User talk:Beastie Bot

Discussion of Beastie Bot. Please start all messages and replies with the text:

if you want to make sure I don't miss it. —Pengo 00:04, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Beastie Bot makes lists of birds by their IUCN Red List status
I really like the idea of automating the IUCN status box so it doesn't need to be done manually. Plenty to do taking that off the table....There are some species that are not regognized yet by the IUCN that we have pages for from sources like the IOC, Clements/EBird, and the AOU, (see Pvmoutside (talk) 13:40, 21 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the response. So my main goal right now is to get these lists tidied up and finished and at a point where they can easily be regenerated to update them. I don't really have the capacity right now to add more features and more types of lists, though I'd like to.


 * Updating the conservation status in taxoboxes something I'd like to see. There's a few issues: we often use a different taxonomy to the IUCN so I'm afraid of clobbering correct statuses (though Beastie Bot is getting pretty good at detecting differences in taxonomy now). Another problem is that we have around three somewhat-related but different taxobox template systems in place now (,, and ), and as far as I'm concerned they're all legacy systems as they only use the old template format and don't take advantage of Lua or Wikidata. A future taxobox which did use Wikidata would stay up-to-date just by keeping Wikidata up to date, which would be a lot easier to do with automatic imports. Some are skeptical that Wikidata could handle the competing taxonomies used by different language Wikipedias (though I fail to see the issue with storing multiple trees, each referenced/sourced, as that's the kind of thing Wikidata is designed to do, but that's another story). Using Wikidata for IUCN data would really simplify things. So if I had the capacity, I'd rather spend my time working towards that goal than trying to juggle the reading and editing of various legacy taxobox formats. Overall it's kind of a big project, and I'd worried I'd be biting off more than I have time to chew. But would be good to get the ball rolling. Unfortunately previous attempts to move taxoboxes to a Lua-based format fell flat mid 2013 and it seems no one has dared bring it up again.


 * Not sure what you want to see done with species that aren't evaluated yet by the IUCN? Perhaps including them in more general lists of birds / mammals which are otherwise based on IUCN data?


 * 'Per country' lists is another one for the to-do list. I'd like to at least see lists of threatened species per country. I haven't looked at how complete IUCN's country data is (it's not included in the CSV export data I've been working from), or how long the lists would end up. But it seems do-able in theory. I'm not sure it would be that desirable to have a list per country though? Especially for regions where there are many small countries. But then when you group countries into regions there it always seems to force a debate about what countries belong to which regions. Seems like it would take some consideration to get right.


 * It's late. I'll respond later with some more below about the direction I'd ideally like to go... —Pengo 15:42, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Status change check functionality?
I've had a look through the functionality as described on the Idea Lab page, and maybe I missed it there - but are you planning on a feature that allows checking a previously generated list for current validity? I am getting the impression that it is less the creation of such lists than their ongoing maintenance that is the main problem with their usefulness. The "may be outdated" tag appears to be a basic component of conservation status lists :p - whenever an assessment changes, it's a toss-up whether someone will notice and incorporate that in the species article, and doubly unlikely they will get around to propagating updates to any lists.

So a very useful feature would a functionality that allows stepping through an existing list and checking each entry against the source article re current validity, then updating (or maybe just flagging) mismatches. Had you planned on this kind of thing?-- Elmidae  (talk) 09:58, 22 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Checking existing lists is a hard problem as they can come in many forms, and parsing each type of list would require writing custom code. Instead I was considering making a tool where you could generate a new list (and perhaps choose from a variety of formats) to replace existing ones. Even better would be to create a template/module which draws the data from Wikidata so the status info could be updated just in one central place (Wikidata) and it would automatically update across Wikipedia sites.


 * That said, right now I don't have the capacity to keep working on this project. If an NGO wants to hire me to continue work, I would love to, but otherwise I can't really justify dedicating time to work on or promote this project, and I might just leave it til I have enough of an itch to do more again some other day, perhaps around the end of the year. —Pengo 23:17, 11 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Fair enough :) I guess replacing vs updating does the job just as nicely. Here's hoping you get around to it at some point! Cheers -- Elmidae  (talk) 10:52, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Changes made to auto-generated IUCN templates
I've updated several IUCN templates (like the IUCN amphibian chart family of templates) by appending, and noticed the text   at the top, so I just want to give you a heads up so that my changes don't get removed whenever you update the templates next. ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf) 12:38, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the heads up. I'll incorporate the changes into Beastie Bot. —Pengo 06:52, 11 October 2016 (UTC)