This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Could a bot sort out the drafts at Category:Userspace drafts by adding a "date=" parameter with the date of creation? If not, at the least, could someone make a table of those pages with their date of creation? I could do it faster if I had all those with the same month together. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 15:17, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps the bot could also drop users a note asking them if they still need the drafts (especially those that are more than a year old) and encourage them to tag them with {{ db-u1}} if not? I suspect many of these have been forgotten about and that the users concerned would be content for them to be deleted without wasting time on MfD nominations... WJBscribe (talk) 15:35, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

WJBscribe, umm, there's 46,000 drafts over a year old, including I think over 100 by at least 4 different editors. There's no bot who should handle that workload but feel free to suggest it. I'm just trying to keep it stable as I got a net 300 down in November (about 2000 more pages go stale a month). -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 00:09, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

BRFA filed I didn't attempt to drop any notes, that would definitely need wider discussion first.   Hazard  SJ  06:00, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Can someone please create a bot to change "outside of" to "outside", with the exception of where "outside" is used as a noun and preceded by the word "the", as in "the label on the outside of the bottle"? I am weary of reading "outside of politics / sport / the United States / Japan etc"!

The only other exception is where the use is part of a quotation or is, for example, the name of a song such as Outside of Heaven. I appreciate this will make the programming complex, and maybe impossible to do in one sweep. If so, can it be set up so that it can be applied selectively in batches, such as "outside of [politics]" etc?

I have been doing this manually, but, with over 67,000 instances of "outside of" listed (which admittedly includes the legitimate uses cited above), it is going to take me a very long time....

This change is consistent with most style guides and appears to be WP policy given the number of article names which are redirected, e.g. List of United States Senators born outside of the United States, Mongolians outside of Mongolia, Think outside of the box etc.

Thank you! The Sage of Stamford ( talk) 21:49, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Per WP:CONTEXTBOT, this is a task unlikely to be approved. Spelling bots are generally not allowed due to false positives, some of which you list above. —   HELLKNOWZ  ▎ TALK 21:54, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Not even for discrete, smaller sets that would not have false positives, e.g. "outside of Japan? That currently has 1,384 instances, so anything would help!-- The Sage of Stamford ( talk) 22:02, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't see anything wrong per se with "outside of Japan". A MOS talk page would be a good place to get consensus for an action of this sort. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 22:06, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

As a general rule a preposition should be positioned pre a noun; the addition of a second preposition, "of", is normally entirely otiose. There is an accepted use of "outside of" when it has the meaning of "other than" or "with the exception of", which seems to have become conflated with the conventional prepositional use of "outside". It is the latter I wish to address. -- The Sage of Stamford ( talk) 15:25, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

@ The Sage of Stamford: Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos would be another place to discuss. Good luck! GoingBatty ( talk) 22:10, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

The Sage of Stamford, even your not have false positives example can easily have false positives. "Outside of Japan, the states parties rejected whaling" means that the idea of whaling was opposed by all negotiators with the exception of the guy from Japan. "Outside Japan, the states parties rejected whaling" means that the negotiators opposed whaling in general, but they didn't mind the practice as long as it was happening in Japan, or it could mean that their meeting in Vladivostok had results different from those of their meeting in Sapporo. All changes of this sort must be performed with human supervision, with AWB if not done fully manually. Nyttend ( talk) 22:32, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks - you make a fair point. In reality, most of the instances you flag of different meaning would be much improved by a change in wording altogether, e.g. "with the exception of Japan", but I accept that that is another matter altogether. Where can I find out more about using AWB as a means of speeding up what is a very big task if done totally manually? -- The Sage of Stamford ( talk) 15:25, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

@ The Sage of Stamford: That would be Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser. Happy editing! GoingBatty ( talk) 18:52, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm happy to withdraw this bot request. AWB is serving the purpose very satisfactorily! -- The Sage of Stamford ( talk) 13:02, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Could someone create a pile of redirects for Dungeons & Dragons? Some of these page titles have "and" variants as well as their "&" titles, but a lot don't, and navigation would be improved if they all did. Here's a complete list of pages that I obtained through Special:Search/intitle:"Dungeons & Dragons", minus the ones that already have redirects:

I assume that this would be a non-controversial issue, comparable to the request I made some years ago at Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_49#Create a lot of unpunctuated redirects; someone at that request required a discussion elsewhere before performing the request, so Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 91#Create a lot of unpunctuated redirects was successful, with several responders saying "this is silly; the bot request shouldn't have waited for a discussion".

Thanks for the help. Nyttend ( talk) 21:58, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Keeping in mind the multiple editors who have been taken to the woodshed for a solid application of ClueBat for creating redirects (most recently Neelix), If I were to take this on, I'd appreciate a consensus agreeing to this because it's not exactly dropping a punctuation. It's mostly a CYA for me as a bot operator in case someone gets upset. Hasteur ( talk) 18:18, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

That's absurd, but I understand your need and don't want you to face complaints from idiots. No permission will be requested, because it's something that's so simple that permission is not needed, but my next edit will be a new section at WP:VP/Pr requesting community consensus in favor of you being able to tell people to go suck an egg if they complain at you for performing this specific request. Nyttend ( talk) 22:39, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

• @ Nyttend:
• I have created a more dynamic list at User:Rich Farmbrough/temp127 - currently 342 items to be created. A null edit will remove created items from the list.
• Click a red link and paste the following:

#Redirect [[{{Subst:#invoke:String|replace|source={{Subst:PAGENAME}}|Dungeons and Dragons|Dungeons & Dragons|1}}]]

• Then save. Voila! redirect created. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes manually.

All the best: Rich  Farmbrough, 18:32, 30 December 2015 (UTC).

@ Nyttend: A little bit faster method than Rich's. First, install this script. Then bypass catche and go to Special:Massedit. Put the list in "Pages to edit" box. Put the code Rich suggested (#Redirect [[{{Subst:#invoke:String|replace|source={{Subst:PAGENAME}}|Dungeons and Dragons|Dungeons & Dragons|1}}]]) in "Text 1" box, and press "Edit". Voila! Of course, first you could test the method by creating a few redirects. The list:

-- Edgars2007 ( talk/ contribs) 17:58, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

BRFA filed. —  Earwig  ^talk 00:16, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Doing... Nyttend. The BRFA was approved and I'll be starting the run shortly. I'll give a hollar once the run is finished. Hasteur ( talk) 23:18, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Nyttend ( talk) 23:48, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Y Done Nyttend. Yeah... it was a lot more than 300 pages... Closer to 1000. Hasteur ( talk) 03:12, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks; I'm surprised, as I don't know how your bot found so many many pages that didn't appear in my search. Nyttend ( talk) 03:31, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Regex title search for "Dungeons & Dragons" anywhere in the title, and evaluate every single match (even ones that do have the appropriate redirect). Hasteur ( talk) 13:39, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

I request a bot that autodeletes the following types of pages:

1.) PROD and BLPPROD pages that have not met guidelines after 7 days, and have not been objected to,

2.) Pages that meet criteria for speedy deletion after 14 days (and tagged with speedy deletion request),

3.) and AfDs that have reached a consensus recommending deletion.

I would like this bot to be named TaakelmàʔnBot

Thank You

2602:306:CF2A:5580:B4A1:AD04:ACF9:4A0A ( talk) 17:32, 30 December 2015 (UTC)TheGreatEditor

Not done And will not be done. Enacting a deletion is exclusively the perview of Admins. There are a few extraordinary cases in which a bot may delete pages, but those are not the generic use cases you have presented. Hasteur ( talk) 18:10, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Hello,

I noticed there are about 35 pages in Article space using the "word" consistuency or consistuencies, a spelling mistake for constistuency. It may be useful to have a bot correct these, rather than doing them all by hand! Place Clichy ( talk) 22:22, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

@ Place Clichy:  Doing... with AWB. Since bots will not be approved to fix spelling mistakes, I suggest you post future requests at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos. Thanks! GoingBatty ( talk) 23:20, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

@ Place Clichy:  Done - changed to "constituency", not "constistuency". GoingBatty ( talk) 23:49, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

@ GoingBatty: Many thanks! Indeed getting the "correct" spelling right helps! Place Clichy ( talk) 23:54, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Per Talk:Pac-12 Conference#Requested move 5 December 2015, Pacific-12 Conference was renamed as Pac-12 Conference.

The ensuing month has seen associated renaming of "*Pacific-12 Conference*" articles, section headers, and categories to adhere to the "*Pac-12 Conference*" naming convention. By good-faith intent, all such instances have been migrated to the new naming convention of "Pac-12 Conference"

So this request is to script the remaining change of ~700 string instances of "Pacific-12 Conference" -> "Pac-12 Conference". UW Dawgs ( talk) 19:49, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

You can do this with WP:AWB. -- Izno ( talk) 01:11, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@ UW Dawgs: Not a good task for a bot., as there may be instances where the text should stay "Pacific-12 Conference", such as direct quotes. Like fixing spelling mistakes, this should be supervised instead of done automatically. GoingBatty ( talk) 03:17, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Would settle for the 1000+ links to "[[Pacific-12 Conference*]]" being updated to "[[Pac-12 Conference*]]" (* wildcard being either empty or "|something"), while waiting for AWB access for the more manual edits. Cheers, UW Dawgs ( talk) 04:04, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@ UW Dawgs: Some of those links may be in direct quotes, which would not need to be changed. The left side of piped bluelinks would not need to be changed per WP:NOTBROKEN, but the right side of piped links (i.e. what is visible to the reader) may need to change. GoingBatty ( talk) 19:39, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Withdrawn. Am using AWB to accomplish. UW Dawgs ( talk) 01:00, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Can I transclude the User:PokestarFan/Hello page on the top of any of my subpages that already don't contain it other than the Hello page itself? Thanks. PokestarFan talk Blocks

@ PokestarFan: I don't see any reason why not. Per the message at the top of this page, this is a page for requesting work to be done by bots - how does your question relate to bot requests? Thanks! GoingBatty ( talk) 17:38, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

@ GoingBatty: It's too tedious looking for every subpage in my user space This is PokestarFan's signature. I have commented on your page. My Talk My Blocks Time is: 21:34, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

You have eight subpages in your userspace, and about five redirects. Fewer than that in your user talk space. Hardly tedious enough to warrant a bot, and you could probably do it manually faster than it would take to write out this request. -- kelapstick^{( bainuu)} 22:03, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

• WP:AWB would take less time to work with. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 22:25, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
• Not a good task for a bot. per the above; you can manually work through Special:PrefixIndex/User:PokestarFan and Special:PrefixIndex/User talk:PokestarFan. —  Earwig  ^talk 00:23, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I know we already have atleast one bot that is archiving Dead links at articles. But considering that it is a list of over 150.000 articles that has Dead links as of today, I suggest that we create one more bot or take an available bot that can help with this task. Atleast an suggestion.-- BabbaQ ( talk) 11:57, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Idea is not well explained. BabbaQ If the rate isn't keeping up then go yell at the bot operator to increase the threshold for fixing or use the grid cluster to paralellize the fixing. Hasteur ( talk) 13:38, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

And also assuming that the archival service and any checked websites are okay with the amount of requests. —   HELLKNOWZ  ▎ TALK 13:43, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

N Not done Cyberbot II already does this, and it's speed can be ramped up if needed.— ^cyberpower _Chat:Online 22:23, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Occasionally, I've noticed that an article has been mistakenly template-protected. Perhaps a bot could monitor the protection log, and if a page in a namespace other then Template, Module, User, or Wikipedia is template-protected, deliver a "did you mean to do this" message to the protecting admin, i.e.

Hello administrator name. On date you template-protected [[page]] ([https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special%3ALog&type=protect&page=page (url-encoded) log]). As template protection is only meant to be used for templates, or other highly transcluded pages, did you perhaps mean to select a different level? Thanks, bot signature

or similar. - Evad37 [ talk 03:54, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Unsure if necessary - couldn't you just add something to said template? (Just lurking WP:BOTREQ to see what sort of things people want bots to do). E. Lee ( talk) 04:59, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

@ Elee: Which template are you talking about? And how does adding something to a template fix a wrongly applied protection level? - Evad37 [ talk 05:50, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

For an example of the problem and proposed solution (letting admins know that they may have made a mistake so they can fix it), see User talk:Ponyo#Maithali protection level, or User talk:Black Kite#Farshad Fotouhi‎ protection level - Evad37 [ talk 05:54, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

There are padlock templates added to protected pages. These "sense" if they are incompatible with the protection actually used, I believe, and put the page in a category to be fixed.

Arguably there is something that could be done along these lines.

A list of template protected articles can be found here (currently empty). A bot could check this, and act upon it. All the best: Rich  Farmbrough, 21:43, 27 July 2015 (UTC).

Such a bot should also check the queue for move protection. ~ Rob ^Talk 14:11, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

As discussed at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Academic_Journals#Bot_task?, there are several fairly standard redirects needed to each article in this project using that infobox. The box has parameters for the journal title and it's ISO abbreviation. Citations routinely vary the capitalization, abbreviations, and punctuation of these abbreviations, creating a need for redirects from each common variation to the actual article title (usually the same as the journal title, in sentence case). Is there a bot that might be suited to the task? LeadSongDog come howl! 01:23, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

• I've obtained the ISO 4 vocabulary to convert, e.g., "European Physical Journal" to "Eur. Phys. J."; it's a spreadsheet-format version of the PDF available at issn.org. Could you bot-wizards please tell us if such a conversion would be simply too complicated? Thanks! Fgnievinski ( talk) 02:30, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

• Maybe an easier and useful thing to do instead would be to start from Infobox journal's title field (e.g., "European Physical Journal") and its manually-entered abbreviation field ("Eur. Phys. J."), and create the desired redirects: e.g., "European physical journal", "Eur. Phys. J.", "Eur Phys J", "eur phys j", "E. P. J.", "E.P.J.", "E P J", "EPJ". Fgnievinski ( talk) 02:45, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

Is there a bot available that could add the current United States Census Bureau population estimates (and unfortunately I wouldn't trust OCR for a lot of the older Census files because I often have to look carefully/zoom myself to tell 3 from 8 or 6 from 0)? It should be a fairly straightforward task. The Census updates can be found at census.gov/popest. I am in the process of adding data (mostly, I am using an AWK script on my computer to format data from a spreadsheet for copy/paste into Wikipedia) manually, and for that, I'm okay, since it gives me a chance to do spot edits on those pages as well and allows me to try to make sure that adding the USCensusPop widget doesn't completely screw up formatting of the page, but it's not something I could do every year.

Specifically, it could check to see if a page for a place has a Template:USCensusPop, and then if so, just update. Very simple. I'd write it myself, but it would be nicer if somebody either has code I can reuse or if they could do it all themselves. Thanks. DemocraticLuntz ( talk) 23:30, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Sounds like a great idea.-- BabbaQ ( talk) 23:47, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Would it be possible to check, for each page with Template:WikiProject Academic Journals in its talk page, if its redirects also have Template:WikiProject Academic Journals (class=redirect) in their respective talk pages? Thanks! Fgnievinski ( talk) 20:52, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Idea is not well explained.— ^cyberpower _Chat:Online 20:14, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

@ C678: sorry, here's an example: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America has several redirects [1], some of which are correctly tagged with {{WPJournals|class=redirect}} in their respective talk pages (e.g, Talk:PNAS) others that are either blank or as a redirect to the target's talk page (e.g., Talk:Proc Nat Acad Sci). fgnievinski ( talk) 22:47, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Maybe it's better moving the page to the redirect pages than just create a new page?-- Kanashimi ( talk) 13:05, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Could a bot please inspect values entered in field "language" of Infobox journal? Then possibly populate individual sub-categories of Category:Academic journals by language (as per WP:JWG). Thanks! Fgnievinski ( talk) 02:14, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

@ Fgnievinski: do you mean check they are valid, or add individual articles about journals to the category? Mdann52 ( talk) 16:19, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

@ Mdann52: the latter, please; thanks for looking into this. fgnievinski ( talk) 19:03, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

@ Fgnievinski: in that case, this is beyond my capability, I will leave this for someone else to take a look at. Mdann52 ( talk) 19:07, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

@ Mdann52: a listing of inconsistencies between category membership and infobox language field would be a great start; then one could manually fix as appropriate. fgnievinski ( talk) 19:15, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Actually, even a reverse listing of transclusions by language field value would be helpful (e.g., English, French, etc.); it doesn't even need to break up sub-values (e.g., "English", "French", and eventual "English and French" would be fine). fgnievinski ( talk) 00:12, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Talkpages have disadvantages, not least that many are unwatched so posting a query on them doesn't always get a response from someone who knows about the subject. But we could greatly reduce this with a bot.

If someone posts on an unwatched talkpage we risk having their query linger unnoticed. Would it be possible to have a bot run lists of open talkpage queries to relevant wikiprojects? With a special list for "talkpage queries on pages not tagged for any wikiproject". I'm sure we could get volunteers to go through the default list and either answer queries or tag those pages for relevant wikiProjects, so as hopefully to bring the query to the attention of someone who could answer it.

It would need to ignore threads marked {{ done}}, and ideally the reports to each WikiProject should be colour coded and date sequenced so you could differentiate between queries or discussions that more than one editor had participated in and sections on talkpages with only one editor having posted. For talkpages tagged to multiple wikiprojects it would probably help if we also had a template that marked that section as of interested or otherwise to particular wikiprojects, so someone from WikiProject mountaineering could go through some relevant talkpage threads, answer those they could and tag those that were about glaciation, vulcanology or botany so that the bot would know that while the article on that mountain was tagged to several WikiProjects including mountainerring, that particular thread with a question re the most recent eruption was for WikiProject vulcanology Ϣere SpielChequers 11:12, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

It's been my understanding that this is what the project tags accomplish on talk pages. You can click the links on those to find a more general audience for queries. ~ Rob ^Talk 19:41, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, but this would work the other way round, so anyone visiting a wikiProject page could easily see a list of open questions that are likely to be of interest to their WikiProject. The reason being that newbies post questions on talkpages and sometimes they linger till stale. Ϣere SpielChequers 16:20, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

As of the September 2015 dump, there are over 2700 articles with a stub category. (e.g. \[\[Category:[\w\s]+stubs\]\]) Could someone create a bot that would replace the stub category with the appropriate stub template? (If the stub template already exists on the article, just delete the stub category.)

For example, Antikristos contains Category:Folk dance stubs. The Category:Folk dance stubs page contains {{Stub Category|article=[[folk dance]]|newstub=folk-dance-stub|category=Folk dance}}. Therefore, the bot would:

1. Delete the stub category
2. Look at the value in |newstub=
3. If the article does not contain {{ folk-dance-stub}}, add {{ folk-dance-stub}} at the bottom of the article

Thanks! GoingBatty ( talk) 21:09, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

• Support -I support this idea.-- BabbaQ ( talk) 23:42, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Anyone interested in taking this on? GoingBatty ( talk) 17:36, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

A BRFA has been filed here; users are invited to comment. —  Earwig  ^talk 19:36, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

On September 24, 2015, some Mexican TV stations will become all-digital. This implies a change in callsigns, but most Mexican TV station links are redirects, not articles.

As such, some redirects need to be moved to new locations and references to them changed out. For instance, XHBAB-TV must become XHBAB-TDT. A bot to make these moves would be very helpful, and the code will be vital when more than 600 stations do this on December 31. There are enough references that all of them can be changed and the old -TV suffixes can be removed.

Note that some stations have their own articles, and those will be manually moved and updated.

The stations that are redirects and to be moved are:

• XHAFC
• XHBAB
• XHBTB
• XHGWT
• XHMOY
• XHOPMT
• XHGNB
• XHSIB
• XHSRB
• XHVEL

I will likely need to make one or two more requests, and then on December 31 we will need to have a massive blitz of some 600 of these, so having reusable code is a must for my sanity. Raymie ( t • c) 21:37, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

@ Raymie: So just to make sure, you want all redirects with the prefixes listed above with the "TV" suffix to be changed to the same prefix with the "TDT" suffix? -24 ^Talk 20:15, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

@ Negative24: That would be correct. The actual redirects need to be moved and the links to them need to be modified too. And I'll want to be able to do it again in December with 600+ of them. Raymie ( t • c) 02:38, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

@ Raymie: Alright, I will see what I can do but this would be the first "real" task for User:Bot24 so it might be a tiny bit rough from the beginning. -24 ^Talk 02:43, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

(Repeat of my posting of 27 February) Would some kind bot take this on? The subpage name is of the form Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2015 February 26; it needs to be added to Wikipedia:Copyright problems after seven days; i.e., the page for 19 February is added at midnight on 26 February. It's being done manually at the moment, would be good if it could be automated. Thanks, Justlettersandnumbers ( talk) 20:06, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Also it'd be really good if a bot could be asked to create the daily listing subpages of the copyright problems page, such as Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2015 October 11. I'm doing them manually at the moment, but I'd rather do other things. This should be a no-brainer for a bot. Thanks, Justlettersandnumbers ( talk) 20:06, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

This report was last updated only in March 2014 but most (if not all) of the IP talk pages listed here are still blank. A bot should be used to apply the template {{ OW}} to all the pages which were blanked to remove stale warnings. An easy criterion for identifying such pages is this: the last editor should hve been User:BD2412 and the edit summary should have a link to WP:AWB. In all the pages that I checked at random, the page was blanked to remove the stale warnings and this was done by BD2412 using AWB. 103.6.159.89 ( talk) 17:50, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

That was the practice at the time. How many of these are there now? bd2412 T 18:13, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

Well, I did not accuse you of doing anything wrong, of course. I don't know how many are there. Nevertheless, I think this task should be done by a bot rather than through AWB because bot edits, if marked as minor, would not trigger the unnecessary "You have new messages" note at the IPs' end. 103.6.159.89 ( talk) 19:07, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

BD2412 Is there a reasonable consensus to do this? I could look at coding up a bot to do this. Hasteur ( talk) 19:24, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, but I'll have to find the discussions. I'm actually headed out right now, but will get back to the question tonight. Cheers! bd2412 T 20:10, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

There have been lots of small discussions, e.g., Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Archive_9#IP_talk_pages, Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_50#Bot_to_remove_patently_stale_warnings_from_IP_talk_pages, Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_110#Bot_blank_and_template_really.2C_really.2C_really_old_IP_talk_pages. bd2412 T 00:55, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

Template:OW is pretty terrible, in my opinion. Why not just delete the pages? User talk:67.173.42.13 is an easy example: that IP hasn't edited in over a decade. There's no good reason to indefinitely keep a templated warning from 10 years ago. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 18:22, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

@ BD2412 and Hasteur: BTW, there are 68 782 blank talk pages for IP users. You can see the list here. Sorry for non-wiki list, but Mediawiki didn't allow me to save the page :D -- Edgars2007 ( talk/ contribs) 10:59, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

@ MZMcBride: My primary objection to just deleting the pages (which was also my initial practice) is that some unpredictable portion of them will become blue links again at some point, but with unexplained deleted history. bd2412 T 14:33, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

BD2412: And? Are the odds really that good that it's the same person from 2004 that it is in 2015? And even if so, who cares about some templated message from so long ago? Is there any value to us keeping thousands of duplicative old templated warnings indefinitely in database dumps, in Special:Search, tracked in pagelinks tables, etc.? I think there's real value in de-cluttering the user talk namespace and Wikipedia generally, especially as the site gets older. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 05:28, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Even though I was fine with the bot from a little while ago to undelete a couple thousand talk pages, the more I think about it, the more unsure I am. There's definitely something to be said for declutter, but there's also an argument for keeping as much harmless stuff public as reasonably possible, in the event that people want to do research on old user warnings, or just as a general principle of openness. Also, deletion would add more entries to certain tables, so I'm not sure if that's a great argument. I may have mentioned this before, but in practice I doubt it adds much to database dumps, and people who want smaller dumps can eat more fiber can download the ones that only include articles or current revisions. I don't know. —  Earwig  ^talk 06:03, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

We already have fairly disparate treatment of IP talk pages (including thousands of even more useless "IP talk page/archive" pages that were created by a bot at some point, containing old warnings with no associated edit history). I think that we should be 1) consistent; and 2) transparent. Deletion does not achieve transparency. bd2412 T 13:23, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Radical openness requires constant maintenance. Deletion exists for a reason. Transparency is great, but we also must consider whether these ancient templated messages are providing any value to the encyclopedia. I agree that we currently have disparate treatment of IP talk pages, but I don't think that should prevent us from cleaning house. Regular housekeeping should allow us to eventually have more consistent treatment. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 05:37, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

There's also an argument to be made about the "right to vanish," as IPs get reassigned to various organizations and people. That's why we don't indefinitely block IPs. Plus, a vandalism warning from literally 10 years ago, for example, means literally nothing to anyone. It's not useful for any purpose other than, maybe, nostalgia at what user warnings looked like 10 years ago. If a page is deleted with, say, hypothetical "CSD U99," it can always be speedily undeleted via WP:UNDELETE if someone wants to investigate it. In fact, if we really wanted, we could make an adminbot for the task. However, on the flip side, if warnings exist from 10 years ago and suddenly someone gets a warning about their current conduct, they'll see the 10-year-old warnings and think, realistically, nothing's going to happen to them if they fail to heed it, since nothing ever happened before. -- slakr^{\  talk /} 06:59, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

If you copy this page to en:WP you will have a 2 click method of putting the OW on each of the first 995 pages, almost as efficient as AWB.

Using the same technique when Bernstein bot updates the list will rapidly clear the list down if anyone cares enough to put the time in.

All the best: Rich  Farmbrough, 02:23, 7 November 2015 (UTC).

A bot should change all h1s (surrounded by just one equal sign on each side) to h2s and all h2s, h3s, h4s, and h5s under an h1 to h3s, h4s, h5s, and h6s respectively. H6s cannot be changed into h7s because h7s do not work, instead they will be treated as h6s where the section header name begins and ends with an equal sign. GeoffreyT2000 ( talk) 16:02, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

I don't think this can be done with a bot. What if you had a header structure like this:

• h2
• h2
• h1
• h2
• h2
• h2

in which someone has erroneously inserted an h1 into an otherwise well-formatted set of h2s? You would want to change that h1 to an h2 without changing the h2 below it.

If h1 is not allowed in articles, a bot might be able to tag or make a list of articles that are afflicted with h1s so that editors could work from a list of those malformed articles. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 17:48, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

Could a bot at least look for that and post a list of articles with that issue? Frankly, it may be something for a cleanup bot or as part of an AWB check or something. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 19:55, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Are you seeing articles with this problem right now? Checkwiki task 19 already looks for lines that start with a single "=" character, and its most recent report shows no articles with this error. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 21:50, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

AWB will correct some of these errors as GFs I believe. All the best: Rich  Farmbrough, 02:19, 7 November 2015 (UTC).

Persondata was deprecated: by this RfC which closed on 26 May this year and included consensus to remove Persondata from Wikipedia.

An earlier request for a bot to undertake this task was closed on 7 September, with the comment:

a discussion about a bot operation of this magnitude needs to be held in a broader forum, with more participants and a more focused discussion

This has now taken place, and the second RfC has just been closed with the comment:

There is consensus to have a bot remove all the persondata from all the articles.

Please can we now have a bot to do this? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:24, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Andy Mabbett does this mean that 23 Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Yobot 24 can be resumed? -- Magioladitis ( talk) 05:18, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

I assume you meant Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Yobot 24? —  Earwig  ^talk 05:25, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes. Fixed. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 11:55, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@ Magioladitis: Yes. Please do. We now have two RfCs that have found conssensus to remove Persondata. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:51, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

What Andy fails to mention is the rest of the close, which I think is rather important:

As a side note there is common sense coming from the minority and even some supports. That the removal be done in steps and that moving what has not been moved to wikidata to some other place so that it can be done at a later date is a good plan that may save time of less informed editors. But there can not be said to be consensus for this, though I see no opposes.

Yobot 24's denial reason is probably just as applicable to this recent RFC, which established no time period for removal beyond the quoted material. I'm happy to help iron out myself how a bot or set of bot tasks should take care of this, but Andy's pointy-effort to remove this template immediately is not doing him any favors, and I would echo Guy's previous comment to him about this template were it not that I think that Dirtlawyer1 had already done so enough times…. -- Izno ( talk) 11:36, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Oh FFS. How much longer are people going to Wikilawyer this? The text you cite concludes "there can not be said to be consensus for this...". It is important only in that it gives a green light to proceed immediately with the removal of Persondata. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:48, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

You didn't answer the question you thought you did in the RFC. Please review--the question you asked and the majority if not entirety of the discussion centered on "should it be bot-removed" and not "should it be bot-removed now". Wikilawyer? No, certainly not. -- Izno ( talk) 14:03, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@ GoingBatty: because I think you probably did the most in the most-recent discussion to move this forward sensibly. -- Izno ( talk) 11:38, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@ Izno: On one end of the spectrum, there are people who think that all {{ Persondata}} templates should be deleted immediately. On the other end, there are those who think there is more work to be done to copy the data to Wikidata. As an attempt to find a compromise, I submitted a bot request to remove Persondata where ALL of the values are found elsewhere in the article, such as an infobox, the lead, and/or categories. However, the bot request was only approved to remove Persondata where it only contained |NAME=. I would be happy to resubmit my original bot request if there's a reasonable chance of it being approved. GoingBatty ( talk) 16:53, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@ GoingBatty: as far as I understand the Wikidata guys do not need the Persondata info so any concerns about transferring data to Wikidata are mute. Am I wrong? -- Magioladitis ( talk) 16:59, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@ Magioladitis: In previous conversations, there were those who said the Wikidata editors don't want the remaining Persondata, and others who thought there was still opportunity for manual (and possibly automated) copying. GoingBatty ( talk) 00:57, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

@ T.seppelt: because I think [2] might be a useful and extensible method to preserving/moving the data that isn't checkable by a bot, which would help us remove the template. -- Izno ( talk) 11:46, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

There is no need to "preserve" any data (it's already in article histories) and the recent RfC found no consensus to do so . Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:48, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Your comments are false. See below. I'm happy to take this to ANI given your behavior if you don't back off on the plainly-sensible suggestions. -- Izno ( talk) 14:03, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Ooh goody, more dramah. Off you go... Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:26, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

I can extend my tool. Please let me know when you reach consensus on this topic. Regards, -- T.seppelt ( talk) 22:29, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@ T.seppelt: Thank you. Consensus has been reached, in not one, but two RfCs. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:36, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@ Pigsonthewing, Izno, and Magioladitis: Now I read the whole discussion. What I can offer is the following: KasparBot goes through all pages which transclude {{ Persondata}} and compares the information with the statements, labels, descriptions and aliases of the connected Wikidata item. Missing information is added to Wikidata. After all the data which is equally stored in Wikidata is removed from the article. Problems will be tracked in a special database which can be accessed using a tool I am going to develop. If no data remains in the article the whole template will be removed. This procedure is exactly the same as I am using for {{ Authority control}}. What do you think? -- T.seppelt ( talk) 20:13, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. I think you've overlooked all the issues about unreliable and unparsable data, discussed in the first RfC, and the Wikidata discussion to which it linked and the outcome of both that and the more recent RfC. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:25, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

I think there were complains that the info in Persondata is not reliable. This is a lose-lose situation unless we really act. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 21:54, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

It will take time until all data can be parsed and moved. But I will improve the code continuously based on the experiences during the migration. -- T.seppelt ( talk) 20:37, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

So what do we want? Deleting everything (which is very easy. writing the code takes 10 minutes. running the program approximately one week) or copying each piece of information and make sure that nothing is lost (which will take months. days for the code. a week for running the program and hundreds of hours of manual work to decide whether the Wikidata or the Wikipedia value is more appropriate). We should make this decision before somebody starts to develop a program and set up a suitable frame to make the work of the user as easy as possible. -- T.seppelt ( talk) 11:17, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

The decision was made in the first RfC: Persondata is deprecated, and is to be removed. We want a bot to do this, as per consensus in the second RfC. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:13, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

@ Magnus Manske: because you have experience with setting up neat tools for Wikidata--I'm not sure this would be exactly up your alley to up this but figured I'd ping you. -- Izno ( talk) 11:46, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

All the data that can sensibly be transferred to Wikidata by a bot has already been trasnfered; that was discussed at length in the first RfC. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:48, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

And as multiple persons have stated (myself included), your statement is false (or perhaps misleading). You don't need to repeat yourself on this point. -- Izno ( talk) 14:03, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Izno should then AWB be altered to removed Persondata as part of general fixes? -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:30, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Can you guys get moving on this? Once the template was deprecated in the first RfC, editors stopped adding it to new pages. Following the more recent RfC decision to remove, editors started routinely removing the template. My watch list shows that this is progressing. The WikiData editors said back in May that the data contained therein was unreliable and of no interest to them, but if they want it, then they need to get cracking before much of it disappears bot or no bot. Hawkeye7 ( talk) 20:47, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

BRFA filed -- T.seppelt ( talk) 18:13, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

A more simple request. Could someone break out Category:Stale userspace drafts into subpages at Wikipedia:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts/Stale drafts? There's over 46k pages. I realized that AWB only outputs the first 25000 pages and in the time I've spent manually breaking these down there's been hundreds of changes so it's too much. It would be breaking these into pages of 1000 each titled Wikipedia:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts/Stale drafts (01), Wikipedia:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts/Stale drafts (02), etc. so about 47 pages. If possible, maybe create "Section 1" ,etc headings for each hundred listings. I've already asked at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts but there's zero activity there. Feel free to re-write the pages already created. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 22:26, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

@ Ricky81682: if it helps, created list here (first part) and here (second part). There may be some redlinks, where qoutes are in title. If those lists are useless, then feel free to nominate them to deletion. -- Edgars2007 ( talk/ contribs) 08:14, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

That's a total of 32590 pages. What is that exactly? -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 09:10, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, my mistake :) Will correct later. It is (will be) Stale userspace drafts splitted in two parts in list format. -- Edgars2007 ( talk/ contribs) 15:57, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

@ Edgars2007: Did you fix it? I'd like to have at least one static version to work off rather than duplicate the work again and again. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 22:24, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

@ Ricky81682: Sorry, had some extra work at my homewiki. Thanks for patience. Now it should be fixed. For some reason, Quarry returned only 46 607 pages, but currently in category there are 46 610 pages, hope those 3 pages aren't a problem. Actually, the biggest problem in this task was selecting 20tk+ rows in Excel (if you have 40tk+ rows in total), it was quite boring. Now I found out, that a simple A1:A20000 (typing in the box) works :) So thanks also to you. -- Edgars2007 ( talk/ contribs) 10:52, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm not really sure why we have this category in the first place, but in an ongoing discussion at WP:AN it has been mentioned that there are large numbers of users listed here who are not in fact indefinitely blocked for violations of the username policy. We're talking about tens of thousands of pages in total, so it's pretty much never going to be fixed by humans. I know I use a script that automatically strikes out the usernames of blocked users, I assume the same type of coding could be used to scan this cat and remove anyone who shouldn't be in it? Beeblebrox ( talk) 01:33, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

User:Betacommand has a tool that lists all accounts that are not blocked locally in that category. Legoktm ( talk) 01:41, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

A bot should automatically remove statements from subpages of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case that are longer than 500 words. GeoffreyT2000 ( talk) 01:29, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

No, it shouldn't. That's the job of clerks, and sometimes statements are allowed that go over the limit. Besides, shortening statements is better than removing them outright, and bots can't do that. —  Earwig  ^talk 01:34, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Could a kind soul create a list of articles that use the parameter thermal_capacity from {{ Infobox power station}} please? You may dump the list on my sandbox. Feel free to overwrite the sandbox contents. Also, is there a faster way to do this myself next time? Thanks in advance! Reh man 13:13, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

I've added a tracking category for this; see: Category:Infobox power station with thermal_capacity parameter. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:25, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Andy! Reh man 12:31, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years#Using archives of Portal:Current events for month articles, a bot should move all month articles that transclude Portal:Current events pages to subpages of Portal:Current events/Archive without leaving redirects (bots can do this; no need to be an adminbot) and recreate the moved pages as redirects to the corresponding year article. Also, the same bot should automatically create an archive page at the beginning of each month. GeoffreyT2000 ( talk) 02:47, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

@ SugarRat: This might interest you. GeoffreyT2000 ( talk) 03:01, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

I've seen a number of articles recently that include standard academic-paper phrases like "This paper demonstrates" or "In our research".

In at least one case, a researcher has asked me for help resolving the plagiarism.

I know there are some bots that automatically flag pages for review based on content; it'd be great if this could be added to one of the existing patrol bots. -- Metahacker ( talk) 15:35, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Some of the instances for this kind of thing occur within quotations and references. It will have to be made sure that it's been taken from the actual article text. Rcsprinter₁₂₃ (interface) 21:42, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

This sounds like something EranBot should be doing (since I would expect Turnitin to catch papers not detected by CorenSearchBot or toollabs:copyvios). —  Earwig  ^talk 22:18, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Right now there are approximately 2500 pages with "naked" google books entries (defined as containing the string > http://books.google.com/ ). I asked on Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser whether there was any way to combine AWB and the Wikipedia citation tool for Google Books at http://reftag.appspot.com/ to help on cleaning these up, and got a response to ask here. Would this be appropriate for a Bot? It *may* also be appropriate to include <ref>[http://books.google.com/... text]</ref> cleanup as well, but that would be a later request if the first makes sense. Naraht ( talk) 17:05, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

It would have to distinguish between reference and non-reference links, at any rate. IMO, changing the links in this way would be a net improvement of the wiki, at any rate. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 17:20, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

OP:Absolutely. And given the small (but not non-existant) crossover between those users who would use named refs and those who would put a "naked" google book in a ref, I would be *quite* happy to limit this at the start to something like regexp <ref>http://books.google.com/[^ <]</ref> Naraht ( talk) 18:07, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

@ Naraht: If no one else pops up in the meantime, I'll take this on once my current BRFA is concluded, and I have sufficient time to sort this all out. Mdann52 ( talk) 08:41, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

If you're going down this line (and it sounds worthwhile) I strongly recommend you set the bot to run slowly, so you give people a chance to notice and then feed back on any errors before they're reproduced on multiple pages that may not be actively Watchlisted. -- Dweller ( talk) 08:49, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

@ Naraht: Creating a appropriate cite tag requires human intelligence and eyeballs to correct mistakes. This is a big no-no for Bots. I see a case for a bot (or report) that lists all pages that have at least one naked books reference and allow people to work the report/backlog by sorting the cite tag out. Hasteur ( talk) 12:34, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Just to note that if I do it, it will be a manual (or at best supervised) run, and won't be ongoing. If you want one that runs constantly, I'm not the person to write that. Mdann52 ( talk) 15:02, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

• Support - I support a bot to be made that fixes these issues.-- BabbaQ ( talk) 23:41, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

I recently changed the template {{ Not English}} which now requires that it be substituted. The task that would need to be done by a bot is replace all instances of {{Not English}} with {{subst:Not English}}. Would that be possible? Thanks! -- rayukk | talk 12:30, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Your header was causing it to act screwy here. Why did you make the change? AWB could be used to help out. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 12:33, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

I made the change, so that the date is automatically added to the template and articles that have not been translated in a two-week period will be listed for deletion. (also see here). How would one use AWB? Thanks! -- rayukk | talk 

@ Rayukk: One could make a list of all the articles that transcluded Template:Not English and replace {{Not English}} with {{subst:Not English}}. Or you could follow the directions at Category:Wikipedia templates to be automatically substituted so AnomieBOT would substitute them for you. GoingBatty ( talk) 13:59, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Would it be possible to scan the astronomical articles for occurrences of "C." and "R." "de la Fuente Marcos" and expanding those to "Carlos" and "Raúl", respectively? There seems to be over a 1000 such pages, at first glance. Urhixidur ( talk) 15:44, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

@ Urhixidur: Is there a specific category that you want to be checked? Kharkiv07 ( T) 20:48, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Category:Astronomy and its subcategories should be enough. Urhixidur ( talk) 00:47, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

This is a request for an off-Wikipedia bot; if this is offtopic, feel free to remove it, or tell me where is more appropriate.

On the ArchiveTeam wiki, we have a template (called, simply enough, url) that can be applied to external links to add links to various web archiving services (currently just the Wayback Machine, WebCite, and archive.today). We don't currently have any automatic way to ensure that all the external links added to the wiki use this template, or that all such links are archived in one (or better, all) of the linked services. If a public-spirited bot owner wanted to contribute such a thing, I, for one, would be delighted. JesseW, the juggling janitor 07:29, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Redundant and Needs wider discussion.. Cyberbot II and a bot over at Wayback automatically archive links into their server. As for replacing external links with a template, you'll need consensus for that.— ^cyberpower _Chat:Online 22:17, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

@ C678: I'm not sure it needs wider discussion or that it's redundant given that it appears to be a non-Wikimedia wiki the request is for. -- Izno ( talk) 12:17, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

I interpreted the request to be fulfilled on enwiki. If this is for a non-enwiki bot, then N Not done. This is a place to request bots be operated on enwiki, as the botops here are familiar with policy. Off site requests should be handled off site.— ^cyberpower _Chat:Online 13:31, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

A lot of people when pasting an image into Wikipedia get it with the surrounding image display code which contains code for a box and 'insert caption here'. This often gets pasted into infoboxes where it can look really bad. I've been working to clear some of these out recently, e.g. here. It's not a common problem but one I don't see going away - would this be worth automating? Blythwood ( talk) 06:21, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

How common is this? I found two results and the edits were made months ago. I assume fixing these manually is sufficiently effective. Finnusertop ( talk | guestbook | contribs) 09:00, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Doesn't seem common at all, so if it's worth automating at all, it would probably be better off as general fixes in AWB.   Hazard  SJ  00:58, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Not even worth adding in AWB. It's totally rare. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 20:05, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Here's a small tweak, applicable to a lot of pages.

Many category pages include a link to a portal, usually via {{ Portal}} or its aliases ( Portal box, Portal-2, Portalbox, Portalpar, Ports).,

Some of those pages link to more than one portal. This is one most efficiently by one use of the template: e.g. {{ Portal|first-portal|second-portal}}.

However, the portal links are often added more crudely in an AWB or BOT run, creating multiple call to the template, like this; {{ Portal|first-portal}} {{ Portal|second-portal}}.

Merging the two (as I just did here) makes the display neater, and saves a little bit of vertical screen space.

Could someone run a bot to do this globally? -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 21:17, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

@ BrownHairedGirl: Although AWB general fixes is supposed to do this, it doesn't seem to do it at all in articlespace, and only seems to work on categories with a See also section. Hopefully the AWB developers can provide a fix. GoingBatty ( talk) 00:17, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for that info, GoingBatty, and for filing the bug report. Hopefully it can be fixed.-- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 00:23, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

@ BrownHairedGirl: BRFA filed GoingBatty ( talk) 15:25, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

@ BrownHairedGirl: Doing... GoingBatty ( talk) 21:31, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

That's great. Thanks, GoingBatty. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 00:33, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

@ BrownHairedGirl:  Done - please let me know if I've missed any. Thanks! GoingBatty ( talk) 16:14, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

That's wonderful work. Many thanks, GoingBatty. I don't intend to try checking every page for any omissions, but if I stumble across any, I will let you know. -- BrownHairedGirl (talk) • ( contribs) 16:33, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

An adminbot should automatically remove move protection from all pages that are protected with "move=autoconfirmed". GeoffreyT2000 ( talk) 19:15, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Why? Where is consensus that this needs to be done? Anomie ⚔ 00:10, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

It's a housekeeping matter. There's no point to using this protection setting, because it has absolutely no effect: autoconfirmed status is required to move pages anyway! I've always wondered why it existed in the first place, unless perhaps there was at one time a possibility of moving pages without an account or with a new account. Nyttend ( talk) 14:00, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Doesn't it automatically make "move=autoconfirmed" whenever you make "edit=autoconfirmed"? Or have I been protecting pages incorrectly? I would disagree with having a bot change this mainly because it would change the protection log, so instead of an editor being unable to edit the page and seeing the reason as vandalism/edit warring/etc, they would see a housekeeping message by a bot. Maybe it's something that could fixed on the dev end so that it's no longer an option. Jenks24 ( talk) 14:31, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

If the protection log is the problem, we could always have the bot use a modified version of the edit summary. For example, if the previous message were "Edit warring/content dispute", the new message could be "Edit warring/content dispute; slight modification for housekeeping purposes" or something of the sort, and the linked page would be a short paragraph explaining the reason for removing move=autoconfirmed from the entry. Nyttend ( talk) 20:10, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

If we really want this (and I don't see the purpose), it should be a software change. Otherwise the bot's gonna be re-protecting nearly every semi-protected page, since this is the default (just head over to Special:Log/protect and search for "move=allow only autoconfirmed"). It's there because moving doesn't have to be restricted to autoconfirmed users; if at some point we chose to give that ability to any registered user, suddenly users would be able to move pages they couldn't edit, which doesn't make sense. —  Earwig  ^talk 07:40, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

WP:COSMETICBOT. The protection setting has no effect, so what's the point in removing it? 103.6.159.68 ( talk) 04:57, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

There are many links referring to certain pages on accesstoinsight.org, which are 1. redirected to a different page as before and give now a link to a pdf file, which is 2. different to the original and 3. not a direct html. It could be changed (here a sample) like this to make the original page content of the reference available on a living "Mirror page" or ATI: Original link: http://accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/bmc2/bmc2.ch20.html (= Redirect) Addressing the original content: http://accesstoinsight.eu/lib/authors/thanissaro/bmc2/bmc2.ch20_old_en.html or http://zugangzureinsicht.org/html/lib/authors/thanissaro/bmc2/bmc2.ch20_old_en.html The part which would needed to be changed is bold marked. So it would require something like this: find "accesstoinsight.org\/lib\/authors\/thanissaro\/bmc(.*?).html" and replace with "accesstoinsight.eu/lib/authors/thanissaro/bmc\1_old_en.html" or "zugangzureinsicht.org/html/lib/authors/thanissaro/bmc\1_old_en.html" (the natural link). May it be useful and understandable. Samana Johann -- 203.144.93.201 ( talk) 16:44, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

From village pump ( Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Peer_review_bot_down_-_please_help.21):

We have a crisis brewing... the bot that closes old reviews ( PeerReviewBot) has stopped working, last edit June 19. This is a very time-consuming and labourious task to be done manually that was previously easily automated. The bot is owned by CBM who is mostly retired.

Is it possible to either get the bot started again, or create a similar bot that does the same thing? Yours very gratefully, -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 23:09, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Yours very gratefully! Per This, that and the other asking here. CBM states he is happy to give the code to someone via email if they request it. -- Tom (LT) ( talk) 21:47, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

this external link search shows proquest external links which are tied to a specific dclibrary. these can be made into a generic search request by replacing search.proquest.com.dclibrary.idm.oclc.org with search.proquest.com and removing the trailing ?accountid=46320. the resulting links still may not return any useful information for people without a proquest account, but at least it will provide something other than a DC Library login screen (e.g., the citation information). I imagine there are more than the dclibrary ones. can someone help with this? thank you. Frietjes ( talk) 00:42, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

This would turn redirects into sectional redirects for those that the title (being redirected) matches a heading in the article being redirected to.

For example, a plain redirect from Text cloud to Tag cloud would be changed to Tag cloud#Text cloud because the article "Tag cloud" has a section titled "Text cloud". So, rather than just going to the top of the "Tag cloud" article, the redirect would go straight to the section titled "Text cloud".

The bot would need to look at all redirects, checking the target article in each for a heading that matches the topic title being redirected.

Note that if the redirect is already a sectional redirect that indicates a section other than the title of the redirect, then the section in the redirect would be changed to that title, but only if a section by that title was found in the article. The Transhumanist 19:40, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

When a section title (heading) gets changed, sectional redirects leading to it are broken. Those redirects then go to the top of the article rather than to the intended section.

What this bot would do is check redirects, and for those that are sectional, check the target article for the section title indicated in the redirect. If it doesn't exist, then it checks the historical diffs of the article to see what the section was changed to (and whether that section title was later changed, and so on), and then it updates the redirect so that it points to the current title of that section.

If the section title doesn't exist at all in the article or its previous versions, the section is removed from the redirect. The Transhumanist 19:36, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Brought up here. @ Ladsgroup: It looks like Dexbot is not working on these anymore. -- Bamyers99 ( talk) 20:19, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

@ Bamyers99 and Ladsgroup: What's the next step? The Transhumanist 20:50, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

This process is far more complicated than it seems. I built a system to handle that. I'll improve it and then re-run it. :) Ladsgroup ^overleg 08:16, 25 November 2015 (UTC)