User:TinucherianBot/BOTFAQ

WikiProject Banner Tagging, Auto Assessment etc

 * 1) What are WikiProject banners for ?
 * A WikiProject is a collection of pages devoted to the management of a specific topic or family of topics within Wikipedia; and, simultaneously, a group of editors that use said pages to collaborate on encyclopedic work. It is not a place to write encyclopedia articles directly, but a resource to help coordinate and organize article writing. Please note that No wikiproject owns any article in Wikipedia. (Read more..)
 * A WikiProject banner is added to the talk page of the article if the project feels that the article comes under its scope. The banner allows to project members to identify the article, assess its importance to the project and quality of the article as per WP1.0 Assessment criteria. Once the talk page is tagged by a project, it gets the attention of subject experts in the matters and may help to improve the quality of article.
 * 1) Who can tag an article with the WikiProject banner?
 * Anyone! Many articles will be tagged by more than one WikiProject. This is particularly true of articles which deal with prominent people, as those articles may be tagged by WikiProjects for biography, their places of residence, their professional field, and any other activities they may engage in. This can and occasionally does create problems, as some projects will, quite reasonably, think that another project might be only minimally capable of assisting in the improvement of an article. However, it is important for all parties to remember that beyond simply being WikiProjects, they are also collections of people with specific abilities and competencies which might not be available within other groups. A member of a football project might be better able to copy edit an article about a player from a non-English-speaking country, who might even go on to achieve prominence elsewhere and draw the attention of other projects, than a native speaker of that country who might be less skilled at English composition. On that basis, it is a good idea to welcome any banner placements on an article provided that the banner is actually at all relevant to the subject. The fact that these other projects may also regularly "check up" on the article for improvements, vandalism, etc. can also be beneficial.
 * However, there may well be times when someone clearly places the wrong banner on an article. When this happens, it is generally a good idea to approach either that individual or that project to determine why the banner was placed. Doing so reduces the likelihood of inter-project animosity, and also could potentially help the article in some way. Examples might include instances when a project's scope has expanded in some way to include the article, which, if true, might help in the development of the article. Also, there is the possibility of an article being miscategorized, which might not draw the attention of your own project otherwise. In instances like these, like in all others, civility, respect for others, and clear and unambiguous communications are to be greatly valued.
 * Another matter that has been discussed is about which "WikiProject country" tag to use on an article about a city, especially if the city has changed hands several times over the course of history. The community consensus on this is that if there is disagreement, then the only country's WikiProject template that should be used, is the one for where the city is currently located. For example, though the Germans occupied France during World War II, it would not be appropriate to put articles about French cities under WikiProject Germany.
 * In some topic areas it may be the case that the choice of which WikiProject tags to place, could cause conflict. In such situations, the best solution may simply be to remove all WikiProject tags, rather than argue endlessly about which tag to use.
 * 1) What's this class/importance thing all about anyway?
 * Please see the WikiProject Council's Assessment FAQ.
 * 1) Why are bots employed to tag articles with WikiProject banners?
 * Project banner Tagging and Assessing articles are an important part of the workload of most, if not all WikiProjects. Howover it is tedious to keep track of newer articles that come under the scope of the the project regularly and add the project banner manually. Hence WikiProject members request the services of TinucherianBot or some other similarly functioning Bot, for the automatic tagging of the relevant articles. The bot usually gets request to tag the articles in categories and its subcategories. Please understand that these are done in good faith and done usually with maximum possible care and caution.Should you find any article wrongly tagged / or any kind of weird behaviour from the TinucherianBot, Kindly let me know here. If needed, you may remove the wrongly added tag or an inappropriate Category from the article.
 * 1) How does the bot operator pick up and undergo bot task runs?
 * Bot Operators are usually experienced Wikipedians and hence treated with high regard in the community. They normally do the bot tasks with utmost care and caution. I usually pick up bot tasks 1) for the WikiProjects that I am part of, 2) Tasks requested by people at Bot task requests page ,3) Tasks requested by people on my talk page. I normally discuss with the requester for further clarifications before the task is undertaken. I usually take the help of other concerned Wikiproject members to help 'clean the list' of categories and articles. When in doubt, I may leave a note regarding the activity on the user talk page of the concerned members. If it is a huge list , I personally go and double check for any possible wrong categories in the list with the limited subject expertise on the project scope. Adequate time is given for discussion between the project members for the 'final cleaned up list'. The bot operator assumes good faith that there was a consensus for the bot task requested and the requester had already discussed with the concerned people. There is a tendency of bot requesters to ask for tagging all articles in a main category and ALL its subcategories. To be safe I don't not run for categories recursively. The reason is pretty simple: You might not expect Category:World War II to be a subcategory of Category:Thailand, but it actually is, and a bot will find it! It is usually safer to give a complete list of categories that should be worked through individually, rather than one category to be analysed recursively. I am not sure whether every bot operator takes each bot task as seriously as I do.Although I expect the requester to provide the end node category(s) for the article list collection,I usually go an extra mile helping the task requester. Using AWB , I collect and provide the complete list of categories in the category tree for further analysis and cleanup. I do carefully try myself cleaning up the list. Once we have the cleaned up list ready, I feed them to the AWB to generate the article list. Once we have the article list, they are converted to their talk page. Once the WikiProject banner settings are made, the bot is ready to be run.
 * 1) Why do you get some false positives?
 * The bot tags articles based on selected categories. Almost invariably because of errors or inconsistencies in categorisation, although there are other causes which I'll detail in a moment. I'd like to point out, though, that the bot has now tagged thousands of pages. If there have been 200 false positives - and I have no reason to suspect the number is anything like that high - it's an error rate of 0.2%. I think that's a more than acceptable price for the work being done.
 * Categorisation errors - Some articles are incorrectly categorised. If a dead person is listed in living people, he'll be tagged a s living. If a song or songwriter is in an albums category it will be tagged as an album (possibly - I take a few precautions against these case, such as filtering out "(song)" and not tagging talk pages which have WPBiography or WPSongs tags).
 * Poorly organised categories. Category:Albums, for example, has over 4,000 subcategories, some of which don't contain albums at all. Operator error can play a part here - if I miss a dodgy category - but mostly I don't miss them, and I fix any errors .Of course, some incorrect articles will remain if folks choose to categorise non-album articles in album categories.
 * Redirects. I have the bot set up to follow redirects, so if a redirect is categorised the target page might get tagged.
 * If you find any false positives please just remove them; in minor cases (article is categorised incorrectly etc etc) I don't need to know, so if you can please just fix it (and if you can't/won't I'm always happy to help). If I'm tagging any complete categories incorrectly, or something is seriously amiss, let me know or ask an admin to block the bot if it's really terrible (unlikely but things can go wrong to the best of us, and I don't claim to be one of them :)). You can also find out who/which project had requested for the particular bot task, leaving a note on their talk page will also help as I may not be a subject expert on the scope of the WikiProject
 * 1) Is category based tagging a flawed idea?
 * We don't have a better option. That is how most bots operates. Careful selection of categories can prevent lots of false positives. Categories are not perfect but it is the best way for tagging .The only thing to be very careful is to avoid running the bot recursively over the categories.The bot operator should collect the subcategories recursively and then analyse with utmost care and caution . All possibly wrong categories should be removed and the bot should be run on the 'cleaned' up list of categories only.
 * 1) Why have you tagged stubs with class=Stub? Isn't Stub-Class different from a stub article?
 * They serve very different purposes, yes, and we need to categorise them separately for a variety of reasons, but in most cases a stub article is Stub-Class in Wikipedia 1.0 parlance. We'll get a few false positives (less than 10% I would imagine) but it's a small price to pay for the huge benefit of automation. Also, a false positive is likely to result in the article being destubbed and properly assessed, which might not otherwise happen.
 * 1) Should WikiProjects get prior approval of other WikiProjects (Descendant or Related or any ) to tag articles that overlaps their scope ?
 * The answer is NO ! ( Read what the community thinks of this..)
 * 1) Why does the Bot move Redirect Project banner templates ( like WPVN ) to actual Project banner template (like WikiProject Vietnam ?
 * This is the default feature of Kingbotk Plugin + AWB based bots.. May be the developers of the plugin thinks that the transclusion of the actual banner template is better than Transclusion of a redirect banner.
 * 1) Why does the Bot move class=cat,category etc moved to |class=Cat for the WikiProject banners?
 * This is the default feature of Kingbotk Plugin + AWB based bots.. As of now, I can't do much of this.
 * 1) The edit summary was truncated...?
 * Sometimes the summary of the changes the bot has made is too long to fit in the summary field. I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done about that. You can always check the diff if you want to see exactly what the bot has done.
 * 1) Did the bot ran an unapproved task ?
 * I don't do this normally. I apply for BRFA for the bot task first and then do the bot run. Rarely one issue occurs. I use a AWB based bot and run it under the username TinucherianBot. AWB takes the user credentials from Internet Explorer cookie. During the time of bot run, I usually use Mozilla Firefox as my browser for normal Wikipedia edits. Sometimes the browser takes my login as TinucherianBot instead of Tinucherian and I realize it only when I sign a page. On some circumstances, I may forget that I had logged in as TinucherianBot previously and continue editing on my Internet Explorer without realizing the use of wrong login for some time. Kindly bear with me for this unintentional mistake.Please understand that it is me who have done this edit and not the bot under such circumstances.Kindly let me know if you notice such edits on a wrong username.
 * 1) Is the bot editing at a faster rate ?
 * I usually set the Bot edit timer to run approximately 6 edits per minute on the assumption of my average internet data transfer speed and other factors (possible edits per article in the list etc). Sometimes due to varying internet speed, it may rise to a few higher edits per minute and also may even fall to even 1-2 edits per minute but the average edits will be around 6 edits/min. Please understand that I may require to set a higher editing speed when I am tagging for thousands of articles.If you have serious concerns regarding the bot editing at a higher speed, kindly let me know.
 * 1) What is auto-assessment for Project banners?
 * Assessing articles is an important part of the workload of most, if not all WikiProjects. However, many articles fall under the jurisdiction of two or more projects. As all projects use the same or very similar assessment criteria ( based on WP 1.0 guidelines ), it seems silly and unwanted rework for the same article to be assessed multiple times by different projects manually. Why can't the project look at the article and tag its banner based on other project banners if it is already assessed ? The bot does this : It looks at the Talk: page for an article, and looks at the classes it has been given. Then, it adds the highest class to the template for the project that it is working for.
 * E.g. if a talk page of article has one Project banner with 'Start' class and 'B' class from another Project banner, '|class=B' will be added to the Project banner class to our project banner. And also "|class=Stub" if the Bot is running over articles in stub categories (using the Kingboyk plugin option) and "|class=Cat", "|class=Template" if it is category,template respectively etc.
 * We may get a few false positives (less than 5% I would imagine) but it's a small price to pay for the huge benefit of automation. Also, a false positive is likely to result in the article being identified and properly assessed, which might not otherwise happen.
 * This process saves hours of work (some projects have 9000+ non-assessed articles!) for human editors, leaving them free to actually improve the articles in question.The bot does not usually auto-assess all banners. It is not run arbitrarily on every project banner on the talk page. It can run for only one WikiProject at a time and usually done by the request of the particular WikiProject members or the WikiProjects in which the bot operator is a part of . If you would like to this for Wikiproject, please contact the bot operator.
 * 1) If the bot had made a wrong edit, do you need to shoot the bot operator ?
 * It is up to you. The bot and the operator works on good faith and for the betterment of Wikipedia. In many cases, the bot operator may be requested for tagging for WikiProjects of which the operator may not be a subject expert.He will try to make sure to best possible way to crosscheck the categories he was given but expects the task requester have done the research and cleanup himself. If you notice any issues or wrong edits by the bot, first let the bot operator know. If you are admin, and feels that the bot is making too may errors, you may block the bot temporarily if you were not able to get attention of the operator to stop the bot run. But kindly unblock the bot if the operator asks for the same since he must have stopped the bot by then for investigation.

Interwiki Tagging

 * 1) How does the Interwiki Tagging bot operate?
 * The bot is given a single site (in this example, ru). The bot takes one page, and looks at all interwiki links to other sites. It then takes interwikies from all those sites. The process is repeated until there are no new links from any of the sites. If there is no more than one page per site, the bot places links to all found sites on all the pages involved. As a result, all pages become interlinked.
 * Example: ru:Wikipedia has links to en and fr, fr has links to zh, fr, and da, etc... As the result, the list will include pages from ru,en,fr,zh,da, and any other found. As long as each site has only one page, bot will place links to all found pages on each one of them.
 * Conflicts: If bot finds more than one page on any of the sites, it stops and asks operator for help. The operator has to analyze each page and choose one page that most accurately reflect the original topic. Once all conflicts are resolved, all pages are updated with the new information.
 * 1) Your bot keeps adding interwiki xx:xxxxx to the article xx:xxxxx. I have removed it 10 times, but it still does it. They are not the same articles. Please make it stop!!!'.
 * Before you remove it again, or leave an angry message on my talk page, please understand why it happens.
 * The bot does not know anything about the subject matter, nor does it care if they are the same or not. If the bot placed a link, it means that the link already exists somewhere else, and it just got copied. Removing it on one page will not fix the problem - somewhere some human made a mistake of linking two unrelated articles, and bot propagated that mistake to another site (see more details above). To fix it, you must manually remove all the bad links. If just one remains, it will come back.
 * 1) Is there a dictionary bot to find new links?
 * No. The bot operates only on the links found on the given page, and uses them to discover more links.
 * 1) The bot keeps adding back an incorrect link to site xx, what should I do?
 * One or more of the sites found during discovery also point to site xx (see ).
 * Any of the following solutions can be used to solve this problem:
 * Find or create the correct page on site xx, and fix just one of the other site's pages with a new link instead of the existing one.
 * The bot will see two links to site xx, and will ask operator what to do.
 * or
 * Edit the page on xx to link with the proper existing page on other sites, thus also causing a conflict.
 * or
 * Go through all the pages and remove offending link everywhere (but remember -- if you miss just one, it will come back)
 * Example: en, ru, ja, and ko are all interconnected. ko describes some other topic than the first 3. Removing it on just ru will not help, as all other sites still point to it. To fix this, create or find a page on ko that matches the topic and edit just one site, like en to point to new ko page. Alternatively, find the topic of ko site on either en, ru, or ja and change ko page to point to it.
 * 1) The bot deleted a link, but i know it's there!
 * The links are case sensitive, please make sure the link has the same case as the article.
 * 1) Why is bot replacing non-Latin characters with question marks or blanks?
 * It's not. Your computer has no appropriate font installed, so for example Chinese or Japanese characters will appear as question marks. The links still work and will get you to the proper page (you probably won't be able to read it, as most of those characters will also be question marks). The reason for bot to do this is to get rid of the unreadable html Unicode notation (like ? used to be written as &amp;#22283;). The ease of use should be self-evident.
 * 1) Why should the bot change all sites at once?
 * To find all linked pages, the bot needs to check all linked sites (count N). Afterwards, the bot used to change just one page. Other sites were running their own bots, that also checked N sites and changed one. The total server load was N sites * N reads + N writes. Changing all sites at once allows total server load to be N reads + N writes -- a very significant improvement.
 * Another reason is that when sites are kept in sync, if some site renames the page A into AA, that change is immediately seen everywhere. If later some decides that A should be a topic of its own, there will be no conflict, as no site is pointing to A, only to AA. This is a fairly common scenario I had to resolve.
 * 1) Disambiguation handling ?
 * When running in autonomous mode, bot checks if the page is a disambig or not, and makes sure that all the other pages it links to have the same status. This means that when page A has a disambiguation template, all linked pages must also have a disambiguation template, otherwise they will be ignored. The reverse is also true - a regular page link to a disambig page will also be ignored.
 * 1) The bot is hiding vandalisms!
 * Please be aware that there is an option to hide bot edits from your watchlist and from recentchanges. Alternatively, choose 'expand view' for the watchlists and RC in your preferences. That way you'll be able to observe all human edits, even if a bot made an edit afterwards.
 * 1) The bot replaces one link with another ?
 * Sometimes bot will modify a link to a site by replacing it with another link to that same site. This may happen for one of two reasons:
 * The target is a redirect, in which case bot will link to the actual page rather than going through a redirect. Redirects are automatically created when the page is given a new name.
 * The target is a disambiguation page, yet another linked page in another language has a link to a non-disambiguation page. Regular page is always chosen instead of a disambig.