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All references utilizing Geocities.com domain

Resolved

Geocities is pulling all Web sites down on 26 October 2009 (except those who move to a Yahoo! Hosting plan).

I was wondering if someone could do a bot that searches for <ref> tags that use references to the Geocities.com domain as I fear we will soon have a ton of dead references that need rectification.*

If it dumps the results somewhere, if anywhere, put them somewhere on my user talk page.

Thank you. -- Guroadrunner (talk) 10:10, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

* * - yes, I realize that Geocities fails WP:RELIABLESOURCES. I want to see what the damage will be.

Problem is already being dealt with: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WebCiteBOT 2 (related VP discussion) --Cybercobra (talk) 12:00, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
Good to see. -- Guroadrunner (talk) 03:36, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Talk Page Signature Find and Replace

 Not done. Not a good use of bot or Wikipedia resources. –xenotalk 14:15, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Is it possible to get a bot to replace all instances of JEF with Jorfer. I used the original for my signature before simplifying my signature to be just my user name. Having my signature be my user name helps eliminate confusion, but users may not realize that the new and old signatures are both from me.--Jorfer (talk) 01:39, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Possible, yes. But probably not such a good idea, and not recommended by WP:Username policy#Changing your username (in the context of a renamed user, which has more justification than this situation). Most likely, doing this would mainly result in a large number of complaints about making useless edits to archived talk pages. Anomie⚔ 02:31, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Record chart bot partner wanted

I'm looking for someone that wants to tackle a fairly major bot project: one that will help with vandalism across the music area. The record charts are extremely prone to vandalism: some people trying to make their favorite artist look better, and others just randomly changing figures. There's a certain amount of cluelessness going on as well: an artist may reach number thirty on the official chart for Spain, but number five on an individual Spanish station, so an editor will edit the Spanish position to "5", not realizing that the individual station chart isn't the official national chart.

I'm planning on implementing a series of templates to build record charts from. {{singlechart}} is the first. It takes several arguments:

  • Chart id
  • position
  • artist name
  • song title
  • a few special case parameters like year and week number for charts that need additional info to search

It formats the data, and generates a URL for an online source that the figure can be verified against, formatting the URL as a reference. I've modified a couple articles as a test case: Sneakernight and My Life Would Suck Without You.

I'm in the course of building similar templates for single certifications, album charts, and album certifications.

What I would like to find someone with bot experience to help build is a bot that will monitor changes to these templates and verify the contents. Basically:

  • Monitor recent changes
  • If the recent change removed one of the chart macros, log it for a human to investigate
  • If the recent change changed or added one of the chart macros
  • generate the same URL the template would generate
  • fetch the data
  • scan the HTML for the figure (extremely site specific)
  • If the figure does not verify, log the change for a human to investigate (in the future, maybe autorevert if we get very confident)

If anyone is interested in helping with this, please let me know.—Kww(talk) 17:34, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Let me say that I'm extremly supportive of this idea (I myself don't have the resources to listen to recent changes 24/7, and judging by the scale of this proposal it seems necessary to do so). If you can figure out a way to automatically verify sales figures, I would be ecstatic! Amalthea 09:24, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
I could do this relatively easily, and would have the resources available for at least another 9 months to keep it running (after that there'd be a short interrupt while I moved to a different system, but there's plenty of time for that). I'll ping over to your talkpage for this. Fritzpoll (talk) 15:21, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

WP:CL tagging

I would like a bot to please tag (and keep tagged) all articles in any of: Category:Constructed languages, Category:Artificial scripts, Category:Artistic languages, Category:Constructed language multilingual support templates, Category:Constructed language organizations, Category:Constructed languages resources, Category:Engineered languages, Category:Esperanto dictionaries, Category:Fictional languages, Category:Gibberish language, Category:International auxiliary languages, Category:Language creators, Category:Reconstructed languages, Category:Voynich manuscript, Category:Constructed language stubs ... with:

  1. on talk page top: {{WP conlangs|class=|importance=|needs-infobox=|Esperanto=}}, preferably with class taken using previous projects' taggings as a default, and with |Esperanto=yes if the article contains the keyword 'Esperanto'
  2. on article page bottom: {{Constructed languages}}

It would also be helpful if the bot can do the same, and categorize appropriately, for the keywords: "conlang", "artlang", "auxlang", "engelang", "artificial language", "artistic language", "engineered language", "constructed language", "artificial language", "auxiliary language", "Constructed script", "fictional language", "Universal language, "conlanger", "Blissymbol", "Blissymbolics", "Enochian", "Esperanto", "Glosa", "Ido", "Interlingua", "Ithkuil", "Kēlen", "Kelen", "Klingon", "Láadan", "Laadan", "Lingua Franca Nova", "Lingua Ignota", "Loglan", "Lojban", "Mänti", "Nadsat ", "Novial", "Occidental", "Quenya", "Sindarin", "Solresol", "Teonaht", "Toki Pona", "Volapük", "Volapuk" ... if they are not already categorized per above.

Thanks! Sai Emrys ¿?✍ 22:35, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

User:GrooveBot can do this, I'll start it tomorrow. GrooveDog • i'm groovy. 04:27, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
Thanks! Please post something on WP:CL talk & my user talk once it's set up. Much appreciated! Sai Emrys ¿?✍ 07:52, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
Having some AWB problems, I'm still trying to get it working. I'll let you know when they're tagged. As for the "categorize appropriately," that'll be difficult but  Possible, I'm not sure. GrooveDog • i'm groovy. 12:13, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Need list of articles

I've been trying to use the CatScan tool to find articles in Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles that are tagged with {{WikiProject Lancashire and Cumbria}}, but try as I might I can't get it to work. Is there another way of of doing this, either by bot or otherwise? Small-town hero (talk) 14:04, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Hey there again Small-town hero :). It would be very easy to write a program to do this, but I think AWB should be able to; Fill a page list from the DYK category, convert to talk pages, save the list as a .txt, fill a list from the Lancashire and Cumbria category, go to "Filter", and load a load the saved txt, but select the option to only keep the pages which are in both lists :). That's all from memory, so I might have a few things wrong. I can do this for you if you like, if so, where do you want to list? - Kingpin13 (talk) 14:11, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
Anywhere in my userspace will be fine, if you don't mind doing it. :) Small-town hero (talk) 14:06, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
 Done Results posted to this sub-page, feel free to mark as CSD U1 and time :). And let me know if they are incorrect. - Kingpin13 (talk) 16:48, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
Hmmm, I don't have much experience with AWB but I've had a go at this myself. The "make list" feature seems to max out at 25,000 pages, while Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles contains 30,000+ pages. I'm getting the same result as you, but I know it's missing some out, Talk:Tower Hill Water Tower for example. I don't suppose there is a way to work around this? Small-town hero (talk) 00:53, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
Not to worry, I've got what I want out of CatScan after trying things a different way. Thanks anyway! :) Small-town hero (talk) 01:00, 30 October 2009 (UTC)


WP:CHU Soxbot replacement

Since X! seems to be on indef break, can someone write a replacement for Soxbot to do the work at the CHU pages? — Rlevse • Talk • 01:05, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

The bot's source code is available for anyone who wishes to use it / build off of it. The Earwig (Talk | Contribs) 01:09, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

I'll work on incorporating this into Chris G Bot 3 which currently archives CHU --Chris 00:57, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Date delinking

Could someone please de-link the dates in the Burger King family of articles?

Thank you very much, --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 07:59, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Why don't you just wait for the ArbCom-approved date delinking bot to finish its BRFA? Anomie⚔ 13:58, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Its because I am trying to clean these articles up and the citations are not uniform. In most cases some citations have linked dates while others do not. With the smaller articles it isn't an issue, but with the main ones there are more than 100 references spread over articles that are often 35k+ in size and finding each of them is really time consuming. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 17:00, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

 Not done

Nevermind, I used Lightmouse's js to delink them. Cool tool... --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 17:13, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Great. I was just going to suggest it. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 17:20, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Simple article moves

Very simple project: I need a bot to move the articles in Category:Days in 2005 and Category:Days in 2003 to the portal space. For example, February 12, 2005 needs to be moved to Portal:Current events/2005 February 12 like the more recent Portal:Current events/2008 November 23. Thanks! Reywas92Talk 23:21, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Seems easy enough; to be clear, only the articles named as "Month day, year" and not any "Month year"? Should the bot leave redirects from the old articles when doing the moves? Anomie⚔ 02:19, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
Also, should redirects like January 10, 2003 (which redirects to January 2003) be moved, or just actual articles? And if so, should Category:Days in 2004 (which seems to be all redirects) get the same treatment? Anomie⚔ 02:51, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
No, the redirects may be ignored. "Month year" articles also can be ignored. Yes, redirects should be left because, for example, February 12, 2005 is transcluded to February 2005. It's just that the current practice is that these are not articles and are instead kept within Portal:Current events. The 2004 days don't have individual pages at all so don't worry about them. Basically, only the non-redirect articles in those two categories in MDY format need to be moved to "Portal:Current events/Year Month Day". Thank you for the quick response and just ask if anything else is unclear. Reywas92Talk 17:09, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Add archive of previous events to article alert bot

Perhaps some of you could help with this: Wikipedia_talk:Article_alerts/Feature_requests#Add_well-formatted_archive_of_previous_events

It'd be useful across all WikiProjects, and should tie in well with the existing functionality of the article alert bot.

Thanks! Sai Emrys ¿?✍ 03:46, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Lists as category members sorting

There are many categories of the type "Lists of...," such as Category:Lists of universities and colleges with members such as "List of colleges in Thailand". Usually, editors pipe the inclusion, e.g., [[Category:Lists of universities and colleges|Thailand]], but about 10% of the time they do not and the L section of the category ends up with misplaced entries.

The request is for a bot to

  • find any entries named "List of ..." which are members of "Lists of " categories,
  • attempt to algorithmically determine the correct sort (see below),
  • if possible, add it, and
  • if not possible, add the article to a new hidden Category:Lists in need of category sorting; this category should be placed immediately after the problematic one.

To determine the correct sort...

  • Look at all words in the article title which are
    • not part of the category title (including List) and
    • not articles or certain prepositions: a, an, the; about, at, by, for, from, in, of, to.
    • Note that this includes words in parentheses and numbers.
  • If there is only one such word, it is the correct sort.
  • If all such words are capitalized, they jointly make up the correct sort.
  • Otherwise, give up.

I would suggest that the bot run about monthly; I don't think WP:wikignomes are going to be any faster than that at cleaning up the ones needing manual attention. Matchups 12:53, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Paraguay Templates

I want to request the change of templates in the Category:Paraguay articles, which currently is {{WikiProject South America|class=Stub|importance=Mid|Paraguay=yes|Paraguay-importance=Low}}, to this one: {{WikiProject Paraguay|class=|importance=}}. Reason is that I'm trying for Paraguay to have a bit more of prominence as a country of its own and not just a sub category. Any articles which are considered stubs could hae this template instead: {{WikiProject Paraguay|class=Stub|importance=|auto=yes}}. Thanks a lot! Veritiel (talk) 11:52, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Doing..., just adding the templates now with GrooveBot. GrooveDog • i'm groovy. 20:52, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
Y Done, WP:South America templates are still there. GrooveDog • i'm groovy. 23:07, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! I really appreciate the help. Veritiel (talk) 11:49, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Removing user namespace pages from article namespace categories

User pages turn up in categories that are reserved for article namespace articles. This is not allowed according to Wikipedia:Categorization. Can a bot remove them when they are added? -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 23:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Should they be removed (deleted) or should a colon be added before it? I.e., turn [[Category:Foo]] to [[:Category:Foo]]? That would help if it was in the middle of a talk page comment. tedder (talk) 01:49, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
I guess either a colon added or commented out. Colon might be better. If it is the main user page they probaby should be removed totally since that is not where articles are userfied. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 02:11, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
I'd just be a bit concerned that if someone is working on a major edit in user space and we add the colon, someone might not notice when the article is moved back to article space. Probably if a bot does this, it should leave a note on the user's talk page. Matchups 04:26, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
Yep, good idea. Easy for a bot to do. Ideally editors should thoroughly preview an article of course!!! -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 05:56, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
How does the bot identify which categories are reserved for mainspace only? - Kingpin13 (talk) 09:45, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
Ah, this is where it gets messy I guess. Might have to build up a white list for cats that have the word WikiProject, Userbox, Wikipedian, User, etc. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 21:53, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
Too bad that it's not possible to select which namespace(s) a category should contain. Garion96 (talk) 21:55, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Change refs from uChicago to WeKinglyPigs

Many of the Playboy Playmate's articles have references to the University of Chicago, see Reagan Wilson for just one example. There is an employee there who keeps a database online. Anyway, they've moved their archives to their own server and a separate domain, wekinglypigs.com. For an example with the new domain, see Jaime Faith Edmondson All the bot would need to do is trawl through the Playmate articles and

  1. Change "mozart.lib.uchicago.edu" to "wekinglypigs.com"
  2. Change the value in the ref name field from "uchicago" to "wekinglypigs"
  3. Change the description of the ref from "Playmate listing at uChicago" to "Playmate listing at WeKinglyPigs.com"

I think that all the articles will be in the child categories of Category:Playboy Playmates.

Thanks, Dismas|(talk) 09:12, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

The oldlinks currently accurately redirect to the new links. Is there a reason to expect this to change in the future? If not, there is no reason to "correct" that which is not broken. --ThaddeusB (talk) 21:29, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Pro-wrestling

Could a bot please tag all articles in Category:Professional wrestling (and its subcategories) with Template:Pro-wrestling? It would be much faster with a bot since that is several hundred articles and would take a human awhile to do it (even with something like AWB). TJ Spyke 21:07, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd be very happy to get my bot to do this. Is the project aware that there will be a bot doing this job? The bot can't do assessments, so it may require members running around after it :) - Kingpin13 (talk) 21:09, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
Okay, I see there has been a message on the talk page. Do you mind waiting a few days for some more input? P.S. Let's continue discussing at WT:PW to keep the project in touch - Kingpin13 (talk) 21:10, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

/Comments subpages

Hi, I would like to place a message on the project talk page of every WikiProject that maintains a category listed on User:WOSlinker/comments. In most cases, it would simply be a question of replacing

  • Category:XXX articles with comments -> Wikipedia talk:WikiProject XXX
  • Category:WikiProject YYY articles with comments -> Wikipedia talk:WikiProject YYY

I haven't penned the message yet, but it will basically be explaining that /Comments subpages of article talk pages are being phased out and asking whether they want to continue using comments in some way. The related discussion is at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Talk page Comments subpage. Thanks — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:42, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I've now got a draft message to send out here. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:24, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Source

A new parameter has been added to {{Userspace draft}} and {{New unreviewed article}}. The parameter should be added to all pages in article and user namespace that transclude these templates. Since {{Userspace draft}} transcludes {{New unreviewed article}}, the easiest way to do this is probably to go through all transclusions of {{New unreviewed article}}. Alternatively they can be found in Category:Unreviewed new articles created via the Article Wizard and Category:Userspace drafts created via the Article Wizard and their monthly subcategories. The parameter is |source=ArticleWizard. Is there a bot ready to do this? Debresser (talk) 16:16, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

To be precise, "The parameter should be added to all pages in article and user namespace that transclude these templates" and are in Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard / Category:Userspace drafts created via the Article Wizard. Rd232 talk 16:27, 8 November 2009 (UTC)
I agree. Nevertheless, since at the moment no use has been made of these templates that should not involve the new parameter, this amounts to the same as I said. Whatever is easier to programm. Debresser (talk) 16:39, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Ok I'll take care of this one. Rich Farmbrough, 22:41, 8 November 2009 (UTC).

 Done Thanks. Debresser (talk) 07:28, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

The motorsport-related content of Ligier has recently been split off into a separate article: Equipe Ligier. But (almost) all the motorsport-related links still point to Ligier. I would like a bot to change the 500-or-so links in article- and template-space which currently point to Ligier to point to Equipe Ligier instead (with appropriate piping - see below) and then I'll go through and manually change back the handful that actually should point to Ligier. Specifically, I would like the bot to change all instances in article- and template-space of:

  • [[Ligier]] to [[Equipe Ligier|Ligier]], and
  • [[Ligier| to [[Equipe Ligier|

Existing links to Equipe Ligier should remain unchanged. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 01:57, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

No interest in this one? DH85868993 (talk) 10:57, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
I pretty sure WikiProject Disambiguation participants can do a disambiguation run as a standard AWB task. Perhaps if you brought it up there, you might get more of a response. --Cybercobra (talk) 12:07, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
I'll give that a try. Thanks for the suggestion. DH85868993 (talk) 14:19, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Is it possible to have a bot compile red links in articles tagged with {{WPBiography}} and {{WikiProject Norway}}? Feel free to compile it in my user space. Geschichte (talk) 14:53, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Angola tagging

I am going to try, eventually, to make requests for each country and overseas territory in Africa. Be warned, guys. Many or most of them haven't had any real assessments done yet. Anyway, we are starting with the Angola categories which can be found at User:John Carter/Africa categories. I would request that the following template:

{{AfricaProject|class=|importance=|Angola=yes|Angola-importance=}}

be added to the talk page of each article. If the banner is already in place, please only add

Angola=yes|Angola-importance=

to it if it isn't already there. And, if the bot can do any sort of assessments, like stub, FA, GA, or whatever, that would be more than welcome. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 03:01, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I've filed a request for the approval of this task. Andrea105 (talk) 17:10, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Replacing Template:Stubclass

Can someone please have a bot sweep through Category:Automatically assessed song articles and Category:Automatically assessed Virginia articles and perform the following tasks on those pages:

No objections have been raised at either WT:SONGS or WT:VIRGINIA since I made the proposal over two weeks ago. Thanks in advance. PC78 (talk) 18:57, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I can do this one. Viginia I will probably do manually, it's small. Looks like half of the songs ones are already auto=yes. Rich Farmbrough, 22:49, 9 November 2009 (UTC).
Done.
Rich Farmbrough, 05:12, 10 November 2009 (UTC).

Delink deleted article

The article The Numbers (website) has been deleted following an AfD, but still appears as a red link in a large number of articles. –Dream out loud (talk) 22:44, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Done.
Rich Farmbrough, 05:48, 10 November 2009 (UTC).

Tag all Wikipedia books with {{WBOOKS|class=}}

The relevant category is Category:Wikipedia:Books. Only tag those that are in the Wikipedia space. Run once a week please. That's it! Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 18:09, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Would you be able to link to a WikiProject or another groups consenus for this to happen? Peachey88 (Talk Page · Contribs) 23:23, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
I didn't bother with making a thread on WP. The project is dead and I'm currently resurrecting it. Discussion takes place on IRC usually, so I can't link to anything. It's not a controversial task, and there's no conceivable objection to this, so let's not get bogged down in bureaucracy. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 12:23, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
Shouldn't WikiProject banners generally belong to WikiProjects? PC78 (talk) 00:04, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
Uh, yeah... WikiProject Wikipedia Books (WP:WBOOKS)... ? Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 12:23, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
Ah, OK. The primary link in the banner is Wikipedia:Books rather than the WikiProject, which is a little confusing IMO. PC78 (talk) 13:15, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
Ah yes, it's a custom message instead of the usual one. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 14:23, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
De-archiving. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 17:41, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
You might want to approach one of the operators of WikiProject tagging bots (as linked to in the template at the top of this page). --Cybercobra (talk) 22:11, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
Done.

Rich Farmbrough, 12:08, 10 November 2009 (UTC).

Excellent. Many thanks. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 17:18, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

The IUCN just changed the links to Red List pages, which are very widely linked in organism articles. They need to change as follows:

http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/XXXXX -> http://www.iucnredlist.org/apps/redlist/details/XXXXX

where XXXXX is a five-digit code. Example edit here. I will notify WT:TOL of this. Ucucha 12:41, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like an excellent case for using a template instead of a bare link, so future URL changes aren't a hassle like this. --Cybercobra (talk) 13:16, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
Currently the old links redirect to the proper new links. Is there any reason to believe this will change? If not, there is no reason to go around changing a bunch of pages just to avoid a redirect. --ThaddeusB (talk) 13:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
NM on that. After further examination, some links do redirect properly, but others do not.
 Doing... I agree that the best way to handle this is to set up a template system so that if they ever change again, we won't have to redo all the changes. I'll work on getting something set up today. --ThaddeusB (talk) 13:45, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
Also http://www.redlist.org/search/quick/* changed to http://www.redlist.org/apps/redlist/search/quick/ (works only with parameters e.g. [1]). Also species: has many of these links. Links to http://www.redlist.org/search/details.php?species= ({{Redlist}}) are broken. Merlissimo 16:44, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
Unfortunately I'm not sure I can do anything about the details.php?species= ones. The reason being that IUCN seems to have changed their ID# a little while back and these links use the old #s. For example, http://www.redlist.org/search/details.php?species=48963 is now at http://www.redlist.org/apps/redlist/details/143867/0. I was only able to figure that out by knowing which species the link went to and doing a search. It might be possible to automate that search process in some cases... I will see what I can come up with, but anything tips you might have would be appreciated. --ThaddeusB (talk) 05:31, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
It would be great if this could be solved automatically, but otherwise these links should be marked as deprecated in some way (by a hidden category?), so that people can go around and fix them. Ucucha 11:51, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
If it comes to it, they can be marked with {{dead link}}. --ThaddeusB (talk) 16:47, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
I should point out that there is already a template for this purpose, although I only created it 4 days ago (before the most recent change). The template is Template:Iucnredlist and Ucucha has already updated it to point to the current URLs. Unfortunately it is currently only used by two pages; although perhaps it could be added by a bot to the other pages? -Paul1337 (talk) 13:41, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
There is a number of such templates (Special:Prefixindex/Template:IUCN), and there are many other pages where the IUCN is cited in another way. That is an editorial decision that should be respected; we shouldn't force any particular way of linking to an IUCN page. However, ThaddeusB and I created a Template:IUCNlink to generate just the link and nothing else, which allows for easy updates when the URLs are changed. Ucucha 13:50, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation; that makes sense. I have changed Template:Iucnredlist to Template:IUCNextlink to make it more consistent with the other ones, and to try and make it clear that it's specifically for the External links section. -Paul1337 (talk) 19:19, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

There have been two major changes at IUCN site ("136584" is parameter for id):

Some of the old urls are redirected, others not. I've changed the missing Templates (e.g. Template:IUCN) to the current URL. The IUCN links for searching I've not yet explored in detail. The only URL I know that currently works is http://www.redlist.org/apps/redlist/search/quick/?text=homo. I suggest to use a template for that (see de:Vorlage:IUCNSearch).

I would advise not to mix up the change of url an the change of the id of the birds an handle this changes separately. The change of the url can be handled by a bot easily for weblinks not using a template (for template usages there's no need). The change of the id of the birds can be handled by bot only for cases using templates, I guess, and this is not that easy. Hope that helps. --Cactus26 (talk) 08:04, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Are you sure it is only the birds? I believe I also recall some mammal IDs being changed. Ucucha 13:50, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
I haven't found any changed non-bird yet. Do you remember any mammal?--Cactus26 (talk) 17:02, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
I can't. Well, I may as well have confused something here. Please ignore my prior comment. Ucucha 15:48, 8 November 2009 (UTC)
A template is better. Future changes are one edit, and "what links here" is also useful. Rich Farmbrough, 11:45, 13 November 2009 (UTC).
I looked at this and found http://www.iucnredlist.org/search/details.php/XXXXX/all - note the /all. Since this seems non-trivial I have emailed ICUN asking them for information on the changes. Rich Farmbrough, 07:27, 14 November 2009 (UTC).
That link is a 404 for me (when I substitute the above ID, 136584, and when I follow it plain raw). — This, that, and the other [talk] 09:43, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

"Special district governments" page creations?

Is there a bot that could take data from a spreadsheet and plug it into an article template to create articles? I have proposed using data mined from the Census of Governments to create stubs for about 1,700 municipal authorities--which are special-purpose governments (like water authorities and sewer authorities). Is this possible? --Blargh29 (talk) 06:10, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Certainly such a bot is quite feasible to code; but there's no general bot for article generation as it tends to be very specific to the data source(s) used and the type of articles being produced. --Cybercobra (talk) 12:13, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
You'd also have to get a strong community consensus that these stubs should be created in the first place. I'd suggest taking it to WP:VPR, and also advertising the discussion on the talk pages of every WikiProject you can think of that might be related and maybe even Template:Cent. Anomie⚔ 20:58, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
Suffice it to say there's been some controversy regarding bot-generated articles; particularly after a recent article-generating bot didn't go so well and significant clean up was involved. --Cybercobra (talk) 22:09, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I have officially made this proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Municipal authorities/special district governments, which is probably a better place to hash out the notability question.--Blargh29 (talk) 23:07, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

New books alert

Could it be possible to monitor the Category:Wikipedia:Books and produce a sort of daily "new books ticker" (uploaded at Wikipedia:Books/New books)? Something like:

Community books
User books

Thanks. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 16:00, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Where would you want said ticker to go? Would it only show daily changes, or would it be a list that's continuously added to? Fritzpoll (talk) 16:04, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Books/New books would be a good place to upload. Just keep adding stuff to the lists (making sure the dates are correctly ordered). Stuff older than one month should be archived at Wikipedia:Books/New books/Archive/2008, Wikipedia:Books/New books/Archive/2009, Wikipedia:Books/New books/Archive/2010, and so on. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 16:10, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
if there's a consensus for this at Wikipedia:Books, I'll happily write this one up. Fritzpoll (talk) 16:19, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
Well I didn't ask per say, but I really don't see why anyone would object. At the very least the list will be used by WikiProject Wikipedia Books. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 16:34, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
Why would user created books in their namespace matter and need to be included? Peachey88 (Talk Page · Contribs) 23:12, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
To have personalized books where they control what article goes in, to test things, to have a draft version... Including them will allow us to give pointers and advice, correct obvious mistakes, and so on... Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 19:33, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
De-archiving. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 17:41, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Any takers? Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 05:08, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

See User:TedderBot/New books alert for the request, User:TedderBot/New books alert/results for the output. Did you bring this up at WT:Books? tedder (talk) 18:47, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
It looks goods, although dates would be better in DD MMM YYYY format, and titles could be truncated to just the relevant part (aka Hadronic Matter, instead of Wikipedia:Books/Hadronic Matter, same for user books). Does archiving work? Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 01:29, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
Changed the dates to your specification (did you mean MM or MMM?). I haven't done archiving or piping yet, the project page for it is here: User:TedderBot/New books alert. I'd suggest joining me there to discuss improvements and what needs to be done to make it live. tedder (talk) 01:39, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
I mean MMM, as in three letters abbreviation (see example in the request). I'll continue in on the user talk, although it's not a very good idea to hold discussions on several different places for the same thing. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 02:27, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
Well I don't have much else to add, it looks good overall, so once the archiving is implemented it should be good to go. For it to be perfect, the dates would have to look exactly as written above (no bold, endash between dates and booktitle) so it matches the output of WP:AALERTS. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 02:36, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
I figured that's what you meant by the months when I went back and re-read it. So I changed to code to match that, tested it, and checked it in. Centralized discussions are best, but for longer "code projects" it's nice to have somewhere so it doesn't take over. In reality, WT:BOOKS might be a good place, but I still like having a technical "working group". tedder (talk) 02:34, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
Here's a good enough place. The final list would be uploaded at either Wikipedia:Books/New books (my preference), or Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books/New books. I'll post a message on both to generate discussion. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 02:41, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Clear up messy category

The category Category:Non-free Wikipedia files with red backlink gets full of pages that ought not to be there. The suggestion listed on the page is for someone to go through all the incorrect entries, and do a null edit (a very boring job). A bot (or an AWB job) could take up this cause. The category has been well above its backlog trigger of 25 items, hovering between 150 and 180 over the past few days. — This, that, and the other [talk] 09:33, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Anybody about? — This, that, and the other (talk) 09:19, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
Hi there this/that/other :). Sorry it's taken so long to get back to you. Anyway, I'm not sure this is such a good task for a bot. It's been suggested a few times before, and declined, see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Null edit bot. Best, - Kingpin13 (talk) 14:27, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
Yes. I may ask at VPT for input. This issue makes checking of such categories almost impossible. — This, that, and the other (talk) 06:23, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
Current build of AWB does not allow null editing... –xenotalk 14:40, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

On-Demand WebCitation bot

I'd like to see a bot similar to User:WebCiteBOT that only runs on-demand. Or, to open it up more, archives references on an article that currently exist. I just went through a GA review where one of my articles from several years ago had a lot of dead links that I had to clean up, which is what sparked this request (not to mention WebCiteBOT hasn't ran since 11/1). I see this bot working a couple ways:

  1. Runs on-demand only: The editor enters the article name, and the bot archives all working links. Dead links could be maybe be posted on the article's talk page.
  2. Delayed on-demand: The editor enters the article name, and the bot stores in memory or in a database the references. Then after 12 hours or so, it archives all references that still exist that are working. This would prevent a spam link from being archived in case somebody adds a spam link then runs the archiver. (WebCiteBOT currently monitors #wikipedia-en-spam to prevent spam.)

Granted, it would be nice if the bot ran through all articles but I don't want to step on WebCiteBOT's toes. Thoughts?—NMajdan•talk 17:34, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I have long planned to add that functionality to WebCiteBOT. Unfortunately, I have had very little free time for the past couple months, but i should have some time on my hands in December. --ThaddeusB (talk) 18:34, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
I figured you were busy by the lack of activity with WebCiteBOT. And I didn't want to bother you any more than I already have. Hence, the request here. I don't want it to seem as if I went over your head with this request. Like I said, I was just reawakened to the issue with the recent GA review I went through. WebCiteBOT provides an invaluable service to Wikipedia and I figured your limited time would be better spent getting the primary bot working continuously rather than taking on new requests. If you feel you'll have time to get your bot up and running in addition to adding functionality, great!—NMajdan•talk 19:10, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
No worries. I wasn't offended in the slightest. The only issue with two bots (besides the effort to reinvent the wheel) would be that the WebCite people requested no more than 1 query per 5 secs... In any case, I am restarting the primary task today. --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:43, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Checklinks has a feature to archive individual links (click "(info)", then click "Request to archive this link" button) which will be easier to use in the future as well as replacing existing links with archived versions. It and PDFbot will also archive PDFs they come across, BTW. — Dispenser 07:58, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
I can't figure out how to get Checklinks to archive a site. And it only appears to even allow archiving of a few references. And I don't see an archival feature to PDFbot.—NMajdan•talk 17:02, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Fixed the checklinks feature, wrong logic in regards to cache-control header. Additionally, I implemented an interface for using archive links. The archiver in PDFbot is a passive, only requesting after they've been tested. — Dispenser 01:14, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

De-euphemizing

According to WP:EUPHEMISM, we should "Avoid clichés about death, such as "he died doing what he loved" or "his death was the end of an era", and euphemisms such as "gave his life", "passed away", "passed over", "left his body", or "returned to God". The word died is religiously neutral, and neither crude nor vulgar." Yet in a discussion, I was informed that just one of these euphemisms, "passed away", appears in 35,000 Wikipedia articles. Would it be possible to build a bot that would clean out any or all of these bits of squeamishness? --Orange Mike | Talk 18:06, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

In short, no. Many of the current uses of each phrase are appropriate, as they are either direct quotes or used as proper nouns. Also the 35K number appears to be way off. The internal search engine finds ~2600 in article space and Google estimates 4900 total, included many instances in other spaces. --ThaddeusB (talk) 18:41, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
Would it be possible to build a Twinkle tool which would empower the user to do this kind of ob-comp work? I do not have the programmer nature, but it seems like it ought to be possible. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:04, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos/Archive 2#"Passed away", for the previous automated attempt. It might be worthwhile to haggle WP:WikiProject Check Wikipedia too. — Dispenser 22:40, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I want some bot to add a particular Template to all users page. I am from Hindi Wikipedia.

I dont know how to request to a bot for adding a Template on users pages. So somebody please help me to make such a request. This is the template which is to be added on Hindi Wikipedia users page PAGENAME. And this is users list http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/विशेष:Log/newusers. The users list shows only limited number of users but I want the template to be added to all users' pages till the first user if the user page is not present. Please insert the template I have specified in all those users' page which are red colored i.e theri user pages are not available. If there is any proper way of rwquesting then please let me know. Thanks a lot for help. हिन्दी (talk) 17:42, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Note that this is the place for requesting bots to run on the English Wikipedia. If the Hindi Wikipedia has a bot requests page, you'd have much more luck asking there. Anomie⚔ 21:38, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Although perhaps User:Tinucherian could help you. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:42, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Maryland Historical Trust

Links to the Maryland Historical Trust have recently changed from www.marylandhistoricaltrust.net to mht.maryland.gov. We have at least 1400 articles on National Register of Historic Places that link to the old address, and while this could be done with AWB, it seems like a job for a bot, as it's a simple find/replace operation. Examples done by a diligent IP can be found here [2] and here [3]. Acroterion (talk) 02:44, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

It's been pointed out to me that the find/replace will need to extend to the references as well, so the edits are now x2, more or less. Acroterion (talk) 03:05, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 Doing... - I'll have User:DeadLinkBOT run through these later today. --ThaddeusB (talk) 19:04, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
Have you consider pestering the webmaster there? Dead links effect everybody else too. IIS 6 supports redirects, right? — Dispenser 01:21, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
I wouldn't know where to start. Pretty much all Maryland governmental and quasi-governmental addresses are migrating to maryland.gov, and I doubt they care what Wikipedia thinks about it. Acroterion (talk) 19:04, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
Email the contact address (Cory Kegerise) informing him that your project uses their website as a resource. The 1400+ links (listed at Special:LinkSearch/http://www.marylandhistoricaltrust.net) are dead since they did not use URL redirection and they should expect a lower Google ranking for their new site. Give them a tutorial link like How to Redirect a Web Page so the web guy can work quicker. Be sure to mention doing it will save everyone else a lot of work. It may be useful to include other contact information so they can stay in contact with the project.
I completely disagree with the assertion that they wouldn't care what's on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is usually the first place where people turn to for information (high Google rankings), so it would be natural for them to want some input on what people are reading. "Palmerston North entry dissuades overseas professionals" is a good example of this IMO. — Dispenser 05:14, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll give it a try. My experience with state bureaucracies gives me little hope, but the MHT is, in fact, fairly responsive in other circumstances. If we make it simple for them and us, so much the better. Acroterion (talk) 22:58, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
Let me know when you here something (or if you don't hear anything at all by the end of next week or so). I have held off changing any of the links pending the result of this discussion. --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:57, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Ensuring hatnotes from primary topics to disambiguation pages

If there is a (disambiguation) page for a primary topic, the primary article should have a hatnote leading to the disambig page i.e. {{otheruses}}. For example, Bond Street's hatnote now links to Bond Street (disambiguation). However, there have been cases where the otheruses hatnote is missing from the primary topic, hiding the corresponding (disambiguation).

Could a bot insert missing otheruses hatnotes to primary topics as applicable? Cases to avoid would be 1) where (disambiguation) page is not a valid disambig, most likely when it is a redirect back to primary topic; and 2) where the primary topic page is already a disambig (normally marked with {{disambig}} or {{hndis}} tags). Dl2000 (talk) 03:35, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Ironically, I much more often see the opposite problem of pages violating WP:NAMB and having unnecessary disambiguation hatnotes. --Cybercobra (talk) 09:02, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Bot to remove "Unsourced" sections at Wikiquote

I would really appreciate it if someone could make a bot, over at Wikiquote, that would go and remove the "Unsourced" subsections from pages at that project. (See [4], and also per q:Wikiquote:Sourced and Unsourced sections). These sections should simply be removed. Thank you, Cirt (talk) 02:18, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Addendum: Could also be an option instead of just removing them outright, of moving those subsections to the talk page (with a note that they could be moved back into main-article space once properly sourced), per q:Wikiquote:Sourced and Unsourced sections. Cirt (talk) 02:21, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Sorting fairuse images in "Other images that should be in SVG format " category

Basically what I need is a bot that goes through the images in Category:Other images that should be in SVG format and checks if they contain any fair use tag (incl. non-free tags such as {{Non-free symbol}}). If an image is found to containing such a tag the {{svg}} (or one of the other alternative names for the same template) tag should be changed to {{svg|fairuse}} thereby putting it in the correct subcategory of Category:Images that should be in SVG format. /Lokal_Profil 01:30, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

{{Coord}} templates with a field equal to "city"

I recently discovered that there are over 10,000 {{Coord}} instances that have "city" as one of their parameters. According to the template documentation, these should be changed to "type:city". Anyboty want to take on this project? I'm thinking we should start by doing article space only--no talk pages, user pages, or other namespaces. And don't bother trying to parse {{Coord}} parameters such as {{Coord|1|2|region:AU_city}}, just look for the exact string as one parameter. --Stepheng3 (talk) 21:08, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I start them now -- maelgwn - talk 01:58, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
These come from the Rambot articles, which still needs to be fixed. The Coordinates are duplicated twice in the geography section (SAMPLE: CITY is located at {{coord|LAT|LON|PARAMETER INFORMATION}} (LAT, LON).{{GR|1}}) these should be removed and the infobox updated with the high precision coordinates if no infobox added {{coord}} to the end of the article. There are probably some other things that should be done. At present there are 20984 listed from my error log. — Dispenser 17:41, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
Ok, the job has been stopped for now. Do you have a list of things that should be done? (And relevant discussion ... ?) -- maelgwn - talk 01:16, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 25#Coordinates in US cities articles: where to display. If you need help you can usually find me in the Toolserver IRC channel. — Dispenser 22:07, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
Dispenser, that's a complicated discussion which is only tangentially related to my request. I'd like to avoid making perfection the enemy of the good. A bot that could clean up duplicated geocoordinates in city articles would be marvelous; what I'm asking for is much simpler, but can be done right now. If you're objecting, please withdraw your objection. If not, please create a separate bot request clearly explaining all other the things you'd like done to the Rambot articles and let Maelgwn get on with my request. --Stepheng3 (talk) 00:34, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

ArbCom election bots

The voting stage of the December 2009 Arbitration Committee Elections is underway, and could use some automated help. There is a list of votes cast, but an alphabetical, annotate-able on-wiki version is desired at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2009/Voter log. If a bot could scrape the content of the former and dump it alphabetically to the latter without overwriting notes or strikes, that would be wonderful.  Skomorokh  02:54, 1 December 2009 (UTC)


I'll take a look at this one. Just a couple of questions: Is there any better way to access that list than scraping it off the Web page-by-page? And where does the "disenfranchised voters" list come from? rspεεr (talk) 04:57, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
Update: I got the scraping done, and put up the results manually to start with. Now I just need to do the fiddly part of avoiding edit conflicts and leaving people's comments alone. rspεεr (talk) 06:29, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
All done but the actual editing, but the BAG hasn't said anything about my bot request yet. rspεεr (talk) 19:55, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
Thanks very much Rspeer! It looks great so far, now just have to get people to use it. The "disenfranchised" list is to be taken by comparing a list of anyone who has signed a subpage of Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_December_2009/Comments with the voter log; anyone on the former list but not on the latter should be suspected of being disenfranchised. Mahalo,  Skomorokh  20:54, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure "disenfranchised" is the right word for that. They're more likely to be "confused voters" who should be notified by the second bot you describe below. rspεεr (talk) 22:33, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Secondly, this year voting will be done by secret ballot using SecurePoll: Special:SecurePoll/vote/80. This is a change from previous years, where editors cast a public vote in the form of a comment at the /Vote subpage of the election main page. These /Vote pages have been moved to /Comments, but are still open for those who want to make their votes public to do so. There is a concern that some editors might not know that they need to vote using the SecurePoll, and so it's been suggested that a bot notify everyone who has left a comment about a candidate but is not in the voter log, reminding them to use the secret ballot.

I don't expect that these are difficult-to-implement, but time is of the essence, so any help appreciated.  Skomorokh  02:54, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

MIT OCW linking

Hello,

Recently I removed a large quantity of, what I belive to be spam, from some articles from an aggregation service. There was mixed reaction, however there was relatively good consensus for the linked content to be re-found from the upstream providers and linked to directly.

Specifically the problem is this: Special:Contributions/EconoPhysicist and Special:Contributions/124Nick have created a large amount of links to video lectures on topics throught wikipedia. The content itself is good, however I assert that the aggregator was (1) simply spamming and is (2) using the videos in violation of their CC-Non-commerical licences (discussion is on my talk page). I removed these links, which took me several days, and recieved mixed response for work. A good suggestion for all was to remap the links directly to the upstream content, if the information from the contributions of EconoPhysicist and 124Nick could be harnessed to locate the upstream content.

I am unsure how this relinking could be done, but as the aggregator was essentially leeching content from MIT OpenCourseWare and UC Berkeley content, it could potentially be that one can find the upstream videos from OCW and UCB and re-insert the links to the upstream content.

Now I have no suggestions, but have not undertaken a full analysis, of how one might go about this. However if a unique identification method can be found, or a semi-assisted method (video title + search?) to find this mapping, then perhaps this could be achieved. If anyone has any good ideas, or is interested in implementing this, please let me know! User A1 (talk) 09:55, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Add single reference to about 1400 articles

Each Ohio township article (see Category:Townships in Ohio) has a "Name and history" or "Name" section that includes a statement about the frequency of the township's name: depending on how many other Ohio townships have the same name, it either links to a list of other Ohio townships with the same name, links directly to one or two other townships with the same name, or notes that the township's name is unique. When I added these sections to the township articles in 2007, I used this US Census Bureau website as my source, but I didn't cite any sources in the "Name and history" section. Could a bot go around and add a citation to all of these sections? Please know that some of these sections already have references for other information; for example, Range Township, Madison County, Ohio includes a referenced statement about the township's population in 1854. The citation could be something along the lines of:

<ref>[http://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/general_ref/cousub_outline/cen2k_pgsz/oh_cosub.pdf Detailed map of Ohio], [[United States Census Bureau]], 2000. Accessed 2007-02-16.</ref>

I've selected 16 February 2007 as the access date because I always worked from a copy that I downloaded from the Census Bureau website on 16 February 2007. Nyttend (talk) 05:12, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

    • May I suggest that this reference be created via a citation template? Maybe something like this:
"Detailed map of Ohio" (PDF). United States Census Bureau. 2000. Retrieved 2007-02-16.--Blargh29 (talk) 06:06, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
I've never used the citation templates much because I don't understand them entirely [embarrassed]; so thanks for producing a better format than I'd suggested. Nyttend (talk) 23:55, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
I've filed a request for the approval of this task. Andrea105 (talk) 01:51, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Is it possible for bots to harvest urls from http://web.archive.org and update articles accordingly? I have noticed that a large chunk of the domain sclegacy.com is no longer active and a ton of StarCraft-related articles use those links all the time. All the links are broken, but all that I have checked so far have archived versions on webarchive. I know how to do the simple text replacements in the articles (using pywikipediabot) to add archive urls, but I don't know how the bot actually finds those urls...I assume it might be possible, given that there are bots that do similar tasks (like auto-generated titles for bare urls). If anyone is interested in making such a bot, or could show me where there's information on how to harvest urls like that, I would greatly appreciate it.

While my intention right now is just to fix the links in a particular set of articles, I assume such a bot could later be generalized to work on many article that need massive link updating. (I checked Wikipedia:Bots/Status and did not see any such bot already active.) rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 18:19, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

It's possible. Everything is possible if you know Python.(almost)
I guess that the hardest issue is how to determine if a link is dead or not. (temporary resolution issues? outdated dns? etc, etc...)
Have fun.
NicDumZ ~ 06:21, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
For this particular job I could just tell it to only do links from that one domain that I know is dead.
Do you know which script I would use (or adapt) to get the external information? I know basic Python but I don't really know anything about how bots actually work (I have User:ZhBot another bot but it basically just uses replace.py and I leave it at that). rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 06:51, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
For every domain you have at least to check the archive to get a working snapshot date. The last saved copy of a website could also contain "website closed" pages. Perhaps you should ask User:DeadLinkBOT.
The url of wayback ist quite simple: http://web.archive.org/web/<snapshotdate>/<original url> . If a page hasn't changed since a previous snapshots the url redirects to that version. So you can use the same snapshotdate for all pages. Merlissimo 18:50, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
Actually, I brought this up a few months back and ThaddeusB agreed to add it to his to-do list. Right now, I am working on the bot as-well. I have made it so that It looks for the closest archive date to the access-date and then returns it. I need some help with the regex to return the contents of a {{citeweb}} template, so that it can retrieve the access-date. If anybody here can help, it would be awesome. Hopefully, in the future, the bot won't need an accessdate, and can use wikiblame to return the original access-date. Tim1357 (talk) 12:23, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Just spent some time coding the bot. Im going to file a BRFA to see if this kind of thing would make it. I added code so that the bot gets the accessdate from wikiblame when no accessdate parameter can be found that is associated to the dead link. Tim1357 (talk) 23:29, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

BRFA filed here Tim1357 (talk) 05:58, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Bot to shut off bots

The emergency shut-off feature of many bots is very nice, but it would be a lot more useful if established users could push the button.

A bot which monitored such pushes by non-admins and checked them against a whitelist and blacklist and, if the user was allowed, shut off the bot would help. The whitelist could be something as simple as autoconfirmed or a specific whitelist of people who have asked to be put on it. The blacklist would probably be blocked users + those who had misused the tool in the past.

The only reason not to do this is if it's not worth the effort, i.e. if there are enough admins to do the job that more eyes won't help much. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 05:48, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Have there been many (any?) instances where this would have been necessary? I haven't heard about bots rampaging all over the place other than very occasionally. ···日本穣? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 06:15, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
That's part of why I asked the question - to get some idea if this is an issue or not. I do know of cases of rampaging bots, but they are usually rampaging during initial testing and turned off by the operator quickly. But, as Mystery Bob reminds us all, robots are our friends and occasionally they do go south. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 13:46, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
I don't know if this may be what you are looking for, but... a lot of bots seem to have a shut-off feature that is activated whenever someone edits the bot's user talk page. –BLACK FALCON (TALK) 18:03, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
Or some other page dedicated to that purpose. Anomie⚔ 20:08, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
From my limited experience, making a shutoff button to stop the bot is easy. It should be up the the bot's creator to do that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tim1357 (talk • contribs) 18:55, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

On November 12th, I made a post on Wikipedia talk:Files for deletion asking for peoples opinion. It is still unanswered. Seeking more input, I went to Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous) and asked for more input. It got archived with no reply. I figured per WP:SILENCE (an essay) I had consensus, so I went to User talk:Schutz and asked him a question. Still no response. So now I am here. Would someone be willing to create a bot put a date navigation box on the bottom of each daily page similar to the one currently used on the top? Or maybe add it to a bot that does something similar?--Rockfang (talk) 10:25, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

The problem with trying to put a navigation template at the bottom of the page is that it doesn't work well with using the "new section" feature to add new nominations: the bot would have to edit after every nomination to move the template back to the bottom of the page. It might also confuse people editing the last nomination on the page. Anomie⚔ 13:57, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for replying. Regarding your first point, here I suggested that a bot would, after a new day is created, (not necessarily by the same bot) add the navigation template to the old "current" day. On your second point, some short commented out text could possibly be added near the navigation template to lower the amount of confusion. I think that confusion might be minimal. One option would be to add the template for a few days and just watch to see if there are any mess ups because of the template. If there are too many, we could just stop adding the template to pages.--Rockfang (talk) 20:59, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Would anyone be willing to start this?--Rockfang (talk) 01:17, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

To keep things neat, id ask the bot that creates the new FfD pages to do this. (User:Zorglbot). Just to clarify, would the template go on the bottom of each page after a new page has been created? Tim1357 (talk) 04:24, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
I have already asked that bot's operator here. That link answers your question as well.--Rockfang (talk) 04:41, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
I maintain that this task is good for that bot. If you want, I could add a nav box to all of the old old daily pages, but i think, for a daily task, zorgbot should do it.Tim1357 (talk) 22:53, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
You don't have to do current pages if you don't want to. No biggie. I think I might email the bot's operator in an attempt to contact him/her.--Rockfang (talk) 23:04, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
Well, if you cant find him/her leave me a message on my talk page. Its actually pretty easy (i think its like two lines of code that I would have to write from scratch?) so i could write it pretty quickly. Good Luck! Tim1357 (talk) 00:52, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Bot work at WikiProject Albums

There is currently talk at the Albums WikiProject about a possible widespread change across all album articles, and we need some expert advice on what is possible to accomplish with bots. Please see #Implementation of consensus on album reviews for our discussion. Thanks —Akrabbimtalk 20:54, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject tagging for Wikipedia:WikiProject Pennsylvania

I would like to request a bot to tag all articles, categories, and templates, within Category:Pennsylvania and its sub-categories with the {{WikiProject Pennsylvania}} project tag. I have checked that category, and all of the sub-categories seem appropriate. Thank you! --Blargh29 (talk) 07:00, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I should be able to get this done with my bot if you like. But I'd prefer to wait a few days for some input from the project. Hope that's okay, - Kingpin13 (talk) 07:52, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure whether by "and its sub-categories" you mean just the first level of subcats or you want to include all the subcats of those subcats (and so on). If the latter, you should probably check again: for example, Category:Cincinnati Bearcats football coaches is in there via Category:Cincinnati, Ohio, which is in Category:Settlements on the Ohio River, which is in Category:Ohio River, which of course is in Category:Rivers of Pennsylvania (which is ultimately under Category:Geography of Pennsylvania). If you want, I can provide a list of all 6183 categories under Category:Pennsylvania for review. Anomie⚔ 14:34, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Thanks! I was thinking that it should include all sub-cats, all the way down. I didn't realize that there were 6k of them, so maybe I ought to take a closer look at them. Can you produce a list of all of these? --Blargh29 (talk) 16:34, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Done, at User:Blargh29/Subcats of Category:Pennsylvania. With a list like this, I usually recommend that multiple members of the project look it over before anyone starts using it for tagging. Anomie⚔ 21:47, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Wow! Ok, so how should I designate which ones are relevant? Just delete them from that sub-page?--Blargh29 (talk) 00:08, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
Delete all the ones that are not relevant, leaving only the relevant ones. Or you could move the relevant ones to a separate page, if you'd rather do it that way. The important part is that you end up with a list of categories Kingpin should process. Anomie⚔ 02:25, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
Done! User:Blargh29/Subcats of Category:Pennsylvania. Just to be safe, I removed all sports teams and college-related categories, because those categories are filled with non-pertinent articles, like faculty, alumni, players, and coaches. --Blargh29 (talk) 06:21, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
Two WP:PENNA editors (User:Ruhrfisch & User:Niagara) have looked over the list and made suggestions. Thanks.-Blargh29 (talk) 05:10, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
Great, sounds like it's had enough eyes now, I'll try and start the bot up :) - Kingpin13 (talk) 09:34, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

DYK admin bot

Yes, I know there is DYKadminBot (talk · contribs) already to automatically update the DYK template and hand out credits. But the bot tends to go MIA from time to time (for example it's gone for 2 days now) and its operator nixeagle (talk · contribs) is too inactive these days unfortunately. So I thought I might ask here whether someone got the time and is willing to write a replacement bot or fix the code (apparently Ameliorate! hoped for this to happen) and run it themselves. Regards SoWhy 13:43, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Another idea would be to run a backup bot that could be activated by making an edit to it's userspace and which would then run once and then turn itself off again, for those times were the main bot is MIA. Such a set up could be done using a very slightly modified version of the code I think and not need much coding, just someone willing to run the bot (maybe someone who already runs a bot could do so? - in this hypothetical scenario the workload for this kind of bot would consist of checking periodically if a run was requested and to run if so, maybe once every few days/weeks, depending on the current bot). Any takers? Regards SoWhy 15:52, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
I'll look over the code and see if I can make sense of "the mess." :) At the very least, I could easily run a "back-up" copy of the bot when the main one is down. --ThaddeusB (talk) 22:39, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for butting in and posting naive comments:

  • The major problem with DYKadminBot (talk · contribs) is regular crashes of its "autonomous" wake-up timing, rather than its code per se; the crashes are partly related to the dependence of the bot on the toolserver.
  • As I understand the idea of the requested additional bot, it should perform a single update upon a command by an admin - it doesn't need to run continuously. It should have admin privileges and several admins should have access to its startup or its wakeup trigger. It should not interfere with the DYKadminBot (unless DYKadminBot is banned :-). The DYK admins don't need to change the bot, but it would be nice to give them an option to alter one parameter, namely the shift of the DYK timer, which is usually 6 hrs, but might be 8 hrs. Cheers. Materialscientist (talk) 02:34, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
Yes, the idea of the backup bot would be to have a second bot with the same code (or almost the same since it needs some routine to check whether it has been requested) that can be activated manually if needed. DYK is a large and annoying task to update manually and I think every admin at DYK would be happy if they could simply switch a bot on that does it for them.
As for the timer, if we can get nixeagle to change the code in a way that the timer can be changed with a variable in the bot's userspace, it would be good (strike that, that's actually possible already). The backup bot would need a similar feature then to check if the update time has come and gone (to ensure that a manual update request does not run if the main bot has done the update). Regards SoWhy 13:59, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Would it be possible for a bot to change all the links for Next United Kingdom general election and Next UK general election to United Kingdom general election, 2010. The page was recently moved and after next year the current redirect Next United Kingdom general election will be needed for the election after next. I hope this makes sense. Thank you. --Philip Stevens (talk) 06:31, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Sounds ok to me. Do you have consensus somewhere that I can point to in the BRFA? Maybe it's common sense. Tim1357 (talk) 22:55, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
Since I put up this request the page was moved back despite the fact there was consensus to move here and here. There is one user who disagrees with the consensus and keeps moving the page. I think the bot request should be implemented as it is now impossible for an election to take place in 2009 and it must take place before June 2010, so the page will be moved to United Kingdom general election, 2010 and after next year the page title 'Next United Kingdom general election' will be need for the election after 2010. --Philip Stevens (talk) 08:08, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
Update: The page has now moved back to United Kingdom general election, 2010 where it seems likely to remain. --Philip Stevens (talk) 20:14, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
BRFA filed Tim1357 (talk) 05:09, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
Thanks! --Philip Stevens (talk) 11:07, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

external linking

I'm sure this kind of bot already exists, so I apologise in advance for not taking this request directly to the right place. I'm looking not only for the technical tool but also the pointer to the place to get concensus on mass external linking. I would like to request a bot generate external links to as many of the items in this list that Wikipedia already has a direct equivalent for. The list is all the articles in the recently launched "Dictionary of Sydney" - the official online encyclopedia of Sydney. They are original research essays with footnotes and multimedia, many with direct correlation to our articles, and a large proportion are cc-by-sa licensed. (full disclosure, I was until recently employed at that organisation). Also available are "reference pages" (not the article, but a summary of all relevant data e.g. mapping) and for suburb articles there are also historical demographics information.

I think perhaps it needs to be a semi-automated bot because although many of the articles would have the same article name but they do not have the same scope (for example, the Dictionary of Sydney has an article "Chinese" but this only refers to the Sydney-Chinese history, not the global one).

I have placed an example external link at the WP article about they Sydney Suburb Surry Hills to demonstrate. It says:

Is this appropriate and/or technically feasible for a (semi-autonomous) bot? Does such a bot already exist and are there any policy/voting/approvals that need to be undertaken to get the consensus for a mass-external linking?

Witty Lama 15:00, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Start a discussion at WP:Village pump (proposals), and link to it from WT:External links, Template:Cent, and WP:Australian Wikipedians' notice board. Anomie⚔ 15:22, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
If you are asking to mass-add external links to wikipedia articles that link to that web site, you could run into major issues related to "do we trust this site so well that we are willing to blindly assume it's reliable," "gee, this looks like we are complicit in link-spam," and "does the proponent of the bot have a conflict of interest." The 3rd should be easy to deal with, the first can be dealt with by looking a a representative sample of entries. The third is a matter of perception of "playing favorites" and can't be dealt with easily. For this reason, you will have an uphill battle. Given the nature of the site and who is behind it though, your idea at least has a chance of going forward. If it were a commercial site or it did not appear to be a serious, well-respected non-profit then it likely wouldn't stand a chance. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:23, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
What might be useful is a template to make it easier for editors to add links by hand. An advantage of a template is if the site you are linking to re-organizes, you just need to modify the template once. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:25, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
Generates... links? If an author can't manage to do enough research to have had a few links-- if necessary at all-- I don't know how results generated by a bot would help in any way. We have regulations regarding external links and I'm not picturing a bot complying. Linkspam is bad enough on some popular topics already. An actual human being needs to look at an external link. If someone is too lazy for that, I'm not sure why they're spending their free time at Wikipedia in the first place. Finding "links" might as well mean finding more resources of entirely unknowns and-- well, more talk about be a waste of time. "No." External links are the one section of articles that rarely have any problem filling up.
Oh, and "semi-automated link bot" = a search engine. We have that already. ♪ daTheisen(talk) 05:18, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Bot from changing Changing WikiEd so refs can either be viewed as one line or multi line depending on editor preference

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Currently many refs are spread over 10 - 15 lines of text. Is there a bot that could put the ref all on one line to make editing easier? For example this: 

{{Cite journal
  | last = 
  | first = 
  | authorlink = 
  | coauthors = 
  | title = 
  | journal = 
  | volume = 
  | issue = 
  | pages = 
  | publisher = 
  | location = 
  | date = 
  | url = 
  | issn = 
  | doi = 
  | id = 
  | accessdate = }}

to this 

{{cite journal| author = | title = | journal =  | volume = | issue = | pages = | year = | pmid = | doi = | month =| issn =}}

On highly referenced pages it is hard to find the text between the citations in the first example and much easier in the second. Thanks.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:12, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Bots that muck with the way references have been formatted in an article are typically not well-received... –xenotalk 15:45, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
I end up doing lots of this by hand and have received no complaints. How they are formatted depends on the tool used to generate them. If using diberri's tool we end up with one line. If using the template example here [5] one end up with many lines. If not here were should I bring this discussion? Thanks.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:51, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Well you should move this section to WP:BOTREQ first... And then if there's an interested botop they'll file a BRFA and probably have to find consensus somewhere... Not sure... Maybe WT:REF. –xenotalk 15:58, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Discussion moved from WT:BAG. –xenotalk 16:00, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
There is probably a userscript that can help you to do this, as well. –xenotalk 16:01, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Personally, I like the expanded format (and obviously some others do, because someone must create refs that way), but I think it might make more sense to use the expanded format in conjunction with WP:LDR so that the bulk of the ref content isn't interrupting the flow of the page text. Dragons flight (talk) 16:04, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
One than ends up with sections like this [[6]] that are hard to edit IMO.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:12, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Hence my comment about LDR. If you are going to be mucking about with references, I'd rather see them moved via LDR than collapsed. And let's be honest, collapsing them in place still leaves wikitext that is hard to read. Dragons flight (talk) 16:18, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Is there a bot that implements LDR? Is there a page that has this implimented?Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:49, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
"Is there a page that has this implimented?" Here are two examples of articles that use the LDR model, List of computer science conferences and Josh Ohl. Peachey88 (Talk Page · Contribs) 23:48, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

(Unindent) The vertical format makes it easier to tell where the citation ends, so I would not support the requested bot. --Jc3s5h (talk) 16:56, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

If you want a script that toggles between the two formats, it would be pretty easy to code up. We do much more complicated (but less controversial) changes with WP:AutoEd. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 17:25, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
That would be a wonderful idea. Than each editor can get the format that they wish and all would be happy. Plastikspork how would one go about generating something like that? ie how would one combine it into the autoed tool bar?Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:00, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
No the single-line version is horrible. You can't see if the reference is complete, what's missing, and easily compare their style. If you don't want to see the refs, then just click on "toggle [REF] and [TEMPL] hiding" in the editing toolbar (in wiki-ed). Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:04, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
I wish to see the ref but just on one line. Now if this can be easily done so that everyone can see what they want then what is the issue?Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:45, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
To clarify, that was a reply to the orignal post, and not to your 18:00, 4 December 2009 (UTC) post. Sorry for the confusion. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:56, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
No worries. Plastik has suggested something better than what I initially wished for.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:30, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Do you want to actually want to reformat the reference (i.e., perform an edit), or just have it rendered on one line when you look at it (i.e., no edit, just for your own personal view)? With WP:AutoEd, we actual change the contents of the edit box. In Wikipedia:WikiEd, it can perform visual transformations which do not actually change the contents of the edit box. For example, hiding the ref templates as Headbomb alluded to. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 23:50, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Just reformats for my own view ( and who ever else wishes to see it like this ) which would mean that those who did not, would not have to see it this way. Lots of pages have the refs on one line so if we had a way to view it multiline that would make Headbomb happy to. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:56, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

May I suggest that a tool that does this in a semi-automated way may be better received by the community when used by someone who is careful? I agree that multi-line references are a bother, and unless someone is objecting to it they should be put into a single line. Chillum 00:14, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

"unless someone is objecting"... Well, several people are objecting. I am objecting, for one. I much prefer the multiline format, for ease of seeing what is going on. And from the above, it appears that Headbomb and Dragons flight and Jc3s5h take the same view. I cannot imagine why anyone thinks the single-line format is easier to edit. For me it is a nightmare. -- Alarics (talk) 23:17, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
Yes it looks like the community is split over which format they prefer. Thus same pages on single line and some are muiti line and no one is completely happy. As was stated above it might not be difficult to allow people to select how they wish to see / render references using wiki ed.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:51, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
I vehemently detest the horizontal version. It's ugly, and makes it very difficult to tell where the citation ends and the text begins. Where there are many of them in a single paragraph, the page (or section) becomes almost impossible to edit. Furthermore, the vertical format makes it much easier to find a given parameter, and to check the correct completion of the template. I very strongly oppose the use of such a bot.
Having said that, I think it is preferable to move citations into a "bibliography" or "references" section, so that the text need only contain "author name, year, page number" refs (and can drastically reduce the number of template calls where there are multiple references to the same book), or failing that, to use list-defined references. --NSH001 (talk) 00:13, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
Yes, it appears as though the solution is something ala WikiEd. There will never be agreement, even for something as simple as how to "indent code". The best solution is to allow everyone "view the code" how the wish, and not impose a format on anyone (if possible). I would say this discussion can be closed and moved to the "feature request" page for WikiEd. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 00:33, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Agree with PS will move the discussion.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:35, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Since we had an ANI this week about a bot that was changing the reference style in articles and it was deemed entirely unreasonable to force one style type on anyone. Leave things as they are. The horizontal version reminds me far too much of trying to edit discussion boards that have http links left and right in that it's just a garble of text around the screen. If it's not broke, don't fix it. If it's part of style guidelines then take it over there. As for the statement above of "community split" on this matter, this discussion begs to differ... with a unanimous consensus minus one. Not every difference in opinion is particularly worth trying to "correct", especially to an initial minority view. View to self? Okay. Just don't force style on anyone. ♪ daTheisen(talk) 05:05, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
Please read what has been written subsequently. What is currently being proposed is an addition to WikiEd that will allow people to see all edits as multi line rather than one line and vise versa. Thus all the editor who hate single line edits will no longer need to deal with them.
Since most refs are over one line I though the multi line people would love this recommendation.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:36, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Such a bot is obviously not going to happen, and this is not the place to discuss changes to WikiEd (take that discussion to WP:WikiEd or WP:VPT). Anomie⚔ 12:26, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Thanks already have as I mentioned above.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:32, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Tag articles in Category:Music video games

Can I please get some bot help with tagging articles in Category:Music video games with {{WikiProject Music Video Games}}? The project is new, and it'll take a while for me to do the tagging by hand. Regards -- Sk8er5000 (talk) 22:58, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Never mind. Found a bot. -- Sk8er5000 (talk) 23:16, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Bot to automatically apply the Oldprodfull template to talk pages

It seems that User:RockfangBot was was approved to add the {{oldprodfull}} template to the talk pages of articles, but encountered some difficulty and ceased to perform this task. A more recent and complicated request to go through article histories to find old prod templates was rejected/withdrawn as too difficult. My request is limited to detecting proposed deletions going forward.

I'd like to make the request again.

Some background; the proposed deletion process does not allow an article to be deleted by a second {{prod}} or {{prod-nn}} tag once a proposed deletion tag has been removed from an article. The oldprodfull template has fields for the dates of its application and removal, plus a field for any addition of the {{Prod-2}} tag. There are fields for the reason text given by the editor who proposes the deletion, and the editor who seconds the proposed deletion, but the removal of the tag would require grabbing text from the edit summary. There are also date fields for the events.

Now, my interest is not in a perfect filling in of all these optional fields. All I really want is a indication on the talk page that the article was deprodded, and the oldprodfull tag, the {{oldprod}} template or even just a note would be enough. There are some subtleties I would like, but don't require. It would be nice if the bot ignored articles that are or were already in an AFD discussion. It would be nice if the bot did not create talk pages, since articles that lack a talk page are generally young, and, given that they were prodded while lacking a talk page, likely to be deleted by some other method. Having the bot create a talk page will just annoy the admin who has to delete the article. It would be nice if the bot had a built-in delay of a few hours, perhaps even 24 hours, to allow comment, creation of a talk page, or further deletion action such as an AFD nomination. It would be nice if the bot could detect an old prod on an article that has just been recreated by an editor or restored by an admin.

Can this be done? Abductive (reasoning) 14:57, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

  • Support - Can it be done? Probably, with good coding and flagging cases where the code got confused. If it can be done correctly I would support such a bot. I would recommend someone patrol the output for accuracy for the first few hundred edits. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 15:02, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes it can be done. I'm confident I could write code to do this, but as I've got a number of bot tasks which need working on, I'd be unwilling (atm) to go through another BRfA, or to run the bot (due to bandwidth). However, I'd be very happy to help someone write the bot (I'm only any good with .NET). Which way do people prefer that the bot looks for the articles? Through categories, as MacMedBot did, or something else? @davidwr that could be done with a bot trial, which also takes the workload off the bot-op. - Kingpin13 (talk) 15:54, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
  • This bot has been on my agenda for a long time. Obviously, I haven't got to it (for a variety of reasons). However, I am currently on real world vacation and was actually planning on finally writing the code next week. --ThaddeusB (talk) 19:50, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
  • No apology necessary. If someone else is chopping at the bit to do it, they should feel free to do it. I certainly have plenty to do... I just wanted to say, "yes, I am hoping to finally actually get it done, so no one should pressure themselves too much." --ThaddeusB (talk) 04:41, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Howdy. My bot didn't encounter any difficulty, it just got distracted. :) I was going to start it back up at one point, but then I noticed the withdrawn MacMedBot request. I had asked the operator to let me know if it got approved, but it never did. I used AWB to place a blank oldprodfull on talk pages, and then I'd manually go through and add info myself. If people want me to, I can start this up again until a normal bot gets approved.--Rockfang (talk) 00:49, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Locating a bot writer for an innovation

I am keen to locate a Wikipedian who might be prepared to develop a bot or script as an editing/gnoming aid that would highlight undesirable word repetitions in an article, thus flagging to editors where recasting may be required. Although the exact repetition of a word can add to the cohesion of a text, in many cases it is poor style (I catch myself doing it, especially when tired).

For example, I've just pointed this one out at WP:FAC:

"Activated for service in World War I, the division saw brief service in the conflict, but never fought as an entire division."

But the phenomenon occurs not just within a sentence; some words are prominent enough to be avoided even when they are paragraphs apart. It would need to avoid a white-list of a few hundred common grammatical words, of course (e.g., the, to, been, am). A more sophisticated version would do better, by matching the frequency of occurrence of each word in English (there's a publicly available list) with the distance between specific occurrences in a text; a simple algorithm would be required to balance commonness against distance, which would need to be tested). This would clearly be preferable, but might be a challenge to develop and might require too much grunt.

Does anyone know of someone who might be interested and capable? I'm a total bot dummy (Mac user) and have no experience in writing scripts. Tony (talk) 15:24, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I've just been playing around with this for a bit. It ignores words listed here, repeated words are coloured by how many times they are repeated. --Chris 08:34, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

During a #wikimedia-strategy brainstorming session, regarding http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Question_of_the_week (which is currently "What changes to Wikimedia's technology would enable a friendlier and more welcoming environment?") it was suggested that the main issues could be addressed thusly: 

[20:20] <jimmyps> we could address the first two (tallest) bars on
                  http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:091207_QOTW.png
                  simply by publicizing statistics from http://stats.grok.se
[20:21] <eekim> jimmyps: the key question is, how would you publicize it, 
                and how would you measure if you were being effective?
[20:22] <jimmyps> eekim: easy, for each article find the top 10 articles 
                  also in its categories and list them in order on the 
                  sidebar after the interwikis with "x,xxx views/month" 
                  right-justified on every other line after each of the 10
[20:23] <jimmyps> that would indicate to people the most popular subjects 
                  that they are also interested in
[20:23] <jimmyps> this could be done in batch mode
[20:25] <jimmyps> does anyone disagree that listing the most popular 
                  "related articles" with their viewership counts on the 
                  sidebar after the interwikis would address the largest 
                  leftmost two bars on 
                  http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:091207_QOTW.png ?

(no disagreements were forthcoming)

Would someone who understands what is and is not possible with bots and MediaWiki please comment on the feasibility of this proposal? Thank you. 99.62.186.125 (talk) 04:49, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

it would be possible, the best method would probably be a toolserver acc with a javascript function that retrieves the data from the toolserver once we set the rules for what is and is not related. βcommand 04:52, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
Even better would be to have a statistics tab next to history. With graphs of metrics like readability, bytes size, html size, word count, number of references, incoming link count (backlinks), outgoing link count (links), traffic statistics, and possibly something like history flow. And maybe be able to compare to other pages. If the caching is done right it could be done on the toolserver. — Dispenser 05:41, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps 'related' is everything wikilinked and everything in the same categories? 99.62.186.125 (talk) 18:29, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
The same algorithm as related changed I would say. Rich Farmbrough, 09:20, 15 December 2009 (UTC).

Touch Templates with /doc

Templates with a subpage /doc have Interwiki links not in the template itself, but included from the subpage. If you add an Interwiki the subpage a job is automatically added which purges the template. That means the rendered version is recreated and now conaints the interwikis.

But the database is not changed. If you make an sql query the results may be wrong. To change this you have to touch = null edit (=make an edit without changes) the template. Most of these templates are also edit protected.

So can an admin bot touch all pages which have a subpage in Category:Template documentation? This could be also done with a simple admin account, because it doesn't produce any visible edit. It would be very useful if this could be done e.g. one a month.

If you don't want to touch all pages: The API has the info when a page was touched last time (/page/@touched), so a touch is only need if the value is older than the revision of the subpage ref/@timestamp.

This is needed only for toolserver sql queries. API resturns correct results. Merlissimo 11:44, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Declined Not a good task for a bot. From your final sentence, this sounds like this isn't even an issue with Wikipedia, just the toolserver. Rather than having a bot going around making null edits, why not just fix the toolserver? Anomie⚔ 13:13, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
The toolserver is only a replication of the wikimedia db server. Mediawiki should be fixed instead. But this is not done because of too many needed table locks which downgrades the performance of the db on every edit. But only 10000 more edits once a month does't hurt db (should not be done in mean time of course). The job queue is not the problem because mediawiki checks if something has changed (which is not on a null edit) before adding the subjobs for every page including the template. Merlissimo 14:39, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
touch.py -ref:Template:Documentation would do this job. Merlissimo 14:50, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
But if it works through the API (as you stated), then it wouldn't seem to be a problem with MediaWiki. Just a problem with however the toolserver is replicated. Otherwise link us to the bugzilla bug on this issue that is closed WONTFIX. Anomie⚔ 18:37, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

It's not the replication but the MediWiki software by the look of it. The interwikis are served correctly but the table isn't updated - the updates sit downstream of the table. So the bug does not express through the API or the web interface, but it does through the SQL. The argument that a lock has been saved is not strong because the lock will be needed when the "touch" is done - of course this may be one lock for a whole bunch of editing. The best solution is to fix the table updating. Rich Farmbrough, 21:18, 15 December 2009 (UTC).

There are 33k such templates, a one off touching seems in order. Rich Farmbrough, 21:45, 15 December 2009 (UTC).

Bot to notify major contributors that their BLP is unreferenced.

Per the apparent concensus here and here, I made a bot that will notifies users of articles that are unrefrenced. The bot works like this: Find largest non-bot, non-annon, user with the most non-minor edits to an article, and add that article to the user's list. When the bot is done parsing all the unrefrenced BLPs, it adds a message to the users talk page:

Un-Referenced BLPs

Hello Bot requests! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 2 of the articles that you created , are Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons. Please note that all biogrophies of living persons must be sourced. If you were to add sources to these articles, it would greatly help us with the current 150 page backlog. Here is a list:

  1. Foo Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  2. Bar Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

-Thanks! DashBot

alternativley, as to not flood the user's talk page- if they have more then ten articles, it adds the first ten to the user page, and provides a link to a list of the rest: Example

Un-Referenced BLPs

Hello Bot requests! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that , are Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons. Please note that all biogrophies of living persons must be sourced. If you were to add sources to these articles, it would greatly help us with the current 150 page backlog. Here is a list:

  1. Foo Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  2. Bar Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  3. Foo Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  4. Bar Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  5. Foo Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  6. Bar Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  7. Foo Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  8. Bar Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  9. Foo Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
  10. Bar Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

-Thanks! Dashbot

Tell me if I can change anything before I request approval. Tim1357 (talk) 17:48, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

P.S. I need somewhere to direct all complaints about the bot. I don't want to get beaten. : )
"Here are the articles, in no particular order" probably ought to either try to see if the plural and the extra clause is needed. "Un-Referenced" could be "Unreferenced". In addition, perhaps it could identify the article creator and notify them as well, provided their version of the article was not a redirect. Also, per discussion here, could it only notify users who have been active in the past 6 months? NW (Talk) 18:04, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
Also, could you run this on a different bot account than your Dashbot? No sense delaying this if your bot gets blocked for another reason. Cheers, NW (Talk) 18:07, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
  • I like it, but make it a stricter message. Emphasise that all BLPs MUST be referenced, that unreferenced biographies are likely to be deleted, etc. Ironholds (talk) 18:31, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Here is the template that the bot uses: User:Tim1357/temp. The count parameter is the number of articles to be included. More means that there is more then ten. I encourage you to tweak it all you want. I did a count and it seems around 23,000 users will be getting messages. I am not sure how to determine if a user has edited in the past six months, Ill try to find a way to figure that out. I will add article creators, but from what i read on WT:BLP, the idea was to notify the most common contributor. 67.142.130.12 (talk) 18:43, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
  • I see little point notifying indef blocked users as they can't edit the articles. Nor do I see much point notifying people who have not edited in the last 6 months. I'm also concerned as to how we measure contributors, it would be a bit counterproductive if all our hugglers were to get such messages because their use of Rollback to revert vandalism on BLPs had made them a pages major contributor. ϢereSpielChequers
    • Rollback is automatically marked as a minor edit, I believe. Perhaps there is some way to scan for "Undid", "Rvv", "Reverted", etc. in edit summaries and ignore them when counting up to the threshold? NW (Talk) 19:02, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
Minor edits were not counted. I did a look through the users with the most pages, and it seems that bearcat and some unflagged bots who did not mark their edits as minor showed up. I added some lines to the code so that the bot does not send messages to users who have 'bot' on the end of their name. It would be a great help if someone could point me to a raw .txt file of all users that are indef blocked, because that would be much easier to code.Tim1357 (talk) 02:42, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
  • It appears that editors which only added tags (such as the BLP unsourced tag) are going to get notices from the bot (why else is Fram on the list?). Perhaps there is a way to exclude edits that involve tagging the article for improvement? Otherwise, I think it's a great idea. Best regards. Jogurney (talk) 03:14, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
Well Im dealing with a huge dataset here. It took me 3 days to generate this list (its still finishing). The only variable taken into account (right now) is the number of non-minor edits they made. If they made the most, then they were added. Hopefully they market their tagging edits as minor, and only tagged the article once. If that is the case, they should not appear on the list. If anyone wants a full list of user's to be messaged, send me an email and I'll generate one for you. Per the request of NW, I will go through and add the article's creators. Someone needs to change the template so it says "number" of the articles for which you are the largest contributor, or the creator are biographies... Thanks Tim1357 (talk) 03:42, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
I appreciate what you are doing and understand that the data set is enormous, but it is confusing that this article shows up for Fram rather than Pakupaku. I know that Fram just tagged the article for improvement, while Pakupaku made two edits (the only substantive edits so far). Maybe something is off in the decision code? Best regards. Jogurney (talk) 22:08, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
I see now. Pakupaku marked both his/her edit as minor, so they did not count. However, he or she will be on the list because he or she created the article. Fram got added because he or she was the only non-bot, non-annon user that contributed a non-minor edit. Im not sure that makes sense. In the end annon edits, bot edits, and minor edits were not counted when I generated each user's "score" on the article. On a different note, I was thinking of changing the max number of articles added to the talk page to 15. Is that ok? Thanks for the input.Tim1357 (talk) 22:50, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
Okay. Every editor who started an extant unreferenced BLP article will get a notice, even if they marked the edit as minor. I think that will work well, and perhaps the only difficulty is that editors who tagged these BLPs for cleanup but didn't mark those edits as minor (I never realized such edits should be marked as minor) will probably get a few erroneous notices. I doubt it's a big deal, but maybe the template should have a small warning or refer those editors back here so they don't get confused/upset. I think this will be a valuable tool for addressing the backlog so whichever threshhold that is easiest to manage has my support. Best regards. Jogurney (talk) 22:41, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
Of course, if you want, i can generate a list of users by the number of pages that they are attributed to, and we could remove the top 10 so they do not get pinged. Tim1357 (talk) 22:50, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

In response to NW's earlier request, I made a settings page for the bot, where individual functions can be shutdown, without turning off the whole bot. Tim1357 (talk) 23:36, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Can we do two completely different messages: 1 with the article name inline for a creator of one or two articles, and a 2nd which lists articles for a repeat offender? The list format just seems awkward for listing only one article. Or are we talking about a group where 90+% of recipients would be repeat offenders? Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 07:30, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

We should do this step-by-step

If the process is too blunt, it might backfire badly. The original question I posted in October was Should article creators and/or major contributors help reduce the backlog? of 56,000 unreferenced BLPs. In my small sample (random subset of unreferenced BLP articles flagged in August 2009), 50% of the article creators were still active on Wikipedia, e.g.

I'm worried that the discussion has moved on to the murky depths of defining "major contributors" so soon, and I think we should test the new bot in the uncontroversial shallows of "article creators" first. If creators are inactive now, the message can do no harm. But when they are still actively editing (and maybe still creating unreferenced BLPs) they are the first people who should see the message. Once the article creator message process is complete, the message to subsequent contributors can be more diplomatic, along the lines of "we notified the article creator a month ago, but the article is still unreferenced ... you were once a major contributor ... can you help?"

Why not start with a model like this? - Pointillist (talk) 23:46, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

From what I've seen, the users who are the maijorest contributors are also the creators, except for weird cases like Fram's. Tim1357 (talk) 02:09, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
I also was under the impression that I was supposed to group the articles into one message. I thought it would be nice for the bot to say count of the aritcles that that you created, or were a major contributor are ... Tim1357 (talk) 02:20, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
In any case, it is not that hard for me to change the bot to do two rounds, I just don't think people will appreciate being messaged twice. (once for the articles they created, once for the articles they are the most significant contributor to. Tim1357 (talk) 02:53, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
Update I am re-generating the list. This time "major contributors" will be separate from the page creators. Also users are only added to the list if they are the top most editor and they mad 5 edits or more Tim1357 (talk) 04:52, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
Once the lists are complete, I'd be interested in seeing how much overlap there really is. How many Creators make it onto the Top Major Contributors list, close to 100%? If so (and I suspect this to be the case), I have to say I would be inclined to agree that it would be redundent to send the same message to the same people twice. Then again, what about running the bot to message only page creators this time, and then much later (say, a year from now?) include all top major contributors in a second run of the bot. Then, if some people get the same message twice, oh well, it's been a year, here's your reminder. That's my 2¢. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 07:22, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
New Message

Un-Referenced BLPs

Hello Bot requests! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 1 of the articles that you created and 11 of the articles that you played a major role in creating, are Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons. Please note that all biographies of living persons must be sourced. If you were to add sources to these articles, it would greatly help us with the current 150 page backlog. Here is a list:

I made a new message for the bot. Im quite pleased with it as a solution to redundant messages--Tim1357 (talk) 12:11, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi Tim1357. Thanks for all your work on this. In the variation below this message I've tried using some real data, and comparing {{findsources}} with {{findsources3}}. As you can see, the output is very busy:

Ship categories by year

I'm requesting if anyone could run User:Sambot/Code/Ships? Sam Korn (talk · contribs) hasn't been editing lately so I thought I should ask here instead. The object of the script is to add a ships by year category to articles that contain an infobox with a certain parameter within the infobox that contains a year. --Brad (talk) 16:49, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Pretty please with sugar? I had thought that someone could just pick up the script from the page linked above and run it? --Brad (talk) 15:34, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I stuck this in AWB and there are 16,000 articles, I am removing those with a cat, looks like it will be about 1600 left. I did 2, one based on the launch date using regexes, one with no launch date but a laid down and commissioning date in the same year. I will know by the morning how many there it may be quickest to do this manually with AWB since it's not huge, and there will be a fair amount of tweaking. Rich Farmbrough, 03:46, 15 December 2009 (UTC).

There were 2,170, . 370 had launch dates since 1850, a couple hundred more since 1600, and a few in the preceding two centuries. I am looking at completed date next. Rich Farmbrough, 19:30, 15 December 2009 (UTC).
Done.
Rich Farmbrough, 08:17, 16 December 2009 (UTC).

Remove Category:Wikipedia:Books from pages that manually include it

The {{saved book}} template has been updated to handle categorization automatically. Simply remove the category from the pages that have it "hardcoded" in them. Thanks. 05:15, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Easy. Rich Farmbrough, 09:35, 15 December 2009 (UTC).
OK there's only about 2-3k pages but:
  • All Wikipedia: namespace books should be placed under Wikipedia:Books subcategories.
  • All User: namespace books should be placed under Wikipedia:User page Books subcategories.

so that's a little odd. Rich Farmbrough, 09:46, 15 December 2009 (UTC).

It's an old categorization system (the clean up not yet complete). This has been supplanted by Category:Wikipedia books (community books) and Category:Wikipedia books (user books). Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 17:19, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

OK, removing cat form User: Rich Farmbrough, 00:06, 16 December 2009 (UTC).
Pretty much all done, the rump may need {{Saved book}} adding. Rich Farmbrough, 08:36, 16 December 2009 (UTC).

Bot to clear Category:Biography articles with more than one work group needing priority parameter replacement

Back in October {{WPBiography}} was given an overhaul, and one of the changes made was the replacement of |priority= with specific parameters for each work group (because the main project itself does not assess articles for priority). A discussion on updating individual banners took place here, although not without a little drama. In short, there was some opposition to having a bot clear the 100,000 articles in Category:Biography articles needing priority parameter replacement, but I think it was generally agreed that the much smaller number of articles in Category:Biography articles with more than one work group needing priority parameter replacement should be dealt with.

The |priority= parameter in these banners should be removed and replaced with one specific to each work group used per [[T:WPBIO]], e.g. 

{{WPBiography|priority=Low|filmbio-work-group=yes|politician-work-group=yes}}

should be changed to 

{{WPBiography|filmbio-work-group=yes|filmbio-priority=Low|politician-work-group=yes|politician-priority=Low}}

Thanks in advance. PC78 (talk) 12:24, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Doing... as soon as I finish testing the code (I want to make sure it does {{WPBiography|a&e-work-group=yes|a&e-priority=foo|s&a-work-group=yes|s&a-priority=foo|living=no}} rather than {{WPBiography|a&e-work-group=yes|s&a-work-group=yes|living=no|a&e-priority=foo|s&a-priority=foo}}, and doesn't get weird with linebreaks either). Anomie⚔ 16:12, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
Y Done Anomie⚔ 16:00, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
Thanks. I've checked a few of the bot's edits, and the sports work group was missed on several pages [7][8][9]. PC78 (talk) 00:16, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
Somehow I managed to typo "sports-work-group" as "sport-work-group", so it wasn't handled on any of the pages. AnomieBOT is going through the pages it edited to clean that up now. Anomie⚔ 04:03, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
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