Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BU RoBOT 21


 * The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Symbol keep vote.svg Approved

BU RoBOT 21
Operator:

Time filed: 18:16, Tuesday, June 14, 2016 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): AWB

Source code available: AWB

Function overview: Replace hyphens with endashes within the "teams" and "formerteams" parameters in Infobox baseball biography as per MOS:DASH

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): None; this task is non-controversial and similar to past tasks such as Bots/Requests_for_approval/DASHBot, which took the much more significant action of moving pages to make the same stylistic change. See also Bots/Requests for approval/BU RoBOT 16

Edit period(s): One-time run, possibly recurring at some point in the distant future to pick up new incorrect uses of hyphens.

Estimated number of pages affected: At least 1,750, but probably closer to 2,500. The task is pre-parsing now, and I'll edit in a more final number tonight. Surprisingly, the pre-parse came out to 1,800, quite a bit lower than I expected.

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): Yes

Function details: It's very common for editors to mistakenly use hyphens instead of endashes when providing a date range. In transclusions of Infobox baseball biography, this is common in the dated list of teams each player, coach, or manager has been with. This task will replace hyphens with endashes within the teams parameter subject to the following restrictions:


 * It will not replace hyphens followed or preceded by a letter or another hyphen.
 * It will not replace hyphens within links (both external and wikilinks).
 * It may not replace all hyphens if the infobox uses a large (5+) number of reference tags in the teams parameter. This may affect a very small number of articles. In this case, the bot would replace the first several hyphens with endashes but may leave a few behind. It wouldn't create any errors in this case.

In testing this extensively over thousands of articles of Infobox NFL player and around a hundred articles of this infobox, I found no errors in the final version. It's possible there are some weird edge cases where cosmetic changes would be made due to the wide variety of syntax used in the teams parameter, but I've encountered none.

I would also appreciate feedback on whether a general task to perform this clean-up on the templates in Category:Sportsperson infobox templates would be acceptable, assuming this task goes as well as the previous task did.

Discussion

 * — xaosflux  Talk 02:11, 17 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Contributions here. No errors. ~ RobTalk 02:58, 17 June 2016 (UTC)


 * -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:23, 17 June 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.