Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Polbot 8


 * 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 8
Operator: – Quadell (talk) (random)

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic, but with supervision

Programming Language(s): Perl, using Perlwikipedia

Function Summary: Fixes to references and external links

Edit period(s): In small batches (one category at a time)

Already has a bot flag: Yes

Function Details: The most prominent thing this bot will do is name external links, similar to the way that DumZiBoT does. There are a few differences: DumZiBoT runs on all pages using a database dump, while Polbot will run on one category's worth of articles at a time and will use live data. Also, DumZiBot changes "[http:www.example.com/subpage]" to "[http:www.example.com/subpage A Subpage]", whereas Polbot will instead change it to "[http:www.example.com/subpage A Subpage] at www.example.com" per feedback on my talk page. And DumZiBoT can handle PDFs, but I can't figure out how to do that, so Polbot will skip PDFs.

But wait, there's more! Polbot's 8th function will also make other improvements, to wit:
 * 1) Convert the .  And would the first example that you give change a number [1] to example?  See also AWB/FR.
 * Is there a wiki page where users could see and add to the list of templates? Mind you it doesn't need to pull it from the page.
 * Could I see the source already, because the one I uses doesn't work when the in a ref on the same line.
 * Same comment as on DumZiBoT page, would like to a better ref names as editors ultimately don't change these names
 * This probably isn't useful but if you wanted more you could always have AWB to run the perl script.
 * Did you rewrite all of DumZiBot's code in perl? If you did wouldn't it have been easier to call it the program?  When will you releasing the source code? — Dispenser 21:15, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate your questions, and I hope I'm understanding them all correctly. These are examples.
 * #1: Yes, it keeps font and column formatting.
 * #4: It prepends colons for categories and images, so http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:William_Gibson_by_FredArmitage.jpg becomes Image:William Gibson by FredArmitage.jpg and linktext becomes linktext.
 * #5: the way the code deals with templates such as cite news and imdb is rather complicated -- but people have left requests on my talk pages, and whenever they have, I have implemented the requested templates.
 * #6: The source code is at User:Polbot/source/Reffix.pl. But basically, this function turns a line like this:
 * ...into:

These are examples.
 * Is there something the code's not doing that you think it should?


 * #7: I've given up on this for now. It doesn't come up often, and NickDumZ is having a bugger of a time getting it to work. So I may go back to that challenge later. Or not.
 * #8: Well, the version I'm working on now is over 1000 lines, including XML-parsing packages, HTML-following packages, and strange character-encoding packages, so I don't know that that sort of thing could (or should) be integrated into AWB. I did not use DumZiBot's code directly -- I basically took his idea, changed it considerably, and created a perl bot from scratch. Although the two bots do a few things similarly, the differences really are enormous. – Quadell (talk) 22:45, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Current status (2)
I think I've answered all the questions. I believe this bot is ready for Wikipedia, if Wikipedia is ready for this bot. – Quadell (talk) 13:12, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

BJ Talk 13:17, 29 July 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.