Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Maintenance

The maintenance department of the Biography WikiProject uses various automated and semi-automated methods to perform batch tasks that would be extremely tedious to do manually.

Automation
The current scope of the Biography WikiProject is enormous and covers thousands of articles. These articles must be tagged, their infoboxes replaced or deprecated, and so forth. Given the sheer number of articles, it is quite tedious to do these things by hand; therefore, various automated or semi-automated processes must be set up to perform these maintenance tasks.

How to help?
Depending on the nature of the task, it can be either completely automated and run by a bot, or semi-automated via AWB, requiring a user's decision to whether or not implement the changes. Indeed, in order to minimize false positives, some of the operations should be performed by hand.

Rules of thumb:
 * If you don't have a bot, don't take up a task that can be automated and involves a great number of articles - you will lose precious time pressing Ctrl-S in AWB.
 * Don't create your own bot if there is no need to - a few bots will probably be more than enough.
 * If the task is semi-automated only, it is because there are numerous false positives, so check every article before saving.
 * Don't forget to uncheck "ignore unexisting pages" in AWB's "Set options" tab when dealing with talk pages!

What is a task?
A task is a maintenance operation that can be executed on a precise set of articles. It can be identified by several parameters:
 * Its name
 * A description of the initial set of articles on which the operation must be performed and of the unitary operation itself, along with conditional parameters. The initial set can be:
 * A category
 * A list of pages transcluding a template
 * Whether or not it can be automated (see above)
 * The number of articles in the initial set

Stub tagging
For example, all articles in Category:United States military personnel stubs could be tagged with military-work-group=yes and auto-assessed as stubs. There are many such catgories that can be similarly assessed, e.g. Category:African politician stubs could be tagged with politician-work-group=yes and auto-assessed as Stub, etc.

When a task involves tagging articles from a stub tag and automatically rating them as "Stub-Class", the auto parameter in WPBiography must be set:

Maintenance backlogs
For example, talk pages in Category:Biography articles needing priority parameter replacement have an active importance= parameter, which needs to be replaced with priority=.

Article tagging
For example, all articles in Category:Living people could be tagged and living=yes added.

Resources

 * AutoWikiBrowser page - you can download AutoWikiBrowser there.
 * Kingbotk Plugin for AWB - An AutowikiBrowser plugin for WikiProject templating and Wikipedia assessments. Supports WPBiography.
 * Pywikipedia - a set of Python scripts to use as bots.