Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SWinxyTheBot


 * The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at Bots/Noticeboard. The result of the discussion was

SWinxyTheBot
Operator:

Time filed: 05:51, Friday, August 6, 2021 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic

Programming language(s): Java

Source code available: https://github.com/SWinxy/SWinxyTheBot

Function overview: Remove unnecessary language=enUS (or variations of) in citations. Per Template:Citation, these are not displayed if in English. Often times the automatic citation tool adds (verbatim) the website's provided language code, and this may not be formatted correctly as a result. Plus, it is not strictly necessary on the enwiki.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): None

Edit period(s): Weekly

Estimated number of pages affected: Mainspace articles

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

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

Function details: The bot will remove instances of language parameters set to English via a regex string. and  are both checked for, and ,  ,  , and   as well. The regex also is able to get dialects (ie American English or British English).

Regex:

This task is extremely low-priority, and as such may be configured to run on the least busiest times of the week. The amount of reads to edits is likely to be high, since not a lot of articles have those parameters in citations.

The code does not check to see if what it's searching for is in a, so it's best to keep its edits in mainspace to avoid accidents.

Discussion

 * doesn't change the display on English Wikipedia, but the same section you linked above points out that citation templates come across when articles are translated into other languages. Elsewhere, it would be important to have metadata indicating that the source is in English. Therefore, unless there's some additional harm to having this parameter, I don't think this is a good bot task. Vahurzpu (talk) 15:41, 7 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I interpret Because cs1 to mean that the ISO code is preferred to English-written language names, so that the template on other language wikis will display the full name in that wiki's language rather than the anglicized version. I should have brought up in the request that the TemplateData language parameter says: The language in which the source is written, if not English. And this is copied verbatim in nearly all high-use templates, such as Cite web, Cite news, Cite magazine, and Cite journal. Most (vast majority of) citations don't specify the language when they're in English anyway (probably because of this), so I don't see benefit in keeping them for other language wikis to not fill in the parameter for some citations. SWinxy (talk) 05:57, 11 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Does this cause a visual change? If not, is there a good reason why it doesn't violate WP:COSMETICBOT and/or is on the right side of the threshold of usefulness? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 22:31, 7 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I will wait for a reply to the above question, but for the record I am also leaning towards declining on account of the apparent cosmetic nature of this task. Primefac (talk) 14:13, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
 * It doesn't cause a visual change (the citation doesn't display it, and no categories are used to track). But the bot could instead be run once a month (or even more infrequent, like once every 3 months) to avoid causing cluttering mentioned, or to be approved to run only on pages already slated to be modified by another task given to this bot in the future. SWinxy (talk) 05:57, 11 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Cosmetic bots aren't allowed regardless of frequency, generally speaking. There is the cosmetic bot day (WP:CBD) on which you can do them, but who knows when that'll happen. Bundling this into other tasks by the bot is possible, but is unlikely to make any significant dent unless you operate high volume tasks. The best option would be to bundle this into AWB WP:GENFIXES. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:09, 19 August 2021 (UTC)
 * No indication that this is anything other than a cosmetic task that isn't entirely necessary anyway. Primefac (talk) 20:59, 22 August 2021 (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 Bots/Noticeboard.