Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Helpful Pixie Bot 47


 * 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 The result of the discussion was Symbol oppose vote.svg Withdrawn by operator.

Helpful Pixie Bot 47
Operator:

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic

Programming language(s): Perl/AWB

Source code available: AWB, yes; Perl no.

Function overview: Add to monthly maintenance categories

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): Continuous

Estimated number of pages affected: about 2857 cats

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Yes

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

Function details: This will result in the categories' membership count being tracked by a tool-server tool, and enable longer term monitoring of trends.

Discussion
Extensive manual testing has been successfully completed. See for example. Rich Farmbrough 01:34, 24 March 2012 (UTC)


 * For the record, the operator has already run this task on hundreds of articles without approval, on his main (non-bot) account, at bot-like rates. For example see . &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 01:54, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
 * For the record? For the lulz, perhaps if you were a lulz type of person. For the record another reason that BRFA is more trouble than it's worth is that you or Fram will be there with your passive-aggressive attacks. Rich Farmbrough, 03:22, 24 March 2012 (UTC).


 * It's worth pointing out because you have a history of not following best practices with regards to bot approval, which casts some doubt on whether additional tasks should be approved. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 11:39, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It's worth pointing out that I can and will do this manually if need be. Wikipedia is a word made of two stems, "wiki" for quick and "pedia" for encyclopaedia. If you want a slow bureaucracy there are on-line games of gnomic that might suit you better. Rich Farmbrough, 14:17, 24 March 2012 (UTC).


 * Ordinary editing is quick, of course. However, in a project this size, there are some areas where there is indeed slow bureaucracy. One of them is articles for deletion; another is bot approval. The era when it was permissible to just run bot jobs without approval ended long ago. I am also a bot operator, as you know. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 16:46, 24 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Regarding the actual request, is there any community discussion the establishes consensus for this? It seems like it would not be very hard for the tracker to automatically detect maintenance categories using the existing category tree, so that it should not be necessary to add even more categories to them just to tell which ones are monthly maintenance categories. Just because a bot is technically able to tag thousands of categories does not make that the right solution. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 01:58, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It's not adding any categories. Previously my plan was to capture these figures myself, however if Tim's tool will do it and make the figures widely available that is cool too. Rich Farmbrough, 03:22, 24 March 2012 (UTC).


 * My point is that the categories are already in categories, such as Category:Clean up categories and its subcategories. So it's not clear why another template is needed to find these maintenance categories. Adding a template to every maintenance category is bound to be more error prone than just using the existing system to find them. But really this should be discussed on a village pump, not on the BRFA. It should be clear that there is community consensus before trials even begin, although you have already begun adding the template without approval. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 11:39, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, they are, and the reason they are in those categories is that I, apparently a persona non grata in your eyes, created and populated them. Rich Farmbrough, 14:17, 24 March 2012 (UTC).


 * I don't really care who added them originally, but now that they are there I don't see the reason that another template is needed on every maintenance category. Back to my original question: where was this discussed and agreed upon? &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 16:46, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Question, why is a template needed? Couldn't you just fetch those with some regex, or via Category:Clean up categories or similar? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 21:10, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It's Tim's tool. I'm awaiting a reply on his talk page, which may simplify things. Rich Farmbrough, 23:33, 24 March 2012 (UTC).


 * Simply because Tim's tool works in a particular way does not mean that we have to use Tim's tool for this task if it is not set up in a way amenable to tracking thousands of categories. In any event this ought to be hashed out on a village pump, rather than on the BRFA page. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 00:01, 25 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Suggest closure because Rich and Helpful Pixie Bot have been blocked for a month because Rich violated his editing restrictions. Link to block.  Rcsprinter  (yak)  11:09, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
 * We don't have an appropriate closure tag and this BRFA isn't really "closed", just delayed; so I took the BRFA off the main list until the bot operator returns to this BRFA without prejudice to continue. — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 11:16, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Note: these cats are created by my bot in the first place, and are almost never edited by anyone else,so there's no reason to think that there's a "watchlist" issue. Moreover the cats are ephemeral, so the edits will, in due course, be deleted, so there's not even dump bloat. Rich Farmbrough, 07:58, 2 May 2012 (UTC).

I don't think that my question about where this was discussed and gained community consensus was ever addressed. The implementation seems very suboptimal, making another ongoing maintenance task of tagging categories that can already be found with simple database queries. It would be better to let people work out the best implementation first and then approve a bot once that has consensus. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 11:19, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Suboptimal in what respect? In that it will take me less time to do than typing this reply? Where's community consensus to spam my BRFAs? Really you are becoming extremely tiresome. Rich Farmbrough, 12:19, 2 May 2012 (UTC).


 * Suboptimal in that it is already possible to find these categories without adding another tag to them. Putting tags on all the newly created categories is a new maintenance task. But the fact that a bot could automatically find the new categories to tag shows that the tag is not actually necessary to find the categories. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 12:22, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
 * It's not really. All newly created cats are getting the template anyway. Rich Farmbrough, 18:08, 2 May 2012 (UTC).

BAG assistance needed Rich Farmbrough, 07:58, 2 May 2012 (UTC).

The task itself, seems fairly uncontrovertial and safe, however Carl does make a valid point, namely is this the best way to perform this task? Rich, could you please expand on the overall picture behind this task, so we can get an idea of what the tracking is trying to accomplish and if this is the best way to do it? The other important question is, whether any of these tasks should be approved at all atm considering the impending arbcom decision; However I think that is best rasied on WT:BRFA, rather than here. -- Chris 12:35, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes certainly, by having a record of the size of the monthly categories on a regular basis, it is possible to extract management information about all the dated clean-up categories in tabular or graphical form.  This is vital for some of the decisions we are taking on a day-to-day basis, for example understanding which clean-up tags are effective in gettign articles cleaned, where the backlog is actually getting longer rather than shorter, and so forth.  Basically the information the progress boxes give now, but spread over time. Rich Farmbrough, 12:53, 2 May 2012 (UTC).


 * Although I share some of the concerns above that there might be a better way to do this, I think this is a good idea. Having some metrics data about the categories might be useful. I would also note that this sort of template has presidence. The WikiProject templates for example, as well as the templates used for archiving like Misza bot. Kumioko (talk) 15:03, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Note, in the natural course of events new categories have been created, with the tracking feature, old categories, mostly without have been deleted. We now have a ragged start to the data, delayed by five weeks, for no reason. Rich Farmbrough, 01:05, 3 May 2012 (UTC).

OK we're getting nowhere with this. Lets focus on the other two. Rich Farmbrough, 13:23, 3 May 2012 (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.