Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ZackBot

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The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Withdrawn by operator.

ZackBot[edit]

Operator: Zackmann08 (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 00:05, Sunday, November 20, 2016 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Supervised Automatic

Programming language(s): Ruby

Source code available: User:ZackBot/tv cleanup

Function overview: To cleanup and remove the deprecated parameters from occurrences of {{Infobox television}}. These occurrences currently populate Category:Pages using infobox television with alias parameters.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): Daily until the category is empty. I am going to review each and every edit so won't do it all in one go, but once the category is empty, support for deprecated params will be removed and the bot will no longer be needed.

Estimated number of pages affected: As of this moment, 14,103 (total in the category). I assume there will special cases that will need to be done manually so call it 14,000.

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): As of this moment I haven't implemented this functionality but certainly can.

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): (Pending - Task 3 was approved)

Function details:

Bottom line the goal of this bot is to clean out the Pages using infobox television with alias parameters category. Pages are placed into the category if they use {{Infobox television}} and have any of 4 parameters: channel, host, name or studio. This bot would go through every page appearing in the category and attempt to replace these deprecated params with their newer counterpart. So:

  • channel → network
  • host → presenter
  • name → show_name
  • studio → company

To help prevent against false positives, if any of the parameters appears on a page more than one time, that page will be skipped. So if | name = foo appears inside {{Infobox television}} at the top of the page but later down on the page there is {{cite|name=bar}} the page will be skipped. This is done to prevent accidentally replacing values from the wrong template.

If and when the bot is approved, I will run it in small batches and I plan to check each edit made by the bot to ensure no errors are slipping through. As previously stated, once the category is completely emptied, support for the deprecated params will be removed from {{Infobox television}} and the bot will be deactivated.

Finally, while I have 10+ years of coding experience, this is my first venture into writing Wikipedia Bots so I welcome any and all constructive feedback! --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 00:05, 20 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion[edit]

Pre-trial issue since resovled
Resolved
  • information Note: This bot appears to have edited since this BRFA was filed. Bots may not edit outside their own or their operator's userspace unless approved or approved for trial. AnomieBOT⚡ 19:54, 21 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • information Administrator note This bot is currently blocked, may be unblocked if this moves to trial or upon operator assurance that the bot policy will be followed. — xaosflux Talk 22:02, 21 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Response: Please read my full discussion with Xaosflux on my talk page HERE. In short, I made a really dumb and rookie mistake... Since I was not used to working with 2 accounts, I forgot to switch back to my regular account (Zackmann08) before making edits to articles. All the edits on November 20 (see: Special:Contributions/ZackBot) were made via the browser without the use of a script... I was just logged in on the wrong account. This was the reason for the block. It was 100% unintentional and I do appologize for the mistake. I hope that it will not negatively affect the BRFA and am looking to take steps to fix the mistake. --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 22:48, 21 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Unblocked. — xaosflux Talk 23:28, 21 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Zackmann08: Do you mean supervised? From the filing, Supervised: all edits are reviewed soon after being made"; I highly doubt you want to be shifting through 14000 pages where this is going to make changes! Mdann52 (talk) 08:08, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Mdann52: this is where my n00b-ness comes into play. Initially what I meant was that the initial edits will be heavily supervised. I now realize that is the purpose of a trial period. So you are correct. Thank you for catching my mistake. --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 08:23, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Approved for trial (25 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Please post your trial results when done. — xaosflux Talk 14:43, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If say host= appears in the infobox, and name= appears in some other section - are you going to edit the other section outside of this scope? — xaosflux Talk 14:47, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Xaosflux: that is a case I have not accounted for. Let me do some thinking on that and find a good solution before running the 25 edit trial. --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 16:55, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
In general terms, you need to look for that parameter only inside of that template, and not just as a text search of the entire page. — xaosflux Talk 17:34, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. At the moment, I'm not sure how to do that... Back to the drawing board. --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 17:43, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete.@Xaosflux: Ran the 25 edit trial and didn't see any issues, see Special:Contributions/ZackBot. I also found a solution to the problem that you pointed out. Basically I found a way to only look at the infobox text. The source code has been updated to show the changes. --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 04:52, 23 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Xaosflux: just wanted to check in. I'm sure you've had other things going on but just wanted to make sure you didn't miss this one. :-) --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 06:04, 25 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I won't, BRFA is really backed up right now. — xaosflux Talk 15:39, 25 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
 On hold Pending Task 3 run's beginning. — xaosflux Talk 04:23, 27 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm a bit concerned that this is a purely cosmetic task. WP:COSMETICBOT can potentially be overridden with good reason to do so, but we're talking about a whole lot of edits and no discussion beforehand. This isn't uncontroversial in my opinion. There's got to be some examples of non-cosmetic cleanup tasks which can be combined with this to make the overall edits non-cosmetic. For instance, what about replacing dashes with endashes within certain parameters likely to have dates or number ranges (and meeting some regex that identifies them as dates or numbers, of course)? That's one of those "simple" edits I tend to piggyback off of when I need to make cosmetic "cleanup" changes. ~ Rob13Talk 05:51, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@BU Rob13: I respectfully disagree. I don't see it as a purely cosmetic task as it is working to clean out a deprecation category and fix template transclusions to make sure they work properly. That being said, I will be the first to admit I am new to world of bots so I want to defer to those who know more about the process. It seems to me (and please correct me if I am wrong) that if I were to write a REGEX to make this fix and just ran it with WP:AWB it would all be fine. BUT if I write a bot to do it, that is a problem. Again, I'm new to the world of bots and I absolutely do NOT want to be the person who comes along and says "yea this well established policy that has been in place for years sucks and you need to change because I say so." NO ONE likes that guy, including me!!! lol. But help me here... What is the best way forward? It seems that you agree this cleanup is worth doing... Should I just do it with AWB? The frustrating thing is that I use a mac for most of my stuff and I've never managed to get AWB working on my mac. Anyway, would love to have a dialogue with ya! I'm here to learn so I appreciate any and all feedback you can give! --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 17:52, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, see WP:AWBRULES #4; the same issue would occur using AWB. Fixing template transclusions is perfectly fine, but unless I'm mistaken, you're just altering parameter names without changing the page output in any way here. That's where the problem lies (in my opinion). To bring up the other example of this type of task you had in mind, I did semi-automated work cleaning up the deprecated parameters of {{Infobox NFL biography}} over the summer. The way I made it work was to do endash fixes and remove awards which were not particularly important from infoboxes in the same edits, which made the overall edits non-cosmetic. I basically piggy-backed the cosmetic cleanup off of the non-cosmetic useful tasks that also happened to be needed. A similar methodology would be ideal here. I haven't been around long enough to know the whole history, but I believe the idea behind disallowing automated cosmetic-only edits is to prevent bots from taking up server resources and mucking up page histories with changes that don't actually achieve anything in terms of how our articles look/read. ~ Rob13Talk 17:57, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@BU Rob13: Thanks for that. It actually helps quite a bit! I was confused as to why some other bots were being approved that did similar tasks but didn't want to pull a WP:OSE... For example, I don't think that ZackBot 3 technically changes the display on the page... But it does a hell of a lot more than just rename a parameter. It incorporates a whole different module that is inuse will nearly all mapping templates. Your explanation helped quite a bit! I guess the other question that should be asked here is why not just support both parameters??? Is there a reason that having | data12 = {{{presenter|{{{host|}}}}}} is bad for the template?
Oh and PS, cleaning up {{Infobox NFL biography}} is high on my todo list. Care to collaborate on that? --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 18:10, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I'm happy to collaborate on that, but I don't know that there's much left that can be done without cosmetic edits honestly. I have an existing AWB script that I tack on to every semi-automated task I do on NFL articles more-or-less, and it's just a matter of waiting for the hodge-podge of tasks to affect all articles with deprecated parameters. And yes, I think the change to a module is a substantial change since it will presumably be followed by removing the old functionality. As for why not just leave the parameters ... good question! In {{Infobox NFL biography}}, it's because we have parameters that are actually not operational at the moment (and so misleading when they appear in article source code looking like they're achieving something) and because the template is somewhat bloated with a lot of different parameters. In those cases, it's worth cutting down on the parameters accepted and getting rid of those that are no longer even operational. For {{Infobox television}}, I don't know the full background, but it doesn't look all that complicated to me. Personally, I don't see a particularly compelling reason to systematically remove these deprecated parameters, although it's always worthwhile to consolidate if you're running other tasks at the same time and can just knock it out with little effort. ~ Rob13Talk 18:19, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well lets see what @Xaosflux: has to say on the matter. I'll ping you about the NFL template. --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 18:23, 28 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Xaosflux: did you have any further thoughts on this? I think the other bot went super well. Would love to get this one run if possible. --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 23:19, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
So it turns out these are just aliases... Not deprecations. No need to clean them up. --Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 23:42, 7 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.
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