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Could somebody insert {{mobile IP|[[Vodafone]] UK (212.183.128.0/20)}} to the top of any existing user_talk: in the aforementioned range? Of course, if it is not already there, like in user talk:212.183.140.15. I hoped to do it manually, but became discouraged when looked on Special:PrefixIndex/user talk:212.183.128.

It would be especially fine if the bot replaces all alternative templates such as {{ shared IP}} or {{ dynamic IP}}. Incnis Mrsi ( talk) 16:22, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure this is easily doable in WP:AWB... If I could figure out how to load that list of talk pages... Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 17:50, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

 Doing... Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 17:52, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

 Done and removed the now obsolete templates. Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 18:15, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, a good man… but a /20 consists of 2¹² IPs, not 2⁸. I do not ask you for all remaining 3840 user_talk:s up to 212.183.143.255, but 64 IPs 212.183.140.0–63 are badly needed. Incnis Mrsi ( talk) 18:41, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Oops, well I can do Special:PrefixIndex/user_talk:212.183.140 (If I've understood you fully this time) tomorrow, manually if that needs doing asap. But I now agree that it probably is a good idea for a bot to get the rest, the BAG request could possibly be left partly open so it had permission to bulk tag other IP sets in the future. I don't really have the technical skills to get a bot to 100% remove the extra templates so I'll leave that to someone else. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk • contribs) 19:27, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I think a bot that messaged a user when they added a typo to a page would be a good idea and help nip a lot of typos in the bud. This would work similar to how BracketBot (by @ A930913:) does now, posting a message to user's talk page with a link to their edit and a snapshot of all typos on the page. Potentially some typos would be omitted by the bot, particularly those with a high chance of being a false-positive. Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 14:46, 28 July 2013 (UTC) The message added to the user's talk page should also explain how to use templates such as {{ Typo}}, {{ Not a typo}}, {{ As written}} etc. to reduce false positive in the future. Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 14:52, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't think this is a good idea. I think this should get more community input before proceeding.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 15:13, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@ Cyberpower: What specifically do you think isn't good about it? I agree more community input would be good/needed, where do you suggest is appropriate? Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 15:44, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

If this was to go forward, I suggest an opt-in trial period first, which should help determine the ratio of good notices versus false positives. GoingBatty ( talk) 15:46, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, an opt-in would be a good idea to asses the potential for useless false positives, it would also be useful to refine the 'blacklist' of typos the bot doesn't check for. I'm thinking of the list of typos at WP:AWB/T, there is definitely a big variation in the amount of false-positives each rule generates. Is there any way to generate statistics of false positive rates for the rules in that list? Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 15:59, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I would think this would be interesting for article space, but not for talk pages. What about other namespaces? GoingBatty ( talk) 16:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I was only really thinking about the article space, talk space would be a huge job and would probably just seem condescending. Portal and Book namespaces make sense to me, and possibly User (probably as opt-in only though), none of the others really make sense to me. Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 16:15, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Let me tell my opinion as a person who has many years of experience in correcting spelling mistakes by bot in Hungarian Wikipedia. (See this page to learn what kind of experience I speak about.) I may seem unconstructive but the best thing is to realize that this task is not worth the effort. Either you include such a small set of typos that the project will be ridiculous, or it will be slower and slower and soon it won't be able to follow the flow of new edits. On the other side, as you add newer typos to the same bot, likeliness of false positives will increase. I began with 2 fixes (small packages containing the pattern of the known typical mistakes), and now I have several dozens of them which are run separately and I always make a lot of experiments to invent new ones. It's not so simple. Bináris ( talk) 20:13, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Could some respond at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Theo's Little Bot 24, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:05, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

This isn't the place to ask for BAG attention, but a place to request users to write bots. You want WT:BAG.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 15:10, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Noted. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:32, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

A bot is needed to make a list of all articles in the category Minor planets that are just like 11451_Aarongolden in that they don't have enough in them to pass WP:NASTRO. Also, you might want to tag each one with some sort of appropriate tag that you judge appropriate or helpful in terms of keeping track of them or whatever. You be the judge; just don't delete them or anything like that, just yet.

Please give the list a descriptive title with a date, such as "Minor Planet articles that might fail NASTRO - Phase One" with the date the list was completed.

To explain, at the moment, this is just to know how many such articles there still are, despite earlier efforts, so we can know the size of the situation and discuss what to do, if anything, with the articles. Later, if we decide to pursue it, WP:NASTRO requires a multi-step "good faith effort" to establish notability that you can read about there if you wish, but if that fails, NASTRO asks that they be converted into redirects to the List of minor planets and the info in the articles transfered there and so on - suffice it to say that it looks like a big job, so let's not get ahead of ourselves. I just offer this second paragraph in case you want to know the reason for this request.

If you need/want more information or more specific instructions or something, please do ask. Chrisrus ( talk) 04:44, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

@ Chrisrus: How is the robot to determine if a given article is notable? You'll need to be very specific; bots can't work magic, and need detailed parameters and constraints. Thanks, Theopolisme ( talk) 04:51, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your help! How about this: Like 11451_Aarongolden, the article has no references, and contains no more text than "(name of object) is a (type of object) discovered on (date) by (discover(s)) at (place)". They may or may not have other stuff such as an infobox, navigators, categories, and so on; i.e.: nothing that would establish notability. What do you think, enough specificity to be doable? Chrisrus ( talk) 05:45, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

So, for each article in Category:Minor planets or one of its subcategories, if

• the article does not contain the string <ref
• the article's body text only contains only one sentence

list that article at User:Theo's Little Bot/Minor planets.

Is this sufficient? While it may have some false positives, I think this is better than trying to match a specific sentence, which is a tricky thing to do. Thoughts? Theopolisme ( talk) 06:08, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

If it contains no references and only one sentence, how realistic is the risk that we get a false positive and the article actually does contain proof of its own notability, and is therefore a false positive? If an article has no references and only one sentence, while it might still be notable (as per NASTO's definition), how it could establish that notability internally itself as it stands? Chrisrus ( talk) 06:26, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I meant false positives versus the "(name of object) is a (type of object) discovered on (date) by (discover(s)) at (place)" that you said earlier, which is obviously a bit more specific. However, you know the contents of the category much better than me! :) Theopolisme ( talk) 06:31, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Ok. Let's say 1) only one sentence and 2) no references. Therefore, no risk of accidently including any that have, umm, let's coin a term, say "internally established notability". How's that? Chrisrus ( talk) 06:37, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

You might want to look at those articles with {{ Infobox astro object}} or {{ Infobox planet}} tagged with {{ Notability}} (which should be {{ Notability|Astro}}). GoingBatty ( talk) 13:59, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

The bot is generating a list now; be forewarned that it might take a while. Theopolisme ( talk) 19:47, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Great news! Thank you so much.

While we're waiting, I've been thinking: last time we tried this, we later wished we'd started with a good naming and placing and annotating system for the evolving lists.

1. We should have called the first list something like "2013 Minor Planet Project: List #1" or "Phase one" or "part one" or something, you be the judge. The point is, the first part of the name will stay the same throughout the entire project should there be additions or subractions later, each further iteration is given a version number.
2. And also please do put right up front a sentence or table or whatever explaining what exactly has been done: a description of the work, when, by whom, and with what tools. You might want to put it in chart form so the next botsman can just fill out the next line. You be the judge.
3. Also, can we keep it on a neutral place, like a botreq project page? Last time the location of the lists were kept on each botsman's user pages and such and there were problems because of that putting the situation back together jumping around from place to place keeping track of what happened. I trust your judgment as to exactly where, but the general idea is keep it somewhere neutral and permanent.

Chrisrus ( talk) 02:18, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry my delayed response; somehow I missed your message. (An aside: it looks like the script was getting confused, so I've had to restart it--results will take another day or so). Hmm, a botreq project page? What exactly do you mean by that? Theopolisme ( talk) 02:06, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

@ Chrisrus: The task has been completed and the list has been generated at User:Theo's Little Bot/Minor planets (around 3.2K articles met the criteria). I can write details about what I did specifically (as well as link to the source code) wherever you'd like me to--just tell me where! Theopolisme ( talk) 02:16, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

You have my most sincere gratitude in abundance. I will look at it and discuss with you more about the whole placement, naming, and annotating and so on, but for the moment I'd just like to take this moment to celebrate this milestone and give it a good looking and figure out what to do next. Chrisrus ( talk) 02:53, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

To answer your question "What exactly do you mean by that?"; right now, it's housed on an extension of your personal user page. The next iteration might be by another botsman, and will be on his talk page extension, and so on. It gets messy. Couldn't we put it in some one neutral place where it can stay, perminently, no matter who or how many more people work on it? I just made up the idea of a botreq project page, just to give you an idea of the type of place I was thinking about. Chrisrus ( talk) 03:41, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

@ Chrisrus: I have created Wikipedia:Minor planet articles that might fail NASTRO, is this okay? Your assistance in writing the copy and filling in the details would be much appreciated. Theopolisme ( talk) 04:16, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

That's a perfect place for it! Thanks again. I'm working on it now. Chrisrus ( talk) 05:22, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Uh-oh. I noticed some problems. The second one, 2984 Chaucer, has two sentences. Also, there are some doubles and other multiples. For example, 1486 Marilyn appears five times. Chrisrus ( talk) 05:27, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Let's continue this at Wikipedia talk:Minor planet articles that might fail NASTRO. Theopolisme ( talk) 05:35, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

really would be nice to have a bot to update Wikipedia:Peer review/backlog/items automatically, rather than relying upon editors to do it. perhaps there is already a bot for backlogs that can merely have that page added to it's tasks.... -- Aunva6 ^{talk - contribs} 18:59, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Over at Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard we have accrued an ad-hock combination of scripts and templates, assisted by EarwigBot and MiszaBot. In particular, we seem to be asking The Earwig for a lot. He has been very responsive and has been great about our constant stream of requests, but rather than dumping more and more on him I am wondering whether someone who is really good at automation has the time and inclination to do a proper job of re-engineering all of our DRN automation tools from top to bottom. If we manage to get a smooth-running system working, other noticeboards might be interested in using the same system. Is anyone interested in working on this? -- Guy Macon ( talk) 06:59, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

@ Guy Macon: Let me finish out my 2 active bot requests (and possibly have a mini-vactation), and then I'll put an automation/bot-er hat on and sit down with the users to hash out requirements for the DRN process improvements. Hasteur ( talk) 16:53, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

@ Hasteur: Thanks! Among other issues, here is a taste of the things I have been manually repairing: [1] [2] [3] [4] :( -- Guy Macon ( talk) 23:12, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

A bot is needed to perform the good faith effort to establish notability specified in the "Dealing with minor planets" section of NASTRO: Wikipedia:NASTRO#Dealing_with_minor_planets Here is the list: Wikipedia:Minor_planet_articles_that_might_fail_NASTRO. The bot should add to that list how many, if any, hits the name of the object gets on that database NASTRO specifies.

Thank you for your kind attention to this matter. Chrisrus ( talk) 04:12, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, while going through many of the medical stubs, I encountered a lot of stubs (and some other articles) which have been turned into redirects and are still classified in the assessment (WPMED) on their talkpage as an article. Could a bot set the class to redirect in those articles and remove any importance rating? -- WS ( talk) 14:27, 8 August 2013 (UTC) And, as a secondary request, would it be possible to find all articles which have a Infobox disease, Infobox symptom, Interventions infobox or Diagnostic infobox and tag them with WPMED if not already done? -- WS ( talk) 11:19, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

For some time now, I've been doing this manually, as I edited templates or their documentation, but I've hardly scratched the surface. Can someone assist, please?

The process is:

1. For each page in the Template: namespace, say Template:Foo
2. if Template talk:Foo exists
3. and if Template:Foo/doc exists
4. and if Template talk:Foo/doc DOES NOT exist
5. then create Template talk:Foo/doc as a redirect to Template talk:Foo

We should also so the same thing for /sandbox and /testcases and other subpages' talk pages.

This prevents fragmentation of discussion between the various talk pages; particularly as documentation pages seem to be under-watched. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:35, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Would this task be a one time thing, or would a bot be doing this at a scheduled interval? I'm interested in creating a bot for this task and have calculated that this task would create 21257 redirects. Blake305 ( talk) 01:15, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. I had envisaged a one-time job, but now that you mention it, I suppose it could afterwards be done as a clean-up task, either by a stand-alone bot or one of those that regularly wields the mop already. Is your figure just for /doc pages, or have you included /sandbox and /testcase pages? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:10, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

This number doesn't include /sandbox and /testcase. With /sandbox and /testcase, the number is 24374. How often do you think this bot should run after its initial cleanup? Perhaps it should be queued by a human a few times a year, or maybe once a month? Blake305 ( talk) 20:26, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I have narrowed down the criteria for my code and have found the exact number to be 15422. The redirects that the bot will make are listed at User:Blake305/redirects1 and User:Blake305/redirects2 Blake305 ( talk) 21:23, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

That's good, thank you. I'd suggest monthly, but I'm not troubled if others disagree. Let's do it! Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:37, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/BlakesBot Blake305 ( talk) 23:01, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Over the past several months, those of us working in WP:SPI have confirmed a whole raft of related paid-editor sockpuppets — over 300 so far, according to SPI reports, and that's probably the tip of the iceberg.

These socks all have a similar editing pattern: make some minor random edits to get autoconfirmed status, sleep for a while, maybe a month or two, and then build a seemingly well-referenced but often-promotional article in their sandbox, which they then move to main space. The identity of the company creating these socks is known but I won't reveal it here.

Right now we're in whack-a-mole mode. The socks aren't identified until they actually post an article into main space and a patroller familiar with the SPI case notices the pattern and reports it.

Therefore, it would be really useful if there were a bot that maintained a page that listed new sandbox creations. Such a list would be most useful if it showed the date of creation, link to the sandbox, and a snippet of the lead sentence.

Patrollers could then more easily report potential socks in advance to SPI, and a checkuser could verify them and block them, before the material goes to main space.

A bot maintaining such a page would help us get a jump on this army of socks, thereby denying them their revenue and perhaps, eventually, convincing this company to work with the community rather than resort to block evasion and other tactics. ~ Amatulić ( talk) 23:03, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

I've been participating in that SPI, and Amatulić invited me to comment. I've noticed that these hired writers have changed their behavior in the last few weeks as they've come under greater scrutiny. If this bot proves effective, they are likely to stop using sandboxes in user space. I've already noticed some drafts by them in Articles for Creation. That said, I do think the bot as proposed would be a useful tool against these contributors. If it would also monitor Articles for Creation, the Incubator, user pages that are not sandboxes, pages created directly in article space, and talk pages, there wouldn't be a way to avoid it...I think. That would be a lot of material to wade through. I don't know how to code this, but I have a partial list of Morning277 clients, and if the bot could highlight pages that mention those clients, it would be especially helpful. Another possibility would be to make an edit filter. — rybec 23:53, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

I have some questions about this case, not relevant here, Where is the main discussion taking place? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:50, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

At WP:SPI, mostly. See your email. ~ Amatulić ( talk) 16:39, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Received, thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:17, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Rybec: Actually WP:AFC is the place where editors with a conflict of interest should go. We routinely hard-block new accounts with company names that put an article in main space, but we hold back on blocking if their first edits are to AFC. I have no problem with this company dumping their article drafts at AFC for others to review. Occasionally a COI editor actually writes a good article. This particular sockmaster has created hundreds of socks involving a lot of people, some are better editors than others, and some are capable of creating good content with encyclopedic value. The bulk of it, however, is promotional fluff, and WP:AFC can put brakes on that pretty effectively, if the folks working at AFC are vigilant. ~ Amatulić ( talk) 16:44, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

That's the kind of discussion I was hoping to have elsewhere. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:17, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Well, in any case, if a bot as proposed helps us help convince them to move their operations to WP:AFC, then it would be beneficial. ~ Amatulić ( talk) 17:25, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Instance of {{ Infobox Korean name}} which are underneath a biographical infobox (for example {{ Infobox person}}) need, where possible to be made a module of that infobox, as in this edit. I'm not asking for anyone to start work immediately, but - so that I can draw up a plan and get consensus - can anyone ease advise whether that's something it's likely at a bot could do, or would there be too many false positives? Could we perhaps work on the basis of proximity? Say, "if there is no subheading between them, make the edit"? Or "If nothing but white space separates them"?

Also, would it be possible, please, for someone to draw up a list of articles which use both of the infoboxes named above? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:46, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Apparently, there are 709: User:Pigsonthewing/Korean names. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:58, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Hello, I'm Castigonia, and I want to make a bot request. The reason I would want to ever make a bot is because I would want to contribute to Wikipedia and any other "Wikis" as much as possible, but may not be able to do so (such as sleeping, vacation, school, etc.).

If this request was accepted, I would follow the instructions word-by-word and make a bot that would make major contributions. It would make accomplishments to Wikipedia that would make it a better encyclopedia. It would make accomplishments to other wikis and make them better as well. I have always looked up to a bot such as User:ClueBot NG and now want to create a bot like it.

I hope you accept my request. I am an autoconfirmed user and want to accomplish more on Wikipedia and its sister projects. So please think about your decision and let me know when you have. Castigonia ( talk) 13:45, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi Castigonia! Actually, BOTREQ is generally for users to request creation (in other words, development) of a specific bot. For example, see #Setting_class.3Dredirect_on_medical_redirects, above. If you have an idea for a specific task on Wikipedia that could be automated but don't have the programming skills to make it happen, BOTREQ is where you can leave your suggestion and other Wikipedians will try to make it a reality. However, if you have an idea and programming skills, you can write the bot yourself and then file a bot request for approval, where the Bot Approvals Group will then review (and, assuming all goes well, approve) your request. Hope this helps, and please let me know if you need clarification, Theopolisme ( talk) 14:13, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Sorry about that, I really want to make this bot. Thank you for the information! Castigonia ( talk) 14:18, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

I hate to blow your enthusiasm into the water, but ClueBot NG requires very powerful servers and a lot of programming skill. As a matter of fact, that bot's programming is out of almost every bot operator's league, since the bot is partially artificially intelligent. You may want to start off with something simpler. :-)— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 07:51, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Transclusions of Template:Languages of Angola should go below the ref section. — kwami ( talk) 08:31, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Because the category at issue was created around noon Central time on the day it was created, all counts below are for 24 hour cycles based on noon Central time.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 21:38, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

I have been told that T:AH is in use in 33,000 pages (which sounds like a low estimate to me). I need to know how many of these pages have four=no. four=no is used by WP:FOUR to distinguish the WP:FAs that have been WP:GA and WP:DYK according to T:AH that are rejected from the four=yes. The four=no should populate Category:Wikipedia articles rejected for Four awards in the near future and if the bot both counted and categorized that would be optimal although I just need the count for now. Because of this, it could take weeks for this category to populate itself. The expected number is between 300 and 1300 of the 3980 FAs have four=no.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 06:14, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Note that after 24 hours only 13 articles populated the category and after 5 days only 18. It may take months for all the articles to populate the category without a bot.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 17:11, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Revised estimate of final total is in the neighborhood of 400.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 17:06, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

It seems that since day 5, the pace of population is picking up a bit. By the end of week 1 the total was 41. Still only about 10 percent of what I expect thought.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 00:12, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Day 8 and day 9 brought 92 and 86 pages to the category, bringing the total to 219 (more than half of the pages expected and 6 of the 9 pages that I know should be there). If the pace stays this fast it might not be that long.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 17:20, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Day 10 saw another 43 pages added for a total of 262 pages. 8 of the 9 pages that I know should be listed are. I am not sure what this slow down means, but we might be getting close to the final total. I still expect it to go over 300 though. I will still have a difficult time knowing when it is finished since days 3, 4 and 5 saw zero new pages despite the number of eventual changes. A bot would really help.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 17:04, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Day 11 saw another 24 pages added to the category for a total of 286. All 9 of the pages that I know should be listed are now. I don't know how close we are to having all the relevant articles in the category yet. A bot count would be helpful.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 17:04, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Day 12 saw 20 more taking us to 306. A bot run would tell me what the total is so I don't have to guess whether this process is close to complete.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 17:02, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Day 13 saw the pace trickle to only 3 new articles. I'm guessing about 20-25 more are out there.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 17:05, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Week 2 ended with 313 articles in the category (big jump from the 41 after week 1).-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 17:03, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

Day 15 was the fourth day with no new articles added to the category (Days 3, 4 and 5). Since I know of at least 6 articles from my two samples below of a total of 74 articles that should be in the category, I know a lot more are coming although it may fewer than 10% more than are already in the category. Can't we get a bot to finish this run.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 21:01, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Day 16 also had no new additions. This is odd, since we know about 10% remain unidentified.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 16:54, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Days 17 and 18 saw only 1 each bringing us to 315.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 17:54, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

O.K. I think we are getting close to done. I found a 500 edit sample of my contribution history with 43 four=no edit summary samples 40 of which are already in the category. I guess we are over 90% of the way, but I still don't know how I will know if we are done.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 03:30, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

It has been many days since I have gotten more than half way past through the 24 hour cycle (this category was created at about noon central time zone) of this category without a new article popping up. However, samples like this 500 edit contribution history show me that a lot of articles are missing. In those 500, edits 3 of the 31 edit summaries marked four=no are not in the category yet. Also looks like there should be more nos than yeses. Still would love a bot to tell me what is going on.--06:50, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Give me a few hours to take a look. Werieth ( talk) 20:54, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

I went ahead and purged all pages using the template, and only 345 articles appeared. Werieth ( talk) 23:27, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

I think that number is right. My initial misestimate was based on the fact that the majority of classifications in 2011 being four=no. However, I forgot that I had sought all the pre-Aug 2007 four=yes earlier. Thus, the set I was looking at was all four=no and only 2007-2011 four=yes. Thus, I thought there should be way more nos than the 400 plus yeses. Now, I realize the mistake so the 345 number seems possible. Thanks so much for finishing this up.-- TonyTheTiger ( T/ C/ WP:FOUR/ WP:CHICAGO/ WP:WAWARD) 01:05, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

An editor has been tagging the 2000 census data in articles with {{not in reference}} ( [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24]) because the {{GR|2}} citation template now leads to a redirect page at the Census Bureau website. Is there any way this can be fixed with a bot? It affects hundreds of thousands of articles. Thanks for looking into this. 71.139.153.14 ( talk) 14:42, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

The dead link can be fixed in Template:Geographic reference (GR2). Almost sure there is a copy for that broken reference in another location, WayBack machine, mirrors, etc. (Probably this helps). emijrp ( talk) 13:53, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Template:Geographic reference says that {{GR|r2}} has been superseded by {{GR|r8}}. While useful to know that, it still leaves thousands of {{GR|r2}} citations to be changed. Are you expecting that to be done one by one? That's why I requested that a bot take care of it. Thanks for your attention to this. 71.139.157.80 ( talk) 17:59, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Just a thought but even though Webcite is dead the Way Back machine is working here. Why not just change them to that. Someone should be able to craft a bot to link to that. Kumioko ( talk) 21:00, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Would be good in principle, if someone knows how to craft a bot to bring up the specific US town/village census info from the Way Back machine, more power to them. It seems quite a challenge to me, given the original URLs were just to the census homepage. The Rambling Man ( talk) 21:08, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

( edit conflict) One of the problems with FactFinder is that (to my knowledge) on Wikipedia, citations to the site are usually very general (for example, in [25] that the IP provided, the url simply goes to the homepage). This makes it very difficult to somehow magically generate a link to the new FactFinder for the 2010 Census, as The Rambling Man said. It looks like they do have a deep linking guide, so perhaps it would be possible to construct a new template that could take a "geographic identifier" as input and output an actual functional citation...but that may be out of the scope of this discussion. Theopolisme ( talk) 21:28, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

If a deeplink conversion could be made by a bot, that'd be ideal, but I'm struggling to see if that's possible. If it isn't, then tens of thousands of US city/village articles have paragraphs of material that is not and will never be referenced... The Rambling Man ( talk) 21:33, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I think you're correct. It's possible to link to specific search results, but the search functionality seems...strange (e.g., I tried [26] and came up with no results). It may be that it is simply too complicated for our uses, which is a shame, but if you can make sense of it (there's a page on searching in the deep linking guide), more power to you. Theopolisme ( talk) 21:42, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I think a lot of the blame lies with the Census Bureau's web developers for making it so difficult (if not altogether almost impossible for end users) to link to specific pieces of data. The community decision in 2008 (do you have a link, by the way, for reference?) was probably significantly influenced by this. tl;dr, FactFinder needs a revamp. Theopolisme ( talk) 22:08, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I figured it out for the 2010 census. Go to the the home page of American FactFinder. Search for any municipality, say Celina, Ohio. The resulting page will show a series of links. Click on: "2010 Census: Population, Age, Sex, Race, Households and Housing". This will take you to a table that can be bookmarked. As to the 2000 census, I agree with your assessment of the utility of the Census Bureau's website. 71.139.157.80 ( talk) 22:46, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

So it's possible, and I guess a bot could theoretically be created to search for the article's title, then follow the steps that you provided. This would hardly be foolproof, however. Theopolisme ( talk) 22:52, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

I get the sense that this discussion is probably reinventing the wheel. There had to have been a discussion on this at the time the 2010 census data were ported to WP. But where? I first addressed my request to the United States Wikiproject and was directed here. 71.139.157.80 ( talk) 22:57, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

AHA!! I found a way to get to the 2000 data. Go to the Census Bureau's historical data page. Click on "Census of Population and Housing, 2000". Click on "Demographic Profile Data Search". Select state from a dropdown menu, then enter city in the search box. Select appropriate community from results list, and voila, a pdf of the data. A bot probably can't do this, but at least we know how to access the 2000 data. 71.139.157.80 ( talk) 23:17, 9 August 2013 (UTC) On the other hand, there is a numeric portion of the URL for the pdf file, e.g., http://censtats.census.gov/data/OH/1603912868.pdf . Perhaps there is a table somewhere linking the geographic unit and the number in the URL. Just a thought. 71.139.157.80 ( talk) 23:35, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

So is it possible for a bot to do this rather manual searching and replacing? I doubt it IP98. The Rambling Man ( talk) 16:34, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Any news on this from the bot people or do we need to start tagging these sections as {{ unreferenced section}}'s? The Rambling Man ( talk) 16:31, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

A bot to tag items in Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions that have not been edited since before 2013 for deletion. The main reason is that as I type this the category is at 29,055 refreshes page make that 29,057 and growing fast, due to the sheer size of the backlog it is not really practical for humans to review that many entries. All of this is moot if someone with the bot flag could set up similar parameters in AWB. PantherLeapord| My talk page| My CSD log 05:57, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/HasteurBot already exists. Anomie ⚔ 13:41, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, bot operator here. Just some clarification. The bot will nominate items that it's notified the page creator at least 30 days ago (and only notifiy the creator if the article has been stale for 180 days). The bot will only nominate no more than 50 pages at a time and nominate such that the Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as abandoned AfC submissions is not too much over 50 pages once it's done nominating. This way it doesn't overburden Admins in reviewing the nominations, but does move the backlog forward. Without advancing any of the current "notifications" the earliest we could start auto-nominating is September 5th-ish. And HasteurBot is the reason why the category is balooning so fast. I'm going through the Category:AfC submissions by date and giving notice to all the old creators. Hasteur ( talk) 14:01, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Maybe we need someone with admin rights to create a bot that can just speedy delete the article noce due process is completed rather than just nominate it. There are relatively few admins actively doing these so the liklihood of this task ever being completed is rather unlikely 50 pages at a time. Kumioko ( talk) 14:33, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

With respect to Kumioko, the idea of a CSD:13 deleting bot has been swatted down once already ( Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/7SeriesBOT 3) due to the fact that the actual deletions are contraversial. Assuming that we clean out more than the currently inflowing AfC submissions (which are about 250 a day) we will eventually get to a clear state, but these are the negotiated limits that have been agreed to in consensus building. The nominating bot is slated to try nominating every hour untill such time that we decide that the backlog is burnt down enough that we can transition to a every 4 hours nomination schedule. This means that at best we could get 1200 G13 nominations and at worst we get 50 with a maximum of 300 nominations once we transition into the maintenance schedule. Hasteur ( talk) 15:06, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

I do understand that and honestly I think your bot does a great job of having to perform all those checks and exceptions. I'm also not trying to rehash old debates but if the deletions are contreversial then that makes them ineligible for Speedy deletion. With that said I do agree that these need to be deleted so I'm not trying to argue otherwise, but at the same time, if we are talking thousands and the admin is just simply deleting the submissions as they come in, then what are we really gaining by not using a bot. Remember that these deleted articles can always be restored by an admin later if its contested. So it seems to me like its more efficient to let the bot delete them once they meet the other criteria and then let the admins restore the contested ones than to make the admins delete all 25000+ and still have to restore the contested ones. Its really irrelevent to me because I don't have admin rights so its not making any extra work for me. But it seems to me that there are enough backlogs of admin tasks that we should use the time and effort efficiently rather than make more work for ourselves. Kumioko ( talk) 15:13, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

We need some automated means of dealing with the ever growing backlog. In the time it would take one person to CSD one entry two or more have already taken it's place! The backlog is now at 46,151 and counting! Even if we were able to process one per second it would take over 12 hours non-stop to process them. Considering the average time to process one is about 10 seconds (for me anyway) it will take over five DAYS! These figures do not account for more entries coming in. PantherLeapord| My talk page| My CSD log 23:44, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

The bot has been approved and I'm going to start advancing some of the oldest AfCs to get them moving along. Hasteur ( talk) 02:03, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

As a result of the page moves executed per this discussion at Talk:Hotel California (Eagles album)#Requested move we are in need of a bot to make the necessary changes per the discussion here at User talk:Tariqabjotu#Hotel California page move. Thank you. -- RacerX¹¹ Talk to me ^{Stalk me} 06:05, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

@ Racerx11: BRFA filed here. Theopolisme ( talk) 00:05, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Looked it over and appears to be well done and perform as I had expected. Thank you. -- RacerX¹¹ Talk to me ^{Stalk me} 02:20, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Could someone please parse the list of editors at Wikipedia:Wikipedians_with_articles; check their contributions, and append (if not already there) the text "Not active." to anyone who hasn't edited in a period (say, 9 months?); and remove it from any that have? This task might usefully be re-run on a periodic basis. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:42, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

For the pages on the Category:Pages with archiveurl citation errors page where the archiveurl is from archive.org, generate the archivedate and url from the archiveurl if they don't exist. For example with a cite web that has |archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/20060904135528/http://www.vetmed.auburn.edu/news/bailey.htm the bot would generate |archivedate=20060904135528 and |url=http://www.vetmed.auburn.edu/news/bailey.htm . I'm not sure this could be done with webcitation, but it might be worth looking at. Naraht ( talk) 00:36, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Seems to be already done for archive.org—see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Theo's_Little_Bot_13 (which adds the |url from |archiveurl) and Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Hazard-Bot_21 (still in trial, but when approved this will add the |url and |archivedate). Theopolisme ( talk) 01:39, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

I recently changed title into She's the One (Bruce Springsteen song). Perhaps you can fix ambiguity? -- George Ho ( talk) 05:03, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Can you clarify?— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 09:47, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

I made some fixes to She's the One (disambiguation), and fixed a few links to She's the One and She's the One (song). X Factor (Romania season 2) is the only page that I see that still needs the ambiguity fixed. GoingBatty ( talk) 01:05, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Fixed without needing bot. -- Stryn ( talk) 18:28, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi people, I'm hoping someone could quickly slap a bot together to perform the tasks in Wikipedia:WikiProject Spirits/Assessment Drives/September 2013, that is check daily if there are newly assessed articles, tally those, and print them out in a table. Does anyone have laying something around, or can slap something together quickly? Cheers, Martijn Hoekstra ( talk) 21:22, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Well I certainly can't conjure up anything fast. Sorry. Someone else will have to do that.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 14:07, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Moved from The Star Wars Holiday Special per RM. -- George Ho ( talk) 01:10, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, what does this have to do with bots? —  Earwig  ^talk 01:13, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

I meant, just changing links in articles that link to this article. Well, from redirect title to current title. -- George Ho ( talk) 01:48, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

You might want to check a few sections above about the Eagles album link fixing after a RM (Theo's Little Bot). Same effective task. Alternately an AWB user may be able to do that easily too. -- MASEM ( t) 01:57, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

 Done. Pages containing " The Star Wars Holiday Special" are now changed to " Star Wars Holiday Special". -- Stryn ( talk) 07:34, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Since the parameters in the info boxes are inconsistently ordered, we sometimes end up with duplicated fields. This can cause editing problems. I'd like a list of all articles with duplicate parameters in transclusions of {{ Infobox language}} and {{ Infobox language family}}, with the parameters that are duplicated, even if the fields are blank. (A blank field will still override a filled one, and will also invite future additions that may not display properly). Since there's no actual changes of the articles by the bot, I hope this will be easy to approve. — kwami ( talk) 23:23, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

It's at most 9000 pages to check (if checking for both templates consecutively), and at least 7900, so it'll take a while to complete when started. I'm willing, though I won't be able to start it immediately.  Hazard-SJ   ✈  04:05, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. No rush, and a couple years ago I did an AWB search for some of the more common problems, so hopefully there won't be a lot of hits.

I don't know what would be an easy way to do this, since there are an indefinite number of possible parameters. Perhaps one way would be to flag any parameters which aren't supported by the template; that would be useful info to have as well, though I didn't want to ask for too much in a bot request. — kwami ( talk) 05:59, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

PS. "Speakers", "extinct", and "era" should count as duplicates of each other, because they override each other. ("Speakers2" is not a problem.) — kwami ( talk) 01:36, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

@ Kwamikagami: The following is the result (sorry, it wasn't filtered by namespace):

  Hazard  SJ  08:08, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! That wasn't bad to clean up at all. Some important fixes, though, so I'm glad we did it. — kwami ( talk) 10:32, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Redirect page is The Best Is Yet to Come (song), with pages linking to the redirect. The target page is the very old song, so "(song)" should be dropped in linked articles. -- George Ho ( talk) 23:27, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Why? In general, WP:NOTBROKEN applies. If you're going to change the target of the redirect or have some other reason that WP:NOTBROKEN doesn't apply, you need to say so. Anomie ⚔ 10:27, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

There is more than one song of the same name, so WP:NOTBROKEN wouldn't apply. -- George Ho ( talk) 16:24, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Template:Infobox soap character 2 should only be used for EastEnders characters where relationships play a strong role. Nowadays, the infobox has been ambushed to import unencyclopedic text in infoboxes. A bot (or a willing editor) should replace Template:Infobox soap character 2 with Template:Infobox soap character to all non-EastEnders characters. this can be done by simply removing the number 2. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 13:42, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Agree. Yes, since a lot of non-EastEnders characters are using that infobox.  —  SoapFan12 ( talk, contribs) 14:09, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Discussion is active at Template_talk:Infobox_soap_character_2#Infobox_needs_to_be_replaced_in_many_many_cases. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:19, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

If that's the case, it should be renamed. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:22, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Andy Mabbett check this. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:24, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

On reflection, I've nominated both templates for a merger discussion at TfD. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:30, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

That template is almost certainly not attributed exclusively to EastEnders articles. Very bold move to simply set a bot on any given number of articles. Please consider that many other editors have spent their time discussing what should be included in the infobox. It has been adapted for wide use. It has been discussed before and not only those at WP:EE were willing to use the template. And as for the unfounded accusation that it was "ambushed to import unencyclopedic text". Most have spent time eliminating as many clutter and in-universe parts of the template going. Rain the 1 20:36, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Correct, it's not only for EastEnders, it's for all. The documentation hadn't been updated since several templates were merged (nobody had noticed) a few years ago. Nothing has been ambushed and there is no unencyclopaedic text. But no, removing the "2" won't work because the two templates have very different parameters. – anemone projectors– 08:21, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

With new error checking, we currently have 45,000+ pages in Category:Pages using citations with accessdate and no URL. This is mostly due to citation templates that include |accessdate= but do not have |url=. --   Gadget850  ^talk 19:23, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Do we want outright deletion or putting it into a comment or? —   HELLKNOWZ  ▎ TALK 19:29, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Delete. I have sampled the category and each has been a book or journal without a link. 'accessdate' has no meaning without a URL. --   Gadget850  ^talk 20:09, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll have that added to Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Hazard-Bot 21.  Hazard-SJ   ✈  06:06, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm intrigued by the possibility of creating bots to work with Wikipedia tools like Huggle or Igloo or Vandal Fighter. That could probably be useful....-- User:SmartyPantsKid 20:53, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi, SmartyPantsKid. Have you encountered ClueBot (and read about its process for detecting vandalism)? It's quite interesting. Theopolisme ( talk) 21:40, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Number of pages affected : ~2000

Task : Flag all unused file redirects with {{db-g6|rationale=Unused file redirect}}. And 'unused' is means no incoming links at all.

This will hopefully end the eclipsing of some files at commons as well a dealing with a backlog that has bulit up in respect of -Wikipedia:Database reports/Unused file redirects

Sfan00 IMG ( talk) 14:36, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Is this non-controversial enough that an adminbot should be considered (this would obviously involve further discussion and some strict requirements...for example, a certain amount of time would need to elapse)? Theopolisme ( talk) 16:27, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Adminbots are of themselves controversial, hence the above suggestion.

If it's technically feasible, a bot to 'cleanup' usages of redirected/retitled images in Article space should also be considered. Sfan00 IMG ( talk) 16:31, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

This is possible. Would you prefer it to check on it's own or be commanded by users?   Hazard  SJ  01:47, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Ideally the imeage-redirect cleanup bot should be able to work on it's own in Article space..

But some kind of log so mistakes can be found would be appreciated.

Note not all usages would have a File: prefix, some infoboxes for example add the File/Image prefix internally... Sfan00 IMG ( talk) 14:56, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

This is a read-only request (no bot edits asked, just list pages):
Please list all template calls from Template:RailGauge.

• Template {{ RailGauge}} is used in ~11000 pages, quite likely multiple times per page. I'd like tho have a list of all these template calls by input. My targets: I want to source these items on Template:RailGauge/doc, and I want to throw out unreasonable inputs).

	rowid	namespace	pagename	|1=	Redirect from	other params used
explained:	output row id	name or number	{{PAGENAME}}	Unnamed para 1 input value as typed ("1=" might be omitted)	{{ railgauge}} {{ gauge}}	list of params, n is unk
data example a:	1	0	Standard gauge	57
b:	4837	0	Bradway Tunnel	ussg	Template:Gauge	wrap=y|al=on
c:	7865	0	Indian Railways	1676mm
d:	124	0	Indian Railways	1435mm
data row (CSV example)	"7865", "0", "Indian Railways", "1676mm", "", "allk=on", "foo=nonsensetext", "wrap=yes"

Source facts

• Template:RailGauge
• WLH says: ~11000 pages use the template
• Incoming Redirects (R to Template:RailGauge) are to be catched too:

- Template:Railgauge ~850 pages

- Template:Gauge ~100 pages

• There can be multiple transclusions per page
• The transclusion can be through a template used on a page: East Hills railway line uses Template:East Hills Line

Output request

• One full data row per individual template call

Expect ~25000 rows from ~11000 pages.

• Format: CSV -- you can suggest other
• "rowid" is to be added by the bot (any number will do -- no doubles)
• Header or footer: not needed, but may be added

• Target result page: Template:RailGauge/usage (or Template:RailGauge/usage at 29 aug 2013 looks fine too)
• Other parameters used (all optional and named, or weird & idle) please in a single text string. (Unless it is easy to split them somehow)
  - DePiep ( talk) 21:05, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Coding... Thanks for the fabulous, detailed task description! I'll get this done and generate a CSV in the coming days. Theopolisme ( talk) 16:30, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanx! I was wondering if I was writing too shorthanded. Expectations for the result. - DePiep ( talk) 23:31, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

May I abuse your ethousiasm & understanding: please split al inputs into n separates, and so switch columns "R from ..." and n "al=on", "allk=on", "wrap=yes, .... (list after R from .. is inknown by number)) OK? - DePiep ( talk) 01:40, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

So I have swapped the rightmost example columns: Redirects in a single one. All params not being |1= are optional and so unknown in number (0 ... ). These n can better be rightmost. Please split into "" each, if can be done easy. Not my primary request clearly. - DePiep ( talk) 02:13, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Note - I am in the process of migrating individual usages of {{ Gauge}} to{{ RailGauge}} Sfan00 IMG ( talk) 16:36, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Does not matter (or: could be disturbing even, AGF). Redirects are OK. - DePiep ( talk) 23:31, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

• Ol'lol, from 2011; Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_41#Template_usage. - DePiep ( talk) 02:32, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

• Oy vey – will this be satisfactory for your purposes? I think I'll still probably write the script (just as a fun exercise for myself), but at significantly lower priority if TemplateTiger will handle your needs. Theopolisme ( talk) 01:35, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

[27]

The data is as expected. So this is basically OK.

The layout (format) into HTML table is a horror, because I want to process the data further automatically (off wiki). Also the 30-per-page makes it useless. I cannot request (11000/30=) 366 pages manually.

Does redirect Template:railgauge need its own run?

Not all params are listed, but that is not a priority (not needed).

If you can address these problems, this TemplateTiger would be OK.

These 2008 2011 results suggest that my estimation of ~25.000 rows may be too low. Could be 50.000 to 100.000. - DePiep ( talk) 09:37, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

It is mentioned, that it does not handle nested templates. Does that mean I do not see these at all in the results? It would be OK if these nested templates are listed in their template space. Or another trick? - DePiep ( talk) 09:46, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Theopolisme, any thoughts? - DePiep ( talk) 23:13, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

It was suggested to me at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#‎Finding ACTIVE foreign language speakers. that a bot would be a good option for updating Wikipedia:Translators available. The bot to do this job would, I am supposing on a once or twice monthly schedule, glance across the contributions of editors named therein, and indicate what was the last month in which each such editor had edited. Which would thusly provide an idea of which editors with translational skills would be around to provide such skills in a pinch, as asked. Blessings!! DeistCosmos ( talk) 02:17, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Through many pages/months/years? of discussion at WT:NRHP and its archives, it has been decided that a bot is needed to tag any articles with only a single reference to the National Register Information System (NRIS) with the {{ NRIS-only}} template, which encourages the addition of extra sources and puts the articles in cleanup categories, "Articles sourced only to the NRIS since MONTH YEAR". The shortcomings of NRIS are explained here.

To find articles that are only sourced to NRIS, a list of all the pages on which {{ NRISref}} is transcluded could be a starting point. There may also be pages that link directly to older versions of the NRIS website, which would include the string "www.nr.nps.gov" somewhere in their content. From this giant list of articles, those with a single reference need to be picked off and tagged.

After its initial run, the project would like for the bot to continually check new articles and tag them if they are NRIS-only and prevent the removal of the NRIS-only template from existing articles unless a second source is added. Is this possible?-- Dudemanfellabra ( talk) 05:06, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you Dudemanfellabra for raising this. The hopes and concerns for what a bot run could accomplish were under discussion at wt:NRHP#Moving forward. I guess it can be discussed here instead; there is a pointer now from there to here.

I don't agree that it "has been decided" that tagging, as proposed, should be done, and especially not with promises to repeatedly reimpose a tag, where editors make judgment that the tag is not helpful. It would clearly be helpful to identify the articles believed to have faults, say by listing them in a workpage.

If and when a tag is deemed helpful by a real consensus, the tag itself would need improvement, including to have a state-specific switch/indicator, to enable customization of links for state-specific sources, to enable state-specific categorizations.

Important concerns about some proposals include:

• the likely disruption caused by the posting of a negatively worded template in many NRHP articles, when the proposed message is alarmist and sometimes false. Note the current wording proposed is far more negative than, say, the {{ One source}} template.
• no procedure for removal of template, or intentions to battle about it, when article editors have already done what could be done for an article. For example there are articles where multiple sources were in fact used, but are included as external links or have been removed by article-specific dispute, e.g. where one editor argues a source is a blog or too-blog-like to be included in a mainspace reference. That's a sourcing disagreement to be covered properly at the article's Talk page, and an incorrect tag message should not be re-inserted at the article itself by a bot or otherwise. Some provision for a hidden category or a list of articles not to be re-tagged needs to be set up, before tagging proceeds.
• the potential wp:BATTLEGROUND set up by the wishes by one or more to manually battle, or to have a bot run repeatedly impose, the insertion of a negative template into articles where it is arguably not helpful (for reasons above, or otherwise). Dudemanfellabra's request, here, clarifies that it is indeed his intention to carry on in that way, while he responded unhelpfully and not clearly answering, to a question on this at the previous discussion.

These are serious issues which should be resolved elsewhere, perhaps including ANI or arbitration or RFC/U, about personal attacks and so on included in the discussion.

However, if this bot were just to create a workpage, listing and linking to the articles, which would help to quantify the problem and allow for editors to address the targeted articles, and not to tag them in mainspace, I do support that.

To clarify or perhaps improve upon the bot request:

• Could the bot identify not just the NRIS-only-sourced articles, but also identify no-sourced or just-one-non-NRIS-source articles, and identify which they are. The bot could hopefully identify whether there is zero or just one inline reference in a given article, and where there is one, determine if that is an NRIS-only one by seeing if it starts with <ref name="nris"> or <ref name=nris>. That would correctly identify most NRIS-only ones, but there are other formats of references which actually really only refer to the same NRIS underlying source, but which are presented as references to NationalRegisterOfHistoricPlaces.com (a private website that is an NRIS mirror) or otherwise.
• Could the bot make a list organized by state, or make a separate list for each state, to be located at, say, Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/OneSourceList (or Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/OneSourceList/Alabama, Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/OneSourceList/Alaska, etc for state-specific ones). This would facilitate followup work by editors (who are mostly geographically focused).

-- do ncr am 17:58, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Dudemanfellabra's bot request is the result of a discussion process ( Wikipedia talk:NRHP#New articles should be sourced) that started about a month ago. Everyone who has participated in the discussion appears to support this bot request, except for Doncram. Doncram's request to inject several additional layers of complexity does not have support on the Wikiproject -- and in fact may be an attempt to derail Dudemanfellabra's request by making it so impossibly complex that it won't be implemented. Dudemanfellabra's request is a good idea, with broad support. Please consider it. -- Orlady ( talk) 18:25, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

There is no complexity that I am able to observe. The language of the tag is in no way, different than, any other tag stating that an article requires work/attention. If the tag were to state, WOW this is terrible OR what a big bag of suck this is, etc etc, sure fine. It does not. I have volunteered to take a look at all NRHP in WV. I started with McDowell County, so far, its about right. BUT, if a bot were to add the potential for more data, lets do it. Very simple. Coal town guy ( talk) 18:40, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

I disagree with Orlady's characterization. The general discussion has included support for other alternatives, such as creating a cleanup category (which would not require any mainspace display). There was considerable support for that. The discussion also included vile language and personal attacks, and then most participants dropped out, relatedly. There is less-than-broad support for the specific proposal made here about tagging mainspace articles.

And, about the suggestion that my suggestion is an attempt to make something impossibly complex, is nonsense. It would be easy for a bot to make a worklist, this is done all the time. And should not be controversial. -- do ncr am 18:41, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

If you disagree with Orlady, OR ANYONE ELSE, isnt there another avenue besides this bot request? Coal town guy ( talk) 18:45, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

In the discussion of this proposal at WT:NRHP, everyone involved besides Doncram supported this proposal; Doncram's attempt to raise issues about this proposal here, after a consensus was already established, strikes me as forum shopping. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction• Creation} 01:29, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Moreover, this kind of behavior was already discussed at Arbcom, and Doncram was informed that actions such as attacking others' words as "vile" were seriously at variance with our standards — yet he has continued in his course of action. No further action needs to be taken, unless he wants to take himself back to Arbcom. As Hasteur notes, Doncram's suggestion makes the situation far more complicated; let's not make it any harder than necessary. Nyttend ( talk) 03:46, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

As a bot runner: Dudemanfellabra's request is fairly straightforward and does actively flag down assistance for the NRHP articles in addition to collating the articles by when they were discovered as a problem. doncram's counter proposal seems unnecessarily complicated and prefers the "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" philosophy for flagging down assistance by either creating a hidden maintanance category or by generating a Wikipedia space page that indexes the problems instead of actively calling out the problem on the page where an unregistered user might be able to correct the issue and be converted into a Wikipedian. I also see the subdivision by geographic region as secondary to the "when was the problem called out". Hasteur ( talk) 19:02, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

@ Dudemanfellabra, Doncram, Coal town guy, TheCatalyst3, and Nyttend: Ping on this question. I've got some ambition and mental bandwidth to try tackling this, but don't want to touch the issue with a 40 foot pole unless a consensus as to what you want done has been established. Hasteur ( talk) 15:10, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

In my opinion, follow the initial suggestion of Dudemanfellabra, its simple, direct, to the point and lacks complication, especially the part of creating a list f those articles single sourced Coal town guy ( talk) 16:52, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Hasteur, the discussion at Wikipedia talk:NRHP#New articles should be sourced was convoluted, but I believe I am correct in saying that this proposal was supported by User:Dudemanfellabra, User:TheCatalyst31, User:GrapedApe, User:Dmadeo, User:Cdtew, User:Orlady, User:Coal town guy, and User:Blueboar. User:Ammodramus and User:Smallbones made comments that were consistent with support, but they didn't say whether or not they supported it. The only user who opposed it was User:Doncram. As User:Nyttend (who apparently also supports it) notes above, Doncram is under some Arbcom sanctions related to some of the behavior he has demonstrated here. It is also useful to note that one of the outcomes of the "Doncram" case at Arbcom was a statement that the issue of adequacy/inadequacy of stubs like these (a content issue that was central to the Doncram case) was one for the community to work out, and that the above-referenced Wikiproject discussion was essentially about that issue and led directly to this bot request. -- Orlady ( talk) 17:46, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

SUPPORT, just in case there was any doubt. I fail to see how in any manner how tagging single source articles is in any way, negative, anyone want to clue me in ??? Coal town guy ( talk) 17:54, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

I too support the proposal, although I didn't participate in the original discussion. Theoretically we could occasionally have false positives, e.g. someone places an in-text citation to some other source, but (1) the likelihood of that happening is ridiculously tiny, and (2) with something as innocuous as placing a cleanup template, we're not going to have anything harder than removing the template from any articles where this might happen. Orlady makes a good point; we've reached general agreement on how to handle these stubs, so a bot to fulfill this discussion's agreement would be quite helpful. Nyttend ( talk) 21:51, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Hearing significant consensus for this bot process, I'm going to start developing code to work this. Hasteur ( talk) 22:07, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your help, Hasteur. :-) -- Orlady ( talk) 00:34, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Ping to see how this is coming along. I'm not trying to be pushy, but I have a script that I want to run that necessitates these categories being in place before I start it. I've never requested a bot before, so I don't know how long it normally takes for one to be coded. If this is out of place, forgive me.-- Dudemanfellabra ( talk) 21:29, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Dudemanfellabra See Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/HasteurBot 4. Hasteur ( talk) 21:51, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Hello, WP:JAZZ would like to have a 'bot add the {{ WikiProject Jazz}} banner to jazz-related pages that aren't already tagged, and/or auto-assess pages that aren't already assessed.

Background

• In 2010, we had Xenobot Mk V perform (essentially) the same request that I am now posting. (See archived discussion (2010)). The 'bot also added {{WikiProjectBannerShell}} if and when it was able to do so.
• In January 2013, Yobot fulfilled the same request (since it had been almost 3 years since the original run). The details are available in the archived discussion (Jan 2013). However, there were some problems with the edits, which were cleaned up, but the auto-assessment portion was never completed (see archived discussion (Mar 2013)).

Request

Essentially, I am asking for a repeat of what Xenobot Mk V originally did for us in 2010 (see above). We wish to add {{ WikiProject Jazz}} to articles in jazz-related categories. 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, and 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. I finished updated these listings a few minutes before posting this.

Furthermore, we wish to auto-assess those pages that do not already have an assessment (including those already tagged with {{WikiProject Jazz}}):

• We wish to inherit class= from other WikiProjects (if any):

• Inherit class= if only a single rating is available
• Inherit class= if two or more ratings are available; in the event of auto-stub/inherit conflict, inherit the most frequent (or highest) class= rating
• Presumably these auto-assessments will be flagged as such, e.g. |auto=yes   |auto=inherit   |auto=length   |autoi=yes

• Otherwise, tag as class=stub based either of the following criteria:

• One or more stub templates in the article
• The text of the article is 2,500 bytes or less

• We do not wish to inherit importance= ratings.

And, add {{WikiProjectBannerShell}} when possible/applicable.

I have an additional request, but I am not sure whether it's technically possible (see comments). I'd be interested in having the 'bot add needs-infobox=yes to the {{WikiProject Jazz}} template, 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 in advance, -- Gyrofrog (talk) 17:09, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

You might be interested in the NewPageSearch bot. It can find new pages based on categories, stub templates, and keywords. It does not do any talk page updating, just creates a list. Here is an example of the MusicSearchResult. I could create a custom Jazz new page search if you are interested. -- Bamyers99 ( talk) 14:18, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

Gyrofrog I can do it for you. I have some questions: 1) any |importance= should be removed? 2) "autoi" is a typo? Do you mean auto? -- Magioladitis ( talk) 10:59, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Magioladitis.

1) No, please retain any existing |importance=; do not remove it. But if it is blank for WP:JAZZ, we do not want to inherit that parameter from other WikiProjects.

2) You don't have to worry about |autoi=. It is not a typo, but apparently it is not currently being used, either (anyway, it doesn't work for WP:JAZZ – I may have seen it on a different template [28]).

Additional: I had listed all the different ways I remember seeing |auto= or |autoi= applied. However, a quick test suggests that for |auto=, "length" and "inherit" are the only two options that work. |auto=yes and |auto=stub do not work.

Thanks again! -- Gyrofrog (talk) 14:18, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Gyrofrog should I also tag categories? -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:55, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, please. I believe the template is set up to handle most or all non-Article pages. (When performing a manual edit, I usually specify |class=Category, |class=Template, etc. although I believe the template will automatically handle all of these without having to specify). -- Gyrofrog (talk) 16:06, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Gyrofrog you don't need anymore to specify class for categories, templates, etc. It's done automatically. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 16:13, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Redirect page is Upstairs, Downstairs; many links link to the redirect page of the 1971 series. Perhaps fix ambiguation? -- George Ho ( talk) 17:21, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't think disambiguation bots are always a good idea, but WP:DPL has lots of users doing the same thing. If you suggest it somewhere on the talk page... Perhaps it'll get done.

Or, you can use AWB to do it yourself semi-automatically. Rcsprinter (gossip) @ 20:31, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

WPCleaner is another good tool for semi-automatic disambiguation. GoingBatty ( talk) 15:22, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I was asked by Adam Cuerden, the main contributor to the Signpost's tech report, if I would write a short piece about how to make Wikipedia articles more accessible to screen reader users. I promptly did so and it's now been published along with the rest of the tech report. Adam then suggested on my talk page that the first two problems I noted could be fixed in articles by a bot, which is where you guys come in ... (here's the relevant conversation). In particular, as noted there::

• How should list items separated by image markup be handled?
• How about [the floating TOC templates (or the __TOC__ magic word? Should they be just moved to the right place or outright removed? Or should a hidden section header perhaps be created?
• How about monitoring articles for these problems over time, after the first run is finished?

What do you all think? Graham 87 05:05, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

I, obviously, think this is a great idea. I don't see moving the TOC templates at all controversial. The specific issue of lists seperated by image markup might best be handled with a post on the talk page; to make things easy, why not move the image to the top of the list by bot, then immediately have the bot revert itself. It can then link to the diff of the "suggested change". Or is that too complicated? Adam Cuerden ^{( talk)} 06:06, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

• I also think this general idea is good. Anything that makes our content more accessible is a benefit to our readers. Just a couple of notes. My experience has been that bot requests work best when they describe a specific task and show a consensus to perform that task. Perhaps a discussion could be started at WP:VPP describing the details so that we can show the community wants this. Example; remove blank lines from a list and add and asterisk to the beginning of each line (or something like that). Best. 64.40.54.117 ( talk) 08:35, 8 September 2013 (UTC)
  • So pretty much the reverse of what I did? I advertised this discussion at the technical village pump, the talk page of the accessibility guideline and the WikiProject Accessibility talk page. I thought they were the most relevant pages. Graham 87 02:25, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Normally, that would be true. But this is Graham87 making the proposal, who is both our resident expert on these matters, and widely known and respected. I think the notices given will be sufficient, unless a bot operator doesn't appear/volunteer. (And I support the proposal, too, fwiw). – Quiddity ( talk) 02:33, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. Graham is well-respected and we can certainly have the discussion here. @ Graham87: I don't have much experience with this. Could you please list some specific edits that would help screen readers? Thanks much. 64.40.54.118 ( talk) 03:50, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Here's an example of me removing line breaks to make a proper HTML list and here's one of me moving a TOC for accessibility reasons (I'm not sure how I ended up on that topic). Graham 87 09:04, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Ok, so I tried working on the HTML lists, and came up with [29], which worked on my basic test cases. I'll play with it a little more and then file a BRFA for it. Legoktm ( talk) 10:35, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks very much! Graham 87 14:22, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

(I'd asked about this in late July. Someone else had offered to help with it, but they have since become inactive.)
DASHBot ( talk · contribs) used to create, and/or periodically update, a list of unreferenced biographies of living persons for a given Wikiproject (see User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects). However, that bot has been blocked since March. I'm wondering if another one can accomplish this same task. I'm asking on behalf of WP:JAZZ (whose list is at Wikipedia:WikiProject Jazz/Unreferenced BLPs) but there were a lot of other WikiProjects on that list, as well (I'd already removed WP:JAZZ, though). Thanks in advance, -- Gyrofrog (talk) 13:31, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

I'd also like this task to be revived, but you can see the uBLPs in the full cleanup lists generated weekly by the svick tool on the toolserver. The-Pope ( talk) 06:51, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the reminder. I'm not sure we need both (I'll leave a note at WT:JAZZ), though I guess it wouldn't hurt anything for another 'bot to take over for this DASHBot task. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 15:42, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

User:Theopolisme has taken a temporary hiatus, and I would request that the already approved TAFI related tasks from his bot be taken up by another bot. The python scripts are available here. Performing all these tasks manually are painful. It needs to run one at 00:00 UTC on Mondays, and can basically run all tasks once a week then. -- Nick Penguin_{( contribs)} 04:02, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

NickPenguin Stand by... I think I have all the components and code necessary to do the Monday tasks. Hasteur ( talk) 04:31, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Do you need the monday tasks run? I'm looking and I think Theopolisme left the tasks running. Clarification would be good. Hasteur ( talk) 04:36, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

It looks like Theo's bot had a hiccup for a few days. However, given how I've felt on extended wiki-breaks, it may suddenly stop working. As long as the tasks are run at least once a week on Mondays (putting up the TAFI templates at the new weeks start, moving successful noms into the holding area, creating new schedule groups from oldest successful noms, and notifying relevant wikiprojects), then everything should be good. If you could invest a little bit of time (maybe not right now) then it would be good to have a backup plan. -- Nick Penguin_{( contribs)} 00:46, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

A bot is needed to go through Category:Canoeists and change the name of any pages that are currently called 'NAME (Canoer)' to 'NAME (Canoeist)' as per the discussion at WP Kayaking Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 10:06, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Should the bot also create redirects from 'NAME (canoer)' to 'NAME (canoeist)'? Should the bot also change any text in the articles it moves from "canoer" to "canoeist"? (e.g. "Joe Blow is an American canoer" to "Joe Blow is an American canoeist"?). GoingBatty ( talk) 15:26, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

The bot should definitely create redirects from the old pages as it would have the potential to break a lot of links if not (might be worth checking for double redirects if that's a possibility). It would also make a lot of sense to change text in the article as per your suggestion, I hadn't considered that until now though Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 16:58, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Can/will anyone take this on please? Jamesmcmahon0 ( talk) 09:20, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I'd been doing some of this linkfixes manually, but figured it's an WB or bot task really.

The list contains image pairs.

Basic task is, For Each image pair in the list-

• Check first image still exists
  • If first image does not exist or is Commons - Skip.
  • If exists but is not a redirect skip.
• If first image is a redirect.
  • Get Target from page text
  • Compile a list of mainspace pages transcluding the first image(redirect)
  • For each item in that list (if any) : Replace first name in list with second name in list taking into account the absence of a File: or Image: prefix if needed.
  • Repeat for each item in the list.
• If No links remain (excluding the source of the pairs) tag Redirect as G6 - Retitled file with no significant incoming links.
• Repeat for next pair.

Could an automated task for doing this be developed? Sfan00 IMG ( talk) 22:07, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Hello: Can someone take over the new article alert job from TedderBot? This page has the link to the source code. The bot has been out of operation since August 22. Please see here the requests from various project owners to get bot working again. Thanks. — Ganeshk ( talk) 00:33, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Many of the WikiProjects rely a great deal on the results from this bot; It would be really great if we could get new article listings on a reliable and frequent basis. Thanks. Invertzoo ( talk) 13:30, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Seconded. -- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:56, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

I fully agree.-- Ipigott ( talk) 06:24, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

I second the request too... really vital. Cavarrone 06:33, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Seconded, definitely a very valuable function for many projects, and already much missed (just as during the previous down-periods)! Tomas e ( talk) 11:16, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Hey all, I didn't know it wasn't running until over the weekend. I'm really busy in my startup. I can provide the jar and configuration to get it running on a toolserver-esque place. I can also see why the server I'm paying for is not running when I have a moment. tedder ( talk) 15:22, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Are we sure it's not being IP blocked? If it's being located on a third party server....and the bot to previously do the task this task, AlexNewArtBot was IP blocked. Regards, Sun Creator^{( talk)} 17:38, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Not IP blocked- running on AWS cloud so the ip hops around a bit. But Bamyers99 ( talk · contribs) debugged it as a http vs https issue at login. tedder ( talk) 15:39, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

• I'm not all too experienced with Perl, but I do have experience with Java. If no one objects, I will take over this bot.— cyberpower ^Chat_Offline 03:07, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

It's written in Java. tedder ( talk) 15:39, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

All the better. Can you provide a copy of the correct code?— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 15:43, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

When you get it running again, could you provide a backlog for architecture from 22 August. I would like to what's been going on there.-- Ipigott ( talk) 15:45, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for getting it up and running again. As it is a very important bot for a number of wikiprojects, and Tedder notes he is very busy IRL, it would indeed be good to have a backup ready to kick in on a short notice, so this request should still be seen as open for anyone willing to develop a backup capability. Better have it ready know than after another x-week delay and grief in the future. -- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:06, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Seconded. Most important to have a reliable backup.-- Ipigott ( talk) 07:58, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Completely agree with you. That's why things like open licenses are good- I don't own my bot code any more than I own my wiki contributions. I've started talking to Bamyers99 ( talk · contribs) offwiki about it and want to make sure they can get it running, either as primary or backup to me. I think bamyers has a VPS to run it on, but if anyone can give some help we could move it to a wiki-sponsored toolserver type machine too. More specific question- is it acceptable to share my **bot** username+password with bamyers? It is a bit of a role account but also seems to fall under WP:IAR. tedder ( talk) 20:55, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Preferably, I like to run scripts under my boys to pervert any issues. I can run them on labs where the scripts can live on its own. I am well versed in Java and would be happy to take over your bot.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 21:28, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like cyberpower already has bot/labs accounts so I will bow out of the competition. -- Bamyers99 ( talk) 22:20, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Since no one has objected, I will arrange to provide a backup copy of the bot and file a BRFA so it may kick in if TedderBot ( talk · contribs) fails again.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 14:33, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Good apps — Preceding unsigned comment added by 106.203.17.125 ( talk) 01:59, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

WP:NRHP maintains lists of locations that are on the National Register of Historic Places for everywhere in the USA; an example is National Register of Historic Places listings in Franklin County, Kentucky. Just about all of these lists have tables composed of transclusions of a dedicated template, {{ NRHP row}}; these were just added a year or two ago, replacing hardcoded tables, and it's possible that occasional articles got missed and still have one or more entries with the hardcoded table. For example, the Franklin County KY list had a single entry that appeared different from the rest, and viewing the source showed me that there was a single line with the old hardcoded table; I've since fixed it. Is there any way (other than manually viewing everything) to check for pages that still have the hardcoded table? My first thought is a bot that would check as follows:

• Page name begins with "National Register of Historic Places listings in"
• Finds the |pos= number for the last (i.e. farthest down in each section) transclusion of {{ NRHP row}}
• Counts how many transclusions of {{ NRHP row}} there are in each section
• Logs the page whenever the number of transclusions in a section is not equal to the number of {{ NRHP row}}
• Logs the page whenever the code {{NRHP color}}, {{HD color}}, or other color templates appear in the same section as {{ NRHP row}}, after the last occurrence of that template

The hardcoded tables always used templates whose names end with "color" for all entries, and without the last item, we'd miss any lists in which there's an old-style table entry below the last of the NRHP rows. I don't think we need to worry much about false positives, because the bot wouldn't be doing anything more than logging what it finds. This is a rare enough problem that we're unlikely to find many such pages; the only reason I'm requesting it is that we have more than 3,500 pages whose names begin with "National Register of Historic Places listings in", so it would take an extremely long amount of time for a human to check all of them. Nyttend ( talk) 03:43, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

If I'm reading this request correctly, the only way to look for a table is to scan every page. That is, every article in existence. I'm quite sure Wikipedia servers would not like that very much.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 23:43, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

could I get someone to have a bot tag all the templates listed in the collapsed section of the following two discussions:

1. Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 September 20#Unused fb team templates
2. Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 September 20#Template:TV countries

it's very simple, you just add {{subst:tfd}} at the top, assuming this runs before the end of September 20 wiki time. they are all unused. thank you. Frietjes ( talk) 17:05, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

It would need approval. So it won't be executed for at least a few days.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 19:09, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

there are bots which already have approval to complete this task. I will search the archives to see if I can find a receptive bot operator. Frietjes ( talk) 23:23, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

found the BRFA here. Frietjes ( talk) 23:25, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

and tagged them by hand since there were only 246 of them. Frietjes ( talk) 00:01, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Currently Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 September 11#Template:WikiProject United States shows an overwhelming consensus to destroy the WikiProject United States collaboration and associated template. It is requested that someone with a bot demerge all the projects and reallocate all the articles to the appropriate project. For all those who don't like WikiProject United States here is your chance to end it once and for all and restore about 100 dead projects to their previous state of inactivity. If you don't like Kumioko here is your chance to step up and show them how to build a bot to do assessments the right way! Either way, a bot is needed as this task is just too massive for one person to do. It took Kumioko years to get it to this point, how fast can we restore things back to their natural order? 138.162.8.57 ( talk) 19:22, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

A lot faster provided you give more info on what to do.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 19:25, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Not sure whats needed myself. All I know is that I was checking out some articles, saw that the US project template was being deleted, followed that and I found the monstrous discussion linked above. I assume, by what I read, that the desire is to replace the US project template with the templates of one of the individual projects that fall under it. Which seems rather pointless to me. It also appears that many of the templates will need to be edited or recreated and that many articles will have several of them. I would recommend getting the RFD nominator to recreate and modify all the templates sinc they started the discussion and then you could, using a script or something, go through and demerge them. 138.162.8.58 ( talk) 19:59, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Well, the discussion has not yet closed. Even if this is the eventual decision, isn't it proper procedure to wait for a discussion to close before taking action? Wouldn't the closure be where the decision is noted as to exactly what should be done? — Maile ( talk) 20:55, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Concur with Maile66 and Cyberpower that the best solution would be to have a list of mappings made out rather than a "Do it". 138IP, it might be just me, but I'm getting a sarcastic vibe from your request to the point that a reading of civility guidelines would be appropriate. A mapping might look like "US-animation => {{WikiProject Animation||American-animation=yes}}". Having something like that is going to make it a whole lot easier to do the unmerges as without doing a great amount of legwork, the Bot Operator is going to have low probability of successfully unmerging the template. Hasteur ( talk) 21:20, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Kumioko, you don't need to take this so personally. Merging together all kinds of US-related projects was a big, bold, interesting move. It just didn't seem to work to generate collaboration——too many topics without much overlap and not enough people. Why does it work for MILHIST and not for WPUS? Hard to say. But it's not your fault it didn't work, and the people who want it demerged aren't trying to attack you; they just want to try something else out with the project. Choess ( talk) 16:55, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

• Plastikspork has just closed the discussion. "The result of the discussion was no consensus to delete, but it appears there is significant support for a "controlled demerger". Feel free to continue the discussion elsewhere" Doesn't quite have the same ring as "overwhelming consensus to destroy " mentioned above. I'm not sure what the closure meant, but perhaps that it should be up to each individual project to decide if they want to be unmerged from the template. — Maile ( talk) 21:34, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Would the work include restoring the individual state templates and then converting the templates? For example for Idaho, reverting these edits to restore Template:WikiProject Idaho and then converting {{WikiProject United States|class=foo|importance=blah|ID=yes|ID-importance=bar}} to {{WikiProject Idaho|class=foo|importance=bar}}? GoingBatty ( talk) 02:52, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

I really don't know, myself. Maybe someone who posts here would have some constructive ideas. My personal instinct is that per the suggestion of Plastikspork at the closing, this requires further discussion on a different talk page. I don't see that anything conclusive happened at the discussion that just closed, except perhaps any project that wishes to break away from WPUS should be allowed to do so. And I believe there was a suggestion that the smaller projects should have both templates available and make the choice on an article by article basis. Just my perspective, but I think this needs more discussion and some concrete framework needs to be arrived at before any bot is put into play. But this also puts it back to the reason Kumioko created WPUS, the dead projects that would not respond to any invitation or inquiry as to what they want. — Maile ( talk) 03:24, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

IMO some editor does need to go out and poke each of the associated projects to let them know that there was a discussion and that De-Merging is an option. Let each project decide if/how they want to unmerge, but I think whatever ratings that were amalgamated into the WPUS banner should not be percolated back down. Either people will be interested in doing something and a consensus building discussion will happen and there will be a plan to move forward. Hasteur ( talk) 03:32, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Just for the sake of clarity, the projects were never required to go into the WPUS template and several declined it and were left alone. Those that did were free to leave at anytime. Recently Kansas broke back out and Seton hall and SUNY left and were added to WikiProject New York. In both cases there was no difference. Kansas is no more active now than it was under WPUS andn SUNY and Seton hall are in the same boat. In fact, I would argue more was done to help the projects while under the scope of WPUS. The problem here is the unsolicited and unhelpful comments from editors who don't belong to any of these projects and just want to stir up drama. They do not care or want these projects to succeed and in fact they have no interest in them whatsoever except to ensure their demise. So in the end, the articles lose and that has always been the case. But, this will allow certain editors in question, several of which are admins, to justify continuing to push their POV pushing and article ownership. Well yeehaw. It further appalls me there seems to be several folks interested in this bot task to demerge the project when repeated attempts at bot tasks to help the project(s) in the past were flatly ignored. Typical..but appalling. 71.126.152.253 ( talk) 03:57, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Please assume good faith and don't be appalled that there are several people who think the state-level content that is stored within WPUS is still valuable and should not be deleted, and may be willing to donate their time to ensure that the content is preserved. GoingBatty ( talk) 17:12, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

AGF? Really? Multiple requests were left here over the last several years requesting a variety of bot tasks to help the project. Zero were completed and most never even garnered a single comment. They were just ignored. But now that the community has voted to eliminate the template multiple people are ready to remove the template and restore balance to the universe. Where were these people when the project was trying to get editors to collaborate and work to develop the WPUS supported projects? Where were these helpful bot operators when articles needed to be tagged or to perform other tasks? Lot's of folks are ready and willing to remove templates and destroy collaborations because that is easy. Its hard and it takes a lot of work to collaborate but that's not what we do here anymore. Now we just delete articles; remove content, links and templates; and blog. So you ask for me to assume good faith and I say I would if there were good faith intentions shown here. All I see is a bunch of folks wanting to destroy a collaboration because it interferes with their POV pushing and personal agenda's. So to answer the comment below as well. Submitting the template for deletion was absurd. But at least you got that useless editor Kumioko out of the project. That's gotta count for something! I left the project over them and they left because of you (Orlady, et. al....its an interesting cycle. 138.162.8.59 ( talk) 21:29, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

• This request is premature. A bot request should not be made until there is consensus on the requested action. As noted above, WP:TFD was considered to be the wrong place to make a decision on demerging the individual projects, in spite of the extensive participation that occurred there. -- Orlady ( talk) 15:25, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
• I am going to finish the Wikiproject USA assessment issue and build the importance around what it was originally intended; national topics of importance that are critical to general international studies (of a textbook), articles important to citizenship and naturalization and key high school material, and important secondary topics of government from an international standing point for Top, High, and Mid respectively. Low will be a general dumping category for all other topics. The operation of the importance tag will serve to appropriately balance international and national importance that cannot be governed in any other method. This only task is manually sorting through the topics and correcting their proper assessments. ChrisGualtieri ( talk) 13:58, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Chris, please see the talk page banner on Talk:Matt Urban. It still says the WPUS template is being considered for deletion. I haven't noticed the WPUS banner on other pages still say that. I don't know how the notice went out to the individual articles, but this in an indication some might still have it. — Maile ( talk) 17:46, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

I fixed that for you. Its hard to say why it happens but sometimes articles get hung up like that. To fix it all you have to do is a null edit. Which is just open the article or talk page and then save it with no changes. It usually works to purge the problem. 138.162.8.59 ( talk) 18:11, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I know the subject line don't make a lot of sense, ok? :) I guess I'm asking if there is any way to get a bot developed which can go through one or more of the pdf files of encyclopedias at commons' encyclopedia category and maybe generate a list of articles contained in that file. It would probably be great if it could have some sort of indicator of relative length of the article, things like maybe 4 lines, 1/2 page, 2 pages, or whatever. But I do think, maybe, for some of the smaller countries, with less generally spoken languages, and maybe some of the less popular topics, having something like that which could give editors interested in a given topic a quick list of articles which can be sourced from readily available files might be very useful. Maybe, as a first step, considering most reference books have "titles" at the top of each page, a bot which could see if the same "title" is included on two or three consecutive pages, and then list such titles. John Carter ( talk) 01:15, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with parsing PDFs so I'm out on this one.— cyberpower ^Chat_Offline 03:22, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I think this is difficult, but.... I just removed a few external links, with link named

Per DTI-NCR Permit No. ####, Series of 2013

I think the chance that any such links are legitimate is nil. Would it be possible for a bot to remove, from all Wikipedia articles,

* [URL Per DTI-NCR Permit No. nnnn, Series of mmmm]

Where:

• URL is any URL (probably any string without spaces would be adequate)
• nnnn is a number
• mmmm is a number, usually 2013, but I wouldn't be surprised if 2012 occasionally occurred.

This might scanning a database dump for DTI-NCR.

— Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:49, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

I think I'll withdraw this. A Wikipedia search should catch the links, as we're looking for displayed text, not text within links. An edit filter might be appropriate, though.... — Arthur Rubin (talk) 06:43, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I've been approached by an Art Gallery who are aware that many of the thousands of links that Wikipedians have made to their sites over the years are now dead. They may be able to provide a map or logic for the move, if they can would someone be willing to run a bot to update the links? They think it is mostly on EN wiki but will probably be on many other languages as well. They would also be interested in a report listing all of our articles that reference their sites, and presumably any in external link sections. Hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand of the articles involved will be related to living artists so there could be quite a lot of BLPs where the sourcing is improved by this. Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) ( talk) 16:00, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

@ Jonathan Cardy (WMUK): - Seems that the first step would be to create a list of the links to see if they could provide the map or logic. Could you please provide the domain names for their sites? GoingBatty ( talk) 02:27, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

@ GoingBatty: Thanks GoingBatty, could you drop me an email and I will include you in talks with them as to what we need? Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) ( talk) 13:56, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

@ Jonathan Cardy (WMUK): You've got mail|sig= GoingBatty ( talk) 14:03, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks and replied. Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) ( talk) 14:57, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

• Hi! Can a bot please send this invitation to this invites list? Thanks! -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 22:45, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

== Bot to delete a bunch of redirects == Looking for some bot or script to clean up some spam in the form of 200+ redirects to a single article [[Măeriște]]. I suspect the original author was unhappy about the original article being deleted. As a result, the article for this town [[Măeriște]] now has redirects from a multitude of people names, geographic names, newspapers, museums, ethicities, religions, etc. I consider this spam as in [[Wikipedia:CSD#G11|G11]]: Unambiguous advertising or promotion. I would like to delete (or edit with {{dp-spam}} all of the redirects to this article (https://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/rdcheck.py?page=M%C4%83eri%C8%99te) except the following: *Criștelec *Doh, Sălaj *Giurtelecu Șimleului *Kerestelek *Krasznahídvég *Maladia *Maladé *Măerişte *Somlyógyőrtelek *Somlyóújlak *Uileacu Şimleului *Wüst Görgen Thanks [[User:Hollomis|Hollomis]] ([[User talk:Hollomis|talk]]) 22:40, 2 October 2013 (UTC) :Mass RfD is the third door on your left, see [[WP:RFD]] [[User:Werieth|Werieth]] ([[User talk:Werieth|talk]]) 22:43, 2 October 2013 (UTC) ==Edit-a-thons at UC Riverside== FYI: The UCR Libraries are hosting three edit-a-thons focusing on their great special collections (science fiction, water resources, the Inland Empire and more) on Oct. 12, 2013, Oct. 26, 2013, and Nov. 23, 2013. Please participate if you can, and please help publicize to friends in the area! Details here. All are welcome, new and experienced editors alike! -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 22:44, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

is this not the right place to ask for this?? -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 19:50, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

User talk:EdwardsBot is what you're looking for.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 17:44, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

thanks -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 03:57, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

A discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football#FB team templates has determined that these templates (thousands of them!) should be replaced by direct wikilinks instead (the templates have nothing but a link in them).

What basically needs to be done is; find all instances of a template, replace it with the link (the contents of the template) instead (simply subst the template?), and delete the then unused template. The final part can't be done by bot, but it can be tagged as empty, or we can wait until the task is done and then do one mass-deletion, similar to Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 September 20#Unused fb team templates.

Details on this can be discussed with the members of the Football project at the above discussion, but are there any bot operators who in principle are willing to take this on? Fram ( talk) 09:45, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

There are many uses of these fb team templates, but the most common one is when it is used by the league-table template. While the long-term goal could be to remove all of these templates, a good start would be to replace Template:Fb cl team with Template:Fb cl2 team, and convert the templates into wikilinks like I've done here. Is this a possible task for a bot? After that has been done, I would guess that 90% of the fb team templates are unused and that they can be deleted. Mentoz86 ( talk) 13:24, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Further to comments already made at WT:FOOTY, I'm in agreement with this approach. Giant Snowman 13:27, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Any takers? Giant Snowman 10:54, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

So are these templates simply being substituted? It's pretty straightforward.— cyberpower ^Chat_Offline 12:42, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

2006–07 FC Barcelona season uses Template:Fb in player, Template:Fb out player, Template:Fb cl team, Template:Fb cm3 match, Template:Fb report 2t, and Template:Fb fm match all of which use Template:Fb team to get the link to a team and a flagicon when the team is from a country other than Spain. Fb cm3 match and Fb fm match use the team template to also get the Template:Fb ground where the match is played. The proposal is to change all of the templates that use Fb team templates to use wikilinks instead of these templates to provide the links to team articles. There are other templates that use team templates, but these examples are all involved in this article. Fb cl team is easily replaced with Fb cl2 team which uses wikilinks instead of team templates. EddieV2003 ( talk) 16:54, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

User:Blake305 appears to be inactive. Could someone please pick up this pending task, which has community support and for which his bot already has approval for a trail run? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:45, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

I am thinking to take this task and I will request for BOT flag-- Gabrielchihonglee ( talk) 12:09, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Since Gabrielchihonglee's BRFA was withdrawn, I'll give it a look. Coding... Anomie ⚔ 23:16, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

BRFA filed Anomie ⚔ 01:56, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Ok, a lot of work has been done, adding old sources from the hhtp://www.archive.org to articles , especially in the Israel/Palestine area.

Some time ago, archive.org redirected all these links to a link without www, so if you look at http://www.archive.org/details/palestineundermo00lestuoft you will be redired to http://archive.org/details/palestineundermo00lestuoft

Ideally, all these links should be stripped of their www´s, like I have done here. Looks like the work for a bot? Huldra ( talk) 22:56, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Hmmm. This needs wider discussion. These edits make no change to the outcome. So I'm officially going to say Needs wider discussion..— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 23:38, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Concur with cyberpower and suggest that a Village Pump (Proposals) thread be talked out to make sure. I know that there's a kerfluffle right now regarding archiving services so we want to do everything above board. Hasteur ( talk) 18:56, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Unless archive.org has said they're going to stop supporting www at some point (and given that they're an archive service, I highly doubt they would), there is no reason at all to do this. It's fixing something that's not broken. Mr. Z-man 15:34, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Chris G ( talk · contribs) has left a message on his talk page that real life has taken priority and he's stopped his bots. But he has offered the code if somebody wants to get them running again. Is there anybody willing to take a look at getting RFC bot ( talk · contribs) running again? I'm most interested in the WP:DASHBOARD updating, but the RfC stuff is probably a higher priority. Thanks. 64.40.54.22 ( talk) 06:09, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

So... Special:Contributions/Legobot. Unfortunately Chris made the toolserver database private, so I'm starting off with a fresh database. I'm not sure what side effects this might have (people might get FRS spammed a bit extra?), but nothing should blow up. Right now I have it on a hourly cronjob. Is there any need for it to run any faster? Legoktm ( talk) 06:33, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Hrmph. Special:Contribs/10.4.1.125. I fixed it so that shouldn't happen again in the future. Legoktm ( talk) 06:49, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Legobot to the rescue. Thanks very much, Legoktm. I think hourly is just fine. Is there any chance that Legobot ( talk · contribs) could update the WP:DASHBOARD also? Or should that be spun off to a different bot? Thanks. 64.40.54.22 ( talk) 06:54, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

It should get to that, it's still in the middle of a run since it's taking a while to populate the database. Legoktm ( talk) 06:58, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm, I've offered to run take over the bot already, and Chris_G was preparing to hand me all of the stuff required.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 11:38, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

You are also running without approval, which is in violation of the bot policy.— cyberpower ^Chat_Online 11:43, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Tbh cyberpower, I would say overlook it this one time because it's a pre-approved task, with the same code and by a trusted bot op, and only temporarily probably if you're going to take over. Rcsprinter (chinwag) @ 20:29, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Um, well the code has been posted for quite a while, and you hadn't done it yet, so I just did. And no, I'm not going to bother filing BRFAs for taking over harej's bots, that's pointless bureaucracy. Waste of my time, and the BAG member who has to approve it. Legoktm ( talk) 21:52, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks just wanted to say thanks to everybody for keeping these important bots running. And a quick note that the BRFA for Legobot 33 has been Speedily Approved for the tasks. Thanks again everybody. 64.40.54.104 ( talk) 02:27, 7 September 2013 (UTC)
• WP:DASHBOARD updates? @ Legoktm: it's been a week or so and I was curious if Legobot ( talk · contribs) was still building the database or if it was something else. Thanks. 64.40.54.143 ( talk) 22:53, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
  • See User_talk:Legobot#RFCs_not_getting_listed which I'm actively debugging right now. I believe I've fixed it and am watching it run right now. Legoktm ( talk) 22:58, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
  • [30] Legoktm ( talk) 23:01, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks very much. I really appreciate your great bot work. 64.40.54.143 ( talk) 00:31, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

This request was made a while ago and taken up by User:Hasteur (who may still have preliminary code available). However, there was a bit of a scuffle at WP:NRHP which resulted in one editor being indefinitely topic banned from areas related to the project, and that turned Hasteur off to the task. Would anyone else be willing to pick this up? The initial bot task is to find all articles whose only inline citation is to the National Register Information System via {{ NRISref}} and tag them with {{ NRIS-only}}. A rough pseudo-code logical procedure is provided below, courtesy of User:Hasteur:

For each page that includes a transclusion of {{ NRISref}}:

• Check that the page we're about to tag is in the Article namespace
• If there is a {{ GR}} template anywhere in the page, do not list article as a potential target
• If there is a {{ sfn}} template anywhere in the page, do not list article as a potential target
• If the title of the page starts with 'National Register of Historic Places listings in', do not list article as potential target
• Count the number of references
• Get a list of HTML commented out sections
  • For each section of HTML commented out code, count the number of commented out references
• If the number of references overall minus the number of commented references is greater than 1, do not list article as a potential target
• Otherwise, list article as potential target.

After the initial run which tags existing articles, the bot should scan recent changes and tag any newly created articles citing only the NRIS. Also, the bot would need to prevent removal of the NRIS-only template unless multiple references are present on the page. All of this has gained consensus with members of the project.

Hasteur had run this through several test runs of the first task and generated a list in his userspace of articles that would be tagged on a live run, and we were in the process of refining the procedure to better suit the project's needs, but it seems Hasteur has either gotten too busy or begun to ignore this. If anyone could pick this up, WP:NRHP would be very grateful! If any further elaboration is needed, let me know!-- Dudemanfellabra ( talk) 17:28, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Ludacriously busy + AfC backlog Burn + dissatisfaction with the NRHP infighting. [31] is the script I was using, though I don't really remember what the invocation I used was. Hasteur ( talk) 18:54, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Anyone?-- Dudemanfellabra ( talk) 05:13, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Several times, I've seen an article name with a parenthetical sub-title, even though the non-parenthetical title was free. For instance, naming an article "Such and Such (film)" when "Such and Such" without any suffix wasn't in use. Is there a way that a bot can find instances of such titles? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{( What did I screw up now?)} 00:39, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Definitely sounds doable – I'm traveling today and tomorrow, but I'll work on generating such a list for you over the weekend if no one else has already. Theopolisme ( talk) 01:44, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Is there any chance that a bot wouldn't be needed? I'm wondering if some database report might be able to get the information without a bot. Nyttend ( talk) 03:24, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Whatever would get the job done. This is a problem I've seen time and time again. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{( What did I screw up now?)} 11:37, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Usually it's when there have been two articles, 'Such and Such' (film)' and 'Such and Such' (video game)' for example, and one of them has been deleted. Giant Snowman 11:45, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

@ Nyttend: I was planning on just running a database query myself and storing the output to a table somewhere on-wiki. Theopolisme ( talk) 14:28, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! It just seems a waste to write a bot if we can do the job easier with the database. I know nothing about either one, and my question was meant for the techie types; it wasn't addressed to TenPoundHammer. Nyttend ( talk) 05:36, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

 Done I found 35,281 non-redirect article-space pages that were unnecessarily disambiguated. The first ten thousand of these are listed at User:Theo's Little Bot/unnecessary dab. Theopolisme ( talk) 22:40, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Is there a way that a bot can find all instances of {{ Infobox album}} and {{ Infobox single}} have left the producer field vacant, and maybe categorize them? I think this might be useful in categorizing works with unknown producers (e.g. Ronan (song) and All Cried Out (Kree Harrison song)). Ten Pound Hammer • ^{( What did I screw up now?)} 02:02, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

It seems like a better idea there might be to adjust the template code to add a category if that field is empty. Anomie ⚔ 11:28, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

@Anomie That would work too. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{( What did I screw up now?)} 15:16, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I have requested this before during summer, but without any reponse and it seems that there are more people active here now: while going through many of the medical stubs, I encountered a lot of stubs (and some other articles) which have been turned into redirects and are still classified in the assessment (WPMED, WPAN, WPPHARM) on their talkpage as an article. I have corrected many of those, but there must still be hundreds more. Could a bot set the class to redirect in those articles and remove any importance rating? And, as a secondary request, would it be possible to find all articles which have a Infobox disease, Infobox symptom, Interventions infobox or Diagnostic infobox and tag them with WPMED if not already done? -- WS ( talk) 12:14, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Ah, just discovered Category:Autoassessment bots; apparently I am not the first one to think of this :-) Will inquire further there. -- WS ( talk) 15:39, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

As a botop, I would do it myself. But I require admin rights to carry it out. The task is simple. A bot is to downgrade all fully protected templates to template protection, so editor with the template editor rights can actually edit the template.— cyberpower _Online ^{Trick or Treat} 16:35, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

I think you're oversimplifying the task here. Yes, most templates can/should be removed down. Some templates like Template:! probably shouldn't. You also need to exempt any template used in an interface message, which might be hard to automatically detect due to usage of #switch's. I think it's easier if we generate a list, trim it down, and then run a script to downgrade that list. Legoktm ( talk) 17:46, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Also see Wikipedia_talk:Cascade-protected_items#Proposal_that_this_page_be_unprotected. Legoktm ( talk) 17:47, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Opining as a bot op/future tempalte editor Surely there's a report or something that could be ran to establish a list of templates that should be "downgraded" into the new protection level... Oh wait there is... [32] will give you a list of 2000 pages in the Template namespace that are fully protected that might be eligible for downgrading into the template editor level. All things being equal, I'd much rather have these be evaluated by a human editor to determine if it makes sense to downgrade and a Administrator to second the proposed downgrading. Hasteur ( talk) 19:02, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

I have to agree with Legoktm: most all templates should be reduced, but a very few probably shouldn't. However, we could put together a list as Hasteur suggests, and then proceed to remove templates that shouldn't be reduced. Once we're done, an admin bot could be instructed to reduce protection for everything on the list — we'd save the human effort of reducing protection without unprotecting the top top top templates, and it wouldn't be much work to vet the list of templates. Nyttend ( talk) 22:39, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Why do ! and interface templates need to be excluded? NE Ent 23:15, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

If someone edits ! they'd throw the job queue into whack and we'd all be screwed for the next week. Interface templates need to be excluded because template editors have the right to edit the template/module namespaces (well, enforced socially not technically), which does not include the MediaWiki namespace by transclusion. Legoktm ( talk) 00:22, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Indeed. It would reconstruct 2.5 million pages. Kind of would lock the database into read-only mode for a week or 2. I'm with Legoktm on this one.— cyberpower _Online ^{Trick or Treat} 01:04, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Um, no it wouldn't. It would just flood the job queue. Legoktm ( talk) 01:08, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I was told that when a template that is transcluded on several pages is edited, that it reparses them or something like that. I'm not sure exactly what. If I got wrong, then sorry.— cyberpower _Online ^{Trick or Treat} 01:14, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

In a very basic form, yes. Except that reparsing pages does not lock the database. Legoktm ( talk) 01:16, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Null edits to widely transcluded templates no longer queue up refreshLinks jobs, per this Gerrit change of July 2013. Would changing the protection level of a page count as a null edit for this purpose, or would it queue up the refreshLinks jobs anyway? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 03:44, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I asked the same question to Anomie on IRC earlier today and he stated that protecting a template would not queue any jobs. Legoktm ( talk) 03:52, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Oh, I just realised I've been misreading the discussion above - you were talking about actual edits, not null edits. D'oh. :P — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 04:53, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

• Ok, so let's get a list of fully protected templates posted somewhere for people to look through and see what templates are ok to unprotect. I'm willing to help out with the vetting. It would be best to have the page on-wiki so that we can mark templates as reviewed, and so that they don't end up getting reviewed twice. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 04:53, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

  Wikipedia:Template editor/Unprotection list. Query used:

  select CONCAT('*[[Template:', page_title, ']]') FROM page_restrictions JOIN page ON pr_page=page_id WHERE page_namespace=10 AND pr_type='edit' AND pr_level='sysop' and pr_expiry='infinity';
  

  Legoktm ( talk) 05:04, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

  Thanks. :) There are a few bad links on the list that look like unicode errors, e.g. Template:Country_data_Saint_Barthélemy. (That one should be Template:Country data Saint Barthélemy.) Could you have a go at sorting those out? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 05:55, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

  I could quickly conjure up a script that will do the job of downgrading protection, but an adminbot will need to run it.— cyberpower _Offline ^{Trick or Treat} 13:01, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

  How would this script sort out templates that should stay full-protected from templates that should be moved to template-protection? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:07, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

  My impression was that a list was going to be created first, then vetted, where innappropriate entries are removed, and then processed by an admin bot afterwards. It already looks like legoktm has an idea but I can also develop a script that will make a few checks for each template. Such as extremely high visibility, say > 500,000 transclusions, and transclusions into the MediaWiki namespace. It will then generate a list somewhere that us editors can vet and remove entries as needed. The bot can then read that list and begin changing the protection on all of those templates.— cyberpower _Online ^{Trick or Treat} 14:12, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

  Reiterating my objection to having a bot do this. Is there a deadline to getting these templates into the lower protection level? I'd much prefer a editor nominating the template for the lower protection and then an admin reviewing the RFPP request and seconding it if appropriate. Having an admin bot do all of the changes opens us to potential disasters. Hasteur ( talk) 14:36, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

  Hasteur, I'm not quite clear what you don't want to see a bot doing. Making judgements about what should and shouldn't be protected? If so, I agree with you: humans should do all the decision-making. Doing the actual protection modification? If so, I disagree: if we humans can decide what to modify, wouldn't it be far easier for an adminbot to implement the decision? Wouldn't it be rather simple to tell the bot "Change protection for every page that's linked by this page" and then let it loose? Nyttend ( talk) 23:43, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

  I'm objecting on the exact same grounds that people objected to HasteurBot deleting G13 records. We want a second set of eyes on the templates that are going to be lesser protected. I'll pose a hypothetical to show you why AdminBot unprotection is a bad idea. Just before the bot starts up, an editor sneaks a high visibility template that should never be in the list on. Now the bot doesn't know that the template wasn't intended to be on the unprotection batch, but now it is. I wolud prefer individual petitioning of specific templates that are desired to be in the lower protection or an editor and admin working together manually unprotecting ones that make sense. What deadline are we facing with not having all these templates in the lower protection? What delay are we having in how allowing 31ish more editors the ability to edit the templates when they may not need to. Hasteur ( talk) 00:16, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

UTC)

• That makes no sense at all. You want human editors to process countless templates by hand all because there is the possibility that one editor sneaks on a template that shouldn't be there. That can be easily fixed by reverting the bot once it made the change. And reverting the bot in this case is faster than downgrading templates manually. As a matter of fact, an admin can protects the page before running the script to ensure everything is in place.— cyberpower _Online ^{Trick or Treat} 01:45, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

  [ec with Cyberpower] I'm sorry — I assumed that everyone was imagining the same thing about this page as I was, so I didn't mention it. I was assuming that our bot-instructions page would be fully protected: of course we can discuss additions/removals on an unprotected page, but an admin should protect the discussion page or move its contents to a protected page before the bot does anything. Look at the protection logs for Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working; based on pages such as this and the DYK queues, I assumed that we'd always protect a page that was being used to give instructions to bots. Nyttend ( talk) 01:46, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

NOTE: You can get a list of the fully protected templates with this link -- WOSlinker ( talk) 10:35, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

• I've got Cyberbot II working on a list of templates that should be downgraded. It'll dump it onto legoktm's page. It should fix the unicode issue brought up by Mr. Stradivarius. It automatically removes entries with >500,000 transclusions and entries with transcluded into the MediaWiki namespace. Should make vetting the remaining stuff easier.— cyberpower _Online ^{Trick or Treat} 14:02, 19 October 2013 (UTC)
•  Done Cyberbot II has generated a list here. This should be vetted. I will now go on break.— cyberpower _Online ^{Trick or Treat} 02:12, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

There are a few categories of template left in the list to consider. -- WOSlinker ( talk) 06:44, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• Chemical Symbol templates
• Country code templates
• WPBannerMeta and subtemplates
• Cite templates
• License templates
• mbox/ambox/cmbox/tmbox based templates

I was wondering if it would be useful to create a list of articles that do not yet exist based on categories at WikiCommons. There are I'm sure many groups of images just waiting for an enwiki article, and if someone thinks that something is deserving of a category there it is likely that it is deserving of an article here. The bot could simply look through all the categories and produce a list of those which do not contain an image linked from enwiki. This would likely be a one-off task but could be run periodically if deemed useful. violet/riga  _^[talk] 09:20, 19 October 2013 (UTC)