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Template:Canada CP 2006

Could all 303 pages that use Template:Canada CP 2006 be null-edited (or anything that comes down to the same)? This template in some cases made a broken reference which has now been fixed. This would probably reduce the number of articles in Category:Wikipedia pages with broken references considerably. Since I am doing work on them, this would help. Debresser (talk) 14:09, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

That's what the job queue is for. The broken references will be fixed automatically before too long. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 14:14, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
I know. But the job queue may take up to 6 weeks at times to do this and I'm doing the work now. Basically there might be 2 ways: have the job queue turn to these articles first, or have a special bot take care of such groups of articles that have been affected by some fix. Is either of them possible? Debresser (talk) 14:20, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Where can I have a look which jobs are in line and how long that might take? The number of jobs (102,932) is mentioned here Debresser (talk) 14:25, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
The job queue is 100,894 items long. I can't imagine it's going to be longer than a couple of hours or so, certainly not six weeks. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 14:34, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

The job queue was recently redesigned a little and its performance improved; it now rarely takes more than a couple of days to clear jobs. Only developers can see the raw contents of the job queue or modify their priorities. Patience, as ever, is a virtue. Happy‑melon 14:33, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. That is good news. Debresser (talk) 14:36, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Robot for WikiProject Gastropods

I have improved the prose on Snek's note for this. Invertzoo (talk) 20:04, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Preliminary questions for the possibility of using a bot:

  • For articles which are tagged with Template:WikiProject Gastropods and have no tag needs-photo= add tag
    • needs-photo=yes if there is no photo in taxobox.
    • needs-photo=no if there is a photo in taxobox.
  • For articles which have no tag Template:WikiProject Gastropods. Identify articles about gastropods. It can be identified by seeing that they have the field classis = [[Gastropoda]] fulfilled in the taxobox. Then tag WikiProject Gastropods can be improved according to criteria above in such articles.

Note 1: Robot does not change any quality scale, any importance scale and any needs-photo. It only fulfill some parameters which are not fulfilled yet.

Note 2: that all articles tagged with WikiProject Gastropods but having no taxobox, will have to receive all ratings manually.

Note 3: that articles tagged with WikiProject Gastropods with taxobox about large taxa gastropods articles (families and above) will have to receive only importance, and that manually.

Thank you for a preliminary analysis of the possibility of this robot request. If is this robot request is possible, then it will have to be approved by wikiproject gastropod members first. Any comments welcomed. --Snek01 (talk) 19:14, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBOT can do this easily, once the WikiProject approves it. Anomie⚔ 20:02, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
I think we must check all of this very carefully indeed before it is approved. There was already one crucial spelling error in your instructions. We have several thousand articles, and any possible errors in the protocol could result in changes that might be very widespread, and might also be quite difficult to fix. Invertzoo (talk) 20:04, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I have raised the possibility of a bot which scans database dumps looking for blue links to absent sections in actual articles, e.g. George W. Bush#Olympic medals. I was advised to advertise it here and in WP:Bot owners' noticeboard#Broken section links, but please add any comments to the main discussion at WP:Village pump (proposals)#Broken section links. Certes (talk) 20:11, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

User its

Hi, This template: {{user its}} was recently moved to {{user its-it's}} because the letters "its" referred to a language code. However that template was not modified on people's userpages and affects the following people [1] and needs to be modified. The full discussion can be found here. Thanks. --Amazonien (talk) 05:14, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 26 Anomie⚔ 05:54, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
Doing... Note that you'll have to fix any that are intending to get the new version, since you went ahead and created it before the old one was cleaned up. Anomie⚔ 22:20, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
I understand. Nevertheless there a currently no native speakers of Istsekiri on Wikipedia so there are no users who need to use the new version yet. --Amazonien (talk) 01:21, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Y Done There were 6 pages that could not be fixed automatically: User:Arctic.gnome, User:Teo64x, User:Seanqtx, User:Zywxn, User:Weeliljimmy, and User:Parent5446. Anomie⚔ 23:05, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

User bas

Hi, This template: {{user bas}} was recently moved to {{user BASIC}} because the letters "bas" referred to a language code. However that template was not modified on people's userpages and affects the following people [2] and needs to be modified. The full discussion can be found here. Thanks. --Amazonien (talk) 05:17, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 26 Anomie⚔ 05:54, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
Doing... Note that you'll have to fix any that are intending to get the new version, since you went ahead and created it before the old one was cleaned up. Anomie⚔ 22:20, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
I understand. Nevertheless there a currently no native speakers of Basaa on Wikipedia so there are no users who need to use the new version yet. --Amazonien (talk) 01:22, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Still, it shouldn't have been changed at Talk:Basaa language. I've changed it back. —Angr 14:58, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Y Done There was 1 page that could not be fixed automatically: Wikipedia:Userboxes/Programming. If you decide to move {{user bas-0/1/2/3/4/N}} to match, which you probably will, let me know; ideally, you would first move the templates, then have the bot fix things, and only after that was complete would you replace the redirects with Basaa templates. Anomie⚔ 23:05, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

{{Film}} cleanup

The |needs-synopsis= parameter in {{Film}} was recently replaced with |needs-plot=; can a bot replace all instances of the old parameter with the new? This would be desirable in order to remove the old code from the banner.

In addition, could some general cleanup be done to all affected banners, i.e. fixing redirects and removing the following deprecated parameters:

  • |importance=
  • |attention=
  • |auto=
  • |nested=
  • |portal1-name=
  • |portal2-name=
  • |portal3-name=
  • |portal4-name=
  • |portal5-name=
  • |article=
  • |start=
  • |end=

Thanks in advance for any assistance! PC78 (talk) 01:57, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, I don't think anyone argue that you don't know what you're talking out! Could you run off I quick list of redirects that should be fixed whilst making other edits? I will start tinkering with some code, but I expect someone with a code library at hand will finish before I even start. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 16:53, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
Any objection to moving it to {{WikiProject Film}} to fit in with the increasingly-standard naming convention for WikiProject banners? Happy‑melon 17:46, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
I have some code written (a template replacement library was my first planned "extra" for my new framework), so I can easily do this if you aren't attached to it. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 18:53, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
I have no attachment to it, no. Please be my guest. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 19:00, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
 Done hope that didn't make to many waves... Happy‑melon 22:20, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
Hmm, well some prior notice on the template talk page wouldn't have gone amiss before making the change (and technically it should be "WikiProject Films" never mind, I see that it is). Jarry, the template redirects (excluding {{Film}}/{{WikiProject Films}}) are {{FilmsWikiProject}}, {{WikiProject Film}}, {{WPFILM}}, {{WP Film}} and {{FILM}}. PC78 (talk) 23:34, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
So you want the following edits done:
Is this right? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 00:17, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
Yes, that is all correct, although the category for banners using the old parameter is Category:Films that need a synopsis. Can I put this on hold for the moment, though? I would like to make sure that there are no objections to the renaming of the banner first. PC78 (talk) 00:32, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
D'oh. Now corrected. I've filed the BRFA now, but I won't run the bot until there is consensus over the template name. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 01:23, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
The banner has been moved back. Please add {{WikiProject Films}} to the list of redirects and change all to {{Film}}. Cheers! PC78 (talk) 12:31, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Rather, please await the outcome of the requested discussion on the template's name, so as to avoid inadvertantly using a bot process to enforce editorial opinions. :D Happy‑melon 12:42, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Indeed I shall wait, though I would suggest that the name really doesn't matter... [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 13:01, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
It's certainly not one of the top ten issues facing us on Wikipedia today :D Happy‑melon 14:35, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Doing.... [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 17:39, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

{{WikiProject Korea}} cleanup

In previous versions of this project banner, work groups were assigned rather clumsily using the |wg= parameter. Following a recent upgrade to {{WPBannerMeta}} this has been replaced with specific parameters for each individual work group. It would be desirable to update transclusions of the banner to the new syntax in order to remove the outdated coding from the template. This will require the following changes:

Old (all values case insensetive) Replace with
  • wg=architect
  • wg=architecture
 architecture=yes
  • wg=arts
  • wg=art
  • wg=painting
  • wg=music
  • wg=dance
  • wg=literature
  • wg=poetry
  • wg=pottery
 arts=yes
  • wg=baseball
  • wg=base
 baseball=yes
  • wg=cuisine
  • wg=food
 cuisine=yes
  • wg=film
  • wg=movie
  • wg=cinema
 film=yes
  • wg=history
  • wg=hist
 history=yes
  • wg=housekeeping
  • wg=hk
 housekeeping=yes
  • wg=milhist
  • wg=military
  • wg=mh
  • wg=military history
 milhist=yes
  • wg=nk
  • wg=dprk
  • wg=north korea
 nk=yes
  • wg=pop
  • wg=popcult
  • wg=popculture
  • wg=popular culture
 pop=yes
  • wg=skgeo
  • wg=skg
  • wg=skcc
  • wg=south korean geography
 skgeo=yes

There is a tracking category for affected articles at Category:WikiProject Korea articles using the wg parameter, though I am not sure if all articles have yet filtered through.

In addition for the articles affected by this change, could any uses of the following redirects be updated to {{WikiProject Korea}}:

Thanks in advance! PC78 (talk) 01:19, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Coding... LegoKontribsTalkM 02:27, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Doing... LegoKontribsTalkM 03:24, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Y Done :) LegoKontribsTalkM 00:07, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Many thanks! :) PC78 (talk) 00:28, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Roman redirects

Can the recently created roman numeral redirects listed at User:Arthur Rubin/Roman redirects be tagged for RfD? (If a reason field is needed in the RfD itself, please use "Recently created redirects (since 4 March) from roman numerals to the corresponding year. No one is going to use them as a Wikilink.")

As an admin, I'm authorized for AWB, but I can't get it to edit the redirect as a redirect. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:02, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes you can. Just tell it not to act on them in the options. — neuro(talk) 23:12, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
To be specific, untick 'page is redirect' on the skip tab. — neuro(talk) 23:13, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
With, say MLII in the file list, it follows the redirect to 1052, and starts editing that article. There should be a flag to add redirect=no to the edit box, but I can't find it. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 23:55, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
What is the RFD template that needs to be added to the articles? LegoKontribsTalkM 00:09, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
It seems to be taken for granted that these redirects are a bad thing. I don't think I agree with that; they may have some limited use, and they do not appear to be harmful. Have I missed some discussion on the matter? --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:18, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
@Lego: Just prepend {{rfd}} followed by one new line on each article. Please note that I misspelled two, now fixed. (The edit summary should probably note the nomination is at my request.) (Now fixed, my bad 00:54, 10 March 2009 (UTC))
@Tagishsimon: I'm nominating them for deletion, I'm not proposing an immediate deletion. "Does no harm", however, is not a reason to keep. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:28, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
You are. My bad. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:29, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Doing... LegoKontribsTalkM 01:14, 10 March 2009 (UTC) Y Done :) LegoKontribsTalkM 02:03, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Fixing broken translation requests

I posted a similar request a while ago, but no one responded. Maybe second time's the charm! I have created templates like {{Expand Spanish}} from the master templates {{Expand language}} and {{Expand language (non-Latin script)}}. These templates are used to mark articles needing translation from other Wikipedias. Right now the articlename parameter is optional, and I would like it to stay this way (makes it easier for editors to apply these tags). The bot I am after would find {{Expand XXX}} templates without an articlename, look for the interwiki link at the bottom of the article, and append this articlename to the template. For example, on the article The Colossus (painting), {{Expand Spanish|topic=culture|date=March 2009}} would be changed to {{Expand Spanish|El coloso|topic=culture|date=March 2009}}. Ideally, this bot would run regularly, so editors wouldn't have to worry about specifying the article title. If there is no interwiki link, or more than one, the bot could notify the person who tagged the article, so they could fix the problem. Note: right now the {{Expand language}} templates automatically create links to foreign-language articles based on the en.wiki article title. This is an imperfect solution to the problem, and I would like to discontinue this, making all the templates behave like {{Expand language (non-Latin script)}}. Calliopejen1 (talk) 20:34, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps this could be packaged into existing interwiki linking bots? Just a thought... ;) 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 21:39, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Judging by Wikipedia:Bots/Status, there are lots and lots of interwiki bots... Do you know who I should ask? Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:04, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Coding... it is a little bit out of the scope of interwiki bots. LegoKontribsTalkM 01:21, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Add navigational templates to Category:Exclude in print

The book tool will be rolled out on this site soon. There are various kinds of templates with content which is useless and distracting in offline exports(like PDFs or printed books). Such templates can be excluded in exports by assigning them to the Category:Exclude in print.

Navigational templates are widely used and are defined for most major topics. Unfortunately they often do not inherit from a meta template like Template:Navbox. What these templates do have in common is, that they are embedding Template:tnavbar.

Therefore the task would be to:

  • build a list of all templates that embed Template:tnavbar (api call)
  • for each template:
    • remove from list if tnavbar is only used within <noinclude/> (not visible in articles)
    • remove from list if it transcludes one of the other templates in this list (as it is sufficient to exclude the meta template)
  • with each template in the shorted list:

--He!ko (talk) 14:15, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

I generated a list of 4890 navigational templates which do not use Navbox and should be excluded in print. I used the approach described above. Not having a bot flag on en.wp yet, I'd appreciate if someone could help and add them to Category:Exclude in print. BTW: the book tool is now enabled for signed in users. --He!ko (talk) 20:41, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Documentation subpages are often used for highly-used templates in order to include their cats and interwiki links. Should Category:Exclude in print be put on the doc page, or on the template? I'm asking this because of potential vandalism issues - vandals could remove them from the doc subpages. Of course, the reverse is also true - a vandal could put the category on the doc subpage for something like Template:Infobox and hide a bunch of templates that shouldn't be hidden. --- RockMFR 02:56, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Technically both approaches are possible. Regarding vandalism: The ability to hide content by adding a doc subpage to this category exists, unless the doc page is protected also. On the other hand the potential harm is low as no (evil) content can be injected. --He!ko (talk) 05:44, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Pushing this request: The task was reduced to add Category:Exclude in print to these templates. --He!ko (talk) 22:00, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

There are now answers yet. Is there anything else I should do to get this task done? Write and use my own bot (although the bot approval process is somewhat slow)? Or can someone give a hint regarding an already approved bot that does something similar? --He!ko (talk) 11:44, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

If you want, I can paste your list into MediaWiki:PDF Template Blacklist, but the issue raised at Help:Books/Feedback#MediaWiki:PDF_Template_Blacklist isn't resolved yet. -- User:Docu
Yes, this would be a nice hot fix. Anyway I think in the long term it should be considered to add a cleanup notice to these templates as they should rather use Navbox. I added a notice about "Category:Exclude in print" to the blacklist talk page, please consider to add this to the actual page also. Thanks. --He!ko (talk) 18:44, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Data gathering for biographical articles (non-free pictures)

Could someone possibly take the FA-class biography articles (the pages which have their talk pages listed at Category:FA-Class biography articles), and extract the birth and death year categories (or equivalent) if they exist and do a sortable table with that data? I want to see how many fall in the period of the early 20th century, a period when, if the person has died, it can be difficult to obtain free images of that person (i.e. most if not all existing pictures are in copyright). Even simpler (and generalising it to all biographical articles, not just the featured ones) would be to get a list of all biographical articles (well, actually, there are a lot of those, so some subset to test might be good) and to query which ones have non-free images in use in the articles? The query could be run the other way if it is simpler (query all non-free images to see which are in use in biography articles). To detect biography articles, look for "birth year" categories, or the WP:BIOGRAPHY WikiProject talk page tag. Is something like this possible? This request relates to this. Any query should be able to pick up the examples listed there (J. R. R. Tolkien, Michael Woodruff and Anne Frank). Carcharoth (talk) 01:13, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Bot for Wikipedia:Multilingual statistics

This page provides really useful statistics, but it frequently goes for months without an update, because the main author is busy. I offered to help out, but the manual method he uses to update is confusing to me. He said that it would be possible to automate the updates using "wget", and I would appreciate if someone who knows something about bot programming could write a bot or a task for this. I have the scripts and instructions for the page, and can email them to any interested party.--Danaman5 (talk) 03:27, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Redirects to special pages

I am requesting that a bot add all redirects to special pages to this category. -- IRP ☎ 22:46, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

The following is a list of all these pages.
Extended content

A bot could run through them and tag them, but I think quite a few should be deleted...

[[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 12:29, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I'll go through and run this with AWB. Whether or not they should be deleted is up for debate. Xclamation point 16:29, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Unless I'm mistaken, those userpages that redirect to Special:Random and Special:Randompage violate the userpage policy (at least, I know you're not allowed to link to these in your signature...). 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 18:15, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

 Done Xclamation point 00:36, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Reference Removal Repair

I'm not extremely savvy about how how reference tags work, but my limited perception of the topic seems to indicate that the following problem sometimes occurs:

  • Someone uses the same reference multiple times in an article. The first time the reference tag is given a name and all of the necessary information, and the other times only the name is necessary.
  • Someone else, for one reason or another, deletes the first instance of the reference
  • Now the other instances of that reference tag are invalid because there is no original tag from which they can draw information

A bot that scans the recent changes for such a problem--the primary reference tag being deleted when the identical reference tags relying upon it are not--could easily fix it by fetching the necessary information and placing it into one of the remaining reference tags. A more complex task would be to find all of the broken citations, and search an article's history to see if the occurrence I mentioned above was the cause.

I will, of course, take no offense if any of you informs me that I'm mistaken about how reference tags work. --B Fizz (e•t•c) 08:47, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

See Anomie's Orhpan reference fixer gizmo. It does exactly that, I believe. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 10:01, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
You're right, except that it periodically checks Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting instead of watching the recentchanges feed. It also checks linked articles if the reference isn't found in the page history, fixes several common ref-related typos (e.g. <ref name=foo bar> → <ref name="foo bar">), and moves references out of templates (as it seems to be a recurring problem that the content-bearing ref is in an infobox, and then someone edits the infobox to no longer use that parameter). If you want to see what the bot has done recently, check User:AnomieBOT/OrphanReferenceFixer log. If there are any pages you see that the bot has not fixed, let me know at User talk:AnomieBOT and I'll take a look. Anomie⚔ 11:37, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for the very prompt responses! Keep up the good work! The idea seemed so simple I should've known that someone had already thought of it. =) --B Fizz (e•t•c) 23:41, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Bot needed for merger of template Infobox nrhp2 and template Infobox nrhp

(discussion section retitled to avoid use of template links, so it can be linked to)

Recently over at WP:NRHP, we've instituted a merger of all our infoboxes into one standard infobox. Now that the merger is finished, there are around 1000+ articles that still link to {{Infobox nrhp2}} that need to be relinked to {{Infobox nrhp}}. All that needs to be done is to remove the "2", but because of the sheer amount of articles, I believe it would be easier for some automated bot to do this. Is this possible? --Dudemanfellabra (talk) 17:12, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

It is possible, but it'd be faster to make nrhp2 into a redirect. - Jredmond (talk) 17:26, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
It's a matter of cleaning up after a major revision to the NRHP infobox code, and making way for the next generation of testing for further refinements to the NRHP infobox. The NRHP or NRHP2 infobox is used in over 20,000 articles probably now. Dudemanfellabra led a year-long effort to develop new infobox features by developing the NRHP2 infobox, which came to be used in thousands of articles but which was not entirely compatible until his most recent successful programming effort (now reflected in identical NRHP and NRHP2 infoboxes). Other articles using a temporary NRHP3 infobox have previously all been revised to use NRHP2. Already, in rolling out the new version of NRHP and NRHP2 templates, we did a lot of semi-complex syntax changes in thousands of other articles that used NRHP or NRHP2 infoboxes, to allow the replacement of NRHP by NRHP2. In that effort, five of us used AWB and/or individually edited articles, with coordination at Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/NRHP2 February 2009 merger worklist.
Now, we'd just like the simplest, last task done by a bot. Perhaps other stuff we did could have been done by a bot, but we don't know how to create one. Probably we'd also like to use bots in the future to otherwise develop the 80,000+ potential NRHP articles. Perhaps someone could show us how to create one, starting for this simple task? By the way, I have previously tried contacting one editor who ran a "NRHPbot" to create 200 or so brand new NRHP articles for a while back in 2007, but I never got a response. So currently we have no expertise on bots in the wp:NRHP wikiproject. doncram (talk) 18:38, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Well, I thought about doing the redirect, but I kind of wanted to avoid that, so we could use the nrhp2 template for test updates to nrhp. See Doncram's comment above. --Dudemanfellabra (talk) 20:44, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Common practice for template testing is to create a /sandbox subpage copy of the template in question (e.g. Template:Infobox nrhp/sandbox) and a bunch of testcases on a /testcase subpage (e.g. Template:Infobox nrhp/testcases). See, for example, {{Nihongo}} (sandbox, testcases), {{Navbox}} (sandbox, testcases), and so forth. --Dinoguy1000 as 66.116.12.126 (talk) 05:23, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Thanks Dinoguy1000 for that suggestion and great examples on how to manage development of updates to the template. It would be good for us to switch over to that, and delete the NRHP2 infobox entirely I suppose. I've started the sandbox and testcases pages for template infobox nrhp now. doncram (talk) 23:26, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) About the bot request: More specifically, could a bot be run to change all instances of {{Infobox_nrhp2 that are in article mainspace to {{Infobox_nrhp ? The pages are all within the pages that link to, in fact which transclude, {{infobox nrhp2}}. There are just a few out of the 1500-2000 pages there which are not mainspace articles, and I guess the bot should exclude those, i.e. any Template, User, Wikipedia space pages and Talk pages of any kind that might link there also. doncram (talk) 23:26, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

I wonder if this is too simple or too hard to attract bot implementers' attention. I recognize we are all volunteers here, and don't want to seem like i might be demanding anything. Perhaps there is a cost/benefit question? Okay, I tried doing some of this using AWB, achieving 4 changes per minute. With more than 1600 remaining, that is a task that would take 400 minutes (6 hours 40 minutes) with fairly careful attention to be paid, to complete. I wonder, is accomplishing that enough or not enough benefit for a bot request? It seems to me that this is very simple, that there must exist bots which could just plug in the change string and run through this. But I'd appreciate enlightenment. :) doncram (talk) 20:08, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
This is a very simple task -- most of the people running bots on Wikipedia could do this with no additional programming. For my part, I don't see any benefits of migrating the template that would not be accomplished by redirection. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 23:18, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. I just changed it, infobox nrhp2 is now a redirect to infobox nrhp. That seems not different to me than having it be an exact copy. It is still vulnerable to being edited by anyone and that affecting 1600 or so pages, while infobox nrhp is fully protected, only admins can change it (as it should be, in my view). It remains that there are 1600 or so pages which, in my view, need editing to not invoke this. It seems disturbing to me that there are 1600 pages out there depending on this, and that we have to depend upon no one ever changing infobox nrhp2 to be different. It takes effort to try to get consensus about never changing nrhp2, when prior practice has been that has been used as a sandbox and then a fork of nrhp which ran for a year or two. I would rather clean those 1600 articles up. Otherwise, I expect there will be some screwup and/or lots of discussion. I hate to give up 6 hours of my life to try to prevent loss of more time later, when someone could run the bot in very little time to set it up, plus whatever runtime it takes. I guess an alternative is to get the infobox nrhp2 locked down as fully protected, too, but I am not an admin and can't do that. It will cost a few hours of requests and discussions to convince an admin elsewhere to fully protect it. Again, it seems simple to run the bot. doncram (talk) 04:51, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
{{RPP|f}} the redirect. Happy‑melon 20:22, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Ah, well, that settles it! Actually, thanks all of you. We're better off than before, with the sandbox and testcases system set up now much more sensibly, and the protected redirect takes care of it. Thanks for listening and helping. :) doncram (talk) 21:14, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

People sorting

Hey guys. I originally took on a task of sorting Christian people (I think that's where it started). I can't perform the latest task given to me thanks to a crappy antivirus. I was wondering if someone would be willing to scan all articles listed here for categories and template segments listed here. The output should go here. Some of this should be doable using mass category intersections, the rest would need to be done via a text search. (Of course your genius is generally above mind, so this may be easier than I made it on myself) It is requested that the searches go in order, ie. if article A is sorted under 21, it cannot be sorted under 18; with articles that don't fit into a category going under their own subheading. If you want to make a list of articles in multiple lists (ArticleA falls under 21 and 18, sort under "Multiple lists") as a side that would be nice as well. I hope I explained everything pretty well that isn't already on the linked page. If something needs clarified, let me know. §hepTalk 22:40, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Generating a list of talk pages that meet two criteria

Per Wikipedia:AN#Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion.2FLog.2F2009_March_6.23Template:WPRedir, I would appreciate it if someone could build me a list of article talk pages that transclude {{WPRedir}} (or one of its redirects) that meet the following criteria:

  1. Only a single edit to the page
  2. The page's content consists entirely of the transcluded template

Thanks, –xeno (talk) 14:57, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Done. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:44, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Substituting Template:Delsort

{{Delsort}} is, for obvious reasons, supposed to be substituted. However, there are a number of instances where it is only transcluded - some of these transclusions are in discussions dating back to 2005. Would a bot run to substitute all of these be appropriate (and if it is, you may also want to review {{Delsort2}})? 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 18:04, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Someone with AWB can probably do this quite quickly -- I make it 107 edits when you discount double-transclusions. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 18:22, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
I might run a pywikipedia bot for this and other XFD-related templates that should be substed (such as Template:At and Template:Ab just to name a couple). Its way more than 107 AWB edits if I go after a good amount of the XFD templates which should be substed. FunPika 00:36, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/FPBot FunPika 20:08, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Doing... FunPika 22:17, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Y Done At least for delsort, I think the bot still has some more templates to finish substing. FunPika 02:16, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

This is just a bot idea, and may be old: external links to wikipedia - convert to wikilinks.

Twice today I have come across links to articles that should be wikilinks, but are instead external links. The one just now was here. Hah, for all I know there already is such a bot and it just had not chewed through to those links yet. :)sinneed (talk) 05:31, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Declined Not a good task for a bot. There are many good reasons why you would want to link to wikipedia as an external link. The example you just gave is what is known as a diff. Any dynamic actions to index.php must be through an external link. Besides that issue, I doubt people would appreciate people changing their comments as that goes against the talk page guidelines. —Nn123645 (talk) 16:53, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
I think I misunderstood your comment. I would agree that changing links in the mainspace to interwiki links would be a good idea, though I don't know if it would be a good idea to have a bot do it due to the possibility of false positives. —Nn123645 (talk) 20:50, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
Too many false positives, see [3]. Pages like HTML, English Wikipedia, should actually have 'en.wikipedia.org' in them. LegoKontribsTalkM 23:00, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
I think it would require editor evaluation of each link. There are sometimes valid reasons for making the links, and there are different invalid reasons which require different actions. The links are often made by new editors who can screw up in several ways, for example by using another Wikipedia article as reference. Those references should be removed and claims they are used to reference should sometimes be evaluated. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:08, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
The outdated but still-used {{note}} will account for many instances of this. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 23:18, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
commonfixes.py already does this, the link needs to have a seperate title and must link to the main namespace (to avoid self references). I've written somewhat about this at WP:AWB/FR#External to Interwiki. — Dispenser 23:27, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Coordinating translation requests with wikiprojects

Is there a way to produce a report, on a regular basis, listing pages tagged with both a wikiproject banner and a translation banner? (It might be easier to go with translation categories than translation banners, as the banners all add pages to relevant categories. See Category:Articles needing translation from foreign-language Wikipedias.) It appears that about 20 wikiprojects have translation departments that are not coordinated with the main WP:TRANSLATION system (see Category:Translation projects by topic). It would be great if we could make wikiprojects aware of the articles needing translation that they might be interested in, and to consolidate everything so there aren't random lists of articles needing translation that are floating around in wikiproject subpages. I imagine a bot output to a subpage for each wikiproject, along the lines of the article alert bot, listing all the articles needing translation, sorted by language. Thoughts? Calliopejen1 (talk) 15:12, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Somebody please help out with this as it is not fair for Jen having to sort out this mess manually. There are all sorts of bots running doing tasks, I don't see why a bot couldn't be arranged to fix this. Dr. Blofeld White cat 15:19, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind comment, Blofeld, but this isn't what I'm doing manually, at least not right now. :) Calliopejen1 (talk) 15:40, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Category:Blocked historical users cleanup

A number of users pages do not belong in this category. A simple clean-out can be achieved by:

For each user page in this category for which the Talk page does not exist or consists solely of block notices (i.e. {{indefblock}} and {{sockpuppet}}, either:
  1. Remove the historical parameter from the {{indefblockeduser}} template
  2. Remove the {{indefblockeduser}} template if {{sockpuppet}} is present
  3. Remove the category link from the page if a template has not been used

This should deal with the majority of cases, leaving a smaller task to remove the remaining miscategorisations manually. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 16:22, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

If the "historical" parameter is removed from pages containing {{indefblock}} and {{sockpuppet}}, its just going to be added back in, because it removing it will recategorize the pages into Category:Temporary Wikipedian userpages, and pages of sockpuppets are kept for tracking purposes. Mr.Z-man 16:54, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
But the point is that they should be in Category:Temporary Wikipedian userpages or kept for sockpuppet tracking, rather than being tagged as historical. Category:Blocked historical users clearly states which userpages it should contain (not these). People shouldn't be adding the historical parameter if there is no talk page history to keep. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 21:02, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Conflict of interest

I've noticed that a lot of pages (e.g. xeround) created about companies are made by employees - revealed by googling the company and user name. Is there anyway a bot could be made to check this and add tags? Smartse (talk) 21:38, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

COIBot reports on possible COI. See its user page for details. -- JLaTondre (talk) 23:42, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Changes to Wikipedia:WikiProject Fungi/fungus articles by size

Due to the recent increase in activity in the WikiProject Fungi group, I've been thinking about the possibility of making this useful page even more useful by setting it up as a table, and adding more columns with more information, like in the sample table shown below. I use the page as it is fairly often, but the proposed changes would really enhance its value for me, and for others in the group as well. Obviously some tweaks are required, like getting the rating and date columns to sort properly. The incoming links column is mostly blank because I didn't want to actually count the highly linked pages. Is something like this feasible? Sasata (talk) 04:46, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Article name Size (bytes) Rating Last modified Traffic # Incoming links
Lichens of Maryland 86483 C 20:24, 23 January 2008 106 14
Fungus 82652 B 18:54, 11 March 2009 82657 lots
Amanita muscaria 69191 13:50, 11 March 2009 32728
Beta-glucan 54244 22:33, 23 February 2009 7542
List of Mycosphaerella species 47406 start 12:24, 28 July 2008 129
Ascomycota 43611 start 14:51, 9 March 200 14197
Amanita phalloides 43568 15:12, 5 March 2009 8184
Coding... LegoKontribsTalkM 00:49, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed WP:Bots/Requests for approval/Legobot II 4 LegoKontribsTalkM 22:57, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Bot please?

I think it would be nice if I had an archiving bot. Could someone develop one and please, please, PLEASE, do not put down "Make one yourself" or any other thing that means you are saying I have to make one. Carabera (talk) 22:13, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

For archiving what? - Jarry1250 (t, c) 22:15, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
User:ClueBot III and User:MiszaBot I should be able to handle archival needs. —Nn123645 (talk) 04:32, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

File auto renaming bot

Now file renaming has been activated for admins (see WP:VPT#File renaming enabled), an admin-bot would be great to plunge through Category:Media requiring renaming, rename all files per the proposed names in template {{Rename media}} and remove the template in the process. Should be quite simple if the API allows image renaming, anyone willing to do it? :-) SoWhy 08:06, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

PS: The bot should not be stopped after that is done. After all, it's a tedious task so it would be a good idea to have it configured for a whitelist of allowed "normal users" and it could then rename images for normal users who can be trusted with it, taking the load from admins to do it manually. SoWhy 08:21, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
I'd like to request that all bulk-renaming be put on hold until bug 18017 is fixed: images used through redirects don't show up in the "image usage" API query, so ImageRemovalBot and OrphanBot can't remove them, while FairuseBot thinks they're orphaned and can't evaluate any fair-use rationale. --Carnildo (talk) 08:47, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
As a note, Vasielv told me in IRC that this likely will be seen as a "bot problem", at least for the direct future it does not seem as if 18017 will be fixed. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:10, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
Carnildo, I've already renamed over 500 images, most of them non-free, so I'm not sure what can be done until the bug is fixed. MBisanz talk 18:47, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Declined Not a good task for a bot. unless the bot only moves files that were tagged by a user in some sort of whitelist (oh, I see you mentioned this in your followup). Also, IMO it would be better to wait to see if anything comes of the proposal to give bots or autoconfirmed the move images right before doing anything here; the former would eliminate the need for an adminbot, and the latter would eliminate the need for a bot at all. Anomie⚔ 12:05, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

WPISRAEL tags

Hi. This request is similar to the one above for WikiProject Korea. Many Israel-related articles are tagged with {{WPISRAEL}} or {{WP Israel}}, and a bot that converts this to {{WikiProject Israel}} is needed. This would be useful for articles alerts (see WT:ISRAEL#Article alerts. Thanks, Nudve (talk) 05:22, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

What would this migration achieve? I don't see how the current redirects are problematic. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 15:12, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
As for the Article alerts, it deals with these template redirects automatically. Any article tagged with {{WPISRAEL}} will be treated as if it were tagged with {{WikiProject Israel}} directly. (On the technical side, the bot evaluate the "templatelinks" table of the database, which will always contain an entry to the main template even if a redirect is used.) At least that is my current state of knowledge; I'm not aware of any malfunctions at that point, but if these occur, please report them at WT:Article alerts/Bugs. --B. Wolterding (talk) 20:56, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Signature Bot

I know that Sinebot exist, but is it the only one, because if that is true, then shouldn't there be another one? --♪♫The New Mikemoraltalkcontribs 00:24, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

SineBot seems to do well enough on its own, why would we need another? –xeno (talk) 00:45, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Catgeorization of articles tagged with Wp:Pakistan

Need to cat. according to the the list given here [4].yousaf465

Declined Not a good task for a bot. This needs human judgement on the topic of the article. TARTARUS talk 15:35, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Automatic correction of ridiculously precise unit conversion.

A vast number of Wikipedia articles are blighted by unit conversions which are quoted to a degree of precision far greater than that of the original quantity.

To give one example, 1000 feet is formally equal to 304.8 meters. In many articles (including Trans National Place, Dan Osman, Laurel Creek Gorge Bridge, Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, Ceiling projector, Panama Canal expansion project and Altitudinal zonation) this precise conversion is used. To give a distance as 304.8m, however, implies that the value is highly precise and must lie between 304.75 and 304.85m. For this to be correct, the original figure of 1000ft would have to be accurate to within 2 inches, which is not true for any of the above cases. Therefore overprecise conversions are not just bad style, but a subtle form of error.

A casual search will reveal similar errors for almost every unit, including those of distance, area, pressure, temperature and more.

Therefore, I propose a bot named UnitBot that will automatically search for such errors and correct them. UnitBot would:

  • Systematically trawl through articles (restricting its activity to off-peak times with low server lag).
  • Search for quantities given in multiple units.
  • Quit if the unit conversion appears to be a definition. (e.g. "1 meter is equal to 3.2808399 feet.")
  • Quit if the quantity appears to be a precisely defined standard. (e.g. "The offical boundary of space is at 100000m (328084ft) above sea level.")
  • Quit if the article is about overprecise units.
  • Quit if the units appear as part of a quotation.
  • Assign a score based on overprecision. (For example 500 meters = 1640.41995 feet would receive a high score, whilst 500 meters = 1640 feet would receive a lower score.)
  • Amend the score based on context. For example, use of the adjectives "nearly", "over", or "approximately" to describe the quantity would boost the score, whilst use of "exactly" would reduce it.
  • Fix the article if the score was high enough.

I plan to write this bot myself (probably in PHP).

— Hyperdeath(Talk) 00:38, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

BRFA is over there. —Nn123645 (talk) 00:44, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
I thought that was to request trials for pre-existing bots? — Hyperdeath(Talk) 01:32, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
Nope, this pgae is to request other people to write up bots and run them. BRFA is for new and existing bots. §hepTalk 01:41, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

BOT

May I please have a bot that can search Google, check my email, and greet everyone in the chat? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.52.233.89 (talk) 00:51, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Impossible Not the purpose of Wikipedia bots. §hepTalk 00:54, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

ChartBot

I would like to get someone interested in working on a bot so that I can move on to more fun styles of editing than being bad chart policeman. In structure, the thing needs to act like ClueBot, automatically reverting edits, leaving warnings, and eventually escalating the warning up to AIV. Its pattern engine needs to be different, however: it needs to look for violations of WP:BADCHARTS ... edits whose effect has been to insert a chart that has been determined unacceptable.

Another very useful bot function would be the detection of figure vandalism. Most charts are automatically searchable with a deterministic search string: for example, http://www.australian-charts.com/showitem.asp?interpret=Britney+Spears&titel=...Baby+One+More+Time&cat=s gives you the peak positions of ...Baby One More Time by Britney Spears on the charts for Switzerland, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand. I can help generate search strings for another half dozen countries. Detecting that the edit has changed a figure for a monitored chart and validating whether the change was accurate would greatly help in keeping articles accurate.—Kww(talk) 13:40, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Reference assesment

(I originally requested this as a potential part of the Abuse Filter [5])

This might be way beyond the capability of a bot, but as a new page patroller I've noticed that new users are not usually aware of our core policies in regards to notability and verifiability, specifically the requirement for multiple, non-trivial sources. Wondering if a bot or set of bots could help catch newly created articles that are obviously not in compliance and educate the new contributor at the same time. Specifically, my ideas were:

  • Check if newly created articles by new users (under a certain threshold of edit count or account age) has multiple references, and if not, warn the author about our verifiability policy and auto-tag the article for speedy deletion?
  • Check if the title of newly created articles by new users have exact Google hits, and if not, warn the author about our policies?

-Senseless!... says you, says me 22:00, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Seems rather bitey to me. Especially the part about "auto-tag the article for speedy deletion". And then there's WP:GHITS, too. Anomie⚔ 02:30, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
You're kidding? Dry run on April Fool's Day? Please withdraw this request. --KP Botany (talk) 02:54, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
I saw the notification aspect as something that could be beneficial and helpful, since we sometimes tag hundreds of newly created articles along the lines of "Jay is cool.... the end" each week for speedy deletion. I (personally) don't think a bot leaving a message on a new user's talk page that says "Welcome to Wikipedia, thank you for your contributions..... please remember that articles require references from multiple, non-trivial sources to prove notability and (article name) doesn't appear to have any references.... your first article for more information on citations...." is bitey at all, rather its an attempt to get new contributors caught up to speed on our project. I wasn't sure about the auto-tagging idea, I got it from the abuse filter, my rationale being that if we are now installing a MediaWiki extension that will automatically stop edits that are possibly unhelpful (irrespective if they are made in good faith or not) and that might eventually have the potential to automatically block users making these edits, I'm not sure how new articles that are not in compliance with the reference policy are any different. In any event, I withdrew the auto-tagging proposal along with GHITS (that wasn't a good idea, google isn't infallible), but like I said, I feel giving new users who create an article without references an automatic, but polite heads up can be helpful to everyone. -Senseless!... says you, says me 03:29, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
I believe checking if a newly-created page has references is within the abilities of the abuse filter (it would be similar to Special:AbuseFilter/61), and you didn't actually request that in [6]. I suggest you try asking for it there first, as a warning before page save is likely to be more effective than a bot coming behind later. Anomie⚔ 05:05, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
I think the revised idea we've come to here will be more in line with what WP:AbuseFilter is looking for. You can consider this request withdrawn... thanks for the input. -Senseless!... says you, says me 16:41, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Bot for Wikipedia:WikiProject Egypt

A bot is urgently needed for the Wikipedia:WikiProject Egypt to add the {{WikiProject Egypt}} template on all articles in the category:Egypt. --Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 17:10, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

This is certainly possible, but you'll need to be more specific about which pages you want tagged. Category:Egypt contains no articles; presumably you want subcategories scanned. Can you specify exactly which categories should be checked?
Also, a bot could fill in certain fields in the template, e.g. by detecting when pages are disambiguation pages and by checking for other WikiProjects' class assessment. Would you want this to happen?
[[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 17:36, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the fast reply, here is my total request:
  • Generally all articles in the category and all subcategories and the subcategories thereof and so on should have the template:{{WikiProject Egypt}} in their talk page except articles containing: {{WikiProject Ancient Egypt}} in their talk page.
  • Articles that contain in their mainspace "Disambiguation", should have "class=Disambiguation"
  • Articles that contain in their namespace:"Category", should have "class=Category"
  • Articles that contain in their namespace:"Template", should have "class=Template"
  • The bot should look for already available assesments on the talk pages and copy their class and rating.
  • The bot should look for "infobox needed" on the mainpage and add a "needs-infobox=yes" to the WP-Egypt template.
  • If there are article with merger notices on the mainspaces than: "merge=yes"

This should be enough for now I think.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 19:14, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Current practice is not to just do "all subcategories", because there are often unexpected results. I am generating a list of categories for you to look through and decide which you want to be tagged. What do you mean by "look for infobox needed"? Where will that occur? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 20:52, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
Sorry I thought there would be a template for missing infoboxes. I've been working with AWB on subcategories of Category:Egypt and found most articles in the scope of the project.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 21:03, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
A lot of very unlikely categories are subcategories of Category:Egypt. For instance, Category:Scouting in Malta is a subcategory that I expect you don't want tagged. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 22:20, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
OK, User:Sambot/Tasks/Egypt contains all subcategories of Category:Egypt except following the following category paths:
as they seemed to create the most irrelevant entries. If you can go through the list of categories and remove any that should not be scanned (remember that every page within each of those categories would be scanned), I can then go ahead and file a BRFA. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 01:37, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
The bot should exclude all subcategories of Category:Ancient Egypt because it's covered by another project. It should also check for stub templates on article pages to add class=stub to the talk template. Thank you.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 08:58, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
OK, I think I've cut out most of these. But I need you to go through the list manually. Remember that every page in those categories will be tagged. So if, for instance, you don't want every page in Category:Maps_of_the_1967_Arab-Israeli_War to be tagged, you need to remove it. I can't do this run unless you can do this manually. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 11:28, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
Please don't tag talk pages of categories at all (Changed my mind). Exclude:
  1. Category:Valley_of_the_Kings
  2. Category:Valley_of_the_Queens
  3. Category:Planned_Holocaust_for_Egypt
  4. Category:French_military_personnel_of_the_Suez_Crisis
All has been checked. Don't worry about mistakes we have an assessment page to indicate any newly tagged articles.
Question: Would this bot update any article added to any of these categories (future)?--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 13:02, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
OK, list complete, then. Do you mean you would like to have this bot run regularly to look for new articles in these categories? That can certainly be done if it would be helpful. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 15:38, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
It would be very helpful. Please also add links to all articles tagged by this bot on a subpage like [User:Sambot/Tasks/Egypt/Tagged]], this would help me ensure no mistakes are made and notify me when the bot starts. Thank you so much for your patients and I'm eagerly awaiting the start of the bot.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 18:28, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
Hey User talk:Sam Korn are u coding?--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 10:26, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, yes I am, and it's nearly finished. Coding...! [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 22:21, 21 March 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed. Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Sambot 4. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 18:05, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
Great Work, Thank you so much.--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 18:42, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Category:Blocked historical users cleanup

A number of users pages do not belong in this category. A simple clean-out can be achieved by:

For each user page in this category for which the Talk page does not exist or consists solely of block notices (i.e. {{indefblock}} and {{sockpuppet}}, either:
  1. Remove the historical parameter from the {{indefblockeduser}} template
  2. Remove the {{indefblockeduser}} template if {{sockpuppet}} is present
  3. Remove the category link from the page if a template has not been used

This should deal with the majority of cases, leaving a smaller task to remove the remaining miscategorisations manually. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 16:22, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

If the "historical" parameter is removed from pages containing {{indefblock}} and {{sockpuppet}}, its just going to be added back in, because it removing it will recategorize the pages into Category:Temporary Wikipedian userpages, and pages of sockpuppets are kept for tracking purposes. Mr.Z-man 16:54, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
But the point is that they should be in Category:Temporary Wikipedian userpages or kept for sockpuppet tracking, rather than being tagged as historical. Category:Blocked historical users clearly states which userpages it should contain (not these). People shouldn't be adding the historical parameter if there is no talk page history to keep. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 21:02, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

I've done a bunch myself - listed here - but there are a lot more than I first thought; most of them are sockpuppet cases, which have no need for {{Indefblockeduser}} anyway. I notice User:Mr.Z-bot is the one who added these templates instead of using the blocked parameter on the sockpuppet template.OrangeDog (talk • edits) 21:51, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Canadian electoral districts

Due to reorganization at the www.parl.gc.ca site, some URLs used as references are now broken. The old URLs look like "http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/process/house/hfer/hfer.asp?Language=E&...." The new URLs look like: "http://www2.parl.gc.ca/Sites/LOP/HFER/hfer.asp?Language=E&..."

For an example of a manual change, see [7]

I would be willing to do some verification on the results as required.

See Wikipedia_talk:Canadian_Wikipedians'_notice_board#Canadian_electoral_districts. --Big_iron (talk) 11:46, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Could you give a little more detail about the changes to be made? Is it restricted to http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/process/house/hfer/hfer.asp? Is it only Language=E links that should be changed? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 18:03, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
The issue that I noticed was limited to http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/process/house/hfer/hfer.asp. There are other links from parl.gc.ca which have not been affected.
On the English wikipedia, only Language=E should be in use. I did a quick check on the French wikipedia (Language=F) and found that some links have already been updated and some haven't. I don't have an account there at the moment but I could try and see if I can find a contact person there if you like. --Big_iron (talk) 11:06, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed – Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Sambot 5. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 16:35, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

User:KrimpBot replacement to tend to TOR exit nodes and the like

This bot seemed to stop doing its thing back in July '08 and it doesn't appear anyone ever took up the torch. was the task generally useful and well-regarded? perhaps someone should pick it up? –xeno (talk) 19:54, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/OverlordQBot 6? Anomie⚔ 02:39, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
ah, didn't realize someone had already took it up =) –xeno (talk) 12:55, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

euphemism bot

please would somebody replace passed away with died throughout. Kittybrewster ☎ 12:07, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

This would essentially be a Typo fixing bot, which aren't allowed. –xeno (talk) 12:57, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
I don't agree. I beg leave to appeal. Kittybrewster ☎ 13:19, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
There are many occasions where "passed away" is necessary. For example, it needs to be present in the article euphemism and in direct quotes. This would need to be a semi-automated project at the most. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 13:37, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
I agree. Kittybrewster ☎ 14:16, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
It looks like there's a blank place holder for this in Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos#Incorrect phrases ... but I'm not sure whether the AWB providers intend it be used to replace idioms. But that's the direction I'd head in. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:29, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
"Sadly passed" gets 6,791 hits. "Passed away" gets 65,434. "Sadly died" gets 6,986. Kittybrewster ☎ 14:41, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos#Sadly passed --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:19, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Great. I added "sadly passed away" (4,909). Kittybrewster ☎ 20:37, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

fixing slashes in {{dmoz}} tags

the first positional parameter of template:dmoz is supposed to be part of a URI to Open Directory Project categories and profiles. Because of some bad documentation, a lot of editors ended up entering the parameter with leading and trailing slashes - '/Path/To/Category/' rather than 'Path/To/Category' - and this produces some odd results (see this search result, and note the doubled slashes). can we get a bot to go through and regularize the template tags by eliminating any trailing or leading slashes from the first positional parameter? I'll add a note to the documentation to prevent people from making that error in the future. --Ludwigs2 16:34, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Not difficult to do, certainly, but is it really necessary? The links seem to work fine as they are with the extra slashes... [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 16:39, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
they work fine in any up-to-date browser, but they might break in older ones. I just don't know whether it's modern browsers or the Open Directory servers doing the monkey-proofing here; all I know is that (technically) http://ww.dmoz.org//something// ought to throw a 404 error, so some kind of monkey-proofing is going on. better safe than sorry... --Ludwigs2 17:08, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
It's done server-side, so it should be safe. It shouldn't give a 404 error, because putting two consecutive slashes essentially says to the server "don't change directory", while putting something between them says "change directory" (try it with cd). [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 17:28, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
ok, I'll bow to your better understanding of these things. --Ludwigs2 18:26, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Category:Redirects to special pages

I am requesting that someone create a bot that keeps that category up-to-date. -- IRP ☎ 16:33, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

(Moved here from elsewhere) - Jarry1250 (t, c) 16:42, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Easy to do, but there is a potential for problems that need to be resolved manually. It's probably best that it be left as a manual report -- see this toolserver page. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 13:09, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Replacing project banners 2 - WP:SLO

I need help with replacing Slovenia taskforce assessment banners with the ones for WikiProject Slovenia which got independent a while ago. The bot should go through the category Slovenia task force articles and replace every instance of {{WikiProject Europe|Slovenia=yes}} with {{WikiProject Slovenia}}. The only problem is that sometimes there are assessment parameters in front of Slovenia=yes syntax, so I suggest commanding it to remove |Slovenia=yes and then change Europe to Slovenia in the template instead of just replacing the above text. There are some 1200+ talk pages in the category many of which have been done manually already, so it won't be much work. Thank you, --Yerpo (talk) 07:18, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm interested in taking this one on. Has the project banner replacement been discussed by the Europe and Slovenia WikiProjects? Wronkiew (talk) 17:59, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Yes. See discussion at WikiProject Slovenia. I don't think the change is controversial in either case. Slovenia task force doesn't exist anymore, it's been superseded by WikiProject Slovenia. --Yerpo (talk) 10:12, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Coding... Wronkiew (talk) 00:39, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed See Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DustyBot 3. Wronkiew (talk) 06:01, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Rollback all remaining edits from now-blocked editor

Another sock of The Mystery Man has been outed. Please see here. Can a bot be set to revert any edits this serial sock puppet user, long ago banned by the community, made from his most recently discovered IP address? David in DC (talk) 18:53, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

 Done manually with Special:Contributions/76.116.144.137. —Nn123645 (talk) 20:07, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Is this user actually banned? Is there a link to a discussion somewhere, or was this person just blocked? If just blocked, Nn123645 did you review each edit for accuracy before reverting it? KnightLago (talk) 21:19, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
This user is actually banned. David in DC (talk) 21:26, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
The link you provided is to the master who is blocked. Banned means something entirely different. KnightLago (talk) 21:37, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Last time this serial fraudster was outed, a bot rolled back all his edits. Fruit of the poisoned tree, I guessed. I thought it standard operating procedure. This is the best summary I know how to find of the many times this whack-a-mole has popped up and been blocked indefinitely. His edits ought not to stand. Rinse, lather, repeat. David in DC (talk) 21:51, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Ok. David maybe you could review the now reverted edits and just make sure they all should have been reverted. I just don't want to lose any beneficial edits. KnightLago (talk) 21:58, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
I did not review each edit before rollbacking it, though I did check the block log before I rolled back and the link to the SSP case, in which the general consensus was it was a sock of the user the user The Mystery Man. Though I did take now that I look through it again it appears the user is not banned as David in DC claimed, or if he is I could find nothing listed at WP:BU (which I guess I was at fault for not checking first). I did look at the diff however of all revisions he made after I reverted him, albiet quickly, and can say that almost all of his edits that I rolled back were category additions that could be considered borderline vandalism. —Nn123645 (talk) 00:01, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

User appears to be at it again with another sock Special:Contributions/71.225.223.62. —Nn123645 (talk) 00:11, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Took care of it. KnightLago (talk) 02:31, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Another one to watch is Special:Contributions/76.116.148.99. The IP range is very close to the one that started this thread, 76.116.144.137, The edits focus on labelling Jews and physicians, two standard topics returned to over and over by the many socks of the Mystery Man/Ari Publican/RWReagan/EmmaRoad/Lemonsquares/Dakota Byrd/etc. Admittedly, I'm relying on my crap detector here, but I think 76.116.148.99 is the same odd duck as all the others. David in DC (talk) 02:36, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Encarta

With the announcement that Encarta is closing down near the end of the year, we've been given ample warning to avoid linkrot when the time comes. We should either get WebCiteBot up and running as a test on articles that cite this site or have another centralized attempt at finding alternative sources before it's too late. Do we need a bot to collect a list of all the articles linking to Encarta or can we somehow query the database? - Mgm|(talk) 10:15, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

[8]? It's possible to filter by namespace using the API or the toolserver databases if that's useful. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 13:01, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
WebCiteBOT is programmed and will be running shortly. I will be a simple task to have it run through all of the Encarta links once it gets up and going full time. That, of course, assumes Encarta doesn't have a noarchive flag set. --ThaddeusB (talk) 20:39, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
List of pages with links to encarta here. (I forgot to include page_namespace in the results, I can rerun the query if you wish). —Nn123645 (talk) 23:31, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Articles missing geo-coordinates -> move into subcategories

Three categories dealing with articles missing geo-coordinates have between them getting on for 2,000 articles which could usefully be pushed down into subcategories.

The parent categories are:

and the child categories are the US States, English & Northern Ireland Counties ... and then it all gets a bit difficult for Welsh & Scottish areas.

The creator of the cats, User:The Anome, is happy that this work be done.

The work required consists of changing {{coord missing|United States}} in the article into {{coord missing|Texas}}, for instance. From experience of doing this work, I'd opine that you can rely on categories, or indeed on searches for the state or county name in the article, without being too worried about false positives - they'll be picked up quickly enough by the humans who go through the categories, and we're dealing with hidden category changes which do not affect the general reader.

Should anyone take this up, you might also like to think about taking articles listed in the US State coord missing categories and pushing them into newly made city coord missing categories, e.g. from Category:California articles missing geocoordinate data into Category:Los Angeles articles missing geocoordinate data. If so, the new categories should be hidden.

thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:45, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Hello. I was working recently on the possible use of collaborative filtering (see "A collaborative filtering algorithm based on Users' Partial Similarity" for an example) to help clear out the backlogs at WP:DPL. For an initial test to see if this was possible, I chose the disambiguation page for Mandarin. This seemed like a good test choice, since the page has many possible targets to disambiguate to and some the targets would be expected to have some topic overlap (for instance, pages talking about Mandarin bureaucrats also may talk about Mandarin Chinese).

At the time I was working, there were 6932 pages linking (unambiguously) to one of the Mandarin targets. I built a preliminary model based off 90% of those pages, then treated the 10% left out as if all links in them to a Mandarin target were actually to the disambiguation page. I then used the model to decide where those ambiguous links should point. Since these links were unambiguous in reality, this provides an easy ground truth to decide how well the system performed. Here is the resulting performance plot. The x axis shows the percentage of the total test pages that the system chose to leave ambiguous because there wasn't a clear consensus on the proper target. The y axis shows what percentage of the pages that the system did choose to disambiguate were disambiguated incorrectly. From the plot, if the system choose to disambiguate every page regardless of its confidence in its choice, it would have an error rate of about 16%. However, if the system choose to be very sure before making a choice, it could disambiguate a little less than half of the test pages, but would do so with no errors at all.

Would there be any interest in using a bot to implement a system of this type? Even if it could only clear out half of the backlog to achieve an acceptably small error rate, that could still be very helpful. I'm not sure if this is even the proper forum for a question like this, since I could do the programming all myself, but this seemed like a good place to start. AlekseyFy (talk) 21:25, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

The link to the performance plot isn't working for me at present. It's an interesting idea. Perhaps the next phase of testing would be to develop a parallel run of your bot-to-be and some editors from DPL. This would also help to address my concern about your test; there might be a different level of (contextual) ambiguity in the links in need of disambiguation, relative to the unambiguous links on which your first phase of testing ran. No doubt one can minimise the risks by being more conservative on the confidence level, nonetheless. Human editors make mistakes too. --AndrewHowse (talk) 21:42, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I also get a dead link for http://gavril.ece.ucsb.edu/mandarin_performance.png

I also can't see more than the abstract to the study cited, since I'm not an IEEE member. So I don't understand the details of how your algorithm works, but the results you describe are impressive. The short answer is, Yes! There is certainly interest in this! I'm a former member of the Bot Approvals Group, and would be inclined to approve a bot like that for operation, provided more details were available. (Some editors may be more hesitant, of course.)

In my opinion, here's what would be most useful. Could you produce output on a Wikipage that looks something like this?

article context prediction confidence actual
Singapore ...<br />[[Malay language|Malay (national)]]<br />[[Mandarin Chinese|Chinese]] <br />[[Tamil language|Tamil]] Mandarin Chinese 90% (correct)
Urdu ...orld, with 4.7 percent of the world's population, after [[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]], [[English language|Engli Mandarin Software 22% Mandarin Chinese

Of course, in a real trial run, your bot wouldn't know if it were correct or not; instead, this would allow human editors to look over the results and see if they looked correct. If you could produce this, at least for a trial, it would help people to be more confident in the bot's performance. Thanks! – Quadell (talk) 22:04, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Hello again. My work machine's web server wasn't configured to let outside people access it, so everything looked fine to me, but not to you. That link should be fixed now. I'll get to work producing an output page similar to the format you suggested, Quadell, and put it in my userspace somewhere. Thank you for the interest :) AlekseyFy (talk)

The initial results for the Mandarin disambiguation page are in my userspace here. Did the image link work properly now? AlekseyFy (talk) 06:18, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I can see the graph. And the test results are interesting... I suppose "Consensus" is a measure of how confident you are in your prediction?
I suppose your next step would be to request approval to run a bot, at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval. Create a bot account, such as "User:AlekseyBot" or something, and write up what you want it to do. Again, for your official bot trial, I'd recommend making a list similar to User:AlekseyFy/Mandarin test results, but please include "context" (the 50-or-so characters before and after the link) so human users can quickly doublecheck the bot's work. All the best, – Quadell (talk) 18:41, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

People sorting

Hey guys. I originally took on a task of sorting Christian people (I think that's where it started). I can't perform the latest task given to me thanks to a crappy antivirus. I was wondering if someone would be willing to scan all articles listed here for categories and template segments listed here. The output should go here. Some of this should be doable using mass category intersections, the rest would need to be done via a text search. (Of course your genius is generally above mind, so this may be easier than I made it on myself) It is requested that the searches go in order, ie. if article A is sorted under 21, it cannot be sorted under 18; with articles that don't fit into a category going under their own subheading. If you want to make a list of articles in multiple lists (ArticleA falls under 21 and 18, sort under "Multiple lists") as a side that would be nice as well. I hope I explained everything pretty well that isn't already on the linked page. If something needs clarified, let me know. §hepTalk 22:40, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

I'll only pull this out of the archives once, but anybody want to try this? §hepTalk 03:15, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Doing... I'm putting the results into a mysql table, that way you can sort it however you like. Script is here. I'll post a dump of the db tables when I'm done, its currently running now. —Nn123645 (talk) 09:01, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Y Done uploading the results now. —Nn123645 (talk) 12:15, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Can you convert that into the subheadings mentioned above? Thanks, §hepTalk 21:01, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
Sure though I wasn't entirely sure how you wanted that to setup, most of the pages would be listed in more than one category and I'm not sure what should take preference. For example in what you listed above for Article A would 21 take precedence over 18 or would it be the other way around? —Nn123645 (talk) 03:16, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Earlier (in the list) categories take precedence, so 21 takes precedence over 20, 20 takes precedence over 19, etc.
Don't bother this time with subheadings. I have already finished pushing & pulled the data into a useful form for me-- but could keep the code as I may ask you again to use it (and then subheadings could be a big help)? --Carlaude (talk) 08:41, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

{{ifr}} bot?

There are a huge amount of images with completely unhelpful names; covers cribbed from Amazon or Rate Your Music often get left with a seemingly random string of numbers and letters if the image uploader doesn't consciously avoid that fate. Nobody's favourite album is entitled File:0077775691528.jpg. I imagine a good proportion of Wikipedia's images suffer from the same ignominy.

Now; I'm not a programmer. Far from it. I'm a luddite in comparison. I'm just putting the idea out there: could a bot trawl through these images and append a {{ifr}} template where appropriate? I understand that general users will be granted the right to move images in the foreseeable future, and the template contains a link allowing the move to be done. This could potentially clean up great swathes of un-usefully named images across the project; and could apply to others, I suppose.

Thoughts? Thanks for reading, regardless. Seegoon (talk) 22:55, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Sounds useful. The trouble is, how does one search for badly-named files? You'd want to find things like File:0140444564.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg and File:0103fr.jpg, but not File:1904 OS map.jpg or File:1912 Nina.JPG. I've played around with Auto Wiki Browser, but can't find a good way to pull in files with even a high-probability of being badly named. If someone could create a textfile or wikipage of suspected image names, I (or someone) could use AWB to look at each name and decide whether to all ifr. – Quadell (talk) 13:12, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
I dunno, I thought about that too. I think it would probably need manual approval, but I guess it comes down to where the image is used. Maybe you could just start with images containing no spaces? Again – I might just be creating problems here. Seegoon (talk) 18:40, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
I think it's a good idea in general, but the details are tough to work out. There's no way I know of, for instance, to get a list of all images with no spaces. (I don't think that's a good idea anyway, personally.) There's no way I know of to get a list of all images with all numbers. And although I _can_ find a list of all images containing ZZZ, here, there's no easy way to get that into AWB (and most of those appear correctly named anyway). If someone made a list of suspected images, like I said, I can go through them. – Quadell (talk) 20:56, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Hrmph. I guess this is a regex-type thing. Unfortunately, my knowledge only extends to knowing what a regex is called. Here's a small-scale suggestion: how about album covers (i.e. images in Category:Album covers) that have titles consisting of only numbers? Seegoon (talk) 22:49, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
There are 2,829 images on enwiki with filenames that consist of nothing but numbers, punctuation, and whitespace, 278 in the album cover category. The full list is here and the album cover list is here. The regex I used (using MySQL syntax) in case anyone wants to improve on it is ^[[:digit:][:punct:][:space:]]+[.period.][[:alnum:]]{3,4}$ Mr.Z-man 00:27, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
I'd forgotten how awesome you are, Mr.Z-man! I'll be running AWB on that list. – Quadell (talk) 01:03, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
It's cool to see stuff come to fruition like that. I'm surprised the scale of the problem is so small, but I guess that's not completely a catchall. Still, thanks a lot! Seegoon (talk) 12:46, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
 Working Incidentally, I'm using AWB and telling it to ignore anything containing the following regexp:
(protected generic image name|\{ifr\}|rename media|pp-protected|rename image)
Also, I'm manually skipping ones where title makes some sense, e.g. File:1776.jpg – Quadell (talk) 17:49, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Z-man, could you make a list of images with 7 (or more) numbers in a row, and at least one letter? Example: File:0140444564.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg. – Quadell (talk) 22:56, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Not sure whether you wanted the "7 or more numbers in a row" to apply across the whole file name or just the beginning. A list of files with the numbers at the beginning of the file is here (209 K). [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 09:18, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Well, I'd actually meant 7 numbers anywhere... but I think this list is plenty big enough to keep me busy for a while. All the best, – Quadell (talk) 12:22, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Template:Animanga by year category header

Resolved

I'm wondering if someone could run a bot to replace instances of {{Anime by decade category header}} and {{Manga by decade category header}} with {{Animanga by year category header}}. A full description of the required changes can be found at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks#Template:Animanga by year category header, and some background discussion at User talk:Dinoguy1000#Re:Categorization of anime and manga year categories. If further details are needed, feel free to ask (but note that I may not be able to reply until Monday). 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 18:24, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Though iam not a robot. I can help. A bot is not needed. --SkyWalker (talk) 03:13, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Technically, a bot is not necessary for any of the myriad jobs bots do on-wiki; they are here because they can quickly and efficiently do jobs that are too widespread and tedious for human editors. In this case, there are almost 200 categories to be updated, but I originally requested an AWB run because it's a one-time job that probably wouldn't hurt from *some* supervision, given my requests. However, I've asked three different people for the run, all of whom had to turn it down due to Real LifeTM stuff, followed by a general AWB request that has sat, untouched, for over half a month. Considering the original job is months old, I just want to get it done. If you want to process this, by all means, please do. *finished venting... sorry about all that =P * 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 19:51, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
An example of the required change can be found here (Manga of the 1950s). 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 18:13, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
I will start doing manga today and after finishing that i will complete anime. Was unable to do yesterday due to net stopped working. It will take few weeks to complete it all.--SkyWalker (talk) 08:47, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Cool beans. =) 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 18:05, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
The anime replacement has been completed. SkyWalker finished the manga ones, too. Want me to delete the old templates? ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:17, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Well, it's not quite done, but that's my fault for not bothering to clearly spell out what was necessary (even in the AWB task), and I'm coming in behind to clean it up. I've finished the manga cats and have started a few of the anime ones, and should be through them all in around ten minutes. I'm not sure about deleting the old templates (I never intended to have them deleted), since I borrowed heavily from them when I originally created the current one, and so that category page histories will still work OK. I was actually intending to turn them into wrappers (I'll get to that after I'm finished going through the anime cats). 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 20:51, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Finished (though I'm not going to say I didn't make any mistakes; I went through them pretty fast). 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 21:16, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Sounds good to me. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:55, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Iam sorry for not deleting the categories iam was pretty confused weather to delete the categories or not?. Sorry about that. --SkyWalker (talk) 03:16, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Don't worry about it; like I said, it was my fault for not taking the time to clearly explain what was necessary. =) 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 17:53, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Check Wikipedia Bot

Hi! I was wondering if a bot could be created to update Wikipedia:WikiProject Check Wikipedia each time that the page at the toolserver is updated... it would be a lot easier than needing to check every few hours to see if there's been a change, since the exact time that the update occurs varies. –Drilnoth (T • C) 23:40, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Bump to prevent archiving. –Drilnoth (T • C) 13:24, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
Why not just change the toolserver script to output HTML instead of wikitext, and use it directly? Or change the toolserver script to save it directly to the wiki page, rather than requiring it to be copied and pasted? Mr.Z-man 16:52, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
Hmm... good questions. I'll ask the script's creator. –Drilnoth (T • C) 16:56, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
Hello, I am the script author. I can only program this script in perl. But I have no idea how to write with perl a page in wikipedia. If I create a HTML directly at toolserver (like my other output of the script) the user had a big problem. They can not delete an article from the list. So many user will browse to the same article and try to fix an error, which was fixed hours ago. -- sk (talk) 15:29, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Working on this. Should have it done as soon as I figure out this weird MD5 bug. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:03, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Encyclopedia of Life url updates

 Done Thanks again. -- Quiddity (talk) 01:43, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Hi. The Encyclopedia of Life recently updated their url scheme, and changed the resource numbers for all of their entries. For example, what used to be at

This has made our external link template {{Eol}} have problems. (We can't fix the template, because that breaks the old links; and we cannot add new links, pointing to the /pages/ number)

I'd like to request a bot run to update the ~110 uses of the template so that they point to the new number. Is this possible to do, without too much trouble? Should just be a case of "load page", "wait for redirect", "copy new number", "replace in Wiki-article", but I don't know how one would make such a thing happen. Much thanks. -- Quiddity (talk) 19:51, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

This is few enough edits to do on a normal account, I think. Every instance of the template, yes? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 20:38, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Yes. Every instance. (Does that mean I should just do it myself manually, or should I be asking elsewhere? (could someone with AWB/other do it faster than me? I'm not sure how that works either (linux. mutter.))), or?) Thanks :) -- Quiddity (talk) 01:08, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
It might be a tad more than Quiddity suggests: simply replacing the number in the existing template's argument gives a 404 (in my one test) because {{eol}} tries to link to
Nono, once all the numbers are updated, we will change the template to use /pages/ instead. Hence I was hoping for a bot/script to do it rapidly, with minimal time for the old ones to be broken. -- Quiddity (talk) 02:43, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
If the delay and temporary breakage is a major concern, you could always add alternate parameters (temporarily) to {{eol}} for taxa_id and pages_id, change pages to use those, then simplify. But that may be more work than is necessary here. (I'm willing to help with any part of this, if my help would be, um, helpful.) – Quadell (talk) 03:11, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
I'm happy with any help. No method preference at all. It's not on that many pages, so a few minutes breakage shouldn't matter much. I'm not a template wrangler, so am not sure which of the options would be simplest for whoever does it. I'd suggest you technical folks work out the details, i'll watch and provide answers if needed or help if requested :) (Apologies if I'm just being lazy, but my fingers hurt at the prospect of all that copying tabbing pasting and saving!) -- Quiddity (talk) 04:39, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
I'm just about to do this now. I shall change {{Eol}} first, so that the pages will be recached on the edit, rather than waiting for the job queue to get round to it. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 09:44, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Done. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 10:26, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Much thanks. Might I ask what method you used? I wasn't sure where to best begin, but like to reuse known strategies, and can sometimes adapt old scripts. -- Quiddity (talk) 17:07, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
My code is here. The process basically is to grab a list of all the pages in the category. For each one, I did a regex to extract all the calls to {{eol}}. I then sent a GET request to the old URL, grabbed the "Location: ..." header indicating redirection and replaced the number in the template with the new number. The code uses my Pillar bot framework. There's some (currently out-of-date) documentation on the toolserver. [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 22:32, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Uncategorized files

Special:UncategorizedFiles has a problem because it tends to pick up Commons images for some reason. However, is it possible for a bot to look for images that have empty descriptions and no other edits in its history (like File:Bethelsinging.jpg) and tag them as no source and/or no license? At the very least, a list of those files would be useful. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 09:05, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Try this tool? --MZMcBride (talk) 09:08, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Will do. Thanks. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 21:16, 3 April 2009 (UTC) Nope, still getting Commons images and mostly vandalism. A lot of uploads have found they can wipe out the description part just before uploading finishing and nobody can catch it. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:11, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
I generated a quick list (1000 empty files) here. I can re-run it again if needed. LegoKontribsTalkM 05:20, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Categorize POTD pages

Categorize pages of the Picture of the day as indicated here. Some one could be already categorized. Thank you very much. --Tintero (talk) 21:00, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Doing... LegoKontribsTalkM 23:41, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
Y Done LegoKontribsTalkM 02:31, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
Thank you very much. --Tintero (talk) 16:53, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Bot run to help compile a list

Based on some feedback for a featured article candidate, we at WikiProject Ships are considering the implementation of a new categorization system based on when a ship was launched. In order to assess how to potentially set up this system (by century, decade, year, or some hybrid), I'd like to see if a bot can help compile a list of ships with launch dates.

What I'd like is three lists:

  • A list of articles that transclude {{Infobox Ship Career}} and have any content in the field "Ship launched", preferably formatted like:

    * [[Article name]], [whatever is in the "Ship launched" field]

    (No parsing or processing of the date necessary.)
  • From the articles that do not have anything in "Ship launched", a separate list that has content in "Ship laid down", or if that field is also empty, content in the field "Ship commissioned". If possible this second list could be formatted like:

    * [[Article name]], [code], [whatever is in the field]

    where code would be either "L" for a laid-down date or "C" for a commissioned date. (Again, with no parsing or processing of the date.)
  • And, finally, if an article doesn't have a date in any of the three fields, create a separate list with just the name of the article.

Ideally, each article that transcludes {{Infobox Ship Career}} should be on just one of the three lists. This would be a one-time run and would require no modification of any articles.

So, is this possible? — Bellhalla (talk) 13:38, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Easily, working on it now. Anomie⚔ 14:34, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Y Done I did slightly modify a few of the values: I removed any newlines in the values. Except for Hiddensee (corvette) that was using a bulleted list in its commissioned date, that change makes no visible difference.
"Ship launched" (A - H) | "Ship launched" (H - M) | "Ship launched" (M - U) | "Ship launched" (U - U) | "Ship launched" (U - Z) | "Ship laid date" or "Ship commissioned" | Other articles moved to User:Bellhalla's userspace
Feel free to move the pages out of my userspace. Anomie⚔ 17:44, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Dang! I go away for a little bit and you get the whole thing done. Awesome. I'll move them to my user space. — Bellhalla (talk) 17:50, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Now all in my user space. Thanks again. — Bellhalla (talk) 18:06, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Ok, I'm going to {{db-user}} the redirects. Anomie⚔ 18:19, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Video games Banner

Resolved
 – 2765 template tweaks done by xenobot. –xeno (talk) 00:02, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Could a bot populate a list of the pages with {{WikiProject Video games}} that uses the parameters tf, peer-review, old-peer-review, or magazine. Thanks. MrKIA11 (talk) 18:56, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Please also consider redirects. Thanks! --Izno (talk) 22:22, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
This can be done with tracking categories, no need for a bot. Happy‑melon 22:46, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
Category:WikiProject Video games banners using deprecated parameters should be populating with these pages. Please can you edit that category page to add an explanation of why you're investigating the parameters (I assumed they were deprecated, hence the cat name, but you know better than I). Happy‑melon 22:50, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
The last parameter is supposed to be just magazines, without the or. MrKIA11 (talk) 23:41, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
I updated the page with my understanding of the issue. —Ost (talk) 16:06, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

New Request

Replace all instances of {{WPDQ Article}}, {{WPVG}}, {{Cvgproj}}, {{Vgproj}}, {{WPCVG}}, {{Wikiproject VG}}, {{WikiProject Video Games}}, {{WP VG}}, {{Sports VG Assess}}, {{WP MMO}}, {{WP MMOG}}, {{WP MMOG/RS}} to {{WikiProject Video games}} with the following parameter changes:

  1. Replace any instance of tf=task force, tf2=task force, or tf3=task force to task force=yes without spaces (i.e. Super Smash Bros. to SuperSmashBros.)
  2. Replace any instance of peer-review to peer
  3. Replace any instance of old-peer-review to old-peer

Thanks, MrKIA11 (talk) 00:27, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

I'll have AnomieBOT do this once Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 28 is approved and finishes the run for WikiProject Japan; I already have requests pending for 3 WPVG task force cleanups I can do all at once. Anomie⚔ 01:57, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Missouri university has changed its web address from umr.edu to mst.edu

There are 77 wikipedia articles which link to the old address. Could someone write a bot to change these, as links to the old address just produce the error message: "Address Not Found". Charvest (talk) 16:39, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

I'll have DeadLinkBOT fix these up shortly... all that has changed is the domain - correct? That is http://umr.edu/path/page.htm => http://mst.edu/path/page.htm in every case? --ThaddeusB (talk) 23:36, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
I've just searched wikipedia in a more refined way. "umr.edu" gets 42 hits, but 33 of these begin web.umr.edu however a search for "umr.edu" -"web.umr.edu" shows the remaining 9 begin with other things like civil.umr.edu. I'll change the 9 manually, but that leaves 33 with web.umr.edu to be changed to web.mst.edu Charvest (talk) 11:43, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
After changing the 9 manually, I found that changing umr.edu to mst.edu works most of the time, but for a couple of the links they remained broken even after this change. Charvest (talk) 12:12, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
 Done: I had my bot run through all the links and update those that it could. The log of its changes is here. A large percentage of the links couldn't be changed because the file doesn't exist (in the same location at least) in the new domain. I list of the links not changed for that reason is found here --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:13, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
Great work! Thankyou. Charvest (talk) 11:03, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Bot to insert {{{delete}}} tag on pages with name in english on Hindi (hi) wikipedia

Hello, Hindi Wikipedia is in growing stage. It has currently around 28,000 pages. Initially a lot of users have copied English wiki pages to the Hindi wiki and when they finished translating/creating the Hindi equivalent they either put a redirect or simply left the English heading page as it is.

Now after 4 years its a daunting task to find and delete all the pages with english heading.

Therefor I am requesting a Bot which can scan through hindi wiki and would place a tag to delete the page if its name is in English. This bot can also be useful for other language wikis.

Thanks Gunjan

Note that this page is for requesting bots on the English Wikipedia; you're more likely to get a useful response if you ask in the appropriate place on the Hindi Wikipedia.
To anyone considering this: I suggest you verify that there actually is consensus on the Hindi Wikipedia for this to be done. Anomie⚔ 13:23, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
Here is a list of all the pages on the Hindi Wikipedia that pass the following requirements:
  1. Contains only the following characters
    1. Letters (A-Z, a-z)
    2. Numbers (0-9)
    3. Punctuation (including spaces)
  2. Contains at least one letter
  3. Not a redirect
  4. In the article namespace
If you would like this tweaked (e.g. to include redirects or images or whatever), I can do so. I don't want to do a bot run on a language that I can't even slightly read.
[[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 14:52, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Spellcheck "documentry" to "documentary"

I'm not sure if a request such as this would normally go through this process, but by luck I noticed that the word "documentry" is missed by spell check bots and there was (when I checked) 71 pages with this typo. I've corrected a few, but can't be bothered going through them all when a simple find/replace system is already in place that can do it for me :-) 78.86.230.62 (talk) 16:39, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

There are no spell-checking bots. Anomie⚔ 19:37, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
You may want to instead put in a request at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos. 「ダイノガイ千？！」(Dinoguy1000) 19:42, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
I just did a Google search and found only about 70 hits for "documentry"; I just fixed them all with AWB. --CapitalR (talk) 09:30, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Deferred – Quadell (talk) 19:59, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Piping bot

Is there a bot or could one be programmed to look for pages linking to redirects and have them all piped to link directly to the proper page. This could help with page moves and help general WP efficiency.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 20:38, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

P.S. It should be programmable to check redirects to a certain page, specific redirects and specific pages.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 20:39, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

See WP:R2D. FunPika 20:42, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Declined Not a good task for a bot. – Quadell (talk) 19:59, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

I moved {{SouthParkProject}} to the standard naming scheme, {{WikiProject South Park}} - can someone's bot fix the redirects accordingly? Thank you, Cirt (talk) 21:09, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Unless there's some reason why leaving this as a redirect is problematic, I'd point you to "don't fix redirects that aren't broken". [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 22:48, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
Okay no worries, I guess they'll get fixed eventually. Cirt (talk) 06:02, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Declined Not a good task for a bot. – Quadell (talk) 19:58, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded list by problem

I like doing miscellaneous clean-up tasks, but I want to spend the majority of my time fixing articles that are about clearly important subjects. Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded lists 3650 of the most important subjects; in fact, every link from that page to article-space is a link to a vital article. Could someone create a list of "expanded vital articles" that have problems, by problem type? For instance, a list of all the ones that are missing. A list of all the ones that are stubs. A list of all the ones tagged {{Unreferenced}}. Etc. I'm not sure where to put these; perhaps Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded/lists/stubs and similar? Thanks, – Quadell (talk) 00:51, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

This can also be done if we put {{Vital}} on all the appropriate pages and then get a WolterBot Cleanup Listing subscription. –Drilnoth (T • C) 15:33, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
I hadn't known about that project when I made this request. I liked it so much I became a member. :) Withdrawn. – Quadell (talk) 19:47, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Deferred – Quadell (talk) 19:58, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Creation of categories of the form "[Year] ships"

Based on a discussion at WikiProject Ships we are going to start categorizing ships by time period of launch. For ships built from 1850 on there will be a category of the form "Year ships" to list all ships launched in that year. I'd like to enlist the aid of a bot to create (and populate, but that will come later) the year categories. (All of the century and decade categories required have already been created manually.)

Details
  • For each year from 1850 to 2009 (inclusive), create a category of the form [[Category:[Year] ships]] with the content of {{cathead ship year|[Year]}}. It would be most helpful if the edit summary could reference the above-linked discussion, too.
    • Exceptions: year categories for 1900, 1906, 1911, 1912, and 1986 have already been created and need no modifications.
  • For each category created above, please create the talk page with the content of {{WikiProject Ships}}, the WikiProject Ships project banner. (It will auto-assess for a category page and needs no further parameters.)

Thanks in advance. — Bellhalla (talk) 15:14, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

These are trivial edits to make and the script is similarly trivial to make. Is it possible to have the criteria for finding the pages to go in the categories so it can be done with just the one BRFA? Thanks! [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 17:03, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
Sure.
  • For all articles that transclude {{Infobox Ship Career}}:
    • Examine the field "Ship launched". If it is non-empty, extract the year, if any. (From the results of a previous bot run during the evaluation of this system, you can assume all years will be 4 digits long.) Content in this field may be full dates (dmy or mdy), partial dates (my), or years only, or may contain non-date text like "unknown"; may or may not be wikilinked; and may or may not contain line breaks.
    • If "Ship launched" is empty or does not contain a date, examine the field "Ship completed", and if it is non-empty, extract the year, if any.
      • With the year, place into the appropriate category based on these rules:
        • year <= 1599: place in appropriate century category of the form [[Category:[century][century ordinal]-century ships]]. For the range of dates in use century ordinal should only be "th"; century is (trunc([year]/100)*100) + 1 (trunc([year]/100) + 1 unless year ends in "00" in which case it's trunc([year]/100)*100 trunc([year]/100).
        • 1600 <= year < 1850: place in appropriate decade category of the form [[Category:[decade]s ships]].
        • 1850 <= year <= 2009: place in appropriate year category of the form [[Category:[year] ships]]. These are the categories above that need to be created, with the exceptions noted above.
        • year > 2009: place in Category:Proposed ships (if not already there)
  • Articles should be placed in exactly one of the era categories. For example: a ship built in 1986 should only be in Category:1986 ships and not Category:1980s ships or Category:20th-century ships.
  • There are a few articles, ≈50, that were placed in the appropriate category as part of the testing of the setup and the system.
Again, thanks in advance. — Bellhalla (talk) 18:49, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
With the century categories, I think you mean trunc([year]/100) + 1? (Your code gives 1900th century ships!) Coding... [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 20:01, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
Yes, of course you're right... <sheepish grin> — Bellhalla (talk) 20:20, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
Would you like a list/category of ships without launch dates? [[Sam Korn]] (smoddy) 21:40, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
That would be nice. Please feel free to put in my user space. — Bellhalla (talk) 21:51, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

BRFA filed: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Sambot 6 by [[Sam Korn]]. – Quadell (talk) 19:56, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Missing articles list

I have a list of articles here, some exist, some are redlinks. Is it possible to get a bot to take the list, separate out the redlinks, divide them up onto groups of 100 and put them on separate pages, 10 groups of 100=1000 per page. I created the first one by hand as an example at Wikipedia:WikiProject Aircraft/Missing articles/1. Also (and this isn't vital) could the search function {{subst:google|PAGENAME}} be added after each item? - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 00:43, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Nevermind. I found a way I can do it in AWB. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 19:56, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Deferred

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