Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Polbot 4


 * 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 keep vote.svg Approved.

Polbot
Operator: Quadell

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic, supervised

Programming Language(s): perl, with Perlwikipedia

Function Summary: convert Bioguide to CongBio, and make misc fixes to these articles

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): one-time run, or a few times in small chunks

Edit rate requested: 4 edits per minute

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

Function Details: CongBio is preferable to Bioguide, but you have to find the url of the Congress member at the bio guide to use the better tag. The bot will plow through Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Bioguide and try to look up the names here. If it finds only one person with the name, it will replace the tag in the article. While it's there, the bot will also make other misc improvements to the articles: Turning unlinked phrases that it recognizes into links (e.g. "graduated from Yale College" to "graduated from Yale College"), and unlinking lone years (e.g. "In 1924, he" to "In 1924, he").

Discussion
I know I'm making a lot of requests lately, but I just figured out how to do this bot thing, and I'm like a kid in a candy shop. – Quadell (talk) (random) 19:23, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I was that way too when I first discovered bots. :-) But anyway, won't changing the tag directly screw up formatting on some pages? See for example Arthur E. Nelson and John Lind (politician). — M ETS 501 (talk) 19:36, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
 * No, I don't think so. In both cases, it would be better to have the tag in a "Sources" section, but it won't make the poor arrangement worse. Specifically, it would do this (plus make other minor, unrelated improvements). – Quadell (talk) (random) 19:59, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, and that breaks the style and looks ugly, to me at least. I think that it needs to make sure that it's in a sources section (or references section, or something similar) and that it's not below other stuff like the navigation templates. — M ETS 501 (talk) 04:39, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
 * But the style was already broken, wasn't it? How does that edit make it worse? Are you saying that this bot will improve pages, but you'll only approve it if it will do more to improve pages?
 * Determining whether it's in a Sources section "or something similar" is problematic. There are tons of non-standard ways that people list sources, and any given bot can only account for a subset of these. No matter how smart I try to make the bot, there will always be cases where some article has a "Refs and Sources" section (or something else I'm not taking into account), and my bot would remove it from there and create a "Source" section, which would actually make it worse. By trying to make the bot smart enough to deal with articles that are already mis-organized, I would be making some articles worse. By simply replacing the tags, I would not be making any pages worse. – Quadell (talk) (random) 12:51, 18 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Looking at this, I think I might have come across as defensive or confrontational. I apologize. (Rule #1 of getting your bot approved: Do not bite the BAG.) The bottom line is: I could run the code as-is (simple replacement), or, if you prefer, I could try to move the template in limited situations. For instance, I could look for a section called "Sources", and if there is one, I could make sure the template goes there. Just let me know what you want. – Quadell (talk) (random) 01:34, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Where is the data on the urls going to come from? If you have to find this yourself, what is the point of a bot? Or is there one location listing many (that either your bot will screen scrape or you will feed to your bot)? Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 02:18, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Polbot is a rather clever bot. She tries to separate the name into First and Last names, then enters them into Congbio's form and looks them up. If there's only one matching rep, she grabs that URL and puts it in. She's smart enough to get 90% of them, and the rest she skips. (She uses this same function for Function #1, and she's never gotten a false positive.) – Quadell (talk) (random) 03:09, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

This request has been open for a week. I'm so excited about this bot that I'm likely to wet myself if it isn't approved soon. :-) – Quadell (talk) (random) 13:58, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
 * And I'm wearing my good pants, too. – Quadell (talk) (random) 20:57, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
 * The reason you're not getting a response is because (I think - I can really only speak for myself) we're really not sure what to do. Why don't you ask on the talk page of the MOS or something, because I really think it's breaking the style, so I don't want to approve it, but I would definitely not stand in the way if a couple of others felt that it didn't. — M ETS 501 (talk) 01:29, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Okay. I'm also willing to change the logic in whatever way BAG thinks is necessary to not break the style. – Quadell (talk) (random) 02:03, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

( Will this bot function get approved? Depends. )


 * My interpreation of the function is this: the bot goes through a WLH for one bio template, looks up the person who is named in that template, and if there's a match, changes the template and does some general fixes to the article. Presuming this is correct, I would like to know how the bot is safeguarding against getting false positives ("I haven't had any yet" doesn't strike me as the most assuring :)) - is the bot limiting itself to a category containing Congressmen and women? Martinp23 14:31, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Only congress members should transclude the Bioguide template. The bot will read the person's name (for instance "John H. Malcolm") and split in into first and last name ("John H" and "Malcolm"), and look this up in the bioguide. If there's no one in bioguide by that name, then the bot does nothing and moves on. Likewise, if there is more than one John H. Malcolm, the bot doesn't try to guess -- it just moves on. The only way there could be a false positive is if a non-Congress-member who has the same name as a Congress member is tagged (falsely) as using Bioguide as a source. All the bot would do is specify what page in the bioguide references the Congress-member of this name, which, again, wouldn't make the inaccurate information less accurate. In fact, it should make it easier for someone to see that the source isn't correct, and so remove it. By the way, the bot has created roughly six thousand bios without a false positive, so that's a pretty good track record. – Quadell (talk) (random) 15:11, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

BAGAssistanceNeeded To be honest, I can't see what could be controversial about this bot. It's changing a tag from saying "This info comes from the Bioguide" to saying "This info comes from this specific page in the Bioguide". That's all. It doesn't break or change the style in any way, and it doesn't affect any articles that aren't already flagged as having Bioguide as a source. How long does a request like this usually take to process? – Quadell (talk) (random) 15:53, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

The community has spoken. — M ETS 501 (talk) 05:41, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Support. I've made the change manually and it'll be really nice to have this done and done quickly.—Markles 13:12, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Support. This would make it ***MUCH*** clearer that the article originated as a bot article.  As it stands, it's easy for a novice not to know the article was bot generated.  I personally only found out that an article was bot generated when I went to edit it and only then saw the bot disclaimer.  It is coolest bot I have ever encountered.  A task of finishing biographies in Missouri which I thought would take weeks or months, was finished in one day and looks good.  The clearer indication of a bot article is also important for knowing to clean up odd artifacts in the article. Americasroof 14:14, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Support. Absolutely, it makes the articles a heck of a lot better. —Valadius 17:33, 27 June 2007 (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.