Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PlacenamesBot

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was

Denied.

PlacenamesBot

Operator: Bart133 ^{t c @ How's my driving?}

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic, with some supervision

Programming Language(s): AutoWikiBrowser

Function Summary: Adding diacritics to place names. For example, replacing Timisoara with Timişoara.

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Daily to weekly

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): No

Function Details: Replacing place names without diacritics by adding the diacritic, when the name has diacritics in English. What names it'll replace will be determined by me.

Discussion

This could run into problems like there are with spell checking bots. What protections are in place to prevent this from being an issue? --T-rex 23:20, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If it only corrects spelling in normal text, there shouldn't be a problem. I can't think of any case when the title without diacritics would be correct in mainspace, except in links, images, templates and that stuff, which can be skipped. Bart133 ^{t c @ How's my driving?} 02:31, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I generally don't follow all the lame MoS drama, but I thought diacritics were fairly controversial? Or is that only in titles? (There was some massive dispute over tennis articles I think a while back) Mr.Z-man 01:12, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think it was only in titles. I think I remember the tennis dispute (If I remember correctly, there've been about twelve different titles for Novak Djokovic), but I don't know of any MoS issues with adding diacritics in the main body of an article. Bart133 ^{t c @ How's my driving?} 02:31, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Direct quotes and other 'intentional' misspellings are common in an encyclopedia. What are the protections against changing things like this? Your response earlier is that it will only change "normal" text. Does that mean everything outside of quotation marks, outside of <blockquote>, and outside of templates like {{quote}}? We've run into this issue in a variety of circumstances with spell checking bots and unit changing bots. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:34, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, there are many problems here. There are many cases where an article will legitimately want to use non-diacritic versions of names, and a bot can't tell when those are. Bots can't tell when there's a direct quote. Bots can't easily tell when the article says something like "sometimes written Furth" or "although listed in this directory as Furth", etc. I'm afraid this runs into the same problems spellcheck bots do. It's fine to make these changes, supervised, in AWB without a bot account though. – Quadell ^(talk) 20:29, 15 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Denied.

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.