Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/CountryBot 3


 * 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.

CountryBot 3
Operator:

Time filed: 04:17, Wednesday January 12, 2011 (UTC)

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic (supervised)

Programming language(s): PHP

Source code available: botclasses.php + regex ( /^\\n\\n/m )

Function overview: Remove extra newline after italictitle templates so that articles don't start with empty whitespace.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): one time run

Number of pages affected: 2628

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Y

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y

Function details: A while back, someone added the italictitle template to the beginning of several categories of articles (probably with a bot), but also added two linebreaks after the template. Since the template itself doesn't display anything, this caused all of these articles to begin with empty whitespace (an example). At this point most of the articles have been fixed by hand, but the more obscure articles are still broken. This is essentially a cosmetic problem, but a very noticable and annoying one. I've fixed several dozen myself by hand over the last year as I ran into them, but I would really like to just run this bot and get it over with.

The only thing this script will do is look for articles that begin with the italictitle template followed by 2 newlines, and delete the 2nd newline. I would like to run it in batches so that I can manually review the edits (just to be paranoid).

Discussion
What about >2 linebreaks, someone bypassing redirect to italic title, or inserting whitespace? Or do you plan to only do this once for this specific case and not run this task afterwards? Any particular reason this is not exclusion compliant? — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 08:59, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
 * In all of the cases I've encountered, the format is italictitle followed by 2 linebreaks (as added by Heds using AWB). The articles that have other forms of the template are fine as far as I've seen. This is just a quick clean-up of Heds edits. I want to keep it simple to avoid errors, and I don't really care about it being 100% thorough. The bot was not exclusion compliant because I didn't see any reason it would need to be. The bot doesn't add any content to any articles or talk pages, it's just fixing a simple formatting error on a small number of articles. I've since added exclusion compliance so that it isn't an issue. Kaldari (talk) 20:22, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
 * — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 20:30, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
 * 50 edits completed (plus a few more from early test runs). Kaldari (talk) 20:55, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Do not do so many test edits in mainspace prior to trial. This is against bot policy.

Anyway, for one time run. — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 21:10, 15 January 2011 (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.