Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MBisanzBot 5


 * The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Symbol delete vote.svg Denied.

MBisanzBot
Operator:  MBisanz  talk

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic

Programming Language(s): AWB

Function Summary: Universalize template links

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): One large run, several small runs

Already has a bot flag Y:

Function Details: The bot will scan each template and replace instances of  with. The MediaWiki code defaults to Project: taxonomy so regardless of the namespace name, the link will always work. Per our definition of Free Culture we should make it as easy as possible for people to re-use our content. Being able to reuse our templates on another installation of MediaWiki without translating the hardcoded namespace names would work towards this goal.

Discussion

 * Is this really a useful task? How often are the Wikipedia-space templates re-used? --Carnildo (talk) 18:36, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I know they are re-used on Wikisource, and ideally we should be promoting best practices among projects that may lack the technical knowledge or skill base of our own in reusing our workproduct. Also, this is discussing pages in the Template: namespace that contain links or calls to the Wikipedia/Project: namespace.  MBisanz  talk 18:52, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Doing this would be an enormous waste of resources and would likely break a very large number of things (bots, database dump scans, scripts, etc.). I urge immediate rejection. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:38, 19 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree, this seems extremely unnecessarily. It also seems to assume that everyone using DB dumps is importing them into MediaWiki, that's not at all the case. Also any time you download a page through Special:Export or download an XML dump, it includes a section which provides all the namespace names:


 * Especially doing this with AWB, it would almost certainly be a waste of resources and likely to break things. I would agree with rejection. Mr.Z-man 16:29, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Indeed... this conversion should probably be be done at import-time by whoever's reusing our content, and the unnecessary load on the server it would cause with AWB is not worth it. I concur with Mr.Z-man:  krimpet  ✽  02:54, 20 September 2008 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.