Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/Automation

The automation department of WikiProject United States uses various automated and semi-automated methods to perform batch tasks that would be extremely tedious to do manually; it collects requests for tasks, discusses whether they are suitable for automation, and attempts to match them with bot operators or users of semi-automated tools for implementation. All project members are invited to request tasks and to comment on the suitability of outstanding requests.

What is automation for?
The current scope of WikiProject United States is enormous and covers many thousands of articles. These articles must be tagged as being maintained by the WikiProject, 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 have been 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 AutoWikiBrowser, requiring a user's decision to whether or not implement the changes. Indeed, in order to minimise 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.
 * Don't assign yourself a task if you don't have time for it.
 * If you can only do a part of a task, once finished, update the number of articles remaining, and move it back to unassigned.
 * 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!
 * If you want to help, look at the list of unassigned tasks below, assign it to yourself by adding your name to the appropriate column, and start kickin' :)
 * Once completed, put this fact in a visible manner somewhere in the list.

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

Note: "non-recurrent" tasks should actually be reperformed once every few months, to take into account new articles created on the subject. However, moving a finished non-recurrent task back to unassigned will be done at discretion of the project coordinators.

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

Proposed tasks
Please add a brief description of the proposed task below; once it has been determined that it can be safely carried out, and that there are no objections to doing so, it will be moved into the tables above.

All project members are invited to comment on these requests—particularly if they notice any problems with the proposal!

Resources

 * AutoWikiBrowser page - you can download AutoWikiBrowser there.
 * Kingbotk Plugin for AWB - An AutowikiBrowser plugin for WikiProject templating and Wikipedia assessments. Use generic project plug-in. Full support for WikiProject United States is currently under development.
 * Pywikipedia - a set of Python scripts to use as bots.