User:ArkyBot/AFD summary

The AfD Summary Report is an attempt to create a bot-generated report of the status of various open Articles for deletion discussions. It is intended to replicate the functionality of the AFD summary generated by DFBot which seems to have gone offline mid August, 2007. While the functionality of the summary produced by ArkyBot is similar, it is not identical to the previous summary and some minor changes will exist.

Feel free to leave comments, suggestions for improvement or bug reports on the operator's talk page. Be sure to indicate that the comment you are leaving is in reference to the AfD summary report.

AFD is not a vote
Please remember that AFD is a place for discussion, it is not a vote and should not be treated as such. The following summaries are given as a quick statistical analysis only and should in no circumstances be used as a substitute for actually reading the discussions and considering the viewpoints of all involved.

Subpages

 * All - all currently active AFD discussions
 * Recent - active AFD discussions from the last 3 days
 * Few votes - active AFD discussions with less than 5 participants
 * Controversial - active AFD discussions with 50-80% in favor of deletion and at least 5 participants
 * Many votes - active AFD discussions with at least 15 participants
 * Unusual - active AFD discussions with a high number of !votes in the "other" category

Description
The following is a simple description of how this report is generated. Read the subsequent sections for a more in-depth description of how the bot functions.

The report is based on the assumption that most users who participate in an AFD will follow a well-accepted convention for how to participate. The bot will scan the AFD discussions and look for a signature line that includes both a properly formatted timestamp and a link to either the user's userpage or talk page. It will then look for a bolded comment with which to associate the signature, and attempt to interpret the bolded comment. Participants who fail to sign or use a nonstandard signature will be overlooked by the bot. An entry with a signature but no bolded portion will be recorded as "other" by the bot.

The bot attempts to categorize the comment as either delete, keep, merge, move, redirect or comment. A submission that lacks a bolded section or contains a bolded section with an unexpected comment such as launch this article to the moon will be counted as other.

The bot will only count the last entry that an editor makes to the discussion, so someone who virst says delete but later says keep will be counted as keep. The only exception is a comment or "other", which will not supercede the other categories.

The tables in each report contain a line for each open AFD in that category. Closed AFD's should not appear in the report, although if it was closed in a nonstandard fashion it may confuse the bot and cause it to remain listed as open.

Each entry in the report should contain:
 * A link to the AFD page
 * Total number of submissions processed. Duplicates will be ignored and comments excluded.
 * Percentage in favor of deletion. Comments and other are not included in the calculation.
 * Number of submissions matching each of the following categories:
 * Delete
 * Keep
 * Merge
 * Move
 * Redirect
 * Comment
 * Other - included non-bolded submissions as well as unusual submissions

Color coding
The following colors are used to highlight parts of the table:

Technical errata and known issues

 * The bot presumes that the first contributor to a discussion is the nominator, and if no bolded suggestion is given it will assume the nominator may be counted as a "delete". Any signature lines placed prior to the nominating statement or bolded words used in the nominating statement may cause the nominator's position to be misinterpreted or omitted.
 * Lines with no recognizable signature will be merged with the following line in an attempt to parse multi-line contributions. In certain instances, such as when another editor inserts a signed comment in the middle of a multi-line comment or a non-standard signature is used, the bot may attribute a bolded comment to the wrong editor and in some cases cause the tally to be incorrect.
 * The bot searches for the first bolded words in an entry once a signature line is found. Multiple bolded entries, such as "Delete this article, or maybe merge" will be interpreted as "delete" only.  Similarly, complicated statements such as "I do not agree to delete" will be interpreted as "delete" being the first recognizable entry.
 * Some commonly used constructs such as do not delete and don't keep are correctly interpreted, however.
 * If you have noticed unusual behavior from the bot, please report it so that it can be investigated.

"Other" entries
The bot is limited to looking for certain, specific words and phrases to determine what a contributor meant to say. Unlike a human, it does not have the capacity to subjectively interpret what is said and must take things literally. As a result, a number of entries with what seem to have an obvious intent will wind up being tallied as "other". For example, "save this article!" might seem clear to you or me, but is not so clear to the bot.

To that end there are a few "synonym" votes that the bot looks for and interprets in a certain way. If you would like to suggest some more common synonyms please let me know.


 * "Cleanup" = Keep
 * "Improve" = Keep
 * "Kill" = Delete
 * "Note" = Comment
 * "Rename" = Move