Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 46

Ridiculously over-exact coordinates detector
Many articles on geographic locations have coordinates that are given with far too many digits of "precision". In some cases, these coordinates are not even pointing to the correct location, and others (especially towns) point to some user's house or some other such shenanigans. (0.0001° is <11 m, 1″ is <31 m) Is it possible to built a bot that would list (not change) all articles with coordinates that are, say, 10 digits long or longer after a decimal point? Then once I deal with those, 9 digits and so forth? For a fuller discussion of the inanity of lengthy decimal coordinates see WP:Coordinates. Abductive (reasoning) 15:50, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Running now for usage over 11 decimals. Results will save here when the report finishes. Remember to set your browser's encoding to UTF8. The query I used is below. Tim  1357  talk  22:21, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

The preponderance of recurring digits suggests rounding errors by a script; it would be good to deal with that at source. I've added a pointer to this discussion from WT:COORD and notified User:The_Anome, whose bot already deals with a number of coordinate-related tasks. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 01:04, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Here is a formatted version of the results. Tim  1357  talk  02:52, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd go beyond that, and regard anything with 8 or more decimal places as being physically meaningless as absolute coordinates for a fixed location: 10-8 degree of arc at the equator is roughly 1 millimetre -- the Earth's surface shifts more than that from day to day with natural processes such as rainfall expansion of soil and Earth tides, and continental drift motions run at about 10-160mm/year. I think most of them are either points picked off a mapping tool by hand, or dms coordinates converted to decimal. The latter are easy to spot: there are only 3600 possible values for the fractional degree part. In the first case, we should round to six decimal places, in the second, to degrees/minutes or degrees/minutes/seconds, depending on the relevant level of precision. This should be accurate enough for all practical purposes: in the first case, 10-6 degree of arc at the equator is about 0.1m, and in the second, one second of arc is about 30 metres. -- The Anome (talk) 09:58, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd prefer the DMS seconds to have a single decimal place. 30 metres is quite large when pointing to a house or a road or river estuary (think width), for instance. It'd be a bit vexing to see on target coords just miss, after the correction. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:06, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The precision should be appropriate to the object. Lower precision is appropriate for a dessert than for a National Geodetic Survey station or the Airy transit circle at Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Jc3s5h (talk) 00:23, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It's not possible to evaluate the appropriate precision for an object using an automated method (i.e. a bot). I think what everyone is trying to do here is to simply figure out what is the smallest reasonable precision for any object.  Certainly, I can think of no unique object covered by a Wikipedia article which requires sub-millimeter precision in its location.  If we can all agree that locations don't need to be any more precise than within (for example) 1 meter, then we can find all of the articles that are specifying locations with nanometer precision and round them up.  &mdash;SW&mdash; converse 02:26, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Coord's type parameter, where present, gives us an indicator for calculating the the required precision; for example, city requires less precision than landmark. that said, six decimal places should always be sufficient. I seem to remember being taught that one should truncate, not round, coordinates (where one is not referring back to a map for a more exact point); is that so, or is my memory playing tricks Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:20, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * From my numerical methods course several decades ago, I recall that rounding is generally more appropriate than truncating, unless one is more concerned with not exceeding a minimum or maximum than with obtaining the closest practical value. If coordinates are expressed in decimal degrees, one might want to change a rounded result of 360 to 0. Similarly, a rounded result of 55°60' should change to 56°00'. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:48, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Fixing incorrect names linked to the redirects marked with the R from incorrect name template
My request is trigged by the recent deletion discussion of the redirect:Talinn. Talinn is an implausible typo of Tallinn and, as such, useful redirect. At the same time, there was a number of links linking to this incorrect name without being fixed for years as they had perfectly normal blue links and they are quite hard to notice. Therefore I propose that if the redirect is marked with  template, the bot should automatically fix incoming links (from articles only, excluding talk pages, user pages and project pages) replacing them with the correct spelling. In case of the above example (Talinn) that means that bot will replace all links linked to 'Talinn' with links to correct spelling 'Tallinn'.

Currently there are 65 pages marked with this template, which is not a large number. However, as a rule they are not regularly checked by editors and therefore these misspellings which could be easily fixed by bot may stay unfixed for the long time. Beagel (talk) 19:20, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Nope. See WP:NOTBROKEN.  &mdash;SW&mdash; yak 21:14, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I really don't believe that WP:NOTBROKEN applies here. WP:NOTBROKEN states clearly that "This rule does not apply to cases where there are other reasons to make the change, such as linking to an unprintworthy redirect." The request concerns only unprintworthy redirects marked with the   template and not any other type of redirects.  Beagel (talk) 21:42, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * If the redirect is an im plausible typo, then it should be taken to RfD and deleted per WP:RFD (criteria #8) or speedy deleted per WP:CSD (if it was recently created). Otherwise, if the typo is plausible, then the redirect should stay, and you can fix them manually if you want (although nothing technically needs to be fixed because when you click on the link, you end up at the right page, regardless of what's going on behind the scenes).  It's very unlikely that you'll find consensus for a bot to perform this task, as many will likely judge it to fall under WP:COSMETICBOT.  &mdash;SW&mdash; verbalize 21:55, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * WP:NOTBROKEN or WP:COSMETICBOT do not apply here. If the name is incorrect, then it is broken. However, the list should be reviewed by humans to make sure those redirects are indeed due to incorrect names, and not simple mistaggings. It could be done via AWB without any BRFA though, so if the task is small, you might want to do that instead of going through bot trials etc. But if someone prefers to do it via bots, I'm fine with it too. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 21:57, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

The main issue is not if you end up the right place by clicking on the link, but that the article containing the link contains also a misspelling/typo, which is hard to notice and therefore it may stay not corrected for quite a long time. To make more clear what I meant, just some examples I proposed to be changed by bot:


 * Kopenhagen → Copenhagen
 * Moskow → Moscow
 * New Yrok and New york → New York
 * Talinn and Tallin → Tallinn

At the same time, it should not included redirects if there is no consensus what is the the common name in English or if different forms are accepted. E.g. Kyiv should be not automatically replaced with Kiev. It should also not replace diacritics. In this context, the proposal that there should be approved list makes a sense. Beagel (talk) 22:30, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Bots/Requests for approval/WildBot 4 is an approved task for this; I'm currently trying to regain toolserver access. Josh Parris 22:31, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

A couple of Ideas
I have a couple of ideas for bots and I am a programmer so I wouldn't mind making these myself (I think I might even enjoy it). I just wanted to check here to see if there are already bots doing these or if these are stupid ideas (feel free to say so) or something else.

My first idea is for an antivandalism bot. I have noticed that some vandalism is does not make actual words. My idea is the bot that follows the recent changes and if an edit is mostly words it does not find in a dictionary it would either just revert it or alert someone or something.

My other idea is for an "as of" bot. It would wander wikipedia and if it finds any phrases that say "as of" and then a date older than, say five years, it would leave a nice note on the article talk page (or maybe on an associated project page or something).

Those are my ideas, let me know what you think. Eomund (talk) 03:36, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Another option for an "as of" bot is to change the article itself to use . GoingBatty (talk) 03:55, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * For the anti-vandal bot, I think listing a report would be ok, but not automatically reverting it. For instance, some gibberish-like text is actually legitimate, like this: $$x={-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}$$  &mdash;SW&mdash; confer 15:43, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Chemistry compounds templates
Please make a bot to order the templates in Category:Chemistry compounds templates by period number.--Kc kennylau (talk) 10:04, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * 84 pages of adding is the kind of thing one does by hand.  Now, it seems to me that finding the Chemistry compounds templates will become quite hard if they're ordered by period number.  Can you point to a discussion when a consensus opinion was formed that this was a Good Thing to do? Josh Parris 10:59, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Done by hand.--Kc kennylau (talk) 05:30, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

List of articles using a particular field
Hello, would it be possible to generate a list of all articles that use the "distributor" field in Infobox video game? I suspect that it is only being used for online services such as Steam, and not for physical distributors as intended, and as such should be re-purposed to make that clearer for editors and readers. ▫  Johnny Mr Nin ja  16:08, 3 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I'll make the list. — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 16:28, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Oh wow, cool thanks. ▫  Johnny Mr Nin ja  16:40, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

{{collapse bottom}} Raw: distributor distribution media1 media2 (size limit) — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 19:37, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I'm concerned that after approval, there is no oversight of bot operations; it is assumed that an approved bot will only perform the tasks to which it is approved. Bot edits are flagged and generally ignored, so there's a reasonable scope for a bot account to go off reservation without anyone noticing, at least for a while. There have also been incidents lately of this occurring and causing a ruckus.

I'd like a dev to propose a minimally intrusive bot to monitor all bot accounts on Wikipedia. I imagine that over time it will grow more sophisticated, but for a first iteration I'd like to see at least monitoring of the namespaces edited and use of edit summaries. There ought to be some thought given to security/monitoring/auditing/generation of the data that configures the monitor's operation.

A retrospective report of all bot accounts that have operated outside approved tasks would be of interest. It would not be able to be generated until appropriate configuration data had been assembled.

Others might suggest other necessary, basic functionality. Josh Parris 03:06, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Lists in infoboxes
The use of list templates (Plainlist; Flatlist; ) in infoboxes has proved uncontroversial; it improves their accessibility and web standards compliance, makes the content easier to edit (especially for longer lists), and makes the data more easily parsable. I'd like to work with a bot owner to look for cases where the conversion could be automated. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:49, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I've had a little poke around this problem, and it sure seems messy. I selected one other writer's bio, Ayn Rand.  The field spouse, in this case, is not delimited the same way as it was in the above diff - there's a BR tag, but that's to separate the spouse's name from the period of marriage.  That's what happens when humans get at stuff, and makes for a parsing nightmare.  And this problem was found in just the first (and last) article I fiddled with.  So that's a problem at the lowest level.  Then you've got the additional problem of "infoboxes exist on most pages on the wiki", which means at least a full scan is necessary, although I have no feeling for how many infoboxes have fields that could reasonably be expected to have multiple entries for that field, nor how many have infoboxes with these fields that actually have multiple entries.  Infoboxes get changed, created and retired, so whatever solution there is will need to monitor for these occurrences during its life given the shear number of them it will have to work on.
 * For the interested, I used this regex to extract out Infobox writer params that could be expected to have a BR in them, and indeed do (based on only two articles):

([\|]\s*)(occupation|spouse|notableworks)(\s*=\s*)([^\|\}]+<[Bb][Rr]\s?/?>.*)(?=\s*(\||}})) $4 is the value passed to the template; the other matches are to maintain existing formatting A variation is required for lists expected to be separated by commas
 * I think a good starting point is to get someone to generate a list of possible matches for using (Plainlist, and use that to identify the various formats humans have used thus far. That can act as a basis for a parser to strip lists apart for reconstruction.  And once that's sorted, drop it into a tool like AWB that gets used all over the place - you're going to be up for hundreds of thousands of edits. Josh Parris 00:00, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time ;-)

Thank you for the time you spent on this. You have identified some issues I anticipated. I would start by, say, doing all the "occupation" fields in Infobox person, rather than trying to do all infoboxes at once. Unfortunately, AWB wont run properly on netbooks, which is what I'm using. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pigsonthewing‎ (talk • contribs)


 * So, can anyone help, please? Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:37, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Old prod full template applier
In the past I have requested that a bot be designed to apply the Old prod full template to talk pages of articles that have been prod-tagged and then deprodded. This bot has never been built, although a couple programmers have said they would like to. Perhaps the technical difficulties could be overcome this year? Here are some of the technical problems that I have thought of or that have been mentioned before: 1) The detection of Prod and Prod-nn tags is difficult, because they are assigned to a category with a date that, perforce, always changes. 2) If an article is prodded and rapidly deprodded, is it hard to detect. 3) If an article was prodded, deleted and recreated, it requires a different sort of detection. Anyway, any takers? Abductive  (reasoning) 15:43, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I have a few other tasks in line before this, but I've added it to my to-do list. Tim  1357  talk  22:02, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
 * An update: I started scanning through all of the revisions of articles using a database dump, looking for edits adding/removing/endorsing PRODs. Hopefully that can help me retroactively add oldprodfull to the appropriate talk pages. It should be done scanning in a few days (I'm too lazy to learn a faster method). Tim  1357  talk  16:11, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Citation Bot cleanup
has a tendency to upload things at the wrong place following bad template usage from humans. So there's some cleanup to be had.

First, the following • Template:Cite doi/:10.1016.2Fj.molmed.2011.01.002

• Template:Cite doi/:10.1016.2Fj.orggeochem.2011.09.003

• Template:Cite doi/:10.1016.2Fj.pnpbp.2006.01.00

• Template:Cite doi/:10.1038.2F130467a0

• Template:Cite doi/:10.1038.2F480458a

• Template:Cite doi/:10.1080.2F07434618812331274657

• Template:Cite doi/:10.1098.2Frsbm.1933.0011

• Template:Cite doi/:10.1098.2Frsbm.1945.0007

• Template:Cite doi/:10.3390.2Fsym2021081

should be moved from Template:Cite doi/:10.Foobar to Template:Cite doi/10.Foobar.

The following • Template:Cite doi/DOI: 10.1002.2F.28SICI.291098-111X.28200001.2915:1.3C61::AID-INT4.3E3.0.CO.3B2-O

• Template:Cite doi/DOI: 10.1002.2Fjclp.20593

• Template:Cite doi/doi: 10.1097.2F01.inf.0000256751.76218.7c

• Template:Cite doi/doi: 10.1136.2Fbmj.d1045

• Template:Cite doi/doi: 10.1259.2Fdmfr.2F85149245

• Template:Cite doi/doi: 10.1521.2Faeap.2008.20.2.148

should be moved from Template:Cite doi/doi: 10.Foobar to Template:Cite doi/10.Foobar.

The following • Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1007.2Fs11416-006-0028-7

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2F0166-1280.2894.2903961-J

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2F0370-2693.2894.2901302-0

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2F0960-894X.2895.2900473-7

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2Fj.jaad.2010.09.776

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2Fj.jmb.2003.12.072

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2FS0140-6736.2803.2913803-2

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2FS0140-6736.2807.2960076-2

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2FS0140-6736.2810.2960062-1

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2FS0140-6736.2898.2908350-0

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2FS0196-0644.2805.2982389-3

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1016.2FS0304-3770.2802.2900025-6

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1029.2F98JC02476

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1038.2F344540a0

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1038.2Fng.355

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1038.2Fng.915

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1038.2Fnnano.2008.3

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1053.2Fgast.2000.18149

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1086.2F421051

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1088.2F0370-1301.2F63.2F12.2F304

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1088.2F1742-6596.2F61.2F1.2F120

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1088.2F1748-9326.2F4.2F4.2F045108

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1093.2Fbrain.2F34.2-3.102

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1093.2Fije.2Fdyg316

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1098.2Frsbm.1995.0016

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1098.2Frstb.1935.0004

• Template:Cite doi/DOI:10.1111.2Fj.1744-313X.2012.01095.x

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1112.2Fjlms.2Fs1-21.4.300

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1126.2Fscitranslmed.3001777

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1136.2Fthoraxjnl-2011-201398

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1214.2Faoap.2F1177005705

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1371.2Fjournal.pbio.0030164

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.1371.2Fjournal.pbio.1001234

• Template:Cite doi/doi:10.2217.2Fepi.11.19

should be moved from Template:Cite doi/doi:10.Foobar to Template:Cite doi/10.Foobar.

And lastly the following • Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.1016.2F0010-0285.2880.2990005-5

• Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.1016.2F0022-314X.2880.2990084-0

• Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.1016.2Fj.cub.2010.03.027

• Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.1016.2Fj.neuroimage.2003.12.047

• Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.1016.2Fj.tree.2009.05.013

• Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.1016.2FS0959-4388.2802.2900306-9

• Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.1023.2FB:ELAS.0000005636.90348.2b

• Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.1071.2FMU10020

• Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.4153.2FCJM-1965-045-4 should be moved from Template:Cite doi/http:.2F.2Fdx.doi.org.2F10.Foobar to Template:Cite doi/10.Foobar.

Additionally,
 * All articles that invode these templates should be updated to use the correct arguments
 * Leftover redirects can be tagged with db-r3 (or just move without redirects, if possible)
 * Moves that cannot be performed due to the location already being occupied by a template can be tagged with

I've left a message to User:Smith609, but he's on a wikibreak so anyone that wants to clean this stuff up is more than welcomed to. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:18, 4 March 2012 (UTC)


 * On a side note to the cleanup, the bot should probably upload the citation in the correct place and edit the article to use the correct location as well. Going through the last set by hand. --Izno (talk) 17:03, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Now doing the second batch. G6ing them via TW, which is faster than T3 (and probably r3? I'll check). --Izno (talk) 17:35, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Unable to move Template:Cite doi/DOI: 10.1002.2F.28SICI.291098-111X.28200001.2915:1.3C61::AID-INT4.3E3.0.CO.3B2-O as it was triggering the blacklist. Probably too many random characters or too long. Probably an admin can see to that? Also have used prefixindex (below) to list the ones I didn't get to.
 * Also, done with "DOI: " and "doi: " other than the above blacklisted title. --Izno (talk) 17:54, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
 * FYI, it matches, which is intended to prevent moves to titles with more than nine consecutive capital letters (after ignoring non-letter characters). Looks like Headbomb used his   flag to move it already. Anomie⚔ 18:19, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I figured it would be something like that.
 * Finished the rest, from the below set. If there's any remaining there after all the deletions go through, someone else can do 'em. :^) --Izno (talk) 19:11, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Repopulating 'New unreviewed articles' category
Would a bot operator willing to spend a bit of time looking into a series of discussions be able to look at the request here that was not done at the time (for the reasons given there) and see if anything can be done about it? The links are provided from that page. Essentially, the task would involve re-tagging for review the articles listed at User:Δ/Sandbox 4 (this list was generated on request back in November 2011). If it would be better to generate a new list, please say so. What was suggested, given the problems found with some of the reviews, was to re-tag all the articles to be re-reviewed (an example of the tag to be replaced is here). If a new consensus is needed to run such a re-tagging request, please say so and I'll raise that in the appropriate location. Carcharoth (talk) 18:40, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Dealing with misplaced user subpages
I have encountered several users, both new and experienced, who by accident made a mainspace page when tried to make a user subpage by forgetting the user: prefix. (i.e. Yoenit/Sandbox instead of user:Yoenit/Sandbox).

Could somebody make a bot which automatically moves pages to userspace without redirect if the page name starts with username of creator followed by "/". I think this would result in very few false positives as "/" is not commonly used in article titles. The bot should also leave a message at the creators talkpage with information what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. Yoenit (talk) 11:19, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Assuming the bot would check that the page was created by the same user, it should have virtually no false positives. — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 11:21, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * This seems like a good idea. Who ought to get the message?  Are there any devs interested in taking this up? Josh Parris 02:31, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It should be easy to code, but my only question is how do you plan on finding the incorrect edits? Do you just want to watch the New Articles feed for any edits which follow the above logic? LegoKontribsTalkM 21:51, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
 * All coded up using Special:NewPages, except for the user's talk page message. If someone wants to create a template for it, it would be trivial for me to add it in. LegoKontribsTalkM 05:31, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
 * See User:Legobot/userfy move for a first draft of a subst'able template for the talk page. Josh Parris 03:40, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Wow looks good, the only thing I noticed that it may not be possible for them to move it back right away. Since the bot moves it, I added a line in the code that would mark the newly created redirect for db-r2. If the redirect isn't deleted by that time, the user (unless theyre an admin) shouldn't be able to move the page back until the redirect is deleted. Not sure how you explain that to a inexperienced editor without confusing them further though. LegoKontribsTalkM 08:58, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Bots can move without creating a redirect. Josh Parris 09:47, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

<--Oh did not know that. here LegoKontribsTalkM 04:47, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Removal of redundant date templates
Can we get a bot to remove expired show by date and update after templates if it is not already done? It is only a minor issue but removing redundant wikitext is a nice thing to do to help any editors who subsequently edit the page. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 21:25, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Surprisingly, it looks like there isn't a bot to do this (or if there is, it managed to get approved without linking to Template:show by date or Template:update after from its BRFA). I'll look at having AnomieBOT take this on. Anomie⚔ 02:18, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
 * How do you propose that the bot ensures that the article has been adequately updated before removing update after? For example, the template should not be removed from Advanced Micro Devices, which says " "  -GoingBatty (talk) 02:24, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I was thinking of creating a template that displays unconditionally what update after currently does once its timer expires. But looking at it a bit closer, I'm not entirely sure that is all that much worse than something like . Anomie⚔ 02:29, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Note that redirects to .  GoingBatty (talk) 02:35, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, I know. The point is the difference in syntax, not the specific template name. Anomie⚔ 03:08, 5 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I was a little to broad in my initial brief. update after should be done by actual humans. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 03:57, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

The Ukraine -> Ukraine
Hello,

Often English speakers, used to talking about "The UK" and "The USA" make the mistake of writing "The Ukraine", which is incorrect (the country is simply Ukraine). Currently a search for "The Ukraine" -Ukrainian returns 2,719 results, about half of which I guess are incorrect instances of the country's name. I had a go at correcting the first dozen or so instances in the search (hence you may find the first few pages to be all false positives), but I quickly realised this could do with some semi-automation.

What I propose is a semi-automated bot/editing tool that allows this to be done as efficiently as possible, with a user reviewing every edit before it's implemented of course. I'd be happy to be one of those users.

Cheers -- LukeSurlt c 17:27, 6 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Try WP:AWB. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:34, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The Ukraine is correct English and was the standard. Secretlondon (talk) 23:26, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Actually it's not (among many other possible sources). Volunteer Marek  23:43, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The country also wished us to change the spelling of Kiev. We don't do that either. Not suitable for a bot edit as it's contentious. Secretlondon (talk) 23:50, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
 * "The country"? I was not aware that any country tried to make Wikipedia do anything. Did they propose a UN resolution saying that "Wikipedia shall change the spelling of Kiev" or something? Threaten to invade Jimbo's home?
 * Also, I don't think a guy named Paul Brians, who wrote a book called "Common Errors in English Usage", and who is a professor at the non-Ukrainian Washington State University, which happens to be located in The Washington rather than The Ukraine, qualifies as "The country of the Ukraine".
 * What are you talking about? Volunteer Marek 00:30, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
 * This isn't the place to discuss which version of the country name is correct. I think it has been shown that it is not an uncontroversial change, and therefore it is inappropriate as a bot task.  If you can point to a recent discussion showing consensus for one version or another, then come back here and let us know.  This is not the appropriate place to form that consensus.  &mdash;SW&mdash; speak 20:02, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Plus, does anyone consider where the idiom, correct or not, occurs in direct quotes from the correct or not sources? Reason enough not to automate. Dahn (talk) 20:06, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks. It looks like WP:AWB would be the tool to use. I've posted a notice on the policy board of the village pump to see if consensus can be reached on standardising the naming of the country before implementing any semi-automatic changes. LukeSurlt c 21:40, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Bot needed to get ISBNs
cite doi, cite pmid etc are nice ways of adding references and I see the need for a cite ISBN/cite isbn. Books are frequently cited in articles and most new books and most books published in the past 20-30 years have an ISBN. Adding book citations by hand is tedious and some of the citation tools are sporadic in operation or are a little "fiddly". I would like to have a cite ISBN template created and then a bot goes off to find the biblio data to build a reference along the same lines as what happens with cite doi. There are concerns about availability of ISBN data in the quantities that would be used by WP, however WorldCat allows up to 1000 ISBN queries per day with other options available. That may be sufficient for WP needs. The citation templates would then be placed in a Category:Cite ISBN templates similar to Category:Cite doi templates, Category:Cite pmid templates etc. This is surely a simple task for the experts who lurk here? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 01:36, 8 March 2012 (UTC)


 * That should be discussed at User talk:Citation bot, as it's that bot (and User:Smith609) that takes care of that stuff. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:53, 8 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Ok. I will pop on over there. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 04:31, 8 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Cite book has 378832 transclusions. It may be worthwhile checking for uses of the template with an ISBN but missing other common data, such as title, author, publisher, etc. Without a local copy of the wiki I can't provide an estimate but I'd guess it would be very low. I suspect the template could be modified to detect that kind of situation to make it very easy to find incomplete calls to the template, which a bot could fill in. Josh Parris 04:35, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I have gone off this idea completely. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 19:46, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Checking WP ref fields with external databases
I am looking into ensuring rigour in WP referencing. I would like a bot to do a sample run on references to see how they compare with external sources. It should not be too hard for a bot to pull ISBN, doi, pmid numbers out of cite templates in an article, get the bibliographic metadata from an external database, and then compare it to what has been put in the cite template fields. Initially I am interested in the percentage of perfect matches and getting a spreadsheet of how the rest mismatch. Anyone interested in doing a sample of 1000 refs? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:03, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I've got a mysql table of the ~700k scientific journal references on en-wiki and ~25k pubmed records. There doesn't seem to be a pubmed bulk API though. Rjwilmsi  00:56, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * So getting those records out of the WP database is easy? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 02:13, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I use the enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml database dump, have written a custom database scanner function in AWB that parses citation templates to pull out the common parameters and produces a flat tab-separated file, ~120 MB. I set up a mysql table to match, then load this into mysql using "LOAD DATA INFILE". I collect pubmed data via web calls to the Diberri tool from an AWB custom module. I've now got various sets of SQL queries to identify data problems and inconsistencies. Rjwilmsi  08:10, 10 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Whew! Hang on a sec while my head stops spinning after reading all those techie terms. Ok. So can you make that available to other editors? It is a big file so maybe it can be split into ISBN, doi, pmid sections for ease of downloading and use. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 18:02, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Message to take part in Assessment Drive
WP: India has a massive backlog of over 18,000 unassessed articles. To help significantly bring down the backlog, an Assessment Drive has been planned. Could a bot please message users who are reviewers as well as members of WP:India to request them to volunteer to help clear the backlog? Thanks, Around The Globe  सत्यमेव जयते 06:20, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It may be better to announce this in the next edition of Wikipedia Signpost. – Allen4names 07:17, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * If a message delivery bot were to do this, they'd want the text of the message; have you written one up? Josh Parris 07:41, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Spamming "reviewers" is probably not the best idea. Just because someone was trusted with the ability to review pending changes doesn't mean they want to copyedit or assess articles for some random WikiProject. I'd recommend limiting the message to members of the project. Anomie⚔ 13:16, 29 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree, please limit the message to Members of WikiProject India. Message given below:
 * "Tag & Assess 2012

Each Wikiproject in Wikipedia has many article under its stewardship. Assessment means the addition of a WikiProject template to the talk page of an article, assessing it for quality and importance and adding a few extra parameters to it.

In WikiProject India we have 93,867 articles under it as of date. Of these a stupendous, 18235 17511 articles are completely unassessed, both for class and importance. In addition, another 42,772 articles are unassessed for importance. Accordingly, a Tag & Assess 2012 contest has been proposed to run from 01 March 2012 to 31 May 2012.

You can sign up on the Tag & Assess page itself. There are many awards to be given and scope for everyone to win huge awards. Come & join us in this exciting new venture. You'll learn more about India this way.

& (Drive coordinators)"


 * Is there any thing else that needs doing? AshLin (talk) 20:05, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * If no one else can do it, I can have Legobot do it, but it would have to go through BRFA for it. You may be faster off contacting an operator of any of these bots: Category:Newsletter delivery bots. LegoKontribsTalkM 22:49, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for offering! I didn't understand the term BRFA. What do I need to do? AshLin (talk) 17:49, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thehelpfulbot's 8th BRFA (Bot Request for approval) might cover this - This bot will tag pages as directed by projects from lists that they give me. This will include adding and substituting templates and adding notices to pages (including talk page messages). - WikiProject India would be an appropriate project requesting this. The  Helpful  One  20:03, 3 March 2012 (UTC)


 * A member of the BAG has confirmed that my bot is able to run the task and I have copy edited the message slightly:


 * "WikiProject India Tag & Assess 2012 Contest

Hello friends, we are a number of editors from WikiProject India have got together to assess the many thousands of articles under the stewardship of the project, and we'd love to have you, a fellow member, join us. These articles require assessment, that is, the addition of a WikiProject template to the talk page of an article, assessing it for quality and importance and adding a few extra parameters to it.

As of March 11, 2012, 07:00 UTC, WikiProject India has 95,998 articles under its stewardship. Of these 13,980 articles are completely unassessed (both for class and importance) and another 42,415 articles are unassessed for importance only. Accordingly, a Tag & Assess 2012 drive-cum-contest has begun from March 01, 2012 to last till May 31, 2012.

If you are new to assessment, you can learn the minimum about how to evaluate from Part One of the Assessment Guide. Part Two of the Guide will help you learn to employ the full functionality of the talk page template, should you choose to do so.

You can sign up on the Tag & Assess page. There are a number of awards to be given in recognition of your efforts. Come & join us to take part in this exciting new venture. You'll learn more about India in this way.

& (Drive coordinators)"


 * If you could confirm that the date (February 29, 2012) is correct and the number of articles is also correct, I will be able to run the task. The  Helpful  One  21:20, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Could you also add an introduction so that the message is more welcoming? Perhaps something like "Hi, we are a couple of editors from WikiProject India and would like to recruit you, a fellow member, to help out with a new initiative that we are starting." would be sufficient? The  Helpful  One  21:32, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks, User:Thehelpfulone, those were great suggestions, I have done the needful as requested by you. Anything I need to do, please let me know. AshLin (talk) 06:49, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Nope, I made a couple more fixes but otherwise all done and messages delivered. The  Helpful  One  01:49, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

'''Thank You! From a satisfied customer.''' AshLin (talk) 14:04, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

merging two templates
A few minutes ago I was merging and checking all parameters of Infobox AFL player and merged the last four missing parameters to Infobox AFL biography as noted at Templates_for_discussion/Holding_cell per the outcome at Templates for discussion/Log/2011 April 5. The "only" problem now is to determine the two nonstandardized parameters and. The two parameters should be divided to and (for the coaching related) That is (I believe) not an easy task, but this template is simply too often transcluded (~1900) to do this by hand. mabdul 20:41, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Hatnote renaming
Pursuant to Template talk:Further and Template talk:Further, looking for a bot to replace all invocations of further with further2 (exact same template, it's just being renamed). Any takers? --<b style="color:#3773A5;">Cyber</b> cobra (talk) 05:27, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Further seems to be better name than Further 2. Why don't go the other way? -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:31, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Additionally WP:NOTBROKEN. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:08, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Additionally WP:COSMETICBOT. Basically, Cybercobra, the point is MediaWiki is built to handle template redirects perfectly well so there's no need to have a bot do this. . Cheers! &mdash; <span style="font-family:monospace, monospace;">madman 14:48, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * (ec) Per further discussion at Template_talk:Further2 this will probably have to happen for what people want to be done  ·Add§hore·  <sup style="color:black;">T alk T o M e ! 14:50, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Sure mediawiki can handle redirect perfectly, but if the move from the template see to further is to happen without the changing of all instaces of the current further template to further2 template something would defiantly be broken.  ·Add§hore·  <sup style="color:black;">T alk T o M e ! 14:52, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * This doesn't seem to quite be a WP:NOTBROKEN situation. I've read through the confusing situation a few times, and I think I see what's going on.  Right now, see and further are very similar, they both produce a hatnote in the form of Further information: Stuff.  The only difference between them is that see automatically wikilinks whatever you put in it, whereas further doesn't.


 * So, these template folk are working to standardize the hatnote templates and they'd like to get rid of see altogether, and I agree it's a bit silly to have a template named "see" which produces the text "further information". Also, the rest of the standard hatnote templates automatically link their parameters, like see currently does.  So, the plan is to move see to further (i.e. make further the auto-linking template).  This, of course, would break all of the current transclusions of further, so their plan is to use a bot to change all of them to further2 (i.e. make further2 the non-auto-linking template).  Make sense now?  ;)


 * So, I think this is an appropriate bot task. I could run this task if you like, or if someone else would rather do it that's fine too.  <b style="white-space:nowrap;text-shadow:#000 0em 0em 0.4em,#a00 -0.2em -0.2em 0.4em,#00a 0.2em 0.2em 0.4em;color:#ddd">&mdash;SW&mdash;</b> confer 16:36, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Well they seem to have made up their mind in regards to what they want so one of us may as well put in a brfa for a bit more discussion :)  ·Add§hore·  <sup style="color:black;">T alk T o M e ! 16:45, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * re Add§hore: Aren't you a bit too cynical, given that the Move request already was clear about this, and the only problem left is: explain this to bot people? With you, that problem still exists. And if you react: please note that I happen to pass by here by coincidence, since I did not expect bot handlers to start a redo of a finished template discussion. -DePiep (talk) 21:13, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Can't we just use a parameter like text for custom output and links like the one currently used at further? Why do we even need 2 templates? — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 16:49, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * That seems like a logical suggestion to me, although I'm concerned that we'd just be introducing more non-standard idiosyncrasies into the hatnote templates. Are there any other hatnote templates that use the text parameter (or something similar)?  <b style="white-space:nowrap;text-shadow:#000 0em 0em 0.4em,#0a0 -0.2em -0.2em 0.4em,#0a0 0.2em 0.2em 0.4em;color:#ddd">&mdash;SW&mdash;</b> yak 18:12, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Probably not, since I made that up. Looking at existing list, there are a few that use 2 or 3 at the end for arbitrary text as parameters, like for2, see also2, details3. Not exactly an intuitive method and I suppose I would propose merging them all into their central template. — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 18:19, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Since this will result in fewer hatnotes, I agree. I can rename further -> further2 with Yobot (8,000 edits). -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:21, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I support what has been done so far with hatnotes. It really helped in standardiation. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:27, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Great; thanks Magioladitis! --<b style="color:#3773A5;">Cyber</b> cobra (talk) 21:35, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I am almost done. I am leaving this message to avoid archiving. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:16, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Magioladitis (talk) 21:32, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Automatic addition of
When a user creates an article with tags, but doesn't understand that they need to put reflist in the article, a glaring red message appears on the page directing them to the help page. They probably will figure it out on their own eventually in most cases, but it seems to be a fairly common point of confusion for newbies. It seems like it would make things a whole lot simpler if a bot were simply to add the template where it's needed. Is this plausible?  Swarm   X 16:51, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Something like scanning through the last 50 (?) newly created articles, searching for articles for where there are tags but no reflist?  S ' D ' 5  18:08, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * There's already a couple bots that add missing reflists. — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 18:09, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Really? I wasn't aware.  Swarm   X 18:24, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * User:Thehelpfulbot has been running this task for a while, but on-and-off. Now that I've got a Wikimedia Labs account, it runs hourly on a crontab as you can see at Special:Contributions/Thehelpfulbot. It's using the noreferences.py Pywikipedia python script. The  Helpful  One  00:34, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * If the frequency needs to be increased then I can increase it, but if you look at Special:DeletedContributions/Thehelpfulbot, you can see that it's making edits on pages that are soon deleted, although I don't see this as much of a problem. The  Helpful  One  00:37, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

au.geocities.com dead links
au.geocities is a dead duck, and it would be great if someone could get a bot to go through and appropriately dead link this domain. — billinghurst  sDrewth  03:49, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Linksearch/*.au.geocities.com au.geocities.com]
 * AnomieBOT did this already, for all geocities.com subdomains; all the existing mainspace uses should already be marked with dead link or be used in citation templates along with archiveurl pointing to an archive at the Internet Archive or WebCite. Are there any that aren't? Anomie⚔ 17:29, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free files speedy tagging bot
Hello, everybody, I have come up with a new idea. Why not run a bot which will tag orphaned non-free files? It is really a very hard work to find out orphaned non-free files and delete them (or tag them). Dipankan says.. ( "Edit count do not matter" ) 14:10, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm reasonably sure there's already at least one bot doing so, and I've also seen administrators auto- tagging files with Twinkle.  S ' D ' 5  14:52, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * There is a Python script that does this, checkimages.py, but I don't know if anyone runs it.  Rcsprinter  (gossip)  17:37, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Then you should run it, as there is no one who does that, and it is very hard to find those images. Dipankan says..  ( "Be bold and edit!" ) 06:49, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Help keep Short popular vital articles current?
Dear Bot People,

I recently created Short popular vital articles to help figure out what to work on next, and my preliminary reviews of the first few dozen articles on that list suggest to me that it is likely a very useful resource. However, if it becomes out of date while articles grow, it will become confusing and possibly lose its appeal.

It took more than twelve hours to query the 60-day JSON data from http://stats.grok.se for all of the ~10,000 level 4 Vital articles, so I am considering assuming that article page view popularity will not change much. I think it is also safe to assume that articles will not shrink, or if they do, there is really no pressing need to move them on to the table from the larger list of level 4 vital articles.

However, it would be a great help if a bot could update the table -- perhaps weekly? -- with correct article sizes from the API. If you can help with this, let me remember to say, use the &redirects& API option when querying article size because many of those links are redirects to other spellings and character sets.

Is there anyone willing to take on this low priority maintenance task? If you reply here, please ping me on my talk page so I don't miss replies in my (now 1,068 page larger) watchlist. Thank you very much for any and all your help. Npmay (talk) 23:07, 12 March 2012 (UTC)




 * I am planning on implementing a system of organizing articles in backlog categories by page view (see User:Scottywong/Backlog prioritization), but I'm waiting for a more efficient way of querying large numbers of page views. Gigantic page view database files are available here for download, but they are about 75-100MB for an hour's worth of data (that's 2-3GB per day).  User:Erik Zachte is apparently working on a system which will boil down the hourly stats into a monthly file.  Once he gets that done, I'll continue the work I've been doing, and would be glad to help you with your project as well, which seems like another good use for this type of data.  <b style="white-space:nowrap;text-shadow:#000 0em 0em 0.4em,#5a0 -0.2em -0.2em 0.4em,#5a0 0.2em 0.2em 0.4em;color:#ddd">&mdash;SW&mdash;</b> converse 23:15, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Great! Thank you. Let me know if I need to do anything to help. I have the raw list of 1,068 short popular vital articles, but you can get it from between the and  on the table too. I also have a raw list of the nearly 10,000 level 4 vital articles, but it's dynamic so it would probably be best if a bot were to scrape it weekly or bi-monthly, whatever you decide. Thanks again! Npmay (talk) 23:34, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Rather than querying http://stats.grok.se for all of the ~10,000 level 4 Vital articles, you could query just those that are short, cutting query time down to one hour. Josh Parris 05:09, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Quite true, but I wanted to get a log-log scatter plot and regression before I decided where to draw the line on how small is small. I also used the API to query talk page wikiproject <tt>| *class *= *[bBaAgGfF]</tt> regexp matches to measure the sizes of B-class and better articles and exclude them from the list. Npmay (talk) 06:47, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject Teahouse bot, help wanted
Hi, I'm a host with WikiProject Teahouse, which is a supportive social and help space for new editors. The Teahouse is in pilot phase, and one of the main tasks of this period is reaching new editors to come and use the project. A helpful database report is available which creates a daily list of new but active editors (1 day, >10 edits; 4 days>20 edits). These lists are used for hosts to leave welcome and invitation messages on user talk pages.

The problem is that checking each page to see if there's been an invite previously made significantly slows down efficiency, and with 25 hosts aiming for a minimum of 500 invites per weak, that adds up in time costs. What would be amazing-great-phenomenal, is if someone with bot coding experience could whip up a simple machine to check the talk pages of the users on the database report, search for the word Teahouse, and then update an 'invited' column in the database report at regular intervals. I don't know how much time it would take, but it seems to be on the less complex end of things. Any help would be greatly appreciated by me, as well as the other Teahouse hosts. Or tips on who might be able to make such a thing. Thanks so much for your help and suggestions! Cheers, Ocaasit 13:19, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I pinged the report generator (I think) with some ideas and an offer to help if they can't do this. Npmay (talk) 00:28, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Department of Redundancies Department
I'm hoping this is the right forum for this request, but is there any way to get a bot to fix instances where the word "fellow" is redundant? I notice quite a bit of "fellow teammate" and "fellow bandmate" and this seems to be a fairly pervasive error, and searching for common terms showing fellow-ness reveals as much: These don't account for cases where "fellow" and "co-" or "-mate" are separated, and obviously, the last search yields uses of "fellow" that aren't redundant. But in the very obvious cases, simply deleting the word "fellow" would remove the redundancy. Is it possible to get a bot to do that? --Mosmof (talk) 14:33, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
 * "fellow classmate": 357
 * "fellow class mate": 5
 * "fellow teammate": 424
 * "fellow team mate": 146
 * "fellow band mate": 150
 * "fellow band mate": 65
 * "fellow label mate": 55
 * "fellow labelmate: 45
 * "fellow compatriot": 36
 * "fellow crewmate": 17
 * "fellow crew mate: 4
 * "fellow coworker": 48
 * "fellow co worker": 70
 * all instances of "fellow co-": 199
 * all instances of "fellow" and "mate" in the same article: 15, 688
 * I've made an addition to WP:AWB/Typos so humans using AWB can clean these up. GoingBatty (talk) 01:50, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

linking
I would like a bot to add templates to the See also sections of all articles which have  banners where   or   or. Thanks, – Lionel (talk) 10:20, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * No bot is needed, I can do that easily with AWB. I will have to wait until tomorrow to start, but do you have any idea of the scale of how many pages I might need to do? Thanks,  Rcsprinter  (articulate)  22:10, 12 February 2012 (UTC)
 * That's great! And thanks! Let me get the count and I'll contact you on your talk. I'll also double-check the proposed articles. Give me a day or so. – Lionel (talk) 23:05, 12 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Any updates?  Rcsprinter  (warn)  11:27, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * And ✅.  Rcsprinter  (Gimme a message)  16:35, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Container categories
Would it be possible for someone to create a bot that periodically goes through the sub-categories Category:Container categories, and tags categories, that doesn't only contain categories, with Category diffuse? Armbrust, B.Ed. <sup style="color:#E3A857;">Let's talk <sub style="color:#008000;">about my edits? 02:48, 17 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I am not too keen on that idea. Category diffuse is an ugly, distracting, intrusive template, but more importantly not all of the sub-cats in Category:Container categories are labelled correctly. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 08:03, 17 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Than, what about listing such categories and someone can through them manually, and decide whether to mark them with Category diffuse or remove Container category. Armbrust, B.Ed. <sup style="color:#E3A857;">Let's talk <sub style="color:#008000;">about my edits? 11:05, 17 March 2012 (UTC)


 * There is 2,698 in the category. I am crazy enough with having to check all those manually!! -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 05:33, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Bot needed to make a list
✅

Needed: A bot to make a list of articles on Category:Minor Planets that look like this one, 25001 Pacheco, in the following ways. Here, “exactly like 25001 Pacheco” means that articles consist of: Basically, we need a bot to make a list of all these articles that are just like this example: 25001 Pacheco. We need this list in order to move on to the next step very carefully. Later, more bots may be needed, but we're taking this one careful doable step at a time. Chrisrus (talk) 06:07, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
 * 1) No more than the following text: "(Article title) is a main belt asteroid discovered on (date) by (name(s)) at (place)." No more text than that.  It might have less.  For example, it might not include the date, name, or place, but it no more.
 * 2) The only section break will be “External links”.
 * 3) The only external link is “*http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov.....JPL Small-Body Database…...”
 * 4) It will also include this Template:Infobox planet, a planet infobox template.
 * 5) Next, it will have an empty reflist.
 * 6) There will probably be more, but nothing that would establish notablity and therefore matters. There may be a minor planets navigator and a minor planets footer; a “DEFAULTSORT”; several categories such as "Main Belt astroids", "Discoveries by (name)", and “Astronomical objects discovered in (Year); a "beltasteroid-stub" designation; and maybe a number of links to other language wikipedia articles, the same name in different alphabets.  None of this matters, again, as these things to not establish notablity.
 * Looking at this. Anomie⚔ 19:16, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Ok. I expanded the request slightly to include pages with "an inner-belt asteroid", "an outer-belt asteroid", "a main-belt asteroid", "a Jupiter Trojan", and so on, to include "Its provisional designation was whatever.", and also considered any other empty sections to be unindicative of notability. The final list is at User:Anomie/Asteroid list.
 * Many of the remaining articles just contain an additional sentence along the lines of "It was named after Joe Bloggs", which may or may not barely scrape the bottom of the "notability" barrel for some few of them. Or further variations of the text, e.g. "(Article title) is an asteroid. It was discovered on (date). It was discovered by (name) at (place).". I've placed a second list at User:Anomie/Asteroid list 2 of all the number-named asteroids sorted by the size of the wikitext after the templates and some of the other junk are removed. Anomie⚔ 00:18, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Excellent. I hope that didn't take too much time out of your day.  I'll start a new section to discuss the next step, but first: thank you for all your efforts thus far. I will now start a new section about the following step, below. 03:59, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Do you have a datasource to pull the information about minor planets? — Ganeshk  ( talk ) 19:26, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Right now, we're not looking for information about the minor planets from off Wikipedia. We are just looking for a reliable list of articles that for sure don't have enough information to establish notablity within them as they stand, and therefore cannot meet WP:NASTRO.  Chrisrus (talk) 20:01, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Got it. — Ganeshk  ( talk ) 20:05, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Bot needed to tag the list
Needed: A bot to tag each article on User:Anomie/Asteroid list thusly" ". Chrisrus (talk) 03:59, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I was going to file a BRFA for this, but it looks like User:Avicennasis has already started this. Since this is a dated template, it would be better to add  .  GoingBatty (talk) 21:50, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Thought I had replied here, but I guess I just previewed and never saved. <sup style="color:red;">Avic <sub style="color:blue;">ennasis  @ 02:22, 13 Shevat 5772 / 02:22, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
 * ✅ <sup style="color:red;">Avic <sub style="color:blue;">ennasis @ 03:56, 15 Shevat 5772 / 03:56, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
 * You guys are awesome! My sincerest gratitude, and, if I may, please accept from me sincere gratitude on behalf of the Wikipedian standard of Notablity. Chrisrus (talk) 01:46, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Bot needed to perform "good faith effort to establish notablity"
Needed: A bot to automate the "good faith effort to establish notablity" referred to in WP:NASTRO. For example, if I copy and paste into the Google Scholar search box, in quotes, the name of the first article on User:Anomie/Asteroid list, (196297) 2003 FA, it returns "no hits" from any of the WP:RSes that it searches. Not one. It is my hope that this will fulfill NASTRO's "good faith effort", but we may need to find the proper database that Ganeshk seemed to be referring to above. If not, it's at least a good start. At this point, however, my question to you is this: Is it possible, practicable, very difficult, or problematic to create a bot that will find out which if any of these do not return exactly zero results on a Google Scholar search? Chrisrus (talk) 03:59, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Looking into this. Tim  1357  <sup style="font-family:Times new roman; font-size:small;">talk  02:08, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmm. At this point google scholar does not have an API (that I can find). Using screen scraping would probably be a violation of their TOS.  Tim  1357  <sup style="font-family:Times new roman; font-size:small;">talk  02:18, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Google also autodetects bots and offers them a simple turing test. I get this occassionally even when doing things manually. Stuartyeates (talk) 02:59, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry. Instead of Google Scholar, I noticed that NASTRO recommends the SAO/Harvard abstract service of the Astrophysics Data System and the SIMBAD database's "display -> reference summary" in the "reference" section. Hopefully, that will be easier than Google Scholar.  Actually, please have a look at that section of WP:NASTRO, which is a new document and so untried in the case of so many articles, so it may turn out that they while a good idea you may find don't turn out to be reasonable or doable or some such and still could be tweeked or an exemption could be requested.  It depend on what happens when you go to implement them for this a list of more than six thousand articles to be checked and redirected to the List of minor planets chart, so please let us know if it's just not doable or reasonable or whatever the case may be.  Chrisrus (talk) 03:26, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Don't be sorry :), I like doing this stuff. The Harvard and Simbad databases look good. What do you want me to do when the queries return data? For example: 1173 Anchises returns 5 results with the Harvard database. What should the bot do with this data? Just plop it in the Source section? Tim 1357  <sup style="font-family:Times new roman; font-size:small;">talk  02:29, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * That's a good idea, but to answer your question, it should remove them from the list most importantly. Because in the end, what we want is a list of these articles which not only contain no sign of notablity but also which we tried but could not find any sign of notablity to put in them.  In the end, we'll have a list of articles to convert into redirects to the chart called List of minor planets.  Ones like 1173 Anchises you discover have some chance of notablity, so putting the hits you find into such articles or their discussion pages or something would help a person who wants to bring them up to WP:NASTRO, so it's nice as a secondary goal.  We could call them "possibly notable" asteroids or some such, and set them aside to work on later.  We could give that list to the astronomy project or some place later for them to work on.  But the important thing at this point is to separate out the ones that have some sign of notablity from the list of ones with no sign at all.  Chrisrus (talk) 22:28, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Well if that's all you want, I could bang out a script in 30 minutes. I'll post back. Tim  1357  <sup style="font-family:Times new roman; font-size:small;">talk  02:16, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Ok, its all written. I'm going to have it spit out a sortable wiki table of how many results the Harvard Database has for each asteroid. It should take about 5 hours, so I'll let it run while I'm sleeping. Tim  1357  <sup style="font-family:Times new roman; font-size:small;">talk  03:17, 16 February 2012 (UTC)


 * On second thought, I'll wait for you to reply. Below is a sample of what I was planning for the output. Do you want anything tweaked or added before I run it? By the way, I couldn't figure out how to use the Sinbad database, so as of now, the script does not check it. If you can give me some instruction on how to use it, I'd gladly include it in the script.  Tim  1357  <sup style="font-family:Times new roman; font-size:small;">talk  04:39, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Hey, that's fantastic. Will will be able to separate out make a list of "zero"s? The ones with zero results are the easiest ones to move ahead, to the "convert to List of minor planets chart redirects" step. I guess that won't be necessary if the bot only moves the zeros, but I had been looking forward to getting my hands on the list of zeros.

About the other website, there are some tips and places to go for questions discussed here at WP:NASTRO, but no I'm sorry I don't know how to use it. Chrisrus (talk) 05:07, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

OpenOffice.org Calc to MediaWiki
How can I import an OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet to use in a Wikipedia table? Is there a bot? Allen (talk) 02:19, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * No, there's no bot; it should be uploaded by you as you're the contributor and the table should be attributed to you. Apparently in OpenOffice you can export to wikitext by selecting File | Export, selecting MediaWiki (.txt) as the File type, and clicking Save. Does this work? (I don't have an installation of OpenOffice at hand.) &mdash; <span style="font-family:monospace, monospace;">madman 15:24, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I tried it, but the only file format was .pdf. There weren't any other options. Do you know what else I can do? I want to keep as much formatting as possible. Allen (talk) 20:10, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * In fact User:DrTrigonBot should be able to process 'ods' file format... anyway you will not be able to preserve formatting - you just get the cell data/content... --DrTrigon (talk) 14:38, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Migrate articles from Infobox Indian jurisdiction to Infobox settlement
Would be grateful if a bot could replace all calls to Infobox Indian jurisdiction with ones to Infobox settlement, as the former was deleted at TFD and is deprecated and outdated. Saravask 22:20, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * There are [17779 transclusions] Infobox Indian jurisdiction
 * Templates for discussion/Log/2011 June 6 is the pertinent discussion; there may be some complexity associated with conversion. Implementer is encouraged to research.  Josh Parris 12:38, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Best to make the deprecated template a wrapper for the other; check for issues, and once all is OK, run a bot to subst the former. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:30, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Deleted image link removal
I recall a bot removing links to dead images. Is it still around or has it rusted up? Category:Pages with missing files has got a backlog of 30,000 odd pages. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 05:37, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Pywikipedia ships with a script called "delinker.py" that does just that. Tim  1357  <sup style="font-family:Times new roman; font-size:small;">talk  21:20, 18 March 2012 (UTC)


 * So does that mean any of the bots clattering round here can be sent of to tidy up the contents of Category:Pages with missing files? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 00:07, 19 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, Category:Articles with missing files would be better but yes it does. I volunteer.  Rcsprinter  (Gimme a message)  18:45, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Notification of deletion discussions on commons, for images originally uploaded on en.wiki
(Reviving an old request that was never coded...) When uploaders' images are moved to the commons, they likely won't be aware of deletion discussions so they can address fixable issues like lack of sourcing. Sometimes deletion nominators on commons make notifications to uploaders on en.wiki, but this is generally rare. (There are bots that leave messages at article talk pages for in-use images, but this doesn't necessarily accomplish the same thing. For example, the original uploader might know the source of an image that is difficult to determine by later passers-by.)  A bot should be able to detect the original uploaders at least for images moved to commons using the standard CommonsHelper format. Notifications of the uploaders on en.wiki would be very useful to avoid unnecessary image deletions at commons. Calliopejen1 (talk) 20:44, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Remove article categories from User pages
Would it be possible for someone to create a bot that would replace article categories from user pages with links to the categories per WP:USERNOCAT? (e.g. this edit, which just added colons) Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 15:47, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * That seems like it can be done pretty easily with AWB. I'll have a go with my main account then see if we need a bot. Good idea, though.  Rcsprinter  (state)  16:53, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree that the removal is easy - it's the identifying which user pages have category links that should be removed is what's stumping me. GoingBatty (talk) 17:05, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It was actually quite easy.  Rcsprinter   (talk to me)  17:43, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I Just did 75 using AWB quite quickly (see on link above). I think a bot seems feasible.  Rcsprinter  (chatter)  18:26, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Looks great! Care to share how you identified the user pages?  GoingBatty (talk) 22:04, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

I wish it was some code I'd written, so then I could argue it doesn't have to be open-source, but seeing as it's AWB I'll tell you. It seems rather obvious really; get a category in the make list box, like Category:Living people, filter it to userpages and then set off with the find and replace. I did that and then went through things like births and deaths through year categories, and racked up nearly 200 edits just with this trial. No, it's easy and would be much quicker with a bot too. You want to file the BRFA or shall I?  Rcsprinter  (shout)  22:11, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * That way is OK, and I'll file the BRFA. I was trying to think of a way to search all user pages for ", Category:Wikipedia bots, etc.  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 22:54, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * GoingBatty (talk) 23:07, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Database reports/Polluted categories looks relevant. It's made by BernsteinBot and currently limited to 250 pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:02, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
 * That's great - thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:15, 17 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Yeah, that's great. I am going batty going crazy removing user namespace pages out of article pages. I has been a longstanding problem that I tried to get sorted some time ago. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 07:56, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Looks nice. Bot trial has gone well and I think I'll take the task too. We'll share the responsibility between two bots.  Rcsprinter  (gas)  15:10, 19 March 2012 (UTC)
 * - Sounds good to me. I'll finish off Category:Living people and then work through the rest of the polluted categories that are not created by a template until I hear from you.  GoingBatty (talk) 03:32, 20 March 2012 (UTC)
 * for now with all the polluted categories not created by a template. GoingBatty (talk) 04:28, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Bots needed on the commons
Seems to me the Commons is in need of bots to do batch uploads of images. There's quite a backlog, should anyone here care to get involved. See also Commons:Bots. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:59, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Dead link dansdata.com
It would be worthwhile someone deadlinking Special:LinkSearch/*.dansdata.com. It seems to be gone, though someone may want to leave it a few extra days before initiating. — billinghurst  sDrewth  04:24, 21 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Works for me. I'd be shocked if Dan allowed that url to die. Josh Parris 12:49, 21 March 2012 (UTC)