Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 14

Template:Di-no fair use rationale bot
A lot of images get tagged with Di-no fair use rationale (aka nrd). The tagger usually notifies the uploader of the tagging, which is good. However, the template specifically asks the tagger to "Add following to the image captions: deletable image-caption". Many taggers do not do this. A quick, random check of the first page of Category:Images with no fair use rationale indicates that many such images are not so tagged. This leaves only one interested person, in most cases, aware of the tagging, instead of anyone watching the articles on which the image is included. In most cases, the rationale is obvious -- organization logos on the organization's article, for example -- and article contributors would be happy to add it, especially to avoid the trouble of having the image deleted. Without the deletable image-caption tag, though, such article contributors will likely be completely unaware of the tagging until the image is deleted.

What I would propose is a bot that could add the deletable image-caption tag to the captions of any images tagged with Di-no fair use rationale. This would notify article contributors without overburdening our intrepid and dedicated fair-use rationale patrollers.

Powers T 14:56, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Im sorry but I write a bot that does nrd tagging and editing image captions is just far too tricky, template syntax is not standard and adding the caption template would just break stuff. (I know Ive tried). βcommand 14:59, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Yikes. That's too bad.  Would posting a notice on the articles' talk pages be an acceptable compromise, or would that be considered "spam"?  Powers T 15:02, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * that is what BCBot does. ill think about writing this. βcommand 01:51, 8 September 2007 (UTC)


 * AzaToth has some way of doing it with Twinkle. His way doesn't quite work, so I run a script every couple days to fix some of them. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 15:27, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Question concerning Interwiki bots
Salutations, I use to translate many articles from Wikipedia in English to Wikipedia in Portuguese; however, I perceive that the Portuguese version link is not added in the English version's Interwiki list. So, my question is: how often do the Interwiki bots function? Can I request for an Interwiki bot to add the Portuguese version to several articles? How do these bots do this? Thank you in advance, Sanscrit1234 22:03, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Remember that the iw bots really only propagate changes, so if your articles don't have any iw links, the bots can't add any. --ST47 Talk&middot;Desk 22:55, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

DFBot replacement?
Sorry if this has been asked here before, but User:Dragons flight's bot has stopped functioning b/c of user absence, and I was wondering if there was interest in creating a new bot with the same functions, such as AfD summaries (I think RfA stuff is taken care of right now). ~ Eliz 81 (C)  05:50, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

reference bot
i've found im incresingly coming by pages that have references (as in ) but no, i was wonderin if theres any way to have a bot built to add in the reference template for pages that dont have one but do have references... if that makes sense,  Ancientanubis ,  talk  Editor Review 23:18, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I've seen a lot of that too. Shouldn't be that hard to do, either (I don't have time to right this second, however...) --SXT4$\color{Red} \oplus$ 01:32, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
 * On second thought, I'm game :P I'd like some input from a more experienced user on the Regex'es I'm using However... Do they cover all the tags? --SXT4$\color{Red} \oplus$ 02:22, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
 * There is also ref-section, but that doesn't seem used much. -- JLaTondre 02:30, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I am 100% in favior of this and reference is good but there is also reflist and instead of searching for an image extension. In case you have access to the toolserver you could simply select all pages in this category without imagelinks. --Erwin85 09:59, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Who the what now? Toolserver? shoy  21:29, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The Toolserver is a Wikimedia-owned server that has a relatively-recent copy of the project's database. It's possible to write a SQL query to create a list of pages without images. I have an account on the server, if you would like me to generate this list. Shadow1  (talk) 18:45, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

What Erwin85 saying is that instead of the bot checking if its an image by its extension, the bot will check if the page has on it and as for the toolsever take a read here. I think that's it anything I missed? --  Chris   G  02:01, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I've never programmed in C before, but I'll give it a shot. Thanks! shoy  03:00, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

As a substitute to regex searching, you could also access the information in a more accessible form here (using formats such as JSON, XML, YAML, WDDX, or serialized PHP). You can also use a generator to check if an image is missing; unfortunately, images on Commons are marked as missing, but this can be checked with a query like to Common's API. Grace notes T § 23:05, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Will I need a separate bot account at Commons, then? shoy  19:52, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * You won't, since api.php is publicly accessible to all who request it. If you want your bot to edit at Commons, you'd need the bot to be approved there too, but you're only accessing information from its API. One caveat, though: an api.php query made from a regular user account can't request as much information as one made from a bot account (see the API's documentation, e.g. "No more than 50 (500 for bots) allowed").
 * Note that this all could be handled by screen scraping an article's HTML, although I think the APIs are a bit easier to work with. An SQL query might be partially effective, although stub images (for example, those on Iodargyrite) might result in a fair amount of false negatives. One solution not involving a bot would be to add a maintenance category to transclusions of chemboxes without an image parameter (example of a similar category), but this only works if the article has a chembox in the first place. Grace notes T § 21:50, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Forgive my ignorance, but what other programming languages "play nice" with API requests? Say for example that I'd rather not code in XML or PHP. Do I have other options, or am I limited there?  shoy  01:36, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Okay, I made a brfa for this task. Now, what categories do you want to be scanned? Do you want all categories, sub categories, sub sub categories, etc in Category:Chemical compounds to be scanned, or just the category and subcategory of Category:Chemical compounds? (Px)  Ma  02:24, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, all the sub-sub-(etc)-categories as well. Thanks! shoy  02:42, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

(undent) Pretty much every higher-level programming language either has native support for XML or has a well-supported XML parser library available. &mdash; madman bum and angel 06:07, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Now on Commons bot

 * Could a bot be created which tags images on Wikipedia with the "now on Commons" tag if it verifies that a certain image is on commons, or does this exist already? There are a lot of images which have been uploaded to Commons from Wikipedia through the Commonshelper device, but the images remain on Wikipedia. That creates problems if users from foreign language Wikipedias want to use such images, as it seems like the image only exists on the English Wikipedia. Funkynusayri 23:14, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * You could use CommonsClash. However the replag for enwiki is quite large at the moment. --Erwin85 09:52, 13 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Looks cool, though I'll have to figure out how it works. But it seems like quite a repetitive task, so wouldn't a bot be nice? Funkynusayri 20:05, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

General biographical sort key clean up
It is possible to get a bot to (at least partially) tidy up biographical sort keys so special characters and accented characters are replaced, and punctuation (except hyphens) removed, and all words in the sort key start with a capital letter? Have a look at Categorization of people. It says the following:"'(1) Punctuation, such as apostrophes and colons (but not hyphens) should be removed, and accented letters and ligatures should be replaced by their unaccented or separated counterparts. (2) The first letter of each word should be in upper case, and all subsequent letters should be in lower case, regardless of the correct spelling of the name. Thus, Lena D'Água sorts as . Without these last alterations, all punctuation marks and internal capital letters would be sorted before A, and all accented characters and ligatures would sort after Z.' (my emphasis)" What the bot should do is look for sort keys in category tags, plus any DEFAULTSORT sort keys, and remove punctuation such as ' and : (removing ' entirely and replacing : with a space, I think), and replaced an accented 'e' with an unaccented 'e', and so on. It should also run the end result through a program that makes the start of every word a capital letter, and removes capitals that appear within the words. Thus le Guin becomes Le Guin, and McCallum becomes Mccallum. If this is not done, the results is what is seen here, with lots of stuff appearing at the end of the category listing. This example uses the listas parameter, which is a talk page sort key, but this applies to all sort keys wherever they are used. So, is this possible? It would require a very long list of accented and other special characters to look for. The removal of apostrophes and suchlike should be easier, and the capitalisation issue should be really easy. Can this be done? Carcharoth 13:32, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * This should also apply to non-biographical sort keys as well. Carcharoth 13:34, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * About time I had a challenge, Im going to start on the dictionary of special characters and what their replacements are. βcommand 23:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It might be worth having the bot add a comment after the DEFAULTSORT key explaining that the altered name is correct per the above link. I know if I saw one of these in an article, I might assume it was a mistake and "correct" it. I wasn't aware of that limitation in the sorting and I'm sure others aren't as well. -- JLaTondre 21:24, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Tracking use of magic words

 *  Copied from Village pump (technical). 

I'd like to raise this issue again, or if no-one here has any further advice, to ask where to go next. See here for the previous discussion. What I'd ultimately like to see is something like Category:Default sort key missing for biographical articles (probably on the talk page), so they can be worked on. At the moment, there is Category:Biography articles without listas parameter, but that only works from a talk page template parameter (specifically, listas in WPBiography) and doesn't truly reflect DEFAULTSORT usage (it would only reflect the usage if the two values were synchronised on all pages). Ultimately, it all comes down to this simple question:"'Which biographical articles lack DEFAULTSORT'?"

Surely a simple question like that can't be that difficult? :-) Carcharoth 04:43, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
 *  End quote. 

The response over there was to suggest I post a request here. I'd also like the bot to cross-reference the list of category with Category:Biography articles without listas parameter, which refers to a talk page sort key parameter. This is closely tied to the function that was developed under Polbot 3 (Bots/Requests for approval/Polbot 3). That was probably too ambitious, so I'm trying to break up the task into manageable chunks. Ideally, I'd like to replace Category:Biography articles without listas parameter, with Category:Default sort key missing (not that they are the same at the moment - I mean deprecate listas after synchronising the two systems). Failing that, I'd like to see the DEFAULTSORT and listas sort keys synchronised by a bot. Carcharoth 13:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I can do several parts of that now, Ill sort the WPBIO pages into two groups one listing pages wtih defaultsort and the other lacking. βcommand 23:43, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Cool. 400,000+ pages. Remember to use the transclusion list of WPBiography. I think working from bot-generated lists is the only way to go here. Turning the list into a category won't work, because then people have to do two thing: (1) Add DEFAULTSORT to the articles and (2) Manually remove the category. Of course, if DEFAULTSORT included its own category... Anyway. I look forward to seeing the lists. Maybe the bot could also suggest a DEFAULTSORT value, and if the list was split into chunks, people could scan the list and approve/correct it for the bot to use the suggested DEFAULTSORT values. It would also be a good idea for the bot to list the existing DEFAULTSORT value, as some of those might be wrong. Oh, dang. This is turning back into the complicated Polbot 3 proposal (linked above). That was a good idea, but too much work. I think getting the list you talk about is a good first step. Carcharoth 17:48, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Bot to do bulk template inclusion modifications on request
At WP:TfD, we occasionally get templates that have a lot of calls on various articles, which need to either be modified to call a different template (so that the first can be deleted), substituted or simply removed. Other, more complicated things can also be needed infrequently. To date, this has been done by User:^demonBot2; however, he's currently too busy.

Is there anyone here that's willing to take up this task? The jobs could easily be done using WP:AWB, and information on exactly what needs doing in each case would be provided in the request.

An example: needs all template calls removing so that the template can be deleted. Another example: needs converting to, but the text describing the source needs to be put either in the "source" field of an info template, or adding onto the end of the image description text.

Thanks in advance. Mike Peel 20:19, 14 October 2007 (UTC)


 * This doesn't look too hard if no one else is up to the task I might do it. I may even be able to create a cgi page to make the procces easier. --  Chris   G  09:20, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Changing piped links
I have a small problem. I have to change hundreds of piped links, and I'm hoping a bot could save me a lot of work. I have to change every piped link that currently contains User:Lincalinca (i.e.  Foo... ) to another piped link (i.e.  Foo... ). I've done this change manually to show what I'm trying to accomplish (see here). Any suggestions on how to change this in as little effort as possible are most welcome. If anyone's up for the task, I'll be glad to share the details. Thanks! - Mtmelendez (Talk 01:42, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It looks like can do this for you; I have left a note on its operator's talk page.  &mdash; madman bum and angel 02:13, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Seems like a pretty simple task. I'm running my bot now, see Special:Contributions/MelsaranAWB. Should be done shortly. Cheers,  Melsaran  (talk) 09:27, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * And so shines a good deed. Many thanks, Mel. - Mtmelendez (Talk 09:48, 17 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Good work, Melsaran! :)  My only comment is that in the future, you may wish to exclude the RfD log.  Changing that makes things slightly confusing.  ;)  Cheers!  &mdash; madman bum and angel 15:19, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Automatic name disambiguation pages using DEFAULTSORT on biographical pages
I recently updated a disambiguation page (Aaron (name)) by looking at Category:Living people, which is fairly well sorted. I am wondering whether a trial "suggested disambiguations" bot could be run over this category to generate suggestions for disambiguation pages. I'm not sure, but I think Polbot does something similar, but I don't know how it does it. Anyway, what the bot would do is scan the category and find articles that were sorted using the same "first part" of the sort key. This would generally be the surname. ie. it would find articles sorted "Lane, Gary" and "Lane, Percy" and suggest they be added to either Lane (name) or Lane (surname). This won't be complete disambiguation, as it won't cover dead people. That will hopefully be possible if a supercategory is created to contain all people articles. Of course, people would still be needed to annotate the dab pages, unless infobox information could be used to do that... I'm throwing this idea out here to see if people think it sounds feasible and worth the effort of finding people who could make this work? Carcharoth 13:57, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The bot couldn't create the pages, though, or keep them up-to-date, as people would need to be able to add redlinks to the pages. Carcharoth 17:17, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, that's not too much of an issue for a bot as it could simply add missing ones (accounting for possible redirects being already present) and not remove existing content. The problem with a bot doing it, however, is it coming up with a meaningful descriptive sentence fragment. I suppose it could pull info from the categories, but I think leaving it to a person would be better. -- JLaTondre 21:59, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Maybe stick the suggestions on the talk pages and stick the talk page in a category for humans to clean up? Carcharoth 00:48, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I think it would be useful. I've seen multiple cases of an article at "First Last" with no dab header or disambiguation page and yet there are other articles on people with the same name. This makes it harder for people to find those alternate pages. This should be pretty straightforward. I'll put something together that queries a category, looks for common names and finds cases where they are not listed on a disambig, name, or surname page. I'll also look for cases where there is a "First Last" that needs a dab hat. It will take me several days based upon available time, however. -- JLaTondre 21:59, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
 * A good way to generate a description should, in theory, be to use the first sentence of an article. Think of the mouse-ups you get when hovering over a link in some systems, showing you the first few sentences of the link you are about to click on. Either that, or use Persondata (if present) or infoboxes (if present). Using categories is another option. Of course, only Wikipedia would have this biographical metadata spread out and duplicated like this... Carcharoth 00:46, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Status Update: I have it properly querying a category and parsing names to determine first, middle, last (as appropriate). It will also find the duplicates. Next, I need to implement the matches against potential disambig pages. I've had less time that I thought, so it'll take me a bit longer. -- JLaTondre 23:36, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Deletion request notification
Currently, our Guide to deletion states: "It is generally considered civil to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors of the articles that you are nominating for deletion."

and lists several bullets and paragraphs of details that the nominator need to carry out. From my experience, depending on where you draw the border between "main" and non-main contributions, this can take more than an hour for a medium sized article. A bot could do that in fractions of a second. The bot would simply notify every non-bot who did non-minor edits. (Criteria could be refined in a later version.)

Currently, the distinction between "main" and non-main depends on each nominator's goodwill. This means, that particularly the nicest editors end up spending the most time with menial tasks. I don't think that's fair. More importantly, we are creating an unnecessary gray area: Nomination is nomination, it should be reported regardless of the character of the nominator. If anything, then we want better, not worse reporting of nominations by uncivil nominators. &mdash; Sebastian 07:09, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how much support there would be for this idea. The argument over whether or not it is required to notify people of an AfD has come up time and time again (and is a familiar debate to anyone who patrols DRV) and the outcome has been consistenly that notifications are a courtesy only.  The argument has also been made that this is precisely what the watchlist exists for - to monitor articles someone "cares about".  Making a bot to automatically notify non-minor editors of an article up for AfD is likely a controversial subject. ɑʀкʏɑɴ 20:19, 18 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry, this does not make sense. Our guides tell everybody who considers a deletion that they should do it, so we can not here on this page say "yes, we say so, but we don't really mean it". This clause has been part of our guides for more than a year . If you disagree with that, please raise your concerns on WT:AFD or Wikipedia talk:Guide to deletion.


 * As long as our guides recommend a certain chore, we should look for ways to make that chore easier, fairer and more effective. I think, bots provide such a way; hence this request. Please, help me with this and let's discuss here if this is technically feasible and how it could be implemented. &mdash; Sebastian 20:59, 19 October 2007 (UTC)


 * From a technical perspective it is not that difficult to do. I'm familiar with AFD procedures, and I know that the recommendation to notify major contributors has been around a while - long enough to often become a point of contention.  In any case, since it is nonetheless an optional step (saying it is civil to notify major contributors is not the same as saying it is incivil not to notify them) I'd like to see more of a community mandate for such a bot before considering working on it.


 * I do have a bot that processes AFD discussions and it likely would not be difficult to add that kind of functionality to it as well. If there was a little more discussion on the matter other than just between a couple of us here at BOTREQ I'd be happy to take a look at it. ɑʀкʏɑɴ 18:08, 21 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your great reply; I see your point now and I absolutely agree with you. I will try to get some clarification on Wikipedia talk:Guide to deletion first. &mdash; Sebastian 02:13, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Sandbox the newbies
Many vandalism events involve two or more sequential edits with sample text, inane comments, or vandalism, which the authors immediately try to delete. Usually the articles are left in the same condition as when they began. Often the same editors continue doing this to various articles, consuming resources and RC Patrollers. I invite a bot to detect such test edits and provide on the User Talk page one of the usual how to edit and use the sandbox messages (perhaps also an appropriate Welcome if the user Talk page was empty). (SEWilco 18:13, 15 October 2007 (UTC))
 * If a bot could reliably detect such "test" edits, the anti-vandalism bots would probably already do this. As it can be hard to determine (without human thought) what is a test edit and what is a good contribution by a new user that may just use poor formatting/grammar, there would probably be a lot of false positives. Also, current consensus is that bots welcoming new users is generally a bad idea for being impersonal and welcoming users who are only here to vandalize. Mr.  Z- man  17:54, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The simplest test is to look for consecutive edits which alter content but the last edit returns the article to the original content. Then emit a "Thanks for contributions to ARTICLE-mention Help-mention Sandbox" message.  The message should assume good faith, while trying to divert tests out of article space.  It also helps create a record for humans who later come to add appropriate notices.  I'm seeing a lot of such edits but no bot notices about them, and they waste RC Patrol time when finding obvious vandalism in progress which evaporates by the time the patroller begins cleanup (as well as causing the vandals carrying erasers to get serious vandalism warnings while they're lifting their erasers to clean up their scribbling).  I'm sure there are several each hour, as I casually find several each day.  (SEWilco 18:17, 16 October 2007 (UTC))


 * I haven't seen any existing bots handling this; vandalism bots probably haven't been told to look for self-reverted vandalism (particularly because much of it is a few words which might not be noticed by the bot). The reason for the requested bot is to direct tests toward the Sandbox and reduce the ongoing rain of noise which interferes with RC Patrol.  (SEWilco 15:42, 23 October 2007 (UTC))

Request bot to DEFAULTSORT
At Category:Australian rugby league biography stubs (and presumably other categories of rugby league articles), there are a lot of players that are sorted by first name. I'm not sure if there's a bot that does DEFAULTSORT, but if there is, that would be much appreciated. Damanmundine1 (Talk) 01:21, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
 * There are several bots that do defaultsort. I know the operator of User:SmackBot has an approved task to do DEFAULTSORT for people stubs )see Bots/Requests for approval/SmackBot XIII), but that only applies when "there is an unambiguous sort key given to existing categories". There is also Bots/Requests for approval/BOTijo 5, but that too has the restriction "Only put DEFAULTSORT when all categories in article have the same SORT".
 * Essentially, these restrictions is because a human is needed to judge whether the name is of the form "GIVEN NAME, FAMILY NAME". You might think that the last name is the family name, but sometimes you have double surname that are not hyphenated, or you have some Asian names (and other countries as well) that are in the form "FAMILY NAME, GIVEN NAME", so they need to be sorted by the first word in the the title, not the last. It is possible that the category sort keys are wrong, but in that case the bots are only perpetuating errors, not introducing new ones.
 * I'm going to list these bots at Template talk:DEFAULTSORT (the next best thing to a Wikipedia namespace page on defaultsort). Do the bot operators watching this page know of any more defaultsort bot operators? Is there a DEFAULTSORT suggestion built into AWB for instance? Carcharoth 17:58, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
 * but in that case the bots are only perpetuating errors, not introducing new ones This assumes something that we know to be wrong - that everyone should be sorted the same way in every category. I've seen Smackbot make bad edits because of this assumption. Haukur 09:02, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
 * This particular category has no people whose names are written in the form GIVEN NAME, FAMILY NAME FAMILY NAME, GIVEN NAME - I've been through the complete list.Damanmundine1 (Talk) 01:08, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Then you should make a list from the category (as the category might change by the time the bot runs) and ask for a bot to do the additions, or get someone to use AWB to run through the list (AWB has an "add DEFAULTSORT and tidy the category sort keys" function, I think). You could even provide the defaultsort values yourself, as it is not too hard to manipulate a list so that the last words appear first. One word of warning. This only works because the "rugby league players" stub template has a category with no piping. Some templates I've seen use to pipesort articles, and that over-rides DEFAULSORT everytime. Carcharoth 10:37, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Request bot to convert .28 and .29 to parentheses
Discussion moved to: Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature_requests. Lightmouse 13:28, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Transwiki work for WP:DIGI
I've gotten sysop access on Digimon, which will allow WP:DIGI to do a full transwiki without having to keep the articles on Wikipedia's side for the page histories (via export/import). I've done a few very basic things with pywikipedia (User:NedBot), mostly because there's nothing like AWB for Mac OS X. I was planning on manually using Special:Export and Special:Import to move some articles, but the process is time consuming, and exporting only works for 100 versions at a time. I'd also like to move the images over, which I did see is a script for pywikipedia bot, but I'm having a hard time understanding even getting the bot to work on another wiki.

I'm very lost at this point, but I do tend to catch on quickly. Ideally I'd like to be able to run the bot/script/whatever so we don't have to keep bothering other people in the future, and because importing requires sysop access. But even if it's just with the images, any help at this point would be greatly appreciated, and would likely make future transwiki projects far more attractive options. -- Ned Scott 04:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I've been told that Wikia's staff / techs can do a mass importing for us, which makes the situation simpler. I suppose that makes the main request right now is assistance in exporting a group of articles to xml files, and another request for help with moving the images over. -- Ned Scott 19:14, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Archiving on MediaWiki_talk pages
The spam blacklist/whitelist pages are getting incredibly backlogged, and it would be nice if a bot was capable of archiving completed requests marked with Done or Notdone. Thanks, ^demon<sup style="color:#c22">[omg plz] <em style="font-size:10px;">20:02, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

request bot that can removed non-cited info on wrestling and wrestlers
I have been looking over at wrestlers information here on Wikipedia and somehow the birthdates are not cited. Plus other information of the wrestlers have also been not cited as well. I am not sure if there is one, but if there is one, that would be taking care of.LindsieandLance 01:57, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
 * That's not really a bot type of job. Sometimes the article creator or editor just fails to properly format references and a quick search to the provided links in the article will give you birtdates quite easily. Also, it happens (and not only in wrestler articles) that multiple sentences or an entire paragraph is sourced with one link. A bot cannot adequately determine which sentences a ref link is supposed to be sourcing. - Mgm|(talk) 20:21, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Plagiarism checker bot
A bot that could see the difference in articles. Check whether the added statements are plagiarized (by searching Google), If a match is found, check whether attribution is proper. We could eliminate a lot of copyright violations and plagiarisms if this bot is done. i don't know whether such a bot exists. But if it does, please let me know.. I've got some more suggestions... Mugunth 18:45, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Both CorenSearchBot and Wherebot do this.--Balloonguy 21:56, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Just a thought, and I'll probably contact the bot operators directly about this idea, but this might be a great idea for episode articles and lists of episodes. They probably don't get triggered, since they're normally already created and simply waiting for content to be filled out, and they often have copyright issues. -- Ned Scott 19:23, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I once considered doing checks from older pages and/or recent changes, but the potential for problems is large and the benefit is hard to estimate. You can, however, check articles by listing them in User:CorenSearchBot/manual; if you have a good list to work from a simple copy-and-paste might be all you need to do the occasional round.  Manual checks, however, do not tag the article.  Only lists the results for human review. I could revive the suggestion to check RC, but that would make my load on WP (and on Yahoo!) an order of magnitude greater than it currently is.  &mdash; Coren (talk) 01:53, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Tagging for WikiProject Ireland
Like other wikiprojects, WikiProject Ireland uses the assessment process to track articles within its scope, but many articles and categories are currently untagged. As a result they don't show up in the statistics on the WP:IRL Assessment page, and are missing from the project's monitoring categories.

Please could a bot run through the talk pages of these articles and categories add the WikiProject Ireland tags as set out below (unless already present)? (I have been started the job with AWB, but decided that life is too short to manually click the save button on a squillion articles)

It would be most useful if the template could be added with the parameters included, but left blank so that editors don't have to type them when filling in the field, as follows:

However, it would be great if categories could be set with the class parameter set as class= Category, since all categories are assigned this to class. (For article talk pages, all parameters should be left blank)

There are a few other points:


 * 1) The Category:Ireland tree can be included if it is possible to tell the bot not to include Category:Unionism, which is a British-Irish intersection category and includes (inbter alia) Scottish Unionism and the British Conservative party (including all Conservative MPs).
 * 2) Otherwise the scope can safely be all articles and sub-categories of Category:Republic of Ireland
 * 3) The bot should avoiding talk pages which already have a Irelandproj tag -- that's a duplicate of WikiProject Ireland.

Is this feasible? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:05, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
 * /me dusts off some old code. Sure Ill get a pre-run data shortly. βcommand 00:29, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks! I'll look fwd to seeing what you come up with. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:26, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Please look at User:BetacommandBot/Sandbox 3 βcommand 18:36, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Wow, so many Irish categories. I hardly thought there would be that many. Cheers ww2censor 20:26, 25 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry for the very slow reply (got sidetracked into something else), but thanks v much for the category list. I have looked through it, and it seems mostly OK, so it would be great if you could go ahead and tag the categories (but not the articles yet), with three caveats:
 * Since I first posted here, I have created a category-specific tag WikiProject Ireland category, so it would be best to use that rather WikiProject Ireland ... but the bot will need to avoid duplicate tagging category talk pages which use either format.
 * The only category I can see which shouldn't be there is Category:Conservative Party (UK) (its subcats have been successfully excluded). Please can you remove it from the list?
 * Since you made that list, I have added dozens of new categories under Category:Years in Ireland. Please can you ask the bot to build a new list of the subcats of Category:Years in Ireland, and tag them too?
 * The reason I suggest holding off on the articles is that there is a massive number of biographical articles (probably the majority are biogs) and I want to discuss the implications of tagging them. I'll get back to you on the outcome of that discussion.
 * Thanks again for your help. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:27, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Search and replace-bot
I've moved Architecture to WikiProject Architecture (+ template arguments) in line with common naming conventions. It also opens up the floor to a navbox at the former title. Unfortunately, I found out that I can no longer do fully automated edits with AWB. Is there a bot that is approved to do a search-replace in about 8000 articles? - Mgm|(talk) 18:33, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Or perhaps it would be possible for my account to get a temporary 24 hr bot flag to run this task with AWB? Would save the rest of you a lot of work.- Mgm|(talk) 18:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
 * See also my request at Bots/Requests for approval. - Mgm|(talk) 18:30, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Update: my request was approved for a trial run. - Mgm|(talk) 09:27, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Section bot
I would like to request a bot to scrutinize Anon deletions of sections. I lurk with VandalFighter; and I can easily discern (based on characters removed) where an Anon has come in and removed significant (or even all) text from a section from a stable article. They may even do this multiple times to the same article, in effect deleting the article piecemeal. Perhaps the bot could also be more aggressive in reverting deletions from articles over a certain age (like a 1 or 2 years old), which are more likely to be decent articles and are unlikely to need sections removed. - RoyBoy 800 16:04, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
 * You want a anti vandal bot, no? I could do it... <b style="font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica;"> C O </b> 21:37, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Except that we have at least 2 other anti-vandal bots running. User:MartinBot, User:Cluebot, to name but a few. Shadow1  (talk) 23:32, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
 * True, but I'm unsure if they are picky enough about section deletions. - RoyBoy 800 21:51, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Um, Martin Bot is kind of dead. --  Chris   G  07:31, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Special Archiving Bot that works differently
I'm thinking of a bot that will not go by length of unused topics, but will archive when a talk page reaches a certain amount. This is for slowly-growing user talk pages. For example, the bot will notify anyone with a long talk page with a template, then on a requests page there can be discussions and the bot op can set it to archive certain pages. I do not know any coding languages except HTML, with is really, really, really, really useless. But I just need a source code and make a bot of my own, but basically I can modify any coding language when simple errors come, but I can't make an archiving bot like this from scratch. -- Coaster geekperson  04  00:21, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Most of the Archive bots already can archive based on Date, Size, or Number of Sections. Q  T C  —Preceding comment was added at 01:12, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * If you need a separate bot (that is, you want to do it by length, which I do not believe is currently a feature of other bots) then I can throw something together. --uǝʌǝs ʎʇɹnoɟʇs 01:45, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't need it, but my talk page is very slow and it'd be better if I could only archive it when it is actually long. Maybe it can do this. -- Coaster geekperson  04  03:01, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I stand corrected, looking at the bot again, it archives after no discussion on a certain date, and it increments the archives when they reach a certain length. Q  T C 10:16, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
 * You might achieve a similar effect with MiszaBot, by specifying the 'minthreadsleft' parameter. This is not quite the same as a size criterion, but might work anyway. EdJohnston 15:44, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

RfA edit counts/analysis
What are some thoughts on a bot that...
 * detects when a new RfA is added to Requests for adminship
 * checks to see if Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Foo exists
 * if no, reads edit count information from wannabe_kate or some other counter
 * and creates Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Foo with the edit count information

 <font color="#4169E1">W ODU P <font color="#4169E1">( ? ) 22:23, 28 October 2007 (UTC)


 * An interesting idea. Could User:Mathbot do this when it adds the link to the edit summary? <font face="Edwardian Script ITC" size="3"> Dreamy   §  00:40, 29 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I asked Oleg Alexandrov about it.  <font color="#4169E1">W ODU P <font color="#4169E1">( ? ) 02:15, 29 October 2007 (UTC)


 * It appears to be easy enough to add this functionality to Mathbot. I will look into it in a day or two. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:34, 29 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I implemented this. Here is a sample run. Let's see how it works in the next few days. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:27, 31 October 2007 (UTC)


 * That's great. Thanks for working on it.  W ODU P  03:32, 31 October 2007 (UTC)


 * That is a good thing. Would it be possible to have him copy all of the boxes as well though? Where it shows the primary pages edited in the namespace? This is just as helpful as the total number. i (talk) 05:34, 1 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Additional request: could it please add the other information listed on wannabe_kate? I'm talking about the monthly breakdown of edits, and (especially) the list of most-edited pages in each namespace. The former helps to track overall editing patterns, and the later provides valuable information about where reviewing editors should focus some of their attentions. Thanks. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 05:37, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

AntiMalBot
Fixes malfunctioning bots and blocks malicious bots. --Gp75motorsports 13:01, 29 October 2007 (UTC)


 * So, a second admin bot? <font face="Edwardian Script ITC" size="3"> Dreamy   §  14:16, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
 * There was an admin bot? I didn't know. --Gp75motorsports 14:18, 29 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Admin bot or not (I'm not opposed to the principle when a useful function requires the bit), I doubt a bot can reliably decide if another bot is behaving correctly or not. Given that the possible trouble blocking a bot people rely on is large, and that admins keep enough of an eye on bots to block a misbehaving one when it happens, I doubt I could be convinced to agree with a bot like that.  &mdash; Coren (talk) 15:21, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Two thoughts: 1) A bot fixing another bot? Don't think that's going to happen!   2) Blocking malicious bots - Would it be possible for a bot to watch other bot activity and after X number of edits, simply check it against the approved flagged bot list? If it's not on the list, it would stop the questionable bot and put a message at the Bot owners' noticeboard or the Administrator intervention against vandalism? Not sure if User:HBC AIV helperbot4 catches these or not... Don't really know if there would be a huge need for this, as the steps in place for turning off an approved bot that's misbehaving work quite well. SkierRMH 00:33, 1 November 2007 (UTC)


 * This idea is simply impossible to do correctly. I don't think we need to keep commenting on it. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 00:40, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Images for renaming
The process for renaming images is obscenely time-consuming and tedious. Needless to say, the backlog is comparably heinous. I imagine this would need to be semiautomated, as a bot cannot find an appropriate name for an image. But, I thought this could be handled with a template on that page with a new name. Say. Then the bot could detect the new image name, create a new page for the image with that name and then tag the original image page with a speedy deletion tag. If the suggested name were already in use, the bot could add "(1)" to the image name and procede (a al File Upload Bot Magnus Manske). It would be much easier for editors to tag images with a name template than do the whole darn thing.--Esprit15d 16:58, 29 October 2007 (UTC)


 * This sounds like an excellent idea, except that I would have the bot reject the rename entirely if the destination name is already in use. (Someone might have already done the copy; or someone might have uploaded an alternative).  &mdash; Coren (talk) 17:56, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Im working on such a bot but I need help setting up the on wiki process, please see, Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive105, Ill repost my needs.

Per several request and comments Im working on writing a image re-naming bot, I am going to make it like WP:MTC, the bot will re-upload the image and then replace the image with the new name. What I would like is help creating a new set of templates specifically for the bot to use.
 * 1) For the image rename
 * 2) One for a conflict that a image with the same name exists
 * 3) a template for images with invalid new file name.
 * 4) one for noting an image was tagged by someone not on the approved list
 * 5) tagging image after rename
 * βcommand 23:07, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Number 1

 * Well, I created Image move, which uses <tt>|name=Image:newname</tt>. Will that work? <font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"><font color="#2A8B31">Ρх₥α 23:49, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
 * lets get rid of the name=, /me hates parameters with bots. But other than that yeah. βcommand 23:51, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
 * [[Image:Pictogram voting keep.svg|18px]] Fixed Should the parameter include <tt>Image:</tt>, or not? (Like  or just  ). <font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"><font color="#2A8B31">Ρх₥α  00:10, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No need to duplicate the Image name. the second option looks best. βcommand 00:14, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * [[Image:Pictogram voting keep.svg|18px]] Fixed Any other templates need to be created? <font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"><font color="#2A8B31">Ρх₥α 00:17, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * In my opinion, the new template Image move has rendered rename image obsolete. Why have two templates, when one is just as good and gets you closer to the ultimate goal of renaming the image?  The only use I could see for rename image is if a bot were created that could automatically tag images that have names that are totally composed of integers or contains special characters, which are generally discouraged.  But really, to handle this, we could just add a parser function to the Image move to request that a user suggest a new name if field  is left empty.  I will go ahead and do that actually.--Esprit15d 17:51, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I've modified image move to prompt a user to suggest a new name if a suggestion is not already provided. So in theory, this could even be used by a bot, with follow up by a human user.--Esprit15d 18:41, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * See Numbers 2,3,4,5 βcommand 00:20, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Number 2

 * I can work on #2 right now. But this will be one that the bot uses?  I am just clarifying.  It seems that PxMa has already addressed this, since in the template image move he or she added a function that if the new title is already taken, it returns an error message.  Based on discussion above, if the bot will not create an image if the name is already taken, I would suggest that the bot be designed to detect this error message and not even process such an image.  If this is what you already meant, Betacommand, then I will make the template reflect that a bot has discovered that the suggested name is unsuitable and another should be chosen.--Esprit15d 17:51, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * This template will just be for catching errors that users miss. Instead of me just logging this to a log file and skipping it will post it to the wiki. βcommand 22:56, 30 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I've made template #2 and you can find it at Image move delayed. There is still a chance, however, that it is redundant, considering the error message on #1.--Esprit15d 19:24, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Note:Would it also be possible to make sure that the name isn't on this list as well? (might be concern #3 above as well) SkierRMH 00:06, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
 * those Images exist and thus cannot be re-named to. βcommand 00:30, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Number 4
This template is odd, since, according to Moving images to the Commons, anyone can move an image to Commons. I've done it many times, and I am not on the list (since I don't use that bot) and I'm not yet an admin (although it seems that will change soon). Should we talk about this matter more?--Esprit15d 20:48, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * for security reasons, I implement a list of "trusted" users, that way the risk of abuse is very limited and the chance that some vandal will be able to abuse such a tool will be eliminated. Currently anyone who wants to can re-name an image by hand. The issue is once this bot is operational the bot will re-name the image, and then replace the old image with the new image name. (something that would be a High Risk vandal target). βcommand 23:13, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Number 5
The already existing Db-redundantimage should work for template number 5.--Esprit15d 20:41, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

London Gazette references
About a month and a half ago the London Gazette changed its website (http://gazettes-online.co.uk) (this change also affects the Edinburgh Gazette and Belfast Gazette) meaning that all references to it that actually linked direct to a pdf copy of the relevant gazette on the website (created prior to this change) are now broken. Links to search results pages are similarly broken. An example of an old style link is as follows: The most important parameters in this are: The equivalent "new" url (in its minimal form) would be: where: The main problem is that we lose the specific page being referred to, this is becuase the new url scheme uses the absolute page number, this numberings starts at 1 for the first page of the first issue each gazette of a new year. The old scheme simply numbers each page within an issue (starting with 0). Appending &page= to the new url doesn't seem to break anything, but doesn't take you to the right page either - it would however preserve this information for our readers.
 * http://www.gazettes-online.co.uk/archiveViewFrameSetup.asp?webType=0&PageDuplicate=x0%20%20%20%20%20%20&issueNumber=24602&pageNumber=0&SearchFor=charbonnel&selMedalType=&selHonourType=
 * webType - which indicates whether it is a London (0), Edinburgh (1), or Belfast (2) Gazette which is being referred to and
 * issueNumber which surprisingly enough refers to the number of the Gazzete issue
 * http://www.gazettes-online.co.uk/ViewPDF.aspx?pdf=24602&geotype=London
 * pdf is equivalent to the old issueNumber and
 * geoType is equivalent to the old webType, but now takes a text input

The nature of this conversion naturally suggests a bot process, assuming we can easily identify the pagess containing broken links. I've tried using special:linksearch to identify pages linking tothe Gazette website, but this seems to be returning only a fraction of the actual pages, try searching Wikipedia for either "London Gazette" or "gazettes-online" to see what I mean.

Also, User:DavidCane has created LondonGazette, if references to the Gazettes consistently used this, ongoing maintenance should be easier, since any future changes to the urls could probably be fixed simply by a template change, and it would in any case be easier to identify affected pages by checking transclusions of the template. However, at the moment this also requires the date the Gazette was issued and the (absolute) page number of the first page being referred to, which are generally not easy to identify. If these were not mandatory, a bot could also be sued to turn the broken urls into templated references. If such a bot logged its changes, then this data could be manually inserted at our leisure by working through the logs.

It would also be necessary to update references which link to search results pages e.g. maps to It seems the search engine has also been updated, so different results are returned, so it is not worth trying to preserve the parameter indicating which results page we were on. Anyoje any thoughts on how best to proceed? David Underdown 17:03, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
 * http://www.gazette-online.co.uk/searchResultsView.asp?webType=0&searchString=shall+be+erased+from+the+Register&selDateFromDay=1&selDateFromMonth=1&selDateFromYear=1998&selDateToDay=2&selDateToMonth=1&selDateToYear=2007&searchIn=Notice&PageNumber=13
 * http://www.gazette-online.co.uk/SearchResults.aspx?GeoType=London&st=adv&sb=date&FDay=1&FMth=1&FYr=1998&TDay=2&TMth=1&TYr=2007&all=shall%20be%20erased%20from%20the%20register&

Trivia sections
A good bot would be one that marks all of our Trivia sections with the "Trivia section discouraged" template (not sure which that is). There are too many Trivia sections on WP right now, and it could be a good awareness campaign. Or is it too active/aggressive? If so, why even have the template? Nate Berkopec 02:09, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It would likely be seen as too aggressive to do this by bot. See WT:TRIVIA for examples. -- Ned Scott 20:54, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Android Mouse Bot 3 performed this task for a short period in May 2007; it ran only about a week bedfore being stopped due to a deluge of protests. The bot operator has not edited for over two months, but seems to have released the source code into the public domain and has stated a willingness to provide the code at request (however, this was several months ago, so...). Anyone interested may wish to contact the operator via his talk page or by e-mail. – Black Falcon (Talk) 04:50, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Bot for Sockpuppet stuff
So I got the idea when I fixed a tag for SockPuppet stuff, and i got the idea that makes tags for sockpuppet sockpuppet stuff (I think it's sockpuppetry). It will be called SockPuppetBot and its for SockPuppet socpuppetstuff. (Maybe I have typos) --MyMii 22:56, 30 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Could you please tell us what you want this bot to do? <font face="Edwardian Script ITC" size="3"> Dreamy   §  00:23, 31 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Is this a hoax nom?--Esprit15d 19:35, 31 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't think it's a hoax, basic on this recent edit from MyMii, but it's not clear to me what he/she wants the bot to do.. fix broken Wiki-tags, perhaps? --Jaysweet 20:01, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
 * EBot2 archives Suspected sock puppets if that is what you're after... &mdash; E  talkBAG 07:05, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Question/advice re annoying repeat vandalism
Unsure if this is a normal type request, or if this is something bots do I'd just like to ask the experts: The article Nil by Mouth (film) repeatedly gets hit by a very specific type of vandalism from a vide variety of IP addresses, rarely the same twice, but a very distinct MO. I am hoping there is something that can be done about this in the automatic sense. This particular vandalism consists of adding an "s" to the word Nil, sometimes just one occurrence, some times every one. To no end this person is amused by inserting the name Nils into this article, so I wonder, is there a way and possibility to have a bot add to its patrol to revert such edits? M URGH <font size="-5">disc.  03:39, 1 November 2007 (UTC)


 * That is to specific, as we have two anti-vandalsim bots. <font face="Edwardian Script ITC" size="3"> Dreamy   §  15:06, 2 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Ah, ok, in that sense. Thanks for simple explanation. M URGH  <font size="-5">disc.  15:54, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

AFBot
I would like a bot, that checks contribs, and for WP:FOWL, or any other WikiProjects, moves a user to the inactive part of a list of participants, and vice versa. It will check for contribs towards a WikiProject like here. <font face="Edwardian Script ITC" size="3"> Dreamy   §  23:35, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Pokébot (or Projectnotifybot)
This is a request for a bot to be used by WikiProject Pokémon. The idea is for a bot to look at all of the nominations in discussion areas such as XFD and FAC. It will then check the talk pages of the nominated article's (or whatever it is that was nominated) talk page for Pokeproject. If the template exists then the bot will proceed to add a notice to WikiProject Pokémon/Noticeboard informing members of the WikiProject about the discussion. Fun Pika  17:48, 28 October 2007 (UTC)


 * If such a bot is to be implemented, why not make it do the same job for all wikiprojects? Whenever anything is listed at Xfd, FAC etc, notify any wikiprojects listed on the talk page.  If the bot is trawling all these articles anyway, why not have it notify all the affected projects? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:19, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
 * That would be a good idea. :) Fun  Pika  19:53, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Although I find the idea appealing, I think some form of control is necessary; otherwise, the talk pages of projects like WikiProject Biography, WikiProject Military history, and the like (i.e. any project with a large scope) would soon be overwhelmed with notices. – Black Falcon (Talk) 04:32, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Goo point. It should be done on an opt-in basis. --17:20, 3 November 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by BrownHairedGirl (talk • contribs)

Peer review automation bot
I'd like to request a bot writer to work with the Wikipedia talk:Content review/workshop on a suggested change to Peer Review. There has been quite a bit of talk at the workshop about possible changes to PR and the current plan is to implement categorization on it. Because the page is currently manually archived, this would require a bot -- the manual process is already tedious and would become unmanageable without automation if categorization were introduced. We'd also like to change the page to list only links, rather than the whole existing review. Here's a mock-up of how the peer review page might look: Wikipedia talk:Content review/workshop/Peer Review mockup.

We are hopeful that this is the first step in a reinvigoration of Peer Review. If this works, we hope to come up with more ideas to help improve not only peer review but other content review processes. However, this first step is in some ways the most important: peer review is a key part of Wikipedia, and it's not working as well as it could. We believe organizing the page will really help participation, and we'd like to work with someone who would be interested in continuing to participate and who can help us improve our ideas and make them implementable.

If you're interested, post a note either here or at the workshop page, and we can talk about implementation details. Thanks. Mike Christie (talk) 19:22, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Bulk image move to Commons -- tarot cards
Could someone please fetch all the cards transcluded in Minor Arcana, upload them to the Commons and then nominate the originals for deletion? The Commons doesn't currently have any images of these cards. Neon Merlin  01:54, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * See WP:MTC 71.124.42.226 02:00, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Commons deletion log checker
Commons admins theoretically are supposed to check instances of all images they delete on all projects--for which they have a marvelously reliable tool--but much of the time they don't (there aren't many of them and they're overworked, in their defense). So could we have a bot that watches the Commons deletion log, checks to see whether the deleted images are in use on article pages here (article pages only, please! no need to remove red links from people's user pages since they'd probably rather see them and thus be alerted to the deletion), and then either removes them or makes a list so that a human could easily do so? Thanks. Chick Bowen 02:16, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
 * This task is already performed by CommonsDelinker. It's a part of pywikipedia, (code here) if you want to run a copy. MER-C 11:06, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Hmm. OK, thanks.  I'll put together a list of instances it missed and see what Siebrand thinks of them. Chick Bowen 23:30, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Question, (moved from VP technical)
Would it be possible to program a bot to automatically update the RfA !vote count? —Cronholm144 20:15, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Ask here. Tangobot updates the chart here; perhaps it could do it. Cheers. --MZMcBride 22:07, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
 * ...Could Tangobot do the job?—Cronholm144 06:57, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
 * User:Wenli is currently seeking approval for this task. See here.  &mdash; <span style="font-family:monospace, monospace;">madman bum and angel 15:01, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Cool, thanks. —Cronholm144 16:33, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Spaces in references?
I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this, but I thought I'd give it a try. :) Anyway, I don't know if a new bot needs to be created or an old one can do it, but I've recently been working on the article Vampire in order to get it to Featured Status. It's quite long, so I started to look as to how I could cut down on space. I found that a number of the references had extra spaces in them that needn't be there (For example, - Note all the extra spaces in the reference between the '|' and the '='?. This reference can be turned into ) I went through by hand and managed to get rid of around 500 bytes of used space just by deleting the extra spaces. Not a lot in the scale of the vampire article, but I was thinking, on the scale of wikipedia it could be massive! So I was wondering, could a bot be programmed to delete any extra spaces in the references on wikipedia. I think it would save tonnes of space, considering that every article with references is bound to have a few extra spaces in them. I don't think anyone's cared before as it's pretty small getting rid of a couple of hundred bytes on a given article; but together the amount sabed would be much more important. Get back to me on my talk page, here or somewhere else. Cheers, :) Spawn Man 00:45, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think that a bot that did this would be useful per the bot policy, and we are not to worry about space; the servers have unlimited space, as far as editors are concerned. Cheers!  &mdash; <span style="font-family:monospace, monospace;">madman bum and angel 01:04, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I'd find it useful - and if we have unlimited space, why do we need to fundraise for page views? If we cut down on the amount of kilobytes downloaded, then we would need far less page views. The bot would make up for itself in a short time, with the average article having about a few hundred bytes extra... Spawn Man 01:49, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
 * As a computer science person myself, the few bytes that are saved while removing spaces will not matter. As for the fundraiser that covers a large number of items besides our bandwidth. βcommand 02:05, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Those spaces have no effect on the visible text, so I suspect they have no effect on the html page served by the servers. However, they help make the edit text more readable. Quite a few editors find wikitext laden with cite templates difficult to read, and these breaks help somewhat. Sometimes, each field in a cite template is separated not by a space, but by a line break. Gimmetrow 02:40, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Fine, shoot me down then! ;) Spawn Man 04:05, 11 November 2007 (UTC)