Archive 35

←

Archive 40

Archive 41

Archive 42

Archive 43

Archive 44

Archive 45

Similar to the bot that dates maintenance tags, I'd like to suggest a bot that dates maintenance merge tags. This will help by 1) Making it possible to use AWB to edit articles with this tag en masse based on the date, and 2) Allow other editors viewing this articles to quickly identify the time of the proposal and removal it if the merge proposal has sat for a long period of time with no one performing an actual merge.--v/r - TP 02:18, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

A bot that dates maintenance tags to help a bot that dates maintenance tags? --Σ _☭^★ 02:38, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

I've inserted "merge" above, per the section heading. --Trevj (talk) 03:44, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Ask SmackBot's operator. --Preceding comment that would've been signed except wasn't by Σ 04:15, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

If the tags accept dating using a parameter |date=, you could just add the tag templates to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Dated templates and their categories to Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month. Anomie⚔ 10:33, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for catching my typo Trevj. The problem with using AutoWikiBrowser to do this task is that it adds the current year and month instead of the year and month the article was tagged. I'm proposing a bot that searches the edit history, similar to X's "Article blamer" tool, to find the year and month the merge tag was added.--v/r - TP 12:55, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Can some user with an automated process please help moving all the talk pages from Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of people in Japan to Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of people in Japan (sample edit) and from Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of New Zealanders to Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of people of New Zealand (sample edit)? I believe that the task is simple enough for a bot, but too repetitive and boring for a person; we're talking about 400+ pages total; and the standard CfD helper bot (Cydebot) isn't capable of this task. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 10:04, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Can you confirm for me - the first task - it should be renamed to Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of people of Japan - you put the category to be renamed as the same as the one that you want it to be renamed to. The Helpful One 12:19, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Simple uncontroversial find/replace following CfD; feel free to do in AWB without BRFA or any special approval. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 12:25, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, therefore  Doing.... The Helpful One 12:26, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

 Done Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of New Zealanders (can be deleted), almost finished the people in Japan one. The Helpful One 13:07, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

 Done Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of people in Japan, can also be deleted - both request are done, so this task in completed. The Helpful One 13:15, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Mercosur has been deleted at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Mercosur. Template:User Mercosur and Template:WikiProject Mercosur have been deleted as a consequence, but it would be needed that a bot removes them from the pages that used those templates, to avoid the red links. It would be also needed to empty Category:WikiProject Mercosur and all subcategories, and delete the category pages afterwards. Cambalachero (talk) 20:05, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Removed banner usages, there were very few. Userbox is only used in userspace, so the users should do it themselves if they wish. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 20:18, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Union of the Centre (historical) has been moved to Union of the Centre (1994) and Union of the Centre (current) has been moved to Union of the Centre (2008). My request is about replacing all the links to the old titles with direct links. Is there any bot able to do it? --Checco (talk) 16:43, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

You mean just bypassing the redirects? ^Avic_ennasis @ 19:21, 29 Iyar 5771 / 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Is that even necessary? --The Σ ^talk_contribs 21:50, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

No, per WP:NOTBROKEN - which is why I want to clarify if that's the goal here. ^Avic_ennasis @ 22:53, 29 Iyar 5771 / 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Terms like "historical" and "current" are so awkward in an encyclopedia that the redirects containing them can be considered unprintworthy redirects. It may be not necessary to modify all those bizarre redirects, but it is worth doing it, I think. If no bot will do the job, I'm sure that many users will fix all those links manually. Is here anyone who willing to help me doing it? --Checco (talk) 00:06, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

That was easier than I expected. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 00:27, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

You had be at "unprintworthy". :-) I've fixed all but a few links in outside of userspace to those redirects and tagged them as unprintworthy. Most were coming from a template, so it was quick easy work. fixed by The Σ, who did some great work with this. :) ^Avic_ennasis @ 01:08, 1 Sivan 5771 / 3 June 2011 (UTC)

 Done Credit thief. :P --The Σ ^talk_contribs 01:18, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Apologizes! I did not know you were working on this. I fixed my statement. Thanks for the help! ^Avic_ennasis @ 02:09, 1 Sivan 5771 / 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Apology accepted, and good job on adding the unprintworthy tags. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 03:10, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Many thanks to both of you for the wonderful job done! --Checco (talk) 07:46, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Greetings,

I was wondering if there is a bot that can rename 50+ (at least) articles in a specific category. It's a non-controversial move. If it can be done, I will response with the details. Thanks in advance. Digirami (talk) 19:06, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Sure, it could be done pretty easy, provided you have either a consistent style for the new name (i.e., "Foobar 1" to "Foobar one", "Foobar 2" to "foobar two", etc) or a list of new titles for each article. ^Avic_ennasis @ 19:13, 1 Sivan 5771 / 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Great! I made a previous request for a bot to rename all the articles in Category:Primera División de México seasons to follow the "####–## Mexican Primera División". But it seemed to have fell on deaf ear (or blind eyes in this case, ha). The only ones that do not have to be moved at the three following the "####–## Mexican Primera División season" format. I think redirect would also have to be created from a "####–## Primera División de México" format to the newly renamed articles. Digirami (talk) 19:23, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Seems straight forward enough. Have you discussed this anywhere to make sure there is consensus? ^Avic_ennasis @ 20:11, 1 Sivan 5771 / 3 June 2011 (UTC)

The Mexican league is the last big league like this that needs to follow this format. Argentina is already there; so is Uruguay. Mexico's Primera was just recently moved to follow the format already in place in similarly named football leagues. I was waiting for that before moving the season articles. Digirami (talk) 20:27, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

 Done :-) ^Avic_ennasis @ 21:43, 1 Sivan 5771 / 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Digirami (talk) 23:50, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Can somebody create a bot that moves automatically userspace pages with {{AFC submission}} on it to Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/whatever? TGhe bot should check this multiple times a day... mabdul 15:14, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Well if someone wants to do this, than I think the bot should also inform the creator of the userpage, that it was moved. Armbrust ^{Talk to me} _Contribs 00:43, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Oh for AFC wasn't bad if a bot can update WP:FFU(Wikipedia:Files_for_upload/recent) pictures (by looking in the archives which were accepted). mabdul 18:53, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

... and are free. From my experience with FFU I can say: most of the files I upload are non-free. Armbrust ^{Talk to me} _Contribs 19:56, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Chzzbot III should make sure the heading stays on the sandbox talk page too. The heading is constantly removed from there too but ChzzBot III ignores it. --Heyitsme22 (talk) 19:08, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

The Wayback Machine has been used to repair many dead links and now the old URLs are being redirected (sometimes slowly) so I am asking that bots making edits to check for old Wayback links and replace them.

• Wayback Machine Classic: http://web.archive.org/web/ → http://classic-web.archive.org/web/
• Wayback Machine Beta: http://web.archive.org/ → http://replay.web.archive.org/

Thanks in advance. – Allen4names 13:57, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

I might be able to help with this. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:19, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

I hope so. This may not be urgent but there are a little less than 200,000 pages with such links. – Allen4names 22:32, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Do these links occur as bare urls, or inside templates, or using {{wayback}}, or a mixture of all of these? Should bare urls be converted to use {{wayback}} at the same time? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:13, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

In practice, they can occur in any place a regular url would. In theory, citations should have it in |archiveurl= and text references in {{Wayback}}. That's assuming they are used as archived versions and not direct links (by mistake or on purpose). Converting bare urls to {{Wayback}} would bring out the incorrect direct uses of archive urls. But it would also incorrectly convert text references using archive urls correctly. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 08:36, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

How soon are these expected to expire? I have a feeling Wayback isn't just going to drop the old urls and they'll work as redirects indefinitely. So I'm seeing this as a minor/general fix that can/should be done with other changes. Then again I'm speculating. What are the problems with leaving them for now? Might this be a WP:DONTFIXIT case for now? —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 08:36, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

The Wayback Machine Classic is slow and the old links to Beta have been known to redirect slowly otherwise I would see no reason to update the links for now. – Allen4names 14:28, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

200,000 edits seems a bit much just to speed up some external links. Noom _talk ^stalk 19:27, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Note that Wayback has now rolled out previously in-beta Replay mode and "replay." sub-domain. It is now the main "web.archive.org/web/" url: [1], so the "replay." part is no longer used. There is still "classic-web.archive.org", for those that need it. But all the "old" urls now point to Replay mode. Just wondering if anyone has converted anything since this request? —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 08:45, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

I know I have brought this up before, but could someone please code a functioning WebCite Bot? Before complaining on this proposal, please consider the following points:

• We already had a WebCite bot. This bot however seems to be broken and no longer functioning.
• I have already been told stuff like "Linkrot is not the primary problem; lack of supporting citations is" and "a reasonable large fraction of complex sites (such as almost all modern news sites associated with paper newspapers) archive in a mangled or poorly rendered manner", so please don't bother to repeat these arguments, as I am already aware of them.
• I think one working solution for the linkrot problem that has some issues is still better than the current case (having nothing). Yes, one could archive all citations by hand, but having an automated tool for this frees workhours that can be spent on other tasks, and most editors (sadly) don't care about linkrot anyway. Therefore, this should be handled by a fully automated tool (bot).
• Setting up this bot would not require the changes to the software, that would be required to get this Wikiwix solution to work (see Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Archived citations and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Archived citations 2.

What this bot should do:

• Automatically scan an article for references using Template:Cite web or ref-tags (both: inline and in a References or similar section)
• Automatically submit the url to WebCite for archiving
• Automatically check references in an article and change a broken link to point to the WebCite archive

I am aware of the fact that no consensus has been reached regarding the use of WebCite to combat Wikipedia's linkrot problems. However WP:LINKROT#Repairing a dead link specifically encourages the use of WebCite to prevent linkrot. Therefore I think it is reasonable to have a working bot for that job.

I am also aware of the fact that Wikipedia's original WebCite bot was the cause for some of WebCite's downtimes. This could be addressed by limiting the submission rate of the bot to an amount that can be safely handled by WebCite.

Thanks for any helpful replies. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 16:27, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Actually, there is much more support for this than you think. Apart from a few opposers and arguments, most editors want a working WebCite bot. We just don't have a one. There are a few approved and even an active BRFA: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/BOTijo_10. See also Wikipedia:WikiProject_External_links/Webcitebot2#Previous_attempts, for examples. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 16:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Wikiwix does not require "changes to the software." Saying it that way makes it sound like a scary, difficult thing. It requires a change to the site JavaScript, something done on a semi-regular basis. It's trivial to do, far simpler than making millions of edits using a bot. Mr.Mr.Z-manZ-man]] 02:28, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Ok, having looked at this, I agree the changes required to the JavaScript don't seem to be a very big thing. So what about simply having both solutions implemented together? This would eliminate "Single-point-of-failure" issues. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 14:43, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Citation links that go dead are a serious problem for Wikipedia because it interferes with people's ability to verify that our content is both accurate and reliable. This is the basis for Wikipedia being a valid source of information and, in my humble opinion, the problem is serious enough to require multiple solutions. Both Wikiwix and WebCite want to help us solve this problem. I think it would be to our benefit if we tried to implement both solutions. Having said that, any movement in a positive direction would be helpful. The worse thing we could do is let the situation continue to deteriorate, which is what the community has been doing. Any suggestions would be most welcome. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 06:28, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Many members have already said this is a very important and necessary direction. It is not that the community is ignoring this. It is that the majority of community cannot do anything about it. It takes a lot of work and even more refining to make an archiving/webciting bot/tool/script. Not to mention the processing and bandwidth requirements for browsing all the sites. Unpaid volunteering is not exactly anyone's dream job. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 10:29, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

There is in fact a chance to make some money with this bot, since there is a bounty of $535 USD offered for creation of a working WebCite bot, which is also the second highest bounty listed on the board (see WP:BOUNTY#A working WebCiteBOT). Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 11:26, 7 June 2011 (UTC) Ok, strike that. I added the wikilink to that page I had read some time ago without reading it again and misremembered what is written there. Thanks for the correction. Yes, in fact the money is donated to the WMF, and not the person completing the task. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 14:49, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Bounty board's reward is a donation to the WMF in user's name, not to the user: "If the Bounty Hunters complete the task, the person offering the bounty – known as the Bounty Keeper – donates the bounty money to the Wikimedia Foundation in the name of the Bounty Hunters who worked so hard on the task." —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 11:28, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the correction (see my previous comment). Actually I was mistaken. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 14:49, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Would like to be able to convert very long articles like List of former NTA Film Network affiliates, which uses all citation templates, to non-citation template citations. The templates are causing the page to load very slowly, and successfully editing the page is now nearly impossible. Frequently, a message now pops up that states, "Too many users are trying to view this page", caused by the over 800 citation templates in the article. A stripped-down version of the article, which avoids all citation templates, would be useful. The article is still incomplete, but more info cannot be added at present. And it would take a bot, I believe, to successfully convert all the citations to a different style of citation. Firsfron of Ronchester 11:22, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure if thats the right answer for this article. Even if thats done your still left with it having 800 references. IMO the better avenue here would be to fork the article into a couple of groups, maybe by state or by those that started (currently denoted with an asterisk). I think it would also be useful to create a section at the bottom for references with the general title of the reference and then use the non citation format to note the specific page and date. --Kumioko (talk) 13:04, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

I am starting to see the problem. I have been trying to open the article for the last 45 minutes and I can't. I get a wikimedia time out error and it just stops. --Kumioko (talk) 14:27, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

50 separate articles wouldn't be very useful (and would attract more vandalism than I would be able to deal with), and there's nothing wrong with an article with 800 references. It is the citation templates which are causing the slow load time, and if they can be converted to non-templates, the article can be reworked further.

As you observed, the article loads very slowly, when it loads at all. This is because of the citation templates. The article prose itself is only about half the length of the article. Without the citation templates, the article would load reasonably quickly. Firsfron of Ronchester 14:38, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Oh no your right not 50 but less than what it is. For example if you look at List of Medal of Honor recipients you'll see that it has all the recipients but when there are large groups, like for the American Civil War, the main article forks giving only a summery and a link to the other related article. I am not convinced though that its solely the citation templates but I agree that they could be minimized. But I can't even get into the article to make the change so I am kinda stuck. --Kumioko (talk) 14:47, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

I considered breaking the article in half (US stations east of the Mississippi River usually have a call sign beginning with a 'W' and those west of the Mississippi usually begin with a 'K', with a few exceptions), and I also considered breaking off the Canada section. All of those options can still be done, but it doesn't solve the problem of the citation templates. It is a known issue that citation templates cause pages to load more slowly ("According to one (artificial) benchmark, using {{Citation}} and {{cite journal}} templates causes page generation to be about 6.6× slower than doing things by hand (10.396 secs vs. 1.584 secs)"), and the more citation templates that are used, the more slowly the page will load. I didn't know they would cause the page to load this slowly when I began work on this article, or I would never have used the citation templates in the first place. I'd like to remove the citation templates without removing the formatting. I appreciate your efforts reducing the size of the article, but even cutting the article in half will not fix the template problem, which is causing the very slow load time. You stated above that you cannot get into the article; are you able to view the page, but not edit it, or can you not view the page? Firsfron of Ronchester 15:09, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Are we sure it's just the citation templates? I did get some ERR_READ_TIMEOUT errors when editing the article - however, I copied the whole thing over to User:Avicennasis/sandbox8 and broke the citation templates there, and on edits afterwards I'm still getting the ERR_READ_TIMEOUT errors, albeit not as often. ^Avic_ennasis @ 19:02, 1 Sivan 5771 / 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it is the citation templates. I can easily view your sandbox page, and do not get the timeout error when just trying to read it, the way I often do with the article. I can also edit your sandbox page, even the entire page; I cannot edit the article in question, even a section, successfully: I just get error messages. Now obviously, slicing this article in half will reduce the load time further, but the templates are what is causing the extremely slow load time. It would be great if they could be converted to standard template-free citations by an automated process. Firsfron of Ronchester 20:40, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Curious. I can view the article just fine - it loads for me in under two seconds. It's only editing I have trouble with. Hmm. ^Avic_ennasis @ 21:44, 1 Sivan 5771 / 3 June 2011 (UTC)

There have been previous discussions on how Citation templates bog down articles at Wikitech-l ("When parsing articles [...], it takes 20s to produce the page, 17s is spent on Cite block, executing {{cite}} mostly. That makes every editor wait for ages to get a page displayed, and due to cache stampede after invalidation it causes considerable stress on site"). At this discussion, it was agreed by several users that "someone can write a very little bot that converts all the templates you want" and "[seek]ing out bot editors to help with conversion" would be the solution. Firsfron of Ronchester 22:20, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

So, is there someone interested in coming up with a way of automatically converting citations from citation template format to citations which look the same but do not use templates? There was a lot of work on June 3rd on the NTA list reducing table elements and fixing small reference elements, but the citation templates remain. Avicennasis created a sandbox page to break the citation templates, but that version still has the citation templates still in it. I realize that this conversion is a complicated project, but the list is still incomplete, and I cannot even reference the lead of the list (due to the timeouts). A bot which could perform this task would not only be useful for this article, it would be useful for other editors who are complaining about the length of time it takes to edit articles that use many citation templates. Firsfron of Ronchester 11:57, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

We have a rule (WP:CITEVAR and WP:CITECONSENSUS) to leave the article with templates if that is the way it was established, and similarly not to redo an article to use templates if it was established without them. So a bot could not go through and automatically make this sort of change. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:08, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

I am the only editor adding material at the article in question (I started the article and added all the citations), and what WP:CITECONSENSUS states is that "Templates may be used or removed at the discretion of individual editors, subject to agreement with other editors on the article." There are no editors who added citations to this article. I would not have added the citations in this format if I had known they would cause the issue described above. Firsfron of Ronchester 14:42, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Not a good task for a bot. But possibly a good idea for a user script. Anomie⚔ 14:52, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

I tried to solve the problem by running the article through Special:ExpandTemplates (in chunks, because I kept getting errors otherwise), but even so, I can't get the preview to even display. I saved my edit removing the templates, but I'm not sure whether that edit might not have caused problems, since I still can't see the article. Splitting it up seems to be a necessity. Ucucha 16:50, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you very much, Ucucha! I haven't checked all 822 references, but a quick glance through them indicates that the transfer was successful. I'll be splitting the article in three shortly. Firsfron of Ronchester 21:13, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Is it possible to write a bot that detects bad links from {{sfn}}, {{harv}}, {{harvnb}}, {{harvtxt}}, {{harvcol}}, {{harvcolnb}} and {{harvcoltxt}} and adds {{citation not found}}? For example, it would notice that Smith (2001) harvtxt error: no target: CITEREFSmith2001 (help) creates a link ("CITEREFSmith2001") but that there is no corresponding anchor in the article, so it would replace it with Smith (2001) harvtxt error: no target: CITEREFSmith2001 (help)^{[citation not found]}.

I believe there are thousands of these bad links. {{citation not found}} places all the articles with bad links into a maintenance category, and it would make it much easier to find these and fix them.

See User:Svick/HarvErrors.js and User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js for related scripts.

Any takers? Any other advice? ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 08:48, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

I might give this a try sometime, but I don't have much experience coding bots and this seems to be fairly complicated. To find broken citations systematically, I think you'll need to get the rendered HTML for every article that transcludes one of the Harvard citation templates or to recreate a good portion of the MediaWiki parser. I don't know how to do that; I think the Toolserver database only gives you the wikitext for each article, and full-HTML database dumps for enwp are years old.

Charles is certainly right that this is a widespread problem. Using my script (User:Ucucha/HarvErrors), I found that almost every article with a substantial number of Harvard citations has problems. Ucucha 16:16, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm surprised. Your script seemed so simple that I hoped the bot code would be equally simple. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 18:28, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

The API does provide the parse action, if that's what your looking for. Noom _talk ^stalk 20:05, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Template:NFL player is not a infobox template. please help moving all the pages code from Template:NFL player → Template:Infobox gridiron football person. Thanks in advance.--777sms (talk) 16:04, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

It's a working redirect, and I see no reason to change articles that use it; see WP:NOTBROKEN. Ucucha 16:12, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

But, Template:NFL player is not a infobox template form. And Template:NFL player and Template:Nfl player is confused. So Template:NFL player should be modified to Template:Infobox gridiron football person and then Template:NFL player should be redirected to Template:Nfl player--777sms (talk) 16:18, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

What about Template:Infobox NFL player? I agree that there are far too many of these. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 01:27, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

I call it. :P --The Σ ^talk_contribs 01:30, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Well it is non-controversial, right? --The Σ ^talk_contribs 01:31, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Given that there is an objection, I would say it doesn't qualify as non-controversial. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 02:29, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm wondering if there is (or should be) a bot to periodically go around checking whether crosswiki links to Commons exist, and if they don't, to add {{commons}} or {{commonscat}}. Sounds to me like it might exist, or that there might be a bot suitable for taking the task on. And the task itself seems uncontroversial (he says, fingers crossed). Anyone? Rd232 ^talk 20:16, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

I'd like the "ordinary iw linkage bot assistance", for Countries_of_the_United_Kingdom and its iw sister articles; cf. Talk:Countries_of_the_United_Kingdom#A_technical_question for details. Thanks, JoergenB (talk) 21:07, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

If this is the wrong place to ask for this kind of 'bot assistance, please direct me to the right place! JoergenB (talk) 19:52, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

A roving IP has been frequently improperly linking names in citation templates, such as

{{cite news|first=Edward|last=[[Edward R. Murrow|Murrow]]|...}}

would it be possible for a bot to change this to the proper:

{{cite news|first=Edward|last=Murrow|authorlink=Edward R. Murrow]]|...}

I'm afraid I don't have the full list of citation templates where "authorlink" is used, or the full list of authorlinkn fields where this is appropriate. It's possible one of the existing citation bots already has this capability, in which case I would request that it be used more often.

— Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:15, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

Seems a simple enough fix, I could take a look. So basically, when |first=, |last= is a piped link, or |author= is a link and no |authorlink= is given, trim the former field to text and move the link to |authorlink=? —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 18:23, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

Filed BRFA: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/H3llBot 8. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 08:45, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi, I'm an admin on the welsh Wicipedia. Is there a ready made Bot for uploading Word pages as Wici articles, please. I have 700 individual Word text files which I have created from my own database on "Mountain Peaks in Wales". To do it by hand would harm my tendons! I've done one by hand: here. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 21:08, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

When you say "Word text files", do you mean text files (.txt) with wikimarkup, or Word files with the Word formatting? Are they all named as you want the pages to be titled? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 21:38, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi. I've mailmerged the database into a Microsoft Word document. I can change the page names manual to the names of the peaks, I would also need to set aside those which already have an article. I've already placed a list of all peaks here and you can see that a few of them exist. There's only a handful of us on the Welsh Wici, and being able to do this copy / paste automatically would help enormously. I've done the Scottish Peaks manually. You can see that I'm slowly coming to an end of the journey! - here. Many thanks. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 22:35, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject Biography is explicit about not being substituted; however many articles are using the redirect Template:WPBiography. This is making it difficult to get changes, particularly categories, fully implemented. Can a bot run through articles using the latter and replace the redirect? Timrollpickering (talk) 09:17, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

You seem to have misunderstood the situation. Unless something particularly weird is going on, use of the redirect Template:WPBiography has nothing to do with whatever problem you are having with getting changes "fully implemented". And certainly has nothing to do with substituting. Anomie⚔ 10:21, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Some of the categories populated by the template were recently renamed; however many articles are still appearing in the old category rather than the new (regardless of the categories listed on the articles themselves) due to the cache not being updated due to the template redirect. Timrollpickering (talk) 10:27, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

The pages just need a null edit to kick it over. Theres a little over 8000 of them - I'll run through it today. ^Avic_ennasis @ 11:42, 12 Sivan 5771 / 14 June 2011 (UTC)

 Done ^Avic_ennasis @ 14:45, 12 Sivan 5771 / 14 June 2011 (UTC)

8000 edits! Good gravy, did you get a BRFA for that? --The Σ ^talk_contribs 03:00, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Ok, apparently you didn't. Oh well. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 03:08, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

That was actually not related to this, at all, and the project tagging was ~ only 800 pages spread out over 6 hours. :-) Null edits are not logged in a contribution history. ^Avic_ennasis @ 04:55, 13 Sivan 5771 / 15 June 2011 (UTC)

I suggest reactivating the automatic assessments, like what BetacommandBot used to do. This would automatically assess articles as stub-class or start-class based on existing assessments by other WikiProjects; this would be done only for WikiProjects that have opted in. This would require two bot tasks as well as an opt-in program. The tasks would be:

1. Notify active WikiProjects of the possibility to opt-in to the automatic assessments program via message to their talk page
2. Once there is at least one WikiProject that has opted-in, automatically assess the quality of their unassessed articles based on pre-existing manual assessments by other WikiProjects.
   

I hope that this could be used to reduce assessment backlog for the interested WikiProjects. Note: I am suggesting this here, opposed to above where it was originally, due to the large scope of the request Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:07, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

• If there is a bot-op who is going to pick this up, please also pick up the tasks at User:Xenobot/R. I have some AWB settings or a Python script (still needs work, programmed by User:EdoDodo) that you can use to accomplish this. –xeno^talk 14:09, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree this is a useful task and many projects would find it useful including WikiProject United States. --Kumioko (talk) 14:20, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Ive still got the code sitting around, if someone wants to file a request for modification of my sanctions Ill dust the code off and get it working. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 14:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I personally don't have a problem with that. Especially considering this wasn't one of the tasks that folks had a problem with as memory serves. Not sure how some of the other folks will feel though. --Kumioko (talk) 14:26, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

The old code was leaving messages to the talk page too. We don't need this anymore. We now have |auto=inherit. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:28, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

That is a rather minor tweak, shouldnt be an issue. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 14:30, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Procedural question: Where would the discussion take place? At something like Wikipedia:Bot requests/automatic assessment opt-in or...? Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:34, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

WP:Bot requests/Revival of BetacommandBot's automatic article assessment code maybe? --The Σ ^talk_contribs 02:50, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Maybe, but I think the title may need to indicate that the editing will be done by a different bot, perhaps WP:Bot requests/Recycling of BetacommandBot's automatic article assessment code for another bot. Crisco 1492 (talk) 03:58, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Because BetacommandBot has a history of being buggy, how about WP:Bot requests/Recycling of BetacommandBot's automatic article quality assessment code which will be checked for bugs and will be used for another bot? --The Σ ^talk_contribs 05:06, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Sounds good. Crisco 1492 (talk) 05:37, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

I hope you have a good shortcut for that... WP:BOTREQ/ROBAAQACWWBCFBAWBUFAB is kinda lengthy... Or, we could just go with something like WP:Bot requests/Automatic Assessment Bot, and just mention on the page itself that it's new and improved Betacommand bot code for different bot. No need to try to throw tons of details into the title. (This is why we have Barack Obama instead of Former Senator from Illinois and current President of the United States, Barack Obama.) ^Avic_ennasis @ 05:45, 13 Sivan 5771 / 15 June 2011 (UTC)

WP:BOTR/AANB (for Wikipedia:Bot requests/Automatic assessment, not Betacommandbot) Crisco 1492 (talk) 06:28, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi. The "qroti.com" domain is dead for several years, but has been crawled by the "wayback machine". Is it possible for a bot to check these, and either prefix the URL with the Wayback archive (like I did at Mungar railway station), or even better would be to change them to full citations with the |archiveurl= and |archivedate= and the direct link to the most recently crawled version of the page. Thank you. Frietjes (talk) 21:06, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Seems easy enough, but more opinions are needed. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 00:29, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

The request should be removing these links, since this website—which ran as a one-person show—isn't a reliable source. —[d'oh] 04:08, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

There is a tool on toolserv : http://toolserver.org/~magnus/cgi-bin/duplicate_images_across.pl?lang=en&max=25

That lists duplicates of image between Commons/enwiki.

Would it be possible to automate the tagging of these duplicates? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 09:30, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

Indeed I could. What is the template I should use to tag duplicates? Tim1357 ^talk 03:37, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

HOw about a bot to make talk page redirects from page redirects.
Example:
WP:POKÉ redirects to Wikipedia:WikiProject Pokémon, but WT:POKÉ does not redirect to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pokémon. Could bots do such? ~~EBE123~~ ^talk_Contribs 22:41, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think this is a good task for a bot. Not all of these talk page redirects will be useful. Also, this is not always desired. An example is Malamanteau, which is a redirect, but was so often discussed that it's talk page has 2 archives. Not to mention the overwelming amount of talk pages this would create - we currently have only 6,816,583 articles, but we have over 8.5 billion pages in the article namespace! ^Avic_ennasis @ 04:15, 12 Sivan 5771 / 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I think Ebe123 was talking about only redirects in the WP namespace. By the way I ran a quick database query to search for them and found that there were more than 74000. (The full results are here, but be warned, its 7.4M) Tim1357 ^talk 03:21, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

And I don't know where you got 8.5 billion. We only have 60,526,288, including talk pages, redirects, ect. Tim1357 ^talk 03:25, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Typo'd. Billion above should be million. I just downloaded the most recent Database Dump file "all-titles-in-ns0", and it seems to have one article title per line, with 8,584,771 lines in it. A random sampling I took from it seems to be mostly redirects. As mw:Help:Magic words points out, {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} does not include redirects and disambig pages - you would use {{PAGESINNAMESPACE:0}} for that number, and that magic word is currently disabled. ^Avic_ennasis @ 07:36, 17 Sivan 5771 / 19 June 2011 (UTC)

This request has a "two" in the headline because it is very similar to a previous request which was successfully carried out by The Σ and Avicennasis. Some pages have been moved and I'm asking you to bypass the redirects in all the other pages as they are unencyclopedic, bizarre and de facto unprintworthy. The pages are:

• Italian Liberal Party – moved from Italian Liberal Party (historical)
• Italian Liberal Party (2004) – moved from Italian Liberal Party (current)
• Christian Democracy (Italy) – moved from Christian Democracy (Italy, historical)
• Christian Democracy (Italy, 1997) – moved from Christian Democracy (Italy, current)
• Christian Democracy for Autonomies – moved from Christian Democracy for Autonomies

The Σ and Avicenassis did a wonderful job the last time. Thanks in advance to whoever will "unleash" his/her bot this time. --Checco (talk) 19:30, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

I call it , but for the sake of process I feel I must go through a BRFA. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 21:34, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Drat, beat me to it! I'm a day late and a dollar short. ^Avic_ennasis @ 02:54, 15 Sivan 5771 / 17 June 2011 (UTC)

BRFA filed --The Σ ^talk_contribs 04:40, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Eu gostaria de saber se é possível fabricar um bot para o jogo Metin2? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.186.130.2 (talk • contribs)

This page is for bot requests for English Wikipedia, not for any other software/game. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 20:33, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Você pode tentar postar este pedido, http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia_Discuss%C3%A3o:Coordena%C3%A7%C3%A3o_rob%C3%B3tica, mas eles só vão considerar bots para a Wikipédia. Boa sorte. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 21:12, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Bots for a game are probably against their rules... We're definitely not going to help you now. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 21:34, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

I was wondering if a bot could detect pages that have been vandalized more than 3 times in 24 hours and automatically list them at wp rpp. people will still be able to request protection and the bot will find edits reverted through twinkle or huggle by cluebot or with an edit summary like rvv or revert vandal. itllbe like at uaa. would this be possible. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Heyitsme24 (talk • contribs) 15:29, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

User:AntiAbuseBot, but you have to opt in. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 01:07, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Would it be possible for a bot to do the following?

1. Either remove WikiProject templates from the talk pages for redirects or tag them as Redirect-class, no importance, with a priority on WikiProject templates that are on redirected talk pages
2. Correct misspellings, word-choice, and capitalization which cause the assessment / importance value to not show up (i.e. "Class=stub" or "Importance=low" instead of "class=stub" or "Importance=low", "priority" instead of "importance" [except for WikiProject Biographies], "classs" to "class" and whatnot)
3. Automatically assess articles on a regular basis, based on other projects' classification, ignoring articles that have received different assessments from different projects (similar to what BetacommandBot used to do)
4. Tagging the talk page when there are differing assessments of an article and adding that talk page to a category (perhaps Category:Articles with inconsistent assessments) for manual examination

I've been cleaning out the assessment backlog at WikiProject Indonesia and I've noticed many of these problems; having a bot take care of it would help take care of all the backlogs and help the Wikipedia 1.0 project immensely. Thanks. Crisco 1492 (talk) 10:43, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Can you please give more specific instructions of what is to be done? There are million of pages out there. I can give it a look. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:21, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Proposed tasks for the bot:

1. Remove WikiProject templates (such as Template:WikiProject Indonesia) from the talk pages of redirects OR automatically assess redirects as "class=redirect|importance=none"
2. Remove WikiProject templates (such as Template:WikiProject Indonesia) from redirected talk pages OR automatically assess them as "class=redirect|importance=none"
3. Correct mistakes causing the breaking of WikiProject templates on talk pages (i.e. changing "Importance=low" to "importance=low" [big I vs. small i])
4. Automatically assess articles based on other WikiProject assessments on the talk page, like what was done by BetacommandBot at Talk:Rufous-necked Sparrowhawk and thousands of other pages
5. Identify assessments that are not the same so that they can be manually checked, i.e. WikiProject Foo assesses example as a B, but WikiProject Goo has it assessed as a start-class article

5a. Identify GA, FL, or FA-class articles that have one or more WikiProject template with an assessment that is not GA, FL, or FA for manual checking (i.e. WikiProject Foo assesses example as a FA, but WikiProject Goo has it assessed as a B-class article

5b. Identify GA, FL, or FA-class articles that have one or more WikiProject template(s) with an assessment that is not GA, A, FL, or FA for manual checking (including unassessed, i.e. WikiProject Foo assesses example as a FA, but WikiProject Goo has it assessed as a B-class article

Crisco 1492 (talk) 11:50, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

As for finding the articles, I am under the impression that it can be done automatically by the bot, perhaps by crawling categories like Category:Unassessed Germany articles. I am not a coder myself, so I am not sure of the bot's limitations Crisco 1492 (talk) 11:54, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

• Are you suggesting a bot do this for projects despite them not having requested it? Or are you specifically asking about WikiProject Indonesia? Not all projects want auto-assessment to be done. –xeno^talk 12:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
  • Good point. I plan on doing WP Indonesia myself, so I am striking 1, 2, and 4. Adding another though

6. Flag WikiProject templates on the talk pages of redirects and/or on redirected talk pages if they are not assessed as redirects (i.e. "class=redirect") for manual checking

6a. Flag redirect talk pages and/or redirected talk pages with WikiProject templates that are not classified as redirect-class or similar class (NA-class, for example) for manual checking

Crisco 1492 (talk) 12:46, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Point 5 is also a bit weird too. Every wikiproject has it own criteria on the assessement level. Moreover, there are projects that dpn't support class C or other classes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:00, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

How about 5A? Since GA, FA, and FL are assigned by the community, there should not be any problems with different standards. Are 3 and 6 okay? Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:18, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

 #5 seems ok - but it should only address unassessed templates as most projects also have an "A" class which is between GA and FA. As regards #6, not all projects use "redirect-class". Still not so sure about acting on project templates without the project's request, though. –xeno^talk 13:22, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

How about 5b and 6a? I have modified the requests slightly in accordance with the above input. Number 3 seems to be minor, but can be RFCed if it it could be controversial Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:39, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Still think this probably should be done on an opt-in basis - as there are already enough projects that are explicitly looking for bot tasks to be done (like those waiting at User:Xenobot/R - I don't have time to complete those tasks). –xeno^talk 13:54, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Wouldn't 5b and 6a be considered project-wide? (Wish I was able to program; then I could create a CriscoBot to help) Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:59, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

5b - flag something for manual checking? I suppose. Who will do the manual check? =) This could be easily done as a dump report rather than a bot task. 6a - some projects might just want their tag removed in this case, rather than flagged as redirect or NA-class. –xeno^talk 14:05, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

[Deer caught in headlights] Don't understand dump reports </deer caught in headlights> Ah. So 6a would require a discussion at a central place, with WikiProjects opting in for removal, classification, or opting out? Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:12, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I think that there are merits to some of these but as Zeno put it the WikiProject should request it not be forced to do it. I would suggest creating a category or template that the bot could use to identify which projects want the task or you could make a optin page that the bot could use. Here are a couple notes about some of the items that I see:

1. if the article is a redirect but the talk page reflects something else we should tag it as redirect not delete it. Some project may not support these though so there should be a way to exclude them.
2. Correcting misspellings is a good idea, I already have some logic to fix some of the parameter problems mentioned (replace Class with class or fix things like no =, - instead of =, + instead of = etc.
3. Automatic assessment of articles can be done through several bots currently so the precedent has been set for this. Of course again the Project should optin not be forced to use it.
4. I could also see some falue in having a category as mentioned for articles with inconsistent assessments but I would restrict this to GA and higher. We would also need to create a template that the bot could use for Assessment verified or something so it doesn't keep retagging the ones that have already been checked.
5. I see some problems with 5 because some projects have different criteria. (for example, I would trust a Milhist B class more than many others). If the articles is GA or higher though they should all be consistent IMO.
6. I have also noticed a lot of articles with a redirect being improperly marked as other things. I just fixed about 1000 for WikiProject US and I continually recheck for them. A category for this would be good I think but it would probably need to be project specific. --Kumioko (talk) 13:42, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Some of your comments have been addressed in the proposed tasks (currently active: 3, 5b, 6). Reactivating the automatic classification would be nice, but I think it may need to be a separate proposal since it has a much larger scope. Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:49, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict)  #3 seems OK too but then we 'll need tracking categories for invalid parameters. I could add something to AWB's code but I don't think this problem is common. AWB already fixes importance/priority problem for all(?) cases. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:44, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I've encountered roughly 10 (out of 500) I <-> i problems today. It happens, but I cannot say how often. Low-traffic pages almost certainly can be missed for years, like the ones I corrected earlier. Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:13, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I like the idea of fixing (or at least producing a list) redirect-class articles—both articles tagged as redirects when they aren't (any longer) and articles assessed as articles or lists when they're actually redirects. If someone wrote such a bot, I'd be happy to help advertise it to WikiProjects that might be interested in it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:04, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Could I interest someone with experience with the xml dumps to update this compilation of journals?

In a nutshell, it a bot that would compile all the |journal= found in citation templates, and build various lists (top 1000 cited journals, top 1000 cited journals without articles, and a comprehensive alphabetical list of everything). Something like

Journal	Target	Citations	Articles (if ≤ 5 uniques)
Am J Foo	American Journal of Foobar	98	>5	Wikipedia · Google
American Journal of Foobar	American Journal of Foobar	3	1, 2	Wikipedia · Google
American Journal of Foobar A	—	7	1, 2, 3	Wikipedia · Google
American Journal of Foobar B	—	1	1	Wikipedia · Google
J Foo	Journal of Foobar	4	1, 2	Wikipedia · Google
J. Foo	Journal of Foobar	47	>5	Wikipedia · Google
Journal of Foobar	Journal of Foobar	32	>5	Wikipedia · Google
Journal of PENIS!!!1h!AHA	—	1	1	Wikipedia · Google

It's been over a year since WP:JCW has been updated and WP:JOURNALS really could use a fresh one. I've been begging ThaddeusB for ages, but he's missing in action since forever. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 02:25, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

I'll work on it. Some questions:

1. It looks like the templates to capture journal entries from are {{Citation}}, {{Cite journal}}, {{Vancite journal}}, and {{Vcite journal}} (plus their associated redirects as applicable). Is this correct? Any others?
2. They way you wrote "It's been over a year since WP:JCW has been updated and WP:JOURNALS really could use a fresh one" implies they are updated separately. But as far as I can tell, WP:JOURNALS points back to WP:JCW via the template at the top. Am I missing something?
3. I assume the current way the pages are broken out ({{JournalsMain}}) should be kept?
4. For cases where a journal is cited by both its fullname and its abbreviation (like the first two lines above), do you want those counted together or separately for purposes of the Top 1000?
5. Currently, the list has a Top 500. You really want that bumped to Top 1000?

-- JLaTondre (talk) 13:43, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

1. I think it was only covering {{Citation}} and {{Cite journal}} (and redirects), but {{Vcite journal}} and {{Vancite journal}} are certainly perfectly valid additions to the templates considered.
2. WP:JOURNALS is the journals project. So basically I was saying WP:JCW (i.e. the compilation) could use an update, and it would really benefit WikiProject Academic Journals.
3. {{JournalsMain}} is basically the navigational template for the hundreds subpages involved. For example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/A1's structure is

   {{JournalsMain}}

   {{JournalsLetter|letter=A}}

    

   [Compilation table]

    

   {{JournalsPrevNext|previous=|current=A1|next=A2}}

4. I'm really undecided about this. For several journal this would be nice (counting PNAS and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as one), but for others, it would be a bit weird. Physical Review D redirects to Physical Review, but Physical Review E is a standalone article. Keeping the current sorting method is probably best per the KISS principle, although maybe a compilation of the most popular "targets" could also be made. I suppose that mostly depends on you. If you want to code that part, we'll make use of it. But if you'd rather spend the time doing something else, no one will throw eggs at you either.
5. The top 500 most popular all have bluelinks now. Upping this to 1000 lets us know where missing journals sits in terms of Wikipedia-usefullness.

I usually roam #Wikipedia-BAG (freenode) BTW, so if you want a live chat about this, head over there. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 01:37, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm good with keeping it simple. If you find a need, we can always make changes later.

I've got the parsing done. Now it's time to work on the output. I have some questions on the columns. The previous bot displayed the journal name as a link and then a redirect target if that link was a redirect. It looks like your table above is similar except that the target column repeats the link if the link is to a page that exists and is not a redirect. Do you care about what is displayed as the title of the journal vs. the journal title links to? For example, for these three cases:

• | journal = Nature -- displays Nature with no linking
• | journal = [[Nature]] -- displays Nature linked to Nature
• | journal = [[Nature (journal)|Nature]] -- displays Nature linked to Nature (journal)

I believe the first two cases should be listed as [[Nature]] | [[Nature]] per the examples, but for the third one do you want [[Nature]] | [[Nature (journal)]] or [[Nature (journal)]] | [[Nature (journal)]]?

And then for a case like this, how do you want it handled?

• | journal = The Shorter [[Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy]]

The bot just slapped brackets around the whole thing which produced the output on this page. If that's all that's needed for all these cases, I'm fine with that. However, it seems like there should be three columns: 1) the journal name as displayed by the template; 2) the link provided by the template or the displayed name linked if no link given in the template; 3) the redirect target if 2 is a redirect. So for the four cases above, it would produce (where the first two would be summed together when counted, but left separated here):

Journal	Link	Redirect
Nature	Nature	--
Nature	Nature	--
Nature	Nature (journal)	--
The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy	Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy	--

-- JLaTondre (talk) 22:57, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

With regards to the compilation, Nature, Nature, and Nature (journal), should all be treated as the same entry on the list. Links should be converted to the pipe (aka. if you find [[Foobar (journal)|Foobar A: Toilets & Plumbing]], treat the entry as Foobar A: Toilets and Plumbing, rather than Foobar.

So basically, if you find

• | journal = Nature
• | journal = [[Nature]]
• | journal = [[Nature (journal)|Nature]]
• | journal = The Shorter [[Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy]]
• | journal = The Shorter [[Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy]]
• | journal = Sheng li xue bao: [Acta physiologica Sinica]

Then that would make the left side of the table look like

Journal	Target	Citations
Nature	Nature (journal)	3
Sheng li xue bao: Acta physiologica Sinica	—	1
The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy	Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy	1

[Convention: Bold = exist, italics = redirect]

Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:11, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Okay. I think there are going to be some odd cases that will need special handling (ex. same title with different piped, non-redirecting, links), but let me generate some real test output and we can worry about that when they occur. -- JLaTondre (talk) 20:04, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, the kinks can be worked out after some draft is made. For testing purposes, you might want to run the code on a small subset of articles (you can get small xml dumps generated via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export) Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:59, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

It's already working off the database dumps. For testing, I just limit the number of records it parses. -- JLaTondre (talk) 00:36, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I put the results of some initial testing at User:JL-Bot/Journal Testing. Please review that and then see the comments/questions I listed on that page's talk page. -- JLaTondre (talk) 22:55, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Could I askthat a bot is used to update all 2526 stations across the UK National Rail network? It would need to take the usage from documents located here and worked with {{Infobox GB station}} and {{Infobox London station}} which use two slightly different coding.

Simply south...... eating shoes for 5 years 23:30, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Example diff? --The Σ ^talk_contribs 01:30, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

In the relevant field London box uses 'railexits0203', 'railexits0304' etc... whereas GB Stations uses 'usage0203', 'usage0304' etc. GB stations also uses the field 'lowusage0203' to display single digits if its a small number (e.g under 0.5m) whereas 'usage' displays the number in millions. Protocol is you display the last 5 years for which data is available so if you add 09/10 you take away 04/05. WatcherZero (talk) 02:08, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

If you are wanting diffs on stations, Emerson Park, Mill Hill Broadway, Blair Atholl in Scotland and Bridgend in Wales. Obviously some stations have been updated. Low usage tends to be below 100,000 although there is no complete uniformity on this. Simply south...... digging mountains for 5 years 21:18, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Has someone moved this thread? If so, then where and why? See [here]. Llywelyn2000 (talk) 05:47, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

It got archived by User:ClueBot III. You can find it in the archives, over here. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 05:54, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Hello! I have a bot-request regarding the WikiAfrica project. We are trying to get an overview of all the articles that need to be created/edited/wikified/etc. on our project page. We want to encourage people to expand existing articles on Africa and start with subject related to art, literature, poetry, etc. To do this, we need to pull in a list of (for example) African poetry stubs: however, this could refer to either Africa stubs, notable Africans, notable Malians, or African literature stubs, all crossed with poetry. Is there a way of creating a bot for this? Did anybody do this before and would anybody like to help us with organizing? Thanks! Riannedac (talk) 13:31, 24 June 2011 (UTC) P.S. this is not a project similar to WikiProject Africa. We do support their work

The United States Wikipedians collaboration of the month has been back up and running for the last few months and we would like to automate a couple tasks that currently is done manually.

1. When an article is submitted as a candidate to be the collaboration of the month using Template:USCOTWnom can a bot add Template:USnom to the talk page of the article?
2. We would also like a message to be sent to any WikiProjects associated to the article notifying them that the article was submitted as a collboration candidate.
3. If an article is selected as the Collaboration of the month can a comment be sent to any WikiProjects associated to the article telling them the article was selected.

These three tasks would help tremendously. If anyone accepts this task we can discuss what the messages should say. --Kumioko (talk) 02:12, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I assume at this point that there is no interest in doing these so I will continue to do them manually until I can find someone willing to add them to an existing bot. If anyone is familiar with a bot that could be suited for one or all of these tasks please let me know.--Kumioko (talk) 17:00, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Could be a useful task to add to my messenger bot. Can put it together this weekend. Noom _talk ^stalk 14:48, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Ok that sounds great. Just let me know what you want me to do. --Kumioko (talk) 14:56, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

What messages did you have in mind for WikiProjects? Noom _talk ^stalk 19:27, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

The messages I was thinking of are:
For the nomination:
The Article, an article within the scope of this project, has been nominated to be the United States Wikipedians' Collaboration of the Month for next Month Year. You can vote for this or other articles to be next months Collaboration of the Month here.

For the selection:
The Article, an article within the scope of this project, has been selected as the United States Wikipedians' Collaboration of the Month for current month year. All editors interested in improving this article are encouraged to participate. You can also vote for next months article of the Month here.

with a title of:
"Article has been selected/nominated as the United States Wikipedians' Collaboration of the Month for current Month/next month Year"

• Article = The article selected
• current Month = the Month the article was selected.
• Year = the year the article was selected.
• next Month = the next Month the article was selected.

I asked the other maintainer of the collaboration to review it (Casliber) and they concurred. If you have any questions please let me know. Thanks again for doing this task for us. --Kumioko (talk) 01:42, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Greetings, I just wanted to check back and see if there were any more questions on this request. --Kumioko (talk) 13:25, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, personal issues took over much of my weekend. About half done at the moment, will finish soon. Sorry for the wait, Noom _talk ^stalk 21:04, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Had an internet outage again. It's half done, but you may want to find someone else to code it, as I won't be able to finish it until sometime this weekend/start of next. Sorry for wasting your time so far, Noom _talk ^stalk 18:46, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

No problem at all. Take your time. The collaboration is a long term thing so if it takes a couple weeks or a couple months its no biggie. I will just do things manually. --Kumioko (talk) 22:40, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

I am contemplating resurrecting WatchListBot, a bot which generated a list of wikiproject-tagged articles used by RecentChangesLinked (example). The bot owner seems to be MIA. Luckily she published the source code, written in python. My plan would be to upload the code to the Toolserver and run the bot there. Any comments? Lionel (talk) 08:49, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Not to say we can't have 2 bots doing it but Femto Bot is already doing this and if the project contacts Rich Farmbrough he seems to be willing to add more projects to the list. --Kumioko (talk) 12:57, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

And I developed WikiProject Watchlist which does pretty much the same thing, right? Tim1357 ^talk 01:50, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Tim! I'll check it out... – Lionel ^(talk) 20:53, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

To eliminate stubs is NEEDED and the wikia page needs repairing — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.197.170.122 (talk • contribs) 21:52, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow you. Are you asking for a bot for a Wikia wiki? ^Avic_ennasis @ 01:26, 22 Sivan 5771 / 24 June 2011 (UTC)

And if a bot could eliminate stubs, you wouldn't be editing this page right now. In fact, none of us would. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 01:57, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

I would like to scan the DYK archives and compile a list of DYK articles, submitters, and hooks. I can specify the info I need and how much, and do some analyis afterward, but would like help from a bot maker to get the scrape done.

Also, if they have the ability to do some simple checks on users as well (join date, number of edits, admin flag) that would be useful as well. I'm thinking a little bit like the person who did the RFA reform data compilation. Will read out to him, but not sure if he likes me.

Any advise on person or "other desk" to go for help?

TCO (talk) 18:53, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Who doesn't like you, User:Worm That Turned? --The Σ ^talk_contribs 01:57, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Most people don't, so I was pre-emptively worrie. But actually we are cool and collaborating. don't sweat it. but it turns out he is not a bot maker. so really we still need the help. It's too much to do manually. BTW, I started a thread on this at DYK talk and there is pretty high energy for this. will be a very useful analysis. I've even been pushed to join some wiki research mailing list. So if we can get bot help, most appreciated.

You could probably do this with a Database report. I could help you out, if it doesn't take too long. What type of information, exactly, do you want? Tim1357 ^talk 03:39, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

The "Immutability of AN archives" section of WP:AN discusses the possibilities of vandalism to the archives of WP:AN and related pages. 28bytes has made a useful suggestion: could we have a bot that looks at the edit history of the archives periodically (perhaps once per day) and leaves a note at WT:AN if any archive page is edited by an account that isn't an archive bot? Since the point of such a bot is simply to make us aware that someone modified the page, and not to warn users or revert changes or anything else that an antivandal bot does, I doubt that you need to worry about false positives such as someone un-archiving a thread. Nyttend (talk) 04:00, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

There are quite a few projects out there that use a 5 point checklist for assessing articles and I was wondering the possibility of getting a bot to do some of the assessment updates. This is just to determine if there is someone who might be interested in creating and running such a bot. Below is some general info just to clarify the intent and purpose of the task for anyone who might be interested. If someone is interested I will start a discussion on the Village pump but I don't want to do that until I determine if this is a task that someone would want to do.

I know that it could not possibly determine everything in the checklist but my idea was this. If a bot were given some specific rules to look for, and if an article met or didn't meet them, then it would change that particular checklist item. For example the checklist typically looks like this:

<-- B-Class 5-criteria checklist -->
| B1 <-- Referencing and citations --> = y/n
| B2 <-- Coverage and accuracy --> = y/n
| B3 <-- Structure --> = y/n
| B4 <-- Grammar and style --> = y/n
| B5 <-- Supporting materials --> = y/n

I do not think a bot could do much for 2 or 4 but 1, 3 and 5 it might be able to do.

1. First, It could place the Checklist on articles that lack it. Even if in an empty shell form. I would suggest that the projects have the ability to select which class of article should have it because this varies by project. IMO its only needed on Lists, Start, C and B. Stubs obviously wouldn't meet it so the checklist is evident in the class. Anything higher than GA should meet the checklist so again its self evident. Some projects don't support List or C. Some think it should be on all articles or other combinations.
2. B1 = If the article contained a template for related to needing citations then it could change the B1 to N if its a yes.
3. B1 = If the article contained a citation after each quotation and at the end of each paragraph, at minimum, then it might be able to populate B1 to Y (this will probably need more discussion to flush out completely but I think its doable)
4. B3 = We should be able to come to some understanding of what constitutes structure for the sake of this. (I.e. contains X number sections, contains an infobox, contains persondata, Maybe an image, etc)
5. B5 - If an article contains items such as an Infobox, image, map or diagram and met some other criteria then it might be able to do this.

Some notes:

1. The bot should only run on projects that request it
2. It should only modify the banner for the project that requested it
3. We would probably need to start with one checklist item at a time and discuss before implementing.
4. The criteria and rules that the bot follow would likely need to be tweaked along the way as its flushed out
5. The checklist and the B class criteria are subjective from person to person and are not flawless so the bot need not be either. Its just a general gauge to give the readers editors the general condition of the article.
6. I would suggest that the article not be fully implemented to B class until it has been reviewed by a human. The bot would just be a tool to help us clean up some of the problems with these checklists, add them to articles that need them, etc. --Kumioko (talk) 17:00, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi, I'm not very experienced with bots and such but I'd like to ask if there is someone who could make bot that would change every [[Škoda Fabia|Škoda Fabia S2000]] to [[Škoda Fabia S2000]]. This relates many pages so it'd help a lot. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hakulin (talk • contribs)

Pretty much unnecessary. ~~EBE123~~ ^talk_Contribs 20:26, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Is there any consensus to do that Petrb (talk) 17:09, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

File:Vote.png, on Commons, was deleted recently, leaving lots of broken image links here on WP, mainly on user pages (through userboxes), portal pages, and WikiProjects. Could someone fire up a bot to replace all usages with the very similar looking File:A coloured voting box.svg, please? I've found some of the userboxes and the one template that used it, so there shouldn't be much left to do. Special:WhatLinksHere/File:Vote.png Thanks. Bencherlite^Talk 12:19, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Except you wouldn't want to change image derivatives, such as this one, I don't think. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 12:55, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Good point, but that's the only one, I think. In fact, File:Demarchy.png is probably vulnerable to deletion: Vote.png was deleted as a deriative of non-free content, and Demarchy.png is therefore a deriative of a deriative of non-free content. Bencherlite^Talk 13:50, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Can't we place the new version at the old name? —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 14:25, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that's advisable, because that would leave a redirect at File:A coloured voting box.svg, which doesn't always link nicely thereafterwards (as I found out when trying to solve this issue using a redirect at Vote.png to A coloured voting box.svg). Also, are .svg and .png the same format? If not, I don't think that having one format under the name of another is a good idea. Bencherlite^Talk 14:30, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I meant placing a copy and marking it as such. A derivative work if you will; a PNG version of the SVG sized to fit the old usages. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 14:36, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

A file redirect will do the same thing. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 01:54, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Bencherlite already tried a file redirect, but s/he promptly deleted it, so I suspect that such an idea doesn't work well. Nyttend (talk) 04:02, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

It's really not hard task, if there was a concensus it's matter of few weeks (from my experience 40k edits takes about 1 week at slow-edit mode of my bot) to replace all usage, but I think link is a better idea Petrb (talk) 17:13, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Could someone please create a bot to scan the subcategories of Category:Radio stations and move any file pages to Category:Radio station logos, removing the other categories? Their appearance in the article categories is contrary to advice offered at Wikipedia:Categorization, and, more importantly, contrary to the NFCC, as the non-free logos are displayed in category-space galleries. I raised the issue on the appropriate WikiProject page a while ago, and received minimal response, so I think it'd be great if we could get a bot to deal with this. J Milburn (talk) 10:20, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

• 13 files outside logos category
• 1217 files in subcategories other than Radio station logos and using Logo fur template

— Dispenser 19:34, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, that's a start. I've added the 13 images to the logo category where appropriate, so all that needs to be done now is remove all the article categories from the images. I'm not really capable of scripting such a bot myself, and I'd rather not sit and do it manually... J Milburn (talk) 22:38, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

It should easy with AWB. Use the "wiki" format option on CatScan, then import it to AWB. Using the follow regex to remove the categories from the description page \[\[Category:(''CATEGORY TITLES SEPARATED BY "|"'')(\|[^\n{|}[\]]*)\]\]\n? (get the list from catscan) and have fun mindlessly click save for the next hours. — Dispenser 01:27, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction of how to find a bot that could do the following task; simply put a template (I already created it) on every page in a certain category. I can give more specifics if that matters, any help would be appreciated. Thanks! Magister Scienta (talk) 04:55, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

WP:AWB - you don't even need a BRFA. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 04:58, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Forgive my ignorance, but what's a BRFA (please respond on my talk page) Magister Scienta (talk) 05:41, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

BRFA stands for Bot Request for Approval. However what Sigma said is only half-true. You can easily add templates on every pages in a category with AWB (Source>Category:Foobar with Append/Prepend {{foobar}}). If you're tagging just a few pages (~100 or less) then a BRFA isn't required. If you're planning to tag several thousand pages, then a BRFA would be needed.

Note that if you're not familiar with AWB, or don't have time to learn/manually tag 1000 articles yourself, you could also give the specifics and people would be able to help you, or tell you what your next step should be. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:01, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

If a website is found to have had multiple single purpose accounts spamming links to it across many articles, you can then use the Search function to find out what other Wikipedia articles have a link to that site. But its hard to see who added it if a lot of edits have been done since then. Can you make it where an article can have its history searched, edit by edit, to see when a link was added and by who? Then that person can have their contributions checked, and if the only edits they ever did to Wikipedia were adding in links to that site, a spam investigation can follow. Dream Focus 19:16, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

There are two tools that can do this. One of them is SoxRed's tool [2]. The tool searches an article's history for a certain string of text, and returns when it was added, and who added it. Hopefully that helps. Tim1357 ^talk 01:55, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

nobody want to do this job? Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_42#moving afc pages mabdul 10:36, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

taking Petrb (talk) 17:59, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure that moving these is needed. I'll start a discussion at WT:WPAFC to explore the best way to deal with them. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:50, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

How is your test doing? mabdul 22:14, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

We are understandably wary of bots deleting articles, but it seems to me that this would be hard to screw up. A bot that would delete talk pages of articles that were deleted for a reason that links WP:CSD could save admins quite a few clicks and let us get on with CSD review more quickly. --causa sui (talk) 23:37, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Twinkle does that, I think. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 23:44, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Twinkle does do it, but not all admins use twinkle. It would be possible and very easy for me to code up. Let me look into it quick, but I would also prefer a bit of community talk on this first. -- DQ (t) (e) 00:13, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

As the above request states, this would be a bot that would simply check to see if the mainpage was already deleted and if it is delete the associated talkpage. Knowing that people have been on edge about this before, I would like to invite the community to comment on this. -- DQ (t) (e) 00:34, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

To be a devil's advocate, what happens when vandals tag pages like the Talk:Main Page (okay maybe not that page, but similarly high traffic ones) as CSD G8? Any bot would need to check for edits from IPs/non-autoconfirmed users before just deleting a page - else we could have abuse to deal with, and unnecessary WP:ANI threads. The Helpful One 00:55, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

The bot would actually only delete the page if the article does not exist (aka the article would have to be deleted, basically an admin would look at the article, delete it, and if they forget about the TP, this bot covers), and there are certain pages that would be on a white list. -- DQ (t) (e) 01:15, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Would the bot even need to wait for someone to tag the page as G8? The criterion seems clearcut enough that a bot would rarely get it wrong, me thinks. --causa sui (talk) 02:13, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Nope, but the bot would need before hand testing, because there is likely some fallout in this. Being a botop, I know that all too good. -- DQ (t) (e) 02:17, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Talk pages that have useful discussion on them (for example, from before the main article was deleted) should be preserved and aren't covered by G8. Unless the bot was able to read English to see what the discussion says, it can't just automatically delete the talk page of a deleted article. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:20, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Hypothetically, these pages should already be marked with {{G8-exempt}}. The bot could ignore such articles. Still, when I originally made this proposal, I thought it went without saying that the bot would only delete talk pages of articles that were deleted with a reason that linked to WP:CSD, as these are (a) the most frequently used kind of deletion and (b) the least likely to have anything important on the talk page. --causa sui (talk) 18:05, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Um, you mean like User:Orphaned talkpage deletion bot? --Chris 13:36, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Wow, I think that just called this dead water, how often do you run it though Chris? -- DQ (t) (e) 20:02, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Once a day. Although its not as effective as it used to be. Turns out admins are pretty good at keeping up with the deletions if there isn't a big back log. --Chris 10:36, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

"Although its not as effective as it used to be." -- Is it fixable? Because I know admins already do some tiresome work here and to take something off their back would be just a bit of help. -- DQ (t) (e) 14:38, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Interesting. Looks like it deletes pages whether they're tagged with G8 or not. Now I have something to tell all the people bugging me about talk pages that I neglected to speedy. Thanks! -causa sui (talk) 21:28, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Something occurred to me. If we could get a bot to download lists of settlements and coordinates from the geonames server by country like List of United Kingdom locations, such tables could contain an information summary. We could redirect all of the thousands of one liners we have which can't be expanded in the near future until they can be written properly or at least improve the standards we currently have. This way we would have some sort of recognition of all recognised settlements in the world but a new system which we can work off of and maintain some order. If we could try to get a full list of settlements in the world onto wikipedia it would be a good place to work off of I think and would mean we could sort out all of those xxx is a village type stubs we have for Category:Populated places in Kyrgyzstan for example and try to maintain some quality in categories and contain only actual articles. Is it possible somebody could code a bot to generate full lists of settlements by country in a similar fashion? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:27, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Hi, I need to place {{WP India|education=yes|education-importance=}} to all the articles in Category:Education in India. Can someone help me ? --naveenpf (talk) 02:59, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

On their talk pages? --The Σ ^talk_contribs 03:11, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes --naveenpf (talk) 03:13, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

{{helpme}}--naveenpf (talk) 01:30, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry for the late response, but I'll get it done by tomorrow. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 18:10, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Σ, Can you please do this recursively ? in that Category ? --01:12, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

OK. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 00:00, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Dear Σ, what has happened to my request and your bot request? Thanks! --Checco (talk) 11:21, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm waiting for a response. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 20:54, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Since it's been a while, you may want to poke a BAG member by throwing {{BAG assistance needed}} on your BFRA. ^Avic_ennasis @ 08:23, 3 Tamuz 5771 / 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Gah, I completely forgot about that template! Well in any case, Y Done. --The Σ ^talk_contribs 23:58, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Rename Category:Battles of the South American wars of independence and Category:People of South American wars of independence to Category:Battles of the Spanish American wars of independence and Category:People of Spanish American wars of independence. This was discussed at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2011 June 26#Category:South American wars of independence Cambalachero (talk) 00:15, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

The pages in the category or the category itself? --The Σ ^talk_contribs 01:05, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Of course, rename the categories and run a bot to recategorize the articles at the new ones. If it was just creating the category, I wouldn't request a bot Cambalachero (talk) 03:11, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I would first approach Timrollpickering (talk · contribs), who closed that CfD, to see whether he agrees that the renaming ought to apply to the two other categories; if he does, he'll list them for bot processing at WP:CFDW, and if he doesn't, you'll need another CfD (possibly a speedy nomination, I haven't checked). Either way, a bot operator can't simply do this off their own bat. Bencherlite^Talk 14:54, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

 Done Cambalachero (talk) 14:50, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

It would be very helpful to almost any Wikiproject if someone could program a bot that would compile data on the quality assessments of every article within a wikiproject's categories into a table sort of like those of the bot that makes "popular pages" pages (example). It would be nice if, additionally, every category could also get a numerical rating averaging the scores of every article it contains. Every assessment level could be assigned a number in increasing order so a stub would be a 1, a start a 2, and so on topping off at 6 for good articles and 7 for featureds. Giving a numerical rating to categories could help Wikiprojects keep track of which categories would be easy to turn into featured topics and which need a lot of work. Would anyone be interested in creating such a bot? Abyssal (talk) 00:15, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Hi! I've been editing Latin American people's names to include the proper accent marks. During the last days I've included thousands of accent marks, but the task is showing itself to be too huge to do it manually. Would some of your bots care to help me with this, please? I have a first list here for your orientation on what to do. When disambiguations are no provided for common names, it is safe to add the accent marks to those names in sports articles (I've checked it out). Please let me know if you decide to give me a hand and do this. Thanks you! Againme (talk) 02:20, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

User:Starzynka created hundreds of sub-stubs on villages in Argentina like Farallón Negro. When creating these articles in hyperspeed, he automatically inserted {{Expand Spanish}} on every one of them. (He was determined to have been operating an unauthorized bot by virtue of his manual or assisted super-fast article creations.) Most of these articles are really not that good of candidates for translation--many are three unreferenced sentences or so, and there is no indication that Starzynka considered whether they were accurate enough to consider translating etc. There are hundreds and hundreds more worthy translation candidates, and these are essentially just junking up the translation request category. Can someone have a bot go through and remove all these tags? I don't know if this needs approval from anyone else, but I'm probably the person most involved in translation processes in en.wiki, and these were essentially created by an unauthorized bot to begin with... Don't know if it's possible just to remove them from articles he created, or if we'd have to remove them from all Argentina geostubs (which would probably be worth it even with a bit of collateral damage...). Calliopejen1 (talk) 03:45, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps ask an AWBer to remove the tags like RichFarmbrough or Ser Amantio? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 18:02, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Hi Σ, thank you for the marvellous job done by your SigmaBot. There are still plenty of unprintworthy redirects to be fixed (see 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). I hope you will find the time to work also on them. Thank you in advance and excuse me for my insistence. --Checco (talk) 16:01, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

WP:JOURNALS tags images used in its articles. Specifically of interest are the images found in the |cover= of {{Infobox journal}}. It's been a while since our last bot run, so if someone could do one it would be very much appreciated. The code for the banner would be {{WP Journals|class=File}}. Thanks. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:28, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

I can do it. I think using {{WikiProject Journals|class=File}} is better. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:30, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Sure, although the full banner is {{WikiProject Academic Journals}}. Thanks a bunch. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 21:31, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, {{WikiProject Academic Journals}} is better. So, do I tag all images found in the |cover= of {{Infobox journal}}? Do I need to create the list of images too? -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:35, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

That's pretty much it yes. Not sure why you'd want a list of images, but if you want to build one, go right ahead. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:54, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

 Done I tagged 300 files. I hope these were all. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:40, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Many thanks! Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 12:13, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

A user made a change to a categorization project template last week, but due to a coding error his edit had the accidental side effect of completely depopulating almost 3,000 articles from a backlogged maintenance queue. I've repaired the template error, but wanted to know if anybody's willing and able to set a bot loose on the articles in order to properly repopulate the categories — the mission, if you choose to accept it, is for the bot to do null and/or cleanup edits on all articles that transclude {{cat improve}} (and its redirects). It's just too tedious and time-consuming a task to do manually in AWB, eh? Bearcat (talk) 19:29, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Surely it will just take a few days for the job queue to get around to it? –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 19:38, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

It can't wait "a few days" — it needs to happen as close as feasibly possible to immediately, because it's a nine-month maintenance backlog that the categorization project has to bump up to the top of its priority list. Bearcat (talk) 19:49, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Null edits running now. Rich Farmbrough, 18:01, 12 July 2011 (UTC).

Hi! The category Category:Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav should be empty. The corresponding article is at Order of St. Olav (not "Royal Norwegian") following a requested move a while back. Can a bot recategorize the 58 articles in question to Category:Knights Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav? Geschichte (talk) 09:12, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Don't really need a bot for this; a single manual run of WP:AWB will take care of it. I'll go set it up now. HersfoldHersfold]] ^(t/a/c) 16:03, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

 Done! HersfoldHersfold]] ^(t/a/c) 16:45, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Is there a bot that could systematize changes like this? This really would help cleaning up articles (esp. in PDF form). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 05:58, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Looks easy for "For", (4 or 5 trial edits done) - can you spec the work more completely? Rich Farmbrough, 18:02, 12 July 2011 (UTC).

The documentation for {{for}} links to all hatnote templates and their usage. See also WP:HATTEST. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:24, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Hm, I looked at the category, there's a lot of hat notes out there! Rich Farmbrough, 12:16, 13 July 2011 (UTC).

Yup! Hence why a bot would be awesome here :p Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:51, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

(Implementing the fixes in AWB would be great too). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:53, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Per this discussion and this deletion result I would like to substitute some templates and redirects. The article headers have changed for the redirects and they are currently held by anchors, plus it would be better to link to the created or potential article than a specific section within the overview article. Almost every rugby biography and many related articles use one or more of these templates/redirects so there will likely be hundreds to replace. AIRcorn (talk) 02:16, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Looks like a job for AWB if ever there was one. :) Investigating. Rich Farmbrough, 12:26, 13 July 2011 (UTC).

1500 pages transclude the templates, a further 2,600 link to "Rugby union position" - although many of these may be via infoboxen, of course. Rich Farmbrough, 12:35, 13 July 2011 (UTC).

I can do all the templates right away. Yobot has already approval for this kind of tasks. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:44, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Nope, don't do it yet. The templates subst: to the old format of the positions. First fix the templates. Rich Farmbrough, 12:49, 13 July 2011 (UTC).

Here's the list:

• Template:wing  Done
• Template:back row
• Template:rugbycentre
• Template:first five-eighth
• Template:flanker
• Template:fly-half
• Template:front row
• Template:hooker
• Template:inside centre
• Template:lock
• Template:loosehead prop
• Template:number 8
• Template:out half
• Template:outside centre
• Template:tighthead prop
• Template:stand-off
• Template:second row
• Template:second five-eighth
• Template:scrum-half
• Template:prop
• Template:outside half
• Template:fullback
• Template:half-back

Rich Farmbrough, 12:53, 13 July 2011 (UTC).

I can just replace directly instead of subst, or not? -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:10, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes if that's permitted by your BRFA. Rich Farmbrough, 13:11, 13 July 2011 (UTC).

I'll submit a BRFA for the other bit. I'm running a pre-parse now. Rich Farmbrough, 13:18, 13 July 2011 (UTC).

[Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Helpful Pixie Bot 44 BRFA here]. Rich Farmbrough, 21:13, 13 July 2011 (UTC).

Thanks. I am off to bed now, but if there is anything I can do to help out tomorrow let me know. AIRcorn (talk) 13:24, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

I notice position 11 isn't included on it's own as in Errie Claassens. Rich Farmbrough, 21:04, 13 July 2011 (UTC).

The positions have been changed a few times before, which was the original reason to have the template. Some, like the 11 on its own, still link to old names. There shouldn't be many so I will work through them. AIRcorn (talk) 22:07, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

The links of all the subtemplates at Template:Rugby squad player/role/ could do with updating as well. -- WOSlinker (talk) 21:12, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

I did like 1,600 edits. there are some leftovers. Someone please do them by hand. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:19, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks again. I can probably sort the rest out. AIRcorn (talk) 22:07, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Was {{RU position}} subbed during this cleanup? It should be treated like the others. --Bob247 (talk) 05:24, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry forgot about this one. It might not take too long to do manually. AIRcorn (talk) 06:11, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Hm. Not happy to put the work in getting a BRFA approved, and then find egg on my face because you did it yourself. Oh well. Rich Farmbrough, 12:57, 15 July 2011 (UTC).

Sorry, was just trying to help. AIRcorn (talk) 13:09, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

NP. Rich Farmbrough, 13:57, 15 July 2011 (UTC).

Yet another time I need to manually find and type missing parameters (example). Is it possible to regenerate this infobox? Bulwersator (talk) 15:45, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Er, well if you

1. can define the problem, for example if you have a list of articles that need infobox images and a way of finding the right image and caption and
2. can show consensus to have those images added

then it can be done. Rich Farmbrough, 13:08, 15 July 2011 (UTC).

Ops. I am not asking to add images (using bot), but only to add parameters (BTW - I generated list with images that can be imported from plwiki)

I am asking to add missing parameters - like in this edit Bulwersator (talk) 13:30, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Has anyone ever thought of making a bot that people could use to move WikiLove to award pages automatically? --Nathan2055^talk 19:37, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

You can use ClueBot III's archivenow parameter. It will be similar to the one currently on the bot's talk page:

{{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis
|archiveprefix=User talk:ClueBot Commons/Facepalm
|format=
|age=99999
|index=no
|nogenerateindex=1
|archivebox=no
|box-advert=no
|archivenow={{tl|facepalm,{{Facepalm

Hope it helps. --Σ ^talk_contribs 22:28, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

 Request on hold. I will start a discussion on WP:VPR to gain a clear consensus for this first. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 14:07, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Per a proposal by User:Rd232 at WP:VPR#Ratings poll a distraction? I propose to run a bot that mirrors discussions from meta (such as the discussions regarding Liquid Threads, see Rd232s comment at the 4th level 1 indented dot) somewhere here at EN Wikipedia. People then can put that page on their watchlist and keep themselves informed about stuff such as Pending changes or Liquid threads rolled out by the foundation. Maybe this could help enabling a better communication between the foundation and the community. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 23:21, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Please could you change all links to InterCity or Intercity to point to Intercity (Deutsche Bahn) (piped to say Intercity) within the categories Category:Railway stations in Germany and Category:Rolling stock of Germany (and sub categories)? A new, more focused article has been created.

Ideally, every article in Category:Rail transport in Germany would have the change made. Thanks. ArtVandelay13 (talk) 12:50, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

The Fakta om Fartyg website has moved from www.faktaomfartyg.se/ to www.faktaomfartyg.nu/. A bot run is needed to change all the .se extenions to .nu instead. I raised this at WT:SHIPS and it was suggested that a general fixes run be done at the same time. 794 articles/talk pages etc are affected. Mjroots (talk) 10:57, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

BRFA filed Seems simple enough. ^Avic_ennasis @ 04:45, 20 Tamuz 5771 / 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Withdrawn by operator. - User:Brad101 seems to be completing this task themselves. ^Avic_ennasis @ 21:57, 20 Tamuz 5771 / 22 July 2011 (UTC)

I did a few as a test but had no intention of completing them all. I wanted to make sure the request was feasible. Brad (talk) 02:46, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

I'll complete it manually, then. :-) ^Avic_ennasis @ 11:30, 21 Tamuz 5771 / 23 July 2011 (UTC)

 Done All but ~10 links in userspace. ^Avic_ennasis @ 13:09, 21 Tamuz 5771 / 23 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks all. Mjroots (talk) 14:45, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

A bot request for my request was made in February, though it was not responded to. From discussions elsewhere, it sounds like DASHbot was actually doing this for a very short while (and no longer does). But I thought I would give it another shot because any help would be tremendous. Consensus was reached back in 2009 to remove the Reviews parameter from {{Infobox album}}, and possibly the bot was initiated at this point. It stopped working for whatever reasons, and the archives have several discussions trying to pick up this project throughout 2010. Only recently has activity really picked up after a notice of deprecation was implemented which would make the project a highly visible one. There are 50,000+ articles that need to have reviews moved into the {{Album ratings}} template and placed directly below the Infobox albums template. What would it take to get another bot to kick this project into super high gear? The manual labor on this is fairly extensive and time-consuming and this will most likely otherwise take months, if not a year, to complete.

I'm more than happy to give specific details the bot would be required to do, some of which I think I can easily explain below, using Songs in the Attic and an example:

1. This is the way the article originally looked: Songs in the Attic

• The bot would need to move the articles from the Review parameter and place them into the {{Album ratings}} template. The review source would be placed in the rev# parameter, and the review rating and URL would be placed in the rev#Score parameter. The hash sign is replaced with the order number, rev1, rev2, rev3, etc.
• The reviews parameter in the infobox is naturally deleted. Some people format the infobox parameters weirdly, with pipes occurring after each parameter, or extra pipes appearing for no reason.
• The external links beside each review are against WP:EL and should technically be citations. The brackets and "(space)link]" should be replaced with <ref></ref> tags.
• Allmusic reviews sometimes (very often, but not always) have their URL listed in the {{Allmusic}} template (seen in the Attic example), and these are also placed in brackets with the word "link" as the external link.
• {{Review-Christgau}} templates can get kind of messy. I suppose the URL would need to be broken out and become its own citation, while the name "Robert Christgau" (wikilinked) would become the review source, and the rating could remain in the template. This isn't always the case for Christgau, though, as some people simply write the rating out by hand.
• Review URLS already cited properly and in "ref" tags can be left alone.
• The {{Album ratings}} template would be placed directly beneath the infobox unless a Reception/Critical reception section is located.
• A great many of the articles found in the category (linked above) don't have References sections, so if a {{Reflist}} or </references> tag is missing, a section should be created.

2. The resulting article diff looks like this.

I think that sums up most of the things I've noticed while doing this manually. How feasible would it be to do something like this? Even if the bot were allowed to say "no" to certain articles due to complexity issues, a bot working on the thousands of easier articles would be tremendously helpful. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 06:27, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

What do I do when there is no score given (see this) Tim1357 ^talk 15:06, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Also would a section like "chart performance" be appropriate place to put the template, given that there are no other places? Tim1357 ^talk 15:06, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi Tim1357, thanks so much for your response. In answer to the first question, if there is no rating, I've been putting (?)<!--add rating--> <ref>.... as a quick placeholder, but I haven't asked the people at WikiProject Albums if there's a more professional way of handling that. I'll bring it up and see what I get for responses. As for your second question, if there is not Reception/Critical reception section, then I suppose the Chart performance section (if there is one) would be a viable alternative. Let me also bring this up at the WP and see what people say! – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 00:46, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I've just "walked in" and a few changes have been made that I've already forgotten about. The Album ratings template now has the same width as the infobox, so placing it directly beneath should be the alternative if there is no Reception section. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 00:49, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Okay, it's not pretty, but it looks like if a rating does not exist, we'll stick with the (?) inserted in there before the citation. This way the review isn't lost (removed) and someone can manually update it (shouldn't be too hard) or remove the review at a later point. Thanks! – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 13:13, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Any progress on the bot request? Should it be whittled down to be less complex? Maybe only articles with one review, or all articles without any Allmusic and Robert Christgau reviews (since those have one or two separate templates, respectively, which can get confusing)? – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 21:45, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes. All the code has been done for a while now (I completely re-wrote it from last time). The thing that makes me nervous is that there is so many weird ways that people format the reviews. I programed it so that it is supremely timid: If it encounters any format that I have not coded for, it skips the page and logs it for human review. That being said, I want to be around to watch it go for a long time before it can go on its own. I'll do that tonight, and if I'm comfortable, I'll let it do work unsupervised. Thanks! Tim1357 ^talk 23:14, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Wonderful, thanks so much for your help and for the work going into the code (both old and new). Let me know if I can be of any assistance. If it logs the pages that bother it, I'd be more than happy to glance through the log and either deplete it by manually updating them, or if you need the log to (as best it can) remain "full" so you can use it for your own purposes in fine-tuning the bot, that's fine too. There are definitely some variations in how people format the reviews, which is a shame. If you'd rather proceed forward without any assistance, ignore me, and good luck! :) – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 23:41, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

This is really good news. I'm looking forward to seeing the bot in action. Thanks in advance. I agree that there's a lot of variety in the current articles, so we should expect it to be necessary to make some bot adjustments along the way. Here are my two questions: (1) Will the bot try to find a "Reception" or "Critical reception" section and put the "Album ratings" template there, and, if there is no such section, put the "Album ratings" template right after the infobox? (2) Where will I be able to see a list of the bot's updates? I suppose the bot will have its own user page so I can go there and click on "User contributions", so where will that be? — Mudwater ^(Talk) 23:54, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

The bot will put the reviews in a section that matches the regex string.([rR]eception|[Rr]eview|[Cc]ritical|[Ll]egac|[cC]hart)+.*. That means it will will use the section if it starts with any combination of the words: Rectption,review,critical,legacy,chart. If more than one section is found, the bot chooses the one with the lowest heading level (==Review== will be chosen over ===Review===), and afterwards (if more than one heading remains) it will take the first match.

For your second question: Here is a list of DASHBot's article edits. I'll be checking each one so it will be slow going for a bit. Keep this section watched so that I can ask questions. Hope that answers your question . Tim1357 ^talk 02:15, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Album ratings operations

So far, so great. I'm going to post about this at WikiProject Albums, I think the crew over there will be pretty excited to hear about this. I know I am. And without further ado, here's some feedback. In my opinion, the template should not be added to a Chart section, or to a Legacy section. The ratings do not directly relate to the charts, and I would also argue that they don't directly relate to the legacy. Other editors might have a different opinion about this, but that's what I think. Reception, Review, and Critical all sound good though. Anyway, yeah, I'll watch this space. Thanks, and keep up the good work. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 02:52, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

P.S. Whatever sections the bot ends up looking for and adding the album ratings template to, the current consensus is that, if none of those sections exist, the template should be added right after the infobox, with no section headers or tags being added to the article. Thanks. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 03:13, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Tim1357, excellent news, and it looks like it's working great! This will really help things out. Two things that come to mind:

I did find a curio, which the bot would have eventually run into, so I'm glad it happened so soon. At this diff, you can see that the ratings, in this case, were placed after the link, which the bot will apparently miss. As this format is so rare from what I've done, it never rang my bell enough to mention it to you. Sorry! — Wait, nevermind, my diff was apparently you noticing this lol, so we're synchronized there, I think.

Here is a clarification of Robert Christgau reviews, because these get really annoying (even manually). There are several ways these reviews seem to appear, but I think DASHbot may need to recognize the last example:

| review = [[Robert Christgau]] (B-) [http://www.foobar.com link]

Robert Christgau (B-) link — DASHbot should handle this one properly

| review = [[Robert Christgau]] {{rating-Christgau|hm2}} <ref>[http://robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=they+might Robert Christgau Review]</ref>

Robert Christgau ^[1] — DASHbot should handle this one properly

| review = {{subst:User:Edgarde/Review-Christgau|A-|cgurl=http://music.msn.com/music/consumerguide/april07}}

Robert Christgau (A−) link — DASHbot can maybe add "[[Robert Christgau]]" to the rev# parameter and parse the URL from the template and move it into the rev#Score</rev> parameter.

| review = {{subst:User:Edgarde/Review-Christgau|A-|album=411}}

Robert Christgau (A−) link — DASHbot can maybe add "[[Robert Christgau]]" to the rev# parameter and expand the URL to http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_album.php?id=411, replacing the id number each time.

What a pain in the butt, I know, and apparently these templates are condoning the usage of external links in an improper manner/format, but that's for a separate discussion later. Tell me what you think. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 03:45, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I did a random spot check, and noticed at 3121, the Pitchfork Media rating (6.0/10) was replaced by {{Rating|0|0}}. Maybe the decimal interfered? Otherwise, this is great, thank you! – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 06:02, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

 Fixed Thank you. Tim1357 ^talk 14:58, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Also, at the same article 3121 (album), the bot duplicated the HTML comment "See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Albums" and put the duplicate in an unnamed parameter. It certainly shouldn't copy the param, if anything it should (IMHO) remove it, but keeping it is OK as long as it isn't doubled. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 15:02, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Also, could the bot add the "|noprose=yes" parameter of {{Album reviews}} if there is no reception section? Might result in a handful of false positives, but overall I think it would be helpful tagging. Nevermind. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 15:12, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that we need to add 52000 articles to a maintenance category just like that. In my opinion, the message should be mostly just be used in the case of a specific article or group of articles undergoing an actual drive for expansion and improvement. Most of these articles are stubs, and that should be enough tagging to say that the entire article needs to be expanded and improved. I don't think that the need for accompanying prose for this template is more important than say, a more complete lead section. —Akrabbim^talk 16:19, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I have to disagree as well, the noprose thing is a nice parameter, but it should be used on an article-by-article basis. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 16:58, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Ah, good point. Nevermind; 'twas just a thought. @Akrabbim: Pleased to say that the backlog is now under 50,000 articles, and not at 52,000 articles! –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 21:01, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Any news about the bot? –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 12:38, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

So I have a question. I wrote my template parser so that it preserves the parameters' spacing, and preserves blank fields. :For example:

{{Infobox Film
|     |name=blablabla|
||director=Mr. Rogers|
|}}

will be turned into:

{{Infobox Film
|
|name = blabla
|
|
|director=Mr.Rogers
|
|
}}

Is it ok to remove blank fields? Tim1357 ^talk 14:22, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

I'd think so, for that template. IIRC, it doesn't haven any unnamed parameters, so removing blanks should be fine (although other templates it may be more problematic for). –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 14:24, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

P.S. Drilnorth, that's why the bot duplicated the comment, because it thought it was a parameter. Tim1357 ^talk 14:33, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

A perfectly reasonable assumption. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 14:49, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

So I let the bot do 119 edits by itself. I'm going to look through them before I let it go out into the wild. Tim1357 ^talk 16:54, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Awesome! I looked briefly through parts of the list and checked a few random edits, and it seemed mostly fine. The only one I noticed as being incorrect is this; an article about a TV series with a section about the soundtrack, and the bot moved the reviews box to the reception section for the TV series as a whole. Maybe put in some code so the bot skips articles where the infobox is in a section? That way more complicated situations like this can be done by humans. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 18:46, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

 Fixed The bot now ignores inboxes that are not in the lead section. Tim1357 ^talk 15:04, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I've checked a few of the bot's latest edits and things are looking really good. I'll try to check some more soon. As a minor point, when adding the text of the footnote, such as "Allmusic review", I think the word "review" should not be capitalized. Here are a few questions: (1) What section headers is the bot looking for now? There was some discussion earlier, mostly by me I guess, about cutting down the list from five to three, to not look for Chart or Legacy. (2) Once the bot is let loose, how many articles will it update at a time? I'm thinking it would be safer to gradually increase the "batch size", in case some further adjustments are found to be necessary. (3) In your most recent post, you provided a link to the bot's most recent edits. Can you provide a link that will show all of the "album bot" edits (moving the reviews from the infobox to the album ratings template), without showing any other DASHBot edits? Thanks. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 02:41, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

(1)  Done The bot will not capitalize "review" when it generates references. (2) The bot looks for sections that match ([rR]eception|[Rr]eview|[Cc]ritical)+.* or any section that begins with "Reception";"Review"; or "Critical". (3) I'll probably do another "batch" of 500 and then after that let it go until it's finished. (4) I'll work on getting a list of edits, it will probably involve a database query. Tim1357 ^talk 15:04, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I looked through some of the bot's earlier edits today and they were looking fine, along with what Drilnoth said above. Mudwater, I believe the bot is no longer placing them in the Charts section; I saw an edit where the bot avoided this. Haven't seen any "legacy" section examples, though. As for the bot's edits, Tim linked to it above (and I added the link into the how-to page), which is here. I think at the moment that these are the only "article" edits the bot is doing—you'll notice the results are simply filtered by "article". Tim simply limited the results to 119 for that last link. I too am curious how many edits the bot will do. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 03:11, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I found something that should be corrected. At this diff, you'll see the Pitchfork Media rating in parentheses was translated into a {{Rating}} template. Pitchfork gives its reviews as decimal numbers (out of 10), and they don't use a star system. The Ratings template is actually only supposed to be used for reviews given in stars, not just for any review. Hopefully that can be tweaked. Thanks! – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 11:37, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Didn't know that. Will stop doing that. Tim1357 ^talk 15:04, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Addendum: of course, we have to assume good faith (at the moment) that the reviews using the Ratings template are correct. Many aren't, but there really isn't any easy way of catching these without memorizing every review site and their rating system. So for the moment, the ratings given in the reviews parameter should be translated exactly the same to the Album ratings template. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 11:40, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

It is not true that the rating template is only for star ratings. A 6/10 is a rating just as is a rating. What the template is not for is summaries of reviews, like (favorable) and so on. So: star ratings should be in {{Rating}}, numerical and letter-grade ratings should be left as is, and summary words should not be there. The bot should not be expected to make these changes, but just move them over, correct or incorrect. —Akrabbim^talk 12:20, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I never said what you think I said. Maybe my saying "Ratings template" was confusing, in the plural. The {{Rating}} template is for star-rated reviews only. That's all I was saying. When I referred to {{Album ratings}}, I spelled it out in its entirety. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 12:28, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Oh OK right, so we're all on the same page. —Akrabbim^talk 12:37, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

No worries, like I said, I probably made things more confusing than they should've been. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 12:57, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks so much Tim! – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 20:54, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Being able to get a list of all the "album bot" edits would be great. That would make it very easy for editors to go back and check as many edits as they want, whenever the edits were made. But, I have no idea how hard or easy it would be to create a link like that. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 00:06, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Bot speed and batch size

Things are looking really good. But in my opinion, we should err on the side of caution for the size and number of batches for the bot running. Instead of letting the bot run after the next batch of 500, how about doing a few larger batches -- like, a few thousand at a time -- maybe a day, or a few days, apart? That way more editors will see what's going on, in more differently formatted articles, and have a chance to give feedback on any adjustments. I know that's more work for you, Tim1357, but I think we want to try pretty hard to avoid less than perfect edits on thousands of articles. Perhaps I'm being overly cautious, but I don't think I am. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 21:41, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Personally, I think that a batch of 500, which we'd skim for anything unusual, but not actually look at each diff, and then continuous run makes sense. As long as there is a bot shutoff, it would get deactivated if it starts doing something obviously wrong. However, I don't think there will be anything else that's problematic; I would tend to assume we've found all the major bugs from the sampling of articles already edited. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 23:10, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

And though we don't have the exact details of how "timid" the bot is, apparently it will skip over more complex pages or questionably formatted reviews and their links. As far as I could tell glancing through the bot's recent edits, it seems to be finding the more "standard issue" of these articles' reviews. I'm all for plowing ahead, but obviously there may be several edit issues we can't foresee at the moment. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 23:50, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi Tim, can you let us know when you may run a batch of 500? I know I'd be willing to help go through the diffs for a final round of checks. I'm assuming when the bot is set "free", it will go nightly. Any idea how many it'll be limited to? Thanks! – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 04:14, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Sure thing. I actually haven't gone through the first 119 myself, so I'm just going off what has been reported to me. You going through the edits is super helpful, because I have dialup and going through the edits goes glacially slow. You're ready for another 500? Tim1357 ^talk 16:00, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

P.S. When it goes "free" I'll just run it straight until it's done. The bot runs on the toolserver so it should go pretty quickly. I suspect there will be a significant number of articles left over, because the bot skips quite a few that have weird formatting. That way I can focus on the new formats once the first run is over. Tim1357 ^talk 16:00, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Dialup? Dang. With the number of scripts Wikipedia has to load, that must be a nightmare!

On topic, I'd be ready for the next 500 and I can skim through them to see if there's any obvious problems which we've missed so far. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 16:44, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I'll be on and off throughout the day and evening, so I'll be ready to skim through them as well. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 17:08, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I noticed that the bot continued well past 500 articles. It had updated more than 1,300 articles. I tried to shut it off, here, but it looks like that didn't work, and it's still updating articles. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 23:43, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Okay, the bot has been stopped, and all is well. Here is a link to the test batch, which ended up at 1,433 articles. Interested editors are strongly encouraged to check the bot's work and provide any feedback here. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 00:05, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Feedback on 1,433 test batch

• Probably shouldn't edit pages outside of the mainspace. [3] [4]

•  Fixed Thanks. Should have thought of that earlier. Tim1357 ^talk 16:13, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

• It probably shouldn't remove comments, but that is probably so rare that the hassle to program it would exceed the time needed to fix it in the few cases it happens.

•  Fixed Additionally, the bot will no longer change the title of the Infobox. Tim1357 ^talk 16:13, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I'm happy to say that that is all I noticed. Now, I didn't look through a whole ton of edits, but a nicely representative sample with the bot doing different things (reception section vs. after infobox, different numbers of reviews, etc.) –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 00:14, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Is it possible to make sure that we are using {{Infobox album}} and not {{Infobox Album}}; it is unnecessary to make redirecting templates, like it did here. Also, would it be possible to make |type=Album to change to |type=studio? BOVINEBOY2008 00:43, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Here's one that's not quite right, although at the moment I can't figure out what went wrong. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 01:27, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Me neither. I'll come back to it. Tim1357 ^talk 16:21, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Here's a case where the infobox had 13 reviews. The bot's edit is fine, it moved all 13, but {{Album ratings}} is only set up to display 12. The problem here is that a reference is lost, or rather, turned into a comment. So that's not good, but I'm not sure what the bot can do about it. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 01:37, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I've tweaked the template to support up to 14 ratings. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 13:39, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I didn't even notice this earlier. Can we have the bot using {{Album ratings}} and not the redirect {{Album reviews}}? – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 02:14, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

 Done Tim1357 ^talk 16:21, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

 Fixed The bot separated the wikilink and confused it with the rating. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 02:21, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Okay, it's a good thing people above noticed stuff. I haven't found a single error—though eerily, I did find that I'd reverted a DASHBot edit as vandalism, and on my honor, I don't remember making that edit or visiting that page. o.O Not sure what that was about. Anyway, a quick reply/summary list:

1. Mainspace-only edits: Drilnoth, is there a reason why it shouldn't? We need all of the reviews moved out, don't we? And better a bot does a userspace edit than a real editor, simply out of respect for potential CC licensing issues in the future, right? (I'm going out on a limb here...)
2. I agree with Bovineboy2008, {{Infobox album}} should not be capitalized, to avoid redirect usage
3. Similarly, {{Album ratings}} should be the template used by the bot, to avoid redirect usage
4. Not sure how to handle 12+ reviews. I did one manually a few days ago, and I simply commented it out and left a note explaining. Not sure what else to do. None of us is going to sit there and choose articles, so maybe the bot should continue handling it the way it does?
   • I've tweaked the template to support up to 14 ratings. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 13:39, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
5. Question for Tim: I think once the bot kicks in full gear, we'll see better which articles it's avoiding, but if there's some clue that would help us (or me) keep an eye out for articles I can update manually, that would be great. For example, I see the bot is doing a bunch of Robert Christgau reviews, but they're all formatted similar to other reviews. Is DASHBot skipping over those strange Robert Christgau template reviews? If so, then if I see one in passing, I can manually work on the article immediately knowing the bot wouldn't get to it. Examples of what the bot skips could be helpful, in other words. This is only so we don't end up working manually on articles that the bot would otherwise do (since with the bot in progress, I've been getting muchhhh lazier).

Thanks all! – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 04:44, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I like how the bot sped up the process for decreasing the backlog in that category. The bot was moving reviews at an even faster rate than previously. It fixed some of the pages that were on my watchlist, and what I observed from what it did there got my approval. If this bot goes on to the rest of the category, that would be nice. Backtable _{Speak to me}^{concerning my deeds.} 07:10, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I suggest doing another test batch of one or two thousand articles, after the bot has been adjusted based on the feedback from this batch. Things are going really well, and I know a lot of people are eager to get all the ratings moved, but it's important that this be done right. It takes editors some time to find things that the bot should be doing differently, and making these minor adjustments is very worthwhile. Let's not go off half cocked, so to speak. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 10:46, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm down with that. Can we keep it limited to 500–1000? It's still a lot of articles to sift through, and I think there's only a small number of us doing this. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 12:09, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 12:32, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I have reverted User:Drilnoth's edit to Template:Album ratings which increased the number of reviews to 14 - I'm sure that the number of reviews the template supports was arrived at after some debate, and so should not be changed just because "album bot" has issues. Could the bot be made to reject any infobox with more than 12 reviews? memphisto 14:59, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

That would be a reasonable solution for the time being. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 15:04, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

 Done Tim1357 ^talk 16:29, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't really have a dog in this fight so to speak but I think that it would be a good idea to change the location of the template to be {{Infobox album}} vice the current name of {{Album ratings}}. Just as with the standardization of the WikiProject templates I think calling an infobox an infobox in clear text is a much better and clearer way of knowing what it is. For new users especially the lack of standardized naming can be extremely confusing. I also think that assuming that a lengthy debate must have happened to arrive at the magic number of 12 reviews seems optimistic. I can't imagine why a change like that should be reverted as long as there are albums that would meet that criteria. --Kumioko (talk) 15:48, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Another possible bug: this edit adds extra whitespace below the infobox, causing a blank line to appear before the first text. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 19:47, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Good catch, that appears on every edit that I've just quickly checked. Maybe the bot can run through and remove those as well? I'm not going to be available for checking the bot run this weekend and my time on Wikipedia will be pretty minimal. Hopefully we can do another test batch before then? – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 12:18, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Y Thanks. The bot will no longer add that extra newline. I'm working right now on running through and fixing the double newline. I'll leave a note here when I'm done. Tim1357 ^talk 22:58, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 12:35, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

(Done) Tim1357 ^talk 00:04, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry but... you removed the wrong whitespace. The problematic one was the space below the ratings template, not the space above the ratings template. :/ See [5] –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 00:10, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Will the bot be running soon? My plans have changed and I will not be on Wikipedia for more than a few glances for the remainder of the week. Just thought I'd check in. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 05:08, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I asked him on his talk page about it a few days ago... no response. I'm starting to get concerned. :/ –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 13:07, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Next test batch

I think we're ready for the next test batch. I'd propose a batch of 500 or even 1,000 articles. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 12:16, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. Unfortunately, the bot operator seems to not be editing :/ –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 23:42, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, its been a hectic week for me. I just downed some coffee and I'll do this tonight. Tim1357 ^talk 04:14, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Lookin' good! How many are in this batch? — Mudwater ^(Talk) 04:53, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

I've stopped the bot for now. It updated a few thousand articles. I did a quick check and what I saw looks really good, but I'm not sure we're ready to have the bot update all the articles yet. Let's wait for feedback on this batch and see if any more adjustments need to be made. I'll check some of the latest batch, and I'd encourage other editors to do the same. Thanks! — Mudwater ^(Talk) 12:51, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Here is a link to the latest batch of bot edits. A total of 2,778 articles were updated. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 13:12, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Here are some thoughts on the latest batch:

1. Besides moving the album ratings, the bot is also applying common fixes, as its edit summaries say. It looks like one of the fixes is to remove spaces embedded in the album infobox parameters. A lot of articles have the equal signs lined up, which in my opinion makes it easier to read, and work on, the infobox, when you're editing the article. Here is an example, although you can only really see what I mean when you're editing the article. Anyway, I would prefer it if the bot did not remove the extra spaces. The argument could also be made that moving the ratings would be more straightforward if the bot didn't apply any common fixes, although I don't have a strong opinion about that.

Actually, that is not part of the common fixes. That bug is part of the parser that extracts all the information from the Album Infobox. I was wondering myself what I should do? Should I preserve the spacing? Or should each parameter be tabbed? Tim1357 ^talk 01:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Yea, on second thought that's what I'll do. The bot won't change spacing any more, but will enforce one parameter per line. EG:

{{Infobox
 | name=Foo
 | bar=Baz
 }}

Hope that's good. Tim1357 ^talk 01:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

1. When changing links to footnotes, the bot is treating the {{Allmusic}} template like any other link. That works fine, but there's an alternative that could be considered. Instead of changing the link to this:

<ref>[{{Allmusic|class=album|id=r1574069|pure_url=yes}} Allmusic review]</ref>

which results in a footnote that says "Allmusic review", the bot could change it to this:

<ref>{{Allmusic|class=album|id=r1574069}}</ref>

which results in a footnote that says "[name of article] at Allmusic", with the "Allmusic" being a link to the Allmusic article. This second way conforms more to the way the Allmusic template was designed to be used, so I think it's slightly preferable, but some editors might prefer to let the bot continue doing these the first way. I'd go along with whichever way most people like better.

3. The bot is marking its updates as minor edits, but they're pretty substantial, and we want to make sure that other editors notice them, so I'd suggest not marking them as minor.

 Fixed Tim1357 ^talk 01:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

In general I think the bot is doing a great job of moving the reviews, which of course is the main point of all this. So far I haven't noticed any issues with that. So, I think things are going really well. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 13:40, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

I notice that the bot is picking up reviews that were commented out (I admit to having done that prior to being aware of this bot being activated). This is a good thing, however, it leaves a hanging <--! just sitting there in the infobox (see example here). Can the bot be programmed to check if the reviews are commented out, and remove that? MrMoustacheMM (talk) 17:29, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Should be fixed now. Tim1357 ^talk 01:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Looking good Tim! I understand; life can get busy :) . Anyways, nice to see you and your bot back! –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 21:26, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Some of the pages that test batch did appeared on my watchlist. I don't think I have any complaints to give; I liked what I saw with some of what the bot worked on. It has also reduced more than 6% of that backlog, if I'm correct.Backtable _{Speak to me}^{concerning my deeds.} 03:55, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Any news on when the bot should really get going? –Drilnoth (T/C) 12:39, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, we eagerly await the return of the album ratings bot! And also, any feedback on the points raised in this subsection would be appreciated. Thanks.... — Mudwater ^(Talk) 01:12, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Ok, I think I adressed everything urgent up there. I'll go for 5,000 tonight? Tim1357 ^talk 02:20, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Cool. I'd actually say that just turning on the bot, without limiting the count, would probably be fine at this point, but that's up to you. –Drilnoth (T/C) 19:32, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I'd still advocate a more cautious approach, and say that a batch of 5,000 sounds good to me. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 21:56, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Also, here's another thought about the bot fixing other parameters in the album infobox. Tim1357, you said you'd have the bot preserve the existing spacing, which is what I requested, so thanks for that. As far as enforcing one parameter per line, I'm good either way. Like I said before, the main point is to move the ratings. Any other cleanup of the infobox or the article is completely optional, and I for one would be happy whether the bot did that type of thing or not. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 01:46, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Any updates on this? –Drilnoth (T/C) 13:52, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't think people have seen any problems; can we have DashBot continue to move forward on this? —Akrabbim^talk 17:32, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I'd like this too. Unfortunately, it seems like Tim is semi-inactive. He last edited four days ago, but even that was just two edits to Amy Winehouse; it has been eleven days since he's been doing anything significant. –Drilnoth (T/C) 17:59, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Please could a bot operator arrange for their bot to tag all the categories listed below, and the articles they contain, with the project template for Wikipedia:WikiProject Buses using following template: {{WikiProject Buses}}. For the categories please use the class=Category parameter also. For articles, if possible please use the same quality assessment as other projects (if there is more than one tag with a quality assessment present, and the assessments disagree, please leave the class parameter blank).

Please note that some categories/articles are already tagged with the project banner, and these should only have the class parameter added (per the above rules) if it is absent.

This list was posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Buses#Tagging bus stations for this project for a week without comment or objection so the chance of error is low (in my opinion). Thryduulf (talk) 22:17, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

I can do that starting from tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. -- Magioladitis (talk) 05:38, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Doing. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:11, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

 Done 694 edits. Magioladitis (talk) 23:28, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Thryduulf (talk) 11:48, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

 Half done I don't think that it was completed per request. Thryduulf asked for "please use the same quality assessment as other projects", but this edit shows that the |class=start on the two existing project banners was ignored. Thryduulf did allow "if there is more than one tag with a quality assessment present, ... leave the class parameter blank", but only when "the assessments disagree", which in this case they do not. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:14, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Aha. I didn't notice that. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:36, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Someone has just to add a request in User talk:DodoBot/Requests. It's easier than me doing it. :P -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:43, 27 July 2011 (UTC)