bot

Hello, fellow editors ... I have created a template that I'm using by hand now, but I think that several bots could use it as well ... please see this talk page and tell me what you think of my newly created {{Oldprodfull}} ... would you use it, or update it if you encountered it?

Although it has 9 parameters, all of them are optional, and it "does the Right Thing" for display based on the input ... three user-ids (PROD, 2nd, and DECLINE) plus DATE and REASON for each of the three ... the idea is to insert the "boilerplate" with a PROD, and then the 2nd or declining editor add their own id, date, and reason.

Many editors do not even know that {{Prod-2}} exists, but this template will help document declined PRODs so that they won't get PRODed again after they have already been contested.

On a related matter, what are your thoughts on my proposed WP:FLAG-BIO and other flag templates?

Happy Editing! — 72.75.72.63 (talk · contribs) 21:01, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

  • FWIW I support this idea. In theory a bot could scan the cat of Proposed deletions and then add this to the talk page. It can scanned supported proposed deletions and add the Prod2 comment. Then it could wait say 6 days and if the tag is still there (meaning the prod was declined), it can add the declined variable. Given the standard formatting of a prod template, it shouldn't be too hard to scan the history and pick up which editor added it. And of course, most prod's aren't super active pages like George W. Bush. MBisanz talk 01:19, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Perhaps a bit late, but I have been looking for a bot project, and this certainly seems worthwhile - there have been a few instances where I have recommended deletion and then realised that the tags have already been removed. As my first bot it would take a while to develop, but I'm willing to take the time... - Fritzpoll (talk) 22:31, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
    • Great, I know nothing of coding, but I'll help in any way I can (sorting, testing, reviewing, etc). Anon/Bipolar seems to know wiki-markup coding and might be willing to help. MBisanz talk 22:35, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
    • Well, I can code, but I've never tried to interact with Wikipedia before - I'll check out some of the pages at the top and see what I can fathom out - your help would be much appreciated - Fritzpoll (talk) 22:37, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Find articles with See also, References in incorrect order

There are many articles that have a wrong layout of sections, See also, Notes, References, External Links.

The manual of style says, "The standard order for optional appendix sections at the end of an article is See also, Notes (or Footnotes), References, Further reading (or Bibliography), and External links; the order of Notes and References can be reversed. See also is an exception to the point above that wording comprises nouns and noun phrases."[1]

I've been correcting these as I find them, but it'd be nice if a bot could list all the ones needing changes. This might be as simple as searching with a sophisticated regular expression, but I'm not sure. MahangaTalk 03:00, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I really dont think there's a reliable way to search for something like this. Q T C 06:37, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
It's possible to run though a database dump and generate a list of articles where the sections don't match some specified sequence. However, the quote above doesn't seem to be in WP:GTL. In fact, it's not uncommon to find the external links before "see also" or "notes". You're wecome to change them to the "preferred" order if you're editing an article, but it's not necessarily "wrong" as it is. Gimmetrow 07:00, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
WP:GTL lists the sections in the order shown above, then says Although the preferred order is as above, it is permissible to change the sequence of these ending sections if there is good reason to do so. I'm not really sure what a "good reason" would be.
I personally support the idea of more standardization when there isn't any good argument against it (and I see none here). So I agree that getting a bot to do a database seach for non-standard layout, and listing articles where that is the case, would be good, assuming that there are editors actually willing to do the manual fixes as needed. Perhaps the bot could do one letter of the alphabet at a time, not doing the next one until editors have done cleanup on the prior results? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:56, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Ive been playing with sections, it might be possible to have a bot do all the work in regard to this. βcommand 15:00, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Yes, beta, it would be easy for a bot to grab the sections and rearrange them, if they use any of the standard variant names. But this is a MoS issue, and it's generally not a good idea for bots to impose MoS. Gimmetrow 17:46, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
I think I have a working script. βcommand 17:47, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Don't do it, beta. This is not a task for an automated bot, and it will draw complaints, even if it handles all the standard section variants correctly. Gimmetrow 18:01, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Beta, I would like to examine your code for this task before you run it. Would that be possible? Gimmetrow 21:52, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
True, but how recent is the last DB dump? And those are rather large Q T C 09:35, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Unless the MOS is changed to make the layout order mandatory and simply not preferred, this is a bad idea for a bot. Bots should never override writers' preferences. If the desire is to make this layout the mandatory one, then that should be discussed at the MOS and consensus sought for that change. A bot should not be used to bypass established procedures for seeking consensus for changes in our guidelines. -- JLaTondre (talk) 17:49, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
The original request was for a bot to create a list, not for a bot to make the actual changes. I hope we can start with a bot-generated list, and then perhaps after a while, if human editors haven't run into any resistance in making changes based on that list, we might revisit the issue of bot-made changes to articles.
And there certainly is no reason for a human editor to have to ask permission to make changes that follow the preferred/suggested specifications at two separate guideline pages, are there? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:52, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Well, there are editors who prefer "see also" last on the page. If you're going to be doing these edits in large quantity, you might want to start a discussion at WP:GTL to see how people think. Gimmetrow 18:01, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, I read too fast. I agree simply identifying them for human editors would be fine. From a non-bot point of view, I do think Gimmetrow's suggestion is a good one. -- JLaTondre (talk) 18:53, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
I've started a new discussion at WP:Layout. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mahanga (talk • contribs) 20:51, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
I'd be fine with a bot moving "see also" to the beginning and "external links" to the end, so long as it didn't touch the other sections. The naming of the other sections is much less consistent across the encyclopedia and in any case there is no real consensus about what their order should be. Christopher Parham (talk) 00:33, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Ohio article counter bot

I would like something similar to MathBot. All I need it to do is count all Ohio related articles once a week or so. These articles would be found under Category:Ohio and its subcategories. Could this be possible?

Many thanks! §tepshep • ¡Talk to me! 01:17, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

If you want I can set up something like WP:BABS or WP:BABS for you βcommand 15:31, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Sorry, I was looking for a bot that just makes one number. Similar to this page:here.
Not too hard to do, I'll whip something up. Q T C 09:39, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
If you want, you can use User:Erwin85/CatCount. It runs every day at noon and uses the toolserver's database to count the number of articles. --Erwin85 (talk) 15:59, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Request for template posting bot

Hi guys, I need the help from a bot and operator that can post templates on User talk pages - it'll be like a copy paste job thanks. The code will be the following


{| class="{{#ifeq:{{{nested|}}}|yes|collapsible collapsed messagebox nested-talk|{{#ifeq:{{{small|}}}|yes|messagebox small-talk|messagebox standard-talk}}}}" |- {{#ifeq:{{{nested|}}}|yes| ! colspan="2" style="text-align: center" {{!}} {{#if:{{{class|}}}|     (Rated {{{class}}}-Class)}} }} |- |align="center"|Hi, seeing from your recent contributions you have been fairly interested in the works of Raymond E. Feist. I am currently considering about starting a brand new Wiki-project (or maybe a task force) and will need your help – if you are interested could you please sign at [[WP:COUNCIL/P]]. Thanks very much ~~~~ |}

it'll show this:

Hi, seeing from your recent contributions you have been fairly interested in the works of Raymond E. Feist. I am currently considering about starting a brand new Wiki-project (or maybe a task force) and will need your help – if you are interested could you please sign at WP:COUNCIL/P. Thanks very much Fattyjwoods (Push my button) 06:53, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I can't copy and paste it one by one because it'll take me for ages so I need your help! The user talk pages are listed below.

  • User talk: T@nn
  • User talk: Hmoul
  • User talk: Thekyle55
  • User talk: Franczeska
  • User talk: 195.93.21.40
  • User talk: 192.251.125.85
  • User talk: 203.27.91.196
  • User talk: 210.49.18.252
  • User talk: Nimmy
  • User talk: Elminster
  • User talk: 210.49.18.252
  • User talk: 24.72.109.227
  • User talk: Arthais
  • User talk: 60.231.90.214
  • User talk: 68.239.101.122
  • User talk: TamhasArthur
  • User talk: FrozenPurpleCube
  • User talk: 74.78.246.242
  • User talk: Ostaf
  • User talk: Mike Peel
  • User talk: Painbearer
  • User talk: TalwinHawkins
  • User talk: 86.149.101.127
  • User talk: Francs2000
  • User talk: QuentinGeorge
  • User talk: 203.171.122.242
  • User talk: Gwern
  • User talk: Alensha
  • User talk: Ishmayl
  • User talk: Shadow Dancer 994
  • User talk: Salters
  • User talk: Tony Sidaway

and as a token of thanks Ill give the helper a barnstar or something. Thanks PS there might be some more coming along Fattyjwoods (Push my button) 06:52, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

That really wouldn't be that difficult to do by hand, in my opinion... SQLQuery me! 02:45, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Alright then ill see if I can do it by hand Fattyjwoods (Push my button) 02:53, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

DON'T. Bad idea! CWii(Talk|Contribs) 02:03, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
Meh, nevermind :P CWii(Talk|Contribs) 02:04, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

A StatusBot-For members of the Counter Vandalism Unit

Bot to remove deleted user categories from user pages

It would be helpful to have a bot that would periodically go through all UCFD'd user categories and delete any members from them. This would speed up the WP:UCFD process in that editors wouldn't manually have to remove pages from the category (sometimes a tedious process requiring over 100 removals). As you can see here, there are several categories that have members in them that still need emptying, even from a long time ago. This would also help for those who re-add the category to their page after it has been deleted, as such actions disrupt Special:Wantedcategories in making it seem like the category should be recreated (which has happened several times before). There could be a fully-protected subpage in which admins could add user categories (along with a link to the UCFD or DRV authorizing deletion) which the bot would go through and see if anyone has on their userpage. If a userpage was protected, it would simply skip it and retry the next time it ran. VegaDark (talk) 16:32, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

What's wrong with Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/User? BencherliteTalk 22:43, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
As in a bot could use that instead of a subpage? True, but some of the pages listed there need to only be depopulated of individual users (while still allowing subcategories). Additionally, using that would mean users having to manually add already-deleted categories that have been repopulated, whereas a subpage would permanently have every category that needs to stay empty, saving lots of work. There are many hundreds (if not thousands) of user categories that have been deleted, and it would be a lot less work to list them all on one page and have the bot patrol it than it would be to manually patrol them all and then list them there if they need users removed. VegaDark (talk) 23:40, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
Ah, I see what you mean now - I didn't realise that you wanted a recurring sweep of deleted categories to keep them empty. I'll shut up now! BencherliteTalk 23:43, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
If this is done, it should a) stay in article space, and/or b) follow {{nobots}} convention. Just my $0.02us.  :) -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 05:17, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
  • There was already a bot running around doing this. Is it dead? Anyway, fine with me as long as it stays off of my userpages. I've got some deleted cats that I won't left on my user pages and don't want some rogue bot coming around removing them. This has been discussed before and the consensus was that there's no harm in having deleted cats on your page nor is there policy preventing it. - ✰ALLSTAR✰ echo 05:31, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
    • I particpated in that discussion, and I wouldn't go so far as to say that was the consensus. In fact, I was one of the people who said I didn't see the harm in it, but I have since changed my mind after realizing that it is disruptively adding the categories to Special:Wantedcategories. In either case, people who don't want categories removed from their page can add {{nobots}} to their page as suggested above. And as far as I know, there was never a bot doing this that I know of, at least not for user categories. VegaDark (talk) 07:08, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
      • There was a bot doing it because I had an issue with one a couple months back. {{nobots}} is useless because not all bots use it and you don't know which bots do and which bots perform this function to add them to the allow list. - ✰ALLSTAR✰ echo 22:34, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
        • Due to the fact that the bot in question would be editing people's userpages in a way that is known to be against some people's wishes, I would imagine it would have to be {{nobots}} compliant to be tolerated. In any case, if you add {{nobots}}, no bot compliant with the tag will edit your page. You don't have to know which bot it is that would be removing categories.--Dycedarg ж 22:47, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
          • If you just add {{nobots}}, it will block all bots that observe the nobots tag, including some you don't mind doing things such as Sinebot. If you add {{bots|allow=<botlist>}} instead, you can show which bots to allow and it will allow those and block the others - this is what you would use to allow SineBot but block CatDeletedBot - if the bots observe the bots tag. This is why I said it's useless without knowing which bots perform which tasks. Read the documentation at {{nobots}}. - ✰ALLSTAR✰ echo 14:26, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
            • I am perfectly aware of the functionality of that and related templates; I run bots that follow them after all. I simply don't think that the majority of bots that edit userpages are particularly essential; SineBot would be an exception but it only edits user talk pages not user pages and that's where most people keep their categories (you included until recently). In any case, in my opinion you can either watch this page and see what the person who fulfills the request (if anyone does) calls the bot or wait until it edits your page and deletes your categories and then you'll know what it's called.--Dycedarg ж 01:07, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
              • BetacommandBot is the bot I was talking about earlier that removes cats. It just removed a cat from me and User:SatyrTN. - ✰ALLSTAR✰ echo 04:39, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
                • That bot did in fact make a few recent removals (of all redlinks, not just user categories), which has been brought up in a recent AN/I thread as apparently not being approved. I am proposing a bot be specifically approved for this function, and make the bot be nobots compliant (which apparently BCB isn't right now). Additionally, it wouldn't remove pages from all red links, only UCFD'd and DRV-endorsed ones. VegaDark (talk) 21:38, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Daily bot for WP:GL/IMPROVE to mark requests as stale

A request for the random tasks bots out there. I would like a bot that can go through the requests at the above page and if there has been no activity in each section in the last 10 days, add the following to the top of the section: {{Stale|1={{subst:plain now}}}} or {{Stale|1=~~~~}}. Thanks.↔NMajdan•talk 20:10, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Anyone?↔NMajdan•talk 18:45, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Spelling bot?

I can't seem to find one. I think a bot that auto corrects commonly misspelled words would be wonderful. I searched and found over 90,000* occurrences of "occured" in the article name space. (It's spelled occurred FYI.) I would be willing to be responsible for maintaining a list of words, and I do work as a programmer, but actually doing it on wikipedia is daunting. (Perhaps because I haven't looked into it enough). Mainly I think I don't know enough about "web friendly" languages. *(ok, it's actually lower, wiki search automatically looks for commonly misspelled words, but there are still a lot of "occurences") Bassg☢☢nistTalk/Contribs 17:24, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that automatic spell-checking bots are usually denied. The reason being that it is very hard for an automated process to judge whether that specific instance is intentionally misspelled or not. For example, if, in an article about spelling, they used occured as an example, the bot would fix it and it wouldn't make much sense any more. Same thing for any article that was either pointing out the misspelling, or where a word was intentionally misspelled. See WP:BFDB for more information. -- Cobi(t|c|b) 17:36, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
Oh drat, didn't see that page. Makes a lot of sense now that I think about it...sorry! Bassg☢☢nistTalk/Contribs 20:00, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot to help with banned user StealBoy

I'm wondering whether a bot could help me in identifying new sockpuppets of StealBoy (talk · contribs). As some of you may know, this troll is incredibly persistent and has been creating hoax articles for over a year, possibly more. The list of his sockpuppets is too long to list and in fact, no admins really take the time to put the new puppets in the corresponding category, if only for WP:DENY reasons. Periodically, his semi-static IP is blocked for months and he returns once he gets a new IP. However, this guy has patterns which are very easy to spot: he creates only TV or film related hoaxes, almost invariably in the same time range, new puppets created have names with easy to identify patterns, anon edits are used to create links to the hoax articles and these links are always added to one of roughly twenty or so articles. So I was wondering if one of the tech-savy people here could periodically generate a list of suspicious edits/usernames. I do this manually from time to time by going through the list of new film-related articles and by spotting the IPs from a certain range on the aboved mentioned articles. If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to discuss privately the name patterns, IP range, articles which are usually vandalized and so on. Pascal.Tesson (talk) 16:57, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Is StealBoy the new Willy on Wheels ? Guroadrunner (talk) 00:00, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
I have to say I'm not that familiar with Willy's antics. What I do know is that as far as number of sockpuppets, tenacity over time and utter pointlessness of the vandalism pattern, StealBoy (who is probably himself a sock of Lyle123) is in a pretty elite class of stupidity. 05:11, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

bare footnotes

How can I run a bot to fix the many bare URLs in Antipsychiatry's footnotes? —Cesar Tort 23:33, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I'll write a script to do it. Mønobi 03:38, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! —Cesar Tort 03:59, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
I've actually ported the part of the pywikipedia bot collection online. The reflinks.py script isn't synced up since I haven't had the time to merge my changes. — Dispenser 04:12, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Well I'll run a script to create titles for the urls directly ;). Mønobi 04:26, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks again. When will you run a program? —Cesar Tort 04:02, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
ASAP. Mønobi 22:27, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

See also User:DumZiBoT. Gimmetrow 04:19, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Template:ACIDnom

I came across this template {{ACIDnom}} which is part of the Wikipedia:Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive, a WikiProject that is now inactive. The template contains the phrase "The Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive is now closed. Please remove this template." Unless I'm completely misunderstanding something, this template should be removed from each article talk page it is used on. But the template and a bunch of template-redirects are used on hundreds of pages. Perhaps a bot could quickly remove them all? Gnome de plume (talk) 18:41, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

working now !! -- maelgwn - talk 02:32, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
 Done -- maelgwn - talk 05:50, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Thank you! Gnome de plume (talk) 18:24, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot to change old signature/user name

I have changed my user name, and would like, for reasons of privacy, to edit the old signatures to my new one. Is it appropropriate to ask for a BOT to do so, or do I have to make the edits myself? I know the information will still be in the old histories, but would appreciate it if the average search didn't drag them up. My old user name should be determinable from my contribs, as I just moved some pages that referenced it, and I'dlike to not reference it any further. FrozenPurpleCube (talk) 18:57, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

that is why we have redirects. replacing your old sig goes against policy. βcommand 19:02, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
In my opinion, as far as privacy goes, changing your signature on every page it's on would be more damaging to your privacy than just leaving it alone. People tend to have their archives watchlisted, at least I know I do, and I'm sure that more than one person has the archives to public pages watchlisted. Everyone of those people would know that you changed your username; more people than I think are going to visit those archives and notice the changed username on their own.--Dycedarg ж 19:18, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Could you please cite the relevant policy? The page on Wikipedia:UNC#Changing your username says they can be changed manually. Is this in error? I could change the edits myself if there's some reason a bot can't do it, but it's just going to be a lot of work in what seems to be a redundant process so I would think that's just the thing you'd use a bot to do. And no, I don't mind that people know I changed my user name, as long as they don't invade my privacy by making some big deal about it. It's not like folks can't look things up in the history anyway if that's their concern. My problem is that I just don't care for search engines having it, and I believe removing it would maximize my desire for privacy. FrozenPurpleCube (talk) 21:41, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
What particular privacy reasons do you have? You old username reveals very little about your identity. -- maelgwn - talk 05:57, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
The same one that lead to me to change my username. So, anyway, can anyone answer me as to whether this is a valid request for a bot to do, or should I just proceed to do it manually? It is apparently allowed to do it, being referenced both at the page above, and at WP:CHU. FrozenPurpleCube (talk) 06:12, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Instead of doing it manually (and possibly losing content through clicking errors), please look at WP:AWB for a faster way to change it. MBisanz talk 06:25, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the information, I'll give it a try. FrozenPurpleCube (talk) 06:30, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Never mind, it's too complex a tool for me to figure out, just for this one purpose, and I honestly don't feel comfortable making the request to use it either. I'd just have one use for it, and I'd be done here forever and ever. Is there any chance of finding someone who has figured this stuff out to do this for me? If not, I'll get to making the change manually. FrozenPurpleCube (talk) 06:35, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
I would do it if you could provide a reason for it to be done. WP:REDIRECT#NOTBROKEN applies here. -- maelgwn - talk 06:55, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Well, forgive me if I seem terse, but I really don't want to get into a discussion of my reasons, as I fear that would defeat the purpose of leaving, but: I wish to maximize the amount of privacy I can gain through changing my username, the reason for doing so I stated as clearly as possible when making the request for changing it. If I need to reiterate, then I will say again, I intend to leave Wikipedia utterly and forever. The last edit I will make will be to my talk page saying so. Since I wish this to be as complete as possible, this includes utilizing every available option, which as indicated on the page I referred to earlier, includes changing the old signatures. I have found them remaining through several search engines, and while this does include some off-site examples, I can only hope that they disappear on their own, as many of them seem to simply be mirrors exploiting wikipedia content to attract search engine hits. For those that don't, well, I can't do everything, if I could, I'd remove every single edit and comment in their entirely. I know I can't, so please don't waste time saying so, but I do want to do what I can to distance myself from this place. If this is not a sufficient explanation for you, I'm sorry, but I don't like discussing this in this public way, and having to keep doing so only continues what to me, is something very painful. I can't give you any further explanation, I can't give you any further details, and if that's not enough, I guess I'll just have to begin doing it myself. FrozenPurpleCube (talk) 08:12, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Missing settlements

Hi. I don't know how many people are aware but we are missing vast amounts of articles on towns and villages , and I mean VAST in a serious way -particularly on countries in the developing world, notably Latin America, Asia and Africa which comprises at least 85% of the world land cover. Given the enormous size and organization of wikipedia already, I would have thought that it was be an important goal for wikipedia to begin to address uneven coverage gegraphically and try to create an even coverage of the world like a neutral encyclopedia should, at least articles with a locator map and some basic details for starters as a reference point. I do a lot of work adding new articles on settlements using the same sources each time. I am certain a bot could be programmed to blue link articles on places by country and give the encyclopedia something of enormous benefit for people to try to work on. Given the sheer amount missing by now I;d be expecting wikipedia to be drilling bots to create these articles on a daily basis, but bots rarely seem to be taken to their full advantage and used to generate new articles, with the exception of the polbot and gene bots which run from time to time. Could somebody please explain how this could be done? ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 20:12, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Back in the day Ram-Man got some huge repository of info on U.S. places and had Ram-Bot create all the pages and put the info in. Really we'd need some list of notable places, like a gazzetter of South America or something. Then a bot could create simple stubs from it, adding pretty things like Cats and Infoboxes. I don't know where such a database is, but I'd suggest the federal government or the UN might have one in English. It would also need to have a human follow-up afterwards for the duplicates that would be created from different naming conventions. But it should be possible to code, if you can find the sources and a free-bot lying around. MBisanz talk 20:17, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Well the nearest thing I;ve found is the list at MSN Encarta.e.g Nigeria which lists towns and villages by country but it isn't a proper source. Now I am aware that some of the place names are slightly differnetly transliterated or dated in places, I remember Darwinek discussing this, but when I've been creating articles I've been checking at least three or four others websites such as maplandia, google maps etc to try to get some authority that they are accurate names and I have to say that 99% of what I;ve come across seems to give some standard assertion that it is very accurate. I;m not certain if every places will meet everybody's notability requirements but they are all populated settlements which I believe the vast majority of could be written into informative articles. I think it would strengthen the encyclopedia considerably to begin to address the uneven coverage geographically. Maplandia for me appears to be the best geo site but because of huge uneveness in knowledge often accurate population data isn't available for the undeveloped countries. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 20:25, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Well the ENcarta link is difficult, only that it would be hard for a bot to parse the 60 entry sublists and that there is no commentary on the cities on the maps (X is a city in province Q of Nigeria" I feel like the UN cartagraphic division must have lists of cities. MBisanz talk 20:32, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree. I;ve been trying to find a detailed list for each country in a long list with some basic data but I haven't found one. All I;ve found is world gazateer.com which lists probably 50 biggest cities in a country but isn't quite as full as I;d like it to be ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 20:39, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

For Nigeria, Nigeria Direct has information which might be at least a start. I'm thinking that the best places to go for such information would be the web pages of each individual country myself. John Carter (talk) 20:41, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
John's right that ideally countries should have government sources. But does anyone here think Uganda or Burma has a website listing their major cities in English? It might work for some of the larger nations, like S. America (I'd expect Brazil and Argentina to have them) and what not, but Africa and East Asia will probably be deadends. http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/maplib/maplib.htm says it has 3000 gazzetters. I'm wondering if they could send a bibliography of them or if any are digitized. Also, there is the issue that China had at last count, around 980,000 good sized towns. Even if we could get a listing for them, do we really want to increase the size of Wikipedia by 50% at once? MBisanz talk 20:53, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Mmm I don;t know it is potentially problematic due to the deficiencies in avilability of government sources for poorer parts of the world which is a great shame, but it is inevitable that the encyclopedia as it is will easily double in size anyway, and likely to be increasingly filled by articles which aren't considered traditionally encyclopedic. I remember several people saying "real world content is what this encyclopedia needs" which I fully agree with ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 21:02, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Yea, I was thinking more of every third Random Page being a Chinese stub. Not a reason to not add them in, maybe just a reason to spread it around to smaller countries first. I'll take a look tonight as to what resources I can find. MBisanz talk 21:11, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

OK. Its just I feel places form a backbone to the encyclopedia and while hundreds of topcis are equally important many articles are based around a location in the world whether its people, landmarks or whatever. Even films and books are based in a place. I just feel that it is more powerful not to ignore that these places exist and begin to construct the best coverage of the world on one site the best we can. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 21:28, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree with you regarding the importance of having a good coverage of settlements, but I'm concerned that a bot is not the right way to do it. First, there is the issue that an article about a settlement may already exist under another name. Second, there is the issue of quantity vs. quality. Having thousands of new articles that no one watchlists, maintains, and improves may not be entirely a good thing. Black Falcon (Talk) 20:52, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Pretty much every country in the world – apart from countries like Somalia or Democratic Republic of the Congo, which have more urgent things to take care – have a statistical agency, whose purpose is to provide geographic, demographic or economical data for other government organizations. The use of government data is strongly preferred to Encarta or other outside sources. The problem with using the data from Encarta (or similar lists) is that we don't know what they include and what is missing. In other words, we will end up with a huge disorganized pile of blue links. For example, Madagascar has about 150 places called Ambodimanga... without accurate coordinates nobody would ever be able to figure out what is what, or even what they are (villages, communes...). I'm all for expanding the geographic coverage of Wikipedia, but it needs to be done systematically, hierarchically and complete for whatever administrative level we are talking about (counties, departements, communes, munincipalities etc). My understanding is that such a data exists for most (perhaps almost all) of the developing countries, and increasingly in electronic format. The data may not be available publicly on-line, but I would assume if we were to ask the relevant agencies for it, they would probably give it. – Sadalmelik (talk) 21:39, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

The best thing I have found to date is Global gazetteer. It lists places A-Z through an A-Z of all countries in the world. The information on population should be ignored though as it is an estimate but actual location, and elevation is reliable. I'd be amazed if a bot couldn't generate articles based on this. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 17:02, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I've reviewed it, it looks complete and standardized in a format a bot could read. Strong support for this task. And the country variable would provide a way to tag the talk to the appropriate wikiproject. MBisanz talk 17:26, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
I don't think it's a good idea to use Fallingrain as source, as it's indiscriminate on what it contains. I think it simply includes all the populated places from US gov. sources. It makes no distinction between villages with population of 100 and town with population of 100000. The problem then is that we end up with tens of thousands of new articles per country, only classified by first level administrative divisions. And that classification is not enough. That's why I suggested using government data instead, as it's hierarchical from the start (country level -> provinces -> counties -> towns or something similar). This hierarchy simply has to exist if one wants to find their way through tens of thousands of articles. And the hierarchy should be correct from the start, so government (official) sources are required. Wikipedia is big enough to ask and get the data, if it's not available on-line now.
By the way, the altitudes in Fallingrain are not reliable. I did check a few when I started stubbing Malagasy communes. Generally I think they are correct within 100m or so... The worst case among the handfull I checked was Ambalahonko - Fallingrain claims 321m[2] while SRTM shows 15m. – Sadalmelik (talk) 23:18, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Given the type of information that is contained in the Fallingrain database, I strongly disagree with having a bot carry out this task. Using a semi-automated process to create articles about cities that includes an infobox and a few sentences of information, like Sadalmelik has been doing with Malagasy settlements, is a good thing; however, creating thousands of stubs that say nothing more than "[Settlement] is a settlement in [Province], [Countrty]" is not, especially when the source used does not provide reliable population or elevation estimates, and does not really offer much else. Black Falcon (Talk) 17:56, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

A talk page archiving bot

I would like to put in a request to a talk page archiving bot with a similar syntax to User:MercuryBot, or at least the source code so I can run my own copy of the bot. Thanks, Nol888(Talk)(Review) 02:21, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

There are several already, including, as you mentioned, MercuryBot. Others include ClueBot III (mine), and MiszaBot III. -- Cobi(t|c|b) 02:29, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
Well, none of those seem to be active, and ClueBot has a different syntax from the other two. Nol888(Talk)(Review) 21:27, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
See WP:ARCHIVE. I've seen MiszaBot at work recently. -- SEWilco (talk) 03:30, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Missing references section

Hello. I would like to ask if you can use some bot in geographical articles. Problem is following: There are many references used in many articles about U.S. towns but the References section is missing, see e.g. Gillsville, Georgia. Could some bot add
== References ==
{{reflist}}
to articles which need it? Thanks. - Darwinek (talk) 18:53, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

The problem comes from adding the {{GR}}-template. Smackbot has done something similar before. I'll leave a note to the operator. Rettetast (talk) 21:23, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Thank you very much. It is a complex problem affecting hundreds of articles, therefore should be fixed. - Darwinek (talk) 10:56, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
I have been going through some articles with the {{GR}}-template, and about 20-25% of the articles has this problem. The {{GR}}-template is used on 40,000 articles, so that will mean that about 10.000 articles has this problem. Rettetast (talk) 13:00, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for doing that. This means it should be done only by a bot, manual work on this would be deadly and would take a long time. - Darwinek (talk) 14:15, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Er, since when did {{GR}} produce ref-tag references? That's not what the TfD said. People mentioned the idea, that's it. If a bot needs to go about editing the page, it could just as well replace the GR templates with a proper in-line non-templated reference. Gimmetrow 20:25, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Portal icon placement

Is there a way for a bot to:

  1. Check if an article's talk page links to a specific WikiProject with an associated portal, (for example, WP:Norway).
  2. Check to see if the see also section already contains a link to the associated portal, (for example, Portal:Norway).
  3. If the see also section doesn't contain a link to the portal, add the following code at the top of the see also section: {{Portal|Norway|Nuvola Norwegian flag.svg}} (That's the code for the Norway portal, would be specific to each portal.)

This would be really neat if a bot could do this. (Not just for Norway, but for any other type of WikiProject talk page tag and associated Portal icon as well). Cirt (talk) 09:30, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Layout#See also says The "See also" section provides a list of internal links to related Wikipedia articles. That doesn't support a link to a portal, even in the form of a flag. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:21, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Layout#See also supports linking a Portal with {{portal}}. Nevertheless, I don't think there would be enough consensus to add this link by bot everywhere. Some articles have a portal link under the lead infobox, for instance. But if a specific project asks for it and has a directly corresponding portal, a script could easily do this. Gimmetrow 18:25, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Okay, will keep these responses in mind, thanks. Perhaps specific projects will ask for this in the future. Cirt (talk) 20:39, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Depopulating a deleted category

Category:Jewish Christians has been deleted. Could a bot please depopulate it? Thanks! —Angr If you've written a quality article... 20:58, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Strange story: CfD'd first, thent restored via DRV, then speedied as empty, then recreated, then speedies as repost. Was the latter deletion valid? MaxSem(Han shot first!) 21:28, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Unless another CfD took place that wasn't mentioned in the deletion log, I don't see how it could be.--Dycedarg ж 00:55, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Ouch, I think I may have been cleaning up on auto pilot. Can someone point me to the DRV; if I made a mistake, I'll surely be glad to restore it. "What links here" on the cat doesn't link to a DRV, and the discussions that are linked to it all are for its deletion. -- Avi (talk) 12:21, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2007 May 31. MaxSem(Han shot first!) 12:36, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the link. However, both http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_August_29#Category:Jewish_Roman_Catholics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_August_25#Category:Jewish_atheists occurred afterwards and this category was still considered deleted. The cat's own history shows it was only recreated on 07:33, March 1, 2008 by User:Joyson Noel, who has a history of re-creating improper categories and posting blatant copyright violations (see the history of his talk page). As it was re-created under strange circumstances, I'm not certain it should be restored. If you wish to recreate on your own recognizance because you think it necessary, by all means do so, although based on the tortuous history of this cat, I'm certain someone is going to nominate it for deletion yet again .Thoughts? -- Avi (talk) 12:46, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
I've restored it, though I'm not adverse to its being nominated for deletion or re-naming again. I don't think the two CFDs from August are enough weight to overrule the DRV in which it was decided that the original CFD was sockpuppet-tainted. If anyone wants it to be deleted, let it be a brand-new CFD with no reliance on precedent. —Angr If you've written a quality article... 16:08, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Fair enough. -- Avi (talk) 16:11, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Article classification within Formula One project, part II

Hello,

Is it possible for a bot to find any article with {{F1-bio-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.

Requests for help on how to do this myself with AWB were ignored, hence the bot request.

Please let me know Guroadrunner (talk) 01:40, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I'll do it. Give me a day. Mønobi 05:10, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
DONE - Work completed by Monobot, owned by Mønobi. Thank you for doing this! Guroadrunner (talk) 05:40, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Request for Bot to tag Company Articles

I was wondering if it would be possible to create a bot that would add the WikiProject Companies banner (Template:WikiProject Companies) to the Talk page of any Mainspace article which includes the Infobox Company or Infobox Defunct Company templates (assuming of course that the banner is not already there).

As of the last count (Oct 2007) there were over 11,000 articles that included Infobox Company, and with the project standing at just over 2,000, this bot would allow us to focus on classing and improving articles. I envisage having this bot run maybe once a month. Thanks for your help! Richc80 (talk) 05:04, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

This isn't hard to do, but I remember that when I was last active on Wikipedia (I've been inactive for a bit), there was a lot of frustration with bot operators (myself included) bot-tagging talk pages of articles. Do you know if this still a problem? If not, I'd be happy to do this for you with Alphachimpbot. alphachimp 06:35, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm not aware of any problems, but then this is my first foray into the world of bots. From my perspective I would hope this isn't an issue, all I am looking to do is automate (and quicken) a process that we (WikiProject participants) are already working on. Maybe some more experienced editors could comment on whether this is still a problem, and if there are no major issues raised proceed? Thanks. Richc80 (talk) 13:02, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
It's not a problem. In fact, it's highly desirable to get articles associated with WikiProjects; the more the merrier. (I note that there is a special template to deal with excessive talk page clutter when there are multiple WikiProjects.) Tagging of this sort is important for Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment, since it depends on WikiProjects to do assessments.
There are a number of bots that already do this type of tagging - see the "Bots" subsection of the the WikiProject topic in the Editor's index. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:26, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
John Bot will be happy to do this once it gets approval. CWii(Talk|Contribs) 20:24, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

DOI finder for journal citations

Hi,

References are much more useful when they provide a permanent link to an online copy of the paper to which they refer. This is provided in the form of a doi, which can be placed in the template {{cite journal}} in the form of a parameter doi = . However, these codes are often cumbersome and unweildy, and for this reason and neglected by editors not using automated tools to insert their citations.

DOIs follow an easy-to-spot pattern, and are easy to detect using regexp. I find the following syntax is very effective for retrieving them from the source of web pages: 

|doi.*(10\.\d{4}/.*)[\s;\"]|Ui

It seems to be that it would be rather simple to program a bot to follow links already provided in a citation, which often point only to a mirror of the abstract page, and not the article itself, and to append a doi to the citation. It would also be possible for the bot to query google/google scholar with the authors and title where no URL is available, and search for a DOI in the result pages.

This would make verifying sources and using them to expand articles much simpler for editors, as well as futureproofing links with an unstable structure.

Anyone keen to make such a bot, or have any comments as to its feasibility?

Thanks,

Verisimilus T 17:57, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not certain this could be done in a fully-automated manner. A tool that helps with link fixups is http://tools.wikimedia.de/%7Edispenser/cgi-bin/linkchecker.py. My guess is that AWB may also have some capability for improving references, and I have heard that AWB is an interactive tool. Whenever I visit an article with the aim of tidying references I usually find numerous problems that need some amount of manual attention. The only fully-automated tool that should work across the board is the one running lately that adds the title of a web page to every URL reference. EdJohnston (talk) 20:29, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
I don't remember if I published User:RefBot code for that. Check the public code.[3] -- SEWilco (talk) 18:04, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to see a few examples of pages where Verisimilus thinks this would work. Not clear if you intend it to work in a fully automatic way. EdJohnston (talk) 20:29, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Once it was fully tested, there'd be no reason not to work it fully automatically; it is only adding data, not removing any. Since each DOI can be followed, it can be easily checked that a) it works and b) it leads to an article containing the title of the article and authors' names. If this didn't suffice, a commented tag could always be added after them saying "DOI added by bot" or some such. I suspect a bot would be a lot more reliable here than a typo-prone human!
Here are a couple of articles which could be improved, with just one example of a reference that could be easily DOI-linked.
I didn't see anything obvious in the refbot code; I suspect that it will be easier to get the bot past beaurocrats if that bot isn't refered to, flicking through some of the correspondence - it may cause confusion, even if the same framework is used.
Thanks, Verisimilus T 12:36, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Most of the correspondence was political and had nothing to do with the trivial tasks that old RefBot code performed. But if the DOI code is not in there, you'll have to write new code anyway. -- SEWilco (talk) 13:16, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Hm, I'd hoped to avoid doing any coding myself, as my previous attempts have involved much slog and little success. Could anyone recommend a PHP bot framework that I might be able to tinker with to avoid starting from scratch? Thanks. Verisimilus T 14:42, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Gosh, that was easy! I've now got a bot working and will put it through the WP:BRFA process when I've tweaked it. Thanks for all your support! Verisimilus T 15:59, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
You work fast! It would be good to see an example of what your bot would produce if run on a page like Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines. This is a good one to pick because it has a number of example references to scientific journals. Actually changing that page should be avoided (I think) for now. Also I'm not clear if you will just add a field when a citation template already exists, or if you generate a new template from scratch. EdJohnston (talk) 18:07, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot for formating lengthly templates (such as infoboxes)

An editor expressed concern that many uses of an infobox within articles are formated very tightly, as opposed to a cleaner table-like version, etc: For example, within a template's parameter arguments, this is bad: 

|param1 = blah
|param2 = blah
|longparametername = blah
|param3 = blah

instead of the cleaner: 

|param1            = blah
|param2            = blah
|longparametername = blah
|param3            = blah

As this only affects the backend of the article and nothing display wise, it's not a high priority, but I'm wondering if a bot yet exists that can update the formatting for a given template through its use by simply doing this expansion (given the length of the longest parameter); if no bot does exist, I can see this being very generic for any template like Infobox or the like. (The specific template in question is {{Infobox VG}}) --MASEM 18:11, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

This type of cluttered infobox structure is one of my pet peeves, as I find that it makes editing more difficult and increases the likelihood of accidental errors. Although this type of change would not produce a visible result to readers, I think it would be very helpful for editors, and I would love to see cluttered infoboxes cleaned up in this way (it is quite-time consuming to do it manually). Black Falcon (Talk) 18:15, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
its possible, Masem if you can compile a list of parameters for a single template Ill look into it. βcommand 18:18, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Well for the specific template, it would {{Infobox VG}}, which has all the parameters listed in Template:Infobox VG/doc. However, as I've noted, I think this can be made a highly generic task that can be applied to any similar box, so maybe there's a template specific format that can be created so that the bot is aware what template it is looking for, and what parameters are in that template, instead of programming specifically to one template. --MASEM 18:47, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
If there will be still no objections, I could add such feature to AWB general fixes, SmackBot will quickly propagate them everywhere. MaxSem(Han shot first!) 18:21, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
This would be great to have as part of the generic cleanups in AWB, and should be part of general cleanup maintenance if possible. --MASEM 18:47, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

param1 = blah |
param2 = blah |
longparametername = blah |
param3 = blah |

I think this should also adjust infoboxes such as above to have the separators first on the line, and it should only adjusts infoboxes, rather than all templates on the page. Gimmetrow 19:46, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Definitely it would be limited to a subset of templates (whitelist, otherwise ignore). However, I'm not sure about that format, again it's still cluttered, and the separator symbol could easily be missed on longer lines. --MASEM 20:08, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Right. I'm saying if someone is going to format templates (when editing the page for some other reason), I would like them to also reformat the above to have the separators first on the line. Gimmetrow 01:20, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Rechristen -> rename

Can anyone help replace instances of Christian name -> forename, christen -> name, etc.? --kylet (talk) 16:18, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I am not aware of any consensus that this is universal, approved or even necessary. Why do you want to make these replacements? Happy‑melon 19:17, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Simply because not everyone here is a Christian, and so does not have a Christian name. --kylet (talk) 15:47, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
The onus is on you to prove that your request is wholly within the bounds of consensus before it can be considered, as making potentially controversial edits in either an automated or semiautomated fashion is prohibited. Please point to a guideline, policy, or community discussion demonstrating that such consensus exists. If one does not exist, feel free to start one, obtain consensus, and then come back here.--Dycedarg ж 05:00, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
See the Christian name article, Guardian style guide, and the Oxford American Dictionary (that came with OS X): "In recognition of the fact that English-speaking societies have many religions and cultures, not just Christian ones, the term Christian name has largely given way to alternative terms such as given name, first name, or forename." From here on in I am out of my depth, and have no idea about how one might create a 'bot'. --kylet (talk) 16:29, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
OK, so you've proved that people outside of Wikipedia think this. What I meant was that you need to prove that people inside of Wikipedia think this. A Wikipedia policy or guideline declaring that Wikipedia strongly discourages the use of the term "Christian name" and its derivatives, or a discussion demonstrating sufficient consensus for this taking place on a related page. Furthermore, the terms christen and rechristen are commonly applied to boats and other inanimate objects, and I don't see any reason to go changing those instances.--Dycedarg ж 06:37, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
An article about religion or which mentions a religious ceremony could quite legitimately use the words "Christian name" and "christen", in my opinion. I doubt a bot could distinguish when this is the case. That reminds me of a joke. It went something like this: a priest started discovering the joys of a word processor. He had a marriage ceremony written out for a client named "Dorothy" and just did a global edit to change all instances of "Dorothy" to "Susan" the next time he performed a marriage. It worked wonderfully. The next time, he did the same thing to change "Susan" to "Mary". And then the time after that, the woman's name was Elaine, and he found himself reading out, "The Holy Virgin Elaine..." --Coppertwig (talk) 17:41, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot to post page view stats

Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Video_games#Project_traffic_statistics. See Jacoplane's 2008-03-14 00:16 comment; a bot that could post those stats somewhere would be cool and, I presume, fairly simple. Please comment there if interest. Cheers, dihydrogen monoxide (H2O) 08:52, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Protection template maintenance

Something I can't currently do myself because continuous-operation bots are beyond me :D. Currently protected pages are visibly flagged using one of a number of protection templates derived from {{pp-meta}}. There are several of these for specific problems, and also generic ones for each form of protection. However, this is dependent on the protecting admin placing the relevant notice on the page, which is not always done. In addition, all the templates take a parameter for expiry time, but this is rarely specified. A bot which could ensure that the protection templates on a page are always synchronised with the protection that is actually in place would be extremely useful, and improve the professional appearance of Wikipedia pages. "Yes, we disagree horribly over this page, but at least we're polite and professional enough to tell you that we're arguing" sort of thing.

The simplest way of implementing such a bot would be to monitor the IRC or API feed of Special:Log/protect. Some simple regexes can extract the relevant data, and the relevant template prepended to the page text, or an existing template modified. A one-time script would also have to be run on all pages transcluding {{pp-meta}}, and all pages listed in Special:protectedpages, to start from a clean sheet. As I say, I would run the bot myself if I had the knowledge or infrastructure to create continuously-running bots (or if anyone was prepared to teach me :D).

The only problem I can forsee (and it might be a large one) is that in order to be able to update fully-protected pages, the bot would need the sysop bit <gulp>. Happy‑melon 18:23, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

AFAIK there alreay are a couple bots that handle adding and removing templates. Q T C 03:53, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Without the sysop bit though, they'd be kind of useless at this. In any case, kudos to whoever wants to try and get this through RfA. Try to not let yourself get overrun by the overly paranoid people who have seen entirely too many "ROBOTS ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD!" movies.--Dycedarg ж 05:38, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Well ofc not for fully-protected pages, but for the rest. Q T C 06:07, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
My bot already tries to remove protection templates that have expired and fix templates that are for the wrong protection level (except case where an admin is needed). It catches most of them but obviously does not template articles that are protected but not templated. -- maelgwn - talk 07:05, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Extended help wanted

Cross-posted from Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard

I'm interested in developing my bot skills, particularly to running bots which operate on a continuous basis, rather than the more script-oriented bots I'm already operating. I'm looking for a more experienced bot coder/operator who can help me get to grips with the extra knowledge and tools required to operate continuously-running bots. Kind of an adopt-a-bot-owner system :D. I can work in C++ and VB, but all of my previous bot-coding experience has been in python. Anyone interested and willing to give me a hand? Happy‑melon 10:40, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot to rate WikiProject quality assessment on talk page as same as other project tags

Resolved

I would love someone who knows more about this, to help with this:

  1. Find all article talkpages that are already tagged with {{WikiProject Theatre}}, but are not assessed yet for quality ratings.
  2. Check to see if other project tags on that talk page are already assessed for quality ratings.
  3. Update {{WikiProject Theatre}} on each talk page, if missing quality rating, to match the other quality ratings on the other project tags.

I coulda sworn I've already seen something automated around wikipedia that does this, can't remember where or what. Could really use the help in doing this, it will help to assess what quality content to use at Portal:Theatre, which I want to work on next. Cirt (talk) 04:01, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

As I recall, this task was a bit controversial for anything but stubs, so we agreed that it could be done on a project-by-project basis if the project asked for it and understood the consequences. Projects can rate articles differently depending on how the article covers material relevant to each project. You might have an article on a drama which WP:CHESS rated A based on the description of one scene with a chess game. Gimmetrow 04:12, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
How about if we start by just matching up FAs and GAs? {{WikiProject Theatre}} won't really have any of those, because I just added the parameters to the template, even though the articles were previously tagged w/ the template itself. Cirt (talk) 04:15, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
I think the previous discussion is at Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_13#Assessment_bot. If you want this done right away, it looks like Betacommand did this one before. Gimmetrow 09:37, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
Okay, thanks, I'll check out the archived thread and talk to Betacommand (talk · contribs). Cirt (talk) 19:27, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Betacommand (talk · contribs) seems to be pretty busy - any help/ideas on this request? Cirt (talk) 06:40, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Do you have consensus in your project for this? -- maelgwn - talk 10:42, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
I only want this to be done for the WP:GA and WP:FA ratings, not lower. As WP:GA and WP:FA ratings subsume any project ratings, there should be no problems with this. Cirt (talk) 10:44, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
What about just for FAs ?

Would the above idea be acceptable if it were a bot just to check for unassessed project tags or incorrect project tags on articles that are already successfully promoted WP:FAs, and rate them accordingly for quality=FA ? Cirt (talk) 09:23, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Any help here? I think if we just focus on the unrated tags on WP:FA articles only, this is pretty noncontroversial. Cirt (talk) 08:57, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
Anyone? Bueller? Cirt (talk) 12:01, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Yes, Beta seems preoccupied. There are only 17 FAs amd 14 GAs with the WikiProject Theatre template, though. Gimmetrow 14:08, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Thank you, in that case I'll just tag those few myself manually, sigh, I guess that means there are tons more theatre related articles that just aren't tagged with {{WikiProject Theatre}} at all. Cirt (talk) 20:53, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Tag some articles

Will someone please place {{WikiProject Green Bay Packers|class=|importance=}} on every talk page of any articles within Category:Green Bay Packers and its 6 subcategories that does not have {{WikiProject Green Bay Packers}} on its talk page? It shouldnt be that many, but I want to make sure that any newly created articles are added to the project. Thanks! « Gonzo fan2007 (talk ♦ contribs) 07:02, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Is there any bot operator who handles requests like this regularly who is prepared to be put in a big "Common requests: contact X if you want to do Y" banner at the top of this page? We seem to get a huge number of these requests. Happy‑melon 10:20, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
There is Wikipedia:EIW#WikiProject that has a list of bots that have done it. I think it is probably better here so that who ever is available to do it on the day, can do it, rather than ones person getting backlogged with requests. -- maelgwn - talk 11:29, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
That and I cant believe that there are more than 20 or so articles that need to be tagged in this request. It is more finding the articles that arent tagged, which would take forever by hand. I would contact an individual bot owner I know but I figured that the request would be processed faster here, and as this is the page for requests for work to be done by a bot, I figured I would go through the proper area instead of individually bugging someone to do a pretty simple (at least it seems simple to me, but what do I know :P) job. Thanks again. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk ♦ contribs) 17:36, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks a lot for the no-help, this page is pretty worthless. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk ♦ contribs) 19:59, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, It's a volunteer project, and I, for one, hadn't noticed this up on my watchlist. I just did the same, for someone who asked me on my talkpage... SQLQuery me! 20:35, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Oh god, please dont give me the unpaid volunteers bit, I for one havent been paid by Wikipedia either :P but whatever I struck my comments, dont worry, next time I'll go ask personally; where I am confused is the purpose of this noticeboard if it is faster to just ask someone on their talk page. But again, Im over it, sorry if it seemed I was a little angry, but it seemed like no one was watching this board at all and my request wasnt that big of a request. Oh and I went and asked for help from specific user, fyi. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk ♦ contribs) 20:50, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

List of settlements

I was wondering.... OK, so no consensus was made to create the articles -can we at least get a bot to generate a list of settlements by country and a globe locator by the next of them using falling rain?. If we have a list of settlements in the wikipedia database at least then there is a catalogue of missing articles to work through. I'd rather not have to generate the lists manually. This way if there are many settlments with the same name etc these can be fixed afterwards and we should have a clean list of missing articles ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 10:58, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I'd be willing to create these lists, but it would be a lot of work to clean them up... If you (or other people) are willing to do that, that would be great. Take a look at List of settlements in Utrecht; does that look like what you want? I'm working on several other tasks at the moment, so I may forget this one; please keep bugging me on my talk page until I do something about it ;-) -- Eugène van der Pijll (talk) 09:38, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke has died and we're trying to improve the article. Could anyone of you run a bot to convert the bare footnotes please? Thank you. —Cesar Tort 02:11, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Can we have a bot to address the misconceived links to date fragments such as Wednesday and April? There are tens of thousands of these and probably only a few hundred make any sense at all. It is relatively easy to identify the nonsense ones.

There are many other ridiculous ways in which people handle dates. Many are fairly easy to identify e.g. '[February 8|8 February]'. This is a known side-effect of autoformatting and must be one of the most common diseases on Wikipedia. They are difficult for human editors to identify and fix but they are ideal bot fodder. Lightmouse (talk) 20:11, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Could you give a few examples? Mønobi 22:22, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
I do not understand your question. The request contains examples. Do you want examples of links to '[Wednesday]' or examples of links to '[February 8|8 February]'? Lightmouse (talk) 09:11, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
Could you explain It is relatively easy to identify the nonsense ones a bit more? How would a bot pick out, from among 10,000 or so links, the hundred or two that were in fact valid and should not be de-linked? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:29, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
We do not seem to be understanding each other. I hoped that the example of '[February 8|8 February]' would explain what I meant. Are you saying that example is not clear? Lightmouse (talk) 19:02, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
We want a in-article example. CWii(Talk|Contribs) 21:38, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Here are some in-article examples:

Do you understand what I mean now?

Lightmouse (talk) 11:01, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Those are easy for a bot to identify but difficult for a human. Do others agree that these misconceived links should be corrected? Lightmouse (talk)
Convert To
[[January 1st]] [[January 1]]
[[January 1]]st [[January 1]]
[[January 25]], [[2008 in music|2008]] [[January 25]], [[2008]]
It would be easy for a bot to periodically clean out WhatLinksHere for the redirects like 1st January, 2nd February, etc. In fact, there are many MOS:DATE fixes that could probably be done reliably by bot. Maybe I'll try and cook something up. Happy‑melon 16:08, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
While the MOS is relatively clear, this topic does seem to stir up a bit on controversy. I would recommend a bot be conservative in what it changes (ex. fixing date formats) and leave the more problematic cases (ex. delinking) to human editors. -- JLaTondre (talk) 13:04, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
True. What conversions would be uncontroversial? Feel free to add to the table to the right. Happy‑melon 15:33, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
I have added one from the list that I gave above. See also the list at Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Autoformatting_and_linking e.g. date ranges, disambiguation page links, section headings etc. Furthermore, you may find useful regex for this at User:Lightmouse/javascript conversion. Lightmouse (talk) 11:14, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot for WP:GL/IMPROVE

I made this request last month I believe but it went unfulfilled so I am trying again. Per this discussion, please mark requests/sections that have had no activity in 14 days with {{Stale|1=~~~~}} at the top of the section. Thank you. Also, still hoping an archival bot comes around that looks for the {{Resolved}} template.↔NMajdan•talk 19:46, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

So basically, you want a bot that marks requests as stale after 14 days, and archives discussions marked with {{resolved}}? I think I could handle that. Would you want the resolved discussions to be archived after being marked for a certain period of time, or only after they'd been there a while longer to make sure the original requester sees the result? And was that "in progress" tag mentioned in the discussion you linked to above ever implemented?--Dycedarg ж 18:14, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for responding. I don't think a consensus has been reached on the in progress tag and I, personally, don't think one is needed. A simple glance at the comments shows whether work is in progress. Regarding time to archive, I think the agreement was to mark as stale after 14 days of inactivity and to archive 7 days after that. Regarding resolved requests, if you can, I would like to see resolved requests remain on the page for a minimum of 24 hours and a maximum of 48. That should give the requester time to see the request has been fulfilled. Otherwise, the requester should know to check the archive. See our current archive for the requested layout. We would like to keep requests that went stale and those that were resolved separate. Again, thanks very much for responding to our request.↔NMajdan•talk 20:42, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
OK, I think I can have something cooked up by the end of the weekend.--Dycedarg ж 21:29, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
 Done Please see my note on the talk page of WP:GL for details.--Dycedarg ж 06:37, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot for WP:GL/IMPROVE

I made this request last month I believe but it went unfulfilled so I am trying again. Per this discussion, please mark requests/sections that have had no activity in 14 days with {{Stale|1=~~~~}} at the top of the section. Thank you. Also, still hoping an archival bot comes around that looks for the {{Resolved}} template.↔NMajdan•talk 19:46, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

So basically, you want a bot that marks requests as stale after 14 days, and archives discussions marked with {{resolved}}? I think I could handle that. Would you want the resolved discussions to be archived after being marked for a certain period of time, or only after they'd been there a while longer to make sure the original requester sees the result? And was that "in progress" tag mentioned in the discussion you linked to above ever implemented?--Dycedarg ж 18:14, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for responding. I don't think a consensus has been reached on the in progress tag and I, personally, don't think one is needed. A simple glance at the comments shows whether work is in progress. Regarding time to archive, I think the agreement was to mark as stale after 14 days of inactivity and to archive 7 days after that. Regarding resolved requests, if you can, I would like to see resolved requests remain on the page for a minimum of 24 hours and a maximum of 48. That should give the requester time to see the request has been fulfilled. Otherwise, the requester should know to check the archive. See our current archive for the requested layout. We would like to keep requests that went stale and those that were resolved separate. Again, thanks very much for responding to our request.↔NMajdan•talk 20:42, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
OK, I think I can have something cooked up by the end of the weekend.--Dycedarg ж 21:29, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
 Done Please see my note on the talk page of WP:GL for details.--Dycedarg ж 06:37, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Page moves

Would it be possible to have a bot that reported on possible inappropriate page moves? I just noticed that Hell was left for almost an hour at "Anne Frank wuz here". A bot that left a report to be checked by a human might have some use and could speed up the reversion of such moves. On the other hand it's quite possible that the Hell page move is an exception and pages are restored much quicker. CambridgeBayWeather Have a gorilla 10:55, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I just put up a IRC based version of this for admins. βcommand 2

Lots of images now appearing in incorrect size

Please see thread at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Barnstars_format for this problem that's rather a headscratcher at first sight, that's seemingly affecting a lot of userspace and mainspace images. Rather than waiting for this to be addressed by the overworked bugzilla developers, it seems the fix is quite simple and could be implemented by a bot, though I think an explanatory edit summary would be a very good idea, especially for the userspace edits. --Dweller (talk) 14:14, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

To fix the problem, simply remove instances of "px" within all {{click}} template calls, within the "height" and "width" parameters. I'm afraid not using a bot in the first place (when it wasn't a problem) caused this; I put in the edit having been convinced by example that it didn't cause issues. Nihiltres{t.l} 15:26, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
OK, let's see. A regex for fixing duplication of "px" in normal image parameters is (\[\[Image:[^\]]+\|\n?\d+)pxpx([^\]]*\]\]) --> $1px$2 . I'll work on a regex for click templates. Happy‑melon 16:33, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Try (\{\{\n*[Cc]lick[^\}]+?\d+)px(([^\}]*\d+)px)?([^\}]*\}\}) --> $1$3$4 . MelonBot's running this regex on AWB, but there are 7730 pages transcluding {{click}}, so it'll take a while. Anyone who wants to start a thousand entries down the list, or who can think of a faster way of getting it done, go for it (someone ought to check my regexes too, better safe than sorry). Happy‑melon 16:48, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. Is there a way of working out if there are other templates affected? --Dweller (talk) 16:55, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
There's at least three others affected based on two separate village pump threads, those being {{Infobox Airline}}, {{Infobox rail}}, and {{Infobox Bus transit}}. See [5] and [6]. There's definitely more out there as well, but unfortunately we won't know what they are unless someone reports it. --TMF Let's Go Mets - Stats 17:05, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
I've just thought of a (messy) way to add code to {{click}} to categorise all instances which have it with "px" in... it just requires me to create a thousand user subpages first :D! If anyone can think of a better method than adding <includeonly>{{#ifexist:User:MelonBot/ClickFix/{{{width}}}|[[Category:Click templates needing fixing|{{PAGENAME}}]]}}, please shout before I go creating User:MelonBot/ClickFix/1px, User:MelonBot/ClickFix/2px, etc!! The same code could be applied to other templates, but we now have to decide which way to standardise - do we put all "px" in the template, or in the template call?? Something to decide at VPT - for now it seems that in the template call is the more popular. Happy‑melon 17:10, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
I went through many of the pages that use {{Infobox rail}} and adjusted as needed until I found the link to this discussion. There are still quite a few more pages to check for this template. Also add {{Infobox Locomotive}} to the list; I found a couple on the first page of links that needed adjustment. In both cases, the parameters are named "*_size" (where "*" is either "logo", "image" or "map"). I've mentioned the issue on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains to notify project participants of what to do if they come across an affected page. Slambo (Speak) 18:17, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Add {{Infobox Station}} to the list. Slambo (Speak) 18:36, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Discussion on this topic has been centralised at Wikipedia talk:ClickFix. Happy‑melon 20:19, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

{{missing-taxobox}}

Resolved

The Template:missing-taxobox should be on the talk page of articles (per Wikipedia:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life#Cleanup) but this is often not the case. Could a bot move the template to the talk pages automatically? Is that a task big enough to be done by a bot or is it small enough to be done by a human? Pro bug catcher (talk • contribs). 23:30, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

It's only transcluded on nine pages. I think this can be handled by human editors.--Dycedarg ж 03:05, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
Ok. Thanks. Pro bug catcher (talk • contribs). 03:08, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Are there any bots who can handle tagging of massive categories?

I'm adept at throwing things like Category:Museum stubs at SQL and his bot but short of being a nudge, is there any bot that could handle the monster Category:Museums *AND* its sub cats, or is that beyond bot ability? That said, thank you too all of who you write and run bots that make our lives easier TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 01:43, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Um what do you want done? -- maelgwn - talk 06:11, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
I don't mind doing it :) SQLBot is hungry for edits! :P Just drop me a list of categories, and make sure the relevant WikiProject is OK with them all :) SQLQuery me! 07:58, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, both of you. Basically the whole of Category:Museums eventually needs to be tagged with {{WikiProject Museums}} to add it to The Museums WikiProject, but the issue is there are no articles in the main category, they're housed in 22 sub categories, each with numerous own subs. Can a bot dig that deep? The project is definitely OK with it as we've been working through what SQLBot assessed for us so far and assessing, etc. TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 11:51, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Ill have BCBot create a list of subcats to work through. then if you want I can have BCBot quickly tag them also. βcommand 2 15:08, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks! No rush on any of this, I appreciate everyone's help TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 15:50, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
BCBot will update User:BetacommandBot/Sandbox 3 shortly going only 5 levels deep. this will need cleaned up (there are things coming up that you probably did not know was under that main cat.) βcommand 01:22, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
Oh wow, thanks! Would you mind leaving that up for 24-48 hours? I'm about to feed it to the project for help in weeding out the unrelated cats. I'm assuming we shouldn't touch it so the bot can still read it? Can the bot then read that to tag the cats or would we just use that to throw a cat or 10 at Betacommand/SQL Bots on occasion? Thanks! TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 03:41, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
that will be up for a while, and BCBot can parse almost any format. BCBot could handle all of the tagging and have it done within a few hours. (its what BCBot does best) list ping me when that list has been filtered. βcommand 14:38, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
thank you, we're working on it and I'll let you know when we're done. Thanks again for all your help. TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 17:28, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

WPF1 Newsletter

The editors of the WPF1 Newsletter are looking for a bot that could deliver it. So far it is being delivered manually; it is becoming popular and becoming a bit of a handful to deliver manually. Does anyone have a bot or willing enough to have a bot that could deliver it. Chubbennaitor 21:19, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

User:Newsletterbot, User:DeliveryBot, User:R Delivery Bot, User:ENewsBot, User:COBot, User:GrooveBot and User:Anibot all deliver newsletters for various WikiProjects. Checking with one of them will probably help out and get the work done. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk ♦ contribs) 23:59, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
If you need BCBot can do that also. βcommand 14:39, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Cross-tabbing

I'm looking for a bot, not based on the toolserver, that can output the following 2 lists. An intersect of all images that appear in one of these Cats Category:Fair use images but are not in Category:All non-free media? And then intersect all images in both Category:All non-free media and any of the sub-Cats starting at Category:Free images? That would give two lists. One of non-free images that for some reason aren't in the master category (corrupt license, etc) and a second list of all images with conflicting free and non-free licenses. And the reason it can't be a toolserver bot is that this query involves comparing 300,000 images to 300,000, images and will apparently crash the server. MBisanz talk 02:08, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Cancel this request. I've found a non-bot way to get the info. MBisanz talk 03:21, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Ohio Article tag on talk pages

Would it be possible to add {{OH-Project|class=|importance=}} on all article talk pages under Category:Ohio that don't have the project tag already? Also, would it be possible to automatically assess stub class, FA, FL, and GA articles for the articles once they have the templates added? Thanks, §tepshep • ¡Talk to me! 23:19, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Working on right now. :) Soxred93 | talk bot 01:56, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
And also, stub = yes. Others = no. Bot's can't generate that judgement. Soxred93 | talk bot 03:09, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

But could it take from other banners around it and asses it for "class=" and automatiucally assess stub articles if they have the stub template on the article page? If not, no big deal, just trying to shorten the workload. Thanks for the help. §tepshep • ¡Talk to me! 19:54, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Thanks Soxred93, I have downloaded and setup AWB so I should be able to finish what is left (as soon as I get approved). Thank you fro your time. §tepshep • ¡Talk to me! 00:37, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Infobox (and other template) formatting improvements (rebump from archive)

Following on a previous request I made to have a bot for the cleanup of the wikitext used for "long" templates such as most infoboxes, I was wondering if there's still an interest in a bot for this? While I can point to a specific template to start cleanup on, I'd like to see this made as generic as possible for any possible template (whitelisting for those templates that would be affected, mind you). --MASEM 16:37, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

If a bot were to be created for this, it might be useful to add a few additional features. For example, correction for renamed parameters (obviously a list would need to be created, but the bot would probably be doing one infobox at a time or something, so that wouldn't be hard). Also, potentially adding a minimum list of parameters (say, if a useful parameter was missing, add it as a blank, so someone is more inclined to fill it in). This would take some knowledge of what paramters are important, however.
My concern is whether this is something bots should be making mass edits for. As in, if the bot is doing nothing else, is that a good use of an edit? It would definitely be something I'd like to see in AWB general fixes or something. Finally, is there community consensus on the "correct" way to write infobox transclusions? - AWeenieMan (talk) 03:07, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure about a consensus for it being the "correct" way, but I'm pretty sure it is regarded as the best way. So I don't think putting it in the AWB general fixes would be controversial, as it doesn't change anything except make it more readable.--Dycedarg ж 05:11, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

racing-reference.com -> racing-reference.info external link checker and changer

Resolved

Hello, I am not affiliated with the site but many stock car driver profiles include a link to either http://www.racing-reference.com or http://www.racing-reference.info - the same site with two URLs. For background, Racing-Reference is sort of like the IMDB of stock car racing. In October 2007, the racing-reference.com URL went offline, leaving only racing-reference.info as the correct way to get to the site. However, that may leave many old links added to Wikipedia in the dark.

Is it possible to scan for any Wikipedia articles that include the string "racing-reference.com" and have a bot change/update that part of the string to update it to "racing-reference.info"  ?

Please let me know. Guroadrunner (talk) 10:43, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[7] this page only has one page affected? -- maelgwn - talk 11:53, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
When they changed the URL several months ago, I had used an AWB to make the change. Royalbroil 12:23, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Oh. Did not know. Sorry about that. Guroadrunner (talk) 18:27, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Wow - I never knew you could look up what is linked to what across the project. Thanks for the tip Maelgwn. Guroadrunner (talk) 18:27, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot

Would it be possible for a bot to delete articles under 700KB, Furthermore tagging it with a "prod", or maybe a "afd". Dwilso 04:43, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I think you need to clarify your request. It's not clear what you are suggesting. You don't delete and then tag an article. Also, 700KB is a pretty large number (50KB is the recommended maximum size for an article). If you are suggesting that a bot delete short articles:
1. Bots will not be approved to delete articles.
2. Short does not equate to should be deleted. There are many valid short pages (stubs, disambig, etc.). Also, short pages often occur due to vandalism (which just needs reverting).
There are already methods for patrolling short pages (Special:ShortPages, Toolserver report, etc.). -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:32, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Orphans

i am finding literally 100s of orphan-tagged articles that are not oprhans. can someone design a bot to remove all the orphan-tags from non-orphan articles? The bot would look at all the articles with orphan tags, and remove the tags of articles that are not orphans. the bot would have to be designed to discern what would constitute a genuine link. Articles linking only to talk pages, categories, Wikipedia: pages, and other non-article pages would not lose the orphan tag. Kingturtle (talk) 22:07, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

if you could be a little more specific about what/how you want the bot to do, and I will see what I can do. βcommand 22:13, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Are you sure you've got the right definition of "orphan"? On Wikipedia, an "orphaned" page is one which has few incoming links - that is, Special:Whatlinkshere has very few results. The number of links from the page to other articles is not relevant. Happy‑melon 22:15, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
The bot will look at every article tagged as an orphan. When the bot looks at Ethiopian Sidamo (coffee), it will look at Pages that link to Ethiopian Sidamo (coffee) and see there is at least one article linking to Ethiopian Sidamo (coffee), and the bot will remove the orphan tag. When the bot looks at Etebac5, it will look at Pages that link to Etebac5 and see there is one link to Etebac5 but that link is not a proper article, so the bot will leave the orphan tag alone. Kingturtle (talk) 22:25, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
I am not sure the proper (uncontroversial) bar here is one incoming link, as many people regard articles with "few" incoming links as orphans (see here). I would suggest setting the bar slightly higher (maybe 3 links?). Also, don't forget about disambiguation pages; those shouldn't count. Probably can be handled by removing parenthetical phrases and looking for a title match. It is something to be considered. - AWeenieMan (talk) 02:34, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Set the bar at two articles. That's fine with me. Although I am of the mindset that one is enough. As for disamb pages, they are definitely more complicated because it takes a human eye to determine what disambiguation pages they should be linked to. Kingturtle (talk) 04:04, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Board and table games

I'd like to request a bot to locate all talk pages that use the {{BTGProject}} template with no "class" rating, and assign a class of "unassessed" to them. This way the project Wikipedia:WikiProject Board and table games can easily pick them up and assign a rating to them. I'd also like to request that any mainspace article that has {{board-game-stub}} or {{card-game-stub}} on the article page and no {{BTGProject}} on the talk page, to have the BTGProject template inserted on the talk page with a class of "unassessed". In other words, I'd like to insert {{BTGProject|class=unassessed}} for the types of pages that I have mentioned.

I'm just trying to locate pages that do belong, or should belong, to the project so that they can be assessed. Thanks in advance. --Craw-daddy | T | 20:09, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

For the first part, and kinda the last part, it would be much easier to just add a

|#default=[[Category:Unassessed board and table game articles articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]

to {{BTGProject}}. This would mean that any page that either has {{BTGProject|class=}} or {{BTGProject}} would automatically go to Category:Unassessed board and table game articles. Im not great at parsar but I believe this would be an easier, more effective (especially for the future), and less work than tagging every article. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk ♦ contribs) 21:07, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
Ok I added the default, so within the next hour or so the category should be filling up. For the bot owners the second part of the request, to "I'd also like to request that any mainspace article that has {{board-game-stub}} or {{card-game-stub}} on the article page and no {{BTGProject}} on the talk page, to have the BTGProject template inserted on the talk page with a class of "unassessed". In other words, I'd like to insert {{BTGProject}} for the types of pages that I have mentioned" still needs to be done. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk ♦ contribs) 21:18, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for that first part! I'm not great at the whole template thing myself, and am still trying to learn more about them. I hope the bot managers/programmers can help out with the second part. --Craw-daddy | T | 21:52, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
No problem, you may just want to ask User:SatyrTN or User:SQL, they both do WikiProject help. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk ♦ contribs) 22:08, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
About the second task: I've done this sort of thing in the past, and generally when project tags are added to talk pages of stubs the class is stub instead of unassessed, since generally if an article has a stub tag it is a stub class article. Is there any particular reason you don't want these just classified as stubs? It would save your project a fair amount of effort.--Dycedarg ж 02:25, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
Doh! I just wasn't thinking straight. :) Yes, of course it makes sense to classify them as stubs if they have the stub tag on the main page. Thanks in advance! --Craw-daddy | T | 15:00, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
 Done--Dycedarg ж 17:41, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Many thanks for this! --Craw-daddy | T | 10:37, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

A first/last name reverser for names written "Last Name first" (Japan, Korea etc.)

I wish there was a bot that could find Japanese or Korean or any other name that is originaly written "Last Name fisrt" but with it's article written "Fisrt Name first", and then create a page with the "Last Name first" and redirect it to the article. That is, if another different article doesn't exist. —Preceding unsigned comment added by BrianGo28 (talk • contribs) 15:33, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

There will be. Eugène van der Pijll (talk) 19:56, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Great! :) βriαn Go XXVIII (talk) 05:25, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

RPG project pages

Greetings! This is one of the usual requests for tagging of a project's pages, in this case the Role-playing game project. The project's tag is {{RPGproject}}. I'd like a bot to go through articles, tagging those with {{rpg-stub}} on the main page to be in the "stub" class (assuming they're not there already of course). Also, at the same time, if it can identify any redirects and categories with the RPGproject tag on the talk page and classify them accordingly that would be much appreciated. Finally, (untagged) articles that use the RPGproject tag *and* with article titles that begin "List of ...", could these be filtered in the "list" class *and* be marked with "importance=low" at the same time? Thanks in advance! --Craw-daddy | T | 10:37, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

One other thing, I can't figure out why, but it seems that some pages aren't showing up in the "Unassessed" category, despite the fact that they are unassessed. Is it possible to get a robot to "touch" all the talk pages in the project, just so that they will be filtered into the categories? In other words, it need not update the pages, but if you "make an edit" without changing anything, this causes the template to be read again and the page gets filtered to the right category. (I'm not explaining myself very well, but I'm sure you know what I mean). Thanks again. --Craw-daddy | T | 10:41, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot to de-tag categories that I mistakenly had added to the Museums WikiProject?

I'm owning this one wholly, Beta gave us a list that BCBot got from Category:Museums and I thought we'd removed all of those that were not applicable but we missed some. Wholly my fault, but there are far too many for me to undo by hand. We've started a master list of those categories that need to be un-done, is there a bot who could help with this? Again, apologies for causing the problem. I really thought I'd caught these. Thanks! TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 21:40, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Give me ~3 hours to get back to my main PC and code a quick fix up. βcommand 2 21:48, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Thank you! I didn't want to ask you directly in case you were busy and because I was the cause of the extra work. I've addressed the questions raised to you on your talk page and owned the problem, hope that helps some. TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 21:51, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
ETA: List here whenever you're ready to look at it TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 01:11, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Geographic references

As a result of this discussion, the various GR templates were changed from being references to Wikipedia:Geographic references to being various templates that produce standard-looking references. There was originally a different format for these links (like [[Geographic references#2|<sup>2</sup>]] for {{GR|2}}), most of which were removed years ago with edits like this one. However, there are a lot remaining, and since the GR templates are standard references now rather than being links to Wikipedia:Geographic references, the old-style ones are inferior. Could we have a bot simply to go around and put the respective GR templates in place of all instances of links to [[Geographic references]] with numbers?

To explain:

  • [[Geographic references#1|<sup>1</sup>]], [[Geographic references|<sup>1</sup>]] with {{GR|1}}
  • [[Geographic references#2|<sup>2</sup>]], [[Geographic references|<sup>2</sup>]], [[Geographic references#2|²]] with {{GR|2}}
  • [[Geographic references#3|<sup>3</sup>]], [[Geographic references|<sup>3</sup>]], [[Geographic references#3|³]] with {{GR|3}}
  • [[Geographic references#4|<sup>4</sup>]], [[Geographic references|<sup>4</sup>]] with {{GR|4}}
  • [[Geographic references#5|<sup>5</sup>]], [[Geographic references|<sup>5</sup>]] with {{GR|5}}
  • [[Geographic references#6|<sup>6</sup>]], [[Geographic references|<sup>6</sup>]] with {{GR|6}}

Nyttend (talk) 16:56, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Give that to smackbot. its what it does. βcommand 17:05, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Pict

would it be possible to create a bot that shrinks images down, I have noticed several articles that have overblown pictures above 350px, and am tired of manually shrinking them down. Dwilso 20:02, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

For images that are not sized you can set the thumbnail size in Special:Preferences, under Files. For images with a size specificied, a bot cannot tell if a pic is intended to be over 350px or whether it is 'overblown'. -- maelgwn - talk 22:05, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

WP:AFC stats bot

I'm somewhat active at WP:AFC, which sees many submissions each day. I'd like to see if there might be a way to get some stats for submissions. I originally posted my idea at [8], but since nobody has opposed my idea, I'll bring it here.

The long and the short is that each day, new articles for creation are submitted at WP:AFC. They're added to Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Today, which is transcluded to WP:AFC. They are archived daily at Wikipedia:Articles for creation/List, which is in turn archived monthly.

The stats would be basically number of submissions per day, number of accepted requests (and by inference, number of declined requests). The submissions appear to be well-formed:

A completed day is listed in Wikipedia:AFC/LIST with the {{done}} template.

For each day that is listed as {{done}}, the individual pages are:

  • existence of {{afc c}} template for verification of completion
  • the number of level two headings is the number of sumissions
  • the existence of the parser #switch:accept identifies an accepted submission (as opposed to #switch:|accept for a declined submission)

Since formats have changed over time, this can only be done from the present. I'd like to see a bot write out WP:AFC/Stats in something like:

2008-04-01: 21 submissions, 6 accepted

And maybe even with a link to the AFC page, in this example Wikipedia:Articles for creation/2008-04-01.

I hope I am being clear, I see it in my head, but sometimes writing it down in detail gets a little clumsy. Yngvarr (c) 16:04, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Is this the right place ?

I have a bot idea that (if I understand the rules) would run in toolserver space since it is read only (it will analyze certain diffs). Do I request such a bot in this forum? Low Sea (talk) 16:12, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Go right ahead. People request bots that perform read-only activities here fairly often.--Dycedarg ж 16:16, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
Cool. OK, here goes...

Wanted: TagkerBot (pronounced "tagger", short for Tag Tracker). This bot could run slowly and execute read only actions to compile statistics on adding/removing of tags. Below is a rough outline of the output from the bot and some preliminary logic on how the bot might work.

  1. The end product would be three data tables (built automatically as new data is encountered by the bot):
    1. TABLE#1 would show 1 record for each tagname. Each record would contain only two fields: tagname (which will be the key-field for each record), and tag_counter.
    2. TABLE#2 would be a set of simple placeholder records showing article_name (key-field) and date-time for last edit of this article processed by TaggerBot. This table would need to be kept for use on each run to avoid re-processing data.
    3. TABLE#3 would be made of journaled records using the following fields:
      1. tagname
      2. Flag: Was tag added or removed during this edit?
      3. DTS of relevant change
      4. mainspace article name
      5. username or IP of editor who altered the tag
      6. Edit summary left by user on new edit.

The logic for this bot is roughly as follows (I am using crude logic and I know better tools may exist but hopefully this will help clarify how I think this bot can work).

  1. Search all mainspace articles for new edits. For testing assume any edit prior to 23:59 31-Mar-2008 has already been processed by TagkerBot (might require a baseline pass to create the first set of TABLEs).
  2. Create a temp textfile containing the raw Before edit data.
  3. Create a temp textfile containing the raw After edit data.
  4. Extract a list of all {{tagname}} strings from each of the two temp files.
  5. Compare the two lists.
    1. If a tag has been added then create a new tagname record for TABLE#1 (only if needed) and a new record for TABLE#3. Increment the record's tag_counter field by 1.
    2. If a tag has been removed then decrement the tag_counter field by 1. Create a new record for TABLE#3.
    3. Create/Update the relevant record for TABLE#2 only if a tag has been added or removed.
  6. Repeat comparison of list until all tags have been processed.

NOTES:

  • TABLE#1 and TABLE#3 should be cretaed with a filename that includes bot run date-time info (example: "TagkerBot_Table#1_2008-04-02_13-59.LOG". These tables can be archived and can be downloaded and used offline to build extracts of all sorts of statistical data. TABLE#2 needs to be kept internally for use by the bot to avoid reprocessing of data.
  • tagnames should be exactly what is between the double braces up to the first pipe symbol. Typo'd and imaginary tagnames must be noted or else diffs will be meaningless.

Low Sea (talk) 01:08, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

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