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Mass title move

I need a bot to do a mass move of articles for Ontario Highways. The current articles are named Highway X (Ontario). However, according to WP:SRNC, the preferrable title is Ontario Provincial Highway X

X in this case is 2–169 and 400–427. There are around 100 articles. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 23:05, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Why would a state route naming convention apply to a Canadian highway? –xenotalk 03:00, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Needs wider discussion. - No apparent consensus for this, and it would be extremely peculiar to refer to Canadian highways in this manner. See also Wikipedia:Canadian Wikipedians' notice board/Style guide where disambiguation is done with province in brackets after the subject. WT:ONTARIO or WT:CANADA would be places to see if consensus exists for this. –xenotalk 03:06, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Correct archive parameters if url is archive.org

This is probably a task that could be added a bot. I'd like for a bot to check the url paramater of a citation template such as {{cite news}}. If it starts with http://web.archive.org/web/<date>, then it should correct the url to the actual original url, and create/update the archiveurl and archivedate tag. The bot should also check the archiveurl paramater and make sure that the archivedate paramater is correctly set.

Archive.org urls are given as follows: http://web.archive.org/web/<year><month><day><othernumber>/<original website>

So given the url http://web.archive.org/web/19970724174700/http://www.uni-ulm.de/~richter/udiwww/index.htm

The year is 1997, the month 07, the day 24, and the original site is http://www.uni-ulm.de/~richter/udiwww/index.htm

Also be aware that archive.org/...will not work...so that could be fixed as well.

If anybody would add this task to their bot, I'd appreciate it...otherwise when I get some more time , I'll write the bot. Thanks!Smallman12q (talk) 00:37, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

If this happens, then the link should be disabled; we should not be knowingly serving our readers broken links, nor should we be deliberately directing 404 traffic to external sites. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 00:50, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
Well, generally, by not disabling the archiveurl, it is assumed that the original url is either a 404 or has changed.Smallman12q (talk) 01:20, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
The archive URL is a working URL. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:06, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
Maybe somebody can create or expand a bot that it forms thw {{cite web}} links from

{{cite web|url=http://web.archive.org/web/19970709122848/www.uni-ulm.de/~richter/udiwww/soon.htm|title=UdiWWW: Coming soon|last=Richter|first=Bernd|publisher=[[University of Ulm]]|date=September 4, 1996|accessdate=16 March 2010}}
to
{{cite web|url=http://www.uni-ulm.de/~richter/udiwww/soon.htm|archivedate=1997-07-09|archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/19970709122848/www.uni-ulm.de/~richter/udiwww/soon.htm|title=UdiWWW: Coming soon|last=Richter|first=Bernd|publisher=[[University of Ulm]]|date=September 4, 1996|accessdate=16 March 2010}}

This is a mistake which is often made. mabdul 16:19, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Dead user equals dead bot

I planted this warning on several pages in the last weeks without much reaction:

Given that the honorable Mr. Wolterding seems to be dead (no edits since January 3rd), what is the Plan B for WolterBot ??? Then User:Rd232 picked it up and brought it on this page, from which it was archived in the last hours for lack of updates. Here it is: Hello all, User:WolterBot has not run since mid December. It generates cleanup listings for wikiprojects, which is a useful thing particularly for the less active ones, providing new content in terms of To Do tasks. The bot's owner hasn't been around since early January. Is there any other bot doing something similar? Could someone else take over the bot (might need source code requesting from the operator, it doesn't seem to be public)? Rd232 talk 10:18, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

ping! anyone? Rd232 talk 14:19, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
Could you give a quick outline of how this bot worked? Did each WikiProject give a list of categories they wanted monitored for {{cleanup}} or what? I wouldn't be surprised if the bot op returned. - Kingpin13 (talk) 14:22, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
The instructions are here: User:WolterBot/Cleanup listing subscription and example output here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Arkansas/Cleanup listing. It was based on project banner tagging on talk pages. Rd232 talk 14:52, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

So, is WolterBot dead or... is Wikipedia dead? --AlainR345Techno-Wiki-Geek 04:31, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, if absolutely no one else is willing to do this, then I might take a crack at it some time in the future (would be a fun challenge!), but please don't count on it. If no one else responds to this thread in, say... five days, I might start working on it. — The Earwig (talk) 04:49, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
depending on what you want done I can see about creating reports on the toolserver. Write up an exact detail what you want done. βcommand 01:07, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
As Tothwolf, creator of the wolterbot answered on my talk page:
It only updates whenever a new database dump is available. It does not work from the live version of the database. --Tothwolf (talk) 17:30, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects run by Tim, runs daily. So it is possible.Okip 02:51, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

A bot to add alt texts to templates

see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Wikipedia:Manual of Style (icons)#Remember accessibility for the visually impaired —Preceding unsigned comment added by Manishearth (talk • contribs) 10:12, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

So what do you want done? –xenotalk 14:12, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
Well the issue isn't a simple due to the attribution requirement. Would a bot be able to check the license ? Gnevin (talk) 16:56, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
Sure, a well-designed bot (not necessarily designed by me, mind-you) could ensure {{PD-self}} or one of its analogues was on the image page. –xenotalk 17:00, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
Well can we start with the PD images in templates that are only used on talk pages? Gnevin (talk) 19:27, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
This can be withdrawn in light of Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Alt text Gnevin (talk) 15:54, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Geography of Canada

Resolved
 – Task running. –xenotalk 03:39, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Might it be possible for a bot to go through the talk pages of all of the articles in all of the subcategories of Category:Geography of Canada and tag them with {{WikiProject Canada|class=|importance=|geography=yes}} if they don't already have the template? If the article has a stub template on it, you might also want to modify it to be class=stub. Thank you! --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 03:12, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

This is a pretty standard request. Click here to file a request at one of wikipedia's most active tag bots. Tim1357 (talk) 03:32, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
As Tim says, Xenobot Mk V (talk · contribs) is standing by to complete requests such as these. However, the most important part is a well-defined category list. Last night I recursed all the way through Category:Geography of Canada and it included such categories such as Category:Geography of Portland, Oregon. (Don't believe me? Try it yourself: Category:Geography of Canada -> Category:Ecozones of Canada -> Category:Ecoregions of Canada -> Category:Pacific Northwest -> Category:Geography of the Pacific Northwest -> Category:Geography of Oregon -> Category:Oregon counties -> Category:Multnomah County, Oregon -> Category:Geography of Multnomah County, Oregon -> Category:Geography of Portland, Oregon). Even if I recurse only 2 levels, categories include Category:Detroit, Michigan. I've started you off with recursing 1 level through the main category and placced the resutls here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography of Canada/Categories. Go ahead and delete any categories which are not within the scope of the project. –xenotalk 15:10, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
Interesting; I had assumed that categories were arranged in a much more tree-like arrangement. I've taken out the natural disasters and the political groupings from your list, and I'll fill out one of Xenobot's forms tomorrow. Thanks for your help. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:20, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
Don't worry about the paperwork, I already have approval from the project for the last task. I went down one more level in the categories, and trimmed what I figured was too wide or out of scope. Please go over it as well. Let me know when you think we're ready to roll. –xenotalk 16:45, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
It looks good, the only thing I did was remove Owen Sound (it's a city, not a sound). I think it's good to go. Note that WPCANADA is a common redirect to the template, so if you see that, better add |geography=yes to it rather than re-adding the template. Also, go ahead and let the bot do quality assessments based on templates that are already there. Thank you! --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 14:10, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Do you want to tag categories and templates? Can you see the last iteration I'll do... Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography of Canada/Categories#1 more level down 2. –xenotalk 15:28, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Those look good too. I wasn't sure whether the mines belonged there, but I guess they do put big dents in the geography. The categories and templates may as well be tagged since there is an official type for them in 1.0 now. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 23:27, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
 Task running... [1] see User:Xenobot/R#WP:GEOCANADA. –xenotalk 03:39, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for doing this. Now, I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth and I'm very sorry, but I may have really screwed this up. I did not anticipate how much the geography project would be overrun with small villages by including Category:Settlements in Canada. When this is done, the Canadian geography project will almost completely encompass the canadian communities project with the exception of neighbourhoods inside cities. Since there are two separate projects for physical and political geography, it would probably be better to keep them split up. I'd like to ask, very apologetically, whether it would it be possible, to get in line for the use of the bot again to see that articles in the settlement category have the community=yes but not geography=yes? Sorry. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 15:18, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
Sure. Don't sweat it. –xenotalk 20:01, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Upscaling of portraits in infoboxes

I raised this issue at Template talk:Infobox_person#Upscaling of portraits in infoboxes with no response, so figure I should bring this here.

Basically: upscaling pictures of any detail is usually bad and should be avoided. Upscaling is fine for simple images like the Flag of France, but not for photographs, detailed portraits, and so on. To quote from the article on image scaling: "Enlarging an image (upsampling or interpolating) is generally less common. The main reason for this is that in "zooming" an image, it is not possible to discover any more information in the image than already exists, and image quality inevitably suffers."

Now, as it happens, practically 99.99% of images used in Infobox person are too detailed to upscale well. However, the default image size if imagesize is unspecified is 225px, and plenty of images have a smaller native resolution. Many users have directly specified a "too large" image as well, probably out of not realizing the image wouldn't scale well to that, or else simply copy-and-pasting a different infobox, replacing the picture, and not realizing they needed to adjust the imagesize as well. In other words, pretty much any time the specified resolution is larger than the native resolution for infobox pictures, it's a mistake. For a few examples, see Donald Kohn, Miep Gies, and Martti Ahtisaari.jpg. Note that even in the case of Maati, the upscaling is still quite noticeable even though the size difference is tiny (207->225). The original image is notably sharper, while the 225px image is blurry and seems out of focus. The upscaled pictures of Kohn and Gies just look terrible, on the other hand.

Anyway. I was hoping to fix this via a bot. Basically I imagine the bot would work like so: Examine all transclusions of {{Infobox_person}}. If the image parameter is set, look up the imagesize parameter (or use 225 if unset). Compare it with the native resolution of the picture. If it's larger, then set the imagesize parameter to the native size.

Thoughts? Thanks in advance to anyone willing to work on this. SnowFire (talk) 16:02, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I'd be willing to do this task, but I must ask first: do you think that the bot will always be doing the right thing when it changes the size of an image? Is it possible that by shrinking the image, we will be taking something away from it in a few cases? Of course, I imagine that in the majority of cases, the resizing would be fine, but the bot might cause trouble if it decides to make an image smaller, yet the image happens to be something that looks fine when upscaled. I know it's rare, as you said above, but is a bot really able to judge the quality of an image when resized? Perhaps it might be better for the bot to log all occurrences of incorrectly-sized images it finds, but not actually fix them? It's a stupid concern; that's about all I'm worried about, otherwise something like this seems fine. — The Earwig (talk) 04:37, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
You might want to make sure it does not resize .svg images, since they are able to be scaled up. --Andrew Kelly (talk) 06:24, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
Andrew Kelly: Yeah, should have mentioned that, but SVGs obviously get a pass on this since they don't exactly have a native resolution. It's possible that there's a few SVGs that look bad here but that is probably the exception.
The Earwig: Hmm. Honestly, the closest to "wrong" cases I can imagine would be cases that are basically equivalent. For example, a sketch drawing akin to a less-detailed File:Leonardo self.jpg might look about the same quality between 120 pixels wide and a proportional blow-up to 240 pixels. And even then, it'd be more a matter of taste; there's no problem with the taste of the editor who chose 240 pixels, but 120 wouldn't be a wrong answer either.
Still, there's something to be said for caution. Maybe we can start with just a "log all current cases this is occuring to a page for examination," and do a manual sanity check on those before running the bot in fully automatic. The log would also be handy for dealing with the above case - let's say we run the bot now, and then decide to run the bot again in 2011. We could create a new log and then throw away any repeats of articles caught in 2010 - that means an editor reverted the bot somewhere along the line, and we wouldn't want to have the bot make the same change again to edit war. SnowFire (talk) 17:17, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

I've programmed a bot script to do this and ran it in read-only mode on the first 1000 transclusions of {{Infobox person}} that have images. Out of those 1000, the bot proposed 28 edits. Details:

Edit details: (click [show] to view)
User:EarwigBot/Temp/Image display resizing

I'm interested in running this as a fully-automatic (or perhaps semi-automatic) bot; the above shows what it is likely to do on a normal run. Currently, it will ignore an edit if the size modification is two pixels or less, because changing image_size from 100px to 99px is a little pointless. I reviewed most of the edits; about half of them are making minor changes that aren't really visible, while the other half are making changes that are visible. So, before I go to WP:BRFA, what do we think? — The Earwig (talk) 03:40, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

BRFA filed Let's just go ahead and roll with this, alright? I've fixed something in the code; originally the bot would skip pages if there was no imagesize parameter, but now it auto-fills in imagesize as 225. This was caused by misreading the request. Also, I've changed the modification-threshold to five pixels, instead of two. — The Earwig (talk) 00:59, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Need bot for "table" template

Resolved
 – Done manually

I just noticed that the {{table}} template is being used all over the place without doing anything! After updating a number of pages, I realized there is more to clean up than a human can do, so here I am asking for a bot.

Background

{{table}} allows easy creation of tables. There are a number of parameters that the editor can use, automatically creating headers, columns and rows.

Improper use

On dozens of pages, the template is being used paramterlessly (is that a word?) and thus serves no purpose whatsoever. For example: 

{| {{table}}
{| class="wikitable"
! blah
! blah

Clearly in this instance, the first line is absolutely pointless. Sometimes I've seen it this way: 

{| {{table}}
! blah
! blah

or even this way: 

{{table}}
{|
! blah
! blah

How a bot can fix it

I think there are a couple ways a bot can automatically fix this:

  1. Find a page where {{table}} exists on a line by itself. Remove that.
  2. Find a page where the text {| {{table}} exists:
    • If the line below that line starts with {|, remove the line altogether.
    • If the line below that line doesn't start with {|, just eliminate the text {{table}}.

In any case, anywhere that {{table}} shows up, it needs to be removed. It may also be helpful for the bot to list all the pages where changes were made (possibly added to Template talk:Table).

I hope someone creates this, it seems trivial! — Timneu22 (talk) 16:39, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

If the template isn't causing any harm why should it be removed? –xenotalk 19:34, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
I believe it is bad for future wikipedians. Obviously people are putting {{table}} on pages because they think it does something, because they saw it on another page. It slows page rendering to call another template, and the "what links here" list for {{table}} shows pages where it isn't actually used. The whole thing is a mess; removing it will make things cleaner. I guess I could ask: if if we could clean it up, why wouldn't we do that? Right now it's on 500+ pages, but as more people use existing pages to copy and make new pages, it will continue to be used incorrectly and cause more user confusion. I temporarily created Category:Articles using the table template incorrectly to see where this template isn't used right: far too many pages!! Timneu22 (talk) 00:18, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Withdrawn, for now. I went through and found some offensive pages. Not sure if I got them all, but I'll spot-check and see what really needs to be fixed. If something is bot-worth, I'll be back! Timneu22 (talk) 13:37, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

I think this task would be a good idea to add to AWB's general fixes, so it can be done in conjunction with other, substantive edits. –xenotalk 13:45, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
It looks like I got all the offensive pages, and the template has been modified to show the user a "hey don't do that!" message, if it isn't used right. So I think at this point AWB doesn't need to know about it. Timneu22 (talk) 13:55, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for your diligence. –xenotalk 13:56, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Deliver cleanup message to affected WikiProjects

This would immensely help WP:WBOOKS with the cleanup of all books, but is a bit different from the usual message delivery. The main idea is to intersect Category:Wikipedia books (community books with errors) with each subcategory of Category:Book-Class articles. Then, if there are books found in both category, post this message on the corresponding project's talk page:

Hadronic Matter
An overview
An example of a book cover, taken from Book:Hadronic Matter

As detailed in this week's Signpost, WildBot has been patrolling Wikipedia-Books and searched for various problems in them, such as books having duplicate articles or containing redirects. WikiProject Wikipedia-Books is in the process of cleaning them up, but help would be appreciated. For this project, the following books have problems:

The problem reports explain in details what exactly are the problems, why they are problems, and how to fix them. This way anyone can fix them even if they aren't familiar with books. If you don't see something that looks like this, then all problems have been fixed. (Please strike articles from this list as the problems get fixed.)

Also, the {{saved book}} template has been updated to allow editors to specify the default covers of books (title, subtitle, cover-image, cover-color), and gives are preview of the default cover on the book's page. An example of such a cover is found on the right. Ideally, all books in Category:Book-Class FOO articles should have covers.

If you need help with cleaning up a book, help with the {{saved book}} template, or have any questions about books in general, see Help:Books, Wikipedia:Books, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, or ask me on my talk page. Also feel free to join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as we need all the help we can get.

This message was delivered by User:Bot, at TIMEOFDELIVERY, on behalf of Headbomb. Headbomb probably isn't watching this page, so if you want him to reply here, just leave him a message on his talk page. BOTSIGNATURE

If books aren't found in both category, then this message should be delivered instead:

Hadronic Matter
An overview
An example of a book cover, taken from Book:Hadronic Matter

As detailed in this week's Signpost, WikiProject Wikipedia books is undertaking a cleanup all Wikipedia books. Particularly, the {{saved book}} template has been updated to allow editors to specify the default covers of the books. Title, subtitle, cover-image, and cover-color can all be specified, and an HTML preview of the cover will be generated and shown on the book's page (an example of such a cover is found on the right). Ideally, all books in Category:Book-Class FOO articles should have covers.

If you need help with the {{saved book}} template, or have any questions about books in general, see Help:Books, Wikipedia:Books, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, or ask me on my talk page. Also feel free to join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as we need all the help we can get.

This message was delivered by User:Bot, at TIMEOFDELIVERY, on behalf of Headbomb. Headbomb probably isn't watching this page, so if you want him to reply here, just leave him a message on his talk page. BOTSIGNATURE

If both categories are empty, then there is no need to deliver any message.

Just to make sure no one gets confused, Category:Book-Class FOO articles is the appropriate subcategory of Category:Book-Class articles. The rest, such as BOTSIGNATURE, should be relatively obvious, but if there is anything unclear, just let me know (I'm watching this page so you can reply here). So yeah, it would be great if someone unleashed some command-line fu on behalf of WP:WBOOKS. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 02:49, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Can anyone help here? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:57, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
Sure. I'll see if I can do this (will report back in an hour or so). — ⊥ɥǝ Ǝɐɹʍıƃ (ʇɐlʞ) 00:18, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
BRFA filed — ⊥ɥǝ Ǝɐɹʍıƃ (ʇɐlʞ) 02:25, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
Cool beans. I'll head there. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 02:40, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Redirects from hyphens to endashes

Per MOS:ENDASH, redirects are required when an article title contains an endash (–). Would it be possible for a bot to go through Category:Seasons in English football (and all its subcategories) and create redirects for all of the articles that do not yet have them? Examples of required redirects include: 

1870-71 in English football → 1870–71 in English football
1883-84 Newton Heath L&YR F.C. season → 1883–84 Newton Heath L&YR F.C. season
1892-93 Football League → 1892–93 Football League

This operation could be performed by a user or group of users, but there are far too many affected articles for that. Any help a bot could provide would be very useful. – PeeJay 09:23, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

I pointed the operator of BOTijo (talk · contribs) here. That bot has done much redirect-creation in the past. –xenotalk 18:33, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, Xeno. I look forward to hearing from that bot's creator. – PeeJay 22:57, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
Bot to create redirects from hyphens to dashes

Per this MOS discussion, could there be a bot which creates redirects from titles with hyphens to titles with dashes, like this one I just created? Such redirects will make articles with dashes in their titles more accessible to those who can't easily type the dashes. Ucucha 18:53, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

This is precisely my request, but on a larger scale. I hope we can get a bot to do this! – PeeJay 23:05, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Why was this discussion archived? No bot has been created yet! – PeeJay 17:08, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Hello?! – PeeJay 01:04, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
I can do the specific task; for tha persistent task you should see if Botijo will do it; maybe he missed my message. –xenotalk 20:03, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Hello. Sorry about the delay. I can create a bot to make redirects from titles with – to -. This will be done in all English Wikipedia, right? Not only to those in the football category of above. emijrp (talk) 14:18, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, I think that's what Uchucha is asking for, yes. Would need a BRFA I think, because again it's potentially an enormous number of redirects being created. –xenotalk 14:23, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
I actually meant that for every title with an endash, the corresponding title with a hyphen should be redirected—not sure whether that was also what Emijrp meant. Thanks if you're willing to do this; I agree that a BRFA would probably be needed. Ucucha 14:28, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

OK, I will open a BRFA. emijrp (talk) 12:33, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Statistical approach to spam/vandalism identification (CRM114, Bayesian, tokens lifetime)?

Has anybody tried Bayesian filtering or CRM114-like approaches to vandalism identification? Any known failures/successes? (If yes, has anybody tried separate statistics files for different Wiki categories?)

Seems to be doable. I did a few quick hacks/tests:

  • token/words 'lifetime' stats (how long/with what variability different tokens manage to stay on the page);
  • page history dump -> reverts identification;
  • reverts history -> good/bad edits identification;
  • identified bad/good edits -> statistical engine training;
  • classification of 'new' edits (by statistical engine);
  • output evaluation (human assisted).

Somewhat moderate success so far. I'll post the details if anybody shows any interest.

By the way, anybody interested in collaboration? (You'll need to know python). Or you may also help in this 'human assisted output evaluation' step; that's basically checking uncertain (from the engine POV) edits and identifying 'false positives'. The result of that is a verified list of bad/good edits/revisions (BTW have anybody seen any lists like that)?

--Dc987 (talk) 08:58, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Here are some 'words lifetime' stats in the history of the Rocket Wikipedia article (~4000 revisions):[2] (Note: lots of obscene words here) --Dc987 (talk) 01:11, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
I did an analysis on this along with a friend as well, but our initial estimates determined, unfortunately, that bayesian filtering was ineffective at learning (it appears, for some reason, vandalism patterns aren't well suited to neural networks). Of course, this was only a brief estimate as we were surveying various types of AI. Instead, I've started work on CollabRC using a genetic algorithm which seems to be a little better at picking up these details, though unfortunately has a performance penalty. If you're interested I could certainly use some help, but unfortunately it's in C++, not python. But I don't want to discourage you – we only did a very brief estimate as we were surveying many methods. Your mileage may vary. --Shirik (Questions or Comments?) 03:51, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
I can help you with the python if you want to pursue this further, however I am rather inexperienced with AI, but I learn quickly. Tim1357 (talk) 03:57, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
By the way, if you do end up pursuing this, I would love to get it involved in the CollabRC net. Every additional data source helps the net. Feel free to join Tim and myself in IRC sometime if you'd like to hear some ideas on how the net works (or rather, will work). --Shirik (Questions or Comments?) 04:24, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
Well, so far I've only tried a few quick hacks with the bad edits identification based on reverts, CRM114 engine and this 'tokens lifetime' idea. Here's the current code [3] if you want to take a look.
Thanks for pointing at the CollabRC. I've especially liked these: User:Crispy1989/Dataset/Vandalism, User:Crispy1989/Dataset/Constructive, User:Tim1357/dataset. Any more datasets like these? --Dc987 (talk) 04:48, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
I know of existence of another data set (User:Cobi's), but I don't know if he has it or if/how it can be obtained. Tim might know more. Beyond that I don't know of any datasets, but I'm sure more can be found through the toolserver, etc. --Shirik (Questions or Comments?) 05:46, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
Here are stats (with false positives reported) [4] for the Rocket article history analysis (reverts identification -> good/bad edits identification -> statistical engine training -> classification of 'new' edits) of the 4000 revisions with this [5] code. Apparently straightforward brute force approach gives too many mistakes... but... there is still a lot of room for improvement here... --Dc987 (talk) 06:55, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
BTW, can anyone point to some python code that would gracefully do | Special:Export & for all pages in a given Wiki category & saving all the revisions & separate xml file per page? I can hack it with pywikipedia, but if there is some code already? --Dc987 (talk) 06:55, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
here Is a list of diffs I have compiled. I can generate more, for each list that does not have a 'human' in front of it. The titles are pretty self-explanatory, but ask me if you need explanation. Tim1357 (talk) 11:14, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
Excellent. Thank you.
And yes. In fact there are a few questions. How would you classify constructive edits on vandalized pages that: a) Revert vandalism only partially? b) Do not revert vandalism? The resulting revision contains very ugly stuff, but the edit itself was definitely constructive. It may or may not have been done by a user other from a vandal. (?) --Dc987 (talk) 00:26, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
BTW - some research papers on the topic of vandalism detection in Wikipedia: [6] --Dc987 (talk) 04:11, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
New good/bad revisions data set

I've generated a data set (for the first 2000 revisions of the Rocket article) identifying good/bad revisions. See: User:Dc987/Dataset_for_the_Rocket_article. Most of it is auto-generated, but some questionable edits were human verified. I guess it is pretty accurate, but I'd like to see it cleaned up even more. Would anyone be willing to run their favorite vandalism identification bot against it? --Dc987 (talk) 01:54, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Request to read all video game articles, and gather data in infobox for year, genre, and platform to compile into list articles

I want a bot that will look through all the video game articles, and read the information in the infobox to automatically compile relevant list articles.

There are articles about each decade in video games, such as 1990s in video gaming. We already have category articles for things like 1985_video_games[7], and Category:Arcade_games[8]. I want a list for each decade showing all games released during that decade, and a have whatever genre each game comes from automatically read from the infobox of its main article. Since thousands of games are released each decade, I'd like to be able to make one listing all notable games, those with Wikipedia articles for them anyway, for each genre. Platform, arcade, first person shooters, sports, role playing, turn based, real time strategy, etc. Whatever officially recognized genres things are classified into. Dream Focus 09:34, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

To clarify, all the games are already listed by year in a category. I want a bot to go through the selected list, and then read the information in the infobox of all of these games, to create list articles for those interested in seeing things such as List of platform games of 1990s or List of platform games of the 1990s(Nintendo platform). Dream Focus 09:43, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Japanese Cinema Database url changes

Could I request a bot to fix URLs here? The Agency for Cultural Affairs' Japanese Cinema Database has recently changed its urls, dead-linking dozens of citations in our Japanese film articles. What used to be, for example, "http://www.japanese-cinema-db.jp/searchDetails.php?id=11402" is now "http://www.japanese-cinema-db.jp/details/11402" All that would have to be done is to substitute any link in an article that starts out: "http://www.japanese-cinema-db.jp/searchDetails.php?id=" with: "http://www.japanese-cinema-db.jp/details/" Thanks! Dekkappai (talk) 21:21, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Interesting: enwiki is the only wmf wiki having links to that domain. I'll do the replacement (124 links on ans) within the next two days or so. Merlissimo 00:04, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
Hi Merlissimo. I know, it seems like jawiki would use this good source, but jawiki is notoriously poorly sourced anyway... Thanks for doing the work-- it'll save me a lot of manual labor! Dekkappai (talk) 00:14, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
 Done [9]. Merlissimo 13:38, 4 April 2010 (UTC)
Thanks! Dekkappai (talk) 14:15, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Infobox criminal parameter renames

Per discussion at Template talk:Infobox criminal#Status, a bot is needed, to change all instances of {{Infobox criminal}}'s parameters as below:

penalty -> conviction_penalty
status -> conviction_status

please. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:51, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

I might be interested in doing this. Give me an hour or so to investigate the task further. — The Earwig (talk) 02:21, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
BRFA filed. — The Earwig (talk) 03:28, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:31, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
Please see also #Infobox journalist parameter rename, below, for a similar, but simpler, request. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:00, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Infobox journalist parameter rename

Per discussion at Template talk:Infobox journalist#Ethnic, a bot is needed, to change all instances of {{Infobox journalist}}'s parameter as below:

ethnic -> ethnicity

please. See #Infobox criminal parameter renames, above, for a very similar task. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:58, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Honorific title infobox cleanup

Several days ago, a good faith (and very bold editor) added honorific prefixes to the infoboxes of apparently every United States Senator, Governor, and Congressman. Consensus has long been opposed to the widespread usage of these titles (see WP:HONOR and WP:HONORIFIC), and a discussion at the United States Congress WikiProject has reaffirmed that consensus. There are 585 current potential articles that could have been affected, and apparently multiple accounts may have been used. Some have since been reverted manually. Would it be possible, and would it be more efficient, to have a bot assist in restoring these articles to their humble states? Specifically:

The bot would search through:

...and remove, from any article in any of those categories, any infobox line that begins with:

  • |honorific-prefix=

For example: sample removal. Thanks! jæs (talk) 02:08, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Eh? MOS:HONORIFIC says "the honorific title should be included in the initial reference and infobox heading for the person" and "the infobox is the canonical location for all titles and honors.". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:25, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
The style guideline ought to be made easier to read, but if you read it closely, it makes a clear distinction between honorific titles and honorific prefixes: "Styles and honorifics [prefixes] which are derived from political activities, including but not limited to The Right Honourable [...], should not be included in the text inline but may be legitimately discussed in the article proper." The section you were refering to, which states that titles may be included in infoboxes, relates specifically to honorific titles, such as Sir, Dame, Lord, and Lady. Fascinatingly (and confusingly, to most of us), two different sections on the same page prescribe two very different paths for two very similar issues. In any event, consensus has held that prefixes are inappropriate for American politicians (see WT:USC#Regarding honorifics). The "right" to the style can be mentioned at United States Senator and so forth, but, again, including "The Honorable" or "His (or Her) Excellency" at the top of the infobox of every Senator, Congressman, and Governor is without consensus and completely outside our style guidelines. jæs (talk) 17:51, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject Canada Roads assessment of redirects

I don't know whether bots can make sysop actions, but I thought I'd ask anyway. Most of the articles in Category:NA-Class Canada Roads articles are redirects, and that category should be limited to things like disambiguation pages and images. Pages are put in the cat by a wikiproject tag, so would it be possible for a bot to delete talk pages of all redirect pages in that category? --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 19:53, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

I think we need to be cautious about outright deletion, for two reasons:
  1. All of the pages are populated by {{WikiProject Canada}} and most also are within the scope of a province-level WikiProject, so the project banner should not be removed (or the page deleted) without the consent of all affected WikiProjects; and
  2. There may be useful page history aside from the addition of the WikiProject banner, so deletion should occur only if there is no useful page history.
I can think of three ways to proceed that would address those concerns:
  1. Obtain the support of all involved WikiProjects to discontinue assessment of redirect pages, and proceed with deletion of the talk pages of Canadian roads-related redirect pages which lack useful page history;
  2. Create Category:Redirect-Class Canada Roads articles to be populated when "class=Redirect", resulting in the automatic transfer of redirect pages from Category:NA-Class Canada Roads articles (this will probably require creating similar categories for all projects which use {{WikiProject Canada}}; or
  3. Remove "road=yes" from {{WikiProject Canada}} in all cases where the project banner is transcluded into the talk page of a redirect page.
Personally, I favor the second option, but I recognize that it's ultimately up to the members of the WikiProject(s). -- Black Falcon (talk) 19:02, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
It looks like the project is going to do something like option 2, so I withdraw my request. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 17:41, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

The World Database on Protected Areas has a downloadable database. I would like to see URLs of the files that match WP articles added as external links. I have added one to Pureora Forest Park by way of a simple example. Can we get a bot to do this? A list of close matches should also be made for actual humans to check. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 09:23, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Categories for renaming and merging

It is relatively easy to tag a large number of categories for deletion quickly when one has AWB, because the code to add the tags is the same for all categories in a given group nomination. It is more problematic, however, to use AWB to tag categories for renaming or merging, including speedy renaming or merging, because the code is generally not the same for all categories in a given group nomination.

Consider the hypothetical example of nominating the subcategories of Category:Years of the 20th century in Australia (e.g., Category:1901 in Australia):

  • To nominate for deletion, add: {{subst:cfd|Years of the 20th century in Australia}}
  • To nominate for renaming, add: {{subst:cfr|PROPOSED NAME|Years of the 20th century in Australia}}
  • To nominate for merging, add: {{subst:cfm|PROPOSED TARGET|Years of the 20th century in Australia}}
  • To nominate for speedy renaming or merging, add {{subst:cfr-speedy|PROPOSED NAME or TARGET}}

"Years of the 20th century in Australia" is the (again, hypothetical) title of the section on the appropriate CfD log page which contains the nomination, and it is specified in each case except speedy renaming or merging. The values of "PROPOSED NAME" and "PROPOSED TARGET", however, vary between categories (e.g., it might be "Australia in 1901" for Category:1901 in Australia, but it would be "Australia in 1902" for Category:1902 in Australia, and so on).

I think that a bot which could, when prompted by its operator, appropriately tag large numbers of categories for renaming or merging would be extremely helpful (tagging pages—and not necessarily just categories—for deletion would be useful too). (Note, please, that the use of "when prompted by its operator" is deliberate, since it seems like a bad idea to permit anyone to activate a bot and prompt it to edit hundreds or thousands of pages.) Editors requesting tagging help should, of course, be expected to provide a full, formatted list of which pages to tag and how. -- Black Falcon (talk) 19:39, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Checking parameters of List-Class biography articles

According to the usage instructions of Template:WPBiography, "living=no" should be specified on all pages that are tagged with {{WPBiography}} but are not articles about living persons (such as lists of people). However, for all such pages which contain "sensitive information about ... living persons", "blpo=yes" should be specified so that {{BLP others}} is added.

My request is for a bot to check Category:List-Class biography articles and perform two tasks:

  1. Convert any instances of "living=yes" to "living=no|blpo=yes", which will remove the pages from Category:Biography articles of living people; and
  2. If the page name follows the List of {Topic} format, then specify "listas={Topic}, List of" for proper sorting.

I proposed this task to WikiProject Biography (see here) one week ago, and there have been no objections. Thank you, -- Black Falcon (talk) 21:05, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Dates in Spoken Wikipedia template

The {{Spoken Wikipedia}} template now emits an hAudio microformat. To include the publication date of the audio file in the microformat's metadata, a bot is needed, please, to change the date in ~900 instances of the template to use {{Start date}}, thus:

old:

{{Spoken Wikipedia|black.ogg|2005-08-16|5.9 mega}}

new:

{{Spoken Wikipedia|black.ogg|{{Start date|2005|08|16}}|5.9 mega}}

Here's a sample conversion. For more information, see microformats project. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:09, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Untitled request

The following syntax are the 1st 2 lines of a lot of infoboxes etc.:

{{#ifeq:{{{embed|}}}|yes|</td></tr><tr><td colspan=20>}} {| class="infobox vcard" style="{{#ifeq:{{{embed|}}}|yes|width:100%; border:0; margin:0; background:transparent|width:250px; font-size:90%}}"

This creates an extra space in articles:

Can we get a bot to please change the 1st 2 lines to:

{{#ifeq:{{{embed|}}}|yes|</td></tr><tr><td colspan=20>}}{| class="infobox vcard" style="{{#ifeq:{{{embed|}}}|yes|width:100%; border:0; margin:0; background:transparent|width:250px; font-size:90%}}"

This is an example of templates that are create "such" problems. Please be boldlike.

TIA174.3.123.220 (talk) 02:17, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Lukas-bot and removal of Newpage tags

I had noticed that Lukas-bot has been programmed to remove Construction tags after 7 days of inactivity. I was wondering if it could be programmed to remove Newpage tags as well. There is currently no agreed upon time, however 36 hours should be sufficient for now. Thanks! - Stillwaterising (talk) 11:31, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Tagging of uncategorized articles

For the last couple of days I have been tagging uncategorized articles with {{uncat}}. However the amount of articles is not managable to do manually. UnCatBot (talk · contribs) has not been active for over a year and there is over 13000 articles listed in a toolserver report right now. It would be great if there is a bot operator that is willing to handle this on a regular basis. Rettetast (talk) 13:15, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

I could do it. But I thought another active bot was already doing it. I created Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Yobot 13 -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:27, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Unsigned

I noticed that the usage of {{Unsigned}} indicates that it should be substituted, but there are thousands of transclusions. Is substitution of this template (and its various redirects) a good bot task, or is it just simply a waste of time? Thanks! Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 23:35, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

There was a discussion here: Template talk:Unsigned#Why_substitute.3F. If substitution is decided to be a good thing, it'd be trivial for me to modify an existing bot to do it. IIRC there are other templates that are converted to being substituted, I think I've seen it on the user warning templates before. tedder (talk) 03:45, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
I am pretty sure there are bits subst'ing "always subst" templates. They could easily add this one. Rich Farmbrough, 14:56, 14 April 2010 (UTC).
Might be simplest to ask SineBot to do it en-passent. This would catch most big, busy talk pages, which are the ones where server load "might" be a consideration. Rich Farmbrough, 14:57, 14 April 2010 (UTC).
Good idea but afaik Slakr is fairly busy with other matters and not really adding things to SineBot's codebase. –xenotalk 15:03, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Move punctuations before references

  • To be fixed: Some sample text[1], some more sample text[2].
  • Post-fix: Some sample text,[3] some more sample text.[4]

According to our MOS, punctuation is supposed to precede the reference, as in the fixed text above. Going through pages to fix this manually can be really tedious. I propose a constantly running bot action that goes through all articles to correct this. It seems simple enough and can probably be tacked onto an existing bot (like AWB's general fixes run by User:SmackBot). Equazcion (talk) 05:59, 14 Apr 2010 (UTC)

Declined Not a good task for a bot. This has been declined a few times before (at WP:Bots/Requests for approval/Mr.Z-bot 2 for example). Our MOS actually links to Wikipedia:REFPUNC#Ref_tags_and_punctuation, which says that either is acceptable, and if the page has "grown up" with the citations "in-house", then it shouldn't be changed (exactly what this bot would be doing) unless there is a consensus to change it for that article. - Kingpin13 (talk) 08:25, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
The commonfixes library already does this and avoids the preferences debate by counting which way is used more. Although it was hard to program with all the newline special cases, but I haven't noticed any problems recently. The library is used by webreflinks. — Dispenser 13:18, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
This is or was in general fixes, but SB rarely runs these now, because User:CBM objects to footnotes being put in numerical order. Rich Farmbrough, 14:52, 14 April 2010 (UTC).
We have to do a discussion about that somewhere sometime. I never heard of putting references in order of importance. At least not the scientific magasines I read. - Magioladitis (talk) 15:09, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
It is frustrating because he objects to the re-ordering in-case someone meant the different order specifically. So far no-one has said that, either for the articles SB re-ordered, or some thousands I did manually as a test, nor as far as I know any that AWB has sorted. Rich Farmbrough, 18:16, 14 April 2010 (UTC).
I'm not sure what footnotes being put in numerical order has to do with where the refs are placed within the article text. As far as I can tell those are two separate issues. If the numerical fix somehow also fixes placement of refs with regard to punctuation, it certainly isn't required that either both are done or none at all. Equazcion (talk) 19:43, 14 Apr 2010 (UTC)

Brexx contributions

Would it be possible to generate a complete list of articles edited by editors in the categories Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Brexx and Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Brexx? Probably more of a script request than a bot request, but this is the only place I know to ask. Ideally, I'd like a tool that I can plug in any user name and get the articles edited by editors in those two categories. I'd think such an obvious script already exists somewhere on toolserver, but I can't find it.—Kww(talk) 16:54, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Its something that should be done via the toolserver, give me a few days and Ill create a tool for it. Not sure if it will be public or just run on request yet. βcommand 19:13, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
This is what your looking for. βcommand 21:38, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
That looks great, I snatched a copy so you can delete your sandbox copy if you want. Let me know if you make a general purpose tool: I know I'd appreciate it.—Kww(talk) 22:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
AWB is a general purpose tool that can do this. Use the "make list" on the cats, then select all in the list box and rt click "make list from" -> user contribs. Rich Farmbrough, 23:09, 14 April 2010 (UTC).

Urgent ArticleAlertbot update needed

As some of you may know, the original coder for User:ArticleAlertbot is nearly completely absent from WP. Well recently some API changes have been made and AAB isn't running at all, and won't be running until it gets updated. Needless to say that not getting Article alerts is a major inconvenience for several hundred Wikiprojects, which cripples their ability to monitor deletion discussions, peer reviews, nominations, and so on.

Coders interested in updating the bot should contact User:Legoktm for the exact details and the source code. (And of course, fixing some bugs and implementing feature requests on the side wouldn't be unappreciated either if you find the time.) Apparently it's written in JavaScript. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:56, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Lol I think you mean Java. Not JavaScript. Sadly, I don't know Java :(. Tim1357 (talk) 23:38, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
Uh, yeah I had a brainfart there, my bad. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 00:00, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Bot request for Turkish Wikipedia

Vandalism has been an important issue these days in Turkish Wikipedia pages. If the ClueBot's full source is availbale, I request a customized ClueBot for Turkish Wikipedia. A custom score list may be developped.

Thanks

--Alperen (talk) 09:46, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Have you considered using the AbuseFilter? --MZMcBride (talk) 03:00, 10 April 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for your suggestion, however for our case I think we need a bot rather than a mediawiki extension. I would like to learn how to setup and customize it for a particular wikimedia project (tr wiki for instance) --Alperen (talk) 20:14, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

We had two useful templates: {{popular articles}} which returned the most popular articles in the latest hour and {{Linked on Google News}} which returned articles linked on google news. Unfortunately, the bot operator Numbo3 is no longer active and they haven't been updated since resp. October and July of last year. Would anyone be interested in operating a bot to update those templates or one of them ? Cenarium (talk) 05:49, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Article transfer to WikiProject Insects

As discussed here, WikiProject Insects is now up and running as a daughter project of WikiProject Arthropods. We would like a bot to go through the insect articles (articles in Category:Insects and its subcategories), and replace {{ArthropodTalk}} (or {{WikiProject Arthropods}}) with {{WikiProject Insects}} on their talk pages. It would also be useful if any articles which had not previously been assessed for importance were given "importance=low", and any marked with a stub tag assessed as "class=stub". Since we're only asking for one banner to be replaced with another, there shouldn't be any risk of tagging articles in categories unexpectedly nested within Category:Insects. --Stemonitis (talk) 11:37, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I can do it in a few hours. Yobot is already approved for WikiProject tagging. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:41, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
Excellent! Thanks for the quick response. --Stemonitis (talk) 11:42, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Some problems that occurred:

  • A bug that won't let me add the template if it doesn't exist.
  • The template's code is a bit weird. Importance is not add through the importance parameter as expected but as the second parameter without explanation.
  • A long standing bug won't let me assess the stub pages for stubs class.

Therefore, I can only move articles from one project to the other and add articles to the new project without parameters. Is it ok -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:02, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

What long-standing bug are you talking about? Just use special:Export on the articles, database scan for -stub}}, and use "class=stub" "auto=stub" on the Plugin++ settings... Agree the template is peculiar with unnamed refs... –xenotalk 18:23, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:AWB/B#ArgumentOutOfRangeException_in_AsyncApiEdit.CallEvent is preventing us from auto-tagging. assessing -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:55, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
Strange. I haven't had any problems: [10]. –xenotalk 19:03, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
I meant "assessing". -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:06, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
Ok, but they asked for auto-stubbing... Which works fine... –xenotalk 19:07, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

I did about 9,000 edits. I think I managed to replace all of them. I performed a Wikipedia:CatScan to check which in there is any transclusion of the given projects in subcategories of Cat:Insects. The scan was able to reach level 4 of recursion and stopped after checking 499 categories. It didn't find any transclusions. I think I finished my part. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:00, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Infobox journalist parameter rename

Per discussion at Template talk:Infobox journalist#Ethnic, a bot is needed, to change all instances of {{Infobox journalist}}'s parameter as below:

ethnic -> ethnicity

please. See Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 35#Infobox criminal parameter renames, for a very similar, and completed, task. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:43, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Piece of cake. I can do this later today. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:57, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
Thank you. There may be others, in a similar vein, later, I'll let you know ;-) Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:51, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
1,379 articles loaded. Just started. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:35, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
 Done 1,225 changes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:06, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
Many thanks. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:36, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Infobox historic cricketer

This template has been deprecated for some time, so I switched the backend to use {{Infobox cricketer biography}} and all that is left to do is to substitute it on all pages that transclude it. To make the substitution look nice and pretty, a bot would just need to change {{Infobox historic cricketer to {{subst:Infobox historic cricketer|subst=subst: This will allow an if statement inside the template to get substituted as well. Note that {{Infobox Historic Cricketer}} and {{Infobox Historic cricketer}} are both redirects, and should be substituted in the same way. Thanks! Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 05:24, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Update: And the same thing for Template:Infobox cricketer. Change {{Infobox cricketer to {{subst:Infobox cricketer|subst=subst: which is also deprecated, and using another template for the backend. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 05:33, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, it appears this is now complete! Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 23:19, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Parameter replacement in BS templates

Per Wikipedia talk:Route diagram template#Broken Maps? Urgent attention required and Wikipedia talk:Route diagram template#Replacement, would it be possible for a bot to make the following changes to parameters of {{BS}}, {{BS1}}, {{BS2}}, etc templates (see below):

  • |KBHFa| → |KBHFa|
  • |KBHFe| → |KBHFe|
  • |exKBHFa| → |exKBHFa|
  • |exKBHFe| → |exKBHFe|
  • |KDSTa| → |KDSTa|
  • |KDSTe| → |KDSTe|
  • =KBHFa| → =KBHFa|
  • =KBHFe| → =KBHFe|
  • =exKBHFa| → =exKBHFa|
  • =exKBHFe| → =exKBHFe|
  • =KDSTa| → =KDSTa|
  • =KDSTe| → =KDSTe|
  • |KBFa} → |KBHFa|}
  • |KBFe} → |KBHFe|}
  • |exKBFa} → |exKBHFa|}
  • |exKBFe} → |exKBHFe|}
  • |KDSa} → |KDSTa|}
  • |KDSe} → |KDSTe|}
  • =KBFa} → =KBHFa|}
  • =KBFe} → =KBHFe|}
  • =exKBFa} → =exKBHFa|}
  • =exKBFe} → =exKBHFe|}
  • =KDSa} → =KDSTa|}
  • =KDSe} → =KDSTe|}

I don't think the second group will actually occur, as it would be odd for them to be the final parameter of the template, but I'm not completely certain. – edit: it's possible to have an overlay icon at the end of the template ... the additional '|' will fix it ;-)

The strings can be in any positional parameter of the template, and can appear multiple times in the same template.

Every instance in the article and template namespaces need changing. Instances in other namespaces probably need changing also, but I think it would be best if the bot could just generate a list of where its used in other namespaces in the first instance.

I believe the full list of templates is everyting in the pattern, where # is a number between 1 and 14 (not all exist): Template:BS# Template:BS-# Template:BS#-2 Template:BS-startCollapsible Template:Bs#=startCollapsible

See Wikipedia:Route diagram template if you need help understanding the table. Thanks Thryduulf (talk) 22:51, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I added some more possible occurances due to the overlay parameters. axpdeHello! 16:43, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
I'm working on this now with AWB; it should be reasonable to complete this without having to use an actual automated bot. --Darkwind (talk) 02:31, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
 Done - 4200+ pages scaned, 194 edits. If I missed any, let me know. --Darkwind (talk) 06:48, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Changing of {{otheruses4}} to {{about}}

Although a guideline states that bots should not be used to change one that redirects to another, to this other, I think in this instance, we this would be a good idea because:

  • Otheruses4 is deprecated
  • Doing so will reduce confusion of these templates

I think we should get a request for a bot to go to the instances that uses otheruses4 and change them to about, so here is my request.174.3.123.220 (talk) 06:59, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I totally agree on that. I could do it if we have consensus. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:10, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

What's wrong with the redirect? Tim1357 (talk) 02:31, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
It's more confusing. {{otheruses4|bees|the letter}} is less intuitive than {{about|bees|the letter}}. That said, not a big deal either way. -Frazzydee|✍ 03:08, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
  • This sounds like something that would be better dealt with by AWB general fixes rather than a bot making 10,000+ edits that will have no real effect. Mr.Z-man 03:27, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
Adding in genfixes something that won't reoccur in the future is not worth. At the moment I have it in my Find & Replace list. -- 06:51, 12 April 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Magioladitis (talk • contribs)
AWB already handles other similar cases (ex: Template:Fact -> Template:Citation needed). Not sure why this would be considered different. -- JLaTondre (talk) 10:15, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
Fact is added daily. These otherusesX templates are currently unused. Their number of transclusions decreases. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:29, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
And will decrease significantly faster if it's corrected in general fixes. There's no reason why general fixes can't be removed once their task is complete. Happy‑melon 11:02, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
Another idea: We can ask SmackBot to add it as part of its fixes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:40, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
Could we put {[tl|otheruses3}} into {{otheruses}} too?174.3.123.220 (talk) 06:14, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
SmackBot already does these as it happens. There are a fair few high-use templates that have been renamed and benefit from being tidied up, but are better done if possible as part of another edit. Rich Farmbrough, 23:53, 17 April 2010 (UTC).
Usage was 19380 mainspace in November compared with 15911 on the 8th of April in all spaces. Rich Farmbrough, 01:01, 18 April 2010 (UTC).
It's already orhan and nobody used it the last 40 days. I ll resend it for an RfD at the end of this month. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:23, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
Why? It's already been to TFD, RFD, and DRV. Just leave it alone. Let's not forget it's got incoming links. –xenotalk 15:52, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
Brcause the main argument was that some people will still add it because they were used to it. As I said I won't do it now but I'll leave some months. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:01, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
I am. And I can expect other future readers who will be come editors.174.3.123.220 (talk) 21:21, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
What is so confusing? –xenotalk 01:18, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
The fact that there is this template that starts off with the name otheruses, and then a suffix of 4, when there is no otheruses1 or 2, and then another template, named about, and they both do the exact same thing.174.3.123.220 (talk) 22:25, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
I think you are a bit hasty and open discussions in many places. Most of them were closed as "not now". In the next months the number of transclusions will drop more. Same holds from otheruses3. We ended up to a discussion without having convinced everyone that these templates are not really helpful anymore. We have to wait in order to gain a consensus. At the moment I encourage everyone that uses AWB to add this rename in their settings file. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:55, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
I don't see how that is at all confusing. To me, {{about}} is actually more confusing; hatnotes are designed to tell readers what the article is not about. –xenotalk 15:54, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Current tag removal

Could a bot be tasked to remove {{current}} and {{current-related}} tags from articles after (say) 12 hours without a human edit? Abductive (reasoning) 19:37, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I might step up to this if nobody else leaps on it. Bug me in a week if that's the case. In the meantime, it should at least be announced, if not discussed (perhaps at Template talk:Current?) tedder (talk) 03:42, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
12 hours should be more than enough. The template is used when there's dozens of edits an hour on an article. When there's been none (or just a handful, even) in the last 12 hours, it should definitely be removed. --Conti|✉ 11:29, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
  • I strongly suggest that the threshold be two hours. The template was created and designed for those occasions in which hundreds of edits occur in a day, with many editors. Any article with no edit in two hours clearly does not have need for the template, and is not subject to the problem that the template was created for. Under the 12 or 24 hour standard, the bot would operate infrequently, though it certainly would pick up the most egregious mis-uses of the {{current}}.
    Yellowdesk (talk) 15:57, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
It'd be best to discuss the "how long should the tag remain up?" at Template:current. A consensus about it here would be questionable at best. tedder (talk) 15:59, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Commons interwiki linking

I have requested a bot to perform interwiki linking on Commons, to facilitate navigation between Wikipedia and Commons; the discussion may be found here. Any assistance or suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you, -- Black Falcon (talk) 20:14, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Help with speedy moves

The following categories are being speedy moved; but the categorization in them is done using a parameter for a template, which means that Cydebot can't handle them. I have supplied a sample edit for each of the categories, and the edit summary explicitly has the category name. I would like some bot to finish these speedy moves.

Category Example edit
Category:Years in athletics (track and field) [11]
Category:Aquatics by year [12]
Category:Association football by year [13]
Category:Boxing by year [14]
Category:Futsal by year [15]
Category:Horse racing by year [16]
Category:Motorsport by year [17]
Category:Multi-sport events by year [18]

Thank you, עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:07, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

I was just making my way here to make this exact same request. As Od Mishehu has pointed out, poor old Cydebot (talk · contribs) only deals with replacing or removing categories. This task is far too tedious to do manually and setting up a bot would be a nice way to swiftly get these processed. — ξxplicit 02:32, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Pages in Category A which are not in Category B

I am involved in clean-up of the 'Association football templates' category tree, and I find myself needing a list of categories which are in Category:Association football templates or its subcategories up to 10 levels deep (according to AWB's list generator, there are currently 842) and are not in Category:Categories for speedy renaming—i.e., a list of categories in the 'Association football templates' category tree which are not currently nominated for speedy renaming. Would this be possible? Thanks, -- Black Falcon (talk) 06:19, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

You can do that with AWB's list interseciton tools. βcommand 15:52, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
I can? Nice! Thanks, -- Black Falcon (talk) 18:01, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
Yes in "List comparer" –xenotalk 18:03, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
I just found it under "Tools". Thanks again, -- Black Falcon (talk) 18:06, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

This one shouldn't be too hard (basically just a really big parser), but would be extremely helpful. Could someone please make a bot that runs through the lists in Wikipedia:Templates with red links, removing from the list:

  • Article links that are now blue
    • Templates where all of the cited links are now blue
  • Red template links (templates that have been deleted)

For quick reference, the list format is:

  1. Number of redlinks | Link to template in question | "->" | Redlinks in the template.

I've even made a basic run-through of a possible routine:

  • Look for the link that comes after the "#", but before the "->" (The template link) and check to see if it is red.
    • If the link is broken (the template has been deleted), then remove the entire list item and move on to the next one.
  • Otherwise, look through all of the links after the "->" and before the newline to check to see if any of them are blue (articles have been created for them).
    • If there is a bluelink, then remove it (preferably updating the redlink count along the way).
  • If the redlink count ends up being 0, then that template has no more redlinks, and it can be removed from the list.

For extra credit, you could also have it check the template page itself to see if any of the links that are on the list have been completely removed from the template (I'd prefer if it didn't add new redlinks to the list, at least not for old database dumps), and also reorder the lists based on the new number of redlinks in each template.
You should probably run all of the lists through it one time once you get it finished, then maybe run it again once every couple of months or as needed.
Thanks. --98.114.243.75 (talk) 21:08, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Your mom

Could the anti-vandalism bots be tweaked to search for the insertion of the phrase "your mom" into articles. It's a very common form of vandalism but no bot seems to pick it up. Nunquam Dormio (talk) 06:36, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Ask for a new edit filter. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:38, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
User:AVBOT, currently in trial has an open bad word list. 2 months ago I already added Regular Expressions to pick up:
Your Mom

ur mom 
yyyoooouuuurrrr mom
urr mAMa
yo mommy

and any combination of those.Tim1357 (talk) 00:53, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikispecies-Wikipedia linker

Manually linking Wikipedia articles to Wikispecies articles, and the other way around, is time-consuming. I've looked through species:Special:ListUsers&group=bot and species:Category:Wikispecies bots without any luck in finding such a bot, but if one already do, or if this type of bot already has been dismissed, please ignore this message. Virtually all main namespace articles on Wikispecies are corresponding to the identically named other-language Wikipedia articles, so with a list of the non-corresponding articles compiled, a bot could perform this task much easier. So far the only exception I've found is the Main Page (including redirects, such as article "Wikispecies". Warning: don't trust the "what links here" function, it seems to be bugged). If we're lucky, all non-taxonomic articles are prefixed with "Wikispecies:", "Help:" and so on, but really, I don't know. If this turns out to be a viable idea, someone at Wikispecies will be able to give a certain answer for sure, and that would be awesome. jonkerz♠ 02:12, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree. I do a lot of Wikispecies tagging on Simple English, and the task is tedieous, indeed. If someone has the know-how to do this (Or the patience to program this feat with pywikipediabot and make a good user's manual with it :p) it would be a great help. Avicennasis @ 09:29, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Text removal from a limited range of geo-stub articles

Hi. I've got a list of 1,823 article that all need some text removing. An example is at User:Mattgirling/Kenya. It's basically a few lines out of the infobox (one of which is identical through all the articles, the other two are values) and then a string in the article's body (which also contains the values in the infobox). The example probably explains this better than I ever could. I've never really dealt with this side of the bot world, so if I'm doing this wrong or if there's a different process please let me know! matt (talk) 15:41, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Strong support -This data is false. This editor is clearly very responsible. The population data in particular is a random estimate of population in a 7 kilometres radius which is redudant anyway as often 20 odd villages and hamlets may lie in a 7km radius to information specific to that settlement is wrong. Also when the is run I strongly suggest that you re stub sort from Kenya-geo-stub to the province stub tags (Actually this is undergoing stub sorting proposal at the moment to split Kenyan geography stubs by province) and also categorize the articles . E.g Category:Cities, towns and villages in Rift Valley Province. The stubs should be categorized also. Dr. Blofeld White cat 16:30, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

I can do the original post easily enough but not the added suggestion. –xenotalk 16:35, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

OK. That can be done later using AWB. Anyway the stub proposal has to go through anyway first. If you or Matt could take care of Matt's proposal I'd be happy with that as a first step. Perhaps Matt could add the categories later. Dr. Blofeld White cat 16:37, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Actually I can probably do the categorization, but are "settlements" considered "Cities, towns and villages" ? –xenotalk 16:44, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

That's currently undergoing discussion. I believe there is a consensus forming towards Populated places in... which I also support (if it must change). If so then the categories would have to be renamed anyway. So perhaps it would be best to wait until the decision is made. Dr. Blofeld White cat 16:50, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Amazing. Thanks for doing that! Dr. Blofeld White cat 09:23, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Phew! Cheers guys. matt (talk) 10:05, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Bot request for Changing of "favicon image's text"

  • [[Image:Wikipedia-favicon.png|16px|Favicon of Wikipedia]] → {{Wiki favicon}}

for article in Wikipedias by language. --DolphinL (talk) 12:01, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

I can do this with AWB, but what is the advantage of transcluding the file as opposed to directly embedding it in articles? -- Black Falcon (talk) 18:15, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
Well, there is no particular reason, but simple thing is better. --DolphinL (talk) 11:42, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
Fair enough. Neither the nature of the change nor the number of articles is too significant to be controversial; if anyone truly objects, they can nominate the template for deletion.  Doing... -- Black Falcon (talk) 16:47, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
 Done 43 edits using AWB + 1 manually. The following pages were skipped: pages already containing the template (Catalan Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia and Swedish Wikipedia); pages containing no infobox and no favicon (Belarusian Wikipedia and Siberian Wikipedia); and pages containing an infobox but no favicon (Dutch Low Saxon Wikipedia). -- Black Falcon (talk) 17:10, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
Thanks a lot. --DolphinL (talk) 09:01, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Null edits for entire category

I recently revived WikiProject U2, and when it was originally determined to be inactive, all the article talk pages were removed from their class/importance categories. Null edits will be required for each article with the {{WikiProject U2}} banner on their talk page to put the pages back into the category pages (list of pages). A bot would be most helpful to perform this task. Thanks. –Dream out loud (talk) 00:15, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

N Not done This will happen in due time, no need for a bot to do it. –xenotalk 00:17, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
Ok, thanks. –Dream out loud (talk) 00:38, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Convert dates to template

This request remains outstanding. (There's a more up-to-date list of templates to act on) SmackBot started the work, but has made no such edits for some months; repeated requests for it to restart have been to no avail. The original request was made in August 2008! I'd be grateful for some help, please. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:42, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

BRFA filed. Emily Jensen (talk) 01:56, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Remove 'No Photo Available.svg' from Ship infoboxes

Would it be possible for someone to create a bot to remove instances of Image:No Photo Available.svg from all articles containing Template:Infobox Ship Image. The template has been updated to automatically add an article to a category for articles requiring images in the infobox if no image exists therefore making the usage of this image redundant. (The image is also not supposed to be used on articles) There are over 1,000+ usages of this on ship articles so a bot would be the most logical way to perform this change en masse. 

| Ship image               = [[Image:No Photo Available.svg]]

becomes 

| Ship image               =

JonEastham (talk) 12:23, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Note: existing usage may also appear in a variant of this format (which also needs to be change to only show "| Ship image = "):
| Ship image = [[File:No Photo Available.svg|300px|AlternateTextHere]]
--- Barek (talk • contribs) - 14:55, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Looks good. Doing... — The Earwig (talk) 21:20, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
BRFA filed. — The Earwig (talk) 22:06, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
FYI: For reference, the discussion supporting this request can be found at Template talk:Infobox ship begin#Proposed code change. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 21:25, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
I think this issue needs a wider discussion and I have started one here. Gatoclass (talk) 07:56, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
The discussion appears to have fizzled out without any real consensus being achieved, however the objection by Gatoclass has been resolved that he is only opposed if it resulted in an inconsistency within articles. As removing this image would make articles more consistent. (ie, articles wont have placeholder images and will automatically be tagged to a category requiring an image) then I think it would be safe to proceed with the removal. JonEastham (talk) 08:58, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Fantastic. I've left a note on the BRFA page, hopefully another BAG member will come by soon so we can get this approved. — The Earwig (talk) 10:37, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Okay, the bot has been approved, and I'm running it now. Hopefully the bot will be done soon, it shouldn't take too long. — The Earwig (talk) 15:17, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Bot to add a template to a talk page based on Category name?

I need a bot to go through item Categories belonging to Canadian music and add a template. The logic: if the Category's name contains "Canadian music" add a template to the Category's talk page (if it does not have one). It can be done manually, but I don't even know how many there are. Please help. Argolin (talk) 22:30, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

  • update: if "Canadian" and "music" are anywhere in the Category name OR "Canadian" and "song".

I'm not being too specific at this point, because I'm sure there's already one out there. Thanks. Argolin (talk) 23:15, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Categories

Can you have the bot place {{WikiProject Canada|class=Cat|importance=???|music=yes}} on the Talk page IF the WikiProject Canada template is not already there on the talk page? Yes, I realise that two portal items in the list get a different banner (just did that earlier). I need the ??? as I will be doing maintenance on the Cats and will change it's importance when I'm done. Thanks Argolin (talk) 03:21, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Doesn't WikiProject Canada assess 'Category-class' pages as having 'NA-importance' like other projects do? -- Black Falcon (talk) 03:34, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I'm using the ??? as a temporary flag. I'm doing maintenance on the Categories and will change the importance=??? to either top/high/med/low/NA when I'm done. Thanks BlackFalcon, I should have spelled it out that it is a temp thing. Argolin (talk) 03:51, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
That is not set in stone anywhere, or is it? Argolin (talk) 04:06, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
No, but I think it might be confusing having categories mixed in with articles. You should probably propose it at WT:CANADA if you think it's a good idea. –xenotalk 04:10, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
There is a separate Category for "Category" see our stats page Wikipedia:WikiProject Canadian music. Thanks for the link above. I was also going to post something to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Canadian music. Argolin (talk) 04:27, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
That's category-class, but you're talking about the importance scale. See, for instance Category:Top-importance Canadian music articles - currently articles and categories are intermingled. If the music task force wishes to set importance for categories, they should ask for a separate music-importance= parameter at Template talk:WikiProject Canada so it doesn't also put it into the top-level Canada importance categories. The reason I think it's peculiar is because the members of most categories may be of top,high,medium or low importance. It doesn't really make sense to assign an importance to the category. –xenotalk 04:32, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
No offence at all, but it makes sense to me. It is a functionality of WP: let's use it. I've been told there is a switch in the namesapce to allow for (or not) the rating of type=Cat. The Canadian music project's is turnned on. Before any assinment of it's importance, I would like my fellow Canadian music group participants to decide. The group may vote against assigning importance to the Cat's; if so, I'll live with it! Argolin (talk) 04:46, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I take no offense. If the music project wants to do it, I'm sure someone can fix the template so it doesn't affect top-level Canada importance categories. (It currently does) –xenotalk 04:50, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Category:Top-importance Canadian music articles deals with articles not categories (maybe I'm splitting hairs?). I know it affects the stats page: great, I want to be able to get the list and add an appropriate banner, etc. Is there something else I should be aware of? Argolin (talk) 05:01, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes, that's exactly mt point. Without some template changes, Categories that are assigned an importance will be mixed in with articles. –xenotalk 05:04, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Ah, I don't have a problem if they are mixed together. Thanks for reminding me. I have to post the question first to Template talk:WikiProject Canada not to the Canadian music group.
  • Earwig, If you can squeeze this in great: Add {{Portal|Music of Canada|Tower-wireless-can.png}} to the Category page:
    • if {{Portal|Music of Canada|Tower-wireless-can.png}}
    • OR {{Portal|Music of Canada|Maple Leaf (from roundel).png}} is not already on the page. Placing the portal and the banner templates are completely Independent events. Thanks once more... Argolin (talk) 04:27, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Earwig, for greater certainty: run the bot on the list (I guess it's SQL)?
  1. to place {{WikiProject Canada|class=Cat|importance=???|music=yes}} on the Talk page IF the WikiProject Canada template is not already there on the talk page.
  2. using the same list: add {{Portal|Music of Canada|Tower-wireless-can.png}} to the category's page if {{Portal|Music of Canada|Tower-wireless-can.png}} isn't there already or if {{Portal|Music of Canada|Maple Leaf (from roundel).png}} isn't there on the page already.Argolin (talk) 06:18, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

 Done. Argolin (talk) 01:02, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Move to Commons

I know, I know, this has been proposed many many times. However, my idea is a little different (I think, unless I missed a page in the archives): Only move images that have been manually reviewed. I'll volunteer to review. Instead of automatically moving all images in a given category, (which is bound to cause issues as some are listed do not move, incorrectly tagged, et cetera) it only moves images that have been human reviewed as safe to move to Commons. A page could be created for this bot to check - only files listed on this page would be moved, and only reviewed edits would be added to this page. Only trusted users should be able to add files to this page, else it could easily be abused - this could be solved by using something like User:Example/MTC.js for the page - only that user (and admins) can edit the page. (If I knew how, I would just setup pywikipediabot to do such a task, but my knowledge of python is lacking...) Thoughts, ideas, comments? All welcome. :) Avicennasis @ 20:36, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

I had the same idea, only a bit more specific: all the images at Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Jb2move have been reviewed. But the botop is indef'd and the bot also, as a result, so hundreds of images are just sitting here locally. This particular task would be a one-time thing, although a general move-to-commons bot wouldn't be a bad idea--reviewing sort of like the Commons "trusted user" (Flickr reviewer) deal. • ɔ ʃ → 00:37, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
I used to run a bot for this, if your still interested my restrictions expire in about 70 days. The related information was located at User:Betacommand/Commons βcommand 16:00, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
Sure thing, I'll try to remember then. Thanks, • ɔ ʃ → 18:04, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Living people possibly deceased or deceased people possibly living

Check all the Biography or subcategories (806000+ articles) and create the six following Database reports where the:

  1. article has Category:Living people[A] but the talk page has living=no, living = no, living= no, living=No or living=NO
  2. article has Category:Living people[A] and also any of the many death categories.[B]
  3. article has Category:Living people[A] and also uses a death template.[C]
  4. article does not have Category:Living people[A] but the talk page say living=yes,living= yes, living = yes, living=Yes or living=YES
  5. article does not have Category:Living people[A] but contains any of these living templates [D]
  6. articles which contain {{bda|1900|1|1}} or {{date of birth and age|1900|1|1}} excluding <!-- marked out template code -->


At first only require a one time run but I expect it would sensible to have each report run at set intervals and be listed on Database reports. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:40, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Yobot is doing this already! -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:58, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Check User:Magioladitis/WPBiography for some of the cases you describe. Pages need update though. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:09, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I may be missing it, but on User:Yobot and the link you provide, I don't see any mention of detecting an article that is marked as both living and dead (either via categories or templates). Don't know how often that mistake occurs, but it's not something a bot can fix automatically so a list would be the right approach. -- JLaTondre (talk) 15:12, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Please provide links to the six different reports as unable to find them on User:Yobot. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:32, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
This is it:
  • Step 1: I am using catscan to check if xxxx deaths and Living people coexist.
  • Step 2: If Living people in the page, then "living" is set to "yes"
  • If there is a death category in the page, "living" is set to "no" unless page is reported for describing multiple people who at least 1 is alive. This list exists here: User:Yobot/Task 9.
  • Extra: Create a list using catscan and previous work to create pages of pages potentially lacking "Living people" in Wikipedia:Uncategorized biographies of living people/BLPPotential
  • AWB adds categories based on the templates given above as a general fix. I am running AWB in the articles, not the talk pages, of the talk pages found Category:Biography articles without living parameter.

I hope I am covering everything this these methods. A database scan would be useful of course. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:29, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

That's still not clear to me. For results of step 1 (an article that is both in the living and dead category), what happens?
It also doesn't seem to cover #3 of the request, but I'm not sure how common/useful that is (I have seen the death templates used to calculate the age of a person at an event other that of their death). -- JLaTondre (talk) 15:39, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I am fixing step 1 manually. The only cases I found recently were people alive related to a category dealing with shooting and the latter is a subcat of Category:Dead people.
I haven't done anything for case #3. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:46, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
xxxx deaths and Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Death_categories are not the same. Many people die but the year is unknown hence they can have some death category but no year. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:32, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
That's why is better to use the more general category for comparisons. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:42, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
The idea here is to find the exceptions, those with incorrect categories. Checking only the year of death against living category is not an exhaustive way to find exceptions. If an article is marked as a Category:Living person and Category:Burials in Burma but no year category then it's not going to get found with the method you suggest. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 22:12, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I am not using all the subcats neither only the xxxx deaths. Most common case is : Year of death missing and Living people. I fix these cases manually. I am also checking for cases of people in Deaths by type and Living people. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:19, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I'm quite confused here as it seem the talk is not about the bot request but another bot that doesn't do any of the above six requests. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 13:07, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I am running Yobot and manually through Living and death categories to update the status. Check progress in User:Magioladitis/Sandbox. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:51, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

On several occasions I've run across articles where an IP or newbie has added a year of death, or a phrase such as "Professor x passed away last year", without updating categories or tags. I don't know if a bot could find that sort of thing, but I would welcome one that did so. ϢereSpielChequers 13:18, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Converting refs to list-defined refs

As of September 2009, the Cite.php extension was modified to support list-defined references. These can be implemented with the |refs= parameter to the {{reflist}} template, or by using a pair of HTML tags (<references> and </references>) in place of the <references/> tag. These reduce clutter within articles, by putting all the citation details in the section at the end where the footnotes are displayed.

Is it possible to create a 'bot which would look through current articles (or newly-created articles) and convert inline citations to list-defined ones - here is a suggested algorithm: 

current-ref=1
IF article is too old THEN
   end-run // this means that stable articles aren't changed
ELSE
   IF no-refs-present THEN
      IF no-tag THEN
         add tag
      ELSE
         end-run
      ENDIF
   ELSE
      IF already-list defined THEN
         end-run
      ELSE
         FOR each reference
            IF named-reference THEN
               IF first-one THEN
                  move reference to list
                  replace reference in article with <ref name="xxx"/>
               ELSE
                  do nothing
               ENDIF
            ELSE
               use reference name="Ref-"&current-ref
               current-ref=current-ref + 1
               move reference to list
               replace reference in article with <ref name="xxx"/>
            ENDIF
         ENDFOR
      ENDIF
   ENDIF
ENDIF

I've tried to get the idea in my head down there!

In-list defined refs make the markup easier to follow. An example of an article which was written from scratch with a lot of references list-defined is William Stanley (Victorian inventor) - look at the markup for the paragraph starting "William Stanley was born on Monday 2 February 1829" for the references:

William Stanley was born on Monday 2 February 1829<ref name="nat-biog"/> in Islington, London,<ref name="oxford-dnb"/> one of 9 children<ref name="na-births"/> of John Stanley (a mechanic and builder) and his wife, Selina Hickman.<ref name="oxford-dnb"/> He was baptised on Wednesday 4 March 1829 at St Mary’s Church, Islington.<ref name="oxford-dnb"/> At the age of 10 Stanley started going regularly to a day school run by a Mr Peil until he was 12. From the age of 12 until he was 14, his maternal uncle William Ford Hickman paid for his education at a different school.<ref name="akpan-13"/> Despite having limited formal learning, Stanley taught himself mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, music, French, geology, chemistry, architecture and theology.<ref name="cg-erased"/><ref name="wfs-org"/> He attended lessons in technical drawing at the London Mechanics’ Institution (now called Birkbeck College), where he enrolled in 1843, attending engineering and phrenology lessons.<ref name="wfs-org"/>

Compare this with Carlos Tévez with inline refs - look at the paragraph starting "His career has been dogged by a long-standing affair ...":

His career has been dogged by a long-standing affair with [[Media Sports Investments]], the company who owned the rights of Tévez,<ref>[http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/sport/134193/WEST-HAMS-TEVEZ-EVIDENCE-We-reveal-documents-Hammers-will-use-in-their-defence.html WEST HAM'S TEVEZ EVIDENCE]</ref> and several other players and coaches.,<ref>[http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=390319&cc=5739 MSI rap Corinthians over Carlos Alberto axing]</ref>,<ref>[http://www.javiermascherano.net/ Javier Mascherano Bio]</ref><ref>[http://en.sambafoot.com/articles/118_MSI_the_Corinthians_Russian_connection_page_1.html MSI: the Corinthians' Russian connection]</ref><ref>[http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2005/3/4/sports/10320884&sec=sports Passarella arrives in Brazil to sign with Corinthians]</ref><ref>[http://en.sambafoot.com/articles/188_Crisis_at_Corinthians_page_1.html Crisis at Corinthians]</ref> This eventually resulted in West Ham United being fined over issues regarding third-party ownership.,<ref>[http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/west-ham-hit-by-16355m-fine-but-do-deal-for-tevez-to-play-446536.html West Ham hit by £5.5m fine but do deal for Tevez to play]</ref><ref>[http://www.sportspromedia.com/deals/_a/west_ham_and_sheffield_united_end_tevez_saga_with_us21m_settlement/ West Ham and Sheffield United end Tevez saga with US$21m settlement]</ref>

I feel that this would be a useful bot (in fact, if it can be got working, it could ultimately be used on all articles, not just newly-created ones, and after that on all newly-created articles)

Any comments (or bots!) would be most welcome -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 19:15, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

That's why I suggested that it initially is used for newly-created articles. As my examples above show, the list-defined article is easier to follow when editing the markup! -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 19:26, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
xeno is right about people being sensitive. I personally like list defined references. There are some article that are so bad, that if I wanted to overhaul them but the folks on the talk page wouldn't let me convert to list-defined-references or some other sane system, I would just let the article rot, but I don't make the rules.
In the event that the probable opposition is overcome, you should examine every instance of a named reference, and make sure exactly one of them contains bibliographical information, and that all the rest are of the form <ref name=xxxx/>. If that criterion is not met, do nothing, because valuable bibliographic information could be lost.
Furthermore, the existing references should be examined to see if any of them are identical, and if so, they should be combined. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:28, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
I'd think I'd rather see this added to AWB or a similar tool rather than a bot. As Xeno stated, there are a lot of people sensitive about how refs are done that getting a bot involved to do anything beyond expanding bare links to base templates would be a problem. --MASEM (t) 19:34, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Create list of names (genera and species) into lists.

I request someone to be able to design a bot that would be able to arrange a list from this data source: [19]. I did page one Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/Global_Names_Index/A although when trying to update page 2 I am getting error messages and I figure doing it by hand would take too long anyway. I need someone who can make the lists in the same format as the first page I showed as an example on all the remaining pages (A2, A3, A4 ETC. then B, B2, B3, B4 ETC. ETC.). Any help with this would be much appreciated. Note that page A2 through to A10 and the first page of letters B to Z were done by hand but will need to be updated because the lists are from an old source (unfiltered name list). Cheers!Calaka (talk) 09:25, 27 April 2010 (UTC) :{{BOTREQ}} CrimsonBlue (talk) 21:02, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

My computer must not be that great, because I can't even process the list without it freezing... They are huge... If someone else wants to take this feel free... I will try to figure out something for you CrimsonBlue (talk) 06:06, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
Tell me about it! Although I should point out that there is a limit of approx 2000-2500 names of species/genera on one page due to having more would disable the {{search}} function at the end of each name. Thanks for trying though!Calaka (talk) 08:35, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Can't figure it out, the list is too big, someone else can pick this up CrimsonBlue (talk) 01:18, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

check biographical infoboxes for presence of microformats

Resolved

Could somebody please check each template in Category:People infobox templates and its subcategories, and draw up a list of those which do not include the class (or simply string, if easier) "vcard", which indicates the presence of the hCard microformat. That will enable me to add that microformat to any which do not yet include it but which should do. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:48, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Y Done - I put the list here in my userspace, feel free to move it to wherever you wish. I just checked to see if the string 'vcard' was on the page, if not, it went on the list. Hope this covers what you wanted! - Mobius Clock 09:32, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you; just what I needed. I moved it to User:Pigsonthewing/novcard. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:06, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Most now have the microformat (some are no eligible), or have been sent to TfD. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:00, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Username Change

Would like a bot to replace as many instances of my former username (a unique word), particularly signatures and user page/talk links, with my new one per the approved rename request[20], as feasible, and to avoid confusion in conversations, what not.-- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 22:50, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

I would think the redirect from your old username to the new one would be sufficient enough. I think it would cause confusion otherwise - if I were reading an old discussion I had with someone and all of sudden the name was changed, and by a bot at that? :) Just my opinion, though. Not sure if a similar request has been made. Avicennasis @ 00:01, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
Surely you can't be serious? With close to 24,000 talk space edits this is going to draw waaaay more attention to your new username than just simply leaving it. Not to mention the confusion that would result from replacing your username in conversations from 2007 with this new username. –xenotalk 00:05, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
Yes, this has been requested before. The most recent request was discouraged. If you search the archives for "signature" or "change username" you will find some other requests. As a general rule, I would say it's not worth it. Just redirect your old page and move on. Unless it's a WP:RTV, and your old username is your actual name, then there might be an exception. Just my observation. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 00:11, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
One reason for the change was to remove as many references to my old name as possible from Wikipedia, and I intend to remove as many of my old userpages as I will be allowed so that there are no redirects, beyond the minimum I'm required to keep. If it isn't allowed for a bot to do, though, I can understand that. Of course, the best solution would be if MediaWikia was built like a proper system and the username change was instantly propagated instead of crazy username change systems required. It isn't my "real" name, however because it is a very unique name and the one I have used for many years online, it is very easy to connect one to the other and after having had issues with it in the past, I hoped to at least make it more difficult to tie my Wiki life to the rest of my life since its the text that comes up in search engines. I can understand not updating archives, but I imagine people will be confused if I continue existing conversations on current talk pages with a new name. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 00:16, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
Well, you could have a case per WP:RTV. You could look into that. For active conversations, of course, go ahead and change them yourself when you post a new comment. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 00:35, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
Last I checked, WP:RTV required actually vanishing, not just changing usernames. WP:UNC discourages it unless the name change was for "privacy reasons". Anomie⚔ 11:24, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
I haven't checked but I don't believe you are required to keep any pages. Rich Farmbrough, 16:23, 24 April 2010 (UTC).

I note SmackBot is now silently doing this (e.g. [21][22] with a summary of "Subst unsigned template.") without approval. Anomie⚔ 11:24, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

That's annoying. –xenotalk 12:33, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
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