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Depreciated template

Would anyone be able to replace Template:Volcanism of Canada Workgroup? It has been depreciated and merged into Template:WikiProject Volcanoes, and is no longer needed. Thanks! Kevin Rutherford (talk) 22:47, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

@Ktr101: Could you please point us towards the discussion where consensus was reached to do this? Also, could you please update Template:Volcanism of Canada Workgroup/doc to state that the template is deprecated? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 23:34, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
Here you go! Kevin Rutherford (talk) 23:38, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
@Ktr101: Thanks for the link. Instead of my suggestion above, should Template:Volcanism of Canada Workgroup be changed to a redirect to Template:WikiProject Volcanoes? GoingBatty (talk) 23:59, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
@Ktr101: I believe your request is to replace {{Volcanism of Canada Workgroup}} with {{WikiProject Volcanoes}}. What should be done with the class and importance parameters in {{Volcanism of Canada Workgroup}}? If {{WikiProject Volcanoes}} already exists on the talk page, should {{Volcanism of Canada Workgroup}} just be removed? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 00:07, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
Merging the template would not help because it would still be duplicated on hundreds of pages. In terms of removing it, yes that should be what is done. The parameters should be moved over, much like what is done with Template:WikiProject United States, where parameters are used within the template. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 00:29, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
@GoingBatty:, are you going to do this, or are others going to have to do it instead? Kevin Rutherford (talk) 06:28, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
@Ktr101: I see you added the task force to Template:WikiProject Volcanoes. Could you also please update the documentation? GoingBatty (talk) 22:38, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Done! Kevin Rutherford (talk) 00:24, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
Thank you! I'm interpreting that change as saying that there's no |Canada-importance= parameter. Presuming the importance of the workgroup may not necessarily be the importance of the WikiProject, are these two edits correct? [1] [2] Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 04:02, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
The updated WPVOLCANOES banner template is not linking to the portal. It needs to be fixed to link to Portal:Volcanism of Canada (this can either be done by adding a portal link to the TF line, or using a switch to switch the main portal to the Canadian one when the TF is active) -- 70.50.151.11 (talk) 07:57, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
Fixed. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 01:57, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
@70.50.151.11: Actually, would you be able to check that out, as I am not completely sure that I got it right that time. Thanks! Kevin Rutherford (talk) 04:31, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
I took a look. It appears to add a portal you need to use HOOK_TF. I created a sandbox version at Template:WikiProject Volcanoes/sandbox that you can see at Template:WikiProject Volcanoes/testcases working showing the portal. Also, the "|tf 1 importance={{{Volcanoes}}}" appears nonstandard. Usually, this would match the TF name and append "-importance" (ie. "|tf 1 importance=" )-- 70.50.151.11 (talk) 06:56, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
Okay, I have gone ahead and fixed it, so thanks for the help! @GoingBatty:, will you be able to help with this? Kevin Rutherford (talk) 03:33, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
@Ktr101: Still waiting for a response to my question from 19 February above. GoingBatty (talk) 03:53, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
No, because they don't include the volcano-importance (when in doubt, make a reasonable guess), as well as an importance to the workgroup. Here are the correct versions of those edits 1 and 2. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 04:04, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
@GoingBatty:. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 16:46, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
@GoingBatty:, did that answer everything? Kevin Rutherford (talk) 05:23, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
@Ktr101: Thank you for showing that there is a |Canada-importance= parameter. Could you please explain what logic the bot should use to populate |importance= and |Canada-importance=? I don't know how what you want when I look at this edit and this edit? A bot can't "make a reasonable guess". Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 02:55, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
@Going Batty: Most likely, keep the importance from the Volcanoes one, and merge in the Canada-importance one if there is one. If not, then we can hand-add it at a later date. I would say use your discretion if you are going to be using AWB, but if not, they don't all have to have importances on the page, but it would be nice not to have to go back and add them to hundreds of pages. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 18:51, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 Doing... semi-automated, since there are several variations and only a 380 pages. GoingBatty (talk) 03:08, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 Done! GoingBatty (talk) 04:54, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Add {{WikiProject Glaciers}} to Category:Glaciers

Can someone please set use a bot to replace {{Messagebox glaciers}} with {{WikiProject Glaciers}}. After that is done, could that bot to run through Category:Glaciers and place the template on the articles that don't already have it? Thank you. --evrik (talk) 03:30, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Unless there is going to be gained from doing this WP:COSMETICBOT kind of discourages the first part, although the second part would definitely require a bot. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 06:28, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Why would that be beneficial? Template:Messagebox glaciers is a one-level redirect to Template:WikiProject Glaciers, and since it's not a double redirect, it is WP:NOTBROKEN. Sending a bot out to change one to the other and make no other changes at the same time is a cosmetic change. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:12, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
I had been under the impression that deprecated templates should be replaced whenever possible. --evrik (talk) 18:23, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Deprecated means "you shouldn't use this in future", not "you must eliminate without delay". --Redrose64 (talk) 18:57, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Okay. Not a big deal either way, I was told that redirects consume unnecessary server capacity. There still two parts to the request. --evrik (talk) 20:04, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Nope. WP:Redirects are cheap. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:15, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
  • ::::I just learned that the bots treat these templates differently, and that the redirects may affect how articles are assessed. --evrik (talk) 02:08, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
Having a bot do the second one is a good idea (in fact, it can easily be done), but it may take a few pings of people before it can be done. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 21:13, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
I think the second part can be done with WP:AWB. You may want to ask at the talk page. --Izno (talk) 18:46, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
@Evrik: I boldly changed the section header to attract those editors who run WikiProject tagging bots. Note that the instructions at the top of this page state "If you are requesting that a bot be used to add a WikiProject banner to the talkpages of all articles in a particular category or its subcategories, please be very careful to check the category tree for any unwanted subcategories. It is best to give a complete list of categories that should be worked through individually, rather than one category to be analyzed recursively." Could you please provide this list? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 05:17, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

My bot, Yobot, can do this task. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:48, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

At about 700 newpages will be added to the project including some pages in "category talk" namespace. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:00, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

 Done -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:41, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Infoboxes not using parent template

Please could someone's bot traverse Wikipedia:List of infoboxes and compile a list of those infoboxes listed there, which are not based on either {{Infobox}} or {{Infobox3cols}}? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:19, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Could somebody please remove link tracking from Daily Mirror citations (and external links) (that's a UK newspaper) as in these edits? If the same can be done for other sites, so much the better. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:22, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Anyone? Perhaps a job for one of the cleanup bots? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:13, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: Could you please point us to the discussion where consensus was formed to remove the link tracking? For this edit I used the following regex:
Find: (http:\/\/www\.(?:dailymail|examiner|mirror)\.co\.uk\/[A-Za-z0-9\/\.-]+)#[A-Za-z0-9\.]{12,13}(\s|\|)
Replace: $1$2
Is that the right logic? GoingBatty (talk) 00:28, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with regex, so can't comment on yours, sorry. However, the changes in that edit look fine. Nor am I aware of such a discussion; but removal accords with WMF policies on privacy, and I've seen others remove it as a matter of routine, as do I. Why would we include it? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:04, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
The regex looks for URLs for the UK sites dailymail, examiner, & mirror that end with a # followed by a series of 12 or 13 characters that contain letters/numbers/periods, and removes the # and subsequent characters. Do you have a link to the relevant WMF policies on privacy that I could add to the bot request form? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:59, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
Sounds OK; try https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy - Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:00, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
@GoingBatty: Any news? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:09, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
I'll let someone else run with this request. Using AWB, I think finding all the articles to change would require using the database scanner, and I haven't been able to download the database successfully yet. Good luck! GoingBatty (talk) 02:52, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
OK, thanks, anyway. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:44, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Redux

Can someone else assist, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:44, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Add volume parameter to Cite DNB/Cite DCB templates

Per Template talk:Cite DNB#CS1 errors when volume not included, could someone create a bot which would look at all the instances of {{Cite DNB}} and {{DNB}} (and their redirects) where |wstitle= is populated and |volume= if it doesn't already exist? For example, Ralph Cudworth contains {{DNB Cite|wstitle=Cudworth, Ralph}} which displays:

"Cudworth, Ralph" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.

The first link takes you to https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cudworth,_Ralph_(DNB00) which contains a DNB00 template with |volume=13. The request is to change the Wikipedia article to {{DNB Cite|wstitle=Cudworth, Ralph|volume=13}} which displays a more specific reference:

Stephen, Leslie, ed. (1888). "Cudworth, Ralph" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 13. London: Smith, Elder & Co.


Similarly, could someone also add |volume= to {{Cite DCB}} (and its redirects) if it doesn't already exist? For example, Mackenzie Bowell contains {{Canadabio|ID=7231}} which displays:

"Mackenzie Bowell". Dictionary of Canadian Biography (online ed.). University of Toronto Press. 1979–2016.

The first link takes you to http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio.php?id_nbr=7231 which contains var m_volume_name = 'Volume XIV (1911-1920)';. The request is to change the Wikipedia article to {{Canadabio|ID=7231|volume=XIV}} which displays a more specific reference:

Cook, Ramsay; Hamelin, Jean, eds. (1998). "Mackenzie Bowell". Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. XIV (1911–1920) (online ed.). University of Toronto Press.

Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 04:00, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

I am not sure how many bots have the ability to follow sister links to other wikis. It may be simpler to look at the first and last entries for each DNB volume and then pattern match on the parameter wstitle= to decide the value of volume to which the volume paramter should be set. -- PBS (talk) 17:36, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
When I suggested this before, your response was "I would be against automating on the letters at the start of the name as there is no guarantee that the name reflects its position in the volumes". Since you've changed your position, could you please provide a list of the first and last entries for each DNB volume that a potential bot operator could use? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 20:26, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
@PBS: Are you able to help with this? GoingBatty (talk) 22:57, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
@GoingBatty a list is available at s:Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900. As can be seen the list is divided up on the surname of the individual (which is the first name before the comma in each wstitle parameter entry. I have located a double barrelled family name as in Richard Chenevix Trench which is placed under Trench, Richard Chenevix. Some funnies that spring to mind.
-- PBS (talk) 09:01, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
I forgot! There is another list of DNB articles and volumes, this one is on Wikiepdia at Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/DNB Epitome -- PBS (talk) 12:24, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Facilitate inclusion of all target articles in Category:WikiProject Australian Roads articles without a road junction list

Run WP:NULLEDIT against all articles in Category:WikiProject Australian Roads articles Downsize43 (talk) 05:55, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

@Downsize43: I null edited all pages in that category. Did you want it recursive?  Hazard SJ  04:21, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
Thanks very much for that. No need for any repeat performance. Downsize43 (talk) 01:35, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

I wanted to know if there was a way to get a bot to remove wikilinks in pages where the wikilink goes back to the original page. Jinkinson talk to me 05:07, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

This usually happens because the wikilink used to go to its own page, but then the target was redirected back to the main topic. Jinkinson talk to me 17:32, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Add Navboxs

Add this templates, each one in its articles.

--Vivaelcelta {talk  · contributions} 08:50, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Chronobot

Would it be possible to create a bot that would automatically arrange dates in chronological order (ranges would probably be from the earliest one) on pages? Supernerd11 :D Firemind ^_^ Pokedex 02:00, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Could you link to an example edit so that we know exactly how you mean? Also, how many pages is this a problem on? Rcsprinter123 (message) @ 09:36, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
Alejandro Jara is one that wasn't in any sort of order at one point, I'd imagine that the potential would be there for pretty much every politician and diplomat. As for exact numbers, I've got no idea. Supernerd11 :D Firemind ^_^ Pokedex 23:38, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Falklands Islands to Falkland Islands

It's the Falkland Islands or the Falklands, not the Falklands Islands. Would it be possible for a BOT to be set up to fix this very common typo and change all instances of "Falklands Islands" to "Falkland Islands"? Many thanks. --Philip Stevens (talk) 14:00, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

@Philip Stevens: This kind of task is listed at Wikipedia:Bots/Frequently denied bots, so probably not. But I've just made this edit in 51 articles using AutoWikiBrowser, after reviewing each edit in turn. I skipped a few where "Falkland Islands" appears inside a quotation, book title, or similar; they would need someone to check the text against the source. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:46, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
Thanks. --Philip Stevens (talk) 15:24, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Allow a Flag in cite template to get the attention of a citation archive bot

Might there be any way to add a flag to a specific reference that is in the standard <ref>{{cite news |title=... |url=... etc.}}</ref> footnote format that would let some cruising bot know that the news article would likely be going behind a non-free/subscription wall in a few days/weeks, and thus would be really useful for Wikipedia use if some bot got an archive URL for the news article? Sometimes the news article I come across in leaving a citation is one that I know the newspaper won't leave the source freely available for more than a few days or weeks. Aviation Week, the Financial Times and The Economist all seem to do this, as do many others.

I asked this question on the Teahouse, or rather, a question as to whether there might already exist such a method, and was referred over here, after being told that no existing bot can handle that. Here is the remainder of that conversation, which clarifies things a bit. N2e (talk) 18:34, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

"Hello, welcome to the Teahouse. I think you could just go to the Wayback Machine and tell it to archive the article right then, and add the archive URL and date yourself. Anon126 (talk - contribs) 06:33, 6 March 2014 (UTC)"
"Yeah, Anon126|, I had understood that there was some manual way to do this. And I even tried it a few times about a year ago: but it required a lot of manual steps, wasn't intuitive, and not worth the time expended. I suspect this is true for the vast majority of citations added to WIkipedia everyday that will soon disappear to WP readers behind subscription walls. Many editors just don't take the time to manually go through several more steps after they just spent several minutes adding a source citation in the first place."
"My question is about whether there might be a way to simply leave a "flag" in a cite template (e.g., |needsArchive=y or something like that ) so that the citation might be saved in an automated way, without a multistep manual process on the part of the volunteer editor who did, after all, just spend three minutes just creating the citation in the first place."
"If the answer is that "There is no current way to do that.", then is there some way to perhaps leave an idea at a "ideas for future bots" location on the English Wikipedia? N2e (talk) 14:24, 6 March 2014 (UTC)"

The end goal would be to have a bot that searched articles for newly-added citations, and if a citation had the appropriate flag indicating that an editor had requested an archive URL be added, the bot would obtain the archive URL, and add the "|archiveurl=http etc." to the particular citation by replacing the "|requestArchiveUrl=y" flag. That's my request. Let me know if you have any questions. And I thank you for even considering it. N2e (talk) 18:34, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

@N2e: Is User:DASHBot/Dead_Links what you're talking about? If so, it has existed but got shot down due to messing up references. I still think a bot that works well should be created, as this is extremely useful. -Newyorkadam (talk) 18:40, 6 March 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam
Well, actually, no. I didn't know anything about that history. I just know that, if Wikipedia wants better sourcing from our large set of volunteer editors, it will be in Wikipedia's best interest to make adding sources as easy as possibly. And getting a permalink to an online source is part of what will give us better sources over the long term, providing better service to our readers. In general, anything that can be automated, should be, as that will reduce the "cost" to our editor's time. N2e (talk) 01:31, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
I went and looked a bit at that old bot. Looks like it was definitely doing more than I'm asking for here, which might have got it in trouble with some folks. I'm thinking this one would be less controversial for sure, partly because it is only responding (and adding an archiveurl) for editor-requested cite refs. N2e (talk) 02:47, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Opinion: Any bot that auto-magically converts regular refs to archive refs should be speedy declined. The last bot we had to do automated archive url creation needed an act of Jimbo to shut down and we still have that bot's vector and site under the global spam list. I see no problem with the bot adding a template in the reference tag that adds a hidden maintenance category for editors who want to premtively work frequently deadlinked sites is not a problem, but should not touch the cite template itself. Hasteur (talk) 02:58, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Less than 15 minutes after the above post from Hasteur, this edit was made. For those who aren't aware, RotlinkBot and "the last bot we had to do automated archive url creation" are one and the same (although after being blocked, RotlinkBot switched to editing anonymously, using a dynamic IP address which changed every few minutes). --Redrose64 (talk) 11:31, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
Well, would you look at that... Another attempt to make a end run around consensus. The past demonstrations of failure and high rate of false positives makes this a non-starter in my view. The cite template should not be modified. And yes Redrose64 I was deliberately being obtuse in my initial statement because I was trying to not make it a referendum on RotlinkBot/Archive.is. Hasteur (talk) 13:43, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
AFACT, the complaints about DASHBot related mostly to a misunderstanding of how the deadurl template parameter worked, not any actual problems with the bot. It was not blocked because of the archiving task, but because of a problem with a completely unrelated task. Rotlinkbot was blocked because it was unapproved and there were serious questions about archive.is, not because it didn't work. I agree that it shouldn't be a referendum on that, because the problems with it were almost completely unrelated to the task itself. I see no reason why a bot acting on user requests and using an established archive service would be problematic. Mr.Z-man 15:19, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

I think we are having two discussions here, the second of which seems to me may be derailing the conversation that I initially proposed to have. But maybe I'm wrong. Please consider:

  • TOPIC 1: I proposed to provide editors with a user-requested method by which an editor might request, with a flag of some sort added to the {{tl:cite}} template, that the editor would appreciate a bot stopping by and adding a link to an archive url. (I think) I provided a reasonable rationale for how such a bot might be a way to improve Wikipedia articles, supposedly the reason we are all here building content in the first place.
  • TOPIC 2: Other editors have brought up how some past historical bot that did something quite different, and a LOT more, ran amuck. Other editors have brought up how some particular bot may be evading consensus by working as an IP. Those are both interesting things for us as good WP editors to go off and deal with. But I've not ever been involved with any bot before, let alone any bot playing with citations.

So, if it is possible, I would really appreciate it if we might separate the two conversations.

Perhaps someone could move the stuff not related to THIS SPECIFIC BOT REQUEST to somewhere else where it might be productively dealt with. (IP editors avoiding consensus, etc.)

Then, perhaps we could discuss my specific bot proposal. Does a single-purpose bot, for a bot that would do only one thing (look for a specific editor-added flag) and then create an archive url for urls that would otherwise soon go behind a subscription paywall, create a bunch of issues that would make it a problematic bot? Thanks for reading this far. Cheers. N2e (talk) 23:46, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Using archiving services to circumvent the paywalls will have legal consequences for both the archivers and wikipedia. Those snapshots will be quickly removed from the archivers by publisher's request (e.g. http://archive.is/www.telegraph.co.uk) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.83.121.39 (talk) 04:32, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
Oh, I didn't know that. Others have always encouraged me to add archiveurl's to our citations. I guess it is just the case then that a lot of our citations will prove to be deadlinks in the near future. I understand the legal implications, so that's fine; the authors own their stuff. But it does make the citation folks efforts to have Wikipedia citations link to the source impossible in this case. Cheers. N2e (talk) 17:53, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Automatically add {{merged-to}} and {{merged-from}}

The merging process basically goes like this:

  1. Copy content into one articles from another
  2. Create redirect on one page, ad {{R from merge}}
  3. Add {{merged-to}} and {{merged-from}} to the talk pages of both articles

I would like to have it be such that adding an {{R from merge}} tag automatically adds the merged-to and merged-from tags. The reasons being that this tag is only placed after a completed merger, and that the to and from info is readily available. I don't know if this can be accomplished with a substitution, but a bot seemed the most likely solution. --NickPenguin(contribs) 03:28, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

It would be nice if the bot also checked for WP:Copying within Wikipedia-compliant edit summaries and made a Help:Dummy edit if necessary. I prefer the {{Copied}} tag. Flatscan (talk) 05:17, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Incomplete References

There are too many references on Wikipedia that are simply bare URLs. Could you make a bot that notifies a user on his or her talk page if they have simply added a URL as a reference; and remind them to cite the source properly?

If such a bot already exists, is there a way to make it better? Right now this seems to be a bit of a problem. Although, I have to admit, not quite as bad as it could be.

-- Kndimov (talk) 22:31, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

DYK noting bot

OK, we recently had a RFC on the way things worked at Did you know, here, and the thing which gained consensus was a bot to notify people when others had nominated their article for DYK, see here. There have been a few issues recently over article creators not liking hooks, or not wanting their articles nominated, which could be helped if they were aware that there was a discussion about the nomination which they could contribute to. Thanks, Matty.007 11:22, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

To help any potential bot creator to understand what is now in place, and what we need:
  • Instructions for nominating an individual article at DYK are at Template talk:Did you know. The instructions take the editor to a pre-programmed template where they fill in the blanks and "Save". That produces a template, such as this one I created today:
Template:Did you know nominations/Ljubica Acevska You can see from this template that I am "Nominated by", and the "Created by" is another editor. The nominator then transcludes to newly created template to "Template talk:Did you know" under the appropriate section date heading. I also transcluded this particular template on the creator's talk page. You can go there to see how it looks.
  • In some cases, the nominator and creator are the same person, so we have no problem in that situation.
  • In some cases, it is like the one I created above. In other cases, the nominator is also one of multiple creators listed.
There is no DYK process in place to notify anyone their article has been nominated. Article creators often prefer to be notified, and issues sometime arise in the review process that only the article creator can answer. The discussion Matty has lniked above suggests it should be done automatically by a bot. Can a bot be created that can detect if anyone listed as "Created by" on the DYK nomination template is other than the "Nominated by", and can that bot then transclude the nomination template to their talk page(s). — Maile (talk) 21:09, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
Coding... -ceradon talkcontribs 02:06, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
Ceradon when you get the coding done and, I assume it has to be approved as a bot, would you please post a message at WT:DYK so the DYK folks know this is operational? Thanks for your help on this. — Maile (talk) 23:21, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Reference/Notes/Citations Needed BOT

Hi,

Am involved in Tamil Wiki Projects. I would like to improve the quality of the Tamil Wikipedia articles by adding references/citations/notes for all the articles. If there is a bot for performing the operation it would be easier.

What functionality I need?

  1. It should check articles based on category (it should be configurable, supportable in UTF-8)
  2. It should check articles based on creation date (same pre-requisites of first point and end date can be current date by default/date should be given)
  3. It should add current date along with unreferenced template

How it can be done?

  1. It's simple, just we need to check whether the ref tags present in the article.
  2. If ref tag is not found in the article just mark it with unreferenced tag in addition to the current date.

How it will help?

  1. Once the template is added to the articles, we can manually search for the references/citations/notes related to the articles, which will reduce the human efforts to check randomly or category-wise.
  2. will give an overview of unreferenced articles, which will help us to know the quality of the content.

The same tool can be used in other wiki projects also. Hope to get a bot soon for high-quality articles in Tamil. Thanks. --Dineshkumar Ponnusamy (talk) 09:57, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Meta: unresolved requests

FYI, I've started a discussion at VPT about how we deal with unresolved requests. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:10, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Last-name-first redirects.

Every page on a human name written in conventional Western style (e.g. Jacob Henderson) should have a redirect pointing to that name from its sortname title (e.g. Henderson, Jacob). This makes it easier to find names when searching by last name, which is the common practice of print encyclopedias, and which many users may expect. This also applies to disambiguation pages (e.g. John Anderson), which are tagged with an {{hndis}} template, and should have an incoming redirect (e.g. Anderson, John). In each case, the redirect itself should be tagged {{R from sort name}} to indicate that it is a printworthy redirect. There are some special cases, particularly redirects with accents, diacritics, or other special characters. Where a name has a such a character, (e.g. Torbjørn Agdestein), there should be a redirect from the actual last-name-first title (e.g. Agdestein, Torbjørn) and from the sortname title (e.g. Agdestein, Torbjorn), with only the sortname title having the {{R from sort name}} tag. I estimate that there are about a half million last-name-first redirects needing to made. Note that pages with parenthetical disambiguators (e.g. Tom Jones (singer)) do not need such a redirect. Cheers! bd2412 T 17:23, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is really a good idea. Are these really common search terms? Even Obama, Barack has only 69 hits in the last 90 days, compared with 1.8 million on the article itself. Even the seemingly implausible typo Barok Oboma has more hits. It may be common practice for print encyclopedias, but WP is not paper. Print encyclopedias don't have a search engine. And given that there are nearly 1.2 million biographical articles, but only 4300 uses of {{R from sort name}}, I think this may require far more than 500k. Mr.Z-man 17:57, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
We may not be paper, but that shouldn't stop us from being searchable in a specific way that paper reference materials typically are. We do already have at least tens of thousands of last-name-first redirects, although obviously most are not tagged with the template (it might also be a botworthy task to identify redirects that are untagged sortname redirects to human names, and tag them accordingly). I've been doing these redirects by AWB myself, and I plan to continue doing so unless some faster mechanism becomes available, but there are other things I could be doing with my time. At the very least, these redirects are appropriate for an encyclopedia, potentially helpful, and should be very easy for a bot to make. bd2412 T 18:47, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
We are searchable in that way even without the redirects, because we have an actual search engine. There is no redirect at Knowlton, Andrew, but if you search for that, the very first result is Andrew Knowlton. If you do the search on Google, we're the 2nd result. My point is that we don't have to create a million redirects that almost no one is going to use because the search engine basically already implements the same functionality. The link I provided basically addresses this exact scenario:
While a bot probably could do this, bot policy requires that tasks a) be useful and b) don't consume resources unnecessarily. Since this is basically just duplicating the function of the search engine for very uncommon search terms and requires hundreds of thousands of edits, I can't see how it passes either of those requirements. Mr.Z-man 22:44, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
If these aren't useful, why do we have so many (albeit mostly untagged, which is another issue)? Why does it seem to be an automatic presumption that highly notable people like presidents and rock stars will have such redirects? Obviously, someone finds them useful enough to make. In any case, if no help is forthcoming here I will continue making them manually, and at some point most of them will be done. bd2412 T 13:45, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
Looking at whether or not someone made them is not an indicator of whether or not they are useful. We have pageview stats for that, and as I pointed out, they show that they're not very useful. Why have people created them? Who knows? Busywork? Editcount padding? Some seem to be old, possibly from the days before our search engine worked well. Mr.Z-man 14:24, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
Since you have only provided one pageview stat, perhaps we need more data points. "Jefferson, Thomas" has had 575 hits in the last 90 days. "Washington, George" has had 1184 hits in the last 90 days. "Lincoln, Abraham" has had 1897 hits in the last 90 days. These are not trivial numbers. bd2412 T 15:24, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
They're not trivial, but they are all only around 0.1% of the number of hits the actual articles get - [3] [4] [5]. Assuming that trend holds for all articles, an article that gets less than 1000 hits per month may not get any hits on the redirect. 80% of articles get <1000 hits per month.
And that trend may not hold - besides the Obama example (0.004%), we have Jagger, Mick (0.03%), Starr, Ringo (0.01%), Schwarzenegger, Arnold (0.01%), Curie, Marie (0.03%), and Nobel, Alfred (0.08%).
And, finally, as I said at the beginning: The lack of the redirect would not prevent any of those searches from working because we have a functional search engine. The point of having a search engine is so that we don't have to create redirects for every possible permutation of a title. Mr.Z-man 16:27, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

LAU

There is disagreement about whether this TLA should redirect to Local administrative unit (the situation until a couple of weeks ago) or Lebanese American University (changed then and since reversed). The disagreement can be largely made moot by fixing the 400 or so links to LAU in articles about settlements in Portugal. Each of these contains a {{Geobox}} Settlement template, with a link to LAU. If a bot could pipe these to "Local administrative unit", very few links to LAU would remain. Colonies Chris (talk) 16:01, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Conversion from Raster to Vector (SVG) Images

Hello all, I am proposing an idea based on my current activities on Wikipedia. There should be a way that the massive amount of Raster images on the project that needs converting can be changed to Vector (SVG) files, a more efficient file type that can be edited at ease. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Danielh32 (talk • contribs) 23:41, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Declined Not a good task for a bot. These sorts of conversions need human judgment to determine whether the result looks good, and very likely human judgment to perform the conversion in the first place. There may be some very simple images that could be automatically converted to pixel-identical-when-rendered versions, but I suspect these are few and far between. Anomie⚔ 12:58, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

More Portuguese settlements

There are many hundreds of articles in the subcategories of Category:Parishes of Portugal whose ({{Geobox}}es have problems with incorrect or unnecessarily indirect or unconventionally spelled links. The first in the list below is a problem that needs to be fixed; the others are all minor improvements that could be done at the same time.

  1. Civil Parish or Civil parish. These links both redirect to Civil parishes in England, so they're just wrong. They would be best converted to [[parish (administrative division)|Civil parish]]
  2. Freguesia --> [[Freguesia (Portugal)|Freguesia]], to avoid a redirect
  3. Patron Saint --> Patron saint, standard capitalisation
  4. Sea Level --> Sea level, standard capitalisation
  5. [[West European Time|WET]] --> [[Western European Time|WET]], to avoid a redirect
  6. District links of the form "[[xxx (district)|xxx]]", converted to [[xxx District|xxx]], to avoid redirects
  7. Subregion links of the form "[[xxx, Subregion|xxx]]" converted to "[[xxx Subregion|xxx]]", to avoid redirects

Colonies Chris (talk) 15:38, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Automating sort keys "by year"

For example, would it be appropriate for a bot to change the sort key of

Category:Manufacturing companies established in 1897‎ in Category:Manufacturing companies by year of establishment to "1897". If so, I can provide a partial list of such categories (starting with x (companies) by year of estabilshment). Further research would be required for automated sorting for categories which have both years and decades, but I asking whether this would be appropriate. Frequency would probably be "on request" (or weekly) for new additions, and monthly for maintenance, once individual patterns are established.

More complicated patterns might include "by country" lists.

My question here is more hypothetical: Would it be appropriate for a bot or AWB script to do this. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:12, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 21#Automatic time period category sorting, for the reverse request, which was performed by Polbot 9. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:19, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Pages with missing references list

I suggest a bot to work through the 6,300-odd pages in Category:Pages with missing references list to insert a References section heading (if not present) and the {{reflist}} template, ignoring the pages mentioned on the category page, the operation to be repeated at stated intervals. It looks from the description as though User:JamietwBot would have done this but is shown on its page as inactive: Noyster (talk), 13:40, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

According to User:Magioladitis/AWB_and_CHECKWIKI, it appears that Xqbot does this task. GoingBatty (talk) 13:47, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
There are only some 300 articles in this category, the rest are (mainly) portal subpages which don't need a reference list (they are transcluded unto a page where there is a reference list). Most of the 300 articles currently in the cat seem to be caused by a language template which has a reference to display on articles. Fram (talk)
Pages with an apparent missing reflist aren't always best fixed by adding one. If there is a <ref> with no balancing </ref>, that will also throw the error "Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).", even if there is a {{reflist}} or <references /> later on. That </ref> might be missing by accident; or it might be present as a typo e.g. </reg>; or the page may have been vandalised. Each case needs to be considered in relation to its recent editing history. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:14, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
It looks like Helpful Pixie Bot used to do this sort of edit, FWIW. The bot's owner appears to be blocked.
A longer version of Redrose64's explanation is at Help:Cite_errors/Cite_error_refs_without_references. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:35, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
The bot owner's block expires in a little less than three hours, but their ban on the use of bots is for life, so don't expect Helpful Pixie Bot (talk · contribs) to ever be reactivated. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:17, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Easy roulettebot

Is there anyone who can make a bot that will bet on different colors in roulette? For example when winning it changes to betting on black and if loses it just doubles the bet on the same color. xoxo — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.210.30.233 (talk) 16:34, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Ah, a Martingale. How would that help to build the encyclopedia? --Redrose64 (talk) 17:12, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
While we're at it, my back itches right where I can't reach it. If someone can make a bot to scratch my back for me, it will give me more time to focus on fixing disambiguation links, thereby helping to build the encyclopedia. Shoulder rubs would also be great. Cheers bd2412 T 17:18, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Page archiving for Televisionwithoutpity.com links

The website Television Without Pity is going to be shutting down next week (they aren't clear on the exact steps, how long the content will remain), and about 500 mainspace articles use it for references for primarily television episode reviews. (My list from AWB is: User:Masem/TWOP pages). While most of the recaps are archived at Archive.org, the way TWOP paginates it stories means only the first page of these reviews/recaps are archived, and I don't immediately see any way to alter the URL to get then entire recap in one shot. Of course, the ideal route would be to have a bot run though the list of articles using televisionwithoutpity.com links and archive those links, but because of this pagination, it would require 1) figuring out how many pages there is (fortunately, the url for a specific page is simply to get) and 2) submitting each of those pages to an archive. I've altered the TV project to this issue as they might provide more suggestions here. --MASEM (t) 21:53, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Romanian orthography

Hello again,

some months (or even years?) ago, I requested a mass-move and following orthography check allover the Romanian topics: Şş and Ţţ (with cedilla) are wrong, Șș and Țț (with diacritic comma) are correct. I don't remember who did it finally, but it was done.

I now see several "cedilla-s" and "cedilla-t" coming again: Could please somebody (or even the same who did it in the past) check the whole category (including the category itself) Category:Communes of Ştefan Vodă district?

Thank you (and a happy new year)! —[ˈjøːˌmaˑ] 11:09, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

It appears that your previous request was done by Vacation9's VoxelBot. GoingBatty (talk) 01:15, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
This task was not done completely. Every few days i rename pages with wrong diacritics into correct ones. XXN (talk) 12:04, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
Can someone please effectively prevent the bots from archiving this section? Thanx! —[ˈjøːˌmaˑ] 13:32, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
I've done it with my sig timestamp: Rcsprinter (Gimme a message) @ 22:00, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
Obviously, that didn't work either... :( —[ˈjøːˌmaˑ] 13:31, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
* non-automatic anti archive line * —[ˈjøːˌmaˑ] 12:33, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
* non-automatic anti archive line * —[ˈjøːˌmaˑ] 11:51, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
* non-automatic anti archive line * —[ˈjøːˌmaˑ] 15:39, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

What exactly do you want the bot to do? There were some moving requests in the past, but not much happened due to the opposition of some in the en.wp community, so you might want to search for support first.--Strainu (talk) 15:22, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

project honeypot

i need to have a bot for filling up my all entries in my project honeypot,its my college project and so i need that to show the demo to my professors — Preceding unsigned comment added by 27.251.70.204 (talk) 06:17, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

You should do your own college project instead of trying to get people to do it for you. See also Wikipedia:Do your own homework. Anomie⚔ 12:13, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Repeat request DYK notification bot

Please note that when Matty.007 listed the request below on Feb 23, it was responded to by Ceradon on March 2. This editor's contributions page show he did no other edits since that time except to archive his talk pages on March 6, and previously had not edited since July 2013. Can someone else please program the bot we need described below? — Maile (talk) 13:55, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

DYK noting bot

OK, we recently had a RFC on the way things worked at Did you know, here, and the thing which gained consensus was a bot to notify people when others had nominated their article for DYK, see here. There have been a few issues recently over article creators not liking hooks, or not wanting their articles nominated, which could be helped if they were aware that there was a discussion about the nomination which they could contribute to. Thanks, Matty.007 11:22, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

To help any potential bot creator to understand what is now in place, and what we need:
  • Instructions for nominating an individual article at DYK are at Template talk:Did you know. The instructions take the editor to a pre-programmed template where they fill in the blanks and "Save". That produces a template, such as this one I created today:
Template:Did you know nominations/Ljubica Acevska You can see from this template that I am "Nominated by", and the "Created by" is another editor. The nominator then transcludes to newly created template to "Template talk:Did you know" under the appropriate section date heading. I also transcluded this particular template on the creator's talk page. You can go there to see how it looks.
  • In some cases, the nominator and creator are the same person, so we have no problem in that situation.
  • In some cases, it is like the one I created above. In other cases, the nominator is also one of multiple creators listed.
There is no DYK process in place to notify anyone their article has been nominated. Article creators often prefer to be notified, and issues sometime arise in the review process that only the article creator can answer. The discussion Matty has lniked above suggests it should be done automatically by a bot. Can a bot be created that can detect if anyone listed as "Created by" on the DYK nomination template is other than the "Nominated by", and can that bot then transclude the nomination template to their talk page(s). — Maile (talk) 21:09, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
Coding... -ceradon talkcontribs 02:06, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
Ceradon when you get the coding done and, I assume it has to be approved as a bot, would you please post a message at WT:DYK so the DYK folks know this is operational? Thanks for your help on this. — Maile (talk) 23:21, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
@Maile66: Have you attempted to get in contact with the volunteer who took it before? Getting really irritated with the "We need a bot to do this, why isn't anybody paying attention to us" loops that are hapening here. Hasteur (talk) 14:09, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
Well, I did ping the volunteer right above your post. There was no response. And had the editor been continually editing, I might have made more tries. But this editor seems to have departed Wikipedia, and was otherwise not active on WP for over 6 months previously. I'm sorry this irritates you. But aren't you irritated at the wrong person? How about volunteer editors who verbally commit and then don't do anything? It's a little irritating on this side also.— Maile (talk) 14:17, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
@Maile66 Yes, I'm working on your task. If you want to track my progress, go here to GitHub. But the coding is coming along well. No worries. I should have a bot task filed by Monday. --ceradon talkcontribs 22:30, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
Thank you. — Maile (talk) 13:44, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
@Maile66 If the creator of the article hasn't edited in a full year or is an IP address, would it be acceptable to not notify them? Thanks, --ceradon (talk • contribs) 22:02, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
Ceradon, I have placed an inquiry at WT:DYK for admins to respond here. It occurs to me that there is a need to be selective, but I don't know how best to answer your question. The short of this is that only an editor who has really made substantive contributions. But how do you determine that? And in the case of recent Good Articles that get nominated for DYK, only the person who nominated it for a Good Article needs to be notified. But I think you need a more seasoned opinion here than I can give you.— Maile (talk) 22:21, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
(Not an admin, but a long-time DYKer.) In my opinion, you should not notify the article creator if they haven't worked on it recently. More importantly, you should not be looking at the article's history at all. Assuming the nominations are done correctly, the only users who should be notified are those who made significant contributions to the recent creation or expansion and are named in {{DYKmake}}s in the nomination template. If there's a {{DYKnom}}, then it's not a self-nomination, and all users with a DYKmake could be notified. If there's no DYKnom, it's a self-nom, and any users with a DYKmake other than the nominator could be notified. The nominator may most easily be determined by checking the nomination template's history to see who created it. The DYKmake syntax is {{DYKmake|article title|user name}}, with an optional subpage parameter at the end. There should be a way to opt out, so, for example, people who collaborate on articles won't be irritated with unwanted notifications. It would be great if the bot could check to see if the nominator has already notified other user(s), but maybe that's asking for too much. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 23:37, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
Ceradon, in regards to your IP question, it would be handled as Mandarax has suggested handling the others. Nominations have been made by registered users, when the creator was an IP address. When filling out the nomination template, there is a space for the nominator to list who created/expanded the article. That's probably the space you should draw that information from. If it lists in that space ONLY the same person who has filled out the template, then no notification is needed. If any name is listed there other than the person filling out the template, that editor should be notified. Taking into consideration what Mandarax suggested about an "opt out".— Maile (talk) 00:15, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

afi (afi.com) have reorganised their website. Links in the form connect.afi.com no longer work. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&limit=500&offset=0&target=http%3A%2F%2Fconnect.afi.com there are 210 results. Some are personal pages or talk pages, which don't need to be changed, but all links on main wiki pages should be re-pointed:

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/100Movies.pdf?docID=281 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/100Movies.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/10top10.pdf?docID=361 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/TOP10.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/Movies_ballot_06.pdf?docID=141 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/Movies_ballot_06.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/TOP10.pdf -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/TOP10.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/TOP10.pdf?docID=441 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/TOP10.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/cheers100.pdf -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/cheers100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/cheers100.pdf?docID=202 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/cheers100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/cheers300.pdf?docID=201 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/cheers300.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/handv100.pdf?docID=246 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/handv100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/handv400.pdf?docID=245 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/handv400.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/laughs100.pdf?docID=252 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/laughs100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/laughs500.pdf?docID=251 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/laughs500.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/movies100.pdf?docID=264 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/movies100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/movies400.pdf?docID=263 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/movies400.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/passions100.pdf?docID=248l -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/passions100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/quotes100.pdf?docID=242 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/quotes100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/quotes400.pdf?docID=205 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/quotes400.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/scores250.pdf?docID=221 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/scores250.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/scores250.pdf?docID=22 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/scores250.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/songs100.pdf?docID+244 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/songs100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/songs100.pdf?docID=244 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/songs100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/songs400.pdf?docID=243 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/songs400.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/stars50.pdf?docID=262 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/stars50.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/stars500.pdf?docID=261 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/stars500.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/thrills100.pdf?docID=250 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/thrills100.pdf

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/thrills400.pdf?docID=249 -> http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/thrills400.pdf


http://connect.afi.com/site/PageServer?pagename=100YearsList -> is the wrong link anyway, needs to be manually remapped to the right target

http://connect.afi.com/site/PageServer?pagename=micro_100landing -> is the wrong link anyway, needs to be manually remapped to the right target


http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/10top10.pdf?docID=381&AddInterest=1781 could be changed to http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/TOP10.pdf, but the former lists all the nominations (I think) whereas the latter only lists the winners.

Manolan1 (talk) 21:17, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Adding Glottolog codes to language infoboxes

Hi! I've been asked to write a new task for my bot at User talk:PotatoBot#PotatoBot for Glottolog codes?. Before I start coding, I'd like to ask if there is any bot around that can already do this (i.e. adding parameters to language infoboxes based on a list in wiki format) without [much] additional coding work. Thanks, ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 11:25, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

They changed their online Gold Book, breaking all our direct links. Easy regexp/replacement mapping to update them...see for example this manually done edit. Better a bot than 161 articles manually. DMacks (talk) 01:58, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

This can easily be done with AWB, so I'll go ahead and change it in the next few days. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 04:12, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
Almost 250 edits later, everything has been replaced, as there were a lot more on pages that weren't showing up on that link page. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 02:26, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
Awesome--thanks! Any idea/pattern for what made so many omitted from special:linksearch? DMacks (talk) 06:38, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
I have no idea, but this edit makes a good point that not all of the links are dead, so would you be willing to check out why this might be occurring, as I might have to rollback all of my edits. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 14:09, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
IUPAC hosts lots of content, including Gold Book. They didn't "change their domain-name from www to goldbook" (or at least it wouldn't make sense for them to do that and I didn't investigate or expect to see that change). Instead (or at least what I was flagging) was just the move of the /goldbook/ content to that subdomain (my special:linksearch was for "www.iupac.org/goldbook" not the whole "www.iupac.org"). DMacks (talk) 14:21, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
Well, after much panicking, I think I fixed everything, so all should be good now. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 03:06, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
Still broken (or re-broken, or some-adjective/adverb-broken). This still has the /goldbook/ in the pathname. The game is "the content of a directory on the main site became the toplevel content on a different site", so as I said before: They didn't "change their domain-name from www to goldbook". DMacks (talk) 04:40, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
Pages like that were from instances that shows up on the list, and I have reverted it for now as I am about to travel for a few days and want to be safe rather than sorry. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 13:55, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Broken Links: JCPC and Supreme Court of the United Kingdom

Resolved

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom have changed their website (ref) and old links are now broken. Requested changes:

  • www.jcpc.gov.uk/* → www.jcpc.uk/*
  • www.supremecourt.gov.uk/* → www.supremecourt.uk/*

--Txuspe (talk) 09:00, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

I'll tackle this in the next few days, unless there is an urgent need to change the links right now. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 05:05, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
They've been broken for three months so a few more days will be great. Thank you! --Txuspe (talk) 09:14, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
Done! Kevin Rutherford (talk) 03:52, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
Great! Thanks very much Kevin! --Txuspe (talk) 11:29, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

There are a lot of dead links on MTA (New York City)-related pages because MTA recently moved all its pages to new URLs as of March 6, 2014. The links have been dead since that date.

For example, the URL http://www.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/ridership_sub_annual.htm was moved to http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/ridership_sub_annual.htm.

The URLs all have to be changed from the format http://www.mta.info/... to http://web.mta.info/...

At least 500 pages make use of the old http://www.mta.info/... URLs. I have already notified three WikiProjects (WP:TRAINS, WP:NYC, WP:NYCPT) about this. --Epicgenius (talk) 19:49, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

To anyone who wants to do this with AWB, there are 1,260 links on the site to the dead external links. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 04:18, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
Just a note, to anyone doing this, that http://new.mta.info/... URLs should not be changed, as these are not dead links. Epicgenius (talk) 17:34, 8 April 2014 (UTC)
@Epicgenius: Do you have links to the consensus discussion? Hasteur (talk) 13:03, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
@Hasteur: Which consensus discussion? I only found that the links were dead. Mjroots pointed me here on WT:TWP. Epicgenius (talk) 13:31, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
This isn't a controversial request. An editor could do the task manually, but it's something far better suited to a bot. I've fixed the link to the WP talk page where this was first brought up. Mjroots (talk) 19:51, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I updated the links on your main page Metropolitan Transportation Authority (New York) – review the diff:

—This doesn't seem that easy to automate. A bot will need to verify that (1) the current link is a "404 Page Not Found" and (2) the new link it writes actually works. – Wbm1058 (talk) 11:51, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Dispute resolution noticeboard

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

(Previous request: Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 56#Dispute resolution noticeboard, User talk:Hasteur/Archive 8#DRNBot) --Guy Macon (talk) 17:33, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

I would second this request. Despite The Earwig's laudable efforts and full cooperation, the system for categorizing [the status of a DRN thread: open, in progress, stale etc.] and archiving threads still has glitches.-- — Keithbob • Talk • 16:30, 20 March 2014 (UTC)-- — Keithbob • Talk • 18:00, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
And often the bot 'forgets' to notify people on the user talk page that they have been listed as a party in a DRN case. If the DRN coordinator gives a warning or asks for clarification, or if a participant prematurely comments in the discussion section, the case is listed as OPEN when it clearly is not an open case.-- — Keithbob • Talk • 18:00, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
For whoever might be interested, by "do a proper job of re-engineering all of our DRN automation tools", I am talking about both a form or forms plus a bot, and someone who has the time to work with the DRN volunteers to get the details right. Here are a couple of examples of what I am talking about:
Let's say someone has a dispute about the content of First law of holes. We have a form for filing a case, but it allows the filer to enter "First law of holes" "Wikipedia talk:First law of holes", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_rule_of_holes" "irst law of ho", etc. Only the first one gives us working pagelinks. The form shouldn't let the user enter something that isn't an article in mainspace. Likewise, right now you can file a case with nobody as a party to the dispute. The form shouldn't allow that.
Right now, if someone has an old notice from a previous DRN case on their talk page, the bot doesn't notify them. The bot also won't let a volunteer make a comment without being listed as the volunteer who takes the case.
In other words, what we need is a new filing form and a new bot, both optimized for this task. I would also very much like it to be adaptable so that we can offer a version to WP:3RRNB or WP:AIAV. If we are smart about this, we can convince other editors to use the tool and thus automate multiple noticeboards and other dispute resolution venues.
I realize that this is quite ambitious compared to your average bot request, but the benefits would be huge. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:03, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
Sigh.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] --Guy Macon (talk) 07:54, 22 March 2014 (UTC)
Grumble.[13] --Guy Macon (talk) 01:20, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
(Sound of Crickets...) --Guy Macon (talk) 02:32, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Hi, I'm alive. — Earwig talk 04:24, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Good to hear from you. First, let me once again emphasize that the combination of Earwigbot and the script at Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard/request have been extremely helpful and that your work is very much appreciated. I have heard the same sentiment from other DRN volunteers. That being said, if you look at the thread above you will see some legitimate areas where we can do better, especially in the script that allows malformed requests to be posted. So, am I correct in my belief that asking you to do a proper job of re-engineering all of our DRN automation tools from top to bottom would be dumping more and more on you? On the one hand, I don't want to offend by asking elsewhere, but on the other hand I don't want to offend by asking too much of you. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:59, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Redoing DRN from scratch isn't something I'm comfortable with, particularly since it's not a project I'm personally involved in, and writing code for projects I'm not personally involved in is how we got into this mess in the first place. The bit about malformed request titles is pretty far removed from EarwigBot's area of functionality (unless you want the bot to fix bad titles, but that's going to run into other problems), so I'd rather not handle it myself. You have identified two specific areas that I think I can look into, which are the missing notifications and the ability for a volunteer to make edits without "opening" a case. I find the latter to be a bit nitpicky given DRN's informal nature, but who am I to talk? If you'd like, we could stop the bot from changing cases from 'new' to 'open' and require volunteers do it, but I don't know if this would be very helpful. As for the former, I'd rather the bot accidentally not notify someone rather than cause someone to be notified twice, which is why it's fairly conservative. It's always been my understanding that the filer is expected to leave notifications, and the bot only acts as a safeguard in case they forget. In order to improve it, we would need a more foolproof way of determining whether someone has been notified, and I've been unable to come up with a good system for that which also takes into account custom notifications that don't use the substituted template – unless, as noted previously, we're okay with double-notifications (and that prospect makes me very uncomfortable). Any other issues the bot has are either things I'm unaware of, or are a result of mutual misunderstanding regarding how the bot works (like the confusion over the meaning of 'needassist' a couple months ago). — Earwig talk 06:57, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

So, is anyone here willing to volunteer to do a proper job of re-engineering all of our DRN automation tools from top to bottom? --Guy Macon (talk) 16:51, 27 March 2014‎ (UTC)

Earwig has given a pretty substantial response about why he doesn't think re-doing DRN from scratch is a good use of (his) time. It would be helpful of why you think a "re-engineering from top to bottom" is necessary so prospective bot ops know the challenges and expectations before taking up the task; right now there's just an open-ended request, of which the scope is still unclear. Legoktm (talk) 18:04, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Ok, let me try to summarize:

  • DRN is a busy place and there are multiple cases in various stages of development at any given time. We have very few active volunteers and we are constantly on the verge of a backlog. DRN is also (in my opinion) a crucial gear in the WP machine (along with other DR forums) as conflict is the inevitable side effect of the WP collaboration model. A complex forum with a high workload and few volunteers means we need to be efficiently supported by automation. While we are very grateful for the automation afforded us thus far, the current automation has several problems and deficiencies and counteracting these deficiencies via manual examination and manipulation is time consuming and unproductive. For this reason, we need an appropriate technical person to review the entire automation set up at DRN and make fixes, revisions and upgrades. Earwig has been most helpful, but outlining isolated concerns via discussion and consensus on the DRN talk page has been slow and ineffective. A band aid approach to this problem is not working. What we need is someone who will work with DRN volunteers such as Guy Macon and myself, in a focused way, to a) review all current automation procedures and forms, b) ID and fix current problems and deficiencies, c) add additional features to further automate the DRN process.
  • This is by no means an exhaustive list. But my summary of the current problems would be:
    • Case summary chart-- Automated status changes are sometimes inaccurate and/or misleading.
      • IN PROGRESS triggers prematurely
      • CLOSED Embedded instructions to volunteers regarding manually changing the status to CLOSED should be clarified
      • Each status' markup 'code' should match the actual displayed status ie markup of NEEDASSIST yields a status of NEEDS ATTENTION and OPEN yields IN PROGRES
      • NEEDS ATTENTION and STALE were also triggering prematurely but this may have been remedied as I think Earwig removed "the logic that checks for cases being a certain number of days old...... [to] get rid of the bot's tendency to modify case statuses against volunteers' wishes"
    • Case notifications-- User talk page notices are inconsistent.
    • Filing form -- Needs improvement and expansion. It does not require a URL to prior discussion and allows editors to open a case without crucial information. It needs to be expanded to include a place for administrative comments so the case status is not prematurely changed to OPEN.

-- — Keithbob • Talk • 16:56, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

  • A follow up note........ It seems that despite possible recent changes ot the status settings, they are still cumbersome and misleading. There are too many types of status and they are confusing. For example right now (3:50 UTC) the summary chart lists cases as: New, Stale, In Progress, Need Assist. While the individual cases themselves have their status listed as: New Discussion, Dispute Inactive, Discussion In Progress, Needs Attention. Furthermore: the two cases labeled as Needs Assist/Needs Attention are ongoing cases in progress and are mislabeled. Likewise one cases listed as In Progress has yet to be opened by a moderator. -- — Keithbob • Talk • 03:59, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
  • Another glitch is that the Filed By: User XYZ section of the case overwrites the closing summary when its closed, making that portion of the summary unreadable. Please help us.-- — Keithbob • Talk • 19:57, 3 April 2014 (UTC)
  • There is also this needed change to the form, which has already been discussed and has consensus on the DRN talk page here.-- — Keithbob • Talk • 03:18, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
It is annoying that I still have to do things like this. Before I fixed it, the links in the "Location of dispute" section didn't go where we want them to go. Is anyone here willing to help us? --Guy Macon (talk) 18:11, 3 April 2014 (UTC)
(Sound of crickets...) --Guy Macon (talk) 13:38, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
...CHIRP... --Guy Macon (talk) 22:58, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
@Guy Macon: we get it that you want someone to fix the automated processes for you, however you seem to miss that the lack of response here is an indicator that the editors who are technically minded have no interest in helping DRN sort out their process. As such please do not "thread bump" this again. Perhaps in a few months when editors aren't as busy they might be able to spend time on sorting out the process but not now. Hasteur (talk) 00:47, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Add Navboxs

Add this templates, each one in its articles.

--Vivaelcelta {talk  · contributions} 07:30, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I will get this sorted tomorrow. Rcsprinter123 (converse) @ 23:55, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
I am striking through them as each one is completed. Rcsprinter123 (talk) 20:01, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Remove {{Please check ISBN}} from |isbn= in CS1 citations

At some point, a helpful bot or human editor inserted the {{Please check ISBN}} template within the |isbn= parameter in citations in a thousand or so (somewhere between hundreds and two thousand) articles. This addition may have been a helpful maintenance tag at one time, but now it interferes with displaying and fixing ISBNs in citations, as documented on the template's documentation page.

Can someone please use a bot or AWB or other means to run through Category:Pages with ISBN errors and remove all instances of {{Please check ISBN}} from the |isbn= parameter in citations? This will make it easier for human editors to clean up the articles in the category. There are about 6,600 articles in the category.

As a side note, it is likely that many of the articles edited by the bot will remain in Category:Pages with ISBN errors, since CS1 citations contain code that checks |isbn= for valid values.

A sample article that shows what this template does to citations is Theleis I Den Theleis. Thanks in advance. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:53, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

You just need to move the {{Please check ISBN}} to be outside the {{cite book}} but still be inside the <ref>...</ref>, like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:40, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
You could do that, but since the CS1 module code checks the ISBN, I don't think the "please check" template is needed at all. The template is still useful in locations where the ISBN is used outside of CS1 citations. – Jonesey95 (talk)

Here's a regex (tested successfully via AutoEd) that you can use, if you are a willing AWB user or bot operator:

(\|\s*isbn\s*=\s*[\d-X]+\s*)\{\{Please check ISBN\|reason\=[a-z\d\s\.\(\)]+\}\}

Do the find in case-insensitive mode, and replace with $1 – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:01, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Jonesey95 Do you have a discussion link showing support for this? Hasteur (talk) 12:51, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
No, I do not. The "please check" templates are old, dating from a time before the citation ISBNs were automatically checked for validity. As you can see in the link above, they do not even render correctly within the new citation module. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:00, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
Addendum: Hasteur, there was discussion at Category talk:Articles with invalid ISBNs#Placement of this template? and there is a bold warning at {{Please check ISBN}} that explains why this template should not be in |isbn= in citations. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:40, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
In point of fact, they didn't render correctly in the pre-Lua cite templates either. Most were placed by Rich Farmbrough (talk · contribs) or one of his bots - Rich had the intention of going through Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs and fixing them all up, and did in fact make some progress (if you look at his user talk page from around May/June 2012 you'll see several discussions); but with one thing and another, he has been unable to complete the cleanup. See also Category talk:Articles with invalid ISBNs#Placement of this template? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:56, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
The problem then was that the cite tempalte had been re-written to "ISBN" to the article ISBN on every single instance, contrary to the wiki-magic that links ISBN 0-14-044-170-0 automatically to the special:booksources page, and contrary to WP:OVERLINK. However the best solution is to fix up the ISBN numbers, there are only a few thousand. Unfortunately I am prevented form being much help, last time we did this we were very successful as a team, and really got stuck in on the last, very hard to source ISBNs. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 19:30, 9 April 2014 (UTC).

@Jonesey95, Redrose64, and Rich Fambrough: I ask for the Consensus discussion as a CYA of being a bot operator. So that I understand, we are to look for the {{Please check ISBN}} template inside a {{cite book}} block and move it outside the cite book, but still have it be inside the reference section. If this is correct, I'll start tinkering with my AWB rules to work on this. Hasteur (talk) 00:36, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

See this diff for a one off example that I personally double checked. Hasteur (talk) 00:53, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
I would prefer that the template be removed entirely, but moving it outside the cite template is acceptable and conservative. Please also check {{citation}}, not just {{cite book}}. Thank you! – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:12, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
@Jonesey95: Total of 17 pages (1 demo, 16 follow ups) ran. The ones that I did change I saw improvement upon in moving the template outside of the citation template but still inside the ref block. Please verify if the results (which are the block from 20:13 to 20:28. Please verify that this satisfies your need for this request. Hasteur (talk) 20:35, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
I looked at all of those edits, and they look great. Nice work. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:48, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
Hearing no objections I'm marking this resolved Hasteur (talk) 22:05, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
My mistake. I thought those were test edits. There are still dozens or even a couple hundred more articles in the category with this template in the ISBN parameter. I find them using the regex above. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:17, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
I used your regex (with a few modifications) to search on the template. Everything else was not captured by the regex. I'll paste the exact regex (and replacement I used) when I get back to my home machine so you can determine what is wrong. Hasteur (talk) 14:59, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
If it helps, here's one that my script found this morning that was apparently missed by your script. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:00, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Ok, the regex you gave me would handle the removal of the template, however the one I used to relocate the Please check ISBN and fix the closing didn't have enough potential matches in it's class match for after the ISBN template. [14] is a edit that satisfies the relocate better. Thoughts? Hasteur (talk) 23:21, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

That looks like it worked. It makes it much easier to click on the ISBN and begin the process of resolving errors with the number. Don't worry if you can't move the ones that are embedded deep in a cite template rather than at the tail end. I can handle the stragglers. Thanks! – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:45, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
@Jonesey95: [15] is a example of a deeply embedded template relocation Hasteur (talk) 12:58, 15 April 2014 (UTC)
@Jonesey95: Edited semi-automated some ~600 pages to relocate the templates. Let me know if you have further objections. Hasteur (talk) 20:02, 15 April 2014 (UTC)
That sounds like about the right frequency, so you probably got almost all of them. Thanks for the diligent work. Let me know if you need a letter of recommendation. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:14, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Can someone fix Cydebot?

Cydebot (talk · contribs) keeps replacing my template {{DVD}} with a licensing template, but it is claiming Wikipedia:Non-free content/templates which has been marked historical since 2012, and has been unused since 2008. There's no reason for this to still be actively replacing templates, since everything will have been fixed years ago. Further, {{DVD}} isn't even listed as a template needing replacement on that page. -- 70.24.250.235 (talk) 04:33, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I would recommend contacting the owner Palmtree5551 (talk) 20:22, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
I did that, he failed to respond. His archivebot already archived it. -- 70.24.250.235 (talk) 04:53, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
Can you show us where Cydebot is misbehaving via a diff? Hasteur (talk) 12:54, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
This happens everywhere diff where the template was placed. -- 70.24.250.235 (talk) 03:38, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
Another example diff: diff Palmtree5551 (talk) 03:57, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
There seem to be two possible courses of action. One is to remove {{DVD}} from the list that Cydebot works from; unfortunately, I don't know what that list might be. The other is to move {{DVD}} to a different name - two that spring to mind are {{DVD navbox}} and {{DVD topics}}, and then adjust the articles to use the new name. These two names have never been used before, so it's unlikely (but possible) that these names are also on Cydebot's replace list. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:40, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
I'm poking Cyde again, but if the message goes unanswered I'm going to ask for a summary blocking of Cydebot as the operator is unable/unwilling to follow the bot policy (especially with respect to WP:BOTCOMM) in addition to the bot's own user page ("Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it."). Hasteur (talk) 13:52, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Hey, it's fixed now. The long version of this is that in 2006 a lot of templates were migrated from one set of names to another, and to enforce that, I had a periodic bot task running that renamed any new uses of those old templates. It's been long enough now that I'm pretty sure no one even remembers the old templates, let alone uses them, and there's been some conflicts now with unrelated templates coming up using the old ones' names, so I've simply canceled the task. You shouldn't see this issue again. Sorry about that! --Cyde Weys 05:13, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

I've been through all the articles transcluding {{Non-free DVD cover}} in error for {{DVD}}, and reverted the Cydebot edit. This has caused an anomaly at The Hits: Chapter One#Track listing; see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Albums#Track listings for music DVDs. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:28, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

From the very origin of the interwiki linking system, the prefix "wiki:" was available for making links to the WikiWikiWeb. However, in the intervening years there became less and less reason to link from here to that website, and people began to increasingly confuse it with the "Wikipedia:" namespace. So, given that the WikiWikiWeb also has the prefixes "c2:" and "WikiWikiWeb:", in January of this year it was switched off. (See the discussion at Meta.) This broke just short of 1100 links across all projects. About 700 of those are on this wiki, and I'd like to request a bot run to fix them. Thankfully, as page names on the WikiWikiWeb follow a predictable format (CamelCase), it was trivial to separate them out from the links that appear to have been intended to actually be "Wikipedia:" links. I've put both lists in this paste. The format is one page ID and link destination per line, tab-separated. Some pages have more than one link that needs to be fixed and thus appear multiple times. I also stripped out a lot of obvious mistaken article links from the latter list, plus any occurring on IP users' talk pages, because there's really not much point updating those. The final total of links that need fixing is 635.

If there's any other information I need to provide please let me know. Thank you. — Scott • talk 17:38, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Um... If I recall correctly we should not ever be mucking around with talk page archives. In addition I see other pages (such as Arbitration proceedings) that are also in the "Don't ever touch" category. Please check again. Hasteur (talk) 15:07, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
You've got it back to front. Those pages have already been "mucked around with", because a change at the system level has caused linkrot. Links are content and linkrot is content damage. By the way, talk archives are not Holy Writ that can never be touched. — Scott • talk 17:19, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
Yes there are many reasons archives can be changed, and this is certainly a valid one. The general reason for slapping a big "do not change" template on them is to prevent people from trying to continue a discussion, a trap not just for rookies. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 19:21, 9 April 2014 (UTC).
I'd appreciate if there was a consensus discussion that established that the modificaiton of the archives is appropriate. Hasteur (talk) 20:37, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
Completely unnecessary. I modify talk archives frequently, along with many other editors engaged in maintenance tasks. Again, these archives have already been modified, by breaking hundreds of links. I'm not sure why you're finding that difficult to understand. — Scott • talk 21:04, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
Scott then by all means, Fix it yourself. Hasteur (talk) 21:22, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
Isn't that precisely what this request is about? Resolute 21:25, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
I gave up on this request the moment after I'd typed the above comment and am now about a third of the way through the really tedious process of clicking a button in AutoWikiBrowser hundreds of times. Good thing I can play solitaire on my phone with my other hand.
Thanks, Hasteur, loving your work on behalf of whoever it is that hangs out in here. — Scott • talk 21:29, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
And I'm afraid that has often been the case that it is quicker to do a few hundred or even a few thousand with AWB than to get two Wikipedians to agree about anything. 600 will be done before you know it. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 23:46, 13 April 2014 (UTC).
I find your response baffling, Hasteur. Scott came here to request a maintenance task's automation. You chose to reply, based on a mistaken impression that such edits are controversial. (In actuality, the repair of links broken due to external factors is routine housekeeping. In the case of an archived discussion, it preserves the original context, which is exactly the intent behind the disallowance of most edits.)
On what basis did you tell Scott to "fix it [him]self"? This page's purpose is to request the implementation of bots tasks. The very act of suggesting one is a valid contribution, and Scott went much further by actually compiling a document identifying the work to be done. No one suggested that you had any obligation to participate in the process, so I can't imagine why you felt the need to essentially tell Scott to go away. —David Levy 21:58, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
I don't have any objection to these links being fixed by a bot, since they have become broken due to an action outside our control (that is, they weren't links to Wikipedia pages that have been deleted). There is established precedent: when ClueBot III (talk · contribs) archives a thread, it then goes and looks for links to that thread, and adjusts them so that they link to the archived thread instead. This action may itself involve the editing of archive pages: example, which relates to the archiving of these four threads from this page. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:50, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
We certainly need to go and fix these links. -- Magioladitis (talk) 20:27, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Gazette index

Some time ago I created an index to the London Gazette. The root page is Wikipedia:London Gazette Index.

It appears (per the following note) that the pages have been migrated, and not in a predictable way. I have requested a mapping file form Authority, and will share this, as needed, if I get it. If not there are other ways to fix up the index.

=== London Gazette index ===

Rich, I randomly tried a few links from the 1918 index and it looks like the Gazette's move to it's new url and pagination has screwed things up as I got a 100% error rate. For example the 1 January issue url you have in the index is http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/30453/pages/1 this is now https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/30453/page/113 and the first supplement which was http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/30454/supplements/1 is now https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/30454/supplement/225 All in a bit of a pain in the backside. Nthep (talk) 08:08, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, there is a nice document by Tim Berners-Lee explaining why people shouldn't break the Internet like this. We are used to it, though, on Wikipedia. Unfortunately I am prohibited from fixing anything by means other than "typing in the edit box". I will make an appeal in various places for someone to fix the index. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 19:13, 14 April 2014 (UTC).

Any takers?

All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 19:53, 14 April 2014 (UTC).

Clean up with retention of data

Hello over at Wikiproject Video games, we need to clean up our articles and remove a hell of a lot of redundant data.

Since the project started, a number of template fields have been added and removed from the main article template. We now have 15 defunct fields that still appear in the code for some article pages, and we're now in the position where all of this old data is getting in the way and making things confusing for new users (They copy over template code from existing articles only to find that some template fields aren't working after they have populated them with data.)

Initially we were just going to delete the data, but Wikidata say they want it, so that negates any semi-automatic editing as its outside the capability of AWB; and the volume of edits makes any manual effort a non-starter.

In order to aid all users (especially new ones) in editing the infobox code, and at the same time preserve data, we want to move the populated defunct fields from the template on existing article pages, to a new hidden template at the bottom of the article, so that the data in those fields can be harvested later by the squirrels at WikiData. Any field that is blank can just be binned.

As we have over 11,000 articles that need this process carried out on them, a bot really is the only way of doing this.

We have a tracking category that lists every article that needs editing.

The discussions around this job are the following:

Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Video_games/Archive_104#We.27re_editing_42.25_of_all_WP:VG_articles

Template_talk:Infobox_video_game#Tracking_category

Category:Infobox video game with deprecated parameters

I've also put the details in a table to make things easier to read.

Job Description
Item Comment
Template Infobox Video game
Brief outline: Remove defunct fields from template markup and copy any populated fields to hidden template at bottom of article for later collection by Wikidata
Defunct Fields: picture format, aspect ratio, input, license, resolution, ratings, requirements, version, preceded by, followed by, latest release version, latest release date, latest preview version, latest preview date, website
Category Category:Infobox video game with deprecated parameters
Number of Articles: 11,766
Other info. Most of the formatting is standard, but the requirements field can have a number of different user devised layouts.

Its not going to be easy as some of the fields contain user's own unique - and sometimes differing - formatting styles, but we know you'll find a way to cope with it. Hope you can help. - X201 (talk) 08:12, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

@X201: What's the name of the stealth template we're going to be adding to the bottom of the pages to hold all the deprecated parameters/values? Hasteur (talk) 13:05, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
@Hasteur: Anything the bot creator thinks is appropriate. How about something along the lines of InfoboxVGArchive ? - X201 (talk) 13:10, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
I would strongly suggest {{Video game data}} to align with {{Persondata}} (without being agglutinative). All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 19:23, 9 April 2014 (UTC).
Surely Wikidata is capable of extracting data from the version before the bot run? All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 19:23, 9 April 2014 (UTC).
Yeah, I suppose I've been concentrating on getting the WP:VG part of the job done and sort out the WikiData request later. I'll put a request on their bot request page to see if they can/will do it. If they say no I may be back asking for a deletion run. - X201 (talk) 07:56, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
I can't run this for you, but I might be able construct some AWB settings to do it. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 00:38, 11 April 2014 (UTC).
@Rich Farmbrough: AWB settings constructed? @X201: Is WikiData going to mine all the data they want? Hasteur (talk) 22:07, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
Sorry, no, those guys over at dramah are still ABFing to the nth degree. I'll have to copy some stuff to my local wiki to do some testing. Can't risk an accidental "save"! All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 22:20, 13 April 2014 (UTC).
OK I have a solution that is 90% there. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 00:20, 14 April 2014 (UTC).
@Hasteur: |Here is an AWB settings file. Needs testing of course, maybe a few hundred pages would do. I believe that it will do over 99% of the job, but that is just a (reasonably well informed) belief. I smoke tested on about a thousand and it successfully removed the unwanted parameters as far as I could tell. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 00:59, 14 April 2014 (UTC).
  • It should be fairly easy for anyone with pywiki to use it to migrate the needed data in a few hours, as long as the correct fields already exist on wikidata. Werieth (talk) 23:56, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the AWB script, much more thorough than the one I made. As for WikiData, there has been no reply to the request I placed on their bot request page. - X201 (talk) 08:04, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

  • Give WikiData a deadline for extracting the data. I find that when people are presented with a "Could you do" they aren't as concerned about changed elsewhere. A deadline forces them to make the decision "How important is it that we retain this data?" Let's give them 30 days to extract the data and then we'll remove the data ourselves and they can dig through the history with the info. Hasteur (talk) 12:24, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
Have done, thanks for the tip. - X201 (talk) 13:09, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Bot request#10

I want to create a bot that does the editing on wikipedia on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Anuvarshanw (talk) 19:51, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

I would help, but my bot only works weekends now. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 23:48, 13 April 2014 (UTC).
Did you have a specific task in mind? Palmtree5551 (talk) 22:11, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
I think the idea is that we can do the editing on Saturday and Sunday, while not at work/school, and the bot cover the rest of the time. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 07:11, 16 April 2014 (UTC).
Thats alright with me, but can we get on with creation, not talking to each other --Anuvarshanw (talk) 00:42, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
Awaiting instructions! Monday-to-Friday Bot (talk) 03:40, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Talk page archive

 Request withdrawn
A bot to archive my talk-pages on the basis of signals from me. The talk-pages are the primary talk page of specified accounts and nominated holding pages. The bot should check the pages frequently, ideally by watch-listing them, or monitoring recent changes feed.

A thread will closed by me, either by a triple "-" following someone else's comment or a line starting with "--" following my own sig. (Attempted) closures by other editors, excluding Femto Bot (who knows what it is doing, and mediates all other processes that know what they are doing) should be ignored.

The entire thread from the 2nd level header to the line before the signal should be moved to the destination, preceded by one blank line. Headers should have spaces removed from between the "=="s and the title of the thread. Blank lines immediately after headers, and trailing blank lines should be removed. The "signal" line together with preceding and succeeding blank lines should be replaced with one blank line.

Edit summary should ideally identify which threads were moved where, but a summary "2 threads moved to XX, 3 threads moved to Y" is acceptable.

If no destination is specified the target page is the archive pertaining to the month of the last sig in the thread.

If the target page does not exist it should be created, with the appropriate headers, and the index/mega pages updated as required. The naming scheme for archive pages will be User talk:<account name>/Archive/YYYY Monthanme (slightly different from that used in the past). A redirect from User talk:<account name>/Archive/YYYYMM should also be created.

If an invalid destination code is left the bot should leave a note on my talk page. The bot may mark the signal line in order to simplify the task of recognising that it has already seen it.

Syntax: <closure signal>[Dest code]

The only current valid destination codes are "TODO" (case insensitive), "TALK" (case insensiteve) and BARN. TODO's target is User talk:Rich Farmbrough/To do (regardless of the account being archived) sub pages may be specified in future. TALK is the talk page of the account involved. BARN specifies that any enclosed award or gift (kittens, cookies, beer etc.) should be copied to the barnstar locations for the account involved, and the thread should be archived as normal.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:35, 23 April 2014 (UTC).

Based on the recent modifying of your Ban on automation, I have opened a request at ArbCom Clarification asking them to enumerate if user triggered automation is included in the ban on automation. As such I suggest that no Bot Operators/Designers take the request up until the committee has rendered a verdict. Hasteur (talk) 20:40, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
To be blunt, Hasteur, I was simply giving the Arbitrator's request that I get someone else to run an archiving bot for me a fair shake. I seriously don't expect to get any takers, but if I did, then that would have been one problem resolved. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:39, 23 April 2014 (UTC).

Request to tag articles for a Wikiproject

In order to get a grip of articles under the scope of the new WP:Physiology, I request that all articles under Category:Physiologists and Category:Physiology and all subcategories be tagged with:

{{WikiProject Physiology |class=|importance=|field=}}

Thanks in advance, --LT910001 (talk) 00:13, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Do you want the "class" parameter copied from existing banners? And set to stub if the article is a stub? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 05:57, 25 April 2014 (UTC).
Thanks for your help! If you are able to, that'd be wonderful. Thank you! --LT910001 (talk) 06:16, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Bot for CAT:UAA

CAT:UAA is used to track violations of the username policy pending discussions with the users, etc. User talk pages are added to the category and removed when the relevant users are blocked, deemed to have acceptable usernames, or when they become inactive. KingpinBot removes all of the blocked accounts automatically (although it has been dormant for some time). What we need is a bot that can remove all of the inactive accounts. Standard practice at CAT:UAA is if a user has (1) been in the category for 7+ days, & (2) not edited/made log entries for 7+ days, then it is removed. Right now all of this is done manually, but it would be more efficient for a bot to do it. Is this possible? NTox · talk 04:56, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it is eminently do-able. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 07:10, 16 April 2014 (UTC).
Starting protyping Hasteur (talk) 23:22, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, Hasteur. That sounds great. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. NTox · talk 06:10, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

All content. i.e. web pages, under http://hometown.aol.com/ disappeared on Oct 31,2008 (see AOL Hometown). All links to that content should be marked {{Dead link}}.

Existing bots should be modified to do this. Lentower (talk) 21:45, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Note: I've since found that much of this content is archived at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/ in archives before Nov 1, 2008. Archives after Oct 31, 2008 just link to root of that web site. Lentower (talk) 13:20, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Bot for Category:Articles containing video clips

We are starting the project Videos for Wikipedia articles. The Category:Articles containing video clips is extremely useful for understanding what kinds of videos are already used in what kinds of articles. Alas, it seems the list is not complete. Therefore we would like to request a bot to search for articles with video clips and mark them for that category. Thank you. --Vgrass (talk) 16:56, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Strong Agree. It is really essential that this category refflects the current status, and as it is a hidden cat, most users don't know it, so they can't add it when they add a video. --BR, .js (talk) 09:06, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
Considering... If no one else is working on this, I may take it up. Anon126 (notify me of responses! / talk / contribs) 21:59, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Blank and template really, really, really old IP talk pages

Per the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 110#Bot blank and template really, really, really old IP talk pages., there is consensus to have a bot replace all content on IP talk pages with an {{OW}} tag if:

  1. No edits have been made by the IP within the last seven years; and
  2. The IP is not been blocked within the last five years.

Some editors would allow even shorter time frames, but those in the proposal are what have been unanimously approved at this point. Now all we need is a bot to take this up. Cheers! bd2412 T 17:54, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Considering... Hey, something within reach of a new bot developer like me! grin I will probably take this up unless someone else can do it faster. Anon126 (notify me of responses! / talk / contribs) 21:58, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Bot to create redirects for titles ending in periods

It has been pointed out that URLs ending in period cause issues when copied to clients such as email (version of 15:25, 21 April 2014). The easy solution as proposed by SmokeyJoe is to "create a redirect without the period for every article URL ending in a period". I support this, and propose assigning the task to a bot, to first make initial redirects for existing articles ending in a period such as those on the referenced list, and then to continue making such redirects for new articles, on an ongoing basis. Cheers! bd2412 T 20:04, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

I'll note that if the bot encounters instances in which the variant without the period is in use as a different article's title/redirect, it should leave it untouched and list it in a report (for human analysis). —David Levy 23:00, 30 April 2014 (UTC)
Also, redirects ending in periods should be included, but the bot obviously should duplicate the original redirects' targets (instead of creating double redirects). —David Levy 23:05, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Some stats for this problem:

  • We have 66285 entries in namespace 0 ending with a period (dot). Of these
    • 15692 are not redirects
      • In 1548 cases, the title with no trailing period (dot) exists. Of these
        • 1505 are redirects. Of these
          • 1466 are redirects from the title with no trailing period (dot) (* CLASS A)
          • 39 are redirects to some other title (* CLASS C)
        • 43 are not redirects (* CLASS C)
      • Leaving 14144 titles with no corresponding redirect (* CLASS B)
    • 50593 are redirects. Of these
      • In 7567 cases, the title with no trailing period (dot) exists. Of these
        • 931 are redirects to the title with no trailing period (dot) (* CLASS A)
        • 6636 are redirects to some other title (* CLASS C)
      • Leaving 43026 redirects with a trailing period (dot) with no corresponding undotted version (* CLASS B)

Tentatively, this makes the scale of the work:

  • CLASS A; no work needs to be done - 2397 cases
  • CLASS B; no contending factors, these should easy to bot - 57170 cases
  • CLASS C; contending factors, manual attention needed - 6718 cases

- TB (talk) 15:52, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks very much for performing this analysis.
Do the 6,636 redirects composing most of class C include instances in which both the dotted and undotted versions redirect to the same article (with a different title)? If so, those should be filtered into class A. —David Levy 23:05, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
You are correct, most of the redirects for which an undotted redirect exists share a target with it. There are 408 instances where this isn't the case, reducing the number of exceptional cases to around 500 - much better. I have adjusted the (much neglected) Inconsistent Redirects report to include these for now - hopefully some will get fixed ahead of any bot run. - TB (talk) 14:39, 2 May 2014 (UTC)
Would be nice if this listed more redirects - maybe a next page facility, and up to 100 per page? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 08:27, 4 May 2014 (UTC).

This request from April 10, 2014 is still unresolved. Perhaps a bot could quickly be written to fix these links; it's been two weeks since the last reply has been made to this thread, and yet no solution is in place yet. Epicgenius (talk) 03:11, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Mechanical ontology creation/Inference/Processing is a deep CS idea, not something that is reasonable for real world application. Hasteur (talk) 12:27, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Bot that reads newspapers and creates an ontology

We can use published sources to create an ontology. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Geetha nitc (talk • contribs) 12:10, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

--Geetha nitc (talk) 12:19, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Bot to do temporal reasoning using ontologies

Information changes with time. There is no bot which automatically infers new information and prints the source. A human has to do this process. This bot should reason the changes with time. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Geetha nitc (talk • contribs) 12:16, 30 April 2014 (UTC) --Geetha nitc (talk) 12:19, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Bot that adds information using new constructs

This bot should convert an existing ontology to text. Precisely controlled language should be used. Controlled language creates short unambiguous sentences. --Geetha nitc (talk) 12:22, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Bot to update Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/missing stubs

I think the report Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/missing stubs could use to be updated on a regular basis (probably monthly). Could someone create a bot to do it? There are instructions at the bottom of the page on how the report is generated. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 04:27, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Alerting users about discretionary sanctions applying to topics which they edit

Discretionary sanctions (WP:AC/DS) are a procedure established by the Arbitration Committee that allow administrators to take measures such as blocks or topic bans to prevent disruption in some particularly contentious topic areas, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict or other ethno-nationalistic or ideological disputes. The Committee just enacted a new set of procedures that provide that editors must be alerted about the existence of this procedure, and that such alerts expire after a year.

Now I wonder whether it would not be better to automate this alerting procedure with a bot, in order to save editors the hassle of alerting one another manually, and to prevent these alerts from appearing to be confrontational or accusatory in nature.

The bot I envisage would add the template {{Ds/alert}} to the talk page of any editor who edits an article page within the scope of discretionary sanctions, as determined by categories associated with the covered topics on an administrator-editable configuration page. The bot would first check whether the editor has received such an alert in the last 12 months (there is a filter for this, see {{Sanction enforcement request header}}). The template message would be preceded by a statement such as:

"Hi, I am a bot, and I noticed that you edited [article], which may be an article related to [contested topic]. This message is to inform you that Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee has established particular rules for editing in this topic area, as detailed below. Please feel free to delete this message. [template follows]"

I have linked to this idea from the arbitration noticeboard talk page, to allow arbitrators to indicate whether they think that such a bot would be a good idea.  Sandstein  09:27, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

I do not think this a good idea nor do I think that there is a significant problem that needs fixing. The main effect will be to spam gnomes and typo=fixers.  Roger Davies talk 11:10, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
I agree completely with Roger that this is a bad idea. I have just made a tiny fix to an article in the Gun Control sanctions area [16]. Getting a bot message on my talk page alerting me to the sanctions because of that edit would dissuade me from doing similar ones in areas that are or may be under sanctions. I'm a very experienced editor who follows arbcom, so think how much more off-putting it would be for someone who just wants to fix errors without getting involved in any drama. Thryduulf (talk) 11:17, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
That's a realistic concern, but maybe the bot could issue alerts only after a certain number of edits to a covered article, to prevent alerting users who are only passing by to make a small edit.  Sandstein  12:08, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
An even greater concern, which I haven't yet touched here and which I'm astonished you didn't raise, is that it is extremely difficult to scope a bot to respond to all edits for remedies which are expressed as "making any edit about, and all pages relating to, [topic X] broadly construed". This would present insurmountable problems during say discussions of [topic X] at AN or ANI.  Roger Davies talk 13:26, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
Obviously the bot can't parse edits by topic, but it can for instance react to a user editing a page in the pseudoscience category or its subcategories. This should cover most editors active in a particular topic area, eventually.  Sandstein  15:26, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
Unless I am misunderstanding this idea, it sounds inadvisable. I make small non-content edits to dozens of pages, sometimes a couple hundred, every day. If my edits are disruptive, by all means notify me. Otherwise, assume good faith and don't bother me.
Many, if not all, pages in the areas you describe have garish edit notices that warn editors about limits on reverts and contain other sanction-related information. I believe that these edit notices are sufficient to meet the OP's stated requirement that "editors must be alerted about the existence of this procedure".
And here's a link (I think) to the Noticeboard post that the OP mentioned above. I explored that rabbit hole for a while, but was unable to find a clear summary of the original consensus decision that led to the OP's post here at Bot Requests. Can the OP provide one, so we don't rehash the discussion in full here? (P.S. to Roger Davies: "typo=fixers" above was delightful.)– Jonesey95 (talk) 16:08, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
There isn't a consensus decision, the Arbitration Committee takes decisions by vote. And, no, under the new procedures adopted by the Committee these edit notices are no longer sufficient to alert users (see WP:AC/DS#Awareness and alerts). Hence this proposal to alert all editors active in a topic area. If I understand the Committee's intentions correctly, these alerts do not imply misconduct and therefore aren't only to be issued to disruptive editors.  Sandstein  17:14, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
The intent of the requirement though is clearly to alert users who are making topical edits to the topic area. What is and is not a topical edit is not easy to define for bot purposes - especially when it is on a wider page. While it is easy to determine the set of pages that fall within some DS areas, in most it is only possible to define a subset of significantly varying completeness. This means that a human will still be required in all cases, so the bot doesn't actually bring much benefit. Thryduulf (talk) 17:27, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
Sandstein, I have read the page you linked to, and it appears to have problems with internal consistency, as well as inconsistency with what you posted above. (That is why I asked for a link to the discussion; I'm still hoping for such a link.) Given those problems, I would rather have a bot distributing these notices so that their posting and timing could be carefully and systematically tracked. The language in the linked text makes it look like I could get multiple alerts per year from humans if I edit articles on different contentious topics (which I am sure I have done). As such, a single bot-posted alert per year seems like the least damage that this policy could inflict on active editors, so I would choose to go with that. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:28, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
Under the new discretionary sanctions regime, you will get a maximum of one alert per year per DS topic area. If you edit in multiple contentious areas you will therefore get multiple alerts. This is to ensure that everybody who needs to be aware that DS is authorised for an area they are editing in actually is aware. Just because you know that Abortion is controversial does not mean that you know that the Austrian School of Economics is for example. Thryduulf (talk) 20:46, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
Yes, that's how I read the page too, and it sounds even more inadvisable than it sounded when I thought it was only one message per year. But if it's not avoidable, I, for one, welcome our new discretionary bot overlords. Just let us know the name of the bot, if you can persuade a bot operator to take on this task, so that I can block it from editing my Talk page. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:12, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
I think you misunderstand. I am arguing against this being done by a bot as determining whether the editing is topical and within a DS topic area requires the judgement of a human. Further discussion of the merits or otherwise of DS alerts left other than by a bot is off-topic for this page, so I'll leave my thoughts about it on your talk page. Thryduulf (talk) 12:19, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
  • I don't see how this is workable, for reasons already stated. Having the bot only alert if they make several edits to the topic area is not a solution. I ofte n see a single user lighting up my watchlist as they make the same type of small fixes or format adjustments to dozens of articles. These helpful users will be discouraged if their talk page is constantly flooded with these alerts. Unless there is some radical advancement in the ability to program bots I think an actual human needs to determine whose editing triggers an alert and whose does not. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:06, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Issuing a DS "notice" is a discretionary choice, something that bots are very poor at doing. I think this is a very bad idea. Hasteur (talk) 02:25, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
  • A user should only get a DS ntice if either they do a major edit to a sanctioned page, or they do several non-minor edits to pages under the same sanctioning. I don't think a bot could distinguish these levels well - this needs human judgement. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:32, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Bot for CAT:UAA

CAT:UAA is used to track violations of the username policy pending discussions with the users, etc. User talk pages are added to the category and removed when the relevant users are blocked, deemed to have acceptable usernames, or when they become inactive. KingpinBot removes all of the blocked accounts automatically (although it has been dormant for some time). What we need is a bot that can remove all of the inactive accounts. Standard practice at CAT:UAA is if a user has (1) been in the category for 7+ days, & (2) not edited/made log entries for 7+ days, then it is removed. Right now all of this is done manually, but it would be more efficient for a bot to do it. Is this possible? NTox · talk 04:56, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it is eminently do-able. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 07:10, 16 April 2014 (UTC).
Starting protyping Hasteur (talk) 23:22, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, Hasteur. That sounds great. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. NTox · talk 06:10, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
NTox Annother question: Please take a look at User talk:86dstudios. How much of the postamble should I be removing? The COI notice category? The ifeq afterwords, or just the "usernames with possible policy issues" category part? Hasteur (talk) 23:03, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Adminbot required

We need a bot to upload/protect local copies of images that are going to be used on the main page, since the commons bot protection system is unreliable. Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/TFA Protector Bot 2 has stalled. Is there anyone able to take up the task? BencherliteTalk 08:24, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikinews Importer Bot

This bot has been down for four months and more than 200 portals are no longer updated. --SleaY(t) 22:35, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

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