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Sorry if something like this has already been proposed...

I was wondering if anyone would be interested in making a bot that made redirects to articles that contain capital letters (other than the first letter) or punctuation. The bot would see Xena: Warrior Princess, and automatically make a redirect at Xena warrior princess, Xena: warrior princess, Xena: Warrior princess, etc. Obviously it would only create a redirect where no article currently exists. It could also do the same for currently existing redirects. For example, based on AAFCO, it would make Aafco, which would redirect to the original target (in this case Association of American Feed Control Officials.)

As I do most of my Wikipedia reading on my phone, I go to most articles by typing in the URL. My phone autocompletes the en. URL, and I just edit that last part, which is by far the easiest way for me to access Wikipedia.

I seriously doubt that I am the only one who assumes URLs, and since this bot wouldn't change anything on existing articles, I don't see any potential drawbacks. If, for whatever reason, the redirect is not logical, it can always be changed later by a human editor. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 05:33, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

One potential drawback is the potential for creation of unnecessary redirects that reflect simple mistakes (e.g. typing errors) in article creation or pagemoves, pagemove vandalism, or pagemove disputes. Black Falcon ^(Talk) 05:41, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I certainly agree, it will likely create many unnecessary or unlikely redirects anyways, but I would think the useful ones would heavily outweigh the silly ones. And again, as these would be in unused space anyways a few extra redirects couldn't really hurt. It could also not create a redirect if an article has already been deleted in that same space. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 05:47, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

The search engine already takes care of insensitivity issue (example) so creating a bot to do the same thing seems a bit unnecessary. — Dispenser 17:49, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Could someone create a bot to replace hyphens in numerical ranges with en dashes? I'm too lazy to use the right one myself and people keep hounding me. A bot could easily take care of this. Any takers? --Adoniscik^{(t, c)} 02:19, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Conveniently, the script I wrote to take care of the request immediately above this one could be modified to do this easily. (It also could have been modified to use en dashes instead of hyphens for those articles in the first place had anyone told me, but that's besides the point.) Of course, since it will probably be a much larger bunch of articles (given the innate laziness of people when it comes to naming things properly), I'm not going to want to semi it, and will have to run it through BRFA. I'm going to class now, I'll put the BRFA up when I get back. Hopefully it won't end up taking a week for approval.--Dycedarg ж 18:44, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

To clarify, as it seems I misread the request a bit, I am planning on doing this for numerical ranges that appear in page titles, not numerical ranges that appear in article text. As that is a relatively minor issue, you'd probably do better to ask the operator of SmackBot or some other bot that propagates general fixes to add this, or perhaps get the maintainers of AWB to add it to the general fixes for that.--Dycedarg ж 22:06, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

BRFA is up.--Dycedarg ж 00:04, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I think this is actually subtle. For example ISBNs we don't want to insert en-dashes. Rich Farmbrough, 13:03 29 April 2008 (GMT).

Do you know of any Wikipedia articles on specific IBSN numbers? Happy‑melon 10:49, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

It would be a great thing if these hyphens could be changed to en dashes, as this is a problem in, I daresay, hundreds of articles. However, I believe that some kind of list should be made of the articles, so that the WikiProjects responsible can take notice; the change of the titles should be a good opportunity for the correction of any relevant templates, as well as instances in the text.

I should also like to mention that it is not just date ranges which are problematic. All the tens of articles about bilateral relations should have an en dash; if one of the two parties has a space in its name, then the en dash should be spaced as well. Examples: Canada–Greece relations and Canada – United States relations. This is a wide and pretty much standardised category (x-y relations), so this could perhaps be taken care of automatically as well. Waltham, The Duke of 19:58, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Date ranges were just the first run. In the future, I had every intention of fixing every single instance hyphens are used in place of en dashes in page titles that I could find. I just haven't figured out every type of article name that falls under that little paragraph in the MOS. I intend to ask advice of some people more knowledgeable about these things than I am when I run out of things I can find on my own. Also, if you want me to compile a list of the articles I change and put it somewhere I could, but I'm not going to have enough time to notify wikiprojects (due to the sheer number of them that are affected) on my own. (Oh and by the way, it's not hundreds of articles. It's thousands. There are almost 7000 articles with hyphens in date ranges alone.)--Dycedarg ж 19:45, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Following up on Rich Farmbrough's comment about ISBNs: the usage of en dashes will break the ISBN magic for all ISBNS included in book references which are properly hyphenated. Notice that one of the following ISBNs is not highlighted in blue: ISBN 0-123456-789, ISBN 0–123456–789. The second ISBN is punctuated with en dashes rather than hyphens. Don't do this change! Also think about whether it will modify URLs. EdJohnston (talk) 18:05, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Can we please try to remember that this bot is only working with page titles? Concerns like the ones above, legitimate though they would be if the conversions were applied to page text, are not relevant to this proposal. Happy‑melon 15:59, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Actually, Happy-melon, the original proposal was for this fix to be done in general, not just it titles. I'm specifically dealing with article titles, and any concerns relating to that part of the proposal would be more appropriately expressed on my BRFA. Concerns relating to this replacement being performed in the main text are appropriately expressed here as anyone intending to deal with the rest of the request would do well to take them into account.--Dycedarg ж 18:19, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

And more generally: don't deploy a bot to enforce recommendations in WP:MoS without discussion on WT:MoS first, please. There are likely to be subtleties that are not discussed in WP:MoS, and guidelines are not policy, and changing things when editors are not warned and informed of the changes is likely to result in broken code and confusing failed searches. See WT:MoS#Bot is being developed to convert hyphens to en-dashes for discussion. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:14, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Currently, Template:Infobox actor is fairly widespread in its usage. Several fields (i.e. "notable roles") have been deleted from the template page, but a very large number of individual infoboxes out there still contain them (i.e. because of their deletion from the template itself, they don't appear on the article itself, but are still there in the coding/html). I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but can a bot be programmed to remove the fields "notable roles", "notable role", "influences", "influenced", "height", "baconnum", "imdb_id", "bgcolour", "children", "parents", "relatives", "restingplace", "restingplace_coordinates", "deathcause" and "nationality" (all of which have long been deleted from the template itself) and replace the field "partner" with "domesticpartner" and the field "location" with "birthplace"? Thanks, All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 05:01, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

It would certainly be very easy to convert the two parameters which have been renamed, but why is it necessary to remove the (now) unused parameters? If the code no longer appears in the template or documentation, then the parameters themselves are completely harmless, and removing them would be a waste of resources. Happy‑melon 18:15, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I suppose. But where, so to speak, can I get a bot to convert the two parameters? All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 18:53, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I've added a maintenance category to {{Infobox actor}} to identify the instances which use these two parameters; and I'm getting a bit worried. Category:Infobox actor templates needing updating currently contains over 4,000 articles, and is growing all the time. That indicates that at least 20% of all instances of {{Infobox actor}} will need updating. Given that the functionality of the infobox is not adversely affected by having these duplicate parameters, are you sure this is really necessary? Happy‑melon 11:29, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

It's now up to 8,000 articles, which is 40% of the total. Once again, how necessary is this change? Happy‑melon 16:00, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

If they aren't using the correct parameters at all (and my random clicking in your category seems to indicate that they aren't), then the information isn't showing up, which is a real problem. They aren't duplicate fields, they're misnamed fields, and in my opinion should be fixed. The rate at which the number is increasing indicates that current users of the infobox are not paying attention to the fact that the parameters have changed, replacing them all could have the effect of alerting people, or at least making it easier to identify who needs to be notified by other means. Doesn't someone have an approved find and replace bot that could do this quickly? In the grand scheme of things, 8000 articles isn't exactly a particularly large number. I'd do it myself if I wasn't already running a bot through a BRFA that's turned relatively annoying.--Dycedarg ж 03:36, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

The |location= field is a duplicate of the |birthplace= field - the two are coupled together in the code; so when people use that field, it displays correctly under "birthplace". The |partner= field is unused, so any data passed to that parameter won't be displayed. My concern is not that it's 8,000 articles (actually 9,000 now), but that that represents 45% of the total. Happy‑melon 08:47, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Oh. Next time I'll read the template code more carefully before commenting. Considering that, I agree that this is not exactly of pressing importance.--Dycedarg ж 18:10, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi. Are there any handy-dandy ways to convert tables in CSV or PRN (comma or tab-separated) into wikitable formatting? Also can Wikitables do any calculations, i.e. percentages? Reason I'm asking is complex census data on a large number of topics/towns. Pls reply on my talkpageSkookum1 (talk) 19:41, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

A couple of possibilities are listed at WP:EIW#Table. Regarding the second question, see Help:Calculation. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:45, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Is there a bot that can go through and automatically update all links to an article if the article has been renamed? I.E. such as changing all instances of Tessaiga to Tetsusaiga? Collectonian (talk) 00:33, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Redirect#Do not "fix" links to redirects that are not broken. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:38, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Okay, though that doesn't quite apply in this case as this was a case of straight name fixing and consensus to only use Tetsusaiga throughout all articles. One reason I'm curious is because Tetsusaiga is now tagged for merge, which would mean future double redirects, but someone already fixed them all, so guess its moot now. :P Collectonian (talk) 00:49, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Images uploaded in the PDF format cannot be displayed in articles, and as a result the vast majority of PDFs hosted here need to be converted into another image format, converted into plain text into an article, or (if the PDF is unencyclopedic) tranwikied or deleted. The template {{BadPDF}} was created to notify people about this problem, but the vast majority of PDF files aren't tagged with it. If a bot could be programmed to add this template to all PDF files we currently have it would be great for people trying to fix this problem. There's an external tool here which can give a list of PDFs - there's about 1500. Hut 8.5 19:48, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

How would we know it's a 'bad PDF'? You would need to show some sort of consensus first also. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 22:12, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

As PDFs can not be embedded in articles, and are thus unusable as either images or text, I believe the point is that all PDFs count as "bad". The name of the template is rather misleading in that regard.--Dycedarg ж 23:43, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I also agree that this isn't a very good idea, If you look through the list many of the pdf's are long reports and things containing many pages. To turn them into .png's would just be confusing. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 07:50, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

The template does note that the PDF could be converted to plain text, moved to Wikisource or deleted rather than turned into a PNG. The template can always be renamed. There have been discussions here and here on what to do with PDFs. Hut 8.5 17:08, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Note, I decided to change it to just {{BadFormat}}, noting that it's text in a image or non-image format that could be expressed as plain text, and that can be done with more than just PDF. ViperSnake151 17:34, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... I have a brfa up for this at the moment. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 16:09, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

This question is more or less related to Wikipedia:Highly Active Users. Would there be any way to arrange a "this user is online/offline" template an editor could put on presumably their user page which could automatically be adjusted when a user logged on, possibly with an accompanying category? Also, would it be possible, perhaps, for that same bot to indicate the activity status of the user in question on the above page? I know it's a complicated question, but it might be useful in the future. John Carter (talk) 01:31, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

See User:StatusBot. It's inactive at the moment, but there's a duplicate available, and Soxred93 is trialing a clone. Happy‑melon 18:10, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Per this page at Commons, a bunch of images have been identified as copyright of Library and Archives Canada. LAC allows use of these images but they can't be hosted at Commons. This means they will need to be uploaded to each wiki where they're used and given FUR's (if I understand this correctly).

There are two areas where a bot could help:

1. Upload the images to each affected wiki with their current contents. Not sure how GFDL works vis-a-vis the original uploader, I guess they would need a back-credit to the (soon-to-be-deleted) commons image. And in the case of en:wiki at least, they would need a modified {{KeepLocal}} so some other bot wouldn't detect the dupe and remove them.
2. Deliver notices to the affected articles on each wiki so people there would know that uploads and appropriate rationales are needed. Ideally these would be in the appropriate language, but asking for an image-skilled, multi-wiki botop who also knows 20 languages might be pushing it a little far :)
3. And in the case of en:wiki, the article notices wouldn't be required if the images were uploaded by bot, since we already have such effective mechanisms for requesting article FUR's.

The image list is here and I am still working on getting the exact usage info. These are all historical and valuable images, it would be a shame to see them just vanish from so many places, any help is appreciated. Thanks! Franamax (talk) 19:31, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Please note that they can only be uploaded to wiki's with an Exemption Doctrine Policy. --Erwin85 (talk) 21:36, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that link! That will help me narrow down the list, in the event that someone steps forward. In any case, it's one for the bookmark section. Franamax (talk) 23:35, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Looking for someone to run a bot to deliver the following note:

As someone who may live or work near Washington D.C., you may be interested - if you've not heard already - about the meetup scheduled for Saturday, May 17th, at Union Station. For details, please see Wikipedia:Meetup/DC 4.

And deliver it to editors listed in the following categories:

• Category:Wikipedians in the District of Columbia

• Category:Wikipedians in Maryland

• Category:Wikipedians in Virginia

Thanks! -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:31, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... I have a BRFA up for this at the moment. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 16:09, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I can also help out with this, I'm already approved for this type of task. Me and Addshore have agreed to go 50/50 on this task. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 16:13, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

If you want to split it three ways (since there's three categories), MelonBot can do this too. Let me know if you'd like to share :D. Happy‑melon 18:09, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

You shouldn't really do it by the cat's as there could be the same user in all 3 meaning he would get 3 messages. If I get any reply at all to this then i would be happy to do a 3 way split. Otherwise ill make the 2 lists for you two soon (today/tommorw) ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 06:29, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

There probably is a certain amount of overlap, but I don't think it's a big deal if 10% of editors get two notes, and a couple get three - this is a one-time thing. I'll be happy to personally apologize if anyone does get upset. What I don't want to do is to have the process slowed down - a week advance notice about an event is cutting things about as close as possible without being totally pointless. (My fault, true, but that's where things are.) So yes, if it's easy to remove the duplication, please do so, but if it takes much work or will delay things, let's just get it done. (Thanks.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:43, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... Category:Wikipedians in Virginia - seems this request is fairly time-critical. Have code to test for prior instances of the exact text above, so will try and avoid duplicates. Happy‑melon 18:06, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done Category:Wikipedians in Virginia,  Doing... Category:Wikipedians in Maryland. Happy‑melon 18:16, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done Category:Wikipedians in Maryland. How desperate are you to get your share? Because I'm on a roll now :D Happy‑melon 19:05, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Well i had made some lists to go by to make sure noone gets the message twice but i guess thats pointless now. Lists I guess you might as well do them all now... ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 21:17, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Infact  Doing... i will do Category:Wikipedians in the District of Columbia now as i have 150 trial edits. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 21:42, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done That should now be everyone in all of the cats done now. Glad we could help. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 21:49, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks muchly! -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:09, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Would it be possible to use a bot to change the references in such articles as Genomic_imprinting to the inline style, which allows easy flipping between the text and the references. ----Seans Potato Business 15:50, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Not when the MoS, and a past ArbCom ruling, explicitly prohibit unilaterally changing from one reference format to another without prior consensus. For just one article, you would get a better, faster and more accurate result if you did it by hand. Happy‑melon 17:26, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels/Outreach/Newsletter May 2008 needs delivery to all members ASAP. Please see also Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels/Outreach#Newsletter for options on delivery.

Delivery to all user talk pages on Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels/Members, see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels/Outreach#Instructions. Please contact if something remains unclear. feydey (talk) 20:31, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I got this. β^_command 22:44, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done β^_command 22:51, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

It seems You missed some people again, see User_talk:Feydey#Novels WikiProject Newsletter. Could You please double check Your delivery settings, that it includes all the 280 members from Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels/Members? Also please add a heading when delivering, like: "The Novels WikiProject Newsletter - Issue XXIII - April 2008" (see here). feydey (talk) 05:49, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

If you would like me to finish the task, I can, my bot is approved to do that task. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 05:53, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

You are welcome to complete the delivery, if You can figure how and why some members (like User talk:John Carter) got no delivery, while they are on the Members list. feydey (talk) 06:00, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Can I get a list of people who have already received the newsletter? It's a relatively simple delivery to do. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 06:05, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

 Note: I'll need some clarification on the instructions, there is a list of people who want the newsletter, some who want a link, and some who don't want it at all, is that right? I'll need some clarification here before I can do the task. Thanks. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 06:25, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

That's right. Delivery to all user talk pages on Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels/Members (By default, we will provide a link to the current issue of the newsletter on your talk page when it comes out) except no delivery to these - Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels/Outreach#No delivery and full contents to these Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels/Outreach#Full contents and also just a link to these - Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels/Outreach#Link Only. Bcommand was unable to deliver to the people on the main list: Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels/Members (remember to deliver also to the Inactive members), so if You could just do that list (279 + 112 people)? See User_talk:Feydey#The Novels WikiProject Newsletter - Issue XXI - February 2008 for a previous delivery example. Many thanks, feydey (talk) 06:42, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

I have a bit of an error, when I check using AWB, there are only 387 members on the member list. What would you like me to do about those who have received a newsletter already? Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 06:46, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

If possible do not deliver to those who have received a newsletter already (I'd guess double posting is not that bad in this case). I hope You took the members list and removed the "no delivery" people - Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels/Outreach#No delivery. Then start delivery of the May newsletter link. feydey (talk) 06:54, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Looks like the delivery is running smoothly. Thanks, feydey (talk) 08:18, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done All newsletters and links sent. I've saved the config file for these too, so I can deliver these in future. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 08:34, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Could someone make a bot to post an invitation on the talk pages of Wikipedians interested in genetics? Liveste has created a nice invite template here that I think is appropriate: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Genetics/Invite. Thanks! Madeleine ✉ ✍ 14:49, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 15:21, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 15:35, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

• check all redirects from Category:Redirects from UN/LOCODE whether they point to a page that has a Template:Infobox Settlement.
• if yes: put the 5 char value into the Infobox.

e.g. for the redirect UN/LOCODE:USNYC put in template the variable and value like this:
|un_locode = USNYC

UnLoCode (talk) 19:15, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Template:Reqphotoin is used as, for example, {{Reqphotoin|France}} to populate Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in France. {{Reqphoto}} has an "in=" parameter that replaces the function of Template:Reqphotoin. Now, such requests are made as {{Reqphoto|in=France}} to populate Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in France. Could you please have a bot change the Reqphotoin tags listed here with Reqphoto? Basically, for example, {{Reqphotoin|France}}, {{Reqphotoin|San Francisco County, California}}, {{Reqphotoin|England|Germany|France}} would be changed by the bot to read {{Reqphoto|in=France}}, {{Reqphoto|in=San Francisco County, California}}, {{Reqphoto|in=England|in2=Germany|in3=France}}. Let's start with the simple situations and hope that takes care of most of the tags. Please change the tags that appear (1) exactly as {{Reqphotoin}} to {{Reqphoto}}, (2) exactly as {{Reqphotoin|}} to {{Reqphoto|in=}}. (3) For those having the pattern of a single location request, such as {{Reqphotoin|France}} and {{Reqphotoin|San Francisco County, California}}, please change them to {{Reqphoto|in=France}} and {{Reqphoto|in=San Francisco County, California}}. For now, skip the Reqphotoin templates having small=yes, those having two or more location requests (e.g. {{Reqphotoin|England|Germany|France}}), and those Reqphotoin tags using the not-so-well working "of" parameter. GregManninLB (talk) 06:19, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

um, why? -- maelgwn - talk 12:45, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

In my travels, I've noticed that there's a lot of infobox templates that have been created, but are hardly being used because they're so damn difficult to incorporate into an article. For instance, look at the current version of Infobox Dancer, compared to this old version. In the current version, there's some sample code that can be easily copy and pasted into an article, in the former you have to poke around the template code just to figure out what the fields are, as the main Template page only shows the compulsory fields. As a result, noone bothers. It would be great if someone could just send a bot round the infobox templates, just parsing out all the fields (within {{{ }}} brackets) in the template, deduplicating them, then writing them to a /doc page and transcluding it with {{template doc}}. A phase II version might be to layout subheadings where humans could fill in explanations of what the fields mean - {{Infobox Person}} and others do it with a table, {{Infobox Rugby Union biography}} does it with a straight list, I quite like the way {{Infobox Company}} does it with semi-headings. Is there a style guide for template pages? One thing that would be nice would be a demonstration of image format - it's never obvious whether you should use [[Image:image.jpg]] or [[Image:image.jpg|150px]] or just image.jpg, and if you used Image:Replace this image male.svg or Image:Replace this image butterfly.png in the sample code it would have the extra benefit of encouraging casual users to contribute images to Wikipedia. Plus infoboxes just look more "infoboxey" if they have an image, even a dummy image. I'm way too busy to do anything about this myself at the moment, but thought it might make a nice little project for someone? FlagSteward (talk) 14:48, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

There are two parts to archiving an editor review, and the order in which they are done is inconsequential.

1. Link to the editor review page in Wikipedia:Editor review/Archive.
2. Untransclude the editor review from the main editor review page.

Previously I have done both tasks myself. I've stopped doing it, and it's apparent that nobody else wants to do it either.

There are a couple of possibilities. One way is to place archive templates, which have not yet been created for this specific purpose, on an expired editor review page. Then a bot sees the archive templates and untranscludes the page and links to it in an archive list. This is similar to the process at Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets. It may be necessary in this scenario to switch to a "by month" format instead of the current "by username" format.

Another way is to have the bot automatically add a link to the archive in Wikipedia:Editor review/Archive as soon as the request is filed, or at a designated time thereafter, e.g. if the bot runs once a week. Then a human untranscludes the editor review page at his or her discretion. This might be better because it's a less drastic change from the current system.

I don't know whether bots can be programmed to archive pages based on the alphabetical order of a subpage title. In other words, will a bot know how to sort Wikipedia:Editor review/WikiMan53 before Wikipedia:Editor review/WikipedianProlific just based on the fact that M comes before p? If yes, that's probably what I want. If not, switching to archiving based on month of the request will preserve some archiving system without requiring undue human intervention. Shalom (Hello • Peace) 18:30, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

either way is doable it is possible to maintain the current method and if you want even archive by last edit timestamp, then sort them to the archive page. β^{_{command 2}} 18:40, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Betacommand. Right now the archive actually uses the first edit timestamp, i.e. when was the page created. I would think you could program that just as easily as the last edit timestamp. Hold off for now while I ask a couple of my friends if they think this is a good idea. Shalom (Hello • Peace) 03:48, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd agree with Shalom, preferring alphabetical order but eschewing it if it's easier to program chronologically. I don't know a lot about programming (only a rudimentary knowledge of TI-BASIC), so it would be up to the programmer. bibliomaniac15 03:56, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

I would prefer alphabetical but that doesn't really matter to me. What I do think is important, though, is that the reviews that get archived have a decent amount of reviewing; frequently I won't archive an old review if it only has a few lines. Of course the bot won't be able to tell when someone's gotten a lengthy review but it's all total crap, but having the bot will probably be worth it, and at least a length requirement would be a start. Would this be difficult? delldot talk 05:40, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

you tell me what you want and how, I can normally do it. β^_command 22:39, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

(Unindent) I think the best way to do this is to create an archive template for editor reviews. That way, a human decides that the page should be archived, and the bot takes care of the rest - same as with WP:SSP. If someone wants me to modify one of the existing archive templates, I'll give it a try. Shalom (Hello • Peace) 02:30, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Please could someone replace all instances on article talk pages of {{Irelandproj}} with {{WikiProject Ireland}}. No parameters should be added or changed or removed, just a straightforward replace one template name with another on about 700 pages.

{{Irelandproj}} is a redirect to {{WikiProject Ireland}}, and it was used for tagging at a time when for some reason it existed as a near-clone; I redirected it some time last year.

I know that in general there is no need to bypass redirects, and that the practice is deprecated, However, this redirect is causing problems for WikiProject Ireland's article assessment drive. Several of us are using the User:Outriggr/metadatatest.js script, which not only allows rapid applications of assessment tags, it also displays on the article page the existing assessment, e.g. "Start/Low" or "GA/Mid". Unfortunately, the script doesn't parse redirects, so if it encounters the IrelandProj template it reports that the article has not been assessed using {{WikiProject Ireland}}. The wastes assesors time in adding a duplicate assessment, only to find that it was un-needed.

There replacement is a simple regex, and I would set by BHGbot to do it AWB except that my windows PC is ill, so I have no AWB.

This change has been discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ireland/Assessment#IrelandProj_template, where there is a consensus for the change. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:14, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

My bot can handle that task. So, it's a simple find/replace, no? Also, I'll need the category to find the templates from, or I could do a What links here search in AWB, but a category would help. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 09:50, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

No need to clarify. I've taken a look, should be a relatively simple task. Will take about 20 minutes for me to get started, then an hour or so to replace all the tags, depending on the talk page size. That OK with you? Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 09:53, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... Will need to fix up the redirects, my bot is changing the transclusions. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 11:32, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Stuck. Having some issues replacing the class and importance bits, needs something with a regex, but I'm stuck on to what that is. Let me know, and I can do it with no issues (feels stupid) Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 11:40, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi steve, Thanks very much for doing this. As I think you guessed, the list is Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Irelandproj, filtered to include only article talk pages.

I think that the regex can be quite simple: s/\{\{Irelandproj/{{WikiProject Ireland/

Does that help? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:06, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, well, I'm trying to do a find/replace version, I was thinking something along the lines of find {{Irelandproj}} replace with {{Wikiproject Ireland}}, but needs a regex, so something like {{Irelandproj|class=|importance=}} replaces with {{Wikiproject Ireland|class=|importance=}}, but to keep the =class and =importance bit in. That bit needs a regex. I get kinda stuck when it comes to regexes. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 14:21, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

you guys are thinking too much, just find {{Irelandproj and replace it with >{{Wikiproject Ireland make it case insemsitive and non-regex. β^{_{command 2}} 14:38, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Isn't that what I suggested above? You are right that it's non-regex, but since the template name is case-sensitive, wouldn't it be best for the replacement to be case-sensitive? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:44, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

The first character is case-insensitive, so it does make sense ({{Irelandproj}} works just as well as {{irelandproj}}). I usually do use regex, something like

re.sub(r'(?i)\{\{\s*irelandproj\s*([\|\}])',r'{{WikiProject Ireland\1',text)

, just to catch instances where people have put whitespace in the template in wierd places (also stops the regex matching something like {{irelandprojecttemplate (entirely unrelated)}}). But in simple situations like this, non-regex works just as well and can be safer. Happy‑melon 14:50, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm using AWB, and the suggestion BetaCommand is working like a charm. (smiles at Betacommand). Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 14:57, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Heh, Betacommand knows what he's talking about. And it's working. Thanks. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 14:48, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Looks like it's all done. Thanks Steve, that was great! --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:47, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done. And all errors are fixed. Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 16:49, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

I would like a bot to count the pages in Category:Wikipedians seeking to be adopted in Adopt-a-user and update Template:Adoption backlog/count with that number, daily, or a few times per day if possible. Thanks in advance, xenocidic (talk) 20:51, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Or, how about {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Wikipedians seeking to be adopted in Adopt-a-user}} = 20. :D Happy‑melon 21:09, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah ok you need to wait for the maintenance script to finish compiling the data table for en.wiki, but eventually it'll be a quick and easy way of doing this. Happy‑melon 21:10, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for the suggestion! xenocidic (talk) 22:07, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

←Since this doesn't seem to work, any takers? xenocidic ( talk ¿ review ) 20:47, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

It does seem to work (now)... just about... it's just a bit slow (and you need to purge the page cache to get an updated value). Happy‑melon 21:19, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks Melon. xenocidic ( talk ¿ review ) 21:53, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Could someone please migrate usages of the redirect {{self2}} to its target, {{self}}? There appears to be several thousand usages. The reason is that this license template is being broken when image pages transcluding it are transferred to the Commons, and the name of the author is being dropped. Kelly ^hi! 20:18, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

I now have a BRFA up for this. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 20:51, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Note: There are around 12,000 transclusions of {{self2}} to be changed to {{self}} ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 20:54, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Um, how exactly is this breaking? Commons redirects template:self2 to template:self, too. Gimmetrow 16:46, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the delayed reply...I don't understand why it's breaking either, but when CommonsHelper is used to transfer images to Commons, the {{self2}} part of the template, and the name of the author, is being dropped and the license is broken into its component pieces. Kelly ^hi! 13:10, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

85-odd asteroid-related articles need minor text-replacement updates. Replace at Siding Spring in the course of the U.K. Schmidt-Caltech Asteroid Survey with at Siding Spring Observatory in the course of the U.K. Schmidt-Caltech Asteroid Survey and replace discovery_site = Siding Spring in the course of the U.K. Schmidt-Caltech Asteroid Survey with discovery_site = Siding Spring Observatory. Yes, I know this will leave a redlink, I was unable to find the topic in an article. See User talk:Davidwr/6227 Alanrubin for details.

 Doing...... CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 00:28, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

For some damn reason AWB doesn't like me.  Not done yet. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 20:13, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... It's a love-hate relationship. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 20:45, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 21:12, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

I am from the Assessment dept of WikiProject India. This is a bot request for Kerala work group.
The banner for the Project is {{WP India|kerala=yes}}

Many of the articles Talk pages doesnt have the importance tag for the workgroup kerala.
My request is to append "|kerala-importance=" to ALL article talk pages with {{WP India|kerala=yes}} and doesnt have |kerala-importance= already.

Can this be done by a bot ??. Thanks in advance -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 06:37, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

What on earth is the point in adding a blank |kerala-importance= parameter by bot if it is going to have to be filled in by human editors anyway? The whole point of having separate importance scales for task forces is that a TF might have assign a different importance to an article than its parent project, so you can't just copy from the main |importance= parameter. Given that you're going to have to do this anyway, why not skip the bot step and go straight to digging through Category:Unknown-importance Kerala articles and adding the |kerala-importance= parameter by hand. Unless I've completely misread the situation, there's nothing that a bot can do to help you here. Happy‑melon 21:27, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

One less step for reviewers. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 21:48, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I thought it will be faster and easier with BOTs -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 07:06, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... I've got my alternate AWB account on it now, adding |kerala-importance= to articles in Category:WikiProject Kerala articles that don't already have it. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 11:44, May 18, 2008 (UTC)

Still doing... c.500 pages to go. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 12:21, May 18, 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a lot -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 12:41, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Still doing... c.150 pages to go RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 12:43, May 18, 2008 (UTC)

 Done All relevant pages updated with the parameter. 237 pages edited out of 963 pages checked. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 13:07, May 18, 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a lot from the Project Team -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 13:11, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure if this is possible or not, but is there a way where I could add {{TelevisionWikiProject|class=Redirect|importance=Low|avatar=yes|avatar-importance=Low}} to the talk page of any page that redirects to the article page of any page on this list. For example, one of the pages on that list is Talk:Appa. So any page that redirects to the article page, Appa, should have the template on its talk page. Some of the pages might already have something on them. Since they are redirect pages, I think just blanking the talk page and adding the template would be OK. — Parent5446 ^{(t n e l)} 14:27, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

 Possible: I'll look into it. It will require generating a long list of pages, and checking to see what redirects to each one, then running a script to add the template. It's certainly doable, but will require a lot of work. I'll see what I can do. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 14:52, May 18, 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. — Parent5446 ^{(t n e l)} 15:05, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Generating that list now. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 15:12, May 18, 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... About 300 pages to edit, this will take a while! RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 15:50, May 18, 2008 (UTC)

 Done Pages added to this category automatically by the template. This category therefore is redundant, and discussion should probably be brought up on the relevant project page as to whether to delete it. It is probably easier to keep the new one [which I have categorised appropriately] and delete the old one than to change the template to use the old one, requiring the re-caching of some 300 pages. If you need any more help, please feel free to ask. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 17:00, May 18, 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for everything. The old category is actually redundant. I will put a CSD tag on it. It was there before the project standardized its category system. — Parent5446 ^{(t n e l)} 18:17, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Too often I see this^[1]. <-- it looks ugly, it should look like this.^[1] All we need is a bot that searches for: </ref>. removes the "." and looks for the <ref> that exists just before it, and places the "." in front of that. Many put extra spaces between the ref. also, so that needs to be accounted for, but I'm sure someone could come up with a bot to fix this, it is endemic to Wikipedia right now. 67.5.156.176 (talk) 07:42, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

This applies to all punctuation, so something like

re.sub('<ref([^/]*?)>(.*?)</ref>([.,;!?])','\3<ref\1>\2</ref>',text)

would work in python. I can't think off the top of my head where this would throw false positives (I've excluded all brackets and quotes, as these can be ambiguous). The issue would be finding these errors. They'd probably have to be found from a database dump. Ideally, it would be nice to have a continuously-running MOSbot to check RecentChanges for such simple and easily-fixed violations; when a new feature was added, we'd just have to search the most recent database dump for existing violations and fix them with a one-time script, and thereafter they'd be fixed in real-time. Happy‑melon 08:34, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Please do not do this. I consider it more logical to put the reference immediately after the fact, and that usually means before the punctuation. See Wikipedia:Cite your sources#Ref tags and punctuation, which allows both styles. —AlanBarrett 17:38, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I seem to recall that the MoS says you can put them before or after the punctuation, so long as it is consistent within an article. DuncanHill (talk) 17:40, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Doh! I should have read Alan's comment! DuncanHill (talk) 17:41, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Well if the MoS allows both styles, then this is a fast-track to Special:Blockip. No thankyou! Happy‑melon 21:54, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Two things: 1) we've denied bot proposals for this before, and 2) the regexes to do this properly are a lot more complicated than the above. Gimmetrow 04:29, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

From a strictly academic perspective, how much more complicated? Where would this throw false positives? Happy‑melon 18:12, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Punctuation before and after, to start with.<ref>Something</ref>. Then named/reused refs. Then refs "stacked" back to back.<ref>Something</ref><ref name=two/>. Then spacing and line breaks. Then dealing with quotes of various forms. I have a set of regexes for these situations, but I still know some cases that cause problems. Real language doesn't usually fit nicely into a simple regex. Gimmetrow 21:49, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm... I think that the regex above would work for "named/reused refs", "stacked" refs, and properly skip instances of spacing/linebreaks. However, I have just noticed that it would throw a catastrophic false positive in a page that had an error at the end of a long paragraph (namely, that it would match everything from the first <ref> tag in that paragraph to the misplaced tag), so deploying this 'as-is' is definitely not a good idea :D. Happy‑melon 09:34, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

The regex above does not catch this<ref name=two/>, since the closing ref is part of the match phrase. Yes, it will catch some things, but it only scratches the surface. Like I said, I've developed regexes that catch most of it. Gimmetrow 16:42, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm surprised to see one mention placing something "immediately after the fact" as meaning to jump in front of proper grammar by truncating the punctuation of the sentence structure. i.e. before the fact is finished. I think policy needs to be reviewed in this instance! The latter form I gave is clearly superior in looks and logical structure. 67.5.147.10 (talk) 10:23, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Here is a straightforward one: can someone please replace all uses of {{CanEd}} with {{WikiProject Canada|education=yes}}. The labelling of Canada-related articles is being standardized. Thanks. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 21:44, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Sure. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 21:51, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm already on it, but there are ~300 pages, so collaboration = speed here! RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 21:55, May 22, 2008 (UTC)

Sigh. I was coding something special for this man. Fine! You can do the rest. My bot could do it all in 15 minutes. :| CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 22:22, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry! There are still around 120 pages left to do, and I need to go to sleep. Knock yourself out! Sorry again for jumping in. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 22:30, May 22, 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, yeah. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 22:31, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 22:47, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done Gee, that was fast :D CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 22:54, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I think this should be reverted. Standardization isn't a reason. GreenJoe 23:19, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand the objection. -- Ned Scott 05:26, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Me neither. GreenJoe, this is part of an ongoing standardization project. If you have concerns, please engage in discussion rather than reverting the work of others. Skeezix1000 (talk) 11:07, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

If I had been a client of User:SatyrTN's User:SatyrBot do I need to request new bot assistance.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 16:31, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Tony. Gimmetrow 18:52, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

O.K. User:SatyrTN has been tagging categories at WP:CHIBOTCATS with {{WikiProject Chicago}}. It has autostubbed talk pages that have preexiting templates with class=stub. It also auto-FA, FL, and GAed pages that have templates with such tags on them. I think he had to do some special things to avoid some railroad categories that have articles that don't belong to us, but I don't recall. He use to run this bot twice a week looking for new articles for us. Can I get a new bot that will take over this responsibility?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 19:49, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Would request that the articles in Category:Togo, Category:Assoli Prefecture, Category:Bassar Prefecture, Category:Bimah Prefecture, Category:Centrale Region, Category:Cities, towns and villages in Togo, Category:Doufelgou Prefecture, Category:Kara Region, Category:Lakes of Togo, Category:Landforms of Togo, Category:Lomé, Category:Maps of Togo, Category:Maritime Region, Category:Mountains of Togo, Category:National parks of Togo, Category:Neighborhoods of Lomé, Category:Old maps of Togo, Category:Parks in Togo, Category:People from Lomé, Category:Plateaux Region, Togo, Category:Prefectures of Togo, Category:Regions of Togo, Category:Rivers of Togo, Category:Savanes Region, Togo, Category:Settlements in Togo, Category:Subdivisions of Togo, and Category:Togo geography stubs all be tagged with {{AfricaProject|class=|importance=|Togo=yes|Togo-importance=}}, with autoassessment based on stub template if possible. John Carter (talk) 19:53, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Will Do. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 20:13, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Done! CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 21:47, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Genetics is a new WikiProject. As of 00:41, 9 May 2008 (UTC),[1] User:John Bot tagged the talk pages of all the articles in Category:Genetics stubs with {{WikiProject Genetics|class=Stub|importance=Low|imageneeded=|imagedetails=|unref=|nested=}}. Now, for those article talk pages not already tagged with {{WikiProject Genetics}}, can you get a bot to tag the talk pages of all the articles in Category:Genetics and all of its sub categories with {{WikiProject Genetics|class=|importance=|imageneeded=|imagedetails=|unref=|nested=}}. Thanks. GregManninLB (talk) 05:58, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I can do this one. The whole category, I assume? Steve Crossin (talk) (review) 05:59, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Hummm, on review I think I need confirmation on this from Madeleine Price Ball. I'll let you know. GregManninLB (talk) 06:09, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

User:John Bot Will do this again. I have the code ready for it anyway. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 14:02, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry I've been away. I think this is a good idea, much appreciated! Thank you! Madeleine ✉ ✍ 14:37, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Will begin Later today. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 15:22, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... Starting now. Will do cat by cat because the Wikiproject is in this cat. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 19:31, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... I forgot about this lol! CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 20:15, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Wow, that didn't work well at all. I'm really sorry about that. It looks like the bot shouldn't be digging into the subcategories like this! What a mess... Is it hard to automatically clean this up? :-( (I don't mind if you have to remove all wikiproject genetics banners entirely.) Madeleine ✉ ✍ 00:22, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

um sure. codes some stuff CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)}

Give me two hours and i can do a mass revert. β^{_{command 2}} 00:35, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Do It. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 00:40, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

roger, will do. I just have to get back to a machine that supports javascript. (ETA 1.5 hours) β^{_{command 2}} 00:54, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

← Let's do this the right way this time. Give me a list of all categories like the request here. Thanks, CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 20:19, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

What's going on with this - is this running again? I see Age at first marriage got tagged in the last day and it clearly doesn't belong. Did someone give you a list of categories somewhere? Madeleine ✉ ✍ 04:35, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Okay, may I please say this is a TOP PRIORITY. We have tens/hundreds of thousands of articles missing on places all over the world. Myself and User:Blofeld of SPECTRE have been working so hard to create these articles but a bot would really help. We could use Maplandia.com to create stubs like Simaw. Many thanks to whoever creates such a bot. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 21:49, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Well I've tried to propose something before where it can generate 10 articles a minute but nothing has been done. Articles such as Simaw are created using the same source and all that changes is the external link and the digits in the infobox. What is being done to burma and togo can be done to virtually any country in the world which doesn't have a full gazetteer and lord knows that many countries on here, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America only have 20 or so articles for osme of the countries whn potentially there could be several thousand even for each region of the country. Creating district templates like so is the best possible way to cover territory on here anywhere. Evne as the stubs are they are of value. The list of places for each district is listed in maplandia where it is copied to wikipedia. Then the articles are created with as little change as possible making it as efficient as possible. Such is the extreme simplicity of the procedure that I am certain a bot could be programmed to perform the task ten times faster as it is reading a repeated format each time. A Bot I believe can read the list of places on the site by region or district for eahc country and can read the coordinates on the site and copy them into the infoboxes as the articles are created. If wikipedia is to be serious about developing into the best reference site imaginable, then given that all populated settlements have claim to notability we should seriously be thinking about a way to be adding these articles on a daily basis. To be able to cover the world evenly and in a detailed way for each country would be an incredible strengthening of our encyclopedia and I know that we should start to be thinking seriously about making this possible. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 14:48, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

If this can be done, it should be, and quickly - there's a ton of information out there that ought to be made available, and the sooner the better. It would be a tremendous boon to the project. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:18, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Given the activity and nature of RamBot's work before this is definately possible particularly given the simplicity of the task. I see it as an essential foundation to cover the world properly and evenly on wikipedia and give a strong basis to build upon in which in my view I think it should have been done long before now. There is likely to be information out there on many countries which could be used to epxand them and I am convinvced more data and info will become available for the developing countries over time. What this encyclopedia needs is real world content and nothing can be more important that covering the world comprehenisively on wikipedia ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 16:09, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

give me month, (im very busy at the moment) and Ill look into it β^{_{command 2}} 16:28, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

I have some bad news for you. From http://www.maplandia.com/terms-of-use/:

“

Provided you comply with these Terms of Use, Maplandia grants you a nonexclusive, non-transferable license to view and print the Materials solely for your own personal non-commercial use. You may share a map with another individual for that individual's personal non-commercial use using the email option on the map webpage. You may not commercially exploit the Materials or the underlying data, including without limitation, you may not create derivative works of the Materials, use any data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools on the Materials, frame any portion of the Materials, or reprint, copy, modify, translate, port, publish, sublicense, assign, transfer, sell, or otherwise distribute the Materials without the prior written consent of Maplandia. You shall not derive or attempt to derive the source code or structure of all or any portion of the Materials by reverse engineering, disassembly, decompilation or any other means.

”

Emphasis mine. Also from FAQ: "However you may not copy any part of our webiste under any cirucumstances" (sic). Using robots is forbidden, and I'm not even sure whether using mplandia as a source for creating articles manually is ok (using it for one article is fine, but using it systematically could be considered copying). The problem is not the names and coordinates, that comes from US military and is PD. The administrative hierarchies are a different story. I'm not sure if I have seen any other site with such detailed information, so I think that's their own doing. Correlating the geoname databases with administrative division data is not tricky, it's quite trivial in fact, but the GIS data for administrative divisions tends to be proprietary and (very) expensive. Certainly somebody who actually understand copyright (I don't) needs to take a look at this.

I still believe it's better to approach the governments directly and ask what information they have available. Wikipedia is now big and well known. Pretty much every country has statistical and/or map making agencies, as the countries need that kind of data for their internal planning. As a rule, they do not make such a data publicly available (one reason is the large size of such data sets, especially if they have been meshed into full GIS system). Potentially that data could be very detailed... – Sadalmelik ☎ 17:24, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

well yes but how do you suggest we get them onto here more efficiently then??? I don;t see how using coordinates from the webste is copying -the names and coordinates of the places are naturally public domain. I pretty certain the site is talking about copying their maps as it is "Maplandia". If anything it is google maps not maplandia. Ideally I would also stick to using official goverment sources if possible but the idea that the Burmese goverment is going to give an online website like wikipedia statistics and info on their 40,000 towns and villages is a highly improbable one ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 19:03, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

We are not copying any information from maplandia other than the coordinates, which are already present on a bunch of other websites such as Fallingrain.com. Besides, I'm sure they were talking about the maps and source codes, not coordinates. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 19:51, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

You are copying more. The names and coordinates come from US military and are not an issue – maplandia, fallingrain & co simply wrap this information in html. Personally I have always used GNS directly for coordinates without bothering with various gazetteers, but regardless where you get the names and coordinates they should be free (I have not seen any disclaimer about sources Maplandia is using, so I'm strictly speaking only assuming they are using GNS). What GNS does not include is the administrative hierarchy beyond first level. That appears to be work of Maplandia. Like I said in above, in principle it's quite trivial. You simply take the administrative boundaries, and check where the coordinates lie. As simple as that! But as far as I understand Maplandia have done it themselves, and is claiming copyright for it. From FAQ: The use of boundary data, regional directory data or any other part of our website's content outside the maplandia.com is prohibited. Also according to their FAQ they are not using freely available sources for administrative boundaries (whatever is freely available tends to be old, anyway). All I'm saying is that somebody who actually understands copyrights need to look at this site, before a bot is sent to crawl through it. I have certainly been wrong (too paranoid about copyright) about these issues before. I'm not sure who to ask, though... – Sadalmelik ☎ 21:40, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes I think you are being very paranoid about this -- besides, they cannot claim copyright for material that is in the public domain. Their data comes from google maps, which has the exact same coordinates and is ot as paranoid. Besides, I never thoght that strings of numbers were copyrighted anyway, and the "content" that they are claiming copyright for is simply "so and so is located at..." etc. I'm sure there are many sorces available for this data, but the end result would be the same and I certainly don't see why we would have to sacrifice misinformation (writing the wrong coordinates) for copyright paranoi. Besides, in the .00001% chance that they decide to take us to court for an issue as unimportant as this, I guarantee 100% that we would win. I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 00:40, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

It is possible to claim copyright for works derived from public domain sources – that's why there is a whole industry selling reprocessed Landsat images. It depends on the modifications done. From what I can see Maplandia essentially claims their addition of "Regional Directories" (administrative hierarchies) is sufficient (again I'm only assuming they are using coodinates and names from GNS... I suppose there are also commercial products similar than or derived from GNS). Whether their claim is true and whether it covers the whole of Maplandia or only parts of it, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. The maps are separate topic. Google provides the basemap: satellite images (coincidentally from Landsat and copyrighted) and some of the labels. The administrative boundaries drawn are from Maplandia and, as they state, are proprietary and licensed from third party geo information providers. The same administrative boundaries have likely been used to created the "Regional Directories" in the first place. – Sadalmelik ☎ 05:02, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Well I've contacted the website and I'm waiting for a reply. Given the huge traffic on wikipedia an increased direction to that website would certainly not be a bad thing for it. In fact if I was the owner I pretty much want to increased as much traffic to my website as possible ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 11:52, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Assuming it is all legitimate for using it, I could probably sit down and write up a bot to do this task. Getting the bot approved might take a little time though - could you wait that long? Fritzpoll (talk) 14:14, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Well if it is years or a year no. But if you could sort something in a few weeks or months I wouldn't have any objections as long as you consider it important. Things can be done manually up until then. I seriously doubt the name and coordinates of towns are copywrightable and if maplandia tries to claim this it is clearly deluded. The site obviously used google data but they do appear to be claiming authorship of this. I;m certian if you studied that site you'd see how straightforward its system is ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 20:35, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't know about that, but I do not that there have been sources which have intentionally introduced willful small errors in their work, which, if copied, are clearly copyright violations. Such might happen here as well. If some other site, like governmental sites, were available, that might be different. John Carter (talk) 20:46, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

I'll take a look at this over the weekend Fritzpoll (talk) 16:37, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Basically we are looking to retrieve the names and coordinates of places which can be inserted straight into the infoboxes and work through districts/regions of each country. There are likely to be google databases or other sites which have such lists anyway. Extracting place names and coordinates are non copywrightable I'm pretty sure ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 18:33, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Names and coordinates can always be taken from GNS (http://geonames.nga.mil/ggmagaz/geonames4.asp there is a download link on left hand side), which is maintained by US military (and therefore even officially PD); I have always used this. The files are TAB-separated text files, so parsing them is easy. GNS only has information on the first level administrative divisions, so the hierarchical information will have to be taken from somewhere else. – Sadalmelik ☎ 18:52, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Feist v. Rural establishes that mere data without any human creativity (like phonebooks) are not copyrightable. Mind that this is SCOTUS so the decisions will not apply outside of the United States. So it is always best to try and get the information from public resources whenever possible. — Dispenser 22:05, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I am satisfied by this discussion, and have begun work on the bot to achieve this. Since it will be automated, I shall apply to BAG at the appropriate time to get it flagged and any further information can be brought up then - alternatively, if something crops up sooner than that, let me know ASAP Fritzpoll (talk) 22:19, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I have coded a bot that works simply by using the publicly published hyperlinks of maplandia, which the bot uses to reference the GNS database. I think this skirts any outstanding copyright issue. Fritzpoll (talk) 20:37, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Could a bot standardise the babel templates to the standards described here, and search for templates that are not in that category yet and standardise them too? Example of a good way to do it: fr. How not to do it: af. User:Krator (t c) 21:41, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Given that the "standards" on that page make no sense to me whatsoever, what, exactly, would the bot be doing? There is such a massive amount of difference between {{user af}} and {{user fr}} that I have no idea what features of 'af' are problematic (I'd guess all of them, but you can't be sure :D). Happy‑melon 15:54, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Often times, people mean to add <ref></ref>, but instead they put <ref><ref>, resulting in a lot of missing text. I don't think <ref></ref> tags can be nested inside one another, so finding these errors and changing the second to </ref> would fix most cases. Or, how about just even making a list of articles that have this occurrence that can be scanned. I think this would be a very useful bot. --Rajah (talk) 16:30, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I have some regexes for a related thing, I may be able to make a list. Mr.Z-man 22:08, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

The list is at User:Mr.Z-man/Broken refs. Since there are well over 1000, I'll post this elsewhere so more people can work on these. Mr.Z-man 20:28, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I'll start helping with this now [hope you don't mind]. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 20:35, May 19, 2008 (UTC)

Per WP:NFCC#9, non-free images are only allowed in mainspace. Apparently we used to have a bot to remove non-free content used elsewhere, but it is no longer active. I think we need a bot to automatically remove non-free images from user, template, etc. spaces. Kelly ^hi! 20:18, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure we did and still do. I can attempt doing this I guess. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 21:26, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether I am quite up to writing one, but if someone can point me in the direction of some source code, I can refine it and run it if you like. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 21:30, May 18, 2008 (UTC)

That's okay. I'm good in the image bot field so I can handle it. I found one that used to run, User:ImageBacklogBot. I'll see about getting source code... CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 21:32, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Looks like I'm coding this from scratch. Say Hello to User:John Bot IV CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 21:40, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

All pages that use Template:Infobox Settlement and have an incoming redirect from Category:Redirects from UN/LOCODE shall get the 5 char value of the redirect e.g. for the redirect UN/LOCODE:USNYC put in the Infobox at New York City the value like this: |un_locode = USNYC UnLoCode (talk) 08:50, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I see no parameter in {{Infobox Settlement}} for {{{un_locode}}}. Are you sure you have the right template? RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 15:29, May 19, 2008 (UTC)

 Not done for the moment. OK, I see that the idea has been proposed but not added in. If/when the parameter is added to the template, please repost the request as [at the moment] there is nothing to do. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 20:11, May 19, 2008 (UTC)

Out of sheer ignorance of bots and how they work, I am unsure whether this has been done or thought of before, or even if this can be done, but I would like to request a bot who could possibly do RCP-ing and identification of certain kinds of inappropriate pages, in a similar way to User:ClueBot or User:VoABot but with new pages? For instance, the ability to detect when a page is created for pure vandalism, link spam, blatant copyvio's or just an empty or near-empty page, etc.? Thanks, Mizu onna sango15/水女珊瑚15 21:28, 20 May 2008 (UTC).

ClueBot V was going to do it, but the BRFA was withdrawn. Soxred93 (u t) 00:45, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

For those articles listed at Category:Engineering stubs, please tag their talk pages with {{Engineering|class=Stub|importance=Low|imageneeded=|imagedetails=|unref=|nested=}}. Please do not modify any existing parameters on the talk pages and please do not tag the subcategories of Category:Engineering stubs. Thanks. GregManninLB (talk) 22:19, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... Soxred93 (u t) 00:46, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

All but 100 pages done, I'll need to be reminded later today to do it. Soxred93 (u t) 12:10, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Right now, the "alongside" field (also the "alongsideX" field, where X is any integer from 0 to 9) of Template:Infobox Officeholder is automatically wikilinked. This can pose problems in some cases, so I would like to remove the automatic wikilinking, and have proposed as much at the talk page. However, if I do that, there are going to be a bunch of wikilinks that should be there disappearing; I'm wondering if it would be possible to have a bot put wikilinks in to replace the ones that I'm removing from the template. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 18:32, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I could probably do that. When will the change be done? Soxred93 (u t) 22:46, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

The response to the proposal on the talk page was a resounding silence, so I think I can do it any time. When would you be able to do the bot thing? Sarcasticidealist (talk) 22:54, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Including time to program, it only takes about 20 minutes. I can do it later tonight. Tell me on my talk page when it's done, and I'll fill out a BRFA. Soxred93 (u t) 22:58, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Maybe this got lost in the middle of a discussion above so I will create a separate section.

It seems User:SatyrTN and his bot User:SatyrBot are no longer active. WP:CHICAGO needs articles in WP:CHIBOTCATS tagged with {{WikiProject Chicago}}. It would also be helpful if the bot autostubbed talk pages that have templates from other projects with class=stub. I think his bot also tagged newly found articles with FA, FL, and GA parameters and added them to class when it added the template. --TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 18:55, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

•  Possible:It's a definite can do, see this edit for a primitive example using a custom AWB module. I shall code GA/FA/FL recognition in and set it running (it may take a while). RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 19:52, May 22, 2008 (UTC)
•  Doing... Tagging all Talk: pages in the WP:CHIBOTCATS categories with {{ChicagoWikiProject}}, adding Stub/GA/FL/FA where appropriate. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 20:30, May 22, 2008 (UTC)
• I have just realised that due to the labourious nature of manually adding categories to AWB's page list, it will most likely be easier if someone contacts SatyrTN [I can do it, but it would probably make more sense if someone from the project did it] and asks for the source code as SatyrBot ran tasks like this very efficiently. Although using AWB works, it is very time-consuming to add the pages manually, and doing it every week or so would be completely unfeasible. Tasks like this need to be 100% automatic, and AWB isn't up to the job of things like this. Sorry for all the flim-flam. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 21:50, May 22, 2008 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the effort. I will ask him for the code.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 08:23, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I've been in the process of moving our Flickr-sourced free images to the Commons, so the license can be verified to protect us from license changes in the future. In the process I've been finding a lot of copyright violations. I'm sure most are good-faith mistakes; many people think that any Creative Commons license is acceptable and don't understand that NonCommercial and NoDerivs variants are not OK for Wikipedia, and some images have been the victim of license changes at Flickr since upload. Would it be possible to have a bot scan images that are sourced to Flickr, and check the license against the Flickr source page? If the license does not match, the image should be listed at WP:SCV or perhaps some subpage/subcategory for human checking. From what I've seen, the most commons false positives would be cases where the Flickr user is also a Wikipedian who has uploaded a duplicate copy here under a different license (but provided a link to the Flickr page regardless), and Flickr images with OTRS permission (those should have an OTRS ticket on the page). Images whose licenses "check out" could have a confirmatory note placed on the image page by the bot and/or be tagged with {{Move to Wikimedia Commons}}. Thoughts? Kelly ^hi! 16:05, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Commons has a bot for this, "FlickrReviewr" or somesuch. You could ask them for help. --Carnildo (talk) 19:12, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I'll look into this. Monobi (talk) 02:46, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

There are lots of former articles in the sub-categories of Category:Lists of World War II topics that show up as redlinks, and were probably created by renaming using diacritics in the title given they have a ? (character) in them now. It would be great if there was an easy way to clean this up. I suppose same may have occurred in other categories, so this may be a Wikipedia-wide issue.--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 00:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Just give it some time to update :P CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 03:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

• Stub tagging. Please tag the talk page of the articles listed here/test2 with {{WikiProject Ecuador|class=stub|importance=low|imageneeded=|in=|unref=|nested=}}. Thanks. GregManninLB (talk) 14:23, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Doing; see User:Giggabot/Ecuador 25 May. dihydrogen monoxide (H₂O) 02:46, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done. Raw watchlist ready logs available at User:Giggabot/Ecuador 25 May. Cheers, dihydrogen monoxide (H₂O) 03:19, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Since our referencing system is not showing any chance of improving or getting a real bibliographic system in the near future, we should create bots to do the same thing.

Currently, we have User:DumZiBoT, which converts bare URL refs like

<ref>http://www.google.com</ref>

into

<ref>[http://www.google.com Google]</ref>

based on the title of the retrieved page.

We should expand on this bot or create other bots that do the same thing for news articles, books, and journal articles.

For instance, a ref like

<ref>ISBN 354063293X</ref>

would be changed to

<ref>{{Cite book
| edition = 2nd exp. ed.
| publisher = Springer
| isbn = 354063293X
| pages = 304
| last = Mumford
| first = David
| title = The Red Book of Varieties and Schemes
| date = 1999-10-29

}}</ref>

based on information from isbndb.com using the API.

And a ref like

<ref>PMID 4957203</ref>

could be fixed to

<ref>{{cite journal
|author=Koprowski H, Wiktor TJ, Kaplan MM
|title=Enhancement of rabies virus infection by lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus
|journal=Virology
|volume=28
|issue=4
|pages=754–6
|year=1966
|month=April
|pmid=4957203
|doi=
|url=
}}</ref>

based on the data retrieved by this tool.

There is also a link scraper for news sites

And so on for other types of references that have easily-retrieved metadata.

Also, the current DumZiBoT should be using a citation template like {{cite web}}, so that it can add "retrieved on" information for better verifiability or to mark the link as dead. Yes, I know it's in the FAQ, and I don't care. There's no good reason not to do this. — Omegatron (talk) 01:26, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Well I am currently taking a crack at making the isbn bot. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 10:06, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I am from WP:INDIA to request for a Bot Assisted Assessment. Please see the discussion on this here .
Our banner is {{WP India}}
Our request is

1) If "|class=" tag is empty, replace it with the highest quality assessment from the other project banners on the same talk page. for articles in Category:Unassessed-Class India articles

Who can take this up ? -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 05:06, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

 Possible: It can certainly be done with AWB. I'll generate that list now. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 15:36, May 20, 2008 (UTC)

I can't seem to get the regex working, so I've asked over at WP:AWB; I'm still working on it, but it may take a bit longer than expected. Also, this requires over 9000 pages to be processed, so if anyone wants to share the workload... RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 21:34, May 20, 2008 (UTC)

Is BetacommandBot still operational ? I remember taking BC's help for a similar task for another project -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 04:46, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

I have asked BC for the source code. -- maelgwn - talk 04:59, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Any progress ?? -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 04:40, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Nup -- maelgwn - talk 08:31, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

can you get on IRC tuesday so that I can walk you through the usage of my tool? β^{_{command 2}} 20:35, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

No basically, someone else can have a go, or email me pls :-) -- maelgwn - talk 07:47, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I'll take a look at this, but no promises. If I can figure it out it will probably take awhile as things are currently a bit slow with the bot approval process. --T-rex 17:45, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I have got this working as a custom module, and can file a BRFA later. If T-rex has already got this going, please let me know. We don't want two bots doing the same job! RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 08:29, May 24, 2008 (UTC)

BRFA now filed. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 14:31, May 24, 2008 (UTC)

It looks like RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ is better off taking care of this one. --T-rex 14:57, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Richard for working on our request. Let us know when done -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 06:36, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... My shiny new bot will start doing this now (9000+ pages, so it will take a while!). RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 07:38, May 26, 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Richard -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 10:14, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Y Done 1991 pages edited out of 9275 pages checked. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 19:54, May 26, 2008 (UTC)

Thanks from the Project Team . It was of great help. -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 02:45, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• Please tag the talk page of the articles listed here/test1 with {{WikiProject Ecuador|class=|importance=|imageneeded=|in=|unref=|nested=}}. Thanks. GregManninLB (talk) 13:43, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
•  Doing... RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 13:46, May 24, 2008 (UTC)
  • I will need to file a BRFA as there are 1000+ pages and it would be far easier to have this done automatically. Therefore it may take a bit longer. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 13:52, May 24, 2008 (UTC)
    • Irony here but uh, User:John Bot is up for this ;-) CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 14:17, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
    • Go ahead, the BRFA won't be for nothing, the WP:INDIA project wants a similar thing done. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 14:21, May 24, 2008 (UTC)
      • In the WP:BRFA, please note that each of the articles listed at here/test1 is tagged with an Ecuador category on the article page. GregManninLB (talk) 14:25, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 12:59, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Still doing... CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 13:45, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Leaving for holiday. made it up to en:Talk:Gonzalo Galindo. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 14:27, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

 Doing... CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 13:39, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 17:00, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot Assisted Assessment is where "a bot looks at all unassessed pages and adds the highest assessment parameter from other project templates on the page to the {{WP India}} template. E.g. if a page that has the WP India template has 'Start' and 'B' classes from other templates, '|class=B' will be added to the WP India one."[2] You can do this!?! I've been working on moving WikiProject Ecuador along and something like Bot Assisted Assessment would be great for WikiProject Ecuador as well. In view of this, is it possible that you guys can create a list of things you have done with the bots as they relate to regional WikiProjects so that not-bot people (e.g. me) are aware of what can be done and can pick an choose among bot options. Thanks. GregManninLB (talk) 14:38, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I certainly can, and I would be happy to do it for the Ecuador project as well. If the BRFA succeeds, just point me to the category and I will set the bot going [WP:INDIA did request first though, so they're first in line!]. As for making a list of possible tasks, you will probably have more luck asking at the Bot Owners' Noticeboard.RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 14:42, May 24, 2008 (UTC)

That would be great! Thanks, Richard, from the Ecuador project. GregManninLB (talk) 00:12, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Auto-assessing all articles in Category:Ecuador where possible. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 19:58, May 26, 2008 (UTC)]

Took a bit longer due to code debugging, but it has been set off now. ~4000 pages to check. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 20:34, May 26, 2008 (UTC)

Y DoneRichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 17:25, May 27, 2008 (UTC)

Recently created WikiProject. There is a list of neurological related articles (here) and the diagnoses section needs every different diagnosis to be wiki linked? Is that possible? If so thanks so much! Regards, CycloneNimrod^Talk?_Sign? 13:52, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I forgot to ask this as well. Is there any chance that all the articles listed on that page (not just diagnosis, once it is done, but the rest of the sections too) can have a template applied on them? This template is: {{Neuro}} Thankyou :) Regards, CycloneNimrod^Talk?_Sign? 14:00, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

The second one (WP tagging) my bot can certainly do. Doing... RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 14:17, May 29, 2008 (UTC)

Many thanks. Although the Diagnoses section has not been wikilinked yet, it is possible for your bot to apply the template to the articles listed there? Thanks. Regards, CycloneNimrod^Talk?_Sign? 14:20, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Good point. I'll wait until that section has been wikilinked (I'm not sure how to link all those automatically) and then run the bot. Sorry for the flim-flam, but I feel it's better to wait and get a job done right, first time around! RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 14:26, May 29, 2008 (UTC)

Not a problem at all :) Thanks. Regards, CycloneNimrod^Talk?_Sign? 14:40, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi. I've updated my template to {{Neuro}} and it now contains parser functions. Regards, CycloneNimrod^Talk?_Sign? 15:09, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Can I very strongly recommend that your banner be located at {{WikiProject Neurology}}? This will eventually hit the road, and you'd be doing yourself a favour if you pre-empted it. Redirects from {{Neuro}} or wherever are still a good idea, but you have no idea how much easier it is to handle WikiProject banners if they use a standard naming convention. Happy‑melon 16:14, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Excellent idea, this will also allow my bot to tag the pages without me having to faff around with the source code too much. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 16:36, May 29, 2008 (UTC)

 Done :) Anyone got any ideas about how I can automatically wikilink all the articles in my diagnoses section? Regards, CycloneNimrod^Talk?_Sign? 17:02, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Could anyone place {{WikiProject Neurology}} on every page listed in Neurotrauma? Thanks! Regards, CycloneNimrod^Talk?_Sign? 21:51, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Yep, I can do that.  Doing... Steve Crossin (talk) 21:55, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Question: Include subcategories as well? Steve Crossin (talk) 22:01, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

No thank you :) Thanks! Regards, CycloneNimrod^Talk?_Sign? 22:09, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Alright then. Steve Crossin (talk) 22:19, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done, finally. Steve Crossin (talk) 22:37, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I would be grateful if a bot changed "captive market" or "captive markets" in all articles into a internal links to the captive market page. If this is too vague i can provide a list of pages, but from doing a google search it seems all returns of the terms above are appropriote to be automatically changed. Thanks Chendy (talk) 10:57, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I could do this and yes a list would be nice. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 11:20, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Best suggestion is to combine google's search feature with AWB's find/replace feature. Generally will let someone find all the exceptions questions. MBisanz ^talk 11:31, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

One thing It will have to do is a bit of regex to amke sure it doesnt get [[captive market]] and change it to [[[[captive market]]]] :D ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 14:58, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done. It needed to be done by hand as there was a Philip K. Dick short story by the name name. Regex used was (?<!\[)(captive +market). — Dispenser 21:52, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Per Template_talk:Infobox_Artist#Famous_works, the parameter "Famous works" has been changed to "Works". This means the existing template on article pages, e.g. Vincent van Gogh needs to be updated, so the template, which at the moment says "famous works", reads just "works", as has been done here.[3] This seems like a job for a bot, if anyone can help out. Thanks. Ty 23:23, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Doing... §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Y Done §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:25, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I would like a bot that fix redirects in templates. Generally we discourage fixing links to redirects that are not broken, but in templates a correct link is better since the direct link will display in bold (and not as a link), making it easier to navigate through a series of articles using the template. See WP:R#NOTBROKEN. I tried bypassing redirects links on football templates with AWB, but it was a pain doing this manually. A bot could be tried out on templates in the subcategories of Category:Football squad by nation templates. Rettetast (talk) 18:12, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

I would be willing to take a look at this, but my bot is still in the process of being developed, and it may be a while before it's completed/approved. --T-rex 22:02, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I have coded out a technique to do this. Just need to finish some testing and get approval to move on. --T-rex 17:15, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Great. Rettetast (talk) 17:43, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry this is taking so long. I have it all set up, and am just one button click from having it all done, but BAG has apparently slowed to a crawl since I've last dealt with them. I'll do this as soon as possible. --T-rex 02:50, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi, I'd like to request that a bot patrol Special:Lonelypages whenever it is updated. This bot would go through each article, check if it met the orphan criteria, and, if so, tag it with {{orphan}}.--Aervanath's signature is boring 17:41, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

This is already done, but if the bot that usally does this isn't working let me know. I could do this. CWii 2_{(Talk|Contribs)} 17:51, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

My bot User:Addbot already does this and it still runs whenever I see that the list has been updated. I ran it today also so I don't think there is a need for another bot to do this also. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 18:02, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Never mind, then. Glad to find out that this already being taken care of. Is there a list of bots and their tasks somewhere, so I don't make a redundant request again? It says at the beginning of this page that there is a list on WP:Bot policy but I couldn't find it.--Aervanath's signature is boring 18:12, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I think Wikipedia:Bots/Status would be the one you are looking for (its not very updated as it says) ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 18:14, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

User:SoxBot has just started with the tasks once more. Soxred 93 04:32, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi, could a bot change all instances of the awful spelling error (currently redirect from misspelling) shot putt? It's written shot put. Thanks, Punkmorten (talk) 08:55, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Note: this is not a Spell-checking bot, it is a redirect repairer. Punkmorten (talk) 08:58, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Fixing redirects is usually frowned on due to the server load involved in fixing them outweighing the load involved in parsing them, but fixing spelling errors is a different thing. I could do this with AWB, anyone want to generate a page list, or shall I do it? RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 09:34, May 29, 2008 (UTC)

This specific fix (Shot putt --> Shot put) could/should be added to the AWB typo fixer (if it isn't already). dihydrogen monoxide (H₂O) 09:43, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

136 uses at the moment. Seems to have been part of a pattern for certain articles. Is this perhaps a legitimate optional spelling [4]? Gimmetrow 09:44, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I've seen it spelt both ways; possible an Am-En/Gb-En difference (in which case it shouldn't be fixed). RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 09:50, May 29, 2008 (UTC)

Found it in an old source (page 278 for instance). Gimmetrow 09:56, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I was wondering if someone could program b=my bot, BarkBot for me! Please reply on my talk page.-- Barkjon  17:42, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid our usual response to requests like this is to say that if you don't know enough about computer programming to be able to write the bot yourself, then you're not going to be able to maintain it or fix any mistakes it makes; consequently, bot-operators rarely write new scripts for use by non-bot-operators. If you want to get into writing and running bots on wikipedia, you'll need to teach yourself enough of a programming language to be able to write the scripts yourself. I'd highly recommend pywiki, a really helpful framework using python. Python is a doddle to pick up if you've got any previous experience with other programming languages, and is fairly intuitive even for a complete beginner. I suggest you have a look. Happy‑melon 19:05, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

The other point is that any task performed by a bot has to be approved by the Bot Approvals Group - see WP:BRFA for how that all works. You can't just set up a bot willy-nilly - in fact, should we have a bot patrolling new user creation, to keep an eye out for usernames ending in -bot or -Bot, to notify their Talk page that they need to go to BRFA? FlagSteward (talk) 16:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

There are articles and lists on the Ten Outstanding Young Americans award and on The Outstanding Young Persons of the World award. After taking the time to add links for each recipient and their country manually to the TOYP list, can someone help add links to the TOYA list? I'm still learning the appropriate formatting for each page.

Also, at some point, one dream is to have every Wiki article on a past honoree may have a link to the TOYA or TOYP article or list.

Not sure if either of these requests are the jobs of bots or semi-bots or inappropriate requests...Dagordon01 (talk) 21:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Could a bot help me finding incorrect use of {{flagicon}} in football biographies. Per consensus at WP:FOOTY the flags should not be included inside the infobox like her. Could a bot help making a list of the articles with this error, or if the operator dare, make a bot that remove the flags? Rettetast (talk) 00:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Sure, I could do both! I'll see what I can do. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 13:32, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Per Wikipedia:Template documentation#How to create a documentation subpage, the talk pages of template documentation should be redirected to the talk page of the associated template to keep discussion centralized. Would it be possible to have a bot automatically go through and create these redirects? There are a couple of minor complications that spring to mind - if the doc talk page already exists, the contents need to be moved to the redirect target. Also, if the talk page of the template does not yet exist, I think we have an adminbot out there somewhere that deletes redirects with no target. We would want an exception in this case to keep these redirects from being deleted. Kelly ^hi! 15:34, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Kelly asked me to come here and comment, probably since I have created and documented many templates. Talk page redirects saves a lot of trouble. Centralising the discussions for a template and its /doc page, or even a set of templates saves a lot of time. It is very annoying and a waste of valuable template programmer time to have to answer the same question over and over again at different talk pages.

And I too have been repetedly "harassed" by some admins that first delete the empty talk page of the template (sometimes even if it wasn't technically empty since it had a notice box telling about the other pages redirecting to it), then they delete the redirects from the /doc talk page and from the sister templates' talk pages stating that they are redirects to a "non-existant target". Problem is that moving a discussion to the central talk page after it has been started on the wrong talk page is much more work than pre-emptively creating the redirects.

This has led to that I nowadays spend time filling the main talk page with anything just so that it won't be deleted and the redirects to it won't then be deleted due to having "no target". Having to fake talk page content like that doesn't feel good, but the current practises by some admins means it is the most efficient option available for me. Since faking some content takes much less time than later having to move a discussion from the wrong talk page.

So I very much would like that a bot automatically add redirects from the /doc talk pages to the templates' talk pages. There are several options what the bot could do if the target talk page is empty: The easiest is probably to simply redirect anyway, another option is to put a notice box on the target talk page telling that "The talk page of the /doc page redirects here." thus making it so the target exists and then redirect to it.

If the /doc talk page already has content I usually move its sections to the template's talk page with an added sentence at the top of each moved section: "This sections was moved here from the /doc talk page.". If that is too complicated for the bot then simply leave those pages alone and human editors will probably handle it.

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:27, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I assume Kelly brought this up now due to the automated mass deletion of redirected /doc talk pages that was done recently by one admin. See section Bot to mass-revert a specific list of deletions below about that. (Sorry if my comment above was cranky, I was in a bad mood since I had just spent some hours manually restoring some of those deleted talk pages.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 15:07, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

For your future enjoyment, DG: {{central}}. Happy‑melon 15:21, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Happy-melon: Oh, that template is lovely. I responded about it on its talk page. --David Göthberg (talk) 16:17, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I strongly oppose an idea like this. It seems to be an unnecessary use of redirects. Why not use a JavaScript solution instead? --MZMcBride (talk) 00:30, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I don't think your credibility regarding redirects is very good right now. Kelly ^hi! 06:09, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

It'd be real nice if someone were to make a bot to move all the Title (computer game) and (arcade game) to Title (video game) to reflect naming conventions. Ideally it would also handle (computer/arcade game series), (YYYY computer/arcade game) and (computer gaming). If an article or a redirect to another article exists at (video game) it would do nothing; if the target is a redirect to the article in question, it would move over. It should only move articles with ( ), avoiding titles like WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game. Also, if it could grab any (videogame) titles, that'd be great too, as that's not a real word. JohnnyMrNinja 12:41, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Possible - those are some complicated heuristics to analyse to determine whether a page should be moved or not. If someone could assemble a list of pages that needed to be moved, then a bot could do the actual page moves with very minimal difficulty. Happy‑melon 18:51, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I would be willing to both assemble the list of pages and perform the moves when I get back from my trip, as I've been doing similar things recently. It'd also have to wait until after I'm done with my bot's current mass-renaming task though. I would guess I could put up the BRFA and get things rolling in about two weeks, barring anything else cropping up. If anyone wants to do it before I'm available feel free.--Dycedarg ж 19:03, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I'll have a go at generating the list, when I'm done I'll put it up for scrutiny. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 19:37, May 27, 2008 (UTC)

Page is here, some of the search terms ['arcade game series' for example] didn't throw up anything. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 19:57, May 27, 2008 (UTC)

If you need need a bot to run through that list, I can do it. Just let me know. -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 09:00, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Feel free, if you have a bot ready, go for it! Feel free to delete the page when you're done. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 09:26, May 29, 2008 (UTC)

Would it be possible to generate a list of (YYYY computer/arcade game), like Overlord (1990 computer game)? JohnnyMrNinja 08:38, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Are "computer game" and "video game" synonymous? What about text-based computer games? Pseudomonas_(talk) 10:27, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

A computer game is a video game, as it has a video display. The type of display doesn't matter. JohnnyMrNinja 08:38, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

We need a bot to mass-revert a few hundred deletions. See this AN/I discussion for details. Before firing off the bot, please post a notice in the ANI thread that you have such a bot, then wait 12-24 hours for objections. I don't anticipate any but given the history of this incident, it's better to go slow than jump the gun. Note - the AN/I thread will probably spill over into archives in the next day or so. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 14:48, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Hey,not saying that I can / will make this but just got a quick question, Is it only those deletions listed on that page you linked to or all of his deletions or more than those 100? If it is all then there are at least 10000 :> ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 16:27, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

It looks like he did two runs of (orphaned talk page redirect) deletions recently: One on May 31-June 1, another ending on May 10. I haven't checked older ones. The deletions using other edit summaries can stand for now. We only need reversions for the 5/31-6/1 run for now. Hold off on undoing anything older until it's discussed. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 16:35, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

From what I gather from the discussions, only a small portion of the several thousand redirect talk page deletions were contested. It seems like manual restoration of the contested ones would be a far better option than simply restoring all of them via a bot. VegaDark (talk) 00:25, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

It's not practical for us to manually go through them all and make sure there are no errors, especially considering some of the concerned users are not admins and have no access to deleted versions. -- Ned Scott 00:36, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

At the very least we should undelete any talk page redirect with "archive" in the title. A redirect from a moved talk page archive should not be deleted, and a ton of those redirects were. -- Ned Scott 00:47, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

From what I understand, if an admin were to restore this particular type of deletion, it would be well over 100,000 restorations, possibly more than 150,000. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:28, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm. Restoration of the redirects which were clearly improper to delete, even if the redirects are not helpful, seems appropriate, even if it is more than 150,000. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:35, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

User:ST47 has volunteered to run a bot to restore the "6307 deletions" he's identified. I asked him to wait half a day to see if anyone objects. He can also restore the "4859 from May 10, 1812 from Apr 12, and 13943 from Apr 7" similar deletions if the community wants it. I say go for it, but what do you guys say? Let him know over on WP:ANI. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 01:18, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I would have to find an inordinate amount of self-restraint to stop myself from blocking ST47 if he were to restore over 100,000 pages. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:46, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Ironic, isn't it? -- Ned Scott 06:06, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

This is probably the easiest way to undelete the redirects that shouldn't have been deleted. There doesn't seem to be any great cost incurred if in doing so we undelete the others as well; even if they are not actually helpful, they are completely harmless. Christopher Parham (talk) 06:03, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Seriously? Having a bot restore 100,000 pages would be best? --MZMcBride (talk) 06:14, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Seriously? Having a bot/script delete 100,000 pages in the first place? -- Ned Scott 06:26, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes? It's been done for years. And from what I've been told, it's done on other wikis as well. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:29, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I'd expect that anything that was deleted more than a year ago either wasn't that useful or has already been restored manually. In any case, it would be nice if everyone kept in mind that these are redirects we're talking about: all but insignificant in both cost and value, particularly given that they're so easily recreated by anyone who stumbles across them. It's not that big a deal either way, even if there are 100,000 of them. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 06:47, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Obviously you are welcome to undelete them by hand if you wish, but if someone else is expected to clean up the mess a bot would seem to be the simplest way to do it. Christopher Parham (talk) 06:36, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Sometimes undeletion is needed to make the point that deletion is not, and never should be, the default. My analysis here indicates that the recent run deleted 6306 redirects split up by namespace as follows: Category talk (10), Help talk (21), Image talk (3), Mediawiki talk (5), Portal talk (39), Talk (3939), Template talk (1065), and Wikipedia talk (1224). User:ST47 has done a similar analysis, going into a bit more detail: "The 6307 are from that day only. 3940 are in Talk:, 1225 in Wikipedia talk:. Of the talk: ones, 105 contain archive, 162 have a /, 77 have a colon. In total, 2602 from that day and 8032 in total are outside of talk or contain a /, :, or the word archive." A list is at User:ST47/restores, though it is not completely clean (some article talk pages have colons in them from the article title, and some of those are on this list). I would suggest restoring all talk redirects outside the "Talk" namespace (that is a total of 2367 redirects), and keeping the list visible to prevent MZMcBride's script from redeleting them (they will then have an incoming link). This isn't to make a point, but to avoid the drama that would ensue if MZMcBride ran the script again and ended up redeleting any that were restored. On a more general point, the problem with MZMcBride's criterion of "absolutely zero incoming links", is that the talk page tab (at the top of pages where the talk page has been redirected to centralise discussion) is an incoming link that doesn't show up on "what links here". MZMcBride did make some point at User talk:Kelly about using the "breadcrumb" link instead (but that doesn't always work if the pages are not linked that way), and that some of the redirects are hardly ever used (which doesn't mean they won't be used in future), but, as I've said in parentheses, in my opinion both of those arguments are wrong, and MZMcBride has not rebutted the "people will create talk pages in the wrong place if they see redlinks" argument. He has suggesed a javascript solution, but I'm not certain is that would be universal, or whether there is any real advantage in doing things that way instead. MZMcBride, what do you think? Carcharoth (talk) 08:13, 3 June 2008 (UTC)