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All the foreign language articles that are interlinked from the RV Belgica (1884) article backlink to the RV Belgica article, which is due to be turned into a shipindex page once the RV Belgica (A962) has been created. Could a bot alter all the en:iwls on the foreign language articles to point back to the 1884 ship please? Mjroots ( talk) 14:37, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
A bot keeps reverting my RfC in this talk page : talk:Special forces. It is seriously annoying as it keeps deleting every half hour or hour. Can someone please fix this ASAP. Thanks. CET ♔ 08:37, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
(Moved from BAG
Rich
Farmbrough, 11:34, 7 October 2010 (UTC).)
I make this comment here in the hope of reaching enough bot programmers to get a useful answer. It concerns a proposal (see the RFC at
Wikipedia talk:spoiler) to make the link to the disclaimers more prominent in the default Vector skin. I know bot programmers use (or are supposed to use) the API rather than scraping HTML, but there may be some bots and other automated tools that are still reading HTML for one reason or another.
So I want to consult bot designers and ask if this proposed change would break anything important. In the interests of keeping things together please comment on the spoiler guideline talk page whose link I give above. -- TS 03:23, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
If you have a 'bot that thinks that it knows how to spell better than human beings, please ensure that it is on the same page as the other 'bots and semi-automated tools who also think that they know how to spell better than human beings. Otherwise, as you can see, pointless back and forth results. Uncle G ( talk) 10:53, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
As soon as the two bots agree to use ONE of the two methods, I am okay with any of them. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 23:40, 19 September 2010 (UTC)
Well, IMHO, capitalizing via bot the name of a template is pretty useless. -- Basilicofresco ( msg) 21:17, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
SmackBot was stopped temporarily some hours ago, but appears to be running once more at the time of writing. X! ( talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) has blocked Rich Farmbrough for running an unauthorized 'bot on that account, and this edit with AutoWikiBrowser. Uncle G ( talk) 13:42, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Comments are invited at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Block_review:_User:Magioladitis regarding a similar issue to the above. – xeno talk 18:00, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
Good afternoon (CDT),
The question regards what is to be done with 60K edits to 8K articles.
I have an overall outline of what I would like to do, but I'm a little short on details and expertise. Has anyone had to go through an exercise like this before? If so, are there artifacts from that process? A silver bullet perhaps?
Barring a Major Breakthrough, the first thing I will need is a way to download 60k of usercontribs in xml or something useful (without getting another migraine from editing the "next date" every 500 lines, copying, pasting etc) so I can load them onto mysql here at home. A web page that dumps all usercontribs, or something similar I could adapt, would be Most Welcome.
There are bigger technical challenges I must overcome.
Per my comments at the other talk page,
So, I am nibbling around th edges, and any examples, artifacts or advice I can get are Most Helpful.
And, as I said, the first thing I need is a way to download 60k of usercontribs so I can load them onto mysql.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Aquib ( talk) 22:12, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Edit_restriction_proposal_for_Rich_Farmborough for the proposal to restrict Rich from: using AWB or any other mass-editing tool; running bots of any sort; making bot-like edits; making more than four edits per minute. - Kingpin 13 ( talk) 22:29, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
User:DASHBot is doing multiple false positives, often on the same files. For example, DASHbot had a false positive with the file En-derin-g-files.png [2] yesterday. The image is in use on an Incubator page at Wikipedia:Article Incubator/En Derin. I tried to shut down the bot, but the page User:DASHBot/F5 is protected. I posted to the bot owner talk page, but no response. Today DASHbot did the same false positive again, and no response from the bot owner. We request the bot be temporarily turned off, until such time as the 'unused-image' logic is rewritten to avoid false positives for files in the Incubator. Thanks. Eclipsed ¤ 08:20, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
Hi. A Wikipedian helped update all the links at the German Wikipedia, and is requesting assistance in order to do the same thing here.
Please see Template talk:Allmusic#URL syntax has changed, and provide advice or assistance to User:Cactus26. (Please feel free to move this note, if there is a more appropriate place for it). Much thanks. -- Quiddity ( talk) 21:01, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
Could Svick be approved to run the task approved for CleanupListingBot either with CleanupListingBot or SvickBot? I'm rewriting the code so that bot will be run serverside on the toolserver, and Svick has offered to run the bot. Smallman12q ( talk) 16:30, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
Mobius Bot ( talk · contribs)
Looks like someone took control of this bot's positronic brain. I've blocked it indef (with the probably not appropriate "vandalism only account" message, but time was of the essence) and notified the owner. Does anyone here have an explanation for this rather erratic behavior? Favonian ( talk) 13:11, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
I'm curious what the policy is regarding automatic insertion of interwiki links by bots. What happens when a bot inserts a set of false links? I have an example where a meaningless page in an obscure dialect has been linked to a set of (properly-linked) pages in other languages. The dialect page is not related to the others but one particular bot thought it was, and linked that page to all of the others, and all of the others to that dialect page. When I try to delete the link from the en page, other bots now spot that missing link and "helpfully" reinsert it.
I contacted the owner of the original bot, but the owner was completely unhelpful and said they "didn't have time" to undo their bot's edit by removing all the links. It seems that regular users are then expected to register accounts at all the different wikipedias in order to fix the problems which the bot has caused. Apart from being irritating, isn't automatic behaviour like this ripe for manipulation? Isn't it leaving an inviting target for vandals to insert links, let the bots propagate the mess over a large list of pages and then make it difficult for regular users to undo the damage? Isn't there an easier way to fix this kind of problem (without escalating a bot vs bot war of course!) Thrapper ( talk) 19:10, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
Hello! I invite you to comment on my BAG (Bot Approvals Group) nomination: Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/H3llkn0wz. Thank you. — HELLKNOWZ ▎ TALK 11:19, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
Hi, this might not be the most obvious place to ask but we're looking for anyone with a programming bent that might be willing to take a look at Template:Automatic taxobox to see if there are any ways that it could be improved (either in functionality or performance), before it is rolled out more widely. Comments would be very warmly received at Template_talk:Automatic_taxobox#Request_for_comments. Thanks! Martin ( Smith609 – Talk) 13:16, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
Peter Karlsen has recently been blocked indef for socking, shouldn't we block his bot too? Usb10 Connected? 01:44, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
hi,
i'm not sure if this is the right place. to summarize my thoughts from here: human editors need to spoon-feed this User:ClueBot_NG with false positives in order for the bot to work satisfactorily. i will not submit my edit to the provided link as it is not hosted on wikimedia, but on some private non-open source location. how come that this bot is allowed at wikipedia if it is not entirely managed within wm servers, nor is its functioning open to all aka open source?
188.2.168.166 ( talk) 23:14, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Is this really CorenSearchBot? It seems (and claims) to be, but is the address approved for this bot? Can someone confirm its status and/or identity? Feezo (Talk) 01:44, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
This user has bots running and issues are being raised on his talkpage - however they do not appear to be active - last edit was Nov 10. Should bots be running if the user is not around to respond to issues? That would seem to be against the Bot Policy. Exxolon ( talk) 03:42, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
Last week I made some changes to SuggestBot's handling of its regular users, switching to using a template/userbox similar to what we've been doing on the Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia since early December. We've already got some new users signed up using this system and things are running smoothly, so I now want our existing regulars to start using it too.
This has left me wondering what the best practice of notifying our (currently ~350) users of the change is, previously people signed up by adding their name to User:SuggestBot/Regulars, it's now a redirect. I looked through the noticeboard archives and failed to find anything resembling this problem being mentioned. So far I've come up with a few options:
Perhaps the main reason for asking is that we'd like to try to minimize the possibility of a user who wants to stay subscribed not getting the message, which is why having the bot (or me) post this message separately is on the list of ideas. On the other hand, I'm not wanting to step on any toes here. Since I'm a researcher, I'm tempted to try all three approaches and see if any works better, but again want to make sure I'm not going against WP policy.
Would appreciate suggestions on how to proceed. Cheers, Nettrom ( talk) 17:19, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
Does 1000 edits/hour on AWB require a bot flag? -- Kleopatra ( talk) 04:00, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Hi,
Mjbmrbot is broken. I notified it's owner here, but the bot is still running, apparently. It is -according to the owner- a standard pywikipediabot, but it is making a mess of interwiki-links. Can someone take appropriate action? (Not just en.wikipedia is affected!) Thanks Buzz-tardis ( talk) 13:29, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Bot has approval by Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Mjbmrbot. I m not expert in pywikipediabots. Can someone indicate a bunch or bot's false edits? -- Magioladitis ( talk) 13:46, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
First step is that the bot stops editing in mainspace. Then, we ll find a solution. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:07, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
mjbmr, can you please turn cosmetic changes off? We have many problems caused by them. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:32, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Thanks all, and sorry for the hassle. Buzz-tardis ( talk) 14:47, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
What is this?-- Амба ( talk) 01:17, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
How were the last 15,000 expand templates replaced according to the holding pen instructions (if they weren't just removed) in such a a short space of time? Does anyone know?
Rich
Farmbrough, 02:17, 28th day of January in the year 2011 (UTC).
{{ Run-page-shutoff}} has been nominated for deletion. You may be interested in this issue. 65.93.15.80 ( talk) 05:14, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
It's at it again: see? Block, someone? -- Buzz-tardis ( talk) 05:11, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
Another example. -- Buzz-tardis ( talk) 05:27, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Automate stock information through RSS feeds - I have proposed using a bot (or bots) to automate stock information through RSS feeds, specifically in company infoboxes. This is not a bot request, I just thought that bot owners might have something of value to add to the discussion, as it could eventually lead to a bot request. Thanks! ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 07:57, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
This discussion at AN/I may be of interest to bot owners. User:Plastikspork runs a bot and owns an alternate account, User:Plasticspork. When 27,000 edits to taxoboxes were requested here, Plastikspork volunteered to make the edits. However, instead of using his bot account, Plastikspork used AWB and his alternate account to make the edits. After I asked him/her to link to the RfBA for the task, I then noticed his bot was not making the edits, and crossed out my question. [3] Noticing that the category of 27,000 articles ha plummeted to some 21,000, I went back to my discussion on this talk page and noticed that he was making the edits semi-automatically. This was when I found the alternate account and the edits, rather than him/her informing me of the existence of this account when I raised the issue.
I post this here because I believe that this number of automated edits might require a bot. Please discuss any non-bot specific aspects of this at the AN/I discussion. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 16:36, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
Plastikspork speculates there may be a bug in his browser or a conflict with one of the plug ins. I have posted at AN/I about this issue. However, if there is some action that bot-owners usually do under such circumstances (meaning a potentially corrupted bot account), this is to notify the board that this may be an issue.
"The only reason that I can come up with for why I didn't see the message earlier is some javascript bug in my browser, or a conflict with one of the plugins (e.g., noscript or greasemonkey)."
-- Kleopatra ( talk) 23:27, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
I just found this bot editing articles on my watchlist to add commons category boxes per Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/FrescoBot 6. Those boxes aren't always placed in articles on purpose based on the editorial decisions of the articles' editors. One good reason: all of the photos in the category are already in the article. Why entice a reader with the promise of more content, and then show them everything that they've seen in the article? Just something to consider since I've had to remove the box from 13 articles. The two articles where it was left in place each had one additional photo in the category. I'm waiting for the bot to hit the end of the alphabet, but I expect more edits to undo yet. Just some food for thought. Imzadi 1979 → 09:26, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I agree with DJSasso: it's important to extend these interwiki links. The template may be a bit obtrusive, but it's just a cosmetic issue (well... change it). There is nothing wrong with placing the link when there are no additional images on Commons: first of all the number of (well categorized) images on Commons is going to grow, secondly the link is useful to check for new pictures. The category, likewise its link, has not to contain new images in order to be useful. Moreover imho a bot should not remove or add the link to Commons everytime someone add/remove a file on Commons or within the article... -- Basilicofresco ( msg) 18:21, 1 February 2011 (UTC) I almost forgot it: last but not least, categories on Commons could contains subcats. These subcats will likely contains media related to the article, so even a category without images is a good target for a link. -- Basilicofresco ( msg) 18:28, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Please see 130.223.122.123. Seems like a bot gone wild. - DePiep ( talk) 01:01, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
User:Luckas-bot is continually adding an actor's article from the Swedish wikipedia ( sv:Leslie H. Martinson) to an article about a book ( Lad, A Dog). [4] This is not the first time it (adding irrelevant links) has happened. [5] Can someone please block the bot to get its operator to notice the problem and fix it. Jappalang ( talk) 15:29, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
I'm looking for a co-maintainer for User:WP 1.0 bot. This is the bot that tracks WikiProject article assessments. It is also closely involved with the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team that produces packaged DVDs of selected Wikipedia articles. The bot itself runs on the toolserver, as does the web interface that allows users to query the assessment data. It's written in PERL at the moment, but the data is stored in a proper database on the toolserver where it can be accessed by tools in any language.
What I'm looking for is someone who is interested in contributing to the WP 1.0 project or being a co-maintainer of the bot. The bot code was rewritten about a year ago, and is stable, but there are many features and improvements that could be made. I'm happy to give commit access to anyone who wants to contribute to it, and in particular I'm looking for a co-maintainer to share admin access to the bot's account. I think it's not ideal to have such a key bot dependent on a single bot operator.
This is a big project - there are over a thousand WikiProjects that rely on the bot, and the bot is one of the few that has made over 1,000,000 edits. I have always found it interesting and satisfying to work on, but it's grown enough that I think additional maintainers would be helpful. I would be happy to mentor and help new maintainers learn how the system is designed. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:55, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
As discussed in an archived thread, Mobius Bot ( talk · contribs) went berserk late last year, and its owner, Mobius Clock ( talk · contribs), hasn't been heard from since long before that. I emailed Mobius but got no response. Is there any way the bot can be restored or replaced? Or could some other bot(s) take over Mobius Bot's functions? It seems a dreadful shame to lose a useful bot over something like this. Adrian J. Hunter( talk• contribs) 10:00, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
time required:utility gained
, this would surely be an incredibly time-efficient way to help the 'pedia.
Adrian J. Hunter(
talk•
contribs) 13:53, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
I recently discovered this page with several users in the top five with shockingly high edit numbers. Far higher than a user should have without a bot flag. I also looked at the contributions pages and most have edit counts far exceeding what has been explained to me to be appropriate. I also reviewed the list of bots and do not see these user accounts listed on there although several do maintain bots that have been approved for use. Since server resources, bot edit policy and the filling of watchlists has become such a significant area of concern I wanted to bring these to someones attention. -- Kumioko ( talk) 19:55, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi. I have an account for my bot. The policy appears to be that I may not login as the bot and edit manually in its name. However, I'd like to opt in to the edit counters, which is done by creating a subpage in the bot's userspace and can only be done by the account holder. What do I do ? - Richard Cavell ( talk) 05:34, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
Any bot operator whose bot deals with any BLP-related issues should be aware of this CfR discussion, as its results may result in renaming categories which the bots handle. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:26, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
I noticed in this edit that User:RebelRobot was "fixing" ISBN formats, which caused a link to an image to be broken. I left a message about that, which I'm sure can be fixed for the future. However, due to volume of edits, it's impossible to humanly check them all for broken links. Also, I wandered if a bot requires community approval to do this type of reformatting, and if such approval has been given. -- Rob ( talk) 11:01, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
Hi guys. The bot made a blunder in
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health simply because the image title contains ISBN1403105464
and neither the original developers of the script I'm running nor me imagined that a image title will at some point contain an ISBN code. Should you have not pointed this mishap in time, it would have done the same for the other images named similarly on en.wp.
Those 8 files are used in 7 articles so technically all I need to watch for is those 7 articles. Apart from these cases, there is no possibility that the bot would create broken links in articles and I wouldn't say watching over 7 articles would be that difficult on me.
The bot performs three types of edits:
Please note that the bot does not convert ISBN number into ISBN n-u-m-b-e-r (as shown here). It merely performs a part of what SmackBot was doing in 2006. Considering it's not making any substantial changes and that the community already approved of these at some point, I see no reason to open a new discussion about it. So far the bot edited some 6000 articles ( ! –> Focke-Wulf Fw 187). Given that en.wp has 6,818,738 articles, I wouldn't really label this as editing on such a large scale. -- Rebel ( talk) 05:58, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
When using the API's categorymembers to retrieve the contents of a large category, I'm not getting all the members returned. I've double checked it's not a bug in my code by using AWB and the api via the browser. For example, when I query Category:Wikipedia good articles, the page Talk:Stargazy pie is not returned, but the category is listed on the talk page and the talk page is listed in the category. Has anybody else seen this issue? Am I missing something? Also, if it is an API bug, does anybody know the best place to report it? Thanks. -- JLaTondre ( talk) 21:07, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
The following bots have the preference, which has been hidden on the English Wikipedia, set (locally):
For obvious reasons they should not be relying on this functionality, and, in fairness, probably aren't. This is merely a notification that the bot's preference will be automatically switched to false for you on the English Wikipedia shortly and you may need to adjust your code appropriately. Regards, - Jarry1250 Who? Discuss. 16:53, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone. I have written User:RichardcavellBot, a fully functioning bot in C, using libcurl. I open-sourced it on the off chance that someone might find it useful. To my genuine surprise, someone has joined the project and contributed code. Now, the thing has to run in an account, and when I run the bot on my machine, I will call it RichardcavellBot. But I want to rename the code and project to something that doesn't include my name. What should I call it? It's a generic framework written in C, highly portable, using standard libraries and libcurl. - Richard Cavell ( talk) 14:17, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
I have made a proposal for creating a central place for computer readable messages containing the interwiki sort order. At the moment each framework uses it own config file which has to be updated manually after changes to the list of wikis. Please respond to it on metawiki. Merl issimo 17:19, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Tim1357 (who's been gone for a few weeks) programed DASHBot to automaticly resize fair use images placed in Category:Non-free Wikipedia file size reduction request. DASHBot has been running it's other tasks, but not this one. This means one of two things, a) the bot isn't working properly, or b) that function was turned off and either no one was told or it was announced somewhere I didn't see it. Please keep me in the loop. If he can be contacted to fix it, that would be preferable to me doing it manually. If someone else can fix it, I suppose that would be a good secondary option (but I'd rather not piss Tim off by treading on his toes.) If neither of those pan out, a new bot would be... nice. Sven Manguard Wha? 06:56, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
It seems that the sandbox bots are no longer operative, and Cobi and X! are not active at the moment. So could other bots take over ? They reset the sandboxes, listed at Template:Template sandbox. I'd also request that they reset the Wikipedia:Introduction, so that we can leave it unprotected or with PC, because readers should be able to see the 'edit' button. Cenarium ( talk) 16:57, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
I'm required by BAG policy to notify this noticeboard of my nomination for BAG member. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:44, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
Can somebody take a look at the thread at User talk:Wikitanvir#nobots. It has been an uphill struggle to get even a grudging partial acceptance of responsibility for WikitanvirBot's edits. I am still not convinced the user is on-message about this. I think someone from BAG should have a word. SpinningSpark 19:35, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
So Cluebot NG has been down for over a week, the old Cluebot has been down for months, and there are hours where no one is on Huggle. This is very bad. What can be done in the mean time? Can old Cluebot be brought back online while new Cluebot is getting... (whatever reason it's not online) rectified? Sven Manguard Wha? 04:25, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
Arthena (talk) 16:54, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
Hello, in case someone mantains bots related to the template {{ Link GA}}, I wanted to inform you that now also it.wiki has activated the "Good Article" category. The articles having this status will be put under subcategories of it:Categoria:Voci di qualità per argomento. Bye, Gengis Gat ( talk) 17:14, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
I have rarely checked up on bot actions, normally assuming they do the right thing or they wouldn't be allowed to run.
However, Snotbot just found an error in a page that i created, and Snotbot broke the hierarchical structure while attempting a repair.
It is important that section titles 1906 split, 1908 split, and 1924 split be on the same level, since the article treats them as equivalent level events. That was the case in the article before the Snotbot edit, even though there was a structural error. Snotbot effected an improper repair, which put these three section titles on different levels.
I will put a notice on Snotbot's talk page that i'm flagging this situation here. Richard Myers ( talk) 00:31, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
==== Eastern Wobblies, western Wobblies ==== ===1906 split=== ===1908 split=== ====Overalls brigade==== ===IWW east, IWW west=== ====The Detroit IWW==== ====The Chicago IWW==== =====Seeds of another split===== =====Centralizers===== =====Decentralizers===== == See also == ==Notes==
So '1924 split' was at a different level to the other two before the bot's edits, and rendered in a different font. It seems to me to be incorrect to assert that "it was invisible to the reader of the article". Mr Stephen ( talk) 11:19, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi guys, a long term aim of WP:FOOTBALL will be to empty Category:Football biography using deprecated parameters by converting a multitude of old infoboxes into the correct code found at {{ Infobox football biography}}. However, with nearly 50,000 infoboxes to be converted, this will take a helluva long time - would it be possible for a bot to do this instead? Regards, Giant Snowman 16:53, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
I'll do this as soon as I have my bot account unblocked. It had this already in mind and have approval to perform tasks like this. I fixed all infobox names in order to start doing this task. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 20:28, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi. It turned out I can't do it with my bot. I am OK with Petrb doing it. Thanks! -- Magioladitis ( talk) 13:43, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Please be understanding about my attempt to explain my complaints; although i've been editing on Wikipedia for more than five years, these particular issues are a little outside my comfort zone.
I have created a fair number of in-depth articles, some with one hundred to two hundred footnotes. My experiences with citations in each of these articles have generally been good, right up to the point where someone with an automated process comes along and compresses all of the footnotes into a different format. Much of the subsequent editing on the given article suddenly goes from simple and straightforward, to complex and (sometimes extremely) frustrating.
This has happened to dozens of articles that i've been working on, including in the middle of my edits. Permission has never been asked, and in my experience the changes have never been explained or discussed or even noted on the TALK page by the bot owner, either before or after edits. The standard edit summary rarely contains enough info for the average editor to appreciate what has just happened, or why.
Lack of information isn't the worst of it, however; rather, in my experience the impact of this type of edit can be very harmful. Sometimes such edits have made it nearly impossible for someone only familiar with the normal citation methods to do subsequent editing of articles, without losing and misplacing footnotes. This is because compressing footnotes retains cite data only in the first footnote occurrence. What if one wants to move a lower paragraph above the paragraph with that first occurrance? Suddenly, editing tasks become a puzzle with only the most cryptic of clues.
An example—this footnote has all of necessary information:
After a bot runs on the page, all but the first appearance of this reference will be converted to this:
How do i look at that, and comprehend what it refers to? I have to jump through hoops (or, well, extra pages and links) to find the source information that i need while editing.
The "1912" is a grab of the last bit of data, whether that's a page number, a date, or whatever, so not only is the key data missing, there's no data consistency to the new format.
Now suddenly, almost all footnotes on the page appear nearly identical to each other. When there are a hundred plus footnotes, that can be very intimidating for someone in the middle of creating a worthwhile article.
And what happens if the first entry is deleted from the page during normal editing? All of the reference data for that source is lost for the entire page!
Now, i don't have a problem with someone who wishes to write their footnotes in this manner to begin with. But when a bot automatically converts the footnote style from a more basic style, it creates chaos for the editors who had been editing that page.
Not only that, but it is a violation of Wikipedia:Citing sources, which states:
Another aspect of this problem for the editor inexperienced with bots, it is difficult to know whether it is considered proper to revert the edits of a bot. I truly wish that i had reverted every bot that did this to the articles i've edited, but i didn't know if i would be violating some difficult to discover Wikipedia policy.
I've complained about this issue numerous times in years past, but apparently not in the right forums to have it seriously considered. I hope now will be different.
I have another complaint that is only indirectly related. One of the bots (or is it a semi-automated editor?) is apparently controlled by Betacommand ( talk · contribs), but if i follow an edit to that editor's page, i don't find anything on that user's user page, nor the talk page to discover an actual user ID that i can convey to others. I had to search through ten archives of the talk page to locate "Betacommand". This creative nomenclature is certainly clever, and may be fine for ordinary users, but for someone who traipses across thousands of wikipedia pages in a short period of time, shouldn't there be ID information and bot info that is more readily accessible on one of their pages?
Please note that Betacommand isn't the only citation scrambler i've encountered, and that i don't really have anything against bots or automated tools, so long as they perform helpful functions. However, footnote scrambling is not helpful, it is very harmful to users who frequently feel ambushed by it, like me. Richard Myers ( talk) 09:02, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
On your first concern: There is a bot to revive orphaned named references. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 11:06, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
The relevant policy/guideline pages are WP:REFNAME, WP:CITEFOOT, and WP:NAMEDREFS. Grouping duplicate references is highly preferable to leaving them ungrouped. —SW— comment 16:03, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion at VP: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Bot_to_reduce_duplicate_references. While there is strong support towards merging dupe refs for articles that already use named refs, there are a few opinions the other way for general cases. There is a BRFA ( Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Snotbot_4) in progress. Admittedly, this is being done by at least several tools/bots already as "uncontroversial". — HELLKNOWZ ▎ TALK 12:06, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
Rich
Farmbrough, 21:47, 25 April 2011 (UTC).
Just a couple of notes. There hasn't been much mention of the the reader. Which scheme is better for the reader? In my opinion, each method has drawbacks.
As to editing, it's also a no-perfect-solution situation as there is an advantage for editors when refs are grouped: it there are lot of refs, it can be kind of difficult to follow the flow of the article text when editing. Grouping makes this easier. Herostratus ( talk) 14:07, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone. I've had it suggested to me to create a bot that will count redlinks and identify which terms are most frequently redlinked (ie they're linked to but there is nothing at the destination). How would such a bot work most effectively? Would the bot comb through all the pages in a category, or all the pages in 'what links here'? I don't own a server or domain name so would it be best if the results were posted on the requesting user's talk page? Or within the bot's own userspace? If the bot only posted in its own userspace, would it need BRFA approval at all? - Richard Cavell ( talk) 06:23, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Pretty sure this already exists (most wanted pages?) .
Rich
Farmbrough, 06:55, 26 April 2011 (UTC).
There’s been a recent spur of nominations for certain bot activities of User:Lightbot (operator: User:Lightmouse) documented in a discussion here by User:MBisanz. Cross-posting for reference. :| TelCo NaSp Ve :| 06:49, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
I don't want to patrol new pages, but I do want a list of new pages within the last few days. Obviously Special:NewPages isn't implemented in the API. What methods do people use to get this data? I'm guessing the toolserver DB could be used, what else? (I really enjoy the flexibility of non-toolserver bots, I don't want to fuss with a tunnel to the toolserver DB if I don't have to). tedder ( talk) 02:13, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with the bot policy. User:Cboursnell is mass-creating draft articles inside his/her userspace. See also User:PfamWikiBot (inactive). Marcus Qwertyus 16:26, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
Hi. Is there a script (Phython) that inserts, for example, the image data graph "image" template {{ taxobox}} from the English Wikipedia's article en:Smearwort in the column "şəkil" template Takson in the article (interwiki) Girdə zəravənd Azerbaijani Wikipedia?
{{taxobox | image = Aristolochia rotunda.jpg ---> {{Takson | Şəkil = Aristolochia rotunda.jpg
Sincerely, Vago ( talk) 07:26, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
I'm trying to find the approximate lede of an article. It's just for scoring/categorization, so it doesn't have to be perfect. My first thought was to strip the infobox and any other {{templates}} first (not using regexes, since it's hard to "count" or deal with nested templates). Then I realized there could be very useful information in an infobox.
So my second thought is to just grab all text until a "\n\n" or a "==".
Has anyone done this or something similar? Or has anyone thought about this enough to tell me why my second technique is a bad idea? tedder ( talk) 19:16, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
Just ask the API for section 0, [12]. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 19:23, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
Unregistered user apparently undertaking a bot-related research project:
[13] and
[14].
Meph
talk 11:33, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone. As part of an ongoing research project, I am parsing out all external link additions to en.wiki to do some machine-learning to detect link spam (see [15]). As part of this processing, I obtain the HTML source of the URLs being added. Occasionally, I get a 404 error (file not found), and it would seem beneficial to report these somewhere so people could manually investigate, if desired.
The question is whether or not this needs BAG approval. My program would only post to a single page, and not in the article-namespace (probably something like WP:STiki/Dead_Links). Thoughts? West.andrew.g ( talk) 01:20, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
User:Yobot and its owner Magioladitis have decided to ignore my complaint that changing Greek letters from html entities such as ν to the equivalent Unicode character ν makes articles hard to edit. While an editor skilled in the topic of the article can usually tell the difference when reading the article, it is often difficult to tell in edit mode, and an editor who is, perhaps, cleaning up vandalism but is not too skilled in the article topic doesn't have a prayer. Therefore I am contesting Magioladitis's decision in this forum and request that his bot be forbidden from converting the html entities for Greek letters to Unicode characters. (Just in case you think it's easy to tell "v" from "ν", try telling "A" from "Α".)
I have also added {{ nobots}} (with Yobot in parameter list) to Equation of time which has been repeatedly disturbed by this action. Jc3s5h ( talk) 13:45, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Any botops have room for one more?
HBC Archive Indexerbot is broke because its server has died. Krellis is offering it to whomever would like to give it a new home
here.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► (
(⊕)) 02:13, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
I am wanting a bot to add a link to drugs.com pages from The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists to all Template:Drugboxs for medications. User:Boghog has offered but is exceedingly busy. The lisinopril article is an example of where this was done. Wish to look at the effect this link on all Wikipedia medication articles has on drug.com internet traffic. Have been discussing with a number of organization the possibility of them becoming involved with donating content or time to improve Wikipedia (ie. collaborting with us) and need some data to show that Wikipedia "does matter". Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 21:27, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
Alright, then how would someone know which link to add to the drugbox? Simply take {{
Drugbox/Foobar}} and add |Drugs.com=foobar
to it? Are there cases where this would create mistakes, or dead links?
Headbomb {
talk /
contribs /
physics /
books} 16:53, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
Bslwikicorporation ( talk · contribs)
Claims to be a bot on the account's userpage; some edit summaries indicate it is a bot. Not registered. Singularity42 ( talk) 19:18, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi,
I recently added a feature to SuggestBot so that it's capable of replacing an existing set of suggestions, rather than simply append them. Would this kind of feature require a separate BRFA and some trials before I add it to the bot's documentation, or is it not such a critical piece of functionality? Cheers, Nettrom ( talk) 19:03, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
I notice that the "m" flag is shown in a bot's contributions, but the "b" flag is not, although both flags do appear in my watchlist. Is there a way to tell that a particular edit (e.g., this one) was marked as a bot edit? 28bytes ( talk) 18:06, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi folks,
I came from huwiki to gladly tell you that I have written a HOWTO on using functions in your fixes.py/user-fixes.py. See hu:user:Bináris/Fixes and functions HOWTO. This is a mostly undocumented feature of replace.py and will improve your fixes (for those who are a bit familiar with Python programming). Useful for complicated replacement tasks. Enjoy! Bináris ( talk) 11:22, 3 July 2011 (UTC)
Python 2.7.2 has been released at Sun, 12 June 2011. This release does no longer trigger unicode bug 3081100, which happened for characters with multiple accents (for example on hak-, hi-, cdo- and sa-wiki). I guess it is highly recommended to migrate to this new release if the local version has this bug. Xqt ( talk) 13:19, 3 July 2011 (UTC)
Could there be a bot that requests pages be protected at wp:rpp if an article is vandalized more than a certain amount of times (like 3) in a certain time (like 24 hours)? The bot could also automatically protect the page without requesting. Heyitsme22 ( talk) 12:45, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
Please let me know if there is a public code for such a bot, because I would like to implement it in huwiki. Bináris ( talk) 16:25, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
Hi! I've been editing Latin American people's names to include the proper accent marks. During the last days I've included thousands of accent marks, but the task is showing itself to be too huge to do it manually. Would some of your bots care to help me with this, please? I have a first list here for your orientation on what to do. When disambiguations are no provided for common names, it is safe to add the accent marks to those names in sports articles (I've checked it out). Please let me know if you decide to give me a hand and do this. Thanks you! Againme ( talk) 17:56, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
User:Oleg Alexandrov operates User:Mathbot. Mathbot has been reverting my re-categorisation of some Wikipedia namespace articles. They are visible in Category:Indexes of articles and Category:Mathematics-related lists but they should only be in Category:WikiProject Mathematics. Oleg does not seem to check the Mathbot talk page regularly and he is yet to reply to my request on his talk page. How can I get Mathbot to stop my reverting my edits? -- Alan Liefting ( talk) - 08:42, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
Hi there. DASHBot is supposed to clean out Category:Non-free Wikipedia file size reduction request nightly, at least of all of the images (95% of what's there). It went for over a week not doing it, then ran on July 6, but failed to run yesterday. (Task here)
I can keep that category trimmed, but it sucks up lots and lots of time. I'd like for either DASHBot to be brought back up, or some other solution to be found. Please? Sven Manguard Wha? 07:50, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Further to User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2011Jul#Bot's name and an email from Phillipe@WMF, I have created a new account with a more "friendly" name. I plan to transition SmackBot's activities to this account, once a bot flag is set.
Can BAG please make the necessary arrangements with the 'Crats?
Rich
Farmbrough, 13:10, 12 July 2011 (UTC).
I recently ran into a case where
XLinkBot reverted the edits of a user because these edits added a link to Facebook (
see diff). I find this behavior of the bot questionable. There is a lot of potential of removing a lot of good work because of a single link that violates
WP:ELNO#10. In my opinion such a task should NOT be handled by a bot. A link to facebook is discouraged, but perhaps not nearly as harmful as the eventual loss of the editor. There should be a careful review before such a reversion should take place, and the way in which XLinkBot handles this is more than unfortunate (reverting all subsequent edits of the user). This behavior of XLinkBot needs to be changed in my opinion.
Toshio Yamaguchi (
talk) 08:59, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
I notified the bots operator
User:Versageek of this discussion on his talk page.
Toshio Yamaguchi (
talk) 09:10, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
Hi. Is this a bot or a living person? - User:WPCbot - Off2riorob ( talk) 21:44, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
Back in 2008 there was a centralized discussion that concluded that image placeholders are not needed but nobody ever came to remove the existing placeholders. In the following years some editors kept adding placeholders and some other removing them. As User:WOSlinker wrote on my talk page "If image place holders were ever needed, a better place would have been to add them at the template level rather than on articles then it would have meant that all articles without an image set would get a placeholder image instead rather than just a few of the articles, but since they are not, better to be consistent and remove them all. There is not that many really, although it's a few to many to do by hand but not a big job for a bot."
Infobox standardisation enables us to treat the question uniformly. In the last months we put a lot of effort to standardise the code and the visual outcome of all infoboxes. My bot, Yobot, started removing placeholder infoboxes from articles yesterday in the frame of this standardisation and did 3-4k edits. There is a tracking category, Category:Infobox person using placeholder image, which is common for all infoboxes about persons. At the moment there are like 12k pages more. I thought I had to leave a note here since I got a couple of questions on the matter from editors who not disagree but would like to know that the community is informed on this change. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 10:09, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
I had made User:Porchcorpterbot as my bot account. It got approved as a bot. See User talk:Porchcorpter#"Bot" account. Frank says that it is not a bot, and it is a violation of the username policy. But I created it as my bot account for AWB purposes. Would anyone be willing to give their opinion on this? - Porch corpter ( talk/ contribs) 10:13, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
Since it looks like we need more active BAG members, I volunteered to help out; feel free to leave comments. On a related note, if any of you are experienced editors with good tech skills when it comes to bots + would like to make it a haunt, please feel free to open one up as well. -- slakr\ talk / 11:21, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
I've nominated myself for BAG membership; comments, questions, and !votes are welcome at Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/Hersfold. Thanks. :-) Hersfold ( t/ a/ c) 18:35, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Discussion can be found here. Please discuss there, not here, should you desire discussion. Thanks. -- 68.127.234.159 ( talk) 21:26, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
Not really much to explain; in fact, the history of WP:Requests for comment/History and geography basically explains its problem. LikeLakers2 ( talk) 04:15, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
There is an RFC on the addition of identifier links to citations by bots. Please comment. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:51, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
I can no longer seem to log in using my homemade scripts, which always used to work - either under my bot account or my normal user account. When I give the correct username and password, I just get served up with the main page, and I'm not logged on. Has there been a change of requirements as to the user agent string or something? Thanks for any pointers,-- Kotniski ( talk) 08:24, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
(outdent)I run them from home. The response I was getting to the (unsuccessful) login attempts was the Wikipedia main page.-- Kotniski ( talk) 14:32, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
User:CommonsNotificationBot currently monitors speedy tagged files on commons and posts article talk page notices here to keep people informed. I have had a request to do the same, but for images tagged "F6" here on en.wiki. (see here and my talk page). Does this need new approval? It adds probably less than 20-30 edits per day (I think) to the bot, and doesn't do anything "new" except change the category being monitored. -- Errant ( chat!) 21:45, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
I often come across edit summaries by bots which do the "bare minimum" when it comes to our requirements on informative edit summary and open communication. I'm not interested in doing a big "crackdown" on the edit summaries, but I would like to remind everyone that verbose edit summaries are better than "terse" ones. For example, a bot updating the parameters in a template might have the edit summary
But it could also have much better summary by having something like
|class=C
→ |class=Good
) based on the other banners
per request. Report errors and suggestions at
User talk:GenericBot."So it would be great if everyone would
For a "real life" example of where this makes a difference, compare [22] with [23] and ask yourself what is clearer.
I'll defer to individual bot owners on best to achieve good communication for whatever bot / bot tasks they are running, but it would be nice if everyone would at least review their bot's edit summaries and ask themselves if it's possible to make them better (suggestions 3 & 4 should be particularly easy to follow). Thanks. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:46, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I completely agree that a summary of the form 'fixing infobox' should be improved. I have two comments:
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:30, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
diff
shows what was done, not why it was done (who authorised it, and the rationale behind it). Linking to eg.
WP:MOSNUM is good but its scope is large and I think the "blow-by-blow" is useful in narrowing the specific area/action taken being undertaken (and only if it was actually undertaken in this specific edit). —
Sladen (
talk) 20:40, 21 August 2011 (UTC)I am always open on suggestions of how to improve my bot's edit summaries. You always how to deal with edit summary length and lack of inspiration. Check also most of non-bot editors' edit summaries, the situation is not better. I can try add dynamically some stuff for awb users but in the past when we tried it we had complains on performance. The only thing I find unnecessary on Headbomb's suggestion is the link for suggestions. This link is supposed to be the talk page in most cases. PS after this discussion I improved my bot's edit summary a little bit. :) -- Magioladitis ( talk) 22:48, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Whilst I won't go in-depth on what I would like to see or not see in the summaries, The small change I would like to see for people running multiple tasks from the one account is to include something like "Task #" in the edit summary then on the bot's userpage to provide a list of tasks so people can easily look up more information on it. Peachey88 ( T · C) 01:07, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
A long time ago, I started adding details. The irony was the demand for detail increased in proportion to the amount of detail provided. I'd mention A, B, C, D, and E and would say "You didn't mention F" or "You didn't mention the discussions, the guidelines, the BRFA". With the article title and section heading, a summary can easily be three lines for some readers. Long summaries got complaints that it was incorrect, succinct ones didn't. The problem was worse if I customised summaries and forgot to update it. It's probably time to have another think about it (thanks to comments by Headbomb, Sladen, and others). I've always wanted to be able to provide an automated summary from the diff as Rich suggests, but I've never been able to do it. Does anyone know how to do it for AWB custom modules? Lightmouse ( talk) 18:34, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
I would like to edit my bot to allow read deleted versions of a page in a semi-automated manner (only when I ask it to). Would I need approval for that? It would log in as me, read the file, and immediately log out. Magog the Ogre ( talk) 10:59, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Note sure where to post this, but hopefully someone here can assist. I tried User talk:Misza13 already to no avail. It appears that this bot has ceased running all tasks other than Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases. In particular, the edits to the sub-pages of User:MiszaBot/Trackers appear to no longer take place. Is anyone still running the bot, and if so can this function be restored? If the answer to either question is "no", please advise and I will boldly get rid of the templates and remove any transclusions of same. -- After Midnight 0001 18:47, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
Orphaned non-free use Wikipedia files | |||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||||||||||
All articles | 483 |
Rich
Farmbrough, 03:08, 1 September 2011 (UTC).
Hi there, I am Kudu, an experienced Wikipedian who's very familiar with *nix systems. I just wanted to leave a notice here to say that I have access to several shell servers, and for bot creators who don't want to request a Toolserver account yet or who want a backup instance, I'd be glad to run their bots. This can be done by the bot owner sending me their code or me making them a shell account. If you're interested, leave a message on my talk page or email me. — Kudu ~I/O~ 23:05, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
Yobot won't be running for the next eight-nine months. We need someone to fix Checkwiki errors. Here's the list of errors fixed by Yobot: User:Magioladitis/AWB and CHECKWIKI. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 00:48, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
I do not have time to maintain my bots anymore, so effective immediately I am discontinuing the following bots:
People have come to depend on these bots, so I would like to have as little service disruption as possible. Anyone who is interested in running these bots should email me so that I can send them the most recent scripts, the crontab, the database dumps, and the bot passwords. You will also be taking care of bot maintenance from here on out. hare j 22:57, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
Wikinews Importer Bot ( talk · contribs) is adding full URLs to wikinews links. The owner Misza13 ( talk · contribs) has been notified, but has yet to act and has not edited since May. I propose that the bot be blocked until the issue is settled, and for all of the full URL additions to be reverted.-- William S. Saturn ( talk) 23:53, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
Hi, I m an admin in wiki ar. I m just wondering if in wiki en do you have a bot that organize categories order depending on the name of the article ? I mean if for example in the Article Canada, the category Canada will appear automatically the first one below the article in the catogory section. Do you use a bot ? Can you help us to do the same in wiki ar ? -- Helmoony ( talk) 21:29, 28 September 2011 (UTC)
DASHBot task 9 has been inactive for over a month now. The backlog it keeps clear is at over 1000 items. Not only that, but this is not the first time that the task has gone dark under mysterious circumstances. To be blunt, a replacement is needed. I can neither do resizings nor run bots off my computer right now, so I'm asking for someone to code and run the bot. I'm not sure how toolserver works, but I'd be willing to try and run the program through TS using Svenbot if someone is willing to code the bot but not run it. Sven Manguard Wha? 06:20, 9 October 2011 (UTC)
So as a fairly newbie-bot question - it makes sense to me to test things before releasing them - is it good/common practise for bot developers to grab a recent wiki-dump and use it to set up a local mirror of wikipedia for bots to be tested in? Or are there any subtle disadvantages? Failedwizard ( talk) 18:19, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
As per WP:BOTPOL, I am required to notify this board regarding my nomination to the Bot Approval Group which can be found here. I welcome any and all comments regarding this. Thank you. + Crashdoom Talk 06:46, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Bot Approvals Group#BAG Nomination: Snottywong if you're interested. Thanks. —SW— gossip 17:58, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
Input here would be nice, thanks. -- Chris 02:42, 15 October 2011 (UTC)
I have visited User talk:X! with a message about what I am about to say. He has not replied so I will say it here: I was looking at a bot (SoxBot III), which reverts pointless wikitext additions like [[File:[[File:Example.jpg]]<ref></ref>]]<nowiki>Insert non-formatted text here</nowiki>, and noticed that it had not edited since 2009, but I think that this is a brilliant idea. I think that the bot should be running again, and if X! doesn't want it himself I would be happy to take over the running myself. There are a lot of new editors, particularly IPs, who just mess around clicking buttons and saving and this needs to be reverted. If this is the case, can somebody please find me the source code and we can take it to BRFA. (Although I would like a renaming to RcsprinterBot.) Thanks, Rcsprinter (talk) 17:01, 4 October 2011 (UTC)
Can someone explain throttling? I'm hitting a wall with it, and I'm not sure why. -- SatyrTN ( talk / contribs) 20:58, 23 October 2011 (UTC)
$_SESSION
, with no additional expiration logic; IIRC Wikimedia wikis use memcache to store $_SESSION
, so the expiration actually depends on the memcache settings.
Anomie
⚔ 12:27, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
ClueBot III runs a task with the edit summary "Fixing links to archived content.", such as here. Why does its userpage at User:ClueBot III not contain any mention of this task? Should it perhaps be added? I think it's a useful task. Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 14:39, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
I've re-written my bot ( MichaelkourlasBot) such that it is now completely automated, and can be left alone for an indefinite period of time. However, I do not have enough bandwidth to actually keep it operational; my ISP cuts me off at 60GB a month, and the bot looks like it would use about half of that, based on some preliminary calculations. Would anyone be willing to host it, or give me suggestions as to how to cut down the amount of bandwidth used? (By the way, just so you know, the bot monitors the recent changes list to find user-blanked pages, then marks them with a CSD tag (db-blanked). It's written in C# using DotNetWikiBot.) Thanks! -- Michael Kourlas talk – contribs 04:13, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
See here. Rcsprinter (whisper) 20:33, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
KuduBot ( talk · contribs)'s task was to create the Category:Wikipedia files missing permission subcategories, but, due to inactivity on part of the owner, the request was marked as expired. Even so, the bot has continued to make these categories, and it is doing them incorrectly for the single-digit days (see what it created and where the files are actually located), so it should probably be blocked. It would be nice to have a bot that actually does this correctly, though... Logan Talk Contributions 15:31, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
I am looking for a bot operator who is willing to take over some tasks from VeblenBot and PeerReviewBot. These run on the toolserver, so someone with a toolserver account would be able to just copy the code and it would work. The code itself is very stable and has been running for years without trouble. I simply want to reduce the number of bot tasks I am responsible for.
The tasks are:
If you might be interested in taking over one of these, please let me know. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:00, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
I already brought it up to the discuss page at wikispecies but well there aren't many bot-master around to help the issue as someone has said. There are plenty of bot-master here at wikipedia so i think some of them should go to wikispecies to take over the issue. The issue here is there are many missing links connect wikispecies to wikipedia. Plus there are still missing tons of Vernacular names in the Vernacular names section. The Vernacular names can be copy from the links of each other language if they have one. So hope someone will consider this and inform bot-master to go to work over there. Thanks! Trongphu ( talk) 02:47, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
There's a bot to assist disambiguating links; however it appears to be damaging pages. I am leaving this note here since the author's page is marked inactive.
You may notice strange strings of the form link:1 through link:5 on this page. Every time someone clicks a DAB Solver button to disambiguate a term, and tries to fix it, the term is replaced by link:n. The original text is not merely obscured but destroyed from the article source text. So, someone must identify all of these and if necessary go through the article history to recover the missing terms.
<<link:#>>
) are easy enough to finding with AWB's Dump scanner. —
Dispenser 02:18, 9 December 2011 (UTC)I have a fairly stupid question but I confess I can't figure what I'm doing wrong. Someone stopped my bot earlier with a comment and now every time I try and start it the bot tells me I have a message. I have tried several things including clearing the comment and the cache and nothing seems to work. Any ideas? -- Kumioko ( talk) 04:04, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
Please shut off the bot. -- 91.10.32.109 ( talk) 18:51, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
Yobot added {{ ibid}} to List of Ohio covered bridges, even though none of the citations were problematic. I don't want to stop the bot for one minor issue, and operator Magioladitis is on wikibreak until next May, so I can't see how to report this properly. Is there someone here that could address the issue? Nyttend ( talk) 19:23, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
and the rest are <ref name="Delorme"/> You'll notice that the article is undercited, but these specific citations shouldn't produce this type of bot reaction, and a bot shouldn't tag an article with {{ ibid}} if it simply lacks sufficient citations. Nyttend ( talk) 20:49, 29 December 2011 (UTC)<ref name=Delorme>Ohio Atlas & Gazetteer, DeLorme, pg 68-9</ref>
I have a question about the speed barrier for bot edits. I have multiple tasks currently approved for my bot with 2 more pending and several more in the future. Is it ok for me to run some of these concurrently without being in violation of the speed limit. For example, the bot may be doing 8 - 10 edits a minute for one task and 8 - 10 edits a minute for a completely separate task at the same time meaning its running at 16-20 edits a minute and maybe more. I just want to make sure I am not going to be breaking any rules if I start one task while another is still going. -- Kumioko ( talk) 16:51, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
My bot already has the capability and general authority to do this type of change however some may view it as purely cosemetic so I am posting it here prior to running it to give an explaination and give an opportunity for comments.
Per a conversation on my talk page and on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Templates#Update of category it appears that a WikiProject template redirect is causing articles to not categorize properly. It could be argued that this particular problem might be fixable by simply nudging the template or the redirect but it emphasizes the point I have been making for sometime that Template redirects should treated differently (preferable avoided when possible) than normal article redirects because the coding of the template can, and relateively frequently does, have negative affects on other things when redirected.
In this case it appears (and I could be wrong which is also why I am posting this here first) that the {{ WikiProject GeorgiaUS}} needs to be replaced with Template:WikiProject Georgia (U.S. state) because the redirect appears to be causing categories not to be updated correctly.
The exact question in this is, can I go ahead and use my bot to replace these, using my prior approval of WikiProject template replacement BRFA, to make these changes? There are a about 3000 articles affected but many of them have other problems in addition to this one change. -- Kumioko ( talk) 16:14, 12 January 2012 (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 1 | ← | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | → | Archive 10 |
All the foreign language articles that are interlinked from the RV Belgica (1884) article backlink to the RV Belgica article, which is due to be turned into a shipindex page once the RV Belgica (A962) has been created. Could a bot alter all the en:iwls on the foreign language articles to point back to the 1884 ship please? Mjroots ( talk) 14:37, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
A bot keeps reverting my RfC in this talk page : talk:Special forces. It is seriously annoying as it keeps deleting every half hour or hour. Can someone please fix this ASAP. Thanks. CET ♔ 08:37, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
(Moved from BAG
Rich
Farmbrough, 11:34, 7 October 2010 (UTC).)
I make this comment here in the hope of reaching enough bot programmers to get a useful answer. It concerns a proposal (see the RFC at
Wikipedia talk:spoiler) to make the link to the disclaimers more prominent in the default Vector skin. I know bot programmers use (or are supposed to use) the API rather than scraping HTML, but there may be some bots and other automated tools that are still reading HTML for one reason or another.
So I want to consult bot designers and ask if this proposed change would break anything important. In the interests of keeping things together please comment on the spoiler guideline talk page whose link I give above. -- TS 03:23, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
If you have a 'bot that thinks that it knows how to spell better than human beings, please ensure that it is on the same page as the other 'bots and semi-automated tools who also think that they know how to spell better than human beings. Otherwise, as you can see, pointless back and forth results. Uncle G ( talk) 10:53, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
As soon as the two bots agree to use ONE of the two methods, I am okay with any of them. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 23:40, 19 September 2010 (UTC)
Well, IMHO, capitalizing via bot the name of a template is pretty useless. -- Basilicofresco ( msg) 21:17, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
SmackBot was stopped temporarily some hours ago, but appears to be running once more at the time of writing. X! ( talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) has blocked Rich Farmbrough for running an unauthorized 'bot on that account, and this edit with AutoWikiBrowser. Uncle G ( talk) 13:42, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Comments are invited at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Block_review:_User:Magioladitis regarding a similar issue to the above. – xeno talk 18:00, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
Good afternoon (CDT),
The question regards what is to be done with 60K edits to 8K articles.
I have an overall outline of what I would like to do, but I'm a little short on details and expertise. Has anyone had to go through an exercise like this before? If so, are there artifacts from that process? A silver bullet perhaps?
Barring a Major Breakthrough, the first thing I will need is a way to download 60k of usercontribs in xml or something useful (without getting another migraine from editing the "next date" every 500 lines, copying, pasting etc) so I can load them onto mysql here at home. A web page that dumps all usercontribs, or something similar I could adapt, would be Most Welcome.
There are bigger technical challenges I must overcome.
Per my comments at the other talk page,
So, I am nibbling around th edges, and any examples, artifacts or advice I can get are Most Helpful.
And, as I said, the first thing I need is a way to download 60k of usercontribs so I can load them onto mysql.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Aquib ( talk) 22:12, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Edit_restriction_proposal_for_Rich_Farmborough for the proposal to restrict Rich from: using AWB or any other mass-editing tool; running bots of any sort; making bot-like edits; making more than four edits per minute. - Kingpin 13 ( talk) 22:29, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
User:DASHBot is doing multiple false positives, often on the same files. For example, DASHbot had a false positive with the file En-derin-g-files.png [2] yesterday. The image is in use on an Incubator page at Wikipedia:Article Incubator/En Derin. I tried to shut down the bot, but the page User:DASHBot/F5 is protected. I posted to the bot owner talk page, but no response. Today DASHbot did the same false positive again, and no response from the bot owner. We request the bot be temporarily turned off, until such time as the 'unused-image' logic is rewritten to avoid false positives for files in the Incubator. Thanks. Eclipsed ¤ 08:20, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
Hi. A Wikipedian helped update all the links at the German Wikipedia, and is requesting assistance in order to do the same thing here.
Please see Template talk:Allmusic#URL syntax has changed, and provide advice or assistance to User:Cactus26. (Please feel free to move this note, if there is a more appropriate place for it). Much thanks. -- Quiddity ( talk) 21:01, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
Could Svick be approved to run the task approved for CleanupListingBot either with CleanupListingBot or SvickBot? I'm rewriting the code so that bot will be run serverside on the toolserver, and Svick has offered to run the bot. Smallman12q ( talk) 16:30, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
Mobius Bot ( talk · contribs)
Looks like someone took control of this bot's positronic brain. I've blocked it indef (with the probably not appropriate "vandalism only account" message, but time was of the essence) and notified the owner. Does anyone here have an explanation for this rather erratic behavior? Favonian ( talk) 13:11, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
I'm curious what the policy is regarding automatic insertion of interwiki links by bots. What happens when a bot inserts a set of false links? I have an example where a meaningless page in an obscure dialect has been linked to a set of (properly-linked) pages in other languages. The dialect page is not related to the others but one particular bot thought it was, and linked that page to all of the others, and all of the others to that dialect page. When I try to delete the link from the en page, other bots now spot that missing link and "helpfully" reinsert it.
I contacted the owner of the original bot, but the owner was completely unhelpful and said they "didn't have time" to undo their bot's edit by removing all the links. It seems that regular users are then expected to register accounts at all the different wikipedias in order to fix the problems which the bot has caused. Apart from being irritating, isn't automatic behaviour like this ripe for manipulation? Isn't it leaving an inviting target for vandals to insert links, let the bots propagate the mess over a large list of pages and then make it difficult for regular users to undo the damage? Isn't there an easier way to fix this kind of problem (without escalating a bot vs bot war of course!) Thrapper ( talk) 19:10, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
Hello! I invite you to comment on my BAG (Bot Approvals Group) nomination: Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/H3llkn0wz. Thank you. — HELLKNOWZ ▎ TALK 11:19, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
Hi, this might not be the most obvious place to ask but we're looking for anyone with a programming bent that might be willing to take a look at Template:Automatic taxobox to see if there are any ways that it could be improved (either in functionality or performance), before it is rolled out more widely. Comments would be very warmly received at Template_talk:Automatic_taxobox#Request_for_comments. Thanks! Martin ( Smith609 – Talk) 13:16, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
Peter Karlsen has recently been blocked indef for socking, shouldn't we block his bot too? Usb10 Connected? 01:44, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
hi,
i'm not sure if this is the right place. to summarize my thoughts from here: human editors need to spoon-feed this User:ClueBot_NG with false positives in order for the bot to work satisfactorily. i will not submit my edit to the provided link as it is not hosted on wikimedia, but on some private non-open source location. how come that this bot is allowed at wikipedia if it is not entirely managed within wm servers, nor is its functioning open to all aka open source?
188.2.168.166 ( talk) 23:14, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Is this really CorenSearchBot? It seems (and claims) to be, but is the address approved for this bot? Can someone confirm its status and/or identity? Feezo (Talk) 01:44, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
This user has bots running and issues are being raised on his talkpage - however they do not appear to be active - last edit was Nov 10. Should bots be running if the user is not around to respond to issues? That would seem to be against the Bot Policy. Exxolon ( talk) 03:42, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
Last week I made some changes to SuggestBot's handling of its regular users, switching to using a template/userbox similar to what we've been doing on the Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia since early December. We've already got some new users signed up using this system and things are running smoothly, so I now want our existing regulars to start using it too.
This has left me wondering what the best practice of notifying our (currently ~350) users of the change is, previously people signed up by adding their name to User:SuggestBot/Regulars, it's now a redirect. I looked through the noticeboard archives and failed to find anything resembling this problem being mentioned. So far I've come up with a few options:
Perhaps the main reason for asking is that we'd like to try to minimize the possibility of a user who wants to stay subscribed not getting the message, which is why having the bot (or me) post this message separately is on the list of ideas. On the other hand, I'm not wanting to step on any toes here. Since I'm a researcher, I'm tempted to try all three approaches and see if any works better, but again want to make sure I'm not going against WP policy.
Would appreciate suggestions on how to proceed. Cheers, Nettrom ( talk) 17:19, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
Does 1000 edits/hour on AWB require a bot flag? -- Kleopatra ( talk) 04:00, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Hi,
Mjbmrbot is broken. I notified it's owner here, but the bot is still running, apparently. It is -according to the owner- a standard pywikipediabot, but it is making a mess of interwiki-links. Can someone take appropriate action? (Not just en.wikipedia is affected!) Thanks Buzz-tardis ( talk) 13:29, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Bot has approval by Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Mjbmrbot. I m not expert in pywikipediabots. Can someone indicate a bunch or bot's false edits? -- Magioladitis ( talk) 13:46, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
First step is that the bot stops editing in mainspace. Then, we ll find a solution. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:07, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
mjbmr, can you please turn cosmetic changes off? We have many problems caused by them. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 14:32, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Thanks all, and sorry for the hassle. Buzz-tardis ( talk) 14:47, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
What is this?-- Амба ( talk) 01:17, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
How were the last 15,000 expand templates replaced according to the holding pen instructions (if they weren't just removed) in such a a short space of time? Does anyone know?
Rich
Farmbrough, 02:17, 28th day of January in the year 2011 (UTC).
{{ Run-page-shutoff}} has been nominated for deletion. You may be interested in this issue. 65.93.15.80 ( talk) 05:14, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
It's at it again: see? Block, someone? -- Buzz-tardis ( talk) 05:11, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
Another example. -- Buzz-tardis ( talk) 05:27, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Automate stock information through RSS feeds - I have proposed using a bot (or bots) to automate stock information through RSS feeds, specifically in company infoboxes. This is not a bot request, I just thought that bot owners might have something of value to add to the discussion, as it could eventually lead to a bot request. Thanks! ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 07:57, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
This discussion at AN/I may be of interest to bot owners. User:Plastikspork runs a bot and owns an alternate account, User:Plasticspork. When 27,000 edits to taxoboxes were requested here, Plastikspork volunteered to make the edits. However, instead of using his bot account, Plastikspork used AWB and his alternate account to make the edits. After I asked him/her to link to the RfBA for the task, I then noticed his bot was not making the edits, and crossed out my question. [3] Noticing that the category of 27,000 articles ha plummeted to some 21,000, I went back to my discussion on this talk page and noticed that he was making the edits semi-automatically. This was when I found the alternate account and the edits, rather than him/her informing me of the existence of this account when I raised the issue.
I post this here because I believe that this number of automated edits might require a bot. Please discuss any non-bot specific aspects of this at the AN/I discussion. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 16:36, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
Plastikspork speculates there may be a bug in his browser or a conflict with one of the plug ins. I have posted at AN/I about this issue. However, if there is some action that bot-owners usually do under such circumstances (meaning a potentially corrupted bot account), this is to notify the board that this may be an issue.
"The only reason that I can come up with for why I didn't see the message earlier is some javascript bug in my browser, or a conflict with one of the plugins (e.g., noscript or greasemonkey)."
-- Kleopatra ( talk) 23:27, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
I just found this bot editing articles on my watchlist to add commons category boxes per Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/FrescoBot 6. Those boxes aren't always placed in articles on purpose based on the editorial decisions of the articles' editors. One good reason: all of the photos in the category are already in the article. Why entice a reader with the promise of more content, and then show them everything that they've seen in the article? Just something to consider since I've had to remove the box from 13 articles. The two articles where it was left in place each had one additional photo in the category. I'm waiting for the bot to hit the end of the alphabet, but I expect more edits to undo yet. Just some food for thought. Imzadi 1979 → 09:26, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I agree with DJSasso: it's important to extend these interwiki links. The template may be a bit obtrusive, but it's just a cosmetic issue (well... change it). There is nothing wrong with placing the link when there are no additional images on Commons: first of all the number of (well categorized) images on Commons is going to grow, secondly the link is useful to check for new pictures. The category, likewise its link, has not to contain new images in order to be useful. Moreover imho a bot should not remove or add the link to Commons everytime someone add/remove a file on Commons or within the article... -- Basilicofresco ( msg) 18:21, 1 February 2011 (UTC) I almost forgot it: last but not least, categories on Commons could contains subcats. These subcats will likely contains media related to the article, so even a category without images is a good target for a link. -- Basilicofresco ( msg) 18:28, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Please see 130.223.122.123. Seems like a bot gone wild. - DePiep ( talk) 01:01, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
User:Luckas-bot is continually adding an actor's article from the Swedish wikipedia ( sv:Leslie H. Martinson) to an article about a book ( Lad, A Dog). [4] This is not the first time it (adding irrelevant links) has happened. [5] Can someone please block the bot to get its operator to notice the problem and fix it. Jappalang ( talk) 15:29, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
I'm looking for a co-maintainer for User:WP 1.0 bot. This is the bot that tracks WikiProject article assessments. It is also closely involved with the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team that produces packaged DVDs of selected Wikipedia articles. The bot itself runs on the toolserver, as does the web interface that allows users to query the assessment data. It's written in PERL at the moment, but the data is stored in a proper database on the toolserver where it can be accessed by tools in any language.
What I'm looking for is someone who is interested in contributing to the WP 1.0 project or being a co-maintainer of the bot. The bot code was rewritten about a year ago, and is stable, but there are many features and improvements that could be made. I'm happy to give commit access to anyone who wants to contribute to it, and in particular I'm looking for a co-maintainer to share admin access to the bot's account. I think it's not ideal to have such a key bot dependent on a single bot operator.
This is a big project - there are over a thousand WikiProjects that rely on the bot, and the bot is one of the few that has made over 1,000,000 edits. I have always found it interesting and satisfying to work on, but it's grown enough that I think additional maintainers would be helpful. I would be happy to mentor and help new maintainers learn how the system is designed. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:55, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
As discussed in an archived thread, Mobius Bot ( talk · contribs) went berserk late last year, and its owner, Mobius Clock ( talk · contribs), hasn't been heard from since long before that. I emailed Mobius but got no response. Is there any way the bot can be restored or replaced? Or could some other bot(s) take over Mobius Bot's functions? It seems a dreadful shame to lose a useful bot over something like this. Adrian J. Hunter( talk• contribs) 10:00, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
time required:utility gained
, this would surely be an incredibly time-efficient way to help the 'pedia.
Adrian J. Hunter(
talk•
contribs) 13:53, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
I recently discovered this page with several users in the top five with shockingly high edit numbers. Far higher than a user should have without a bot flag. I also looked at the contributions pages and most have edit counts far exceeding what has been explained to me to be appropriate. I also reviewed the list of bots and do not see these user accounts listed on there although several do maintain bots that have been approved for use. Since server resources, bot edit policy and the filling of watchlists has become such a significant area of concern I wanted to bring these to someones attention. -- Kumioko ( talk) 19:55, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi. I have an account for my bot. The policy appears to be that I may not login as the bot and edit manually in its name. However, I'd like to opt in to the edit counters, which is done by creating a subpage in the bot's userspace and can only be done by the account holder. What do I do ? - Richard Cavell ( talk) 05:34, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
Any bot operator whose bot deals with any BLP-related issues should be aware of this CfR discussion, as its results may result in renaming categories which the bots handle. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:26, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
I noticed in this edit that User:RebelRobot was "fixing" ISBN formats, which caused a link to an image to be broken. I left a message about that, which I'm sure can be fixed for the future. However, due to volume of edits, it's impossible to humanly check them all for broken links. Also, I wandered if a bot requires community approval to do this type of reformatting, and if such approval has been given. -- Rob ( talk) 11:01, 8 March 2011 (UTC)
Hi guys. The bot made a blunder in
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health simply because the image title contains ISBN1403105464
and neither the original developers of the script I'm running nor me imagined that a image title will at some point contain an ISBN code. Should you have not pointed this mishap in time, it would have done the same for the other images named similarly on en.wp.
Those 8 files are used in 7 articles so technically all I need to watch for is those 7 articles. Apart from these cases, there is no possibility that the bot would create broken links in articles and I wouldn't say watching over 7 articles would be that difficult on me.
The bot performs three types of edits:
Please note that the bot does not convert ISBN number into ISBN n-u-m-b-e-r (as shown here). It merely performs a part of what SmackBot was doing in 2006. Considering it's not making any substantial changes and that the community already approved of these at some point, I see no reason to open a new discussion about it. So far the bot edited some 6000 articles ( ! –> Focke-Wulf Fw 187). Given that en.wp has 6,818,738 articles, I wouldn't really label this as editing on such a large scale. -- Rebel ( talk) 05:58, 9 March 2011 (UTC)
When using the API's categorymembers to retrieve the contents of a large category, I'm not getting all the members returned. I've double checked it's not a bug in my code by using AWB and the api via the browser. For example, when I query Category:Wikipedia good articles, the page Talk:Stargazy pie is not returned, but the category is listed on the talk page and the talk page is listed in the category. Has anybody else seen this issue? Am I missing something? Also, if it is an API bug, does anybody know the best place to report it? Thanks. -- JLaTondre ( talk) 21:07, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
The following bots have the preference, which has been hidden on the English Wikipedia, set (locally):
For obvious reasons they should not be relying on this functionality, and, in fairness, probably aren't. This is merely a notification that the bot's preference will be automatically switched to false for you on the English Wikipedia shortly and you may need to adjust your code appropriately. Regards, - Jarry1250 Who? Discuss. 16:53, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone. I have written User:RichardcavellBot, a fully functioning bot in C, using libcurl. I open-sourced it on the off chance that someone might find it useful. To my genuine surprise, someone has joined the project and contributed code. Now, the thing has to run in an account, and when I run the bot on my machine, I will call it RichardcavellBot. But I want to rename the code and project to something that doesn't include my name. What should I call it? It's a generic framework written in C, highly portable, using standard libraries and libcurl. - Richard Cavell ( talk) 14:17, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
I have made a proposal for creating a central place for computer readable messages containing the interwiki sort order. At the moment each framework uses it own config file which has to be updated manually after changes to the list of wikis. Please respond to it on metawiki. Merl issimo 17:19, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Tim1357 (who's been gone for a few weeks) programed DASHBot to automaticly resize fair use images placed in Category:Non-free Wikipedia file size reduction request. DASHBot has been running it's other tasks, but not this one. This means one of two things, a) the bot isn't working properly, or b) that function was turned off and either no one was told or it was announced somewhere I didn't see it. Please keep me in the loop. If he can be contacted to fix it, that would be preferable to me doing it manually. If someone else can fix it, I suppose that would be a good secondary option (but I'd rather not piss Tim off by treading on his toes.) If neither of those pan out, a new bot would be... nice. Sven Manguard Wha? 06:56, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
It seems that the sandbox bots are no longer operative, and Cobi and X! are not active at the moment. So could other bots take over ? They reset the sandboxes, listed at Template:Template sandbox. I'd also request that they reset the Wikipedia:Introduction, so that we can leave it unprotected or with PC, because readers should be able to see the 'edit' button. Cenarium ( talk) 16:57, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
I'm required by BAG policy to notify this noticeboard of my nomination for BAG member. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:44, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
Can somebody take a look at the thread at User talk:Wikitanvir#nobots. It has been an uphill struggle to get even a grudging partial acceptance of responsibility for WikitanvirBot's edits. I am still not convinced the user is on-message about this. I think someone from BAG should have a word. SpinningSpark 19:35, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
So Cluebot NG has been down for over a week, the old Cluebot has been down for months, and there are hours where no one is on Huggle. This is very bad. What can be done in the mean time? Can old Cluebot be brought back online while new Cluebot is getting... (whatever reason it's not online) rectified? Sven Manguard Wha? 04:25, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
Arthena (talk) 16:54, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
Hello, in case someone mantains bots related to the template {{ Link GA}}, I wanted to inform you that now also it.wiki has activated the "Good Article" category. The articles having this status will be put under subcategories of it:Categoria:Voci di qualità per argomento. Bye, Gengis Gat ( talk) 17:14, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
I have rarely checked up on bot actions, normally assuming they do the right thing or they wouldn't be allowed to run.
However, Snotbot just found an error in a page that i created, and Snotbot broke the hierarchical structure while attempting a repair.
It is important that section titles 1906 split, 1908 split, and 1924 split be on the same level, since the article treats them as equivalent level events. That was the case in the article before the Snotbot edit, even though there was a structural error. Snotbot effected an improper repair, which put these three section titles on different levels.
I will put a notice on Snotbot's talk page that i'm flagging this situation here. Richard Myers ( talk) 00:31, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
==== Eastern Wobblies, western Wobblies ==== ===1906 split=== ===1908 split=== ====Overalls brigade==== ===IWW east, IWW west=== ====The Detroit IWW==== ====The Chicago IWW==== =====Seeds of another split===== =====Centralizers===== =====Decentralizers===== == See also == ==Notes==
So '1924 split' was at a different level to the other two before the bot's edits, and rendered in a different font. It seems to me to be incorrect to assert that "it was invisible to the reader of the article". Mr Stephen ( talk) 11:19, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi guys, a long term aim of WP:FOOTBALL will be to empty Category:Football biography using deprecated parameters by converting a multitude of old infoboxes into the correct code found at {{ Infobox football biography}}. However, with nearly 50,000 infoboxes to be converted, this will take a helluva long time - would it be possible for a bot to do this instead? Regards, Giant Snowman 16:53, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
I'll do this as soon as I have my bot account unblocked. It had this already in mind and have approval to perform tasks like this. I fixed all infobox names in order to start doing this task. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 20:28, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi. It turned out I can't do it with my bot. I am OK with Petrb doing it. Thanks! -- Magioladitis ( talk) 13:43, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Please be understanding about my attempt to explain my complaints; although i've been editing on Wikipedia for more than five years, these particular issues are a little outside my comfort zone.
I have created a fair number of in-depth articles, some with one hundred to two hundred footnotes. My experiences with citations in each of these articles have generally been good, right up to the point where someone with an automated process comes along and compresses all of the footnotes into a different format. Much of the subsequent editing on the given article suddenly goes from simple and straightforward, to complex and (sometimes extremely) frustrating.
This has happened to dozens of articles that i've been working on, including in the middle of my edits. Permission has never been asked, and in my experience the changes have never been explained or discussed or even noted on the TALK page by the bot owner, either before or after edits. The standard edit summary rarely contains enough info for the average editor to appreciate what has just happened, or why.
Lack of information isn't the worst of it, however; rather, in my experience the impact of this type of edit can be very harmful. Sometimes such edits have made it nearly impossible for someone only familiar with the normal citation methods to do subsequent editing of articles, without losing and misplacing footnotes. This is because compressing footnotes retains cite data only in the first footnote occurrence. What if one wants to move a lower paragraph above the paragraph with that first occurrance? Suddenly, editing tasks become a puzzle with only the most cryptic of clues.
An example—this footnote has all of necessary information:
After a bot runs on the page, all but the first appearance of this reference will be converted to this:
How do i look at that, and comprehend what it refers to? I have to jump through hoops (or, well, extra pages and links) to find the source information that i need while editing.
The "1912" is a grab of the last bit of data, whether that's a page number, a date, or whatever, so not only is the key data missing, there's no data consistency to the new format.
Now suddenly, almost all footnotes on the page appear nearly identical to each other. When there are a hundred plus footnotes, that can be very intimidating for someone in the middle of creating a worthwhile article.
And what happens if the first entry is deleted from the page during normal editing? All of the reference data for that source is lost for the entire page!
Now, i don't have a problem with someone who wishes to write their footnotes in this manner to begin with. But when a bot automatically converts the footnote style from a more basic style, it creates chaos for the editors who had been editing that page.
Not only that, but it is a violation of Wikipedia:Citing sources, which states:
Another aspect of this problem for the editor inexperienced with bots, it is difficult to know whether it is considered proper to revert the edits of a bot. I truly wish that i had reverted every bot that did this to the articles i've edited, but i didn't know if i would be violating some difficult to discover Wikipedia policy.
I've complained about this issue numerous times in years past, but apparently not in the right forums to have it seriously considered. I hope now will be different.
I have another complaint that is only indirectly related. One of the bots (or is it a semi-automated editor?) is apparently controlled by Betacommand ( talk · contribs), but if i follow an edit to that editor's page, i don't find anything on that user's user page, nor the talk page to discover an actual user ID that i can convey to others. I had to search through ten archives of the talk page to locate "Betacommand". This creative nomenclature is certainly clever, and may be fine for ordinary users, but for someone who traipses across thousands of wikipedia pages in a short period of time, shouldn't there be ID information and bot info that is more readily accessible on one of their pages?
Please note that Betacommand isn't the only citation scrambler i've encountered, and that i don't really have anything against bots or automated tools, so long as they perform helpful functions. However, footnote scrambling is not helpful, it is very harmful to users who frequently feel ambushed by it, like me. Richard Myers ( talk) 09:02, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
On your first concern: There is a bot to revive orphaned named references. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 11:06, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
The relevant policy/guideline pages are WP:REFNAME, WP:CITEFOOT, and WP:NAMEDREFS. Grouping duplicate references is highly preferable to leaving them ungrouped. —SW— comment 16:03, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion at VP: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Bot_to_reduce_duplicate_references. While there is strong support towards merging dupe refs for articles that already use named refs, there are a few opinions the other way for general cases. There is a BRFA ( Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Snotbot_4) in progress. Admittedly, this is being done by at least several tools/bots already as "uncontroversial". — HELLKNOWZ ▎ TALK 12:06, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
Rich
Farmbrough, 21:47, 25 April 2011 (UTC).
Just a couple of notes. There hasn't been much mention of the the reader. Which scheme is better for the reader? In my opinion, each method has drawbacks.
As to editing, it's also a no-perfect-solution situation as there is an advantage for editors when refs are grouped: it there are lot of refs, it can be kind of difficult to follow the flow of the article text when editing. Grouping makes this easier. Herostratus ( talk) 14:07, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone. I've had it suggested to me to create a bot that will count redlinks and identify which terms are most frequently redlinked (ie they're linked to but there is nothing at the destination). How would such a bot work most effectively? Would the bot comb through all the pages in a category, or all the pages in 'what links here'? I don't own a server or domain name so would it be best if the results were posted on the requesting user's talk page? Or within the bot's own userspace? If the bot only posted in its own userspace, would it need BRFA approval at all? - Richard Cavell ( talk) 06:23, 7 April 2011 (UTC)
Pretty sure this already exists (most wanted pages?) .
Rich
Farmbrough, 06:55, 26 April 2011 (UTC).
There’s been a recent spur of nominations for certain bot activities of User:Lightbot (operator: User:Lightmouse) documented in a discussion here by User:MBisanz. Cross-posting for reference. :| TelCo NaSp Ve :| 06:49, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
I don't want to patrol new pages, but I do want a list of new pages within the last few days. Obviously Special:NewPages isn't implemented in the API. What methods do people use to get this data? I'm guessing the toolserver DB could be used, what else? (I really enjoy the flexibility of non-toolserver bots, I don't want to fuss with a tunnel to the toolserver DB if I don't have to). tedder ( talk) 02:13, 2 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with the bot policy. User:Cboursnell is mass-creating draft articles inside his/her userspace. See also User:PfamWikiBot (inactive). Marcus Qwertyus 16:26, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
Hi. Is there a script (Phython) that inserts, for example, the image data graph "image" template {{ taxobox}} from the English Wikipedia's article en:Smearwort in the column "şəkil" template Takson in the article (interwiki) Girdə zəravənd Azerbaijani Wikipedia?
{{taxobox | image = Aristolochia rotunda.jpg ---> {{Takson | Şəkil = Aristolochia rotunda.jpg
Sincerely, Vago ( talk) 07:26, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
I'm trying to find the approximate lede of an article. It's just for scoring/categorization, so it doesn't have to be perfect. My first thought was to strip the infobox and any other {{templates}} first (not using regexes, since it's hard to "count" or deal with nested templates). Then I realized there could be very useful information in an infobox.
So my second thought is to just grab all text until a "\n\n" or a "==".
Has anyone done this or something similar? Or has anyone thought about this enough to tell me why my second technique is a bad idea? tedder ( talk) 19:16, 15 May 2011 (UTC)
Just ask the API for section 0, [12]. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 19:23, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
Unregistered user apparently undertaking a bot-related research project:
[13] and
[14].
Meph
talk 11:33, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone. As part of an ongoing research project, I am parsing out all external link additions to en.wiki to do some machine-learning to detect link spam (see [15]). As part of this processing, I obtain the HTML source of the URLs being added. Occasionally, I get a 404 error (file not found), and it would seem beneficial to report these somewhere so people could manually investigate, if desired.
The question is whether or not this needs BAG approval. My program would only post to a single page, and not in the article-namespace (probably something like WP:STiki/Dead_Links). Thoughts? West.andrew.g ( talk) 01:20, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
User:Yobot and its owner Magioladitis have decided to ignore my complaint that changing Greek letters from html entities such as ν to the equivalent Unicode character ν makes articles hard to edit. While an editor skilled in the topic of the article can usually tell the difference when reading the article, it is often difficult to tell in edit mode, and an editor who is, perhaps, cleaning up vandalism but is not too skilled in the article topic doesn't have a prayer. Therefore I am contesting Magioladitis's decision in this forum and request that his bot be forbidden from converting the html entities for Greek letters to Unicode characters. (Just in case you think it's easy to tell "v" from "ν", try telling "A" from "Α".)
I have also added {{ nobots}} (with Yobot in parameter list) to Equation of time which has been repeatedly disturbed by this action. Jc3s5h ( talk) 13:45, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Any botops have room for one more?
HBC Archive Indexerbot is broke because its server has died. Krellis is offering it to whomever would like to give it a new home
here.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► (
(⊕)) 02:13, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
I am wanting a bot to add a link to drugs.com pages from The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists to all Template:Drugboxs for medications. User:Boghog has offered but is exceedingly busy. The lisinopril article is an example of where this was done. Wish to look at the effect this link on all Wikipedia medication articles has on drug.com internet traffic. Have been discussing with a number of organization the possibility of them becoming involved with donating content or time to improve Wikipedia (ie. collaborting with us) and need some data to show that Wikipedia "does matter". Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 21:27, 24 June 2011 (UTC)
Alright, then how would someone know which link to add to the drugbox? Simply take {{
Drugbox/Foobar}} and add |Drugs.com=foobar
to it? Are there cases where this would create mistakes, or dead links?
Headbomb {
talk /
contribs /
physics /
books} 16:53, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
Bslwikicorporation ( talk · contribs)
Claims to be a bot on the account's userpage; some edit summaries indicate it is a bot. Not registered. Singularity42 ( talk) 19:18, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi,
I recently added a feature to SuggestBot so that it's capable of replacing an existing set of suggestions, rather than simply append them. Would this kind of feature require a separate BRFA and some trials before I add it to the bot's documentation, or is it not such a critical piece of functionality? Cheers, Nettrom ( talk) 19:03, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
I notice that the "m" flag is shown in a bot's contributions, but the "b" flag is not, although both flags do appear in my watchlist. Is there a way to tell that a particular edit (e.g., this one) was marked as a bot edit? 28bytes ( talk) 18:06, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi folks,
I came from huwiki to gladly tell you that I have written a HOWTO on using functions in your fixes.py/user-fixes.py. See hu:user:Bináris/Fixes and functions HOWTO. This is a mostly undocumented feature of replace.py and will improve your fixes (for those who are a bit familiar with Python programming). Useful for complicated replacement tasks. Enjoy! Bináris ( talk) 11:22, 3 July 2011 (UTC)
Python 2.7.2 has been released at Sun, 12 June 2011. This release does no longer trigger unicode bug 3081100, which happened for characters with multiple accents (for example on hak-, hi-, cdo- and sa-wiki). I guess it is highly recommended to migrate to this new release if the local version has this bug. Xqt ( talk) 13:19, 3 July 2011 (UTC)
Could there be a bot that requests pages be protected at wp:rpp if an article is vandalized more than a certain amount of times (like 3) in a certain time (like 24 hours)? The bot could also automatically protect the page without requesting. Heyitsme22 ( talk) 12:45, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
Please let me know if there is a public code for such a bot, because I would like to implement it in huwiki. Bináris ( talk) 16:25, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
Hi! I've been editing Latin American people's names to include the proper accent marks. During the last days I've included thousands of accent marks, but the task is showing itself to be too huge to do it manually. Would some of your bots care to help me with this, please? I have a first list here for your orientation on what to do. When disambiguations are no provided for common names, it is safe to add the accent marks to those names in sports articles (I've checked it out). Please let me know if you decide to give me a hand and do this. Thanks you! Againme ( talk) 17:56, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
User:Oleg Alexandrov operates User:Mathbot. Mathbot has been reverting my re-categorisation of some Wikipedia namespace articles. They are visible in Category:Indexes of articles and Category:Mathematics-related lists but they should only be in Category:WikiProject Mathematics. Oleg does not seem to check the Mathbot talk page regularly and he is yet to reply to my request on his talk page. How can I get Mathbot to stop my reverting my edits? -- Alan Liefting ( talk) - 08:42, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
Hi there. DASHBot is supposed to clean out Category:Non-free Wikipedia file size reduction request nightly, at least of all of the images (95% of what's there). It went for over a week not doing it, then ran on July 6, but failed to run yesterday. (Task here)
I can keep that category trimmed, but it sucks up lots and lots of time. I'd like for either DASHBot to be brought back up, or some other solution to be found. Please? Sven Manguard Wha? 07:50, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Further to User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2011Jul#Bot's name and an email from Phillipe@WMF, I have created a new account with a more "friendly" name. I plan to transition SmackBot's activities to this account, once a bot flag is set.
Can BAG please make the necessary arrangements with the 'Crats?
Rich
Farmbrough, 13:10, 12 July 2011 (UTC).
I recently ran into a case where
XLinkBot reverted the edits of a user because these edits added a link to Facebook (
see diff). I find this behavior of the bot questionable. There is a lot of potential of removing a lot of good work because of a single link that violates
WP:ELNO#10. In my opinion such a task should NOT be handled by a bot. A link to facebook is discouraged, but perhaps not nearly as harmful as the eventual loss of the editor. There should be a careful review before such a reversion should take place, and the way in which XLinkBot handles this is more than unfortunate (reverting all subsequent edits of the user). This behavior of XLinkBot needs to be changed in my opinion.
Toshio Yamaguchi (
talk) 08:59, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
I notified the bots operator
User:Versageek of this discussion on his talk page.
Toshio Yamaguchi (
talk) 09:10, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
Hi. Is this a bot or a living person? - User:WPCbot - Off2riorob ( talk) 21:44, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
Back in 2008 there was a centralized discussion that concluded that image placeholders are not needed but nobody ever came to remove the existing placeholders. In the following years some editors kept adding placeholders and some other removing them. As User:WOSlinker wrote on my talk page "If image place holders were ever needed, a better place would have been to add them at the template level rather than on articles then it would have meant that all articles without an image set would get a placeholder image instead rather than just a few of the articles, but since they are not, better to be consistent and remove them all. There is not that many really, although it's a few to many to do by hand but not a big job for a bot."
Infobox standardisation enables us to treat the question uniformly. In the last months we put a lot of effort to standardise the code and the visual outcome of all infoboxes. My bot, Yobot, started removing placeholder infoboxes from articles yesterday in the frame of this standardisation and did 3-4k edits. There is a tracking category, Category:Infobox person using placeholder image, which is common for all infoboxes about persons. At the moment there are like 12k pages more. I thought I had to leave a note here since I got a couple of questions on the matter from editors who not disagree but would like to know that the community is informed on this change. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 10:09, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
I had made User:Porchcorpterbot as my bot account. It got approved as a bot. See User talk:Porchcorpter#"Bot" account. Frank says that it is not a bot, and it is a violation of the username policy. But I created it as my bot account for AWB purposes. Would anyone be willing to give their opinion on this? - Porch corpter ( talk/ contribs) 10:13, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
Since it looks like we need more active BAG members, I volunteered to help out; feel free to leave comments. On a related note, if any of you are experienced editors with good tech skills when it comes to bots + would like to make it a haunt, please feel free to open one up as well. -- slakr\ talk / 11:21, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
I've nominated myself for BAG membership; comments, questions, and !votes are welcome at Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/Hersfold. Thanks. :-) Hersfold ( t/ a/ c) 18:35, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Discussion can be found here. Please discuss there, not here, should you desire discussion. Thanks. -- 68.127.234.159 ( talk) 21:26, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
Not really much to explain; in fact, the history of WP:Requests for comment/History and geography basically explains its problem. LikeLakers2 ( talk) 04:15, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
There is an RFC on the addition of identifier links to citations by bots. Please comment. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:51, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
I can no longer seem to log in using my homemade scripts, which always used to work - either under my bot account or my normal user account. When I give the correct username and password, I just get served up with the main page, and I'm not logged on. Has there been a change of requirements as to the user agent string or something? Thanks for any pointers,-- Kotniski ( talk) 08:24, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
(outdent)I run them from home. The response I was getting to the (unsuccessful) login attempts was the Wikipedia main page.-- Kotniski ( talk) 14:32, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
User:CommonsNotificationBot currently monitors speedy tagged files on commons and posts article talk page notices here to keep people informed. I have had a request to do the same, but for images tagged "F6" here on en.wiki. (see here and my talk page). Does this need new approval? It adds probably less than 20-30 edits per day (I think) to the bot, and doesn't do anything "new" except change the category being monitored. -- Errant ( chat!) 21:45, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
I often come across edit summaries by bots which do the "bare minimum" when it comes to our requirements on informative edit summary and open communication. I'm not interested in doing a big "crackdown" on the edit summaries, but I would like to remind everyone that verbose edit summaries are better than "terse" ones. For example, a bot updating the parameters in a template might have the edit summary
But it could also have much better summary by having something like
|class=C
→ |class=Good
) based on the other banners
per request. Report errors and suggestions at
User talk:GenericBot."So it would be great if everyone would
For a "real life" example of where this makes a difference, compare [22] with [23] and ask yourself what is clearer.
I'll defer to individual bot owners on best to achieve good communication for whatever bot / bot tasks they are running, but it would be nice if everyone would at least review their bot's edit summaries and ask themselves if it's possible to make them better (suggestions 3 & 4 should be particularly easy to follow). Thanks. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:46, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I completely agree that a summary of the form 'fixing infobox' should be improved. I have two comments:
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:30, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
diff
shows what was done, not why it was done (who authorised it, and the rationale behind it). Linking to eg.
WP:MOSNUM is good but its scope is large and I think the "blow-by-blow" is useful in narrowing the specific area/action taken being undertaken (and only if it was actually undertaken in this specific edit). —
Sladen (
talk) 20:40, 21 August 2011 (UTC)I am always open on suggestions of how to improve my bot's edit summaries. You always how to deal with edit summary length and lack of inspiration. Check also most of non-bot editors' edit summaries, the situation is not better. I can try add dynamically some stuff for awb users but in the past when we tried it we had complains on performance. The only thing I find unnecessary on Headbomb's suggestion is the link for suggestions. This link is supposed to be the talk page in most cases. PS after this discussion I improved my bot's edit summary a little bit. :) -- Magioladitis ( talk) 22:48, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
Whilst I won't go in-depth on what I would like to see or not see in the summaries, The small change I would like to see for people running multiple tasks from the one account is to include something like "Task #" in the edit summary then on the bot's userpage to provide a list of tasks so people can easily look up more information on it. Peachey88 ( T · C) 01:07, 22 August 2011 (UTC)
A long time ago, I started adding details. The irony was the demand for detail increased in proportion to the amount of detail provided. I'd mention A, B, C, D, and E and would say "You didn't mention F" or "You didn't mention the discussions, the guidelines, the BRFA". With the article title and section heading, a summary can easily be three lines for some readers. Long summaries got complaints that it was incorrect, succinct ones didn't. The problem was worse if I customised summaries and forgot to update it. It's probably time to have another think about it (thanks to comments by Headbomb, Sladen, and others). I've always wanted to be able to provide an automated summary from the diff as Rich suggests, but I've never been able to do it. Does anyone know how to do it for AWB custom modules? Lightmouse ( talk) 18:34, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
I would like to edit my bot to allow read deleted versions of a page in a semi-automated manner (only when I ask it to). Would I need approval for that? It would log in as me, read the file, and immediately log out. Magog the Ogre ( talk) 10:59, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
Note sure where to post this, but hopefully someone here can assist. I tried User talk:Misza13 already to no avail. It appears that this bot has ceased running all tasks other than Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases. In particular, the edits to the sub-pages of User:MiszaBot/Trackers appear to no longer take place. Is anyone still running the bot, and if so can this function be restored? If the answer to either question is "no", please advise and I will boldly get rid of the templates and remove any transclusions of same. -- After Midnight 0001 18:47, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
Orphaned non-free use Wikipedia files | |||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||||||||||
All articles | 483 |
Rich
Farmbrough, 03:08, 1 September 2011 (UTC).
Hi there, I am Kudu, an experienced Wikipedian who's very familiar with *nix systems. I just wanted to leave a notice here to say that I have access to several shell servers, and for bot creators who don't want to request a Toolserver account yet or who want a backup instance, I'd be glad to run their bots. This can be done by the bot owner sending me their code or me making them a shell account. If you're interested, leave a message on my talk page or email me. — Kudu ~I/O~ 23:05, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
Yobot won't be running for the next eight-nine months. We need someone to fix Checkwiki errors. Here's the list of errors fixed by Yobot: User:Magioladitis/AWB and CHECKWIKI. -- Magioladitis ( talk) 00:48, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
I do not have time to maintain my bots anymore, so effective immediately I am discontinuing the following bots:
People have come to depend on these bots, so I would like to have as little service disruption as possible. Anyone who is interested in running these bots should email me so that I can send them the most recent scripts, the crontab, the database dumps, and the bot passwords. You will also be taking care of bot maintenance from here on out. hare j 22:57, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
Wikinews Importer Bot ( talk · contribs) is adding full URLs to wikinews links. The owner Misza13 ( talk · contribs) has been notified, but has yet to act and has not edited since May. I propose that the bot be blocked until the issue is settled, and for all of the full URL additions to be reverted.-- William S. Saturn ( talk) 23:53, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
Hi, I m an admin in wiki ar. I m just wondering if in wiki en do you have a bot that organize categories order depending on the name of the article ? I mean if for example in the Article Canada, the category Canada will appear automatically the first one below the article in the catogory section. Do you use a bot ? Can you help us to do the same in wiki ar ? -- Helmoony ( talk) 21:29, 28 September 2011 (UTC)
DASHBot task 9 has been inactive for over a month now. The backlog it keeps clear is at over 1000 items. Not only that, but this is not the first time that the task has gone dark under mysterious circumstances. To be blunt, a replacement is needed. I can neither do resizings nor run bots off my computer right now, so I'm asking for someone to code and run the bot. I'm not sure how toolserver works, but I'd be willing to try and run the program through TS using Svenbot if someone is willing to code the bot but not run it. Sven Manguard Wha? 06:20, 9 October 2011 (UTC)
So as a fairly newbie-bot question - it makes sense to me to test things before releasing them - is it good/common practise for bot developers to grab a recent wiki-dump and use it to set up a local mirror of wikipedia for bots to be tested in? Or are there any subtle disadvantages? Failedwizard ( talk) 18:19, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
As per WP:BOTPOL, I am required to notify this board regarding my nomination to the Bot Approval Group which can be found here. I welcome any and all comments regarding this. Thank you. + Crashdoom Talk 06:46, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Bot Approvals Group#BAG Nomination: Snottywong if you're interested. Thanks. —SW— gossip 17:58, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
Input here would be nice, thanks. -- Chris 02:42, 15 October 2011 (UTC)
I have visited User talk:X! with a message about what I am about to say. He has not replied so I will say it here: I was looking at a bot (SoxBot III), which reverts pointless wikitext additions like [[File:[[File:Example.jpg]]<ref></ref>]]<nowiki>Insert non-formatted text here</nowiki>, and noticed that it had not edited since 2009, but I think that this is a brilliant idea. I think that the bot should be running again, and if X! doesn't want it himself I would be happy to take over the running myself. There are a lot of new editors, particularly IPs, who just mess around clicking buttons and saving and this needs to be reverted. If this is the case, can somebody please find me the source code and we can take it to BRFA. (Although I would like a renaming to RcsprinterBot.) Thanks, Rcsprinter (talk) 17:01, 4 October 2011 (UTC)
Can someone explain throttling? I'm hitting a wall with it, and I'm not sure why. -- SatyrTN ( talk / contribs) 20:58, 23 October 2011 (UTC)
$_SESSION
, with no additional expiration logic; IIRC Wikimedia wikis use memcache to store $_SESSION
, so the expiration actually depends on the memcache settings.
Anomie
⚔ 12:27, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
ClueBot III runs a task with the edit summary "Fixing links to archived content.", such as here. Why does its userpage at User:ClueBot III not contain any mention of this task? Should it perhaps be added? I think it's a useful task. Toshio Yamaguchi ( talk) 14:39, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
I've re-written my bot ( MichaelkourlasBot) such that it is now completely automated, and can be left alone for an indefinite period of time. However, I do not have enough bandwidth to actually keep it operational; my ISP cuts me off at 60GB a month, and the bot looks like it would use about half of that, based on some preliminary calculations. Would anyone be willing to host it, or give me suggestions as to how to cut down the amount of bandwidth used? (By the way, just so you know, the bot monitors the recent changes list to find user-blanked pages, then marks them with a CSD tag (db-blanked). It's written in C# using DotNetWikiBot.) Thanks! -- Michael Kourlas talk – contribs 04:13, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
See here. Rcsprinter (whisper) 20:33, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
KuduBot ( talk · contribs)'s task was to create the Category:Wikipedia files missing permission subcategories, but, due to inactivity on part of the owner, the request was marked as expired. Even so, the bot has continued to make these categories, and it is doing them incorrectly for the single-digit days (see what it created and where the files are actually located), so it should probably be blocked. It would be nice to have a bot that actually does this correctly, though... Logan Talk Contributions 15:31, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
I am looking for a bot operator who is willing to take over some tasks from VeblenBot and PeerReviewBot. These run on the toolserver, so someone with a toolserver account would be able to just copy the code and it would work. The code itself is very stable and has been running for years without trouble. I simply want to reduce the number of bot tasks I am responsible for.
The tasks are:
If you might be interested in taking over one of these, please let me know. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:00, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
I already brought it up to the discuss page at wikispecies but well there aren't many bot-master around to help the issue as someone has said. There are plenty of bot-master here at wikipedia so i think some of them should go to wikispecies to take over the issue. The issue here is there are many missing links connect wikispecies to wikipedia. Plus there are still missing tons of Vernacular names in the Vernacular names section. The Vernacular names can be copy from the links of each other language if they have one. So hope someone will consider this and inform bot-master to go to work over there. Thanks! Trongphu ( talk) 02:47, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
There's a bot to assist disambiguating links; however it appears to be damaging pages. I am leaving this note here since the author's page is marked inactive.
You may notice strange strings of the form link:1 through link:5 on this page. Every time someone clicks a DAB Solver button to disambiguate a term, and tries to fix it, the term is replaced by link:n. The original text is not merely obscured but destroyed from the article source text. So, someone must identify all of these and if necessary go through the article history to recover the missing terms.
<<link:#>>
) are easy enough to finding with AWB's Dump scanner. —
Dispenser 02:18, 9 December 2011 (UTC)I have a fairly stupid question but I confess I can't figure what I'm doing wrong. Someone stopped my bot earlier with a comment and now every time I try and start it the bot tells me I have a message. I have tried several things including clearing the comment and the cache and nothing seems to work. Any ideas? -- Kumioko ( talk) 04:04, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
Please shut off the bot. -- 91.10.32.109 ( talk) 18:51, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
Yobot added {{ ibid}} to List of Ohio covered bridges, even though none of the citations were problematic. I don't want to stop the bot for one minor issue, and operator Magioladitis is on wikibreak until next May, so I can't see how to report this properly. Is there someone here that could address the issue? Nyttend ( talk) 19:23, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
and the rest are <ref name="Delorme"/> You'll notice that the article is undercited, but these specific citations shouldn't produce this type of bot reaction, and a bot shouldn't tag an article with {{ ibid}} if it simply lacks sufficient citations. Nyttend ( talk) 20:49, 29 December 2011 (UTC)<ref name=Delorme>Ohio Atlas & Gazetteer, DeLorme, pg 68-9</ref>
I have a question about the speed barrier for bot edits. I have multiple tasks currently approved for my bot with 2 more pending and several more in the future. Is it ok for me to run some of these concurrently without being in violation of the speed limit. For example, the bot may be doing 8 - 10 edits a minute for one task and 8 - 10 edits a minute for a completely separate task at the same time meaning its running at 16-20 edits a minute and maybe more. I just want to make sure I am not going to be breaking any rules if I start one task while another is still going. -- Kumioko ( talk) 16:51, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
My bot already has the capability and general authority to do this type of change however some may view it as purely cosemetic so I am posting it here prior to running it to give an explaination and give an opportunity for comments.
Per a conversation on my talk page and on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Templates#Update of category it appears that a WikiProject template redirect is causing articles to not categorize properly. It could be argued that this particular problem might be fixable by simply nudging the template or the redirect but it emphasizes the point I have been making for sometime that Template redirects should treated differently (preferable avoided when possible) than normal article redirects because the coding of the template can, and relateively frequently does, have negative affects on other things when redirected.
In this case it appears (and I could be wrong which is also why I am posting this here first) that the {{ WikiProject GeorgiaUS}} needs to be replaced with Template:WikiProject Georgia (U.S. state) because the redirect appears to be causing categories not to be updated correctly.
The exact question in this is, can I go ahead and use my bot to replace these, using my prior approval of WikiProject template replacement BRFA, to make these changes? There are a about 3000 articles affected but many of them have other problems in addition to this one change. -- Kumioko ( talk) 16:14, 12 January 2012 (UTC)