Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 80

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Archive 75

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Archive 78

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Most imported user scripts table

Latest comment: 5 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion

Per a request at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Popular user scripts, SD0001 created a script to update the table at Wikipedia:User scripts/Most imported scripts. While it's great that the table can now be updated without too much effort, the ongoing work of keeping this table up to date on a periodic basis seems like a task better suited to a bot than a human. Plus bots have the higher query limit, and shouldn't mind waiting a bit longer for results in order to lessen the sever load of ~1700-1900 API calls (e.g. making sequential API calls and/or using an appropriate maxlag setting). - Evad37 [talk] 13:45, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

@DannyS712: probably worth a mention in the next issue of WP:Scripts++. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 07:58, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Bot for Simplifying Medical Jargon

Latest comment: 4 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Not a good task for a bot.; if you want to discuss non-bot ways of doing changes, you should do so on a more appropriate page. Anomie ⚔ 03:32, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Hello, I was wondering if it might be possible to construct a bot to streamline the otherwise tedious task of fixing numerous (thousands) of Wikipedia articles that use certain medical jargon terms and revise them to their more widely understood counterparts. For example, I would propose a bot that changes the phrase "renal failure" to kidney failure (except on pages when they are a part of quotes or in the title of a research article that is being cited, if a bot can be programmed to screen for those exceptions). There are several other examples and programming is foreign to me. Please let me know if this is a viable idea for an otherwise tedious (and herculean) task. Thank you! TylerDurden8823 (talk) 00:46, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Not a good task for a bot. This sort of task falls under WP:CONTEXTBOT. Word replacements, like automatic spell checking, typically have a higher-than-desired chance of causing more problems than they fix. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 01:34, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Okay, AntiCompositeNumber. Also, just for feedback-it's not particularly constructive or kind to say "bad idea". It's unnecessary and demeaning. Instead, perhaps just say this probably won't work because...as you did above, and skip the negativity in the edit summary. That doesn't feel very collaborative. Thanks. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 05:00, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

When I use a pre-formed message template, like {{BOTREQ}}, my edit summary usually ends up as the key for the message I used. In this case, that's {{BOTREQ|badidea}}. I'm sorry that it came across as demeaning, that wasn't my intention. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 05:06, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

@TylerDurden8823: Try the Simple English Wikipedia. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:43, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Regular Wikipedia articles on medicine are generally still written at a higher than desired reading level and many of them require further simplification of jargon for a general audience (a target of ~ an 8th grade reading level). The Simple Wikipedia suggestion doesn't really help me in this case, but thanks. Also, thank you for your reply Anti. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 23:21, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

@TylerDurden8823: You might consider using Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser which is semi-automated. It will do simple search and replaces automatically, but the user has to check each one to make sure they are appropriate and can reverse them with a click before saving. If you want help setting that up, let me know. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 23:28, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

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

Bot to replace User:UTRSBot

Latest comment: 5 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

This bot is unfortunately down again and both of the users who maintained it have departed the project. without the bot there is no on-wiki record of UTRS appeals, leaving the system ripe for WP:FORUMSHOP abuses. At the very least if the "notify user" functionality could be replicated, that would be great. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:25, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Maybe this is why. Any replacement should not be prone to the same abuse. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:25, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Beeblebrox, To echo Redrose64 above, the bot is disabled at the moment due to abuse. SQL ^{Query me!} 22:20, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Huh. I thought UTRS itself verified emails or something for this sort of reason. Well that blows, but thanks for your replies. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:47, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Archiving live links to SR/Olympics before it goes down

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Hello. I wasn't sure where to put this as this is a request in regards to a live website that's going down in a few months. SR/Olympics will be closing by March 2020. On Wikipedia, there's 945 articles that are using this website url, with 2 here and 391 more here (might be duplicates). I feel that InternetArchiveBot nor WaybackMedic would be suitable for this request as the links aren't dead yet. Should a bot archive these links before they break or wait? --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 19:25, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678: is this something IABot can do preemptively? DannyS712 (talk) 19:35, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

DannyS712, I let the Wayback operators know. They should start archiving the site soon. —CYBERPOWER (Happy 2020) 23:39, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

WP:BOLDAVOID search

Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion

Is it possible for someone to search the English Wikipedia and create a list of articles that do not follow WP:BOLDAVOID? Specifically, the search would need to find if there is any use of linking ([[ ]]) within the bolded (''' ''') portion of the first sentence of the article. If this is possible, would you be able to provide an output list of the linked article names here: User:Gonzo_fan2007/BOLD. Cheers, « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 21:50, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Someone's already got a bot for that, if I remember correctly. Don't remember who it is or I'd check to see if they're still operating. Primefac (talk) 14:51, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Primefac, when I searched WP:BOTREQ and WP:BRFA archives for WP:BOLDAVOID, MOS:BOLDAVOID, etc. nothing came up. I would be concerned if a bot was actually making the changes (instead of just identifying possible problem articles), as fixing it requires a little human input. As an example, you may have The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria... (which is incorrect), in which you would need to remove the link, but then still find the best place to add a link to Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria somewhere in the lead. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 16:30, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

You're probably thinking of various AWB genfixes runs. Nothing specifically tackling this though. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:34, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

As linked below, I'm referring to an existing bot task. I'd suggest pinging the botop about it. Primefac (talk) 19:03, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Primefac perhaps your thinking about WikiCleanerBot 9 which deals with bold and links in the lead, but another issue. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 17:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

NicoV, is this something you would be able to provide some insight on? « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 19:51, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Currently, WPCleaner doesn't detect this kind of construct, but I can probably add it if nobody else can provide a list. Just drop me a request in Wikipedia talk:WPCleaner, I may have some available time in Februray... If I implement this, it would generate a list like Wikipedia:CHECKWIKI/WPC 048 dump. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 06:29, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Done, thanks NicoV. As requested, I moved my question to Wikipedia talk:WPCleaner. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 15:34, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Bot to add signature and timestamp to hundreds of user talk page messages added by Geregen2

Latest comment: 5 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

Geregen2 has added hundreds of "proposed deletion" messages to User talk:WildCherry06 and other user talk pages without signing any of them with four tildes. I suggest that a bot add a signature (Geregen2's signature, not the bot's signature) and timestamp to the end of all those messages using {{subst:unsigned}}. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:41, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Oops, I didn't realize the template doesn't contain the signature. Will do that going forward. Geregen2 (talk) 15:44, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Not sure if a bot just for that is necessary. Signing is somewhat important but hassling everyone with an extra bot edit does not sound like a good idea to me. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:32, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Talk page sections without date stamps typically are not archived by archiving bots. This can be a hassle. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:45, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Slakr, can we send in SineBot (talk · contribs)? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:38, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

TV task force categories

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello, I'd appreciate if someone can help me with placing the following templates on the relevant TV task force categories found here Category:WikiProject Television task forces, with {{WikiProject Television task force assessment quality category}} and {{WikiProject Television task force assessment importance category}}. There was a recent discussion which lead to WikiProjects being converted to TV task forces and this is part of the clean up. Using the templates on these categories will categorize them in their correct place. An example can be seen here Category:A-Class Avatar: The Last Airbender articles (which uses the template) and Category:A-Class Holby articles (which does not). As can be seen by the example, usually only the template will be needed, without any other category or text being used on the page. --Gonnym (talk) 01:45, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

Mass RfD nomination

Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

This is a multi-part request.

The first part should be relatively uncontroversial: it is to generate a page (for instance, User:Tigraan/Exxx redirects) containing a list of all pages which are redirects and whose title matches the regexp E1?[0-9]{3}[a-j]?. (If there is an easy way that I could do it myself, please enlighten me.) Bonus points if the page contains the current redirect targets as well. I estimate this would be around 1000 pages.

The second part would be, after manual inspection of the redirects to clear up false positives, to mass-tag those redirects for a WP:RFD bundled nomination. That certainly requires consensus but I got mostly ignored when asking at the places I would think to ask: I posted at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Food_and_drink#Food_additives_codes_redirect_to_chemical_compounds_instead_of_E_number_article (where you can read a sketch of the RfD nomination rationale) and Wikipedia_talk:Redirects_for_discussion#Nominating_lots_of_related_redirects, both of which combined attracted a whole one other comment (supporting the proposed RfD) after a week. (If you want to see more solid consensus, please tell me where to ask for it.)

The third part would be to clean up after the RfD, either by untagging and leaving things in place if rejected, or by retargeting the redirects according to a relatively simple scheme. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 17:49, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

@Tigraan:Part one's easy: https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/41859 is across all mainspace pages, and https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/41860 is only what's linked from E number. As far as actual tagging goes, I dunno. Someone with AWB could probably do it easily enough, but a BRFA would be required to use a fully automatic bot (which is what I would do). I don't know if anyone's got an RfD tagging bot already that could help. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 23:39, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

DannyS712, you have the tag bot, right? ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 23:48, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@Trialpears: yes, but only for CfD. Should I file a brfa for this? DannyS712 (talk) 03:44, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

DannyS712, if you want. This is probably not the last time approval for all XfDs would be helpful. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 06:43, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: thanks for the quarry request, especially the modified version which eliminates quite a few false positives (such as E112). I downloaded the CSV. I checked all titles and ~20 articles and it all looks in order.

@DannyS712: I will give a look at the AWB solution this weekend, and keep in touch if I need you/your bot. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 12:02, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Adding a new template

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, I want to add this template (Template:Ash'ari) to all the pages/articles that are listed/linked. Thanks in advance!--TheEagle107 (talk) 01:45, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Page list

— Preceding unsigned comment added by TheEagle107 (talk • contribs) 03:47, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

This is a very large nav template and placement in an article will matter, a lot. Placement probably shouldn't be automated, and it probably should be collapsed by default. -- GreenC 15:48, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Bot for merging Russian locality permastubs

Latest comment: 4 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion

After a discussion here a couple weeks ago, there was a rough local consensus that it might be beneficial to merge the majority of Russian rural locality articles (95% of which are two-line permastubs) to list articles (currently these lists are by first-level division, such as List of rural localities in Vologda Oblast). As you can see on that article, Fram is in the process of merging the pertinent information from the individual stubs into tables, but it's tedious work and there's something on the order of like 10,000 or so of such articles.

I was wondering if it's possible/plausible to create a bot that could automate any part of that process? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 04:04, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

If the stubs in question have all an identical structure, it could work. Otherwise we might get WP:CONTEXTBOT issues. That said, did that merger proposal get more widely advertised than just the user talk page you link there? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:02, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Not hugely, but to be honest, the total interested audience for these stubs is basically Nikolai Kurbatov, their creator, Ymblanter, as probably our most prolific Russia-focused editor, Fram, who came across them and proposed the merge, and myself, because I maintain the "List of rural localities in X" articles. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 07:15, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

I would say if one can add the stubs with identical structure to the lists it would be already very useful. Everything else can be done manually (or not done at all, we have quite a few fully developed articles on the topic).--Ymblanter (talk) 07:45, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, it would be a great help if a bot could do this. The only harder parts are getting the population information from the article, and "deciding" whether to redirect the article or whether to keep it as a standalone article. Perhaps the bot can use some measure of the length of the article and do a cut-off based on this? It's a redirect, so any errors in this regard can be easily reverted by anyone. Fram (talk) 07:54, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

I wonder if the bot could scrape the info onto a sub-page or a draft page of some kind to be checked by humans before being mainspaced. That way we can make sure the info is getting properly, er, populated. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 07:56, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

@Premeditated Chaos, Fram, Ymblanter, and Jo-Jo Eumerus: I took a pass at parsing out population data into User:AntiCompositeNumber/rustubs, trying to get data from the infobox, {{ru-census}}, and string matching. The character count is also included. (It's lower than the MW byte count because of UTF-8 character encoding.) --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 01:38, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

@Premeditated Chaos, Fram, Ymblanter, and Jo-Jo Eumerus: AntiCompositeNumber, a ping needs to be on a new line to work. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:07, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Remove sister project templates with no target

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Among moth articles, and I suspect many others, there are sometimes template links to Wikispecies and Wikimedia Commons but there's nothing at the target location in the sister project. I'd love to see a bot which could go through and check these and remove the deceptive templates.

Even better if it could remove links to Commons if the only file in Commons is already in use in the article.

Another refinement would be to change from a general Commons link to a Commons category link when that exists.

Examples:

Drasteria axuana (this version) has links to Wikispecies and Commons, but there's nothing there.
Spirama recessa (this version) has no Wikispecies target. Commons has nothing at Spirama recessa, but does have C:Category:Spirama recessa.

Thank you. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 03:59, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

SchreiberBike, forgot to say here but

BRFA filed a few days ago. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 10:17, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

@Trialpears: I'd seen that and had no objection to it. Does it relate to the request above though? Thanks, SchreiberBike | ⌨ 21:53, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Oh sorry it's at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PearBOT 7. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 22:02, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Update parameter on template long since changed

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

The parameters were changed 9 July 2018 per this discussion: Template talk:WikiProject Christianity#Parameter Correction. church-of-the-nazarene was changed to holiness-movement as was the -importance parameter. However, per the discussion above, and as I've seen, it wasn't updated everywhere. Jerod Lycett (talk) 04:24, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Jerodlycett, I only found 6 pages with the parameter set, and I have fixed those manually. Were you expecting there to be more? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:29, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: I went through a number on my own with AWB, but I couldn't pull more than 25k, and there were >50k transclusions, so I had no idea how many would remain. Jerod Lycett (talk) 16:17, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Bot for lint errors

Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments6 people in discussion

I know this is going to be quite a bit of work, however I feel it will have significant value once the process has caught up.

I refer to the error cat "Tidy bug affecting font tags wrapping links (4,275,998 errors)" as at today, some of which date back to 2006.

As an example the followong sinature;
[[User:AndonicO|'''A'''ndonic'''O''']] [[User talk:AndonicO|''Talk'']] | [[User:AndonicO/My Autograph Book|''Sign Here'']]
has various errors that may cross various error categories and will never be fixed as per current methodology, a bot that does a simple find and replace, with something like; [[User:AndonicO|talk]] signature adjusted by lint bot for lint errors.
would fix every instance of each signature as identified and could cover many instances in order, this is especially important for these aged and non-active users, and could also be used to identify current user signatures with errors and we could offer a reformatted signature solution.Thoughts121.99.108.78 (talk) 00:03, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I don't think there is consensus to drastically reformat editors' signatures in the way that is proposed here. I have been performing edits like this one that fix Linter errors without changing the rendering of the signatures, and I have had no negative feedback, as far as I can remember. At least one bot, Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Ahechtbot 2, has been approved to perform a limited set of Linter-related fixes to talk pages. It is possible that Ahecht would be willing to run a bot with a broader set of fixes. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:21, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I don't see that there's an absence of consensus either. Past objections to 'fixing' signatures were mostly because the proposed 'fixes' were based on ill-defined personal preferences criteria like changing something like ... to '''...'''. Lint errors are a clear criteria. This would probably have consensus, although that's still not a guarantee. Basically, take it to WP:VPR and see how the dice lands. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:42, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks bothHeadbomb Jonesey95

Ahechtbot is a blunt tool. I've only been doing find-and-replace on signatures that (a) are present and identical on very large numbers of pages and (b) affect the function or appearance of the rest of the talk page, not just the signature itself. For the example above, since you're not getting bleedover to other parts of the text, it's not really worth the overhead and extra edits. Frankly, this should be labeled as a Tidy bug, and it should be fixed so that [[link]] works just as well as [[link|link]]. Yes, I know that font tags are deprecated, but there are literally millions of pages that use the former format. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:57, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

tyi's and if you want to add anything 121.99.108.78 (talk) 10:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Ahecht and others: formerly, [[link]] did work like [[link|link]]. That is, [[link]], and also [[link]] both were processed by Tidy into [[link|<font...>link]] (piped appropriately, of course). The font tag had to immediately wrap the Wikilink or External link, otherwise it was ignored. The font color, but not the font style, is detected as the Tidy font link bug, but the font style version of the Tidy font link bug is quite rare. Tidy has been replaced, so now font coloring tags immediately wrapping a Wikilink or external link are overridden, as you would logically expect, by default link colors. The replacement parser is an HTML 5-compatible upgrade from Tidy and we are not going back. Wikipedia:Linter#How you can help was written November 23, 2017, and since it was first written it has always said that it is OK to fix lint errors, including on talk pages, but one should "[t]ry to preserve the appearance." So, for more than two years, it has officially been OK to de-lint user signatures, preserving the appearance, and this has never been officially challenged or disputed; it is the consensus. (However, I don't think there's a consensus on systematic lint fixing by bot.) The Tidy font bug is a high priority lint error and I would favor fixing these lint errors in a systematic way by bot, taking care, of course, to exclude talk page discussions where fixing an instance of this error would confuse a question about this exact behavior. —Anomalocaris (talk) 02:22, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PkbwcgsBot 17 has been approved to do this using WPCleaner but right now; WPCleaner is broken for me so I am unable to do this task until WPCleaner is up and running again. Pkbwcgs (talk) 17:21, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Bot to fix up some blank peer reviews

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Hi all, I saw that "peer reviews" are now included on WP:Article alerts (yay!). Unfortunately it turns out there's more than a few reviews that editors either haven't been opened properly. These will clog up article alert lists and I was wondering if I could have some help with a bot to process them (or even generate a list to give me).

In short:

The list of all transclusions in article space is here: Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Peer_review&namespace=1&limit=500
An example of an unopened peer review is here: [[1]] - ie, a review without a corresponding "archive1" page
- (as a randomly selected example, the Clara Schumann peer review generates "Wikipedia:Peer review/Clara Schumann/archive1")
I suggest that all such unopened peer reviews not opened within the last week be simply removed from the talk page with the summary "remove unopened peer review"
I can manually remove this, but as a repetitive action that may take some time I'd be very grateful if a bot could do it for me :)
If there is a way to preserve the code of this, I can keep a link in the WP:PR archives so it can be run ever year or so.

Thanks for your help, --Tom (LT) (talk) 08:47, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Tom (LT), According to https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/42330, there are 42 pages transcluding {{peer review}} without a corresponding WP:Peer review/<title>/archive page right now. Unless misfiled peer review requests are more common than that query indicates, it seems like this is something human editors can handle. You can re-run the query in the future by logging in to Quarry, hitting Fork, then hitting Submit Query. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 17:48, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Good point, we're working on it over at WP:PR, and this is less than I thought! Your query is very useful. Happy for this bot request to be taken down. --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:30, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Consolidating multiple WikiProject templates into taskforces of WikiProject New York (state)

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

We're in the process at WikiProject New York (state) of converting 5 WikiProjects to taskforces. Specifically the following are being consolidated, under the statewide banner:

WikiProject Capital District now |Capital=yes
WikiProject Hudson Valley now |Hudson=yes
WikiProject Long Island now |LI=yes
WikiProject Syracuse now |Syracuse=yes
WikiProject Western New York now |Western=yes

However, we can't just convert the existing templates to wrappers and have AnomieBOT substitute them without creating a mess of duplicates, because some pages are tagged by more than one subproject or are already tagged with {{WikiProject New York (state)}} in addition or both, e.g. Talk:Albany, New York.

I don't want to take the time to do the scripting just yet unless it's necessary, going off the assumption that this has been done frequently enough that there's already a working version for project mergers. I'll just take a quick minute here to give some basic examples to avoid confusion.

Examples

Without loss of generality we will use |importance=low, for WikiProject New York (state), |importance=mid for WikiProject Capital District and |importance=high for WikiProject Hudson Valley as our parameter values in these examples.

Case

{{WikiProject Capital District|class=c|importance=mid}}

Output

{{WikiProject New York (state)|class=c|importance=|Capital=yes|Capital-importance=mid}}

Case

{{WikiProject New York (state)|class=c|importance=low}}
{{WikiProject Capital District|class=c|importance=mid}}

Output

{{WikiProject New York (state)|class=c|importance=low|Capital=yes|Capital-importance=mid}}

Case

{{WikiProject New York (state)|class=c|importance=low}}
{{WikiProject Capital District|class=c|importance=mid}}
{{WikiProject Hudson Valley|class=c|importance=high}}

Output

{{WikiProject New York (state)|class=c|importance=low|Capital=yes|Capital-importance=mid|Hudson=yes|Hudson-importance=high}}

Case

{{WikiProject Capital District|class=c|importance=mid}}
{{WikiProject Hudson Valley|class=c|importance=high}}

Output

{{WikiProject New York (state)|class=c|importance=|Capital=yes|Capital-importance=mid|Hudson=yes|Hudson-importance=high}}

I'm not particularly active around here, but I should be around for an hour or two more today; I will try to find time at least once every 48 hours this week to log in and do some work, so hopefully I'll be able to respond to any inquiries reasonably promptly, thank you. (please ping on reply)

𝒬 𝔔 23:42, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Looks like this has been discussed and approved, so I can hit this with my bot, probably this weekend. Primefac (talk) 00:53, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Done for the record. Primefac (talk) 01:21, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Bot to update number of Duolingo users doing a course

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Hi there! I’ve been editing the Duolingo Wikipedia article to keep it up to date with the number of learners on each course. I was wondering if there’s a boy that could update the lists daily, rather than having to do it myself, or how I could create such a bot? Thanks! :-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by CcfUk2018 (talk • contribs) 03:28, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure that's the kind of minor statistical data that Wikipedia needs, let alone needs updated on a daily basis. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:02, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Turing test: bot or boy? -- GreenC 17:05, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Fixing Vital Articles bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago18 comments6 people in discussion

The bot (approved here) for updating vital articles counts, icons, and corresponding talk pages has been inoperable for a while, per this discussion. Could one of you please look into fixing it? Thanks! Sdkb (talk) 19:03, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

BRFA filed --Kanashimi (talk) 07:06, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb and Spaced about: I will not count the articles listed in level other than current page, to prevent from double counting. Please tell me if it is better counting the articles still.

Thank you --Kanashimi (talk) 11:40, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

This page Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/2 is off by 10 now. It should be at 100. --Spaced about (talk) 11:49, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

@Spaced about: There are 10 level 1 articles in the list, so the bot will not count them. Is it better counting them still? --Kanashimi (talk) 11:56, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi: Yes, they should be included at any level, so, including level 1 at level 2, and level 1+2 at level 3, and so on, would be helpful. --Spaced about (talk) 12:02, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

@Spaced about: OK. I will fix the code and re-execute the bot. --Kanashimi (talk) 12:11, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Done --Kanashimi (talk) 13:29, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

VA5: Sports, games and recreation is completely wrong right now. Also, I think it'd be better to list an article's icon for current quality status always first (instead of icons for peer reviews etc.) because that way they're more easily compared via skimming and they're what the vital article project is most concerned about. The icons that haven't been traditionally listed (peer review, in the news) might even be unnecessary.--LaukkuTheGreit (Talk•Contribs) 15:25, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Fixed If there are quality status, it should show first. But it seems there are some articles without quality status. e.g., Talk:Virtual camera system in Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/Everyday life/Sports, games and recreation. --Kanashimi (talk) 16:00, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi: I am rather confused, is there an active bot that regulary updates the count of the level 5 vital articles? I saw that someone counted all of them and I'm very happy, but it's not clear how did that. The idea was to have a bot that counts the amount of articles, so we'll know when we are done with the 50,000 goal. Is there such a bot? Fr.dror (talk) 15:16, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@Fr.dror: The task was just approved. I will updates the counts daily. --Kanashimi (talk) 22:52, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi: many thanks to you and everyone else working on this. Is there functionality here to add the VA tag to the talk pages of the articles listed? It looks like that used to be done by Feminist's SSTbot, but that bot now says it's been deactivated. I'm a bit confused overall why so many of the bots related to VA have stopped functioning, given that there don't seem to have been any major technical changes that might have broken them. The VA project is ongoing, and the bots that help with it are thus needed on an ongoing basis as well. Sdkb (talk) 06:56, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb: I can also maintain the template {{Vital article}} in the talk pages, but it needs to write some codes. Is it OK if we add {{Vital article}} to talk pages with class=Start for those articles without {{Vital article}}? --Kanashimi (talk) 07:27, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Since it'll be reviving SSTBot task 4, hopefully it won't require writing too much new code. For articles that haven't been assessed yet and are without the VA tag, it'd probably be best to leave them unassessed rather than labeling them all start-class; it's possible to add the tag without marking the class, right? Sdkb (talk) 07:46, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

SSTbot 4 is quite stupid as it involves compiling article lists manually. I don't really know how to code beyond an elementary level, and I kind of just got tired of "operating" it using AWB. feminist (talk) 08:28, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

@Feminist: It is OK. The bot may read the list now. But it is still needing to write some code... --Kanashimi (talk) 08:34, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

BRFA filed --Kanashimi (talk) 12:13, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Replace Template:Distinguish in Category namespace for Template:Category distinguish

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

There are about 2,000 transclusions: Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Distinguish&namespace=14&limit=500

For an example of the change, see change history of Category:Literature:

{{distinguish|Category:Publications}}
{{category distinguish|Publications}}

Thanks. fgnievinski (talk) 21:18, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

I feel like it might be a better idea to merge the templates and implement the changed wording automatically. You should consider opening a discussion at WP:TFD. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 03:42, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Aye, in this case I'd think that two templates is one too much. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:22, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Please remove residence from Infobox person

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Hi there, re: this permalinked discussion, could you stellar bot handlers please remove the |residence= parameter and subsequent content from articles using {{Infobox person}}? Per some of the discussions, Category:Infobox person using residence might list most of the pages using this template. And RexxS said:

"Using an insource search (hastemplate:"infobox person" insource:/residence *= *[A-Za-z\[]/) shows 36,844 results, but it might have missed a few (like {{plainlist}}); there are at least 766 uses of the parameter with a blank value."

I don't know if this helps. This is not my exact area of expertise. Thanks! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 05:31, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

I explained my objection to this proposal in the Removal section immediately below the closed discussion in the permalink above. It is not a good idea to edit 38,000 articles if the only objective is a cosmetic update. Further, there is no rush and the holiday season is not a good time to make a fait accompli of an edit to the template performed on Christmas Day. Johnuniq (talk) 06:40, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Cyphoidbomb, I already have a bot task that can handle this, but it sounds like there is some contention about the actual removal, so ping me somewhere if and when the decision about how to deprecate the param is finished. Primefac (talk) 16:24, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

@Primefac and Johnuniq: OK, I'm certainly in no hurry. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 16:34, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

I just want to add support for this. I'm quite tired of seeing the residence error when I do quick previews before saving edited bios. —Мандичка^YO 😜 11:02, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Correcting links to Mexican Federal Telecommunications Institute documents

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

This is simple and can be handled by just about any bot.

The Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) of Mexico made a one-character change in document URLs that will need updating. Hundreds of Mexican radio articles cite its technical and other authorizations.

They added a "v" to the URL, so URLs that were formerly

https://rpc.ift.org.mx/rpc/pdfs/96255_181211120729_7489.pdf

changed to

https://rpc.ift.org.mx/vrpc/pdfs/96255_181211120729_7489.pdf

Is this possible to have done as a bot task? The articles that need it are mostly in Category:Radio stations in Mexico or Category:Television stations in Mexico. Raymie (t • c) 20:10, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Huh. I was certain there is some kind of general bot for this kind of link replacement operation... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:35, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Jo-Jo Eumerus, I think GreenC (talk · contribs) ends up doing most of them at WP:URLREQ --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:34, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

@Raymie: In addition they now serve https only, but left no http->https redirect, and ~~most~~ all of the links on WP are http. This should be done by URL-specific bot because of archive URLs and {{dead link}} tags (some may already be marked dead and/or archived that need to be unwound once corrected). Could you post/copy the request to URLREQ, there is a backlog but I will get to it. -- GreenC 20:02, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Request for change of (soon to be) broken links to LPSN

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Thread moved to Wikipedia:Link_rot/URL_change_requests#Request_for_change_of_(soon_to_be)_broken_links_to_LPSN and poster notified. -- GreenC 03:26, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

I need a bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello. I want a bot . Because as I'm a student so I'm unable to be active on Wikipedia as much as it is required. So I think if I will get a bot then when I will unable to do template like about 100 pages at that time , instead of me my bot will do that . — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tanisha priyadarshini (talk • contribs) 16:07, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

This is a page for requesting bots to do certain tasks. A bot is not something granted to you by Wikipedia, it is something you program and create by yourself in order to edit Wikipedia pages. Please check Help:Creating a bot for more information. Sam1370 (talk) 00:24, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Articles needing an infobox backlog reducer

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Resolved

There are many articles (or at least enough that it would be tedious to go through and check each and every one) in the backlog (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_infobox_backlog) that actually do have infoboxes. I think a bot that could be submitted a category of 200-500 pages, read the wikitext of each one, and if the page has {{infobox in it, go to the talk page of that article and remove the needs-infobox=yes parameter Firestarforever (talk) 13:39, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

I am pretty sure there was a recent bot request and even BRFA to do that. --Izno (talk) 17:55, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Wait, really? Huh. I guess I just needed to look around some more. ThanksFirestarforever (talk) 19:36, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Found one Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/PearBOT_2. My request can be safely ignored Firestarforever (talk) 11:57, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Address implicit/structural composition gender bias by bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

While it is likely impossible to automate all of these guidelines Wikipedia:Writing_about_women, things like using last name or relationships in lede are systematic bias which can have systematic solutions. A bot attempting to do this would be AMAZING (where exceptions like Icelandic folks would be an opt out rather than opt in) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Icy13 (talk • contribs) 21:39, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Icy13, interesting idea, but I think it's way too much of a WP:CONTEXTBOT problem. The bot would need to be able to do the following:

Identify the article as a biography of a female - not necessarily an easy task for a bot! Gender may or may not be mentioned in categories, isn't in the infobox and just checking for words like "she" and "her" wouldn't be sufficient.
Identify the subject's given and family names - again, not necessarily an easy task, given the number of name formatting styles. I don't just speak of patronymic names like Icelandic, but surname-first family names, Spanish names which contain surnames from both parents, mononymous people, probably several more cases I haven't thought of.
Recognize problematic sentences like those you suggested.

In short, I think it's much too context-sensitive to be feasible for a bot to reliably identify, much less correct, the rules you linked. ^creffpublic _{a creffett franchise} (talk to the boss) 21:57, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

If there's such a bot coded, it would probably have to be the kind that creates a report on a centralized page, rather than one that edits anything in the article or its talk page. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:17, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Maintenance tags for questionable sources

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

When using footnoted referencing, the task of assessing what source supports what text is complicated. A reference may be tagged e.g. {{self-published source}}, {{self-published inline}}, {{deprecated inline}}, {{dubious}} and other tags which may be applied to the footnoted reference but these are not linked to the readable content. When using <ref> tags, by contrast, we can use <nowiki><ref>{{cite [...] | publisher=$VANITYPRESS [...] {{self-published source}}</ref>{{self-published inline}} to flag both the reference and the inline citation.

I would like a maintenance tag bot to add, e.g., {{self-published inline}} after the {{sfn}}/{{harv}} instances matching footnoted citations that are flagged as self-published, deprecated or otherwise dubious. Guy (help!) 09:15, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

That's really too much of a WP:CONTEXTBOT here. For example, WordPress is a venue for a lot of self-published things, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong to cite them (WP:RSCONTEXT), so applying {{self-published source}} to some of those would be flagging a problem that isn't one.

A WP:CITEWATCH/WP:UPSD-like solution really is the best thing here. The CiteWatch only looks for |journal=, but a similar bot could be coded to look for domains found in |url= and |publisher/website/magazine/journal/work/...= Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:22, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Convert Non-free reduce to Non-free manual reduce for images that are not .jpg or .png

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Greetings. I'm here once again to bother you all about Files!

Tagging a file {{Non-free reduce}} places it in Category:Wikipedia non-free file size reduction requests, where User:DatBot performs the file size reduction automatically if the file is in .png or .jpg format. However, DatBot doesn't process any other format, and therefore files in other formats need manual processing.

I am requesting a bot to, once daily, check all files in Category:Wikipedia non-free file size reduction requests and, if the file format is not .png or .jpg, change {{Non-free reduce}} into {{Non-free manual reduce}}, so that they're more readily processed.

Thanks! The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 02:31, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

No need for a bot. I've updated the category sorting in {{non-free reduce}} to default to manual except for png, jpg, and svg. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:59, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

~~You are a dark and powerful warlock and I fear to fall afoul of your mastery of the code.~~ Excellent. Looks good to me. Thanks! The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 04:21, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Y Done — Preceding unsigned comment added by The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk • contribs) 19:50, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Bot needed to tell Wikiprojects about open queries on articles tagged for that WikiProject

Latest comment: 4 years ago11 comments7 people in discussion

I sometimes put queries on article talkpages, some get answered quickly, some stick around indefinitely and occasionally old ones get resolved. My suspicion is that my experience is not unusual, but I hope that this is a software issue and that a lot more article queries could be resolved if the relevant editors knew of them. Would it be possible to have a bot produce reports for each Wikiproject of open/new talk page threads that are on pages tagged to that project? Ϣere SpielChequers 09:49, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

The main thing is how do those 'queries' get detected? What constitutes 'queries'? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 12:44, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

One way that might work, but would throw a lot of false positives, would be to notify the project(s) if there is a post that has no reply after a week. Another option would be to have some form of template like {{SPER}} that could summon the bot if a user wanted more input. Primefac (talk) 12:50, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

@Headbomb I was assuming a new query would be any new section on the talkpage of an article tagged for that wikiproject, excluding any tagged as {{resolved}}. @Primefac I'm not sure of the false positives, other than on multi tagged articles. If that did get to be an issue it might be necessary to have people going through such a report the option to mark a section as not relevant to their wikiproject. So an article about a mountain might be tagged under vulcanism, climbing, skiing and still get a query as to the gods that some religion believes live on it. But I suspect that thhe false positives will nnot be a huge issue. Ϣere SpielChequers 16:16, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

"any new section on the talkpage of an article tagged for that wikiproject, excluding any tagged as {{resolved}}" given that most sections on talk pages don't need to be marked as {{resolved}} to begin with, I can't see this idea/criteria getting consensus. The signal-to-noise ratio would be ludicrously small. Taking Talk:Clara Schumann from a few sections above as an example, that would be 39 'queries' for that article alone. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:50, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Clearly that article is not typical. But the most recent thread is from January this year, the previous one from last October, so a report of any new section would include it now provided new was interpreted as broadly as thirty days. If we only went back 7 days it would already have dropped off the report. In the unlikely event of needing to make the report shorter, if someone has a tool for identifying signatures it could list single participant threads. Ϣere SpielChequers 07:17, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I would certainly veto such an idea. These would likely be spam levels of updates, and duplications for those that would watch the updater and also the article itself. I would assume most would unwatch the updated list of "queries" pretty quickly, which would be pointless. A better solution is to post on the wikiproject talk page if a post doesn't get enough attention.

There are also a LOT of inactive/semi active Wikiprojects that would get a lot of bot updates, for no one to read. Seems like a lot of work and edits when we could simply post something on the wikiproject talk page to gain additional input. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 08:45, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes lots of wikiprojects are inactive, perhaps some will be revived by having this report, others will be unchanged. The report would be a success if an increased proportion of talkpage queries get a response, 100% response rate would be nice, but this report aims to reduce a problem not to totally resolve it. As for posting things on WikiProject talkpages, that is reasonable advice to the regulars, not something we expect newbies to do, and in case it wasn't obvious, it is unnoticed queries by newbies that I worry most about. Ϣere SpielChequers 09:15, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

This can be done without a bot with RecentChangesLinked where you set it to "Show pages linking to". --Izno (talk) 16:25, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

That just gives you an indication that there has been a change to a page not that there is a query that needs to be responded to on that page. Keith D (talk) 00:03, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

If I'm reading the intent correctly, I think this can be resolved by, alternatively, (1) using WikiProject banners to encourage editors to ask the question there instead, (2) relying on WP:Article alerts to list all WP:RFCs of consequence in the project, or (3) adding some tag with lower stakes than an RFC (e.g., a variant of {{help me}}) and submitting a feature request for WP:Article alerts to track that template/tag. On the whole, could use more evidence that this is an actual problem. Agreed that it would be a lot of noise to create a listing for every new, unreplied talk page section on every project page, especially when such sections do not necessarily require responses (e.g., "FYI" messages). czar 01:57, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Consolidating multiple WikiProject templates into taskforces of template:WikiProject Molecular Biology

Latest comment: 4 years ago10 comments3 people in discussion

Related post: Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_79

I'm in need of help replacing all instances of a set of WikiProject templates as taskforces of the one unified template: {{WikiProject Molecular Biology}}. Unfortunately a simple transclusion of the new template wrapped in the old templates isn't enough, since some pages have multiple WikiProject templates, so will need to be marked with multiple taskforces. It's therefore similar to when Neurology was merged into WP:MED.

Example manual edit:

Replacing

{{WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology|class=GA|importance=high|peer-review=yes}}
{{WikiProject Computational Biology|importance=mid|class=GA}}

With

{{WikiProject Molecular Biology|class=GA|importance=high|peer-review=yes
  |MCB=yes     |MCB-imp=high
  |COMPBIO=yes |COMPBIO-imp=mid
}}

Broadly, I think the necessary bot steps would be:

If {{WikiProject Molecular and Cell Biology}} OR {{WikiProject Genetics}} OR {{WikiProject Computational Biology}} OR {{WikiProject Biophysics}} OR {{WikiProject Gene Wiki}} OR {{WikiProject Cell Signaling}}
Then add {{WikiProject Molecular Biology}}
For {{WikiProject Molecular and Cell Biology}} AND {{WikiProject Genetics}} AND {{WikiProject Computational Biology}} AND {{WikiProject Biophysics}} AND {{WikiProject Gene Wiki}}
Remove {{WikiProject MCB/COMPBIO/Genetics/Biophysics/Gene Wiki|importance=X|quality=y}}

Add |MCB/COMPBIO/genetics/biophysics/Gene Wiki=yes + |MCB-imp/COMPBIO-imp/genetics-imp/biophysics-imp/GW-imp=X (note: GW → Gene Wiki)
For whichever WikiProject template has the highest |importance= and |quality=, add that as the overall |importance= and |quality= to {{WikiProject Molecular Biology}}
Additionally add to articles in the following categories:
- Category:WikiProject Cell signaling articles add |signaling=yes (i.e., replace {{WikiProject Cell Signaling}} on pages that transclude it with {{WikiProject Molecular Biology|...|signaling=yes}})
- ~~Category:Gene Wiki articles add |genewiki=yes~~ (added as task force above)
- ~~Category:Metabolism add |metabolism=yes~~ (see discussion below)

Thank you in advance! T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 07:09, 12 January 2020 (UTC) (refactored/edited by Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 05:48, 18 January 2020 (UTC))

We posted threads about this on different pages at the same time, so I figured I'd follow-up here as well. I can implement this myself using template wrappers and/or a new bot (re: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Molecular Biology#Template:WikiProject Molecular Biology, as described in the sub-section); I just need a little more feedback from WT:MOLBIO. That said, you've more or less answered my question on how to do it here. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 01:56, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

@Primefac: You mentioned in the earlier thread on this topic that one can use Anomiebot to merge templates using {{Subst only|auto=yes}} template to merge one banner into another, but is there any support for merging multiple banners on a single page into 1? If not, are there any bots that have been approved to merge multiple project banners on talk pages (particularly where 2+ banners occur on a single page) into a single parent banner? Asking because I could likely modify the source code of a bot designed to merge the banners of another project's task forces for this purpose, especially if there's one written in python. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 03:45, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

@Seppi333: You make a good point about what to put as overall WP:MOLBIO class and importance based on WP:MCB, WP:GEN etc. at WT:MOLBIO. I think the best option is to simply use the current taskforce importance (if something's high importance to the WP:GEN taskforce, chances are it's high importance to the WP:MOLBIO wikiproject). The edge case is when two taskforces currently indicate different importance levels (e.g. Talk:DNA_gyrase). In such cases it might be safest to use the median rounded up for the overall importance (high+low→mid, high+mid→high), but maybe that's over complicating things. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 04:45, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Sure, I ran a bot like this last weekend. ~~I could probably put in a BRFA today or tomorrow if I get time. Primefac (talk) 10:55, 16 January 2020 (UTC)~~ I did just notice, though, that there are also sub-projects for each of the (now) sub-projects; are those tasks forces (such as genetic engineering or education) being handled by the replacement template as well? Primefac (talk) 10:59, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

@Primefac: No, don't think so. The primary reason the Gene Wiki sub-task force was added is that it has its own banner (w/ corresponding article categories: {{WikiProject Gene Wiki}} & Category:Gene Wiki articles) which is currently present on ~1800 pages. I think we're probably just going to go with the current task force listing in the {{WPMOLBIO}} template.

@Evolution and evolvability: I added the signaling parameter for categorizing cell signaling articles; Category:Metabolism is an article category and the metabolic pathways task force doesn't have its own category, so I couldn't add the metabolism one.
Addendum, re: The edge case is when two taskforces currently indicate different importance levels (e.g. Talk:DNA_gyrase). In such cases it might be safest to use the median rounded up for the overall importance (high+low→mid, high+mid→high), but maybe that's over complicating things.. It wouldn't be that technical to encode that. Programatically, one just needs to ordinally encode low→1, mid→2, high→3, top→4 (NB: this method implicitly assumes that there's an equal "importance distance" in a mathematical/statistical sense between importance ratings, which might not necessarily be true - it depends on how people go about rating importance on average), then use round(median(list of ratings)) or round(average(list of ratings)), then remap whatever number it returns back to an importance rating. E.g., the average rating of task forces that rate an article as low, high, and top is (1+3+4)/3, which would be rounded to 3 → high importance. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 02:56, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: I refactored the request in Special:Diff/936327774/936342626 to reflect the changes to the template. You might want to look it over just to make sure nothing seems off. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 05:48, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

@Seppi333: That looks correct to me! Great to see it coming together. I'll also go through the taskforce pages and relevant template documentation over the next few days to make sure the instructions for tagging new articles is up to date (example). T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 23:11, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

@Primefac: Are you still interested in doing this? Either way, can you point me to the bot script you had in mind in the event I have a need for reprogramming it to run a similar bot in the future? Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 04:42, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

This seems to meet the criteria for Task 30, so I should be able to get to it this weekend. Primefac (talk) 11:59, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

A heads up for AfD closers re: PROD eligibility when approaching NOQUORUM

Latest comment: 4 years ago15 comments3 people in discussion

{{resolved}} Revisiting this March discussion for a new owner

When an AfD discussion ends with no discussion, WP:NOQUORUM indicates that the closing admin should treat the article as an expired PROD ("soft delete"). As a courtesy/aid for the closer, if would be really helpful for a bot to inform of the article's PROD eligibility ("the page is not a redirect, never previously proposed for deletion, never undeleted, and never subject to a deletion discussion"). Cribbing from the last discussion, it could look like this:

When an AfD listing begins its seventh/final day (almost full term) with no discussion, a bot posts a comment on whether the article is eligible for soft deletion by checking the PROD criteria that the page:
- isn't already redirected (use API)
- hasn't been PROD'd before (check edit summaries and/or diffs; or edit filter if ever created)
- has never been undeleted (check logs)
- hasn't been in a deletion discussion before (check page title and talk page banners)
- nice-to-have: list prior titles for reference, if the article has been moved or nominated under another name before
To check whether anyone has participated in the AfD, @Izno suggested borrowing the AfD counter script's detection

This would greatly speed up the processing of these nominations. Eventually would be great to have this done automatically, but even a user script would be helpful for now. czar 19:26, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

@Czar: Is it good enough if a bot just reports these attributes for AfD expired with no discussion?

Whether the page is redirected or not
List up all previous WP:AfD and WP:AFU with the results.

--Kanashimi (talk) 05:52, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

I was thinking that a more general scoped bot which tells the AFD whether there were previous redirectings, (un)deletions and deletion discussions might be useful to inform the discussion of past changes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:23, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi, that would cover 75% of the criteria a closer needs to know (and would at least be a start!) so would need to remind the closer to check the page history for prior PRODs as well. Otherwise, yes, that's exactly what I think would work here. Essentially, if it detects positive for any of those criteria, would be nice to summarize that it's ineligible for soft deletion because of x criterion. czar 13:03, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

@Czar: For Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2020 February 3, I extract information like this: report. Is the information enough? --Kanashimi (talk) 10:06, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi, it's a start! I was thinking of formatting along the lines of:

Extended content

posting something like this to the AfD discussion when no one else has !voted

Note to closer: While this discussion appears to have no quorum, it is NOT eligible for soft deletion because it has been previously PROD'd. (can link to the live diff instead if the PROD wasn't successful)
Note to closer: While this discussion appears to have no quorum, it is NOT eligible for soft deletion because it was previously discussed at AfD.
Note to closer: While this discussion appears to have no quorum, it is NOT eligible for soft deletion because it was previously undeleted (22 August 2019).
Note to closer: While this discussion appears to have no quorum, it is NOT eligible for soft deletion because the subject is currently a redirect.
Note to closer: From lack of discussion, this nomination appears to have no quorum. This bot did not detect ~~previous PRODs,~~ previous AfD discussions, previous undeletions, or a current redirect, so this nomination MAY~~appears to~~ be eligible for soft deletion at the end of its seven-day listing if it has not been previously proposed for deletion; please review the article's edit history.

In this case, wouldn't need to list the entire history but just say at a glance (or the strongest reason) why the article isn't eligible for soft deletion. Eh? czar 02:46, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

@Czar: How about this report? --Kanashimi (talk) 11:13, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi, this is great! If it ran at the beginning of the 7th day of listing for Articles for deletion/Vikram Shankar and Articles for deletion/Anokhi, which for lack of participation would appear eligible for soft deletion, the closer would know that it's not actually the case. I'm not sure that the list of deletions/undeletions is needed for this case but open to other opinions. At the very least, pictorial image use is historically discouraged in AfD discussions. A few fixes:

The Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Greta Thunberg speeches would need a tweak. What would make it ineligible is if the existing article (under discussion) was redirected elsewhere, leaving its history in the same location, meaning that someone redirected it in lieu of deletion. In this case, the article (and its page history) was moved to a new location, so this case should check both whether the title redirects AND whether the page history remains. Page moves would still be eligible for soft deletion/expired PROD by my read.
Tok Nimol is presented as undeleted but its log doesn't show a restoration?
Reem Al Marzouqi: The rationale for this should not be "previously deleted" but specifically "previously discussed at AfD", which supersedes whether or not it was deleted. (Deletion itself doesn't make the article ineligible—e.g., Hasan Piker and Heed were each only deleted through CSD—but specific signs that someone has previously considered the article ineligible for PROD.) Same applies to the remaining "2nd+ nomination"s listed.
And of course there's the caveat that the script wouldn't have actually run on most of these (all but four?) since the rest had at least some participation.
Will this script catch whether the article was previously PROD'd? If not, would want to add something to the text to remind the closer to check. The rationale for Heed (cat)'s ineligibility, for example, is that the article was previously PROD'd and contested (03:32, 1 June 2009), not that it was previously deleted via CSD. Same for Paatti, which actually shows the PROD in the log (most do not, to my understanding).
Ayalaan actually appears eligible for soft deletion. Its deletion was through CSD and it appears to have not been previously PROD'd. As long as the script confirmed that the article was not tagged for PROD before, this would be a great case of where the script could say that the article appears eligible.

Thanks for your work on this! It's going to be really helpful. czar 14:18, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

@Czar: I fixed some bugs and generate 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Ayalaan: Do you mean that, all CSD is not taking into account? If so, it is easy to fix it.

Heed (cat): It seems not easy to parse comments, and it is expensive to fetch all revisions. So I have not decided yet.

Please check the results and tell me if there are still some things to fix. --Kanashimi (talk) 08:01, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Yep, CSD/BLPPROD doesn't affect PROD/soft deletion eligibility (WP:PROD#cite_ref-1), so don't need to track that.

If the v1 won't parse edit summaries or diffs, I've modified the collapsed section above with some suggested boilerplate. Of course, would be great if it could, but this would do for now.

It looks like all of those results would not run because the bot detects participation for each? The case of Madidai Ka Mandir should let the bot run since the only participation is from a delsort script. Henri Ben Ezra should let the bot run too (to post that it's ineligible based on having a prior AfD). So would need to tighten participation detection. If the bot/script is detecting one or fewer delete/redirect participations, the bot should run (e.g., Ayalaan and Anokhi). Probably also want the bot to only run when the nom hasn't been relisted, or else it could potentially run twice on the same nomination.

As for the logs, related discussions, and previous discussions, I think it might be overkill to post these. It could be potentially interesting as its own bot task, if there is consensus for it, but I think simply showing "soft deletion" eligibility is sufficient for this task. I'll ask Wikipedia talk:AfD for input. czar 16:42, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

The latest version: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Ayalaan Fixed
Heed (cat) Fixed via parse summary
Anokhi Fixed
Henri Ben Ezra Fixed

Please check the results and tell me if there are still some things to fix. ---Kanashimi (talk) 00:57, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

I didn't check all logs, but from the ones I did, the log analysis looks good! It doesn't look like the tests were doing "no quorum" detection, so as long as the script knows when it should run on a discussion (one or zero !votes in the last 24 hours of the AfD's seven-day listing) then sounds good to proceed to the next step/trial. Thanks! czar 01:49, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

@Czar: If you think it is good enough, I will file a bot request. I will generate some reports at sandbox next days. --Kanashimi (talk) 23:14, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi, sounds good czar 04:36, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

@Czar:

BRFA filed --Kanashimi (talk) 11:32, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Harvard Bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago15 comments5 people in discussion

{{resolved}} I've been using User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js for a few days now, and it's a pretty nice little script. However, the issues it highlights should be flagged for everyone to see and become part of regular cleanup. For example, in Music of India, two {{harv}}-family templates are used to generate reference to anchors, designed to point to a full citation.

{{Harvnb|MacDonell|2004|pp=29–39}}, pointing to Music of India#CITEREFMacDonell2004
{{Harvnb|Radhakrishnan|Moore|1957|p=3}}, pointing to Music of India#CITEREFRadhakrishnanMoore1957

However, inspecting the page reveals those anchors aren't found anywhere on the page. Even a manual search won't find the corresponding citations on that page, because this isn't an issue of someone having forgotten a |ref=harv in a citation template, they just aren't there to begin with.

A bot should flag those problems, probably with a new template {{broken footnote}}, or possibly on the talk page.

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Looks like the inline ref problem template {{citation not found}} is designed for this already. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:18, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: – {{citation not found}} is too general, for citations that are completely missing (see harv problems, #1). This is more specific. The citation could be there, but simply not linked to correctly. The bot shouldn't add a tag to a footnote tagged with {{citation not found}}, though, since that would be almost sure to be redundant. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:35, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps a new template such as {{Harv error}} would be needed. Or one might rig the CS1 templates to produce an automatic error message ... Trappist the monk? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:36, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: well, that's what {{broken footnote}} is. @Trappist the monk: CS1 should really emit |ref=harv automatically though. That would kill a great deal of those errors (although certainly not all). Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:12, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Um, the preceding post was by me, not Trappist. I just pinged them. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:50, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Brainfart, meant to ping Trappist for the second part only. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:01, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

This is a very good idea. Recently came across this in Easter Island ref #113 (Fischer 2008). There is no reference for Fischer 2008. In fact the reference is a faux-Harvard <ref>Fischer 2008: p. 149</ref> Lot of permutations for Harvard reference problems that a specialized bot could become expert on. -- GreenC 20:09, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Since there appears to be interest in this,

Coding... No real preference about what template should be applied. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 22:50, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

BRFA filed --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:28, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Tweaking the harvard templates to show the User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js by default, and maybe add a maintenance category, would be much preferable. The display would be instant and it would save us from lot of spammy templates and bot edits. This is also how the CS1/2 templates do it: i.e. Help:CS1 errors#Missing or empty |title= instead of a bot going around tagging these with {{title missing}}. Is there any technical reason why this couldn't be done? – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 21:05, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Finnusertop, Yes, that is not possible inside the template. To be able to determine if the link works or not, the template would need access to the rendered page HTML. Since the rendered page HTML is only available after the template itself is parsed and rendered, the template can't look at it. A MediaWiki extension could hook itself into the parsing chain, but changes in the parsing system make that a bad idea, especially in the next year or so. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 21:25, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

I see, AntiCompositeNumber. Then how about making User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js a default gadget (or will the parser negatively affect that too)? – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 21:30, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

@Finnusertop: That would be possible, but it would require someone to maintain it. Consensus would probably be required to have it default-on as well. Pages that have broken citations that have less editing traffic would also be unnoticeable, since the script wouldn't be able to apply tracking categories. This sort of problem is more directly comparable to dead links than missing parameters. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 21:38, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Not only that, but turning that on would also throw pointless warnings (anchors without refs) and fail to populate maintenance categories. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:50, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Updating essay impact assessments

Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion

{{resolved}} Per this conversation, the automated essay assessment system has fallen badly out of date since BernsteinBot stopped updating it in 2012. It would be useful to revive it so that essay readers could have a better indication as to whether the essay they are reading is more likely to represent a widespread norm or just a minority viewpoint. MZMcBride has provided the original code, but it will need to be updated. Your help would be much appreciated. Regards, Sdkb (talk) 20:19, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb, MZMcBride, and Moxy: Considering that the original script depends on python2, wikitools, toolserver SQL, and stats.grok.se, I decided to go the full rewrite route. The score calculation is the same, but watchers and pageviews data are retrieved from the MediaWiki action API. I made a test edit here and the code is here. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions, as well as how often you want the report to be updated. I can then move forward to file a BRFA. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 19:15, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Neat! --MZMcBride (talk) 21:17, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Looks good to me; thanks for this! Xeno had mentioned this in the other discussion: Keep in mind some essays get linked through maintenance templates, which can greatly inflate their inbound links (we might have corrected for this, I can't rememeber). Does the code correct for that, and if not, does it seem like there's much distortion happening because of it? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:58, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

It does not correct for template links, and I can't think of a good way to design such a thing short of parsing the wikitext for every page with a link (not a great idea, would make the report take 10x as long). I also don't see much of such an effect, outside of a few potential outliers. The scoring system weights pageviews the highest. I took the data and plotted it [2], might be interesting for you. Pageviews are clearly driving most of the score, but watchers also have a noticeable effect. As pageviews and watchers decrease, the effect from links increases. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:18, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb and MZMcBride:

BRFA filed: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AntiCompositeBot 2 --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:33, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Done Task approved and if the ancient god of Cron smiles upon us, the page should be updated every two weeks. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 16:47, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Resurrect RonBot task 4

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

{{resolved}} Greetings, I'm here to bother you all about File namespace nonsense again.

User:RonBot, which was disabled because its operator went inactive a year ago, had an approved task to reduce the display size of SVGs (BRFA). In its absence, there's quite a pile-up of SVGs awaiting reduction (over 100 currently). I tried to reduce them manually and failed, so now I'm here asking someone else to take up the task themselves. The source code for the task is here.

Many thanks, The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 23:41, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

I'll take a look into incorporating it into DatBot. Dat Guy^Talk_Contribs 05:36, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

BRFA filed. Dat Guy^Talk_Contribs 05:32, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Bot or AWB to fix identical CITEREF value error in 1,500 articles

Latest comment: 4 years ago11 comments5 people in discussion

{{resolved}} I have found 1,575 articles that have an identical referencing error. The author name listed in {{sfn}} does not match the author's name as listed in the |ref= parameter in the matching full {{cite book}} citation template, which causes a non-working link from the short reference to the full reference. It also causes a red error message if you have the relevant script enabled.

I have performed a sample fix here. Is there a kind AWB editor or bot operator who would be willing to fix the rest?

The list of articles that need fixing is here. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:23, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

It's misuse of the {{sfn}} template. The book is

*{{cite book
|last1=Gröner
|first1=Erich
|author-link1=
|author-mask1=
|last2=Jung
|first2=Dieter
|display-authors=
|last-author-amp=
|last3=Maass
|first3=Martin
|translator-last1=Thomas
|translator-first1=Keith
|translator-last2=Magowan
|translator-first2=Rachel
|year=1991
|title=U-boats and Mine Warfare Vessels
|volume=2
|work=German Warships 1815–1945
|location=London
|publisher=Conway Maritime Press
|isbn=0-85177-593-4
|ref=CITEREFGröner1991
}}

so the {{sfn|Gröner|1991|p=...}} should actually be {{sfn|Gröner|Jung|Maass|1991|p=...}} and that |ref=CITEREFGröner1991 (or |ref=CITEREFGr.C3.B6ner1991 if not yet modified) should be |ref=harv. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:14, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

You see misuse, I see WP:CITEVAR. Plenty of books are referred to in this shorthand way in Sfn templates in order to keep the short references short. It may not be your idea of "correct", but it is consistent throughout this batch of articles, as far as I can tell. I'm trying to get a technical problem fixed. If someone wants to come along later and change these articles' established citation style, that can be a different discussion. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:36, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

It's even mentioned in the template documentation as a valid method of shortening long lists of authors (though the doc recommends "Gröner et al", which I agree with). The documentation also recommends |ref={{SfnRef|Gröner|1991}} over |ref=CITEREFGröner1991. I think the SfnRef way is a bit cleaner (since it matches the {{sfn}} invocation), so would probably use that. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 02:11, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Thing is 'Gröner 1991' is actually wrong, because it should be 'Gröner, Jung & Maass 1991' or 'Gröner et al. 1991', so it's not just a matter of fixing an anchor, it's a matter to having a proper short ref and fixing the anchor. Going {{sfn|Gröner|Jung|Maass|1991|p=...}} is the way, and people can change it to {{sfn|Gröner et al.|1991|p=...}} + |ref=Gröner et al. if they want to manually shorten the list of authors (most style guides say keep 3, so that's why the default is up to 3 named authors, and 4+ gets truncated to et al. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:22, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

That said, having a working |ref=CITEREFGröner1991 would be an improvement. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:29, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

I dusted off ol' Harvcheck and found that the only page that actually had a broken {{sfn}} was the one that Jonesey95 fixed manually. That means the reported problem is largely moot and this task would probably fall under WP:COSMETICBOT. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 03:43, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't know what Harvcheck is. User:Ucucha/HarvErrors shows the errors when you have it installed, and the errors also show up when you unhide the error messages described at Category:Harv and Sfn template errors.

Did you try manually going to any of the articles, for example German submarine U-1015, and clicking on the link "Gröner 1991"? When I click on that link, it does not jump to or highlight the full citation. That is the problem I am hoping that someone will be willing to fix. I will fix them myself if necessary, but I know that AWB makes it a lot easier and less tedious. Fixing this batch of articles will fix about 5% of the total population of Category:Harv and Sfn template errors. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:22, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Harvcheck is a tool I wrote to do batch harvard-style reference checks. I fixed the bug and re-ran it, and found some more errors after Keith D ran his replacements. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:00, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Y Done I took the easy way and made the suggested change, if anyone wants to alter the way that the linkage is made then go ahead. There are 3 articles, October 1918, SM U-10 (Austria-Hungary) and SM U-11 (Austria-Hungary), that need further investigation as there were 2 substitutions in them. Keith D (talk) 14:45, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Keith D, thank you! I have cleaned up those three articles, which had redundant full citations in them. Thank you for your attention to detail. And AntiCompositeNumber, thanks for the updated list. I will check those remaining articles. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:25, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Forking listeria bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

{{resolved}} Listeria bot has been blocked due to it not complying with our non-free content policy and having someone knowledgeable in PHP fork the bot using the original code and implement a fix would be greatly appreciated. Extensive discussion has occurred at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard#Re-examination of ListeriaBot and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#ListeriaBot blocked an urgent resolution is needed. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 20:08, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

It appears this has mostly resolved itself. Magnus's tools are some of the most highly-used on the projects, and I would encourage him to try to find some co-maintainers to assist in the operation and development of his tools. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 16:31, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Lists of new articles by subject

Latest comment: 4 years ago10 comments3 people in discussion

My kingdom for a bot that compiles new articles in a new subject area (e.g., added to a WikiProject's scope). @PresN, currently runs a script that does this manually (see one of the "New Articles" threads at WT:VG) but would love to be able to do this for other projects so that new editors get visibility/help and that the project can see the fruits of its efforts. (Also discussed at PresN's talk page.) Special:Contributions/InceptionBot currently finds articles that might be within scope but this proposal is instead a log of recent additions to a topic area (similar to how the 1.0 project compiles). It could be useful if delivered directly to a WikiProject/noticeboard page or, alternatively, updated on a single page and transcluded à la WP:Article alerts. czar 20:07, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

@Czar: This seems like a fairly simple task, but I want to make sure I have all the details right: For every wikiproject that opts-in, each week, generate a list of articles that had that wikiproject's tag added to their talk page within that week. Information about the article should be included, including importance and quality rating and author. Should non-articles (cats, templates, files, etc) be considered as well, or just articles? What about drafts? Are newly-created redirects important? Do you want articles that were removed from the WikiProject, deleted or redirected too (this would make it more complex)? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:04, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber, yes, that's right! Can detect on the addition of the template or the addition to the category associated with the WikiProject (i.e., ArticleAlerts uses a combination of the banner and the talk category). I'd recommend including the quality rating but excluding the importance, à la {{article status}}. I'd recommend cutting scope to only include articles to keep the v1 reasonable. (Let someone request the extras if they have a valid case, but ArticleAlerts currently lists relevant deletions and AfC drafts.) In WT:VG#New Articles (January 27 to February 2), as an example, I personally don't find the category reports useful. The goal of this bot, to my eyes, is to make WikiProject talk pages closer to topical noticeboards, so editors interested in a topic receive a digest of new article creations to pitch in either to contribute to the article or simply to welcome new/isolated editors. So while I recommend against listing files, cats, templates, drafts, importance, deletions, or redirects, if there is any stretch goal, I'd particularly recommend incorporating InceptionBot's possibly related articles, in case there are new articles from the last week that may be eligible for the project but just haven't been tagged. But, yes, core function is just new, on-topic articles. czar 03:07, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Czar, how does this (for WP:VG) look? I'll add some explanatory text to it before calling it ready, but wanted to get your thoughts on what the output looks like now. I haven't written the bot part of the bot yet, just the category analysis. The report's only based on the category and doesn't particularly care about the template since that data is much more accessible. Also, do you know of wikiprojects that would be interested in the reports? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 22:34, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber, love it. Looks great! I'd start with WT:VG just for testing and can advertise/expand it to other projects. (FYI @PresN, curious if this test is missing any articles you'd normally catch) czar 00:31, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber and Czar: Ah, the machines are coming for my (machine's) job... Yeah, there's some differences between this bot and my script's output for the week:

Source 2 on Feb 5 is missing- my script lists this because it was previously a redirect (for 2+ years) and was converted to a 'real' article on that day
Jablinski Games on Feb 7 is missing - was created as a redirect on Jan 30 with no talk page tag (so, not in the project), then converted to a 'real' article on Feb 7 and a talk page tag added.
You have Animal Crossing Plaza on the 2nd when it was created/tagged on the 1st, but I think that might just be a time-zone issue
You list Candy Crush Saga as new on Feb 1, when it's years old; this appears to be because of a crazy revert war with a vandal on the talk page on Jan 31.

So, from this limited sample set, it appears the main miss is considering redirect->!redirect as a 'creation', and not discounting the 'creation' of an existing page. That said, I fully expect there to be weirdness around page moves and double-page moves as well, but those are smaller corner cases. The other major difference is that my script would have listed 17 new categories as well (in addition to listing new article deletions and redirections/moves to draft space (aka soft deletions) this week, and (none this week) new templates/template deletions). --Pres N 05:36, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

@PresN and Czar: Jablinski Games and Animal Crossing Plaza are both just time zone issues. The bot considers the last 7 full days in UTC, so Animal Crossing Plaza was tagged at 01:05 and Jablinski shows up today.

The other two are because of the data source. My tool is only querying the categorylinks database table for recent additions of the category, so it doesn't pick up redirect -> article conversions. WP 1.0 Bot gets around this by logging article metadata into it's own database, but that data isn't super accessible outside of parsing the on-wiki logs (afaict). The categorylinks table only cares about the page id, not the page title, so moves don't affect it. So while there is data for new catgorization of drafts, I won't see articles that were previously tagged and were moved to mainspace. There is, of course, data for the tagging of drafts, files, categories, etc: I'm just ignoring it. Listing articles currently tagged for AfD or PROD wouldn't be too difficult, it's just a category intersection. Code if you're curious --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 16:13, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: OK, so assuming I'm reading this right, there's not really a good way to get un-redirects; they'd show up when the redirect is first created (which isn't ideal as most redirects never get undone, and most un-redirects are years later) but that's it. Same for draft->mainspace, but no issues with page moves. So your version would cover the majority of cases, but would miss those edge cases. That's probably fine for most wikiprojects, though- my non-data-based feeling is that it's the media projects that have the most "article created, redirected, and later re-created" occurrences, whereas projects that get less attention from eager fans don't get as many articles created prematurely.

Your code is definitely more readable than my spaghetti nonsense, though- for an example of what happens if you try to base this off of the WP1.0 bot output and then compound it by actually just parsing the html of Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Video game articles by quality log directly without any sort of api access and then make it worse by parsing top to bottom aka reverse temporal order, here's the python function that does the logic of building the list of article objects that appear to have been created in the date range given:

Extended content

  def parse_lists(lists, headers, assessments, new_cats, dates, dates_needed):
    NULL_ASSESSMENT = '----'
    max_lists = dates_needed * 4
    extra_headers = get_extra_headers(headers) # Note "Renamed" headers

    # Initial assessment
    for index, list in enumerate(lists):
      if index <= max_lists:
        for item in list.find_all('li'):
          contents = _.join(item.contents, ' ')
          offset = count_less_than(extra_headers, index) - 1
          date = dates[int(max((index-(1 + offset)), 0)/3)] #TODO: handles 3+ sections
          assess_type = assessment_type(contents)
          
          # Assessment
          if assess_type == ASSESSMENT:
            namespaced_title = get_title(item, ASSESSMENT)
            title = clean_title(namespaced_title)
            old_klass = NULL_ASSESSMENT
            new_klass = get_newly_assessed_class(item, namespaced_title)
            if (not is_file(namespaced_title)
            and not is_redirect_class(new_klass)
            and not (title in assessments and was_later_deleted(assessments[title]))): # ignore files, redirects, and mayflies
              if is_category(namespaced_title):
                init_cat_if_not_present(new_cats, namespaced_title)
              else:
                init_if_not_present(assessments, title)
                assessments[title]['creation_class'] = new_klass
                assessments[title]['creation_date'] = date

          if assess_type == REASSESSMENT:
            namespaced_title = get_title(item, REASSESSMENT)
            title = clean_title(namespaced_title)
            old_klass = get_reassessment_class(item, 'OLD')
            new_klass = get_reassessment_class(item, 'NEW')
            if not is_file(namespaced_title):
              init_if_not_present(assessments, title)
              if is_redirect_class(new_klass): # tag redirect updates as removals, unless later recreated
                if not (is_draft_class(old_klass) and 'creation_class' in assessments[title]): # Ignore if this a a draft-> mainspace move in 2 lines
                  assessments[title]['was_removed'] = 'yes'
              elif is_redirect_class(old_klass): # treat redirect -> non-redirect as a creation
                assessments[title]['creation_class'] = old_klass
                assessments[title]['updated_class'] = new_klass
                assessments[title]['creation_date'] = date
              else: # only add the latest change, and only if there's no newer deletion
                if 'updated_class' not in assessments[title] and not was_later_deleted(assessments[title]):
                  assessments[title]['updated_class'] = new_klass

          # Rename
          if assess_type == RENAME:
            namespaced_old_title = get_rename_title(item, 'OLD')
            namespaced_new_title = get_rename_title(item, 'NEW')
            if not is_file(namespaced_new_title) and not is_category(namespaced_new_title):
              new_title = clean_title(namespaced_new_title)
              if is_draft(namespaced_old_title) and not is_draft(namespaced_new_title):
                init_if_not_present(assessments, new_title)
                if not was_later_updated(assessments[new_title]) and not was_later_deleted(assessments[new_title]):
                  assessments[new_title]['creation_class'] = DRAFT_CLASS
                  assessments[new_title]['updated_class'] = "Unassessed"
                  assessments[new_title]['creation_date'] = date
              if is_draft(namespaced_new_title) and not is_draft(namespaced_old_title):
                init_if_not_present(assessments, new_title)
                if not was_later_updated(assessments[new_title]) and not was_later_deleted(assessments[new_title]):
                  assessments[new_title]['creation_class'] = "Unassessed"
                  assessments[new_title]['updated_class'] = DRAFT_CLASS
                  assessments[new_title]['creation_date'] = date

          # Removal
          if assess_type == REMOVAL:
            namespaced_title = get_title(item, REMOVAL)
            # Articles
            if not is_file(namespaced_title):
              title = clean_title(namespaced_title)
              if title not in assessments: # don't tag if there's a newer re-creation
                assessments[title] = { 'was_removed': 'yes' }
                if is_category(namespaced_title):
                  assessments[title]['creation_class'] = CATEGORY_CLASS
                if is_draft(namespaced_title):
                  assessments[title]['creation_class'] = DRAFT_CLASS
            # Categories
            if is_category(namespaced_title) and namespaced_title not in new_cats:
              new_cats[namespaced_title] = 'was_removed'

    return {'assessments': assessments, 'new_cats': new_cats}

--Pres N 04:25, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi @AntiCompositeNumber, checking back—need anything else from us? czar 04:36, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't think so, but I'll need to sit down and look at everything again. I'll probably have a chance for that sometime in the next two weeks. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:11, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Plain text to template

Latest comment: 4 years ago11 comments4 people in discussion

I think I made this kind of request several years ago, but I can't find it in the archives.

Occasionally people add text like [citation needed] or (reference needed) to articles, and these articles don't end up in maintenance categories because they're plain text instead of templates. Could someone write a bot that would go around making edits like this, or could an existing maintenance-bot operator add this task? I'm guessing that it would be rather simple — give it a list of phrases, tell it to look for them inside parentheses and brackets, and let it loose. Of course, this isn't a one-time problem, so if this is a good idea, it ought to be made an ongoing task. Nyttend backup (talk) 16:35, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

It's probably best to do this with AWB or another semi-auto tool, as there are some legitimate uses of "[citation needed]" in pages (on this page, citation needed, and links to citation needed for example). [3] is a good search term for the first one, then can regex search-and-replace \[?\[citation needed\]\]? with {{subst:cn}}. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:49, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

@Nyttend backup:

Doing... via AWB. GoingBatty (talk) 12:58, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

@Nyttend backup:

Done - except for those inside comments. GoingBatty (talk) 16:53, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Another one that could be picked-up is (dead link) or [dead link]. Keith D (talk) 14:29, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the help! I know there are some general maintenance tasks that AWB operators tend to look for. How do I ask that this kind of fix be added to their task list? Nyttend backup (talk) 19:13, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

@Nyttend backup: Seems like a good question for Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Check Wikipedia. GoingBatty (talk) 22:38, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

@Keith D:

Doing... but many can be deleted if there's already an archive-url or the link can be fixed. GoingBatty (talk) 01:40, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! As you've probably seen in your notifications, I've posted this request at AWB and WCW. Nyttend backup (talk) 18:08, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

@Keith D:

Done - except for those inside comments or templates. GoingBatty (talk) 01:40, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: Many thanks for doing that. Keith D (talk) 10:54, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Cleanup of cite templates after "ref=harv" became default and/or update to HarvErrors.js

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Please see Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive 69#Cite book Harv warning where the suggestion was made: not a formal BOTREQ yet, but might help if bot operators can give some advise about how this could best be addressed, so that a more formal BOTREQ can follow (if that is the best option). --Francis Schonken (talk) 07:38, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

I think that one part of the fix is to fix User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js so that it doesn't get fooled by the new functionality of the CS1/CS2 templates. That's no bot task. If the new functionality of the CS1/CS2 templates means that the |ref=harv parameter is no longer needed one could run a bot task to remove it. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:58, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

As stated there, either use User:Svick/HarvErrors.js instead, or add the window.checkLinksToCitations = false; line to your common.js page. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:47, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

A bot to substitute accidentally transcluded instances of Template:Do not archive until

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

I occasionally see this (and have done it once or twice), and it's annoying to have to un-archive when it happens. Could we get a bot to find instances of people using something like {{DNAU|47}} and switch them to {{subst:DNAU|47}}? (I know there are a few bots already running that substitute accidental transclusions, so perhaps one of them could be tasked to this without too much effort.) {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:16, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Looks like JJMC89 has made the template automatically subst [4] Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:20, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Ah perfect; thanks! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:17, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Bot to remove pandemic portal from articles?

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Hello! I asked over at WikiProject Council if someone could have a bot remove all appearances of Portal:Pandemic from articles, and was advised to ask here. Could anyone here help? ---Another Believer _(Talk) 20:20, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Another Believer, why should this be done? Is there some concerns us building discussion I'm missing? ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 20:28, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Trialpears, Portal:Pandemic does not exist and should be removed from pages. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 20:29, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

To clarify, many pages have both Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019 and Portal:Pandemic. The latter redirects to the former. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 20:30, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Not a good task for a bot. 61 articles does not a bot task make. I did 57 manually. Please clean up the remaining 4 that aren't COVID-19 related. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 22:13, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Automated F8 handling

Latest comment: 4 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion

As of right now, there are currently 1065 images tagged with F8 that need deleting (specifically, these two categories are severely backlogged). Is it possible for a bot to perform this kind of maintenance based on transwiki checks to ensure that the Wikipedia and Commons versions of each file match, down to maximum resolution and filesize? ToThAc (talk) 17:33, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it would be a wise task for a bot. Humans have to check additional features, in particular factors such as attribution and description. You might upload an en:wp file to Commons with a very different description, and whether it's better or worse is impossible for a bot to tell. And whether the attribution is right is basically impossible to determine without human discretion. Nyttend backup (talk) 18:10, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Agreed with Nyttend. Each file requires human review, and there are a limited number of admins - user:Fastily and user:Jo-Jo Eumerus are the ones that come to mind - that work in that namespace. It's not just "have the description and attribution been carried over properly", it's also "is this file actually allowable on Commons or does it need to be deleted there and kept locally". The latter is likely why the backlog persists. It requires specialized knowledge and a fair amount of time.

I'd be willing to do the license vetting and make any corrections to the Commons pages that are necessary, but I'm not an admin, so I can't delete the files themselves. I can, however, pre-vet files and say "yeah, these are ready for you delete" if an admin that doesn't normally work in the file namespace were willing to partner with me on that backlog. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 22:29, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Sure, I can partner with you on that. {{Now Commons}} has a |reviewer= parameter which will categorize files accordingly; fill that in for each file you've finished reviewing/fixing. -FASTILY 04:08, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan. Will you have an easy way to tell which ones I reviewed? It looks like MGA73 has also been doing some reviewing. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 05:14, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

That's fine, I'll be able to tell the difference. -FASTILY 01:47, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

I am inclined to agree that F8 deletions are not really the sort of thing that can be done by a bot. There is too much double-checking involved there. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:57, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Putting

Not done here. Mdaniels5757 (talk) 20:47, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

A bot that categorizes (possibly tags) pages with embedded images and files that don't have alt text.

Latest comment: 4 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion

Basically the title. There are numerous articles with images (and other content) that should have alt text but do not. MOS:ALT says that we should try to ensure that images have alt text for accessibility reasons, which is especially important for people that utilize screen readers that cannot physically see the images. In a nutshell, said bot would probably check articles that have an embedded file such as a video, music, or image. It would then add the article a maintenance category on whether or not the embed has alt-text, as well as possibly a tag to the article letting readers (including people with screen readers) that alt-text is missing.
A related idea would be the same as the above but for math markup, which should probably be tagged/categorized separately due to the technical knowledge required to translate it into English. Chess (talk) Ping when replying 01:52, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

I've seen past discussions about ALT text and one thing that came up is that it's not always appropriate to have ALT text for an image and that ALT text is often hard to write. I am thus not sure we want to have a general maintenance tag for missing ALT text. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:37, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Jo-Jo about how hard writing one seems to be. I have seen everything from a repeat of the caption to a detailed description of the picture that mentions everything except who or what is in the image. If it it does proceed someone will want to write a guideline page giving detailed instructions about how to write one. MarnetteD|Talk 08:42, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

I should add that it is only used occasionally so the number of articles has gotta be immense. MarnetteD|Talk 08:44, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, if images are tagged as needing alt text, there is the likelihood that somebody will simply copy the caption to |alt= and feel that they are justified in removing the tag. No |alt= parameter is better than having a repeat of the caption. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:52, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Is it possible to at least get alt text tagging for math markup? As of now many of these equations are inaccessible. Chess (talk) Ping when replying 16:59, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

A bot and tag does not seem suitable to this problem. As it is today, the image alt tag is I believe filled by the LaTeX, which is a reasonable alt text. I would recommend improvements to MediaWiki core and the Math extension to emit a tracking category or Linter error instead. --Izno (talk) 00:23, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

@Izno: The LaTeX can be questionable or even incomprehensible in many cases especially to someone not intimately familiar with the markup. For example, \and and \or are deprecated in favour of \land and \lor, which obviously can cause problems with screenreaders. Help:Latex has a lot of examples and if you look at some of the LaTeX source for them you can see how it might be incomprehensible for a screen reader. Formatting instructions would presumably also be a pain to hear especially if there's a lot of them.

Anyways one of the main reasons for me requesting this is that I'd like to start adding some math markup alt-text myself. If it's not possible to get a bot to categorize, is there another potential way I could find a list of LaTeX equations in articles? I'm not good with coding so I'd love it if there was a way possibly with Regex or something. And if I were to do this is there some place I'd need to seek consensus before doing so? Also is there anywhere I could get a good opinion on how transcriptions of math should work? Chess (talk) Ping when replying 00:29, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

@Chess: I said reasonable, not any other word that would indicate that all was right in the world. :) I have no doubt the LaTeX can be incomprehensible at times.

This won't tell you which ones have alt text and which don't, but this search is as good as any. I suspect most of those pages need them, so edit to your heart's content. If you think you might need consensus, you should ask at WT:MATH (your question is reasonable but I don't know better than you do if others will be disappointed by your changes).

As I said, I think it would be a good idea to change one of a couple of extensions to emit categories or Linter errors instead, if alt text is desirable generally. Help:Bug reports is the place to start for that. --Izno (talk) 00:40, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Thinking about it some more, alt text for math that would avoid ambiguity would require us to standardize some method of converting mathematical expressions to words in an unambiguous and consistent way. Such a formal language would be an unprecedented undertaking that would probably require significant expertise far beyond what I have. Especially considering the reason why math has switched to symbols for expression is that wordy statements can be impossible to parse. Chess (talk) Ping when replying 22:51, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Converting inline interlanguage links to use Template:Interlanguage link?

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

It's not uncommon that inexperienced editors will add piped inline interlanguage links to articles that exist on a different Wikipedia in order to avoid red links. This is a contravention of the MOS, as it surprises the reader, and prevents links to valid articles once they are created. Such piped links should be replaced with the {{Interlanguage link}} template, e.g. Special:Diff/866719019.

Is this something that could feasibly be done by a bot? Are there valid intentional uses that shouldn't be changed? (I guess it's clearer with languages that use non-Latin script, since I can't think of a good reason to pipe a foreign name under English text, but I'm not sure about those which use the Latin alphabet.) --Paul_012 (talk) 02:48, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

There's an idea to explore here, but there should be a fair amount of testing on this. I feel oftentimes those interwiki links should be replaced with an enwiki link (as in we have an article, but someone used another language for some reason). Also, probably should only affect mainspace/draft space. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:55, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Definitely something to explore, though I wonder about the scope; is this a "hundred-edit cleanup" project, or is this a "hundred-edit-per-day cleanup" project? I notice that WP:WCW tracks (via #45, #51, #53, and #91) most of this type of issue. Only about 400 hits on the first three. The only one I would be concerned about is #91, because I glanced at a few and it looks like people are trying to use the other-language wikis as references; converting those to {{ill}} might be problematic as they would be harder to track and thus makes it a CONTEXT issue. Primefac (talk) 15:26, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

I did some preliminary searches and found some three thousand results for Japanese and Chinese, and a hundred or so for Thai. It does appear that there are false positives in the form of deliberate references, though these should be avoidable by excluding citations. I just realised though that there's another issue which may prevent a bot from doing this: the link might be piped to something else that isn't the appropriate English title, e.g. abbreviations and non-disambiguated forms. Fore example, 2020 in Philippine television contains the piped link [[:th:ลมซ่อนรัก (ละครโทรทัศน์)|Hidden Love]], which would need to be converted to {{ill|Hidden Love (TV series)|lt=Hidden Love|th|ลมซ่อนรัก (ละครโทรทัศน์)}}. --Paul_012 (talk) 18:58, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Deleting tracking parts of URL from sources etc.

Latest comment: 4 years ago8 comments7 people in discussion

There are a lot of URL in sources, that have tracking extensions by Facebook attached, they should be deleted. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=fbclid&title=Special:Search&fulltext=1&ns0=1) I think that would be a fine job for a bot, and as it's probably happening unintentional by some editors, who copy'n'paste this without much thinking, it should probably done once per day or week or so. Same goes probably for Google Analytics extensions with UTM: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Suche&limit=500&offset=0&ns0=1&search=utm_source&advancedSearch-current={} Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(talk) 15:02, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

@AManWithNoPlan and Sänger: Probably a good idea to at least offload some of that to User:Citation bot. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:06, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

This can be prone to breaking archive URLs and creating link rot if one is not careful. See WP:WEBARCHIVES for a list of the archives used on Enwiki and the formats they use. The regex at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/DemonDays64_Bot_2 is an example, it uses lookback to avoid URLs that are embedded in an archive URL, User:DemonDays64 could probably help explain it. The other problem is that if you retain the tracking bits in the archive URL but remove it from the source |url= they are now mismatched and look like different URLs, other bots might pick up on that and restore the archive URL version of the source URL, since it is the authority (once the link is dead). Personally, I would bypass any citation that involves an archive URL too many complications. -- GreenC 16:23, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Tracking bits are evil, they must go away. If web archive used this evil URL in the past, that's something we have to live with, better link rot then supplying facebook with anything. Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(talk) 16:27, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

@Sänger: not challenging the idea (it'd be great to clean up links if there weren't side effects) but think about this: we'd be hurting Facebook by leaving them; it gives them bad data every time someone clicks one that isn't actually in the place it was supposed to be. Still would be a good idea if only the archive bots would reliably understand. DemonDays64 (talk) 17:48, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

I think KolbertBot 4 operated by Jon Kolbert has approval for this. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 22:48, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

If it can be done reliably without altering the generated contents, damaging links and causing linkrot, I would applaud any efforts to remove these tracking/click identifiers like utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content, gclid, gclsrc, dclid, fbclid, zanpid (see UTM parameters). Similar things could be done for some other known types of links as well, for example Google Books links as used in many citations often contain all kinds of irrelevant parameters and could, in most cases, be reduced and normalized to just the id parameter identifying the book and some page information. If this causes problems in associating archived links, we should try to work with the archivers so they improve their matching algorithms - given our good relations with them I guess this already happens at least in the case of archive.org). We might also think about adding a module to the framework of citation templates containing a ruleset for a number of known sites which would at least highlight links containing unnecessary parameters in edit preview so the parameters can be manually removed by (knowledgeable) editors even before archives are created. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:48, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

I have a bot task that does this. I haven't run it in a while though. Primefac (talk) 14:43, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia Edition Article Similarity Bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello,

I have a working bot; its purpose is to give readers and editors alike information regarding the presence of different content in other Wikipedia language editions for the same article they are reading. This information can be used to guide the reader to content which will add to their study, and/or highlight that content in another language happens to be biased. I hope that such a bot would be used to ratchet up the level of discourse across language editions and spread useful knowledge between them.

My proposal is that the bot be allowed to add a small phrase to the 'See Also' section of a given article, such as, "The Russian edition of this article is 70% different from this edition. You can view it here."

As I was working on this bot, there was an ongoing discussion at the Idea Lab. You can view it at Wikipedia Edition Article Similarity Bot.

I assert that the bot works: its most limiting factor right now is that I only have access to 2 million characters of translation capability per month for article comparisons, which limits the bot to a relative handful of articles in output per month. You can see the code here.

This is not a bot request--it is a request for the bot to have edit capabilities. If there is a more appropriate place for this request, please let me know.

Theory42 (talk) 16:16, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

I think you need WP:BRFA, though one of the requirements is that you show you have consensus to perform the edits you want. I don't see that in the Village Pump discussion you've linked to. Spike 'em (talk) 16:56, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Adding reciprocal merge templates

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

To add a merge template to the other page where only one page has had the merge template added; that is, to add reciprocal tags. This has been proposed before, and developed consensus, but doesn't seem to have been finished or the scope has been expanded too far until it becomes controversial. Rather than starting from scratch, it might be possible to resurrect Mutleybot or to add this as a Merge bot task, something wbm1058 has suggested before (Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 70#Removing bad merge requests). I suggest that the scope of the bot be simple, and that it not be designed to interpret merge consensus (or not), something that has been controversial in the past. Klbrain (talk) 07:50, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

@Klbrain: Right, I last did significant work in this area in May 2019, and also some fixes in January. I'll take another look and see what I can do. Merge bot remains a work in progress. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:44, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Sports Reference

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Hi. The main resource for sourcing basic biography data on Olympians, Sports Reference, has now been switched off. I started a recent thread about this at the Olympic Project. There are tens of thousands of articles that source Sports Ref. However, there's quite a simple fix that can be done to stop the links from going dead. Just change "cite web" to "cite sports-reference" in the ref, as per this example, adds the web archive link. This is per the recent change made to the cite template by Zyxw.

So therefore, please can a bot change anything from "cite web" to "cite sports-reference" where this is used on WP? Many thousands of article already use the latter, but even more so do not. Please ping me if you need anymore info. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 13:58, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Yes I've been working on this for months. See WP:URLREQ. There are a lot of complications and it's a very large job. Please do not switch to {{cite sports-reference}} this will create problems. -- GreenC 14:43, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Y Done Around 150k links archived in around 100k articles. -- GreenC 02:39, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

A bot that condenses article issue templates into the ‘multiple issues’ template

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion

I think it would be effective to have a bot that condenses multiple “article issue” templates, such as “more citations needed” or “Missing information” into the “This article has multiple issues” so it appears as one notice instead of several consecutive notices. Users might forget to do this, or add to previously existing issue templates and forget to condense it using the ‘multiple issues’ template. I propose that this bot would apply the condensing template to any article with more than 2 notices at the top, or whatever the official guidelines are for this according to the Manual of Style as I’m not yet sure what they say about the number of templates allowed to appear. This would be fully automated as opposed to the semi-automation of the AutoWikiBrowser that already has this capability.

This might already exist or have been discussed, so forgive me if I’m wrong.

Thanks! MrSwagger21 (talk) 10:50, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

I hold a bot running the same function in zhwiki for several years and generate a report w:zh:User:Cewbot/含有太多維護模板之條目. Maybe I can help? --Kanashimi (talk) 08:25, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi: Hi, that seems like something that would work. Could you optimize it for use on the English Wikipedia and then submit your request at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval?

BRFA filed --Kanashimi (talk) 11:53, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

@MrSwagger21: The bot will work weekly. --Kanashimi (talk) 23:17, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi: Thank you so much! Great work. I will display this on my user page! MrSwagger21 (talk) 02:13, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

A bot to monitor the activity level of other bots

Latest comment: 4 years ago33 comments10 people in discussion

There are many bots whose job involves making regular updates or are otherwise anticipated to make edits frequently. When such bots stop operating, it might just be because they're no longer needed and have been retired, or it might be indicative of a problem. I propose a bot that monitors the edits of other bots known to make frequent edits (those bots could be added to a category, or to one of several categories based on level of activity expected), and sends an automated alert to a noticeboard if the bot makes no edits within the expected timeframe. At the noticeboard, editors could review the alerts, marking some as no issue and placing others into a queue for repairs. (This is somewhat a follow-up to my brainstorming from March; feel free to lmk if it's just as non-viable, but I wanted to at least throw it out here.) {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:20, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

There are bot accounts, bot operators and bot software. We could monitor bot account activity but for any given account there could be a dozen or more bots (software) associated with that single account. It might be possible to differentiate by looking at edit summaries, but the complexities of keeping it up to date would be challenging. -- GreenC 17:36, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, that is a challenge. I wish that more of a standardized notation was set up so that bots would always identify which task they were doing in the edit summary of each edit they make. As it stands, I think the more realistic goal for now would be to just focus on catching bot accounts that stop editing entirely (many cases where bots stop without being immediately noticed fall into that category anyways, I think?). That would improve on the status quo, and if the system works, maybe others in the future would feel compelled to expand it to include individual tasks. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:03, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Even identifying the specific task might not be enough. Take Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Legobot 33 for example - this has several sub-tasks, and is still running to update the GA lists and RfC lists, but hasn't sent out any WP:FRS messages since December 2019. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:49, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

If no human notices that a bot has stopped editing, doesn't that mean the bot was doing a task nobody else cared about? * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:36, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

@Pppery: I wouldn't say that's always the case. Take the example above — people cared enough to start updating it manually, they just didn't know it was supposed to be done by a bot, or didn't know to take it here, or maybe assumed someone else was working on the issue. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:04, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

How would we monitor the activity of Joe's Null Bot (talk · contribs)? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:50, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

In theory, bots can/should define a unique useragent. These can be queried via meta=featureusage, although doing so it tedious and would require knowing the agent for each bot. I'm skeptical of the utility of this in general, but in theory such a tool could check bots without edits and known none-or-minimal-editing that way. In practice, User:Joe's Null Bot/source does not list a custom useragent, so it'll be MediaWiki::API/0.41 or whatever version it's using. Trivial to add. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 15:14, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Throwing ideas, we could simply have a table of bots sortable by bot name, operator name, number of edits made, and by date of last edit. Then have a disclaimer at the top that several bots, like nullbots, will not make edits. Would give a good idea at a glance of which bot is active and which isn't. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:56, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Seems reasonable. The only question would be what to do with the inactive bots and/or blocked bots; do they share the same table or do they eventually get pulled and/or lose their bot status? Primefac (talk) 15:03, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

There could be a "status" column as well. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:16, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Primefac: It used to be that inactive bots would be deflagged after notifying the operator, but I don't think anyone on either side has done that chore for a while. I wonder if we should flag bots for 3 years and have the operators request extensions. –xeno^talk 23:20, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

BOTPOL already says we can pull the flag after 2 years (and 1 week notice); a table like this would make the task a little easier, since it would mean not having to manually update it like some people do. I do think we can be a little less blasé about hanging out the bot flag - if a bot is doing a one-time run, there's not much point in granting it indefinitely. However, that's something to discuss at WP:BOTN. Primefac (talk) 14:58, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Coding... Current messy code is at [5] and example output at User:MajavahBot/Bot status report. Is there anything that should be included and currently isn't? – Majavah ^(t/c) 17:36, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

@Majavah: not a super fan of the machine-format time stamps. Any way to format them in a friendlier-to-human way, e.g. 2020-05-02T08:14:47Z → 2020-05-02 [08:14:47] (UTC) or whatever? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:42, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

@Headbomb: As I said, that's still a work-in-progress. I'm not sure what to do with them as I would also like to keep them automatically sortable which gives its own problems when trying to make them human-readable (must use order year-month-day... and can't use month names instead of numbers). – Majavah ^(t/c) 17:45, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Well my format above is still sortable. There's also {{sort}}. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:47, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

I'd also add a total edit count to the table. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:48, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

How about now? The date format is still open, I'm 50-50 split between your format above and the one currently there ("02 May 2020 18:04:45 (UTC)"). Also added the edit count there. – Majavah ^(t/c) 18:08, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Not super fussy on the exact format. I'd put edit counts in the second column personally. And use <center>—</center> instead of hyphens to indicate an inexistent entry. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:14, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

And maybe move (UTC) to the headers, instead of repeating it in each entry to save width/space. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:16, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Please don't recommend <center>. I have no opinion on centering text, but an obsolete HTML element isn't cool. --Izno (talk) 18:28, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Whatever gets the job done. I use < center > </ center> because it's the simplest way to reliably center something that doesn't require convoluted mark up. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:32, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

In this version, I don't really see a need for all three columns indicating activity, and total edits doesn't seem necessary for a report on activity. Non breaking spaces are overkill (but even if they weren't, you should prefer class="nowrap" on the cells in question). I do not think we need to know HH:MM:SS to know a bot has failed or stopped operating. I'm tempted to suggest a human-readable "time since last operation", probably also to 'day' precision. --Izno (talk) 18:40, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Well this isn't just to provide the minimum required information to know if yes/no a bot is active, but also to provide a general overview of the activity of bots. A bot with 3 million edits that is inactive is more interesting than a bot with 240 edits which is inactive. Agree that the exact time-of-day of those activities is probably overkill, but at the same time, there's room in the table. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:46, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

There's room in the table for people with big monitors or skins which aren't responsive. :^). A bot with 3 million edits is no more interesting, though may be more important, than one with 240 edits. I suspect there is a more interesting metric than count of actions/edits to indicate the important ones though...? --Izno (talk) 19:00, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Such as? – Majavah ^(t/c) 09:50, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

@Majavah: anyway you can add the bot operator(s) from {{Bot}}? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:03, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Sure! Done. – Majavah ^(t/c) 16:23, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

@Majavah: I made some tweaks [6]. The class="center" thing messes with column widths, so I went with <center> </center> tags. The final ' of diffs should be done with {{'}} (or you could just make use of {{'}} everywhere instead of '). But this table looks pretty good to me. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:12, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Thank you! I adopted those changes.

BRFA filed. – Majavah ^(t/c) 06:19, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

I'm glad to see this went through — thanks Majavah and everyone else! To follow up from Primefac's question above, it does look like there are quite a few bots that haven't made an edit in a long time. It'd probably be good to mark those as retired or remove them from the list. Once that cleanup is done, it might be possible to add some light color coding so that e.g. the "last activity" timestamp cell of any bot inactive for more than say a month is turned red. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:40, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

I don't think we need any sort of colour coding - 2 years is a pretty easy timeframe to sort out. Primefac (talk) 21:36, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

A bot to update Template:NUMBEROF/data

Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion

This task was previously handled by Acebot (BFRA here), but it stopped functioning in November 2019. The manual updates done by several editors since then indicate that there is continued demand for the information in the table. Its operator appears to have retired. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:05, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Acerbot was running the bot on around 50-60 wiki language sites. If they applied for and received bot perms on all those sites, that is a lot of time and work. First step would be find out why Acerbot stopped running and try to get it restarted with Acerbot's established perms. -- GreenC 17:48, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

There is another bot on ruwiki that generates similar data here. Ideally data would be stored on Commons in Tabular format then templates pull it from there, so bots don't have to run on each language wiki. -- GreenC 18:10, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Doing... - an opportunity to test out tabular data on Commons with a Lua template. If it works, the Lua module can be rolled out to other wiki languages without needing bot perms or bot edits. -- GreenC 18:24, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:03, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Y Done, new system working with Commons tabular data. Installed on 60+ wikis. -- GreenC 02:41, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

List of Wikipedians by article count on Luganda Wikipedia

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

I would like to generate a list of Wikipedia Editors on the Luganda Wikipedia by Article Count https://lg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olupapula_Olusooka

To be able to generate something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_article_count — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kateregga1 (talk • contribs) 19:54, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Kateregga1, https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/44128 --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:47, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Kateregga1, if you want the bot that generates Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_article_count to also run for Lgwiki, post a request on the talk page of the list. I recently set it up on Trwiki for example. -- GreenC 00:10, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Follow up task for files tagged Shadows Commons by GreenC bot job 10

Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion

GreenC bot by @GreenC: has a job that detects when a file on Wikipedia has the same name as one on Commons but is a different image, and tags the local file with Template:Shadows Commons, which puts it in Category:Wikipedia files that shadow a file on Wikimedia Commons.

I've been processing the files in that category, and many of the files on Commons are copyright violations, which are deleted within hours/days of upload. It would be useful for a bot to review the files tagged with Template:Shadows Commons and remove that template if there is no longer a file on Commons with the same name.

At any given time there are only a small number of files in that category, 30 or so, so this could potentially be done more than once a day without being very resource intensive, though once a day would be plenty useful. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 06:43, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Shadowbot the bot that adds the tags, runs daily at 4:37 GMT -- GreenC 11:38, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

The Squirrel Conspiracy and GreenC: Here's the code (in Python) that I have for this so far; it's already been tested and it appears to work as intended. I just want to know if it looks good to both of you before I send it over to BRFA. Phil roc (c) 16:11, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Nice. Pywikibot is nifty. My only thought the stdout statements have a date/time stamp and go to a log file, in case you want to track activity. -- GreenC 17:16, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Done. Phil roc (c) 22:17, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

I have absolutely no coding ability. I defer to @GreenC:'s expertise entirely on this matter. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 23:14, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

@The Squirrel Conspiracy and GreenC:

BRFA filed; code has been completely debugged. Phil roc (c) 20:32, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Move 500 River articles per consensus on tributary disambiguator

Latest comment: 4 years ago17 comments4 people in discussion

This is a simpler multi-article move than the last one I requested and withdrew, since the targets are all redlinks. See the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers#More tributary disambiguators to update and complete list of old and new titles at User:Dicklyon/tributaries, which are listed like these examples (about 500 of them):

I appreciate your help. Dicklyon (talk) 18:05, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

I think we should leave a redirecting for each article, right? --Kanashimi (talk) 00:29, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Yes, for sure we want redirects, so existing links don't break. Dicklyon (talk) 03:21, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

coding... --Kanashimi (talk) 04:23, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

@BD2412: You've been doing some of these by hand. Hold off while the list is grabbed for the bot. Dicklyon (talk) 04:38, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

I'm done for now. I figured out my other project. Cheers! BD2412 T 04:39, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

I don't know if Água Fria River (Tocantins River) and Slate Creek (Rapid Creek) are still need to move. Please check the result, thank you. --Kanashimi (talk) 05:25, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I went ahead and moved those two. I don't know why my query didn't find them. Dicklyon (talk) 17:12, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

@Dicklyon: Thanks for spotting this requirement. I've put another bunch of pages that you may wish to move here. Certes (talk) 11:08, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Yes, excellent; I'll review and then come back and ask Kanashimi to do them. Dicklyon (talk) 17:12, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

@Kanashimi: do you need the list of old and new names as I had prepared before to make this easy, or is Certes's list enough? Dicklyon (talk) 17:12, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

@Dicklyon: I need a list so the bot won't make mistakes, thank you. --Kanashimi (talk) 19:46, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Making a list ... checking it twice. Dicklyon (talk) 22:55, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

@Dicklyon: The articles in User:Dicklyon/tributaries are all redirected. The articles in User:Certes/sandbox are not with targets. Is there another list existing? --Kanashimi (talk) 03:11, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Not yet. I'll make it. Dicklyon (talk) 03:51, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

OK, new list of about 54 from Certes has been reviewed and made explicit, herebelow. Dicklyon (talk) 05:04, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Done --Kanashimi (talk) 09:55, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Bot to update the pages: Wikipedia:Vital articles/List of all articles and Wikipedia:Vital articles/List of all level 1–4 vital articles

Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

The list of vital articles gets updated on a regular basis. Sometimes page titles are changed. I think we should have a bot update the pages to make work easier for humans. Interstellarity (talk) 13:14, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

I will let cewbot update the list when updating the section counts and article assessment icons of vital articles. --Kanashimi (talk) 08:11, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Done --Kanashimi (talk) 11:39, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Five year old mass message to Wikiprojects not being archived

Latest comment: 4 years ago17 comments6 people in discussion

I noticed that a "Wiki Loves Pride" mass message to all wikiprojects from June 2015 is not being auto-archived by some of those projects that set up autoarchiving (such as WT:IRAN). It is missing a timestamp. Can a bot be set up to archive all those messages that still remain on the main talkpages to the proper archives? Or can a boit be set up to to add timestamps to all the messages that remain on the main talk pages? (June 2015 timestamp) This is 5 years out of date, and seems odd to inform people to do still some thing 5 years after it already ended.

-- 65.94.170.207 (talk) 18:50, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

These were not mass messages per se, but emanated directly from Another Believer (talk · contribs). There were several batches beginning at 00:52, 31 May 2015 and ending at 16:34, 3 June 2015 amounting to more than 1,000 posts. Not all edits in that interval were "Wiki Loves Pride" messages. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:39, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I regret not time-stamping these messages, but lesson learned. I archive these manually as I come across them. If a list of WikiProject talk pages with unarchived WLP posts were available, I'd help with archiving, but I don't know how to best help with this otherwise. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 21:43, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Possible There's currently an issue with the Data Services replicas from WMF Labs, but once that's sorted, I can hopefully identify a list of the pages that this template is on with some fairly simple SQL. Once I've got that list, should just be a case of running an AWB run to wrap the relevant bits in {{archive top}} and {{archive bottom}} templates - I think stuff being unsigned inside one of those doesn't cause problems for the archiving bots (although feel free to correct me on that!) Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 22:17, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

I'm quite sure archiving bots need a timestamp somewhere inside the section. {{archive top}}/{{archive bottom}} don't indicate when the section was last edited so the archiving bots won't know that the mass message needs to be archived. Galobtter (pingó mió) 22:26, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

@Galobtter: {{Archive now}} should do it, surely? Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 22:29, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

No, only if specified as described at Template:Archive now/doc. Why not just add a 2015 timestamp? Galobtter (pingó mió) 22:31, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

@Galobtter: Ah, I didn't remember it needed the specified bit in the bot config. Fair enough - something like (timestamp may not be accurate) {{subst:Unsigned|Another Believer|15:13, 3 June 2015 (UTC)}} on the end of each of them then? Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 22:34, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

That should work. Galobtter (pingó mió) 22:37, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

@Another Believer: This should suit if you're interested. [7] includes the June 2015 text, so I don't know what the 100 page disparity is between search 1 and 2. --Izno (talk) 22:19, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

@Izno: From a brief look, it doesn't look like it's just WikiProject talk pages - it's also user talk pages too at least, possibly more. Now there is of course the question of whether or not user talk pages should just be left as they are if the user hasn't bothered to clean it in all that time... but nonetheless. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 22:22, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

The IP specified WikiProject talk pages and accordingly both searches were solely in Wikipedia talk namespace. --Izno (talk) 22:25, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Izno, Ah, very helpful, thanks! So should I work on this manually or wait a bit to see if a bot can do this? ---Another Believer _(Talk) 22:23, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

No opinion from me. It looks like Naypta can help though. --Izno (talk) 22:25, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Doing... - and I've just realised the edit summaries AWB is leaving includes the usernames of the two users responsible - to both of you, I am very sorry for the ping explosion! Helpfully, running AWB in Wine seems to hide the checkbox to turn that off, so I'm going to switch to JWB for the rest. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 22:55, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Done -- cc 65.94.170.207. With apologies as mentioned above to the temporary ping-bomb for Another Believer - fortunately it looks like the other user had a rename so they won't have got all the pings. All sorted now, things should be archiving soon :) Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 23:15, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Naypta, Thanks for your help! Where I did received pings, I've been helping to archive my old posts as well as other outdated notifications on talk pages. I'm happy I could help a bit with this cleanup since the mistake was mine. Glad this is finally being resolved, much appreciated! ---Another Believer _(Talk) 01:26, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Fixing broken section anchors

Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion

Wikipedia has a very long list of section anchors that need to be repaired. To fix these broken links, it is necessary to add an {{anchor}} whenever a section's title is changed.

User:Dexbot was designed to correct these broken links, but it hasn't corrected any of them in several years. Can Dexbot be configured to fix these links again? Jarble (talk) 16:40, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

pinging Ladsgroup, the botop for Dexbot Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 16:51, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I haven't touched it. I should pick it up again and do it. Hopefully in a week or two. Ladsgroup^overleg 06:24, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

Done I started the bot, here's the first edit: Special:Diff/958520923 Ladsgroup^overleg 08:31, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Aand Special:Diff/958526196 and Special:Diff/958526426 and Special:Diff/958526630 Ladsgroup^overleg 08:53, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

so much done \o/ 16:22, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank you Ladsgroup - nice job! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 16:23, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: Will Dexbot continue to repair these links periodically, or does it still need to be started manually? Jarble (talk) 18:22, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

@Jarble: I will make it work monthly, as long as the report works, my bot should work too. Ladsgroup^overleg 04:59, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

Revival of User:TedderBot/CurrentPruneBot

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

This defunct bot removed inappropriate uses of {{Current}} (which per its documentation is meant only for short-term use on articles receiving a high edit count) by removing it from articles that have not been edited in more than two hours. It stopped functioning I think in 2013, and since then (perhaps because it stopped) the standards have gotten increasingly lax. I propose that we bring it back (with perhaps a slightly longer edit window, at least to start). {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 08:54, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

I support this. Thryduulf (talk) 09:43, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Coding... - seems a good idea to me! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 19:30, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb and Thryduulf:

BRFA filed Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 08:32, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Replacing categories

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I am a bureaucrat on Real Life Villains Wikia and the other bureaucrat wanted to do a category cleanup, but changed his mind about some of the categories. Unfortunately, the user he tasked with removing the categories took his job too seriously and removed them anyway even after we decided to keep them. On any page where User:Super Poison Ivy removed the categories Anti-Semitic, Anti-Christian, Bully, Islamophobes, Fascist, and Communist, I want those categories to be restored. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bjanderson94 (talk • contribs)

This is the request page for bots running on English Wikipedia. Wikia is not affiliated with English Wikipedia, so you're in the wrong place and likely won't get anyone willing to help. However, what you're looking to do could be accomplished by AutoWikiBrowser, which you can download and run yourself. Here is a page on Fandom about running it on non-Wikipedia projects. That page also links to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser, where you can find documentation. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 20:13, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Create WT: redirects according to WP: shortcuts

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Would it be controversial to request a bot to create redirects in the Wikipedia talk namespace to the talk pages of the targets of redirects in the Wikipedia namespace? I've typed WT:xxx, expecting it's a shortcut given WP:xxx is, only to be disappointed it doesn't exist from time to time. Nardog (talk) 01:26, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Not really. It'd create a lot of pointless ones for mostly unused redirects, but it's not like anyone will care. Should only cover those explicitly marked as {{R from shortcut}} though. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:49, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Should only... Why? It's not like WP: shortcuts technically exist in the main namespace, as in H:. I'd like e.g. WT:Actors to work, even though WP:Actors isn't marked as a shortcut. (I can see an argument for avoiding shortcuts to sections, though.) Nardog (talk) 03:23, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

@Nardog and Headbomb: There's an order of magnitude fewer tagged WP redirects without a talk page than all WP redirects without a talk page. There's definitely an argument to be made that the tagged redirects are generally more useful or more well-known than untagged redirects, and there is definitely a lot of chaff in the all redirects query. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 04:04, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I think it would be controversial, actually. For example, a lot of WP: shortcuts are to sections or anchors within a page, and it would seem unnecessary to create corresponding WT: shortcuts for these. In addition, the talk page of a redirect is the place to discuss that redirect—it should not automatically be made a redirect to the talk page of the redirect's target. I would definitely oppose using a bot to mass-create these redirects. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 21:34, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Clean up translation template quotemarks

Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion

The {{literal translation}} and {{langnf}} templates were originally written with simple unquoted outputs of (if called with just "example text" as their argument) Spanish for example text and lit. example text. This isn't the best way to present a translated string, and in hundreds of articles users have very reasonably added quotemarks into the template calls (eg. {{langnf||Spanish|"Rich Port"}} and {{lit.|"Free Associated State of Puerto Rico"}} on the Puerto Rico article).

Last week User:Ravenpuff updated the two templates to include apostrophes around the translated phrase. This resulted in some articles displaying nested quotation marks, such as:-

Puerto Rico (Spanish for '"Rich Port"'; abbreviated PR), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Spanish: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, lit. '"Free Associated State of Puerto Rico"')

I suggested adding a {{trim quotes}} to the templates to avoid this, and Ravenpuff suggested fixing all of the hundreds or thousands of template calls in articles instead. Which sounds like a job for a bot, so here I am. A bot would simply be tasked with checking all usages of the {{literal translation}} and {{langnf}} templates (and their synonyms), to look for any argument that starts and ends with a quotation mark, and remove those marks. If an argument contained more than two quotemarks, which is perhaps plausible where an editor offers multiple translations, that should be flagged somehow.

Is this worth creating a bot for, or is {{trim quotes}} a better solution? Or are there other options to explore? --Lord Belbury (talk) 10:52, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

I do not recommend putting {{trim quotes}} into a template unless you know for sure what the parameter values will be. There are too many edge cases, like the one you have already thought of. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:43, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

What other options are there? Is it possible to have a template that applies the logic of "if the passed string is not already wrapped in quotemarks, wrap it in quotemarks", without being computationally expensive? Or should this be the job of a bot? --Lord Belbury (talk) 10:21, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

There are too many kinds of quote marks, in too many arrangements, to be sure that automated trimming would render the string correctly. You could probably use string processing of the contents to put pages in a hidden category for human inspection. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:29, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

So would it work to have the template apply a string process of:

If the string starts and ends with a quotemark (or starts and ends with an apostrophe), display it unchanged
If the string contains any quotemarks at all, or any apostrophes that aren't in the middle of a word, display it unchanged and add a hidden category to flag that the template call is providing something more complex than a single literal translation
Otherwise (ie. if the string contains no quotemarks, and its apostrophes are all in the middles of words), display it surrounded by additional quotemarks

I'm not sure how I'd write that in a template, but can take a look if that seems like it wouldn't be computationally expensive. --Lord Belbury (talk) 14:04, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

That sounds like a fun experiment. Let me know if you set up a testcases page, and I'll come visit. Make sure to account for straight quotes and curly quotes. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:06, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Best I can do offhand has been User:Lord Belbury/sandbox, which needs another pass to ignore all italics markup, and I'm stumped by Lua's handling of curly quotes (I've never used Lua before): it's beyond me why a match of s:match([[([“])]]) is returning true for a single curly apostrophe. Will take another look later, would appreciate any feedback (or a pointer to a better talk page to ask for templating help).

While this is being worked on, should {{literal translation}} and {{langnf}} be left as they are (with Ravenpuff's simple "put quotemarks around every string, even if it already has them" update) or reverted to leaving the string unchanged? --Lord Belbury (talk) 10:50, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

"2019–20 coronavirus pandemic" title changing

Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion

As the result of a move request, 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic was moved to COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, there are a metric tonne of articles (and templates and categories) that have "2019–20 coronavirus pandemic" (or "2020 coronavirus pandemic") in the name. Accordingly, it would be appreciated if we could get a bot that would move all of these to the consistent "COVID-19 pandemic" name. This matter was briefly discussed in the move request, with unanimous support for consistency, and it's quite obvious that all these titles should be in line with the main article, named so only because of the previous name.

While this is a one-time request, I believe this is too time-consuming with AWB as these are title changes. But happy to be told otherwise. -- tariqabjotu 03:14, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

If implemented, can appropriate rcats please be added via the bot, as outlined as User:J947/sandbox/16. — J947 ^[cont] 03:22, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

As a note, it seems like enough people are attempting to do this manually that this may not be necessary as a bot. But, I'll leave this up anyway. -- tariqabjotu 03:31, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
I'd like to see this done through a bot, just so we don't miss any and save ourselves some work. I started some discussion about general implementation here. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:40, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Care should also be taken to ensure all talk page archives (or any other subpages if they exist) are moved. Nil Einne (talk) 06:17, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Per an intitle search [8] and [9] it looks like all the relevant pages have been moved already. Galobtter (pingó mió) 23:25, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Wow, well done, gnomes! I found a few stragglers. Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/styles.css; Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/Benin medical cases chart; Template:Territories affected by the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic; Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/India/Punjab medical cases chart; Charitable activities related to the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic; maybe 2020 Philippine coronavirus testing controversy. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:02, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Yes, it was mostly taken care of with AWB and the MassMove tool. Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/styles.css just needs to be deleted (done). Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/Benin medical cases chart was recently created; I moved it. Template:Territories affected by the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic is a deprecated template that should just be deleted. Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/India/Punjab medical cases chart should just be a redirect; I reverted a change that removed it. Charitable activities related to the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic was missed because it didn't have an endash; it's been moved. 2020 Philippine coronavirus testing controversy... yeah, I'm going to leave that alone. -- tariqabjotu 03:25, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

If someone wants to take on the task of a bot that tags a few hundred COVID-19 categories for moving, by all means; there is a long list at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy#Current requests. -- tariqabjotu 03:43, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

A bot to add missing instances of padlocks

Latest comment: 4 years ago15 comments8 people in discussion

Following up from this conversation, I think it would be helpful to have a bot automatically apply the appropriate padlock icon to pages after they become protected. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 09:39, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Worth noting that TheMagikBOT 2 previously had a successful BRFA to do this, but no longer appears to be functional. If there's consensus that it's still a good idea, I'm happy to make this task 3 for Yapperbot - it's not that hard to do. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 09:43, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

I think it's still a good idea. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 15:15, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

courtesy pinging Redrose64 who I see was involved in the previous discussion Sdkb linked Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 15:17, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Could I also mention that it would be useful to have a bot which fixes incorrect protection templates? MusikBot removes incorrect ones, as I pointed out here, but it doesn't replace them (and could be the cause of some of these missing templates). This seems like a related subject. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 18:29, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

MusikBot is capable of fixing incorrect protection templates, that feature just didn't get through the BRFA. I am willing to give it another push though, if there's demand for it. Similarly it can apply missing protection templates, I just didn't enable that since there was talk to revive the Lowercase sigmabot task that did this and we didn't want the bots to clash. When that didn't happen, TheMagickBOT came through, but alas it has retired now too. I don't mind one way or the other, so if Naypta wants to take it on don't let me stop you, just know that the code is largely written in MusikBot. — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:49, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

@MusikAnimal: If the code's already written in MusikBot, seems to me to make a whole lot more sense to just push to use MusikBot for it then if there's consensus to do this now - the lazier I can be, the better!

Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 18:52, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

It definitely makes sense to have one bot do all the work regarding protection templates rather than a hodge podge of different bots. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:45, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I've been doing a fair amount of batch protects now (which are easier using p-batch or manually using the mediawiki interface in some cases.) I'm not mass adding the ECP template though, as that seems like a waste of my time for nice but optional templates. Anyway, I thought this was still happening via another bot, so add a +1 to bring some bot back to do it (cc: MusikAnimal if you're still willing to give this a go ) TonyBallioni (talk) 18:57, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
Insert reference to ancient task on the point. --Izno (talk) 19:32, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Coding... — MusikAnimal ^talk 17:34, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb, RandomCanadian, Naypta, TonyBallioni, and Izno: Code is largely ready. A few questions:

Should the bot add templates to fully-protected pages, too? The bot will be exclusion compliant, so if admins for whatever reason didn't want to advertise full protection they can use the {{bots}} template to keep MusikBot out (MusikBot II to be precise, since it already has admin rights).
Should it do this for "move" and "autoreview" (pending changes) actions in addition to "edit"? Cyberbot II used to handle PC-protected pages but it appears that task has been disabled.

I'm going to hold off on fixing existing protection templates for the time being, just to keep it simple. We'll get to that with a follow-up BRFA. — MusikAnimal ^talk 21:06, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

MusikAnimal, adding it for full-protected pages sounds fine to me. I'm not sure about move and autoreview. Thanks for working on this! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:31, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

Be cognizant of different content types e.g. CSS/sanitized CSS. --Izno (talk) 14:51, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

BRFA filed — MusikAnimal ^talk 01:04, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Remove deprecated parameter "w/l" in Template:CBB schedule entry

Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion

There is already an existing score parameter that will determine if a team wins or loses a match. This w/l parameter deemed dubious and redundant, hence score parameter must be taken advantage to assess the win-loss logic instead.

Scenarios for bot actions according to existing parameter values
Scenario description	Sample parameter usage	Requested bot action
Both w/l and score parameters are empty	`\|w/l=` `\|score=`	Remove w/l parameter usage
w/l value is empty, and score value is dash (or en dash, hyphen)	`\|w/l=` `\|score=-` (using minus sign)
	`\|w/l=` `\|score=–` (using en dash)
w/l is either W or L, and score contains dash-separated numbers	`\|w/l=w` `\|score=100-90` (using minus sign)
	`\|w/l=l` `\|score=90–100` (using en dash)
	`\|w/l=w` `\|score=[http://www.game.com/boxscore/game/1 100–90]`
	`\|w/l=l` `\|score=[[Duke–Michigan men's basketball rivalry\|90–100]]`
w/l is either W or L, and score contains HTML `–` between scores	`\|w/l=w` `\|score=100–90`
	`\|w/l=l` `\|score=90–100`
	`\|w/l=w` `\|score=[http://www.game.com/boxscore/game/1 100–90]`
	`\|w/l=l` `\|score=[[Duke–Michigan men's basketball rivalry\|90–100]]`
w/l value is either w or l, and score is contains all any other values or is empty (i.e. the winner/loser of the match is known, but the final score is not available)	`\|w/l=w` or `\|w/l=l` `\|score=Default`	Rename parameter to status: `\|w/l=w` → `\|status=w` `\|w/l=l` → `\|status=l`
	`\|w/l=w` or `\|w/l=l` `\|score=Forfeit`
	`\|w/l=w` or `\|w/l=l` `\|score=`
w/l value is p	`\|w/l=p`	Rename parameter to status: `\|w/l=p` → `\|status=p`
w/l parameter not found		Do nothing

Let me know if I miss any other scenarios. – McVahl (talk) 07:09, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

With over 7k transclusions, it sounds like this would fall under User:PrimeBOT/Task 30. Won't have time to start it until probably next week, but that has the benefit of allowing for discussion here about any issues with the above, and/or implementation. Primefac (talk) 12:48, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Sounds great. Meanwhile, I'll keep update on above table when necessary. – McVahl (talk) 20:06, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

McVahl, I've done 25 changes just to check everything's working appropriately - mind taking a look and seeing if I'm screwing anything up too badly? Primefac (talk) 19:52, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi Primefac, I reviewed all 25 amendments and I don't see any issues. Thanks. – McVahl (talk) 04:44, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

Primefac, I added new case when score uses HTML-based code – instead of "–" (for example, |score=90–100). Sorry for late notice. I just observed only today when PrimeBot made some edits, as this case where not covered on the initial 25 amendments the other day. – McVahl (talk) 06:27, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, added in. Primefac (talk) 13:54, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Populate tracking category for CS1|2 cite templates missing "}}"

Latest comment: 4 years ago11 comments3 people in discussion

Example. Missing "}}" is a not too uncommon problem. They can't be tracked by CS1|2 itself because the template is never invoked. I would caution attempting an automated fix because when "}}" doesn't exist there are often other structural problems, and there might be embedded templates etc.. -- GreenC 15:29, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Another problem with automated fixes is that edits that result in unclosed templates often need to be reverted entirely. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:03, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

@GreenC: Where would you envisage this putting categorisation markup? Tracking categories are a MediaWiki internal feature that would have to be added by a MediaWiki extension, not a bot. A bot could add a hidden category to the wikitext of the page, it could add articles with issues to a list, or it could tag articles with a maintenance template, like {{Invalid citation template}} perhaps - which could then categorise the page. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 16:19, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

That is a good point. I think your idea for {{Invalid citation template}} (or universal {{Invalid template}} or {{malformed template}}) is great because it could be visible in the wikitext, produce a red warning message, allow for a tracking cat, and have argument options for the bot name and date, plus whatever future requirements. -- GreenC 17:05, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

@GreenC: Well there's my next project then Let me look into it

Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 17:27, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

The problem here is going to be that, because there's no invocation of the template, it's tricky to find an appropriate set of pages to check over, without doing some god-awful regex search and crashing Elasticsearch in the process

One way to do it might be to implement an edit filter that finds matching regexes and tags them, but I'm not sure if that'd necessarily be the best way. Any thoughts, ideas or suggestions are appreciated! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 09:16, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

For other bots, I have a system on Toolforge that downloads a list of all 6 million article titles then goes through the list, when done recreates the list and starts over. It's brute force but effective and not as terrible as it sounds when running on Toolforge since the Wikipedia servers are on the local LAN. Another possibility is generate a backlink list for the CS1|2 templates and only target those which would reduce it down to a few million. I have a unix command-line tool that does both these (generate the full list, or backlink list) if you want to use it, on git. -- GreenC 13:48, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

@GreenC: Going through a backlink list would be easy enough through the API, and there's already a list of all article titles in the DB dumps that are stored on drives accessible through Toolforge anyhow. My concern had been that doing that a) introduces quite a fair bit of server load, and b) seems like it would take about five hundred years to complete - have you found it works better? Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 14:30, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Generally speaking in a shared environment like this slowing things down is the nicer way as it doesn't cause a spike in demand. Downloading every article sequentially would be like a 15-30k steady stream which is a blip on a gigabit LAN. And CPU/memory to regex a single article is nothing. It's about as low as one can get resource wise, while running a SQL query across 6 million can cause a resource spike but it's hidden from view. My guess is 10-15 days to complete 6 million articles based on previous experience. I have processes doing this continually so do other bots. If there was a way to regex the target articles with Elasticsearch could try that but I suspect ES will bail on the query if too complex (it limits 10,000 results but should not be a problem here). -- GreenC 15:11, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Sure - I'll give it a crack and see what happens

Assuming all goes well, will put up a BRFA for the task soon(ish). Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 15:41, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

BRFA filed - it does a hell of a lot more than just solve this problem, but it definitely solves this problem too! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 15:31, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

Removal of "w:en:" prefix from wikilinks

Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion

About 106 pages in article and template space contain wikilinks that begin with w:en:, which is redundant, and VPT consensus was that this extra code can interfere with various tools and scripts that expect links to be in a certain form. Would it be possible for an AWB-wielding editor to go through and remove those prefixes, at least in article space? The edits in template space would need manual inspection to see if they are intentional for some reason. Pinging @Redrose64, Trialpears, Xaosflux, Johnuniq, and BrownHairedGirl:, who attended that VPT discussion. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:55, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

@Jonesey95, I'm doing it now for article space only. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:36, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

I have completed a first pass, in these 87 edits[10].

In that run I turned off genfixes, so that I could focus clearly on this precise issue. Some of the links fixed were of the form [[w:en:Foo|Bar]], which has now been changed to [[Foo|Bar]]. That's fine ... however, many of the links were of the form [[w:en:Foo|Foo]], and that first run has left them as [[Foo|Foo]], which needs to be consolidated as [[Foo]]. So I will do a second run through the set, just applying genfixes. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:08, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Second pass complete, in these 70 edits[11]. A further 17 pages needed no genfixes at all, so were skipped. Note that some of the pages had only genfixes unrelated to the first pass.

That leaves only the 19 pages in template-space with wikilinks that begin with w:en:. I will leave to others the manual inspection and possible cleanup of those templates. @Jonesey95, Redrose64, Trialpears, Xaosflux, and Johnuniq: do any of you want to do the templates? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:31, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

I got all of the trivial ones for you. The remainder either require advanced permissions, or are Template:En-WP attribution notice, which appears to have the w:en: on purpose. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 06:15, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

I did a couple of "w:en:" removals but left it in these:

Template:Non-free symbol (it specifically says "the English-language Wikipedia")
Template:En-WP attribution notice (does it need ":" in case the parameter is File/Category? any other bad side effects?)
Template:Checkip ("intentional so that the links work in m:Special:CentralAuth")
Template:Checkuser ("intentional so that the links work in m:Special:CentralAuth")

My thanks to JJMC89 for the information regarding the last two.

Johnuniq (talk) 07:49, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, all! I did not search other namespaces initially, but there are apparently 100,000+ instances across all namespaces. Many are in user signatures and other things that should not be modified, but detail-oriented editors may find links worth changing in some namespaces. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:27, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Cleanup Template:harv-like templates.

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

If you have short citations like

{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=1-3}}

Those will appear like

Smith 2001, pp. 13
Smith 2001, p. 1-3

Those are obviously wrong, and should be fixed so they would appear like this

{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=1–3}}

Those will appear like

Smith 2001, p. 13
Smith 2001, pp. 1–3

Those should be an easy fix for an AWB bot or similar. Those should cover all {{harv}}/{{sfn}}-like templates. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:02, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Also, the same for

{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=p. 13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=p. 1–3}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=pp. 13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=pp. 1–3}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=pp. 13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=pp. 1–3}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=p. 13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=p. 1–3}}

→

{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=1–3}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=1–3}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=1–3}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|p=13}}
{{harvnb|Smith|2001|pp=1–3}}

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:05, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Before doing this, would it be reasonable to ask if the template source could be tweaked to display the right info even when the parameter is incorrect? GoingBatty (talk) 04:12, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

A bot or script taking on this task would somehow have to account for the edge case where a single page number contains a valid hyphen, like p=3-1, for a document where page 1 of part 3 is called "3-1". – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:00, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Those have IMO, acceptable false positives rates (after all this type of stuff is part of AWB genfixes, and no one is calling for heads to roll), and that's why the standard is to explicitly set |page=3{{hyphen}}1 in those cases in CS1/CS2 templates. But if that's somehow not an acceptable solution here, the bot could take care of the rest. Or assume that |p=p. 3-4 should be converted to |p=3-4 and not |pp=3–4. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:21, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Updating DANFS links to ship articles

Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion

While working on a stub recently, I noticed the US Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command has updated the syntax of links to entries in the important reference Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. This means that many outside links to the dictionary and tools like Template:DANFS (which is transcluded on hundreds if not thousands of US Navy ship articles) now have incorrect html targets. Here are three examples of repairs I've performed personally: [12], [13], [14]. As those examples reveal, the new webpage structure isn't complicated and while I suppose I could go through all the articles by hand and rapidly improve my edit count, this is exactly the sort of thing that an automated performer of edits would be best to solve. I've never before requested a bot, so I'm asking meekly for advice. BusterD (talk) 15:54, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

BusterD, what is the change in syntax between the old URL and the new one? Primefac (talk) 16:00, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the speedy reply. As I mouseover the links I created in my request, I see

the site is now secure "https" not "http"
after the page address www.history.navy.mil/ they've added a new location for the entire collection "research/histories/ship-histories/"
the new addresses all end in .html not .htm
In addition, they've changed the reference structure so that the page link no longer directs to a sub-page, for example in the USS Minnesota example, the old link referenced the 11th "m" page, rendered as "m11". The new link just uses "m".

The first three are simply direct replacement edits (copy and paste), the fourth one requires the deletion of ANY digit or digits directly following the only letter in that sector of the address. Does that make sense? I'm certain my use of terminology is inexpert. BusterD (talk) 16:15, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

I've converted you list to numbers just for my own ease of use. I've got a few other projects I'm working on, but I'll take a look if and when I can.

Small update, looks to me from a quick LinkSearch that we're looking at around 18k links to http://www.history.navy.mil. Primefac (talk) 16:21, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the refactoring. I suspected the number of entries must be large. Testing the success of the first few attempts would be a simple matter. Thanks for any help you can offer. Perhaps there are some MilHist or WPShips people who'd do this, but as opposed to starting a talkpage discussion, I just thought I'd request automated help. I'd be glad to monitor or help in any way necessary. Coding isn't my thing. BusterD (talk) 16:26, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

The major part of the change isn't recent - see [15] and the discussion there was that the changes weren't completely consistent so couldn't easily be done automatically.Nigel Ish (talk) 20:41, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for linking that discussion. BusterD (talk) 21:55, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

A lot of the links have been fixed manually by users in the meantime as part of normal editing.Nigel Ish (talk) 09:13, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Many of my criticisms in that old discussion stand but a few of the historical documents have come back. Some of those are not in the original report format preserving all context but in new transcribed form. Meanwhile the Vandals (Homeland Security with no interest in "Service history"?) sacked the USCG Historian's site with the old cutter histories "burned" and instead of a good index a pile of "stuff" one has to click through in hopes of finding what was once well organized. (Fingers crossed Army holds the anti Vandal defense line!) One has to realize providing excellent historical libraries for the public (that paid for everything) is not high on the mission priority or budget list and contracting out has eliminated subject matter expert librarians from intimate involvement and oversight regarding on line collections. Palmeira (talk) 15:04, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

British Film Institute database citations

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Moved to WP:URLREQ#BFI. --Izno (talk) 12:32, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Finding artwork for missing pages

Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

After editing a lot of music articles that had no album cover in the Template:Infobox_album (Category:Album_infoboxes_lacking_a_cover), I realized that it was a very repetitive processed that could be streamlined by having a bot that:

Checks if article in Category:Album_infoboxes_lacking_a_cover is not about a single (as many singles don't have album artwork, so only looking at EPs/albums/mixtapes only would streamline
Using Last.fm's album.getinfo request, and obtains the "small" artwork to abide to the size guidelines regarding uploading album artwork to wikipedia.
Uploading said cover to the wiki, and editing it into the Album infobox

I looked in the rejected ideas and bots, and it seems like none really tried to attack this. My programming knowledge is okay at best, but I couldn't get any of the Java frameworks working so I'm out of luck doing this myself. ⠀^TOMÁSTOMÁS_TOMÁS⠀TALK⠀ 00:49, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Strongest possible oppose to any automation that adds non-free content to the project. WP:NFCC criteria 8 has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, and while there are some that believe that there is an inherent justification for using a non-free image in the infobox of a media work, that is not what the NFCC says. No offense to the proposer themselves, but this is a dangerous idea that goes against the third pillar, and would set a dangerous precedent if allowed. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 00:00, 23 June 2020 (UTC)
@The Squirrel Conspiracy: Thanks for the response. I understand, but one question just for my clarification more than anything. Wouldn't criteria 8 be applicable to any specific album page though? Wouldn't the addition of artwork in album articles "significantly increase readers' understanding of the article topic"? I wouldn't have think of a case where an album artwork doesn't do that (unless it's a soundtrack for a film or TV show). As well, to @Redrose64:'s point, since the inherent format of album articles gives consistency and thus consistency in reasons to use Non-Free Content, wouldn't boilerplated text be applicable since what is generally true for one similarly formatted article carry on? Again, don't mean to be contrarian here or anything, but I just want to genuinely better familiarize myself with the policy. ⠀^TOMÁSTOMÁS_TOMÁS⠀TALK⠀ 15:28, 23 June 2020 (UTC)
I am the wrong person to ask that question to. I'm of the opinion that unless the album cover itself is the subject of non-trivial coverage in cited prose, it doesn't meet NFCC #8, and that the community's consensus that creative works get a piece of non-free content in the infobox for free for identification purposes is a terrible mistake. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 18:37, 23 June 2020 (UTC)
Oppose WP:NFCCP#10c requires ... a separate, specific non-free use rationale for each use of the item, as explained at Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline. The rationale is presented in clear, plain language and is relevant to each use. This is not possible for a bot to do except by means of boilerplated text, and that would imply that little or no thought has been put into the wording of the FUR. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:21, 23 June 2020 (UTC)
Not a good task for a bot. for the repeated reasons listed above. Yes a bot could provide links to an editor to facilitate the process of processing a NFCC import/justification, but a user script could as well. Hasteur (talk) 17:44, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

wp:SQLREQ COVID 19 data compiler

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Could a bot run a SQL query or similar to compile COVID 19 data into a editable data sheet that another/same bot could import to Wikipedia COVID 19 pandemic update map/graph — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.41.138.48 (talk) 16:24, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi, what database would the bot be querying, and can you elaborate on what you had in mind by an 'editable data sheet'? Also, who would edit this sheet prior to the bot importing it into the map/graph? Pi (Talk to me!) 06:03, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

Challenge bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion

I hope that someone can help me by making a bot add the template that articles has been added to Wikipedia:WikiProject Europe/The 10,000 Challenge for example. There are several Challenge pages and there are templates to be added at the articles talk pages that the articles has been added to the Challenge project page, but the bot has stopped to do the task for a long time. Please ping me if this can be done.BabbaQ (talk) 17:17, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

@BabbaQ: This still a active request? Hasteur (talk) 23:06, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

@Hasteur: - If it can be done. Sure.--BabbaQ (talk) 10:03, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Coding... I did a quick sample/proof of concept of going in and reviewing paged for eligibility, here's a random sampling of pages that appear to be eligible. Adding the template to the talk page is easy compared to unwinding the list.

@BabbaQ: Was there a consensus discussion about applying {{WPEUR10k}} to these talk pages? I suspect this isn't contraversial, but it might be needed when I go to file the BRFA. Hasteur (talk) 19:45, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

@Hasteur: - I did the request based on this being uncontroversial. A few years back the template was added to all new articles joining the projects. And I was surprise to notice that was not done anymore. BabbaQ (talk) 08:11, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

BRFA filed.

Done. It's doing a first round of adding the templates. Hasteur (talk) 17:10, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

2019-20 coronavirus pandemic updater bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago15 comments7 people in discussion

If any bot could take data from https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 and https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries and edit Template:Cases in 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic and Template:Territories affected by the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic automatically with the latest information that would be great. Sam1370 (talk) 00:21, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Paging Wugapodes, who's working on a similar bot. Enterprisey (talk!) 01:51, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm a little backlogged at the moment, but will try to get the worldometers dataset working asap. The first link uses the same dataset that WugBot does, and an interim solution would be to write a Lua module that reads the on-wiki CSV files and writes a wikitable. — Wug·a·po·des 05:12, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

@Wugapodes: I did a little work on this myself, and found that there’s an additional complication: the GitHub dataset updates only daily, while the actual interactive website updates every few hours. I tried fooling around with some web-scrapers that support JavaScript, but ran into a lot of problems, probably due to my very small amount of programming experience. Perhaps you can find a working solution? Sam1370 (talk) 10:04, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Updating more than once a day is likely unnecessary. The source data for each administrative unit doesn't really update more than once a day anyway, the website just shows the data as it comes in and the GitHub export combines it into a batch update. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 23:15, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

However, it is likely that even if this bot is implemented which updates it once per day, there are still going to be people who, in the interest of providing the most up-to-date information, will manually edit in the correct numbers, and bringing us back to where we started. I think that we should try to keep the info as accurate and recent as possible. I have contacted JHU on their email about this subject, asking him to either make the GitHub update along with the site or provide an easy way for a bot to get the most up to date data, but have received no response so far. Sam1370 (talk) 06:32, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps this could be useful for any developers who want to take up the task: https://apify.com/covid-19 Sam1370 (talk) 06:37, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Any potential problems caused by manual changes may be resolved by the bot building the page instead of amending it, just as Legobot (talk · contribs) does with the RfC listings. For example, go to WP:RFC/BIO and alter it in any way you like - move the requests around, delete some, add others. Then wait for the next bot run (1 min past the hour) and see what happens. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:58, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

However, do we really want to sacrifice accuracy for automation? Personally I would rather have manual, but the most accurate, case readings instead of automated, but slightly inaccurate, readings. As for the bot building the page, that just seems weird to me — removing helpful edits in favor of outdated data? I think we should either find a way to deliver the information right along with the JHU site, or leave it to be updated manually. Sam1370 (talk) 09:35, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

It would be best to use mw:Help:Tabular Data files on Commons, that way other wikis can benefit from the updating data as well. Tabular data can also be used to create graphs and charts using Extension:Graph. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 23:21, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Oh come on, the JHU data isn't freely licensed and they're actively claiming copyright over it (which has no basis in US law). Copying it to Commons would not be a great idea in that case, unless the Commons community has decided to ignore their claims. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 23:30, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

The JHU data had a specific discussion at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_180#Let's_update_all_our_COVID-19_data_by_bot_instead_of_manually; Enterprisey/Wugapodes, you need to stop the bot task at earliest convenience. Thanks. --Izno (talk) 23:43, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

@Izno: I've been in touch with WMF Legal regarding this specific bot task and the response from Jrogers (WMF) was "I don't see any reason for the Foundation to remove these templates or any of the map pages linked from them". Johns Hopkins can claim copyright only on the specific presentation and selection of the data, not the data itself (which is public domain) per Feist v. Rural: "Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement". The data on the wiki have a different presentation and selection of data and therefore represent a valid use of the public domain component of the Johns Hopkins dataset, so I see no need to stop the bot task nor does WMF's senior legal counsel see a reason to remove its output. — Wug·a·po·des 03:14, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

The data's not acceptable on Commons because Commons cares about source country and US copyright. However, enwiki only cares about US copyright law, which doesn't recognize any copyrightable authorship in data like this. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 13:28, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Heather Houser (May 5, 2020). "The Covid-19 'Infowhelm'". The New York Review of Books. Covid-19 is undoubtedly testing our public health, medical, and economic systems. But it's also testing our ability to process so much frightening and imminently consequential data. All these data add up to the Covid-19 "infowhelm," the term I use to describe the phenomenon of being overwhelmed by a constant flow of sometimes conflicting information. -- GreenC 16:56, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject United States files on Commons

Latest comment: 4 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion

There are thousands of file talk pages in Category:File-Class United States articles for files that were moved to Commons and deleted in 2011 or 2012. These talk pages contain no content except a transclusion of {{WikiProject United States}} (or one of its redirects) and should have been deleted long ago. These transclusions are of no use to the WikiProject and should be removed; however, simply removing them would leave these talk pages blank and mislead a viewer seeing a blue link into thinking there is something there. More broadly, there is no reason for these Commons files to be project-tagged on en.wikipedia—local talk pages for Commons files generally lead to split discussions or invite occasional comments that no one sees or answers.

I asked about these talk pages at the WikiProject's talk page (see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States#Categorizing files on Commons), and was told to "go with [my] own instincts on this". Any page in Category:File-Class United States articles that (1) does not have a corresponding file on en.wikipedia and (2) contains no content other than a transclusion of {{WikiProject United States}} (or a redirect), should be speedily deleted under criterion G6 (routine housekeeping). Given the sheer number of pages involved, I am hoping a bot could take on the task. Thanks, -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 23:21, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it's this clear cut. Even if the files are on Commons, they do appear and are used on enWikipedia and I can see reasons to tag them for a WikiProject. The misplaced comments are an actual problem but I don't think their occurrence has any correlation with the presence of a WikiProject template. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:23, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Jo-Jo Eumerus, you may be right in general, but this WikiProject does not have such reasons. Certainly, the fact that CSD G8 exempts talk pages for files that exist on Commons suggests it would be wrong to assume that no WikiProject could tag files on Commons (although that is my preference). However, I am not looking to take on that broader issue right now, and my focus is just on WikiProject United States, which does not need these pages to be tagged. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 16:32, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

I think I'm going to go with

Needs wider discussion. WP:PROJSCOPE is pretty clear that if the members of a wikiproject agree that a page is outside of their scope, it should not be tagged. However, anything related to mass deletion requires strong consensus to implement, which I do not see here. Under WP:G8, simply being a talk page for a Commons file is not a sufficient reason to delete, and this task isn't clearly covered by the text of G6. According to this query, there are over 11,000 file talk pages with only one revision and a {{WikiProject United States}} tag. (I unfortunately can't reliably filter for "has more than one template" without doing wikitext parsing. However, most of the WP:USA file tags appear to have been added in single-project AWB runs, so the total number is likely to be fairly close. Any bot that would implement this task would need to parse the wikitext to ensure that the WP:USA tag is the only page content.) Bot tagging 11,000 pages for deletion is also not exactly polite, so this task would be best implemented by an adminbot that can just do the deletions (which again, requires demonstrated strong community approval). --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 16:25, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

AntiCompositeNumber, thank you for responding. The challenge is that there are two issues which are intermingled here: (1) removing {{WikiProject United States}} from talk pages of files on Commons; and (2) mass-deleting the resulting empty talk pages. (1) is the WikiProject's decision and does not require a wider discussion. I was hoping that (2) would be uncontroversial housekeeping (CSD G6), but am willing to seek a wider discussion if that is not the case. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 16:32, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: Making an edit with the sole purpose of bringing the page within the scope of a speedy deletion criterion is not acceptable behaviour for a human or a bot. You will need explicit consensus that these pages should be deleted. Thryduulf (talk) 09:57, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: fixing the ping. Thryduulf (talk) 09:58, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

That's what I said. @Thryduulf:, did you mean to ping Black Falcon instead? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 14:52, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Whoops, I did indeed mean to ping Black Falcon. Sorry. Thryduulf (talk) 15:41, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Thryduulf, that misses the point. The edits would not be for the sole purpose of speedily deleting the pages; instead, they would be for the purpose of removing an unneeded project banner. Deletion would be incidental to the pages becoming blank, and I am just trying to save time by skipping an intermediate step. However, in light of the hesitation expressed above, I will seek a wider discussion related to this request. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 16:35, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

Referencias

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Very easy typo task (no proper rights to do it myself): == Referencias == -> == References == and ==Referencias== -> == References == --Emptywords (talk) 09:02, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Done using JWB, along with a few related minor fixes. Certes (talk) 10:32, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Mark squatted links as unsafe

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

For all citations to pages under westmidlandbirdclub.com, please add |url-status, thus, as the domain has been cyber-squatted. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:54, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Deferred - Pigsonthewing, sounds like a job for WP:URLREQ. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 20:03, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

That's new to me; I'll try there. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:06, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Y Done -- GreenC 00:44, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Checking Category:Wikipedia images in SVG format

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Namespace: File:

Hello!

I checked this category which is for so-called valid SVG files tagged with {{Valid SVG}} however I noticed that many in fact were invalid. I would like a bot to check all files in the category to see if they are in fact valid or if the files are mistagged. Steps:

Check if file is valid at http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http:{{urlencode:{{filepath:{{#titleparts:{{PAGENAME}}}}}}}}, if yes ignore, if no see 2.
Replace {{Valid SVG}} with {{Invalid SVG|<number of errors>}}.
1. <number of errors> can be retrieved at http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http:{{urlencode:{{filepath:{{#titleparts:{{PAGENAME}}}}}}}}

Pinging @JJMC89: who is familiar with the File: namespace.

I think this is quite important to do since now probably hundreds of files are lying about their validity which isn't good.

Thanks!Jonteemil (talk) 07:21, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

@Jonteemil: I looked at doing this but couldn't find an API that matches that validator. There is one for https://validator.w3.org/nu/ that I could use though. — JJMC89 (T·C) 01:25, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

@JJMC89: I don't think using another validator should be a problem, as long as they both output the same amount of errors. If that's not the case, I think the valid/invalid SVG templates should be updated with the new validator as well.Jonteemil (talk) 20:56, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

@JJMC89 and Jonteemil: Both validators shared the same number of warnings/errors for a few files I put through them, which makes sense, because, well, they're following the same spec to validate off. That being said, whilst there is a nice, easy API to use for the nu validator, it's still possible to use the old validator just by parsing the HTML it outputs - although that'd be slower to run and a bit more of a pain. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 21:06, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

@Jonteemil and Naypta: They don't always give the same errors. File:NuclearPore.svg: 60 for check vs 4 for nu. Yes, the HTML could be parsed, but I'm not going to do it, especially when I can get JSON from nu. — JJMC89 (T·C) 01:39, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Updating the dates on the maps on COVID-19 pandemic

Latest comment: 4 years ago18 comments6 people in discussion

Can someone create a bot that will look at the latest date of the maps when the maps are updated and update the date automatically? I tried putting in the TODAY template, but I got reverted by Boing! said Zebedee that it would not work. I was hoping someone could work on a bot to save editors' time updating the dates on the maps. Interstellarity (talk) 19:45, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

No, the "as of" dates should be updated only when the actual data is updated, not any time the map file is updated (which could be for many reasons). Do we update the "as of" if someone adjusts the colour of a map? No. Do we update it if someone modifies a geographical border? No. We would only do it when a map is updated to reflect new data - and I can't think of how that could be done other than manually. Incidentally, I reverted your use of TODAY as it's obviously wrong for every map to say it's up to date as of today. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:52, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

This seems like a doable task. I'm not sure if it's for a bot so much as a template, though. I imagine that it would work similarly to {{Cases in the COVID-19 pandemic|date}}, fetching a value that would be stored at the Commons file and updated by the map updater whenever they upload a new version. As an aside, thank you, Interstellarity, for all the work you've put in updating map date captions; I recognize it's a tedious task. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:59, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Some kind of template like that might work, but whoever updates the map would still have to update the data field at the Commons file manually - it couldn't just use the upload date as the "as of" date. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 20:03, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

While we're here, if anyone wants to work on a bot for updating maps themselves, that's something that ought to be done at some point, but I imagine it'll be a much more complex task. Still, we have the data stored in templates already, so it'd just need to be mapped onto the various maps. It could help with some of the standardization we've been discussing at the WikiProject. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:05, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

This is a very good idea. Currently, for the map File:COVID-19 Outbreak World Map per Capita.svg and File:COVID-19 Outbreak World Map.svg, the date is accessible in the first sentence, e.g. "Map of the COVID-19 verified number of infected per capita as of 28 May 2020.". It takes me a lot of time to then go modify the date in every page, even more in many languages. We would gain a lot by having a way of entering this value only once. Raphaël Dunant (talk) 15:15, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb and Raphaël Dunant: It looks like you two might be talking about different things - either that or I'm misunderstanding one or both of you. Raphaël, it sounds like what you want is basically just an AWB run for pages that contain the map to replace the associated date when appropriate; Sdkb, it sounds like what you're after is software that constructs the actual map.

Both of these things are eminently possible; the world map SVG is such that making a bot to update the colours from a dataset given a scale ought to be trivial. That being said, if that bot was wanting to update the Commons file, it would need to be a Commons bot, not a bot on enwiki. Let me know if I've got what you're both looking for wrong though! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 16:06, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Update: actually, on looking, seems there's already a bot that's making a version of the map! See c:File:Covid19DataBot-Case-Data-World.svg and c:User:Covid19DataBot. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 16:08, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

This bot request is about updating dates automatically, not about the map colour. But it would be nice to adapt the map bot for COVID-19 map, @Sdkb: if you can open a discussion about this subject, I'll happily participate. @Naypta: if you could explain how to automatically update dates, I'll be delighted! Raphaël Dunant (talk) 16:42, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

@Raphaël Dunant: So one option here might be using the {{Wikidata}} template to pull in a record from Wikidata. That would mean that you could replace each iteration of the date with {{wikidata|qualifier|Q81068910|P1846|P585}}, which produces - and you'd then only have to update the single point on Wikidata qualifier on Wikidata (wikidata:Q81068910#P1846) for it to update on all wikis. I've had a chat with a couple of admins about this and the general consensus is that it's okay to do performance-wise, but be careful with how you use this - using the wikidata template in this way can be taxing on the server, so try and use it the fewest amount of times you can!

If you're happy with that method, I can run through and update the relevant bits on enwiki - you'll know better than I will where the bits are on the other wikis. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 18:26, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

@Naypta: The main places where the date is needed are, in English Wikipedia, COVID-19 pandemic and COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory (performance-wise, it's a total of ~1.5 mio page views per week). How doable is the use of this bot in other languages? As of now, there is 56 different languages using the map, with the date to update on each of them. Raphaël Dunant (talk) 10:36, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

@Raphaël Dunant: Well, this would be a way of doing it without a bot. The {{wd}} template pulls directly from Wikidata, so there's no need for a bot to update the page wikitext then. Assuming that the other wikis also have a similar template for Wikidata, which I think most do, they'd be able to use the same code. I will just ping in here the creator of the template, Thayts - do you think it'd be okay to use this method on high traffic pages in this way? The general consensus I've had seems to be "yes", but I've not spoken to anyone directly involved in the Wd module. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 13:52, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Sure, why not. :) Thayts ••• 15:20, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Awesome! Raphaël Dunant, if you're happy with this solution, I can get it working on the relevant pages on enwiki at least. I can also have a crack at the other language wikis - it's clear that the template is available on the other wikis too, so this kind of a centralised approach should work. The only problem might come in terms of needing to purge the page caches when the Wikidata item changes - but that should happen when any part of the page changes anyway, and can be done manually if need be. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 16:34, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

@Naypta: Thank you very much for the solution! I applied it to the English Wikipedia pages. It would be amazing if you can apply it here and on other Wikipedias, as I am not quite sure on how to apply the template to Commons and other languages. Thanks again, I hope this solution works. Raphaël Dunant (talk) 19:00, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

@Raphaël Dunant:

Doing... - just FYI, to make it compatible for inclusion on Commons and on some other language Wikipedias, I've changed the Wikidata page it links into. It's now wikidata:Q95963597 - so when updating the date, update it on the P585 "point in time" property there, and it'll update everywhere else automatically.

Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 20:02, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

@Naypta: The solution works well for most pages, thanks! However, it does not automatically update this page, which is problematic (maybe because the date is updated only when there is a page update?). Do you have any solution to make it update this page as well? Raphaël Dunant (talk) 22:01, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

@Raphaël Dunant: Sure thing. So the cache expires on the sooner of the next edit, a manual purge being requested, or seven days from the last cache time. I've manually purged the cache of that page, and you can see it's now updated, but you can also purge it at this link whenever you like. You may wish to do so after updating the Wikidata item - just click that link and then click "yes", it'll automatically update the date :) Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 22:16, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

Convert comma separated values into List

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Comma separated values like A, B, C can be instead converted into

A
B
C

or

{{hlist|A|B|C}}

This is usually found in infoboxes. Additionally, values separated by a

<br/>

can also be converted into a list.

I'mFeistyIncognito 16:39, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

@I'mfeistyincognito: Is there a particular reason for doing this? It looks cosmetic to me, and per WP:FLATLIST, either style is acceptable for the MOS. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 17:25, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

@Naypta: I always try to turn the data carried by the infoboxes into a more structured form (I know it'll never get there completely). It would make it easier to export data from infoboxes into WikiData. I'mFeistyIncognito 20:01, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

This is a context-sensitive task. To give just one example, {{hlist}}, because it uses <div>...</div> tags, cannot be wrapped by any tags or templates that use ... tags, like {{nowrap}}. If an infobox wraps a parameter with {{nowrap}}, converting that parameter's contents to use {{hlist}} will lead to invalid HTML output. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:17, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: You are probably right. Nevertheless, using {{Comma separated entries}} shouldn't be a problem. I'mFeistyIncognito 20:13, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

Enlist help to clear Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors

Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion

Fetch all articles in Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors
Compile a list of who created what article
Compile a list of which Wikiproject covers what article
Send each user^[1] and each WikiProject a personalized report about which articles they created have errors in them, e.g.

 
= = List of your created articles that are in [[:Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors]] = =

A few articles you created are in need of some reference cleanup. Basically, some short references create via {{tl|sfn}} and {{tl|harvnb}} and similar templates have missing full citations or have some other problems. This is ''usually'' caused by copy-pasting a short reference from another article without adding the full reference, or because a full reference is not making use of citation templates like {{tl|cite book}} (see [[Help:CS1]]) or {{tl|citation}} (see [[Help:CS2]]). See [[Category:Harv and Sfn template errors#Resolving errors|how to resolve issues]]. To easily see which citation is in need of cleanup, you can check '''[[:Category:Harv and Sfn template errors#Displaying error messages|these instructions]]''' to enable error messages ('''Svick's script''' is the simplest to use, but '''Trappist the monk's script''' is a bit more refined if you're interested in doing deeper cleanup).

The following articles could use some of your attention
{{columns-list|colwidth=30em|
#[[Ancient 1]]
#[[Article 2]]
...
}}

If you could add the full references to those article, that would be great. Again, the easiest way to deal with those is to install Svick's script per [[:Category:Harv and Sfn template errors#Displaying error messages|these instructions]]. If after installing the script, you do not see an error, that means it was either taken care of, or was a false positive, and you don't need to do anything else.

Also note that the use of {{para|ref|harv}} is no longer needed to generate anchors. ~~~~

^ Skip user talk pages with links to List of your created articles that are in [[:Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors]] in headers since they already have such a report

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:18, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

I think the message needs to provide a link to a discussion page where people can go for help. Keep in mind that most requests for help will be of the form "What is this message? I didn't do anything or ask for this. I don't understand it. Help me." – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:31, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Agree it would be a good idea to point to a help page. Where would that be? Help talk:CS1 perhaps? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:21, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Maybe Template talk:Sfn? If this goes through, I'd like to see these messages go out in batches, in case a potential help system (run by you and me, presumably) gets a lot of traffic. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:44, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Doesn't really matter much to me where things go. Module talk:Footnotes could be a place. Messages could be sent in batches too. Maybe top 25 users, then next 25, and so on each day for the first week. And then see what the traffic is and adjust rates if it's nothing crazy. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:28, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

@Headbomb: as an intermediate step, I think it would be helpful to include articles in the category in Bamyers99's WikiProject Cleanup Listings. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 00:16, 17 June 2020 (UTC)
- I have added both categories to the WikiProject Cleanup Listings. They will appear in the next run on June 23. --Bamyers99 (talk) 01:24, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Archive debates

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Let's make a bot that creates each page that day at midnight. 95.49.166.194 (talk) 13:10, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Looks like it's mostly ProveIt who does this normally, who's previously mentioned that they have a script to do it that they then copy and paste from. I've pinged them in here - ProveIt, is this botreq something you're interested in having? Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 13:38, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

I want a bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I want a bot to do all of my editing.It is hard to do editing.It may help with deleting pages if you want to.Having a bot also puts less stress on editing.Was an explorer —Preceding undated comment added 14:21, 4 August 2020

I don't think you really understand what bots are used for. They can assist with editing for tedious and/or repetitive tasks, but they won't "do your editing". Primefac (talk) 15:48, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

Copy coordinates from lists to articles

Latest comment: 4 years ago12 comments6 people in discussion

Virtually every one of the 3000-ish places listed in the 132 sub-lists of National Register of Historic Places listings in Virginia has an article, and with very few exceptions, both lists and articles have coordinates for every place, but the source database has lots of errors, so I've gone through all the lists and manually corrected the coords. As a result, the lists are a lot more accurate, but because I haven't had time to fix the articles, tons of them (probably over 2000) now have coordinates that differ between article and list. For example, the article about the John Miley Maphis House says that its location is 38°50′20″N 78°35′55″W / 38.83889°N 78.59861°W / 38.83889; -78.59861, but the manually corrected coords on the list are 38°50′21″N 78°35′52″W / 38.83917°N 78.59778°W / 38.83917; -78.59778. Like most of the affected places, the Maphis House has coords that differ only a small bit, but (1) ideally there should be no difference at all, and (2) some places have big differences, and either we should fix everything, or we'll have to have a rather pointless discussion of which errors are too little to fix.

Therefore, I'm looking for someone to write a bot to copy coords from each place's NRHP list to the coordinates section of {{infobox NRHP}} in each place's article. A few points to consider:

Some places span county lines (e.g. bridges over border streams), and in many of these cases, each list has separate coordinates to ensure that the marked location is in that list's county. For an extreme example, Skyline Drive, a long scenic road, is in eight counties, and all eight lists have different coordinates. The bot should ignore anything on the duplicates list; this is included in citation #4 of National Register of Historic Places listings in Virginia, but I can supply a raw list to save you the effort of distilling a list of sites to ignore.
Some places have no coordinates in either the list or the article (mostly archaeological sites for which location information is restricted), and the bot should ignore those articles.
Some places have coordinates only in the list or only in the article's {{Infobox NRHP}} (for a variety of reasons), but not in both. Instead of replacing information with blanks or blanks with information, the bot should log these articles for human review.
Some places might not have {{infobox NRHP}}, or in some cases (e.g. Newport News Middle Ground Light) it's embedded in another infobox, and the other infobox has the coordinates. If {{infobox NRHP}} is missing, the bot should log these articles for human review, while embedded-and-coordinates-elsewhere is covered by the previous bullet.
I don't know if this is the case in Virginia, but in some states we have a few pages that cover more than one NRHP-listed place (e.g. Zaleski Mound Group in Ohio, which covers three articles); if the bot produced a list of all the pages it edits, a human could go through the list, find any entries with multiple appearances, and check them for fixes.
Finally, if a list entry has no article at all, don't bother logging it. We can use WP:NRHPPROGRESS to find what lists have redlinked entries.

I've copied this request from an archive three years ago; an off-topic discussion happened, but no bot operators offered any opinions. Neither then nor now has any discussion has yet been conducted for this idea; it's just something I've thought of. I've come here basically just to see if someone's willing to try this route, and if someone says "I think I can help", I'll start the discussion at WT:NRHP and be able to say that someone's happy to help us. Of course, I wouldn't ask you actually to do any coding or other work until after consensus is reached at WT:NRHP. Nyttend (talk) 15:53, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

You could use {{Template parameter value}} to pull the coordinate values out of the {{NRHP row}} template. It would still likely take a bot to do the swap but it would mean less updating in the future. Of course, if the values are 100% accurate on the lists then I suppose it wouldn't be necessary. Primefac (talk) 16:55, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Never heard of that template before. It sounds like an Excel =whatever function, e.g. in cell L4 you type =B4 so that L4 displays whatever's in B4; is that right? If so, I don't think it would be useful unless it were immediately followed by whatever's analogous to Excel's "Paste Values". Is that what you mean by having a bot doing the swap? Since there are 3000+ entries, I'm sure there are a few errors somewhere, but I trust they're over 99% accurate. Nyttend (talk) 02:57, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

That's a reasonable analogy, actually. Check out the source of Normani#Awards_and_nominations: it pulls the wins and nominations values from the infobox at the "list of awards", which means the main article doesn't need to be updated every time the list is changed.

As far as what the bot would do, it would take one value of {{coord}} and replace it with a call to {{Template parameter value}}, pointing in the direction of the "more accurate" data. If the data is changed in the future, it would mean not having to update both pages.

Now, if the data you've compiled is (more or less) accurate and of the not-likely-to-change variety (I guess I wouldn't expect a monument to move locations) then this is a silly suggestion – since there wouldn't be a need for automatic syncing – and we might as well just have a bot do some copy/pasting. Primefac (talk) 21:27, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Y'know, this sort of situation is exactly what Wikidata is designed for... --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 22:29, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Primefac, thank you for the explanation. The idea sounds wonderful for situations like the list of awards, but yes these are rather accurate and unlikely to change (imagine someone picking up File:Berry Hill near Orange.jpg and moving it off site), so the bot copy/paste job is probably best. Nyttend (talk) 02:23, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

By the way, Primefac, are you a bot operator, or did you simply come here to offer useful input as a third party? Nyttend (talk) 03:12, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

I am both botop and BAG, but I would not be offering to take up this task as it currently stands. Primefac (talk) 11:24, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for helping me understand. "as it currently stands" Is there something wrong with it, i.e. if changes were made you'd be offering, or do you simply mean that you have other interests (WP:VOLUNTEER) and don't feel like getting involved in this one? This question might sound like I'm being petty; I'm writing with a smile and not trying to complain at all. Nyttend (talk) 00:27, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

I came here to say what AntiCompositeNumber said. It's worth emphasising: this is exactly what Wikidata is designed for. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:25, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Actually not. A not-so-small fraction of articles need to have different coordinates in lists and infoboxes, as I already noted here. If we consistently rely on the lists to inform Wikidata, it's going to end up with a good number of self-contradictions due to lists that appropriately don't provide coordinates that make sense in articles (e.g. multi-county listings). Moreover, you can't rely on the infoboxes to inform Wikidata, because there's a consistently unacceptable error rate in coordinates unchecked by humans, and very few infoboxes are checked by humans; they're derived from the National Register database, and it would be pointless to ignore or trash the human-corrected Virginia coordinates. Literally all that needs to be done is a bot doing some copy/pasting; it would greatly be appreciated if someone were to spend a few minutes on this, instead of passing the buck. Nyttend backup (talk) 19:36, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

The coordinates in the lists are often incorrect too. Let me know if you want help manually correcting them. Abductive (reasoning) 02:46, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

A bot to develop a mass of short stubs and poorly built articles for Brazilian municipalities

Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

I propose a bot along the lines of {{Brazil municipality}} is created to develop our stubs like Jacaré dos Homens which have been lying around for up to 14 years in some cases. There's 5570 municipality articles, mostly poorly developed or inconsistent with data and formatting even within different states. A bot would bring much needed information and consistency to the articles and leave them in a half decent state for the time being, Igaci which Aymatth2 expanded is an example of what is planned and would happen to stubs like Jacaré dos Homens. Some municipalities have infoboxes and some information but hopefully this bot will iron out the current inconsistencies and dramatically improve the average article quality. It would be far too tedious to do it manually, would take years, and they've already been like this for up to 14 years! So support on this would be appreciated.† Encyclopædius 12:09, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Support. See User talk:Aymatth2/Archive 14#Brazil municipalities for more discussion. It looks like a straightforward (but far from trivial) screenscraper. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:35, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

@Encyclopædius: and @Aymatth2: Where's the community endorsed consensus from WikiProject Brazil/WikiProject Latin America/Village Pump? Where's your driver list of proposed articles? How are you proposing to improve the page so that these aren't perma stubs with no chance at improvement? Per WP:FAIT and WP:MASSCREATION it's expected that there will be a very large and well attended consensus that this bulk creation is appropriate. In short,

Not a good task for a bot. table this until you have a community conesnsus in hand as very few bot operators will roll the dice on doing this task in exchange for having their bot revoked. Hasteur (talk) 17:40, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

@Hasteur: The title of this proposal is a bit misleading. The idea is not to create a mass of short stubs and poorly built articles, but to improve the existing mass of short stubs and poorly built articles. There are 5,570 of them, all notable based on WP:NGEO. The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) maintains a database with extensive information on the geography, population, economy etc. of each of them. See Cocalinho and Brasil / Mato Grosso / Cocalinho for a sample IBGE entry. Using this information, and information from sources like GeoNames and Mindat.org, we can upgrade a stub like Araguaiana into a more useful article like Cruzeiro do Sul, Paraná. This seem uncontroversial. The proposal is to develop a screen-scraping tool that will make it easier to copy the data into each Brazil municipality stub.

There are quite a lot of these database-type websites on different topics, displaying each entry in highly standardized format. There is no copyright concern as long as we stick to dates, numbers etc. It would probably be very difficult to develop a generic screen-scraper that could be configured to handle them all, but might be possible to develop reusable logic that could make it fairly simple to develop a new one. That seems to be worth discussing. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:02, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Not a good task for a bot. Absolutely NOT. FULL STOP. Get a broadly endorsed consensus at Village Pump as there have been several cases (NRHP, Betacommand, etc) automated database dumps that have gotten editors drummed out either in part (restrictions on creation) or full on community/Arbitration banned. While you may think this is uncontraversial, this is requires a well attended RFC to confirm the sense of the community. Hasteur (talk) 20:58, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

I see this as a screen scraping tool running under editor control rather than a bot. I have started a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 31#Database website screenscrapers. All comments welcome. Aymatth2 (talk) 23:29, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

DYKN image resize bot

Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

Greetings. At WP:DYKN, the image size is based on the orientation of the image; vertical images at 120px, square at 140, and horizontal at 160. However there is no way to set the resolution during nomination, which means that even experienced editors often forget to fix the size of the image, and new editors don't know that they should.

I am proposing that a bot do a daily check and update the resolution where needed. In order to cut down on the amount of resources required, it needs only look at recent additions.

It would, I'm guessing, work something like this:

Generate a list of all DYK nominations added to Template talk:Did you know since the task was last run. (It can't use the nomination date because there's a 7-day window to nominate.)
Determine if they contain {{main page image}}.
For nominations where that template is present, determine the aspect ratio of the image.
If the ratio is between 5:6 and 6:5, change the field width= from 120 to 140.
If the ratio is greater than 6:5, change the field width= from 120 to 160.

Sincerely, The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 00:31, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Since nominations can be reviewed quite quickly and moved to the Template talk:Did you know/Approved page, the bot would need to check there as well. While the main Nominations page has a "Current nominations" section comprising of the current date and the previous seven days—this is updated at midnight every day—the Approved page doesn't have the equivalent section. Depending on how often it runs, the bot may need to check earlier on the page, because the dates are not when the nomination was added, but rather when work on the article began, which is supposed to be no more than seven days before nominating. (But is sometimes a little late.) BlueMoonset (talk) 01:44, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if it's possible to do this with a module? I'm not familiar with them, but a quick glance shows file metadata can provide height and width.[16] If it is possible to do with a module, that'd probably be better, and it would update automatically rather than having to wait for periodic bot runs. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 02:34, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

The Squirrel Conspiracy, BlueMoonset,

Done using a template and module. See: Template:DYK image. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:17, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Remove malformed obsolete Template:Infobox drug field

Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion

Per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pharmacology/Archive 16#Molecular weights in drugboxes, I am requesting bot attention to remove the following regexp line:

/\| *molecular_weight *= *[0-9.]+ *g\/mol\n/

in articles that transclude Template:Infobox drug. There are a few rare variations that I can remove by hand or that require manual decision whether to remove, but this seems to be the vast majority and a conservative regex for it. This is a one-time cleanup pass that I started doing it with WP:JWB before I realized it was possibly the majority of the 12K articles in that transcluders list. DMacks (talk) 19:18, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Am I correct in that the parameter itself has not been deprecated, just the usage where a value and units are given? Primefac (talk) 19:38, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

Mostly-correct. The units should not be given with the number...that's a mistake that needs to be fixed. The majority of cases, even the number does not need to be given (it's a deprecated use-case of the field, not the field deprecated as a whole). One detail I had in my offline note and forgot to paste (yikes! sorry!) is to limit the scope to pages where there is a:

/\| *C *= *\d/

as those are pages where the value can be automatically calculated, so the field is not needed. In terms of regex, this is almost always on the line immediately preceding the /molecular_weight/ if it would be useful to have a single regex rather than "one regex to filter the pages, another to replace". Rather than simply fixing the units across-the-board, this is an opportunity to upgrade the usage wherever easily possible. There are a bunch of special cases, where the field contains other than a single number or where the number really does need to be manually specified, but I'm setting those aside for now...once the majority of mindless fixes are done, individual decisions about each remaining case can be made. DMacks (talk) 00:37, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Might be useful to set up some tracking categories, then; those that don't need the param, and those that need the units removed. Primefac (talk) 00:40, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

Category:Chem-molar-mass both hardcoded and calculated tracks where the param is redundant (or will, as soon as the job queue catches up), so can use that rather than looking for "tranclusion of {{Infobox drug}} ∧ |C=\d". DMacks (talk) 05:10, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

...has stabilized around 5600 pages. Next step is to filter the ones whose field is malformed (mistake to fix) rather than just redundant (deprecated but valid format). DMacks (talk) 14:40, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Deferred I'm JWB'ing it, with a looser regex and manual oversight...manually annoying but still scratches the itch. DMacks (talk) 13:43, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Bypassing redirects for hatnotes and see also sections

Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

This task might be better for semi-automated editing than a straight bot, but I'll throw it out here. I often come across hatnotes and see also sections that link to an old title for a page, e.g. this sort of fix or this one. Would it be possible to create a bot or a tool that lists or fixes instances where hatnotes or see also sections include a redirect to a page that has been moved to a new title? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:30, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Probably not, unless there is some other substantive change to be made. See WP:NOTBROKEN. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:06, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Normally, if a page title is not broken, the page move won't succeed. If it does succeed, it's likely there's a good enough reason that it'd be worth changing the see also links and hatnotes as well. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 01:13, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

I think the point is more that if there is a link to United States Constitution there is little reason to change it to Constitution of the United States purely for the purpose of avoiding a redirect. Primefac (talk) 01:53, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Oppose There can be reason to use a correct but alternate name in a hatnote because it is shorter, such as the example Primefac gave above. (t · c) buidhe 10:38, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

[1] Skip user talk pages with links to List of your created articles that are in [[:Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors]] in headers since they already have such a report

[1]

Scenario description	Sample parameter usage	Requested bot action
Both w/l and score parameters are empty	`\|w/l=` `\|score=`	Remove w/l parameter usage
w/l value is empty, and score value is dash (or en dash, hyphen)	`\|w/l=` `\|score=-` (using minus sign)
	`\|w/l=` `\|score=–` (using en dash)
w/l is either W or L, and score contains dash-separated numbers	`\|w/l=w` `\|score=100-90` (using minus sign)
	`\|w/l=l` `\|score=90–100` (using en dash)
	`\|w/l=w` `\|score=[http://www.game.com/boxscore/game/1 100–90]`
	`\|w/l=l` `\|score=[[Duke–Michigan men's basketball rivalry\|90–100]]`
w/l is either W or L, and score contains HTML `–` between scores	`\|w/l=w` `\|score=100–90`
	`\|w/l=l` `\|score=90–100`
	`\|w/l=w` `\|score=[http://www.game.com/boxscore/game/1 100–90]`
	`\|w/l=l` `\|score=[[Duke–Michigan men's basketball rivalry\|90–100]]`
w/l value is either w or l, and score is contains all any other values or is empty (i.e. the winner/loser of the match is known, but the final score is not available)	`\|w/l=w` or `\|w/l=l` `\|score=Default`	Rename parameter to status: `\|w/l=w` → `\|status=w` `\|w/l=l` → `\|status=l`
	`\|w/l=w` or `\|w/l=l` `\|score=Forfeit`
	`\|w/l=w` or `\|w/l=l` `\|score=`
w/l value is p	`\|w/l=p`	Rename parameter to status: `\|w/l=p` → `\|status=p`
w/l parameter not found		Do nothing