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KeyArena is one word

KeyArena is a multi-use entertainment arean in Seattle, WA (sports, concerts, events, etc). Proper spelling is one word, like KeyArena. Incorrect spelling uses two words, Key Arena. Request is for links ala Key Arena to be replaced with links ala KeyArena.

There are no similarly named arenas which require special handling logic or disambiguation.

Confirmation of correct one-word format can be seen throughout the arena's official site, http://www.keyarena.com

I started to hand fix the fewer than 100 links, but this would be nice for ongoing corrections as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Key_Arena&limit=500 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.216.228.112 (talk) 06:33, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

 Done in the main namespace only (37 pages). --Meno25 (talk) 12:47, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
I also added a typo rule to WP:AWB/T, and fixed another 25+ pages that contained "Key Arena" without a link. GoingBatty (talk) 16:45, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Could we please have a bot that will deal with Special:LinkSearch/*.holocaustdenialontrial.org. The links are all dead, actually point at twitter so fall foul of Wikipedia:External links and Wikipedia:Citing sources anyway, and I would challenge their validity in the first place. Thanks. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:26, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Clerking WP:AIV

Could someone put together a bot or two to clerk WP:AIV? Both User:HBC AIV helperbot5 and User:HBC AIV helperbot7 appear to have died (see the "Help with AIV bot(s)" section of WP:AN), and JamesR, who runs them, doesn't appear to be around very often. Both bots use the same GFDL source code, which can be found at User:HBC AIV helperbot/source, so you won't need to write anything new. Nyttend (talk) 23:55, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

I saw helperbot5 20 min ago, are you sure that the bots are dead? mabdul 00:25, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Looks like its back. Legoktm (talk) 00:26, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Super Bowl is two words

The Super Bowl is the premiere, annual championship game of the National Football League. Proper reference is as two words, like Super Bowl, and never as one word (either as Superbowl or SuperBowl).

Request is for both Superbowl and SuperBowl to be replaced with Super Bowl moving forward.

There are no non-football uses of the one-word format which would require special handling logic or disambiguation.

Confirmation of the two-word format as standard can be seen throughout the NFL's site as redirected from http://www.superbowl.com

Current instances can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Superbowl&limit=500 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/SuperBowl&limit=500 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.216.228.112 (talk) 00:59, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Typo fixers should be aware that there are some exceptions, such as Superbowl of Wrestling and "The One After the Superbowl". Hopefully these are rare. GoingBatty (talk) 02:54, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
There's also the Sun City Superbowl, "one of Southern Africa’s finest venues for sports, entertainment and product launches" - see http://www.suninternational.com/DESTINATIONS/RESORTS/SUNCITY/Pages/EntertainmentCentre.aspx
Links to individual games (e.g. Superbowl XXX) also need to be fixed. However, misspellings that aren't evident to the user (e.g. [[Superbowl XXX|XXX]]) don't need to be fixed per WP:NOTBROKEN.
I've started making these changes, but it will take a while to do, and it's not something for a bot per WP:FDB. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 17:42, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
 Done, as far as I can tell. Someone may want to create an article for the Sun City Superbowl. GoingBatty (talk) 02:07, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Special:Linksearch/*.Myspacetv.com

The links to Myspacetv.com are at a minimum deadlinks as the articles no longer exist at the respective urls. I would feel that we should be looking strongly at removing these links as they struggle for both Wikipedia:External links and Wikipedia:Citing sources, if others don't feel as strongly, then can we please just {{dead link}} them. Thanks. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:14, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

RFD/W

Ok, so we're spoiled having the bots help out at CfD : )

I went to help out closing at RfD, and discovered that there is no "working" page to handle retargeting redirects (Whatlinkshere).

So I copied CFD/W, and reworked it for RfD.

Any chance it's possible for a bot to regularly take care of this?

And of course, I'm happy to discuss this to see if we can work out whatever details. - jc37 09:34, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

As someone who isn't very familiar with how RfD works, do you mind explaining what "retargeting" entails? I didn't see anything on Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Administrator instructions that explained it well. Legoktm (talk) 09:38, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
When you do Whatlinkshere on a redirect page, you can see all the pages which have the redirect on their pages. So to retarget a redirect, first you have to edit each of those pages to dab the link from the redirect page name to what the redirect's current target full page name is (possibly using a pipetrick). Then once that is done, the redirect page can be edited to change from the current target to the new target.
In the case of template redirects it's a little more complex since you have to deal with {{ and not just [[
- jc37 10:14, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Hasn't it been decided before that bots can't handle redirects on a fully automated basis? Can you give me some specific examples of what you think a bot might be able to do? In your description above, you talk about disambiguation, which is definitely not something that a fully automatic bot can handle. Can you come up with a set of sample entries that might go on an RFD working page so I can get an idea of what you think can be automated? --Cyde Weys 17:22, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Ok, perhaps I am making a presumption, let me ask a series of questions and see if this is possible.
  1. Can a bot develop an action list from Special:Whatlinkshere?
  2. Can a bot determine the difference between [[ and {{ ?
  3. (Pretend example): Can a bot identify [[LOTR]] and upon request change links to that to [[Lord of the Rings]]
  4. (Another pretend example): Can a bot identify [[LOTR]] and upon request change links to that to [[Lord of the Rings|LOTR]]
  5. (And another): Can a bot identify [[LOTR|The Lord of the Rings]] and upon request change links to that to [[Lord of the Rings|The Lord of the Rings]]
  6. Can a bot identify {{parent}} and upon request, replace with {{container}}
  7. Can a bot identify {{parent|x=some stuff}} and upon request, replace with {{container|x=some stuff}}
And we can obviously reconfigure the /Working page to best facilitate bot understanding of what is being requested.
And if a bot cannot do all of these things, but can only do some, when it finishes the "some", the linked-to page could be moved to a separate section of /Working for human hands to finish.
Possible? - jc37 18:52, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
  1. Yes
  2. Not sure what you mean, yes a bot can tell the difference between a template and a link
  3. Yes
  4. Yes, I'm assuming this isn't done in conjunction with #3.
  5. Yes. How do section links affect this?
  6. Yes.
  7. Yes. Is there a major difference between this and #6, or did you just include it for completeness?
So the tl;dr answer is yes. A specific format is obviously needed since this obviously has more options than CFD does. Legoktm (talk) 23:37, 27 November 2012 (UTC)
I added a proposed layout using templates to WP:RFD/W, assuming my responses to your questions were what you were looking for. How does that look? If that's what you want, I can start coding it. Legoktm (talk) 12:16, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
Not exactly. It needs to do all those things from a single entry. If we are retargeting X to Y, then all instances of X will need to be replaced to Z; all instances of pipetrick links to leave the pipe trick in place, and all instances of non-pipetricked links to be turned into pipetricks. Also, I think we should retain the standard used at cfd for indicating the rfd log page. I'll see if I can show an example. - jc37 00:33, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
I added some explanatory text (commented out), and an example to RFD/W.
Essentially, when a bot sees that, it should attempt to do each of the things noted above from whatlinkshere. - jc37 17:42, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Null-edit Category:ParserFunction errors members

The division by zero hiccup has left a lot of pages in Category:ParserFunction errors through the use of Template:Convert. The error category is only removed by a null edit. It would be nice if a bot could null-edit all 1,581 members. --Tim Landscheidt (talk) 03:35, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Doing... I'm not going to null edit, merely forcelinkupdate purge them. Legoktm (talk) 03:36, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
Y Done There are now 0 articles in that category. Note that I used null edits to clear the category as forcelinkupdate purges were not clearing the articles from the category. Legoktm (talk) 11:59, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
Thanks! --Tim Landscheidt (talk) 12:40, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Tag a large number of templates at TfD

Could someone take care of this request (note the list is inside a collapsed section)? there is no response from the last bot-op who did this for me. thank you. Frietjes (talk) 18:30, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Doing... Legoktm (talk) 18:33, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
All should be  Done. I did a few manually since the bot was having unicode issues. Legoktm (talk) 23:37, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

URLs using characters that break the URL notification

I've been using cites for a while, including the |URL= parameter. Often, the URL would not dsiplay correctly. I thought this was due to the URL length. However, it turns out that if URLs in citation template parameters contain certain know characters they will display and link incorrectly. See Template:Citation#URL. If it possible to create a bot to find URLs in citation template parameters that contain those certain characters and post a notice on the URL poster's user page to let them know of a URL issue and how to fix it (similar to how User:DPL bot notifies users of linking to a DAB page? It would be even better if the bot could do the percent-encoding fix itself. An example of manually percent-encoding is here. Thanks. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 13:00, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

A bot updating the percent-encoding would be dangerous, because it's only hard to tell what correct is and what broken is without context. I suggest creation of a list and/or notification. Stuartyeates (talk) 23:29, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
I suppose you could check the rendered HTML to see if it was really broken rather than just depending on the context of the link. Is there a tracking category for these broken templates? Legoktm (talk) 23:32, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
I don't know whether there is a tracking category (search1, search2). Maybe Category:Articles with broken or outdated citations or Category:All articles with broken links to citations. The links that break for me usually are from http://nl.newsbank.com . To find a URL for a newspaper article, I'll go to http://news.google.com/newspapers and enter the first 8-10 words of the article. That usually brings up a link to http://nl.newsbank.com to a pay article. It's those http://nl.newsbank.com links here that broke and were fixed. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 11:00, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Category

Could you please move this category to this one? Many thanks. Cheveri (talk) 10:29, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

 Done Magioladitis (talk) 14:09, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Redirect Latin namesWelsh names on 1050 moths articles

Hi all. I've just finished the last of 1,050 articles on butterflies and moths on Wiki-cy as you can see here. This list contains a list of all Welsh and Latin (or Scientific) names. Can someone please make a redirect from Latin to Welsh?

Secondly, and at the same time, we need to add a link to where the database came from. This reference should do the trick:

<ref>{{Dyf gwe |url=http://llennatur.com/ |teitl=Gwefan Llën Natur |awdur= Duncan Brown, Twm Elias ac eraill |dyddiad= |gwaith= |cyhoeddwr= |dyddiadcyrchiad=06 Rhagfyr 2012 |iaith=}}</ref>

placed immediately after the first reference. Many thanks; diolch yn fawr. - Llywelyn2000 (talk) 23:42, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

 Done. Did it myself with the help of — Ganeshk (talk). Created a bot account and... job done. Thank you all, once again, for your euphoric enthusiasm towards the Welsh Wiki. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 07:10, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Lists of films by country by year

As a followup to the closed move discussion at Talk:List of Bengali films of 2012#Requested_move, a further 850 such pages should be renamed, as listed at User:BrownHairedGirl/Film lists for renaming. (Note that this is a followup to a bot request I made in October, where I was advised to open an RM discussion on the proposal.)

Please note that:

  1. the sample of 12 pages which I listed at the RM has already been moved, so the bot should skip those entries
  2. Some other pages may already have been moved, so a check will be needed first
  3. In some cases there proposed new title redirects to the current title, so the move will have to override the redirect.

If these are issues which a bot cannot handle, please notify me so that I can remove any such entries from the list before the bot starts work.

Thanks! --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:35, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

 Doing.... I'll have the bot create a list of the articles it can't move and have you (or another admin) move them by hand. Legoktm (talk) 21:26, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 Done. Only Singaporean films of 2010 and Singaporean films of 2011 will need to be moved by hand. Legoktm (talk) 06:17, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Copy Town Infoboxes to the corresponding Wiki-cy articles

I realise that I'm asking a lot (!) but I have faith that the Welsh Wiki have friends in high places! This request (my last for a while) is for the copying of existing English langauge Infoboxes (Infobox UK place) from en to cy. I suggest that we try one county first: Ceredigion. There's a list of settlements on this page. The corresponding Welsh article is here. We have done this manually for maybe 25 articles. Not all articles have these Infoboxes.

We have redirected the English wording to the corresponding Welsh language articles. All will be manually checked. A Welsh Barnstar will be issued on all 3 requests as thanks! - Llywelyn2000 (talk) 07:18, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I have two questions about that task:
  • Why isn't the enwp not using any infobox template?
  • Can you direct me to the actual list? (or do you mean that list?
Regards, mabdul 14:33, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
Thanks Mabdul!
Ganeshk has also responded to this on my Talk Page here.
Your questions:
1. enwp has created some boxes on some towns and villages, but remember that we are in Wales, and we're not high in their priority list.
2. My (above) link is to a county called Ceredigion. Infoboxes have been created on some towns and villages. I can't find a main cat list of all towns and villages in Wales, I would need to open every county in turn. Ganesh addresses this issue on my Talk Page. Maybe we should continue there? Many, many thanks for your response. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 04:22, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 Doing... mabdul 19:11, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Not actually a request, but unsure where to ask this

Does anyone know of any way of adding all Talk: pages that are in both Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of mountains andCategory:WikiProject British and Irish hills to a new category I created, Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of mountains in the British Isles. I was thinking AWB, but I am unsure on how to implement it and going through the whole category by hand is taking far too long. I appreciate that this could probably be done with a bot, but I would prefer to be able to do it manually as I anticipate doing lots of similar categorisation in this area. Thanks--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 20:33, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

 Done all 5 pages ( 5+the one you already found) are tagged now. mabdul 22:43, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
If you're asking how to find the list of pages in the future, you could use AWB's List comparer functionality or CatScan. Good luck! GoingBatty (talk) 02:16, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Ok thank you very much :) --Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 20:58, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Six Degrees Of Wikipedia Bot

I would like a bot that creates related links from normal articles to orphaned articles, quickly and easily, with an auto shut-off if it gets haywire.

Superwikiwalrus (talk) 01:05, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

It's not easy to avoid invalid links. To do this to a reasonable level you need a POS-tagger and a semantic context analyser. These are the sorts of questions which I am interested in, but even if a level more reliable than human de-orphaning were achieved, there is still a vociferous contingent who would reject it, so this one isn't going to fly. Rich Farmbrough, 15:01, 16 December 2012 (UTC).
Instead of a bot creating links, how about a database report instead which humans could review and make the appropriate links manually? GoingBatty (talk) 15:22, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Listas parameter

Could a bot be created (or does one exist) that could go into an article, copy the **NAME** from {{DEFAULTSORT:**NAME**}}, then go to the article's talk page and paste it with "|listas=**NAME**" in the WikiProject Biography template? This could help to reduce the number of articles in Category:Biography articles without listas parameter. It wouldn't work for articles without a defaultsort, but many of the articles do have it above the categories. Del♉sion23 (talk) 19:26, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Coding...  Hazard-SJ  ✈  02:09, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
It looks like User:ListasBot did this in the past, however it's operator, User:Mikaey, doesn't look very active. Legoktm (talk) 02:28, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
ISn't BGbot doing this? mabdul 19:13, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BG19bot, maybe ask Bgwhite (talk · contribs) to improve his bot. mabdul 19:48, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
I do have a bot that fixes listas. The problem being is that there is no way for a bot to add the correct listas value for non-standard western names. Examples are Chinese, Burmese, Malaysian, Vietnamese names. The other problem deals with particles or prefixes. Sometimes Van or De are part of the sort value and other times they are not. All the messy details are at: WP:NAMESORT. You can't copy DEFAULTSORT into listas because of the high rate of errors DEFAULTSORT contains.
A few of us did clear out the category about a year ago. A bot ran over the early summer to add WikiProject Biography banners to talk pages that were missing the banner. ~50,000 new articles were added to the category. I've slowly gotten the number down to ~19,000 by doing all the names starting with the letters A thru L. I've taken a break because I'm tired of doing listas and the letter M is next. The M's about killed me last time do to the vast number of Arabic names.
If you would like to help. Grab a chunk of "weird names" and add the correct value for listas and DEFAULTSORT. Asian names are the easiest to start out on. Wrong values for DEFAULSORT on Asian names are either the name is in the wrong order or a comma is missing. I use two AWB windows when adding listas, one for the talk page and the other for the main page. Bgwhite (talk) 20:12, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
I completed my script, but haven't gone to request approval as a result of one of your points:

You can't copy DEFAULTSORT into listas because of the high rate of errors DEFAULTSORT contains.

My bot was coded to do that as the primary method (with other fallback options). Do you have any possible suggestions of how to minimi[sz]e errors from this method automatically?
In addition, I mentioned that my code offered fallback options. These options include the use of {{lifetime}} and {{persondata}} to get the value for listas. Do you think it would be okay if I got approval to just use these, is there's no easy way to overcome the DEFAULTSORT problem?  Hazard-SJ  ✈  04:11, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
  • {{Lifetime}} should always be substituted.
  • AWB does a pretty good job with DEFAUTLSORT, and if DEFAULTSORT is wrong then faulting the copy over to listas is shooting the messenger.
  • Dealing with names that shouldn't be re-ordered is a problem but not one to stop progress. Moreover there are some fundamental usability questions which have been overlooked by those with, often new-found and often incomplete knowledge about these names. Some quick examples, Japanese names are often Westernised, meaning that they are already reversed, they then need to be re-reversed for sorting purposes. Icelandic names in Iceland are generally sorted by given name, matronynmic/patronymic however expecting a general reader to know whether to look for "Johan Magnusson" under J or M based on whether the person is technically an Icelandic citizen, actually has a family name, self identifies as Icelandic or whatever is patently absurd. This matter was raised a few years ago, and I'm not sure of the outcome of that debate.
  • As BGwhite says a number of us have tackled this problem in the past, I certainly did thousands of these, and others (Rjwilmsi, Waacstats, Jim Cubb and Maglioladitis spring to mind, but I can't remember for sure) did in the low zillions. I would be willing to have another go at this work .
Rich Farmbrough, 14:35, 16 December 2012 (UTC).

Vital articles

Could someone please make a bot that could update the vital article pages (e.g. WP:Vital articles and WP:Vital articles/Expanded/Physical sciences)? It would save us humans a lot of tedious work on updating these pages, and would make sure that they are always up to date. StringTheory11 (t • c) 19:55, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Legobot was approved to do this (nearly 5 years ago!!!) but the code is in severe need of an overhaul. I won't have time until late December to get to it (at the earliest) so if someone else wants to pick it up, please do. Legoktm (talk) 06:23, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Duplicate coordinates issue

Additional error detection has been added to the {{Coord}} coordinates template. This has identified a problem with a number of articles where an infoboxe has the coordinates specified twice.

The solution is this: For pages in Category:Pages with malformed coordinate tags, if there is an infobox where |latitude=,|longitude= and |coordinates= all have content, delete (or perhaps comment out) the |coordinates=, as in this example.

Can someone run a bot or AWB script to fix examples in the category, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:30, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

This seems relatively easy to do: I'll see what I can do. Getting things right with parsing nested (and possibly also occasionally malformed) templates is probably the most complex part of this. I'll add it to my queue of things to do. -- The Anome (talk) 21:52, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
Actually this may be better done by fixing the template to suppress the coordinates parmeter if lat and/or long are present. Rich Farmbrough, 17:46, 14 December 2012 (UTC).
There are multiple infoboxes involved. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:23, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

To change the order of languages in every page of Wikipedia

As per here, it appears that this proposal is likely to pass, pending the approval of a closing admin. To implement this, we shall need to move Simple Wiki to the top of the languages for every article on wikipedia (or atleast the most visited ones in the beginning). I think a bot shall be able to implement it best. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 11:06, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't this already happen by default? Look at the left of Main Page. Legoktm (talk) 11:23, 17 December 2012 (UTC) Apparently on some pages simple is on top, others it isn't. This should be just a simple configuration change to pywikibot and existing bots will update when necessary. Legoktm (talk) 11:26, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
With the rollout of Wikidata next year this could complicate things. It currently hosts all interwikilinks in alphabetical order, and in 2013 interwiki links at the bottom of articles will be gradually be replaced with the ones in the Wikidata central repository. In the meantime, AWB should probably be notified that Simple English articles should be moved to the top of the list (unless it already does this, I'm not sure!), as it will be a while before every article is covered by Wikidata anyway. Del♉sion23 (talk) 12:21, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Looks like the RfC was closed with no consensus. If there was a consensus to change, however, Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/IW would have been the page to modify so Simple would be moved to the top (or not moved from the top). GoingBatty (talk) 02:50, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

This should not be done by bot. It should be done by filing a request in the Mediawiki Bugzilla to have Mediawiki automatically put Simple Wikipedia at the top for us when each page is rendered. Otherwise, there will be a needless permanent maintenance issue to have to keep resorting the language links. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:08, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Infobox Settlement to Infobox settlement (24914 articles)

The real template is Template:Infobox settlement and has 304251 transclusions according to the official counter.

Template:Infobox Settlement is a redirect to Template:Infobox settlement. The problem is that very likely all articles having Template:Infobox Settlement (the redirect) are not included in the counting, since they are given separately by the counter:

Task is:

NVanMinh (talk) 03:23, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

See WP:NOTBROKEN. Legoktm (talk) 03:25, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
But it ISBROKEN. NVanMinh (talk) 03:56, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, what is broken? Are the templates not displaying correctly? If it's just an external tool that isn't working perfectly, that's something to speak with the tool author about. Legoktm (talk) 04:00, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
Counting is broken, and maybe other tools too. To my knowledge there is no tool to count Infobox Settlement AND Infobox settlement. And so, within in the project that cares about the template, it is not possibly to see with only one click on the "official transclusion counter" referenced from Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Infobox settlement how many articles are transcluding Template:Infobox settlement. So, a little bot work, would help the editors a lot. NVanMinh (talk) 04:11, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
So if the counting is broken, we should fix that. And it's not an official tool, its just included there to help editors. The right solution here is to talk to Jarry1250 and ask him if he can modify his tool to count redirects. Having a bot modify 30k pages is not a "little" bot work. Legoktm (talk) 04:16, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
No, it is not the right solution. Since such brokeness can occur again and again. Fix at the source and be done, don't hack around. There are many many other important things to do for tool programmers. NVanMinh (talk) 04:21, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
You're answer is exactly right. Fix the problem at the source. The tool. Renaming a whole bunch of templates transclusions because one tool is broken is just hacking around the problem. --Chris 04:39, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
No, the source is here. And other tools may be broken too. I just found this one so far. The Wiki source puts extra burden on external developers. So fix at the wiki source. NVanMinh (talk) 04:45, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
No. Redirects are a fundemental part of the wiki. Having a redirect to a template is not broken. Just think of how many template redirects already exist. The problem is in the tool.
The burden of fixing this one bug in a tool is MUCH MUCH MUCH less than going through and removing every single template redirect. It is actually a pretty simple bug to fix. --Chris 04:51, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
No. It's not a bug if the tool has the purpose of displaying what is included via the source directly. Some people may exactly want to see this. By hacking around, the functionality is changed. And tools that only work on the source of the articles in question, don't even see that Infobox whatever is a redirect to Infobox settlement. There are redirects with a purpose, but here there is none. The template is on 300 000+ pages, with all redirects maybe on 350 000. And on other articles it may be missing - i.e. "10%" of all WP articles are involved. Streamlining is helping a lot in management here. Fix once, and profit for all the years to come. NVanMinh (talk) 05:05, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

I now did 500 by hand. Left are 24414. So far, most of the affected articles are U.S. articles. One "bot" involved CapitalBot - great he converted from Infobox City to Infobox Settlement. Since the box is now at Infobox settlement it would be nice to have this changed. NVanMinh (talk) 06:24, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

What? Stop now. You've been told its against current standing policy and now you're probably flooding the RC feed. If this were something that should even be done, it would take any bot operator a few minutes to get a bot to do it. There's a reason it isn't done. Legoktm (talk) 06:28, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
No, I have nowhere been told it is against current standing policy. I only have been told it is complicated for bot people. Now you tell me it would only take a few minutes to do it. I have not seen such unfriendly behavior. Maybe I should never have come to the bot request page. NVanMinh (talk) 06:40, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
You're right I misspoke. It's against current standing guidelines, which I linked to you in my first response. I never said it would be complicated for bots to do, I (and Chris) said it shouldn't be done, period. If an external tools isn't working the way you want, fix the tool. There is no need to edit 30 thousand wikipages to fix the case of one letter. Legoktm (talk) 06:43, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
It's not even in the guideline that you cited in the first response. And for complicatedness I was referring to your "Having a bot modify 30k pages is not a "little" bot work.". So if it is not little bot work, I do it by hand. Now you even want to stop me to do it by hand. So there is a problem and all you do is not only to not help but also to command me to not fix it myself. NVanMinh (talk) 06:52, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Here is a fixed tool. You can choose whether or not to include redirects, and it will even warn you when you are viewing the transclusions for a template that is a redirect. There, problem solved. No need to make 30k edits. --Chris 06:53, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Chris, thanks a lot for this! It is not protecting from other problems, but at least there is now a possibility for counting. Really helpful. Again, thanks a lot. NVanMinh (talk) 06:58, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
It says 335392 transclusions - could it also say the number of articles? There may be two transclusions on one article. NVanMinh (talk) 07:08, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
That is the number of articles, I believe. The database doesn't record whether a page has more than one.
Chris, could you publish the source code? (Or commit it to your repo?) Then I can update the tool for the benefit on non-enwiki users. Thanks! - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 11:41, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
If the DB does not record it, them how else can it be obtained? It is also shown at the Jarry tool: "Number of transclusions". NVanMinh (talk) 12:15, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
I checked the code (Thanks that you publish it, this is good documentation!) "SELECT count(*) FROM templatelinks WHERE tl_title", so one would need to look what is in "templatelinks". From what you said, one could assume that there is only one link irrespective of how many includes there are. NVanMinh (talk) 12:20, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
Sure thing. Uploaded (direct svn). Sorry, it's a bit scruffy. --Chris 16:58, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

No one in this conversation has realized that the initial premise is incorrect? When a template redirect is transcluded, the templatelinks table includes both the redirect and the target so that when the target is edited those pages transcluding it via the redirect can be properly updated. So if you add the transclusions of Template:Infobox Settlement to those for Template:Infobox settlement, you're counting them double. The correct number of transclusions is, in fact, around 304443. Anomie⚔ 02:52, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Maybe they took more care not to dive into assumptions about the database. If one looks at real data one may doubt you are correct for every instance in time. 2009-06-22 with 137966 has a drop in usage shortly after the template was moved. And what is the big drop for the redirect one year later? Set a side that only one thing can be true at a time and hence one thing here is wrong.. People have problems to present these simple things correctly and to make proper documentation, e.g. include the query string in the page. Keep it all simple, remove Infobox redirects and no one has any problems with them. KISS. NVanMinh (talk) 09:58, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
It seems to be you making the assumptions. The most likely reason for the drop in 2009 is because before the move, all transclusions of {{Infobox settlement}} were also transclusions of {{Infobox Settlement}}; after the move, this was not the case. The most likely reason for the big drop between 2010-06-08 and 2010-06-22 is probably because a bot bypassed the redirects while updating the template parameters for an approved task, as in this edit. I think it's time for you to drop the stick now. Anomie⚔ 13:05, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
For 2009 - what you say does not explain the drop, if your other logic that count for one is included in the count for the other. In what direction the redirect goes (S->s or s->S) does not matter for the max(S,s) value. But that dropped from 149533 to max(137966, 138391)=137966. For 2010 - the bot you mention already started to lower the case before the move took place. Documented now here. NVanMinh (talk) 03:20, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Infobox settlement - data analysis

According to the counter made by Chris there are 335392 transclusions of Template:Infobox settlement. Is it possible to obtain some statistics for the field settlement_type? Most common fillings are:

  • Foo
  • [[Foo]]
  • [[Bar|Foo]]

but there may even be two links, or one link and some wording outside the link. Maybe disregard this, and only give the values

  • article name
  • settlement_type-display (Foo)
  • settlement_type-link (Foo or Bar or nothing)
  • settlement_type-raw data

NVanMinh (talk) 07:13, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

It would be nice to analyse the data and detect inconsistency. Apart from the field settlement_type one can perform other analysis. If the type field contains a country specific link, one could also check whether subdivisions are filled correctly, e.g. if the type link goes to U.S. country, then there should always be a value for a U.S. state. And the state should be the same for all settlement that list this county in their subdivision listing. So this here, would only be a basic check. NVanMinh (talk) 21:19, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Meteorites

Greetings.

Looking for a bot owner to help classify articles in Category:Meteorites and its sub-categories.

I've gone into a lot of detail below for my own peace of mind; most of this will be self evident to the experienced.

The task...

  1. For every article in the Category:Meteorites category tree:
    1. If its talk page does not contain {{WikiProject Geology}} add this with parameters "|class=|importance=|attention=|needs-infobox=".
      1. Do not touch "class=" if it is already set; otherwise set it to "Stub" if there is a stub tag on the article (in which case also set "|auto=Yes") or else leave "class=" blank.
      2. If the article contains "{{Infobox" set "needs-infobox=" to "No" otherwise set it to "Yes".
    2. If the article is a stub (ie stub tag on article or "class=Stub" on talk page) ensure that {{Meteoroid-stub}} is in the article and if it isn't then add it.
    3. If the talk page includes {{WikiProject Astronomy}} add its name to a list of articles for future consideration.
    4. Ensure that every image displayed in the article is included in Category:Meteorite files.
    5. Deleted task
  2. For every Category in the Category:Meteorites category tree:
    1. If its talk page does not contain {{WikiProject Geology}} add it with parameters "|class=".
      1. Do not touch "class=" if it is already set; otherwise set it to "Cat".
  3. Sub-categories of Category:Meteorites by find location take the form "Category:Meteorites found in <Country>". For each article in any of these except the one exception (Category:Meteorites found on bodies other than Earth‎):
    1. Check if {{WikiProject <Country>}} exists and if so that it is on the article's talk page. If not then add it using the usual rules for setting "|Class=Stub" and "|auto=Yes".

Having made many edits to these articles over the past few days with virtualy no response I suspect no one is interested in discussing this uncontroversial request. None the less I've added pointers to it (or am about to) at Category talk:Meteorites and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geology. -Arb. (talk) 00:07, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Pointer also at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomy for good measure. -Arb. (talk) 00:17, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think it's a good idea to mix image and articles in a category, when you can have a separate image category instead. Category:Meteorite files should hold the media files. That way they can be properly placed into the media files category tree. -- 70.24.250.110 (talk) 00:30, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
Good point. Requirement above edited accordingly. Will re-categorise the few existing files manually. -Arb. (talk) 10:33, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
Added task 3. -Arb. (talk) 12:34, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
Meteorites has become the December collaboration of the month at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geology#Collaboration of the month so it would be good if this request was dealt with soon. Many thanks. -Arb. (talk) 12:34, 3 December 2012 (UTC)


For (2), what if the category doesn't have a talk page? Should one be created with this template in it? — Wolfgang42 (talk) 20:28, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
Yes. -Arb. (talk) 00:50, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
Coding... — Wolfgang42 (talk) 01:44, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
That's great. Any idea how long it will take you? -Arb. (talk) 12:28, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
I already have it about 50% done; I expect by next week it'll be ready. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 23:22, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

That's good news.

As you are still coding would you kindly accommodate a small requirement creep to step 1.1 (per Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geology/Meteorites):

  1. When adding {{WikiProject Geology}}, include before the closing "}}" the string "|meteorites=Yes|meteorites-importance="
  2. If {{WikiProject Geology}} is already present then check if it contains "|meteorites=Yes|meteorites-importance=" and if not add it. Note that there might exist instances like "|meteorites=|meteorites-importance=" or "|meteorites=Yes|meteorites-importance=Low" and all possible permutations. If you come across one of these ensure "|meteorites=Yes" and leave "|meteorites-importance=<any value>" untouched.

Many thanks. -Arb. (talk) 01:32, 12 December 2012 (UTC)


{{Coord missing}} has several parameters for categorization. Would meteorites be considered astronomical objects to be placed in Category:Astronomical objects articles needing coordinates even if they've landed? — Wolfgang42 (talk) 20:14, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Interesting question. My gut feeling is no; landed meteorites seem to be more the province of Geologists than Astronomers (though I am neither). If we really want to do that job properly it would be best achieved via a small update to {{Infobox meteorite}} and a new category Wikipedia infobox meteorite articles without coordinates‎ similar to Category:Wikipedia infobox amusement park articles without coordinates‎. No bot action required. -Arb. (talk) 23:15, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
Should I perhaps create a new Category:Meteorites articles needing coordinates so we can use {{coord missing|country|Meteorites}}? — Wolfgang42 (talk) 00:13, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Coords missing should be driven from the infobox. That's the most user friendly way to do the job in that once coords are added to the box the "no coords" category just goes away without the editor having to remember to delete coords missing. Just because you have a hammer (bot) does not make every problem a nail. Would much rather you focused on the requirements above. Thanks. -Arb. (talk) 01:55, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
So I should ignore task 1.5 above and not include {{coords missing}}? — Wolfgang42 (talk) 02:10, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
That does indeed seem to be the case. Task 1.5 was a mistake and, worse, I'd forgotten it was there. Humble apologies for wasting your time; feel free to call me any names you like under your breath. The rest are still anxiously awaited though. -Arb. (talk) 12:33, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
I understand completely. Leaving your mental state in the edit summary was extremely helpful—it gave me an idea of what was going through your head.
I'm almost done; I just need to make sure that the code I've written actually works and then I'll submit the BRFA. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 12:54, 14 December 2012 (UTC)


Requirement creep 2 if it's not too late:

  1. In requirement creep 1 above the strings should all be singular not plural ie "|meteorite=" and "|meteorite-importance="
  2. Task 1.1.2 should read: If the article contains "{{Infobox" or "{{MarsGeo" or "{{chembox", remove the "needs-infobox=" parameter (whatever it is set to) otherwise set it to "Yes".

By way of explanation, this is the first task force I've worked the detail for; I'm learning plenty as we go along. Many thanks for your understanding. -Arb. (talk) 12:54, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Should images on Commons also be tagged with Category:Meteorite files? — Wolfgang42 (talk) 00:18, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Another issue with tagging images with Category:Meteorite files: The bot will also tag images such as File:Folder Hexagonal Icon.svg, File:Question book-new.svg and File:Commons-logo.svg. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wolfgang42 (talk • contribs) 02:09, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Good catch there Wolfgang42. Commons images should not be tagged, Commons has a completely different category system.
The background to this task is that there are a few Wikipedia hosted meteorite images in the target category; we want to ensure that all such Wikipedia hosted images that are used on any of the articles are so tagged. This would (clearly) not include the three you mention nor any others like them. If you can figure out a way to distinguish those from "ours" then great, otherwise we'll have to do this task manually.
The only thing the three seem to have in common is that they are all in Category:Protected images... -Arb. (talk) 13:44, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
Overnight additional thoughts. Don't place these into a category but instead build a list and I'll use AWB to go through them manually; there won't be many it's just locating them that's time consuming. Filter out commons files and any others that are easy per discussion just above. -Arb. (talk) 11:34, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
BRFA filed I can filter out commons files, but trying to find the other ones without false negatives may be difficult. I'll look into it shortly. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 00:22, 19 December 2012 (UTC)


Good to see the first test run a couple of days ago Wolfgang42. Look forward to more after the Christmas break. -Arb. (talk) 13:03, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Oh, yes, about that... Actually, that wasn't supposed to happen. I thought I was running the bot in `fakedit' mode where it would print its edits to a file instead of actually making them... then I looked and there wasn't any such file... At least I found some bugs in my code! (And my head.) — Wolfgang42 (talk) 17:55, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Handbook of Texas Online

Per Talk page conversation Magioladitis. We need a bot.to correct coding on existing articles that contain the Template:Handbook of Texas. The handbook changed its URLs. User Magioladitis has changed the template so it works with all new uses. But we need to run a bot to correct how existing templates were coded in the template section "id="

  • Mason County is one example. You can see "id=MM/hcm4". The new handbook URL has eliminated the double alpha "MM" and its forward slash, and inserted a zero to the left of the number 4. Handbook-Mason County
  • However, the addition of the zero seems to apply only where there previously existed a single digit. Guadalupe County is an example. The digit in this one is 12, and the Handbook-Guadalupe did not add a zero, but eliminated the double alpha and the forward slash to the right of it

Therefore, we need a bot that makes these changes to the coding on "id=":

1) Remove the double alpha coding and the forward slash to the right of it
2) Add the extra zero to the left of any single digit coding

There are possibly hundreds or thousands of Texas articles affected. Please let me know if you need additional explanation.— Maile (talk) 15:16, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

There are about 120 articles affected at first blush. I will attend to these over the next few days if I can. Rich Farmbrough, 21:30, 24 December 2012 (UTC).

Request for update to two references

Would it be possible to use a bot to update occurences of two online references occuring in about 250 articles?

Back in October, the Royal Australian Navy decided to overhaul its website, breaking almost every single one of the 2,000-odd external links here. While most would be impossible to update via bot (due to weird and wonderful changes in the URL naming conventions and alterations to or removals of content during the update), there are two addresses (http://www.navy.gov.au/w/images/Units_entitlement_list.pdf and http://www.navy.gov.au/Navy_Marks_109th_Birthday_With_Historic_Changes_To_Battle_Honours) removed from the site that are linked around 250 times each, which I think could be mass-updated by a bot to include the link to the Archive.org Wayback Machine version.

What the bot would have to do is take the articles containing the url(s), add the relevant archiveurl and archivedate parameters to the citation, and update the accessdate parameter. Not knowing bots at all, would it would be easier to insert/adjust these parameters, or strip out the entire citation template and replace it with a new one? Full format is below.

  • {{cite web |url=http://www.navy.gov.au/w/images/Units_entitlement_list.pdf |title=Royal Australian Navy Ship/Unit Battle Honours |date=1 March 2010 |publisher=Royal Australian Navy |accessdate=14 March 2010}} with {{cite web |url=http://www.navy.gov.au/w/images/Units_entitlement_list.pdf |title=Royal Australian Navy Ship/Unit Battle Honours |date=1 March 2010 |publisher=Royal Australian Navy |archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/20110614064156/http://www.navy.gov.au/w/images/Units_entitlement_list.pdf |archivedate=14 June 2011 |accessdate=23 December 2012}}
  • {{cite news |url=http://www.navy.gov.au/Navy_Marks_109th_Birthday_With_Historic_Changes_To_Battle_Honours |title=Navy Marks 109th Birthday With Historic Changes To Battle Honours |date=1 March 2010 |publisher=Royal Australian Navy |accessdate=14 March 2010}} with {{cite news |url=http://www.navy.gov.au/Navy_Marks_109th_Birthday_With_Historic_Changes_To_Battle_Honours |title=Navy Marks 109th Birthday With Historic Changes To Battle Honours |date=1 March 2010 |archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/20110613184920/http://www.navy.gov.au/Navy_Marks_109th_Birthday_With_Historic_Changes_To_Battle_Honours |archivedate=13 June 2011 |publisher=Royal Australian Navy |accessdate=23 December 2012}}

Any assistance or thoughts appreciated. Thanks in advance. -- saberwyn 03:52, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

I ran my bot across all pages that were in a couple of Australian Navy categories and every page that started with "HMAS ", it didn't quite make 250 edits, but ~220, which you can see at Special:Contributions/Thehelpfulbot. Hope this helps, if I've missed any please let me know and I'll run the bot for the rest of the pages. Thehelpfulone 17:23, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for that. There are a couple that were missed (I'm guessing because of a different citation layout to the others), but its small enough that I can do them manually. -- saberwyn 19:58, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
No problem at all, out of interest how did you find the ones that were missed - using a toolserver tool? Thehelpfulone 20:27, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
I don't know if such a tool exisits. I just went wandering through a bunch of articles and applied a Mark I Human Eyeball. Any that I've missed at this point, I'll pick up through the course of general editing. -- saberwyn 21:45, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
Curious which BRFA this was done under? Rich Farmbrough, 02:05, 25 December 2012 (UTC).
That would be BRFA number 3, simple find/replaces "for Wikipedia:WikiProject Topic outline and any other articles that need it." Merry Christmas! Thehelpfulone 02:18, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Just an idea..

But i had the idea that if we had an bot that checked users using Check User and added the Ip to a database by ip and if it has 2 users conflicting then will add the sock-puppet tag to all users with that ip (Other then the first account). Being a semi programmer i know that the only real problem is the database. IanMurrayWeb (talk) 03:56, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

This would run afoul of Wikipedia:CheckUser#CheckUser and privacy policy as "fishing", not to mention that accounts used from the same IP are not necessarily the same person's. Also, for sockpuppets of already blocked users, we already have autoblock. PleaseStand (talk) 04:51, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
Thank you PleaseStand. — Preceding unsigned comment added by IanMurrayWeb (talk • contribs) 05:15, 25 December 2012‎

Scottish Peaks (around 2,000 articles)

We have 8 list of Scottish Peaks on Wiki-cy which contain individual peaks: names and co-ordinates. The other 7 lists can be found here. My request is for a map to be placed in the Infobox ("Mynydd2"). All that I require is for someone to just add these two lines as the last lines of the infobox:

| lledred = 56.454 | hydred = -3.991

replacing the XY, of course with the corresponding / correct co-ordinates. Then, the map appears.

Sounds easy! Is it? - Llywelyn2000 (talk) 00:09, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes. Rich Farmbrough, 17:44, 14 December 2012 (UTC).
I'm not sure where I'd be getting the correct coordinates, though.  Hazard-SJ  ✈  04:17, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
I have the coordinates in an Excel file. Trying now to input them with WMB, but it's a tad difficult. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 04:27, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
What does "WMB" stand for? The Transhumanist 03:55, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Removal of comments

There is obviously no consensus for the removal of these comments, so this is not a suitable matter for bot edits. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:54, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

A number of articles include the comment:

<!-- please do not add an infobox, per [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music#Biographical_infoboxes]]-->

Not only is this against the spirit of Wikipedia, but it is explicitly contrary to the outcomes of this RfC. Can someone with a bot remove all instances, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:47, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

I can't find any such articles using a regular Wikipedia search. Could you please give some examples? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 15:22, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
By the way, Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music#Biographical infoboxes provides a link to Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music/Style guidelines#Biographical infoboxes, which states "current consensus among project participants holds that the use of biographical infoboxes is often counterproductive on biographies of classical musicians, including conductors and instrumentalists and that they should not be used without first obtaining consensus on the article's talk page." Should the guidelines be updated to reflect the RfC first? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 15:26, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
Also, is there consensus to remove this comment from each article? GoingBatty (talk) 16:27, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
Consensus at the cited RfC is that "WikiProjects are free to publish guidelines and recommendations but do not have the authority to override a local consensus on the talk page of an article." Thus, the comments do not reflect the will of the community. From the examples I've seen, such comments pre-date that RfC. For example, the Vivaldi article mentioned below had it added on 28 April 2007‎; the RfC ran Feb-April 2010. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:32, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
Almost certainly. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:32, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
Regular searching doesn't find comments; that's why script assisted editing is needed. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:32, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Requested at IRC -wikipedia to add: tools:~betacommand/reports/db_scanner.log which is the results of a running dump scan . Dru of Id (talk) 15:53, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Ah, Antonio Vivaldi contains <!-- please do not add an infobox, per [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers#Lead section]]-->. GoingBatty (talk) 16:27, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
Thank you. That's 363 articles, by my reckoning. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:33, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Please additionally note that the script continues to run, but the 363 fugure figure (insert- may or...) may not update. Dru of Id (talk) 17:16, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

I can take this one, under my 3rd BRFA as per above, I'll replace it with nothing and will wait until the database scan is complete to process it in one go. Thehelpfulone 17:39, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

See: Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music/Guidelines#Biographical infoboxes. Hyacinth (talk) 03:39, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Given all the prior discussion about composer infoboxes, including the RfC, it ought to have been obvious to everybody from the start that the removal of these comments was not going to have consensus. This includes the requester, who definitely ought to have known better. Most of the edits made by Thehelpfulbot have in the meantime been reverted by various other editors. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:54, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Note: The comments are now being discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Wikiproject notes in articles. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:48, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Assessment

Hi everyone. I realize there already is a bot, DoboBot, used for this upon request, but how about a bot that will automatically assess talk pages with the banners of WikiProjects based on the article or page's subject, links, or such. This is useful because it helps WikiProject statistics maintain their accuracy, and I notice that there are a number of articles without assessments from relevant WikiProjects. This is different that the DodoBot because it will add assessments without a request, and most will not bother requesting banners be placed and it will save some time, although I am not sure how it will effect each other. I'd be more than happy to work on this type of bot myself, but would like the opinion of others as well, and, of course, am just thinking out loud. Thanks, and happy holidays! TBrandley (what's up) 02:33, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Just a note but Dodobot and I think all the other bots that did assessments are down. Dodobot hasn't edited since last year. Kumioko (talk) 02:37, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

List of WikiProjects

I am preparing the research within wikigroups. I need a list of WikiProjects, would it be possible to send me (you can use e-mail) a list of pages (would be nice one pagename per line) which starts at Wikipedia:WikiProject~ ? I will sort out subpages manually, or if you can remove them would be nice. I guess each pagename which has / is not needed.--Juandev (talk) 18:00, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

WP:STANDARDIZE (or this) is what you are looking for? -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:05, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
The problem here is that although there are several of us that can tell you what the WikiProjects are, the naming isn't standard among them. Some start with WikiProject, Some with WP, some have names like Maths project or US Roads WikiProject. Additionally there are many variations of some with a large number of redirects. What this means is that although its fairly easy to identify 99% of the projects, doing any sort of analysis on them becomes much much harder due to the lack of standardization. Kumioko (talk) 22:22, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
Actually most of the projects (if not all) do start with Wikipedia:WikiProject, even the templates there are only about three that are non-standard, Maths Rating, US Roads WikiProject and Canada Roads WikiProject, by memory, though there are a zillion redirects, as you say. Rich Farmbrough, 01:08, 25 December 2012 (UTC).
Good to know, there are just 3 projects without "standard" name.--Juandev (talk) 13:42, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
[All This] may be what you are looking for. — Ganeshk (talk) 22:06, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
Well its better than the category list, which is not complete by the means I cant get a full list on one page. This I can sort much easier. Looking on that number (2087) its much higher than the category:WikiProjects by status. Is that a real number of WikiProjects? Even those, which are abandoned? --Juandev (talk) 13:42, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
This also shows the WikiProjects and their associated redirects if applicable. Kumioko (talk) 22:24, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
Looking on that, I would not know, how to sort it out and get just project names from that.--Juandev (talk) 13:42, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
For the full list you will need someone to use the API to return all non-redirect pages in Wikipedia space with a prefix of WikiProject and fileter out the subpages, or scan a database dump in the same manner. I had a quick go with AWB but it is limited to fetching the first 25000 pages. I don't download database dumps since I can't make much constructive use of them thanks to the certain people, or I would run a scan for you. Rich Farmbrough, 01:18, 25 December 2012 (UTC).
Thank you Richard, I think I will use that Project index to get the full list. But one small related question. Can bot read project participants even from page history?--Juandev (talk) 13:42, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
In principle, yes. However I can see little (not zero, but little) use in knowing who has left certain projects. Rich Farmbrough, 21:31, 29 December 2012 (UTC).

We're discussing adding project tagging to Twinkle, where the issue of non-standard banner templates has arisen. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:44, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Resolving multilanguage pages

It happened a few times that I found a wikipedia page in a language with links to others that weren't consistent. Let say the English version of the page has German, French and Polish. It happens that the French version of the page only has German and English.

My bot idea is to automatically add the link to the Polish version in the French version.

I wonder if such a bot already exists or not and if the numerous interwiki bots already do this or not. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Asimoviv (talk • contribs) 05:38, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

That sounds like exactly what all the numerous interwiki bots already do. Also note that we here cannot give you permission to run a bot on frwiki, you'd need to go to fr:Wikipédia:Bot/Statut (or get approved as a global interwiki bot) for that. Anomie⚔ 13:55, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Pennsylvania State Routes navbox

It would be great if a bot could do this.


For every article about a state route in Pennsylvania:

Add the template Template:navbox Pennsylvania State Routes to the bottom

King Jakob C 17:03, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

That's quite a big navbox you have there. Is there consensus to add this new navbox to hundreds of articles? (If not, maybe Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Roads and/or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pennsylvania would be a place to start.) Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 18:09, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Italics for ship names

I have been doing this for a while, being a little OCD, but I realize that a bot would be much better at this job then I would do. This is definitely for the bot programmer who likes a challenge.

I am trying to italicize the titles of the various ships and ship classes titles found on this site. The titles of ships are weird. Their prefixes are not italicized, while the name of the ship/class is in italicizes. Take for example USS Enterprise. I have been making some of these changes like this one [1].

Here are some of the complications:

The main ship categories that have not been italicized are the ship classes. Category:Ship classes but their are many ships within the vast number of categories of the Category:Ships category in itself is not complete. Thanks for your help. Oldag07 (talk) 15:19, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

We need to generate a list of common redlinks linked from Ethiopia-related articles. Is it possible for a bot to do this? The articles could be found in a number of ways:

There are probably even more ways of identifying the articles. But if possible we need the bot to dump the list of redlinks into a page: allredlinks. If the list is too long, perhaps break it down by alphabet like: A-G redlinks or A redlinks, B redlinks, C redlinks. Then also we would like a list of the top 100 most common redlinks.

I don't know if this is possible or feasible. However, it would greatly improve our project's goal of expanding Wikipedia's coverage of Ethiopia. Thanks from (WP:ETH) አቤል ዳዊት (Janweh) (talk) 06:49, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

I believe tools:~magnus/missingtopics.php can help you out, though depending on the length of the list, it might be easier/faster just to have a toolserver user run a query for you manually. Legoktm (talk) 06:53, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Over-enthusiastic Addbot

A bot has subst'ed a TfD notice onto about 3000 talk pages - example edit, list of affected pages. The TfD discussion is now closed, so the notice is no longer relevant. Is this something a bot could/should clean up? -- John of Reading (talk) 09:12, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I believe so. Would replacing the entire substitution with {{OW}} be sufficient?  Hazard-SJ  ✈  01:39, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, simplest is best. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:58, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

{{Rayment}}

Template:Rayment should have the parameter external links=1 when used as an external link. I have often seen people forget that parameter, and that causes two error messages appear that should only appear when used as a source. Werieth (talk) 21:48, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

previous comments where archived, I am un-archiving as this is not resolved. Werieth (talk) 19:08, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Xeno bot and Dodobot

I just wanted to mention that Xeno bot refers WikiProject Tagging requests to Dodobot and Dodobot has.'t edited in over a year. Someone might want to go and update those pages so that folks won't continue to try and get them to work!. Kumioko (talk) 18:13, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

I can take over all the tasks. -- Magioladitis (talk) 20:09, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Your the man Magio!. Kumioko (talk) 20:59, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject tagging request: WP:JAZZ

Hello, WP:JAZZ would like to have a 'bot add the {{WikiProject Jazz}} banner to jazz-related pages that aren't already tagged. We had already left a request at User talk:DodoBot/Requests#WP:JAZZ (with more details concerning inheritance; auto-tagging stubs etc.). However, that account does not seem to be very active (which I did not notice at the time I filed the request). (I later left a request for User:MuZebot, before I noticed an older message indicating that MuZemike would be on administrative hiatus.)

The list of relevant categories is located at Wikipedia:WikiProject Jazz/Categories, but please note that there are actually three lists of categories at that page; they each need to be tagged slightly differently:

  1. We need the bot to add {{WikiProject Jazz|album=yes}} to the articles (or rather, the talk pages) within the /Albums sub-listing
  2. We need the bot to add {{WikiProject Jazz|song=yes}} to the articles (or rather, the talk pages) within the /Songs sub-listing
  3. We need the bot to add {{WikiProject Jazz}} to the articles (or rather, the talk pages) within the /General sub-listing

To the best of my knowledge, /Categories represents all applicable categories and sub-categories (I deliberately omitted those that are outside the project's scope), so you should not need to worry about sub-category depth or "false positives".

FYI in 2010, we had Xenobot Mk V perform (essentially) the same request. (See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Jazz/Archives/2010 1#Adding WikiProject banner). It also added {{WikiProjectBannerShell}} if and when it was able to do so.

I think we do not want to inherit importance=, only inherit class=.

I have an additional request, but I am not sure whether it's technically possible, and furthermore I'm not sure whether we have consensus (see unanswered comments). I'd be interested in having the 'bot add needs-infobox=yes if the article does not have an {{Infobox foo}} template; or if {{WikiProject Jazz}} can inherit this setting from another WikiProject banner, or it can inherit this setting if the talk page already has {{Infobox requested}}.

Let me know if I can clarify anything, either leave me a message here or at WT:JAZZ.

Thanks and Happy New Year, Gyrofrog (talk) 15:27, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

I can do it. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:30, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! I figured something was underway when I saw all the Yobot edits on my watchlist. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 15:27, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I 'll do the request in two steps if you don't mind. I don't have the time to rewrite the code so I find it easier to do it this way. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:40, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Hey, no problem, you're the one doing us a favor! -- Gyrofrog (talk) 15:51, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Why is this bot adding the jazz header to unrelated articles? Cruel Summer, Done by the Forces of Nature, Clouds (Joni Mitchell album), to name a few. Dan56 (talk) 16:50, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm really not sure about the first album. Done by the Forces of Nature is in Category:Jungle Brothers albums which rolls up to Category:Jazz rap albums. And Category:Joni Mitchell albums rolls up to Category:Jazz fusion albums. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 17:08, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I added all the pages found in rhe categories given in /Album. If this helps. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:55, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Clouds (Joni Mitchell album) is in Category:Joni Mitchell albums. Recall something important, only reverting won't help unless you do it after I finish everything. Otherwise, my bot will readd the tag. there are three options: Please wait and revert tomorrow or fix the categorisation or make me a list of false positives. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:27, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Those genre categories were erroneously place in the artist-album categories ("Category:Joni Mitchell albums" is also under the category "Folk rock albums", which would have nothing to do with jazz fusion). Still doesnt explain Cruel Summer, though. Dan56 (talk) 23:15, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
It's in Category:Common (entertainer) albums. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:02, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
How about "And I Love Her", "Here Comes the Sun", and "My Sweet Lord"? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:22, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
The first one is on Category:Diana Krall songs, the second on Category:Nina Simone songs and the third on Category:Nina Simone songs. I am not gonna continue doing this though. I am doing what I 've been told to. I don't have time to fix categorisation tree. -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:33, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
I don't know if these songs were sang in a jazz version but these jazz singers. Someone expert has to tell us I guess. -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:40, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for letting me know why they were included in your run. Since it doesn't appear that Krall or Simone's versions were particularly notable, I removed the categorizations you mentioned from those articles. Thanks again! GoingBatty (talk) 01:43, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

I finished the songs, I almost finished albums but a rerun is needed in this case. Now I am doing the general ones. -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:34, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

I finished and double-checked the songs and the general ones. I'll rerun for the albums. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:31, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Bot capable of rearchiving from incremental archives to month-year archives

Background. There's a reason why incremental archives exist: for Talk pages of articles like Talk:Barack Obama that generate so much content in a single month that it would be impractical to archive in month-year format. However, there are other talk pages that don't generate so much content in a single month but that were archived in incremental archives when they should have been archived in month-year format.

Proposition. I need a bot that can rearchive from incremental archives to month-year format. We have to do this manually today (see [2] followed by [3]) or through a special key requested to Misza to operate on MiszaBot. Unfortunately this key has to generated every single time for each rearchive needed. We need a bot capable of doing this without the key restrictions.

—Ahnoneemoos (talk) 02:33, 5 January 2013 (UTC)


Extension infobox update

I hope you don't mind if I post here a request for mw:: we need someone running a bot to automatically (and if possible regularly) update {{Extension}} infoboxes with the hook data now available on Extension Matrix/Hooks (background): for each line of the page, each item in the square brackets should be added as hook1=, hook2= etc. replacing any previous parameter.
If someone is willing to do this and doesn't have bot flag, I'll take care of the paperwork myself to get it approved (processes are quicker on mediawiki.org). A first test run could probably be performed also without flag, however. Thanks! --Nemo 08:59, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

UAA bot

I'd like to run the following idea by you folks for a new bot in the UAA process. This is a bot that would run on four pages: WP:UAA (the main noticeboard), WP:UAA/BOT (the DeltaQuadBot noticeboard), WP:UAA/HP (the noticeboard's holding pen), and CAT:UAA (the noticeboard's category). Currently we have a number of other bots working these pages, including ones that automatically remove any accounts that are blocked.

But an enduring issue that we deal with on all four pages is having to manage a significant number of usernames that have gone stale, and for every one of them we must manually do the work to move or remove them. i.e, we must manually move old reports from the main/bot pages to the holding pen, manually remove stale accounts from the holding pen completely, and manually remove stale accounts from the UAA category.

For this reason, I am asking if it is possible and if there are any people willing to code a bot that would automatically manage this issue. The bot would do the following three tasks:

  1. Move any report from WP:UAA and WP:UAA/BOT to its correct section (date) in the holding pen, if (a) nobody has commented on the report for 24 hours*, & if (b) the account has had no edits or log actions in the previous 24 hours. (It is assumed that in such circumstances it is no longer necessary to 'priority'-watch these accounts on the main UAA pages).
  2. Remove any report from WP:UAA/HP if (a) nobody has commented on the report for seven days, & if (b) the account has had no edits or log actions in the previous seven days. (It is assumed that in such circumstances the reported users are unlikely to ever return, so they are no longer necessary to watch).
  3. Remove any account from CAT:UAA if (a) the category has sat on the page for seven days, & if (b) the account has had no edits or log actions in the previous seven days. (Like above, it is assumed that under these conditions the users are unlikely to return and need no more monitoring).

This would in theory take care of a huge workload for the people who work in this area. Note that the 24 hour and seven day timeframes are a reflection of the timeframes admins and others currently tend to use. If this were to be implemented, we'd likely want to get a more formal consensus on those times.

*Note that a potential issue with task #1 is the bot moving reports that have not yet even been closed by an admin. For this reason we may want to set a third condition that (c) someone has commented on the report with Template:UAA. But I also see a potential risk with this task that the bot will move declined reports that don't need to be in holding pen at all, or that it will move specific reports that require more time on the main pages for comments/discussion. Therefore we might want to scrap this task unless there is a workable way to do it.

Of course, this would not eliminate all issues with stale reports and some would occasionally have to be taken care of manually, but I think there is some potential here to make the UAA process more efficient. Thoughts? Possible? Issues? Anyone interested in coding? NTox · talk 18:39, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Manual SearchBot Not Working

The Coren manual search bot [here] does not appear to be working. There are several unprocessed requests and the last one appears to have run on 3 August 2012. Blue Riband► 04:02, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

CSB has been replaced by User:MadmanBot a long time ago. Legoktm (talk) 04:03, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Humm...I see from User_talk:Coren that there are recent replies from Coren on this talk page but no reply to the inquiry regarding the bot which I left there. According to the page for User:MadmanBot the CSB has been offline since 31 Dec 2011, but seems to have been just abandoned in place. At Wikipedia:Cv101#Tools I just replaced the existing link to the CorenBot/manual with a link to User:MadmanBot/manual. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Blue Riband (talk • contribs) 22:00, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Follow up- MadmanBot appears to not process requests consistently. Some copyright checks were processed but others are still "stuck" on unprocessed. The bot owner has deleted some unprocessed requests. However VWBot/manual does seem to function, as an article request for processing went through within minutes. Blue Riband► 17:27, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

The wikilinks from findarticles.com/Special:Linksearch/*.findarticles.com used to lead somewhere, now they are now just a redirect to a search website. I think that it is time to delete the lot of them. They may or may not have been useful at the time, they are not currently useful, and they are worse than linkrot now. Time to remove them. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:26, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

In case the question comes up during the discussion, it appears they excluded the Internet Archive from duplicating their content. So that's not an excuse to keep the URLs. --j⚛e deckertalk 00:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
It's sad that the Internet Archive allows a site to put up a robots.txt in 2013 and have it delete (from public view, anyway) archives that had previously been available for years. Anomie⚔ 04:13, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
When the reference includes more than just a URL the article's title and author are often enough to find a copy of it elsewhere, so I think that other parts of the reference(s) should be retained if/when possible. VernoWhitney (talk) 04:57, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject Primates template replace

Please could the {{PrimateTalk}} template be replaced with {{WikiProject Primates}} leaving all additional information such as importance and class intact. {{PrimateTalk}} currently redirects to {{WikiProject Primates}}. Many thanks, Jack (talk) 11:03, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Why? It seems to me that WP:NOTBROKEN applies. Anomie⚔ 12:58, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
From the page you linked: Redirects for templates can cause confusion and make updating template calls more complicated. Jack (talk) 13:36, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
If the issue is just that the template has been renamed, a redirect is perfectly fine. That's one of the things redirects are designed for. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:38, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

History of Western Sahara

Could a bot replace {{History of Western Sahara}} with {{Western Sahara conflict}} throughout Wikipedia. The vast majorty of pages that transcend the first one should transcend the second instead. I just moved {{Western Sahara conflict}} to it's current title from {{History of Western Sahara}}, and created the beginnings of an real History of Western Sahara template at the old title. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 18:52, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Nevermind, looks like someone did it manually. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 19:54, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Image removal tracker

Would it be possible for a bot to read the recent changes and pick out edits that involved the removal of an image from an article and, subject to conditions below note on the talk page of the removed file the article(s) from which it was removed (with a link to the edit that removed it and/or a copy of the edit summary)?

The conditions would be:

  • Do not note articles where the removal was reverted (I guess this would require operating with some sort of buffer?).
    This is because there is no point recording images removed by vandalism or editorial dispute.
  • Do not record articles where the addition was reverted (ditto re buffer)
    There is no point recording images added for vandalism or editorial dispute
  • Do not record removals where the edit summary indicates that the image was renamed (e.g. [4])
    This is not a removal of the image, although if a renamed file has a talk page at it's old name it would be helpful to move this, but this is likely outside the scope of this bot.
  • Do not record removals where the image has been deleted
    The will be no talk page to record to, and while the deletion may be overturned noting where it was is a different issue I don't think solvable by this bot.
  • If a removed image is tagged as nominated for deletion, nominate that deletion discussion also
    Ideally avoiding duplicating any manually left messages about this, but I don't know how that could be done.
  • Do not record images used in templates if the template is removed (excluding infoboxes).
    Recording the removal of icons used on cleanup templates for example would be foolish and counterproductive.

See Wikipedia talk:Files for deletion for some background, but at this stage this is just a request from bot programmers about feasibility. Do not worry about specifics, I'm interested in the concept and generalities, details can come later if the idea gets that far. I have not sought to determine if there is consensus for such a bot as this would be pointless if it is not realistically doable. Thryduulf (talk) 00:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

One possibility is to try to get a list of all non-free image uses, and diff that to see which uses have changed. The question is whether the toolserver database is reliable enough to make the list. I am trying a query such as:
select art.page_title, il_to from page as art join imagelinks on il_from = art.page_id join page as file on file.page_namespace = 6 and file.page_title = il_to join categorylinks on file.page_id = cl_from where cl_to = 'All_non-free_media' and art.page_namespace = 0 ;
Unfortunately, explain no longer works on toolserver, so I have a hard time telling whether that will work. I did run it, and it gave about 500,000 rows. So it would work for the tasks above, by comparing the results each day to the results from the previous day. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:38, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
Thank you. So this would collate a list of pages that include files which appear in the category "all non-free media", and then compare that list each day? Thryduulf (talk) 12:00, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, that is the idea. I have been trying to reduce the number of bot tasks that I run, so I don't want to take this on, but I don't see any showstopping obstacles. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:48, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Mass whois checking script

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this is in the wrong place, but I thought it would be the most appropriate. Would it be possible for someone to write a piece of code that could run whois checks en masse? I have a major CU investigation I'm working on and do not want to hand run several screens of IPs through whois manually. Also, in this case I would need the script when it is done, because I can't give out the data I have. I would have written this myself, but I simply don't have the time right now. Would anyone be willing to do this? -- DQ (ʞlɐʇ) 21:34, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

I can give it a shot, what WHOIS data do you want? Legoktm (talk) 21:37, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Tagging redirects for discussion

Could anyone tag a bunch of redirects - currently on RfD, but untagged? - Nabla (talk) 02:09, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

I came across this edit today, whose author unintentionally changed non-latin characters in interwiki links to question marks ("?"). I believe a bot that loop through all wiki pages at a certain interval can inspect interwiki links that were accidentally changed to question marks, and have them reverted. I have programming experience and am willing to contribute if other people believe this idea is worth implementing. Gene91 (talk) 16:18, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

I've made an edit filter request. --Makecat 05:53, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Archiveurl additions needed

As of about a month ago, Banglapedia's site no longer works as they lost their access. There are over 2,000 articles using it [5] so archiveurls will need to be added for the lot of them. Wizardman 20:35, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Disappointing news! Do you know if it's likely to reappear at another address? Andrew Gray (talk) 10:03, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
It seems to be back up for now, but who knows how long that will be. I don't know of another address. Wizardman 15:23, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
It has been moved from here to here. The .htm suffixes have changed to .HTM. The site goes up and down a lot, and I can't find the preface there, but it is nonetheless an extremely useful site. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 19:32, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Dunedin

There are about 100 pages - mainly biographies - which use the nonsense term "Dunedin/Northern Otago"(a redirect to "Otago Region") to refer to New Zealand's Otago Region. The term "Northern Otago" is never used within New Zealand (the term "North Otago" is used, but for a different geographical entity), and certainly there is no entity which uses an oblique to separate Dunedin's name from that of another entity. Could someone please run a bot to replace [[Dunedin/Northern Otago]] with [[Otago Region|Otago]] on these articles? Thanks - Grutness...wha? 23:28, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Never mind - I've started doing them by hand... should keep my OCD happy for a while :) Grutness...wha? 07:42, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Block log filtering

Could a bot op look at Wikipedia_talk:Blocking_policy#All_blocks_other_than_for_unambiguous_threats.2C_spam.2C_vandalism_and_sockpuppetry_must_be_reported_for_community_scrutiny_on_WP:AN_somewhere and see if it is feasible. Basically, the bot would update on an hourly basis from Special:Log/block for blocks that do not include a block summary from a pre-defined list of block summaries. MBisanz talk 00:21, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Revert edits

User:CrimsonBot was substituting a template that was not setup correct, which some errors. These edits need to be reversed. All edit summaries of these edits say: "Replacing multiple templates per this discussion." should be reverted. The error on this template should be fixed shortly. Thanks CrimsonBlue (talk) 07:30, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Is this a request for mass rollback? If so, which edits exactly? ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 20:33, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
 Done except for Robert Wallace (Canadian politician), Charles_Murphy_(Canadian_politician), Terence_Young_(politician) ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 02:31, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
Remaining ones done by User:Frietjes. Rich Farmbrough, 22:43, 17 January 2013 (UTC).

I'd like to request a bots help in changing 1000+ external links on PGA Tour golfer pages. The PGA Tour recently redesigned their web site and broke the links used by the template {{PGATour player}}. I've updated the template but all the ID's used must be changed. I've created a list of the affected pages and the fix required and placed it at User:Tewapack/Sandbox5. The bot would need to go to the "External links" section of each page and replace, e.g., {{PGATour player|02/23/71}} with {{PGATour player|22371}}. I'd also appreciated a report of any failed changes. Thanks. Tewapack (talk) 21:59, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

I'll take this one. GoingBatty (talk) 03:54, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
BRFA filed at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BattyBot 15. GoingBatty (talk) 04:10, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
Just as a courtesy heads up, I also posted a notice at Template talk:PGATour player. GoingBatty (talk) 04:13, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
I've completed my first 50 edits - you can see the diffs here. GoingBatty (talk) 14:56, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
 Doing... the rest of the edits. GoingBatty (talk) 04:09, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
 Done. The only exception I couldn't resolve was on the temporarily protected article Rory McIlroy, so I posted an edit request on the talk page. GoingBatty (talk) 13:56, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
And  Done, see here. I notice that two of the refs in that article also go to pages in the same website (specifically, http://www.pgatour.com/players/02/82/37/scorecards/2009/r470.html and http://www.pgatour.com/players/r/?/02/82/37/results ) and that these are also broken, but altering them in the same way (i.e. to http://www.pgatour.com/players/28237/scorecards/2009/r470.html and http://www.pgatour.com/players/r/?/28237/results ) does not fix these. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:58, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, much appreciated. Tewapack (talk) 16:56, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Mark a lot of pages for microformatting

Could a bot be run to apply {{Start date}} to pages using {{Infobox NRHP}}? I'm envisioning the bot editing every page whose infobox has a single year in the template's |built= parameter to envelop the year in the template, similar to what was done in this diff. According to its documentation, the purpose of the template is to improve microformatting without affecting the appearance of the article. From my experience with this template, I believe that a substantial majority of the template's 40,000 transclusions will have a single date in this parameter, although some will have multiple years or a range of years, and a few will have a blank parameter or no parameter at all. In these cases, nothing should be done. Nyttend (talk) 23:37, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I support this whole-heartedly; and it could also apply to other templates, and to templates with a year/month date or a full date (see previous discussion); but breaking it into manageable chunks is a good way to get started. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:50, 31 December 2012 (UTC)
So basically if the value in |built= is a 4 digit number, encase it in {{start date}}? I can file a request for that in a few days. Legoktm (talk) 08:36, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
For the first stage, yes. The second would be where the value is only a month and year (e.g. "November 1901" convert to, e.g., {{Start date|1901|11}}. the third and final stage, full dates, is obviously more complex. A list of other affected templates is at User:Pigsonthewing/to-do#Date conversions. Note that Dates before the year 1583 AD (or after 9999) should not be converted. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:16, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
I don't fully understand the value of using the startdate template. I have twothree questions or possibly objections to starting with a bot run very quickly:
1. The startdate template could probably be applied within the NRHP infobox template. It does not need to be changed in any of the NRHP articles at all, does it? Assuming that the arguments which appear in NRHP infobox date fields, usually either of format YYYY or of format Month DD, YYYY, are acceptable to the startdate template, the startdate template can be applied by just one central modification of the NRHP infobox code.
If the startdate template is to be applied only to entries of format YYYY, I expect the wikimedia code for the NRHP infobox could handle that, as a conditional application. It would be better to do this in the infobox code, centrally, too, if only for reason of saving all those keystrokes in articles. And the unnecessary edits of new and old editors changing perfectly good info, manually. This comment applies to all the other infoboxes being mentioned above: change the code in their infobox templates, not in all of the articles using the infoboxes. --doncram 19:44, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
2. If it is to be applied by a bot to all the NRHP articles using the NRHP infobox (about 40,000), for some reason, why apply it to just the "built =" field? The built= field is actually not present in every NRHP infobox. The "added=" field is present in nearly 100% of the infoboxes, and is the date of NRHP listing. In most cases it will be filled in with a date like "January 1, 2000", but sometimes it may have just a year, for example in articles that editor Daniel Case created (he happens to think the month and day information is excessive). And also there "designated_nrhp_type = January 1, 2000", "designated_nrhp_type2 = ", "designated_nrhp_type3= ", and "designated_nrhp_type4=" fields that are date fields and that are sometimes present. If a bot is run, it should probably cover them all at once.
3. I also note that the "startdate" is confusing as a term, especially for use in the built= field for the NRHP infobox. In some cases the year-date given there is a start-and-end year-date for construction. In other cases it is a start date while there exists a later completion date, not provided in the infobox. In other cases it is the completion date, and not a start date at all. In other cases it is the date of some significant other event, and is not a built date at all. I wonder, before this is applied by a bot to many thousands of articles, could the term be changed to show something else? Could/should it be called "cssdate" instead? or "mfdate", rather than "startdate"? This has not been used in NRHP articles previously, and I for one do not appreciate its merit yet. Even if it does have merit, then perhaps it could be done better with a different name or changed in some other way to avoid a lot of future confusion.
Thanks, Nyttend, for giving notice about this at wt:NRHP#Recent modification to generator results. I'll comment there too. Perhaps this request should not be implemented without checking there for further discussion, too. --doncram 19:23, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
The previous discussion mentioned above may answer some of your questions; note that it comprised an RfC with overwhelming support. {{Start date}} currently has 104,374 transclusions (including NRHP articles); its name doesn't appear to be a problem. It cannot be applied within the Infobox's code, because of the variety of data formats used, as you mention. I have updated the Infobox's documentation to show examples of its use. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:23, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for replying. At the NRHP page discussion, you stated that you "answered these questions" here, which you did not, IMHO. The linked previous discussion does not address my 2nd and 3rd points above, at all. Partly addressing 3, you simply state that "its name doesn't appear to be a problem", but that does not fully respond to the situation of the NRHP built date, where editors are focused upon, or should be focused upon, whether a given date is a start of construction date or not. This is quite a sore point, actually, that the commonly used NRHP infobox generator puts the wrong information into infoboxes frequently at this field (some small fraction of the occasions, percentage-wise, but it has generated errors that stand in probably hundreds if not thousands of articles still out uncorrected in mainspace, and the generator is poised with similar incorrect information for many more future articles).
I see you mentioned in the previous discussion that sometimes dates in infoboxes get modifiers like "circa 1920" or get vague dates like "1920-23". These modifiers or date ranges SHOULD be implemented into the built= date in NRHP infoboxes. They are implemented into some good number, probably some few thousands of articles. Unfortunately the NRHP infobox generator commonly used, which works from a copy of the NRIS database, ignores the NRIS database field that indicates "circa" applies, so will show "1920" rather than "c.1920", which is wrong. For a building built during 1920-23, the NRIS infobox generator will put in built=1920, which is wrong. So new articles and many existing articles show assertions that are inaccurate, that are not faithful representations of the NRIS database. Applying the startdate template would make these incorrect assertions seem all the more official, and it will be unclear to editors whether and how they can put in the correctly vague information. I think they would tend to let the official-looking startdate information stand, and only perhaps in the article text state something more accurate.
On point 1., you suggest that the variety in dates is too complicated for mediawiki template software to handle. I don't know that there is much variety in dates, besides the circa and date range issues. I think is is otherwise pretty much just January 31, 2000 format or 2000 format (and not ever 31 January 2000 format), and that infobox code could handle that. Also, from the linked previous discussion, i browsed my way to WikiProject Microformats, where there is a question stated How can we use Microformats on Wikipedia? (and, more generally, in MediaWiki)? which is answered by: "It is easier to apply them to templates rather than individual pages. That also means that individual authors need not know the intricacies of microformat mark-up, only how to use the relevant template. Many of the templates on Wikipedia require minimal changes to use microformats to present their existing content with added meaning. While the functionality may already exist in the Wikipedia template, adding microformat mark-up will make that functionality available to people using the same tools they use when visiting other sites." I interpret that to mean that the Wikiproject which you founded recommends the implementation should be done in the NRHP infobox template, not in all 40,000 or so current articles.
Frankly, I think it is a bad idea to implement this microformat effort, on this particular field of the NRHP infobox. I think that waiting about a year or two would enable the NRHP wikiproject to complete articles on its 87,000 or so NRHP places, and to engage in a cleanup campaign about the accuracy of data in that built= field. I believe the provider of the NRHP infobox tool is not currently willing to make changes to prevent new bad data from being added, so the way to go is to create all the missing articles, then fix them, cutting the infobox generator out of the loop. And I see no immediate need to implement the microformatting. The disadvantages of doing mf now are that it complicates the actual development of articles and the correction of the known-to-be-frequently bad information in the built= field. It also is hardly a service to any potential users of the microformat data, to get convenient access to a field of bad data.
Could you respond to these points? About a previous RFC about the hypothetical of this bot being run having achieved a consensus, that is fine and good, but maybe the participants--none of whom were NRHPers--could not anticipate the complications coming up here. --doncram 23:14, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Issues with the generator are outwith the scope of this proposal, and this page. By "its name doesn't appear to be a problem", I mean "not a problem to the Wikipedia community. It's unlikely that the template will be renamed to satisfy some editors using one infobox, but feel free to propose that if you wish. The proposed changes in the first and second stages would not touch articles with "circa" or similar qualifiers; or hyphenated vague dates; and the "complications" you say could not have been anticipated have been. I can see no basis for your assertions about "all the more official" data, or "tend to let the official-looking startdate information stand" or "complicating the actual development of articles" - what is your evidence for them? The microformat is applied to the infobox template; this change will mark up the date within the microformat, as explained at the RfC to which I have already referred. If you think you can make the infobox handle the range of date formats used - including circa and vague dates - then by all means do so; but others so challenged have been unable to comply. To reiterate: the RfC - centrally publicised - has already decided that this work can be done. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:18, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Your declaration that it will be "not a problem to the Wikipedia community" omits that it will be, in my estimation, a problem to the NRHP editor community, of current and future editors. It will make the creation and editing of the NRHP infobox a bit more complex, for little/no gain that I can understand, while the NRHP project is right in the middle of its development (at about 40,000/87,000 articles needed).
It's fine that you see "no basis" for concern about editors being intimidated by official-looking but erroneous data. I am sorry, but I have recently been attacked for "ignorance" and worse about a subject area where I have not previously shown expertise, but I was working strictly from sources, and I believe i showed no ignorance. If those who attacked me were consistent, they should attack you personally for gross ignorance too (e.g. your question about Julian dates, below, and your using complete misnomer "HRHP" where NRHP is intended) and should ban you from this area altogether. I don't doubt your good intentions, however, just saying.
My judgment is informed by long experience with the editors of NRHP articles. New editors are quite scared of changing anything that comes from the NRHP article generator. Even very experienced editors are unduly swayed, especially if they don't have access to the NRHP nomination document that was the source for the data entry into NRIS (that was then processed further, and sometimes garbled, by the commonly used NRHP infobox generator). Even very experienced editors WITH access to the NRHP nom document are swayed. It is not a very serious error, but one logical error put in by the NRHP infobox generator is to list architectural styles erroneously as "Greek Revival, Other, Federal", where "Other" is logically out of order. The NRHP infobox generator programmer doesn't care to correct that, but rather accepts the random output of an SQL merge of data that happens to put "Other" in non-logical position. My own programming (not popularly use) corrected that with a few lines of code. A few seconds browsing of new NRHP articles today finds new Ellendale State Forest Picnic Facility, which shows "architecture=Other, Rustic", produced by a fine NRHP editor who was using the NRHP nom document as source for other material, but relied up the generator for that. There are many examples like that. I and others also went through this with the architect= field, which used to be populated with names of persons other than architects, that went straight into mainspace articles. I don't want to condemn any one editor for not exercising more judgment and for not knowing what to doubt out of the NRHP article generator's output. But, I see it with my own eyes, over thousands of articles, that more complicated, more official-looking output simply gets believed. This kind of judgment is corroborated by there being scads of attacks against me, an experienced editor, for using accurately imprecise language in NRHP articles, e.g. that all that is known about a person is that he was an architect and/or a builder, or that a given date was a built date or another date of significance, when full NRHP nomination documents are not available but an article exists already or needs to be created for some reason. I find by experience that if I put in the possibly-incorrect simpler assertions suggested by the generator, that everyone loves it. These are several kinds of evidence, or several ways of explaining that I have relevant experience and focus upon this, Pigsonthewing. --doncram 02:32, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

I have a question and a concern. The question is, does the emitted start date represent the start date of the historic place, or the start date of the construction of the historic place? The concern is that some historic places will have been built when the Julian calendar was in use. It might not be possible to assign a "built" parameter for 13 days to matter, but in cases where that is possible, it would be incorrect to emit a Gregorian date when the input date is Julian. (Emitted dates are always considered to be Gregorian.) Jc3s5h (talk) 23:40, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

You will note that the RfC and documentation for {{Start date}} both explicitly exclude Julian dates. Are there any HRHP entries with explicit Julian years? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:18, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
First, thanks Jc3s5h for being the third person to comment (Nyttend in his comment at wt:NRHP, me, then you) with assumption being that "startdate" means the start date of construction. This documents the likely confusion if this is implemented in the built= field, which is focused on a date of starting and/or completing construction usually (and otherwise is erroneous data). Pigsonthewing's proposal is to use the "startdate" template which has nothing to do with the start of anything.
Second, to answer Pigsonthewing's question, no there never have and never will be any Julian calendar dates in the NRHP infobox, ever. The NRHP listing dates in the "added=" field are all from 1966 on. Some archeological sites that are NRHP-listed may have dates appearing in a built= field that are pre-1500, but the dates given would be from the perspective of U.S. historians and officials of the 1960's and onward. --doncram 02:32, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Oppose I've raised some concerns that are not addressed. One concern, for one example, that the built= field is especially confusing, could be mitigated by applying the new template to the added= and other fields at the same time. The person who wants to run the bot does not pick up on that, and I perceive wishes to run the bot exactly as proposed, only, dammit. On those terms, and without reasonable discussion and give-and-take perhaps, well, I think it is best not to allow this bot to run. --doncram 02:32, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Your concerns have been addressed; that you don't accept the answers you have been given does not overturn a properly conducted and well supported RfC. The template should never be used in the |added= field; that's not what it's for. As for calling for people to "attack [me] personally for gross ignorance" and to "ban me from this area altogether" over a single-letter typo... Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:59, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm sorry, there is some basic miss-communication here. Is the startdate template meant to indicate start dates of things, or not? I have been understanding it not to be about the start dates of anything like construction, but rather to be a (somewhat misnamed) general date formatting that puts "microformat" into an article, so that the dates can be harvested by some external systems in the future. If it is meant to be about some kind of start date, then the "added=" field should be understood to mean the beginning of a place being NRHP-listed. For most places there is a beginning and no end; for some NRHP places there is an end by delisting sometime after a given building has been demolished or a site has otherwise lost historical integrity. But I do not understand you to want to indicate start and end dates of anything. Instead, the main difference between "startdate" vs. "enddate" templates, that I understand, is that one uses 31 January 2000 format while the other uses January 31, 2000 format, while both provide "benefit" of microformatting. I really really do not understand this bot proposal at all, based on what you say now. Could you please clarify? This is basic to any consideration here.
About calling for people to attack you that was not seriously meant. It was a comment about general stupidity going on that has nothing to do with you. I am sorry for introducing that here.
About your having responded to my concerns, you have not done so. It appears you don't understand my concerns at all, so it makes sense that you cannot respond to them (or if you do understand my concerns, please explain)). Perhaps my concerns are misplaced because of my mis-understanding what you wish to achieve. Please do explain what on earth you wish to achieve. --doncram 15:23, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
(ec) Thank you for your apology. A building constructed in, say 1715 and added to the register in 1959 has a "start" date of 1715, not 1959, just as a soldier born in in 1963 and promoted to general in 2012 has a birth date of 1963, not 2012. The building would have an "end" date if it were demolished, not delisted, the same as the general does not have a death date on retirement. The microformat emitted by the infobox describes the building, not the listing. Your understanding of the difference between {{Start date}} and {{End date}} is wrong; either can display either format of date; it is the meaning of the metadata emitted by them which differs. It is not collegial to block or object to sound and community-approved proposals on the basis that you personally do not understand them. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:39, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
You're probably going to encounter a few Julian dates for NRHP places, but (1) they're going to be rare, and (2) it won't really matter. Some places on the East Coast will have been built before 1752, when the British Empire adopted Gregorian, but since I'm asking for the bot to tag only individual year numbers, I doubt that it will have any difference. Nyttend (talk) 16:51, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Break for convenience

Stop. Think. This is a standardised thing to enable other websites to understand Wikipedia without human guidance. Doncram, consensus has supported its use, so unless you want to file a new request to get that consensus overturned, it's not helpful to object to the concept. Do you have any objections to the concept of adding this template to these dates, and/or do you believe that a bot will be unable to do it? It sounds as if you're objecting to having these dates in the templates in the first place — this information is already there, and the bot won't affect the situation. Nyttend (talk) 16:42, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Last centralized RfC concluded that microformat deployment should be on a case by case basis. The above discussion addresses such a case, so I don't see a problem with Doncram's comments. His point is valid that the same result could be achieved via infobox or MediaWiki enhancement. Except nobody is taking any steps to do so, instead converting individual article infobox fields to {{start date}}-style templates. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 16:54, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
This is not a request to deploy a new microformat, nor indeed to deploy a microformat at all. Please see the more recent RfC, mentioned twice already above, where this is made clear, and which passed with overwhelming support. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:02, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

To reiterate, and with consideration of further discussion, I continue to oppose this bot suggestion, I think for good reasons. The several-times-mentioned previous "RFC: Deploying 'Start date' template in infoboxes", seems to be about the merit of using microformats with dates. There was no discussion and no endorsement within that proposal, for applying "startdate" specifically with any type of start date, and especially nothing about NRHP-listed properties, ships, historic districts, objects, other types of items that use the NRHP infobox. I don't know where "Start dates" are relevant in wikipedia, perhaps for articles about wars or other events that actually have known start and end dates. I don't think "startdate" and "enddate" have been defined for NRHP historic districts, or buildings, or other NRHP items.

If they were to be defined, I don't think any bot should be run based off the built= field, because the contents of that field are known to be sometimes erroneous, in existing articles and likely to be erroneous in new articles that include the common NRHP infobox generator's output. It would not be putting forth WikiProject NRHP's best work, to put it mildly, for this field to be emphasized and picked up in hypothetical uses of the microformatted date information, as if this is a useful or correct date for any purpose. I read the microformat and hcard and some other articles, and see no immediate use for anyone of this. I read the template:startdate and template:enddate pages and see no explanation there for what a "start date" is supposed to mean, or for an "end date". I don't see anything useful at all about anything here, and I think it is an especially bad time to run a bot through all the WikiProject NRHP articles that somehow elevates sometimes-incorrect information that is not useful information. The costs of the bot include all the edits and clogging up of watchlists and edit histories for no gain. The costs include increasing the difficulty of editing in NRHP pages, and in overcoming natural reluctance/unsureness of editors to correct bad information that is widely present. The costs include expanding the size and extending the load time of 40,000 articles.

I doubt whether the major advocate for running this bot is aware of running controversy over the use of NRIS built date in articles for historic districts vs. buildings and some other types of listings, where one editor has been, with some justification, systematically adding and subtracting categories that address whether a listing dates from a given year or not. The categorizing of buildings "completed" by a certain date accepted by this editor is often incorrect, keying off the infobox-reported built= field, in asserting that a given property was built in a given year, when in fact frequently that was the year a building's construction was started. The editor has been simply removing date related categories for the historic district items, where in fact it could be possible and useful for date categories to be defined. Maybe advocates of microformat start and end dates could get together with category advocates, and generate microformats using the somewhat-more-verified category fields, somehow.

The very same built= date, subject of category-focused confusions, is now targeted by this bot proposal to be used as start date, when sometimes the contents appearing probably are a completion date and sometimes are a start date. I honestly don't know what date is wanted by the bot-proponent ideally, nor do I think they are aware of the various options and complications for different types of NRHP items. Again, perhaps for the NRHP wikiproject, the most meaningful start and end dates are probably the dates of listing and delisting (if it has occurred) for a given property. Or to be the beginning and end dates of the period of historical significance for the listed property. Or to be start and end dates of construction. If start and enddate were to be defined in any given way, then surely the current contents of the built= field are not correct in some/many cases.

For the bot-advocate to assert that defects of the NRHP infobox generator and all other content issues are not a subject for this page, and that some RFCs not addressing NRHP items or not addressing any concept of what start and end are supposed to mean, that these RFCs are supposed to dictate what happens now, well, let me say the advocate should not have redirected discussion to here, away from the wt:NRHP page.

I don't think the NRHP wikiproject is ready or willing to take on the burden of getting "start" and/or "enddate" information correct for the use of the startdate and endate templates. I personally see no utility for any user whatsoever of Wikipedia, and I do not want to ask my fellow NRHP wikiproject editors to take this on. I far prefer for NRHP wikiproject focus to be put onto various, more important data quality issues.

Bottomline: No matter how "start" and "end" are to be defined, and assuming there were some value to someone for having this information in microformat, it would be far better to define a new startdate= field and an enddate= field in the NRHP infobox, and to allow NRHP editors to populate that field with information that is correct for whatever definition is chosen. And, then the wikimedia coding of the NRHP infobox can handle the application of startdate and enddate templates. If the advocate of microformatting wishes to advance that usage, please make a proposal at Template talk:infobox nrhp and give notice at wt:NRHP. There certainly is no value in running a bot, IMHO. --doncram 05:15, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Just remember that there's community consensus for implementing this template for making this type of metadata across Wikipedia, and the |built= parameter is precisely what the template is meant to mark. As long as the bot runs properly (which shouldn't be too difficult to ensure), all erroneous entries will be the result of erroneous entries before the bot came along — there's an underlying issue that this bot operation won't affect. Nyttend (talk) 05:29, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
I disagree about the NRHP infobox built= parameter being what some universal "startdate" is meant to contain. According to whom? Should the startdate be the date an associated cemetery is started, before the date a given church building is begun to be built, or should it be for the beginning or end date for the completion date of the church building, or what about a further renovation date, for an article named for, and mostly about, a given a church? I see no use to a universal generic start date. Read the hcard articles, etc., those are about allowing people to grab dates about events to put into their personal calendar reminder systems. I think the concept of startdate and the concept of enddate are not defined usefully, and that should be done in the infobox if at all, and that a bot should not be run. --doncram 05:40, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
As the documentation tells you, its purpose is analogous to {{Birth date and age}} for biography articles; this is far more than personal calendar reminder systems. It's all about building the Semantic Web; computers need to have hints for understanding information that humans can readily absorb. Since a structure's "birthday" is when it was built, this is the kind of information that {{start date}} is made to accept. Regarding your modification of your comments after I responded to them: the RFC discussed what we would do with microformats projectwide, and since categories aren't microformats, they're harder for computers to understand. Meanwhile, as there's no point to a single wikiproject attempting to exempt itself from community consensus, there's no reason to have this discussion at a wikiproject talk page. When "if" has already been decided, discussions of "how" belong on the how-to page, not on an "if" page like a wikiproject's talk page. Nyttend (talk) 05:54, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
tl;dr Your lengthy and repetitive screeds, demonstrating a gross inability to grasp the content and meaning of the recent RfC, are becoming disruptive. An uninvolved editor should please collapse them. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:57, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
I really hate your invoking that you did not and will not read what another editor taking the time to respond to you and your views has to say. One summary of my reaction is that I resent and oppose the probable large time costs that the proposed changes will cause for me and NRHP editors. The time it would take you to read and consider arguments here is incomparable to the time and edits and discussion that this ill-thought-out proposal will cost. --doncram 17:49, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Start date for churches? There are many thousands of churches listed on the NRHP (see for example List of Presbyterian churches in the United States) and also a handful of historic business names, where the article title means both the church as congregation (or business as an ongoing concern) and one or several buildings that have been referred to as the same name. Should "start date" mean the frequently-known-and-reported founding date of the church or business in such cases? Or should it be the start or completion date for construction of just the NRHP-listed one of a church's buildings, perhaps preceded or followed by other buildings used by the church through its history, no matter whether the current church building is different and has longer association with the church? That is best considered by NRHP editors, elsewhere, if they were motivated to take on an initiative to create a meaningful startdate in their articles. I don't think the idea of startdate and enddate for NRHP articles has been adequately considered for a bot to be run now.

If the concern is that microformatting is somehow wonderful and imperative, and it is not about imposing a "start date" concept unnaturally, how about creating a new equivalent template "built-date" and applying that (best done within NRHP infobox coding, not by a bot)? That avoids the unnecessary, not-helpful question of what on earth a start-date is supposed to mean. I would not oppose that, despite current contents of built= field often being invalid. That would put appropriate pressure on NRHP editors to improve data quality, on a topic that they already do accept that it needs to be done. --doncram 17:49, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Light stations, schools, Masonic lodges, churches, other wikiprojects and article types Some hundreds of NRHPs are light stations, many hundreds are schools, a few hundred are Masonic lodge buildings, several thousands are Christian churches, other items that also can have a founding date or prior constructed versions than the NRHP-listed structure(s) or objects. There is a WikiProject Lighthouses and a WikiProject Schools and a WikiProject Freemasonry and a WikiProject Christianity and other Wikiprojects that should probably have say, about what the meaning of "start date" should be for those various types of articles. The NRHP listing is secondary for most of these. For example there are many places named Masonic Lodge, where there is just one article for the local chapter/organization and for its building (or one of its historic buildings). To say start date for the lodge is the construction start or construction end date for its former building that happens to be NRHP-listed, while the lodge was founded earlier and perhaps has no continuing presence at that NRHP building, would probably not be right. Again I think there is not adequate understanding of the variety of articles touched by the NRHP project here, and hence not adequate understanding that "start date" is not ready to be bot-imposed now, IMHO. --doncram 20:39, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

You know, maybe the rest of us should stop thinking that we know anything about how "start dates" or any other dates work in terms of buildings. Apparently you're the only one around here who has the final answer on this stuff. Looking at Basilica of Saint Mary (Minneapolis), I'm probably too dense to figure out whether the start date is 1871 (when the Church of the Immaculate Conception was established), 1903 (when John Ireland announced construction of a new church), 1907 (when ground was broken for the foundation), 1908 (when the cornerstone was laid), 1913 (when the civil dedication was held), 1914 (when the first Mass was held there), or 1925 (when the interior decoration was completed). Or maybe the "start date" is 1926, when it was named a basilica. Yeah, there's text in the article that explains all of those dates, thanks to other editors doing research, but I'll never figure it out on my own. --Elkman (Elkspeak) 21:01, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
I get that you mean to use sarcasm to criticize me personally in some way here. I don't get what your criticism is, though, sorry.
I didn't ever say I wanted to define what a "start date" should mean for a case like that. Do you have some belief yourself, which of those dates should be the "start date"? The bot request assumed that what appears in the built= field of the infobox is what must be taken as the start date. I think the bot request should not be run, because a) you and me and others have not defined what date should be the "start date" for lots of situations like this one, and b) you and me and others probably don't care to bother with such a discussion. I don't think defining a "Start date" in 40,000 NRHP articles has any utility to anyone, so far. The bot is certainly not going to read that article and come to some well thought out conclusion, that's for sure. --doncram 23:58, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Where are we with this, now? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:52, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Reboot

Legoktm has indicated on his talk page that he's no longer available to undertake this task. Could we have another volunteer, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:38, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

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