Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-01-25/Technology report

Second generation article assessment bot
On January 23, the second generation rewrite of the article assessment bot WP 1.0 bot was launched. The upgrade was necessary because the current bot now takes several days to update the many on-wiki database pages for each WikiProject. In addition, the previous bot was not customizable for individual WikiProjects and did not allow for dynamic data queries, such as finding pages which had been rated by two different WikiProjects. The new bot solves these problems in two main ways. First, the bot's record of rating information has been shifted from on-wiki pages to a separate web database. This new interface allows for dynamic queries based on a variety of parameters. Secondly, article summary tables for WikiProjects now display alternate classes such as category, portal, and disambiguation, and customization of classes for individual WikiProjects is possible through Template:ReleaseVersionParameters.

WikiProjects do not need to take any action for their summary tables to be updated for the new bot. However, any questions or bugs should be reported to Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index.

Bug fixes and enhancements

 * Bugzilla, the bug tracking software used for MediaWiki, was upgraded to version 3.4.4. (Bug 16777)

Bots approved
Three new bot tasks were approved this past week.


 * TedderBot (Task 3) – Collate two lists containing all pages belonging to WikiProject Oregon to enable article and nonarticle recent changes lists.
 * BotMultichill (Task 5) – Tag files transferred to Commons with in order to clear the 20,000 file backlog.
 * DASHBot (Task 7) – Move rating in the |Ratings= parameter of to the newly created.