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 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | → | Archive 10 |
Hi.
Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Polbot 3 is a request for bot approval that's been open for about a month now. The last time a BAG member edited it was June 16. It's been tagged "attention requested" for about two weeks now, but no action has been taken. It has had unanimous approval from those who have commented. I'm considering withdrawing the request and just running the bot. This seems to me to be an "Ignore all rules" case: there seems to be community consensus to run it, the bot will help the encyclopedia, and the only thing stopping it from running is a rule. Are there any objections to this? If so, what do you recommend I do? (I mean no disrespect to the BAG members, by the way.) All the best, –
Quadell (
talk) (
random) 14:19, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Scrub the above. It's been approved for a trial period of 50 edits. I'll discuss with Quadell. Carcharoth 14:31, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Those links displayed as [1], [2], etc. seem to be the same as the flag log links. Why do we have two links to the same thing? Andre ( talk) 20:07, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Do I have to requests for approval to make edits to my own userspace like updating the list of album covers with disputed fair use claim or the list of album covers without fair use rationale? Jogers ( talk) 14:28, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
Freak gave me approval but it's still listed under "trial", can this be remedied? Adam McCormick 02:07, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Per [1], I would like to get an idea, before I actually go to the trouble of writing the bot, of the likelihood of a bot that updates scores and team records on individual sports team season pages ( 2007 Indianapolis Colts season, for instance) being approved in principle. I realize that a large part of whether or not my bot gets approved would depend on the particular details of its implementation, but before I go to the work of writing it I'd like to know whether or not the general idea of such a bot is acceptable. Kurt Weber 16:24, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm interested in creating a crawler just to copy all the page content of the translated pages on Wikipedia:Translation/*/Completed_Translations, and I think I have the same question as Symmetric above. If I'm just screen scraping this small section of Wikipedia (maybe 200 pages), do I need to get permission? I might use the "edit this page" button, but just to get the wiki-style page text (not the full HTML). I wouldn't actually edit anything. Thanks! Sedatesnail 19:47, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
Can I get approval to run the bot in supervised, semiautomatic mode to finish debugging it? (Basically, it performs one new page check, and submits the edits for my approval before doing them).
It wouldn't break Google's TOS since, strictly speaking, the searches aren't automated. Admittedly, that's splitting semantic hair but I doubt they'd object. :-) — Coren (talk) 00:14, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
As part of the BAG policy when joining, I must notify certain pages about my request for BAG membership. Please see my request at Wikipedia talk:Bots/Approvals group#Nomination to join the BAG. Thank you for your time, — E talk bots 12:09, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
I would like to get a higher EPM for ClueBot or perhaps just use a maxlag= value. I was told by Wikihermit that I would need to get the bot flagged before I could have a higher EPM. Can I get User:ClueBot flagged? -- Cobi( t| c| b| cn) 01:52, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
Can someone add my bot to the page, I can't edit the page for some reason. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vandalstopperbot ( talk • contribs) 11:01, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
Can someone add {{BRFA|AlptaSandBoxBot||Open}}
to
Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval?
Alpta 03:22, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Bots/Approvals group. Thanks. CO 2 21:39, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
Can someone add {{BRFA|ChandlerMapBot||Open}}
to
Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval? Thank you. --
ChandlerMap 11:42, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
I've asked for assistance in getting a stable solution to the Sandbox reset problem, at Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard#Critical - intro and sandbox bot missing. Please help. -- Quiddity 20:25, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
What is the policy on approval for assisted bots? Like if I want to run solve disambiguation.py only, with no modifications at all, do I need approval? Thanks. :) - cohesion 01:59, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
How does one make a request for removal of bot status? User:JAnDbot has been making questionable removal of valid iw links, such as this one. On following to the owner's talk page (on the Czech WP), it turns out that others have been noticing and commenting on the same problem across several languages. -- EncycloPetey 13:01, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
There is a bot that is clearly flouting Wikipedia:Bot policy#Spell checking bots - GurchBot. Look at this diff to Golden West Network - I suggest something is done if it is an 'unattended fashion' per the bot policy. Auroranorth 12:57, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
Do I have to run it from my computer? Thanks in advance.-- Tasc0 22:01, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
Is there a bot that can crawl a subject's lists (basic topic list, topic list, etc.), and check the talk page of each article listed on those lists for the existence of the subject's wikiproject banner, adding it to those pages where it doesn't yet exist?
If not, would there be any objections to the creation of such a bot?
The Transhumanist 06:01, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
To make it easier for my bots to remove images, it would be useful for the bots to canonicalize image links in the articles they edit: remove unneccessary spaces, convert underscores to spaces, and convert percent-encoded characters to UTF-8. Do I need to get approval for this? -- Carnildo 21:51, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
Some questions on requesting bot approval:
1. I have a few tools on the go that grab various items through index.php and api.php and based on the results grab some more. They are currently read-only. Since one human-click can result in a few hundred page requests, they are definitely "automated tools" - but do they qualify as bots needing approval? My information from a support ticket I placed is that "you can request pages as fast as you want as long as you obey the maxlag= parameter", which I do.
2. Now I want to modify one of my tools to pump some output into a sub-page of my User or User-talk page. Does that now qualify as a bot needing approval? If so, would I need approval before even trying the code? Can I use my own ID for this or do I need to create a FranaBot?
3. In the event the answer to either above is yes, you do need approval, a follow-up question: NOT to be flippant or disrespectful, but given that I could almost certainly make my packets identical to IE7's, why would I care if you approve or disapprove? The obvious answer being that if I cause disruption, I'm tossed out of the project, but are there any other answers?
4.(added) If I distribute the read-only tools to other users, am I now crossing the approval threshold?
Thanks for your help. Franamax 17:40, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
As for why you'd want or need approval, it's actually fairly simple: any account that starts making a lot of edits very quickly without a bot flag is liable to be blocked on sight as a rogue bot by admins watching the RC page. When the account has the bot flag, then its edits do not clutter up the RC (unless one asks for bot edits), and the presence of the bot flag shows approval (to avoid twitchy admins). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Coren ( talk • contribs) 18:33, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks both for your response. More specific questions:
1. crPatrol is a handkerchief an admin gave me to sniff - scan Newpages for recent re-created pages and report. I'm tweaking this to also check variant capitalizations of the article name to spot the more enterprising re-adders. I want to push the results to my Talk as there are indications that the Newpage patrollers may find it useful. Eventually I'm thinking about a 10-minute incremental scan, therefore unattended.
2. wpW5 will eventually do all of who-what-when-where-why. Right now it can take a text fragment and, if it is in the existing article, tell within 3 minutes when and by whom it first appeared (30 seconds is more accurate). I get the revision history by scraping html from index.php - I can get 5000/request that way, at the expense of bandwidth and loading the server. api.php will do it far more efficiently but &prop=revisions is limited to 50/time for non-bots. It would make way more sense for both client time and server load to use the api.php interface, but only if I can use the bot limit of 500 revisions per request.
Thanks for the other tips. I like that Toolserver, I could get my awk and grep back! Franamax 04:58, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
(b)Nope. That's well within reasonable range.
(c)Actually, using action=query&apm;list=recentchanges will get new new pages: they are type="1" in the response.
(b) No, every operator would needs its own bot account and separate approval. The BAG doesn't just approve bots, it also approves bot operators. Don't want to flag a vandal and all that.
(c)I don't expect so. The devs have placed the bot/not bot distinction there, it's not likely you'll be able to convince them otherwise.
A couple suggestions. For #1, I'd recommend using #en.wikipedia on irc.wikimedia.org to get notification of new pages' creation; it's very efficient and puts NO more load on the server when you're just watching the site, as is appropriate. For #2, I'd use the Toolserver. This is not a bot function, it is a script function. There are already several existing scripts that perform this function as well. If you're confident of your script's efficiency and stability, I'd be willing to have my account host it. — madman bum and angel 19:14, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Hi! I'm thinking about building something called User:ChoreBot. It's a way for users to pledge to do some regular cleanup task and get reminders. A few questions.
Thanks, William Pietri 01:10, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm considering writing a bot that would loop through all the articles containing a certain infobox, reading the infobox parameters and making a list of likely errors such as:
My initial planned target is Template:Infobox Locomotive (in about 700 articles, the two errors above are from maybe 20 I've looked at closely enough that I'd have noticed), but it could be adapted to almost any template used to display numerical data, and I'm open to suggestions as to which ones would be worth doing.
Since checks of this sort only indicate that a value is probably wrong, not what it should be, the bot would not be able to correct them itself, and would hence be a read-only bot; according to earlier discussion it would hence not need formal approval, but I'd like to know if you think this is a good idea, and whether it has been tried before, before I take the time to actually write it.-- QuantumEngineer 00:25, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
As someone who frequently RC patrols, and often speaks to others, I would like to make a comment about the various new antivandal bots that are being approved at the current time. I feel the approvals process is not strict enough in this regard, and that approving bots that aren't as good as existing bots may in fact have a negative overall effect. The simple fact of the matter is that, at the moment, we have at least four approved antivandal bots that, for the most part, just race each other to the same reverts. However, these bots are not equally reliable in giving correct warnings and reports to AIV as each other. Given MartinBot is currently shut down, the best bot by far in terms of reliability and accuracy of warnings that we have at the moment is ClueBot. After monitoring the contributions of all the bots for some time, I can conclusively say that it is by far the most consistent with its warning levels and reports to AIV. Furthermore, it uses a standard format of warning templates which mean that other scripts and bots can detect which warning level a user has previously received very easily. However, ClueBot is not the fastest bot. Looking at its status on IRC, it reveals that VoABot II has beaten it to a revert on over 2000 occasions that it recognised recently, and Counter Vandalism Bot has beaten it on 250 occasions. Since both of these bots are not as consistent with their warnings, this is counterproductive. Furthermore, VoABot II has increased response speed so much recently, that it is even causing many rollback failures to admins (notably DerHexer who is one of the most active in this regard). Again, I believe this is counterproductive, because I do not believe a bot is going to be able to judge the appropriate warning as effectively as a person.
There are further disadvantages that also stem from having various different antivandal bots racing each other. One such example, as I have seen on a number of occasions recently, is that Counter Vandalism Bot reverts and gives a level four vandalism warning to a dynamic IP from which there have been no edits for the best part of a month, and should be given a level one or two warning. ClueBot then reverts that IP on a separate page, detects it has just received a level four warning, and reports it to AIV. This may then be turned down at AIV because the IP has only made two edits. Thus, in such cases, Counter Vandalism Bot is actually worsening the effectiveness of ClueBot.
Now, unlike some, I am not against antivandalism bots by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I very strongly support them. However, I would make some strong recommendations which I think would improve the effectiveness of these bots. Firstly, and likely controversially, I think they should operate at a slight delay (only a matter of seconds) so that, if any actual person were going to revert a particular edit, they would have a chance to do so before the bots. Although this would mean that vandalism would appear on pages for a slightly longer period, I think the net result would be positive due to a greater accuracy of warnings and which would see people learning their errors or indeed being blocked more promptly, as appropriate. Secondly, and regardless of whether the first recommendation is adopted, I think the various antivandal bots should have differing time delays so as to ensure that the most reliable bot at warning users (ClueBot) always makes a revert if it recognises something, and the other bots only revert later if ClueBot has missed the vandalism. I think this would be greatly advantageous, and would probably not require much of a time delay to effect.
Finally, I think a far greater consideration needs to be made before approving new antivandal bots. The criteria should not simply be "can it revert vandalism and warn users?" New antivandal bots should exhibit a high reliability (and very low rate of false positives) at reverting vandalism that existing bots would not revert anyway. They should also warn and report users to AIV at least as accurately as existing bots. There is no benefit to approving a new bot that will just race the existing ones to the same reverts, and makes more errors in warning users. I hope all these recommendations will be considered, as I have spent some time thinking about this and indeed watching the current antivandal bots in action. Will (aka Wimt) 21:07, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
(undent)
I'm going to go ahead and draft up a specification for behavior of AV bots today, and we'll poke all the AV bot operators to chime in and contribute. My objective is to have a document we can point to as the "minimally correct" set of behavior that must be implemented for an AV bot to be approved, and which currently approved bots should conform to as quickly as reasonably possible.
Anyone wants to tackle the four templates? I'm thinking {{ uw-avb1}}, {{ uw-avb2}}, {{ uw-avb3}} and {{ uw-avb4}} which should minimally take the name of the tagging bot, the article and a timestamp as arguments? (like {{uw-avb2|bot=ClueBot|time=~~~~~|page=c}} ).
I would like to be able to help out another administrator who has requested that AMbot be permitted to remove a number of user talk pages from a category, which they were put in through an improper template substitution. As this is a one-time task, and it is very similar to what is approved in Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/AMbot, I was hoping to seek simple approval though this talk page rather than submitting a new formal request. For more details, please see the request at [2] concerning Category:User-specific Welcome templates. -- After Midnight 0001 21:10, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
A patch of mine to MediaWiki has just gone live which enables bots to mark their edits as non-bot. ClueBot is already set up to do this, so it should start working as soon as it is flagged. ClueBot needs to be flagged because unflagged rollbackers are limited to 5 reverts per minute, which ClueBot regularly goes over during morning hours. Thanks. -- Cobi( t| c| b) 06:23, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
&bot=0
to the edit page or to the rollback link (which ClueBot currently does) will make it look like a normal edit, in both Recent Changes/Watchlists and in the page history. If &bot=0
is appended, it is exactly as if it weren't flagged at all, except rollback limits aren't so strict that they hinder the operation of the bot during peak hours. And, Tawker, ClueBot already does use rollback. But, it uses its own edit summary so it looks exactly like the bot's manual revert. Rollback is just more efficient. Thanks, Cobi. (At an untrusted computer, thus the IP instead of logging in)
24.211.185.44 (
talk) 22:49, 13 January 2008 (UTC)Even though I'm a non-member of BAG, I also approve this. If we're making it easier for the bot, let's make it easier all the way. To any bystander this will look like an ordinary rollback, but will allow the bot to run faster. Миша 13 20:56, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
This sounds good. And when using rollback the bot still has it's own custom edit summary right? So, it's flagged in order to go faster, turns off "bot" for the edit so it appears in RC, and the rollback has a custom edit summary saying why the reversion was made, where to complain, etc? -- kingboyk ( talk) 18:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm wondering, do I need approval to use this bot? It's listed on the semi-bot pages and I did not understand if the software listed there need always approval from the community. Please confirm.-- Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves talk / contribs (join WP:PT) 03:59, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
I've only just started using AWB, but I was wondering if it was possible to set up a bot account to use it to do some tasks for WP:COMICS. Could a bot account using awb run through the comic stub categories and unstub long articles automatically, and could it replace {{ comicsproj}} with {{ comicsproj}}? I don't want to request a bot account until I understand what I can do with it and if it is neccesary. Appreciate the help, this is all a bit new to me. Hiding T 13:06, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
I've removed it on WP:BRFA, because I found it intensely annoying. Why was it added? I can see potential ugliness from the new "first section" edit headers, but can they not be disabled in each transcluded request rather than making it far more difficult to do anything with WP:BRFA? Mart inp23 02:38, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
This is just to run an idea past you guys before actually doing something about it. :-)
Problem
Some of the Country Projects have huge numbers of Unassessed articles - Spain has 14030, France has 10857. France has another 11610 Stubs waiting to be assessed for Importance. Past experience has shown that noone's much interested in doing anything about that when there's 1000's to be done - I've assessed several 1000 articles myself, it's tedious, back-breaking work - but that if you can get it down to zero, then people are quite good at keeping on top of it after that. Assessing for Class greatly slows down assessment, as you have to grab the article before moving to the Talk page, whereas you can assess for Importance just based on the article name. So a way of assessing for Class automagically would help considerably. When you look at them, you find that most of these Unassessed articles are transwiki'd communes and villages.
Proposal
Two bots, to be run as a one-off per Project. The first is a read-only bot that reads in a list of the Unassessed articles in a Project, and counts article length, number of .jpg links, <ref tags, headings, stub templates and looks for a "town" infobox such as Template:Infobox_CityIT - if present, it extracts the population of the place. Then I would manually set up lists to feed into auto-mode Kingbot for assessment in the Project banner on Talk pages thus :
In the light of the discussion going on at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#BetacommandBot "rating" articles and leaving notes about it, it may be necessary to review at some point whether there is community consensus for this task. I don't know what the procedure is, but I thought that the people running RfBA should at least be aware of this discussion. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 20:04, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
Just out of curiosity, why don't we publish the code of the bots for community review? What are the pros and cons of publishing vs. not? Lawrence § t/ e 14:09, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) The vandal bots aren't sensitive and ClueBot is already open source. I have two objections to releasing my code, first I would have to clean it up as mentioned above and second I don't want to be liable for fixing more that one copy of the code. If I leave and a botop that knows what their doing takes over my code that is fine but I don't want 10 clones of BJBot screwing up everywhere. BJ Talk 21:33, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
I suggest that we discuss whether it is appropriate to encourage bot code to be released under
GFDL.
GFDL-published bot code should of course be approved before anybody is allowed to run it, and it should only be run by approved bot operators. Currently used bots may not be released under GFDL, either because some parts of the code are taken from a non-free source, or because the developer does not want to release the code. However, this can be treated similar to how we treat copyrighted/free images. For instance: A proprietary bot should not be allowed if a free (and approved) one is available that does the same task. A long-term goal may be to use only GFDL-bots. Oceanh ( talk) 22:22, 25 February 2008 (UTC).
Hey, is it just me, or, is the bot that normally maintains the table near the top of the BRFA's MIA? (You know, the one that shows when blah was last edited, and, then, when blah was last edited by BAG etc etc) SQL Query me! 13:52, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
User:AtidrideBot registered on Dec 10, 2007 and thus far as made a single drive-by edit of the editabuse template [5]. 2 things, one the edit itself seemed to target a bot owner, two the user's name looks like a bots, even though it isn't flagged as such. MBisanz talk 20:52, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
I posted this on the main talk, but could someone go ahead and approve this? Geoff Plourde ( talk) 07:56, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest reopening it. It really wasn't open for long enough at all. I'd suggest a minimum term to guage community consensus of 7 days. If the bot fails, then so be it - clearly the community doesn't want it. We should therefore, perhaps, get over it and not try to push a bot which seems to have support within BAG through the system. Thoughts? Mart inp23 23:32, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
KevinBot is no longer active and can be de-flagged. I may reactivate it sometime in the future but I'm just too busy these days. Kevin Rector ( talk) 01:18, 14 March 2008 (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 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | → | Archive 10 |
Hi.
Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Polbot 3 is a request for bot approval that's been open for about a month now. The last time a BAG member edited it was June 16. It's been tagged "attention requested" for about two weeks now, but no action has been taken. It has had unanimous approval from those who have commented. I'm considering withdrawing the request and just running the bot. This seems to me to be an "Ignore all rules" case: there seems to be community consensus to run it, the bot will help the encyclopedia, and the only thing stopping it from running is a rule. Are there any objections to this? If so, what do you recommend I do? (I mean no disrespect to the BAG members, by the way.) All the best, –
Quadell (
talk) (
random) 14:19, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Scrub the above. It's been approved for a trial period of 50 edits. I'll discuss with Quadell. Carcharoth 14:31, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Those links displayed as [1], [2], etc. seem to be the same as the flag log links. Why do we have two links to the same thing? Andre ( talk) 20:07, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Do I have to requests for approval to make edits to my own userspace like updating the list of album covers with disputed fair use claim or the list of album covers without fair use rationale? Jogers ( talk) 14:28, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
Freak gave me approval but it's still listed under "trial", can this be remedied? Adam McCormick 02:07, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Per [1], I would like to get an idea, before I actually go to the trouble of writing the bot, of the likelihood of a bot that updates scores and team records on individual sports team season pages ( 2007 Indianapolis Colts season, for instance) being approved in principle. I realize that a large part of whether or not my bot gets approved would depend on the particular details of its implementation, but before I go to the work of writing it I'd like to know whether or not the general idea of such a bot is acceptable. Kurt Weber 16:24, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm interested in creating a crawler just to copy all the page content of the translated pages on Wikipedia:Translation/*/Completed_Translations, and I think I have the same question as Symmetric above. If I'm just screen scraping this small section of Wikipedia (maybe 200 pages), do I need to get permission? I might use the "edit this page" button, but just to get the wiki-style page text (not the full HTML). I wouldn't actually edit anything. Thanks! Sedatesnail 19:47, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
Can I get approval to run the bot in supervised, semiautomatic mode to finish debugging it? (Basically, it performs one new page check, and submits the edits for my approval before doing them).
It wouldn't break Google's TOS since, strictly speaking, the searches aren't automated. Admittedly, that's splitting semantic hair but I doubt they'd object. :-) — Coren (talk) 00:14, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
As part of the BAG policy when joining, I must notify certain pages about my request for BAG membership. Please see my request at Wikipedia talk:Bots/Approvals group#Nomination to join the BAG. Thank you for your time, — E talk bots 12:09, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
I would like to get a higher EPM for ClueBot or perhaps just use a maxlag= value. I was told by Wikihermit that I would need to get the bot flagged before I could have a higher EPM. Can I get User:ClueBot flagged? -- Cobi( t| c| b| cn) 01:52, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
Can someone add my bot to the page, I can't edit the page for some reason. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vandalstopperbot ( talk • contribs) 11:01, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
Can someone add {{BRFA|AlptaSandBoxBot||Open}}
to
Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval?
Alpta 03:22, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Bots/Approvals group. Thanks. CO 2 21:39, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
Can someone add {{BRFA|ChandlerMapBot||Open}}
to
Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval? Thank you. --
ChandlerMap 11:42, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
I've asked for assistance in getting a stable solution to the Sandbox reset problem, at Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard#Critical - intro and sandbox bot missing. Please help. -- Quiddity 20:25, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
What is the policy on approval for assisted bots? Like if I want to run solve disambiguation.py only, with no modifications at all, do I need approval? Thanks. :) - cohesion 01:59, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
How does one make a request for removal of bot status? User:JAnDbot has been making questionable removal of valid iw links, such as this one. On following to the owner's talk page (on the Czech WP), it turns out that others have been noticing and commenting on the same problem across several languages. -- EncycloPetey 13:01, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
There is a bot that is clearly flouting Wikipedia:Bot policy#Spell checking bots - GurchBot. Look at this diff to Golden West Network - I suggest something is done if it is an 'unattended fashion' per the bot policy. Auroranorth 12:57, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
Do I have to run it from my computer? Thanks in advance.-- Tasc0 22:01, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
Is there a bot that can crawl a subject's lists (basic topic list, topic list, etc.), and check the talk page of each article listed on those lists for the existence of the subject's wikiproject banner, adding it to those pages where it doesn't yet exist?
If not, would there be any objections to the creation of such a bot?
The Transhumanist 06:01, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
To make it easier for my bots to remove images, it would be useful for the bots to canonicalize image links in the articles they edit: remove unneccessary spaces, convert underscores to spaces, and convert percent-encoded characters to UTF-8. Do I need to get approval for this? -- Carnildo 21:51, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
Some questions on requesting bot approval:
1. I have a few tools on the go that grab various items through index.php and api.php and based on the results grab some more. They are currently read-only. Since one human-click can result in a few hundred page requests, they are definitely "automated tools" - but do they qualify as bots needing approval? My information from a support ticket I placed is that "you can request pages as fast as you want as long as you obey the maxlag= parameter", which I do.
2. Now I want to modify one of my tools to pump some output into a sub-page of my User or User-talk page. Does that now qualify as a bot needing approval? If so, would I need approval before even trying the code? Can I use my own ID for this or do I need to create a FranaBot?
3. In the event the answer to either above is yes, you do need approval, a follow-up question: NOT to be flippant or disrespectful, but given that I could almost certainly make my packets identical to IE7's, why would I care if you approve or disapprove? The obvious answer being that if I cause disruption, I'm tossed out of the project, but are there any other answers?
4.(added) If I distribute the read-only tools to other users, am I now crossing the approval threshold?
Thanks for your help. Franamax 17:40, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
As for why you'd want or need approval, it's actually fairly simple: any account that starts making a lot of edits very quickly without a bot flag is liable to be blocked on sight as a rogue bot by admins watching the RC page. When the account has the bot flag, then its edits do not clutter up the RC (unless one asks for bot edits), and the presence of the bot flag shows approval (to avoid twitchy admins). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Coren ( talk • contribs) 18:33, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks both for your response. More specific questions:
1. crPatrol is a handkerchief an admin gave me to sniff - scan Newpages for recent re-created pages and report. I'm tweaking this to also check variant capitalizations of the article name to spot the more enterprising re-adders. I want to push the results to my Talk as there are indications that the Newpage patrollers may find it useful. Eventually I'm thinking about a 10-minute incremental scan, therefore unattended.
2. wpW5 will eventually do all of who-what-when-where-why. Right now it can take a text fragment and, if it is in the existing article, tell within 3 minutes when and by whom it first appeared (30 seconds is more accurate). I get the revision history by scraping html from index.php - I can get 5000/request that way, at the expense of bandwidth and loading the server. api.php will do it far more efficiently but &prop=revisions is limited to 50/time for non-bots. It would make way more sense for both client time and server load to use the api.php interface, but only if I can use the bot limit of 500 revisions per request.
Thanks for the other tips. I like that Toolserver, I could get my awk and grep back! Franamax 04:58, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
(b)Nope. That's well within reasonable range.
(c)Actually, using action=query&apm;list=recentchanges will get new new pages: they are type="1" in the response.
(b) No, every operator would needs its own bot account and separate approval. The BAG doesn't just approve bots, it also approves bot operators. Don't want to flag a vandal and all that.
(c)I don't expect so. The devs have placed the bot/not bot distinction there, it's not likely you'll be able to convince them otherwise.
A couple suggestions. For #1, I'd recommend using #en.wikipedia on irc.wikimedia.org to get notification of new pages' creation; it's very efficient and puts NO more load on the server when you're just watching the site, as is appropriate. For #2, I'd use the Toolserver. This is not a bot function, it is a script function. There are already several existing scripts that perform this function as well. If you're confident of your script's efficiency and stability, I'd be willing to have my account host it. — madman bum and angel 19:14, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Hi! I'm thinking about building something called User:ChoreBot. It's a way for users to pledge to do some regular cleanup task and get reminders. A few questions.
Thanks, William Pietri 01:10, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm considering writing a bot that would loop through all the articles containing a certain infobox, reading the infobox parameters and making a list of likely errors such as:
My initial planned target is Template:Infobox Locomotive (in about 700 articles, the two errors above are from maybe 20 I've looked at closely enough that I'd have noticed), but it could be adapted to almost any template used to display numerical data, and I'm open to suggestions as to which ones would be worth doing.
Since checks of this sort only indicate that a value is probably wrong, not what it should be, the bot would not be able to correct them itself, and would hence be a read-only bot; according to earlier discussion it would hence not need formal approval, but I'd like to know if you think this is a good idea, and whether it has been tried before, before I take the time to actually write it.-- QuantumEngineer 00:25, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
As someone who frequently RC patrols, and often speaks to others, I would like to make a comment about the various new antivandal bots that are being approved at the current time. I feel the approvals process is not strict enough in this regard, and that approving bots that aren't as good as existing bots may in fact have a negative overall effect. The simple fact of the matter is that, at the moment, we have at least four approved antivandal bots that, for the most part, just race each other to the same reverts. However, these bots are not equally reliable in giving correct warnings and reports to AIV as each other. Given MartinBot is currently shut down, the best bot by far in terms of reliability and accuracy of warnings that we have at the moment is ClueBot. After monitoring the contributions of all the bots for some time, I can conclusively say that it is by far the most consistent with its warning levels and reports to AIV. Furthermore, it uses a standard format of warning templates which mean that other scripts and bots can detect which warning level a user has previously received very easily. However, ClueBot is not the fastest bot. Looking at its status on IRC, it reveals that VoABot II has beaten it to a revert on over 2000 occasions that it recognised recently, and Counter Vandalism Bot has beaten it on 250 occasions. Since both of these bots are not as consistent with their warnings, this is counterproductive. Furthermore, VoABot II has increased response speed so much recently, that it is even causing many rollback failures to admins (notably DerHexer who is one of the most active in this regard). Again, I believe this is counterproductive, because I do not believe a bot is going to be able to judge the appropriate warning as effectively as a person.
There are further disadvantages that also stem from having various different antivandal bots racing each other. One such example, as I have seen on a number of occasions recently, is that Counter Vandalism Bot reverts and gives a level four vandalism warning to a dynamic IP from which there have been no edits for the best part of a month, and should be given a level one or two warning. ClueBot then reverts that IP on a separate page, detects it has just received a level four warning, and reports it to AIV. This may then be turned down at AIV because the IP has only made two edits. Thus, in such cases, Counter Vandalism Bot is actually worsening the effectiveness of ClueBot.
Now, unlike some, I am not against antivandalism bots by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I very strongly support them. However, I would make some strong recommendations which I think would improve the effectiveness of these bots. Firstly, and likely controversially, I think they should operate at a slight delay (only a matter of seconds) so that, if any actual person were going to revert a particular edit, they would have a chance to do so before the bots. Although this would mean that vandalism would appear on pages for a slightly longer period, I think the net result would be positive due to a greater accuracy of warnings and which would see people learning their errors or indeed being blocked more promptly, as appropriate. Secondly, and regardless of whether the first recommendation is adopted, I think the various antivandal bots should have differing time delays so as to ensure that the most reliable bot at warning users (ClueBot) always makes a revert if it recognises something, and the other bots only revert later if ClueBot has missed the vandalism. I think this would be greatly advantageous, and would probably not require much of a time delay to effect.
Finally, I think a far greater consideration needs to be made before approving new antivandal bots. The criteria should not simply be "can it revert vandalism and warn users?" New antivandal bots should exhibit a high reliability (and very low rate of false positives) at reverting vandalism that existing bots would not revert anyway. They should also warn and report users to AIV at least as accurately as existing bots. There is no benefit to approving a new bot that will just race the existing ones to the same reverts, and makes more errors in warning users. I hope all these recommendations will be considered, as I have spent some time thinking about this and indeed watching the current antivandal bots in action. Will (aka Wimt) 21:07, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
(undent)
I'm going to go ahead and draft up a specification for behavior of AV bots today, and we'll poke all the AV bot operators to chime in and contribute. My objective is to have a document we can point to as the "minimally correct" set of behavior that must be implemented for an AV bot to be approved, and which currently approved bots should conform to as quickly as reasonably possible.
Anyone wants to tackle the four templates? I'm thinking {{ uw-avb1}}, {{ uw-avb2}}, {{ uw-avb3}} and {{ uw-avb4}} which should minimally take the name of the tagging bot, the article and a timestamp as arguments? (like {{uw-avb2|bot=ClueBot|time=~~~~~|page=c}} ).
I would like to be able to help out another administrator who has requested that AMbot be permitted to remove a number of user talk pages from a category, which they were put in through an improper template substitution. As this is a one-time task, and it is very similar to what is approved in Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/AMbot, I was hoping to seek simple approval though this talk page rather than submitting a new formal request. For more details, please see the request at [2] concerning Category:User-specific Welcome templates. -- After Midnight 0001 21:10, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
A patch of mine to MediaWiki has just gone live which enables bots to mark their edits as non-bot. ClueBot is already set up to do this, so it should start working as soon as it is flagged. ClueBot needs to be flagged because unflagged rollbackers are limited to 5 reverts per minute, which ClueBot regularly goes over during morning hours. Thanks. -- Cobi( t| c| b) 06:23, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
&bot=0
to the edit page or to the rollback link (which ClueBot currently does) will make it look like a normal edit, in both Recent Changes/Watchlists and in the page history. If &bot=0
is appended, it is exactly as if it weren't flagged at all, except rollback limits aren't so strict that they hinder the operation of the bot during peak hours. And, Tawker, ClueBot already does use rollback. But, it uses its own edit summary so it looks exactly like the bot's manual revert. Rollback is just more efficient. Thanks, Cobi. (At an untrusted computer, thus the IP instead of logging in)
24.211.185.44 (
talk) 22:49, 13 January 2008 (UTC)Even though I'm a non-member of BAG, I also approve this. If we're making it easier for the bot, let's make it easier all the way. To any bystander this will look like an ordinary rollback, but will allow the bot to run faster. Миша 13 20:56, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
This sounds good. And when using rollback the bot still has it's own custom edit summary right? So, it's flagged in order to go faster, turns off "bot" for the edit so it appears in RC, and the rollback has a custom edit summary saying why the reversion was made, where to complain, etc? -- kingboyk ( talk) 18:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm wondering, do I need approval to use this bot? It's listed on the semi-bot pages and I did not understand if the software listed there need always approval from the community. Please confirm.-- Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves talk / contribs (join WP:PT) 03:59, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
I've only just started using AWB, but I was wondering if it was possible to set up a bot account to use it to do some tasks for WP:COMICS. Could a bot account using awb run through the comic stub categories and unstub long articles automatically, and could it replace {{ comicsproj}} with {{ comicsproj}}? I don't want to request a bot account until I understand what I can do with it and if it is neccesary. Appreciate the help, this is all a bit new to me. Hiding T 13:06, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
I've removed it on WP:BRFA, because I found it intensely annoying. Why was it added? I can see potential ugliness from the new "first section" edit headers, but can they not be disabled in each transcluded request rather than making it far more difficult to do anything with WP:BRFA? Mart inp23 02:38, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
This is just to run an idea past you guys before actually doing something about it. :-)
Problem
Some of the Country Projects have huge numbers of Unassessed articles - Spain has 14030, France has 10857. France has another 11610 Stubs waiting to be assessed for Importance. Past experience has shown that noone's much interested in doing anything about that when there's 1000's to be done - I've assessed several 1000 articles myself, it's tedious, back-breaking work - but that if you can get it down to zero, then people are quite good at keeping on top of it after that. Assessing for Class greatly slows down assessment, as you have to grab the article before moving to the Talk page, whereas you can assess for Importance just based on the article name. So a way of assessing for Class automagically would help considerably. When you look at them, you find that most of these Unassessed articles are transwiki'd communes and villages.
Proposal
Two bots, to be run as a one-off per Project. The first is a read-only bot that reads in a list of the Unassessed articles in a Project, and counts article length, number of .jpg links, <ref tags, headings, stub templates and looks for a "town" infobox such as Template:Infobox_CityIT - if present, it extracts the population of the place. Then I would manually set up lists to feed into auto-mode Kingbot for assessment in the Project banner on Talk pages thus :
In the light of the discussion going on at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#BetacommandBot "rating" articles and leaving notes about it, it may be necessary to review at some point whether there is community consensus for this task. I don't know what the procedure is, but I thought that the people running RfBA should at least be aware of this discussion. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 20:04, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
Just out of curiosity, why don't we publish the code of the bots for community review? What are the pros and cons of publishing vs. not? Lawrence § t/ e 14:09, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) The vandal bots aren't sensitive and ClueBot is already open source. I have two objections to releasing my code, first I would have to clean it up as mentioned above and second I don't want to be liable for fixing more that one copy of the code. If I leave and a botop that knows what their doing takes over my code that is fine but I don't want 10 clones of BJBot screwing up everywhere. BJ Talk 21:33, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
I suggest that we discuss whether it is appropriate to encourage bot code to be released under
GFDL.
GFDL-published bot code should of course be approved before anybody is allowed to run it, and it should only be run by approved bot operators. Currently used bots may not be released under GFDL, either because some parts of the code are taken from a non-free source, or because the developer does not want to release the code. However, this can be treated similar to how we treat copyrighted/free images. For instance: A proprietary bot should not be allowed if a free (and approved) one is available that does the same task. A long-term goal may be to use only GFDL-bots. Oceanh ( talk) 22:22, 25 February 2008 (UTC).
Hey, is it just me, or, is the bot that normally maintains the table near the top of the BRFA's MIA? (You know, the one that shows when blah was last edited, and, then, when blah was last edited by BAG etc etc) SQL Query me! 13:52, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
User:AtidrideBot registered on Dec 10, 2007 and thus far as made a single drive-by edit of the editabuse template [5]. 2 things, one the edit itself seemed to target a bot owner, two the user's name looks like a bots, even though it isn't flagged as such. MBisanz talk 20:52, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
I posted this on the main talk, but could someone go ahead and approve this? Geoff Plourde ( talk) 07:56, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest reopening it. It really wasn't open for long enough at all. I'd suggest a minimum term to guage community consensus of 7 days. If the bot fails, then so be it - clearly the community doesn't want it. We should therefore, perhaps, get over it and not try to push a bot which seems to have support within BAG through the system. Thoughts? Mart inp23 23:32, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
KevinBot is no longer active and can be de-flagged. I may reactivate it sometime in the future but I'm just too busy these days. Kevin Rector ( talk) 01:18, 14 March 2008 (UTC)