This page describes an ongoing series of edits made by User:BrownHairedGirl, as a cleanup exercise. This follows on from an RFC in late 2018 which changed the WP:NC-GAL convention for election and referendum names from "Foo election, YYYY" to "YYYY Foo election".
This brings the election/referendum naming format in line with the convention for other topics: WP:NCEVENTS. I weakly opposed the change (largely because of the disruption it would cause), but I accept the clear consensus to proceed with the renaming. These edits help to implement that consensus.
This is a one-off change, which will:
After a lot of experimenting, I found a way of doing this which allows nearly all the "Foo election, YYYY" links on any given page to be changed in a single edit. This means much less impact on watchlists than doing each type of election as a separate series of edits.
These edits are performed using WP:AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) with a custom module. (See below: #Custom module).
They replace each
wikilink of the form Foo election, YYYY
or Foo election YYYY
with one of the form YYYY Foo election
, with some exceptions.
The edit summary displays the links changed, insofar as AWB's short limit on edit summaries allows (see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T199347). This allows tracking and fixing of the v small minority of cases where a bluelink is replaced by a redlink.
This run of edits has three primary purposes:
[[Foo election, YYYY]]
. It is much more readable to have [[YYYY Foo election]]
.[[Foo election, YYYY|YYYY Foo election]]
. The wikicode is much more readable as [[YYYY Foo election]]
.When I started on this, I was initially doing a very restricted set of use cases: e.g. only elections to to the European Parliament. But the more examples I encountered, the more I realised that there was no advantage in doing only a sub-set, when each edit could resolve a much wider set of issues in one pass.
So the effect of what I am doing is to fix a set of redirects, some of which may be broken, but where identifying only the broken ones is massively more work than just standardising the lot. AWB just handles text patterns, and can't identify whether a link is red, so unless someone wants to handcode a whole bot which does squillions of system calls to identify only redlinks, this is the neatest way of doing it.
There are some changes (
example) of the form [[Foo election, YYYY|alias]]
to [[YYYY Foo election|alias]]
. This is a mild violation of
WP:NOTBROKEN but harmless, and it's quicker to action the change mechanically (albeit unnecessarily) than to spend time calculating whether it would be redundant.
Edits are done using Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) with a custom module (see WP:AutoWikiBrowser/Custom Modules) which generates a custom edit summary. The code of my module is at User:BrownHairedGirl/Election links cleanup/AWB custom module.
The design goals of the module were to:
Foo election, YYYY
or Foo election YYYY
with a link of the form YYYY Foo election
Candidates in the Foo election, YYYY
should not be changed to YYYY Candidates in the Foo election
.Most of this has been achieved.
Foo election, Monthname YYYY
or Foo election Monthname YYYY
with a link of the form Monthname YYYY Foo election
Foo election, June–July 1907
or Foo election, 1286–1287
United States presidential election, 2012 in Texas
and will not convert it to 2012 United States presidential election in Texas(Boundary|list|in the|at the|elected|returned|results?|candidates?|selection|selected|polls?|polling|opinion|debates?)
This page describes an ongoing series of edits made by User:BrownHairedGirl, as a cleanup exercise. This follows on from an RFC in late 2018 which changed the WP:NC-GAL convention for election and referendum names from "Foo election, YYYY" to "YYYY Foo election".
This brings the election/referendum naming format in line with the convention for other topics: WP:NCEVENTS. I weakly opposed the change (largely because of the disruption it would cause), but I accept the clear consensus to proceed with the renaming. These edits help to implement that consensus.
This is a one-off change, which will:
After a lot of experimenting, I found a way of doing this which allows nearly all the "Foo election, YYYY" links on any given page to be changed in a single edit. This means much less impact on watchlists than doing each type of election as a separate series of edits.
These edits are performed using WP:AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) with a custom module. (See below: #Custom module).
They replace each
wikilink of the form Foo election, YYYY
or Foo election YYYY
with one of the form YYYY Foo election
, with some exceptions.
The edit summary displays the links changed, insofar as AWB's short limit on edit summaries allows (see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T199347). This allows tracking and fixing of the v small minority of cases where a bluelink is replaced by a redlink.
This run of edits has three primary purposes:
[[Foo election, YYYY]]
. It is much more readable to have [[YYYY Foo election]]
.[[Foo election, YYYY|YYYY Foo election]]
. The wikicode is much more readable as [[YYYY Foo election]]
.When I started on this, I was initially doing a very restricted set of use cases: e.g. only elections to to the European Parliament. But the more examples I encountered, the more I realised that there was no advantage in doing only a sub-set, when each edit could resolve a much wider set of issues in one pass.
So the effect of what I am doing is to fix a set of redirects, some of which may be broken, but where identifying only the broken ones is massively more work than just standardising the lot. AWB just handles text patterns, and can't identify whether a link is red, so unless someone wants to handcode a whole bot which does squillions of system calls to identify only redlinks, this is the neatest way of doing it.
There are some changes (
example) of the form [[Foo election, YYYY|alias]]
to [[YYYY Foo election|alias]]
. This is a mild violation of
WP:NOTBROKEN but harmless, and it's quicker to action the change mechanically (albeit unnecessarily) than to spend time calculating whether it would be redundant.
Edits are done using Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) with a custom module (see WP:AutoWikiBrowser/Custom Modules) which generates a custom edit summary. The code of my module is at User:BrownHairedGirl/Election links cleanup/AWB custom module.
The design goals of the module were to:
Foo election, YYYY
or Foo election YYYY
with a link of the form YYYY Foo election
Candidates in the Foo election, YYYY
should not be changed to YYYY Candidates in the Foo election
.Most of this has been achieved.
Foo election, Monthname YYYY
or Foo election Monthname YYYY
with a link of the form Monthname YYYY Foo election
Foo election, June–July 1907
or Foo election, 1286–1287
United States presidential election, 2012 in Texas
and will not convert it to 2012 United States presidential election in Texas(Boundary|list|in the|at the|elected|returned|results?|candidates?|selection|selected|polls?|polling|opinion|debates?)