Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SporkBot 3


 * The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Symbol keep vote.svg Approved.

SporkBot 3
Operator:

Time filed: 19:28, Saturday March 26, 2011 (UTC)

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic, after a supervised trial period

Programming language(s): Perl

Source code available: Standard PerlWikipedia, will provide a link to the source code.

Function overview: Reformat infoboxes for articles in Category:Football biography using deprecated parameters

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):
 * See Templates for discussion/Log/2011 February 5

Edit period(s): One time run, with possible second run if edits are reverted due to unrelated vandalism or other edit conflicts.

Estimated number of pages affected: 50,000

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): yes

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

Function details: The Infobox football biography template was forked to create Infobox football biography 2 as part of an effort to improve syntax and accessibility. I merged the two templates back into Infobox football biography, which uses the new syntax, but is backwards compatible with the old syntax. The bot would convert all transclusions using the old syntax to use the new syntax. It will be programmed to only perform transformations which match very strict patterns, to avoid the possibility of unintentional mangling, and to make the diffs as readable as possible.

Extended details: The reason for the syntax change is that the old template used a single field for years, teams, and caps(goals)). The method for specifying multiple years, teams, appearances, and goals was to separate each with a &lt;br&gt; tag.  This is problematic for at least three reasons, (1) it is difficult to see in the wikitext which year corresponds to which team and easy to make errors when entering or updating the data (2) it is bad for accessibility reasons, since data is not aligned by row, which can be understood by attempting to cut-and-paste the data from the generated HTML, noticing the jumbled mess it creates, and (3) if the line wraps, the data no longer lines up correctly from column to column.

Discussion

 * Note: since this task is associated with the closing of a TFD, my bot does have broader approval to complete this task. However, given the number of edits, I thought it would be best to obtain additional approval here.  Thanks! Plastikspork ―Œ (talk)  19:28, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Let's see the actual diffs of what this task does. — HELL KNOWZ  ▎TALK 12:34, 3 April 2011 (UTC)


 * What's the status of this? Are we ready for a trial, or has a trial already happened? - Kingpin13 (talk) 15:49, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I was preoccupied with another TFD task. Here is a link to the 10 trial edits. Right now, it is only semi-automated (i.e., I inspect each edit), but once I have completed around 500 or so, and there are no issues, I will most likely move to fully-automated mode. This is why there are currently irregular time gaps between the edits. My choice for the pattern replacement was one which would make the diffs as small as possible (hence, the preservation of newlines). Thanks! Plastikspork ―Œ (talk) 20:46, 23 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Bots/Requests for approval/Petan-Bot task7 has been given approval for this task already and appears to be up to the letter R.-- Club Oranje T 08:55, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
 * hmmm, not sure how Petan-Bot is working through them - seems alphabetically, but has not done _all_ the As Bs Cs etc. in Category:Football biography using deprecated parameters. However, earlier comment is still valid, Petan-Bot has reduced the category from 50,000+ articles to somewhere around 30,000 and reducing.-- Club Oranje T 09:15, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Strange, I filed this one before the Petan-Bot request, but for some reason that one was fast-tracked. I see no harm in having two bots work on it, but given the variable speed of approvals, I think it is quite likely the job will be finished before this is approved.  I certainly have other stuff to do.  It would still be good to have approval, since the category may fill up a bit again due to inadvertent reversions, copy-and-paste from other wikis or other reasons.  Thanks for the pointer. Plastikspork ―Œ (talk)  20:44, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

 MBisanz  talk 02:06, 4 May 2011 (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.