Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 52

Move Wikivoyage links to sister project links?
Is it possible to automatically remove the  templates in the external links sections of (all?) articles on geographical objects and instead switch the option   (or so) on in the box with the sister projects links, now that Wikivoyage is officially a sister project? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:49, 16 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Something like [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=United_Kingdom&diff=533565230&oldid=533527823 this]? I think it is a great idea, and I might try making a bot for this. The Anonymouse (talk &#124; contribs) 18:51, 17 January 2013 (UTC)


 * ✅ I've already coded the bot, and I will file a BRFA shortly. I'm excited since this is my first bot. The Anonymouse (talk &#124; contribs) 20:24, 18 January 2013 (UTC)


 * – WP:Bots/Requests for approval/The Anonybot (I almost forgot to post here). The Anonymouse (talk &#124; contribs) 22:16, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

about Yokohama Flügels
Please change Category:Yokohama Flugels players to Category:Yokohama Flügels players like this. This football club exact name was Yokohama Flügels, not Yokohama Flugels. Thanks. --Japan Football (talk) 14:16, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * ✅ This task has already been done using AWB by Thine Antique Pen. The Anonymouse (talk &#124; contribs) 22:19, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Removal of red linked images
(Now added since concerns are raised. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:06, 20 January 2013 (UTC))

I am trying to clear the backlog at Category:Articles with missing files but it is proving to be difficult and it is mind-numbing and there are better things to do. New pages are continually coming in and I suspect that those who monitor recent changes are not picking up the problematic edits because images do not show on page diffs. There are some image link edits that can be reverted by a bot:


 * edits of the form  can be summarily deleted. I think there is a bot that does it but it may be a bit slow off the mark or it needs to be run manually?


 * file links that contain  can also be immediately deleted. These are added by newbies who think they can link to the filepath in their local machine.
 * file links that have no extension, i.e. , is another one for deletion (less common).
 * file links that are preceded by  should be changed to link directly to the Commons image (even less common)
 * red linked files added by anons and new accounts can be immediately deleted since they will not be able to upload a file. Red linked files added by other editors may be added by that editor at a later stage. For these I think it is best to give a 24-48hr grace period before removal and notification. When working on Category:Articles with missing files I am sometimes a bit quick off the mark in removing good faith red image link edits to the annoyance of editors. (BTW, I see no reason for red linked images to hang around for more than an hour or two.) File links that are changed from a valid file to a red linked file should be treated in the same manner as new the file links that are added.

In all cases the bot should add a talk page message explaining the reason for the link deletion (similar to the one left by User:DPL bot). The bot should only work on edits which are solely the addition of a file link. If an edit is the addition of a red linked file AND other stuff a talk page message should be left and no change made to the article.

I have seen bots do some clever things so I think what I am suggesting is possible. Another way is to activate pending changes/flagged revisions but that is another story for another place. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 21:02, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Here are some examples:, , ,. There are more in my edit history. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 21:36, 15 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Regarding the first bullet point, links to File:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/... may presumably be fixed? Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:09, 15 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Yep, yep. Of course. As pointed out in the third bullet point. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 23:11, 15 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The first and second cases are handled by ImageRemovalBot. It does a sweep for them every week, removing about 25 images each time. --Carnildo (talk) 00:39, 16 January 2013 (UTC)


 * It is the fifth case, where redlinked images are added, that is by far the most common scenario. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 04:10, 16 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The fifth case is also the hardest to handle. There's no easy way to tell who added an image to a page or when -- you need to go through the history version-by-version to see when it first appeared (an image that's been added and removed a few times will break a binary search), and that's even assuming it was added directly.  If the image was added indirectly via a template (or worse, something like the old Infobox bilateral relations), it never shows up in the wikitext. --Carnildo (talk) 09:00, 16 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Thinking about it further, if the notification requirements are removed and you don't mind it being a 48-hour grace period for everyone, I could code up a bot to handle it. It would be easier if there was a Category:Missing files used in articles that listed the missing files directly; as-is, the bot will need to inspect each article to figure out which files are missing. --Carnildo (talk) 13:13, 16 January 2013 (UTC)


 * There are some redlinked files listed at Database reports/Articles containing red-linked files but it is only generated monthly. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 07:08, 17 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I was envisaging a bot that is monitoring recent changes (a bit like Cluebot?) so that it catches all of the new occurrences of redlinked files. The backlog can be done manually. At the current rate that I am going it will take another year to clear the backlog! Anyway, I thought a bot could think a bit like this:
 * Is that possible? As for the grace period, I am inclined not to have it at all. There is no reason to have redlinked files on WP, or at least not for more than a hour or two. I don't know what the community at large would feel about this plan. Should we do an RfC or is a BRFA ok? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 07:08, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Near-immediate reversion is the worst idea of all. It may be "logical", but it ignores how human beings work - it's a great way to discourage much-needed newbies. Reversion after at least 2 hours is not as bad, but best of all would be a modification to MediaWiki to make it impossible to link to non-existent images in the first place. I can see the logic of accepting red links to missing Wiki articles, but I can't envisage many cases where you'd want to accept red links to non-existent images. By the same token, perhaps MW could be changed to automatically strip out http://commons URLs? Le Deluge (talk) 16:33, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Near-immediate reversion is the worst idea of all. It may be "logical", but it ignores how human beings work - it's a great way to discourage much-needed newbies. Reversion after at least 2 hours is not as bad, but best of all would be a modification to MediaWiki to make it impossible to link to non-existent images in the first place. I can see the logic of accepting red links to missing Wiki articles, but I can't envisage many cases where you'd want to accept red links to non-existent images. By the same token, perhaps MW could be changed to automatically strip out http://commons URLs? Le Deluge (talk) 16:33, 17 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't see how it would discourage newbies if an explanatory msg is left on their talk page. Given that a lot of redlinked images are added by IP editors and new users this could actually be a tool to attract new editors because they cannot upload images to WP anyway. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:06, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I will reiterate: there is no need for redlinked images at all on Wikipedia. They can be uploaded prior to adding them to an article, and if the upload wizard is used the redlinked image name is not used (so of no use in being added to a page). The only case were having a redlink is of use is when it goes directly to the file edit page (and I think this is not often the case). Even as a editor with a number of rights I am by default sent to the file upload page. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:06, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Near immediate reversion is done with some other types of edits. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 23:06, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm going to be impartial to the argument here, but I wanted to say that I'm not entirely sure an RfC template is warranted here. It isn't a widespread enough issue for having people from all over the place dropping in. You left your message at the bot requests page, therefore only people relating to bots really should answer. If you want an Rfc, ideally hold it somewhere else, Alan.  Rcsprinter  (articulate)  @ 22:28, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I've commented out the RfC template for now. The bot requests page should be used as a place for a request to be placed, and not for consensus to be determined on. I recommend you open up a formal RfC on the proper WP:Requests for comment/ subpage. Thanks, Legoktm (talk) 22:31, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I started the thread here since it is a bot issue but there are wider implications and wider concerns, as indicated by the comments from Le Deluge. As indicated earlier I am unsure if a BRFA means that an RfC is unnecessary. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:35, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I have now uncommented it because it seems that it is "legitimate". -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 04:35, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Domains changes WARFARE.RU <> WARFARE.BE
Please change domain name WARFARE.RU in all links to WARFARE.BE. WARFARE.RU was censored and moved to new domain WARFARE.BE. Old domain and links are not working. Actually it should be done across all Wiki languages - there are thousands of pages. Thanks. --188.191.19.243 (talk) 10:22, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * - Filed BRFA at Bots/Requests for approval/RileyBot - -- Cheers, Ri l ey    11:37, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Does it take long time to complete changes? Please advice. Thanks.--188.191.19.243 (talk) 19:15, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Once the bot is Approved it could take a matter of hours, maybe a day.  ·Add§hore·  T alk T o M e ! 19:16, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * ✅ -- Cheers, Ri l ey    04:56, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you!--188.191.19.243 (talk) 06:57, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Tidying up infoboxes
Sometimes infoboxes are added with the piping (vertical bar) added at the end of a line rather than at the start. It is a pain to fix and I am wondering if a bot is able to do it. As an example here is the Berekum Arsenal article infobox:

To me it seems simple enough for a bot to fix. It would simply be a matter of detecting the pipe followed by a CR (or LF?) and transposing the two. It is not a big issue but it makes it easier to update infoboxes, especially for newbies. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:24, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * This is something that should be done as a general fix, so it might be worth seeing if it can be integrated into AWB. Legoktm (talk) 22:29, 20 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Or some of the cleanup bots? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:31, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * This task may be something I could attempt to code into ContinuityBot given the (seeming) simplicity of the task. Piandcompany (talk) 03:58, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Perhaps not as easy as checking for a pipe at the end of the line - there may be some trailing blanks (or worse, other non-visible characters). Is there any reccommation regarding the spacing around the pipe at the beginning of the line? If so, could the bot enforce that?  For example, a lot of the templates I see have blanks on either side of the pipe: " ".  Finally, I notice in the example, there are some lines in the template with more than one parameter, like .  Could the bot fix these at the same time and put one parameter on its own line. Nothing like good old scope creep, eh?  Regards, Illia Connell (talk) 04:34, 23 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Good points, but since it in not a big issue the scope should be narrowly defined. If there are characters other than a space after the pipe then the edit for that line should not proceed. In the example above, even with the likes of  (which are groups for good reason) a bot could still make it a cleaner layout.-- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 19:13, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * My thought would be something simple like:

Werieth (talk) 19:32, 23 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Yep, but the last pipe (which is redundant) can be moved or removed. 19:46, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

User:OKBot is inactive
Just checked the article Wikiquote, and it looks like the last update for the Alexa rank by User:OKBot was on 2 August 2012. This bot is listed as active; however, the last updates for any articles were on 9 September 2012. Other editors have tried to contact the bot owner on 11 December 2012, but the request was archived without a response from the owner. This bot would be very good, if it was working. Maybe someone else can take over the bot? --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:19, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I am interested in taking over this task Bots/Requests for approval/OKBot 5. Filing BRFA. -- Cheers, Ri l ey    13:26, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * here -- Cheers, Ri l ey    13:56, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Article tagging/Detagging
In September I got tired of fighting a losing battle and stopped supporting WikiProject United States. Since then the project has basically gone inactive and so have many of the supported ones as well. As such some projects want to break back out on their own again (So far WikiProject Kansas and Suny but more will come). What is needed now is a bot operator who can help convert the banner from the WPUS format into the individual project. It should be a fairly simple task but doing it by bot would be best and quicker than doing them all manually. Any takers?Kumioko (talk) 01:47, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * . You should propose this idea first on WP:VPR or such, since removing WikiProject tags is probably going to be controversial... Legoktm (talk) 01:52, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Believe me there is nothing less controversial than removing these tags. 99% of the community has hated WPUS since I restarted it. All this is really doing anyway is converting the KS=Yes and KS-importance=whatever into the Kansas banner (as one example). For what its worth I have done as much as I am prepared to do. I have no intention of turning this into a long discussion yet again so everyone can tell me how horribly I did with the project, etc. Kumioko (talk) 01:56, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Oops I totally misread what you wrote. So if I understand you correctly, this would be copying parameters from the existing WPUS template, and adding a new one? That seems entirely uncontroversial ;-) Legoktm (talk) 01:59, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Yep that's pretty much it. Although I don't see a huge need to keep the WPUS banner if KS is the only supported project parameter. I should clarify that discussions are still ongoing but I expect it to be supported qucikly. There's no reason to keep these project in WPUS if they want to exist now that WPUS is dead. Kumioko (talk) 02:02, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah ok. Whenever that discussion finishes, feel free to poke me on my talk page and I can do the tagging. :) Legoktm (talk) 02:29, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok thanks. BTW when are you going to submit an RFA? I'm sure you would pass easily. Kumioko (talk) 02:33, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Text after reflinks
Sorry, can pywikipediabot automatically add templates or other text after reflinks on certain sites? For example:,. Thanks.--Ворота рая Импресариата (talk) 11:05, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I believe add_text.py can do something close to what you're looking for. Legoktm (talk) 14:14, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I tried to use this script, but it adds the text to the top or the end of a page, but not after reflinks on the website. Thanks.--Ворота рая Импресариата (talk) 14:28, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Same vein, try replace.py Werieth (talk) 19:30, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Using the spamremove.py it seems I can do what I need. Thank you all.--Ворота рая Импресариата (talk) 16:37, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Fix Multi-column references
There are quite a few articles where there are just a few references, yet because of copy/pasting reference sections (headers/templates) they use the multi column format which just looks really bad. An idea would be for a bot to go through and convert the multi-column's to the basic for all articles with say less than 10 unique references. Werieth (talk) 14:41, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * examples  Werieth (talk) 14:45, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * This is a fair suggestion if the majority of refs are long, as in your examples, since it looks messy when a long ref is forced to be wrapped onto several lines purely because the column width has been hit. However, some articles use the system, where most (if not all) of the refs don't wrap even with narrow columns, for example Abingdon Road Halt railway station where the column width is set to 20em - this gives four cols on my monitor, and no wrapping. If the multi-column feature were disabled for this article, the refs section would be four times the present height, and three-quarters of the page width would be blank. -- Red rose64 (talk) 16:14, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * That is a fringe case. I just compared it with and without the multi column. With that few references the single column makes it more readable, while consuming a little more space. As it is I almost missed that section as it was so small. Werieth (talk) 16:19, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Wed address by domain name
Please substitute "http://198.62.75.1/" with "http://www.christusrex.org/". Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 21:46, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
 * It appears that either link takes the user to the same content. Could you please explain why this would be beneficial?  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 14:55, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
 * If something happens and the server hosting the site gets a new IP address all the links will break, using a domain name prevents such breakage. Werieth (talk) 15:05, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
 * That is. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 22:09, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
 * - There only seem to be 78 articles to fix. GoingBatty (talk) 01:28, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅ --GoingBatty (talk) 02:36, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Could you do the same for http://198.62.75.4/ and http://198.62.75.5/ ? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 22:26, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't see any links to http://198.62.75.4/ or http://198.62.75.5/ on the English Wikipedia. GoingBatty (talk) 17:39, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Already ✅. Noom   (t)  19:57, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Could you do the same for the other Wikipedia? (de:, nl:, da: ...) Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 21:21, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * manually, since there aren't that many. GoingBatty (talk) 00:30, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅ with all the other Wikipedia articles/files that came up in a Google search. GoingBatty (talk) 01:17, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Bare URL/expand ref bot
Browsing and I notice a lot of bare urls which look scruffy and make it looks as if the article is lacking TLC (which it more often than not is but that's not the point!). I was wondering if somebody could code a bot to a] search all wikipedia entries for references with bare urls. b] To apply Template:Bare URLs to them, and then to format the ref in citation templates. Same goes for references which only name title not publisher and date of publication data and apply Template:Expand ref and do the same thing. I think it could prove very valuable for improving format and consistency on wikipedia.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld  23:11, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Other than title getting information from a bare URL reference is extremely difficult. Werieth (talk) 23:17, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * If the bot was able to add/expand a citation template, it wouldn't need to add the maintenance template. Try using the Reflinks tool on articles that already have Template:Bare URLs and you'll see lots of parameters are created incorrectly.  There's also the issue of what date format(s) to use for the citation template parameters.
 * If the bot was only going to add Cleanup-link rot ( Bare URLs redirects to Cleanup-link rot ) so humans can add the citation templates, be sure it does so in the References section instead of the top of the article. GoingBatty (talk) 01:09, 26 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I would strongly urge you to add WP:REFLINKS and hit the "reflinks" button every time you see bare urls (it installs a link in the toolbox). I never leave home without my Reflinks! I have had it add up to 17 filled in references. It does a few tidy up tweaks at the same time.-- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 04:28, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I already have a bot task to expand bare URLs of the most common news sources, designed for high accuracy of parameter derivation on a specific set of sites. Reflinks covers the general case with less precision. Rjwilmsi  07:15, 27 January 2013 (UTC)


 * As far as I can see the problem with REFLINKS is that it uses ISO date formats rather than the prevailing format used in the article and you have to manually change them or just ignore thus leaving article inconsistent. Keith D (talk) 17:32, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * There are several problems with WP:REFLINKS. It can't properly distinguish an author from a date for a start, and there are other issues, see User talk:Dispenser/Reflinks. -- Red rose64 (talk) 17:41, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * It also puts some newspaper/magazine titles in publisher instead of work. Rjwilmsi's CiteCompletion bot is carefully setup to correctly handle a small number of sites.  Because of the wide variations in web site setups, I agree that this is the appropriate approach for automated edits.  The maintainers of Reflinks don't seem to be doing this, so it requires human review and correction before saving each edit.  GoingBatty (talk) 19:18, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Infobox football biography image param needs updating
Could anyone help in cleaning Category:Infobox football biography image param needs updating? -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:07, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Magioladitis! I looked at a couple articles in that category, and it appears that the infobox displays the image correctly even with the extra brackets in the image parameter.  What needs to be fixed to improve how the article is displayed to the reader?  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 01:39, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * For standardisation purposes. The image's caption should move to caption, the alt text to alt, the image size to image_size and the filename to be be striped out. All other persons infoboxes use this system. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:31, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Remove fulfilled dn requests
See edits 1, 2, and 3 to Pelusium — in November 2011 someone tagged a link as needing disambiguation; someone fixed it within hours; and I removed it a few minutes ago, more than a year after the issue was fixed. Do we have a bot that's supposed to go around and remove these tags when the link has been fixed? I doubt that such a bot would have difficulties; while most inline templates are context-based, like cn or who, every link either goes to a disambiguation page or doesn't. I suspect that a bot would easily be able to go everywhere that this template exists, check the link in the text before each transclusion, and remove the template from pages where this link doesn't go to a disambiguation page. Nyttend (talk) 04:09, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Handbook of Texas Online
I'm putting this back out here on this page. Rich Farmborough thought he could take care of it. Rich thought it was only about 120 articles involved, but it's literally thousands. The Texas Project has about 30,000 articles with the project banner. No way to know how many other Texas articles are there without the project banner. Countless numbers of those use the Handbook of Texas template in references. It is not unusual for an article to use that template multiple times in one article. .Too much to do manually, and Rich could not get permission to run a bot. Now Rich has been blocked (unrelated to this) from editing for two months. — Maile (talk) 00:31, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Per Talk page conversation Magioladitis. We need a bot.to correct coding on existing articles that contain the Template:Handbook of Texas. The handbook changed its URLs. User Magioladitis has changed the template so it works with all new uses. But we need to run a bot to correct how existing templates were coded in the template section "id="


 * Mason County is one example. You can see "id=MM/hcm4". The new handbook URL has eliminated the double alpha "MM" and its forward slash, and inserted a zero to the left of the number 4. Handbook-Mason County


 * However, the addition of the zero seems to apply only where there previously existed a single digit. Guadalupe County is an example. The digit in this one is 12, and the Handbook-Guadalupe did not add a zero, but eliminated the double alpha and the forward slash to the right of it

Therefore, we need a bot that makes these changes to the coding on "id=":
 * 1) Remove the double alpha coding and the forward slash to the right of it
 * 2) Add the extra zero to the left of any single digit coding
 * So it would be like this for the Mason County example:
 * Old coding "id=MM/hcm4"
 * New coding "id=hcm04"
 * Where there already exists double digits as in Rufus Hardy, it would be this:
 * Old coding "id=HH/fha69"
 * New coding "id=fha69"

There are possibly hundreds or thousands of Texas articles affected. Please let me know if you need additional explanation.— Maile (talk) 15:16, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
 * There are about 120 articles affected at first blush. I will attend to these over the next few days if I can. Rich Farmbrough, 21:30, 24 December 2012 (UTC).


 * Note - There are thousands of articles involved. — Maile  (talk) 00:31, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * How can there be thousands of articles involved, when there are only 1,619 articles] using Handbook of Texas? GoingBatty (talk) 05:08, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok, then there are 1,619 articles. It's also not the 120 Rich originally thought. And some of those articles used the template in multiple places pointing to different pages in the Handbook of Texas (or...is that included in Jarry's count?). I was unaware of Jarry1250's Toolserver tools, but I'm saving the link for future use.  It's still a bit much to do manually. Please see note below from a user who seems to have come up with a secondary issue on the Handbook of Texas references.  — Maile  (talk) 15:53, 23 January 2013 (UTC)


 * It seems that the fix also has to remove the ".html" from the link as well . Compare the following:
 * http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/CC/fcr24.html (Current link from Davy Crockett) (this did not use the Handbook of Texas template - it was a regularly formatted citation, either a cite template or otherwise) — Maile (talk) 16:35, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fcr24.html (Suggested fix) (Handbook of Texas template does not point to html) — Maile (talk) 16:35, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fcr24 (Actual page)
 * Regards, Illia Connell (talk) 05:29, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The "html" is not a part of the above-mentioned Handbook of Texas template. At least, those I see with the Handbook of Texas template do not point to a "html". What you cite above in the article was inserted as a regular reference (cite template or otherwise). There is also a reference in the article that used the Handbook of Texas template for the same reference - and that one does not point to html. Davy Crockett probably needs to be cleaned up for duplicate references. However, you have brought up a good point.  I don't know if this can be added to the same bot, or it requires a second bot.  But where a non-Handbook of Texas template reference points to the Handbook of Texas as an html, it  needs to be corrected.— Maile  (talk) 15:57, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Ah, got it. Thanks for the clarification.  Regards, Illia Connell (talk) 19:43, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * here. GoingBatty (talk) 05:10, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Hope it gets approved. — Maile  (talk) 13:51, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * . GoingBatty (talk) 19:19, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅. GoingBatty (talk) 03:49, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much for all your help on this. — Maile (talk) 23:25, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Dead link archive bot?
Is there a Bot that can find dead links and automatically find an archived link for them?--  Astros 4477  ( Talk ) 04:27, 26 January 2013 (UTC)


 * There (used to be?) several: User:WebCiteBOT automatically archived reference links at WebCite and added the link to the archive to the citation in the article. However, that bot seems to have stopped operations in March 2012. User:DASHBot also includes two functions to retrieve the url of an archive copy at Internet Archive (see User:DASHBot/Wayback) or WebCite (see User:DASHBot/WebCite). It also automatically archived links at WebCite (see User:DASHBot/WebCite). According to User:DASHBot/WebCiteLogs the WebCite archiving functionality doesn't seem to have been working lately. I don't know about the Wayback functionality.


 * So there doesn't seem to be one that is currently active. --  Toshio   Yamaguchi  10:51, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not quite sure, but maybe having a bot that scans links and detects if the website returns a 404 error which then in turns places a tag may be of help. Thoughts?  Piandcompany  chat  12:05, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I think there was RjwilmsiBot and H3llBot that used to do this. Keith D (talk) 12:57, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but is there in the English Wikipedia bot owners weblinkchecker.py ? I can't understand the principle of operation of this bot. Thank you.--Ворота рая Импресариата (talk) 14:16, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Remove articles from non-existent categories
Special:Categories contains a number (probably dozens or scores, maybe hundreds) of non-existent categories with one article. It appears (to me at least) that these cats were added to articles either by mistake or in the hope that the cat would one day be created. It's unlikely that some of these will ever be created and the articles should be removed from the cat.
 * Rationale

Identify from Special:Categories all non-existent categories (i.e., red-links) and remove the category from the articles therein. Run this bot occasionally, perhaps once a week.
 * Request


 * Comments
 * 1) In an ideal world, the non-existent cat would be replaced by an appropriate existing category, but I suspect that this is too much to ask of even the most sophisticated bot. At least the edit will alert anyone watching the article and maybe prompt someone to look for a replacement category.
 * 2) Some articles may be under construction and the editor working on the article may intend to create the cat. To avoid trampling on a work in progress, perhaps the bot could edit only those articles that have not been changed in a few days (perhaps a week)
 * 3) Some cats include pages that are not in the main space (e.g., Category:"Coptright violation" - Not a copyright violation contains User talk:Kippbakr [although I suspect this is likely to get fixed soon]). Perhaps in these cases the bot could insert a colon, (i.e., change   to   )
 * 4) I've taken a crack at fixing some of these manually (a tedious chore) and notice that some of the non-existent categories include enough pages to warrant creation of the cat. Maybe limit the bots work to just those categories that have only one or two pages.

Regards, Illia Connell (talk) 04:19, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * "It's unlikely that some of these will ever be created and the articles should be removed from the cat." I'd disagree strongly with this last bit. In my experience (admittedly mostly on Commons), almost all such "1" cats are either "genuine" as part of a series (eg something like "FIFA World Cups in Africa". Hmm, maybe not the best example but you get what I mean) or are typos or misunderstanding of a standard format (eg "Villages IN Ruritania" rather than "Villages OF Ruritania" etc) or relatively rarely (<10%) are genuine red links waiting to be created. In all these cases those "problem" cats contain a lot of useful metadata, so just deleting that problem cat would be a mistake, it just needs humans to work through the list fixing them. I guess a bot could probably do some of the "simple" cases automagically (like IN/OF above), and mebbe suggest the right categories in a proportion of other cases. The problem here is more about bringing things to a human's attention rather than "this red link cat is never going to be created".Le Deluge (talk) 13:04, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Agree, but some of these cats have been red-links for months. Perhaps the bot could start with pages that haven't been touched in over a year. Wouldn't the edit to remove them alert anybody watching the page who could then address the issue as needed? Regards, Illia Connell (talk) 19:40, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * From my brief efforts at clearing some of them, only about 10% are what I would call "mistakes". The vast majority are filling in date series which are a) perfectly valid categories in their own right and b) useful metadata for the article in question. In fact you could probably do 30% of them automagically with a bot that took the red link cat DBR and looked for "xxxx establishments" type categories, to create them with and related templates. So no, deleting things that have been red for over a year doesn't work, because we do want that category to be created and it's useful for the article to have that cat. Yes, it looks a bit messy, but it's useful mess and there's no WP:TIMELIMIT on making this particular encyclopedia.Le Deluge (talk) 13:35, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose per Le Deluge. Perhaps a bot could add a cleanup tag which would categorise as Category:Articles with non-existent categories? that would also enable us to quantify the extent of the issue. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:00, 23 January 2013 (UTC)


 * There are a bunch of reports in the "Categories" section at WP:DBR that would help you do this manually. Legoktm (talk) 14:02, 23 January 2013 (UTC)


 * A number of red-link categories are simply mis-spellings or mis-capitalisations of a correct category. Keith D (talk) 18:02, 23 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Conditional support. Any bot removal of redlinked categories MUST be accompanied by a user talk page notification and it MUST only be if there are a maximum of two in a non-existent category and it MUST only be related to article namespace. Obviously redlinked cats exist because editors are not being complete or thorough in their editing. By giving a talk page msg diligent editors can then go back and correct any mistakes or follow up on it in some way. If the editor does not follow up they can always be added at a later stage - if they are needed.


 * We have the same problem with images as I outlined in a previous thread. Wikipedia will be improved by bot removal of redlinked cats or images because a lot of it is good or bad faith edits that are not needed. Content, as in actual prose, is king. Categories and images are nice to have but having these as redlinks does nothing for WP.


 * Given the 4 million articles and high edit rate and attrition of established editors and the huge backlog we should be making more use of bots. I was trying to clear the backlog at Category:Articles with missing files but I gave up. I was getting nowhere and it was frustrating and it was mind-numbing. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 18:45, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Agree with Alan Liefting - this would be almost impossible task to do manually. Even a tracking cat suggested by Andy Mabbett would only help quantify the problem.  To then go through that cat manually would be tedious and very mind-numbing.  Regards, Illia Connell (talk) 19:40, 23 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Comment. I would want to have the bot running continually and the reverts done within 24hrs. There is no need for a redlinked category to exist for more than a few minutes. They are very easy to create. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:26, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment Sometimes a page has a redlinked cat because of CFD/CFR. I'm not saying that there is a problem with the CFD process: but there is an assumption that once the cat page for the old cat name is deleted, that's the end of the matter. Let's say that a biog is put in Category:Fooians (which is valid at the time); then a whole bunch of WP:BLP vios are added to the article over some days (or weeks); interspersed with these there might be a few good edits. Separately, Category:Fooians is taken to WP:CFD which in due course closes as "delete", "rename" or "merge"; so a bot goes around updating articles accordingly and then the Category:Fooians page is deleted. Then somebody spots all the BLP vios and, unwilling to sort the few good edits from the large-scale bad ones, takes the easy way out and reverts to the last clean version - so the page ends up in redlinked Category:Fooians. -- Red rose64 (talk) 09:41, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * That senario would be handled by the proposal because the bot would remove Category:Fooians from the freshly reverted article. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 19:08, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * OK, that's fine for a deleted cat - but what about renamed/merged? In such cases, removal of the old cat should be accompanied by addition of the new. Would the bot do that too? -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:44, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I think there is a bot that goes around doing cat renaming and merging after the CfD has closed. The articles never get a chance to have a redlinked category. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:28, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Cydebot (adminbot) automatically enforces CFD closures if they are listed at WP:CFD/W Legoktm (talk) 20:29, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * @Alan Liefting: Yes, after the CFD is closed. But I'm talking about the situation when some time later (after closure and all associated cleanup) somebody reverts the article to a pre-cleanup state. These articles do get a chance to have a redlinked category: I've seen it happen. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:58, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I guess this is the chain of events: category deleted → cat removed from article by Cydebot → article is reverted to a pre-Cydebot version AND the reverting editor did not check the result → redlinked category is then removed by the proposed bot. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:05, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes. Now that is fine if the CFD closed as "delete", but if it closed as "rename" or "merge", the article has lost a category. -- Red rose64 (talk) 22:23, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Ah. Yes. I see what you mean. So should we go for expediency by using a bot at the expense of some categories that are not restored or do we have the status quo of big backlogs? I want accuracy and thoroughness and no backlog, but until we activate flagged rev/pending changes it won't happen. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:33, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Comment Based on my very limited attempt to manually fix some of these red-linked cats, I would guestimate that about 10% of them were due to CfD or other deletion process. Most seem to be due to either someone not understanding cats and just adding a bunch almost randomly, or mis-spellings. Illia Connell (talk) 21:19, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * That sort of fits in with the work I was doing on redlinked images. The vast majority of redlinked images can be deleted sight unseen (pun??) because they don'texist or are bad good faith edits. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 21:59, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Sort of. "Red-linked" can mean the image never existed or it can mean the file was deleted. If the file was deleted, the link removal is easy and straightforward. If there's no evidence that the file was deleted, you (the generic you) must look through the page history to determine how the red link got there. Common vandalism often red-links files, but it's even more common to see users who have changed "Foo bar.jpg" to "Foo bár.jpg" (to match the page title, e.g.) and these users inadvertently break the file link. This can cause a cascading issue with non-free images, as then some bots will consider the image orphaned and will nominate it for deletion. It's kind of a nasty situation. In my view, removing red-linked files (or categories or...) that have no deletion log is definitely a task that's unsuitable for a bot. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:50, 26 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose - Instead, use Database reports/Red-linked categories with incoming links and use judgement on whether the category should be added or whether the red-linked category should be fixed/removed. GoingBatty (talk) 16:02, 26 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose; in many cases that I have come across, the category is almost right and just needs fixing, and in other cases it is worth creating. – Fayenatic  L ondon 20:56, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

The official name of K-League is changed.
The top division of Korean professional football league's official name was changed to K League Classic from K-League.(source:the-afc.com) So, some categories related K-League must be changed too. I request to move all articles in Category:K-League players category to Category:K League Classic players. z4617925 (talk) 13:21, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * See WP:CfD and speedy moves, Cydebot can take care of that. Werieth (talk) 16:16, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Bot to detect NFCC#10c violations
I would like to request the creation of a bot for detection of violations of NFCC Policy 10c. The bot should parse through all pages in File namespace and check whether it has a non-free copyright tag. If that's the case, then the bot should check, whether for each file use in article namespace there is a non-free use rationale (this should also include non-template based rationales, in that case it should at least be checked, whether that rationale mentions the article name). If that is not the case for a specific use, the bot should do the following:


 * tag the file page with User:Toshio Yamaguchi/Template:File page NFCC concerns tag
 * place User:Toshio Yamaguchi/Template:Article talk page NFCC concerns message on the talk page of the concerned article
 * place User:Toshio Yamaguchi/Template:Original uploader NFCC concerns message on the talk page of the original uploader of the file

The tagging of the file page will place that file page in a maintenance category for human editors to check. --  Toshio   Yamaguchi  16:35, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Note: I also notified the watchers of Wikipedia talk:Non-free content here and the wider community here. --  Toshio   Yamaguchi  16:44, 22 January 2013 (UTC) I haven't made up my mind yet about whether a bot run would be useful, but I have concerns about the wording of the notification templates. They are too soft. "Please add a valid non-free use rationale if possible [...] or discuss the issues at WP:NFCR" points the reader in the wrong direction. In 90% of all cases, at my rough estimation, the correct outcome will not be adding of a FUR, but removal of the image. We don't want to push editors to just mechanically add bad boilerplate FURs to cover up bad usages. We also don't want to spread the myth that you cannot remove a bad non-free image without prior discussion (whereas adding one without prior discussion is okay). My suggestion for the notification would be: "Please consider if the use of the file in these articles can be justified under our policy criteria. If yes, please add an appropriate non-free use rationale explaining how and why it is justified. If not, please remove it from the article. If in doubt, start a discussion at WP:NFCR." Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:43, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * A bot used to do this work. I analyzed results of that bot's actions and found that it had no positive net effect on WP:NFCC #10c compliance. With respect, the bot is pointless. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:00, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Since NFCC is still policy, we need a bot to maintain it - even if editors do actions to cause images to fall out of line via edits on file pages, articles, or in uploading of new articles. A bot (Beta's) did this work before back when we had to bring all images into compliance in light of the resolution and it worked then.  It's likely the lack of the bot doing anything like that to why #10c is not being strongly enforced. --M ASEM  (t) 17:21, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Likely? Worked? With respect, no. When there was 10c notification being done before, it had no effect on 10c compliance. None. I'm not suggesting NFCC isn't policy. Rather, a bot making notifications about images not being compliant will not cause NFCC #10c violations to decrease. --Hammersoft (talk) 18:25, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Since this adds the afoul image to a human-maintained category, and after 7 days nothing has happened, outright removal/deletion is then performed (in line with policy). Just tagging is ineffective, it is the human action that is necessary to complete the cycle (a bot could do that cleanup as well, but that's going to have a much bigger complaint) --M ASEM  (t) 21:11, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I made the message of the file template a bit stronger. --  Toshio   Yamaguchi  21:24, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Those templates should probably be moved into templatespace eventually. Hammersoft said a bot used to do this...which bot was it, and was there a reason it stopped? It's probably easier to get an old bot started than writing a new one. Legoktm (talk) 15:25, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * BCBot, which was ended for issues with BetaCommand directly in complaints about his use of bots/automated editing. --M ASEM (t) 15:32, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Oh. Legoktm (talk) 20:16, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The other bot that did this was FairuseBot, which stopped running because MediaWiki kept getting changed on me. --Carnildo (talk) 01:57, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * That sounds like the bot wasn't using the MediaWiki API. If I'm mistaken and the bot was using the API and you were experiencing issues (breaking changes), please let me know, as that should not be happening. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:01, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I was using the API. The problem was image redirects and especially the incomplete implementation thereof: see bug #27621 (which, four years later, still isn't fixed). --Carnildo (talk) 11:21, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Please let me know if there is anything else that needs to be addressed regarding this request. Are the templates okay now? --  Toshio   Yamaguchi  19:09, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

United Kingdom Census 2011 + Indian census
Not a specific request as such, but this is an invitation for bot creators to head over to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography now that we have the main data release for the United Kingdom Census 2011 and we have to figure the best way to incorporate it into Wikipedia. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject India is also going to have a similar problem, their census website is down at the moment which may be because they're about to launch their main lot of data for the 2011 census of India. The UK already has templates such as English district population in an attempt to use templates to pull demographic data from a central source and I seem to remember there was some kind of project going on for this kind of centralised data on the Toolserver, but I can't recall what it was called. I suspect India would involve starting from scratch - and from experience there's going to be a lot of cleanup needed before any bots go near it, a lot of census districts either don't exist or - the bane of Indian geography - they do exist but under different names. It's not just the simple "updating" of colonial names either, like Bombay -> Mumbai. In some cases there are genuinely several different spellings been used throughout history, and in other cases you've got spellings being used as part of an attempt to push a particular ethnic POV. FlagSteward (talk) 15:27, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Romanian orthography
Hello. The Romanian alphabet includes the letters Ș|Șș (S with comma) and Ț|Țț (T with comma). Before Unicode 3 was released and got common, these letters could hardly or even impossibly be typed on web sites, so people got used to the workaround of using Ş|Şş (S with cedille) and Ţ|Ţţ (T with cedille) instead. Nowadays, this workaround is no longer needed: Romanian wikipedia has corrected them all, German wikipedia followed and – with some of my contribution – has finished meanwhile. Could someone make a bot on en:wp subsitute every Ş by Ș, every ş by ș, every Ţ by Ț and every ţ by ț in lemmas within the Romanian geography categories, and do the same substitutions within the article text? Thank you very much! --JøMa (talk) 12:34, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * using AWB Vaca  tion  9  12:37, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Update: AWB has to recursively get all the categories. I did some test runs just with a search, some of which I had to revert because they weren't Romanian I realized after. Now I'm getting the list of all the Romanian geography pages. Hopefully this task will be done by the end of the day. Vaca  tion  9  16:21, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * You should probably review Bot requests/Archive 39 before continuing this task. A blind search-and-replace is likely to cause issues. Anomie⚔ 16:44, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I have replied to this on my talk page. I was before doing a blind search and replace on any pages, but this caused problems which I reverted, as you said. I am now entering Romanian Geography categories individually which need conversion. While these recurse, they are fairily small categories (I won't recurse the whole Geography of Romania category because as you said it can link to other categories and would take waaay too long).  Vaca  tion  9  16:55, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * But are you making sure these articles in the "Romanian Geography categories" don't happen to also contain Turkish, Kurdish, Zazaki, Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, Tatar, or Turkmen words? Anomie⚔ 16:59, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * As mentioned in the previous request, this really would only be a problem if the page in question was not Romanian. I am checking if the page is Romanian before saving the edit. I am also checking if there is a non-Romanian city or place for example. Of course I cannot be 100% accurate but the damage caused, if any, will be very small and easily fixable. Vaca  tion  9  17:04, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * In addition, I am mostly skipping Category:Banat because it is not only in Romania. If it was not already clear, I am using the semi-automatic AWB and checking each edit before confirming. Vaca  tion  9  17:14, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I did many and many of edits like these manually in de:wp, and therefore I suggested to keep in the geo corner of articles. ;o) My experience is that sometimes football players from Turkey can be mentioned, but that's (nearly) all. People's articles with some "Romania related categories" may be really too dangerous for automatisms... Will be a long way to go. Maybe some day when I'm too bored, I'll export a CatScan and filter it manually. That's exactly what we did on de:wp... By the way: You can edit Banat pages, because the "Banat neighbours" (Hungaria, Serbia, ...) don't use this letter. ;) Best wishes from Leipzig, --JøMa (talk) 17:19, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, I am keeping in the geography corner for reasons mentioned. I'll take another look at Banat, but you may find it hard to manually correct the hundreds of thousands of articles here :). Also keep in mind that this is not really "automated" persay, because all edits are manually reviewed by me before saving, they're just generated by the computer. See WP:AWB. Vaca  tion  9  17:23, 30 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I wish to point out that the automated edits miss about half of the diacritics on each page they touch. For instance, they don't seem to be doing anything about the diacritics included in notes or within brackets. Dahn (talk) 19:21, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * If you are talking about links, I can't change those; they would need to be moved. If I changed them without moving it (which I can't do easily with an automated editor) it would become a redlink. Could you give an example? Vaca  tion  9  19:25, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Concerning your example, I would be inclined to ask for some kind of more elaborate move, where the bot would in fact move all the articles so that there would be no redlinks. Avoiding this measure, and going with just some of the diacritics, invariably creates a mess. But before we get there, let me elaborate on what I meant. In Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești, which is on my watchlist and is a good article, your edits had created another anomaly: you changed the Ş in PiteŞti, but not in, for instance, MiŞcarea (look though to the mass of notes at the bottom, you'll see what I mean). I can't say I favor either way; but I do favor consistency over chaos. Is there a sure method of ensuring that the switch will be done without making a mess of recognized content? Regards, Dahn (talk) 19:41, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I have stopped editing these articles using AWB. It seems like this is becoming an automated task now. I am seeing what I can come up with in regards to a consistent regular expression for an AWB bot (User:VoxelBot) and will report back soon. Vaca  tion  9  20:24, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Will you also move the articles? IMHO the lemma should be correct as well. --JøMa (talk) 20:45, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * If you need a bot to move articles, Legobot is approved to mass do them, provided a RM has taken place. Legoktm (talk) 20:46, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * IMHO we don't need to move articles (generally non-supervised moving is a bad idea and would need to be supervised manually, something that for literally hundreds of thousands of articles wouldn't be feasable), but I agree that it should fix notes. I'll make it only ignore links and file names and hopefully file a BRFA later tonight. Vaca  tion  9  21:38, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Errm... Oppose: Moving the wrong lemma to the right one (like Costineşti → Costinești) is exactly what I mainly ask to do. The second part of my request (i.e. correcting the article text) is a good idea as well, but don't you agree a correct lemma is more important? You wouldn't either expect to find Paraguay's capital city unter Asunciòn instead of Asunción. --JøMa (talk) 09:20, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * What we can do is do this in three parts. First, a database scan for articles with incorrect characters in them, which outputs to a file. Then, (after review of the articles) using Pywikipediabot or a similar framework I mass move the pages without leaving a redirect (bots can do that). Then, when doing the AWB scan, we can both correct the redlinks and correct everything else in the page. This will need some interesting code but I think it would be worth it. Thoughts? Vaca  tion  9  13:30, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Sounds good to me (though I cannot judge the technical background) ;) --JøMa (talk) 14:35, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Why in the world would you not want to leave a redirect? Anomie⚔ 01:54, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, I realized that later. I amended the BRFA but forgot to change the version on this page. It will leave redirects. Vacation nine Public 02:52, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Scratch the "tonight" part. Hopefully I'll be able to get to this tomorrow. To get this right takes quite a bit of tweaking. Vacation nine Public 22:45, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * BRFA Filed WP:Bots/Requests for approval/VoxelBot 2 Please leave your thoughts. Vaca  tion  9  03:08, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Army flag.gif to Flag of the United States Army (1775).gif

 * Link change from File:Army flag.gif to File:Flag of the United States Army (1775).gif

The latter has replaced the former as a more descriptive file name and on the Commons, but there are many pages which still point to the old file. Most of them are transcluded through the Flagicon template which has already been fixed, but it would be useful to have a bot go through and replace all the ones that link directly to the file. Sycamore (talk) 18:29, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I manually made this fix to Template:US Army navbox, which is included on many of the pages that link to "File:Army flag.gif" to be updated. Since there's already less than 100 articles, there should be very few to fix once the list of pages is updated, so we can do it manually.  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 19:34, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * via AWB. GoingBatty (talk) 23:31, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅ for articles, templates, portals, and user pages 00:19, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Template:HarzMountain-geo-stub
At Cfd January 24 there was a consensus to delete HarzMountain-geo-stub and its associated Category:Harz Mountain geography stubs. I closed the discussion, but while the bots at WP:CFD/W can delete the category, they don't know to orphan a template.

Please can some kind bot-owner orphan Template:HarzMountain-geo-stub (i.e remove all uses of it)?

Thanks! -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:07, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Sure, Legoktm (talk) 20:10, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅ Legoktm (talk) 20:21, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Many thanks! -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:35, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Infobox cricketer using deprecated parameters
Could anyone help in cleaning Category:Infobox cricketer using deprecated parameters? -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:05, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi again! Same question as above: Since the infobox seems to display the deprecated parameters properly, what needs to be done in order to improve how the articles are displayed to the reader?  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 01:42, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * To save all you bot operators some time, "playername needs to be renamed to name" and "imagealt needs to be renamed to alt" have been done already by Yobot. -- Cheers, Ri l ey    01:58, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * GoingBatty, for standardisation purposes and to enable use of microformat the 3 birth date parameters should be grouped together. same for the 3 death date parameters, the 2 birth place parameters and the 2 death place parameters. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:33, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Example. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:37, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
 * There's a little more.
 * The living and partialdates parameters, if present, must be removed since their presence will cause obsolete parameters like yearofbirth to be processed (even if the new parameters like birth_date are provided) and generate an error.
 * If the player has nothing to put in death_date, then birth_date should be given instead of.
 * . -- Red rose64 (talk) 13:23, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

check that links are correct
There are 7,000 blue links on WikiProject Languages/Primary language names in Ethnologue 16 by ISO code. I would like a bot check to verify which are obviously correct; I will then check any exceptions manually.

The parameter is whether the ISO code at the target article matches what we have on the list. For example, the first link on the list page is aaa. The article Ghotuo language has a language infobox with the parameter "iso3" set equal to aaa, so that link is good.

The potentially matching parameters in Infobox language are iso3, lc1, lc2, lc3, .... (lc-n is used where there is more than one ISO code.)

I would like a list of any links, direct or redirected, which do not match. I suspect there are a fair number of circular links which need to be fixed. It would be nice if both pieces of data could be returned. So, if the example link were bad, we'd get back "Ghotuo language : aaa" or something similar.

Is that possible?

Thanks, — kwami (talk) 06:42, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Converting tables to template at TAFI
I have a very tedious job that I would love to have automated. The current table structure over at Today's article for improvement/Nominated articles is going to be converted into this structure, using a template. Conveniently, each row in the table is labeled identically with comments, and the template is labelled with identifier tags. The details of what I'd like to convert can be found here, but the jist of it is that I'd like a bot to convert all of the tables into templates on the Nominations page, as well as the Holding Area and Archives. -- Nick Penguin ( contribs ) 03:29, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

To what extent can bots harvest facts from summaries?
Where is the discussion area about bot technology? I'm interested in learning what bots are and are not capable of.

For example, when articles are split and a summary is left in the original article, both the new article and the old section that it used to be receive development from editors after the split, creating a fork situation.

New material is added by some editors to the new article, but new material also gets added to the original section in the old article. Not the same material.

There are tens of thousands of instances of the summary style being used, and a great many of them have resulted in forked content, with new content being added to the summary and not to the main article.

Could a bot be created that could sync up article sections with the corresponding Main articles?

That is, identify &mdash; in the section &mdash; material that is not included in the main article, and copy or move that material to the main article?

Is natural language processing sufficiently sophisticated to handle this?

What tools are available (anywhere in the computing world) that would be useful for this? The Transhumanist 02:33, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Given the way articles develop/split/merge this type of behavior would be extremely difficult if at all possible. Werieth (talk) 03:42, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * What about using fuzzy matching against the main article to eliminate sentences from the section? Then copy what's left to the main article.  Would this help narrow it down?  A human would have to be in the loop somewhere, to check for duplication/synonymous prose, before it is saved as part of the main article. The Transhumanist 07:16, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * How the algorithm would determine where in the article to place the material is beyond me. Any ideas?  The Transhumanist 07:22, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Could diffs be analyzed to determine what content has been added to the section, that was not also added to the main article? The Transhumanist 07:27, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Here's an example of section/main article content forking that I came across. Compare the history section of Natural language processing with the article History of natural language processing. The Transhumanist 08:21, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Text mining
To what extent can bot technology be used for subject consolidation?

For example, is this doable: gather all the mentions of a particular individual from everywhere on Wikipedia and dump it all in a project page for evaluation by human editors?

Or identify and gather everything about the subject "natural language processing" regardless of what articles it appears in?

Sometimes, details of a subject are added to a less relevant article. For example, details about an organization in the biographical article on its founder. Those details may be more relevant to the organization article.

How can bots help find and gather material on Wikipedia about a subject that is somewhere other than the article on that subject? The Transhumanist 02:33, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Given the right filters this type of mining is trivial. Werieth (talk) 03:41, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Please elaborate. WP already has bots that can do this?  If so, what are they?  The Transhumanist 07:09, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * What do you mean? This sort of data-mining is the domain of scripts, not bots. Using WhatLinksHere, your first example task becomes simple. You could, for example, extract the paragraph(s) or entire section(s) in which the link(s) occur to a given article. I don't know why you would want to do it, and the results you got for lists, see-also sections, etc. could well be meaningless. — This, that and the other (talk)  08:40, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Yep, that's part of what I meant. (But I don't know what he meant by filters. Search strings?)  Though I've never seen scripts for this in the scripts department, and I always thought bots could be composed of scripts.  I like your idea of a paragraph or section grabber.  Excellent idea.  The idea would be to dump all those to a WikiProject draft page (or user subpage) or to an external file, to look over for material that could be used in the main article.  For example, details about a person's life might be covered in an article about some other subject. Scrolling down a page of paragraph excerpts would be a lot easier than manually navigating to all the pages with the link on them. By the way, lists and see-also sections, etc. could easily be excluded by the algorithm.  So, What links here in AWB, and an external script could accomplish the paragraph grabbing you mentioned.  I didn't put the pieces together until you mentioned "WhatLinksHere".  Thank you!


 * Concerning more complex subjects, like natural language processing, the relevant articles might not mention the word "natural language processing". So another way of finding the material would be needed.  Any ideas? The Transhumanist 09:18, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Please give examples of filters that would be effective for this. The Transhumanist 07:17, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Filters are any base set of rules that a bot can use. Examples:


 * Article as X and Y in it.
 * Article in category X but does not have X
 * Article contains X,Y or Z
 * Or just about any other set of things you want the bot to look for/ignore. Werieth (talk) 13:23, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Adding summaries for missing subtopics
This would probably be considered a form of multi-document summarization.

Sometimes editors skip a subject and directly edit the article on a subtopic. There are many instances of subjects that are missing a subheading for a subtopic that has an article on Wikipedia.

Is it theoretically possible to write a bot that could analyze an article, and Wikipedia with respect to that article's subject, to identify missing subtopics that have their own articles?

It should be an easy matter to check for matching article titles once the subtopics have been determined.

To build a section, all you'd have to do is copy the the lead (or lead paragraph) of the subtopic article.

But how would the bot determine the names of the subtopics that are missing from a subject's article? The Transhumanist 07:44, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Populating empty sections that have Main template
Easier than the above described bot would be one that looked for subheadings the total content of each were a Main template.

That is, the section has a "Main article" hatnote, but is otherwise empty. It's missing a summary style summary.

The bot would simply insert into the empty section a copy of the lead paragraph from the article specified in the Main template.

What problems am I overlooking here? The Transhumanist 07:52, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

P.S.: How would a bot go about finding such sections? -TT
 * If an article has a empty section containing just a "main" template, that probably points to greater problems in hte article structure that need to be inspected by a human. I don't think bots should be doing this sort of thing (even though they certainly could). — This, that and the other (talk) 08:35, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * I see two other uses for such a bot. First, it could identify the articles you mentioned that need human attention.  Second, it could fill in empty sections that an editor purposely added (rather than that editor going through the trouble of copying/pasting the lead by hand, a bot could do that part for him). In the latter case, the editor would supply a list of articles to be worked on by the bot. The Transhumanist 08:53, 8 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Two other options for identifying those articles that contain main with no parameters:
 * Go to Wikipedia talk:Database reports and request a new report to show articles with this issue.
 * Go to Template talk:Main and request a tracking category be added to the template
 * Good luck! GoingBatty (talk) 18:16, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I think the bot populating empty sections in this manner is a great idea. There should be some sort of followup on these items, sometimes the lede is not necessarily the most relevant content to copy and paste, but it's still a better start than an empty section. -- Nick Penguin ( contribs ) 18:47, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

High Commissioner categories
Ambassadors from one country of the Commonwealth of Nations to another are called High Commissioners (though their responsibilities are that of an ambassador). Accordingly, there's no Category:Ambassadors of the United Kingdom to Canada but rather Category:High Commissioners of the United Kingdom to Canada. This category is included in the parent category Category:High Commissioners of the United Kingdom which is itself included in Category:Ambassadors of the United Kingdom. In a recent CfD about the ambassador categories of the United Kingdom, it was decided (among other things) that categories of the form Category:High Commissioners of the United Kingdom to Canada should be subcategories of both Category:High Commissioners of the United Kingdom and Category:Ambassadors of the United Kingdom. It's natural to extend this solution to every country of the Commonwealth and nobody objected when I posted this proposal at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject International relations a couple of weeks ago.

So here's the bot task.
 * Go through every category of the form Category:High Commissioners of Foo to Bar. This category should contain the text and  . Note that in some cases "Foo" is in fact "the Foo" (for instance the United Kingdom).
 * Add and.

Thanks, Pichpich (talk) 16:28, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Mass source fix and link fix
If possible, I like to request a bot run to correct/change the following edits. I have written more than 160 articles about Michelin starred restaurants and it would eat up a shocking amount of time to figure out where the outdated sources are placed and correct them. The last edit is a link fix, because I am sick of all the people saying that it is POV to name a Michelin starred restaurant a "quality restaurant", although they are judged on the quality of their food. The Banner talk 15:02, 12 January 2013 (UTC) If I am at the wrong place, sorry. Please move it to the right place. This is out of my comfort zone.


 * Source fix, change
 * 1) 1957-1964: TO
 * 2) 1965-1970: TO
 * 1) 1971-1975: TO
 * 2) 1976-1980: TO
 * 3) 1981-1985: TO
 * 4) 1986-1990: TO
 * 5) 1991-1996: TO
 * 6) 1997-2000: TO
 * 1) 2001-2005: TO
 * 2) 2006-2010: TO
 * 3) 2011: TO
 * 4) 2012: TO
 * 5) 2013: TO


 * Link fix
 * 1)  quality restaurant TO  fine dining restaurant


 * As all pages are on my watchlist, I will check each and every edit to see if it went okay. The Banner talk 20:33, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Is this more difficult then expected? Or is it just that I am too impatient? The Banner talk 14:04, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Is this something that a bot could blanket find/replace on? If so, you might want to try looking into using WP:AWB. Otherwise, is there a common pattern a bot could follow? Additionally, what is the easiest way to get a list of pages that the bot needs to run over? Is there a category or template that can be used? Maybe Special:LinkSearch? Some more info will help in speeding up your request :) Legoktm (talk) 14:10, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I have no AWB anymore, as I did never fully understood what you could do with it. So I did not renew my permission after a namechange of my account. All articles can be found in Category:Michelin Guide starred restaurants in the Netherlands (regarding to the sources), and in that category plus Category:Michelin Guide starred restaurants in Ireland for the linkfix. <span style="font-family:'Old English Text MT',serif;color:green">The Banner <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 14:25, 23 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The link fix would be pretty trivial to do with AWB. Let me know (here) if you would like me to give it a go.  Regards, Illia Connell (talk) 22:45, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * For sure you could make me me happy with that! So, please! <span style="font-family:'Old English Text MT',serif;color:green">The Banner <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 23:08, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Seen, spotchecked and ok. <span style="font-family:'Old English Text MT',serif;color:green">The Banner <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 14:26, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Second serie als seen and checked. All other changes are in fact also search and replace request, but with a longer text. <span style="font-family:'Old English Text MT',serif;color:green">The Banner <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 20:11, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Is this a difficult request or the wrong place? <span style="font-family:'Old English Text MT',serif;color:green">The Banner <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 12:47, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Looking at the references you want to use as replacements, I noticed that each one begins with  before the cite news template and ends with   after the cite news template.  Would it be better to use the parameters Dutch and Historical Overview Dutch Michelin stars xxxx within the cite news template instead?  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 17:53, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Sound like a new trick I am unaware off! So please do and help teach me a few new tricks for the benefit of Wikipedia! <span style="font-family:'Old English Text MT',serif;color:green">The Banner <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 21:51, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
 * - do these look good?, , , ,  -GoingBatty (talk) 02:25, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, they all look okay. <span style="font-family:'Old English Text MT',serif;color:green">The Banner <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 12:48, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * the rest manually. GoingBatty (talk) 00:16, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅. GoingBatty (talk) 02:39, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot! I noticed that you did more than I bargained for with correcting the dates. Most of them were a bit older articles and I knew that I had to correct hem. I have checked about 20 articles, and they all looked fine. I have also looked at the technical change in the references, and I will apply that from now on. Thanks again for all the work! <span style="font-family:'Old English Text MT',serif;color:green">The Banner  <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 02:55, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Replacing full stop with comma at the num_employees field
Per consensus at Template_talk:Infobox_company and collapsed discussion below, there is a request to replace a full stop (.) as a thousands separation with a comma at the num_employees fields in the companies infoboxes. Rationale and more detailed description is provided below. It also provides information which forums were notified about discussion. Beagel (talk) 19:52, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

The following discussion is migrated from the company's infobox talk page. Beagel (talk) 18:10, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

A lot of current num_employees fields in the companies infoboxes use a full stop (.) to separate thousands (e.g. 12.200, 5.200) instead of using a comma. This is confusing as a full stop (.) usually means the decimal point and this is also violates WP:MOSNUM. E.g. the infobox at Minerva S.A. states that "num_employees   = 7.000". It would be replaced by "num_employees   = 7,000".

Most of these (but not only) was introduced by blocked User:Edson Rosa and his sockpuppets. As the number is a large (mainly concerning Brazilian companies) and they are hard to detect manually, I propose to use some bot for this task. If the proposal achieves consensus, it applies only to num_employees of the template:Infobox company and its redirects. Expanding this function to other fields and/or templates needs separate discussion. Please add your comments and votes below. Beagel (talk) 17:56, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

I notified also WP:COMPANIES and WP:MOSNUM about this proposal. Beagel (talk) 18:12, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Comments

 * The infobox could be coded to correct these errors at least until the bot is finished. Once the bot is done the coding of the infobox could be reworked to give an error message when given misformatted numbers. J IM ptalk·cont 02:16, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
 * That proposal makes sense. Could you help with this coding? Beagel (talk) 05:24, 29 January 2013 (UTC)


 * The discussion should probably migrate from here to a more bot-focused page depending on whether you've already got a bot and are asking permission to run it or you're requesting that someone write the bot. J IM ptalk·cont 02:34, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
 * If you think that the discussion should be moved to Bot requests, I have nothing against it. As I myself don't run any bots and don't have any knowledge how to do it, help in this field is needed. Do you think we should migrate this discussion immediatelly or have it here for some more days and move then? Beagel (talk) 05:24, 29 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I have a broader concern; I think it's very odd that a major sockpuppeteer would only make punctuation changes like this, so presumably their other edits are being cleaned up by some other mechanism. Is it possible that anybody could be using highly-visible-but-innocuous punctuation changes as a marker so they can find new socks, or articles affected by socks, and clean up any more substantial problems? If so, this bot task would mask a bigger problem. bobrayner (talk) 09:07, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
 * This concern is relevant and there may be other issues to be fixed (starting with the same (.) used to separate thousands also inside the body text and some other style issues). However, I don't think there is any big issue which is not discovered yet. The editor in question (but he is not the only one using (.) as a separator for thousand as this is a common mistake for editors from some certain countries) was temporary blocked for uploading copyrighted files without correct licenses and later blocked indefinitely for block evasion by using socks. Beside of uploading copyrighted files (which can't be tolerated, of course) he and his socks have made quote useful edits (again, not all of them but still a significant part) by creating new articles about companies and updating existing ones. In most of cases he did not made punctuation changes but was the editor who originally added these figures into infoboxes. I personally even believe if this editor states he understands what he did wrong and promises to avoid any further copyright violation and sockpuppetry, a change with community paroles may be given. Unfortunately, his history shows no single attempts to communicate with other editors or reply to concerns. However, to address the potential concern you expressed, one solution may be that if bot makes the proposed change, it also lists the article in the hidden maintenance category. It would be manually checked for other issues then. Beagel (talk) 19:02, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Support

 * Support as nominator. Beagel (talk) 17:56, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
 * This looks sensible to me; using "." as a thousands-separator is common in some European languages but it's not the done thing in English. Employees are a discrete variable so we don't have to worry about inappropriate attempts to fix a company that really does have 4.233 employees &c. What else can be done to weed out any false-positives? bobrayner (talk) 19:22, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
 * This is a well scoped proposal and improves consistency of the data within en.wikipedia. I would suggest that the bot not be left active after it's initial run, but rather turned on in 6 months to see if it detects any new instances at that time (or if there is evidence of a significant number of instances being created in the interim). --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 01:35, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I can't see anything wrong with the proposal. In English 4.233 is $4 233/1000$. J IM ptalk·cont 02:21, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Support. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:37, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Suppoprt. While the decimal may be used in other languages to separate thousands, in English 7.000 means seven, not seven-thousand. Canuck 89 (talk to me) 01:01, January 30, 2013 (UTC)
 * Suppoprt - English WP should use English numbering conventions.Rangoon11 (talk) 21:15, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Support - Seems like a "no-brainer". Mlpearc ( powwow ) 21:43, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Support - Seems desirable, and with sufficient care, perhaps not challenging to accomplish --j⚛e deckertalk 18:21, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Oppose
Why this discussion was closed just few minutes after filing as it was specifically about requesting a bot for a certain task? Where it should be discussed if not here? Beagel (talk) 18:37, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Get consensus then file a request, this is not the place for community discussion for/against a task. Werieth (talk) 18:54, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Consensus is there just few lines above. Could we now continue with this request? Beagel (talk) 18:59, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * this is a fairly small user group with little outside of that one article's editors. Werieth (talk) 19:02, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Discussion took place at Template talk:Infobox company. WP:COMPANIES and WP:MOSNUM were notified. Which forums should be notified additionally? What exactly meant by "that one article's editors" as there is no "that one article"? Could you please look the discussion before taking any actions? Beagel (talk) 19:18, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I missed that this was on a infobox template talk page, can you please remove it from here and just leave a link to that discussion? Werieth (talk) 19:28, 1 February 2013 (UTC)


 * here. GoingBatty (talk) 00:36, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
 * . GoingBatty (talk) 00:23, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅. GoingBatty (talk) 17:55, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Unreferenced articles
Is it possible to get a bot to place an unreferenced article tag on all articles without a single instance of " " ? This would speed up the categorisation and reduce human editors workloads. Thanks ツ Je no va  20  (email) 10:03, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * How would you handle NBR 224 and 420 Classes? -- Red rose64 (talk) 11:58, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I was just trying to think of a way to add something similar to this to my bot. Unfortunately it is extremely hard as there are so many ways that users seem to like adding references (other than using the ref tag)  ·Add§hore·  T alk T o M e ! 12:35, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * What about adding it automatically to newly created articles less than a week old? That would reduce the mutant instances of articles with unusual referencing substantially? Thanks ツ Je no va  20  (email) 13:07, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Doing this with a bot would incorrectly tag articles that use external links instead of inline references. Of course, these external links should ideally be replaced by inline citations but that's a separate issue. Pichpich (talk) 16:10, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Its worse than that. This would tag as unreferenced an article with inline citations if they were done by someone who didn't understand wiki markup. It is OK for newbies to put numbers in the text and then at the bottom repeat those numbers and add the references.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  16:14, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I see...There's a category for articles with no citations...Are they added by wikipedians one at a time then? Thanks ツ Je no va  20  (email) 16:25, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, but the accuracy declines over time. The problem being that many newbies assume that if they add a reference someone will come by, check what they've done and remove the unreferenced tag. So when we did a big cleanup of articles that had been tagged for years as unreferenced we found that a proportion actually had a reference.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  16:37, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * To follow up on that: I understand the objective of tagging all unreferenced articles but in practical terms, false positives could be frustrating for newbies while false negatives are only a pressing problem if our backlog of unreferenced articles starts to dwindle. It's safe to say that this isn't happening any time soon. Pichpich (talk) 16:55, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * To reply to WereSpielChequers, my (nearly approved bot) will untag articles listed as unreferenced that have a ref tag (that's a start). Currently trying to make my bot sure that no articles are incorrectly tagged.  ·Add§hore·  T alk T o M e ! 17:07, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * How do you handle ref tags used for footnotes which are not references? --j⚛e deckertalk 17:43, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Topics you may want to consider, if you haven't done so already:
 * Ref tags used for footnotes which are not references would hopefully use
 * Valid citation styles that don't include ref tags include parenthetical references and templates such as sfn.
 * In some cases, replacing unreferenced with refimprove would be more appropriate.
 * In some cases, unreferenced is used for a section instead of unreferenced section.
 * Good luck with your bots! GoingBatty (talk) 17:59, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
 * If you want a good example of parenthetical referencing, see Actuary. That is a featured article; and it uses paren to the complete exclusion of the otherwise commonly-used cite.php techniques, whether <ref ></ref>, or any other methods now known or to be invented. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:57, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

template bombing
Template bombing is a bit of a problem here, it disfigures articles and can hide the more important templates amidst a clutter of ones that are more about maintenance. There are two things that would reduce this problem:

Duplicate templates
Please can we have a bot to find and cull duplicate templates. Where their dates differ keep the earlier template.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  16:31, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * If you can get a list of templates that should be unique this should be rather trivial. Werieth (talk) 17:02, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * My nearly approved bot will remove duplicate templates with the same date but if you want I will add a check specifically to remove duplicated templates leaving the version with the oldest date?  ·Add§hore·  T alk T o M e ! 17:04, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes please, and thanks for already having something on its way.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  19:01, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Use Multiple templates
Please can we have a bot to find articles with more than three templates and ensure they are in the multiple issues template. Currently we have some articles with lots of templates, and worse, ones where the most important templates are in a multiple issues template and less serious ones are given far greater prominence by being a large separate template.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  16:31, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Again my (nearly approved bot) does this with its changes, would you want it done even if no other changes were done by the bot?  ·Add§hore·  T alk T o M e ! 17:05, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes please. I would consider this a sufficiently major change to the appearance of an article that it would be worth doing even if there were no other changes.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  19:02, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

(Both of the above tasks)
I have added the above tasks to my BRFA here and the code is now written. Just have to wait for another trial for testing and bug fixing. If anyone can find any specific articles I could test the bot on that would be great as it is quite hard to find articles with duplicate tags on them. Cheers  ·Add§hore·  T alk T o M e ! 20:37, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Quick update, currently doing a trial and an example edit is here. Unfortunately a wee bug meant to bot removed the wrong dated tag as it should have left the one with the older date, also a small fix with the edit summary is needed. What is the opinion on when it should be added.. Only if 3 or more templates are on the page or if 2 or more are present?  ·Add§hore·  T alk T o M e ! 15:40, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm sure it would be a good thing where we have more than three templates. I'm not so enthusiastic where we have three templates, unless of course we already have multiple with one or two templates in it and one or more outside. I'm leaning neutral for instances where there are two templates, and I suspect there are a lot of these. So I'd suggest at the least getting a figure for how many times it would replace just two templates with a multiple, - if its lots we should get more input than just the two of us before going ahead. BTW Do we yet have a bot that finds articles which now have only one template in the multiple template and removes the multiple bit? I don't know how often this happens, but I've definitely seen it and I can see it would be a bit challenging for a newbie who has fixed all but one problem to work out how to unmultiple the last template.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  00:46, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
 * BattyBot is approved to remove multiple issues when there's only one (or no) mainenance template. I'll run the task now.  GoingBatty (talk) 01:46, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Removed multiple issues from 79 articles. GoingBatty (talk) 05:41, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Do you have an estimate of how many pages use the MI old style? I would like to see this decreasing. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:57, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Magioladitis! Are you asking me?  If so, I don't know.  Does the current release version of AWB 5.4.0.0 (not the SVNs) convert the new MI style back to the old MI style?  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 17:32, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
 * BattyBot can also add multiple issues when there are three or more maintenance templates, which it's doing now. However, since we moved to the new MI style, I haven't figured out an automated way to merge maintenance templates into an existing MI template (and skip if no merge happens).  GoingBatty (talk) 13:30, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Right my task is approved and I will try and talk explain exactly what it does. Firstly it combines all of my previous bot tasks into one.
 * The page is checked to parse the MI tag and any maint templates, it will convert the old Mi style to new as well as adding the Mi template if multiple maint tags are there or removing it is there is 1 or none. the bot then goes through checking the page and seeing if it actually needs the tags i.e. orphan, uncat, unref as well as dating any tags that are undated. The bot then does a second pass determining if the MI template is again needed or not.
 * The bot will edit if any maint tag (i.e. orphan or uncat e.t.c) is removed, added or dated.
 * The bot will edit if it find duplicate maint templates (1 of which it can remove)
 * The bot will edit if it has to remove the MI template (i.e. it is empty or only has 1 tag in it)
 * The bot will also edit if it adds MI and the page has 2 or more tags (although reading above it looks like this may be changing to 3 or above) (This may require a reasonable rewrite of my function as currently if I just changed the value 2 to 3 it would mean if the bot added and orphan and uncat tag it would not add an MI tag but should be do-oable without too much mess!
 * Some sample edits can be found -mi -orphan +mi -deadend -orphan +underlinked -deadend oldstyle -orphan -mi oldstyle -mi -orphan +deadend +mi oldstyle -orphan and convert -duplicates -duplicates e.t.c  ·Add§hore·  Talk To Me! 13:53, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Turns out it wasnt that hard to do a last check which I have implemented. If you have any further requests please post them on my talk page! Cheers.  ·Add§hore·  Talk To Me! 14:03, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi AddShore! You may want to remove duplicates before adding/removing MI so you don't end up with edit summaries like this.  Also, I hope that your comments are not saying that you'll be putting uncategorized within MI.  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 14:45, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I fixed the eidt summary bug yesterday, a counter went astray. The bot also deals with rather complex old style MI templates here. The bot will, as it always has, will add the uncat template to the top of the page.  ·Add§hore·  Talk To Me! 16:03, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
 * The instructions at Template:Uncategorized states "It is recommended that this template be placed at the bottom of the page, where readers will look for the categories, although it is a somewhat common practice among some editors to put it at the top." I wasn't aware of the last clause in that sentence.  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 17:38, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Tagging categories for CFD
I have nominated 158 categories for merger at Categories for discussion/Log/2013 February 13.

This too many to tag manually, so I have made a list at User:BrownHairedGirl/List of states and territories disestablished before 1000AD categories. Please can a bot tag all 158 of these categories with ? The tag should be at the top of the page.

Thanks. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:23, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, the tagging above will not work because we are now in a new day.
 * The categories will now have to be tagged as follows:


 * THe same tag can be used for all the categories.
 * Thanks again for whoever can do this! -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:56, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 *  ·Add§hore·  Talk To Me! 01:55, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅  ·Add§hore·  Talk To Me! 02:09, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Many thanks. That would have been a nightmare job by hand. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:24, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Remove everything in the first column from an article
The first column of both tables at List of round barns contains a numbered list. This numbered list means nothing and also forces a change to every subsequent row if someone wants to add a row in. Is there a quick and easy way to completely remove the number column/entries? Ryan Vesey 19:35, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅ in this edit. It just took a fairly simple regular expression. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)
 * Thank you very much. You're a huge time saver. Ryan Vesey 01:02, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Volunteer for Bot-creation needed
If someone wants to work for bot-creation, there is a lot of creative work on Sanskrit wikipedia (sa.wikipedia.org) waiting. Those who want to volunteer can contact me via e-mail hmt[dot]seeit[at]gmail.com. Thanks a lot. -Hemant wikikosh (talk) 13:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Remove interwiki links on articles that use Wikidata's information
Hi. I would like to make a request to remove interwiki links from articles that already have interwiki links provided by Wikidata. Thanks, Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 16:43, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * There's already at least one bot request on the topic at BRFA, a Legobot task. --j⚛e deckertalk 16:49, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Oh, right. I thought this was the place to put bot requests here. My bad! Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 17:14, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * It is, it is. :)  Maybe I'm not communicating clearly.  I'm saying that someone already has a specific request in to be allowed to do precisely what you're asking for, Bots/Requests_for_approval/Legobot_28, and that you might want to chime in there, too.  Sorry about that! --j⚛e deckertalk 17:17, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I was only confused, that's all. :-) I'll chime in there. Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 17:53, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Changing of coord-missing on a lot of articles
Category:Orissa articles missing geocoordinate data was recently renamed to Category:Odisha articles missing geocoordinate data through WP:CFDS. The trouble is, this category is populated by coord missing - and with 287 articles that need to be changed, that's a small bit of drudgery to be gone though. Would it be possible to get a bot to search the contents of for "" and replace all instances found with "" ? Thanks! - The Bushranger One ping only 07:44, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * via AWB. <span title="Shoot!" style="font-family: Mono; Cursor: crosshair;">-- Cheers, Ri l ey    07:54, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * That was quick and painless. Thanks! - The Bushranger One ping only 08:46, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
 * ✅ <span title="Shoot!" style="font-family: Mono; Cursor: crosshair;">-- Cheers, Ri l ey    08:47, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

and/or --> or
I request a bot to automatically change all instances of "and/or" in the main namespace with "or", per WP:ANDOR, excluding any articles under Category:English grammar or one of its subcategories. ❤ Yutsi Talk/  Contributions  ( 偉特 ) 04:20, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Bot_policy: "Unsupervised bot processes should not make context-sensitive changes that would normally require human attention, as accounting for all possible false positives is generally unfeasible." -- Make  cat  13:03, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Adjusting the behaviour of sister project links
At the moment, Wikivoyage is opt-in in sister project links, while all other WMF projects (except Wikidata and Wikispecies, which are special) are opt-out. This doesn't make sense and should be changed. To do so, however, we would need a bot to go through all transclusions of sister project links and add a "voy=no" parameter, except on articles that are about a town, state, country, etc. It would be fairly simple to use something like infobox settlement as a guide, but it may not be very accurate. (I'm not sure if it is necessary to check for a corresponding page on Wikivoyage, as some of the search results on other pages may be useful as well.) — This, that and the other (talk) 10:22, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


 * The good thing is that recently a started running a bot (User:The Anonybot) to add the Wikivoyage parameter to all articles that have the Wikivoyage-inline template. I might be able to create a new task for the bot to add the "voy=no" parameter to all articles that I have not added the "voy=" parameter to already. The Anonymouse (talk &#124; contribs) 17:44, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
 * That would be great, really. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:48, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll see what I can do, but I probably won't be able to do it for a few days. The Anonymouse (talk &#124; contribs) 06:07, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Just pinging so it doesn't get archived. — This, that and the other (talk) 09:21, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * FYI, I put all bot activity for the template on hold temporarily because of the recent discussions at Template talk:Sister project links. The Anonymouse (talk &#124; contribs) 10:03, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I think there is consensus over at the other page. There's no hurry, of course ... as a coder myself, I know that one lacks motivation sometimes! — This, that and the other (talk) 10:22, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Checking language links
Is it possible to scan our language articles to check that they link to the correct ISO codes?

There are 7,500 blue links on WikiProject Languages/Primary language names in Ethnologue 16 by ISO code. If I could get a bot check to verify which are obviously correct, I could check any exceptions manually.

The parameter is whether the ISO code at the target article matches what we have on the ISO list. For example, the first link on the list page is aaa. The article Ghotuo language has a language infobox with the parameter "iso3" set equal to aaa, so that link is good. That should be easy to check by bot, assuming it can follow redirects.

The potentially matching parameters in Infobox language are iso3, lc1, lc2, lc3, .... (lc-n is used where there is more than one ISO code.)

I'm hoping for a list of any language names which do not link to the matching ISO code. I suspect there are a fair number of circular links which need to be fixed. It would be nice if both pieces of data could be returned. So, if the example link were bad, we'd get back "Ghotuo language : aaa" or something similar.

Is that possible?

Thanks, — kwami (talk) 06:42, 3 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Mutley1989 (talk) 19:18, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Dutch municipalities tagging
I am trying to reactive WikiProject Dutch municipalities. One of the steps would be to assess all relevant articles, which are the articles on the municipalities and the articles about their subdivisions. All these articles are already tagged with the WikiProject Netherlands banner as far as I can tell. These would need to be updated with |muni=yes |muni-importance=Low/Mid.

All municipalities would have to be automatically tagged as Mid and their subdivisions as Low importance. For each of 12 provinces there are lists of Cities, towns and villages and categories with all the municipalities. All articles occurring in both would need a Mid-importance tag, the articles only occurring in the former a Low-importance tag. Both would need the |muni=yes as well.

I am not fully familiar with the wikipedia bot process, but I assume this would be possible to do automatically. Could any of you advice me how to proceed with this? CRwikiCA (talk) 20:22, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * To elaborate a bit more on this, is it possible for all articles in the category and subcategories of Category:Populated places in the Netherlands to have <tt>|muni=yes |muni-importance=Low</tt> added to the template WikiProject Netherlands? CRwikiCA (talk) 11:04, 16 February 2013 (UTC)


 * I am currently tagging the municipal articles with Mid and up. So please do not blindly perform the previous request skip all articles that already have the <tt>|muni=yes</tt> tag. CRwikiCA (talk) 21:14, 19 February 2013 (UTC)