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Too much has been allowed to creep into this category and be reused without watching. The template and category should have been deleted a long time ago, but now represents so much work in removing images from articles nobody would dare approaching it. Can a bot deal with removing images from articles? Circeus 01:03, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Crossposted to Wikipedia_talk:Bots#Bot_for_researchers_needed.

A bot (or perhaps a script, or some other tool) would be very useful to the growing amount of people (myself included) who are interested in studying Wikipedia. I'd very much like to see and use a tool that would look at the history of any article (including a talk page!) and:

• generate a list of people who have edited target article
• generate an information feedable to a statistical analytical program (comma-separated values format is quite simple and popular) which would tell:
  • how often each individual edited this article
  • when did he edit it
  • how much new content has he changed
  • was the edit marked as minor
  • was the edit summary used
  • was the edit a vandalism (possibly using parts of Tawkerbot2)
  • was the edit a vandalism revert
  • was the edit part of a revert war

Even one or a few of those if implemented would be much, much appreciated! If we already have tools that can answer some of these questions, please let me know.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 00:40, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

While this could be implemented as a user script, some of those features would require fetching all the past revisions of the page, which would hit the servers pretty hard. I think this would be better implemented as a Toolserver project, or offline using the database dumps. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 08:51, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree that it likely would be better to use dumps to avoid server load (on the other hand, this bot would not likely be used often). Can one download only a part of the database dump (since this bot would be analyzing only 1 or few pages)? Does toolserver work on the dumps?--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 22:29, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

I have a history stats tool that picks up reverts, and a user contrib's stats tool that get the number of large, medium, and small edits form the summaries (and can be percectly accurate sometimes). I'll try to combine the twain. A tool to get the editors and how many times they edited can be found here[1] for example.Voice-of-All 05:32, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Tnx for any help. Unfortunately the current ' TDS' Article Contribution Counter' seems not to be working with non-article namespaces, which makes it mostly useless for my research :( I will ask TDS if he can fix it, and I will be waiting for your combined tool :) --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 17:12, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't work? It seems to work for me. (Yay! I'm second on the list!) fetofs ^Hello! 17:34, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, it should be working for all namespaces. I just merged my user contribs tool's article sorting stats for the type of edits with my history stats tool[2]. It still may need some debugging though.Voice-of-All 23:25, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Oh :) All right, it's a case of user friendliness problem. We need better instructions on the tool page, as I was putting in Wikipedia:Verifiability instead of Verifiability, and the Wikipedia namespace is named Project in the pool down menu :) Now what all those tools are missing is some kind of time-series analysis: a listing on when the edits were done. A graph would be nice, but that can be easily done with any common statistical packages, if the data can be extracted first. Which reminds me - it would be nice if those tools could generate output in comma-separated values (although it's rather easy to copy and paste them in the current output, too).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 17:18, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I have been thinking over the last few days and seeing that Category:Images with no copyright tag, Category:Images with unknown copyright status, Category:Orphaned fairuse images and Category:Images with no fair use rationale get back-logged quite a lot, I think I bot would be able to help us combat these backlogs. The bot should go through the sub-categories of the main categories and remove all those images listed at the sub-category and remove them from the article(s). The bot would not delete the image, merely remove it from the article(s) that contain the image. This would make it a whole lot easier for admins to go around these categories and delete the images there, and not have to remove the images from the article themselves. I am aware OrphanBot does some work linked to this, but it doesn't go through all of the categories. Iolakana|^(talk) 15:20, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes it does, afaik. JesseW, the juggling janitor 03:11, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I'd very much like a bot that would fill in the blanks in incomplete {{cite book}}s. A cite can be considered incomplete if it's missing any of the following parameters: Title, last, first, publisher, year, id.

I can see five cases in which this could be used (given in fall-through order):

1. An id (ISBN etc.) parameter is given, and it has been referenced in another article. In this case, the completed template (omitting page/chapter references, etc.) can be copied over.
2. An id (ISBN etc.) parameter is given, and the info can be looked up from an external source.
3. A wikilinked title is given, and the linked-to article gives the required information in an {{infobox book}}.
4. A wikilinked title is given, and the linked-to article gives exactly one ISBN. (ISBNs in the References and See Also sections don't count, unless the article's one ISBN is in the References section.) In this case, the info can be looked up as above.
5. A subset of the aforementioned basic parameters is given, and an external source gives exactly one search match with the required data.

If the bot is unable to fill in all of these basic parameters, it should insert ?s for the missing ones and/or a page comment, to show that it has tried.

If this type of bot responds quickly to new {{cite book}}s, it will no doubt save editors a lot of tedious work looking up and typing in all the data fields. We can tell them to type just the ISBN, and suggest that they come back later and verify the bot's work. Seahen 03:42, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Extra thing this bot should do: remove the frequent colons afetr the word "ISBN". these prevent the ISBN from being parsed properly. Circeus 02:29, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Anyone working on this? I think i might do it, sounds easy and fun. LilDice 17:48, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Bot's Name: SpyroBot Editing Spyro Articles

I think you need here: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approvals Reedy Boy 21:20, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

I noticed a lot of the requested article pages are in quite a mess with not being proper formatted, ie bullet points.

Would it be possible for someone to write a bot to place bullet points in front of the requests to make the pages look better?

I did do one page manually, and it took quite a while.

And, would it be possible for a bot to automatically remove blue links.

I would happily run it if someone could write it!

Thanks!

Reedy Boy 10:38, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

I have already created a list of some cross-space redirects at User:Invitatious/cnr. I would like this bot to do the following:

1. Generate a list of cross-space redirects. (Not from any of the acceptable pseudo-spaces)
2. Split this list into main to userspace and not that.
3. Present confirmation of each MTU redirect to the human user of the bot, which if approved, will tag it for speedy deletion using the following tag: {{db-rediruser}}
4. Make the other redirects into a wikicode list, grouped into sections depending on the first two characters of the redirect. And also upload it to a user page, preferably with code that will prevent a bot from "bypassing the cross-space redirect". Or upload it to an outside web server. Example:

==BE==
* [[:Being a dick]] → [[:Wikipedia:Don't be a dick]]

Invitatious 19:07, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to see if anyone's up for writing a bot to help those who monitor PROD. Specifically, I think a bot could:

1. Maintain pages, one for each day, that lists all articles that were PROD'ed that day, the time of the prod, the prodder, the prod concern, and the edit summary used when prodding. It could strike out articles that were de-prodded. Optionally, it could note whether a {{prod2}} or {{prod2a}} tag has been added.
2. Automatically remove prod from any article if prod was previously removed from that same article, and notify the prodder that this was done.
3. Automatically remove prod from any page that isn't an article, and notify the prodder that this was done.

Number 1 especially would be very helpful in patrolling. I don't have the skills to write the bot myself, or I would. Mangojuice^talk 14:50, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

NOTE: There is already a system in place that provides functionality similar to that described in item 1 (I can't remember the specifics, but it includes an auto-updating table of PRODs), and it was used successfully in the early days of PROD. Unfortunately it relies on a copy of the database kept on the Wikimedia toolserver, which is not up-to-date for the English Wikipedia. Wikipedia:Proposed deletion states that the current category-based system is actually a temporary "backup system" until this is fixed – Gurch 17:37, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I am requesting a bot that can detect & remove offensive language.--StitchPedia 00:40, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

If the bot plans to run in the Article namespace, this is censoring, which is not allowed. If it plans to run in talk pages, then this is editing other peoples' comments, which certain users think it rude. Iolakana|^T 18:09, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, this could be problematic. In the article space it could lead to problems, for example, the Sum 41 article correctly uses the phrase "Anna Nicole is a (fucking stupid) cunt". In the talk space, it may frustrate users. It might work if the bot depended on human confirmation before making changes. Cedars 13:49, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

This would definitely be problematic. Wikipedia is not censored. Alphachimp ^talk 17:46, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I would suggest a slightly different approach, then. How about an option where is censors out words for any particular user who doesn't like them?

—Preceding unsigned comment added by OneWeirdDude (talk • contribs)

That wouldn't be a bot thing. That would be something that would have to b accomplished by changing the software behind Wikipedia. It's really not going to happen. Even if it ever did, it would be difficult deciding what was an appropriate and innapropriate use of profanity. Coincidentally, did you know that wikipedia has a fairly large number of pornographic images? As I said before, Wikipedia is not censored. Alphachimp ^talk 18:23, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not censored. --mboverload@ 19:54, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Will a botbeard please go through the Whatlinkshere for Template:Redirect-acronym (recently moved from Template:Disambig-acronym) and snap the links to point to the new name? JesseW, the juggling janitor 03:10, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

That's not necessary unless you intend to re-use the old title for a different purpose, or delete the trailing redirect. — Jul. 6, '06 [03:11] <freak|talk>

I think a bot that creates an index for all 2 and 3 word articles according to their initials (instead of the first letters as in Wikipedia:Quick index) would be very useful for browsing and figuring out abbreviations. I guess in current software it can't be done in a dynamic way or searched for initials. Any ideas?

I would like to work on such a bot, but I have no idea how to write one (even though I have some programming experience). If somebody send me a code for a similar bot (that looks every article title and categorize for a certain criteria) I can modify it.

--þħɥʂıɕıʄʈ^ʝɘɖı 22:10, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

The generated index would never be complete, because articles are always being added, although I can generate a list for you if you are a bit more specific. Will small, common words such as "the" or "of" be counted? If I understand what you mean, Flags of the World will become FOTW (all words), FOW (all but articles), and FW (no short words). Non-return-to-zero will become NRTZ (all words) and NRZ (no short words). This would be an offline report tool though, not really a bot. Invitatious 23:45, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Good point. I was thinking of "no short words" version but it could be otherwise. I don't need it for immediate use so may be we should think of some dynamic way to generate it. I thought that a bot running periodically would do the trick. Do you know how does Wikipedia:Quick index work? May be I should file a feature request to MediaWiki, instead of a bot. þħɥʂıɕıʄʈ^ʝɘɖı 01:01, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Quick index uses a special page Special:Allpages. It is an real-time alphabetical list of all the pages in Wikipedia. It might be possible as a MediaWiki special page extension (SQL text quantifiers), but you wouldn't find the correct NRZ, as opposed to NRTZ for Non-return-to-zero. It would use way too much processing time anyways. So it would have to be an offline report. Invitatious 12:21, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Do you think it would worth the effort? þħɥʂıɕıʄʈ^ʝɘɖı 18:03, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Maybe for finding pages that are not on disambiguation pages for acronyms. I might start programming it to generate wikicode> HTML once I get the data (the current one's at "http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20060702/enwiki-20060702-all-titles-in-ns0.gz" ). If that turns out to be extremely useful, maybe the data can be cached every night and made a special page extension. Invitatious 23:20, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I didn't know that there was a titles only database. May be I can play with it later. I am looking forward for your results. þħɥʂıɕıʄʈ^ʝɘɖı 01:38, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

A prototype is at User:Invitatious/intindex.py (without the short words feature, which I now consider to be of little use). It is written in Python. Instructions are on the page. Currently you will have to search through the text files. If anybody wants to write a database storage modification to this that would certainly be welcome. Invitatious 03:02, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you Invitatious! --þħɥʂıɕıʄʈ^ʝɘɖı 06:56, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

A bot is needed to keep template:ISBN out of actual use, see Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2006 July 9#Template:ISBN. Circeus 12:59, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

We've got a non-Wikimedia MediaWiki site over at Wikible; there are several versions of the wiki in different languages, so we also have a Pool (like Wikimedia Commons). We've changed how things work and now have a bunch of images to transfer from wikible.org/en to wikible.org/pool. I don't think anyone has any bot experience in our group; would you mind helping us out? Read the discussion on our site for more background and relevant links. Thanks! --J. J. 18:42, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

We've manually moved all the pictures, but we're still interested in Bot experts to help out with the site. --J. J. 13:37, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Any idea whom should I contact to get more answers there?--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 16:11, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

First try installing these[3][4] to YOURNAME/monobook.js to be able to anaylize pages. As for something that a bot could do en masse (nothing as complex as that tool), I'd have to know what you want more specifically (point by point).Voice-of-All 07:50, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I'd like a bot to go through small articles and label them stubs. Anything smaller than 1k is probably a stub, yeah? --BradBeattie 05:54, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Omg I was just about to click Request and saw this! :o u stealer :P --Deon555|talk 23:48, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Just to add again (sorry!) if it's not possible, could it work out all the small pages from Special:Shortpages, without the stub tag, and put it to the cleanup area, and we (the cleanup ppls) can tag it with the correct one, whether it be {{animal-stub}} or whatevr, which ever is easiest... I just think the bot wont be able to tell whats a australian geography related and whats an American president related, and having those stubs, is better than just {{stub}}--Deon555|talk 00:02, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I need a bot to review a page I added. I've been without the necessary time to review my writing and I know there must be mulitple grammar and spelling errors. Page is H. B. Hollins.--LongIslander 15:31, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

This is no easy job for a bot, best done by a human. fetofs ^Hello! 16:30, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I originally posted this here, but figured it would be good to post it here also.

I've noticed a recent issue with WikiProjects. I've noticed it in the one I work on, Wikipedia:WikiProject_Anime_and_manga, but it probably applies to all WikiProjects. When an article is declared a "Good Article" or any other article class, editors add the appropriate tag on the Discussion page, but they often forget to add the appropriate Wikiproject tag that says "this is a good article for Wikiproject whatever". This means that the Wikiproject statistics page that shows how many Good Articles and the like the Wikiproject has may be drastically off, and the categories sorting the Wikiproject's articles may show tons of "good articles" and the like in the "unassessed" section.

Would it be possible for a bot to regularly peruse the Wikiproject article discussion pages and find ones that have a GA tag but no Wikiproject GA tag, and the same for all article assessment tags? Also, if a Wikiproject has a system for article ratings that doesn't coincide with the main Wikipedia system (as warned by a commentator on my original post), the bot could simply not affect articles on that Wikiproject. Dark Shikari 15:57, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

It could change M/Y or M/D/Y dates for template defaults like {{cleanup}} and various "As of..." containing articles. It sounds like it wouldn't put too much strain on the servers and would prevent articles from becoming inaccurate datewise. --Blackjack48 23:38, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm a little confused about what you are talking about. My bot is already doing the whole updating cleanup dates thing. Alphachimp ^talk 05:24, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Oh, okay. --Blackjack48 14:00, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

How about a bot that fixes links that redirect. Like, say a link points to A, which redirects to B; the bot could fix it that it points straight to B. OneWeirdDude 18:22, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Then what's the point of having a redirect from A to B?--Orgullomoore 02:38, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

In case a user goes to that page (Got you, Orgullo!) fetofs ^Hello! 15:51, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Given the recent apparent demises of both Crypticbot (talk · contribs) and NekoDaemon (talk · contribs), which did a bunch of housekeeping tasks related to WP:CFD, WP:TFD, and the WP:VPs (and others), I propose we designate some bot source as the "official" daily maintenance bot, create an account for it, post the source, solicit an owner, and put its daily tasklist (instructions) in a protected file. This way anyone could propose or even implement new tasks for it, and if the current owner goes missing, anyone else could take over as its owner as well. I've started a list of maintenance activities at wikipedia:maintenance/tasklist. IMO, having the normal operation of any of the *fD activities rely on any individual's closed source bot is not a sustainable model. Comments? -- Rick Block (talk) 01:07, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree and I would be willing to help with this once you get some sort of system implemented to mantain it (subversion?, cvs?, wiki?). However, another good way to avoid this, not just with this particular bot, is asking for the source code before the operators leave. I think that most of the time, the author isn't intentionally keeping his source closed and would be willing to publish it, but assumes that no one cares and/or doesn't have a convenient way to do it. This is my case.--Orgullomoore 02:37, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't run any bots, per se, but do run some automated scripts whose source I simply post as a subpage either of my user page or of the page they deal with. See, for example, Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations/script. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:05, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

That's fine for just one script, but I don't imagine it's ideal for some one like AllyUnion or myself, who have dozens of bots. I would support a central repository for all of the open source Wikipedia bots.--Orgullomoore 10:52, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Subpages of Wikipedia:Bots, e.g. Wikipedia:Bots/Orgullomoore/bot1, Wikipedia:Bots/Orgullomoore/bot2, etc.? Note posting them here makes the GFDL. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:52, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

This comment is a little different from the others here as its not directly a Bot request but rather some assistance with clarifying whether a bot that can do the following is possible. Any thoughts before I embark on trying to make it are greatly helpful. Please forgive me if this is the wrong place to raise this. I am in the early stages of designing and building a bot named the Prolificity Sentinel.

In short the bot will flag articles where:

• They (and their talk page) have not been updated for a minimum of 6 months.
• They will not be flagged if they contain under 1000 characters. (a measure to avoid flagging stubs and minor articles like most biographies).

It will upon finding a suitable candidate for flagging edit the page of the article and give it 'Sentinel Alert Status'. This will be a category all wikipedians can see and go through.

Any way, thats a very breif overview, i've discussed it in much more detail here Prolificity Sentinel. Thansk for your help and sorry if this is not an appropriate place to ask this. --WikipedianProlific^(Talk) 22:43, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

It is possible. Of course, if you're using a database dump you can check all pages of the 'pedia, but a live lookup demands for extensive thinking about how will this affect the server. fetofs ^Hello! 23:55, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I guess the three key things I'd need to know per page on the run are:

• When the last namespace page edit was made
• When the last talk page edit was made
• How many characters are on the namespace page

So per page analysed there'd be 3 requests for information if it was going to be flagged. I was thinking of setting the Bot up with specific parameters say, so it would only do a run of say 1,000 articles at a time(roughly one per minute over the course of a day?) I can make the bot less server intense by having it immiediately stop requesting say the last talk page edit if its already found out that the main page edit was within the last 6 months. That way the majority of articles would only have one piece of information requested making sure I dont accidently DoS the server. Any thoughts on that. Is there a database query that can be made to ascertain the last page edit date? Thats the key think I need to know and I can't find a script for it if one exists. ta --WikipedianProlific^(Talk) 00:33, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I wanted to ask if someone could create a bot to automate the changing of links to the CIA's World Factbook web site.

For example, the current link for Malaysia's entry on the Wikipedia page for Putrajaya point to http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/my.html . If you go to that address, the CIA says that the page has been moved. Even worse, it doesn't forward you to the correct page for Malaysia. Instead, it redirects you to The World Factbook's front page and you have to navigate yourself to the right page.

I thought they re-did the directory structure or something, but found that the change is much more subtle. They've simply required The World Factbook to be accessed using the secure server method.

So, http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/my.html can be successfully viewed at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/my.html .

Can someone create a wikibot to go through the wiki files and change the http://www.cia.gov.... to https://www.cia.gov ?

I figure it'd be more helpful since the CIA doesn't do the forwarding automatically... The wiki community would appreciate it.  :-D

Thanks!

Brian --Bsheppard 23:57, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Another observation: Links formerly beginning with http://www.cia.gov/nic/ must now be changed to http://www.dni.gov/nic/. -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 21:28, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

That should be fairly easy to do with AWB (my only tool =(). Let me see if I can cook something up. I'll check it out. alphaChimp ^laudare 21:40, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Easy said. Easy done. Check out my changes at Putrajaya with my sock account. I'm putting up a bot proposal now. My only question/difficulty is...where are we going to compile the list of pages to be updated from? alphaChimp ^laudare 21:46, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Google says there are 106 pages linking to the url, http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos. Not sure how you can pick up the links from there. - Ganeshk (talk) 21:55, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Or Wikipedia search too (per Omicronpersei8's suggestion). - Ganeshk (talk) 22:01, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to go ahead and selfishly plug my query link, because the problem described in this section applies to all subpages of cia.gov, with a few exceptions, like with cia.gov/nic and the strange, slow www.foia.cia.gov, which doesn't seem to need changing. -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 22:04, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Just searching for 'cia.gov' has been working quite well for me. -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 21:56, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I put in the proposal on WP:BRFA. Feel free to comment, criticize, etc. As a little note about searching for the factbook text, some of those articles already have the http format in place. The bot is going to replace http://www.cia.gov with https://www.cia.gov. Can you guys give me some examples of the NIC thing, so I can add it to the proposal? alphaChimp ^laudare 22:11, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I only get ten results for 'cia.gov/nic', so I guess you don't have to worry about that. (See where I saw this problem here.) -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 22:15, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Right. It might be worth doing a manual run on that link after the main bot run. alphaChimp ^laudare 22:23, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

I think I already took care of all of them. -- Omicronpersei8 (talk) 22:25, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for their help. Hope they can expedite the approval process.  :-D Bsheppard 01:10, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Heh. Well, we'll see. I'll post here whenever I get approved to meet the request. I really don't see this being a major inconvenience...the only thing really holding us up is the wait for approval. alphaChimp ^laudare 15:39, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Is there a way to make a tool that will help tell us if two users have ever interacted before? For example, it tells you (and provides diffs) of instances when user A has edited user B's talk page (or any user space page) and vice versa. NoSeptember 08:23, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

This really should go on the userscripts page. I have a tool that can spit out the last 20 blocks for two users and all pages they edited in common. I't should be too hard to whip up something like this.Voice-of-All 08:40, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Knowing which pages they edited in common would likely do the trick, since you can look for the user talk pages and other low volume pages that may suggest an interaction (although you would still have to dig into the history). NoSeptember 09:01, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I've added this to the script, which can be found here[5]; note that it also requres this[6] and only supports the monobook default skin.Voice-of-All 20:18, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't know whether this requires a new bot or just an addition to a data file for an existing bot. Anyway, various people add links to various pages in http://www.websearchinfo.com/ e.g in Cloaking. All links to this site are spam e.g. http://www.websearchinfo.com/poker and http://www.websearchinfo.com/cloaking-techniques.

Could we create / amend a bot to revert all links to this site shortly after they are made? Nunquam Dormio 11:54, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

If it's always spam (I haven't checked), we could add that website to our blacklist. NoSeptember 11:57, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Is there a bot that will do font color changes? That is change every instance of a six digit hex string to another 6 digit string within a single page. What I am planning to do is explained here, but the first change is still a month or so in the future. NoSeptember 18:18, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Replace a string of hex digits within a page? Well, a bot can easily do that as long as there aren't any occurances of the hex strings which you don't want to be replaced. fetofs ^Hello! 18:36, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, as soon as I posted this I realized this is a pretty simple request that you guys can probably do in your sleep. The key to my color changes is doing them in the proper order so that you don't have two groups of data having the same color value at a given point in time. I think I still need to select better color choices. If anyone has a better color scheme suggestion, please comment here. NoSeptember 18:44, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

If this is a find and replace operation, it can even be done with AWB. If you send me a list of pages, and the find and replace criteria I can blow it out pretty quick. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:25, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

It's all on one page, just several hundred uses of several colors needing to be changed. NoSeptember 09:50, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

If it's all just on one page, why not simply use a decent text editor, or Cacycle's in-browser text editor to take care of it? A bot seems like a pretty heavy-weight solution. --maru (talk) contribs 01:11, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm looking to write a bot that will go trough all pages, (or for wikipedia, preferably a dump) and look for references to uploaded .gif's if found, convert them to .png's and update the reference. I have some experience in programming, but not anything of this sort. I seems like a fun project, but I would like some help making it. Martijn Hoekstra 17:33, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

It's not necessary or useful. Also, some GIFs are animated; there is no standard animated PNG. There are two common types of animated PNGs (PNG#Animation) but neither are commonly supported by web browsers. Only convert images as you improve them. Invitatious (talk) 17:10, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't tought of animated gif's. Would bringing down the filesize/maintaining the same quality be enough improvement to edit? Martijn Hoekstra 17:32, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

It should be noted that the MediaWiki image scaling code often produces much better results with PNGs than with GIFs, since the PNG format allows more colors in a single image — the scaling often introduces new colors where the colors of adjacent pixels are blended together. Thus, if the image is used at less than full size, converting it to PNG may yield an improvement in thumbnail quality even in the absence of other changes. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:03, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Have you looked at gif2png, which also includes a python web2png, which may do what you want?

moved the following from the talk page to here: Martijn Hoekstra 17:49, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Such as bot would go around, and whenever the string "ISBN" is followed by 10 or 13 digits, would compute the special ISBN checksum, and if the checksum is invalid, leave a comment or a template to the effect that someone needs to check the transcription of the ISBN or fix it. --maru (talk) contribs 04:50, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

SmackBot already does a lot with ISBNs, this will be the next step. Incidentally there is a category of "invalid isbn". Rich Farmbrough 14:28 21 August 2006 (GMT).

This is now tested and awaitng approval. FYI there were c. 1,100 with obvious checksum errors. Rich Farmbrough 14:27 24 August 2006 (GMT).

Note that there are indeed erroneous ISBNs. If a book has a bad ISBN printed on it, we can label it as incorrect as much as we want but it still exists, and someone holding the book should be told the ISBN on the book rather than what it should be. There also are different books which have the same ISBN printed on them. A related issue are SBNs which have been converted to ISBNs although the book only has the SBN on it. It probably is a good idea to be able to graciously handle certain improper information, but we're in a different situation than unpacking books in a library where a challenged book can be immediately examined and confirmed. (SEWilco 17:45, 24 August 2006 (UTC))

Can someone design a bot that when a user posts an alert on the WP:AIV page, it places this template on the reported users' talk page:

This message is to alert you to the fact that you have been reported to the Administrator Intervention against Vandalism (AIV) page so that your case can be reviewed by an Administrator. They may then impose a block for a period of time on your IP to prevent you from editing in the future. If you wish to contest the merits of the report, please post it under the actual report on the AIV page. Do not remove the initial report, as this will probably not help you in trying to prove you are not a vandal.

The template is {{subst:User:Daniel.Bryant/AIV}}. I'll run it off my main user, or create a new bot account, whichever is easier. Thanks! Killfest2 ^{(Critique my new user page design please)} 05:13, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to follow up on this really quickly. I encouraged Daniel/Killfest to post this request here. At present I'm not sure what this would entail in terms of unecessary server load and increasing vandalism to WP:AIV. I'd be very interested to hear what you all think. Alphachimp ^talk 05:17, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

anyone????? I've thought about it, and really do think it might be a good idea, if implemented correctly. Alphachimp ^talk 05:57, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Judging by the time admins take to block vandals, are there many vandals who would need this anyway? fetofs ^Hello! 13:54, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

When I was an IP, got blocked because an administrator didn't even bother to check my contributions, but instead took the word of a now-blocked user that I was "POV-pushing". If there was this template to alert people who have been reported, situations like mine would be avoided. Killfest2—Daniel.Bryant 06:31, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

There are hundreds of articles about holders of the Victoria Cross where the opening statement is a standard phrase:

the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to [[United Kingdom|British]] and [[Commonwealth]] forces

which should be disambiguated to

the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to [[United Kingdom|British]] and [[Commonwealth of Nations|Commonwealth]] forces

Simultaneously, most of these articles could have the reference title Monuments To Courage corrected to Monuments to Courage, and many of them need SCOTLAND'S FORgotten VALOUR (and other eccentric capitalisations) converted to Scotland's Forgotten Valour.

Colonies Chris 22:55, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Consider it done (I seem to keep coming back to these articles). Rich Farmbrough 14:29 21 August 2006 (GMT).

BTW "SCOTLAND'S FORgotten VALOUR" is correct. Rich Farmbrough 14:31 21 August 2006 (GMT).

I was hoping to get a bot to change all instances of List of professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster slam and Professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster slam to List of professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster. Although currently it is linked to spinebuster slam it is a nearly universal consensus that it is always linked to simply as spinebuster and never referred to as a spinebuster slam. The problem is it's a very common link in wrestling profiles and would take an exceedingly long time of human interaction to find all instances of the link and remove the word slam from the URLs. Could someone help me and WP:PW out? --- Lid 10:01, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

All instances of [[List of professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster slam|*]], [[List of professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster slam]], [[Professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster slam|*]] and [[Professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster slam]] should be changed to [[List of professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster|*]] or [[List of professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster]], where * stands for random characters, correct? --Erwin85 12:04, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Correct, if you're going to do this can you leave a message on my talk page and if I don't respond in time can you change the title from Spinebuster slam to Spinebuster before you run the bot otherwise other users may change the link back to Spinebuster slam? --- Lid 09:23, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Just an addition to state that I still need a bot for this and any help would be appreciated. --- Lid 19:20, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Your request looks fairly simple. I might be able to help out. Trouble is, I already have 2 pending requests on WP:BRFA and 2 waiting proposals here. It might be a little bit. Do you have any idea of the scope of the proposed replacement? alphaChimp ^laudare 19:40, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Not really no, sorry. --- Lid 02:25, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

List of professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster does not exist. If I were to perform this change, it would break links... alphaChimp ^laudare 17:15, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

That is true, I've left the title so as not to break the links in advance however if you were to change the title before you start the bot there would be no problem. HOWEVER, an issue has come up in that List of professional wrestling throws appears to have been moved to Professional wrestling throws (although someone may have simply copied + pasted looking at the history). What this means is that currently the link is Professional wrestling throws#Spinebuster slam but I'm not sure how much longer this will last so maybe put a hold on it for a short time while this gets figured out. --- Lid 19:00, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Ewwwwww. Copy and paste move. I'm really sorry about that. Just shoot me a line when we get this whole thing working. alphaChimp ^laudare 19:30, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Ok we've got everything fixed and it's moved back, just change Spinebuster slam to Spinebuster and then run the bot. Thanks for your help. --- Lid 19:59, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

I would like to request a bot for me that can:

• Warn vandals
• Block pagemove vandals with the edit summary (pagemove...) or ({{WoW}})

This would be good, since Curps block bot is inactive at the moment. --TheM62Manchester 12:05, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

If you just want to warn vandals, a script would be a good idea. You can find some here. You could also download a vandalism fighting program, like VP, which will automate your vandal fighting. Eitherway, the Tawkerbot team already does a ton of stuff like this. The Curps thing, however, is a good point. I'm not sure where we are with that. Anyone? alphaChimp ^laudare 14:21, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Curps is offline, and allowing bot to have administrator rights is never going to happen (not in the near future anyway). They can cause too much damage. — FireFox ^(talk) _{14:53, 30 July '06}

At least one bot has admin powers --mboverload@ 19:57, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Which? — FireFox ^(talk) _{12:12, 01 August '06}

Will anyone be willing to create a bot to redirect ticker symbols to their respective companies? -Blackjack48 18:59, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Can you give an example of what you're talking about? I'd just like to see one article example to get an idea of what we're looking at. alphaChimp ^laudare 19:17, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Like SBUX would redirect to Starbucks and CSTR would disambig to Coinstar. A bot that could make changes like that. --Blackjack48 19:37, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

How would that list be generated? It almost seems to me like this job would be better done by a user than a bot, simply because some of the names of listed companies are common names. Still, it would likely be a crapton of work...and I imagine that some of the companies don't even have articles yet. What would be done about that? alphaChimp ^laudare 15:38, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

You may be right as we do have a list of stocks which I looked over and it did have many red linked company articles. But I still think it can be done. If we have a bot that generates articles on cities and their demographics, we can generate articles on companies with basic facts about them and their financial statistics. We could focus on this before going on to those redirects. -User:Blackjack48 19:58, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. Do you mean something like what Rambot did with all of the articles for small US towns (based on US census data)? We could probably find a source and generate articles from it. Trouble is, most sources of market information are copywritten, and obviously wouldn't consent to their work being released under GFDL. alphaChimp ^laudare 21:26, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Well unless we could get someone to get permission from a copyrighted source, I guess we're out of luck because I've tried searching for a GFDL source for company profiles already. -Blackjack48

The goal, though, is very admirable. Someday, Wikipedia really out to have an article on every listed company, considering that listing is a criteria of WP:CORP. I'm not sure what to say. Obviously we could navigate to their sites and copy their descriptions...but...that's copyrighted too <slaps face> alphaChimp ^laudare 23:37, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Hasn't this morphed a bit? I read the original request to be to add a set of redirects (not the articles). Assuming there's a list of symbols to company names somewhere, shouldn't this be relatively trivial? -- Rick Block (talk) 02:27, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

We put a request in recently for all the articles in Category:Architects and all it's sub and sub-sub categories to have {{Architecture}} added to their talk pages. I think only the root category got done. Would it be possible to now do the sub and sub-sub-cateogies? Many thanks. --Mcginnly | Natter 23:33, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

That shouldn't be too hard to do with AWB (considering that that's how BlueMoose originally did it). Unless someone else is interested, I'll take a look tonight and see if I can cook something up using AWB. I'll get you some diffs, and, if you approve, I'll put in a request. alphaChimp ^laudare 23:40, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Many thanks. I don't know whether this is relevant, but for some of the article which I added the template to manually didn't have talk pages - I had to create the page and then add the template. Regards --Mcginnly | Natter 09:29, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

As long as you didn't have to create the article, then no, it shouldn't be. alphaChimp ^laudare 12:01, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

This request is 2nd on my list, following approval of my CIA task on WP:BRFA. Sorry for waiting so long to get back to you. alphaChimp ^laudare 23:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

No problem. One of the things I like about architecture is it's permanence. --Mcginnly | Natter 15:15, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps someone else could have a look at this - alphachimp seems busy doing other things - many thanks. --Mcginnly | Natter 21:25, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm trying [7]. 22:22, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Oh! Apologies......--Mcginnly | Natter 23:24, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

A bunch of images are showing up on Category:License_tags. When I looked at the source it looks like some public domain template might have gotten subst'd in rather than being included using PD-whatever resulting in those pages having the License_tags category applied even though it's in a noinclude section. I forget if subst works that way, but that's my best guess.

I created Template:PD-Japan for some of those images and started applying, but I think it might be bottable. If so that would be much simpler than doing it by hand :-). At the least, I would think the noinclude sections could be removed from the image pages using a bot.

RainbowCrane 22:35, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

{{Hospital-stub}} and Category:Hospital stubs were created today. Articles in Category:Medical organization stubs that have the word "Hospital" in their title need to be re-stubbed from {{med-org-stub}} to {{hospital-stub}}. I count over 200 such articles in Category:Medical organization stubs. If a bot could please do this it would save a lot of time. Kurieeto 18:25, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I can easily do it, but they're not approving my requests over at WP:BRFA. I've already got a backlog of 2 requests. Let me see what I can do. alphaChimp ^laudare 23:00, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Great, thanks for looking into this, I appreciate it. Kurieeto 16:26, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

request met. Let me know if you need anything further. alphaChimp ^laudare 17:09, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I think there should be a bot that fixes spelling mistakes and typos

There are still lots of such maps not moved to Commons. Is it possible for bot to do it? If bot can't find maps, which haven't been moved, I can find some of them. Paweł ze Szczecina 13:34, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi! I would like to ask someone to add missing interwiki links to Polish Wikipedia in Category:Asteroids. Those articles appeared on pl.wiki just few days ago. I was asked to do this with my bot, but it doesn't run here yet. Asteroids articles are named identically on both wikis and we now have every article that you have, so it shouldn't be that hard task. :) And sorry for my probably poor English. Thanks a lot for help, Jozef-k 10:33, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Regarding this discussion, please someone move every article in Congenital genetic disorder category to Genetic disorder category. Thanks! NCurse _work 19:36, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Request met. alphaChimp ^laudare 04:28, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! :) NCurse _work 06:50, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

We all know OrphanBot removes unsourced images. The thing is, sports logos are exempt, because it being a logo is a source in itself. Recently, OrphanBot removed a logo for the Pee Dee Cyclones, and it was in a teamtable and everything. Therefore, I request the installation of FreedomBot, a bot that will undo any damage OrphanBot may unintentionally do when someone feeds it a little too many cookies (restore sports logos OrphanBot may have removed-as long as they're sourced). Tom Danson 14:52, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

This is probably not the place to voice your objections to Orphanbot. alphaChimp ^laudare 05:23, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

lol i love the name already :P
Anyway.. I was going through some random pages and i saw Turkey slap, and on the talk page I noticed it had survived an AfD, but all that was placed was this [8]. So i changed it into the right header [9], and it prompted me to think there must be heaps more of these, hundreds possibly on Wikipedia, and I think we need a bot to either a)put the notice on Talk pages, or b) Change plain text into the proper font. I would be happy to run the bot. I welcome feedback. Thanks --Deon555|talk|e|Review Me! :D 05:16, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

You're talking about admins (or those closing AfDs) missing the {{oldafdfull}} template. It's a real problem, and you're certainly bringing up a valid concern. Are you saying that you would be able to program a bot to do it youself? alphaChimp ^laudare 05:22, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I .. could... give it a shot :), although I may need a little help :)--Deon555|talk|e|Review Me! :D 05:24, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

We were discussing the need for this tonight on IRC. I think it might be a good idea to incorporate something like this into the scripts for closing AfDs. Is there a way you could do that? alphaChimp ^laudare 05:27, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I s'pose I could help.. I don't have a lot of programming experience.. probably not enough to fully make a bot by myself, but i guess I would catch on :) --Deon555|talk|e|Review Me! :D 05:30, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Eagle_101 has created this [10]. Thanks anyway :) --Deon555|talk|e|Review Me! :D 03:14, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to request an image trawling bot to do some indexing for me. Now, I'll explain with the first one I'd like to go with. Start with linksearch. Go to each image page and log if that image is not in Category:NASA images. I want to try to generate a list of image that reference a NASA image page, but don't have the correct image classification. Post results somewhere (probably not on this page, of course). Would prefer a wikiformatting, like * [[:Image:blah]]\n for each image to make it easier, but whatever. Just need to get a list of images that refer to that link and are not in that category, so I can analyse them for retagging. Note that Special:Linksearch needs to be screen scraped. &action=raw and the rss and atom feeds don't work for it. Don't forget to restrict results to the Image: namespace. If this works, I may request a different URL and a different cat to be compared in the same manner. Thanks! --Kevin_b_er 05:22, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm attempting to restart this project, and was wondering if a bot could regularly run on a list of its subpages (such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/UK) to remove transcluded deletion discussions that have been closed. It's not ready for the bot to start yet, I just want to find out if it's feasible/easy, and if anyone is willing to do it. the wub "?!" 14:42, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Quite simple really, a bot that checks all edits that are done to User: and User_talk: pages and user space for swears/insults/racism etc. And ****'s them. It is optional and only watches user pages that are listed in the bots user space. Thought this would be useful for admins, and users that recieve a lot of vandalism/attacks. Good idea?--Andeh 18:21, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Personally I'd prefer to have admins that are mature enough not to give a **** if there are nasty words on their talk page. the wub "?!" 20:23, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Well some insults/vandalism are just repeats from 10 minutes ago and are just not needed.--Andeh 21:05, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not censored. — FireFox ^(talk) _{21:40, 10 August '06}

Yes, I know that. But does that mean you can upload the most disgusting images and place them on your user page for others to see? Having a bot to give some sort of protection to users who want it would be nice.--Andeh 21:47, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

It'd be really easy to do, even with AWB. The trick would be listing the relevant images and relevant profanity. Very simple. I'm just a little worried about the controversy it would generate (by the way, I could do it if you provide me with the profanity list and bad picture list). alphaChimp ^laudare 01:05, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Images? I don't believe you said that in your original description, so I assumed you just meant the odd swear word or two. — FireFox ^(talk) _{10:15, 11 August '06}

I've found a bug in this template. I fixed it, but there are a ton of pages that used the broken template. Here's what I've done, and here's the list of sites that need to be fixed. Is this a thing a bot could fix, or does this need to be done by hand? Lawilkin 22:34, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

All fixed. alphaChimp ^laudare 02:47, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

The content of Athletics was recently moved to Athletics (track and field), and a disambiguation page placed at Athletics, after a lengthy discussion. However, many pages on track and field still link to Athletics. We need a bot that would redirect appropriate links from Athletics to Athletics (track and field), using the pipe trick to keep the wording the same in the text. -- Mwalcoff 01:20, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

The key word that makes this request difficult for a bot to satisfy is "appropriate". If the task requires user input to make the decision, I'd suggest you guys use AWB. alphaChimp ^laudare 02:02, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

There's probably already a generic bot that can do this, but I need a bot to add the {{WikiProject Kentucky}} template (if it or {{LouisvilleWikiProject}} isn't there already) into the talk pages of articles listed in specific categories: Cities in Kentucky, Kentucky counties, Towns in Kentucky, and Unincorporated communities in Kentucky. Doing this manually has become too much of a chore. Thanks! Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 17:41, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

This is quite easy to do. Unfortunately my bot is currently in the middle of a very long task, so I'll leave this open for other offers, and if nobody has said anything when my bot is available, I'll try and sort something out for you. — FireFox ^(talk) _{17:56, 15 August 2006}

And also, can I just ask you to clarify what you want doing, for the benefit of myself and other bot owners? Am I correct in saying you want only {{WikiProject Kentucky}} adding to the talk page, if both {{WikiProject Kentucky}} and {{LouisvilleWikiProject}} aren't there? — FireFox ^(talk) _{17:58, 15 August 2006}

That is correct. If neither of these templates are on the talk page, add the {{WikiProject Kentucky}} template to the top of the talk page, or under other preexisting templates at the top (if that's possible). Thank you very much for considering doing this for WikiProject Kentucky. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 18:15, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I've put in a request and I'll get started as soon as that goes through. If I don't get finished tonight I'll finish it off tomorrow for you. — FireFox ^(talk) _{18:50, 15 August 2006}

Thank you. This is very much appreciated. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 18:57, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

No problem. I'll drop by a message on your talk page when it's all done. — FireFox ^(talk) _{18:58, 15 August 2006}

Firefox has unfortunately taken a leave of absence. Does anyone else have the capability to run a bot in the manner I heretofore described? Thanks! Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 14:58, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I can Take over just let me get it approved. Betacommand 15:54, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind assistance. It is much appreciated. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 15:59, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Should be done within a few hours Betacommand 06:27, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Appears done, and it worked like a charm. Thank you again for doing this task for the project. It is very much appreciated. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 09:11, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

A couple weeks ago, I noticed a significant disparity between a Wikipedia page and the Meta master page. I updated it, but I notice there are a lot of such pages, and many are not kept up-to-date. I suggest a bot to update page copies on a regular basis.

The pages in question are most—but not all—of the pages listed here and here.

Now it's worth noting that people do edit these pages, despite the prominantly displayed message suggesting that they refrain from doing so. It may be worth the time to transfer significant edits back to the Meta copies beforehand, if they are obviously good additions to the article. I dunno if I'd want to do that all myself though, so someone else would have to be interested as well.

Any regular bot activity should be announced on the talk page, I think, to discourage anyone making changes that may be quickly overwritten. --Tsuji 02:16, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

A good idea, but I tried to code it in the pythony way, and my computer can't encode the characters used at meta. I've seen that the bots used to ignore them, but I don't know how to do it without triggering any error that causes the program to stop. fetofs ^Hello! 00:39, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I've run into a number of people lately whose idea of fun is editing numbers on Wikipedia (and other information that most people won't recognize as vandalism, but numbers are the most obvious) just for the hell of it. Some do it every day as a hobby. They usually switch usernames often, or use anon/proxy.

It would be very useful to have a bot that downloads the Wikipedia database (to avoid undeserved load on the real one) and searches the entire edit history of Wikipedia for edits that:

• Were made by an anon or user with few edits (fewer than 5 or 10 maybe).
• Only change a number and nothing else with no edit summary.
• Have not been reverted or otherwise changed since.

These edits could then be checked out by Wikipedians to see if they're vandalistic or not. Dark Shikari ^talk/_contribs 00:32, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to work this bot. Can you provide examples of pages that have been vandalized in this manner? Curtis Autery 17:04, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Discussion of this proposed bot's function can also be found at Wikipedia talk:Reference desk.

Cleaning and maintainance of the Reference Desk was formerly performed on a daily basis by the now defunct Crypticbot. Due to the incredibly large size of reference desk archive pages, Crypticbot began to have problems archiving the questions. In order to make the reference desk easier to use, the way in which archive pages are managed was recently changed. Consequently, a new bot will need to be designed to handle daily maintainance tasks. Each day at approximately 00:00 UTC, the bot would have 18 tasks to complete: three pages must be modified (main page, monthly archive page, daily translusion page) for each of the six reference desks (Humanities, Science, Mathematics, Computing, Language, Miscellaneous).

As such, the bot must be able to complete the following tasks for each of the six reference desks on a daily basis at approximately 00:00 UTC:

1. Start the new date at the bottom of each page
2. Archive oldest date
3. Transclude questions and answers that are more than 24 hours old (include {{Reference desk navigation}})
4. Add the newly transcluded page to the reference desk archives

At the start of each month, the bot would have six additional tasks to perform to create a new monthly reference desk archive page with {{Reference desk navigation}} for each of the six reference desks.

Detailed Example of Bot's Function:

At 00:00 UTC on August 16, 2006, for the Miscellaneous reference desk the bot would:

• Append = August 16 = to the bottom of Wikipedia:Reference desk/Miscellaneous
• Remove = August 9 = and {{Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/2006 August 9}} from the top of Wikipedia:Reference desk/Miscellaneous
• Copy all text between = August 14 = and = August 15 = from Wikipedia:Reference desk/Miscellaneous to Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/2006 August 14
• Prepend the copied text with the following text and create the new page Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/2006 August 14

<noinclude>
{{subst:Reference desk navigation
|previous = Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/2006 August 13
|date1 = August 13
|next = Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/2006 August 15
|date2 = August 15
|type = Miscellaneous
}}
</noinclude>

• Replace all text between = August 14 = and = August 15 = on Wikipedia:Reference desk/Miscellaneous with {{Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/2006 August 14}} and save the page
• Append = August 14 = and [[Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/2006 August 14]] followed by a numbered list of all questions asked to the end of Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/August 2006 and save the page. For August 14, this would look like:

<!--werdnabot-archive-->
= August 14 =
[[Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/2006 August 14]]
#A type of chair 
#Male Orgasm 
#World Trade Center Movie 
#edits 
#Maps from Nationalatlas.gov 
#Clitoral Hood Piercing 
#Guitar 
#Alexander Graham Bell 
#Cruise control on the 1998 ford windstar 
#Gangster Chronicles TV Series 
#Physics of a bullet 
#T.E.A.M. 
#Who would be richest? 
#My surname is Bencko. 
#Top Hats 
#pounds to dollars 
#The New York Pass

In addition to its normal daily tasks, at 00:00 UTC on the third of each month, the bot would need to create a new monthly reference archive page for each of the reference desks. After creating all six monthly pages, the bot would perform its normal daily duties.

For example, at 00:00 UTC on September 3, 2006 the bot would create Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/September 2006 as a new page containing the following text:

<noinclude>
{{subst:Reference desk navigation
|previous = Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/August 2006
|date1 = August
|next = Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Miscellaneous/October 2006
|date2 = October
|type = Miscellaneous
}}
</noinclude>

-- C. S. Joiner (talk) 23:07, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

• I hope you don't mind, but the templates have been altered since then, so <noinclude>{{subst:Reference desk navigation|24|August|Computing}}</noinclude> is now used to create daily archives, and

<noinclude>
{{subst:User:71-247-243-173/RDmonthly
|previous = 
|date1 = 
|next = 
|date2 = 
|type = 
}}
</noinclude>

is now being used for monthly archives. The changes were to decrease the work load so that it could be done by hand until a bot was made available--VectorPotential^{71.247.243.173} 21:16, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

There are a bunch of articles in this category: Category:Articles_with_invalid_ISBNs that have this reference in them:

 ''Naval wars in the Levant 1559-1853'' - R. C. Anderson [ISBN 0-87839-799-0]

The correct reference for the 2005 edition (the only one with an ISBN I could find) is:

 Anderson, R. C. (2005), Naval wars in the Levant 1559-1853, Martino Pub, ISBN 1578985382

or, wiki-style:

 {{Harvard reference|ISBN=1578985382|Title=Naval wars in the Levant 1559-1853|Given1=R.C.|Surname1=Anderson|Year=2005|Publisher=Martino Pub|Location=Mansfield Center, [[Connecticut]]}}

Is it possible for someone to do a mass search and replace on that reference in the bad ISBN category? It looks like all of the bogus ISBNs were added by [User:SpookyMulder] on September 4, if that helps.

Examples:

• Action_of_14_July_1616
• Battle of Focchies

Thanks RainbowCrane | Talk 02:29, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Talk to User:SpookyMulder. Adding a zero to a nine-digit SBN makes a valid ISBN. The 1952 editions may have had SBN 87839-799-0. The ISBN which you gave is for the 2005 edition, which might not be the edition which SpookyMulder used for a source. (SEWilco 05:55, 25 August 2006 (UTC))

I forgot to check something: 87839 identifies Princeton University Press, the publisher of one of the 1952 editions of that book. The ISBN probably is valid, it just isn't in all modern databases. (SEWilco 06:06, 25 August 2006 (UTC))

Thanks for the info... I just looked in LC and in WorldCat at that edition of the book and couldn't find the SBN. Do you know of any databases that have SBNs available? RainbowCrane | Talk 19:08, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Can someone write a bot that parses a page in the form (...)(...) and prints the results on another page? The format of (...) is (quality and importance and name). Ratings could be posted on another page. The rating of an article is the average of all the user ratings. There is a quality rating and an importance rating (quality and importance are numbers). The URL for the ratings is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eyu100/Bot_area, but there are no ratings yet. This bot will be used for the Wikisort project. Eyu100 18:08, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Occasionally, when browsing categories, I find user pages that are tagged under some of the encyclopedic categories. These pages are usually user sandboxes or "Works in progress" of articles that they copied to their user space to thoroughly revise incrementally. Now, I'm still quite new at Wikipedia, so I may be missing something here... but I am surprised that the encyclopedic categories aren't hardcoded to skip User: Space pages.

In lieu of such a change, it seems like it would be simple to have a bot go through the categories, and when it finds an article linked to User: Space, it would go and tack <nowiki> tags around the [[Category:(.*)]] links. Of course, templates that add categories, like {{stub}} and such would make things more difficult, but I imagine the most common templates could be similarly coded into the bot.

Does such a bot exist? Is there a particular reason why it doesn't? Just a few thoughts. Matt B. 06:16, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

There is a reason that the bot doesnt exist there are thousands of cat's and cheching them all isnt feasable. also the Temp pages should have those cats that way when the user copys them back the page has the cats. Betacommand 15:21, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I see that now. Previously I had assumed that all User categories began with "Wikipedian," but that is obviously not the case. I would still love to see some sort of segregation between the user pages and the encyclopedic content... but I suppose this would need to be done at a deeper level (like category classes). Matt B. 16:54, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

At Wikipedia:Categories for discussion we're entering a terrible logjam caused by my taking on the responsibility to ensure Wikipedian user categories all had "Wikipedian" in the title. These are many hundreds of categories, and some of the more traditional CfD bots (notably Cydebot) can't handle user categories. We're only about a week out from having most of these approved for renaming and deletion, but we have fewer resources for actually carrying out the renaming and deletion. So if anyone has a bot that can handle this task, I encourage you to go to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working and help out. Thanks!--Mike Selinker 20:40, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Mine can, and already is :) — FireFox ^(talk) _{20:44, 03 September 2006}

dito Betacommand 21:02, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Neat! Thanks. If you can just clear out those Wikipedians by location categories and the rest, we can get on to other things.--Mike Selinker 22:33, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

→ Discussion moved to Template talk:Infobox City. Please add posts there, thanks. --Ligulem 00:45, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

PLEESE PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE! See my request for beurocrattiness to see what I am all about.I just think that I could program a bot-abouve-all-bots bot that picks up all vandelism and nothing BUT vandelism!--Hi its mina19_1919! 03:57, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

That'd be really hard to do without a human controlling it. Tawkerbot and Antivandalbot are trying, however. alphaChimp^(talk) 04:24, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Is there a bot that can add the {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Sharks/SharksTalk}} template to the top of all of the talk pages of the articles in Category:Sharks? And if there is one for that is there also one that can replace {{portalpar|Sharks}} with {{Sharksportal}} for all of the articles in Category:Sharks, and if it doesn't have {{portalpar|Sharks}} could it just add {{Sharksportal}} below the taxobox.

Is this easy to do? --chris_huh 13:29, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Not a problem it is fairly easy for my bot User:BetacommandBot to do it give me about a week and ill get it done for you. im in the middle of another run at the moment when the current one is completed ill get on you request Betacommand 15:40, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

I have created WikiProject Pittsburgh, and for the organizational work I am trying to do, it would have to have the Pittsburgh links changed to article [[Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania|Pittsburgh]]. This is the only Pittsburgh in existence; all other "-burghs" in the United States dropped the last "H" at the turn of the 20th century, so anything marked "Pittsburgh" actually refers to "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania." --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 21:50, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Easy to do. I'm putting in a bot request. alphaChimp^(talk) 21:57, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm so glad I found this page. --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 22:06, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

No worries. See Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval#Alphachimpbot_Task_6:_Link_Repair alphaChimp^(talk) 22:13, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

If someone could design a bot to replace things like "User:Akrabbim/Asplode" (which redirects to User:UBX/Asplode) with "User:UBX/Asplode. I've been working on it with AWB, but I don't have enough time, as there are hundreds of transclusions. I think it would be a relatively simple bot task, as it is really only a few simple replacements. The only pages that need it is User:Akrabbim/Asplode, User:Akrabbim/Earthling2, User:Akrabbim/Emptybox, User:Akrabbim/No secondhand smoke, and User:Akrabbim/Towel. I'm just moving them into the User:Akrabbim/UBX subuserspace. It would be appreciated. —Akrabbim^talk 16:05, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Will do with User:MetsBot —Mets501 (talk) 21:51, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I would like a bot to check links to all Connecticut cities & towns and create the standard redirects [[town, CT]] and [[town (CT)]] if they haven't yet been created. I have noticed that these have not all been finished for Connecticut. --Schzmo 11:55, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia_talk:Redirect, redirects may now contain multiple lines (by design) and categories, but an unforseen side-effect is that the developers did not know redirects contained templates such as {{R from misspelling}} and the other contents of Category:Redirect templates (and they may break this functionality in the future). There are currently 52 templates, 34 of which may have no current transclusions, and ~15,000 instances that need to be substituted in - all they contain is the categories Category:Redirects from X and Category:Unprintworthy redirects, to my knowledge. -- nae'blis 19:23, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I'll get on subst'ing the templates on Category:Redirect templates within the next few days I'm not sure how long it will take me to subst ~15000 pages. But i will get it done as soon as i can with my bot. Betacommand 21:01, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Can someone please write a bot that could tag articles in Category:Rapid transit and it's subcategories with {{TrainsWikiProject|Subway=yes}}? I'd do it myself, but the perl module used appears to require a steep learning curve (that and the fact that I have not written a perl script for ages). Thanks! -- Selmo ^(talk) 00:03, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Does anyone know of a Bot that I could request to add a project tag {{Project North Carolina}} to every article talk under a Category (including Sub-Categories) - (North Carolina), if the tag does not already exist on the article? Looks like Selmo has the same request. Thanks Morphh 04:04, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Will do with User:MetsBot —Mets501 (talk) 21:52, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I've also requested feedback on this idea from User:Beland:

"Hi,

I had an idea to sort Category:Pages needing expert attention according to expertise. That way, Wikiprojects could easily track articles needing expert attention in their field. I think expert attention will get more input from wikiprojects than general cleanup. I've already begun "Pages needing attention from expert in medicine" manually, but if a bot could detect categories, it could split up the expert-category entirely into subjects (if necessary, with a complete list of pages needing expert attention in place).

a) I'm not sure if you don't already plan to implement such functions into Pearle. b) If you like the idea, I'd be interested in running a clone of Pearle for this task. Or maybe Pearle could be expanded.

Anyway I have no experience with bots. "

--Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 12:06, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi everyone. I'm a member of wikiproject Writing Systems. A while back I created the template {{wsproj}} with the intent of adding it to every article under the topic of writing systems, but after looking at Category:Writing systems, I realised it would take an extremely long time to do and misleadingly inflate my edit count. Is there a bot that could add this template to the talkpage of every article under Category:Writing systems and its sub-categories? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 23:04, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Being Worked out Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 00:10, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

There's been some talk at CFD about having a bot patrol Category:Protected deleted categories to make sure the categories stay empty. Does anybody have a bot that can do that? - EurekaLott 02:56, 6 September 2006 (UTC) (copied from Wikipedia_talk:Bots#Category:Protected_deleted_categories TimBentley (talk) 16:10, 8 September 2006 (UTC))

Someone with WP:AWB could do that Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 18:48, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Per the MoS (dates and numbers), dates should read September 10 or January 1 instead of September 10 or January 1. Although many pages use the "th", "rd", and "st" for dates. Is it possible to get a bot to fix this? Either by going through the articles or by going to the "What links here" page for each of the incorrect date formats and changing the linked pages? Not only would September 10 have to be checked but also 10 September. Dismas|^(talk) 07:46, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Bot request.

this bot is python bot.

I use it mainly for interwiki.

I use bot in korea. (at kowiki)

-- Wybot 03:03, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

AWB request: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere/Category:Evolution_Wikipedians&limit=500&from=0 - remove this category from these places, it's been deleted by CfD CfD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_May_10#Category:Evolution_Wikipedians

Thanks! JesseW, the juggling janitor 21:27, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Taken care of Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 21:48, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Good luck ;) --Ligulem 21:50, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Berria requested:

Please, can somebody (an administrator) add the interwikis to this kind of templates (selected anniversaries templates) if it is possible? Only the month of january yet. I would do it myself but it's impossible. The interwiki of this day is [[eu:Txantiloi:Urtarrila 2]] and the next days are similar; only changes the number ([[eu:Txantiloi:Urtarrila 3]], [[eu:Txantiloi:Urtarrila 4]]... ...[[eu:Txantiloi:Urtarrila 31]]). Thanks in advance. If there are any trouble, my talk page is always open for questions. Berria · (talk) 14:08, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Adding 31 slightly varying interwiki's seems like the perfect job for a bot, so I'm posting it here... JesseW, the juggling janitor 22:06, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Bots do not run with administrator rights, so a bot cannot do that task. —Mets501 (talk) 18:52, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

A bot could create a list of proposed edits, and an admin could approve them manually, but it makes it alot harder. HighInBC 19:15, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

A while back Template:Cite journal was forked to create Template:Cite journal2, the only difference being that "In contrast to cite journal, cite journal2 omits the quotation marks around the article title." Since this fork, an option was coded into cite journal so that the quotation marks can be removed from individual usages of the template. Would a bot be able to change all usages of {{cite journal2}} to {{cite journal}}, copying over the existing information for each usage of the template and adding "|quotes=no" at the end? For example,

* {{cite journal2 | author=Könneke, M., Bernhard, A.E., de la Torre, J.R., Walker, C.B., Waterbury, J.B. and Stahl, D.A. | title=Isolation of an autotrophic ammonia-oxidizing marine archaeon | journal=Nature | year=2005 | volume=437 | pages=543-546}}

needs to be changed to:

* {{cite journal | author=Könneke, M., Bernhard, A.E., de la Torre, J.R., Walker, C.B., Waterbury, J.B. and Stahl, D.A. | title=Isolation of an autotrophic ammonia-oxidizing marine archaeon | journal=Nature | year=2005 | volume=437 | pages=543-546 | quotes=no}}

For comparison, this is how the two render:

• {{cite journal2 | author=Könneke, M., Bernhard, A.E., de la Torre, J.R., Walker, C.B., Waterbury, J.B. and Stahl, D.A. | title=Isolation of an autotrophic ammonia-oxidizing marine archaeon | journal=Nature | year=2005 | volume=437 | pages=543-546}} [deprecated]
• Könneke, M., Bernhard, A.E., de la Torre, J.R., Walker, C.B., Waterbury, J.B. and Stahl, D.A. (2005). "Isolation of an autotrophic ammonia-oxidizing marine archaeon". Nature. 437: 543–546. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |quotes= ignored (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

{{cite journal2}} can then be depreciated. I've contacted the original author of the fork, and they have agreed to the merge (see User_talk:Stemonitis#Template:Cite_journal2). About 120 pages would be affected by this change, with multiple instances of the template in use on each page. Thanks. Mike Peel 21:43, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Yup. I will do it. m:MWiki-Browser should fit for this. Consider it done. --Ligulem 22:18, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Done. I also put a deprecate notice on template:cite journal2 and will blank that template in a week or so (after re-checking that no calls have reappeared). --Ligulem 12:46, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Nice work. Thanks. It's a pity that nothing like your MWiki-Browser is available for use on a Mac. :( Mike Peel 08:17, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Table requested:

On the Fun Song Factory page in Wikipedia can someone put a table for the TV Schedule (You will see this added on the page). I have tried to do this but got into a bit of difficulty.

Any help appeciated

This is a question for WP:VPT. —Mets501 (talk) 18:27, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

I've moved a few userboxes onto my user space, and I need a bot to update them.

• {{User trifecta}} to {{User:Lawilkin/UBX/WP:PCM}}
• {{User wikipedia/WPC}} to {{User:Lawilkin/UBX/WPC}}
• {{User wikipedia/Counter Vandalism Unit (alternative)}} to {{User:Lawilkin/UBX/CVU-alternative}}
• {{User wikipedia/Administrator someday}} to {{User:Lawilkin/UBX/admin someday}}
• {{User WikiProject Preclinical medicine}} to {{User:Lawilkin/UBX/WP:PCM</nowiki}}

Thanks! Laurən^whisper 18:24, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

As long as the original templates have the GUS template (which all of those do), they are listed at CAT:GUS, and will eventually be dealt with by a human or bot there. No need to request at this page. —Mets501 (talk) 18:22, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Gotcha, thanks! Laurən^whisper 20:05, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

I am not certain if this is the right place to post this question (if it is not, please move it to the right place and drop a note on my talk page.

The editor Sheynhertz-Unbayg has recently been banned and now his contributions (mostly weird "onomastics" pages that are just concatenations of several disambiguation pages, see Lust (onomastics) for a typical example) need to be cleaned up. To ensure that all pages he has edited do get checked, I would like to have a bot- or script-generated list of all pages he has touched. As he has more than 20,000 edits, manually created lists like the one here are probably incomplete. Also, a centralized list would help avoid duplicated efforts from the people who check the pages.

Please create a list of all pages touched by this editor and drop it somewhere, for example at User:Kusma/Sheynhertz/contribs. A good format would be a bulleted list with wikilinks to the pages, perhaps with a "redirect=no" or a mentioning of the redirect target for the numerous redirects created.

In addition, a bot could be used to check all of the interwikilinks created by Sheynhertz. I have already removed dozens of links to nonexistent articles on the Japanese Wikipedia, and I expect that many more of his interwikis are wrong.

Thank you for any help or insight you can offer, Kusma (討論) 08:28, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

My bot can't do this, but someone else's might. You might also want to see the pages linked to from here, as it seems like that editor has already made a big list of his contributions. —Mets501 (talk) 18:41, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Interiot just did it for me. Thanks for the idea, though! Kusma (討論) 19:15, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

There ought to be a bot that is automated to remove common things used for testing, such as Bold text, Italic text, [[Link title]], [http://www.example.com link title], [[Media:Example.ogg]], Image:Example.jpg, #REDIRECT [[Insert text]] within other text, etc. from the article space. --Gray Porpoise 10:48, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

No, that should better be done by hand, as such articles have to be checked for other damage done by the editing experiment. Sometimes such an article needs a reversion, sometimes it can be deleted right away (talk pages), replaced by the welcome message (user talk of newbies), or it may also be a unintentional click on the toolbar while doing good edits, only then the plain removal is correct. I am doing these cleanups manually almost daily... andy 11:38, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, me too. Rich Farmbrough, 11:42 22 September 2006 (GMT).

Tawkerbots usually pick them up.--Andeh 21:10, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Is there any way a bot can go through and look for all talk pages without an associated article/image and tag them with Template:db-talk? I've encountered a large amount of these and I can foresee a bot finding a few thousand. VegaDark 20:18, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Good idea! I'm going to look into it. —Mets501 (talk) 20:28, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

The problem with doing this via bot is that you run the risk of taging and retagging (depending on how often the bot is run) talk pages that are being used for page research/construction. See Talk:Chiba-Ken for an example (only one I can think of off the top of my head). There's also a number of pages which have been deleted but contain information related to the deletion or an eventual recreation (explicitly exempted from the CSD criterion).

Now, what I think would be useful is if someone took an offline data dump and created a list of all such pages for human examination and possible tagging. It'll flood CSD like whoa when it's processed, but still has that human intervention necessary. -- nae'blis 20:44, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I see your point. What about an altered template, such as this? —Mets501 (talk) 21:07, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

This page may meet Wikipedia's speedy deletion criteria, as it is a talk page of a page which does not exist (CSD G8). This notice was added by a bot. There are three reasons why a talk page may exist without an article, which are: Suggestions for a future article Important deletion discussion only available at this page If this page is a subpage. Only delete this page if it clearly does not meet any of those three criteria.

A link to the articles deletion log would be helpful for admins.--Andeh 21:09, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, that looks pretty good. Another option may be a "whitelist" where pages can be added that the bot won't tag. The offline data dump is also a fine option. We may also want it to find all other namespace pages with only talk pages just for review. Wikipedia space talk pages are the most likely to be exempt from speedy deletion, but it would still be useful and we may still find some of those elligible for deletion.VegaDark 21:26, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I was thinking of something similar to Wikipedia:List of stubs without msg, where people can then go through the list at their "leisure" (ha ha) and tag the pages that actually need. We're ranging farther afield from bot requests, though... -- nae'blis 21:30, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Another thing to note is that there are a large number of MediaWiki images that have had Wikipedia talk pages accidentally created for them. Such pages are speedyable, but any relevant content should first be merged to the MediaWiki talk page. VegaDark 21:32, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I've added a bot request. Let's continue any discussion there. —Mets501 (talk) 22:11, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I was wondering if a bot could do the same for Category:Articles to be merged as it did for Category:Category needed and Category:Articles that need to be wikified. To sort them out per month. There currently is a backlog of close to 11.000 (!!) articles. And it would help a lot if you could see quickly how long the merge tag is already on an article. Garion96 (talk) 00:13, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

I'd be able to do this (at least put everything into a single month now, and into later months starting in October). I'm not able to find the month that the tag was applied...sorry. Fortunately, someone could always send a bot through September 2006 and organize the articles. I'll put in a bot request. alphaChimp^(talk) 18:33, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. That already would help a lot. Garion96 (talk) 09:32, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

A while ago, I made maps for all of the cities and towns in Indiana, and started semi-automatically adding cityboxes each article. I got part way through the 'L's but I have not worked on it for a year now. It would be helpful for someone to finish the rest of the pages. The red-dot maps are located here [11]. - Marvin01 | talk 00:49, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Bots can't really add city boxes to pages (where would they get the info?), the only thing they could do was add the map, but that would look kind of funny in an infobox with no other information. —Mets501 (talk) 18:30, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Most of the information you can get from the text of the page itself - Marvin01 | talk 19:46, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

If there is a better place to request "semi-automated bot + a little research", let me know or move this request, though I can't imagine doing this task without at least a little bot participation. - Marvin01 | talk 19:50, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Never mind, I will take care of these - Marvin01 | talk 14:49, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi, could someone please replace mammal-stub with bat-stub for the articles listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eug/Bat-Stubs ? Eug 13:43, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Working on it. - Ganeshk (talk) 13:52, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Half-way done. Will continue later. - Ganeshk (talk) 14:26, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

I finshed it up. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 15:05, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! Eug 14:48, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm relisting this since nobody responded to it the first time before it got archived.

Per the MoS (dates and numbers), dates should read September 10 or January 1 instead of September 10 or January 1. Although many pages use the "th", "rd", and "st" for dates. Is it possible to get a bot to fix this? Either by going through the articles or by going to the "What links here" page for each of the incorrect date formats and changing the linked pages? Not only would September 10 have to be checked but also 10 September. Dismas|^(talk) 17:59, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Sorry this didn't get responded to the first time, I read it but was thinking about it and forgot to respond. I don't know if this is a good job for a bot, because of things like July 4, which as a holiday is referred to as July Fourth, not July Four, and is written that way. —Mets501 (talk) 18:27, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the response, though I'm a bit confused about your response. Are you using July 4 because of the U.S. holiday that falls on that day? I'm having a hard time thinking of that many exceptions that would exclude a bot from doing the job. Besides which, July 4 redirects to July 4 as it should. Surely the bot could be told to ignore certain dates. There shouldn't be that many of them that fall under a holiday terminology clause such as the Independence Day holiday. Dismas|^(talk) 21:13, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

OK, you're probably right. —Mets501 (talk) 21:26, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

So does this mean that it will/can get done? Dismas|^(talk) 21:29, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Not by my bot, but if someone will pick it up then it can get done. You could also do it yourself: do you use AWB? If so then you could enter a request for bot approval and run AWB in automatic mode. —Mets501 (talk) 02:23, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't run Windows, so no go on the AWB. Where do I find someone with a bot that can do it? Will they possibly be reading this? Dismas|^(talk) 08:33, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

This doesn't seem that hard, the worst part looks like making the list of articles. I'll see what I can get done with AWB. -Mulder416 02:02, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Following Wknight94's suggestion, I would like to request a bot whose function would be to create redirect pages for articles whose names contain diacritics. For example, the bot could verify if the article České Budějovice can be redirected from Ceske Budejovice. If not, the latter would be created.
This could prove useful because many articles lack these redirect pages and are hard to find for those who do not possess the diacritics on their keyboards. Recently I had to create redirect pages for nearly all Portuguese municipalities. A bot could perform these tasks much more efficiently. If there is someone interested in creating this bot, thank you in advance. Regards.--Húsönd 22:44, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi. I wonder if there's a bot with the time and inclination to go around all the articles linking to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and change those links to point at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are between 1500 and 1600 such pages, so it's a bit of a task to do by hand. Thanks! -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:24, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Just a comment, wouldn't the correct article title not include the "the"? The MoS says this: Avoid the definite article ("the") and the indefinite article ("a"/"an") at the beginning of the page name unless the article would be capitalized in the course of a sentence such as The Gambia or The Hague. Dismas|^(talk) 01:28, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, in this case, the word "The" is part of the official title of the church. Kind of like The Beatles. Please feel free to read the discussion at Talk:The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:30, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

A point raised by your comment though, is that maybe any bot completing this request should search for instances of "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" and convert them to "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", capitalizing the "The". -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:31, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

There are also those articles that use a capital D for day (Latter-Day) which could be fixed, and others which have a lowercase the and a capitalized one, as in "the The Church..." --Lethargy 02:28, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

To clarify, you guys want to switch all links (in articles) from Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints...right? (Pointing to it is different). I could probably do this pretty easily, I just need to know exactly what is wanted. alphaChimp^(talk) 06:13, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, let me be precise: every occurence of the text:

the [[Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]]

or

The [[Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]]

should be changed to:

[[The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]]

If there's no "the" in front of the link, then those should probably be dealt with by hand, because it could mess up the surrounding grammar to start inserting indefinite articles. Still, I think the edit I've described above will fix the vast majority of those redirecting links. Does that make sense? Please feel free to ask for any additional clarification, and thanks for offering to help. -GTBacchus^(talk) 18:55, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

There are also 90 pages[12] that link to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a redirect page which seems to be there in case someone uses improper capitalization. So, using the system above, pages using:

the [[Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints]]

or

The [[Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints]]

should also be changed to:

[[The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]] --Lethargy 21:10, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

sorry for the delay guys. I'm going to get going on this as soon as my current bot run is complete. Alphachimp 02:55, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

No worries; at your convenience. -GTBacchus^(talk) 02:54, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

I would like permission to run Firefoxbot using AutoWikiBrowser in automatic mode. The Fox Man of Fire 14:37, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Request that on WP:BRFA Alphachimp 14:39, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

We still need an archive bot, our current system is starting to break down, and the last bot we had was CrypticBot, so we've been doing it all by hand for quite a while now. Since our old request has been long since archived off this page (by an archiving BOT, oh the irony o:) I decided to repost a less involved version of the same request here--VectorPotential^{RD NEEDS A BOT (-:} 13:01, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

A link to the complete description. I'm unable to do it with my bot, but maybe someone else will pick it up. —Mets501 (talk) 13:13, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

• Quick breakdown: Each day it would remove the oldest header from the top of the page, let's say for Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Computing, for instance "= October 3 =" and all the content from under it, it would then move that content to a page, in this case Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Computing/2006 October 3, and add "<noinclude>{{subst:Reference desk navigation|3|October|Science}}</noinclude> " to the top of the page, and place the content for October 3, on that page. The older description is a little dated--VectorPotential^{RD NEEDS A BOT (-:} 13:15, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Revisal

Here is a new REVISED bot request. I have created a demo reference desk that could be used to test implementation of an RD bot using a slightly updated layout. It will be proposed by a few of the RD editors (including me) only once a bot is working for it, because of the increased number of desks to manage manually. Please read User:Freshgavin/Sandbox/Reference_desk_bot_request for more details about the changes that will be proposed, and for a detailed summary of the requirements for the bot.

The reference desk relies now on a few diligent editors for manual archiving, and there are a lot of people that would really appreciate a bot to help us do this task. Any suggestions, ideas would be greatly appreciated. Questions and comments about the new layout should be posted on this talk page, and those about the current system should be posted here.  freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ  07:03, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm happy to give this request a go - I'll look at writing the code over the coming week (fitting it in with other commitments) - then I'll test and fix (and so on) until submittiny to WP:BRFA. Martinp23 20:42, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Off-topic question: There's an MSN bot that lets you get information from Encarta. Are there Wikipedia IM or SMS bot? Such a bot, if it doesn't already exist, would be mighty useful. IM bots would let people get information from Wikipedia without opening a web browser. And an SMS bot would let people get info anytime, anywhere, for just the price of an SMS text message. Anybody know if these exist? If not, would it be appropriate for me to file a bug on MediaZilla or would this request be off-topic there too? :-) Cheers, --unforgettableid | talk to me 00:54, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Very interesting; I never thought about something like that before. Not quite sure how to implement it though. — Mets501  (talk)  02:50, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Trillian has this integrated with the IM client; it highlights various words. However there's no bot to my knowledge.. SMC 21:15, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

The templates {{user ara}}, {{user Arab}}, {{user cyr-1}} etc shall be replaced with the parameterized template:user iso15924. Parameters given below. Some templates may be included via Template:Babel. AFAIK these cannot be replaced by a bot and will be done by hand. The request was developped at Wikipedia_talk:Userboxes/Writing_systems#Bot_request Tobias Conradi (Talk) 16:05, 25 September 2006 (UTC) The 15 replacements are as follows:

1. {{user cyr-1}} -> {{user iso15924|Cyrl|1}}
2. {{user cyr-2}} -> {{user iso15924|Cyrl|2}}
3. {{user cyr-4}} -> {{user iso15924|Cyrl|4}}
4. {{user cyr}} -> {{user iso15924|Cyrl|5}}
5. {{user grk-1}} -> {{user iso15924|Grek|1}}
6. {{user grk-5}} -> {{user iso15924|Grek|5}}
7. {{user grk}} -> {{user iso15924|Grek|5}}
8. {{user cyrl}} -> {{user iso15924|Cyrl|5}}
9. {{user Cyrl-1}} -> {{user iso15924|Cyrl|1}}
10. {{user Cyrl-2}} -> {{user iso15924|Cyrl|2}}
11. {{user Cyrl-4}} -> {{user iso15924|Cyrl|4}}
12. {{user Cyrl}} -> {{user iso15924|Cyrl|5}}
13. {{user Grek-1}} -> {{user iso15924|Grek|1}}
14. {{user Grek-5}} -> {{user iso15924|Grek|5}}
15. {{user Grek}} -> {{user iso15924|Grek|5}}

• I completed all replacements on user pages that do not use Babel. - Ganeshk (talk) 07:57, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
• And I have done all Babel replacements. PoccilScript 08:18, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

thanks a lot for your help! Tobias Conradi (Talk) 01:33, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm proposing a bot that patrols articles for creation and starts new articles for unregistered users. I understand that this defeats the purpose of the restriction that only registered users can create articles, and that this bot can be easily abused. However, this bot may not be such a bad idea if the following measures were in place:

• the bot creates the article if and only if it can find enough Google matches
• anonymous users cannot use the bot to create more than three pages in one hour
• the bot declines requests from blocked IPs

Anonymous editors would also be able to create pages by accessing the bot interface on an off-wiki site.

Any thoughts on this? --Ixfd64 05:47, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't recommend it. It does completely defeat the purpose of not letting unregistered users start articles. Someone with an AOL dynamic IP could create thousands of articles easily on things that are "googleable" but not deserving of Wikipedia articles. —Mets501 (talk) 15:11, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Personally it sounds like something impossible to work. Google matches are a pretty bad indicator of notability - it seems way too much like a one way trip to CSD for most of these articles. Good thought but I think the risks outweigh the benefits on this one -- Tawker 06:54, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I think that AfC needs human patrolling to find worthy articles - neologisms may have huge numbers of gHits, but are not permitted on WP. However, don't despair! I'm in the progress of writing a program for closing AfDs, which a list of approved users will be able to use (regular AfC patrollers). I was having a problem with it, but I think that may be fixed now :) (hoping..) I'll try to get a BETA release out soon. Martinp23 17:02, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to ask a bot to help the Medical genetics project. We've finished the article rating mostly and we'd like a bot to tag every unassessed articles in Category:Medical genetics with {{MedGen|class=unassessed}}. Thanks in advance. NCurse _work 18:30, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I'll take care of that. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 18:40, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Done Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 19:37, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! :) NCurse _work 19:40, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

At Wikipedia:WikiProject Bedfordshire/Infobox status we are trying to create a list of all pages and their infobox status. We have a template which is placed on the talk page of all these articles that contains an infobox status and automatically puts them in one of four categories. We would like a bot that automatically creates the list daily. If you do want to help please contact the talk page of that article for more information. Thanks. Lcarsdata (Talk) 14:54, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

I'll do this Martinp23 19:32, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Hello everyone, how are you going? I'd like to request a bot for WikiProject Indonesia. With it's current number of members, it is getting hard for me to post a message on each talk page. For now, maybe I'd like the bot runs every week, to deliver weekly notices (but I can change it, right?). Thanks in advance -- Imoeng 14:11, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi - I'll look at doing this for you :) Martinp23 14:15, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm looking for some help converting all the article titles, links, and non-linked mentions of a great number of Japan-related articles which, when macrons (e.g. ō and ū) are taken into account, need to be respelled. The greatest congestion of these, I think, comes from the ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Right now, I have a very short list of names that need to be changed, but as I look into each individual ship's Japanese name and how it ought to be spelled, I'll be adding to the list of those that need renaming. The number of ships isn't too great - those that need renaming hopefully do not number more than 30-50, hopefully. But if each of those is linked to by 10 articles, that's 300-500 right there. Please let me know what to do or who to talk to. Thanks for the help. LordAmeth 23:51, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

P.S. The current changes that need to be made are Kotetsu-->Kōtetsu, Hyuga-->Hyūga, Soryu-->Sōryū, Unryu-->Unryū, Fuso-->Fusō, Kongo-->Kongō, Kaiyo Maru-->Kaiyō Maru, and Hiryu-->Hiryū. All of these have an article named either "Japanese battleship X" or "Japanese aircraft carrier X", but that is not the only context in which they will appear; they will be referred to simply by name (e.g. "the Unryu was sunk at the battle of such-and-such...") or as "X-class aircraft carrier" or a number of other contexts. Some such as Hyuga and Kotetsu may appear quite often in non-naval related contexts. But as far as I am aware, and I can double-check this, both of those words should be respelled (with macrons added) in any and all contexts. Thanks once again. LordAmeth 23:51, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Would there be any way to create a bot which would be able to indicate which pages have been added to the listing of pages here or elsewhere, over, say, the last month? Maybe a two-section format listing all the pages in one column and another listing either those which existed (or were revised) before a given date or were created after a given date might be easiest. Also, the bot could potentially be used to determine which pages are "stable", which is to say, not modified over a given period. Thanks for your response, positive or negative. Badbilltucker 16:16, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I'll take a look at doing this - would you be able tell me (on my talk page), how many days ago the last edit is to have beeen for the page to be considered stable? (I'll be a while fulfilling this request - perhaps just over a week because of other commitments). Thanks Martinp23 20:28, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I'd like a bot to go through all the articles linked to in this template and add this template to the bottom with {{fb start}} and {{fb end}} around it as is standard with football templates. If {{fb start}} and {{fb end}} are already present, just add this template in front of {{fb end}}. Not too hard to do I hope? - MTC 11:43, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I can do this manually with AWB using some fancy regexes, just let me set it up ST47Talk 18:56, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

48 edits completed using AWB at 19:20, 19 October 2006 (UTC) by ST47Talk 19:20, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, thanks, but there are a couple of errors I noticed from checking a few of the pages:

• Some of the pages haven't been touched at all (Norwegian Premier League to name one, {{FA Premier League]] too, though I added it manually just now)
• Some have had the box added around other boxes that were already there (Serbian Superliga, League of Wales for example)

I wonder if there's a way you can fix these easily using some more fancy programming or maybe it's best to just go through them manually? - MTC 19:58, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Just like repeatedly-recreated unwanted articles are tagged with {{deletedpage}} and protected, some unwanted categories are protected with {{deletedcategory}}. However, given the way the cat system works, this doesn't stop people from adding articles to the cat. Hence, a bot is requested to regularly (e.g. weekly) empty these deleted categories. >Radiant< 12:04, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I could have my bot do it if you are interested. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 13:26, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I would be, thanks. >Radiant< 13:33, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

• It appears (see User talk:Centrx) that a bot is already doing this. >Radiant< 09:14, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

User:RobotG currently clears categories in Category:Protected deleted categories. Any Category tagged with {{deletedpage}} (or the now-redirect {{deletedcategory}}, is placed in this category. —Centrx→talk • 23:58, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Do we have a welcome bot, that adds welcome templates to new user pages? Seems like a good idea to me, it was discussed on the mailing list somewhere. Mind, it seems such a good idea it's probably been discussed before. Hiding Talk 10:12, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I think a welcome bot is a bad idea, as it will reduce the number of personal welcome messages. If I see a redlinked talk page for a user and see that he is making good contributions, I welcome him and thank him specifically for his contributions. I don't see much point in welcoming users just for signing up. In any case, welcoming can be done through a MediaWiki message at account creation instead of by a bot, saving lots of server space that would otherwise be used for all those indefblocked username vandals. Kusma (討論) 10:48, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

One place where this was discussed is Template talk:Welcome. Kusma (討論) 10:50, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

To say some more, I think we should solve the social problem that newbies aren't welcomed by encouraging RC patrollers and New Page patrollers to welcome good-faith users personally (ideally with a message that acknowledges their edits), not by applying a technical solution that doesn't actually have any of the social components that welcoming should have. Kusma (討論) 10:55, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I've learned that the { { IPA } } template is used to enable phonetic symbols to appear as they should, and not as little squares, in IE6. A bot to do a mass conversion of "hard" phonetic symbols to { { IPA } } template-formatted phonetic symbols would be useful. Tawagoto 01:47, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

can you give me a list of the hard phonetic symbols, and i'll load up a database dump and see how many edits need to be made? I'd also like an example to help set up. Two options are a bot and manual using a tool, bot's probably smarter but would need a BRFA, and User:STBot is currently busy overnight, so I couldn't even run it for another week. reply here or my talk ST47Talk 19:25, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

ok, i see how it works, I'll start working on a count later. ST47Talk 19:29, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

count is at 62k edits. I'll confer with some admins later to determine whether or not it's worth it, though as it, first probably is less that that, as that includes pages with the ipa template(subtract 10-20k) and will add support for an otherwise porked browser as far as i can tell, it should go. only one question - are you bringing the help, or the cookies? ST47Talk 23:14, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Uh, I don't really understand any of the technicalities of this. It sounds like you found the answer to your first question. Just in case, the IPA symbols are the last line of hyperlinked characters in the Insert/Sign your name/characters rectangle at the bottom of each "Edit this page" page. I have plenty of cookies on my hard drive that I can upload if you're interested. Anyway, thanks very much for your work on this. Tawagoto 01:29, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Can someone please write 4 me a bot that will pick up NPOV breaches which is shut-off complinatnt.

Thanks

Nathannoblet 04:29, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

a NPOV bot is not feasable as there is too much of a human factor.Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 04:52, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Can someone write for me a bot that removes red links, red templates, and red categories from articles (except Template:Red link)? What it does is it will turn "{{red link}}" into "this" for red links, and remove red templates and red categories straight from the article. --AAA! ^{(talk • contribs)} 11:45, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

IMO, this is a very bad idea. See Wikipedia:Red link for some reasons why red links are good.

If you remove all red links, then the person who writes a new article has to go around to every page that my conceivably contain a link to that page and make new links. If the red links are left alone and that same article is written then they will automatically turn blue. Red links aren't the devil!! Dismas|^(talk) 11:58, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Red links to plausible article titles are a good thing. It inspires people to create articles and create them under the correct name, and it means that when a good article is created there are likely to be at least a few useful incoming links, so people will be able to find the new article. But people should be careful to only create redlinks to possible articles, same as always. A bot to just remove all redlinks is a bad idea. --W.marsh 15:56, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Touché. --AAA! ^{(talk • contribs)} 04:03, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi. At this page, you can see a list of links pointing at List of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy episodes. That page, however, is a redirect to List of Ed, Edd n Eddy episodes, without the apostrophes. Could someone please sic a bot on that list and fix all the individual episode pages, which are currently double redirects? Thanks. -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:34, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

No problem, getting to it. —Mets501 (talk) 19:35, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Wait a minute: was there consensus for this move? —Mets501 (talk) 19:38, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

It was listed [13] at Wikipedia:Requested moves for five days without anybody objecting. The editor filing the request had commented on each of the three talk pages involved, in this case, here. I followed the link provided, and sure enough, the official site lists the title without the apostrophes. So, I went with it, rather than relisting for another week. It seemed pretty clear-cut to me. -GTBacchus^(talk) 07:09, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Change all "Major Highways" titles to "Major highways", particularly in counties. --MNAdam 03:41, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

You mean page titles or in text? why? is there a consensus/vote(I SAID THE V WORD ZOMG!) somewhere? ST47Talk 11:11, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

In the titles, I don’t know about consensus/ there hasn't been a vote, but the template on Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. counties has it listed as "Major highways". It also violates the MOS wording [14] . Back when the template was first made, all titles were capitalized, and the capitalization was removed from the template on December 5, 2004. I just think all county articles should be standardized. --MNAdam 21:38, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I have noticed that perhaps six out of seven anonymous users who leave comments on talk pages do not sign their posts properly. I have usually added the {{unsigned}} message after those posts when I have encountered them. However, this could be a job for a bot: scan the Recent changes list limited to the Talk space, and if a comment is made by an IP-address, check it for a signature and add one if necessary. Of course logged in users also forget the signature sometimes, and those could be checked too, if it doesn't take too much resources. Alternatively only check those users that have not created an user page yet, they are often new to Wikipedia and do not know about signing their posts. Is anyone with the skill/equipment up to this? --ZeroOne (talk | @) 20:49, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Do-able but not 100% sure of the demand on resources it would make -- Tawker 20:52, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

To help gauge how big the demand would be, what is the number of nsigned comments made, say, per minute (I can easily see this being well over reasonable bot editting limits). Perhaps an extension to mediawiki is more appropriate? Martinp23 21:05, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, within the last two hours there were an average of 110 anonymous edit per hour in the talk namespace. Some of these were edits instead of new comments. Also excluding signed comments, I'd say there are some 90 matches / hour, or 1,5 matches / minute. Registered users seem to edit the talk namespace maybe five times a minute (300 times / hour), but if you count only those who have not created an user page (the risk group of new users that may leave unsigned comments), the number is much smaller, about 15 / hour. So all in all, rounding a little upwards, I'd say the bot would have to make ~120 edits / hour or 2 edits / minute. I believe this is about half the amount of edits that the AntiVandalBot makes.

I'm not familiar with the MediaWiki extensions you mentioned. However, I can accept anything that works. :) --ZeroOne (talk | @) 13:56, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I thought of this same idea last night. We could really use a bot signing for anonymous users. Alphachimp 14:15, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

A disadvantage of auto-signing edits with a bot is that a potentially nonsensical/vandalistic entry will no longer be the top edit in people's watchlist, and will require more effort reverting or removing. Also, you'll have to know which edits do not require signing (addition of templates, edits to headers or general information about the talk page, archiving, refactoring etc.), which is a rather nontrivial and probably impossible task. I would certainly not want a bot that signs my edits. Kusma (討論) 15:40, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Another problem is that many pages need signatures more than talk pages do. On AFDs, signing is usually necessary, but they are not in the talk namespace. On many article talk pages, it doesn't matter at all which anon says what, as most discussions with anons do not involve more than one at the same time, and they will sign manually if necessary for identification. Plus, an AOL anon signing with a nickname is signing in a more useful way than our autosig with his always-changing IP address. Kusma (討論) 15:49, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

If the bot gets a bot-flag, it won't even be shown on people's watchlist, so no problem there. The first rule could be that if a new paragraph is created, then add signature, otherwise treat it as an edit. The paragraph should also not start with a {{ and not end with a }}, nor should the signature be added to those paragraphs that already end with one. The bot could also be made to monitor AFD-pages.

The signature has other functions besides identifying the user who left the message. It separates different messages from each other and tells you the date and time the messages were left. --ZeroOne (talk | @) 11:54, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Er, when I have "hide bots" turned on, I don't see the edit before the bot edit on my watchlist, the page disappears from my watchlist completely (and I want to see what the interwiki bots do anyway, so I don't want to hide bots). I can't use the "extended watchlist" because I have too many high-volume pages on my watchlist, and it sucks anyway, as I need an extra click to see whether the top edit summary at WP:AIV does or does not include the word "empty". Kusma (討論) 12:19, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, if that's how it works then it sounds like a bug in the MediaWiki software. --ZeroOne (talk | @) 13:20, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Why not just write it into the program (an auto signature)? If it's not an option to not leave a signature then a bot wouldnt be needed in the first place. --MNAdam 23:19, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

In case of simple edits or addition of certain templates one will not want to leave a signature. --ZeroOne (talk | @) 12:51, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

How about a manually summoned bot that can suggest images for an article based on images from Commons that exist on copies of the page on other language wikis? --InShaneee 02:21, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Like this? --Emijrp 12:02, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Waht I'm after is either guidance on how to write a bot and what I need to run it, or perhaps someone to set up a bot that would run through the various comic stubs categories and tag them as stubs for the 1.0 assessment. I get some webspace with my ISP that includes cgi space I don't know if that's enough to host a bot, but I'd be interested in doing it if someone would hold my hand, otherwise if that's impractical or impossible, I'd appreciate someone taking it on. The categories are Category:Comics stubs and sub-categories and the code that needs to be added or amended on an article talk page is that either {{Comicsproj|class=Stub}} needs to be added or where it exists {{Comicsproj needs to be amended to {{Comicsproj|class=Stub, leaving the close brackets in case other fields are active. Also, I guess a subpage, um, {{FULLPAGENAME}}/Comments needs to be created with a message, um Assessed by comics-bot which automatically tags articles in stub categories as syub class articles. Appreciate thoughts. Hiding Talk 18:23, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

can do the tagging but do you realy need a subpage? I could just put that in the edit summary. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 18:50, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, the tagging is the more vital element, so no, the subpage isn't vital. Hiding Talk 20:39, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I was just asking why you want a subpage? Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 20:44, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, that's the way the 1.0 version ideally want it set up, with comments on such a subpage so they can better contextualise the ratings. So that's why. Hiding Talk 21:02, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I can do Ill set up the pre-run data and get back to you. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 02:44, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

See: User:Betacommand/WPCOMIC and remove/add any that you want tagged and leave me a note on my talk page when you are done. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 03:24, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks, will do. Hiding Talk 20:02, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Please don't bot-create the subpage: otherwise we'll end up with several hundred thousand sub-pages saying nothing but "automatically assessed as a stub-class article due to being a stub", as well as several hundred thousand article talk pages saying much the same thing. The "auto-assessed" surely says it all; if people want to expand on that when they confirm (or deny) the auto-assessment, they can do so at their leisure. Alai 10:01, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if this would be a good idea or not but perhaps it would be possible to build a robot to standardize Wikipedia pages (make them of similiar formatting).

Some points would be:

1. Convert American spellings to English or vice versa.
2. Capitalize words that should obviously be capitalized; for example, the beginning of a sentence.
3. Uncapitalize words that should obviously not be capitalized.
4. Convert accented characters to their normal equivalents (for example, '�' to 'e').

I'd be interested to see other people's points on this. Yuser31415 07:43, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

re 1&4 should be left alone American and Engish are both the same language. And the accents are there for a reason Betacommand ^{(talk * contribs * Bot)} 07:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Re 2 & 3, how would the bot know where the beginning of a sentence is or which words are improperly capitalized? For the first, if a sentence were to have an phrase such as "...percent of U.S. citizens...", how would the bot know that the word "citizens" wasn't the beginning of a new sentence? For the second, how would the bot know that the word in question isn't part of a band name or something like that? For instance, Red Hot Chili Peppers is a band and thus those words are capitalized but a bot wouldn't know that it's a band name and would therefore uncapitalize the words. Dismas|^(talk) 08:35, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I suppose you're both right. I was thinking of human interaction though: the bot finds keywords it's not sure about and the human checks them. I suppose this could take too long and would only be useful for individual pages.Yuser31415 19:11, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

It might not be exactly what you described, but the Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser has this "Apply general fixes" option that is pretty similar. The program works with human interaction just as you described. --ZeroOne (talk | @) 05:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I would like to request a bot that can touch about 80.000 pages on Wikispecies. I am one of the admins on Wikispecies, and we're going through some major changes. We do have one registered bot, but it stopped working, for an unknown reason. Perhaps a 'techy' is able and willing to do some standard changes. In principal it would need to delete '::::' colons out of taxonavigation sections. Perhaps also a check on a certain layout and if it does not fit standard layout add a Category. (or fix the issue if possible). Help would be highly appreciated. --Kempmichel 10:21, 3 November 2006 (UTC) (Wikispecies:User:Kempm)

Well, I can write a quick thing for WP:AWB to remove colons, that's easy. The layout, you'd need to give me a 'good' example and a 'bad' example, but I can use AWB for that too once I can tell it what to look for. Can I see some sample diffs of both changes? Thanks! ST47Talk 11:28, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Ok, the colon thing is funtional simply by changing :::::::Species: to Species:. ST47Talk 11:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Note here it can also be ::::Subspecies, ::::Regnum, :Superregnum, :::Subregnum, or ::Subregnum, and many more :) --Kempmichel 12:13, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

ok, how about ^:+([KPCOFGSR]) -> \1 ?(that is, if it works, ill try it out in 5 seconds) ST47Talk 19:08, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Yep, that works. Generating list... ST47Talk 19:11, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

That ended up hitting interwikis, now I'm using [^(\w\w)]:+([KPCOFGSR]) ST47Talk 19:30, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

And saving it to $1<br />, because otherwise pages with more than one(i just saw one) would get clumped up ST47Talk 19:34, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

And using [^(\w\w)]:+([KPCOFGSRIT]) cause some scientist hates me :) ST47Talk 19:39, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

And 50 edits made, looks good to me, let me know if I can start it on automatic. ST47Talk 19:49, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

You already found out :) --Kempmichel 14:05, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

indeed :) ST47Talk 14:46, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not like, killing your servers am I? ST47Talk 14:46, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I have some annoying hiccups sometimes, but that seems quite normal. So far I received 20.000 e-mails from your edits :) Is that how many you did? --Kempmichel 17:58, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

20,000? WHY! That's probably about right. i have 20k pages left to do, then i wait for a database dump and re-scan it ST47Talk 19:03, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I've just come back from fixing about 16 double redirects. Could someone write up a bot for me that fixes double redirects (If it's possible)? --AAA! ^{(talk • contribs)} 08:40, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

all ready being run Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 09:47, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Which? --AAA! ^{(talk • contribs)} 00:39, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Many bot do it (including mine). Just download the pywikipedia framework, a double redirect fixer is included (make sure that you get approval at WP:BRFA first though). —Mets501 (talk) 01:31, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Is it possible to have a bot written that would patrol subcategories of Category:Comics and where an article has been tagged for deletion it could add that fact to the relevant section of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Comics/Notice Board? Hiding Talk 21:22, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

There are many pages dealing with subjects in ancient Greece and Rome that erroneously capitalize "ancient". WP guidelines and editorial consensus say that "ancient" should be lowercase. It's easy enough to move individual pages, but fixing the redirects is a pain. Is this the kind of task that a bot can help with? If not, are there other ways to (semi-)automate the process? Thanks. --Akhilleus (talk) 16:32, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Have you looked into WP:AWB? I know this could be helpful--Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 19:01, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Not in detail, because I mostly use OS X. But I have some access to a Windows machine, so I'll check it out. --Akhilleus (talk) 19:05, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Of course, you want to be able to capitalize if it's the beginning of a sentence, and possibly some other contexts a bot might not always recognize. Maybe there could be a special symbol, such as inserting any invisible comment between ancient and Rome, which signals the bot not to decapitalize in this case (as well as the bot being smart enough to recogize almost all beginnings of sentences). Just an idea. --Coppertwig 19:32, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Errr...this proposal speaks of moving pages. Article titles must begin with a capital letter, for technical reasons. Hence the link ancient Greece will always point to the article titled Ancient Greece. Robert A.West (Talk) 19:47, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

• OIC. If the article has "Ancient" in a medial position, then this makes sense. Is that what was meant? Robert A.West (Talk) 22:01, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes. My initial request was unclear, I see. I was interested in a less tedious way to make moves such as

Gymnasium (Ancient Greece) -> Gymnasium (ancient Greece) and

Art in Ancient Greece -> Art in ancient Greece

There's a similar problem with the titles of articles dealing with ancient Rome, classical Greece/Rome, and other articles where a country/culture is modified by an adjective.

Mistaken capitalization in the article text is also an issue, of course, but it wasn't what I was asking about. --Akhilleus (talk) 02:10, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Could someone write a bot that'll convert the old Template:PDFlink format to the new one, while adding file size info possibly, some details one what needs to be done is located at Template talk:PDFlink#PDFbot -Dispenser 08:19, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I can't do the file size, but I'll convert the old style to the new style. —Mets501 (talk) 14:35, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

OK, should be done now. —Mets501 (talk) 21:48, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Great work. However, there is a problem (now documented the on first page of the template) where if a link contains pipe (|) or equals sign (=) the template will cause the link to display incorrectly. See [15]. --Dispenser 06:33, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Is it possible that a bot could be created or used that would be able to patrol all images on the wiki, and either add or replace the category with Category:Memory Beta images, as we have hundreds of images and it would be a mammoth task to do by hand. If so that would be fantastic, address for the wiki is Memory Beta Main Page. --The Doctor 11:32, 08 November 2006 (UTC)

I could make a list of all the image names on your wiki, load them into AWB, and if they have a page here, I could add the category. ST47Talk 11:36, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

That would be brilliant if possible. Thank You :-). --The Doctor 12:21, 08 November 2006 (UTC)

Looks like there's something up with the wiki, I can't get AWB to connect to it, I'll hve to think of a better way to get your images. ST47Talk 19:27, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, I have a list, and I have a way to isolate star trek images, can you create the category with a note saying it was populated by a bot and may have one or two false positives, and I'll do the categorizing as soon as I have a free computer ST47Talk 19:39, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

A lot of userboxes are being moved per the WP:GUS to userspace. This is probably a good thing; but when a box is moved everyone who had it on their userpage is left with something like this:

. Could someone create a box to fix those automatically? ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 16:28, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Sure, give me a list of changes, my bot is already allowed to do that. ST47Talk 18:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Many bots regularly do that (mine too). Just add the GUS template, it will appear in C:GUS, and bots go through that category fixing transclusions. —Mets501 (talk) 22:11, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Could someone run a bot through the Playboy Playmate articles to compile a list of the dead ones so that I can compare it to the list at Dead Playboy Playmates. I want to check the list to see if it has all of them or not. Dismas|^(talk) 09:07, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Uhh...you want me to do what? with what? Define dead. We'll need a list of articles to check and a place to output to, and a way to define dead, and a category to add them all to is probably the only way to do it with a bot, still, bots, being bats, cannot determine whether something is dead unless you tell it how to. ST47Talk 11:52, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Going through Category:Playboy Playmates and seeing which ones contain a by-date death category would work. Martin 12:16, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. Martin, that should work fine. I just want the names if that's possible. Maybe the bot could write them to User:Dismas/Playmates or something like that? Considering there are more than 50 years of playmates, I'd rather not go through the articles one by one. Dismas|^(talk) 12:59, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

So do I take this silence to mean that nobody wants to help? Dismas|^(talk) 23:08, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Show me a living one and a dead one and I'll see if I can do something ST47Talk 23:14, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Dead Playmate and live Playmate. Thanks, Dismas|^(talk) 01:50, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

cool, searching for anything that's dead and then i'll compare it to Category:Playboy Playmates ST47Talk 11:37, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! Dismas|^(talk) 12:29, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I mentioned this on the Village Pump, but then I realized that this page existed: I've noticed that tables are used an awful lot everywhere on Wikipedia, even when using <div> tags would work just as well. I looked up Wikipedia:When to use tables, and I thought it would make sense to have a bot to find unnecessary tables, i.e. single-cell tables, and turn them into an equivalent <div style="CSS"> combination. That doesn't exist already, does it? Phoenix-forgotten 20:00, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

no I don't think so. Best way to do this would probably be

{|([^!\|]+)|} -> <div style="CSS">$1</div>

Can I have a sample of a bad table and a good div for comparison?

In addition, if anyone has any ideas for or against this, please say so. ST47Talk 20:44, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Divs can't be vertical-align: middle; in IE because it doesn't support display: table;. --Dispenser 21:20, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

One example is Template:TOCright. As long as the border is nonexistent, a div will still look just like a one-cell table does if you convert any cellspacing and cellpadding into an appropriate amount of CSS padding. If the table has a border though, I haven't been able to make an exact equivalent because the table always seems to have a one-pixel border for its cell, which messes up the border-style:outset the outer boundary has. Phoenix-forgotten 01:25, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Hello, I need a very specific change to be made to a number of very specific articles. For a list, see User:lensovet/Rail. What I need is as follows: for each line that reads

{{rail line|previous=[[Metropark (NJT station)|Metropark]]|route=[[Northeast Corridor Line]]|next=[[Linden (NJT station)|Linden]]|col=FF2400}}

to be converted to

{{NJT line|previous=Metropark|line=Northeast Corridor|next=Linden}}

that is:

1. change template name from rail line to NJT line
2. for previous and next parameters, remove piped link and keep only the part that is normally displayed
3. if either parameter is not a piped link, remove it completely
4. change route= to line=
5. change Northeast Corridor Line to Northeast Corridor
6. remove the col= parameter completely

please let me know when you make the change. thanks! —lensovet–talk – 20:23, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

There are 10 articles. Hardly seems worth a bot. ST47Talk 22:27, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

There will probably be at least 20-30 more, just with different lines. I wanted to make this easy and break up the job into each line, and also to get a feel if something like this is actually feasible to do with a bot. How many articles do you want, 100? It's repetitive work regardless. —lensovet–talk – 23:27, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

It's definitely possible, my best idea would be using WP:AWB:

{{rail line|previous=\[\[[^|]+|([^\]]+)\]\]|route=([^\||[lL]ine])[lL]ine]]|next=\[\[[^|]+|([^\]]+)\]\]|col=FF2400}}

{{NJT line|previous=[[$1]]|line=$2|next=[[$3]]}}

which is incredibly scary and almost certainly wrong. but we can make it work :) - only thing is that I haven't a clue what to do about the third request. I'll think about that. ST47Talk 23:44, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Let me know if you can come up with something for the third request. also, i don't have access to a wintel box, so ideally i'd need a bot account to actually perform the edits. —lensovet–talk – 00:32, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

So, what's new here? —lensovet–talk – 20:38, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

I can do the edits, I'd like to do a regex for each change, and we can to request for approval - I'll file it, but you might want to comment on it just to make sure we know what we're doing, I'll post when it's done. ST47Talk 21:29, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Not worth filing a bot approval for 40 edits, just do it from your user account. Rich Farmbrough, 12:03 20 November 2006 (GMT).

I was thinking last night that it would be fun to have a bot that randomly generated a page in certain areas for the editor to edit. Like folks interested in botany or biology could get a random biology or botany page, then copyedit it. If Wikipedians did this for a year in all major areas, many of our crummiest articles, apperance wise, would get cleaned up.

I think that there are numerous articles on Wikipedia that need copyedits. I attempted to do this in the [Herat] article and the [Afghanistan] articles, but got sucked into a vicious flame war--these articles need serious work. However, I moved on to using the Random Article generator to find articles that could use copyediting, leading me to copyedit obscure pages like [Pre-dreadnought]. About half of the articles that come up have to do with Anime or television shows it seems, and some are in areas I know nothing about, but sometimes I find something interesting that needs work.

I can find articles on list, fine, but adding a little fun to it, and making it an all-Wikipedia project could seriously improve many Wikipedia articles. Editors would be encouraged to add citation needed tags, categories, and just do the rudimentary copyedit work that really makes Wikipedia viable. By allowing folks to get random articles in selected categories people would work on articles in their areas.

One of the best things about Wikipedia is writing a good article, then coming back the next day and finding someone else has spit-shined for you. There are a lot of articles that have some useful information but are rather sorry in appearance. Devoting some time to cleaning up these articles would, imo, greatly improve Wikipedia. Adding a little twist for those seeking something to do would make it a bit more interesting.

Please someone write this bot. Oh, I would call it the KPBot (for Kitchen police)!

KP Botany 20:55, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

You may want to check out User:SuggestBot. It's very similar to what you're proposing. —Mets501 (talk) 21:07, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

As we know, images and templates on the main page are changed on a daily basis. To prevent vandalism to Wikipedia's most important page, these images and templates must be fully protected. I'm sure that many administrators will agree that this task can be pretty tedious. Also, it's always possible that something will be left unprotected by accident. After all, we're all humans! :)

Therefore, I'm proposing a bot that will automate the following tasks:

1. protect any images and templates that will be used on the main page (one day beforehand)
2. unprotect any inactive images and templates (many inactive templates are still protected, despite being off the main page)

I do have one concern, though. If administrators become too dependent on the bot, some images or templates may be left unprotected if the bot suffers a downtime. --Ixfd64 09:44, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

We don't protect stuff on the main page:

"Important Note: When a page is particularly high profile, either because it is linked off the main page, or because it has recently received a prominent link from offsite, it will often become a target for vandalism. It is rarely appropriate to protect pages in this case. Instead, consider adding them to your watchlist, and reverting vandalism yourself."

ST47Talk 11:20, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

But the main page policy does require protection for all images displayed on it (for obvious reasons). The protection policies only prevent the protection of articles linked from the main page. Martinp23 18:22, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

It'd be nice to have a bot automatically add Template:Verylong to articles that are above the recommended size. Vicarious 09:24, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I can do that automatically with WP:AWB once I get back from vacation, but how long is too long? ST47Talk 11:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't have a quick answer. Wikipedia:Article size provides the general number of 32k, but if it's not too challenging it might be worth comparing different thresholds. Vicarious 13:15, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, I can do that - 16, 32, 48K mabye - I'll see what I can do ST47Talk 15:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Whoa! Wait up. We have featured articles such as 0.999... which are over 60 kilobytes in size, but are not "too long". Too long has to do more with content than with the actual size in KB of the article. I don't recomment doing this by a bot. —Mets501 (talk) 16:01, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, I can't do anything yet ST47Talk 16:12, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, I just wanted to make sure you didn't start yet :-) —Mets501 (talk) 16:37, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure I agree with Mets that .999... isn't too long, but even if it isn't, the template can easily be removed from articles that it doesn't suite. If you think that the 32k threshold would provide too many inappropriate tags then we can increase the number to something where the ratio is much better. I have no idea how many very large articles there are but I feel reasonably confident that the vast majority of articles over 80k should be trimmed. Also keep in mind that a key reason to keep articles small is not just for readability, it's for technical reasons, and technical reasons don't care about your good reason for being too big. Vicarious 03:59, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Exactly what technical reason? My understanding has always been that anything over 32K can be problematic for users of certain browsers, but I've never heard of anything that would rise to the level of a true technical issue, i.e., a software or server problem. We are first and foremost an encyclopedia, and being so, the good reason for being to big (vis-a-vis being a good encyclopedia article) does and will always trump technical issues. Something tells me that if asked, Wikimedia's CTO Brion Vibber will tell us that there is absolutely no technical reason to start cutting featured articles back to stubs. Essjay (Talk) 04:16, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

"On Wikipedia, and other Wiki-based websites broken external links still present a maintenance problem." linkrot

I am hoping someone takes on the task to write a WebCite-Bot, i.e. a bot which automatically feeds all cited URLs in Wikipedia to WebCite, which is a web archive similar to the Internet Archive, but with enhanced features such as on-demand archiving, and with a focus on scholarly material (as opposed to IA's shotgun-crawling-"archive-all-you-can"-approach). WebCite creates a snapshot (cached copy) of the cited URL, thereby archiving/preserving the cited webpage or webdocument (if caching was successful, the link to the snapshot should be added to the original URL on wikipedia). WebCite takes care of robot exclusion standards, no-cache tags etc on the cited page. If caching was successful, WebCite hands back a WebCite-ID, which should be added to the original link (for an example on how this could look like see the reference list at the bottom of the article http://www.jmir.org/2006/4/e27/ - all cited non-journal webpages also have a link to the WebCite snapshot). The benefit would be that all cited material will be automatically preserved and link rot, 404s or changes in the cited webpages will no longer be a problem. WebCite has an XML-based webservice which allows to communicate the caching request as well as to receive the WebCite ID if the caching was successful, see technical guide http://www.webcitation.org/doc/WebCiteBestPracticesGuide.pdf User:Eysen 19:45, 01 Dec 2006 (UTC)

I wanted a bot to do the following :

• take a page of the form Wikipedia:Translation/XXX in Category:Translation sub-pages
• edit the article XXX
• add at the top of this article the template {{Wikipedia:Translation/XXX}} if it doesn't exist

Thanks,

Jmfayard 14:02, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

oh that's easy - couple of simple regexes and you're done - let me get a full database dump and I'll see what is to be done:

search for pages with title Wikipedia:Translation/.+

regex it to Wikipedia:Translation/(.+) -> $1

and then if not {{Wikipedia:Translation/.+}}

add {{Wikipedia:Translation/{{subst:PAGENAME}}}}

sound good? ST47Talk 20:24, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, this sounds good. Jmfayard 23:31, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

But I just noticed, there is something else to care of.

Before, we used {{Translation request}} and {{Translation request from German}} which are now obsoleted. Instead, one should use {{Translation}}. I just made a redirect of the two first templates to {{Translation}}. This solve the case of future translation requests with the old templates.

But there is the problem of existing translation requests.

The bot should replace the obsoloted templates in the talk pages Talk:XXX (the full list is hre) with

• {{Wikipedia:Translation/XXX}} if [[Wikipedia:Translation/XXX]] exists<
• {{Translation request (old)}} respectively {{Translation request from German (old)}} in the other cases (we do not want to port all the existing templates to the new system because it is a lot of work).

Is it doable ?

Jmfayard 23:31, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

That's not only doably, but as a template change, my bot can already do that - you want me to change {{Translation request}} and {{Translation request from German}} both to {{Translation}}?? ST47Talk 23:55, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

No, this is not what I want.

To make it simpler :

I want you to replace

• {{Translation request}} with {{Translation request (old)}}
• {{Translation request from German}} with {{Translation request from German (old)}}

The thing is that, because I made a redirect, the talk pages with {{Translation request}} are not listed in Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Translation request as you could expect, but in Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Translation

Jmfayard 00:16, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

It'd be nice to have a bot automatically add Template:Verylong to articles that are above the recommended size. Vicarious 09:24, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I can do that automatically with WP:AWB once I get back from vacation, but how long is too long? ST47Talk 11:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't have a quick answer. Wikipedia:Article size provides the general number of 32k, but if it's not too challenging it might be worth comparing different thresholds. Vicarious 13:15, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, I can do that - 16, 32, 48K mabye - I'll see what I can do ST47Talk 15:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Whoa! Wait up. We have featured articles such as 0.999... which are over 60 kilobytes in size, but are not "too long". Too long has to do more with content than with the actual size in KB of the article. I don't recomment doing this by a bot. —Mets501 (talk) 16:01, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, I can't do anything yet ST47Talk 16:12, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, I just wanted to make sure you didn't start yet :-) —Mets501 (talk) 16:37, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure I agree with Mets that .999... isn't too long, but even if it isn't, the template can easily be removed from articles that it doesn't suite. If you think that the 32k threshold would provide too many inappropriate tags then we can increase the number to something where the ratio is much better. I have no idea how many very large articles there are but I feel reasonably confident that the vast majority of articles over 80k should be trimmed. Also keep in mind that a key reason to keep articles small is not just for readability, it's for technical reasons, and technical reasons don't care about your good reason for being too big. Vicarious 03:59, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Exactly what technical reason? My understanding has always been that anything over 32K can be problematic for users of certain browsers, but I've never heard of anything that would rise to the level of a true technical issue, i.e., a software or server problem. We are first and foremost an encyclopedia, and being so, the good reason for being to big (vis-a-vis being a good encyclopedia article) does and will always trump technical issues. Something tells me that if asked, Wikimedia's CTO Brion Vibber will tell us that there is absolutely no technical reason to start cutting featured articles back to stubs. Essjay (Talk) 04:16, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Beyond the admittedly uncommon 32k issue, people with slow internet connection will find it difficult to load very large pages, although I admit this is much more strongly effected by included images than text (although there is certainly at least a weak correlation). I think you're sensationalizing a bit when you talk about cutting featured articles to stubs. I also think that all techinical issues aside, keeping articles of reasonable size improves readability and makes them more manageable, keep in mind I've not suggested removing content at any point, and tag I'm suggesting we have a bot add doesn't encourage deleting material either. I might add, this is not just my opinion, refer to Wikipedia:Article size. Vicarious 09:29, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

the list of fiddlers is getting a little unwielding. right now it duplicates itself completely, listing all the names first alphabetically and then by style - nice, convenient, but long. the plan is to split it into two articles. obviously there's a problem: how do we make sure people put their additions on both pages? already people aren't adding them to both lists.

seems like there are a couple ways this could be done with a bot, though I haven't read up on how they work and what they're capable of. conceptually most simply a bot could copy recent additions from the one page to the other - but it would have to check to see if the editor had edited both already. if bots can get around edit protection we could protect the list-by-style and have the bot check for changes to the list by name (take a look at the page - each name in the alphabetical list is followed by the styles they play... could a bot find and parse those parenthetical strings, and copy the name into the appropriate part(s) of a protected list-by-style article?) --Eitch 19:21, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

IMHO categories is the way to do this. Rich Farmbrough, 12:06 20 November 2006 (GMT).

Absolutely. Is there an existing bot that can tag the existing entries in the list? What about subcategories? Regards, Ben Aveling 00:53, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

My bot can trun list into cats. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 00:57, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Whaddaya mean?^v^ [[User:orngjce223|my home page[[Talk:orngjce223|my talk page]]]] 21:12, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

This sounds suspiciously similar to a discussion I've been having over on the Simpsons project, for which I've set about developing ListGenBot - see User:Mortice/ListGenBot for a spec and let me know if it would help, or if it needs expanding in order to be useful for you --Mortice 21:24, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Pretty cool, Mortice, but I think Rich and Ben are right that -in the case of the fiddlers- categories are the way to go. Ben and ß: the only problem I see with implementing categories is how to deal with redlink articles. I guess they could go in "Articles that have yet to be written" subcategories... is there some kind of standard out there already for dealing with this? --Eitch 23:05, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Someone should write a bot to clean up Ganeshbot's bad grammar. Kaldari 06:56, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

seems useless, can't ganeshbot clean up his own grammar? ST47Talk 11:39, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

apparently not. why do you say this is useless? it would certainly be easier than me fixing thousands of articles by hand. Kaldari 02:07, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure this can be automated (or at least, it's not automatizable using simple regular expression replacement, as done by most bots.) Tizio 10:35, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like what I did for the Rambot articles. I'll take a look tomorrow if I get time. Rich Farmbrough, 23:14 18 November 2006 (GMT).

Well that example is easy. I'll do some tests and file an approval request. Rich Farmbrough, 12:07 20 November 2006 (GMT).

Awesome, thanks! Kaldari 06:14, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Hello, would it be possible to have a bot created that would add the Law enforcement wikiproject header ({{Law enforcement}}) to articles that are in the Law Enforcement catagory? (here). Many thanks.--SGGH 14:37, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I'll take care of it shortly. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 14:56, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Thankyou.--SGGH 15:40, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

What subcats do you want tagged? Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 16:25, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

If im understanding you correctly, then all of the sub cats apart from Unarmed people shot by police, People shot dead by police and Vigilantes.

Template:CopyrightedFreeUse has been officially deprecated since February. However, there are still about 7000 images using it. The equivalent Template:PD-release should be substituted for it (or Template:No rights reserved which is also legally equivalent). Personally I prefer Template:PD-release as it is less confusing but means exactly the same thing legally, i.e. that all rights are renouced by the copyright holder. Kaldari 17:45, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Ill start on this Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 17:55, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

See User talk:Betacommand/20081201#Bot question, thanks/wangi 22:41, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

It looks like some people have "Free Use" confused with "Fair Use". Regardless, this bot is still doing the proper thing. The images that have been tagged by people incorrectly will have to be fixed by hand regardless. Kaldari 04:53, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

The sooner we can get Template:CopyrightedFreeUse deleted the better. It seems to be the source of lots of confusion and redundancy. Kaldari 04:55, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Could someone please create a bot which would automatically replace the Template:SER with Template:SRB. Even though SRB is an official ISO 3166-1 3-letter country code and an abbreviation for Serbia (from Srbija) many people still think this code is SER and having a wrong template doesn`t help either. It would be nice to have an automatic bot to correct future mistakes. Avala 14:08, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm tinkering with a proposal I've made which involves using categories to replace a list page (the proposal is Wikipedia:WikiProject The Simpsons/Proposal for managing song lists on Simpsons episodes) but I wonder if this is something that could be well managed by a bot.

The requirement would be to generate a page (or I guess edit a delimited section in the middle of a page) based on all the pages listed in a different category. Perhaps the extended requirement would be to find all the subcategories of a given category and use them to generate a list of lists. For instance, 'generate a page with sections named from subcategories of the category "songs on the simpsons", where each section has a list formed from the names of the pages in those subcategories (which would be the names of songs)'.

Or perhaps to take the text from a given section from each page of a list of pages (identified from being members of a category) and generate one page containnig all those sections. For instance 'copy all the sections called "songs" from all pages in the category "simpsons episodes" to the "songs" section of the page "list of songs on the simpsons" page'.

This all sounds quite fiddly, but I can imagine someone may have made a generic bot that can be fed with parameters to do this sort of processing. Is there anything out there to do something like this, or any keen on developing one? Please feel free to chat on my talk page if you want to ask questions or suggest solutions --Mortice 18:10, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Sounds feasable, But i have few questions are the songs in their own cats? if not do the page names all follow a pattern? could this just be one master list sorted by name? Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 18:51, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. There are, as suggested above, a number of options for doing this. The category based way would work something like this: category 'songs in the simpsons' contains subcategory 'songs in the simpsons episode 13'. Song 'happy birthday' is in category 'songs in the simpsons episode 13'. The bot should generate a page (or insert into a page) section "episode 13" with a bullet list including 'happy birthday'. The songs are all in 'episode' based categories (with structured names) which are all subcategories of the supercategory 'songs in the simpsons' so it should be all auto-generatable.

Hope that answers your question. The alternative might be easier (and preferable for editors?) - extract sections from the 'episode' pages into a big page, and I'd think that would make for a more generic bot (if you tend to do bots that way). As for your question about 'all just one list', personally I'd like the 'songs' page to have two lists, one alphabetical by song name and one sectioned by episode name, but that may be considered 'overkill'.

Even if the bot can be developed, this suggestion has to pass approval by the people who maintain the relevant pages, I'm just trying to kick some ideas around to see if one sticks --Mortice 20:25, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Update - I've been having a look at the bot API and it looks quite straightforward so I might 'have a go' at this (I'm a coder by trade and have a 24/7 connected server), although I know it will require 'approval' and I'm sure I'll need advice about writing an industrial strength bot --Mortice 00:40, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I've written a spec for this bot - see User:Mortice/ListGenBot, which I'm sure would be of use for all sorts of pages. So much so that I'm sure someone must have developed it already - anyone confirm or deny that? And if I develop it I'm likely to have a few questions about producing a pywikipedia based bot - anyone volunteer to be a sounding board for me? I'm aware of the requirement to get it approved first --Mortice 21:56, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm currently developing this bot --Mortice 12:21, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Category:Main pages with misplaced talk page templates contains pages with a template that belongs on the page's talk page instead. Can we employ a bot to move these? (Radiant) 13:28, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Yet again I should be able to do this if you explain the function a little better, Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 14:50, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks. Templates in this category shuold be on an article's talk page rather than the article itself. The category I mentioned above contains articles that contain at least one of those templates. The bot should periodically check this category, remove the relevant template(s) (and any parameters) and add them to the talk page instead. (Radiant) 14:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

And, Category:Articles actively undergoing construction and Category:Articles actively undergoing a major edit are supposed to be temporary categories, but have grown very large. Perhaps a bot could depopulate them weekly? (Radiant) 13:44, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes I can and Will have my bot empty the cat, Is there a day that you would suggest doing this? Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 14:44, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

• Not particularly. Note that these categories are generated by {{inuse}} and {{Underconstruction}}. Thanks! (Radiant) 14:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Before I go and have my bot blocked for this, (as a malfunctioning bot) what should I use for the edit summary? Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 15:06, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

• How about "(bot) Remove inuse tag, no activity for three days"? Or maybe five days. Or I could think of some pun to go with that :) (Radiant) 15:25, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I try to go through this and weed out the forgotten ones. It is a bit frustrating because some people demand the right to leave up the tag for long periods of time, and aren't shy about complaining. Also it's transcluded on a bunch of instructional pages, like Wikipedia:Edit lock so some care needs to be taken not to mess up those pages. But if someone wants to run a bot and deal with the occasional upset article owner, I think that's great. --W.marsh 18:22, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

How do I make a bot to message Wikiproject Gold Coast members? If possible, can someone make it for me. Thank you -- Nathannoblet 07:49, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Can do this. But I need what you want sent out and to who. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 13:08, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

I have opened suggestions for creating a template for image pages that warns admins that a user has contacted the copyright owner requesting the image's use of Wikipedia and asks not for it to be deleted while a response is expected. The discussion can be found here.

In order to work, it will need a bot that checks a tagging date and remove images that have been tagged for more than one week, and create a relevant category of unlicensed images each day, the same way it is done in {{Replaceable fair use}}.

I don't have any expertise in creating bots, so could someone please create a bot that can do this? ~ ► Wykebjs ◄ (userpage | talk) 18:05, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

WP:AWB can do this. If you want I can write up a guide for you and show you how to have AWB do this if you are intrested. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 20:02, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Betacommand, that would be much appreciated. ~ ► Wykebjs ◄ (userpage | talk) 21:15, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Also, Category:Pages needing an infobox conversion and Category:Needs album infobox conversion contain a template that should be switched to another template. Would a bot be feasible here? (Radiant) 13:33, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Likewise I can set my bot up to do this if you give some more detailed information on exactly what is changing Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 14:49, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

• This gives some related info. I'll ask around a bit to get the specifics. (Radiant) 14:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
  • (queried at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Albums). (Radiant) 16:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
  • [16] [17] [18] These three diffs are examples of the way the replacement works. The editor who does this is unconvinced that this can in fact be automated, so ymmv. (Radiant) 09:31, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

There are quite a few lists of new articles related to specific subject used by various wikiprojects. They all work 'manually' - with dedicated users adding articles they find to the lists - but this could all be easily autmomatized (botized). We need a bot that would: 1) look at a specified forum (i.e. Portal:Poland/New article announcements) 2) look at a specified section to find last reported article (they differ as various wikiprojects and such have no unified structure, so some may have 'November', others 'November 1-15', and so on 3) look at a 'what links here' of given article(s) - for example, Poland, Polish, Polish language for Portal:Poland, see what new articles have been added to the 'what links here' and generate a report in the above section in the format *[[article name]] created by [[User:Username]] on date This bot would save much time now spend by dozens of dedicated editors who scour the 'what links here' lists instead of doing more constructive work. Issues to consider: articles in question (countries) have many pages of 'what links here', to speed up the process the bot may want to look from the end to find the most recent article added, thus skipping 99% of the links - but this may skip checking redirect. I don't know how long will it take to analyze the entire page to find and analyze redirects, but once they are found they can be added to the main 'check' list and the bot wouldn't have to look through main article for them again, so it would be useful to have to options: normal scan (from the end to the last reported) and complete (from the end to the last reported, and then to the begining but generate only list of redirects). Additional features which I doubt would be included (wishlist): add lenght of the article, tags, lead; scan for new pictures, categories and stubs.-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  18:03, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I support this idea. If the bot doesn't work properly, it can be disabled. --Ineffable3000 18:58, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

• Support. It would definetly save a lot time for users. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 00:19, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
• Support. These lists could do with a bit of a hand. It'd be better if it had some way of working from newpages instead, but whatlinkshere would at least get it kicked off. Rebecca 09:40, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
• This is an interesting idea. I would be happy to get a bot-generated list once per day of articles that might be related to Germany, I would check them by hand and announce at the relevant announcement page myself. Whether the bot should work from Special:Newpages or from some Whatlinksheres or both should be tried out experimentally, whatever works best. Kusma (討論) 16:39, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
• Seems worth trying the experiment. - Jmabel | Talk 07:51, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Per here and on each affected template's talk page (thread name "Template name"), please dispatch a bot to rename all transclusions/links of:

• {{Africa in topic}} to {{Africa topic}}
• {{Asia in topic}} to {{Asia topic}}
• {{Europe in topic}} to {{Europe topic}}
• {{North America in topic}} to {{North America topic}}
• {{Oceania in topic}} to {{Oceania topic}}
• {{South America in topic}} to {{South America topic}}

Thanks!  David Kernow (talk) 10:22, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't think there's really a need for that. It wastes a lot of resources making all those edits, and the templates redirect to each other anyway. —Mets501 (talk) 21:32, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Templates {{wc}}, {{ec}} and {{ec2}} need substing into what appears to be thousands of articles. Chris cheese whine 20:10, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I can do this with AWB, though can I have a link that says they must be substed? ST47Talk 20:56, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Template namespace. Chris cheese whine 20:59, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi, I'm trying to get some Country and City Wikipedia pages for use on a Google map travel site. The code is written in C# and works ok for other sites. On Wikipedia I get a 403 error when I read in a page. Do I need to register my site process as a bot or could I use an existing bot to get the pages ?

please

our robots.txt blocks all automated crawlers. I would recommend that you either [download.wikimedia.org download a database dump] or use google's cache. ST47Talk 01:51, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks I'll try those --Seewhere.net 02:08, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

"On Wikipedia, and other Wiki-based websites broken external links still present a maintenance problem." linkrot

I am hoping someone takes on the task to write a WebCite-Bot, i.e. a bot which automatically feeds all cited URLs in Wikipedia to WebCite, which is a web archive similar to the Internet Archive, but with enhanced features such as on-demand archiving, and with a focus on scholarly material (as opposed to IA's shotgun-crawling-"archive-all-you-can"-approach). WebCite creates a snapshot (cached copy) of the cited URL, thereby archiving/preserving the cited webpage or webdocument (if caching was successful, the link to the snapshot should be added to the original URL on wikipedia). WebCite takes care of robot exclusion standards, no-cache tags etc on the cited page. If caching was successful, WebCite hands back a WebCite-ID, which should be added to the original link (for an example on how this could look like see examples below and also see the reference list at the bottom of the article http://www.jmir.org/2006/4/e27/ - all cited non-journal webpages also have a link to the WebCite snapshot). The benefit would be that all cited material will be automatically preserved and link rot, 404s or changes in the cited webpages will no longer be a problem. WebCite has an XML-based webservice which allows to communicate the caching request as well as to receive the WebCite ID if the caching was successful, see technical guide http://www.webcitation.org/doc/WebCiteBestPracticesGuide.pdf User:Eysen 19:45, 04 December 2006 (UTC)

Webcite usage is under discussion at WP:EL. Could be a great idea, but this type of citation usage is still a long way from mass replacement by bot. ∴ here…♠ 02:21, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I have seen a bot dealing with 404 broken links running on Polish Wikipedia. I couldn't remeber the bot's name, but you can ask at pl:Wikipedia:Boty.-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  05:34, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

The idea of WebCite is to prevent 404s in the first place by archiving the cited webpage immediately after they have been cited, i.e. archiving them prospectively and replacing the original URL with a link to the cited snapshot (in contrast, I assume that the Polish bot merely deletes or flags broken links). BTW - In the discussions on WebCite I have seen some misguided comments on copyright concerns - on that note one should stress that caching on the Internet is frequently done and does not constitute a copyright violation if no-cache tags and robot exclusion standards are honored (see also Webcite FAQ, which cites a recent lawsuit against Google, which Google won). While retrospective "mass replacement" makes little sense, at least cited URLs in new articles should be webcited as soon as possible. I am still hoping for a volunteer to write an experimental bot which hands over new wikipedia submissions to WebCite and replaces newly cited URLs with WebCite links or at least adds a WebCite link to the original reference (for how to do this including explanations of the XML-based webservice see WebCite FAQ. Below, I have given some examples on how this should look like. --Eysen 19:22, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

--snip--

---

It is proposed to develop a bot which - using the WebCite webservice - changes a reference (or even "naked" URLs) as follows:

Replace a reference like:

• Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying", The Guardian, October 27, 2005, retrieved October 27, 2005.

with a reference like this

• Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying", The Guardian, October 27, 2005, retrieved October 27, 2005, WebCited December 4th, 2006.

or this (in addition to the WebCite URL, the original URL might be given):

• Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying", The Guardian, October 27, 2005, retrieved October 27, 2005, original URL: http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1601858,00.html, WebCited December 4th, 2006.

Alternatively, the cited URL can also be retained as part of the link to webcitation, to keep the cited URL explicit and to allow easy reverting to the original URL should this be desired:

• Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying"], The Guardian, October 27, 2005, retrieved October 27, 2005, WebCited December 4th, 2006, archived URL:http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1601858,00.html&date=2006-12-04

---

--snap--

As a lowly peasant of wikipedia only, I think this is a great idea - PocklingtonDan 22:06, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Great - any volunteers to write a beta-bot to experiment with this?--Eysen 17:21, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Hello again, I was wondering if one of you lovely people could help us out again - we've set up an Assement department and would like all {{Architecture|class=stub}} adding to all of the stubs currently listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Architecture/Stub categories, starting with those articles with {{architecture-stub}} and {{architect-stub}} tags. Cheers. --Mcginnly | Natter 12:06, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Ill take care of that Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 14:19, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I see the bots off and running already - cheers. Please share a cigar with me as a token of my appreciation - for all you americans out there - it's the best cuban.......--Mcginnly | Natter 00:06, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Back again, on a similar tack, is it possible to add the FA and GA criteria as well, just leaving the A's and B's for us to assess? --Mcginnly | Natter 00:53, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

(This isn't a bot request per se but an "is this worth doing" post - I can write the bot myself if people think its worth doing.)

I notice that one of the items permanently on the maintenance list is the Wikipedia:Cleanup list and that the number of articles needing cleanup seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. I had an idea for a bot that might help with this problem. I could write this bot myself (already have one bot on trial) but wanted to get people's ideas for whether it was worthwhile, comments etc etc, before I started on it.

Brief scope as I see it now (amenable to change): Bot would be manually run or automatically run on an eg weekly basis. Bot would trawlCategory:All_pages_needing_cleanup and find any new additions since its last trawl. It would visit each new addition and pull a list of contributors. It would then leave a message on the talk page of (every contributor) or (last 10 contributors) or (article starter) or (contributors with 10+edits) or (whatever) notifying them that the article is in need of cleanup and listing tips for how they could help to achieve this etc.

What do you think? Worthwhile? Ideas? Comments? - PocklingtonDan 17:44, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a nag-bot though if it's only weekly, I don't have a complaint on that. I'd be willing to help out with this if you decide to go ahead with it - for example, AWB can be used to generate a list, and to find new additions to the list.(it can compare 2 lists of articles) AWB can also probably be used to find the last 10 people - it has support for C# modules. I'd have to think about that one. But yeah, it is a good idea! ST47Talk 19:04, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

It would be a nag-bot essentially, yes. I'm not sure from your wording whether or not you're suggesting there is generally a policy agains the use of nag-bots?? It just seems that the articles needing cleanup list is getting bigger and bigger and, since bots cannot effectively clear up articles, the next best thing would be to run a bot to try and prod users into cleaning up articles. Can I get some more input on this, from multiple people before I go ahead? Which set of users do you think it would be fair to "nag"? Perhaps last 0-20 plus article originator?? Editors with top 10 number of edits for that article?? Top 10 most-editing editors from other articles in the category? I want to get a good impression of whether people think the general idea is a good one, and then hammer out a more specific scope/specification before I start work on the bot. Cheers - PocklingtonDan 19:32, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

If the talk page has a WikiProject tag, could you have the bot flag the attention parameter instead? This will place the article in "X articles needing attention" for the specific WikiProject (see for example Category:Hawaii articles needing attention). Members of the projects are supposed to be watching these cats, so there's no reason to contact anyone. —Viriditas | Talk 21:03, 7 December 2006 (UTC):

This seems like a useful extra feature, certainly. Can you just explain to me exactly how the attention flag works etc? Is it a simple case of adding something like "attention=yes" to the poject banner? If so, I don't see why the bot couldn't set that flag if it was a project article, or else contact some of the editors if not a project article. - PocklingtonDan 21:40, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. See Template_talk:WikiProject_Hawaii for a brief description. I doubt every WikiProject has the appropriate template, so your bot could check against a list of WikiProjects currently using the assessment template. —Viriditas | Talk 22:05, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for all comments. This is now in request for approval - PocklingtonDan 12:40, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi there!

I was wondering if it would be possible to run a spacing bot, either automated or manual, that puts spaces or newlines between wiki syntax and removes spaces or newlines if they weren't needed? Obviously it would have to be pretty simple so as not to get spacing wrong. I could probably knock something up in Yabasic pretty quickly, using an external program like Wget to handle getting and sending data from the page.

If anyone's interested I'll give an account of different wiki syntax that I believe spacing makes easier to understand (like putting spaces after bullet points before the text).

Cheers,

Yuser31415^@?#&help! 02:44, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

This seems pretty straight-forward; But is it a valuable use of resources? Jmax- 02:59, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, if it makes wiki syntax while editing pages simpler to understand. By the way, what would be a good delay between each edit? Thanks, Yuser31415^@?#&help! 03:09, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm skeptical; that's a lot of resources. Part of the rules of AWB states

Avoid making insignificant minor edits such as only adding or removing some white space

and although that's not official policy, it's generally accepted. Would it change the way pages are displayed, or only their wikicode? —Mets501 (talk) 11:56, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

The reason for that rule is primarily that (a very few) people complained about such edits (for a number of reasons - one was that there was no "hide bots" option on the watchlist then). With the amount of AWB editing going on, were it to be relaxed, very likely most pages would be in conformance with AWB's "Genreal fixes" quite quickly. However the nightmare scenario would be if a different framework had different standards. So it could work, but would need a little planning and cooperation. Rich Farmbrough, 12:45 7 December 2006 (GMT).

I don't know how many resources the bot would use up. I expect I would just focus it in the main articlespace. With a 2-10 second delay between edits, it should give the server enough of a break as so not to notice any difference (of course, you're more knowledgeable in this than me). I would make a suggestion that it runs about once every day for a period of about one or two hours; is this acceptable? (To me, it sounds quite a long time, so feel obliged to point out a better timescale.) I'm not sure the rules of AWB take any standing with this, although I see how they could be a good guideline.

The only nightmare I see is if different people have different spacing or newline standards. However, my (personal!) rule is to use as much whitespace as possible.

I would like to see your input on this. Cheers, Yuser31415 19:28, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Any bot that does nothing but make wikitext prettier is a waste of resources. 10 seconds delay between edits means an extra 8640 edits per day with no benefit to readers. Whitespace edits also tend to make diffs more complicated, although nothing has happened. I am not convinced that this bot will benefit the encyclopedia at all, so any potential mild harm should count against it. Kusma (討論) 13:08, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Just a random user here, but I have to say i'm baffled as to what if any benefit the clearing of excess whitespace brings?????- PocklingtonDan 13:27, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi! I agree with your statement, "... so any potential mild harm should count against it", but I personally disagree with your other statement, "... any bot that does nothing but make wikitext prettier is a waste of resources". 10 seconds delay is too little for this sort of bot, I agree; if it was a 60-second pause then that means 60 edits per hour, ie. 120 edits if the bot runs for a two hour period. Whitespace, in my opinion, can make editing easier (and if there are, by any chance, two newlines in a row, they will be converted to one newline, therefore changing the display). It may be you are completely right; however, I just want to 'do my bit' to improve the encyclopedia. Perhaps, instead, I could write a bot to detect very short articles with no stub marker and report them to me, or as such. Any ideas? Cheers, Yuser31415 19:06, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

(removing indent) I applaud your wish to contibrute your programmign knowledge its just I personally think re-arranging whitespace is a poor use of your bot's time and the server's resources. If there isn't already such a thing, a bot that flags near-empty articles as stubs would seem a much better idea. If it was able to flag the stubs as project stubs based on the category it was in or article name (this would probably need to be manualy-assisted) then all the better. Why not start a new section on this page to discuss this and move these comments there? - PocklingtonDan 19:11, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Aloha. WikiProject Hawaii assessment is just getting started and we really need help. To start, I need a bot to replace the current WikiProject tag with the new tag {{WikiProject Hawaii |class=NA |cat=yes}} on every category talk page contained within Category:WikiProject Hawaii articles (please exclude the subcats). Thank you for your assistance! —Viriditas | Talk 21:51, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Will add that to the que Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 22:06, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your good work. Can you do the exact same thing for Category:Unassessed Hawaii articles? I just noticed it is full of cats. —Viriditas | Talk 21:49, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Great job. Now, on to stub assessment. I would like to add {{WikiProject Hawaii|class=Stub}} to all talk pages in Category:Hawaii stubs (including subcats). Please add class=Stub to unassessed or untagged articles only, skipping articles where class is already flagged. Thank you again. —Viriditas | Talk 01:32, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

User:WatchlistBot can help you with this. I'm a bit behind right now, but I'll add it to my to-do list and contact you when I can get to it, if you can't find anyone to do it sooner. Ingrid 01:48, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your offer to help, Ingrid. Long time, no talk! Hopefully, Betacommand will get to the stub assessment before you do, because I want to talk to you about developing a dedicated WikiProject bot as well as utilizing WatchlistBot data. For example, I would like to see an infobox on the WikiProject page displaying the top ten most active articles in the project. Furthermore, along with what others are proposing regarding stubs, I was wondering if WatchlistBot could also monitor the Hawaii stub cats (mentioned above) for new additions, adding the WP tag and flagging class=Stub as needed. Thank you. —Viriditas | Talk 03:45, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Per discussions here, I need these 152 users informed of a change made recently to the common.css file so that they can restore their ability to view Persondata. The bot should leave the following notice on those users' talk pages:
"Per recent discussions, the way in which Persondata is viewed by Wikipedia editors has changed. In order to continue viewing Persondata in Wikipedia articles, please edit your user CSS file to display table.persondata rather than table.metadata. More specific instructions can be found on the Persondata page."
If there are any questions about this request, please ask me on my talk page rather than here. Thanks. Kaldari 08:33, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Done! ShakingSpirit^talk 00:36, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Simply, this bot would check for {{lowercase}} tags on an article, then rename an article (let's say, "Test article") to "Thisisanarticleusedbylowercasebot". Then, the bot would rename "Thisisanarticleusedbylowercasebot" to "test article". It should be easy to create, and would only need to be run once. -Slash- 20:27, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Lowercase names aren't allowed my the MediaWiki software. —Mets501 (talk) 20:55, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

This a request for a bot that counts the number of items at Wikipedia:Featured articles and puts that number into a template. Once the bot has proved reliable, it envisaged that the bot will be flagged to edit the protected page Template:FA number, which is used as a counter within the Main Page FA box.

A bit of background, in recent discussion at Talk:Main Page consensus was reached for an FA counter. Once it was implemented as template requiring manual updating, several FA regulars expressed their unhappiness with being asked to keep track of another page when pulling together the results of WP:FAC and WP:FARC. On the Talk:Main Page discussion, FA regulars suggested a bot solution, which seems to address everyone's concerns. In case anyone remembers the recent attempt to get approval for a bot to edit a protected page, Raul654 has stated that he would be willing to set its flag once it proves reliable.

It occurs to me (as opposed to me relaying the results of the discussion to date) that some sort of vandal-spoofing feature would be useful. Wikipedia:Featured articles is already under semiprotection, but a particularly determined vandal might add or remove items to make the Main Page number jump. One idea is the use of a user whitelist (admins and selected non-admin FA regulars), in which the bot waits 15 minutes or so if anyone not on the whitelist adds or removes articles, to give time for vandalism to be reverted. (Yes, I'm paranoid.) Hopefully this description has made sense. Thanks! - BanyanTree 13:43, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Seems pretty straight-forward; I'll let you know once I've set up a test page. --Jmax- 05:51, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Alright, See User:Jmax-bot/FACounter. I am in the middle of requesting approval for this bot. I will also need a list of whitelisted editors for WP:FA. --Jmax- 02:31, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, is there a GA botcounter? b_cubed 21:00, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't look like it. The number at Wikipedia:Good articles is updated manually. - BanyanTree 21:44, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Any chance that I can get a bot to go through Category:Unassessed biography articles on the Biography Wikiproject, and have it label any that are stubs as a stub in Wikiproject Biography's rating? I know there's a bot that's doing something similar, but that one's more purpseful in finding unassessed ones rather than assessing some. --Wizardman 05:56, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Anyone? If there's a way to do it on AWB, how would I go about doing that then? --Wizardman 00:52, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

You might want to take a look at Kingboyk's AWB plugin. It seems to be what you're looking for. —Mets501 (talk) 01:45, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Exactly what I was looking for, thanks. --Wizardman 02:35, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

No problem. —Mets501 (talk) 02:42, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Is there anyway that a bot capable of unwikilinking dates (specifically years) could be made? I read a lot of articles that contain such wikilinked dates, e.g. 1942 or 1784, which really add nothing to the article. I am aware, that as it stands now, the wikipedia policy on dates is to have all of the date wikilinked. However, in practice, there has been a growing trend with FA articles to unlink the dates. Personally I think a bot capable of this would be very useful. I'm not sure how to do it otherwise I'd try myself. The only concern is that you'd have to make sure it doesn't unlink the "fuller" dates, e.g. November 20 1983. (if you can respond on my talk page it would be helpful) b_cubed 19:52, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

If given the go-ahead I could probably write this myself, but I'll wait for further input first. Please note I'll be away for a few hours; I'll get back to you then. Cheers! Yuser31415 20:29, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

::I think I saw some discussion of this on another page recently. Objections were raised that: ::*It would lead to overlinking - ie wikipedia doesn't want every year linked. ::*Four-digit numbers could be used as a number or a year. ie "In the year 2000, X did Y" or "X led 2000 troops into battle" ::*Numbers can refer to something more specific ie "2000 AD" or whatever that Judge Dredd comic is. ::*Numbers could be years, but as part of fuller strings, ie "Battle of Suessonia (1976)" should link tot he whole battle article, not just the year. ::*It wouldn't be possible to have a sufficiently clever bot to get round these caveats, so it would probably have to be manually-assisted and would thus represent a massive amount of work. ::Note the above are my recollections of what I read of a discussion of this same idea elsewhere

Ignore me, didn't read properly, thought your edits were going to be in the opposite direction (ie linking, not delinking). Oops - PocklingtonDan 21:46, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I can set it up and have it run just getting the linked to years Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 21:42, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Out of curiosity does anyone know if a bot like this has been made before? Additionally, would someone be willing to explain how to make bots? b_cubed 04:24, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I use AWB/Pywikipedia framework but this is a simple find and replace command that I could do fairly simply. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 06:25, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

With regard to how to make bots, there is a new guide being written at Wikipedia:Creating a bot. It is not yet complete - PocklingtonDan 09:37, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

So for myself to get a bot of this kind, would I need someone else to write the code for me or do I need to figure it out? Although I suppose it technically wouldn't matter whose bot it was, as it would help edit wikipedia, I wanted to have one of my own (assuming of course that its usefulness is approved). b_cubed 20:59, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Either/or would work. I would offer to write this for you but already got a bot development project on the go. If you have programming experience check out the creating a bot guide i linked above, and you should be able to do this yourself. if not, you'll have to hang around til someone with free time and programming skills reads this post - PocklingtonDan 17:29, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Looks like I will be waiting around. b_cubed 19:12, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[Copied from above]: (removing indent) I applaud your wish to contibrute your programmign knowledge its just I personally think re-arranging whitespace is a poor use of your bot's time and the server's resources. If there isn't already such a thing, a bot that flags near-empty articles as stubs would seem a much better idea. If it was able to flag the stubs as project stubs based on the category it was in or article name (this would probably need to be manualy-assisted) then all the better. Why not start a new section on this page to discuss this and move these comments there? - PocklingtonDan 19:11, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I'd love to. How does everyone feel about this? Yuser31415 00:56, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Manually assisted I'd be fine with, but a bot going around analyzing articles and tagging them is a little unnerving for me. --Mets501 (talk) 11:54, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

You are correct. My simple definition of a stub would be an article of 10 or less sentences; this could be manually assisted, the user giving appropriate stub markers, or the bot could just mark the article as a {{stub}} and move on. How does this sound? Cheers, Yuser31415 06:22, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Since you are able to write this yourself, I would move straight to the request for approval stage rather than posting here - you'll soon find out whether or not people think your proposal is any good there. If this is your first bot, make sure to follow the guidelines for the request process, including setting up a user page for your bot etc and writing a full spec - see other examples on the request for approval page - PocklingtonDan 19:22, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I will when I have time :). At the moment I am trying to figure out how to upload the text, it is a bit harder than I thought. I may use one of the frameworks yet. Cheers! Yuser31415 07:05, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

I recently created a new category Cars of England. There are quite a few cars from england, and it's quite tedious to add them all. I do, however, has a list of categories that list cars from manufacturers in England. Is there a way to have a bot add the category to all the articles found in these sub-categories? Thanks, Riguy 07:13, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

AutoWikiBrowser can probably do this. Can you give me the names of the sub categories, so I can give it a try? Jayden54 10:00, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Yea sure. Here are the sub categories I have so far: Category:Aston Martin vehicles, Category:Bentley vehicles, Category:Land Rover vehicles, Category:Lotus vehicles, Category:Rolls-Royce vehicles, Category:TVR vehicles. Thanks for your help, Riguy ^talk/_contribs 03:12, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I've done all the articles in those categories (around 160), and they've been added to the new category. Let me know when you have any other categories I need to do. Cheers, Jayden54 21:31, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

OK, thanks a lot for your help! Riguy ^talk/_contribs 23:13, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Does anyone want to take over tagging orphan articles with {{linkless}}? The actual tagging is simple with AWB, just load Special:Lonelypages (it refreshed Saturdays/Wednesdays as of mid-November) and run the bot, it will make about 800 edits each refresh. I can supply you with the regex I used to ignore an array of pages that should not be tagged (dab pages, pages to be transwikid, various other odd stuff). You would also want to maintain a list of orphaned articles, you can see what I mean at User:W.marsh/orphans articles/A-C.

The one hitch is that you will also want to de-orphan the ignored articles somehow or other, you could create a list of orphaned dab pages and so on from your userspace, or manually add them to Wikipedia:Links to disambiguation pages (which is what I did, hence the burnout after 6 months most likely). It takes maybe 2-3 hours a week (almost all on the manual stuff), maybe 5-10 minutes plus bot time if you just do the tagging and output the skipped articles to lists in your userspace.

The more automation you can add (e.g. automatically updated lists) the faster this would be, unfortunately I could never add much except automated tagging with AWB. It's not glamerous work (for every 3,000 or so edits my bot made, I got about one reply on my talk page) but I think it's helpful work, I did notice a whole lot of articles getting de-orphaned within a few days after the tag was added. --W.marsh 15:37, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

can you give me the regex? Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 20:11, 13 December 2006 (UTC) Ill take over some of the task. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 20:11, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

The regex I used to ignore articles was:

linkless|geodis|copyvio|{{Disambig|this AfD|This page has been deleted|#redirect|dated prod|4LA|{{dab}}|{{hndis|{{disamb|numberdis|4CC|3CC|2CC|Schooldis|Shipindex|Tempdab|Wikipedia does not currently have an encyclopedia article for|{{wi}}|{{surname|4CC|TLAdisambig|{{deleted|{{move to|{{dicdef

It's crude but it worked pretty well. But you'll need to maintain some kind of a list, or use a non-AWB bot that can check "what links here" or special:lonelypages will just give you the same articles every refresh. --W.marsh 20:18, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

We have a lot of articles about individual US towns, many of which refer to the "2000 census" in their introductions. As we have an article for the United States Census, 2000, maybe somebody could script a bot to wikify those references. Cribcage 07:43, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Are they in any specific category, or is there any other way I can track them? --Jmax- 08:04, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Are these the articles that were created by Rambot? If so you might want to speak to that bot's owner about it – Gurch 13:58, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Userboxes - This user is a translator from French to English on Wikipedia:Translation. - This user is a translator and proofreader from Spanish to English on Wikipedia:Translation.

Hello, I've upgraded with others Wikipedia:Translation into English which is now here : Wikipedia:Translation.

One thing we decided is to migrate from one big static page with all the available translators (which is heavy, hard to maintain, never up-to-date) to two userbox templates ({{Translator}} and {{Proofreader}}) so 1) all the work is done automatically by the categories 2) each translator has a link to the translation page on his user page.

To migrate from the old system to the new one, since they were a lot of people, I need a bot which would go through every user listed on Wikipedia:Translators available, and which would let the following message on his talk page :

{{subst:Translation/Talkpage}}

Jmfayard 18:22, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Ok. I'll get this done for you ASAP. --Jmax- 20:19, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

I have asked for clarification of policy for this request. I am still a relatively new editor, and am not completely familiar with WP:BOT. Sorry for the delay. --Jmax- 03:44, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Please postpone this. I want to do changes to this system before we contact everybody. Jmfayard 16:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

A pretty trivial bot, lemme know when you want it run -- Tawker 08:17, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Can someone make a bot which places new user templates on someone's talk pages? If you can, I would seriously appreciate it! Bushcarrot (Talk·Desk) 23:20, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Such requests are usually denied, unfortunately. --Jmax- 03:01, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

If you haven't done so already, I would suggest contacting User:FrummerThanThou, who is trying to put together a proposal for this that everyone is happy with - PocklingtonDan 10:16, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Wow, I wanted to do exactly that. But, I don't know bot code. :-( Can someone help me? Bearly541 13:49, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

There is no such thing as "bot code". Bots can be programmed in several languages. Read Wikipedia:Creating_a_bot. Cheers - PocklingtonDan 13:55, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Is it possible to make a bot that automatically removes users that are blocked? Often times admins forget to remove users that they block or spend time blocking the user and putting the appropriate message(s) on the blocked user's page. Or, sometimes when there are a large number of notices on WP:AIV they will go through blocking users first, waiting until a bit later to remove users. So, to help with efficiency (by cutting down on conflicts) a bot might be useful. -- tariqabjotu 00:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Check with Voice of All; he has a bot that does something similar on WP:RPP, so he probably has the framework that would be necessary already and could make needed modifications, rather than writing a whole new bot. Essjay (Talk) 01:14, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean something like: user A adds vandal B to AIV. admin C blocks vandal B, but forgets to remove him from AIV. bot D looks through all block logs of people listed at AIV every... 1 minute?... and sees that vandal B has been blocked, then edits AIV to remove the vandal, and posts on vandal B's talkpage about being blocked? Seems simple enough I might be able to give my framework a go. GeorgeMoney (talk) 05:31, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

I'd be able to add this to VoABot I I suppose. It would just AJAX down the usernames looking at the ipblocklist for that user, if they are blocked, it could removed the name. Voice-of-All 07:39, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

As part of some work I am carrying out on Scottish Historic Railways, I have created a progress and reference page in my user space at User:Pencefn/Historical Scottish Railways. I would like to add the latest revision date/time into the table for the article and associated talk page on the second and fourth column respectively - which is updated to reflect the work in progress (covering updates to articles and the potential addition of more articles). Can anyone help me? Stewart 19:16, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

How often do you need it run? If not just once, then this may not be a valuable use of resources. Not my call to make, however. If deemed otherwise, I'd be glad to assist. -- Jmax- 20:55, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

I guess once every two or three weeks. This is my first foray into the use of bots, so advice, guidance, etc. gratefully received. Stewart 21:08, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Whoever puts any comments on REF desk without signing should be given a welcome template, so they will sign next time. (only if they don't have the welcome template already).--Judged 23:10, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

You should ask Hagerman about this (his bot HagermanBot already puts unsigned templates on unsigned user comments). —Mets501 (talk) 23:57, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to everyone. I'm curious if anyone knows of any bots working the neutrality template categories. I would like to know what percentage of articles have neutrality-related tags by WikiProject and have a report generated, with a template updated on the project page (Pearle produced a similar report listing articles needing cleanup). After the report is generated, the template on the project page could be updated with a percentage linking to the category of WikiProject-related neutrality issues. Something like, "12% of articles require attention for neutrality-related issues." WikiProject departments would deal with this. The bot would only need to be run once a week. Thanks. —Viriditas | Talk 03:33, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

I was wondering if someone with a bot would be able to place banners for Wikipedia:WikiProject Massively multiplayer online games on all talk pages (including non-existant ones) in the category of Category:Massively multiplayer online games including it's sub-categories. This need not be a reoccurring event, but it is necessary to get this WikiProject up and running. Any help is appreciated! Greeves 04:31, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I should be able to start within the next 24 hours —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Betacommand (talk • contribs) 05:39, 19 December 2006 (UTC).

Not to be rude, but when will you be starting? It has almost been a week. If you cannot do it, would there be any other bot owners willing to help? By the way, the tag to place on the talk pages is {{WP_MMOG}}. Thanks in advance and have a merry Christmas! Greeves 00:00, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

He started today (my watchlist is now full of "Tagging for {{WP_MMOG}}" ^_^) ShakingSpirit^talk 00:41, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Great! Thanks Betacommand! Greeves 17:10, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Not a problem just spread the word about my bot and the availability of it :) Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 01:14, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

A bot would be needed to carry this task following a modification to {{Permprot}}:

• Look linked pages in the template: namespace.
• If the page uses {{/doc}}, add doc=yes as a parameter to {{Permprot}}.

Circeus 21:14, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Basically no bots have admin rights, so this has to be done by hand. —Mets501 (talk) 02:25, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

{{Permprot}} is a talk page header. Circeus 02:31, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

can I get a few links to what you are talking about (examples)? Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 02:47, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

I think he means pages like Template:POV. —Mets501 (talk) 03:03, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

No. Stuff like template talk:Cite news. However, the problem is actually that template:permprot is not too widely used, and maybe I should make similar edits to Template:Protected template instead, which will then make the bot request far more useful, by making it clear that edits to the documentation (quite frequent) can be made directly. Circeus 03:16, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Given that my proposal for an additional step to the AfD process (found here) is meeting both opposition and the suggestion that the job could be better done by a bot, I've brought that proposal here. The suggestion is a reasonably simple one:

1. Once or twice a day (preferably the latter), the bot would scan through the list of AfD nominations at WP:AFD/T.
2. For each nomination, it would check the history to find the creator and creation date of the article;
   1. If the article is older than four months, it is ignored and the bot continues to scan the other nominations.
   2. If it is younger than four months, the process continues.
3. The bot then moves to the User Talk page of the article's creator, and checks that it does not already contain an instance of {{AFDWarning}} or {{AFDNote}} for that article.
4. If there is none, it places {{subst:AFDNote|ArticleName}} -- ~~~~ at the bottom of the page. No new section is required, since the template creates its own.
5. Finally, it returns to WP:AFD/T and continues.

This would avoid the bureaucracy that is the major criticism of my original proposal, and (hopefully) significantly reduce the problems of biting that I raised there. Thanks! Daveydweeb (^chat/_review!) 01:11, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I should note that I would be happy to manually run this bot once or twice daily, if it were not fully automated. Daveydweeb (^chat/_review!) 01:34, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

If there is currently no system in place to notify users that articles they started are nominated for deletion then I think this is a great idea. I am unable to offer you any help right now due to other commitments but if you need help coding this in a week or so I could help. You can start the approvals request process without actually having any code written, which will tell you if it is a good idea or whether to give it up. - PocklingtonDan 19:19, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Support - this sounds like a really good idea, and I was wondering if any progress has been made. I can write this bot from scratch if necessary, just let me know. Jayden54 18:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

I have listed this request on Requests for approval so if have any comments or suggestions, please list them there. Cheers, Jayden54 20:01, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm using the Weblinkchecker.py bot and have a whole load of bad links. Is there a way to have a bot remove them from the articles? (I reaize that this could be hard, since we have refs and [] links) One output looks like:

• http://www.zbi.ee/fungal-genomesize/index.php
  • In Animal Genome Size Database on Tue Sep 12 01:04:24 2006, Socket Error: (10054, 'Connection reset by peer')
  • In C-value on Wed Nov 29 14:41:33 2006, Socket Error: (10060, 'Operation timed out')

ST47Talk 22:13, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I was looking at replace.py for this, and, well, it's ugly. Every link would need me to run the bot another time, with different parameters. I'm thinking a .BAT file with each replacement.

RegExes I will place here for development purposes

[\[|<ref>]''opening tag''[^<\[]*''additional text, like {{cite''%link[^<\]]*''More text before the end''[\]|</ref>]''end tag''

To

Tested in AWB, didn't work. Any other ideas? ST47Talk 19:22, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Eagle_101, king of regular expressions, says:

(<ref>.*?url=\s*|\[)LINK*?(</ref>|\])

I don't think simply removing dead links is a good idea at all. The linkw as presumably added for a reason - because it held good content. Because of web caching services such as google and alexa and WebCite etc this information may still be available eve thought he original link is dead. I would not want a bot siply removing the dead link without giving people a chance to manually update or find a caches copy of the linked page - PocklingtonDan 14:53, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Definitely NOT a good idea, though an understandable desire: Wikipedia:Dead external links specifically says that dead links are NOT to be removed.

On the other hand, TAGGING such dead links or otherwise marking them could be a GREAT idea - then other editors would know that a problem existed when they read the article with the bad link in it. A similar concept is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links; it has been suggested that a template be put immediately after the bad link; the template would display the problem (as does, for example, {{fact}}), and could contain a link ("more"; "help", whatever) that a user could click on to get to an instruction page that would discuss possible ways to fix the bad external link. John Broughton | Talk 00:54, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm trying to find out how many articles and categories ultimately descend from Category:Dungeons & Dragons and how many of these are stubs (both by categorization and by byte/word count). Lists would be good if possible. For comparison sake, I'm also seeking similar numbers for Category:Chess. This is for the following purposes:

• See how much of Wikipedia as a whole is given over to D&D. (It seems to me D&D exposure is much higher among Wikipedians than the general population.)
• Determine whether sweeping mergers are called for, into titles one level less specific (e.g. Dwarven deities in the World of Greyhawk rather than the individual deities).

NeonMerlin 23:56, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

There are 1041 articles in categories branching from Category:Chess. In order to collect the statistics you desire, I would have to request each of those pages and perform a character count. I'll speak to someone from the Bot Approvals Group and see if they'll let me perform this, or what I must do in order to. -- Jmax- 21:30, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

PockBot would give you a list of all articles in category, as well as their article class (eg stub) - PocklingtonDan 16:28, 27 December 2006 (UTC)