Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Archive 21

Bugs & FR
We really need a better way to manage them

Something like bugzilla (or simpler) would be better... But maybe without registration

MaxSem and I did discuss this before, but to no real avail.

Suggestions?

—  Ree dy  14:20, 19 May 2010 (UTC)


 * The advantage of the current form is that we can have an accessible list to known F&R bugs. I would be more on a bugzilla page for the exceptions. PS I think we have to add "Loaded plugins" on the report. Reedy? -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:26, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I think what's needed is a review of all outstanding bugs, and more gradually a review of all the feature requests. Rjwilmsi  08:51, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
 * After rewriting KingbotK's code we ll have much less problems. The only question is if we want to keep track of the bugs we have marked as rare. Some of them may lost in the current archives. There a buzilla style would help. About the FR: We can't do all of them. Some of them are not appropriate for genfixes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:34, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps we should have a 'known issues' section somewhere. Rjwilmsi  09:40, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree on that. Then we can put there a lot of stuff. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:45, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Can't skip pages?
I've always used the "skip if no changes made" option. But recently, it's nonetheless stopped at every page with the message, "No changes made—press 'skip' to skip to the next page." Why, and what can I do about it? ╟─ Treasury Tag ► constablewick ─╢ 17:55, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Are you sure it's still checked? =) (Maybe paste your settings files somewhere if so) – xeno talk 18:00, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, there's a little tick inside the box... ╟─ Treasury Tag ► Lord Speaker ─╢ 18:39, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Are you making custom replacements or fixing typos? The Options tab also has a skip settings for Find and Replace and Typos that may need to be checked. —Ost (talk) 19:00, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
 * ...I just updated from 5.0.2.0 to 5.0.2.2 and it seems to have fixed it, for the moment anyway. Thanks, though! ╟─ Treasury Tag ► UK EYES ONLY ─╢ 19:02, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, this . If I were you I would ensure you are always running the latest WP:AWB/SVN. – xeno talk 19:04, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
 * There was a skipping bug we fixed under . Rjwilmsi  19:22, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Oddity
33d Fighter Wing AWB claims is a recursive redirect. Rich Farmbrough, 08:26, 22 May 2010 (UTC).
 * It doesn't for me. How did you get that article into the list? Sometimes problems can be caused by non-printing characters in a redirect/link. Rjwilmsi  08:44, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Except, if using a SVN snapshot, the redirect is resolved by the API now. —  Ree dy  09:19, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Comments
What's up with the blacklisted usernames being hidden, as they may cause offence? I thought we didn't do that here.Mk5384 (talk) 14:22, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Not censorship, more WP:BEANS, and it saves time for those patrolling Special:log/newusers.  Rodhull  andemu  15:01, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm sure it's a good idea. I've just never seen anything hidden like that here on account of potential offensiveness.Mk5384 (talk) 15:45, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Many of the Special:AbuseFilters are also hidden from public view for the same reason, and I suspect User:Cluebot's wordlist may not be fully visible. I don't see a problem with this. Rodhull  andemu  15:51, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Know in a plugin if AWB is in "pre-parse mode"
How can I know in my plugin if AWB is in "pre-parse mode". This is useful for enable/disable modal window's plugin. Thanks.--B3t (talk) 10:01, 17 May 2010 (UTC)
 * PS: Also, Can I modify the text of the "Summary" text box from the plugin?--B3t (talk) 13:07, 17 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Nothing?--B3t (talk) 08:09, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * exposes pre-parse status to plugins. Use "awb.PreParseMode" in a custom module, or IAutoWikiBrowser.PreParseMode in a Plugin. Rjwilmsi  11:14, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. For change the text of the "Summary" from the plugin?--B3t (talk) 12:56, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * You can't really "change" the summary, but you can append to it... —  Ree dy  14:19, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * How do? I tried with eventargs.Summary but nothing append.--B3t (talk) 20:45, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * It works for other plugins. Can you upload your source somewhere so I can have a look? —  Ree dy  13:01, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
 * homepage - files - last source.--B3t (talk) 13:06, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Cannot build in VS 2010
I am unable to build the latest SVN version of AWB in Visual Studio 2010. I'm using the solution. I was able to build with it until recently. I'm getting lots of errors about missing types, and some warnings like:

 Warning	1109	The primary reference "nunit.framework, Version=2.5.5.10112, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=96d09a1eb7f44a77, processorArchitecture=MSIL" could not be resolved because it has an indirect dependency on the framework assembly "mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" which could not be resolved in the currently targeted framework. ".NETFramework,Version=v2.0". To resolve this problem, either remove the reference "nunit.framework, Version=2.5.5.10112, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=96d09a1eb7f44a77, processorArchitecture=MSIL" or retarget your application to a framework version which contains "mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089".

Can you help me? Thanks. Svick (talk) 01:13, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm getting a different error, but won't compile on my laptop atm..

Error	1	Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:/SVN/autowikibrowser/AWB/WikiFunctions/bin/Debug/WikiFunctions.dll' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. Line 559, position 5. C:\SVN\autowikibrowser\AWB\AWB\Main.resx	559	5	AutoWikiBrowser
 * Will poke it later and see if i can sort something obvious. It's still targetting v2 on this version (I have a branch for looking at upgrading it later, which is using v4 etc) —  Ree dy  11:14, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I think it's some problem on my end, because when I tried reverting to first version with, I got the same errors, but it worked for me before. Svick (talk) 15:23, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

5022_rev6583
During the startup is visible a modal window: Compilation errors - Line 26, col 2: [CS1501] ... 'InitialiseLogListner'. So, there is a overload problem. That window is also visible with custom module's compilation.--B3t (talk) 17:20, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Mine doesn't.. What have you got setup in your custom modules? —  Ree dy  17:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Mine worked fine too and I also use custom modules.--Kumioko (talk) 17:50, 25 May 2010 (UTC)


 * The problem is with the custom module (i.e. disable custom module that error don't appear).

--B3t (talk) 21:14, 25 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Try

—  Ree dy  23:28, 25 May 2010 (UTC)


 * It's OK. So just change "a.InitialiseLogListener;". Sorry, yesterday I have not tried to deepen the problem. Thanks.--B3t (talk) 08:56, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

"Restarting in..."
After every single edit I save, AWB is doing a little countdown, "Restarting in....." going from a larger interval each time. Why, and what can I do about it? ╟─ Treasury Tag ► ballotbox ─╢ 19:01, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Probably need to fix your regex... If you can't figure it out, post your settings (without the giant list this time!). – xeno talk 19:02, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, thanks that did it. (And oh my God, I didn't know the list posted last time, it crashed my browser so I assumed it failed! Sorry!) ╟─ Treasury Tag ► without portfolio ─╢ 19:17, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Problem with updating
I am trying to get my AWB to work again. I think I was using Ver 5.0.2.2. Something has screwed up and now I am trying to use the recommended Ver 5.0.2.0. When I run AWB it wants to do an update. The updater comes up with an error "Problem replacing file" in a temp directory. What is happening? -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 21:22, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Updater is broken, will be fixed in next release. In the meantime there are snapshots available from the link at the top of this page. Rjwilmsi  22:26, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Remove template but not leave blank line?
I am using a find-and-replace function that replaces a template with nothing. However, I don't want an empty line left behind, is there any regex to fix this? -- Zoo Fari  00:24, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
 * If you add (?:\r\n)? to the end of the regex that would remove any left over newline. Rjwilmsi  07:12, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

I would be this to turn to bold
. AWB removed a self-link but I would expect it to turn to bold. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:06, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
 * There's already an entry in bold in the "this album" field, that's why. Rjwilmsi  10:09, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Examples in documentation (or lack thereof)
After attempting to use the documentation for the umphteenth time to figure out how to perform what should ultimately be a simple operation (non-subst replacement of one template for another) and failing miserably, I finally had the stroke of genius that my difficulty lies mainly in the fact that AWB's on-wiki documentation only documents, it doesn't seem to make the slightest attempt to show how to actually do anything. If I actually knew how to properly use AWB, I would, of course, add examples myself, but as I pointed out above, I'm pretty clueless, so I'm posting here in the hope that someone who *does* know can start posting some sample uses, and maybe in the meantime, someone else (or the same someone, doesn't really matter ;) ) can tell me how I can do such replacement.

For anyone willing to provide help directly with my replacement problem, I am wanting to replace calls of with  on Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia. Typical usage is a name parameter which *should* be equal to (which should be simply removed if it is equal), an optional name2 parameter which should be converted to an unnamed parameter if used, and an optional Other parameter which should be preserved if used. Parameters and closing brackets may be on separate or the same line, and whitespace may or may not be present around pipes and equals signs or after opening brackets/before closing brackets (it can be preserved or not, depending on which makes for an easier-to-write regex) (basically, par-for-the-course for template calls). I already attempted some replacements using the template substitute function, and you can see how that turned out... 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 00:04, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Template substitution is not template renaming. What you want to do with that and the parameter updating is certainly doable but not trivial and would need to use advanced find & replace or a custom module. Rjwilmsi  11:19, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I understand that they are different; I just didn't think enough on what the result of substitution would be. As for the replace request itself, all I really need is to see the setup someone else has used to perform a similar task (someone has used AWB on Wikipedia at some point to replace templates, I'm sure; it would just be a case of finding an example). In the meantime, I believe most of the necessary replaces would actually be quite a bit simpler than the picture I paint above; ultimately, I could get away with a search-and-replace to do the following replacement automatically, and could handle any deviating cases by hand:


 * replaced with


 * This, at least, would be far simpler, wouldn't it? 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 01:47, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
 * *nudge* 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 07:13, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
 * So you put that in a find and replace, regex enabled, using \s instead of the newlines and \| to escape the pipe. Rjwilmsi  10:26, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Aah, that sounds easy enough then. Thanks for your help! =) 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 18:43, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
 * All right, I tried  replaced with , first with only "Enabled" checked, and then with "MultiLine" checked as well, but both times, AWB didn't find any changes to make (specifically, on the page wikia:yugioh:Card Appearances:Ambulance Rescueroid) - am I still doing something wrong, then? 「 ダイノ ガイ  千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 19:09, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Did you also check off the Regex box? —Ost (talk) 19:58, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Nope, that did it. Leave it to me to overlook the obvious. =) 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 20:53, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Just for the record, based on my own experimentation, this regex should be completely whitespace-insensitive (for both spaces and newlines):  - having this confirmed by someone who actually *knows* something of regexes would be nice, though (and if there's a shorter method, it'd be nice knowing that, too =) ). 「 ダイノ ガイ  千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 19:33, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
 * *nudge* Also, if anyone is willing to put up with me asking random regex-related questions on their user talk page so I don't have to clog up this page with questions that aren't directly related to AWB (or if someone could simply point me to a page dedicated to regex assistance), I'd appreciate a heads-up. =) 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 06:39, 28 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Going back to my original request, it should be able to be handled by these replaces:
 * replaced with
 * replaced with
 * replaced with
 * replaced with
 * replaced with
 * replaced with
 * If I'm not mistaken (since I wrote these off the top of my head, without any testing), this combination of replaces, used in this order, should match most possible uses of the template (although it requires the parameters to be used in a certain order; I could make it order-insensitive by something like tripling the number of replaces). Are there any regex tricks that would decrease the complexity or number of these replaces? 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 00:25, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

AWB and CHECKWIKI
I created a list that shows how AWB applies to WP:CHECKWIKI. Currently is available in User:Magioladitis/AWB_and_CHECKWIKI. It still needs work and probably update. Our aim should be to have one of Yes/Partial/Highlight/Alert to each entry on this list. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:09, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

AWB taking typos from a different page
When I use AWB (version 5.0.2.0) Typos on runescape.wikia.com, it seems to take the list of Typos from the Wikipedia list of typos rather than the one on RuneScape Wiki, found here. How do I make it so it pulls the typos from the correct location? 24.41.55.233 (talk) 04:54, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Anyone? 24.41.55.233 (talk) 01:57, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
 * —  Ree dy  17:38, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Provider
I often use the provider "Category (recursive)" on Commons for obtain only "Content" and "Category:" (after filter the result list). This execution is very expensive and long because the result list contains more "File:". Is there a provider or a procedure for reduce this kind of execution?--B3t (talk) 10:02, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Font too small in web control window
Okay, this is a really stupid question, I know, but I can't find the answer anywhere. The text in my web control window is really small, and I can't figure out how to change the font size. I have no problem changing the size in the edit window...&mdash; Chowbok  ☠  16:48, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Can't you change it like any other browser? Ctrl + Scroll.. Or whatever, and the other way to use +/-...? —  Ree dy  16:57, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
 * CTRL + scroll changes the size in the edit window, but I can't get it to affect the web control window. CTRL-+ and CTRL-- don't work anywhere.&mdash; Chowbok  ☠  17:07, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

AWB Problem
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/5348/awb.png

This happened and I can't seem to fix it. The bottom part of the window is cut off. Resizing the window, minimising, maximising then restoring; nothing! I've tried to remove every trace of the AWB, using search and delete (can't think of another way), but after re-downloading, it's the same. I've tried to change the screen resolution but only lower (can't go higher). In no can I get to the lower options. I'll show you the whole picture.

Restored (The not minimised or maximised window): http://img594.imageshack.us/i/awb2.png/

Maximised: http://img227.imageshack.us/i/awb3.png/

Can anybody help? 97.120.237.91 (talk) 06:26, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Are you on a netbook? AWB has a minimum required resolution. We might be able to work around this in a later release, though this is not sure. Rjwilmsi  08:29, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes I am using a netbook. What is the minimum resolution? 97.120.237.91 (talk) 09:03, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I know that 1024*768 is enough, though that may not be the minimum. Rjwilmsi  10:17, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm using 1024x600, so somewhere in between. Thanks. 97.120.237.91 (talk) 12:04, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I think it doesn't run in netbooks anyway. Check WP:AWB/B. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:08, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

Typos
Where are typos stored on the computer? Also, are the typos of a wiki added to a list of typos or does it just use that wiki's typos and no others? 198.236.58.30 (talk) 22:10, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * For en-wiki typos are at WP:AWB/T. Other language wikis have their own typo list at the corresponding page. Other wikis outside of Wikipedia can also have their own list. Only one list can be used at once. Rjwilmsi  07:11, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

List comparer code available?

 * what language is the list comparer written in? Is the code available? Tks &bull; Ling.Nut 23:59, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Here you are. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:13, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Hi, is it possible have another form to compare two list, that compare unless the "descriptive title", examples:

foo foo FALSE
 * Don't report in none of the three result's lists

foo (descriptive title) foo TRUE
 * Unique in List 1: foo (descriptive title)
 * Commons: foo
 * Unique il List 2: foo

foo foo (descriptive title) TRUE
 * Unique in List 1: foo
 * Commons: foo
 * Unique il List 2: foo (descriptive title)

Could be called "Light compare".--B3t (talk) 08:51, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

Orphan tagging on airline destinations
Orphan tagging in airline destinations articles is discussed in Template_talk:Orphan. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:00, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

Need another regex
replace with
 * Basically I want to isolate Subject and make it into a template, but still keep before it. Blah blah varies. -- Zoo  Fari  21:00, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
 * this should work;

Find:

Replace:

97.120.227.149 (talk) 12:18, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Find and replace
How do you have your customised find and replace happen after the typos have been applied? 97.120.227.149 (talk) 12:18, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Regex Help
I need to find:

|edible = No

and replace with:

|

97.120.227.149 (talk) 12:18, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Find \|[ ]*edible[ ]*=[ ]*No[ ]* \|

Replace: ...should do it. – xeno talk 16:57, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Possible problem with AWB history and What links here tabs
Before I post this as a bug is anyone else having trouble with the History or What links here tabs in AWB or when selecting help? Whenever I try and click these for the last week or so I get a this program cannot be displayed in Firefox. Im not sure if its my browser or if its the application so I thought I would ask if I am the only one before I submit it as an issue. I am currently using SVN 6676.--Kumioko (talk) 16:19, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

IMPORTANT NOTICE - Editor reviewing rights
Many editors are no doubt aware that the Wikipedia community has spent literally years agonising over the conflict between our open editing policy and the need to protect the content of Wikipedia from inappropriate editing - especially in the area of biographical articles.

A system designed to address this conflict—"Pending changes"—is scheduled to begin trial on 15 June 2010 (although this date could yet change). The Pending changes system is basically an additional level of page protection that permits most editing as normal, but queues certain edits until they are approved by a "Reviewer", at which point they become visible on the article.

A limited number of pages are being selected for the trial based on "ongoing vandalism on busy articles, breaking news, high profile BLPs/companies, low profile but vandalized or edit warred biographies (BLPs), persistent targets, long term protected pages, talk/user talk/project page disputes, non-article namespaces". It is likely that a number of our articles will be affected.

Under the current proposals, autoconfirmed users should be able to edit as normal but there may be edits on some articles that are awaiting approval from users with the new "Reviewer" user right. This has already been granted to a number of trusted editors and more will follow, but any editor in good standing with a decent edit history and sound grasp of Wikipedia's core editing policies who wishes to receive Reviewer rights can make a request at Requests for permissions/Reviewer, or contact an administrator. The standards for granting the Reviewer right are similar to those required for rollback; for more information, see Reviewing.

The above message has been posted to a number of project pages and I reposted it here because there is a chance that some editors using AWB may encounter issues with using AWB to edit articles if they do not have the reviewer privilage and this hopefully will allow them to prepare for that and reduce the amount of questions levied on the AWB team. --Kumioko (talk) 14:21, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Just a suggestion but here is a link to the "test" articles Pending changes/Queue. I recommend someone with and someone without the reviewer role test this using AWB to see what happens. I have the Reviewer role as do all administrators. I would be happy to test it as a Reviewer but I also think someone without the Reviewer role test it so that we can see what havoc AWB and this new requirement will have on each other, if any. --Kumioko (talk) 19:18, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Minor edits?
Generally, it seems as if the edits made using AWB would be considered minor edits, but in many cases it seems as if they aren't being marked minor. Can the default configuation be changed so that they are marked as minor automatically? II | (t - c) 01:44, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Fair enough – minor edit = true in default settings. Users can of course change this in their settings.  Rjwilmsi  19:55, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

French footballers
Using AWB, is it possible to load all the articles in Category:French footballers and add the parameter  to the Football template on the article's talk page? No worries if not, I'll do it manually. Cheers, Big  Dom  18:51, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, of course. Rjwilmsi  19:55, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, didn't make myself clear – I wanted to know how to do it. Is it difficult to set up? I'm not overly experienced with AWB but I do like to try it out. I know I could add a request, but I'd rather do it myself so I can get used to it. Cheers, Big  Dom  20:02, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Add a normal regex find & replace entry for find ({{\s*)([Ff]ootball)(\s*(?:\s*|⌊⌊⌊⌊M?\d+⌋⌋⌋⌋\s*)?(\|((?>[^\{\}]+|\{(?)|\}(?<-DEPTH>))*(?(DEPTH)(?!))))?)\}\}, replace $1$2$3|France=yes}}, checking the regex button. You'll have to skip if France=yes is there already.  Rjwilmsi  20:27, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot. The thing is, the category French footballers is for articles in the mainspace, while the Football template is on the talk page. Will this still work? Big  Dom  20:52, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Easy - bring up the list of, then just right click and choose Convert to talk pages. SeveroTC 20:56, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Cheers, that works. Many thanks to both of you for your time and patience. Big  Dom  20:58, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Talk header in the edit summary
I'm curious why " given top billing" gets added to the edit summary. None of the other items which are moved, such as hatnotes, Orphan tags, stub templates, etc. are mentioned in the edit summary. M AN d ARAX •  XAЯA b ИA M  18:58, 18 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I believe all the 'talk page general fixes' get comments in the edit summary. – xeno talk 18:59, 18 June 2010 (UTC)
 * No idea really. Removed in —  Ree  dy  20:27, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Does that also fix the following bug which I just discovered? On Talk:Charlotte Bill, it adds " given top billing" to the edit summary even though it was already at the top.  M AN d ARAX  •  XAЯA b ИA M  00:31, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
 * The redirect was overrided by the genfixes and that's the reason of the message. We need these messages to make edit summaries clearer. We shouldn't remove them completely. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:27, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Indeed, I'm still using an older build that adds them. They're good for error-checking and the user not having to write "& general fixes" on all their edit summaries. Perhaps an option 'verbose general fixes' or something that could toggle them out? – xeno talk 00:29, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * A toggle might help. I don't mind others, but I dislike the "top billing" ones so much that whenever I notice them, I get rid of them by making and undoing a manual change to wipe out that automatically generated edit summary. In any case, if they're to remain, the bug I mentioned should be fixed. The average person seeing doesn't know or care about genfixes interacting with redirects; they just wonder why changing a letter to upper case is referred to as giving top billing.  M AN d ARAX  •  XAЯA b ИA M  01:03, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I've noticed after that Reedy only nuked those ones, so my earlier comment is less relevant. – xeno talk 01:06, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * All comments in edit summary were removed. Per Reedy they are really time consuming. -- Magioladitis (talk) 04:44, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

mboverload
Don't know if any of the old AWB regulars are still around - but hey how's it going. Returned for Wikipedia for the time being and wanted to say hi to anyone who remembers me. And, in a pure showoff move, here's what 5 instances of AWB open look like. Zoomed to 50% of real size. http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/9051/awbextreme.png --mboverload @ 03:43, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

remove multiline parameter in a template
Dear all, i found some result about removing duplicate line or parameters but I didn't see how to do it. My problem is really simple. I made a template substitution through multiple condition.


 * initial text

}} }} So i only search for a regex condition (if possible by using the Advanced Settings interface to remove duplicate line. I try this regex syntax without result. No more precisevely AWB found the matches but don't perform the replacement... \|avancement=ébauche }} \| Please any idea ? --GdGourou  - °o°  -  Talk to me  22:18, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
 * actual result
 * Animation|faible
 * avancement=ébauche
 * Disney|faible
 * avancement=ébauche
 * wanted result
 * I Check the Apply after general fixes, otherwise before button in Normal Settings settings and it works... strange position --GdGourou - °o°  -  Talk to me  22:26, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Better use Advanced F&R. It's easier than using s regex in the Normal F&R. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:39, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Images
I have a question that might sound weird, and I apologize if it's been asked before. We discovered that the shades of colors in a series of SVG graphics are wrong. Since SVGs are essentially XML files used to define the elements of graphics, is there a way to run AWB on a category of graphics files to search for the hex values for the three colors and replace them with the correct hex values?  Imzadi  1979   →   22:40, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB can only edit the wiki page for the image, not the image itself. Rjwilmsi  05:51, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * It was worth a shot to see if it could (or there was a plugin so it could) or if someone here knew of a tool that could.  Imzadi  1979   →   06:59, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Stub in it:Wikiquote
Hi, AWB in it:WQ with general fixes enabled, shift the Template:Stub below the categories. This is wrong, this template must be stay just before the categories. See this example.--B3t (talk) 08:42, 26 June 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅ . Rjwilmsi  10:18, 26 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks.--B3t (talk) 10:41, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Sort meta data
I'm using Custom Modules for customize general fixes, and I comment the line "Sort meta data" because is different w.r.t. "normal general fixes". For workaround, I use "sort meta data after" in tab More... and this is good. But if I use and enable Disambig the previous workaround ("sort meta data after") enable general fix "FixHeadings" (comment in custom module). E.g.: this delete empty line from a section ("== section ==") and e sub-section ("=== sub-section ==="). What can I do? PS: For easer customization of general fixes, it is possible custom in GUI as the list of check boxs accessible from the button "Auto changes skip options" in the tab Options?--B3t (talk) 13:11, 16 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Example of sort meta data
 * left: en:WP convention, applied if I use "Sort meta data" of Custom Modules for customize general fixes
 * right: it:WP convention, applied if I use "normal general fixes" or "sort meta data after" in tab More...--B3t (talk) 08:50, 21 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Al least, used "sort meta data after" in tab More..., if possible remove the deletion (as do "FixHeadings") of the empty line from a section ("== section ==") and e sub-section ("=== sub-section ==="). So in this case AWB just will ignore the header fix.--B3t (talk) 23:26, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Combining tags at the top of an article
I've noticed that sometimes AWB will combine individual tags into a "multiple" issues template, and sometimes it won't -- not only when AWB adds the tags, but also when I add some individual tags and then re-parse. Just to satisfy my curiosity, is there some rhyme or reason behind when it will and when it won't? (I'm talking about tags like orphan, unreferenced, wikify, etc.) --Auntof6 (talk) 22:44, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB doesn't recognize all of the templates, so it will combine only those that it knows belong there. Is this what you mean? Svick (talk) 23:04, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
 * That could be it -- thanks! --Auntof6 (talk) 23:15, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Changing &amp;ndash; and &amp;mdash; to Unicode characters
I've had a little grumble about this at WT:MOS. I eople using AWB; personally I find the Unicode characters hard to distinguish. Besides my finding the Unicode characters hard to distinguish, I think that automated wholesale replacements like this are best left in separate edits rather than combined with other changes where they clutter the true nature of the change (see WP:OWNFEET for my opinions on the subject!)

I don't see much point starting a discussion about this if it has been gone over so many times before, but since User:Art LaPella quite reasonably "wish[ed] there were one big discussion here [i.e. at WT:AWB]" I wave my magic wand and courteously bring to your attention that I started this iteration over there.

Best wishes to you all. Si Trew (talk) 21:17, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't believe AWB automatically converts these two HTML characters to Unicode. Which editors are doing it? Perhaps it's their own settings and own volition. Rjwilmsi  21:25, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I just found this discussion. I believe AWB's "Unicodify whole page" feature does convert &amp;ndash; to –. Art LaPella (talk) 20:22, 30 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I tried it; it does not. (version 5.0.3.0 dated 6 June 2010). Mr Stephen (talk) 21:44, 30 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Confirmed; it does not. Art LaPella (talk) 23:17, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

I think I see this all the time in AWB. I will look for some diffs; maybe I am confusing this with other entities that are replaced, like &amp;theta; etc. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 00:42, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

What links here list creation only gives Main space articles
I'm using this on my wiki, and I want to replace some links, but annoyingly the List creation only gives me main space articles, so no Templates get changed. If anyone could help, that'd be nice. Thanks. Smashman2004 (talk • contribs • email) 04:18, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * There are multiple versions of the "what links here" list provider. The default one returns mainspace only, but the second returns all namespaces. Rjwilmsi  07:12, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

How to create new pages through auto wiki browser ?
I am one of the (Sysop) in ta.wiktionary Is it possible to create a number of new pages through auto wiki browser? I am having data in microsoft excel sheet which contains 10000 words. In it, left side column English word, next to the right  column, its meaning in Tamil language. How can i create a new pages with the data? thanks in advance.தகவலுழவன் (talk) 00:51, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * You can use the CSVLoader plugin for AWB to create new pages. Let me know if you need any help with setting it up. — Ganeshk  ( talk ) 01:23, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

yes, indeed. i am new to computer programming. Yesterday i read your plug in (CSVLoader)page. I am unable to do. May I send the microsoft excel sample copy to your mail address. please furnish the e-mail address. அண்ணே! உண்மையைச் சொல்லப் போனால் எங்களிடம் தமிழ் இணையப் பல்கலைக் கழகத்தின் நிருவாகிகளும், தமிழக அரசும் சில இலட்சம் சொற்களைத் தந்துள்ளது. வெகுகுறைவான பங்களிப்பாளர்களே இருப்பதால், நான் இந்த முயற்சியை எடுக்கிறேன். சோடாபாட்டில் என் தயக்கத்தைப் போக்கியதாலேயே, இங்கு வினவினேன்.TamilBOT என்ற கணக்கொன்று உள்ளது. அது அனைவருக்கும் பொதுவானது. இப்போதைக்கு அதன் பராமரிப்பு எனது வசம் உள்ளது. அக்கணக்கின் மூலம் பிறரது உழைப்பினைப் பதிவேற்றலாம். எனக்கு இன்னும் 10 நிமிடங்களில் இரண்டுமணி நேர மின்தடை வர உள்ளது. பிறகு வருகிறேன். நீங்கள் செய்ய இருக்கும் உதவி மூலம், தமிழ் விக்சனரி, முதல் 10 இடத்திற்குள் வரும். மிகுந்த ஆவலுடனும், எதிர்பார்ப்புடனும் உங்களை எதிர் நோக்குகிறேன். வணக்கம்.தகவலுழவன் (talk) 02:22, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I just sent you an e-mail. — Ganeshk  ( talk ) 02:41, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for helping Thagavaluzavan out, Ganesh. -- Sundar \talk \contribs 11:50, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * ✅ Thank you very much indeed Ganesh! for your teachings through phone, particularly in our mother(Tamil language) tongue.--தகவலுழவன் (talk) 02:12, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Removing quotation marks from "work" field of cite web
I had this short conversation on the subject. I'm definitely not an expert, so I just went with what AWB suggested. What do you think, should this feature be removed? --Muhandes (talk) 12:50, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Presently, the value of the work parameter is always in italics, and if quote marks are present, they are in italics too. However, the way the work parameter ought to work, and what it means, has been debated, so I think AWB should leave it alone in case there are changes to the template. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:09, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * See Template talk:Cite web. I would have to see a specific edit, but I would have used MTV or BBC as the publisher. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 14:10, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * It is a very common thing in many music pages. Here are recently reverted pages: 4 Minutes (Madonna song)‎ The Confessions Tour (album) --Muhandes (talk) 14:28, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * The cite xxx templates are a hybrid of APA and MHRA styles. Per the APA guide and theMHRA guide p. 61 it looks like the website name would be italicized. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 15:10, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

My AWB deletes whole content of a page
I use AWB just occasionally, and lately it doesn't work properly anymore. I work with it at nl.wikipedia (nl:user:DavinAWB)

What happens is that AWB is emtying the complete article if I would click on "save", in stead of effectuating a find+replace assignment I give.

I'll give some starting settings:
 * Tab "Options": actually, I have only ticked here "enabled" and "no replacement". At normal settings I put the find and replace words
 * The remain Tabs are actually all empty or non-ticked

It worked properly before, and I have Windows XP and .NET framework. Guessing myself, I would say I have not put right one of the settings.

I read something on problems with CSS and I have tested if deleting nl:user:Davin/vector.css would solve the problem. It didn't.

Does somebody have a slightest idea what I do wrong? Thank you in advance, best regards, Davin (talk) 19:02, 3 July 2010 (UTC)


 * We also need to know in which pages the problems occur and which version of AWB you are usíng. --Magioladitis (talk) 19:23, 3 July 2010 (UTC)


 * The version is 5.0.3.0.
 * Actually the pages didn't matter each time. When pressing on start, it just showed at diff' that it would empty the article.
 * If you need an example, I can give that. The selected list was nl:Category:Yarlung-dynastie. There I tried to replace "keizer" into "koning". Now I have completed this manually yet, but doing the opposite gives me the same results. Davin (talk) 19:48, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Are you sure the diff shows page deletion, rather than no changes? Rjwilmsi  20:01, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes I'm sure. To try out if it was really emptying the page, I clicked once on Save and than it returned the message: "Do you really want to save a blank page?" Davin (talk) 09:07, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅ I simply reseted the default settings and now its functioning well again. Thanks for your time. Davin (talk) 12:23, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

advanced settings - help needed
I want to remove a parameter from the reqphoto template but cannot get it to work in all cases. I would like to remove |people or people| including the pipe symbol. The program however appears to ignore the | symbol as it removes the word people anywhere in the line. Any tips welcome.--Traveler100 (talk) 18:55, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Found a solution, although it does leave the odd extra | around. replace \|people(\||{) with |.  --Traveler100 (talk) 20:35, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

automatic run of AWB
I have create a set of edits using advanced settings and used it in semi-automatic mode. It appears to be working fine. I want however to run this on categories that have over 10,000 talk pages of articles in them and have realized that this is something not practical to do in semi-automatic mode. Can I run AWB in fully automatic mode? If so, what is the process for getting this to work? --Traveler100 (talk) 10:34, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
 * If you want to run any task unsupervised, you have to request an approval at WP:BRFA. If your request is accepted, your account (although usually an alternative bot account) has to register at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage. After that, bot mode should be enabled in AWB. Svick (talk) 12:00, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
 * thanks, this could be very useful. --Traveler100 (talk) 20:35, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Or you can request that someone else does it for you. Check WP:BOTREQ. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:07, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

"New pages" option when making a list
When making a list of "new pages", how does AWB decide which new articles to give you? Are they the most recent, the least recent, or what? --Auntof6 (talk) 18:51, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The most recently created articles, the same you got when you go to Special:NewPages. Svick (talk) 20:12, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Microformats
Can AWB be made to read microformats on Wikipedia articles? WikiFunctions will need to be modified to allow AWB plugins to query the microformats similar to how YSQL works. That will give plugin developers (i.e. me :) easy access to metadata. — Ganeshk  ( talk ) 02:41, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

It is probably just me . . .problem with cn tags
Hi

I have been using AWB for about a week and after getting used to how it works on a few sessions, and after reading the manuals, I decided to go for it editing some lists of cats for a project.

I think I may need some advice on 1 what is causing this and 2 how to fix it and 3 rectify the mistakes it has made - It is probably just me and my inexperience though...

I was using the ((cn|July 2010)) format when copyediting thinking that I could easily fill in the rest when processing with AWB.

I opened the list and off we went processing page after page. After a bout 40 mins of doing edits and checking the difss in Firefox I felt pretty confident to carry on just using AWB.

I assumed (yes I know - Assume nothing, expect everything) that the changes it was making to the cn tags were ok and that it would substitute the correct date and parameters once the page was saved and after doing about 100+ pages I found this:

How do I stop this - did I miss something in the settings?

How do I set it up to rectify the mistakes so I can use the cat lists again and redo the list to change them?

thanks Chaosdruid (talk) 00:13, 11 July 2010 (UTC)


 * AWB did two things there
 * Removed the invalid parameter "July 2010". (The correct parameter would be "date=July 2010".)
 * Added the date to the template. The syntax it used will substitute the current month and year when the article is saved.
 * Does that address your question? --Auntof6 (talk) 00:22, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The problem here is that the cn tags in question are within a wiki comment. It appears the MediaWiki parser does not subst CURRENTMONTHNAME or CURRENTYEAR when they are within comments. Rjwilmsi  06:45, 11 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Ok - I am just dumb lol ! I should have checked the article itself and not just the diffs :¬)
 * I realise now that although the diffs shows that long subst text the article itself just has the correct month and year so there was not really a problem at all - mountain—molehill etc lol
 * Chaosdruid (talk) 07:55, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Extra bracket detection and removal
I've noticed that AWB alerts me to extra brackets in articles but doesn't flag them. How can I find them to fix them? Or am I missing something? Dismas |(talk) 01:45, 14 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Options -> Highlight errors. Rjwilmsi  06:43, 14 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Cool! Thanks, Dismas |(talk) 06:53, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

How can i add more category?

 * How can i add more categories? There is an option to add only one category in the more... tab. --தகவலுழவன் (talk) 02:29, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Saving settings for find and replace
Hi

I have trawled through the manuals again but cannot find the answer - and after last time I do not want to be dumb again lol

I have entered a list of words for the "Find and replace" and even though I am saving the settings they are not there when I restart the application and I have to type them in all over again.

Any way to save these or further manual links I have missed ?

thanks Chaosdruid (talk) 17:58, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
 * When you open AWB again use File -> Load settings to use the settings file you saved the last time. Rjwilmsi  18:00, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I realised it was because I was using "save settings as" instead of "save as default". I have also ticked the save every ten mins and it is fine now thx Chaosdruid (talk) 21:29, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Wildcard
Hi

Is there a wildcard i can use within text for find and replace ?

For example Ukrianian Ukrianain something along the lines of Find "Ukria####" replace with "Ukrai####"

thanks Chaosdruid (talk) 21:31, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

In Find column enter "Ukria####", then in the Replace with column enter "Ukrai####". click Done tab. When AWB starts, you can get the result. --தகவலுழவன் (talk) 02:00, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * select options tab then in the Find and replace section, click the box(Enabled) finally go into the Normal settings.


 * Thanks for that :¬) Chaosdruid (talk) 13:56, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Need a regex for two instances of a pattern
I'm having trouble trying to figure out how to match a string twice in a regex. For example, how would I match on  but not match on  ? A regex like  would put the first substring into $1 and the second substring into $2, but I'm looking for something that would put "foo" into $1 for the first example and not match for the second example. Is that possible? Thanks — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 04:41, 18 July 2010 (UTC)


 * try . -- Ludwigs 2  05:05, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I hadn't thought of that, but it doesn't seem to work in the Regex Tester. — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 05:47, 18 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Which regex tester? there are different flavors of regular expressions - AWB seems to use the .NET version - and if you have your 'tester' set to the wrong type it will fail.  -- Ludwigs 2  06:27, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I was using the stock AWB Regex Tester found under the Tools menu of the base 5.0.3.0 version with no plug-ins. — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 06:42, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

\ seems to work for me. Tim 1357  talk  08:46, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * You want what's called a backreference, so instead of $1 use \1. Rjwilmsi  08:51, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * is exactly what I was looking for, but couldn't easily find in the MSDN documentation. Thanks! — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 17:08, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Infobox changes
I'm trying to remove a few lines from some infoboxes and substitute another but I can't see to work out just how to get it done. The normal find and replace settings won't accept a new line character and the advanced settings won't either... or at least I can't get them to. All the fields that I want to remove would be at the bottom of the infobox template. Also, sometimes these fields are filled in, in which case I want to keep them. If they're empty, there's no reason to keep them. What I want is something like this:

Remove:

}}
 * foo =
 * bar =
 * Lorem =

And replace it with:

}}
 * ipsum =

So, how would I go about doing that? Thanks, Dismas |(talk) 23:35, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * You could do this using regex but first I recommend clarifying what fields you want to remove from what infoboxes. Some changes of this type can be contentious. --Kumioko (talk) 23:50, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The fields are non-contentious. The infobox is Infobox Playboy Playmate.  The fields are for the Playmate of the Year.  If it wasn't won by the subject of the article in that year, then it's pointless for it to be there now.  So, how would I do it with regex?  Dismas |(talk) 23:12, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

[ \t]*pmoy-year\s*=\s*\n should do it. Rich Farmbrough, 19:27, 20 July 2010 (UTC).
 * \|[ \t]*pmoy-year\s*=\s*\n should do it. Rich Farmbrough, 19:27, 20 July 2010 (UTC).
 * \|\s*pmoy-[a-z]+\s*=\s*\n tested and working, I can run it if you like. About 90 pages affected. Rich Farmbrough, 21:01, 20 July 2010 (UTC).


 * Thanks, but I'd rather take care of it. I'm a bit of an amateur geek, so it's not only just editing but also learning.  And actually going through the process will teach me more.  Dismas |(talk) 23:09, 20 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I stumbled at first but eventually got it. I didn't know that I had to check the "regex" box.  Thanks again, Dismas |(talk) 08:46, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Please don't consolidate footnotes (copied form SmackBot's talk page)
This edit, for example, consolidated the footnotes on a long and somewhat controversial list of entries, which is likely to be added to or blanked from without notice.

I intentionally repeated sources, to leave citations when such changes happen; also, even when entries A and B are both sourced from source X, one of them may well be added to from source Y, fairly soon now.

Multiple footnoting is a useful thing on some articles; it is not worth the trouble on other articles; bots should not be deciding which is which. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:15, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think this is any problem for new sources being added, if named sources are being removed then ideally the editor will check for multiple uses, but any errors will be picked up by Anomiebot. Rich Farmbrough, 19:27, 20 July 2010 (UTC).
 * Yes it is. If items A and B cite source X and the notes are consolidated, I have to unpick them to add source Y which applies to A and not to B.


 * A second footnote may not be a solution. Some people think it's ugly, and if source Y has something to say about X then they have to be in the same footnote for clarity. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:40, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Then make a new footnote with both sources for this rare situation. The appropriate action is to add a new footnote for Y (or, I guess, X & Y); don't make the source code more complicated and the reference sections long with duplicates so there can be less footnotes after a statement.  This is especially true since it's a list and footnotes won't disrupt prose. —Ost (talk) 20:07, 20 July 2010 (UTC)::::It's not rare; not that it matters. Bots should only do those things which are unquestionably benefits to the encyclopedia; switching between the two styles of footnotes we practice does not qualify.  And as much as I have valued SmackBot, if it is permitted to make editorial decisions, I will make a practice of denying it access to any article I value. Please don't do this. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:30, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah! I hadn't understood that you want two references in one footnote. That does seem a little unusual, but will bear some thinking about. Rich Farmbrough, 09:42, 21 July 2010 (UTC).
 * AWB/SmackBot does not introduce the use of the named references style, it only extends existing use of the style. In the edit referenced, the previous revision used some named references, SmackBot added more. If the major contributors to the article don't feel that named references is the right style for the article, then remove all use of them, otherwise another editor could reasonably see the named references style already in use and further extend its use. Rjwilmsi  07:31, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Bypass all redirects in right-click menu greyed out
When trying to edit, the Bypass all redirects in right-click menu is greyed out. Third on list is a redirect (among others)... What gives? – xeno talk 14:14, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
 * You were logged in with you admin account? Rjwilmsi  15:49, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Nope, is it restricted to the same? Sorry for not RTFM'ing. – xeno talk 15:49, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
 * ...though now that it's not greyed out, it simply isn't working =\ Some dialog pops up for less than a second and then nothing happens... – xeno talk 15:53, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Move with redirect suppressed
Admins can move with redirect suppressed, but I'm not seeing the option in AWB. Is it possible? --Izno (talk) 21:56, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes (option appears when move button pressed), though in AWB all page moving is restricted to admins. Rjwilmsi  22:03, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
 * What version number? I'm not seeing it [redirect suppressed] in 5.0.3.0. --Izno (talk) 22:24, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah, the popup dialogue was too small to show the "no redirect" checkbox. Now fixed for next release.  Rjwilmsi  22:58, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

"Do not use section edit summaries" should be the default
The "feature" added some time ago changed default behaviour, it should've been opt-in. – xeno talk 16:37, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Why? It's better to know if edits are restrixted in a specific section, isn't it? -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:08, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I find it pretty annoying (though that's my personal opinion), nevertheless any "new" behaviour should be turned off by default. Wastes characters in the edit summary, is usually fairly irrelevant (just because whatever AWB happened to be doing was confined to one section doesn't mean the section was relevant to the edit summation) etc. – xeno talk 17:13, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I couldn't care. Have a vote and we'll go with the majority opinion on what should be the default. Rjwilmsi  23:57, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Not fussed regarding the default. I will set it to 'on', though.  Mr Stephen (talk) 21:42, 23 July 2010 (UTC) i.e. I think section edit summaries are good.
 * Depends on the edit. Regular bot edits  "Date maintenance tags.."  it is noise, but other edits it might be useful.  Would be more useful if the  deltas were better in Wikimedia. Rich Farmbrough, 02:01, 25 July 2010 (UTC).
 * I don't doubt that it may be useful; but in the majority of cases, I think it is not. – xeno talk 12:48, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

AWB Alerts for talk pages
''Copied from my talk page. I 'll be removing comments while adding/rejecting Magioladitis (talk) 09:49, 26 July 2010 (UTC)''

I looked at the alerts and there are only a couple that could apply to talk pages. Since I know that you are adding a lot of logic for talk pages and you already have a list of things somewhere here are some potential additions. Rather than add it to the AWB Feature request page (unless you want me too) I will leave my suggestion list here and you can pick through and do the ones you think have merit or havent already been identified as future changes. Some alerts may be doable as logic and some of the logic suggestions may be more appropruate for alerts but Ill leave that in your capable hands to decide. Please let me know if you have any questions. Possible alerts for Talk pages

General

 * No "Wikiproject banners found" - If the article does not contain a wikiproject banner
 * "Unbalanced brackets found" – types checked { } < > [ ]  Done already
 * Multiple duplicate banners (I.e. contains 2 banners for the same wikiproject, such as WP Biography)
 * Needs assessment
 * Needs priority placement
 * Contains Disambiguous links
 * Missing/Incomplete B-Class assessment (for start or B class class articles with an empty or missing bclass assessment)

WP Biography specific related

 * Biographical article without WP Biography banner It's impossible to determine that a talk page belongs to a bio article without checking the page itself. This is very slow.
 * Perhaps this could be done as a partial then? Maybe if it contains certain categories without the WP Biography banner? For example starting with Category:Military biography or Biography (military)? Or maybe if the Biography parameter for certain Wikiprojects (like aviation or MILHIST) is set to Y, y, Yes or yes? --Kumioko (talk) 15:15, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I could then use my bot to add the WPBiography to all these talk ages missing it in regular basis. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:00, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Biography articles needing priority parameter replacement We have a tracking category for that.
 * Priority parameter without workgroup
 * Workgroup without priority parameter
 * Better contact Template talk:WPBiography to add something in the code for that. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:50, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Not sure what you mean by contact them? Could you clarify please? --Kumioko (talk) 14:29, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Leave a message there asking for modifications in the template's code. -- Magioladitis (talk) 04:47, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Why would the WP Biography code need to be modified? Are you saying that a Category should be created instead? --Kumioko (talk) 12:56, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes. For errors in specific templates there is no reason to use alerts. These cases are better handled by tracking categories. -- 12:59, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Living without BLP parameter (logic to compare BLP in banner shell with Living in the Wikiproject templates) This is fixed by genfixes.

General suggestions for talk page logic improvements
--Kumioko (talk) 15:33, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete certain empty parameter fields such as (small, A-Class review, peer review, old peer review, attention=)
 * Delete certain parameter fields if equal to no (needs photo, needs persondata, needs infobox, auto, collapsed)
 * Expand WikiProject banner names
 * Change Class = C to Class = Start for WPMILHIST banner
 * Delete B class checklist for Stub articles

The "General suggestions for talk page logic improvements" should be more a WP:BOTREQ. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:50, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Can I also suggest
 * Talk page with either or  and with one or more WikiProject banners outside those
 * -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:26, 19 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Be careful expanding {{WPJ to {{WikiProject Japan, otherwise you'll end up with {{WikiProject Japanournalists}} . – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 19:58, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks I hadnt run into that yet but Ill watch for it. --Kumioko (talk) 20:07, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * In regards to alerts again. Does AWB look at a certain page to determine what an invalid citation parameter or Unknown WP banner parameter is? I was just wondering if the Help manual could point to it or something so that everyone is clear cause I for one dont know were to find all the possible parameters fort the citations or WP banners so Im wondering how AWB knows what they are. --Kumioko (talk) 20:11, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The best way to do that would be with regex.   – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk  20:15, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Bypassing the redirects is much faster with F&R than using the Plugin++ Still this job is not appropriate for general fixes. Most people consider these changes trivial and shouldn't done alone. Most of the talk pages don't have many issues. In the case we want these changes we certinly have to take this job from the Pluggin++ (recent profiling shows 240-400 ms comparing to 2-6 ms for normal F&S!) -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:35, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Bypassing redirects shouldn't be done alone. General fixes shouldn't be done alone. So why can't bypassing redirects be put into general fixes? – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 13:39, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * OK. Let's see some methods and then we discuss if it is possible to implement:


 * Plugin++ loads redirects if the template is it asked to fix and then bypasses the redirects. First part is fairly fast. Second part is slow, probably because of bad-written code. We are working on rewriting the second part.
 * My method till now: Normal F&R for about 20-30 templates. It's very fast but we have 900+ WikiProject templates, many of them with very few transclusions. If we want to implement it for all it will be slow.
 * Another idea: Find templates in page and bypass them. I am not sure but I suspect it will be slow but faster than the previous method.

Before adding WikiProjectBannerShell in talk page GFs,we had only fixing headers, moving talk header, etc. GFS were really fast (less than 0.5 s). Bypassing redirects it may got us completely off-the-track.

Why an idea of a bot would be that bad? -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:51, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, I have noticed a bit of a slow-down in processing. In terms of bypassing redirects: couldn't it be done with kindof like the AWB/TYPO page where we add well-used redirects and remove them as they disappear? P.S. I've got a bunch of redirect-bypasses too, want to compare notes? – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 14:15, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * If you did them with AWB's latest snapshot, you should have a file called "profiling.txt". We need the numbers next to Plugins, F&R, Talk Genfixes and Universal Genfixes. I 'll post my settings file too. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:22, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * User:Rich Farmbrough/temp61 Some redirect bypasses for WPBanners - all of them those in standard form, as they were a few hours ago. Rich Farmbrough, 21:45, 22 July 2010 (UTC).
 * Whoa, nice one. Does that include all of the ones in mine? ( which aren't as robust!) – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 21:50, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Changes lost because of timeout(?)
I'm quite often noticing the following behavior - when article is opened in AWB and you start editing it after some time, when you are trying to save it, this operation fails, the article is being re-loaded and re-processed by plugins. Why don't AWB can behave a bit smarter, and if save fails because of timeout, it checks that the article was not updated since our initial load and saves it anyway? Do you see any problems with this logic? I realize that normally people are not affected with this behaviour, so no one objects, I can fix it by myself and send patch to someone --Ghuron (talk) 09:08, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: this issue has previously been brought up at WT:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests. M AN d ARAX  •  XAЯA b ИA M  22:02, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Templates Otheruses4 and About +typo question
At the RuneScape Wiki, we don't have a Template:About and AWB wants to replace Template:Otheruses4 with it ( ->  ). Is there a fix for this?

Also, when I add a typo to the wiki's typo page and select 'Refresh status/typos' it won't add the new typo, what's the problem?

97.120.230.183 (talk) 09:53, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Do you have Otheruses4? We can restrict the change to en.wiki. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:27, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
 * We do, here. 97.120.230.183 (talk) 10:36, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Dablinks function in Parsers must become en.wiki only (but as far as I understand it is already?) -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:53, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Interesting: Runescape wiki doesn't have for. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:55, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
 * We don't have a lot of things that wp has and we have a lot of things that wp doesn't have. ;) 97.120.230.183 (talk) 11:20, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Maybe you could help us then. If possible tell me what other AWB features are unnecessary for your wikia or not working properly. We would like more on customisation. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:34, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Not much else... just the templates, really. But if something else comes up, I'll post here again. 97.120.230.183 (talk) 11:42, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

What the RS wiki does have which WP template editors would kill for is variables. Rich Farmbrough, 22:40, 28 July 2010 (UTC).
 * Restrict otheruses4 rename to Wikipedia only. Rjwilmsi  10:22, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Provider "What links here" don't work
Hi, from yesterday the provider "What links here" (and the providers liked to it) don't work on it:WP. What's happening?--B3t (talk) 10:05, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Any errors? Could be that limit=max bug.. —  Ree dy  10:06, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * It is the MW bug. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:10, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * So, I don't do anything, or not?--B3t (talk) 10:23, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Not atm, mw:Special:Code/MediaWiki/70078 needs to be reviewed, deployed and backported. —  Ree dy  10:26, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks.--B3t (talk) 10:56, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * For your information, I have the same problem on the Dutch Wikipedia. Japiot (talk) 19:03, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
 * FYI, same problem on German WP. --WolfgangRieger (talk) 01:53, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * FYI, in all wikipedias since is a MediaWiki bug. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:52, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Bug fixed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:20, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks - Japiot (talk) 17:24, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

MediaWiki
Is it compatible with all MediaWiki websites? Please reply via Talk Page.  Hazard- SJ   Talk 07:39, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes. As long as you have a relatively up to date version of MediaWiki, and the api enabled. —  Ree dy  07:40, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

How to change the font size in the Diff and Preview windows.
I never use Internet Explorer, if there is an alterantive, so I took me forever to discover how to change the font size in the Diff and Preview windows. Just open Internet Explorer, go to View→Text size. The sub-menu offers five choices. This is so simple but as a Fofire user I din't think to look in the View menu. I expected something in the Tools → Internet Options menu. After this change, open AWB and the new font size will be active. I sort of expected an option in AWB itself. Though I was just too dense to find it. – droll  &#91;chat&#93;  07:23, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

title search
How do I search for articles with titles containing phrases which the WP search engine does not support? For example, I'd like to search for titles containing "(language)", but the parentheses are not supported. — kwami (talk) 06:34, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Could maybe google search..? —  Ree dy  08:48, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
 * No, Google ignores parentheses too. I can do it with filtering, but title search is disabled, and many of these articles won't be categorized adequately for a category search. — kwami (talk) 09:11, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I had a dump of all article titles from about April. As of that time, 528 of them contained "(language)". The list is available in User:Mandarax/Sandbox2. M AN d ARAX  •  XAЯA b ИA M  10:21, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks! — kwami (talk) 10:23, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Listing image links
At the RuneScape Wiki, I can't seem to list image links with the "What links here" lister, such as, it will not list the image links but only the regular links. 174.25.31.200 (talk) 04:57, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * You have to use “Image file links” for that. Svick (talk) 11:00, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * ...Did not notice that... Thanks! :D 174.25.113.97 (talk) 02:01, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Pre-parse mode
Hello! I am asking here rather than making a bug report, as I suspect I am having a PEBKAC error... :) When using pre-parse mode, it will go through my list and remove some entries. However, afterwards, when I go through the list manually, There are still quite a lot of pages I get the "No changes Press the "Skip" button below to skip to the next page." message on. I assume I am missing a setting somewhere that will remove these pages as well? (No idea why some are remaining after pre-parse mode) Any ideas? Avic enna sis @ 21:43, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Do you have "skip if no changes" activated? -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:08, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
 * No. No I didn't. I knew I was missing something. Thank you! :) Avic enna sis @ 22:14, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Anytime. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:25, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Year and date in citations
Although I understand why it is set. I would prefer it if the removal of "|year=1234" when there is a "|date" field in a citation or one of the alternatives is stopped because if one is also using sfn or harvnb the "date" field does not always seem to work so it is possible to fall back on the usage of the year field which always seems to work. This is either a mistake in the way I am filling in the date field or it is bug in the way it is passed but either way, it is better if the year field is not removed.

The last article I had this problem with was Anglosphere. To demonstrate the link works but neither  or  do. The only difference between them is that A-Haden has both fields (year and date) as does B-Haden, C-Haden does not have the year field.
 * References

So please disable the removal of the year field if the date field exists, because even if you fix it some articles like Anglosphere my rely on the year field being present -- PBS (talk) 01:05, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
 * In your examples here everything works if you use year rather than date for the harvnb parameter – at harvnb the documentation says to use year rather than full date in harvnb. Rjwilmsi  01:57, 7 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Ah what you mean is that works even though the year is embedded in a date field and not in a separate year specific field. Than you for the information! So there is no need for a change. -- PBS (talk) 23:43, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I've updated the template documentation to explain that point. Rjwilmsi  09:05, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Settings
I am not clear on how to set AWB for use at Simple-Wikipedia. I have gone to Options >> Preferences >> Site tab >> Project drop-down window, which does not have a Simple-Wikipedia option. In the same window it has a "Custom" option, after selecting the custom option it requires a (http://) value, I have tried the main page url but obviously that don't work. Can anyone help ? it would be greatly appreciated. Mlpearc  powwow  14:12, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Try  . Rjwilmsi  15:27, 11 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you, with a slight adaption,   works great. Mlpearc   powwow  01:00, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The official way is to choose Wikipedia as the project, and simple as the language. Rjwilmsi  06:16, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

McAfee warning about AWB?
I've been using AWB for months, but just this week McAfee has started to complain about it: "McAfee detected a program on your PC that is trying to accept incoming connections from the Internet". What has changed? Why should AWB want to accept an incoming connection?

I'm using AWB 5.0.3.1 SVN 6676; IE 8.0.7600.16588; .NET 2.0.50727.4927; Windows 6.1 -- John of Reading (talk) 16:47, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Something in MacAfee's detections. AWB doesn't itself take anything incoming (well, response to HTTP requests etc etc). Sounds like a false positive, or McAfee being over zealous. —  Ree dy  06:18, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

question on using Source Wiki Search (text)
I am trying make a list for a string of words in articles. I am specifying Source WikiSearch (text). I want articles that have a complete string (any case), such as "The quick brown fox sailed over the lazy dog". I do not want articles that just have 'fox' or 'dog', or etc in them; only articles with the full string will meet my needs. How can I do this? Hmains (talk) 02:00, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia search doesn't seem to support those kind of searches. You could try the Google site search or use a database dump. Rjwilmsi  06:11, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Not good. Lots of good things to fix by AWB could be found with such a search.  I am not PC sophisticated enough to do this outside of a tool such as AWB. Hmains (talk) 02:06, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * What are the enclosure characters used to surround a string so it will be searched as a whole? In WikiSearch (text)?  In Source Google search?  In Source database dump? 76.105.54.215 (talk) 03:11, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * For Google use quotes: "search string". Database dumps: depends how you do it, with the AWB database scanner text searches are for the literal string. Rjwilmsi  08:24, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * With AWB Google, using quotes "search string" still gives me many false positives. I then tried to use AWB database scanner (with no instructions on how to fill in the panels).  When I invoked the search, I get got the following: 'Please open an "Pages" XML data-dump file.  See the About menu for where to download this file.'   There is no obvious 'About menu' to be found.  What next?  Hmains (talk) 16:53, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The link you're looking for is “WMF dumps”. Specifically, if you want to search the articles of the English Wikipedia, you want this file (6 GB). Svick (talk) 21:20, 13 August 2010 (UTC)


 * With AWB Google, I think my false positives were from the database not being immediately updated with WP changes. It must be a periodic copy of WP.  With WMF dumps, it seems to want me to download the 6 GB file to my PC.  Right?  In any case, I don't see how to point to the dump wherever it is at. Hmains (talk) 17:26, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Download it, extract it. Use AWB database scanner. And yes, google is delayed. —  Ree dy  18:40, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Redlink removal
Is there any settings or plugins where one can scan a page and remove all redlinks? I don't see the setting for such, but I've been known to overlook the obvious. :) Avic enna sis @ 07:13, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Removing redlinks usually isn't necessary. Having a red link isn't a bad thing, it just means that article hasn't been created yet. There are some circumstances where removing redlinks is useful such as lists but by and large its better to leave the red link. With that said is there a specific reason you want to remove red links? --Kumioko (talk) 16:58, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I totally agree, and would not be using it to remove redlinks in articlespace. My usage would be for quicker cleanup of maintenance reports, like User:Avicennasis/todo/orphtem and User:Avicennasis/todo/csdf8. :) Doing this by hand can be quite tedious. Avic enna sis @ 18:47, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't want to speak for the AWB folks but I believe you should probably do a bot request for this one. I can't personally see this being done by AWB. --Kumioko (talk) 18:51, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * There is a discussion there now, but I believe it's been brought up before with no actual result. I was just hoping that maybe AWB could do this somehow. I didn't think so, but it never hurts to ask. :) Avic enna sis @ 19:09, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Some time ago I participated in a project that corrected some thousands links caused by wrong capitalisation and/or different diacritics, etc. This is a sign that many red links can be corrctd instead of removed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:13, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh I agree. Like I said, my goal would be easy cleanup on maintenance reports, like those above. <sup style="color:red;">Avic <sub style="color:blue;">ennasis  @ 03:40, 7 Elul 5770 / 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Make list: Google search limit reduced?
Until recently a "Make list" with "Google search" returned up to 700-ish articles, but now the limit seems to be around 90. This makes it much harder to find and remove all instances of particular typos. Any ideas? I assume this change is outside AWB's control. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:54, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Could be some crappy change at Googles side. Will poke it later and see what I can do. —  Ree dy  14:09, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, please. This makes the google search almost useless. Hmains (talk) 21:38, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

New version
How often are the new versions released? Who decides to release it. McLerristarr (Mclay1) (talk) 06:03, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
 * When it's deemed appropriate. The developers. SVN snapshots provide a middle ground for users who need/want the newer functionality incorporated —  Ree dy  17:49, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Problem
I wanted to download the application but I couldn't, because I'm from Iran, a banned country. Is there any other way to download it?Farhikht (talk) 12:33, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Use the SVN snapshots link at the top of this page if you can't access sourceforge. Rjwilmsi  12:42, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you!Farhikht (talk) 12:47, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Using Find and Replace
Using Find and Replace, how can one avoid having AWB change anything that is a category name, a wikilink article name, a link to external location, a book or article name, etc etc. Any such change cannot be rightly made when just editing an article content and hopefully AWB can avoid doing so also. Hmains (talk) 20:46, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
 * On the F&R dialog there are two tickboxes at the top left labelled "Ignore...". Try the second of these. I don't know why you can't tick both of them. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:51, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB has two levels of ignoring, the higher level includes all of the lower level, hence no need for both to be ticked. Rjwilmsi  22:27, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The second (bottom) tickbox seems to meet most of my needs, but it still has AWB making changes inside of quoted material, such as "string changed" where no such changes should be made. Hmains (talk) 02:37, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
 * For example see the Kikuchi clan article, which I did not change. I am doing a find and replace change from "twelfth century' to "12th century".  AWB wants to make this change in a paragraph that starts with "At the end of the 12th century events...   which is a quotation.  This is wrong.  Hmains (talk) 04:13, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Not authorised
I've been allowed to use this tool but when I try to log in on AWB, it says I am not enabled to use this. Can anyone help me? Thanks, Rock drum Ba-dumCrash (Driving well?) 16:49, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Try again =) – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 16:53, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Rock drum Ba-dumCrash (Driving well?) 17:05, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Degree symbol
I have created a rule that has the degree symbol in the XML, however the regex on the replacement table shows a non-displayable-placeholder type of character - cuts and pastes as "�". Any solutions? Rich Farmbrough, 17:35, 20 August 2010 (UTC).
 * I can paste in, save & load the Unicode degree symbol no problem (Windows 7). Your workaround could be to replace with the HTML  &amp;deg;  then unicodify. Rjwilmsi  19:21, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Very odd. I pasted ° into a rule and it saves and loads fine, as you say. But the ° in the real rule (matched from a \x{00b0}) fails to load, and saves brokenly. I will dig some more. Rich Farmbrough, 20:03, 20 August 2010 (UTC).
 * Ok I worked around by cutting and pasting the rule from an archive to the working copy. Possibly the created copy is being processed differently since it has an old AWB version number, no PHP flag and other anachronisms? Rich Farmbrough, 20:12, 20 August 2010 (UTC).

Image previewing
Let's say I have a list of images I want to work on. At the moment, the preview function only loads up a preview of the contents of the edit box. I want to be able to view a preview of them in the main window and to view info like resolution, file size & type, etc. Is there any way I can do this in AWB? Spebi (talk) 04:08, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Free or not?
I needed to download AWB onto a second computer, but this time I received a message saying that WinRAR products aren't free and that I only have a 40-day trial. I don't recall getting this message the first time around. Is the product something I'll need to pay for in a few weeks? Thanks, Aristophanes68 (talk) 18:10, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB is free. WinRAR is not. You can use WinRAR to extract AWB from the downloaded archive, or you can use another compression software like the free 7-Zip to do it. Svick (talk) 20:25, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Since I don't know much about how ZIP files work, when I download AWB, should I choose "save" instead of "open", and then use a free ZIP-opener? Thanks again, Aristophanes68 (talk) 20:50, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
 * You can use WinRAR just fine (it just nags you to buy it). Or you could do it the way you suggested, it doesn't matter. Svick (talk) 00:28, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. As long as WinRAR isn't going to send someone to repo my copy of AWB.... Aristophanes68 (talk) 20:04, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Assuming you're using a version of Windows released in the last 10 years, you shouldn't need an app at all. Windows handles .zip files natively.&mdash; Chowbok  ☠  18:16, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * That's what I thought, and I don't recall needing WinRAR the first time I downloaded it. I'm still not sure what's going to happen after the 40 days has ended.... Will they repo it off my computer? Aristophanes68 (talk) 00:09, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * No, it just becomes nagware —  Ree dy  00:12, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

PAGENAME Functions
Hi, i come from a small wikiproject (sw:wp) with only 2 AWB user, so i hope to get some help here. (I was browsing the talk history, but couldn't find anything related to the following): When creating REDIRECTS (but also for other tasks) a modification of the "%%PAGENAME%%" to add, remove or change repetitive phrases would be a huge help. For example: the page "230 BC" to get an additional redirect page from like "230 B.C.", can the PAGENAME function be modified to create such a redirect in one go? Also, it looks like, "%%PAGENAME%%" doesn't work inside square brackets? Is there a way around that? Thx. CGN2010 (talk) 14:07, 23 August 2010 (UTC) (bracket added 17:59, 23 August 2010 (UTC))
 * To create a page as you describe use the append function to append #REDIRECT %%title%% too an empty page and use the normal search and replace to replace B\.C\. with BC. Set the skip to "Page exists", load the text list you have created, and you are off! Rich Farmbrough, 15:42, 24 August 2010 (UTC).

Thanks. the first part ("title") was def. helpful, the second part i still need to work on, but will hopefully get there. CGN2010 (talk) 13:24, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Why subst ?
I'm not sure why AWB subst's as one of it's "general fixes". It doesn't mess with the other variables like, so why this one? I intentionally use all the time, especially for sortkeys (such as with a space or * followed by the name). Some in templates. The benefit of this is if the page is renamed, the sortkey is automatically updated. I think, in general, if people are using a magic word variable there must be a good reason for it. They probably want it to change if the page gets moved. Rocket000 (talk) 01:08, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * There shouldn't be any page in the mainspace which needs a {PAGENAME}. If you're using it in the lead, then it will update if/when an article is moved, but editors may/can be confused by its usage there, or by the text which might now read incorrectly. If you're using it as a sortkey, I highly doubt you're following the rules laid out at WP:Sortkey correctly... As for templates, I don't believe it's substed outside of mainspace. --Izno (talk) 04:06, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Sigh, I should have figured it's another en.wp mainspace rule mixed in with "general fixes". Who said I was editing here? It's subst'd on file pages where I want to use it (on Commons). Rocket000 (talk) 05:11, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Do not subst on file namespace. Rjwilmsi  07:16, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Now what about the category namespace? Or is that asking for too much? :) Rocket000 (talk) 14:35, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Right, I've reverted the previous change because general fixes are not enabled on the File: namespace. So can you please link to an exact commons page where this substitution is happening, since as far as I can see it's not done automatically by AWB on file pages?  Rjwilmsi  15:52, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Do not subst on Commons category pages. Rjwilmsi  16:27, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I just tried a fresh new (unmodified) version and it doesn't subst on file pages so I guess it was something I did unintentionally. Sorry, I should have tested it more. Thanks for rev 7054, it is really appreciated. Rocket000 (talk) 14:41, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * No problem. Providing the boring information up front like wiki, page, AWB version & settings normally gets to the right answer fastest. Rjwilmsi  15:08, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Can't Download
Hello everyone

OK, been off Wikipedia for the last wee while so apologies if this has already been answered.

I'm trying to download the most recent version of AWB. It appears to download ok but when I go to open it on WinZip all it says is that AWB has encountered an error and needs to close. It won't go any further. I tried to download the new version too using the updater but when I re-opened AWB afterwards it kept opening the old version!

I've checked on my pc and I definitely don't have the version installed that is needed. Tried deleting the old version first to see if that makes any difference and nothing. I also tried downloading the snapshot thing on the project page and still the same.

Any ideas? --5 albert square (talk) 23:40, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I ended up using a new install directory. YMMMV. Rich Farmbrough, 16:50, 4 September 2010 (UTC).

Delete unused images
Is it possible to delete unused images? Thanks, --83.255.135.251 (talk) 19:18, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Why would you want too? --Kumioko (talk) 16:47, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

You must be an admin to delete anything. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:17, 1 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Personally I have a bot account with sysop access on another wiki and have a big amount of unused files which I would to delete using AWB instead of clicking through all of them manually. I can't seem to find a setting which'll let me create a list from the special page: unused files. The files I want deleted even have the same name prefix so I can easily sort them in the list so I don't delete other unused files which can be used.
 * tl;dr Does anyone know how to generate list in AWB from special: unused files? Duskey (talk) 00:23, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
 * 14869 —  Ree dy  00:43, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Using the HTML scraper and some regex I managed to get a list of files I want deleted. Can AWB do this automatically or do I need to click delete and then set a reason for each of them? I am flagged as sysop of course. Duskey (talk) 01:51, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

All images on list of pages
Is there a way to parse a list of pages so that AWB will output a list of all images on every article in the list? Right now the only way I have found to list all images on a page is to do it one by one, but I'd like to do it in batches. Thanks, §hep  Talk  21:15, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Create the list of articles in the list box, rt click select all, rt click, add "selected to list from..." links on page, then when the list is complete, filter by namespace. Rich Farmbrough, 16:48, 4 September 2010 (UTC).
 * Thanks. §hep  Talk  17:11, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Clean up Category:Articles with broken citations
Is there a way to use AWB to cleanup Category:Articles with broken citations? The most prevalent problem is using cite web with only one parameter,. The simple solution in this case is to remove the template entirely. --Muhandes (talk) 05:52, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm working through them by hand, adding title= and accessdate= -- John of Reading (talk) 07:34, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * It's an endless job, I was on vacation for a week and 200 were added. --Muhandes (talk) 09:50, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * You can make a bot request. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:47, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think we should automatically replace one problem with another -- John of Reading (talk) 15:38, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I mean a bot to obtain title from urls and add them. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:00, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * WP:REFLINKS does it, but only for bare links, not those within an existing cite web, though maybe it could be extended to do it? Rjwilmsi  22:10, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for all the ideas. I made a bot request, lets see how it goes. If either some bot does it or the tool is made to work when cite url is used with no title field, then my request is indeed redundant. --Muhandes (talk) 12:33, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
 * There was a bot adding titles automatically (and very sucessfully). Rich Farmbrough, 22:02, 2 September 2010 (UTC).
 * Yes, it was/is DumziBot. Rich Farmbrough, 06:31, 10 September 2010 (UTC).

Updating Watchlist
Hi,

Is there any way to use AWB to update my Watchlist, without making any changes to the actual articles concerned?

For example, if I wish to make a list of all pages with a certain category and add them all to my Watchlist.

If this is not possible, can anyone think of an alternative way of achieving this?

Thanks &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 09:14, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Try this: use the "Make list" function to build the list of relevant articles. Use the list's right-click menu to "Select All" and then "Copy". Now, back in your browser, go to your watchlist page and click "Edit raw watchlist" very near the top of the page. Paste the article names into the text box and "Update". -- John of Reading (talk) 15:13, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Timeouts
I have had a lot non-responsive edits, mainly large articles, and with some moderately heavy duty regexes (and a large total number). I have messed around with minimal, greedy and lookahead, but it is hard to pinpoint, sometimes the article will fail three times and succeed the next time. So I finally fired up the debugger and tried to time the regexs - and I am making some progress there but I got he following message form the debugger which may shed some light.

The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context 0x4be0048 to COM context 0x4be01b8 for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages. This situation generally has a negative performance impact and may even lead to the application becoming non responsive or memory usage accumulating continually over time. To avoid this problem, all single threaded apartment (STA) threads should use pumping wait primitives (such as CoWaitForMultipleHandles) and routinely pump messages during long running operations.

Any ideas? Rich Farmbrough, 06:38, 10 September 2010 (UTC).
 * Just a tad more info, I am logging the time taken to execute

MatchCollection matches = findRegex.Matches(articleText);


 * and the "suspecct" regex completes in 20,000 ticks which is apparently 2,000,000 nanoseconds or .002 of a second. (Timer granularity seems to be 10,000 ticks anyway, so why they chose a precision and an epoch that causes overflows in the default data types that most languages use is a mystery.) After the completion of the match, on some large articles, most of the time, AWB goes non-responsive. Rich Farmbrough, 01:35, 11 September 2010 (UTC).
 * Latest occurrence was
 * 634198067554110000 Doctor Mindbender: {{As of\|(\d) May (\d+):{{As of|$2|05|0$1

The next replacement would be:

{{As of\|May (\d), (\d+):{{As of|$2|05|0$1

These seem perfectly innocuous. Rich Farmbrough, 12:13, 11 September 2010 (UTC).

Replacing underscores in image file names... absolutely a bug that should be fixed
AWB should absolutely not remove underscores from image file names. This makes the source more difficult to read (b/c of line wraps) and has a tendency for editors to accidentally break image names. This issue has been raised before by Sswonk in the archived thread Replacing underscores in image file names. There it was labeled "not a bug" after a brief discussion where most of the opponents of the bug status seemed to over emphasize WP:PERF in their objections. The reason it is a bug is because it makes the source harder to read, easier to break, and it doesn't match the actual filename of the image, which doesn't make logical sense. Jason Quinn (talk) 05:00, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
 * While it is not the same as the URL, it does, however, match the page name which is the human readable version, Popups uses the spaced version too. The actual "file name" is irrelvent to the wikisource, but I would lay a half crown that  File:WinslowHomer-Eight Bells 1886.jpg  is probably sitting in a sub-directory like "/W/i/n/s/" - if it isn't is should be, and by that argument we should include "/W/i/n/s/" in the wiki-source, since it  is part of the relative file name.  Rich Farmbrough, 18:41, 13 September 2010 (UTC).
 * Jason notified me on my talk page, and my position on this issue hasn't changed. See my comments at the discussion linked above (same link here). There was a lot of defensiveness in the responses I got, and I was more or less ignored and snickered at for making a point about AWB doing something pointless that I and others might find less than helpful to our work. I was not interested in continuing that debate; it was obviously going nowhere. If someone wants to write a conditional that says "Hey, parser, if you are going to replace underscores inside double brackets, don't do that if the underscore is within a filename and not text that is actually displayed on the page", that would be great. Jason is right, the behavior is undesirable, I detailed my reasons. Rich, please review my earlier text. I was talking about the filename, not the path. Quick example: use a contextual menu to download any image, you will see the underscores are preserved when the "Save as..." dialog appears. That's the actual filename. That's not the relative name, or page name, or path. What is so terrible about preserving that name in the wikitext, and why in the world is it desirable for AWB to alter it? Makes zero sense. Sswonk (talk) 01:29, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Regex for superscript
Can somebody tell me the regex for a superscript like: m²

I'm not having much luck with just copying it into AWB code. Lightmouse (talk) 12:32, 13 September 2010 (UTC)
 * That is Unicode superscript 2 so the regex is no different to the raw text. Rjwilmsi  12:40, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 16:18, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Is there a category that prevents AWB edits?
It keeps messing up tables by removing spaces between sources causing the ref columns to become a mess. It also rearranges the refs, making it difficult to figure out what refs are for what when there aren't any quotes in the refs. -- Jeandré, 2010-09-14t16:02z


 * Try . – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 16:04, 14 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Many thanks. -- Jeandré, 2010-09-14t16:24z


 * Can you tell in which page happens that? -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:20, 14 September 2010 (UTC)


 * -- Jeandré, 2010-09-14t16:24z
 * They show fine to me in both version. I presume it depends on the screen resolution. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:35, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Nothing related to screen resolution, user just doesn't like lack of spaces between consecutive refs in table. Rjwilmsi  21:00, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * They look fine to me (Opera, if it matters). What is the problem supposed to be? Mr Stephen (talk) 21:06, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't see the difference. The page looks like crap either way.&mdash; Chowbok  ☠  21:56, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

We should not prevent bot edits in a page if there isn't a good reason to do so. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:39, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, is there any consensus outside AWB for the edits in question? If not, the rest of Wikipedia might start deciding that is a good reason. Art LaPella (talk) 22:07, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

You've got new message window in AWB
Is counterproductive, IMO: it is almost hidden on 1024x768 displays and blocks AWB operation. Suggest disabling (or improving) this feature. Materialscientist (talk) 05:40, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
 * The idea is to block AWB operation because the message may concern edits made with AWB. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:14, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I understand the idea, but its implementation is not correct, as any message effectively blocks AWB. Blocks, because AWB does not provide an easy way to read the message; its asks "default browser", which message is (i) invisible on 1024x768 screen, and (ii) breaks if default browser is misconfigured. Further, a talk page attack (4chan, for example, which do occur) effectively blocks AWB, but it does not (and should not) block WP editing. Materialscientist (talk) 07:20, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
 * You apparently have an older version of AWB. We have now simplified the box to a single button "View" which is accessible by only pressing enter. Please download a snapshot or wait a couple of weeks for the new release. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:06, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Changing floruit fl. in templates
I think I have come across a problem:

I am updating DNB Cite using AWB I noticed that there is a problem with the alteration it makes to fl. within the template. This is apparently not a new problem because Rich Farmbrough fell foul of it with this edit back in April. The problem is that templates such as DNB Cite wrap the parameter passed into them up in square brackets, so add more brackets breaks the wrapping. I think it will affect any template that creates a link to a sister project such as catholic and 1911.
 * 1911
 * without the mod
 * with the mod

Also it can also affect the cite templates when the url= field is set: -- PBS (talk) 06:26, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
 * without the mod
 * Okay, I'll disable the fix for pages using the 1911 template. Rjwilmsi  07:29, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅ Disabled within templates.  Rjwilmsi  09:03, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

HTML Scraper?
In the Make List window, what are the sources "HTML Scraper" and "HTML Scraper (Advanced Regex)" supposed to do? I looked at the user manual, but there are no descriptions next to these options. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 17:28, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
 * They get articles from HTML pages such as some of the WP:CHECKWIKI error-specific reports. Rjwilmsi  18:39, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Could someone update the SVN please
I was wondering if it would be possible for someone to update the SVN. Its currently up to 7130something and the one thats posted is 7069. --Kumioko (talk) 12:47, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I 'll tell Reedy. I hope we have a new release till the end of month. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:10, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. --Kumioko (talk) 13:11, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Done —  Ree dy  09:51, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

fixing page range dashes using AWB
I noticed that AWB is replacing " - " with " – " in page ranges. Would not " " be better than the explicit character? Jason Quinn (talk) 07:50, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I think it's better as the Unicode character, this follows the documentation at WP:DASH etc. Rjwilmsi  09:06, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Maybe you are right. Has this changed something in the last year or so? I seem to remember that " " was preferred at some point. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly. Jason Quinn (talk) 11:02, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
 * You might be remembering this. I don't know if any consensus has been demonstrated. Art LaPella (talk) 23:58, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

A bad interaction between AWB and Citation Bot 1
User:Citation bot 1 likes to add "" into the body of a reference (Example). This seems messy to me, but I guess the intention is that whoever fixes the reference will also remove the category. When AWB comes along it wants to move the category to the bottom of the page, where it will surely get forgotten. Any ideas? -- John of Reading (talk) 15:58, 19 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Maybe change the bot so that it adds a template that adds the category instead of doing it directly? Svick (talk) 16:07, 19 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree with that. Categories separated from the other categories doesn't sound a good idea. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:12, 19 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Adding categories like Citation bot is doing is a horrible idea. If inconsistent references is something that we want editors to worry about (not clear to me as it is so pervasive) I would agree that adding a template that implicitly adds the category is a MUCH better idea. Jason Quinn (talk) 07:54, 20 September 2010 (UTC)


 * To minimize the potential for bugs, I want to restrict the activities of the bot to the content of reference templates themselves. Within this framework, let me know when you have determined the optimal behaviour of the bot and I will implement it. Martin  (Smith609 – Talk)  (Citation bot maintainer) 16:22, 20 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Assuming that User:Citation bot 1 does need to track certain articles that it has edited, we seem to be agreed that a template call would be much better than the existing category call. The template definition could then place the article into the category. I'd be interested to know who or what is making use of the tracking category, though. Also, given a templated solution there would be no need for the category, since a "what links here" of the template would do the same job.
 * If no-one diagrees with this in the next 24 hours, I'll alert the bot owner -- John of Reading (talk) 13:31, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Trouble with preview
Today I've been having trouble with the preview function. If I edit a page and then press the preview button, It says "Previewing" in the status line and then it says "Restarting" and starts counting down. When the count down is complete the page is reloaded. No preview window appears.

It was working fine yesterday. Since the problem started I have tried removing and reinstalling AWB, cleaning the register, using a fresh default.xml file, etc. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get things working correctly again? – droll  &#91;chat&#93;  07:28, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
 * P.S. I'm using version 5.0.3.0 on XP with .NET 2.0. Internet Explorer version is 8.0 – droll  &#91;chat&#93;  07:36, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

I saw this happen yesterday as well. I was using 5.0.3.1 on XP. LilHelpa (talk) 10:12, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Reedy said there's a problem with the API which means the API preview function has been disabled (temporarily I suppose). Rjwilmsi  11:35, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Yup, the API functions we use to generate the HTML and such to display previews was disabled yesterday (due to some abuse which cause the servers major problems), and as such, there are a few things that are broken now. It should be the minority (editing, list building etc still work). It is indeed temporary. Roan is looking at the issue hopefully soon, and as such, it shouldn't be a problem for too long. —  Ree dy  12:27, 22 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Had the same problem yesterday, but it's working now for me. Is this thread on the village pump related to the issue?  GoingBatty (talk) 16:30, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Defaultsort identical to article title
Is there any reason to have a defaultsort that is identical to the article title? --Pascal666 16:15, 23 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I found this at WP:SORTKEY: "Default sort keys are sometimes defined even where they do not seem necessary—when they are the same as the page name, for example—in order to prevent other editors or automated tools from trying to infer a different default". -- John of Reading (talk) 16:22, 23 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Permit me to rephrase please. Is there any reason to have a defaultsort that is identical to the article title when the article title contains only one word?  Both example AWB edits above still apply.  --Pascal666 16:36, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Yobot didn't do general fixes on these articles. It just replaced Lifetime. This is another proof that Lifetime is very bad because some people enter DEFAULTSORT without knowing. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:46, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
 * As WP:SORTKEY says there's no harm in having a DEFAULTSORT in such situations. Rjwilmsi  17:08, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually yes, it shows that the defaultsorts should not be "Choi Hwee-Sung " and "Dong Young-bae". Rich Farmbrough, 06:07, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Uncategorized template
Recently I have noticed an increase in templates on pages. Often these templates are on articles that are stubs. Stub articles usually have associated transcluded categories (e.g., Jubail Church has two stub categories). An uncategorized template was introduced for that example article by a user using AWB, which is why I'm posting here. I don't use AWB bot so I don't know how much it is to blame, if at all. My question is, don't these stub categories count as categories? If they do, AWB should account for this. Unfortunately it seems like many stub categories are not included in their associated non-stub category as a sub-category. This may indicate a larger problem regarding the usefulness of stub categories. Jason Quinn (talk) 15:41, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I think that article that is only in stub categories should be added to ordinary categories too, so the template is not completely out of place. But adding instead of  would be better. Svick (talk) 16:11, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree with you. I have also started a discussion about the wording on . It is not as accurate as it should be. Jason Quinn (talk) 16:44, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
 * We have fixed this as far as I remember and it will be available in the next release. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:51, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB is somewhat coy about adding "uncat/uncat stub" - if there is any template present, bar a handful of known safe ones. Hence the need to supplement it sometimes. Not always with enough granularity. Rich Farmbrough, 19:08, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

Ordering refs, redux
"I have been told by the AWB devs that it can be disabled via a checkbox, [...]Carl (CBM · talk) "
 * Well news to me. And I'm not sure it's a good idea, for every GF there is a Carl - attrition will mean no GFs left.  But I suppose if this check box does exist knowing where it is (or juts the XML) would save me contending in vain, especially when the waves and tides will do it for me. Rich Farmbrough, 18:06, 27 September 2010 (UTC).
 * Ref reordering isn't adviced for bot general fixes so we advice bot owners to use customised general fixes using stuff found in AutoWikiBrowser/Custom Modules. -- Magioladitis (talk) 20:47, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

25000 page limit
Is there any way to bypass the 25000 page limit when making lists? I find this very limiting when I need to make a list from a very large category or highly transcluded template. PC78 (talk) 23:07, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Try using the nolimits plugin. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:13, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Admins and bots only, though. PC78 (talk) 23:25, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * How would I go about getting bot-access to AWB for list-building purposes? I see this was done for someone else about a year ago (see Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Archive 19). PC78 (talk) 14:51, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

change to negative superscripts
Using AWB in X-ray tube changes 10-4 Pa, or 10-6 Torr) to 10−4 Pa, or 10−6 Torr, for example. Is this a correct change or should such negative superscripts be kept untouched by AWB?  What does MOS say? Hmains (talk) 23:37, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
 * See WP:DASH, AWB inserts Unicode minus symbol, which is correct. Rjwilmsi  00:17, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Whitespace removal from article lead
Hi, a few months ago there was a problem with some bot, in that it was removing whitespace from the start of an article, example. While this is not really a problem (woulc be considered a null edit if not for the other changes), it does create a bit of diff noise. So it would just be nice to know if AWB is still doing this, or if it's an option, since there's another bot doing a similar task now Bots/Requests for approval/BsherrAWBBOT. Cheers, - Kingpin13 (talk) 07:52, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Once again it's all my fault. This is a feature request I made to cut down on diff noise. MediaWiki removes one leading blank line per save.  AWB helps us all by being smarter and just zapping the lot. AWB also has a "skip on only whitespace changes" checkbox, which will usually prevent these null edits. (C le arly  not a l ways be cause so metimes whit espace need s to b e remo ved.) Rich Farmbrough, 06:48, 4 October 2010 (UTC).


 * Ah right, if MediaWiki is doing this anyway, then it's not really a problem for AWB to bunch it into one edit. Thanks for explaining that to me Rich :) - Kingpin13 (talk) 09:12, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Food for thought
"An adjective distance 237&amp;nbsp;km should have been 237-kilometre ....
 * Ok I'll raise an AWB bug on that. Rich Farmbrough, 06:31, 4 October 2010 (UTC).


 * Actually I won't. A non-breaking space is an improvement over a normal space, and expecting the devs to code for the linguistic cues as a bug is asking a bit much. Also it's a little fiddly to make a feature request out of, when there's really useful stuff needed. But I will drop a note on the talk page, so that they can take it into account. Rich Farmbrough, 06:48, 4 October 2010 (UTC)."


 * Rich Farmbrough, 06:48, 4 October 2010 (UTC).


 * NBSP is an improvement to the previous version. The rest can only be done manually. There isn't anyway, that I can think of, to understand whether is an adjective distance or not. I now realise that my request to use Convert instead of npbs can't be implemented. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:01, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes there are two ways in this example: the preceding "a", and the parenthetical "(XX mile)" instead of "(XX miles)". Rich Farmbrough, 07:19, 4 October 2010 (UTC).

Can't compile
First error is: Error	2	'WikiFunctions.AWBSettings.UserPrefs' does not contain a definition for 'UsingSecure' and no extension method 'UsingSecure' accepting a first argument of type 'WikiFunctions.AWBSettings.UserPrefs' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)	C:\AWB\AWB\AWB\UserSettings.cs	485	70	AutoWikiBrowser

This may be due to the custom %$*& I have put in for CBM, but that is why I'm trying to compile anyway so... . If anyone has a pointer cool, if not, oh well...  Rich Farmbrough, 07:19, 4 October 2010 (UTC).


 * It's compiling fine for me. Your SVN must be incompletely updated. I suggest you create patches for your custom stuff (can't see why that would touch user settings/prefs), revert to clean SVN and fully update, then reapply your patches. Rjwilmsi  08:23, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Replacing text with template
On :sl, where I use AWB, I'll be updating articles because of the new rules regarding style. I want to replace text with template, as in example: (Slovene XXX) -> (XXX). Can you please help me? TIA! Regards, --Klemen Kocjancic (talk) 12:25, 4 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Try this:
 * Find
 * Replace with
 * My "Find" string allows for extra spaces at various places, and it allows for "Slovene language" to be separated by an underscore as often happens. I expect some of the backslash characters are redundant, but never mind.
 * This solution does not allow XXX to contain quote characters though - I don't know how to search for a set of characters terminated by a pair of single quotes. There's some example data at User:John of Reading/Sandbox. -- John of Reading (talk) 15:07, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll try it sometime this week. Regards, --Klemen Kocjancic (talk) 04:46, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

AWB should not change this
If I'm not mistaken, AWB changed Cl to Clear in mineral (I didn't save; try running over to confirm). If so, this must be fixed ASAP, as Cl is a common chemical symbol which should not be changed. Materialscientist (talk) 08:41, 9 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Ouch. I have disabled the "Clear" rule. I'll have a look at it if no-one else does, but it won't be today. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:53, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Finding redirects
Best to explain this with an example: I've made a list from and converted from talk pages, which leaves me with a list of 6000 or so articles. Can I use AWB to determine which of these articles are actually redirects? If not, does anyone know of another tool that might assist me with this task? PC78 (talk) 22:41, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Paste the list into Special:Export and then scan the resultant .xml using the database scanner, looking for  in wiki text. – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk  22:47, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Marvelous, thanks! PC78 (talk) 23:21, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Moving templates
Regarding fixed problem on :sl (ABW was moving lifetime above example). Can anyone please make a command, so that lifetime would be move back to right place (between templates and ctgr)? As only 2 users are currently using AWB, it would took a long time to fix all articles using general fixes. Regards, --Klemen Kocjancic (talk) 06:44, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

What is logic for adding Uncategorized?
The user manual states that AWB "appends uncategorised if article has no categories and isn't a stub". I've found that sometimes it adds the template and sometimes it doesn't. Is there other logic that AWB uses to decide whether or not to add uncategorised, such as whether or not there are certain kinds of templates in the article? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 00:21, 11 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I found this comment at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests...

"Also, I think it doesn't tag some of the articles automatically, because they contain templates – in that case, AWB doesn't know, whether the article is already in some categories, through the templates. Svick (talk) 14:12, 12 September 2010 (UTC)"
 * -- John of Reading (talk) 08:57, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Logic of 5.0.3 has been corrected for the new release due today: we now count categories as: all categories (from API) minus those ending in " stub". If that total is zero a stub template is looked for to add either Uncategorized stub or just Uncategorized. I will add myself a TODO to add the tagger to the WP:GENFIXES documentation. Rjwilmsi  14:18, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks - I look forward to giving  5.0.3.1 the new version a try when it's released! GoingBatty (talk) 01:51, 13 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Doesn't work as expected in 5.1.0.0, so I reported some Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs. GoingBatty (talk) 04:47, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Chlorine again, urgent
Still changes Cl to Clear. Please fix ASAP. Materialscientist (talk) 10:08, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Which page has this happened on please? Rjwilmsi  10:55, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Methane, minutes ago (I didn't save the AWB edit and went on editing manually) Materialscientist (talk) 10:59, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB made no such change for me. I can't see a recent diff indicating the incorrect change. I can't see a problem. Rjwilmsi  11:07, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
 * and now I understand why - I keep AWB running without closing for many days, and there was an update recently (which you probably installed) - the bug is likely in the previous AWB version. Materialscientist (talk) 11:13, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Confirmed. Sorry. Few people don't restart AWB, thus it is probably safe to ignore this thread. Materialscientist (talk) 11:21, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
 * No problem. It was an incorrect typo rule which was fixed a few days ago. You can reload typo rules from the AWB File menu if such a problem crops up again. Rjwilmsi  12:32, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Change in editing rate
I recently downloaded the most recent version of AWB (5.1.0.0) and it seems to me that the editing rate has slowed down. The fastest rate I was able to reach for a very simple task (adding a deletion tag) was 7 edits per minute, whereas before I could reach ~20 edits per minute. Is this change deliberate, unintentional, or unrelated to the recent update (i.e. either Wikimedia or my Internet connection is having issues)? Thanks, -- Black Falcon (talk) 07:01, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
 * We've made no deliberate change around this. Most likely at temporary connection problem. Rjwilmsi  07:48, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, thank you. -- Black Falcon (talk) 14:24, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

IFD plug-in help
I'm trying to remove some flags (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Munster_Senior_Football_Championship&oldid=391427279) but IFD plugin doesn't seem to loop. If only removes the image once. Is this correct or am I doing something wrong Gnevin (talk) 12:11, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Have you tried the "comment out file" option on the More tab? Rjwilmsi  15:08, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Doesn't do what I need Gnevin (talk) 20:49, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know why you need a plug-in for this task. Just a plain regex to remove those lines:

\| *RD\d\-seed\d+ *\= *\[\[(Image|File)\:Colours[_ ]of[ _][^\.]+\.svg\|\d\dpx\]\] *\n
 * — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 04:11, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Cheers Andrwsc ,tbh never even though of regex Gnevin (talk) 20:21, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
 * No worries, but it would seem that additional patterns are needed. There are other "colours" image names, such as File:Colours-of-Offaly.png and File:Kilkennygaaflag.svg.  — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 10:56, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that pattern above has done the heavy lifting so I can remove the others manually or create a new regex if required Gnevin (talk) 11:05, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Template redirects
Moved here from Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Dated templates. Some of the templates listed also have redirects to the templates. If the redirects are not listed here but are listed at AutoWikiBrowser/Template redirects, will the dating work on redirects?  McLerristarr /  Mclay1  16:03, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Are the notes I wrote at the top of the Dated templates page not clear? Rjwilmsi  16:57, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah, terribly sorry about that. I forgot to read the notes. They are quite clear thank you.  McLerristarr /  Mclay1  17:11, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Remove fields in template call
How can I remove the third and fourth parameter from so that it becomes  ? __meco (talk) 12:31, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Try:

<Find>\{\{estcatCountry\|([^\|]+)\|([^\|]+)\|([^\|]+)\|([^\|]+)\|([^\}]+)\}\}</Find> <Replace></Replace> <IsRegex>true</IsRegex>
 * — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 13:13, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I have another question on a different level. The above worked great, but I'm unable to grasp the workings of all those characters, and I would like to understand how to do this on my own without having to ask more elementary questions here every time in the future that I want to do something similar. What you did was to represent each of the five template parameters with " ", is that correct?
 * Would that be applying the group or range [^abc] denoting "Set not a or b or c"? And do the parentheses define a capture string? I.e. is what exists between the parentheses defined as "$1" (and then "$2" and up to "$5")? If I'm correct thus far does the definition of each string then equate with "any character not a vertical bar times 1 or more "?


 * You see, I'm a little bewildered by this, if what I have surmised above is all correct, in that this seems to preclude the existence of a sixth parameter which occasionally happens when a sixth, sort key, parameter gets added, i.e. . You see, I forgot to mention this when I asked my question initially. But from what I have reasoned now, such a sixth parameter would screw up the parsing of the expression, wouldn't it? Because, " " wouldn't match " ". But apparently it does, because even those pages where there was a sixth parameter were changed correctly. I hope someone who is experienced with this understands what I have presented here (though I realize that for someone not very versant in this, my condensed and probably not altogether correct presentation, terminology-wise certainly, might be difficult to penetrate)and is able to explain it back to me. __meco (talk) 15:08, 20 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Actually, " " does match " ". Unpacking the magic characters, it says "please find as many characters as you can, up to the next curly bracket, and remember them, and then look for two more curly brackets". Notice that the big "find" string has four groups " " that match text to the next pipe symbol, and then fifth group that matches up to the closing curly bracket. So it works for five parameters or any greater number. -- John of Reading (talk) 15:22, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Just wondering but how does the " " differ from using " "? --Kumioko (talk) 15:52, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Right, I didn't spot that the pipe symbol had been switched for a closing curly bracket in the fifth group. Then it makes sense! __meco (talk) 16:08, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
 * @Kumioko - I've never tried " " but I think that would also work. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:36, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok thanks. I had never used the one you had. Programming is like art. Many ways to do the same thing. --Kumioko (talk) 16:50, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Category (recursive) - articles found
I have been using Category (recursive) Make List Source option to collect lists of people by occupation. With very large groups I am getting articles that should not be in the sub-categories. For example I get US military regiments and American church organisations from Category:American politicians and US and UK university alumni from Category:Religious leaders. I have attempted to go through the sub-categories working down from where I started and going up from offending articles but failed to find the problem connection. Is it possible AWB is having problem? Are there any tools to find the path from a specific article to a category that can be many levels above the categories the article is in? --Traveler100 (talk) 11:40, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Try to restrict to a certain depth level. Subcatogrisation in Wikipedia isn't very good because editors usually aren't aware of the sup-categories and they tend to add every category possible to articles and categories. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:49, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I have been doing that for some cases where it make sense but in other the hit rate is very low. I am comparing the people categories with content of Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of people to break it down into small lists. Depth restriction will not get to all the articles and starting two or three levels down is also a very manual task. You can see what I am try to do here User:People-n-photo-bot, the ones crossed out are either too large or return false results.--Traveler100 (talk) 12:44, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * All AWB does when doing this, is grabs a category, and if any categories are found, added to a list to also be pulled. I've had the same problem before, and if you start digging, find some very screwed up category trees —  Ree dy  14:50, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I think I know the answer already (which is no) but would it be possible to add a selection to AWB that would allow the AWB list maker to use the "Is article about a person" logic to filter out the non-person articles?--Kumioko (talk) 15:12, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * They are not always trees. Svick (talk) 15:58, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, yeah. :P. That's a suprisingly large number of craptastic results. —  Ree dy  16:01, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Found the reason, unfortunately makes sense now that I see it. I go recursively down to presidents which is fine but the the content of this list is not an article but a category with the name of the president. This category then has a sub-category Presidency of xxxxxx which lists event during that persons time of office. Same goes for many other local politicians. This list of event then lead the search in many unexpected directions. Looks like I need another method to create such a list.--Traveler100 (talk) 04:29, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I think the best option would be if you (or someone else) fixed the categorization (yes, I think it's broken). But it may not be obvious how exactly to do that and it may be a lot of work. Svick (talk) 22:54, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Continuing discussion at Wikipedia talk:Categorization --Traveler100 (talk) 08:53, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes basically people put categories named after members of a super category in the category - or similar things. Thus "Stations in France" contained the category "Paris Metro" which contained a load of stations but also rolling stock. Similarly "places in X" wil contain a category called "Y" that is named for a place in X, that in turn contains famous people. Once you get that you start to get loops too. Rich Farmbrough, 17:52, 24 October 2010 (UTC).

Talk page edits
Is there anything that can be done to speed up talk page edits? It seems AWB still takes a long time to process edits to talk pages. --Kumioko (talk) 15:43, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Please post an example page, and check performance without your find & replace entries enabled. Rjwilmsi  20:57, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I have tried it without my find and replace. AWB just seems to operate slower on talk pages for some reason. I recently did an edit on Talk:Theodore Roosevelt to move the Talk header and the Skip to talk templates to the top of the page. You could undo and retry that edit as a test. But that is a big talk page so its kind of a bad example. --Kumioko (talk) 22:37, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I suspect that this is a MW issue. For example if I save a massively transcluded template [with a browser]] I always get an error message, although the save actually succeeded. This I beleive is due to the servers creating the list of pages which need a refresh - which is then not used anyway. On the other hand I have severe issues on very long pages - like Dutch cities towns and villages or whatever it is called, and generally need to go and edit those manually.  Rich Farmbrough, 18:18, 24 October 2010 (UTC).


 * Refactor WikiRegexes.Wikify to avoid lookbehind (caused catastrophic backtracking on List of given names). -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:21, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Q about edit summaries
I can't run AWB, but I want to ask about something. In what circumstances is it possible to disable the "using AWB" part of the edit summary using just the interface provided by AWB? It seems like this should pretty much always be appended automatically by AWB, but I want to check with people who can actually run it. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 14:43, 18 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Most editors using AWB always have "using AWB" appended to the edit summary. Users who have had extra approval to use AWB in its bot mode are given an option to leave it off. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:51, 18 October 2010 (UTC)


 * AWB's code is open-source, so it is possible to reprogram it to omit the 'using AWB' line - though not recommended. – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 14:52, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Indeed I have fairly easily changed it to a custom item, in order to clarify the two versions I use (real and broken), but probably botched it through not knowing C#. However I only have the broken version compiled/running until I write a patch program or learn how to use patch or manually hack the code around a bit more.  Rich Farmbrough, 17:47, 24 October 2010 (UTC).

What constitutes an insignificant or inconsequential edit?
There seems to be some confusion or disagreement over what constitutes an insignificant or inconsequential edit. Is simply changing the case or bypassing a redirect of a template considered insignificant/inconsequential? What about replacing a wrapper template with the meta template? – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 14:56, 18 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, I saw that over at WP:AN. If you're hoping to establish a consensus, here's my !vote - I usually tick one or more of the "skip" checkboxes so that I'm not saving revisions with only general fixes. -- John of Reading (talk) 15:18, 18 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you for asking this. I've wondered the same. Even some of the CheckWikipedia errors I sometimes work on seem fairly minor, but they were important enough to scan for. --Auntof6 (talk) 16:12, 18 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Changing the case of a template is as insignificant as it gets, and edits that only contain these changes are a clear violation of AWB terms of use, in my opinion. Bypassing a template redirect is less clear, as Redirect suggests that this is preferable (in contrast to the text at WP:NOTBROKEN). But even in that case, I don't think those edits should be made with AWB unless accompanied by other more useful edits. — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 11:01, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

I think that trivial edits in include any edit that doesn't affect the rendered appearance or categorization of a page. This includes whitespace changes, template redirect changes, and other "cleanup" things. Occasionally there is a reason to make these changes on their own, like a redirect or category that will be deleted. But, otherwise, AWB edits should always be focused on the content of the article, not on just cleaning up the source code in some way. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 11:09, 19 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Since moving to 5.1.0.0, many of the pages that are in my queue are only adding Persondata. Based on some comments above, some may see that as insignificant since it won't change the appearance of the page.  I look forward to seeing consensus, and a change to the rules of use if needed.  Thoughts?   GoingBatty (talk) 23:01, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * 348,379 transclusions of Persondata while WPBiography has 874,591 i.e. we have done 40% so far. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:06, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * To answer your question adding persondata isnt an insignificant edit. Its difficult to explain why its important because the reasons are somewhat technical, but it is. --Kumioko (talk) 23:11, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Based on what I've read at WP:PERSONDATA, it seems to me it shouldn't be considered insignificant either. Just one example of where we need to be careful when (if?) we change the rules of use.  Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 23:15, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Two points on Persondata: Rich Farmbrough, 17:23, 24 October 2010 (UTC).
 * 1) It's not necessarily invisible: some editors can see it.
 * 2) While we have caught up and overtaken de: very quickly, which is impressive of iteself, I don't yet see the actual value in these templates.  If they were in a sub-page, so that just the critical info could be retrieved that would be a bandwidth win.  But as it is the data that is in the templates is replicated from the article, smart glue would enable extraction of this, and retain synchrony.


 * Question why isn't the software written to not propose a change when the only changes are removal/additions of blanks at the end of lines or adding/removing blank lines?--Paul McDonald (talk) 16:35, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Infobox military person
Just a heads up but Infobox military person is about to undergo a major coding change. Im not sure exactly what edits AWB makes but I wanted to keep you in the loop just in case. I wouldn't want someone to Talk page bomb Rich and Smackbot again because someone updated the code and didnt tell them. --Kumioko (talk) 19:47, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB makes no changes to that infobox. Rjwilmsi  11:48, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh ok, I think I was thinking of the Template redirect change. Thanks. --Kumioko (talk) 14:46, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, my redirects are reloaded from time to time 9and currently disabled) so shouldn't be too much fallout from this stuff, but always nice to know in advance. Rich Farmbrough, 17:44, 24 October 2010 (UTC).

Default sort key error
This edit contains an error (wrong default sort key), and the user who made it is putting the blame on an error in AWB general fixes. Can this be sorted? Thanks --Kotniski (talk) 09:43, 20 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I doubt if a software change could avoid this, but as the banner on AutoWikiBrowser says, edits made using this software are the responsibility of the editor using it. The problem should not occur again at Anne of Great Britain because I have added an explicit DEFAULTSORT. From here on, AWB and other similar tools will not try to add something different. See the last bullet-point at WP:SORTKEY. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:03, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * WP:SORTKEY says the first letter of each word in a sort key is capitalized, so I've corrected your correction. Rjwilmsi  11:44, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * So what algorithm is being applied here? I presume it's something like "if the article is about a person, put the last word of the title first in the sort key", but I'd have thought that at least titles containing "of" ought to be excluded from this (many historical figures are referred to as X of Y, and I wouldn't expect to find most of them indexed at Y).--Kotniski (talk) 09:31, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately the WP:SORTKEY DEFAULTSORT rules have a number of subtleties, so AWB's logic is not right 100% of the time, this article being an example of when it's wrong. That's why AWB has an option to turn off the DEFAULTSORT adding logic. This article now has the right DEFAULTSORT, so AWB won't change it again. I'll see if it's feasible to extend the logic to cover "x of y" person articles, or otherwise check each of those articles and ensure the DEFAULTSORT is right. Rjwilmsi  11:49, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Great, thanks!--Kotniski (talk) 13:51, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

It is not really fair to say "putting the blame on", although words could have been chosen more felicitously by the editor in question. Incidentally I have bot approval (for what that is worth) to fix up "X of Y" person articles. This should make it easy for established botops to get the same approval. I would probably have done a run an prevented this, admittedly tiny, incident but been busy with virtual stuff on the interwebs. Rich Farmbrough, 17:30, 24 October 2010 (UTC).

Find: Space or no space
How do I get AWB to search for the possibility of a space? For instance, I want to find either "foo |" and "foo|". Notice there's a space before the pipe in the first example. Thanks, Dismas |(talk) 04:51, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * That's "foo\s*|" - the asterisk asks for a match with zero or more of the preceding character. This assumes you'd be happy to match something that had two or more spaces. See the "quantifier" section at WP:REGEX. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:25, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Then I have to check the "regex" box too, right?  Dismas |(talk) 07:33, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, that's right. And, sadly, my first answer is (a) incomplete and (b) wrong.
 * You asked how to match zero or one space - if that's exactly what you want to match, that would be \s?
 * The pipe symbol is a special character, and needs a backslash to be taken as a literal.
 * So in fact you need "foo\s?\|" or "foo\s*\|" -- John of Reading (talk) 07:53, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Got it! Thanks again!!  Dismas |(talk) 09:46, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * If foo is a template name, then to be robust you need something like [ \t_]* - zero or more spaces, tabs or underscores, in any order. Rich Farmbrough, 17:32, 24 October 2010 (UTC).

Test for a subpage?
Is there a means to quickly determine whether a page is a subpage or not? Even if I need to poke it into a module. All I can think of is some butt ugly tests based around the forward slash, which my defeat my rudimentary skills. (for Wikisource). (Addendum) The list(ing) is not much help as many long book titles put the subpage indicators of to the right of the visual range in the list. billinghurst  sDrewth  11:52, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * This seems to work for me: make a list of mixed pages and subpages, then use the menu "List > Filter...". The middle group of controls there can be used to remove or keep the titles containing a forward slash, so I'm left with a list of subpages or a list with no subpages. Any good? -- John of Reading (talk) 12:58, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Hmm, a logical simple solution. I was obviously looking for a more technical solution and overlooked that sort of test. Thanks. billinghurst  sDrewth  11:48, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Here's a trick if you want reusable settings; use the "prepend" function to prepend %%title%% (with no carriage returns) and set Skip if contains to {{Subst:Null\|[^}]*\/ with regex and test after boxes checked.

Rich Farmbrough, 17:36, 24 October 2010 (UTC).

Extracting word from category name
How do I extract the last word from the name of a category, e.g. I want "1876" from Category:Government agencies established in 1876? I'm thinking it has something to do with .__meco (talk) 14:54, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Depends what you want to do with the word, and where. For example something like:


 * s/(\[\ _]+[Cc]ategory:[^*[ _]+([^ ][^]]*)\]\])/$1 (last word is $2)/


 * in AWB F&R will change

to
 * (last word is 876)

To extract the trailing year using a template look at Monthly clean up category for an example.

Rich Farmbrough, 17:41, 24 October 2010 (UTC).


 * I don't think this helps me, because I weant to use the name of the category page itself, and that isn't displayed among the page content. __meco (talk) 07:38, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Defaultsort
Currently, AWB adds defaultsorts to articles, capitalizing the first letter of every word. However, outside AWB, this system is ralely if ever used, meaning that in most cases I looked at, the AWB sorted articles are now listed out of order with the other articles. E.g. on Category:Employment law terms, "Employment testing" is given before "Employment contract", because the first was given a defaultsort by Yobot, and the second is not so blessed yet. Similarly, List of logic systems sorts before List of first-order theories because the former has been edited by Smackbot.

Now, once all pages have been updated by these bots or human AWB users, these problems will be resolved, since then we will be back at our original, correct sorting order before any of this happened. But this basically means that these additions have no use and actually make things worse in many cases. Add to that that having no defaultsort is better in the case of a page-move, since the defaultsort would sort the page at the old title, instead of at the new one.

Considering that this function has no apparent benefit, and has clear and demonstrated negative effects, I propose to remove this from AWB. Fram (talk) 13:53, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The better answer would be to have a bot add those missing DEFAULTSORTs. Rjwilmsi  14:29, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
 * ? Resulr: thousands of edits, no improvements, and problems when moving pages afterwards. How is this "the better solution", compared to adding, removing or chainging such defaultsorts on a case-by-case basis instead of automated? Fram (talk) 14:35, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Here's my offer: if you discuss, agree and change the WP:SORTKEY/WP:NAMESORT rules I'll change AWB to follow suit. Rjwilmsi  14:48, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Adding DEFAULTSORT in every page has two advantages:
 * We know that the page was checked for DEFAULTSORT and its key is probably correct
 * New categories added don't have the risk to have a page misplaced.

So yes, a bot running to add DEFAULTSORT everywhere would be cool. Yobot has approval to add DEFAULTSORT in all pages with special characters (as part of the WP:CHECKWIKI error fix runs) and this is already a big first step. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:53, 26 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Um, your first point makes no sense. Smacknbot and Yobot and so on add a defaultsort based on AWB rules. If those rules are not correct or unwanted, then the key may well be incorrect, and in any case the page is not checked, but automatically edited. And the second point also assumes that the new defaultsort is correct and better than having no defautlsort at all. The "advantages" you list are only correct if you assume that the added defaultsort indeed always or usually is better, and that the absence of a defaultsort is not an advantage (e.g. when moving pages). I'll take up the offer of Rjwilmsi to discuss this at WP:SORTKEY, but I do hope I get better answers there, adressing the core of the problem, not starting from an unproven position and drawing a circular conclusion from it: the additions are better, so it is better to have the additions... Fram (talk) 17:52, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Categorization. Fram (talk) 18:14, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Turning greedy regex into lazy regex
As I understand it, the asterisk '*' is greedy. Some web sites say that if you add a question mark '?' after it, it will become lazy. Some other sites say that doesn't work for all versions of regex. I tried '*?' but it didn't seem to have an effect. Any ideas? Lightmouse (talk) 10:51, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I haven't got AWB in front of me, but using a '?' to limit a match has certainly worked for me in the past. Mr Stephen (talk) 10:58, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, C# (AWB) supports lazy regex. Rjwilmsi  11:01, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Aha. My test was complicated because I'm looking for special characters. I see it works now. Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 11:37, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

No display
Hi, I thought I would easily spot my problem in FAQ, but it doesn't seerm to be there or anywhere else I;ve tried. Time ago I was accepted as a registered user of AWB, but due to technical problems in my system then I never managed to run it. Now I am running Windows 7 and decided to try again. So I dowloaded AWB and the program runs. I went to the log in window, entered my username and password, they seem to be accepted, the status bar shows me as Logged in, user and software enabled, Bot=False, Admin=False, etc and my username is highlighted in green. However the top screen remains completely blank, no matter what I try. It will make any lists I ask, but no display at the main window. Is it one more of the inconveniences of windows 7 or my comodo firewall or my ignorance on basics? Any tips? Hoverfish Talk 11:46, 29 October 2010 (UTC)


 * You haven't described the change to articles that you're trying to make (it's best for a beginner to create a test article in your sandbox and run AWB on that). You need to tell AWB what changes you want, then go to the 'Start' tab and click the 'Start' button. Hope that helps Lightmouse (talk) 11:52, 29 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you Lightmouse, I will try it. Hoverfish Talk 11:54, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

A question
Hello, I'm Dragonfree from the Animal Crossing Wiki, I came to ask if there was a way to make this program list by namespace? Thanks. - Dragonfree, 20:13, 29 October 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.107.33.176 (talk)
 * That'd be cool. For now, I make my list, and then click the Filter button, choose the Namespaces to keep, and click Apply.  GoingBatty (talk) 00:18, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Underscore character
How would I scan pages to look for either "foo bar" or "foo_bar"? AWB doesn't like the regex of \_*

Thanks, Dismas |(talk) 02:43, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Try "foo[_\s]bar" GoingBatty (talk) 02:56, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
 * That got it! Thanks, Dismas |(talk) 03:05, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Two questions
two questions: --Umar1996 (talk) 11:04, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
 * is there any option to skip articles with only the alert of multiple wiki-links?
 * is there any make list option to generate Uncategorized stubs?


 * For question two, you can just use Category:Uncategorized stubs from September 2010, for example, as your category, can't you? (don't have access to AWB right now to check).  Dismas |(talk) 11:47, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Or Category:Uncategorized stubs with your source as Category (recurse 1 level) GoingBatty (talk) 12:21, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Also note that you may want to go to  to see these and other hidden categories.  Dismas |(talk) 12:26, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Figured that out, thanks anyway... --Umar1996 (talk) 14:14, 1 November 2010 (UTC)


 * For question one, there isn't one but you can create your own by using a custom module. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:53, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Does that require .Net programming ??--Umar1996 (talk) 14:14, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Not .net but it would require VB or C. --Kumioko (talk) 02:38, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, it's C# or VB.NET and both are .NET languages. So, yes, it requires .NET programming. Svick (talk) 19:31, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry I didnt think AWB was setup for .net. Thought it was still old school C. Learn something new everyday. --Kumioko (talk) 19:52, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

SVN's not able to do edit a blank page
Since this is neither a bug nor a feature request I thought this would be the best place for this. It was recently explained to me that SVN updates cannot edit a blank page. Normally that would be completely understandable but as I work with talk pages more and more (and at the same time trying to take advantage of the most recent changes) I find it more and more of a drag that I cannot add a banner to a blank page of an existing article. Is there some way that an allowance can be made to allow AWB SVN updates to edit blank talk pages? Even if thats by some kind of special access list like the one we use to grant access to AWB or bots? There are a relative few of us that deal with talk pages anyway so the list would probably remain pretty short. --Kumioko (talk) 02:36, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * With the SVN version you can create a non-existent (blank) page, you cannot blank an existing page. Rjwilmsi  08:12, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Then perhaps I am doing something wrong or perhaps there is a problem with the current SVN that I am useing because when I try to add a banner to a blank page I get this message:

Here are a couple of articles as an example. Agricultural Act of 1970 talk, Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1980 talk, Agricultural Conservation Program talk. All three are lacking banners and unfortunately I have a couple hundred more. --Kumioko (talk) 13:39, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, then my understanding is wrong: you can't use the SVN build with a page that starts or ends blank. Rjwilmsi  13:57, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * So theres no way around that then? Thats a shame. Ok thanks. --Kumioko (talk) 14:00, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The way round it is to use the 5.1.0.0 release for this activity. Rjwilmsi  14:26, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok thanks. --Kumioko (talk) 14:28, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Uncategorized stubs
(I haven't changed much AWB settings)

While processing through articles in the Category "Stubs", AWB automatically removes  template together with adding other changes although the article is only a. Why is this so? Am i missing sth? --Umar1996 (talk) 13:56, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Please provide an example diff. Rjwilmsi  13:58, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Expo 2011 is an example.
 * Bugfix stub category counting. AWB incorrectly counted Category:Stubs as a normal category, so therefore would remove uncategorized stub. You'd better not run the tagger (in first tab in centre of AWB) on pages with stub until the next AWB release. Rjwilmsi  14:25, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * happy to report a bug--Umar1996 (talk) 14:18, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

searching outside a template
I know how to find stuff inside a template, but what about outside? There are characters which should always be templated as unicode or IPA or PIE &c for legibility, and I'd like to find tokens which are not templated. I can't think of any regex that would accomplish this, but then I'm not too bright with regex. — kwami (talk) 22:42, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * If you want to run "Find & Replace" without changing anything in a template, the easiest option must be the checkbox at the top left of the "Find & Replace" setup to "Ignore templates, refs, link targets and headings". Admittedly that's not quite what you are asking for. -- John of Reading (talk) 06:27, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but it would work much of the time. It wouldn't help if we'd need a formatting template within another template, but it would at least capture stuff in the text, and there are so many thousands of formatting problems that even that portion of them would keep me occupied for some time. Thanks. (Funny how you can't see what's right in front of you sometimes.) — kwami (talk) 20:57, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Can you give us a better idea of what your trying to do. I don't quite understand what kind of formatting problems you are referring too. --Kumioko (talk) 21:01, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Odd capitalization change
AWB changed this: *

to this: *

in the article Gloria Swanson. Why the odd change in capitalization -- the "MD" but not the "I"? --Auntof6 (talk) 05:09, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB was set up so that when it does template replacements, the first-letter case of the redirect is kept in the new template name. This is to prevent trivial changes, such as cite web to Cite web.  GoingBatty (talk) 05:51, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
 * If we can all agree exceptions to the 'keep first letter case' rule it can be implemented in AWB. Maybe if the new template name has an uppercase first word? But xeno and co would have to agree. Rjwilmsi  07:51, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
 * There's little objection if the template name is actually changing (or even being dated). Rich Farmbrough, 10:39, 12 November 2010 (UTC).

broken links
Another editor is complaining that AWB or I did something wrong, but I cannot figure out. Can anyone see what is wrong here? "You edited the Lynx page a while ago, and your edit broke (orphaned) the references. You may wish to double-check any automatic logic you used for this change." and also "In short: The reference list did not produce "Cite error: Invalid tag; no text was provided for refs named cah/iucncsg; see Help:Cite errors/Cite error references no text" before your edit. At the time, I gave up looking at it, as the refs got sorted alphabetically and thus impossible to follow by hand. It seems you orphaned some live references, possibly because there were a couple duplicate ones." Hmains (talk) 05:11, 13 November 2010 (UTC)


 * If you look at the References section of your edit, References 7 and 11 are big red "Cite errors". So you or AWB definitely did something wrong. The previous version isn't to blame because it doesn't have those cite errors; they were caused by your AWB edit. Does that answer the question? Art LaPella (talk) 05:15, 13 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, I see. I just tested the article again, making a trivial manual change unrelated to references, and a 'cite errors' appears on reference 11.  It seems this is an AWB error.  Hmains (talk) 22:34, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Edit conflicts
Seems AWB is not using the timesstamp when saving? If I open in AWb, then edit in browser and then save in AWB I overwrite my browser edits. Rich Farmbrough, 10:44, 12 November 2010 (UTC).

—  Ree dy  14:16, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * OK I'm puzzled why I don't get an edit conflict then.Rich Farmbrough, 21:17, 16 November 2010 (UTC).

Reload of dated and redirects.
I just came to remove "update after" only to find it was removed 3 hours ago - lookslike "ctrl R" reloads the lists? Rich Farmbrough, 11:08, 15 November 2010 (UTC).


 * Yes that will do it. Rjwilmsi  11:35, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Disabling Personendata template insertion
Is there any way of disabling this automatic insertion of Persondata into biographies? I find it often gets in the way of my central task, cluttering up the edit screen and slowing down processing. Thanks, -- Ohconfucius ¡digame! 03:04, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, you can turn off "Apply general fixes" on the Options tab. GoingBatty (talk) 03:13, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Is there a list of what's included in these 'general fixes'? -- Ohconfucius ¡digame! 03:44, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * See AutoWikiBrowser/General fixes -- John of Reading (talk) 08:50, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * A bot is running daily to insert Persondata for that reason. I don't know how much progress we have but I hope from next month the situation will be restored. You can of course create your own "custom general fixes". Check AutoWikiBrowser/Custom_Modules. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:58, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * There are about 500,000 persondata done. Rich Farmbrough, 21:16, 16 November 2010 (UTC).


 * Er... 665,736 Rich Farmbrough, 02:01, 21 November 2010 (UTC).

Couple of page blankings reported
I'm puzzled about these, one I am pretty sure I saw the exception being thrown on the page - I presumed it was safe to "continue" with the next article? Is this now something we can only throw our hands up and say "It's the API?" Rich Farmbrough, 01:20, 19 November 2010 (UTC).

Fixing 'Refered'
Hi, I do not have AutoWikiBrowser privileges and I am not interested in acquiring them right now. I have however found that the word referred is misspelled (as 'refered') in almost 400,000 articles. I was wondering if someone else with AWB permissions would be willing to fix this. Simply search for the misspelling using the standard search and you will see what I'm talking about. Thanks.

Merehap (talk) 02:30, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * There's already a typo rule set up to fix these. A Google search only finds 4,360 pages, some of which are talk or user pages.  GoingBatty (talk) 02:40, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I did a scan and found half a dozen, in articles, mostly in comments, and false positives. I think someone has picked these up and fixed them. Rich Farmbrough, 01:56, 21 November 2010 (UTC).

don't put refs in main text into numerical order
Could AWB users please stop sequencing references into numerical order? It's sometimes counterproductive. At least in some academic fields, authors specify the order in which references appear within main text, so that note 2 might properly precede note 1 (as in, "This is one fact with two sources.[2][1]"). While there is an argument against nonascending order, that should be referred to the editors who usually work on the article, usually via the talk page.

This was recently raised as an issue: "The order of refs is a matter of editorial judgment. It is standard in my field for references to be presented out-of-order, because they are sorted by author at the end of a paper and then referenced by number. So you might see 'This is a claim [5,2,7]', which indicates that 5 is the best source, then 2 then 7. However, if someone in another field is used to sorting the inline notes by number, that's fine too. It's a matter of the citation style in an individual article. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:58, 12 November 2010 (UTC)" "I like the [5,2,7] option (as an option, so editors who ignore order are still fine), but to keep the option of arbitrary order how do we stop or discourage the bot or editor that insists on rearranging in various articles? I don't remember which articles I saw it in, so I can't track who's doing it. If it's a bot, then I guess WP knows. How do we find out so we can keep our option? Nick Levinson (talk) 05:49, 12 November 2010 (UTC)" "Carl and Nick, I agree with you, and on the pages I watch it is WP:AWB that does this, a good place to start would be to ask the programmers to disable that feature. -- PBS (talk) 20:51, 13 November 2010 (UTC)"

Thank you. Nick Levinson (talk) 05:30, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Sources should be in numerical order. If someone wants to say a source is the best, it should be done in the note itself, like this. Using some obscure reference ordering system lost on the reader is not a good practice. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 05:56, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Example note


 * This is being discussed on WT:CITE, of course. However, if a particular article adopts a style with out-of-order footnotes, that's their prerogative, which AWB should respect. In some fields, out-of-order notes are completely standard. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 13:31, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Well despite the noise created, no-one has ever, as far as I know, actually found a case where the re-ordering was objected to by the author on the grounds that the number were deliberately out of order. On the other hand many thousands of cases have been reordered, with no complaints except from Carl, and only a handful of queries that I am aware of. Rich Farmbrough, 01:23, 21 November 2010 (UTC).


 * I have general fixes turned off rather than try to explain obscurities like this one. Is there a page I could point to that shows some kind of consensus outside of AWB for some rules with no obvious justification? Art LaPella (talk) 04:47, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Me, too (complaining about the reordering), not only Carl, and user PBS agreed. The reason you don't see more complaints may be that some, perhaps most, of the AWB edits occur much later, when the original editor may no longer be watching. I often drop pages from my watchlist when they quickly receive many edits I'm not interested in, which means I may thereafter miss an edit affecting what I contributed. Seeing this type of edit to someone else's work and thinking whether to restore means reviewing the sources and judging what's appropriate, which is time-consuming.


 * Meanwhile, I understand the appearance issue for readers unfamiliar with the convention and will consider this subject in future substantive edits. With respect to the fields in which nonascending order is accepted, I wonder whether most Wikipedia readers reading articles in those fields are professionals or students in those fields or are people from other fields (or no fields of expertise), the former expecting the nonascent convention and the latter not, and of the latter I wonder how many care one way or the other. As to editors, I wonder how many tended to rearrange the references to ascend before there was automation to help them do it. Nowadays, most authors likely add refs without knowing what numbers they'll get and then, if rearranging is important, they'd more or less have to edit moments later to rearrange; but, while I haven't seen evidence of that on pages I watch, since I watch a skewed selection of pages, perhaps someone else knows about editors' practices in other fields.


 * I copied the last post above into a new topic/subtopic.


 * Nick Levinson (talk) 03:53, 22 November 2010 (UTC) (Edited at 04:05 (UTC) per the edit summary: 04:17, 22 November 2010 (UTC))
 * I seem to recall seeing some GAC or FAC reviewers prefer to see refs in numerical order. Personally, I think it looks tidier, and do renumber them, even if I have to do it manually - for I was never aware that it is one of AWB's general fixes. -- Ohconfucius ¡digame! 04:02, 22 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I'll share this conversation from my talk archives as an example of another complaint under Peter Nicholson (architect). --LilHelpa (talk) 18:49, 24 November 2010 (UTC)


 * What criteria were used exactly to put "Essay on Involution and Evolution: particularly applied to the Operation of Extracting the Roots of Equations and Numbers" before the article in "The Monthly Review, or Literary Journal"? I just think the first reference should be in another position. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:44, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

The next 25,000
Howdy! I would like to know if there is a way to tell AWB to exclude the first x number of articles when loading a list from a category. I ask because I would like to work on a category with more than 25,000 pages. It will take several days to process the first 25,000 pages, but when I am done I would like to be able to load the next 25,000 from the category. I am not trying to overload the servers, as there would be several days between requests. Is it possible to do this, maybe by adding some sort of parameter to the end of the category name? Or could I possible get a full list somewhere? (I do not have room on my hard drive for a database dump)? Thanks for your help! --Andrew Kelly (talk) 04:41, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Nevermind, User:Dispenser showed me CatScan 2, which allowed me to get the information I needed. It is a very useful tool!  --Andrew Kelly (talk) 05:47, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

can you change
persuing to pursuing, persued to pursued, persuit to pursuit Kittybrewster  &#9742;  16:20, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅ - 18 articles fixed. --Andrew Kelly (talk) 23:14, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * FYI - the typo rule was already set up. GoingBatty (talk) 00:08, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

explaining nonobviously-justfiable AWB rules
The following post is copied from another topic, since, to me, it looks important enough to warrant its own treatment. Nick Levinson (talk) 03:53, 22 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I have general fixes turned off rather than try to explain obscurities like this one. Is there a page I could point to that shows some kind of consensus outside of AWB for some rules with no obvious justification? Art LaPella (talk) 04:47, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The general fixes are described at AutoWikiBrowser/General fixes, but, yes, that page needs lots more links to explain why each rule was implemented. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:34, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I added many more. What is exactly you need? You can always use customised general fixes using AutoWikiBrowser/Custom_Modules. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:04, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

So, let's see:
 * 1) Article General fixes: Partial
 * 2) Mainspace tagger: Partial
 * 3) Talk page general fixes: Fully covered
 * 4) Helper functions: No need for policy links

More details soon. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:28, 22 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you. I suppose I'll need some experience with it to know what could be explained better. I'm puzzled why Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/General fixes is blank. It can't mean that all the general fixes listed enjoy unanimous support throughout Wikipedia, so is this page a better place to direct those who may disagree with those fixes? Art LaPella (talk) 21:46, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * More policy guidelines provided. I hope I don't have to do this for every project! -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:49, 24 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you again. I suppose I'll need some experience with it ... I actually know the Manual of Style better than almost anyone; that's how I know many of the general fixes aren't in the Manual. Art LaPella (talk) 21:59, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Let's see. The main point is point 1, which was 37 subsections so far.
 * 1.1-1.11 are all covered by guidelines, template manuals and categorisation instructions.
 * 1.12: -
 * 1.13: -
 * 1.14: Guideline
 * 1.15: I probably can find a guideline for this one.
 * 1.16: Common logic?
 * 1.17-1.18: I guess they are obvious. Makes everything easier to read.
 * 1.19-1.21 are all covered by guidelines, template manuals and categorisation instructions.
 * 1.22: No idea
 * 1.23: Isn't obvious that we remove white space when not needed?
 * 1.24-1.26 are all covered by guidelines, template manuals and categorisation instructions.
 * 1.27: -
 * 1.28: Common logic?
 * 1.29: Covered by guidelines which we lighten a bit and don't do the change every time to be on the safe side
 * 1.30-1.37 are all covered by guidelines, template manuals and categorisation instructions.

-- Magioladitis (talk) 00:27, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Great work Magio - keep it up!
 * Art - Besides the one example you provided, could you please be specific as to which general fixes concern you? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:32, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * One specific example is called "Tagger", which seems inconsistent with WP:STUB: "it is impossible to state whether an article is a stub based solely on its length". Perhaps "Tagger" is more realistic than WP:STUB, but it would be nice if the guideline matched the actual practice. From the top of your list, the first one is explained except for the br and p, but I need to look well down the page for something equally familiar. I found a guideline for "Template Redirects", but you didn't make it easy; when I started this sentence I thought there was no consensus outside AWB for it. Categorization should be Categorization. But in general, as I read on and research what the general fixes page means I'm much happier; just because most of it is unfamiliar doesn't make it unjustified. I think I confused general fixes with some other AWB edits I've seen, like removing the space after "==" in a heading, or changing &amp;ndash; to –. Art LaPella (talk) 03:57, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I happy that you guys are happy. Some remarks: Check description in our Stub tagger. We have a huge gap of "can't decide whether it is stub or not". We use the size criterion (plus some more) in the extreme cases of "too small" and "too big". Same goes for wikify tagger. We try to keep everything in the safe side.
 * Spaces in headings aren't AWB general fixes. I know a couple of editors who do that but these are their customised settings. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:31, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yup, I misread "500 words" and "300 characters" as 500–300. Art LaPella (talk) 19:00, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Google search for large result sets
Google thinks there are still 69,100 occurrences of "the the" at en.wikipedia.org, but an AWB Google search for "the the" returns at most 100 of them - typically the same false positives that I've seen many times already.


 * Rich Farmbrough kindly gave me a list of articles containing exactly "the the", and LilHelpa and I have been working through them. But I'm after articles containing typos such as  or   where it is more complicated to work out that two occurrences of "the" are adjacent.
 * This is the URL of an "advanced google search" that asks for pages that were last cached in a particular week in 2004. If I could get the results of this search into AWB, or ask AWB to do this kind of search, then I could gradually work through the pages by date. I was hoping that the AWB "HTML Scraper" would do this if I gave it this URL, but it doesn't.

Any bright ideas out there? Or should I start downloading a database dump for myself? -- John of Reading (talk) 18:08, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Regards, SunCreator (talk) 20:37, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It seems there is less then 900 occurances (90 pages) left now, so someone(John perhaps) has solved this somehow. Matches are available by searching in Google and manually paging through. Also removing all talk pages with -talk is a good idea in the Google search. ""the the " site:en.wikipedia.org -talk"


 * That Google search, with "-talk", still says "about 22,800 results" when I do it; the original search is down to 60,200. But to process them efficiently I need to get them into AWB. Hence my question. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:15, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Try this. Go to tools, list comparer and then try and pull in the search result. If it works just hit compare and then right click on the list and select Use list. Sometimes you can pull in lists larger than 25000 with the list comparer than AWB can normally. --Kumioko (talk) 21:19, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Google says 'about 22,800' but when you page through manually it stops at 89 or 90 pages and with 10 items per pages that around 900. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 21:33, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * If I search for "but" it says there are "about 11,600,000" but if I try to view them page by page it won't let me see more than 785! This is clearly wrong, so I don't trust that 900 figure for "the the" either. I may get round to downloading the source for AWB to see if I can include the cache date in the search... -- John of Reading (talk) 21:58, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, get same thing. So Google seems to limit the return results in some way. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 22:03, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * @SunCreator - Yes, sadly. Thank you for trying!
 * @Kumioko - Sorry, I didn't see your suggestion. No, a Google search in the "List Comparer" only returns the same 90-100 results that "Make list" does. -- John of Reading (talk) 22:07, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Most major search engines limit searches to 990 results, according to one or more books I've read about online businesses. Google also requires a license for high-frequency use, although low-end licenses are reportedly free on request. The engines don't want you making your own search engine by scraping their data. They also assume that if you don't find what you want within 990 you should reframe your request. Nick Levinson (talk) 03:14, 26 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the suggestions, everyone. I'll download a database dump next time I want to tackle the "the the" backlog. (Three in a row there) -- John of Reading (talk) 13:10, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

find on start pulldown
On the 'start' pulldown, at the bottom is the Find box for string search against the article being processed: Is there some way to use a number of strings together so that I could search for all of them at once. Example to find all 'BC', 'AD' and 'CE' strings in the article. In the 'Options find and replace' the pipe '|' symbol works, but not here. Hmains (talk) 02:06, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Presuming you're looking for strings such as "9000 BC", try  with the Regex and Case sensitive boxes checked.  GoingBatty (talk) 03:28, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I tried your code on an article containing BC and AD. It only found 'BC'.    Hmains (talk) 17:53, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I read a little about Regex and tested.   almost meets my current needs, but it keeps finding false positives such as 'AD,'.  How to avoid this?  At the same time, I also want to be able find such strings as '920AD' in order to manually fix them. Hmains (talk) 19:38, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Could you please be specific as to what you want to find? If you want to "find all 'BC', 'AD' and 'CE' strings", then 'AD,' isn't a false positive.  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 04:04, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry. I want to find all the 'BC. ', 'AD. ', and 'BC. ' strings: the two designated characers, then a period, then a space. Hmains (talk) 06:19, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Then it's  per Regex.  Good luck!  GoingBatty (talk) 06:41, 28 November 2010 (UTC)


 * excellent. It works.  Thanks Hmains (talk) 05:11, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Auto-Review?
I have in my Wiki the “Category:Abbreviations” with <1000 Pages. All Pages are unreviewed. Can AWB these mark as reviewed?

And a second question:How can I list the Pages from Categorie by size, not alphabetically. Sorry, my english is not so good ;-(

LG Lady Whistler (talk) 12:18, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Please use informative edit summaries
The range of things that may be implied by "general fixes" or "clean up" may be obvious to habitual AWB users, but not to anyone else, and in many cases edit summaries like these are actually misleading. Changing referencing system by introducing named refs is not "clean up", and it is a change disliked by many users, including me.

Adding persondata templates is, in my view, very useful, but it is also not "clean up". The edit summary should obviously be "Adding persondata template" (including "template" clarifies that the user is leaving it empty or mostly empty).

People who run automated tools are still responsible for what they do and for leaving informative edit summaries. Those who can't bother doing this shouldn't be using these tools. --Hegvald (talk) 09:37, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * We have options to automatically add to the edit summary: replacements/removals done by Find & Replace and any tags changes. Moreover, there is an option when only one section was affected to show which one was this. I agree with the persondata but we can't do it automatically for everything. I'll add something to the manual to encourage better edit summaries. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:54, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * To me, the above are examples of general fixes (although I do agree that ref changes are not cleanup – sorry about that). AWB does generate other edit summaries automatically, but not for refs or personaldata template (as far as I know). You have to remember that those of us who use AWB can be running tens of thousands of articles in a session in an attempt to make Wikipedia better. And when we do this, we are not just scanning for ref tags or if a personaldata template is missing. We usually perform several fixes if they are appropriate (the article you chose to show did not have other problems). To have to customize each and every edit would make the time taken to complete the task a lot longer. If we had to do it manually for every single article, we will never complete the task. For example, I recently went through the Category for Living Persons (over 200,000 articles!). Perhaps AWB can incorporate auto-edit summary to include refs and personaldata in the future, but for now, I can't think of a better general term than "general fixes" for these very minor, behind-the scenes fixes–they do not really affect the content of an article. – SMasters (talk) 10:07, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Rjw usually uses very good edit summaries. I now use the general fixes . I hope the link helps. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:10, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Great tip, thanks! I will use this. – SMasters (talk) 10:49, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Changing referencing system, or aspects of the referencing that may have been used in a certain way on purpose by the main contributors, really shouldn't ever be done through automated tools (SmackBot has been blocked a number of times for doing this). As for adding persondata templates, I find that useful and when someone adds them to a page I watch, it reminds me to fill in the actual data. But that only works if I (or whoever is watching the page) can see what the previous edit did. So many automated edits fix minor -- and, to most people, unimportant -- things, such as changing hyphens to dashes, that I suspect many people wouldn't even bother looking. --Hegvald (talk) 10:24, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Changing hyphens to dashes is a WP:MOS fix, and is a requirement for articles going for WP:FA status. – SMasters (talk) 10:48, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Until recently, I was one of those people who was overusing "clean up". I've since been making an effort to use some combination of Persondata, Tfixed typos & general fixes.
 * I also think it's great that Magioladitis and others have made lots of updates to the general fixes documentation to associate most every general fix to the appropriate policy/guideline. For example, AWB's changes to introduce named references appear to correspond to WP:REFNAME.
 * It's great when AWB's edit summary is automatically populated with details (e.g. adding/removing wikify) ) and wish it would automatically create more.
 * I believe AWB ships with some default edit summaries, such as Tfixed typos . How about adding more specific edit summaries to be included for new AWB users, and maybe even remove "clean up"?  GoingBatty (talk) 03:43, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It just needs pointing out that WP:REFNAME is about how to use named refs, if one chooses to use them. It does not give an excuse to impose named refs on articles not previously using them. Have you done this, believing that it is in accordance with the guidelines? --Hegvald (talk) 17:36, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Named references are used only when they are alredy names references to the article. We expand the logic to the whole article, not introduce it. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:41, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for clarifying my comments about WP:REFNAME. It appears to me that the edit Hegvald included in his original post introduced named references to the article.  However, I can't tell whether AWB did this automatically or whether SMasters did this manually via AWB.  GoingBatty (talk) 18:08, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * This kind of change should only be done if named references were part of the system of referencing used by the first major contributor(s) of the article, not if it was introduced later. An article using a mixed system can be made consistent either way; there should be no preference for changing it to consistently using named refs, rather than the other way around. Is there an option in AWB to convert articles from using named refs to using non-named, consecutive footnotes? --Hegvald (talk) 18:22, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * This can be done only manually. But why do it? -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:06, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Better question: Why would one want to introduce named refs to an article in the first place? --Hegvald (talk) 06:48, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

I think we're getting off topic. Using informative edit summaries is important, and this is the relevant place to discuss that. As Magioladitis pointed out, AWB doesn't automatically add named refs to an article that doesn't have them. Therefore, Hegvald and SMasters can discuss what reference style to use on the article talk page or their personal talk pages. GoingBatty (talk) 17:35, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

I added AutoWikiBrowser/Real user manual. Please help in improving it using proper English. I am a bit busy atm. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:36, 2 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree that referencing as such shouldn't be discussed here (it has been discussed elsewhere). My point is twofold:
 * You (a general you, not any specific person above) shouldn't use an automatic tool to make controversial changes that are more difficult to revert. (There may be other things besides referencing, but that is what caught my attention.) Which brings me to the second point:
 * As you may not be aware of exactly what is in fact a controversial change, using an informative edit summary at least makes it easier for others to detect the change and to find it in the article history once some time has passed.
 * Using AWB can not be an excuse for not explaining yor edit when it would otherwise have been considered good form to do so. You are still individually responsible for doing so. Considering the large number of quick edits enabled by AWB, I would argue that it is far more important to use an informative edit summary in this case. --Hegvald (talk) 15:05, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Succession Box Standardization
According to Brown HairedGirl, a participant at WikiProject Succession Box Standardization, AWB's edits of changing start box to s-start, without restructuring the succession boxes themselves to use new parameters such as ,  ,  ,  , or using s-news-ttls-aft rather than  , makes AWB's edit completely pointless. How can AWB fix this? Her comments are on my talk page if anyone's interested. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 03:44, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Fixing this would involve making changes to AWB/TR. GoingBatty (talk) 04:29, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Is there a way for me to omit this particular template? What do I need to do? Thanks in advance. – SMasters (talk) 07:51, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Actually changing the template to redirect to the s-start/s-end is really a big improvement for the PDFs. See their documentation for why. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 11:47, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, User:Kumioko has mentioned PDF compatibility a number of times in the past. Rjwilmsi  13:54, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Can anyone provide any more details on this?
 * start box redirects to s-start, and I don't see how bypassing the redirect will have any effect whatsoever on PDF generation.
 * The documentation does say that using s-break instead of |- helps PDFs, but that's not what we are discussing here. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:39, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid the specifics are rather technical in nature. The fact is that succession boxes can be declared in several ways. start box start s-start and manually by placing " {| " (which is horrible, but happens). Likewise the succession boxes can end in several ways, end box s-endend, and manually |} . However, of these  is also sometimes used to end non succession tables, (which doesn't happen as much with start because start carries other markup with it, but it still happens) and if it is excluded in print, results in PDF horrors.


 * So while using templates other than s-start and s-end work for succession boxes, it's very bad practice because other uses of them are possible. Changing them all to s-start and s-end draws attention to this and corrects bad practices (which would otherwise propagate through copy-pasting). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 00:15, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the explanation. Given all that, I can see a clear need to change start→s-start and end→s-end, and to replace direct markup ... but the replacement that was happening here was neither of those, merely bypassing a redirect.
 * There are lots of cases where a template has been renamed or merged, or has an alias, and it's a great idea to bypass those when other more useful changes are being made. However, in this case we have edits who do nothing other than bypass redirects, for no other reason than to draw attention to the canonical usage, and I thought that sort of thing was generally discouraged.
 * My mistake: I see that Redirect does encourage this. However, if it is to be done, please can it be done using a bot flag, so that such edits can be excluded from watchlists? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:05, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB isn't a bot, so it can't have the bot flag. Cleanups are usually marked as minor edits however. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 02:05, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Isn't bypassing a redirect a good thing, as it helps to save resources and server load, especially at peak times? – SMasters (talk) 07:07, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * If so, please change WP:R2D. (Unless you meant the exceptions that guideline mentions, including templates.) Art LaPella (talk) 07:49, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * My comments refer specifically to the template we are talking about. There is no need to change WP:R2D. Please look at "Template redirects" underneath that. It says: "Redirects for templates can cause confusion and make updating template calls more complicated." – SMasters (talk) 08:11, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * OK. Art LaPella (talk) 08:20, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The cleanup edits which were flooding my watchlist were not marked as minor. Without either a minor flag or a bot flag, this stuff will continue to flood out watchlists. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:07, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The two instances that you pointed out on my talk page here and here were marked as minor edits. Were you getting edits from another AWB user as well? – SMasters (talk) 06:35, 8 December 2010 (UTC)


 * AWB is not a bot, it is a piece of software. When AWB is used by bots, the edits are marked with the bot flag.  If you notice editors are not marking edits as minor (whether or not they use AWB), then I suggest you contact them directly, with a link to WP:MINOR.  GoingBatty (talk) 00:40, 8 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Also, I note that if you have other edits that should be made automatically for succession boxes, I suggest making a request at WP:AWB for them to be included. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 00:45, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Feature requests can be made at WP:AWB/FR. GoingBatty (talk) 00:58, 8 December 2010 (UTC)