Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/CpiralBot


 * 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 neutral vote.svg Request Expired.

CpiralBot
Operator:

Time filed: 22:32, Monday, December 28, 2015 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Supervised.

Programming language(s): AutoWikiBrowser

Source code available: A regular expression, for which I am a highly capable.

Function overview: Retrofit template usage to achieve template feature parity and avoid the need for backward compatible code. Change or remove unwanted template usage. Change a feature or add a new feature in lock step with a new version of a template.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): The bottom part of template talk:In title, and the following section template talk:In title. Also template talk:Look from.

Edit period(s): One time run, per cleanup/template-change issue.

Estimated number of pages affected: $10,070$ today, with 5–10 newly added problem pages per day.

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No):

No.

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

Function details: This is for intitle, but the approval needs to extend for the sister template lookfrom.

As seen by the query, the list of pagenames to run through AWB all match precise, regex-generated search results.

Discussion
Having search links on an article page is a dubious affair. Nevertheless, intitle exists on 2% of dab pages, and on over 2000 more pages in article space that are not a dab page. In most cases they are showing up in the printed article. Because they are often bullet items, no addition of HTML in the template can remove their bullets from print, hence this bot request.

The new version of the template, in title/sandbox, outputs its own "noprint bullet". There is no better approach to solving the problem, and lookfrom must be done as well.

Current plan is under scrutiny at, but some kind of bot will definitely be needed on these same pages (printing issues due to template). &mdash; Cp i r al  Cpiral  08:01, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

At it was pointed out that although it is a fine idea to run a bot to fix the print problem, that it complicates certain patches of HTML in lists for an issue that is almost certainly going to be a normal priority bug-fix. Then I began to realized that any bot fix now is temporary, and should end up, after some time, needing yet another bot-fix to cleanup the complicated HTML patches.

Anytime a second, cleanup run should be done after an awaited, deeper, fix of a minor problem, this should be a classical reason for denying a bot approval request. This is because the first bot-fix makes any cleanup a low priority, plus the time interval between the two related bot-runs, say, a year, can make the need for the second run much less noticeable.

The bot fix consensus is now depending on a response to the matter at. &mdash; Cp i r al  Cpiral  00:53, 8 January 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.