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Archive 15 | Archive 16 | Archive 17 | Archive 18 | Archive 19 |
Cyberpower678 might be on a little R&R break from Wikipedia, as they are not responding. Meanwhile, his bots seem to not be functioning as they should. I know the admin stats have not updated for a while. And apparently other tasks are stalled out. Please see User talk:cyberpower678 and its recent archives. Is there an alternate admin who can get things back up and running? If not, I guess we just wait it out. — Maile ( talk) 01:16, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello. Per Wikipedia:Bot policy#Activity requirements, we're supposed to be de-flagging bots that haven't been active in two years. xaosflux has this helpful query showing about 150 bots that meet the criteria currently. I dug up a query after noticing that LaraBot still has a bot flag even though that bot hasn't edited since 2014. Can someone please do the necessary notifications and de-flaggings for these inactive bots?
For LaraBot and BernsteinBot, you can just go ahead and remove the bot flags immediately. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 07:09, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
the listed operator has also had no logged actions or edits for two years. The query is based only on bot activity, not operator, so most of the 150 in the result do not meet the criteria for removal. I checked about 20 and all of them had active operators. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ ( talk) 08:02, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Bot account | Operator(s) | Total edits | Last activity (UTC) | Last edit (UTC) | Last logged action (UTC) | Last operator activity (UTC) | Extra details |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
PDFbot | Dispenser | 7943 | 12 Feb 2012 | 12 Feb 2012 | 04 Feb 2007 | 15 Mar 2020 | |
BG19bot | Bgwhite | 1005055 | 09 Feb 2017 | 09 Feb 2017 | 08 Feb 2017 | 15 Mar 2020 | |
Makecat-bot | Makecat | 103877 | 05 Apr 2013 | 05 Apr 2013 | 10 Feb 2013 | 28 Mar 2020 | |
Lonjers french region rename bot | Lonjers | 11910 | 15 Mar 2016 | 15 Mar 2016 | — | 19 May 2020 | |
TAP Bot | Thine Antique Pen | 1920 | 14 Sep 2015 | 14 Sep 2015 | 13 Dec 2014 | 24 Jan 2021 |
Feel free to remove User:Snotbot's bot flag. I haven't used it in 10 years, and I'm unlikely to use it anytime soon. —ScottyWong— 08:11, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
I thought that this kind of behaviour surely happened in the 2000’s. 85.98.16.196 ( talk) 17:20, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
What do you think was the most devastating damage they caused? (In terms of amount of time to fix it)-- 85.98.16.196 ( talk) 12:14, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The bot User:MalnadachBot is currently going crazy, making edits to thousands (?) of talk pages with completely useless edits to decades-old user signatures. The signatures are completely fine and do not need to be changed. The "font" tags they use work in every browser ever and will continue to work in every browser forever into the future. citation needed If font tags are causing someone's linter to complain, then either (a) the linter should not be run on talk pages, or (b) that should be considered a bug in the linter, and fixed.
This bot should be stopped to stop it from spamming everyone's watchlists, and should not be allowed to run again until it can be shown it won't make so many worthless no-op spam edits.
After hitting the E-stop on this one, one thing the bot author may want to do is configure the bot to only examine main namespace. – jacobolus (t) 00:37, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
replacing erroneous and obsolete markupThere is literally no benefit whatsoever in doing this. These html tags have worked for the past 20+ years and are going to continue to work forever. No browser is ever going to drop support. If you linter is giving you a hard time about "deprecated" tags on historical talk pages, that's a linter bug that should be fixed (or better still, you should stop trying to run a linter on 15-year-old discussions).
how mediawiki sofware worksthis has nothing at all to do with “how mediawiki software works”. – jacobolus (t) 05:51, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
pointless crusade with no technical meritdescribes your comment perfectly. My bot (as well as others' Lint fixing bots) has sound technical merit. If you want to propose changes to how mediawiki software should work, do so at Phabricator instead of railing against users working on known issues. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ ( talk) 06:01, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
has replaced over half a million font tags in 4 daysI am curious whether people would complain less if it ran slower, as there really is no urgency here. Legoktm ( talk) 06:36, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
As an unrelated aside, is there any kind of CSS style guidance for the about pages of active bots? I find this one has an almost entirely illegible (to me) page. It looks like this in my browser:
– jacobolus (t) 07:29, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Well, it's pretty rare for people to come to this noticeboard to talk about a bot when they're happy about something it did, but I am pretty glad that all those goddamn lint errors in subpages of WP:SIGNPOST have been fixed -- manually fixing that would have been a gigantic pain. jp× g 11:17, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
If we created an edit tag like "Fixing lint errors" and bots used that tag, it would be straightforward for people to set their watchlist to exclude any edit with that tag, which would allow people to both see regular bot edits but hide just these. Legoktm ( talk) 06:42, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
fixed lint errors
.
Legoktm (
talk) 06:56, 4 February 2023 (UTC)Or, we could just stop wasting electrons on fixing linter errors on sub-sub-subpages of AfD talk pages from 2005 that literally no human will ever visit again between now and the heat death of the universe (and even if they did, it would probably render perfectly fine since browsers still support deprecated tags; and even if they didn't, the worst that is likely to happen is that some long-retired perma-banned sock troll's signature might look a little wonky *gasp* oh, the humanity). I still don't understand why anyone defends this useless and annoying bot task. Here's an idea: how about we allow bots to fix linter errors on any page in mainspace, and any other non-mainspace page that has received more than 50 pageviews in the last 12 month period. Without such restrictions, it's like a tree falling in a forest and no one is around to hear it. We're fixing lint errors for the exclusive benefit of webcrawler bots who index these pages periodically for search engines. Seriously, is there any other bot task that inspires so many random editors to independently come here to complain every month or two? Even for those of you that think Malnachadbot is doing the Lord's work, can't you at least admit that the unprecedentedly high frequency and volume of complaints about this bot task is at least cause for some concern? Closing these threads isn't going to make the problem go away... —ScottyWong— 08:03, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
Off-topic for the question being discussed
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I have hatted a few off-topic (for this subthread) discussions. You are welcome to keep going with your back-and-forth, but please limit the un-hatted discussion to the original proposal/point being raised. Primefac ( talk) 17:47, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
If you read the bot’s about page, there is very little description of what the bot is doing, why it is doing it, who made those decisions, or where those decisions were discussed. There is no attempt made to describe or answer common complaints and questions.
The most prominent feature of the page is a large banner bragging about how the bot has made the most edits of any user in history. The obvious conclusion is that making the most possible edits is a driving motivator for the bot's activity.
If we want to talk "necessary" vs. "unnecessary", here is what I think is a "necessary" prerequisite to keep operating something this disruptive: the people approving / operating this bot should sit down with each-other, have a frank discussion about what the bot's actual purpose is, what the pros and cons of running the bot are, whether there is community consensus supporting the bot's operation, and come up with some straight answers to questions from people who are annoyed by the bot.
What is "unnecessary" is a pattern of deflecting questions and blaming anyone who complains, hiding behind the authority of un-linked, un-described "decisions" by unnamed people at some past time which cannot be meaningfully questioned. – jacobolus (t) 10:43, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
@ Jacobolus: For reference, here are the volumes of thoughtful community discussion that took place on the pros and cons of this bot task prior to approving it. Even the bot operator was surprised that it was so easy to get such an enormous bot task approved, see their comment on the talk page of the BRFA. —ScottyWong— 16:50, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
Off-topic for the question being discussed
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I wrote a short essay explaining why I find the Linter project and these edits valuable. It does not address every single critique leveled here, but I sincerely hope this allows us to move past exaggerated rhetoric like "literally not a single one of them cares", "edits being done ... are literally 100% worthless", "literally no human will ever visit again between now and the heat death of the universe", "fixing lint errors for the exclusive benefit of webcrawler bots", and "there is no benefit to anyone". Legoktm ( talk) 07:34, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
aligns us with HTML5 efforts in general
<span style="color: red;">John Doe</span>
is meaningfully "aligned with HTML5"?People tend to copy and paste things they find in other wiki pages
it's much simpler for people to develop tools if they don't need to implement support for all types of legacy behavior ¶ Imagine a tool that automatically checked pages use of colors for appropriate contrasts
OK, but are those worth making edits to a bunch of pages that are just for archival and no one really cares about or will ever look at again? Sure. I don't see this as any different from updating deprecated template parameters or merging duplicate templates.
huge disruptive project for the sake of a bunch of speculative future benefits that are marginal at best and realistically have almost no chance of ever coming about. This is by no means a rebuttal, just noting the similarity here. 0x Deadbeef→∞ ( talk to me) 09:26, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
a bunch of speculative future benefits that are marginal at best and realistically have almost no chance of ever coming aboutis not really accurate, given that in addition to VisualEditor itself, there are a number of bots, gadgets and tools that are all actively using Parsoid already. Legoktm ( talk) 06:41, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
Note: I have created an RfC to encourage a wider community discussion on whether or not MalnadachBot's mass fixing of deprecated HTML tags is consistent with bot policy. You can find the RfC at Wikipedia:Village_pump (policy)#RFC: Clarifications to WP:COSMETICBOT for fixing deprecated HTML tags. —ScottyWong— 08:37, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I used to have one but then the toolserver changed and somehow an account isn't easy to come by, now.. ~ Lofty abyss 18:10, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Catching up on some housekeeping, when I created DYK-Tools-Bot, I used a naming convention that's out of character (for no good reason) with all the other DYK bots ( DYKHousekeepingBot, DYKUpdateBot, etc). Are there any issues with me doing a rename to bring this in line (i.e. DYK-Tools-Bot -> DYKToolsBot)? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:25, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
SelvasivagurunathanmBOT ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log) which looks like a BOT from TAWIKI. -- Deepfriedokra ( talk) 20:06, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.
The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
All traffic will switch on 1 March. The test will start at 14:00 UTC.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
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Trizek (WMF) ( Talk) 21:24, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Nirmaljoshi requested the create stubs on Japanese dams here on this noticeboard and it was suggested that they refrain from creating stubs but instead create a list article. As to my count, on the 1 March they created 19 articles within less than 3 hours. I believe all were on Japanese dams. Maybe someone could explain what the conclusion of the last discussion was? There was no formal closure at the time. Paradise Chronicle ( talk) 20:19, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
Hello. I've been meaning to ask this since quite a few weeks. There are two bots set up to archive WP:BOTREQ, and currently the settings for these bots have different archive page number. Why are there two bots? WT:BOTREQ redirects here. —usernamekiran (talk) 18:27, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
I was thinking that we need a bot to protect the featured article from new editors due to the vandalism that happens almost everyday. Much of the time we end up having to protect it anyways so I was thinking a bot would be a good idea for protection the article it would either semi or extended protect the article (bot owner can decide what protection is best) it would not fully protect the article or remove/change existing protections and a admin could opt a article out of auto protection if there is a reason it should not be auto protected Qwv ( talk) 10:36, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
A training tool within the framework of Wikipedia:Education creates discussions on Talk pages on behalf of student editors, and publishes a comment on the TP with a sig that is not the userid of the editor running the tool. I'm trying to determine if this is compliant with all relevant P&G, in particular WP:SIG, and perhaps, WP:Bot policy. This tool is an edit-assist tool that operates at human speed, so I'm not clear whether it is covered under bot policy, but my reading of the first sentence, especially the last part of it, implies that it may be. The most relevant section I can find there, is § Bots directed to edit by other users, and these tool-assisted edits are disclosure-compliant, because the user's id is inluded in the edit summary. The problem is that the talk-page sig clashes with the userid in the summary, and contains a different sig. I don't actually see anything in bot policy that prohibits this, so maybe this situation is bot-compliant. However, this is the first time I've run into such an issue, and I am not used to reading or interpreting bot policy, or even whether this situation is covered by it, as the training tool lacks many of the features of a bot. If it is relevant, your feedback would be appreciated at this discussion. Thanks, Mathglot ( talk) 23:49, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
HBC AIV helperbot5 ( talk · contribs) Appears to have stopped after Toolforge was under scheduled downtime, however it doesn't appear to have resumed maintaining AIV and UAA. Its last edit prior to the downtime was here. Bot's creator doesn't seem to be around anymore as they haven't edited in 7 months and haven't responded to their most recent non-automated talk page post. ― Blaze Wolf TalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:51, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
It appears that Mathbot is not updating the AfD open discussion list since 3 April. I've left a note for the bot maintainer, Oleg Alexandrov, but it seems he's been inactive since 14 November last year. Would anyone know if responsibility for the bot was passed on to or shared with anyone who's currently active? Seraphimblade Talk to me 01:55, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
Yapperbot ( talk · contribs) is still running, but seems to have dropped some of its tasks. For instance, it hasn't sent out a WP:FRS message since the run of 00:30, 6 March 2023 (UTC) - it normally does this hourly. The botop, Naypta ( talk · contribs), hasn't eedited in almost a year. Does anybody know what's happening? -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 07:21, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
FRS messages seem to be running normally again. -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 21:12, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.
The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
All traffic will switch on 26 April. The test will start at 14:00 UTC.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
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MediaWiki message delivery 01:21, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
Hi, I was encouraged to post here on the grounds that I have been creating a lot of articles and might need to seek approval to continue in that vein. To be clear, I edit without any automation or assistance, and I'm not aware of any concerns about the actual quality of the articles; but on some interpretations of WP:MASSCREATE's vague 25–50 criterion, I am mass creating articles (though not systematically) – I've created 50 articles this week, for example. Of course I don't want the sheer volume of articles to become disruptive in any way. But I'm not entirely sure how I would go about getting approval to create more articles. The vast majority have been and would continue to be articles about South African legislators – would the best path be to check in with others at the WikiProject? Or to apply at WP:BRFA? If the latter, how? Jlalbion ( talk) 10:51, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
I just want to keep writing articles, probably about South African politicians, for an indefinite period and at a rate proportional to my free time and interest level!It seems that everyone is convinced by your explanation about how you aren't using ChatGPT; given that, I would suggest you are free to continue writing articles like you are currently doing without further bureaucracy - they are high quality, so thank you for creating them. BilledMammal ( talk) 13:53, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
How would I get User:GreenC bot the new sboverride userright? c.f. T36928 recently closed resolved. -- Green C 20:12, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
Oh, that's a neat user right.
User:AAlertBot could use it since it occasionally encounters urls users used that it cannot report and has to trim the report. I spent way too long fixing it when I first encountered this because I assumed bots would surely be exempt from this. I doubt there's any process yet for granting the right though. —
HELLKNOWZ ∣
TALK 21:06, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
bot
user group is "trusted" enough to have sboverride
added to it imho — this is proposed at
T313107 —
TheresNoTime (
talk • she/her) 21:28, 29 August 2022 (UTC)So, it looks like you don't recall correctly. * Pppery * it has begun... 21:52, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[...] the link filtering is based on what links existed before the edit vs. what links exist after (exist meaning interpreted as an external link by the software). Do you have any evidence that an edit that did not try to add a link was prevent by this extension? See the code - this part makes it so that if the page already existed, the links that are checked are only those that were added in the current end. -- DannyS712 ( talk) 00:18, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
— m:Requests for comment/Allow sysops to override the spam blacklist
I guess the question is if there is a case when it would be desirable to block a bot's edit due to the blacklist?AnomieBOT's rescuing of orphaned references. It would probably be better if the bot didn't reinsert blacklisted links, but continue to complain on its talk page for humans to do a proper removal. Anomie ⚔ 01:27, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Follow-up: bots were finally granted the sboverride right today in gerrit:923728 * Pppery * it has begun... 02:52, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
On March 2, I offered feedback on how to improve the proposed CircularRedirectsBot ( talk · contribs) bot in this thread, but it has received no attention from anyone else since then. There are a few other WP:BRFA threads that have not been updated in a long time; for example, Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WegweiserBot is marked as "in trial", but has not been updated since January 8. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 11:09, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
I note that User:MalnadachBot's operator has been indefinitely blocked, as of today, and so too has the bot (apparently for some sort of checkuser business, with them having secretly been an LTA).
MalnadachBot has the highest editcount of any account on Wikipedia, and currently runs a good number of tasks, so what the heck are we going to do about that? Is there a fallback set up for this? jp× g 01:29, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
/\/Archive/
?
User:MalnadachBot has already rendered permanently unusable Wikipedia's functionality to search old discussions by date last modified, since they've all been modified within the past year, all by
User:MalnadachBot, so I suppose the damage is already done, and I'm probably just being an old busted grouch who thinks that old webpages should look old and busted, but it seems like an awful lot of work for very little benefit apart from emptying maintenance categories that don't seem necessary in the first place.
Folly Mox (
talk) 15:35, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
/\/Archive/
is that it the filter would still allow a lot of inappropriate pages to be modified, like every XfD that has ever taken place in the history of WP (which are never "archived" in a way that changes their page title). I think that rather than trying to come up with a way to exclude pages that shouldn't be "de-linted" (if that's a term), we should come up with a way to generate the list of pages that should be de-linted. Fixing this problem by editing each page is an inefficient and unsustainable solution. Imagine 10 years from now, when WP has a 200 million pages, and the <span>
tag gets deprecated. Are we going to make 200 million edits to address that problem? Or would we come up with a more rational way to solve the problem?
—ScottyWong— 18:23, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
The fact that no one noticed that MalandachBot had stopped editing for over a month is telling.- that the bot is unintrusive and its edits are at worst harmless? — Qwerfjkl talk 15:35, 11 June 2023 (UTC)
It is my understanding that Legobot went through every page with a Linter error and fixed all of the ones that met its strict criteria, primary among which is leaving zero remaining Linter errors after its edits. This left many pages with errors that bots can fix, but which also have errors that bots can't fix. As a result, this means that there are zero bots currently fixing Linter errors on en.WP (Legobot has not edited since March 2023). Any potential bot operators who are looking to work on Linter errors, including Scottywong, who
offered to set up just such a bot (I'll volunteer to take over the tasks if no one else wants to.
), are welcome at
WT:Linter. –
Jonesey95 (
talk) 00:28, 10 June 2023 (UTC)
Just letting everyone know that I put in a BRFA for MalnadachBot's other active task blanking inactive talkpages of inactive IP addresses. Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/VulpesBot Dr vulpes ( 💬 • 📝) 02:30, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
I'm not exactly sure where to bring this up, but the Internet Archive bot recently made an edit to the article on the Roman Republic which did seemingly nothing but add archive URLs for live sites, expanding the size of the article by over six thousand characters. Is this actually okay? This cruft negatively affects editing (I use syntax highlighting regardless) and does not seem to offer any meaningful improvement to the articles given all the links are still live. Ifly6 ( talk) 14:51, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
Links added by editors to the English Wikipedia mainspace are automatically saved to Wayback Machine within about 24 hours. So the actual archiving is done automatically, and the archive links can be added at any time after. Pressing the button in the IA Bot Management Console doesn't actually do any new archiving. On the other hand, Visual Editor users can't even see the extra code generated by these archive links, probably leading some folks to think that adding these archive URLs is harmless. When in doubt, follow WP:BRD I guess. cc UndercoverClassicist. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 04:19, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
refbegin
and refend
in a ==Sources==
subheading. If the citations are defined in their own area, no amount of cruft makes editing the prose any more difficult.
Folly Mox (
talk) 20:12, 3 July 2023 (UTC)I'm making this section to possibly discuss further steps? It feels like there are a number of different solutions etc put forward here:
|jstor=
fieldDo tell me if you think I've mischaracterised some positions so far. Do people here think some, any, or all of these ought to be done?
I think we ought to do all of them. The first two seem like clear improvements that a bot could do (clean up and shorten templates with no loss of amenity); the last seems like a loss of amenity which is minimal when searching by ISBN should still pull up the right book.
Ifly6 (
talk) 17:07, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
|jstor=
(or PMID, OCLC, SCID, DOI or whatever) if one is available. The trick is getting IABot to ignore archiving for any template containing one of those link rot resistant stable identifier parameters.
Folly Mox (
talk) 03:10, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
Do not use automated tools to populate archive links for live websites. Only add archive URLs for print or paywalled sources when a compelling need can be demonstrated.be worthwhile to add to that document? Ifly6 ( talk) 06:35, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
Is there any bot that can be used to plug in and modify a given example of a piped internal link across pages, such as those that might have changed or need redirecting due to a page move, split or other change that affects page navigation? Iskandar323 ( talk) 08:48, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
There are 78,874 sports biographies, listed at User:BilledMammal/Sports articles probably lacking SIGCOV, that a Quarry query suggests lack significant coverage as required by WP:SPORTSCRIT #5. I want to use the add_text script to add the template Template:No significant coverage (sports) to these articles in line with a recent suggestion at VPR, but given the scale of change I believed it best to seek approval here first.
I am also not certain if this would require approval through WP:BRFA? BilledMammal ( talk) 17:48, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
There's a proposal at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States#Undo hijacking of WikiProjects Louisiana and New Orleans to restore previous Talk page banners, so as not to use WikiProject US's banner. Currently, if either banner {{ WikiProject Louisiana}} or {{ WikiProject New Orleans}} is put on an article Talk page, a bot ( User:AnomieBOT) soon replaces it by the United States banner. The proposal is also to stop that bot. I opened the discussion there, and hope to achieve consensus there for the proposal. Will that suffice to get approval (here?) for the change to the bot? --Doncram ( talk, contribs) 05:46, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
{{
Subst only|auto=yes}}
is removed from its doc block), AnomieBOT's TemplateSubster task will no longer subst it.
Anomie
⚔ 11:40, 9 July 2023 (UTC)I came across this article Graham Barrow because my bot skipped editing it as there is {{ nobots}} template in "playing career" section. I am not sure by who or why this template has been placed on the article in discussion. Any ideas? —usernamekiran (talk) 14:42, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
A large chunk of the request moves page ended up in a 'notes and references collapses' see Wikipedia:Requested_moves#July_12,_2023— blindlynx 14:38, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
Hello bot operators,
Wikipedia:Bot activity monitor now supports notifying you by email of broken bot tasks. On the
configurations page, you can use the |email=
param in the {{/task}} invocation, to specify either your username or an email address. The
page editnotice will show the detailed instructions.
As before, you can also choose to be notified via your talk page (via the |notify=
option).
BRFA: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SDZeroBot 9.1 (in trial) – SD0001 ( talk) 15:28, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Sandbox history, blatant 3RR violation. Keeps reverting my edits. There is no exception for bots breaking 3RR. 묰묰묰묰묰묰 ( talk) 15:56, 1 September 2023 (UTC)
Over the years, I've written about bots in the Signpost. I've usually covered bots I was involved with, since I know more about those than most other bots, but I'd be interested in either) a writing about other bots b) having other bot operators write about their bots. These could take place in the form of guides (here's how you can use my bot, or how my bot could help you), or a historical coverage. For example what this could look like, see
Do you know of other bots that could get this sort of coverage? Or who'se bot operators/coders could write about them? Like a piece about User:ClueBot would be great I'm sure, but I can't write that one because I'm not familiar with its history. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 23:13, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
I noticed a couple of strange edits by InternetArchiveBot, whereby it is overwriting redirects left by moves, as shown in the following diffs.
I have logged a Phabricator task: T344102. I have logged here as it looks to me as though an eye should be kept on the bot's edits. William Avery ( talk) 12:47, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
Hello,
This is a notice pursuant the global bot policy, to inform you that Lingua Libre Bot is requesting approval to operate as a global bot.
The discussion can be found at Steward requests/Bot status in Meta-Wiki. All Wikimedia Community members can participate in the discussion if they so wish.
Thank you.
You are receiving this message because this page is listed in the list of pages to notify about new global bot discussions. If you no longer wish to be notified, you may remove this page from that list at any time.
Is there a bot to detect incomplete or untranscluded
WP:FAC nominations? For example,
Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/List of Bath City F.C. seasons/archive1 and
Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/List of Bath City F.C. managers/archive1. I commented on these because their articles were on my watchlist, so I noticed the
addition of the {{
featured article candidates}}
. Perhaps I should have checked that it had been set up properly. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 17:42, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
User:HBC AIV helperbot5 isn't removing blocked editors from WP:AIV, but it's still editing WP:UAA and WP:AIV/TB2. It just removed the backlog notice after EvergreenFir manually removed some entries. – dudhhr talk contribssheher 16:19, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.
The Wikimedia Foundation will switch the traffic between its data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
All traffic will switch on 20 September. The test will start at 14:00 UTC.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
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Trizek_(WMF) ( talk) 09:30, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
I just soft-blocked a user for a Bot username and noticed that {{ uw-botublock}} offers account renaming as a potential resolution but does not offer the notion of BRFA approval. Before I go ahead and change the template for what seems imo an obvious change, I'm checking in here to ask if there's any reason not to? Cabayi ( talk) 09:24, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
Hey, I'm making 10 edits per minute to fix or remove invalid parameters on pages in the Category:Infoboxes with unknown parameters and its subcategories using AWB. I would like to point out that I review every edit before saving. Do you think I need a BRFA for this? – DreamRimmer ( talk) 06:44, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
My relevant contribution history
Xqbot was speedily approved to resolve double redirects using m:redirect.py way back in December 2009.
I reported a problem to operator Xqt in April 2020, and again in June 2020 (and September 2020).
They responded by opening phab:T254839 which is currently "Open, In Progress, High" – it's been over three years, and still not resolved. Though it seems there was progress in September?
I just cleaned up twenty bad Xqbot edits caused by this bug (somebody mass-moved a whole lot of redirects)
I noticed that EmausBot was also working these double-redirects, without having the same problem with them (e.g., DIFF)
EmausBot was approved in December 2010 – to use the standard script redirect.py !
What puzzles me is why I can't recall ever seeing EmausBot make this error? Is that bot just incredibly lucky, or is it configured differently, in a way that avoids making bad edits like that? wbm1058 ( talk) 20:37, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
Bot operators operating on the Toolforge Grid Engine may need to read this thread and the pages linked from it. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 23:17, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
This bot continues to place bogus referenences and call them "fixes". Is it really not possible to make it stop doing so? I've used this Noticeboard before to report about a dozen cases. Most recently, I found edit , where the bot resurrected a reference from four years ago (before the pandemic) to cite something about sentiment towards Chinese Canadians because of the pandemic. The bot just guesses about how to replace references that have gone missing, and guesses wrong often enough that it is disruptive and damaging. -- Mikeblas ( talk) 04:40, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
I have general approval for implementing TfD discussions through removal or simple replacements using AWB per Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PearBOT II 11. The reason I phrased it that way is because I did not feel comfortable with all types of TfD implementation being done using a bot without oversight and felt like this was a reasonable limitation. In my work with the archive merger I've found a case that would be quite complex to do using AWB but simple to do with pywikibot which is combining several parameters from two templates into one. This is easy with pywikibots templatesWithParams() function but would require many complex regexs to do in AWB. How should I go about getting approval for this? -- Trialpears ( talk) 15:03, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
a case that would be quite complex to do ... which is combining several parameters from two templates into oneis not in the remit of Task 11, which is for
General TfD implementation through removal or simple replacements, and I would encourage a specific BRFA for this task. Primefac ( talk) 13:26, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
The redirect Wikipedia:SPECTRUM has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 December 20 § Wikipedia:SPECTRUM until a consensus is reached. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 01:17, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
If any BAG members could check out my comments at the bottom of this BRFA I would appreciate it. I tagged it with the usual template but something makes me think that it's not quite as effective as we like to think it is. Basically looking for a 2O on something. Thanks in advance. Primefac ( talk) 13:39, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
e.g. I've got notifications, just an hour apart around "Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:02:53 +0100" for following creation of user talk pages for username `Mnalis` that I use on (English and Croatian) wikipedia sites:
I didn't ever create (to the best on my knowledge; I don't even speak the languages) accounts on it.wikipedia.org nor id.wikipedia.org; so I am quite puzzled why two different bots, in such a close temporal proximity, would create such user talk pages (with "welcome" messages if mechanical translator got it right?) and send me notification email to my e-mail address (which I use for English & Croatian wikipedias)? How would they even know my e-mail if I have not created account there?
Has anyone noticed that behaviour, and where should I inquire/report it if not here? (I'd like to avoid creating accounts on those it/id wikipedias just to comment on bot page). Thanks, Mnalis ( talk) 02:03, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
So I was perusing the BRFAs today and realised that Template:BAG assistance needed doesn't really do anything. I mean, sure, it puts a nice orange "hey look at me" notice in Wikipedia:BAG/Status, but unless you're already on the BRFA page I don't really see how it has much use. On the other hand, {{ Operator assistance needed}} actually drops a talk page note for the operator. Should we modify the BAG version to do something similar, either with a note here or (I suspect less desirable) on each BAG's talk page? I'm not sure we could get it quite the same as {{ @Bureaucrats}} or {{ @ArbCom}} but I suppose if we could get it to drop a ping that would be a little less intrusive. Primefac ( talk) 13:43, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
or is the normal state of things? I'm seeing requests standing for weeks on end without comment by a member of BAG. Is there a shortage of active BAG members? — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 12:37, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
Note: in line with Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group#Activity requirements I have removed a bunch of inactive editors from the list of active members. Do you need a recruitment drive or do you have enough active members? — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 15:38, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
The following bots appear to be eligible to lose their rights due to inactivity per User:MajavahBot/Bot status report:
Bot account | Operator(s) | Last activity (UTC) | Last operator activity (UTC) |
---|---|---|---|
Amalthea (bot) (deflagged) | Amalthea | 05 Aug 2021 | 16 Nov 2020 |
EsquivalienceBot (deflagged) | Esquivalience | 15 Jun 2017 | 20 Mar 2021 |
Luke081515Bot (deflagged) | Luke081515 | 14 Dec 2016 | 31 Mar 2021 |
Guanabot (deflagged) | Guanaco | 12 Jul 2017 | 29 May 2021 |
SeveroBot (deflagged) | Severo | 04 Sep 2012 | 06 Sep 2021 |
CactusBot (deflagged) | Cactus26 | 11 Jul 2016 | 07 Sep 2021 |
NihlusBOT (deflagged) | Nihlus | 12 Feb 2018 | 12 Sep 2021 |
OmniBot (deflagged) | Omni Flames | 20 Oct 2016 | 22 Sep 2021 |
Bot24 (deflagged) | Negative24 | 30 Dec 2015 | 16 Dec 2021 |
There's also Flow talk page manager, which hasn't edited since 2016 when mw:Extension:StructuredDiscussions was uninstalled, which IMO falls into the spirit of the inactivity policy and should be deflagged. * Pppery * it has begun... 18:49, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
Some crat should probably deflag BHGbot and MalnadachBot since their operators were sitebanned. There are five other bots ( FlagBot, CmdrObot, Cydebot, ProteinBoxBot, KasparBot) that are indefinitely blocked and may warrant review. * Pppery * it has begun... 19:16, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
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. |
Archive 15 | Archive 16 | Archive 17 | Archive 18 | Archive 19 |
Cyberpower678 might be on a little R&R break from Wikipedia, as they are not responding. Meanwhile, his bots seem to not be functioning as they should. I know the admin stats have not updated for a while. And apparently other tasks are stalled out. Please see User talk:cyberpower678 and its recent archives. Is there an alternate admin who can get things back up and running? If not, I guess we just wait it out. — Maile ( talk) 01:16, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello. Per Wikipedia:Bot policy#Activity requirements, we're supposed to be de-flagging bots that haven't been active in two years. xaosflux has this helpful query showing about 150 bots that meet the criteria currently. I dug up a query after noticing that LaraBot still has a bot flag even though that bot hasn't edited since 2014. Can someone please do the necessary notifications and de-flaggings for these inactive bots?
For LaraBot and BernsteinBot, you can just go ahead and remove the bot flags immediately. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 07:09, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
the listed operator has also had no logged actions or edits for two years. The query is based only on bot activity, not operator, so most of the 150 in the result do not meet the criteria for removal. I checked about 20 and all of them had active operators. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ ( talk) 08:02, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Bot account | Operator(s) | Total edits | Last activity (UTC) | Last edit (UTC) | Last logged action (UTC) | Last operator activity (UTC) | Extra details |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
PDFbot | Dispenser | 7943 | 12 Feb 2012 | 12 Feb 2012 | 04 Feb 2007 | 15 Mar 2020 | |
BG19bot | Bgwhite | 1005055 | 09 Feb 2017 | 09 Feb 2017 | 08 Feb 2017 | 15 Mar 2020 | |
Makecat-bot | Makecat | 103877 | 05 Apr 2013 | 05 Apr 2013 | 10 Feb 2013 | 28 Mar 2020 | |
Lonjers french region rename bot | Lonjers | 11910 | 15 Mar 2016 | 15 Mar 2016 | — | 19 May 2020 | |
TAP Bot | Thine Antique Pen | 1920 | 14 Sep 2015 | 14 Sep 2015 | 13 Dec 2014 | 24 Jan 2021 |
Feel free to remove User:Snotbot's bot flag. I haven't used it in 10 years, and I'm unlikely to use it anytime soon. —ScottyWong— 08:11, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
I thought that this kind of behaviour surely happened in the 2000’s. 85.98.16.196 ( talk) 17:20, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
What do you think was the most devastating damage they caused? (In terms of amount of time to fix it)-- 85.98.16.196 ( talk) 12:14, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
The bot User:MalnadachBot is currently going crazy, making edits to thousands (?) of talk pages with completely useless edits to decades-old user signatures. The signatures are completely fine and do not need to be changed. The "font" tags they use work in every browser ever and will continue to work in every browser forever into the future. citation needed If font tags are causing someone's linter to complain, then either (a) the linter should not be run on talk pages, or (b) that should be considered a bug in the linter, and fixed.
This bot should be stopped to stop it from spamming everyone's watchlists, and should not be allowed to run again until it can be shown it won't make so many worthless no-op spam edits.
After hitting the E-stop on this one, one thing the bot author may want to do is configure the bot to only examine main namespace. – jacobolus (t) 00:37, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
replacing erroneous and obsolete markupThere is literally no benefit whatsoever in doing this. These html tags have worked for the past 20+ years and are going to continue to work forever. No browser is ever going to drop support. If you linter is giving you a hard time about "deprecated" tags on historical talk pages, that's a linter bug that should be fixed (or better still, you should stop trying to run a linter on 15-year-old discussions).
how mediawiki sofware worksthis has nothing at all to do with “how mediawiki software works”. – jacobolus (t) 05:51, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
pointless crusade with no technical meritdescribes your comment perfectly. My bot (as well as others' Lint fixing bots) has sound technical merit. If you want to propose changes to how mediawiki software should work, do so at Phabricator instead of railing against users working on known issues. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ ( talk) 06:01, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
has replaced over half a million font tags in 4 daysI am curious whether people would complain less if it ran slower, as there really is no urgency here. Legoktm ( talk) 06:36, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
As an unrelated aside, is there any kind of CSS style guidance for the about pages of active bots? I find this one has an almost entirely illegible (to me) page. It looks like this in my browser:
– jacobolus (t) 07:29, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Well, it's pretty rare for people to come to this noticeboard to talk about a bot when they're happy about something it did, but I am pretty glad that all those goddamn lint errors in subpages of WP:SIGNPOST have been fixed -- manually fixing that would have been a gigantic pain. jp× g 11:17, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
If we created an edit tag like "Fixing lint errors" and bots used that tag, it would be straightforward for people to set their watchlist to exclude any edit with that tag, which would allow people to both see regular bot edits but hide just these. Legoktm ( talk) 06:42, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
fixed lint errors
.
Legoktm (
talk) 06:56, 4 February 2023 (UTC)Or, we could just stop wasting electrons on fixing linter errors on sub-sub-subpages of AfD talk pages from 2005 that literally no human will ever visit again between now and the heat death of the universe (and even if they did, it would probably render perfectly fine since browsers still support deprecated tags; and even if they didn't, the worst that is likely to happen is that some long-retired perma-banned sock troll's signature might look a little wonky *gasp* oh, the humanity). I still don't understand why anyone defends this useless and annoying bot task. Here's an idea: how about we allow bots to fix linter errors on any page in mainspace, and any other non-mainspace page that has received more than 50 pageviews in the last 12 month period. Without such restrictions, it's like a tree falling in a forest and no one is around to hear it. We're fixing lint errors for the exclusive benefit of webcrawler bots who index these pages periodically for search engines. Seriously, is there any other bot task that inspires so many random editors to independently come here to complain every month or two? Even for those of you that think Malnachadbot is doing the Lord's work, can't you at least admit that the unprecedentedly high frequency and volume of complaints about this bot task is at least cause for some concern? Closing these threads isn't going to make the problem go away... —ScottyWong— 08:03, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
Off-topic for the question being discussed
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I have hatted a few off-topic (for this subthread) discussions. You are welcome to keep going with your back-and-forth, but please limit the un-hatted discussion to the original proposal/point being raised. Primefac ( talk) 17:47, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
If you read the bot’s about page, there is very little description of what the bot is doing, why it is doing it, who made those decisions, or where those decisions were discussed. There is no attempt made to describe or answer common complaints and questions.
The most prominent feature of the page is a large banner bragging about how the bot has made the most edits of any user in history. The obvious conclusion is that making the most possible edits is a driving motivator for the bot's activity.
If we want to talk "necessary" vs. "unnecessary", here is what I think is a "necessary" prerequisite to keep operating something this disruptive: the people approving / operating this bot should sit down with each-other, have a frank discussion about what the bot's actual purpose is, what the pros and cons of running the bot are, whether there is community consensus supporting the bot's operation, and come up with some straight answers to questions from people who are annoyed by the bot.
What is "unnecessary" is a pattern of deflecting questions and blaming anyone who complains, hiding behind the authority of un-linked, un-described "decisions" by unnamed people at some past time which cannot be meaningfully questioned. – jacobolus (t) 10:43, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
@ Jacobolus: For reference, here are the volumes of thoughtful community discussion that took place on the pros and cons of this bot task prior to approving it. Even the bot operator was surprised that it was so easy to get such an enormous bot task approved, see their comment on the talk page of the BRFA. —ScottyWong— 16:50, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
Off-topic for the question being discussed
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I wrote a short essay explaining why I find the Linter project and these edits valuable. It does not address every single critique leveled here, but I sincerely hope this allows us to move past exaggerated rhetoric like "literally not a single one of them cares", "edits being done ... are literally 100% worthless", "literally no human will ever visit again between now and the heat death of the universe", "fixing lint errors for the exclusive benefit of webcrawler bots", and "there is no benefit to anyone". Legoktm ( talk) 07:34, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
aligns us with HTML5 efforts in general
<span style="color: red;">John Doe</span>
is meaningfully "aligned with HTML5"?People tend to copy and paste things they find in other wiki pages
it's much simpler for people to develop tools if they don't need to implement support for all types of legacy behavior ¶ Imagine a tool that automatically checked pages use of colors for appropriate contrasts
OK, but are those worth making edits to a bunch of pages that are just for archival and no one really cares about or will ever look at again? Sure. I don't see this as any different from updating deprecated template parameters or merging duplicate templates.
huge disruptive project for the sake of a bunch of speculative future benefits that are marginal at best and realistically have almost no chance of ever coming about. This is by no means a rebuttal, just noting the similarity here. 0x Deadbeef→∞ ( talk to me) 09:26, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
a bunch of speculative future benefits that are marginal at best and realistically have almost no chance of ever coming aboutis not really accurate, given that in addition to VisualEditor itself, there are a number of bots, gadgets and tools that are all actively using Parsoid already. Legoktm ( talk) 06:41, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
Note: I have created an RfC to encourage a wider community discussion on whether or not MalnadachBot's mass fixing of deprecated HTML tags is consistent with bot policy. You can find the RfC at Wikipedia:Village_pump (policy)#RFC: Clarifications to WP:COSMETICBOT for fixing deprecated HTML tags. —ScottyWong— 08:37, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I used to have one but then the toolserver changed and somehow an account isn't easy to come by, now.. ~ Lofty abyss 18:10, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Catching up on some housekeeping, when I created DYK-Tools-Bot, I used a naming convention that's out of character (for no good reason) with all the other DYK bots ( DYKHousekeepingBot, DYKUpdateBot, etc). Are there any issues with me doing a rename to bring this in line (i.e. DYK-Tools-Bot -> DYKToolsBot)? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:25, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
SelvasivagurunathanmBOT ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log) which looks like a BOT from TAWIKI. -- Deepfriedokra ( talk) 20:06, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.
The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
All traffic will switch on 1 March. The test will start at 14:00 UTC.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
Other effects:
Trizek (WMF) ( Talk) 21:24, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Nirmaljoshi requested the create stubs on Japanese dams here on this noticeboard and it was suggested that they refrain from creating stubs but instead create a list article. As to my count, on the 1 March they created 19 articles within less than 3 hours. I believe all were on Japanese dams. Maybe someone could explain what the conclusion of the last discussion was? There was no formal closure at the time. Paradise Chronicle ( talk) 20:19, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
Hello. I've been meaning to ask this since quite a few weeks. There are two bots set up to archive WP:BOTREQ, and currently the settings for these bots have different archive page number. Why are there two bots? WT:BOTREQ redirects here. —usernamekiran (talk) 18:27, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
I was thinking that we need a bot to protect the featured article from new editors due to the vandalism that happens almost everyday. Much of the time we end up having to protect it anyways so I was thinking a bot would be a good idea for protection the article it would either semi or extended protect the article (bot owner can decide what protection is best) it would not fully protect the article or remove/change existing protections and a admin could opt a article out of auto protection if there is a reason it should not be auto protected Qwv ( talk) 10:36, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
A training tool within the framework of Wikipedia:Education creates discussions on Talk pages on behalf of student editors, and publishes a comment on the TP with a sig that is not the userid of the editor running the tool. I'm trying to determine if this is compliant with all relevant P&G, in particular WP:SIG, and perhaps, WP:Bot policy. This tool is an edit-assist tool that operates at human speed, so I'm not clear whether it is covered under bot policy, but my reading of the first sentence, especially the last part of it, implies that it may be. The most relevant section I can find there, is § Bots directed to edit by other users, and these tool-assisted edits are disclosure-compliant, because the user's id is inluded in the edit summary. The problem is that the talk-page sig clashes with the userid in the summary, and contains a different sig. I don't actually see anything in bot policy that prohibits this, so maybe this situation is bot-compliant. However, this is the first time I've run into such an issue, and I am not used to reading or interpreting bot policy, or even whether this situation is covered by it, as the training tool lacks many of the features of a bot. If it is relevant, your feedback would be appreciated at this discussion. Thanks, Mathglot ( talk) 23:49, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
HBC AIV helperbot5 ( talk · contribs) Appears to have stopped after Toolforge was under scheduled downtime, however it doesn't appear to have resumed maintaining AIV and UAA. Its last edit prior to the downtime was here. Bot's creator doesn't seem to be around anymore as they haven't edited in 7 months and haven't responded to their most recent non-automated talk page post. ― Blaze Wolf TalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:51, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
It appears that Mathbot is not updating the AfD open discussion list since 3 April. I've left a note for the bot maintainer, Oleg Alexandrov, but it seems he's been inactive since 14 November last year. Would anyone know if responsibility for the bot was passed on to or shared with anyone who's currently active? Seraphimblade Talk to me 01:55, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
Yapperbot ( talk · contribs) is still running, but seems to have dropped some of its tasks. For instance, it hasn't sent out a WP:FRS message since the run of 00:30, 6 March 2023 (UTC) - it normally does this hourly. The botop, Naypta ( talk · contribs), hasn't eedited in almost a year. Does anybody know what's happening? -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 07:21, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
FRS messages seem to be running normally again. -- Redrose64 🌹 ( talk) 21:12, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.
The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
All traffic will switch on 26 April. The test will start at 14:00 UTC.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
Other effects:
MediaWiki message delivery 01:21, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
Hi, I was encouraged to post here on the grounds that I have been creating a lot of articles and might need to seek approval to continue in that vein. To be clear, I edit without any automation or assistance, and I'm not aware of any concerns about the actual quality of the articles; but on some interpretations of WP:MASSCREATE's vague 25–50 criterion, I am mass creating articles (though not systematically) – I've created 50 articles this week, for example. Of course I don't want the sheer volume of articles to become disruptive in any way. But I'm not entirely sure how I would go about getting approval to create more articles. The vast majority have been and would continue to be articles about South African legislators – would the best path be to check in with others at the WikiProject? Or to apply at WP:BRFA? If the latter, how? Jlalbion ( talk) 10:51, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
I just want to keep writing articles, probably about South African politicians, for an indefinite period and at a rate proportional to my free time and interest level!It seems that everyone is convinced by your explanation about how you aren't using ChatGPT; given that, I would suggest you are free to continue writing articles like you are currently doing without further bureaucracy - they are high quality, so thank you for creating them. BilledMammal ( talk) 13:53, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
How would I get User:GreenC bot the new sboverride userright? c.f. T36928 recently closed resolved. -- Green C 20:12, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
Oh, that's a neat user right.
User:AAlertBot could use it since it occasionally encounters urls users used that it cannot report and has to trim the report. I spent way too long fixing it when I first encountered this because I assumed bots would surely be exempt from this. I doubt there's any process yet for granting the right though. —
HELLKNOWZ ∣
TALK 21:06, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
bot
user group is "trusted" enough to have sboverride
added to it imho — this is proposed at
T313107 —
TheresNoTime (
talk • she/her) 21:28, 29 August 2022 (UTC)So, it looks like you don't recall correctly. * Pppery * it has begun... 21:52, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[...] the link filtering is based on what links existed before the edit vs. what links exist after (exist meaning interpreted as an external link by the software). Do you have any evidence that an edit that did not try to add a link was prevent by this extension? See the code - this part makes it so that if the page already existed, the links that are checked are only those that were added in the current end. -- DannyS712 ( talk) 00:18, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
— m:Requests for comment/Allow sysops to override the spam blacklist
I guess the question is if there is a case when it would be desirable to block a bot's edit due to the blacklist?AnomieBOT's rescuing of orphaned references. It would probably be better if the bot didn't reinsert blacklisted links, but continue to complain on its talk page for humans to do a proper removal. Anomie ⚔ 01:27, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Follow-up: bots were finally granted the sboverride right today in gerrit:923728 * Pppery * it has begun... 02:52, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
On March 2, I offered feedback on how to improve the proposed CircularRedirectsBot ( talk · contribs) bot in this thread, but it has received no attention from anyone else since then. There are a few other WP:BRFA threads that have not been updated in a long time; for example, Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WegweiserBot is marked as "in trial", but has not been updated since January 8. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 11:09, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
I note that User:MalnadachBot's operator has been indefinitely blocked, as of today, and so too has the bot (apparently for some sort of checkuser business, with them having secretly been an LTA).
MalnadachBot has the highest editcount of any account on Wikipedia, and currently runs a good number of tasks, so what the heck are we going to do about that? Is there a fallback set up for this? jp× g 01:29, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
/\/Archive/
?
User:MalnadachBot has already rendered permanently unusable Wikipedia's functionality to search old discussions by date last modified, since they've all been modified within the past year, all by
User:MalnadachBot, so I suppose the damage is already done, and I'm probably just being an old busted grouch who thinks that old webpages should look old and busted, but it seems like an awful lot of work for very little benefit apart from emptying maintenance categories that don't seem necessary in the first place.
Folly Mox (
talk) 15:35, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
/\/Archive/
is that it the filter would still allow a lot of inappropriate pages to be modified, like every XfD that has ever taken place in the history of WP (which are never "archived" in a way that changes their page title). I think that rather than trying to come up with a way to exclude pages that shouldn't be "de-linted" (if that's a term), we should come up with a way to generate the list of pages that should be de-linted. Fixing this problem by editing each page is an inefficient and unsustainable solution. Imagine 10 years from now, when WP has a 200 million pages, and the <span>
tag gets deprecated. Are we going to make 200 million edits to address that problem? Or would we come up with a more rational way to solve the problem?
—ScottyWong— 18:23, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
The fact that no one noticed that MalandachBot had stopped editing for over a month is telling.- that the bot is unintrusive and its edits are at worst harmless? — Qwerfjkl talk 15:35, 11 June 2023 (UTC)
It is my understanding that Legobot went through every page with a Linter error and fixed all of the ones that met its strict criteria, primary among which is leaving zero remaining Linter errors after its edits. This left many pages with errors that bots can fix, but which also have errors that bots can't fix. As a result, this means that there are zero bots currently fixing Linter errors on en.WP (Legobot has not edited since March 2023). Any potential bot operators who are looking to work on Linter errors, including Scottywong, who
offered to set up just such a bot (I'll volunteer to take over the tasks if no one else wants to.
), are welcome at
WT:Linter. –
Jonesey95 (
talk) 00:28, 10 June 2023 (UTC)
Just letting everyone know that I put in a BRFA for MalnadachBot's other active task blanking inactive talkpages of inactive IP addresses. Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/VulpesBot Dr vulpes ( 💬 • 📝) 02:30, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
I'm not exactly sure where to bring this up, but the Internet Archive bot recently made an edit to the article on the Roman Republic which did seemingly nothing but add archive URLs for live sites, expanding the size of the article by over six thousand characters. Is this actually okay? This cruft negatively affects editing (I use syntax highlighting regardless) and does not seem to offer any meaningful improvement to the articles given all the links are still live. Ifly6 ( talk) 14:51, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
Links added by editors to the English Wikipedia mainspace are automatically saved to Wayback Machine within about 24 hours. So the actual archiving is done automatically, and the archive links can be added at any time after. Pressing the button in the IA Bot Management Console doesn't actually do any new archiving. On the other hand, Visual Editor users can't even see the extra code generated by these archive links, probably leading some folks to think that adding these archive URLs is harmless. When in doubt, follow WP:BRD I guess. cc UndercoverClassicist. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 04:19, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
refbegin
and refend
in a ==Sources==
subheading. If the citations are defined in their own area, no amount of cruft makes editing the prose any more difficult.
Folly Mox (
talk) 20:12, 3 July 2023 (UTC)I'm making this section to possibly discuss further steps? It feels like there are a number of different solutions etc put forward here:
|jstor=
fieldDo tell me if you think I've mischaracterised some positions so far. Do people here think some, any, or all of these ought to be done?
I think we ought to do all of them. The first two seem like clear improvements that a bot could do (clean up and shorten templates with no loss of amenity); the last seems like a loss of amenity which is minimal when searching by ISBN should still pull up the right book.
Ifly6 (
talk) 17:07, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
|jstor=
(or PMID, OCLC, SCID, DOI or whatever) if one is available. The trick is getting IABot to ignore archiving for any template containing one of those link rot resistant stable identifier parameters.
Folly Mox (
talk) 03:10, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
Do not use automated tools to populate archive links for live websites. Only add archive URLs for print or paywalled sources when a compelling need can be demonstrated.be worthwhile to add to that document? Ifly6 ( talk) 06:35, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
Is there any bot that can be used to plug in and modify a given example of a piped internal link across pages, such as those that might have changed or need redirecting due to a page move, split or other change that affects page navigation? Iskandar323 ( talk) 08:48, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
There are 78,874 sports biographies, listed at User:BilledMammal/Sports articles probably lacking SIGCOV, that a Quarry query suggests lack significant coverage as required by WP:SPORTSCRIT #5. I want to use the add_text script to add the template Template:No significant coverage (sports) to these articles in line with a recent suggestion at VPR, but given the scale of change I believed it best to seek approval here first.
I am also not certain if this would require approval through WP:BRFA? BilledMammal ( talk) 17:48, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
There's a proposal at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States#Undo hijacking of WikiProjects Louisiana and New Orleans to restore previous Talk page banners, so as not to use WikiProject US's banner. Currently, if either banner {{ WikiProject Louisiana}} or {{ WikiProject New Orleans}} is put on an article Talk page, a bot ( User:AnomieBOT) soon replaces it by the United States banner. The proposal is also to stop that bot. I opened the discussion there, and hope to achieve consensus there for the proposal. Will that suffice to get approval (here?) for the change to the bot? --Doncram ( talk, contribs) 05:46, 9 July 2023 (UTC)
{{
Subst only|auto=yes}}
is removed from its doc block), AnomieBOT's TemplateSubster task will no longer subst it.
Anomie
⚔ 11:40, 9 July 2023 (UTC)I came across this article Graham Barrow because my bot skipped editing it as there is {{ nobots}} template in "playing career" section. I am not sure by who or why this template has been placed on the article in discussion. Any ideas? —usernamekiran (talk) 14:42, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
A large chunk of the request moves page ended up in a 'notes and references collapses' see Wikipedia:Requested_moves#July_12,_2023— blindlynx 14:38, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
Hello bot operators,
Wikipedia:Bot activity monitor now supports notifying you by email of broken bot tasks. On the
configurations page, you can use the |email=
param in the {{/task}} invocation, to specify either your username or an email address. The
page editnotice will show the detailed instructions.
As before, you can also choose to be notified via your talk page (via the |notify=
option).
BRFA: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SDZeroBot 9.1 (in trial) – SD0001 ( talk) 15:28, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Sandbox history, blatant 3RR violation. Keeps reverting my edits. There is no exception for bots breaking 3RR. 묰묰묰묰묰묰 ( talk) 15:56, 1 September 2023 (UTC)
Over the years, I've written about bots in the Signpost. I've usually covered bots I was involved with, since I know more about those than most other bots, but I'd be interested in either) a writing about other bots b) having other bot operators write about their bots. These could take place in the form of guides (here's how you can use my bot, or how my bot could help you), or a historical coverage. For example what this could look like, see
Do you know of other bots that could get this sort of coverage? Or who'se bot operators/coders could write about them? Like a piece about User:ClueBot would be great I'm sure, but I can't write that one because I'm not familiar with its history. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 23:13, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
I noticed a couple of strange edits by InternetArchiveBot, whereby it is overwriting redirects left by moves, as shown in the following diffs.
I have logged a Phabricator task: T344102. I have logged here as it looks to me as though an eye should be kept on the bot's edits. William Avery ( talk) 12:47, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
Hello,
This is a notice pursuant the global bot policy, to inform you that Lingua Libre Bot is requesting approval to operate as a global bot.
The discussion can be found at Steward requests/Bot status in Meta-Wiki. All Wikimedia Community members can participate in the discussion if they so wish.
Thank you.
You are receiving this message because this page is listed in the list of pages to notify about new global bot discussions. If you no longer wish to be notified, you may remove this page from that list at any time.
Is there a bot to detect incomplete or untranscluded
WP:FAC nominations? For example,
Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/List of Bath City F.C. seasons/archive1 and
Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/List of Bath City F.C. managers/archive1. I commented on these because their articles were on my watchlist, so I noticed the
addition of the {{
featured article candidates}}
. Perhaps I should have checked that it had been set up properly. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk) 17:42, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
User:HBC AIV helperbot5 isn't removing blocked editors from WP:AIV, but it's still editing WP:UAA and WP:AIV/TB2. It just removed the backlog notice after EvergreenFir manually removed some entries. – dudhhr talk contribssheher 16:19, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.
The Wikimedia Foundation will switch the traffic between its data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
All traffic will switch on 20 September. The test will start at 14:00 UTC.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
Other effects:
Trizek_(WMF) ( talk) 09:30, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
I just soft-blocked a user for a Bot username and noticed that {{ uw-botublock}} offers account renaming as a potential resolution but does not offer the notion of BRFA approval. Before I go ahead and change the template for what seems imo an obvious change, I'm checking in here to ask if there's any reason not to? Cabayi ( talk) 09:24, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
Hey, I'm making 10 edits per minute to fix or remove invalid parameters on pages in the Category:Infoboxes with unknown parameters and its subcategories using AWB. I would like to point out that I review every edit before saving. Do you think I need a BRFA for this? – DreamRimmer ( talk) 06:44, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
My relevant contribution history
Xqbot was speedily approved to resolve double redirects using m:redirect.py way back in December 2009.
I reported a problem to operator Xqt in April 2020, and again in June 2020 (and September 2020).
They responded by opening phab:T254839 which is currently "Open, In Progress, High" – it's been over three years, and still not resolved. Though it seems there was progress in September?
I just cleaned up twenty bad Xqbot edits caused by this bug (somebody mass-moved a whole lot of redirects)
I noticed that EmausBot was also working these double-redirects, without having the same problem with them (e.g., DIFF)
EmausBot was approved in December 2010 – to use the standard script redirect.py !
What puzzles me is why I can't recall ever seeing EmausBot make this error? Is that bot just incredibly lucky, or is it configured differently, in a way that avoids making bad edits like that? wbm1058 ( talk) 20:37, 29 November 2023 (UTC)
Bot operators operating on the Toolforge Grid Engine may need to read this thread and the pages linked from it. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 23:17, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
This bot continues to place bogus referenences and call them "fixes". Is it really not possible to make it stop doing so? I've used this Noticeboard before to report about a dozen cases. Most recently, I found edit , where the bot resurrected a reference from four years ago (before the pandemic) to cite something about sentiment towards Chinese Canadians because of the pandemic. The bot just guesses about how to replace references that have gone missing, and guesses wrong often enough that it is disruptive and damaging. -- Mikeblas ( talk) 04:40, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
I have general approval for implementing TfD discussions through removal or simple replacements using AWB per Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PearBOT II 11. The reason I phrased it that way is because I did not feel comfortable with all types of TfD implementation being done using a bot without oversight and felt like this was a reasonable limitation. In my work with the archive merger I've found a case that would be quite complex to do using AWB but simple to do with pywikibot which is combining several parameters from two templates into one. This is easy with pywikibots templatesWithParams() function but would require many complex regexs to do in AWB. How should I go about getting approval for this? -- Trialpears ( talk) 15:03, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
a case that would be quite complex to do ... which is combining several parameters from two templates into oneis not in the remit of Task 11, which is for
General TfD implementation through removal or simple replacements, and I would encourage a specific BRFA for this task. Primefac ( talk) 13:26, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
The redirect Wikipedia:SPECTRUM has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 December 20 § Wikipedia:SPECTRUM until a consensus is reached. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 01:17, 20 December 2023 (UTC)
If any BAG members could check out my comments at the bottom of this BRFA I would appreciate it. I tagged it with the usual template but something makes me think that it's not quite as effective as we like to think it is. Basically looking for a 2O on something. Thanks in advance. Primefac ( talk) 13:39, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
e.g. I've got notifications, just an hour apart around "Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:02:53 +0100" for following creation of user talk pages for username `Mnalis` that I use on (English and Croatian) wikipedia sites:
I didn't ever create (to the best on my knowledge; I don't even speak the languages) accounts on it.wikipedia.org nor id.wikipedia.org; so I am quite puzzled why two different bots, in such a close temporal proximity, would create such user talk pages (with "welcome" messages if mechanical translator got it right?) and send me notification email to my e-mail address (which I use for English & Croatian wikipedias)? How would they even know my e-mail if I have not created account there?
Has anyone noticed that behaviour, and where should I inquire/report it if not here? (I'd like to avoid creating accounts on those it/id wikipedias just to comment on bot page). Thanks, Mnalis ( talk) 02:03, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
So I was perusing the BRFAs today and realised that Template:BAG assistance needed doesn't really do anything. I mean, sure, it puts a nice orange "hey look at me" notice in Wikipedia:BAG/Status, but unless you're already on the BRFA page I don't really see how it has much use. On the other hand, {{ Operator assistance needed}} actually drops a talk page note for the operator. Should we modify the BAG version to do something similar, either with a note here or (I suspect less desirable) on each BAG's talk page? I'm not sure we could get it quite the same as {{ @Bureaucrats}} or {{ @ArbCom}} but I suppose if we could get it to drop a ping that would be a little less intrusive. Primefac ( talk) 13:43, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
or is the normal state of things? I'm seeing requests standing for weeks on end without comment by a member of BAG. Is there a shortage of active BAG members? — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 12:37, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
Note: in line with Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group#Activity requirements I have removed a bunch of inactive editors from the list of active members. Do you need a recruitment drive or do you have enough active members? — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 15:38, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
The following bots appear to be eligible to lose their rights due to inactivity per User:MajavahBot/Bot status report:
Bot account | Operator(s) | Last activity (UTC) | Last operator activity (UTC) |
---|---|---|---|
Amalthea (bot) (deflagged) | Amalthea | 05 Aug 2021 | 16 Nov 2020 |
EsquivalienceBot (deflagged) | Esquivalience | 15 Jun 2017 | 20 Mar 2021 |
Luke081515Bot (deflagged) | Luke081515 | 14 Dec 2016 | 31 Mar 2021 |
Guanabot (deflagged) | Guanaco | 12 Jul 2017 | 29 May 2021 |
SeveroBot (deflagged) | Severo | 04 Sep 2012 | 06 Sep 2021 |
CactusBot (deflagged) | Cactus26 | 11 Jul 2016 | 07 Sep 2021 |
NihlusBOT (deflagged) | Nihlus | 12 Feb 2018 | 12 Sep 2021 |
OmniBot (deflagged) | Omni Flames | 20 Oct 2016 | 22 Sep 2021 |
Bot24 (deflagged) | Negative24 | 30 Dec 2015 | 16 Dec 2021 |
There's also Flow talk page manager, which hasn't edited since 2016 when mw:Extension:StructuredDiscussions was uninstalled, which IMO falls into the spirit of the inactivity policy and should be deflagged. * Pppery * it has begun... 18:49, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
Some crat should probably deflag BHGbot and MalnadachBot since their operators were sitebanned. There are five other bots ( FlagBot, CmdrObot, Cydebot, ProteinBoxBot, KasparBot) that are indefinitely blocked and may warrant review. * Pppery * it has begun... 19:16, 1 January 2024 (UTC)