This is a summary of the various fixes DrilBot makes. The edit summary field isn't long enough to provide a complete description, so it links here for additional information.
Most of DrilBot's major changes have their own section, below. However, it also applies most of
AutoWikiBrowser's
general fixes (other than a few that are unstable for bot use, e.g. most sort key additions). It also changes "/>
to " />
(note the space) in calls to named references; this is more "standard" syntax, as it is used at
WP:REFNAME. It also, IMO, looks better.
DrilBot removes diacritics from the DEFAULTSORT, or adding a DEFAULTSORT without diacritics if there isn't one and the title has diacritics. This helps with sorting in categories; an article that starts with an "á"; in the DEFAULTSORT is listed after those that start with "Z", for example, so removing the diacritic properly sorts it with the "A"s.
DrilBot also removes whitespace from the start of DEFAULTSORTs, as this typically makes the article sort incorrectly.
DrilBot removes duplicate categories. That is, if an article has the same category more than once and they have the same sort keys, DrilBot will remove the redundant ones. These duplicate categories aren't needed.
If an article contains multiple <ref> tags (and their corresponding closing tags) which contain identical content, DrilBot will try to determine a good name for the reference and merge them together. Doing this saves space when reading the article (by reducing the number of separate instances of a reference that there are), and often also reduces the page's actual size and increases readability in edit mode (by not having citation content repeated over and over). See
WP:REFNAME for details on this "name" feature. When DrilBot is specifically looking for these redundancies on order to fix them, it will skip pages which contains the following
regular expression: /ibid\.?|(op|loc)\.?\scit\.?/gi
. This should catch articles where citation order matters so that they aren't changed, by finding things like
ibid. and
op. cit.. If there is a similar expression which is not generated with the RegEx, please let me know at
User talk:Drilnoth and I'll add it (if it is a very commonly used string, instead report it at
User talk:DrilBot to shut off the bot, too).
DrilBot tries to "guess" an appropriate name for the "name" attribute. If it can't figure one out, it uses a "generic" name like "ReferenceA", which should be renamed by hand. (In my opinion, renaming an undescriptive name is much easier than doing the whole reference merge, anyway).
DrilBot removes uneeded <br> and <br /> tags, usually those located in bulleted lists. The list syntax automatically adds line breaks, so these tags have no effect and can usually be removed.
If all of an article's headers are of level three or lower, DrilBot raises all headers by 1. In addition, when only "common" section headers are level 2 (e.g., "References" or "See also"), all other headers above them are increased by 1 level. It should normally skip disambiguation pages when doing so. It also fixes some other
DrilBot simplifies link syntax by:
DrilBot removes links to the current article. For example, in the article Barack Obama, the text "[[Barack Obama]]" would be converted to simply "Barack Obama", but it wouldn't change "[[President of the United States]]" to "President of the United States". "Selflinks" like these are displayed in articles as bold text. This is almost always undesirable... italics should be used only for the following (per WP:MOSBOLD):
“ | Boldface is used to separate the article name from ordinary text. It is typically used in the first paragraph of an article, used with proper names and common terms for the article topic, including any
synonyms and
acronyms. Do this only for the first occurrence of the term; for instance, you should avoid using boldface in both the
lead section and the caption of the lead image.
... Use boldface in the remainder of the article only for a few special uses:
|
” |
|this album=
and |this single=
parameters of the {{
Infobox album}} and {{
Infobox single}} templates, respectively, then the selflink is instead converted to being actual bold text, using three apostraphes rather than link brackets.
DrilBot moves interwiki and category links to their proper locations at the end of the article. These should be in the following order at the end of the article: Categories, stub tags, interwikis. See Wikipedia:Layout for details.
Note that unless DrilBot is specifically looking for articles with this error, it does not make this change because interwiki links are also sorted alphabetically at the same time. Having this activated, DrilBot may make essentially useless edits to simply sort interwikis.
DrilBot will attempt to add proper opening and closing brackets for templates missing them. It also replaced {{ fact}} with {{ citation needed}}, although this isn't a primary function and isn't usually the only edit that it makes to an article.
DrilBot removes Unicode control characters from articles. These invisible characters are usually not needed and can cause some problems.
This is a summary of the various fixes DrilBot makes. The edit summary field isn't long enough to provide a complete description, so it links here for additional information.
Most of DrilBot's major changes have their own section, below. However, it also applies most of
AutoWikiBrowser's
general fixes (other than a few that are unstable for bot use, e.g. most sort key additions). It also changes "/>
to " />
(note the space) in calls to named references; this is more "standard" syntax, as it is used at
WP:REFNAME. It also, IMO, looks better.
DrilBot removes diacritics from the DEFAULTSORT, or adding a DEFAULTSORT without diacritics if there isn't one and the title has diacritics. This helps with sorting in categories; an article that starts with an "á"; in the DEFAULTSORT is listed after those that start with "Z", for example, so removing the diacritic properly sorts it with the "A"s.
DrilBot also removes whitespace from the start of DEFAULTSORTs, as this typically makes the article sort incorrectly.
DrilBot removes duplicate categories. That is, if an article has the same category more than once and they have the same sort keys, DrilBot will remove the redundant ones. These duplicate categories aren't needed.
If an article contains multiple <ref> tags (and their corresponding closing tags) which contain identical content, DrilBot will try to determine a good name for the reference and merge them together. Doing this saves space when reading the article (by reducing the number of separate instances of a reference that there are), and often also reduces the page's actual size and increases readability in edit mode (by not having citation content repeated over and over). See
WP:REFNAME for details on this "name" feature. When DrilBot is specifically looking for these redundancies on order to fix them, it will skip pages which contains the following
regular expression: /ibid\.?|(op|loc)\.?\scit\.?/gi
. This should catch articles where citation order matters so that they aren't changed, by finding things like
ibid. and
op. cit.. If there is a similar expression which is not generated with the RegEx, please let me know at
User talk:Drilnoth and I'll add it (if it is a very commonly used string, instead report it at
User talk:DrilBot to shut off the bot, too).
DrilBot tries to "guess" an appropriate name for the "name" attribute. If it can't figure one out, it uses a "generic" name like "ReferenceA", which should be renamed by hand. (In my opinion, renaming an undescriptive name is much easier than doing the whole reference merge, anyway).
DrilBot removes uneeded <br> and <br /> tags, usually those located in bulleted lists. The list syntax automatically adds line breaks, so these tags have no effect and can usually be removed.
If all of an article's headers are of level three or lower, DrilBot raises all headers by 1. In addition, when only "common" section headers are level 2 (e.g., "References" or "See also"), all other headers above them are increased by 1 level. It should normally skip disambiguation pages when doing so. It also fixes some other
DrilBot simplifies link syntax by:
DrilBot removes links to the current article. For example, in the article Barack Obama, the text "[[Barack Obama]]" would be converted to simply "Barack Obama", but it wouldn't change "[[President of the United States]]" to "President of the United States". "Selflinks" like these are displayed in articles as bold text. This is almost always undesirable... italics should be used only for the following (per WP:MOSBOLD):
“ | Boldface is used to separate the article name from ordinary text. It is typically used in the first paragraph of an article, used with proper names and common terms for the article topic, including any
synonyms and
acronyms. Do this only for the first occurrence of the term; for instance, you should avoid using boldface in both the
lead section and the caption of the lead image.
... Use boldface in the remainder of the article only for a few special uses:
|
” |
|this album=
and |this single=
parameters of the {{
Infobox album}} and {{
Infobox single}} templates, respectively, then the selflink is instead converted to being actual bold text, using three apostraphes rather than link brackets.
DrilBot moves interwiki and category links to their proper locations at the end of the article. These should be in the following order at the end of the article: Categories, stub tags, interwikis. See Wikipedia:Layout for details.
Note that unless DrilBot is specifically looking for articles with this error, it does not make this change because interwiki links are also sorted alphabetically at the same time. Having this activated, DrilBot may make essentially useless edits to simply sort interwikis.
DrilBot will attempt to add proper opening and closing brackets for templates missing them. It also replaced {{ fact}} with {{ citation needed}}, although this isn't a primary function and isn't usually the only edit that it makes to an article.
DrilBot removes Unicode control characters from articles. These invisible characters are usually not needed and can cause some problems.