User:Bluerasberry/WikiProject Merge

Dmehus is a member

page move bot requested moves bot both written by James hare hard boiled eggs used to do this but never published the source there was outdated code then had to do changes to get it up to date what I had to work for worked for compuserve for 15 years they had a50-year anniversary last month - I went to it!

compuserve had a version or dialect of Fortran so I was able to pick up this php tool the two main things I had to learn were the regular expressions and object oriented programs. I bought a book for this and self-taught this. I had to condsider how to run a program! Brad Naomie - one of the more helpful people at the foundation, told me that they would not run the code and that people had to do it themselves

One option was to run the software on the server but I would have had to learn how to do that. Instead I installed PHP on my own computer. Asked questions on the bot talk page about how to run a bot, and I finally got the thing running manually and another day to figure out how to run it on the windows task manager. It runs every 15 minutes on my home, 24/7. A couple of days it quit working. I hope no one broke into my condo while I am here! I am running this off a windows 7 machine. Modern programmers act like they need a jillion GB of memory. Right now I am running the tool off my laptop here. Maybe my computer at home ran out of memory. I will diagnose it when I get back. I am not running it every 15 minutes here.

John Sadowski - it could have been a power cut

…: I have three bots and all three of them went down so that points to a system problem where my machine froze up. When I was at compuserve we could control what went into the machine but with Wikipedia and bots anyone can add anything, and sometimes people do things which throw them into an infinite loop.

originally people would request a move on the talk page of the article where they want to change the title. Then it would transclude the name of the page to be moved to a central list. This would require posting notices on one page and related pages to move as well.

I added a feature to send notices to related wikiprojects which are configured to accept articles. If the wikiproject is already notified by article alerts, then no change. However if a wikiproject is not receiving article alerts then this tool posts to the project talk page.

The tool also puts a notice on the page moved itself. And also it notifies if anyone requests to make a move to pages which already exist. I have made several enhancements over the years since I took it over. It has become more complicated than when I inherited it.

L: how many moves?

People have asked me and it is on my to-do list. Article alerts related to requested moves can see history there, for article alert bot.

Also the tool would not tell everything about moves, because there are bold moves and requested moves, and this project is just for requests.

I also run merge bot. It was nonoperational for over a year. There were calls to delete some of its machinery, but instead it was marked as historical and kept, which is fortunate because I was able to resurrect it.

I set up WikiProject Merge to clear the backlog. At this WikiProject anyone can see the description. It is kind of like a longer term thing. There was an interesting talk at this conference from someone at MIT who examined requests for comments. This is because the bot removes notices after some time. In contrast with comment requests, requests for moves have to be closed by a human after a move.

There are different reasons for merging a page. The originally identified reason is for duplicate articles and to prevent content forking. There is a concept on Wikipedia called "summary style" and when an article gets really long, people cut out a subarticle from the main article. Sometimes the sub article seems like a stub, and many of the proposed merges is merging a more detailed topic into a more general topic. This is different from more critical issues like getting rid of content forks. Proposed merges sometimes stay open for years because it is not certain when people will show up to specialized topics to engage in the discussion. When people of a fan base propose merges related to some character in the universe to be merged into the main article maybe no one else will care for some time. The WikiProject Merge page has a list of merges by how long they have been open. The overall list of merges to process is shrinking and I feel like I am doing a good job of getting connecting people to the requests.

WikiProject Merge is set up to tackle the back log of merge requests. The requested moves backlog has never been as severe as merges, so there is not a WikiProject for this. It is easy for admins to move a page. To do a merge, it requires a human to correctly and manually migrate and integrate content from one page into another. From the administrator and reviewers' perspectives, they will close a merge discussion to say the consensus is for a merge, but not have the labor to actually perform the merge. For moves, even one month is rare to leave pending, but to leave a merge standing is not rare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_moves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wbm1058 bill mcmurray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RMCD_bot

the talk page of the bot has information about enhancements, fixes, etc

There are a crew of regulars who do requested moves. They are title fanatics. They enforce consensus on topics like whether Jr. —> Jr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Merge_bot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Wbm1058#Birth_dates_in_biographies_and_California_Law_AB-1687

I am doing history merge almost alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_History_Merge some of these requests date back more than 10 years. At some earlier point in WP history all moves were cut/paste until the implementation of the move mechanism. Another editor wrote a bot which crawls the whole database and flags candidates for merge. This is not about templates -

This lists which pages are have almost the same content and measures the differences. For small differences, perhaps 5%, the difference is in the title in the text at the top. The reason for merging is to preserve article history to give credit in contribution profiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_History_Merge/03

If I step away from a backlog then it grows back to the way it was before I cleared it. I am grateful for one guy who addressed a backlog of link misspellings. There is a person who is a quiet gnome. They do not want too much attention to themselves but they are doing this. Once in a while I see that the list went down and this person has done it. It is rare to see a new gnome surface out of nowhere.