Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Kingbotk plugin

The Kingbotk plugin is a set of AutoWikiBrowser plugins written by Kingboyk in VB.NET and used by various automated bot accounts including Kingbotk. The plugin also provides features to assist article reviewers, and ships with a reusable library of functions and objects for use by programmers.

Magioladitis and Reedy rewrote the plugin's code in C#.

News
As of version 2.0, which was released with v4.2 of AWB, the Kingbotk Plugin supports WikiProjectBannerShell and WikiProjectBanners:
 * Existing WikiProject templates will always be written back into the shell container it came from if we detect one
 * New WikiProject templates will be written into the existing WikiProjectBannerShell or WikiProjectBanners template

As originally designed, when a page is being processed each active templating plugin (WPBiography, WikiProject Albums etc.) gets called by the Kingbotk Plugin Manager and decides if it has any edits to make (and templating plugins which the user hasn't enabled aren't called at all). If every active templating plugin decides it has no work to do we never get to the part of the code where we write out templates and examine their position on the page. If folks find the cleanup features useful I might do some restructuring later on to have the Plugin Manager, the Article object we create for each page, or the first active templating plugin, examine the page for these templates before doing anything else (so we never skip a page where we could clean a template). I might also consider allowing the WPBio plugin or the plugin manager to examine the page for WPBiography|living=yes even if we're not going to be writing one of those templates. However, I felt it more important to get this feature out and tested than start breaking apart the internal structure of the plugin, a structure which allows for new plugins to be added easily and which is a very nice OOP model.

Downloading and using the plugin

 * The plugin is supplied with AWB, which can be downloaded here
 * We have a user guide
 * As of May 2008 the plugin is licenced under the GNU General Public Licence Version 2.0
 * Source code can be retrieved by pointing your Subversion client here

Warning and disclaimer

 * This tool is released as is and without warranty. You are RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN EDITS.
 * AWB and this plugin are both very powerful tools. You should familiarise yourself fully with the guidelines, instructions and operation of both tools before using them.
 * Ensure you have the latest version, or that any upgrades/changes in newer versions don't apply to you.
 * Instructions for automated use with a bot account:
 * The above guidelines doubly apply when doing automated edits, particularly making sure you understand what the plugin does and doesn't do.
 * The template tagging feature is extremely well tested, but sometimes new internal changes introduce the risk of something breaking or a new bug. Always run a manual test if a version's release notes says it includes such changes. The author runs tests too but can't test for every eventuality and relies to an extent on the users to test.
 * Before using a new template plugin do a few manual edits first. Some template plugins (WPBio, WPMilHist, WPAustralia, Generic) are very well tested; others might never have been used.
 * If you've run successful tests on a new version or found a bug please post on the talk page asap.

Specification
This plugin comes with several WikiProject-specific tools:

Templating plugins
All templating plugins:
 * Work together. Multiple plugins can be active at the same time to allow tagging for more than one project.
 * Have optional user configurable parameters
 * Use safe, well tested regular expressions to avoid double tagging, recognise badly formatted tags, and safely integrate new parameters into existing templates

WPBiography plugin
As of version 2.3.1.2
 * If WikiProject Biography is missing, it adds it
 * The importance= parameter is removed
 * Living=yes is optionally added/replaced if missing or =no
 * reqphoto is replaced with needs-photo=yes
 * listas= is calculated and added if no DEFAULTSORT key is present (manual mode only; there are too many variations in human naming for this to be done by bots)
 * The template call is reformatted and (if living=yes) moved to the top of the talk page unless a shell like WikiProjectBannerShell is present (template will be left in situ, or written to the top if new. Plugin doesn't yet write new templates into these containers or otherwise reformat them).
 * Marks parameter and template renaming as minor edits, parameter value changes as major

Albums plugin

 * If WikiProject Albums is missing, it adds it

Australia plugin

 * If WikiProject Australia is missing, it adds it

India plugin

 * If WikiProject India is missing, it adds it
 * reqphoto is replaced with image-needed=yes

Military History plugin

 * If WikiProject Military history is missing, it adds it

Novels plugin

 * If WikiProject Novels is missing, it adds it
 * Marks parameter and template renaming as minor edits, parameter value changes as major


 * reqphoto is replaced with needs-infobox-cover=yes

Songs plugin

 * If WikiProject Songs is missing, it adds it
 * Single infobox request is replaced with needs-infobox=yes

Generic templates plugin

 * If your WikiProject's template is "generic" (you have a class= parameter and no workgroups, and no need for other customised programatic logic) the plugin now supports your template! Simply enter the name of the template in brackets, any alternate names (redirects), and click a few boxes to configure the plugin. See Generic WikiProject templates for more information. Note that even if your Project's template has workgroups, you can use the plugin on talk pages/categories which don't need a new workgroup parameter to be added. The plugin doesn't remove parameters it has no knowledge of; rather, if your Project doesn't have a specific plugin you simply won't be able to add such parameters.

Wikipedia Assessments plugin

 * Loads and optionally cleans articles, then prompts user to (p)review the article
 * Presents reviewer with an assessment form, with checkbox options for class, importance, etc.



Version 4++

 * Given the rate of change of WikiProject templates, we may need to consider extending the "generic template" functionality to include adding/changing/removing user-configurable template parameters. Instead of developing plugins for each template, WikiProjects would be encouraged to build and share their own XML settings files. Possibly some WikiProjects will need programatic support still, if the plugin needs to apply more advanced logic to their templating, but I think most won't.
 * Do we want to have the plugin (via AWB?) load the article and look for stub and infobox templates?

Manual assessment

 * Look at whether it would be practical/desirable to have extra params/templates on the manual assessments popup form (per Talk)

Other planned changes

 * The todo comments in code
 * Consider controlling length of edit summaries by using a generic collection of important/unimportant edit summary items, and deciding on which to use at the end of processing the article (currently large category names, more than one template at a time, or multiple parameters are causing the edit summary to get chopped).



Possible future enhancements

 * Sanity-check parameter values and (in bot mode) log any which need manual inspection. Currently the plugin just ignores parms and values it doesn't know about, and only logs badly misformed tags (those which break its main regular expression).

Bot

 * In the longer term, plugins could be used to make AWB more of a bot. Save talk page lists in a database, periodically scan categories and compare against the WPBio living persons category/transclusions. Bot manager, predefined jobs (including creating lists).
 * I'd like it if making lists was easier. e.g. grab list, display list of subcats with checkboxes, trawl those; remove dupes and incorrect namespaces, convert to talk, remove dupes; and get a category or transclusion list to filter against (semi) automatically

Version history
See: AutoWikiBrowser/History

Done

 * Menu items and user interface
 * Multiple plugins per DLL.
 * Turn plugin on/off
 * Statistics tab
 * Read/write XML settings
 * Implement template positional placement code per User_talk:Kingboyk
 * Leave the category talk pages in the list and tag with class=Cat
 * Manual assessments: clean up article, inspect it in preview mode, and then open talk page for tagging and applying assessmentgive
 * Bot mode: give AWB a kick if freezes up.
 * Check that the article attached to the talk page hasn't been deleted (red link)
 * Support for "generic WikiProject templates", allowing users to define their own template instance without it having to be specifically programmed in
 * Added Milhist, Albums, Songs template plugins
 * Added new Milhist, Bio and Australia workgroups
 * Two new boilerplate text buttons on the Comments form, per User:Plange
 * Timer-reset button
 * Option to turn nudging on/off
 * Context menu and XML settings for WP Novels
 * Log uploads
 * Logging features split out to a separate independent DLL (WikiFunctions2)
 * Full support for WP India
 * Bug fix: Date formatting in log entries where user's Windows settings aren't English
 * Modified settings load/save code in line with AWB changes. Plugin can also convert old settings schema to new.
 * Automated edit summaries in assessments mode

Technologies used
The plugin makes use of various technologies including: inheritance (see also polymorphism and encapsulation), interfaces, regular expressions, reflection, XML, XHTML, GDI+, and Windows Forms. Of course most modern programs use most or all of these but listing them like this makes me look clever ;)

Developers
The plugin was conceived and developed by. It is now part of the main AWB repository and is maintained by the AWB developers. Source code is available.