User:Full-date unlinking bot

The bot has completed its operations.


 * What on earth are the codes in your edit summaries?
 * Initial proposal (and poll)
 * Bot request for approval
 * ArbCom approval
 * Bot code

Timeline

 * May 28, 2009: Full-date unlinking bot first proposed.
 * June 22, 2009: Request for comment began.
 * July 8, 2009: Proposal to create a bot approved.
 * July 9, 2009: Bot account created; request for exception proposals began.
 * August 9, 2009: Exception list finalized
 * August 23, 2009: First version of bot code published for scrutiny by the community. Full-date unlinking bot was submitted to WP:BRFA.
 * September 12, 2009: After many revisions, the bot is approved for a trial run.
 * October 2, 2009: The bot completes 51 edits as part of its first trial. Release Candidate 1 is released.
 * October 10, 2009: The bot completes 202 edits as part of its second trial. Release Candidate 2 is released.
 * November 5, 2009: The bot completes 505 edits as part of its third trial.
 * November 7, 2009: Full-date unlinking bot begins full-time operation.
 * December 30, 2009: Task is complete.

Criteria for delinking
In line with the consensus reached in this RfC, and to keep potential controversies to a minimum, this bot uses conservative criteria for delinking, allowing for many exceptions to exist where necessary.

As approved by the RFC, the bot will unlink only day-month-year (triple) combinations such as:
 * January 15, 2005 → January 15, 2005
 * 27 May 2007 → 27 May 2007
 * 1989-11-05 → 1989-11-05

Additionally, the bot will unlink month-day items that are clearly adjacent to and in combination with a triple—i.e., in date ranges and slashed dates. Examples are:
 * October 17 – November 8, 1987 → October 17 – November 8, 1987
 * 23/24 April 1966 → 23/24 April 1966

Notes:
 * The bot will only operate on each page once.
 * The bot will solve simple grammatical errors that the autoformatter will no longer be able to correct (due to de-linking).

Exceptions

 * 1) Anything outside article space.
 * 2) Links of solitary years ( 1989 ) and solitary month-days ( November 5, 5 November ), and links such as 1983 in film will not be unlinked by the bot.
 * 3) Intrinsically chronological articles (such as 1789, January, and 1940s) will not be treated by the bot.
 * 4) Each article will be edited only once by the bot while performing this task. If an edit is reverted the article will not be re-treated by the bot.
 * 5) The bot will follow normal bot exclusion rules, using the bots and nobots templates.
 * 6) Anything on List of years
 * 7) The pages that Lists of years links to.

Edit summary codes
The following codes may appear in the edit summaries generated by this bot. Numbers in parentheses indicate repetition counts.


 * AMlist – Additional American style month-day parts that are part of a date range or list.
 * AModd – American style dates of the form " ", where "..." is something other than a comma+space combination. Punctuation will be replaced with a comma+space combination.
 * AMord – American style dates with ordinal days of the form " ".
 * AMordList – Additional American style ordinal month-dth parts that are part of a date range or list.
 * AMreg – American style dates of the form " ".
 * BRlist – Additional British (international) day-month parts that are part of a date range or list.
 * BRodd – British (international) style dates of the form " ", where "..." is something other than a single space. Punctuation will be replaced with a single space.
 * BRord – British (international) style dates with ordinal days of the form " ".
 * BRordlist – Additional British (international) ordinal dth-month parts that are part of a date range or list.
 * BRreg – British (international) style dates of the form " ".
 * ISO1 – ISO 8601 -like dates of the form " ".
 * ISO2 – ISO 8601 -like dates of the form " ".
 * ordOf – Dates of the form " ".
 * ordOfList – Additional "Nth of Month" day-month parts that are part of a date range or list.
 * piped – Assorted dates that use piped links where the displayed text is a different date form than the link target.
 * pipedList – Additional dates that use piped links that are part of a date range or list.
 * YMD – Year-month-day dates of the form " ".

The following codes were only used for early testing on 2 & 10 October 2009.
 * Lists1 – A two-part date range or combination of the form " ", where "month/day" is a " ", " " or " " (piped-day) link; "-" can be any of a variety of connector words and/or punctuation; and "..." is any space/comma combination.
 * Lists2 – Additional month-day components in a date list adjacent to the left end of a full date or date list, separated by any of a variety of connector words and/or punctuation.

Except for the AModd and BRodd cases, spacing, punctuation, and connector words are generally preserved. The resulting text should appear as it would after date-autoformatting for an anonymous user, absent the links.