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This is a page for requesting work to be done by bots per the bot policy. This is an appropriate place to simply put ideas for bots. If you need a piece of software written for a specific article you may get a faster response time at the computer help desk. You might also check Wikipedia:Bots/Status to see if the bot you are looking for already exists, in which case you can contact the operator directly on their talkpage.

If you have a question about one particular bot, it should be directed to the bot owner's talk page or to the Bot Owners' Noticeboard. If a bot is acting improperly, a note about that should be posted to the owner's talk page and to the Administrators' Noticeboard. A link to such a posting may be posted at the Bot Owners' Noticeboard.

If you are a bot operator and you complete a request, note what you did, and archive it. {{BOTREQ}} can be used to give common responses, and to make it easier to see at-a-glance what the response is.

There are a number of common requests which are regularly denied, either because they are too complicated to program, or do not have consensus from the wikipedia community. Please see Wikipedia:Bots/Frequently denied bots for a list of such requests, and ensure that your idea is not among them.

If you are requesting that a bot be used to add a WikiProject banner to the talkpages of all articles in a particular category or its subcategories, please be very careful to check the category tree for any unwanted subcategories. You might not expect Category:World War II to be a subcategory of Category:Thailand, but it actually is, and a bot will find it! It is usually safer to give a complete list of categories that should be worked through individually, rather than one category to be analysed recursively. Compare a successful request with a similar one that made a mess.

Commonly Requested Bots
Newsletter delivery · Talkpage Archiving · Template substitution · WikiProject tagging  · Article autoassessment

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[edit] Replace hyphens with en dashes in templates

There are many templates for various sports-related articles that have content that should use en dashes instead of hyphens as per WP:DASH. Unfortunately, many editors are not aware of this and use hyphens. Obviously, going through and replacing all instances of hyphens with en dashes is not practical as the bot would have to understand the context. However, for some of these templates, I believe that if we can specify which parameters should always have en dashes, then a bot can be programmed to ensure en dashes are always used. I have gone through many sports-related template and documented parameters that, I believe, should always have en dashes. A lot of these parameters, also contain text but I could not identify a situation where a hyphen would be used. Most of these are parameters that have scores, win-loss records or year ranges. Obviously, the first run of the bot will make a lot of changes. However, after that, I think a monthly run of the bot would suffice. If there is sufficient support for this bot, I will also ask various WikiProjects to add to the list if they have additional templates I may have missed (I'm almost positive I did not get them all). However, I think if this does become a bot, the bot operator needs to make it easy for him/herself to add and remove templates and parameters.

This concept could even be applied to templates outside the realm of sports and used in templates where year ranges are specified and other scenarios. Thoughts?—NMajdan•talk 20:54, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Template:Infobox NFLactive should be included on that list.--Giants27(Contribs|WP:CFL) 20:01, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Looking at that template, the pastteams, teams, pastcoaching, and pastadmin parameters contain a team name followed by a year range, which should have an en dash. I can't think of a team that has a hyphen in the name, so I can't think of a scenario where a hyphen would be used in those parameters. I will add this template above. Thanks for the addition.—NMajdan•talk 20:22, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Well all of the players (see Drew Brees for example) have a year thing like (2000–present) and the like where the use of hyphens and en dashes is still widespread.--Giants27(Contribs|WP:CFL) 22:01, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I have begun adding non-sports template with parameters that could use hyphens.—NMajdan•talk 13:27, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I hope the number of templates that would be included in this bot emphasizes it's potential worth.—NMajdan•talk 16:03, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Any takers?—NMajdan•talk 19:54, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Sometimes editors specify dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format (for example, today is 2009-12-04). Changing from hyphens to n dashes should not occur for any such date. Also, if you stick to sports, you are probably safe, but if you extend your reach to other fields, like military conflicts, you might run into unusual calendars (Roman Republic, China, etc.) We cannot be sure the name of such a calendar will not contain a hyphen. --Jc3s5h (talk) 20:13, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure logic could be added to the bot to check for the mask ####-##-## and skip those. Regarding different calendars, that is something I have not investigated. I am not familiar with other calendars and their use of hyphens.—NMajdan•talk 20:50, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

That is a lot of regular expression! also, you'd have to find all the redirects for those templates. Im not good with regex, and there is probably some really easy way to do it, but i just don't know it. Ill play arround with it, but i cant promise anything. Tim1357 (talk) 05:03, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Keep me informed of the progress as I'm sure it will be slow going.—NMajdan•talk 17:59, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

The date isn't hard: \d\d\d\d\-\d\d\-\d\d.. Okay, it's the inverse of that. tedder (talk) 07:44, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I would think you could store the template names and corresponding parameters in an XML file that the bot would read. This would also make it easier to add additional templates in the future. Also, while I've never created a bot, I would think there is already some function that exists that can grab all the redirects for a given template.—NMajdan•talk 16:17, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Why on earth does it matter whether one uses a hyphen or an en-dash? They are almost impossible to tell apart on the screen anyway. This seems to me to be a solution looking for a problem. -- Alarics (talk) 23:10, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Its a MoS requirement. So, we follow it.—NMajdan•talk 01:55, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

I think AWB is actually pretty smart about making this change as a General Fix, but it may only address birth and death dates. You might like to investigate that further. Rich Farmbrough, 01:24, 15 December 2009 (UTC).

[edit] Navigating daily FfD pages

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

The problem with trying to put a navigation template at the bottom of the page is that it doesn't work well with using the "new section" feature to add new nominations: the bot would have to edit after every nomination to move the template back to the bottom of the page. It might also confuse people editing the last nomination on the page. Anomie⚔ 13:57, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for replying. Regarding your first point, here I suggested that a bot would, after a new day is created, (not necessarily by the same bot) add the navigation template to the old "current" day. On your second point, some short commented out text could possibly be added near the navigation template to lower the amount of confusion. I think that confusion might be minimal. One option would be to add the template for a few days and just watch to see if there are any mess ups because of the template. If there are too many, we could just stop adding the template to pages.--Rockfang (talk) 20:59, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

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

To keep things neat, id ask the bot that creates the new FfD pages to do this. (User:Zorglbot). Just to clarify, would the template go on the bottom of each page after a new page has been created? Tim1357 (talk) 04:24, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

I have already asked that bot's operator here. That link answers your question as well.--Rockfang (talk) 04:41, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

I maintain that this task is good for that bot. If you want, I could add a nav box to all of the old old daily pages, but i think, for a daily task, zorgbot should do it.Tim1357 (talk) 22:53, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

You don't have to do current pages if you don't want to. No biggie. I think I might email the bot's operator in an attempt to contact him/her.--Rockfang (talk) 23:04, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, if you cant find him/her leave me a message on my talk page. Its actually pretty easy (i think its like two lines of code that I would have to write from scratch?) so i could write it pretty quickly. Good Luck! Tim1357 (talk) 00:52, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject tagging for Wikipedia:WikiProject Pennsylvania

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

I should be able to get this done with my bot if you like. But I'd prefer to wait a few days for some input from the project. Hope that's okay, - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 07:52, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether by "and its sub-categories" you mean just the first level of subcats or you want to include all the subcats of those subcats (and so on). If the latter, you should probably check again: for example, Category:Cincinnati Bearcats football coaches is in there via Category:Cincinnati, Ohio, which is in Category:Settlements on the Ohio River, which is in Category:Ohio River, which of course is in Category:Rivers of Pennsylvania (which is ultimately under Category:Geography of Pennsylvania). If you want, I can provide a list of all 6183 categories under Category:Pennsylvania for review. Anomie⚔ 14:34, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! I was thinking that it should include all sub-cats, all the way down. I didn't realize that there were 6k of them, so maybe I ought to take a closer look at them. Can you produce a list of all of these? --Blargh29 (talk) 16:34, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Done, at User:Blargh29/Subcats of Category:Pennsylvania. With a list like this, I usually recommend that multiple members of the project look it over before anyone starts using it for tagging. Anomie⚔ 21:47, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Wow! Ok, so how should I designate which ones are relevant? Just delete them from that sub-page?--Blargh29 (talk) 00:08, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Delete all the ones that are not relevant, leaving only the relevant ones. Or you could move the relevant ones to a separate page, if you'd rather do it that way. The important part is that you end up with a list of categories Kingpin should process. Anomie⚔ 02:25, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Done! User:Blargh29/Subcats of Category:Pennsylvania. Just to be safe, I removed all sports teams and college-related categories, because those categories are filled with non-pertinent articles, like faculty, alumni, players, and coaches. --Blargh29 (talk) 06:21, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Two WP:PENNA editors (User:Ruhrfisch & User:Niagara) have looked over the list and made suggestions. Thanks.-Blargh29 (talk) 05:10, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Great, sounds like it's had enough eyes now, I'll try and start the bot up :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:34, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] DYK admin bot

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

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

I'll look over the code and see if I can make sense of "the mess." :) At the very least, I could easily run a "back-up" copy of the bot when the main one is down. --ThaddeusB (talk) 22:39, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for butting in and posting naive comments:

• The major problem with DYKadminBot (talk · contribs) is regular crashes of its "autonomous" wake-up timing, rather than its code per se; the crashes are partly related to the dependence of the bot on the toolserver.
• As I understand the idea of the requested additional bot, it should perform a single update upon a command by an admin - it doesn't need to run continuously. It should have admin privileges and several admins should have access to its startup or its wakeup trigger. It should not interfere with the DYKadminBot (unless DYKadminBot is banned :-). The DYK admins don't need to change the bot, but it would be nice to give them an option to alter one parameter, namely the shift of the DYK timer, which is usually 6 hrs, but might be 8 hrs. Cheers. Materialscientist (talk) 02:34, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the idea of the backup bot would be to have a second bot with the same code (or almost the same since it needs some routine to check whether it has been requested) that can be activated manually if needed. DYK is a large and annoying task to update manually and I think every admin at DYK would be happy if they could simply switch a bot on that does it for them.

As for the timer, if we can get nixeagle to change the code in a way that the timer can be changed with a variable in the bot's userspace, it would be good (strike that, that's actually possible already). The backup bot would need a similar feature then to check if the update time has come and gone (to ensure that a manual update request does not run if the main bot has done the update). Regards SoWhy 13:59, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

[edit] Ship categories by year

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

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

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

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

[edit] Change UK election links

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

Sounds ok to me. Do you have consensus somewhere that I can point to in the BRFA? Maybe it's common sense. Tim1357 (talk) 22:55, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Since I put up this request the page was moved back despite the fact there was consensus to move here and here. There is one user who disagrees with the consensus and keeps moving the page. I think the bot request should be implemented as it is now impossible for an election to take place in 2009 and it must take place before June 2010, so the page will be moved to United Kingdom general election, 2010 and after next year the page title 'Next United Kingdom general election' will be need for the election after 2010. --Philip Stevens (talk) 08:08, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Update: The page has now moved back to United Kingdom general election, 2010 where it seems likely to remain. --Philip Stevens (talk) 20:14, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

BRFA filed Tim1357 (talk) 05:09, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! --Philip Stevens (talk) 11:07, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Most popular related articles

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

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

(no disagreements were forthcoming)

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

it would be possible, the best method would probably be a toolserver acc with a javascript function that retrieves the data from the toolserver once we set the rules for what is and is not related. β^_command 04:52, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Even better would be to have a statistics tab next to history. With graphs of metrics like readability, bytes size, html size, word count, number of references, incoming link count (backlinks), outgoing link count (links), traffic statistics, and possibly something like history flow. And maybe be able to compare to other pages. If the caching is done right it could be done on the toolserver. — Dispenser 05:41, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps 'related' is everything wikilinked and everything in the same categories? 99.62.186.125 (talk) 18:29, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

The same algorithm as related changed I would say. Rich Farmbrough, 09:20, 15 December 2009 (UTC).

[edit] Touch Templates with /doc

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

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

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

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

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

Not a good task for a bot From your final sentence, this sounds like this isn't even an issue with Wikipedia, just the toolserver. Rather than having a bot going around making null edits, why not just fix the toolserver? Anomie⚔ 13:13, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

The toolserver is only a replication of the wikimedia db server. Mediawiki should be fixed instead. But this is not done because of too many needed table locks which downgrades the performance of the db on every edit. But only 10000 more edits once a month does't hurt db (should not be done in mean time of course). The job queue is not the problem because mediawiki checks if something has changed (which is not on a null edit) before adding the subjobs for every page including the template. Merlissimo 14:39, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

touch.py -ref:Template:Documentation would do this job. Merlissimo 14:50, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

But if it works through the API (as you stated), then it wouldn't seem to be a problem with MediaWiki. Just a problem with however the toolserver is replicated. Otherwise link us to the bugzilla bug on this issue that is closed WONTFIX. Anomie⚔ 18:37, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

should be changed to

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

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

Doing... as soon as I finish testing the code (I want to make sure it does {{WPBiography|a&e-work-group=yes|a&e-priority=foo|s&a-work-group=yes|s&a-priority=foo|living=no}} rather than {{WPBiography|a&e-work-group=yes|s&a-work-group=yes|living=no|a&e-priority=foo|s&a-priority=foo}}, and doesn't get weird with linebreaks either). Anomie⚔ 16:12, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Y Done Anomie⚔ 16:00, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I've checked a few of the bot's edits, and the sports work group was missed on several pages [3][4][5]. PC78 (talk) 00:16, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Bot work at WikiProject Albums

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

[edit] external linking

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

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

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

• Reference, demographics and (cc-by-sa) essay at the Dictionary of Sydney

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

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

Start a discussion at WP:Village pump (proposals), and link to it from WT:External links, Template:Cent, and WP:Australian Wikipedians' notice board. Anomie⚔ 15:22, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

If you are asking to mass-add external links to wikipedia articles that link to that web site, you could run into major issues related to "do we trust this site so well that we are willing to blindly assume it's reliable," "gee, this looks like we are complicit in link-spam," and "does the proponent of the bot have a conflict of interest." The 3rd should be easy to deal with, the first can be dealt with by looking a a representative sample of entries. The third is a matter of perception of "playing favorites" and can't be dealt with easily. For this reason, you will have an uphill battle. Given the nature of the site and who is behind it though, your idea at least has a chance of going forward. If it were a commercial site or it did not appear to be a serious, well-respected non-profit then it likely wouldn't stand a chance. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:23, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

What might be useful is a template to make it easier for editors to add links by hand. An advantage of a template is if the site you are linking to re-organizes, you just need to modify the template once. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 18:25, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Generates... links? If an author can't manage to do enough research to have had a few links-- if necessary at all-- I don't know how results generated by a bot would help in any way. We have regulations regarding external links and I'm not picturing a bot complying. Linkspam is bad enough on some popular topics already. An actual human being needs to look at an external link. If someone is too lazy for that, I'm not sure why they're spending their free time at Wikipedia in the first place. Finding "links" might as well mean finding more resources of entirely unknowns and-- well, more talk about be a waste of time. "No." External links are the one section of articles that rarely have any problem filling up.

Oh, and "semi-automated link bot" = a search engine. We have that already. ♪ daTheisen(talk) 05:18, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Locating a bot writer for an innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

[edit] Bot to automatically apply the Oldprodfull template to talk pages

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

I'd like to make the request again.

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

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

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

• Support - Can it be done? Probably, with good coding and flagging cases where the code got confused. If it can be done correctly I would support such a bot. I would recommend someone patrol the output for accuracy for the first few hundred edits. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 15:02, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

• Yes it can be done. I'm confident I could write code to do this, but as I've got a number of bot tasks which need working on, I'd be unwilling (atm) to go through another BRfA, or to run the bot (due to bandwidth). However, I'd be very happy to help someone write the bot (I'm only any good with .NET). Which way do people prefer that the bot looks for the articles? Through categories, as MacMedBot did, or something else? @davidwr that could be done with a bot trial, which also takes the workload off the bot-op. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 15:54, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

• This bot has been on my agenda for a long time. Obviously, I haven't got to it (for a variety of reasons). However, I am currently on real world vacation and was actually planning on finally writing the code next week. --ThaddeusB (talk) 19:50, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

• Sorry ThaddeusB. I noticed that there was activity on this front, and figured the time was ripe. Abductive (reasoning) 02:39, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

• No apology necessary. If someone else is chopping at the bit to do it, they should feel free to do it. I certainly have plenty to do... I just wanted to say, "yes, I am hoping to finally actually get it done, so no one should pressure themselves too much." --ThaddeusB (talk) 04:41, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

• Howdy. My bot didn't encounter any difficulty, it just got distracted. :) I was going to start it back up at one point, but then I noticed the withdrawn MacMedBot request. I had asked the operator to let me know if it got approved, but it never did. I used AWB to place a blank oldprodfull on talk pages, and then I'd manually go through and add info myself. If people want me to, I can start this up again until a normal bot gets approved.--Rockfang (talk) 00:49, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

• It's not such a crucial task that a person has to do it. I'll be happy to wait for a bot. Abductive (reasoning) 02:39, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Tag articles in Category:Music video games

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

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

[edit] Bot to notify major contributors that their BLP is unreferenced.

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

[edit] Un-Referenced BLPs

Hello Bot requests! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 2 of the articles that you created , are Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons. Please note that all biogrophies of living persons must be sourced. If you were to add sources to these articles, it would greatly help us with the current 53,038 page backlog. Here is a list:

1. Foo Find sources: "foo" — search, news, books, scholar, images
2. Bar Find sources: "bar" — search, news, books, scholar, images

-Thanks! DashBot

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

[edit] Un-Referenced BLPs

Hello Bot requests! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that , are Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons. Please note that all biogrophies of living persons must be sourced. If you were to add sources to these articles, it would greatly help us with the current 53,038 page backlog. Here is a list:

1. Foo Find sources: "foo" — search, news, books, scholar, images
2. Bar Find sources: "bar" — search, news, books, scholar, images
3. Foo Find sources: "foo" — search, news, books, scholar, images
4. Bar Find sources: "bar" — search, news, books, scholar, images
5. Foo Find sources: "foo" — search, news, books, scholar, images
6. Bar Find sources: "bar" — search, news, books, scholar, images
7. Foo Find sources: "foo" — search, news, books, scholar, images
8. Bar Find sources: "bar" — search, news, books, scholar, images
9. Foo Find sources: "foo" — search, news, books, scholar, images
10. Bar Find sources: "bar" — search, news, books, scholar, images

-Thanks! Dashbot

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

P.S. I need somewhere to direct all complaints about the bot. I don't want to get beaten. : )

"Here are the articles, in no particular order" probably ought to either try to see if the plural and the extra clause is needed. "Un-Referenced" could be "Unreferenced". In addition, perhaps it could identify the article creator and notify them as well, provided their version of the article was not a redirect. Also, per discussion here, could it only notify users who have been active in the past 6 months? NW (Talk) 18:04, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Also, could you run this on a different bot account than your Dashbot? No sense delaying this if your bot gets blocked for another reason. Cheers, NW (Talk) 18:07, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

• I like it, but make it a stricter message. Emphasise that all BLPs MUST be referenced, that unreferenced biographies are likely to be deleted, etc. Ironholds (talk) 18:31, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
• Here is the template that the bot uses: User:Tim1357/temp. The count parameter is the number of articles to be included. More means that there is more then ten. I encourage you to tweak it all you want. I did a count and it seems around 23,000 users will be getting messages. I am not sure how to determine if a user has edited in the past six months, Ill try to find a way to figure that out. I will add article creators, but from what i read on WT:BLP, the idea was to notify the most common contributor. 67.142.130.12 (talk) 18:43, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

• I see little point notifying indef blocked users as they can't edit the articles. Nor do I see much point notifying people who have not edited in the last 6 months. I'm also concerned as to how we measure contributors, it would be a bit counterproductive if all our hugglers were to get such messages because their use of Rollback to revert vandalism on BLPs had made them a pages major contributor. ϢereSpielChequers
  • Rollback is automatically marked as a minor edit, I believe. Perhaps there is some way to scan for "Undid", "Rvv", "Reverted", etc. in edit summaries and ignore them when counting up to the threshold? NW (Talk) 19:02, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Minor edits were not counted. I did a look through the users with the most pages, and it seems that bearcat and some unflagged bots who did not mark their edits as minor showed up. I added some lines to the code so that the bot does not send messages to users who have 'bot' on the end of their name. It would be a great help if someone could point me to a raw .txt file of all users that are indef blocked, because that would be much easier to code.Tim1357 (talk) 02:42, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

• It appears that editors which only added tags (such as the BLP unsourced tag) are going to get notices from the bot (why else is Fram on the list?). Perhaps there is a way to exclude edits that involve tagging the article for improvement? Otherwise, I think it's a great idea. Best regards. Jogurney (talk) 03:14, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Well Im dealing with a huge dataset here. It took me 3 days to generate this list (its still finishing). The only variable taken into account (right now) is the number of non-minor edits they made. If they made the most, then they were added. Hopefully they market their tagging edits as minor, and only tagged the article once. If that is the case, they should not appear on the list. If anyone wants a full list of user's to be messaged, send me an email and I'll generate one for you. Per the request of NW, I will go through and add the article's creators. Someone needs to change the template so it says "number" of the articles for which you are the largest contributor, or the creator are biographies... Thanks Tim1357 (talk) 03:42, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

I appreciate what you are doing and understand that the data set is enormous, but it is confusing that this article shows up for Fram rather than Pakupaku. I know that Fram just tagged the article for improvement, while Pakupaku made two edits (the only substantive edits so far). Maybe something is off in the decision code? Best regards. Jogurney (talk) 22:08, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

I see now. Pakupaku marked both his/her edit as minor, so they did not count. However, he or she will be on the list because he or she created the article. Fram got added because he or she was the only non-bot, non-annon user that contributed a non-minor edit. Im not sure that makes sense. In the end annon edits, bot edits, and minor edits were not counted when I generated each user's "score" on the article. On a different note, I was thinking of changing the max number of articles added to the talk page to 15. Is that ok? Thanks for the input.Tim1357 (talk) 22:50, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Okay. Every editor who started an extant unreferenced BLP article will get a notice, even if they marked the edit as minor. I think that will work well, and perhaps the only difficulty is that editors who tagged these BLPs for cleanup but didn't mark those edits as minor (I never realized such edits should be marked as minor) will probably get a few erroneous notices. I doubt it's a big deal, but maybe the template should have a small warning or refer those editors back here so they don't get confused/upset. I think this will be a valuable tool for addressing the backlog so whichever threshhold that is easiest to manage has my support. Best regards. Jogurney (talk) 22:41, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Of course, if you want, i can generate a list of users by the number of pages that they are attributed to, and we could remove the top 10 so they do not get pinged. Tim1357 (talk) 22:50, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

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

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

[edit] We should do this step-by-step

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

• Ralf Altmeyer created November 2004 by MichaelJanich (talk · contribs)
• Ken Allemann created March 2005 by Esteffect (talk · contribs)
• Philip Andrewes created September 2005 by CJCurrie (talk · contribs)
• Mitch Aliotta created September 2005 by Jokestress (talk · contribs)
• David C. Alexander created January 2006 by Ncox (talk · contribs)
• Mohammed bin Nawwaf bin Abdul Aziz created March 2006 by LCahill (talk · contribs)

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

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

From what I've seen, the users who are the maijorest contributors are also the creators, except for weird cases like Fram's. Tim1357 (talk) 02:09, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

I also was under the impression that I was supposed to group the articles into one message. I thought it would be nice for the bot to say count of the aritcles that that you created, or were a major contributor are ... Tim1357 (talk) 02:20, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

In any case, it is not that hard for me to change the bot to do two rounds, I just don't think people will appreciate being messaged twice. (once for the articles they created, once for the articles they are the most significant contributor to. Tim1357 (talk) 02:53, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Update I am re-generating the list. This time "major contributors" will be separate from the page creators. Also users are only added to the list if they are the top most editor and they mad 5 edits or more Tim1357 (talk) 04:52, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Once the lists are complete, I'd be interested in seeing how much overlap there really is. How many Creators make it onto the Top Major Contributors list, close to 100%? If so (and I suspect this to be the case), I have to say I would be inclined to agree that it would be redundent to send the same message to the same people twice. Then again, what about running the bot to message only page creators this time, and then much later (say, a year from now?) include all top major contributors in a second run of the bot. Then, if some people get the same message twice, oh well, it's been a year, here's your reminder. That's my 2¢. Wilhelm Meis (Quatsch!) 07:22, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

┌─────────────────────────────────────┘

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

[edit] Remove Category:Wikipedia:Books from pages that manually include it

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

Easy. Rich Farmbrough, 09:35, 15 December 2009 (UTC).

OK there's only about 2-3k pages but:

• All Wikipedia: namespace books should be placed under Wikipedia:Books subcategories.
• All User: namespace books should be placed under Wikipedia:User page Books subcategories.

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

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

[edit] delinking to kehilla

In a large number of articles there are hidden links "Kehilla|Jewish community" or "Kehilla|Jewish communities". As Kehilla is a disambiguation page, this leads to Kehilla being currently the second most linked-to disambiguation page on Wikipedia [6]. Kehilla just means "Jewish community" in Hebrew, but it clearly has a more restricted meaning in English, see Kehilla (modern): "kehilla", "kehilla council", "kehilla executive", "kehilla president" etc. The bot should transform "Kehilla|Jewish community" into Jewish community (without [[]]) and "Kehilla|Jewish communities" into Jewish communities (without [[]]).--Pylambert (talk) 11:06, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

WP:Wikiproject Disambiguation does a good job of sorting these, and its probably not a good idea to have a bot change hundreds of links without certainty that 90% will be the correct link. However, if you can point to a discussion with consensus for this job to be done by a bot, then it changes things. If you did not know of it already wikicleaner or the pywikipedia script are alternatives. Both do 90 percent of the work for you, all you have to do is decide which option belongs as the link. Good luck! Tim1357 (talk) 22:45, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Help in re-categorizing a demoted WikiProject

The WikiProject Ice Cream is inactive and has been demoted to a task force as well as being re-tasked to the general topic of desserts. I need a bot to do a couple of things:

1. The Project articles need to be re-categorized from Cat:WikiProject Ice Cream articles to Cat:Desserts Taskforce articles, including any sub categories;
2. The Project categories need to re-categorized from Cat:WikiProject Ice Cream to Cat:Desserts Taskforce, including any sub categories;
3. Any article with the {{WikiProject Ice Cream}} banner needs to be changed to {{WikiProject Food and drink |desserts=yes}} banner

At this time that is all I can think of, more will probably be coming later. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 05:29, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Categorisation should be done by the WikiProject banner, and do you have any consensus from the WikiProject for this action to be taken? Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page · Contribs)} 06:26, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

I placed a requested move notice on the page over a week ago as well as the parent project WP:WikiProject Food and Drink and not a single member responded. There has been no change in its statistics in over six months, no response on its talk page in longer than that. The only changes that have occurred in the project have been ones I have made, or have made in conjunction with others in updating "back of house" things.

The changes I have requested for the bot to do have to with page categorization that are one the project page itself (category:WikiProject Ice Cream articles) and the organization of the categories themselves and are not set through the banner. The banner changes are because I have deleted the WikiProject Ice Cream banner and redirected it to the WikiProject Food and Drink banner, both of which I created and maintain. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 16:29, 15 December 2009 (UTC)