Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/OmniBot 2


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OmniBot 2
Operator:

Time filed: 00:53, Sunday, March 27, 2016 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): AutoWikiBrowser

Source code available: AWB

Function overview: Monitors Category:Living people and replaces reference maintenance templates on BLP pages with the correct BLP template (e.g ->  )

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): Weekly

Estimated number of pages affected: Approximately 25-50 pages a week.

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

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

Function details: The bot will replace the following templates using a list of pages in Category:Living people: Note that the replacement of Unreferenced with BLP unsourced is already performed by BattyBot, however the other templates are not replaced. These tasks would be extremely tedious to do manually using AWB because the program only allows the creation of lists up to 25,000 pages long and Category:Living people has over 700,000 pages. This plugin allows the creation of larger lists, however it's only available to those with the "apihighlimits" permission (bots and admins). The bot will use AWB's find and replace feature to switch out the templates. For example, Template:Refimprove will be replaced Template:BLP sources by finding instances of Template:Refimprove using the regex. It will replace these instances with  (which means that it will keep any parameters such as  ). It will skip any pages which do not contain any of the above templates or contain the template.
 * Refimprove with BLP sources
 * Primary sources with BLP primary sources
 * Unreferenced section with BLP unsourced section
 * Refimprove section with BLP sources section
 * Self-published with BLP self-published

Discussion
Try to do ten per template. Also ping to take a look. —  Earwig   talk 20:18, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
 * The first four bullets above are included as part of AWB's general fixes, so you shouldn't need to use regex for those.  I submitted a feature request for the developers to add the last one to general fixes.  GoingBatty (talk) 21:40, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
 * , Okay I'll try for 10 edits per template, and Oh, thanks, I didn't realize that :) —  Omni Flames  ( talk   contribs ) 22:17, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Okay, so I'm running the bot now and so far it's checked ~3000 pages. Yet it hasn't made a single edit. I'm not sure whether this is due to an error or my part or the fact that there aren't that many pages that need to be changed. Thoughts? — Omni Flames  ( talk   contribs ) 08:15, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
 * I think you pretty much answered your own question; if the problem exists and isn't being solved already, you might double check your logic. -- slakr \ talk / 03:35, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

AWB's general fixes can do most for the job. I reported a minor bug at and found some weird cases that the conversion could not be performed. I did a database scan and there were about 15,000 pages with non-converted templates. I fixed about 5,000 manually and used bot for some thousand more. I also added a feature requests at to help this task. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:06, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
 * fixes the bug issue. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:53, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

in contrary to the other BP specific templates Template:BLP primary sources directly transcludes another template instead of having Ambox. This makes difficult to distinguish between the two templates. Do you think we should change this and convert the BLP template to use Ambox? If yes, can you please do it? -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:01, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Magioladitis, of course it's possible, but I imagine there was a reason for making it a wrapper? I will go ahead and change it and see if anyone objects. Frietjes (talk) 13:16, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
 * at least there is inconsistency between this template and the others. This caused me troubles when fixing the articles. Moreover there are approx. 160 templates that contain unreferenced section. I think the tag should be removed from them. Example -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:19, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

If we resolve everything there is only one problem to be solved: How the list will be generated? Running blindly in a category of more than 700,000 items is not a good idea. If if the run is on the What transcludes of the 4 templates there will be more than 300,000 to be checked in order to find only 20-30 pages per week. If this really worth? -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:59, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

I fixed the last remaining pages and I asked AnomieBot to improve their logic. User talk:AnomieBOT/Archive 8. -- Magioladitis (talk) 20:47, 10 May 2016 (UTC)
 * If they're all fixed, then I suppose  Omni Flames   let's talk about it  00:53, 25 May 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.