User talk:Maralia/FA bot

FAC/FLC closing bot
There are several separate discussions about this at the moment, spread across multiple pages. If you don't mind, I'd like to centralize discussion here (I expect we will eventually move this page into the WP namespace). I will add a link here from those other discussions.

Lego asked for an explanation of the bot's importance, so he can prioritize it amongst his workload.

The tl/dr summary, from a FAC perspective: I am so grateful that the current bot saved us (me) from manually closing all the FACs this year, but unfortunately we are facing precisely the same situation again. I really appreciate your willingness to help out, Lego. Good luck on your exams this week. Maralia (talk) 06:09, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) Closing FACs is important. When the process is not completed:
 * 2) *Nominators are left confused about the status of their nomination, resulting in many worried talkpage queries (despite a closing notice intended to allay such concerns).
 * 3) *Reviewers cannot tell which articles actually still need review.
 * 4) *Readers are not made aware that articles have attained FA status.
 * 5) Closing FACs is hard. A single FAC close typically involves opening at least five pages and editing three. A user has to locate the diff where the article was promoted/archived; get the username, timestamp, and url; incorporate this information into an archive tag on the nomination page; add an FA star to the article if promoted; and create or update articlehistory on the article talk page. The last step—articlehistory—includes scanning the talk page for other relevant process actions (GAN, PR, DYK, etc) and getting all the relevant links and timestamps to incorporate those actions as well. Articlehistory itself is so complex that few users know how to fully implement it.
 * 6) There are a lot of FAC closes. On average, we have 50 closes per month.
 * 7) Since Gimme left, I'm effectively the only person around who knows how to manually close FACs. It's tedious, nitpicky work that ends up falling squarely on my shoulders when the bot fails; no one else seems to have the fortitude to take it on.


 * Comment: I'm not sure what kind of commentary is wanted here, but I wanted to add my $.02 as a former FAC delegate. This work that gimmebot used to do is absolutely critical to keeping things in order as an article progresses through the food chain and becomes a Featured Article. The manual tasks of promoting an FA even when gimmebot was functioning were significant: close the FAC page, move it to the appropriate log, add the page to WP:FA under the appropriate classification, update the counter, add it to WP:GO. All that was on TOP of what gimmebot did. Voxelbot was doing some of it, but gimmebot being shut down has created a huge void. Updating articlehistory and other things are thankless tasks, and no one notices them half the time, even when they aren't being done. Most people just want to see the little star in the corner of their article and they're on their merry way. It's far from ideal for all this to be a manual process. Is this absolutely critical to the mission of Wikipedia? No. But it's very important. -- Laser brain  (talk)  19:44, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Side question: Has anyone actually attempted to email Gimme to ask for his source code? He still has email enabled on his account. -- Laser brain  (talk)  20:20, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I know that at least a couple of people did (and got no response), but I've since forgotten who. Guess it couldn't hurt to try again. Maralia (talk) 03:01, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Few changes
I am manually closing Featured article candidates/Interstate 805/archive1 and Featured article candidates/Interstate 70 in West Virginia/archive1 since the bot screwed up again, and noticed a few things...


 * 1) The User: link to the delegates should be piped, next to the "promoted" or "not promoted" part.
 * 2) All assessment classes should be set to FA.

Also, my manual closes should probably be checked Thanks, Rschen7754 20:36, 11 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure #1 really matters (if it ever did matter, I've probably invalidated it by personally doing it 'wrong' a zillion times now), but I'll change the advice. As to #2: I've been doing that all along, so no idea how I left that off the list all this time! Thanks for the notes. I'll check over your two soon; thanks for doing them yourself. Maralia (talk) 21:32, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Update!
See Bots/Requests for approval/Legobot 36.

I just did FAC for now, I should be able to do FAR and FLC in the next few days. Legoktm (talk) 09:19, 31 March 2014 (UTC)