User:Eubot/Redirecting alternative punctuation

From Bots/Requests for approval/Eubot 4:

As you can see at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (people), there is no consensus on the format for initials in article titles. This leads to duplicate articles, such as C.N. Liew and C. N. Liew. I propose to create redirects to existing articles to prevent this from happening again. The bot recognizes titles in two formats, "X. Y." and "X.Y.", and creates missing redirects in four formats: "X. Y.", "X.Y.", "X Y" and "XY". For example, for the existing article R. C. Lucas, Eubot will create the redirects R C Lucas, R.C. Lucas, and RC Lucas.

This will be done for all articles with abbreviations in the above format, including:
 * Personal names with initials
 * Titles of books, songs, and movies (e.g. D O A (1950 film), D. O. A. (1950 film), DOA (1950 film) to D.O.A. (1950 film))
 * Football clubs (e.g. Darvel F C, Darvel F. C., Darvel FC to Darvel F.C.)
 * A lot of US related articles (e.g. Dismissal of U S attorneys controversy documents etc.)

I'd especially like some feedback on the last two categories; I could filter these out, but I don't think the redirects do any harm. There are some problematic titles: for example, does T.A.T.u. need a redirect T. A. T. u.? I'll try to filter these ones out by hand before running the bot.

I have an initial list of 30,000 redirects to add, based on the October database dump; when those are done, I will add new redirects irregularly.

I have mentioned this bot proposal at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (people), and will also leave messages at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football and Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (abbreviations), where this topic has also been discussed. Eugène van der Pijll (talk) 02:09, 24 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Added: I will also create redirects for different styles of adding junior and senior suffixes ("Jr", "Jr.", "junior", both with and without commas).

Please send comments to User talk:Eugene van der Pijll.