Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests/Archive 12

External to Interwiki
By MaxSem from Wikihermits talk page:
 * 1) find, replace with
 * 2) find, replace with.

Reedy Boy 11:10, 12 June 2007 (UTC)


 * 1) find, replace with
 * 2) find, replace with.
 * 3) find, replace with
 * 4) find, replace with.
 * 5) find, replace with
 * 6) find, replace with.
 * 7) find, replace with
 * 8) find, replace with.
 * 9) find, replace with
 * 10) find, replace with.
 * 11) find, replace with
 * 12) find, replace with.

Implementation...?

Reedy Boy 16:57, 12 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Another common pattern is  word  which should be replaced by  whatever:word .
 * I would be wary of implementing the   versions on their own. I have seen quite a few cases where that is used as footnotes. That may not be the correct usage, but converting it to an interwiki link would be worse as it would result in an unintelligible sentence.
 * Example: Alfred Tennyson's works are should not become Alfred Tennyson's workss:Author:Alfred_Tennyson are.
 * -- JLaTondre 00:44, 13 June 2007 (UTC)


 * This code is for en.wiki only! We use AWB in other wiki!--OsamaK 15:28, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
 * We know. It hasnt been implemented as of yet (it may not ever be), so it doesnt really matter atm. Reedy Boy 19:32, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

I needed code for my tool since people didn't know which form to enter in. It has since become convenient to just paste the URL in and watch the magic happen. I hope the AWB devs implement this for the list maker parts of the interface.

A general implementation (suitable for general fixes) for foundation links from the code above: It avoid the flaws from above and works across all languages.—Dispenser 04:13, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
 * 1) Find   replace with
 * 2) Find   replace with
 * Cool, thanks! — Ree dy  12:57, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I've been using my own regexes for this (though, not as good as the combo above) and would love to see this implemented. Rocket000 (talk) 00:17, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Would be good to implement this.. Not sure why the first one is needed in the ListMaker...? If you can elaborate/be a bit more specific Dispenser, i shall get this implemented. — Ree dy  17:44, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Partially implemented. (code exists, but not in use. As per the discussion page, it doesnt seem to actually work as a general fix or in list maker.......) — Ree  dy  22:20, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

While the code I provided above is good what I had coded it for (a user page input routine) it wasn't good enough for a general fix (potential language issues). Thus I've coded the following which should be nearly problem free:

— Dispenser 01:33, 13 October 2008 (UTC) Updated: 01:56, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

I've implemented the above code in my commonfixes.py library. Over time I've noticed a few problems:
 * 1) Due to the haphazard way naming was done the above code will try to make download.wikipedia.org and sources.wikipedia.org into invalid interwikis. This can be solved using interwiki table, which would include more links than we can cover in regexes.
 * 2) Edit on the "Wikipedia" article raises question wheather those links can be linked. And I think I read somewhere that they aren't suppose to be directly, but it still doesn't answer the question about interwiki.
 * 3) [ { | } ] and more are not valid characters, as well as their escaped counter parts like %7B. However, this highly unlikely since people typically don't link to invalid pages anyway.

For those of you still interested in linking I've come up with a set of regex. The whatever.wikipedia.org glitch is avoid by only allowing languages with two to three letter character codes. Regex:     \{3})\.(?:(wikt)ionary|wiki(n)ews|wiki(b)ooks|wiki(q)uote|wiki(s)ource|wiki(v)ersity)\.(?:com|net|org)/wiki/([^][{|}\s"]*) +([^\n\]]+)\] Replace:    $9 Regex:      \|(commons)|(incubator)|(quality))\.wikimedia\.(?:com|net|org)/wiki/([^[{|}\s"]*) +([^\n\]]+)\] Replace:   $6 Regex:     \+)\.wikia\.(?:com|net|org)/wiki/([^][{|}\s"]+) +([^\n\]]+)\] Replace:    $3 However you should likely add   to the beginning to avoid changing lists and   to the end to avoid changing links in references.—Dispenser 01:56, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
 * According to WP:WAWI, AWB would have to detect the difference between a convenient link to material like wikisource page and a reference link like a wikisource policy page. Luckily that's why we created namespaces.—Dispenser 08:07, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Soo.. Are we alright to implement this or something? ;P — Ree dy  13:52, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes. Haven't you already? -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:08, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
 * --Magioladitis (talk) 19:12, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Handling  and  html tags
(.*?)()? --> * $1

Then just remove all other , ,  ..

 --> ""

— Reedy  Boy  13:34, 9 March 2008 (UTC)


 * So that should be easy. Can you implement it? -- Magioladitis (talk) 02:08, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

 test </ol> <ul> <li>test</li> </ol>

<li>test</li> If we implement it, we should really cater for all that —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  19:49, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

I did this manually. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:46, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Ol causes complexions: This wasn't the wanted result -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:52, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Have care with this suggestion. There are some cases where the ol's deliberate (say, when there is also a colstart or style attribute) rather than as holdovers from some person marking his content up in HTML. --Izno (talk) 17:56, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Implementation for il/ul ONLY:
 * Step 1: Remove any ul tags. Example
 * Step 2: Remove any close il tags. Example
 * Step 3: Convert open il tags to bullet. Example

-- Magioladitis (talk) 15:51, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

There are a number of edge cases where line breaks, comments, templates, and attributes are involved that need to be kept in mind. Some of them may even occur in articles. E.g. (see source):

<ul> <li class='FA'> Foo </li> <li>Foo Bar</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Example of a list item</li> </ul>

Amalthea 11:51, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

It seems to work in the general case. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:59, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

This is CHECKWIKI error 12 related FR. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:39, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Templates that end in Breaks (CHECKWIKI error 59)
Replace (with regex and multiline, case sensitive: $1$2 }} Tim1357 (talk) 00:11, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

We already fix it for files. I think it should be easy to implement. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:25, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

I had to remove the break line tag manually. Moreover, it was duplicated to the Persondata entry and I had to remove it from there too. I guess this addition will also fix WP:CHECKWIKI error 59. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:09, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Better in 7171 but there is a comma at the end. Check here. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:00, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
 * for PersonData comma issue. Rjwilmsi  10:32, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

We just need to avoid: honorific prefix, honorific-prefix as the request says. I left a note to Infobox officeholder and they 'll probably fix this too. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:55, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * honorific-prefix, honorific-suffix changed and don't need break lines at the end anymore. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:09, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

nihongo is also a template that uses break line tags as I was hinted in my talk page. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:40, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The point with hon-pref and hon-suf is that in some circs they want the pref and/or suff on the same line as the name, in others they don't. It would be bnest for the template to have the smarts to distinguish, but that would need work and consensus. Rich Farmbrough, 16:35, 22 October 2010 (UTC).

We now have a custom module for error 59. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:21, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Since bots run the custom module for a while now I wonder it it could be now part of general fixes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:07, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

More break line tags cleanup
We could fix this as well. (Break line before template). -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:29, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

When maintenance templates immediately follow section header, change to section template
Added two more suggestions above. GoingBatty (talk) 21:51, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Made them all consistent. GoingBatty (talk) 04:31, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Should this apply to templates within multiple issues? Why only to templates immediately following a header? Why not to notes/references? Thanks Rjwilmsi  17:46, 13 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, this should apply to templates within multiple issues that have yes. Only templates following a header so that it doesn't change templates in the zeroth section that would apply to the entire article. Not to notes/references sections since these templates would apply to the whole article (especially No footnotes, Refimprove, and Unreferenced). GoingBatty (talk) 01:22, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
 * What about change  to  Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 10:41, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Do not include unimportant prefixes in DEFAULTSORT
I only see "In some categories, sort keys are used to exclude prefixes that are common to all or many of the entries, or are considered unimportant (such as "List of" or "The")." It doesn't say in all. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:24, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Are there categories where "The" is important in the sort? GoingBatty (talk) 00:52, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The Beatles? -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:55, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't see anything on Category:The Beatles sorted by "The".
 * Category:The Beatles music is sorted under "M"
 * Category:The Beatles and television is sorted under "T" for "Television"
 * Category:The Beatles concert tours is sorted under "T" "Tours"
 * The Beatles Anthology is sorted under "B"
 * The Beatles' influence on popular culture is sorted under "I"
 * Furthermore, The Beatles article contains - so I've revised my request to match this format. GoingBatty (talk) 01:27, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Adding "The" at the end is unlikely to ever make a difference, but AWB already excludes "The" from DEFAULTSORT tagging. If you look at the edit you linked, AWB did not include "The".  McLerristarr &#124;  Mclay1  06:21, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, you did include "The", you just gave the wrong diff. This has never happened to me; "The" is usually excluded.  McLerristarr &#124;  Mclay1  06:23, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Try The Rats (play) and The UFC Chronicles. I'm using SVN 7424. Should this be moved over to the bug list? GoingBatty (talk) 17:23, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, it is adding "The". I thought it didn't. Maybe I'm wrong.  McLerristarr &#124;  Mclay1  15:23, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Title case for citations

 * Well, except for the non english wiki's ;) —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  19:50, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh yeah :) I meant to change that "en" for some variable, but I couldn't be arsed to find out which was the right one. - Jarry1250 (t, c, rfa)
 * Maybe also external link titles? Harder to grab though, I would think. - Jarry1250 <sup style="white-space: nowrap;">[ humourous – discuss ] 09:16, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

When do you propose to convert the case of citation titles? Just when all in uppercase? Do you have some example articles? Rjwilmsi 10:27, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, in a perfect world, a citation title of "EXAMPLE: Lorem ipsum" would be converted as well, but the false positive/pointless edit rate would be too high I fear. So yes, just when all in uppercase for maximum efficiency. I would like to see this as a general fix if possible, though I haven't tested the FP rate myself yet. I shall set about finding you an example now. - Jarry1250 <sup style="white-space: nowrap;">[ humourous – discuss ] 10:31, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Ten random pages gave me Gaynor Cawley ("BIOGRAPHY") and Mustafa Ahmed Hamlily which includes a partial one (ref #12). - Jarry1250 <sup style="white-space: nowrap;">[ humourous – discuss ] 10:37, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

I've had some experience programming reflinks with this, you can get most of the cases right. Here some edges cases Those are some example I can think off the top of my head. It also a good idea to apply it to the author/first/last/publisher fields as well.—Dispenser 12:13, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Newspaper Archive: MINOR STORY OF THE DAY; MAN BITES DOG
 * 65_PDF.pdf
 * SPACE PROBE 56T LAUNCHES
 * A.I.D.S. EPIDEMIC STILL SPREADING
 * FOREIGN AIDS STILL MISSING
 * ATLAS USER EQUIPMENT INTRODUCTION
 * FIRST ROBOTICS GIVES HOPE
 * NAVSTAR GPS
 * J P PENNY
 * Hey, thanks Dispenser. As written, the code doesn't touch .pdf (lowercase), capitalises "Of", and turns GPS to "Gps". The rest it gets right; hopefully, a few tweaks and it should be read to roll. - Jarry1250 [ humourous – discuss ] 18:58, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Here's a much improved function for converting to useful title case, which is more palatable than block caps (I personally prefer sentence case, but that would be more controversial / less widely deployable. It works on all the examples above (and some more I invented), with the exception of acronyms that could be words UNICEF, etc. GPS has no vowels, and is therefore easy to capitalise.

- Jarry1250 [ humourous – discuss ] 20:16, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Maybe you should use a dictionary from a spellchecker to ensure words like GNU, LIDAR, and CBDTPA stay uppercased? You might also be able to capitalize names Ted Stevens.—Dispenser 18:37, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah... it's a question of how much in the way of resources one chooses to give over to such a minor (albeit intensely annoying to me) thing as capitalisation... hopefully the major acronyms can be hardcoded, and the rest left to the individual editors to catch. As the default Is This Sort Of Capitalisation, We Needn't Worry About Names Of People. - Jarry1250 [ humourous – discuss ] 18:41, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
 * And no matter how much effort we throw at the problem, there will always be "yet another exception", e.g. CAT scan
 * The answer has to be that this will be a computer-assisted process, not an entirely automated one. ClickRick (talk) 18:47, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

This could be implemented as a general fix that users would have to explicitly turn on via the options menu (off by default) and could be disabled for bots. Question then is just what fields is this required on beyond the 'title=' field of a citation template? Rjwilmsi 15:38, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I think this was added to AWB. Not sure though but we might be able to archive this one. --Kumioko (talk) 00:47, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * We haven't added it yet. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:41, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Please ask for a bot to this. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:30, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
 * - Does one of your scripts fix the capitalization in the title field of citation templates? (Maybe User:Ohconfucius/script/formatgeneral ?)  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 19:07, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I guess the one of Jarry1250 is fine for an example module? -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:40, 16 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I have for some time thought such downcasing would be good for the 'pedia but lack the know-how to implement such a fix. I have already built in some case conversions into my formatting script to downcase certain combinations – mainly prepositions of fewer than 5 letters, per the MOS – but not restricted to titles. Most of my fixes are highly specific cases, such as " " and " ", or " ". I also downcase commonly capitalised " " and " ". Yet I constantly make a note of exceptions, so the rate of FP is tending to zero. My sources script also aligns cases for sources to the relevant WP article, even to camelcase where necessary, such as "AllMusic". Sites frequently treat metadata as some sort of dustbin, and some often have FULLCAPS metadata. I suspect part of the fix could lie in WP:Reflinks not importing overcapitalised metadata 'as is'. The problem isn't going away and few people bother to fix these when they do occur; there may be the belief that we should cite sources verbatim including the errant formatting. As suggested by Dispenser above, I assume that we can easily ask for specific cases such as acronyms that are not ordinary words to be exempted ("CAT scan" and not "CAT"). --  Ohc  ¡digame!¿que pasa? 02:15, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I've just asked Jarry to help me incorporate this code. --  Ohc  ¡digame!¿que pasa? 03:01, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

multiple hyphens
Only if you can avoid changing "--" in a URL, or in a. Art LaPella (talk) 14:23, 2 August 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't think any of AWB's changes affect URLs. McLerristarr (Mclay1) (talk) 16:05, 10 August 2010 (UTC)


 * "text -- text" is often used when the intent is to add an em dash, not an en dash (i.e., the intent is to have an em dash with spaces around it). In such cases it should of course convert to an em dash with the spaces removed. I do not see how a program could tell which correction to make.  DGG ( talk ) 17:36, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I disagree. I feel that the intent of "text -- text" is to have some kind of dash longer than a hyphen which is set off by the spaces. This is a stylistic choice, and in my AWB settings, I attempt to respect the original writer's intentions by replacing unspaced instances with em dashes and spaced ones with en dashes. See WP:EMDASH. M AN d ARAX  •  XAЯA b ИA M  18:35, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Fixes for Nihongo template

 * Usually is not good enough. I would like to understand why editors ever put such data in the template. Rjwilmsi  17:50, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
 * They put data in order to add extra information before the parentheses that contains the local name closes. I am not sure how we do it in other cases. Do we have two pairs of parentheses one next to the other. Btw, "usually" in this case is equal to "always with probability 1" i.e. in all the cases I observed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:01, 2 August 2010 (UTC)


 * This is a language-rendering template, and use of extra for birth/death dates ought to be discouraged because it's not its vocation to collect this data. Biographies will usually contain persondata, which is where this metadata should be centralised. I fail to see why it should be duplicated in this, or indeed any other, template. --  Ohc  ¡digame!¿que pasa? 02:28, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Convert spaced hyphens to endashes

 * I cannot think of any exceptions to this rule. Hyphens should never be spaced, nor should emdashes.  McLerristarr /  Mclay1  11:25, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
 * It's not that easy. Think of a math formula. Replacing "2 km² - 400 m²" with "2 km² – 400 m²" doesn't make it more correct. I'm currently using the regex  →   in my tool to avoid that. --TMg 12:53, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)
Duplicate report filed:

Currently we fix dashes in limited circumstances. I think there are several other cases that we could cover: I don't think any of this would be controversial. The spaced hyphen in particular is aesthetically rather unpleasant to a lot of editors.—kwami (talk) 00:51, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Use of an em dash rather than an en dash in dates and page ranges (there are a surprising number of these)
 * Spaced em dashes, though whether that should preferably be corrected to an unspaced em dash or a spaced en dash I don't know
 * Spaced hyphen, in the circumstances where we currently correct a spaced double hyphen. Since these frequently occur in lists, we should fix to a spaced en dash, though many occur in date and page ranges and would need to be ordered before corrections for spacing.

We need more specific rules about this one. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:53, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Rjwilmsi The first diff is about FixNonBreakingSpaces. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:15, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Automatic title bolding

 * What determines if the title is italicised? Rjwilmsi  13:50, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I only mean for titles that are already italicised before AWB works on the article. It would be impossible to program it to know which articles needed italicised titles. McLerristarr (Mclay1) (talk) 03:24, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Well those transcluding Italic title would becontenders. Rich Farmbrough, 21:14, 6 September 2010 (UTC).

No changes inside single straight quotes
Do you want this as general fix? -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:46, 31 August 2010 (UTC)


 * I thought a general fix was an edit. This is not an edit, it's almost the opposite of an edit. I suspect it would need to be an option. Not everybody would need or want to use it. Lightmouse (talk) 13:56, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I think this was fixed. If you scroll up a little youll see it. The new SVN just hasnt come out yet. --Kumioko (talk) 14:03, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

You may be referring to single curly quotes. I should have made clear that I'm talking about single straight quotes. Thanks. I've amended the text above. Lightmouse (talk) 14:06, 31 August 2010 (UTC)


 * I note that HideMore is, by definition, an option for cautious editing. Perhaps the misses are rare enough that it could be added to HideMore for all users until we can selectively choose options. Lightmouse (talk) 14:08, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Template:'"
Where is this in the Manual of Style? This creates an awful unclosed " from the left side! -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:05, 11 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Manual of Style. (I moved it to WP:MOS from Manual of Style (dates and numbers) where it was not relevant.)  McLerristarr /  Mclay1  15:49, 11 September 2010 (UTC)
 * 234 transclsions. Interesting. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:37, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Fix unbalanced brackets inside gallery
{{AWB feature | status     = new | description = --TMg 12:43, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Fix unbalanced curly brackets in redirects
{{AWB feature | status     = added | description = Do the following: Do this before R-tagging because in some cases it adds a new R-tag for instance R from title without diacritics. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:57, 29 December 2012 (UTC) | fix_version = {{Awbsvn|11266}} -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:39, 23 June 2015 (UTC) }}
 * {{R from subtopic} → {{R from subtopic}}
 * {{R from subtopic}] → {{R from subtopic}}
 * {{R from subtopic]} → {{R from subtopic}}
 * {{R from subtopic]] → {{R from subtopic}}

Permanent link of my related fixes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:01, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

More:,. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:07, 9 February 2013 (UTC) {{Collapse bottom}}

Continue unbalanced check
=Skipping=

Multiple skip options
It would be great if it was possible in the skip section to be able to select more words so that if any of those are present then the page is skipped. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mephiston999 (talk • contribs)
 * Regex? (Word1|Word2|Word3) —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  19:20, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
 * A better phrasing would be... "it would be great if AWB could do more to help people who are entirely n00bish about regex" =) Separating it such that you could have a list of the skip log of which word it matched would be nice as well. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 19:21, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Required. Trying to skip if contains 'Category:Living people' or 'Birth date and age|1900|1|1'. I know no way of doing that with regex because | is the separator and thus (Category:Living people|Birth date and age|1900|1|1) don't work. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 02:50, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
 * When you want a literal pipe you escape it: .  Rjwilmsi  07:04, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you Rjwilmsi, you learn something everyday :) Regards, SunCreator (talk) 08:31, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I found another way around this if anyone is interested. If you use the pre-parse option, you can specify a skip option, then you pre-parse the list again with another skip option. Basically you can recurse your list as many times as you want and doing this is the same result as having multiple skip options, although it is somewhat slower because you reload the article multiple times. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 23:29, 29 April 2010 (UTC)


 * I noticed Regex (Word1|Word2|Word3) is logical OR. How does one use it to find out: word1 AND word2 AND word3? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 19:33, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Exactly the point. You have to do ( Word1.*word2.*word3| Word1.*word3.*word2| Word2.*word1.*word3| Word2.*word3.*word1| Word3.*word1.*word2| Word3.*word2.*word1) (Or (1(23|32)|2(13|31)|3(12|21)) )
 * This is bad enough but if you have 4 its even more complex . (In fact you can skip all with word 1, delete the list and copy back the skip list, skip all with word 2.. etc... and even mix these methods reasonably getting 6 "ands" in 2 passes.) So it is do-able but it would be nice to have — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rich Farmbrough (talk • contribs) 15:50, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Template AWB orderless coming up. Rich Farmbrough, 04:32, 28 September 2010 (UTC).
 * - testing... takes up to 6 paramters. You really don't want to go to 7. Rich Farmbrough, 05:49, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Skip pages of indef blocked users

 * This would be very useful for newsletter delivery bots utilising AWB.&mdash; JamesR ( talk ) 11:57, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Skip blanked pages
Jamesmcmahon0 you can regex skip if not .{1} exists in the "Skip" tab. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:48, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Skip if only change is unicodification
= Find and replace improvements =

Allow advanced find and replace entries to be marked minor

 * Haha. Magioladitis and I were discussing this when i implemented the normal FaR one. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  22:22, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * And you decided not to allow it -- just to play a cruel joke on me??? –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black;">talk 22:24, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * We need a box to mark as minor in every rule (..and subrule??? :S). This is scary. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:27, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Haha. More a case of decided it was useful, but not so important. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  22:35, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I suppose the minor changes I have can be moved into the simple F/R matrix. . . –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black;">talk 22:37, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * lol. It aint gonna be done pre v5 :) —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  22:39, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * You're a dreamkiller, sir. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black;">talk 22:40, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser ;D —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  22:41, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Bump! ;> –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black;">talk 16:10, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * :P —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  16:14, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Sir, you really need to get your priorities in order. Just sayin'. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black;">talk 16:16, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * If you want to do my report for me... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  16:17, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Whoever eventually responds to this, please put a whisperback on my userpage, as this is a very active page and I'll miss the response otherwise. -- ··gracefool&#9786; 16:48, 17 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I just wanted to bump this discussion. We'ere at version 5 now so could we please reconsider this? Kumioko (talk) 13:46, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Apply the four generic settings individually
is that so hard to implement? i mean't split "ignore templates, refs, link targets, and heading" into separate options, and improve "ignore images" to ignore "images target" not the whole image section --84.234.42.68 (talk) 17:34, 14 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Sounds very useful to me. Gaius Cornelius (talk) 12:32, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

As a first step we have to call HideText and HideMoreText individually. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:13, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
 * For now, how about just the ability to selectively add replacements to the edit summary? That seems like it would be the easiest to implement, and would be very useful to me. I often have intermediate, temporary replacements which should definitely not be in the edit summary, but other replacements which should. M AN d ARAX  •  XAЯA b ИA M  21:47, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
 * A workaround I use is to set up Find & Replace rules for replacements I want in the edit summary, and Advanced Find & Replace rules for replacements I don't want in the edit summary. GoingBatty (talk) 00:40, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Please move the ignore options that are in the find and replace options (templates, wikilinks, external links, HTML comments, files, excreta) so that these rules can be applied on a per item basis, often I have find/replace that I want to do on external links, while others that I don't want on external or internal link. Having the ability to set these on a per item basis would make it easier. ΔT <sup style="color:darkred;">The only constant 13:44, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I've run into a need for this myself today. I have a rule that I don't want run on links/refs, but I don't want these ignore options applied to everything else. This is very frustrating as I want all my general cleanup F&R's in one settings file.  Stevie is the man!  Talk • Work 15:08, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Addition for "Replace Special"

 * This almost seems like selective hide text.. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  18:54, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Subset regex

 * Maybe I can example it better with an example:

I'll use HTML We want to change String1 to RE1

What I'd like to be able to Rule: Find the body RE find: ( .*? ) Sub-rule: Use what was captured in parent RE find: String1 RE replace: RE1 While the example is a little simplistic, it allow greater flexibly. The String1 in the title tags will never be parsed and there can be many String1 in the body without turning the recursion as with. Hopefully that simplifies things. —Dispenser (talk) 04:16, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Remember "Find & Replace" (and other) window details
I endorse this request. It's a pain to have to manually resize the Find and Replace columns every time I open AWB. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:31, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Wholeheartedly agree. Yesterday I went to resize a column after opening AWB again and accidentally clicked on the heading instead of dragging the separator, thus inadvertently sorting the rules (that's an existing feature request) and forcing me to scrap the F&R rules. Chris the speller   yack  13:55, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd need the window/column sizes to be saved in the AWB folder or registry somewhere, not in the main settings file. I keep my settings files on a data stick and use the same files on a big-screen desktop and a small-screen laptop. As an aside, why is the "After fixes" column so wide? I never use it. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:18, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Find/Replace: Regex checkbox prompt

 * Any false positives would be extremely annoying. This would have to be explicitly turned on somewhere, which would probably make it of little value for new users. Rjwilmsi  15:29, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Or could you write a really good regex for matching regexes? - Jarry1250 [ humourous – discuss ] 09:17, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
 * "a*" could be a regex or a literal search. Any warnings would have to be explicitly turned on somewhere, which would probably make it of little value for new users. Rjwilmsi  09:43, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I would personally take Jarry's suggestion with a pinch of salt for exactly that reason. To your earlier concern, though, I would say that the prompt should be turned on by default but include a "Do not show this prompt again" checkbox, which should be remembered for that user, so an advanced user will only be prompted the once. An option somewhere else (Options|Preferences..., perhaps?) to turn it back on might be appreciated, too. ClickRick (talk) 10:20, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Maybe make the default for the regex box, checked? Most non-regex (for a loose value of the word most) also wokr aas regexen, e.g. "Horse" Rich Farmbrough, 21:55, 21 April 2010 (UTC).

Copy regex find and replace from the "test regex page" to the active page

 * You can do that in reverse. If you go via the FaR, and right click and move to regex tester (not sure on the specifics), you can move it to the tester, edit it, and move it back... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  21:18, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I will look for that - I have not been looking at what was available in the right click menu. When I have needed to test a complicated regex I have started writing it on the tester, and there is no indication of how to transfer it easily to find and replace. Snowman (talk) 21:35, 10 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Anyway, I think this area could be improved to make it more user friendly. Snowman (talk) 22:44, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Sort danger
Hmains now we provide a Cancel button. Is this satisfying? -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:19, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I noticed that new button and it is comforting to have. Thanks.  Still, it would not help when I have just added/changed many entries in the table and am checking that they are ok and then mistakenly sort everything and destroy my work.  Now I can avoid saving and thus destroying my previous-to-this-session work, but I cannot unsort what I just did.  If unsort cannot be done (or more generally undo whatever I just did), even a pop-up confirmation message asking 'do you really want to sort this table?' allowing escape before doing the sort would be helpful. Hmains (talk) 01:12, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

=Threading, Background and Automation=

Load pages in background

 * Migrate to API? will allow us to complete this much more easily (as below). This is very much a duplicate request.. Cant find the others, but it has been requested before. Very similar to/a simpler version of: The only problem we get is if pages are updated between pre-load and save... Which, could be, of course, checked for... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Reedy   Boy  20:53, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Save pages in background

 * Migrate to API? will allow us to complete this much more easily. With the current way, we'd have to be faffing about with multiple browsers (which we already do do...) —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Reedy  Boy  20:51, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
 * What shall we do if the save is aborted for some reason and user input is needed? All UI will already be diplaying the next page... Max S em(Han shot first!) 20:57, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * How about a visualization like the pre-parse mode? Pages that are saved without problems are just removed from the list and pages with errors, conflicts and so on are just marked with orange or red background and kept in the list. This way errors are handled gracefully and the fast workflow without delays is still preserved. Penguin (talk) 16:41, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * *bump* :) -- 16:26, 20 June 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Penguin (talk • contribs)

It will happen, just i've been busy for the last few months. Its on my summer todo list, most of the stuff IS implemented, its just making AWB fully use the API for editing.. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  16:28, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
 * What I suggest is to bunch up this request and the top request into a server request queue sort of thing. As in, let the user queue up some pages for processing and generating diffs. The user then can do something else, while it queues. Then, the user comes back, and queues up the saves after checking each page. The queue will empty itself as the user is checking the page. That way, your diffs preload, and your saves get executed a bit later, but then you get a continuous stream of pages, instead of a broken one. Manish Earth Talk •  Stalk 18:37, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I could still use this feature. When doing typo work with hundreds of articles (which I do at dawiki on a regular basis) the small delays between every save really slows down the process. There are three methods that I want (maybe in combination): 1. Preload the next page (so I don't have to wait for it to load). 2. Background save of article (so I don't have to wait for it to save), 3. Create some kind of bulk save in the end. The revision conflict risk is already there even if we don't pre-load/pre-save. It should just be marked in a sensible way (for bulk saves an option to add conflicts to the could be fine - for background saves a conflict save or otherwise server error could just keep the article in the list with a "notice/warning" background color, just as with pre-parsed links) --Penguin (talk) 20:23, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I was about to add this suggestion and found it here already. Sometimes the saves are just brutal, taking 5-10 seconds each. If they could be queued, that would be a huge time-saver. I think though that there should be a (1 sec?) time delay built into the save (move to save queue) to help prevent machine-gun/asleep-at-the-wheel saves. And the user should be able to stop saves in the queue before they are executed. Perhaps also have an option to "Stop and move back into the list" where the user wants to re-do their work. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 14:18, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Automatic List Making?

 * And like this idea. Sometime we need make a list from many source. Like "Links on page" from 70 page or/and "from text file" from 10 texts files in one folder. That's hard by hand. --OsamaKBOT 16:35, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
 * As a point for any that are just allowing you to type things into the text box, you can type "Page1|Page2|Page3.....Page55|Page56"

Automatically have AWB do multiple things for bots

 * Well, in theory there isnt... If we could build some form of an instruction set that awb can follow... and all the functions are software call-able, its viable... Reedy Boy 08:54, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Sounds like you're talking about a sort of basic scripting language. If it is an itch someone wants to scratch make sure there are commands/points where you can prompt for user input. --Brianmc 12:12, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Agree, this is very convenient to run two scripts subsequently each with its own settings file and its own input data file. A command line parameter will be fine for script name definition. Mashiah 23:29, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Things like this can in theory already be done with plugins or modules. However, I think that AWB does need this as a standard feature. I'd like it to be able to automatically check certain categories periodically and run a bot job (with seperate settings for each category) too. I was thinking more of keeping it all in the UI and using XML to define tasks myself. Anyway, if at some point I'm looking for something to do I might investigate this further. --kingboyk (talk) 23:22, 26 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Now we also have the "call external script" functionality, just adding enough to allow AWB to start log on (log on used to work with profiles?) and run would do the trick. Rich Farmbrough, 11:03, 11 August 2010 (UTC).

= Possible plugins =

Allow easy way to add missing parameters to a template, and also a way to reorder parameters

 * I want to encourage this development as well. It's been seven years, and it is a sorely needed functionality not found in AWB. VanIsaacWS<sup style="margin-left:-3.0ex">cont 05:06, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Just to check: Are you aware that everything requested above is possible to do with regular expressions in the find and replace dialog? Admittedly, doing so is much less convenient than what is requested above. It would also be somewhat less robust than would be possible if specifically programmed. &mdash; Makyen (talk) 07:02, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Display more info for images and coordinating image tags added to menu

 * bumping so someone might at least respond to this.... -ΖαππερΝαππερ BabelAlexandria 18:40, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * There are currently 55 other AWB feature requests, 3 dev's inactive, and a v4 to sort. This would be a major new feature, requiring quite a lot of work, as the actual html of the page would probably be needed to be loaded to get the file links, as with images being here and on commons, it doesnt make life easy. Requests that questions are needed to be asked, or input gained, have had replies...Reedy Boy 20:22, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
 * sorry if i sounded antsy... i wasn't aware that four of you were currently inactive during the newest upgrade. I actually had posted this a while ago when there were relatively few features being asked for so I was hoping for some sort of a response. Letting me know that loading the file links by html rather than query.php (i think that's how you typically retrieve the data, right?) presents a large issue helps me put my request into perspective and I appreciate your response :) On the other hand, tacking on a couple more template options to the right-click menu is likely a relatively simple addition. If you guys need the help, i do know c++ and can wade through c# pretty well, but i can't do much that's complicated. I never offered to help before b/c it seemed you guys had things well covered and only recently ported the code into OOP format, right? I'm confident i could actually implement my changes myself (the menu additions) if i knew exactly how to go about it... never worked on a sourceforge project before. -ΖαππερΝαππερ BabelAlexandria 00:07, 27 July 2007 (UTC)


 * It was sort of OOPs before, but the code wasnt the best. Kingboyk has done a lot of reworking of the code to add functionality, speed it up, and make it generally better. I have helped with this also, adding some major new features and so on.
 * If you wanted to add this yourself, i mean, if you want to do it, or at least make a start, and we can help out as and when, that would be fine. It may be worth looking and having a play with query.php and api.php to check and see if they do what you need to. We do use both the query.php, api.php and loading the actual edit pages to pull off the text, we tend not to really load the actual user view of pages too often for pulling off data. If you checkout a copy of the SVN version, have a play and see where you get.
 * As for the developer side, our "main/lead" developer, MaxSem, has been away from wikipedia for nearly a month now. Feature requests and bugs tend to really just get done by whoever knows how to do it, or wants to attempt to do it, ie personal preference, not really priority/importance of them.
 * v4 Beta (Alpha + a few changes) should be pushed out to most users this weekend... (Force upgrade... :D) so we'll see how that comes about. Reedy Boy 09:32, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Bypass redirects
It doesn't utilise the bot API, it simply changes page CSS on request to make links to redirects visible, which is not helpful for us. Max S em(Han shot first!) 10:33, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I was using api.php before the feature was integrated into the software, older version uses ajax to get the redirects.—Dispenser 05:55, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

= Interface =

Sub-paragraph undo
It would be helpful to those reviewing page edits if this fix could be implemented. Thanks Rjwilmsi 15:15, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Unicode font support

 * What characters arent working? As i can get it to display all the arabic and such characters i have tried... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Reedy  Boy  17:21, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Message left on local page! —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Reedy  Boy  17:25, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * There are lots of them that don't display on different machines (especially running XP, I suppose). The problem is that there is no standard Unicode font that every user has. Arial Unicode MS comes only with M$ Office (and is too wide to be simply used w/o other changes). Other variants are even less standard. Also, many of them are not suitable to be used in interface, cf Code2000. Max S em(Han shot first!) 19:22, 17 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I believe AnjaliOldLipi is the most popular font in Malayalam. Here is the AWB screenshot from a win2k system. In XP, it works fine. If there is an option for adjusting font size will be appreciated. Some characters are difficult to read. --Sadik-khalid (talk) 09:19, 18 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Note, this image was tagged for deletion by the bots. I extended it for a week, but someone may want to declare it as free if that is true, or make sure that they look at it before it is actually deleted by someone else. --After Midnight 0001 13:42, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Prod/AfD buttons

 * Sounds like a good idea. It would be easy enough to do for Wikipedia EN. I guess it could be a feature which is invisible if the settings say we're on another wiki. --kingboyk (talk) 23:33, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Disambiguation repair using numpad

 * Im not sure how you'd actually want the keys mapping... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Reedy  Boy  20:53, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Just by numbering the first nine options 1 to 9... Typing 5 will use the fifth option. Now you can use home/end and the first letter, which can be annoying if multiple options have the same starting letter. My request on disambiguation: the [done] key has no hot-key likt alt-D. Now I am forced to use the mouse (the tab key will only activate this button after many many button presses). It would be cool to have alt-Done and alt-Cancel available, so you can operate AWB to solve disambigs without the mouse. Yeah, sorry, I hate that mouse and I want to keep RSI/CTS away by keeping on hating it. Edoderoo (talk) 10:58, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Options list
AWB's Find and Replace goes up here

Pre-programmed options

Do you program in C#? Or are you capable at least of designing Windows Forms* in Visual Studio? If you are, perhaps you should join the team. Judging by our efforts up to now we don't have any UI artists aboard. *Or we could go with WPF, which would necessitate a move to .net 3.5, a jump I personally feel we will have to make at some stage... --kingboyk (talk) 12:17, 5 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't know anything about C/C++/C#, yet. But I'd be willing to give the GUI thing as free time becomes available. I assume its part of the Visual Studio package I use to compile AWB.—Dispenser 22:28, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes it is. Windows Forms in Visual Studio is fairly simple if you're sticking to design, don't really need to be able to code much to do the visual part.
 * The .Net Framework 3.5 introduced design/code seperation I believe, a replacement for Windows Forms called Windows Presentation Foundation and a new markup language (XAML?). I've not tried any of these features yet and we're currently using .Net 2.0 with AWB so we're stuck with Windows Forms unless there's a compelling reason to "upgrade". Visual Studio can do both types of design anyway. --kingboyk (talk) 19:17, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
 * If you can do the graphical side.. It wouldnt be too hard to tie the backend code into it all... I suspect, looking at that, we're gonna need to make a custom control, probably inheriting from listview/similar... As a list view can do the different types of view like you see in Windows Explorer - Large Icon, Small Icon, Details... I may have a play later on —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Reedy  Boy  19:33, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Bit of googling/looking about. We are certainly going to need either a custom control, or to write our own. As list views by default do not accept images in the sub items (ie columns other than the first) —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Reedy  Boy  20:56, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Fixing ambiguous typos
Sounds like an interesting idea. Jogers (talk) 09:10, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
 * This would be a useful feature, provided that users had an option to 'ignore ambiguous typos' i.e. AWB would not change a word matching an ambiguous typo and would not prompt the user for the correct correction. Otherwise I could envisage users being regularly pestered by message boxes ;) Rjwilmsi (talk) 11:15, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Certainly would, but how about we smarten the regexer as well? "Distict of" is almost certainly "District of" similarly "Business distict" and "congressional distict". I will put some data on AutoWikiBrowser/Typos/distict. Rich Farmbrough, 14:39, 2 June 2010 (UTC).
 * P.S. if someone will buy me Google's n-grams I will produce the rules based on them. Rich Farmbrough, 14:39, 2 June 2010 (UTC).
 * As in ? $150... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree  dy  17:17, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes they are the ones. Rich Farmbrough, 18:18, 2 June 2010 (UTC).

Block and Protection Log Access

 * would be useful to help with this. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  16:04, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Bug fixed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:23, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Make the Find and replace dialog not modal
It isn't modal, see Feature Request Modeless Dialog "Text regex" (Couldn't spell). But I have the main window on my first screen and AFAR on the second. Perhaps, you want an always on top feature or a taskbar button?—Dispenser 03:23, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Show rather than show dialog? IIRC? —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  14:52, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I changed it to modal some time ago because when it was non-modal, closing it sometimes resulted in the main being hidden. Max S em(Han shot first!) 15:16, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I've had this tonight.. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  21:54, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Support non-standard Windows font PPI
Max S em(Han shot first!) 19:33, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Scrollable Window

 * To be honest, im not sure about making the whole window scrollable.. Should be doable, would need to try having a play... That a 9/10" screen by any chance? —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  22:37, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I think its a 10" diagonally. Yea, its 10.2" diagonally. 22:23, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll have to try it on my 9" eee —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  22:37, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Alright, just post what happens when you do that, I guess. Thanks! 02:45, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Suppose i should've posted before, it definately doesn't want to play nice on the smaller screens :( —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  19:19, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

This is related to Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:56, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Possibility to set order of automatic operation (Find&Replace, External Proc. etc)
How I imagine it to look like: it would be a little window like F&R one, with rows like there, and easier possibility to move row up or down (=make it be executed earlier or later), delete or temp disable operation. Also, a button "Add operation...", which will allow to add custom bunches of replaces or, if they were deleted form list earlier, General Fixes, External Proc. and others from another list.

It might look like this: Operation | Description | Minor | | | | | Enabled ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— General Fixes | AWW-specific fixes | ☑ | | [move up] | [move down] | [delete] | ☑ ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Find and Repl... | "cat" -> "dog" | ☐ | [edit] | [move up] | [move down] | [delete] | ☑ ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— External Proc... | friendlyIbox.rb | ☐ | [edit] | [move up] | [move down] | [delete] | ☐

Explanation:
 * Operation: non-editable hard-coded name.
 * Description: editable, just like regexes in Find and Replace; short user-written desc
 * Minor: if checked and only fixes are these from minor operations, AWB would skip article.
 * [edit]: if possible to modify this operation, they will show dialog boxes same as these that appear now when clicking for example Tools -> External Processing
 * [move up]/[move down]/[delete]: self-explanatory.
 * Enabled: would work exactly like the ones in Find&Replace dialog.

The dialog may be shown by clicking Tools -> Manage order... or by button placed near Find and Replaces ones.

I hope you like my idea and understand my poor English ;), Matma Rex pl.wiki talk 10:36, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * , its a good idea.. but there are some that are supposed to be run before others (but this could be catered for).. All that would technically be necessary would be to turn most of the stuff into individual modules that could be added to a list for processing or similar... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  10:54, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Aw, I was looking for request like mine, but I couldnt find it ( I suggest to archive requests more often ;) ). What is supposed to run before others? I have no idead what it can be. And, well, I said it'll be tought, but - I repeat it - I believe in you, developers. Matma Rex pl.wiki talk 11:11, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Haha. People get annoyed if we archive non finished ones ;). I'll combine them later. However, i think this is more a v5+ request.. Hopefully where we'll have *maybe* changed to .NET v3... and can look at improving the gui with the new toys it gives us! —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  11:27, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Move 'Make list' to new dialog

 * Sounds alright to me... Whats the wider community consensus? —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  13:01, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Some further thoughts: Lightmouse (talk) 15:25, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I defined 'New list' but not 'Edit list'. An 'Edit list' function needs an 'Edit list' button beneath the list where the 'Filter' button is now.
 * 'New list' and 'Edit list' should produce the same dialog. A working name for the dialog should be 'List'.
 * The 'List' dialog is the main place for editing lists but removal of articles should be possible in the main AWB interface.
 * The right-mouse menus throughout AWB could do with a review. The right-mouse menu in the current list has 'Filter', 'Save list', and 'Sort alphabetically'. If this design idea goes further, I suggest eliminating those three options.

This feature request has been hanging around for 21 months. Any further thoughts? Lightmouse (talk) 17:35, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

I thought are files were settings with lists included and not lists. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:39, 12 February 2011 (UTC)


 * That could work. Lightmouse (talk) 19:19, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Could we start by designing an 'New list' dialog as described above? Lightmouse (talk) 16:51, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

User contribs tab

 * I wouldn't want to use a separate browser for this... Im wondering about combining the history and WLH here ones and having like radio buttons to select or something... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  17:06, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, having one browser would be simpler. You could then disable the user contributions option for non-user (talk) space. It's not urgent, I can use my local version to do the few I'm interested in at the moment. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 17:17, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Live view tab

 * There was a request for something like this using something that could potentially done internally.. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  11:39, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * hmm...? -ΖαππερΝαππερ BabelAlexandria 12:17, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature_requests —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  12:20, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * actually what i'm asking for is very different than Instaview. I want to, specifically, be able to see the image located at Image:Foo without having to open an external window. -ΖαππερΝαππερ BabelAlexandria 18:35, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Search within 'Make module'.
Code already exists to do this (just not on the custom module).. Any suggestions how to do it designer wise? Do we need a Find form creating..? —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  19:28, 12 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Interesting predecessors include
 * the method that AWB already has below the 'Save' button. Perhaps you could just copy that or update it with ideas from the other predecessors below.
 * MS Word is interesting in that 'Find' and 'Replace' are just tabs combined into one dialog. So it is easy to start with Find and then decide to use Replace.
 * MS Notepad is very simple but can be irritating - it does not search the whole thing like MS Word does. You have to search forward from where you are, or then backward from where you are.
 * Firefox is instant search and has a very small field tucked away
 * You could add some menus to the 'Make module' page and then have the 'Find' menu item in one of them. I instinctively use 'Ctrl-F' to get 'Find' or 'Ctrl-H' to get 'Replace'. Lightmouse (talk) 20:09, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Precisely. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  20:14, 12 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I think a dialog like the MS Word dialog would be good. You could enable it on Ctrl-F even without menus for now. You could use the same dialog in both places. This would allow you to remove the field from below the Save button. Lightmouse (talk) 20:48, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Dialogs are so passé. Firefox's find toolbar is what we should be aiming at, but safari has such cool effect (it dims all non highlighted words). Visual Studio has some cool options, but isn't as powerful as notepad++. I believe I had add Ctrl-F and a few other shortcuts in one of my uncommitted patches.—Dispenser 04:44, 15 September 2008 (UTC)


 * You are right, Firefox is better, although MSWord integrates 'Find' and 'Replace' very well. It would be good if the AWB solution could do that. Lightmouse (talk) 12:50, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
 * What i dont get, is why the .NET framework doesnt have a standard FaR contorl that can be reused. I suppose, its probably worth trying to make up a decent one we can reuse throughout AWB... Hmmm —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  12:55, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

AWB is not an IDE for development of plug-ins or custom modules, therefore I don't think that this feature should be a high priority. Anybody who wishes to improve their custom module can use their own text editor or IDE to work on it. Rjwilmsi 19:33, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

If this is unlikely to be done, feel free to delete it as 'will not do'. Lightmouse (talk) 13:18, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

More special pages

 * We're waiting on . As said before, i am not HTML scraping (not worth the hassle). So this will be resolve when the bug gets sorted on the MW side —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  12:23, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay; thanks. –Drilnoth (T • C) 12:34, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Bug fixed. <sup style="color:red;">Avic <sub style="color:blue;">ennasis @ 10:58, 3 Elul 5771 / 10:58, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

Localhost

 * I'm presuming it whinges about the domain name/similar? (Tbh, never tried a localhost server... Have you tried 127.0.0.1 also?) —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  19:01, 9 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I've tried both localhost and 127.0.0.1, and the error message it gives is: "An error occured while connecting to the server or loading project information from it. Please make sure your Internet connection works and that combination of project/language exist. Enter the URL in the format en.wikipedia.org/w (including the directory where index.php and api.pho reside)." Thanks, <font face="Arial"> Genius 101 Guestbook  20:25, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Did you create Project:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage? –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 22:48, 24 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, this seems to be an error that must have something to do with the last version on the AWB?

--69.143.206.55 (talk) 04:23, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Provide "Move image" functionality

 * Is move images enabled again? —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  17:06, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

MW doesn't support move image. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:37, 10 January 2010 (UTC)


 * well i figured that since AWB is running on the client side, it could work around MW's constraints. The image and info would be stored temporarily on the user's hard drive. of course maybe this is better handled by a script like twinkle or friendly. --&#65279;ΖαππερΝαππερ BabelAlexandria 23:29, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Provide a separate checkbox for "Incorrect phrases" during Regex typo fixing

 * Fronds ofc does something like this.. Its whether you wanted the audit trail and it kept onwiki. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  06:14, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Well there's some disagreement as to whether phrases should be included with typo fixing. I'm leaning towards the no side, but some people like them. So I figured the best of both worlds could be included with a further check box. I would say suggest default to off. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 12:39, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * FYI, someone at the discussion was concerned that Fronds was in its infancy and thus wouldn't be as effective as it being built into the typo matrix. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 13:17, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Admittedly so (think "Who bought the first telephone?"). - Jarry1250 [ In the UK? Sign the petition! ] 15:29, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Probably someone who wanted to ring up 'ole Al. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 19:41, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

If maxlag exceeded more than 10 times, pause for a lengthy period rather than terminating operation

 * I'm not sure how Web Browser AWB will benefit from this. ;D —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  21:43, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Server has been so gorram lagged these days. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black;">talk 18:03, 3 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure if you guys killed the maxlag features with fire or whatever, but I rather liked being able to "let my bot loose" as it were and let maxlag act as a leash. So maybe having maxlag as an option to enable would be cool. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b><sup style="color:black;">talk 15:00, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Ability to resize either list window for at Make List or in List comparer, or a scrollable window

 * I was about to post a request regarding the same issue. In the list comparer, one can hover over a long page title in either input list and see the full page name on a mouseover. The Results lists do not have this feature; the full title of a page in one of these lists can therefore only be seen by saving the list to a text file. Can a mouseover text (or alternatively a scroll bar, as requested above) be added to the three "Results" lists in the list comparer? SiBr4 (talk) 19:58, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Add ctrl+c, ctr+x, ctrl+a shortcuts to log lists
Also ctrl+c to the diff window. I don't know how many times I've highlighted some text in the diff window (it's easy because what I want is usually already highlighted in part by the differencing code so I don't have to try to find the same thing in the edit window), ctrl+c then go to the regex tester or wherever then ctrl+v the wrong stuff. Argh!

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:00, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Allow more granular control of Preference "Enable logging"
Happy. Never. Rearrange to suit. ;D —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  21:49, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Smarter AWBupdater

 * I think this is done. The updater has been updated multiple times since march when this was submitted. --Kumioko (talk) 01:51, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Save and load settings from wiki page

 * Do you mean a physical [[File:]] - Of course, using the relative file location will let you do it, with MaxSems warning... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  14:47, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, no, I meant 'page'. – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 14:56, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * So the text from a specified wiki page? —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  11:50, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, like wrapped in method requires   assembly to be loaded. Which fortunately is the case in AWB, after logging into some wiki.

Maybe this kind of solution can be integrated directly into AWB, it's quite trivial, yet considerably more powerful than current external processing support. --Teslaton (talk) 14:02, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

= Support for Wikipedia books =

Basic cleanup for books
Headbomb maybe you should ask a bot to do these for starts? -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:19, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

=Talk page related=

Expand template redirect functionality to talk pages (zeroth section only)

 * I like this idea too. Kumioko (talk) 03:25, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I thought you had posted this idea somewhere, but couldn't find it, so I added it here. GoingBatty (talk) 03:47, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
 * BTW I have already written written code for most of the Wikiprojects and redirects. If the logic for the AWB/TR page were updated to include talk pages or if another separate page were created for talk pages, I think it would be very beneficial and would be easy to convert the code I wrote over to the new format.Kumioko (talk) 13:38, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

I changed the title to really correspond to what is to be done. We need substitutions only to zeroth section. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:42, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

= Alerts =

Alert: Stub category directly added

 * What logic will identify all such stub categories? Rjwilmsi  20:52, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Categories ending with " stubs" would get most of them. GoingBatty (talk) 03:42, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

HotCat now disallows directly adding -stub categories. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:36, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

FYI, using a regex search of the March 4 database dump, I found 2,292 instances of  in mainspace (excluding comments). GoingBatty (talk) 00:01, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Alert for interwikis (prev. Remove interwiki functionality)
It probably should be removed, but when is the question. Wikidata isn't being pushed to all the other different language Wikipedias until sometime in March. It's going to take at least several months before the bots clean everything up. After that, the bots need to start automatically adding new articles into Wikidata. As long as no harm is being done, probably keep the code around for awhile... better safe than sorry. Bgwhite (talk) 20:43, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Agreed there's no rush - just recorded the thought while I was here. GoingBatty (talk) 01:58, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Do wikias use interwikis? AWB is a general tool and not only for the English Wikipedia. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:19, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

Another thought: would it be worth adding an alert when an article does have interwikis? An editor could choose whether to try to clean it up. --Auntof6 (talk) 05:41, 28 March 2013 (UTC)


 * We have a winner. An extremely excellent idea. FYI... I think the bots are done removing interwiki links from articles and have moved on to other spaces.  I see one doing categories right now.  For anything left in article space, the bot either had problems moving the links (two links going to same language for example) or the wikidata entry hasn't been made in Wikidata.  Phase 2 of Wikidata went live yesterday to 11 wikipedias.  This should cause the demise of Persondata and make life a living hell for infoboxes.  Bgwhite (talk) 06:54, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Alert: Unbalanced comment
Alert for unbalanced comments. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:56, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Doesn't work with svn9507. See 2013 NRL season or 2013–14 British and Irish Cup Bgwhite (talk) 04:26, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Provide options to hide & limit the list of multiple wiki-links
= Autotagger =

Replace/remove Uncategorized when categories exist
These categories should not be hidden categories, maintance categories nor stub categories. Any rule when exactly the article is considered "categorised"? -- Magioladitis (talk) 02:59, 12 September 2010 (UTC)
 * If it's in at least one true content category, it's considered categorized (though cat improve may still be appropriate, such as if an article's only content categories are birth/death years.) You're correct that hidden/maintenance/stub categories don't count toward the article being considered categorized, if they're the only categories present. Bearcat (talk) 03:56, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Enhanced Autotagging
Support I would like to ask for the enhanced autotagger too. I have been using the AWB on Wikia, and I would like to be able to use the autotagger for the placing/removing of the  tag only, because the tags such as ,   or   aren't mostly used on Wikia. -- Spike144 (talk) 12:25, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Support Using AWB at Wikia with the auto tag option checked is an all or nothing option. It appears however that many of the options are specific to Wikipedia such as wanting to add orphan to seemingly every page which makes the feature pretty much useless. I see that there is a tab under preferences that allows the alerts to be selected if desired and I wanted to ask if the same thing could be done to the Auto tagger function so that projects can decide which ones they want to use since it may apply to some (although most don't use it). Reguyla (talk) 00:29, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Change uncat with Cat improve, if page contains only Living people, births, deaths categories

 * That would be cat improve, but let's keep that consideration for another time. Rjwilmsi  09:00, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Add cat improve if the only categories are Category:Living people, Category:xxxx births, Category:xxxx deaths, and/or maintenance & hidden categories. GoingBatty (talk).

Add Cleanup-HTML

 * I would first like to see the template documentation provide a complete list of what is and isn't permitted HTML tagging in Wikipedia. Currently it's unclear. Rjwilmsi  10:14, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

Example -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:00, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Example2. -- 15:04, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Example 3. I fixed some but there some unclosed bold tags. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:14, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

I suggest that we add this template when h2, h3, etc. tags are found in page. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:58, 25 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Could AWB General fixes be changed to automatically change  to   ?  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 00:46, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Add cleanup-bare URLs

 * Changed request from cleanup-link rot to its new name: cleanup-bare URLs. GoingBatty (talk) 00:04, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Change unreferenced section to refimprove section
How can we know that? -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:11, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Using the same logic as when changing unreferenced to refimprove, but only looking between unreferenced section and the next section header? Or by looking for between unreferenced section and the next section header? GoingBatty (talk) 01:44, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I mean: It was risky before already. In the ref can only be a comment and not a real reference. --- Magioladitis (talk) 20:11, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * But that would be easy to be implemented by checking if the ref has a url/or a cite template in, or? <small style="font:bold 12px Courier New;display:inline;border:#009 1px dashed;padding:1px 6px 2px 7px;white-space:nowrap"> mabdul 20:16, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * It is not required that a ref have a cite template, & quite a number of refs do not, from both new and experienced users. . I, for example, never use it unless there are already refs in the article formatted with it.  DGG ( talk ) 16:23, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
 * This issue hasn't been discussed in over 3 years, but I have made a related bot request: WP:Bot requests. Jarble (talk) 04:15, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Remove Stub when a more fine-grained stub tag already exists on the page
{{AWB feature | status = new | description = Could AWB remove {{tl|Stub}} when a more fine-grained stub tag already exists on the page. In these cases the {{tl|stub}} tag is redundant. I think a Regex search of "\-stub\}\}" should find any 'fine grained' stub tag on the page. Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 12:50, 1 August 2013 (UTC) | fix_version = }}

= Make List =

Add Special:PagesWithProp to "Special Pages" dropdown list.

 * Should be trivial. Already has an API module for it https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Bpageswithprop Reedy (talk) 20:51, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Add some options to the Make list option

 * All those are available on https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Bquerypage I believe now... So should be reasonable to do. Reedy (talk) 20:53, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

CirrusSearch
Figured out how to make this work but it is a bit weird. --  Gadget850talk 10:42, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Gadget850 you can help us by writing how you did it. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:52, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser&diff=636041706&oldid=636039035 Does this help?] -- John of Reading (talk) 11:10, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

John of Reading thanks! I wonder if we should something in the manual and in which place. There were a lot of questions/requests/complains about CirrusSearch. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:12, 22 January 2015 (UTC)


 * If I do an on-wiki search for  I get 38 pages (seems like it always reports one more than actual). If I do the same search in AWB I get 0 pages. If I search wiki or AWB for   I get 17 pages. If I search for   I get 22 pages (e is the most common letter in the English alphabet). If I search for   I get 37 pages (a is the second most common letter in the English alphabet). I don't understand why AWB needs this prefixed  search. There were issues with insource searches when CS was first introduced, but they seem to have been resolved. --   Gadget850talk 11:39, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

-- Magioladitis (talk) 11:41, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srwhat=text&srlimit=max&srsearch=insource:/\%3Ccenter\%3E\%3Cgallery/i vs https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srwhat=text&srsearch=%27insource%3a%2f%5c%3Ccenter%5c%3E%5c%3Cgallery%2fi%27&srlimit=max - It seems the html encoding screws it up... Reedy (talk) 19:01, 22 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Should I open a new bug on this? --  Gadget850talk 19:45, 15 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Reedy (talk) 20:50, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

= Unsorted =

On exit, check for changes to settings and query whether user wants to save the changes
This is a very useful proposal, however checking for changes the right way (e.g. by serialising settings and comparing against saved ones) is a heavy operation. Needs more thinking. Max S em(Han shot first!) 08:23, 16 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Perhaps we could divide the request into several pieces. For example, changes to the 'Make module' could be one problem piece to solve and changes to checkbox options in the tabs could be another problem piece. I would regard it as a useful advance if you could solve either of those problem pieces. Lightmouse (talk) 08:39, 16 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Please delete this request. It's resolved by the 'auto-save' feature. Lightmouse (talk) 11:31, 25 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Hold on. I often make incremental adjustments to "Find & Replace" while processing a list of articles, and don't want to save new settings until they are tested on a few articles, so I would not have 'auto-save' turned on in that situation. Before exiting AWB or before loading a new settings file, I would like to be reminded that I have unsaved "Find & Replace" changes to the current settings file. This part should not be difficult to implement, especially if the request for "Unwanted saving of Find & Replace changes" is taken care of by dropping the "Done" button and adding "Apply" and "Cancel" buttons. If the "Apply" button is pressed, just make a note that the settings file has changed and may need to be saved on exit; the heavy operation of comparing settings against saved ones would not be necessary. A similar technique could be used to mark changes to skip options, etc., and all the checks would not have to be added at once. Chris the speller   yack  14:53, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Multiple page moves

 * Possibly best implemented as a MassMove plugin... (could be a default ship plugin with AWB though) —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  22:25, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Define space in lines/paragraphs between Multiply links

 * What? Plrk (talk) 15:10, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
 * i believe gnevin is asking that users have a way to say how close multiple wikilinks have to be to eachother before AWB complains about them. -ΖαππερΝαππερ BabelAlexandria 16:52, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
 * As Zapper says, sorry for not being clearer Gnevin (talk) 21:58, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Lines depend on resolution... Hm... an idea would that in the Multiple wikilinks box to have not only number of occurrences but minimum distance in terms of words too. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:25, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Internationalisation and localisation

 * You can use it on any language (as of the svn version), just the interface isn't localised. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  11:06, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
 * As an aside. We have thought about it, and it would be a good idea. It just would require a lot of reworking of the code, and the interface changing to cater for the larger text aswell... Getting translators would be easy enough, i suspect... —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  11:13, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I haven't found an easy to since the window resizing modes doesn't seem to have an "em" mode. The best I've been able to come up with is using dymaic layout boxes, but that tends to slows redrawing.—Dispenser 16:48, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
 * +1. Helder 18:21, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

We now provide edit summaries in many languages and the set of rules are better localised for the various projects. I call for help in order to expand the localised edit settings to more languages. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:52, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

History analysis
This appears to be similar to Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Archive_19. Lightmouse (talk) 10:41, 8 March 2009 (UTC)


 * This feature would be very useful for bots to filter out articles that it has already edited so it can avoid editing an article for a second time. For example, in some scenarios the bot makes a false positive edit, then a user reverts the bot, then the bot makes the same edit again. I would like to be able to see if the history contains the bot user name but it would be useful to test for any string in the history. I imagine the interface as similar to the 'article contains', 'article does not contain' code. Is it possible? Lightmouse (talk) 07:38, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
 * It probably depends on whether the mediawiki API has a feature whereby it will tell us how many times a given user (or bot user) has edited a page. If that's available then we could certainly have an option "skip if I've already edited this page". Searching a history for a string doesn't sound feasible: the history of some pages is 50 edits per day, so AWB could easily spend several minutes working through the last two months of a page history. Rjwilmsi  22:27, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Also, you'd probably want some time constraint on it. You may have not touched it for 2 years, so missing out on those edits would therefore be bad... It may be possible to query the API (ie have to ask Roan nicely to do it), to be able to specify a date, and a username and return whether the user account has touched that page since that date... *May*. As per prior mentions, i'm NOT html scraping. I'll stick a bugzilla request on and see (or ask Roan on IRC).. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  11:25, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

prop=revision&rvstart=timestamp&rvend=timestamp2&rvuser=username&rvlimit=1

omitting rvstart (prop=revision&rvend=timestamp&rvuser=username&rvlimit=1), will give all (if any) edits by that user to the page since the date. It's possible —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  11:28, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

The two sections History analysis and Filter on timestamp—last edited both want to investigate article history. Any further thoughts on these two requests? Lightmouse (talk) 18:52, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

search individual templates
I think we can do with the Advanced find in replace. Create rules and subrules. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:31, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I can't think of a way to do that, since the searches are global. kwami (talk) 23:31, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Interestingly, I'm currently working on a plugin which will focus on doing things in specific places within templates, with a UI to help define the template, parameter and values which need attention. Might this be of interest? ClickRick (talk) 23:37, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Screenshot at File:TheTemplator.png so you can get an idea of what I'm offering. ClickRick (talk) 23:58, 1 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, that looks like it might do it. But it would still be nice to have a simple check box to restrict the find-replace to the template that matches the if/not conditions. kwami (talk) 08:53, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

If I want to make changes in a specific template I am doing the following: Find and replace -> Advanced settings -> New Rule -> If contains -> Infobox Example and then I am creating subrules. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:29, 2 July 2009 (UTC)


 * But if the page contains a template that contains your search string, then the substitution will be made in all templates on the page, not just the one that contains the string. So if I change apostrophes, I mess up formatting in all of the info boxes. kwami (talk) 08:53, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Try a regex like \{\{IPA\|([^\}]*)\ˈ([^\}]*)\}\} to. I'm sure there are much more elegant ways. --NE2 21:07, 6 July 2009 (UTC)


 * That works! Thanks. A feature option would still be nice, but with this I can at least take care of some of the more grievous problems. kwami (talk) 07:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Namespace-insensitive list sorting or add talk page after article
I'm working on sets of pages where I fix/add DEFAULTSORT and also work on the corresponding talk page, adding WPBiography if missing and fixing/adding the listas and living parameters. It would be very convenient to have the pages sorted together so I can manually apply any nonstandard DEFAULTSORT which I find in the article to the listas, and also determine the living status from the article to fill in for WPBiography. Or, if I find that the article's not a bio, I can immediately skip the talk page. M AN d ARAX •  XAЯA b ИA M  00:18, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

This is such a useful feature for me that I wrote a simple external program to do it and I paste the list into AWB. But it would still be very convenient for AWB to do this. M AN d ARAX •  XAЯA b ИA M  20:22, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Standardise redirects I

 * What would be a purpose of that? Most changes AWB does make some visible change to the edited page. Also see rule #4. Svick (talk) 13:31, 11 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Not all changes are visible, such as avoiding redirects to Citation needed. There are many edits that AWB does that qualify for rule 4 if only done by themselves. However, if all these changes were made to a redirect page, as well as edits to categorisation, interwiki links and other existing changes, it could be beneficial. Removing pointless extra text in a redirect page is useful, as it is completely unnecessary and could possibly be vandalism.  McLerristarr /  Mclay1  15:53, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I would like to see some estimate on the number of pages with lowercase redirect. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:06, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Correct --

 * I think it should correc to an unspaced emdash. It's usually what is mean in my experience. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:07, 14 January 2011 (UTC)


 * There's no reason to make that assumption. If the writer has included spaces, the fix should leave them in. It would mean the same thing, so it's best just to leave the writer's stylistic choice alone in an automatic edit.  McLerristarr &#124;  Mclay1  07:43, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Auto-replace direct use of stub categories with stub templates
I also think that ->stub should be hard coded into the software. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:56, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Any estimate of how many pages have this mistake at the moment? -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:04, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * See Database reports/Stubs included directly in stub categories - the most recent list has 1438, the recent lists were 1601, 1668 and 1740 respectively. (Note that the 13 October list doesn't count, due to the Darius Dhlomo copyvio problem; such pages were removed from subsequent reports.) This report isn't quite complete - some times, a page will have both a stub tag and a direct use of a stub category (such as this revision), and those won't be listed there. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:37, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, but we can't fix more than the "Stubs" one and this report includes subcategories too. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:54, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Magio since I haven't yet looked at this let's not draw any early conclusions about what is feasible. Rjwilmsi  20:53, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I have never seen the code for AWB, but given that AWB has the functionality for parsing page code, and for looking for specific parameters, I would imagine that it's not too hard. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:17, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Remove categories if Persondata populated
If we know a year and page is in YOB unknown, it's a disaster. -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:46, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree, and I'd like AWB to be able to fix that disaster. GoingBatty (talk) 02:02, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Consolidate multiple Redirect templates
Rule: If two redirect templates exist and first parameter is the same then merge: → -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:38, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Consolidate multiple Commons category templates into Commons category multi

 * While there is already  for Commons category we would need to only merge uses with one argument, and rename to Commons category multi.  Rjwilmsi  18:16, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Non-breaking spaces before slashes
But without creating stuff like <blacklisted url redacted upon arhciving, see migrated task on Phabricator>. Rich Farmbrough, 03:49, 7 February 2011 (UTC).

Enhance logic for removing duplicated categories (CHECKWIKI error 17)
Do the same if key is part of DEFAULTSORT. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:58, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Eponymous category sorting
-- Black Falcon (talk) 21:46, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree, in page named "Foo" category "Foo" should have empty sortkey i.e. . This will enable us fix duplicated categories like here and here. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:58, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Allow on-site saving of lists

 * Doing save to site would be rather trivial... We should probably add a load from page type feature to compliment this.. Though, saved in the correct format, links on page would work. Reedy (talk) 21:21, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I see no reason to create a new load option here - saving as a wikitext format should allow current load options to be good enough. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:51, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Filters before running the list maker
Hmm. Something like List --> Filter out non mainspace and Filter duplicates (they run when new stuff has been added).. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  22:35, 31 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Tried that...when I selected "filter non-mainspace", it returned nothing. I wanted the categories alone to pull up (select category check on the List - filter option). Regards, Ganeshk (talk) 22:47, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, what im meaning, is something "like" that needs adding. —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  23:08, 31 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Perhaps it might be worth considering have a separate list maker dialog. This would be equivalent to the 'Open' file dialog in other applications. Then you could have more room for options such as this request for pre-filtration. I would suggest merging it with the similar functionality of the 'List comparer'. I am always looking for improvements that will firstly make the terminology and interaction similar to other applications and secondly give more space for the working areas. Lightmouse (talk) 11:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
 * It would be easy enough to add on the special filter a checkbox to say, apply this filter whenever new articles are added to the List Maker... That saves other real-estate, and puts it in a relevant place? —<font face="Trebuchet MS"> Ree dy  22:57, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, it would :P -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:43, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Some of this can be done with "Special pages" dialog. Rich Farmbrough, 10:16, 14 May 2010 (UTC).

Preserve manual edits when page reloads

 * I don't really consider AWB a tool for making significant manual edits to a page – rather to make the same or very similar edits to a number of pages. Still, others could use it this way. Rjwilmsi  09:37, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, I want this feature badly ;-). I frequently encounter this problem. Rjwilmsi, talking about significant edits, edits like balancing unbalanced brackets, correcting a unique typo, etc. could still be saved. Thanks. --Siddhant (talk) 20:19, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I have also had this problem often. It only happens when it has the worst possible effect – after I've worked on something for about an hour. The way I use AWB is explained here. Art LaPella (talk) 23:02, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I've been able to avoid losing my edits by quickly copying the entire text of the page when I see that AWB is restarting. With the cursor in the edit box, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C will select the entire text and copy it. After the reload, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V will select the entire (reloaded) text and replace it with what you copied. HTH. --Auntof6 (talk) 03:10, 31 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree that AWB isn't for major edits, but even making a few minor edits takes a minute or two. And it really pisses me of when I don't make it in the 30 seconds (or whatever) and my work gets erased. Why is this reloading needed at all? Debresser (talk) 22:01, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree - every now and then, in the course of performing some routine edits, I'll come across an article with a lot more problems and spend some time fixing them, and it's infuriating to see all that hard work lost because of a timeout/reload. Like Auntof6, I've got into the habit of manually saving any large article before I hit the Save button, so that I can recover my work if necessary - but it would be much better if AWB could remember my changes and reinstate them, rather than just reload the original page. Colonies Chris (talk) 23:55, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

This has had a solution for a while. After the page reloads, right click in the Edit box and select "Replace text with last edit". I don't know if others still want a completely automatic solution, but as far as I'm concerned, this can be marked as implemented, and can be archived. M AN d ARAX •  XAЯA b ИA M  07:02, 11 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Belated comment: Could "Replace text with last edit" also restore the edit summary that the last edit was trying to save? -- John of Reading (talk) 17:22, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Add an option, or multiple options, to allow Typo fixing in references, indented paragraphs, etc.

 * Background for this request is at WT:AWB/T. Chris the speller   yack  15:30, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Allow typing shortcuts in the Edit Summary box, similar to "Paste more" in the Edit box

 * I have implemented hotkey insertion (I hadn't seen this request, but it seems like a pretty obvious enhancement). In my current project I often have to type some boilerplate text. I've added a feature that lets you define text to insert using 11 fixed hotkeys (tab, and ctrl/numpad/0-9). The selections save with prefs. I have a patch file against the current version - does someone on the core team want a look at it? David Brooks (talk) 01:50, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

do not alter quotations
The prospect of automatic but improper "correction" of quotations makes me wonder whether excluding quotations from F&R should be the default, with an option to override. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:34, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
 * This is a greatly needed feature. Marokwitz (talk) 15:03, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Marokwitz, J. Johnson (JJ), Hmains can you please provide an example of an improper replacement AWB does? -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:15, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
 * When I use the search and replace feature of AWB, I *always* want to avoid replacing text inside quotations. Obviously it is very undesirable to change a quotation, and when doing massive word replacements this adds significant burden on the editor using AWB. Marokwitz (talk) 16:18, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I think the point is that if AWB users choose to turn off the two "Ignore" checkboxes on the F&R dialog, then they have to be careful. They have to notice that they are about to edit a quote, and either skip the edit, or go and verify the source, add a sic tag, or whatever. If an AWB user wants to use F&R in the whole page except for quotes then there is no easy way to do it. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:20, 1 March 2014 (UTC)


 * This becomes even more of a problem when trying to use AWB within a bot. There is work that cannot be done this way because of this quotation anomaly.  Hmains (talk) 18:45, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Marokwitz, J. Johnson (JJ), Hmains is this the same request with the No changes inside single straight quotes request above? -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:49, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
 * For me, it should no altering of text within any of the several ways in which quotations can be indicated in WP text. Whether is it by means of "xxx"  or by means of any kind of template such as quote, blockquote, and so on.  And also within quote=  in templates.  Hmains (talk) 18:55, 1 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I can't tell if that last mentioned request amounts to a subset of this request, or is just about use of non-word characters. But it should be a general principle that that there is absolutely no automatic "correction" of any kind of quoted material. The sole and absolute criterion of correctness for any quoted material is the original material, per the original source. Even if such material is "wrong" by any other standard, when material is quoted it implies an exact copy of the source, warts and all, and the only basis for changing a quote is if it varies from the source.  AWB should protect quotes from mass changes, not encourage it. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:33, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Your statement here is at variance with the guidance offered in WP:QUOTE, which says "Exceptions are trivial spelling or typographical errors that obviously do not affect the intended meaning; these may be silently corrected ...". Editors who have good sense and well-developed judgment are capable of fixing sloppy transcriptions of spoken words and careless translations of foreign-language texts even when those appear as quotations; they know not to change "PENSYLVANIA" in the inscription on the Liberty Bell, but they know that if French "merde" in a quotation is translated as "shiit" it needs to be fixed. Same thing goes for bad punctuation in an interview with a rock musician; certainly the transcriber of the interview cannot tell that the speaker omitted a hyphen or added an unneeded comma. How are Wikipedia and its readers helped by saying that "Julius Caesar put down the rebelllion" even if that extra 'l' originated hundreds of years ago? Let me remind you that AWB is used for semiautomatic spelling corrections, not automatic ones; every change should be reviewed, and skipped if if there is doubt. Chris the speller   yack  02:17, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I completely agree with J. Johnson (JJ): AWB should not be making any changes to quoted material. It just creates trouble. This is NOT a discussion regarding manual changes to quotes so I will not discuss that. Hmains (talk) 02:37, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
 * What about typographical changes such as hyphens to en dashes? Chris the speller   yack  04:43, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Note that the suggestion is to make an option that quotations are hands-off by default with the ability to apply changes to quotations, if the user specifically selects to do so. Thus, any questions about being able to have AWB perform edits in this situation, or that situation, are specious.


 * My opinion is that the suggestion should be implemented (hands-off by default, with option to permit changes). I would further suggest that a popup alert be generated when quotation editing is enabled similar to the popup alert when the "Regex typo fixing" is checked.


 * The point is that quotations are special. They deserve handling by a human who is specifically intending to put in the extra diligence that should be applied when editing them. The reality is that AWB is used in a large number of situations where the special diligence by a human which quotations should receive is just not available, applied, or known by users that it should be applied to a particular edit.


 * I expect that the vast majority of edits using AWB receive somewhat cursory inspection by a human. Given the large number of edits which are performed by bots via AWB this is almost certainly true. Having the default be that changes are not made to quotations allows the best of multiple worlds: editors do not need to worry that any specific edit is in a quotation (if they are even thinking about that most of the time), bots can be run without the concern that a change which would be desireable in general text might be a bit over-aggressive for a quotation, and humans who specifically intend to be making AWB based semi-automated changes to quotations can do so.


 * Personally, I would find it helpful to have yet an additional option of applying changes only to quotations. That would permit dedicating a session to making only such changes which require greater diligence. Editing quotations is a different mindset than editing general text. However if the option existed to exclude editing quotations, it would be possible to approximate this by running a first pass making changes on non-quotation text, then a second pass which would be on quotations (and any edits performed by others in the interval between passes).


 * Having automated (find and replace, regex, typo, gen fixes, etc.) editing be excluded from quotations by default with the option to enable such changes is a good solution. &mdash; Makyen (talk) 06:07, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I would add 2 checkboxes: "Perform replacements in quotations", "Perform replacements in main text". This way the user could target either quotations, "Wikipedia voice" text, or both. I would also recommend this feature avoids editing the article names and publication names in references. Marokwitz (talk) 07:05, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * AWB's assisted typo fixing is already turned off inside quotations. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:42, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree with Mayken's suggestions to leave quoted text alone by default but allow AWB users to choose whether to go further. Chris the speller   yack  15:41, 2 March 2014 (UTC)


 * , the fact that this capability is already built into AWB is amazing - this would make it so much easier to implement the requested enhancement. Any of the AWB developers willing to take this challenge ? Marokwitz (talk) 06:47, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Indeed, WP:QUOTE does put a qualification on my statement re "trivial" changes. Though I am not fully confident in all Wikipedians' notions of "trivial". As Mayken said, editing quotations is (and should be!) a different mindset, requiring greater diligence, but often done with rather cursory care. I say that quotations and general text be strictly segregated in regard of any automatic and even semi-automatic editing. I doubt that that we should allow even semi-automatic editing of quotations, as I doubt that any quote is so pervasive that it any correction cannot reasonably be done manually in every instance. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:38, 3 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Aaaand it did it again: There is no reason it should ever default to mangling quotations - David Gerard (talk) 14:01, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * That was a bot edit using the general fixes, not "Find & Replace". -- John of Reading (talk) 15:44, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Can you confirm that the general fixes did this, or does the bot run different code? -- John of Reading (talk) 15:58, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * true. This was done by general fixes. So we need two things: An option to exclude general fixes inside quotes and an option to exclude F&R changes inside quotes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:12, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think it should be an option for the general fixes not to edit quotes, as the general fixes shouldn't ever be doing anything contentious. This edit looks like an ordinary bug to me. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:17, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Localization in Turkish
{{AWB feature | status     = new | description = General fixes for Turkish Wikipedia
 * . GoingBatty (talk) 03:59, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I tried to copy that text but it didn't skip the {{t|db-band}} or {{t|db-person}}. - (t)  Josve05a  (c)  20:17, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) I forgot to press "Regex". - (t)  Josve05a  (c)  20:26, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * (Sorry) But can some1 help me to include the {{t|PBB}}-tamplate to that regex. It would help me SOO much! - (t)  Josve05a  (c)  20:29, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Try  Bgwhite (talk) 20:46, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. So I just have to add  -  (t)  Josve05a  (c)  21:01, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, assuming "whatever I want" is the name of a template. Bgwhite (talk) 21:09, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I would put the right parenthesis at the end, as follows:
 * GoingBatty (talk) 01:10, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
 * GoingBatty (talk) 01:10, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Remove 10-digit ISBNs from cite templates when 13-digit is also present

 * Comment: Not sure what the policy says on this, but for all books published before 2007, we should use ISBN-10. In general, we should always use the number printed on the book. But I agree in general that there's no need to have both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 for one book. --bender235 (talk) 16:40, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Beg to disagree. I recently saw a book which had only the 10-digit ISBN printed in the book, but which did have a 13-digit assigned. (No idea how common this might be.) The 13-digit ISBN might be useful in locating the book in various contexts, but most certainly should not cause the 10-digit ISBN to be removed.
 * To fix the doubled-up ISBN problem one of them should be moved (not removed) outside of the template. Perhaps even stuffing the second instance into an ISBN template. Or perhaps the templates could be modified to handle two ISBNs? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:36, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
 * It is very, very common to have books published with only a 10-digit number to have a 13-digit number assigned to it. Two reasons. One is that they are essentially the same numbers.  To convert a 10-digit number to 13, slap 978 on the front and recalculate the checksum digit (last digit).  Second is that the 10-digit's equivalent 13-digit was assigned to each other when the transition happened.  If you goto WorldCat, Google or Amazon, you can find pre-2000s books with a 13 digit number.
 * Example: As Ender's Game, the film, is about to be released, type "9780312932084" anywhere you want.  That is the 13-digit equivalent of the 1985 first edition.
 * WP:ISBN states, "Please use the 13-digit one if available"
 * In most cases, there should be no reason to list more than one ISBN number. One ISBN shouldn't be moved. Template shouldn't contain more than one.  If the 10-digit and 13-digit numbers are equivalent, then use the 13 as they both point to the same spot.   Should AWB being automatically doing that? I don't know.  But it could give a warning. Bgwhite (talk) 06:39, 7 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I am a little concerned that an editor with a printed book in hand that lists only the ISBN-10 might not recognize the equivalent ISBN-13 as referring to the same book. Perhaps that is something be mentioned on the Special:BookSources page?
 * I would be less concerned about AWB removing a 10-digit ISBN if it checks that the 13-digit version is indeed correspondent. If they are not, then that should should be flagged as an error, and no changes made. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:51, 8 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Right. That's what I attempted to say (perhaps cryptically). AFAIK, there is an equivalence between 10- and 13-digit numbers as described by Bgwhite (and in the logic I gave) above. In the cases I looked at, where both numbers were present and the root 9 digits did NOT match, one of the two numbers was wrong – usually because it was for a different edition than the one being cited. —&#91;  Alan M 1  (talk) &#93;— 11:08, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
 * 13-digit ISBNs described as such are a relatively recent phenomenon: since circa 2006 (in the lead-up to 2007, as noted above). But at least twenty years earlier (in Europe at least), these numbers were already being allocated, and being shown on the books in the form of the EAN-13 barcode. I've got several books bearing such barcodes from as long ago as 1984, which are definitely first printings, not post-2007 reprints. All that happened in 2007 is that the publishers stopped putting the ISBN-10 on the books. If it begins 978 or 979, and has 13 digits, there is no difference between an EAN-13 barcode and an ISBN-13, apart from the spacing and hyphenation (which is of no consequence). We only need one ISBN for each cite template: if there are two, one should be removed - but for a pre-2007 book, it doesn't really matter which you remove and which you keep. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:54, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Remove blank lines separating bulleted lists
It's true that having blank lines between bullet points is wrong and should be fixed in many cases. I was also thinking about this but came to the conclusion that it's not so easy to automate. People are using this as a feature in both numbered …
 * 1) Series a, item a
 * 2) Series a, item b

… as well as unnumbered lists. If the user wanted the two lists to be separated AWB shouldn't merge them. Suggestion: Check for loneley list items between other list items: * A * B * C * D * E In this case both empty lines should be removed. --TMg 12:08, 11 May 2014 (UTC)
 * 1) Series b, item a
 * 2) Series b, item b

Fixing interwiki pipe links

 * Is this documented as the recommended policy for generating interwiki links? Rjwilmsi  14:42, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

notifying about skipped pages in pre-parse mode

 * - One workaround would be to enable the logging feature, pre-parse the list, and then sort the log by reason to find the articles with non-Unicode characters and fix them manually. GoingBatty (talk) 16:47, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pinging me.
 * I doubt many people would think of that, or would even be aware that they're missing anything. Would it be possible to have it as a feature?  — kwami (talk) 16:51, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

, we could add this information somewhere in the Manual with the help of GoingBatty. I think the current behaviour is satisfying. Kwamikagami, you can edit the pages that remain in the list and add all the pages skipped for having Unicode control characters too. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:12, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Would it be possible to have a bot change the ones in the PUA range to &#x...; format, and tag them with PUA? And tag other things with some other marker, so we can find them?  — kwami (talk) 13:16, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * I think the best is to ask this in WP:BOTREQ. Rjwilmsi did something similar a year ago. I also would like to know how many pages are out there with this problem. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:25, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Update: We've taken care of nearly all the PUA on WP-en, but new instances do crop up from pasting refs and the like. It would still be nice IMO to have them left white rather than skipped in pre-parse mode, but is much less of a problem for now. — kwami (talk) 02:08, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Remove or tag empty sections

 * Bump Werieth (talk) 15:44, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

When creating new articles with multiple sections it is often convenient to start with the section headers (in the manner of an outline), then fill them individually. It would be irksome to have them removed before one gets to filling them! Therefore automatic removal should allow a grace period for new sections, and respect any tags indicating the article or section is under construction (see following proposal). ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:47, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
 * It wouldnt change the default behavior, but in cases where the user is knowingly needing to remove either the contents of or the entire section across multiple articles (External links, gallery sections are examples) as part of a cleanup process the adding the templates is annoying. Werieth (talk) 20:25, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Change to use Official website
Some variants of the same proposal. (to be included in an posible reg-ex list)

* http://example.com - Official website to

* Official website to

* example.com - Official site to

- (t)  Josve05a  (c)  20:50, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

This should be limited to "External links" section. It seems that can be one of the things we could implement. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:49, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Remove DEFAULTSORT if it matches the article title
...except where the article is about a person, and the DEFAULTSORT is there in first name surname format so no one adds an incorrect DEFAULTSORT surname, first name (e.g. Bao Ninh). In the meantime, you can update your F&R rules to find  and replace it with nothing. GoingBatty (talk) 05:09, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Do not move stubs

 * Or a skip if...only moving stub-template?- (t)  Josve05a  (c)  15:10, 28 November 2013 (UTC)
 * we already have a feature for "skip if only minor fixes". -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:42, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

We do not move stub in Swedish wikipedia. Do we? -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:12, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
 * (Checking...) (t) Josve05a  (c) 17:50, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes it does. Run AWB on sv:Ornis Svecica (with auto tag on). It tries to move  to under the categories. (t)  Josve05a  (c) 18:05, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Josve05a what do stubs in swedish wikipedia have in common? Maybe our logic needs update. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:04, 24 July 2014 (UTC)


 * (per sv:Kategori:Alla stubbmallar which all stub templates are collected in), all stub-templates are either ending with just 'foostub' or is called 'foostub-foo'. (with some exceptions like sv:Mall:Substub which is NOT a stub-template.) (t) Josve05a  (c) 13:18, 24 July 2014 (UTC)
 * And we also have these stub templates which does not follow this rule. (t) Josve05a  (c) 15:32, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Josve05a This is our regex

And the rule is

I ve been told in the past to follow this order. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:44, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Fix more CS1 errors in date fields
I also have created a module at User:BattyBot/CS1 errors-dates, which is a work in progress - feel free to incorporate any of these into the genfixes. GoingBatty (talk) 13:40, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I find this approach to be a bit back to front. Writing lots of regexes is fine, but has the analysis been done to identify what are the most common errors. Otherwise we can spend ages writing clever regexes to find that only one page matches. Rjwilmsi  14:40, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not aware of any formal analysis. Any suggestions on how to get that done would be greatly appreciated.  GoingBatty (talk) 16:13, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
 * What I would like to do/have done is get a databsae dump of all pages in the category, or get a full database dump and cross reference to those pages in the category. Then parse database dump to pull out all citation templates, all the date fields out of those. Put this in a flat file, load to MySQL, then do analysis to see how many dates are non-standard and how many have particular errors (e.g. how many start with a zero). Can then target fixes specifically at what's found. AWB genfixes likely already fix hundreds or thousands of these pages, but need to pull the hundreds/thousands out of the > 100k pages in the category. I take this approach with journal cites. Rjwilmsi  17:04, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

More features in the replace expression

 * There is a workaround using some of the MediaWiki builtin functions. Something like  should convert $1 to lowercase, for example. But this won't work well if you have ticked "Add replacements to edit summary", since "subst" doesn't work in edit summaries. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:11, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
 * \n can be used in both find and replace. Could you please provide more information on how you're trying to use it?  GoingBatty (talk) 18:38, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I just want the possibility to do a replace like this: "$1\n$2". But it is not extremly important for me and you say that it already works (at least outside the Regex tester), so maybe nothing needs to be done concerning \n. The two other I mentioned, \u and \x, is not so important for me for the moment. Svensson1 (talk) 14:24, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Substituting also doesn't work within <ref ></ref> tags, so doing something lik changing months from "november" to "November" and "january" to "January" each have to be spelled out in different regex replacements. GoingBatty (talk) 14:19, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I suspect there was confusion about \n because it does not work for replacements in the Regex Tester – it displays the text " " rather than the desired effect of a new line. It would be great if there was a way to get it to work there. M AN d ARAX  •  XAЯA b ИA M  20:43, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
 * - If I remember correctly, you need to check one of the boxes in the Regex tester to get it to work, but don't need to check the corresponding box in the Find and replace screen to get it to work there. I'll look in to that further later.  GoingBatty (talk) 14:16, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, there's nothing a user can do to make this work correctly in the Tester. When I first encountered this problem long, long ago, I assumed that the Tester was a tool which accurately mirrored what happens with the actual Find and replace, but I eventually discovered that that is not the case for \n. M AN d ARAX  •  XAЯA b ИA M  04:30, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I reviewed the archived bug reports, and don't see the exact issue being discussed here, so I've opened a new bug report. GoingBatty (talk) 15:18, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Also, substituting within <ref ></ref> seems possible if you combine parser functions (e.g.  inside  ) - I look forward to playing around with this.  GoingBatty (talk) 15:18, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
 * See User talk:Technical 13 for more details on the workaround for this if interested. Technical 13 (talk) 00:11, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

AKA
This request appears to be in line with WP:ABBR. GoingBatty (talk) 15:33, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Merge other uses template
GoingBatty I would be interested. What are the rules? -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:33, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
 * - Here's a start on the logic, but it's too greedy (i.e. if for has more than three parameters, such as Systematics:


 * Thanks for your consideration! GoingBatty (talk) 04:03, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Resolve "Link to disambiguate" when it's a #REDIRECT
I second this, as it is a badly needed feature for disambiguators. For example, Saint Thomas is a disambiguation page, but many of the incoming links will be to redirects like St. Thomas, St Thomas, St. Thomas College, and St. Thomas' College. When using the disambig feature of AWB, these redirect links are ignored in articles, when they should be treated just like other disambiguation links. bd2412 T 18:12, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * You may want to try WP:WPCleaner instead, which will do this for you. Good luck!  GoingBatty (talk) 18:38, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Suppose we just make it so that WPCleaner can be run through AWB? bd2412  T 19:21, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Even if it was technically possible, their approaches to making changes are very different. For example, WPCleaner allows you to fix multiple ambiguous links in an article before clicking save.  On the other hand, AWB will automatically make many changes for you, whereas WPCleaner will suggest some but make you manually do each one.    GoingBatty (talk) 19:50, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * AWB's disambig feature suggests possible alternative fixes for a disambiguation page, but it can only be loaded with links to one disambiguation page at a time (and, as noted above, ignores redirects to that disambiguation page). It would be great if AWB could recognize those redirects and treat them the same as the disambiguation title to which they redirect, and if AWB would let you load links to multiple disambiguation pages at a time. For example, it is not uncommon for articles to be written that include multiple disambiguation links to nationality/language terms (e.g. "she speaks English and French"; or "the region was colonized by the English and the French"). Should any of this be technically challenging to implement? bd2412  T 20:00, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Let's see an example. I have a disambiguation page (let's name it "thing") with disambiguation links "thing1", "thing2", "thing3". Then I take a "what's links to" to "thing" pages list and get disambig links from "thing". Works great on start. But then I found a redirect page "thingy" that points straight to "thing" ( #REDIRECT thing ). So I take a "what's links to" to "thingy" pages list and... ups, pages doesn't contain word "thing", they contain "thingy", so disamig doesn't work and nothing changed. Ok, I put "thingy" to disambig link and get disambig links. Ups again, there is only one page - "thing". For now I need process pages twice: first to replace "thingy" with "thing", secong to disambig "thing" to correct page. I think it can be simplified. KorneySan (talk) 17:07, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The example should be, if the disambiguation page is "thing", with redirects "thingy" and "thing (song)" and "thing (film)", that AWB should treat the disambiguation title and all of its redirects the same, so that it provides a solution irrespective of whether the link is the page title or a redirect to it. Run once, solve anywhere. This is particularly important for pages like Destiny (disambiguation), for which links to the actual title do not need to be fixed at all but for which links to redirects Destiny (comics), Destiny (album), Destiny (film), and Destiny (song) need to be fixed. bd2412  T 20:03, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

dates
Have you tried the AWB custom modules posted at User:Ohconfucius? GoingBatty (talk) 05:17, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Oh, it would be nice if such could be systematised and automated one step further, though. ;-) --  Ohc  ¡digame! 06:01, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I tired it after you suggested. Couldn't it be built in? And a problem is that it convert all dates to dmy or mdy without seeing or  . If you are editing a page with  and using module to convert dates to dmy, it will convert all mdy dates to dmy.--Wikiuser13 (talk) 08:06, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
 * You're right, so if you're using the dmy module, you should probably skip pages that don't already have use dmy dates. As documented in Template:Use dmy dates, some people use this template to indicate that ALL dates should be in dmy format, while others think that dates in references can be in a different format than the body of the article.  Since Ohconfucius' modules/scripts change ALL dates, if this were added to AWB's general fixes, I imagine that people in the latter camp would be upset at the bot owners who are running general fixes that changed their formatting en masse.  GoingBatty (talk) 13:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Archiveurl
A list of articles with this is located at User:Josve05a/sandbox3 and was created on 9 January 2014, thanks to. (t) Josve05a  (c) 18:16, 18 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The code that CHECKLINKS is using for this is available here (search for ) (t)  Josve05a  (c) 01:29, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * InternetArchive have now started using  instead of , so that shold be included as well. (t)  Josve05a  (c) 01:32, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * In the find statement, I suggest looking for both "http" and "https". In the replace statement, I suggest adding //web.archive.org... to create a protocol-relative link.  GoingBatty (talk) 03:41, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
 * archive.org certainly hasn't changed over to  completely.  Links to their site from archive pages still go to  .  In addition, I made a data request to them for the URL to an archive page. The response indicated an archive address in the   domain. In a brief look, I found no mention of a change to   on their site.  When I went to   I was redirected to  .  It appears that archives are available at   URLs, but is is not instead of.
 * still appears to be their primary choice.
 * I agree with using protocol relative links, per VPP. However, that discussion was closed without an implementation plan. Makyen (talk) 03:57, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

, I also agree with and  in using protocol relative links, per VPP. The decision there was:
 * "Use HTTPS links for HTTPS only sites, protocol relative links for sites that support both HTTP and HTTPS, and HTTP links for sites that don't support HTTPS at all"

That effectively means that this proposal would be changed to:
 * Make AWB change the following:


 * or


 * to

(Y=Year e.g. 2010, M=Month e.g. 12 (December), D=Day e.g. 10, T=Time e.g. 112345 (11:23:45).

Since AWB can't possibly know if the  site supports protocol relative links, the   for the url parameter should remain unchanged for now; however, if this is to be added, there's no reason not to add the same fix for citations that already include both the url and archiveurl parameters; that would add the following to the find statement of the proposal:
 * or


 * or

This could be the start of the implementation plan the decision reached at the Village Pump lacked. If successful, it could be duplicated for other websites known to support protocol relative links. Additional steps would be to create the same tasks for the other  formats and modify the citation tools to exclude   or   in the archiveurl parameter to avoid the problem to start with.&mdash;D'Ranged 1 talk 12:32, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
 * A discussion about implementation was held at: Village pump (technical)/Archive 123
 * Progress was made, and very rough steps for implementation were enumerated, including having AWB make changes. The stated objections were resolved/withdrawn. Uniform resource locator was written and a redirect created at Protocol-relative link for linking in edit summaries when such changes were made. &mdash; Makyen (talk) 18:55, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Josve05a, GoingBatty what is the status of this one? -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:17, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, I don't have any more information on this topic. GoingBatty (talk) 22:55, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Wildcard

 * If you have built a list of articles and want to search for *|turnip within them, then the existing "Find & Replace" will find them for you. A regular expression such as  will find two open square brackets, then arbitrary text that doesn't include any pipes or square brackets, then a pipe, then the word "turnip", and then two close square brackets.


 * If you asking about using this kind of search to create the list of articles, then this is already available, just about. You can search with arbitrary regular expressions if you download a copy of Wikipedia and then use AWB's database scanner. But that's a big download. I'd be happy to do searches like this for you, but my current download is two months old. If you watchlist User:John of Reading/Latest download you'll get a notification when I have the February database. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:41, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

This page has character(s) in the Unicode Private Use Area so unfortunately can't be edited with AWB. The page will now be skipped
, this doesn't answer your question, but.... I often delete the Unicode Private Use (PUA) if I don't see a reason for it. has started deleting the PUAs or adding PUA. Template docs show which articles use the template and how kwami finds articles with a PUA. Any article with a PUA would have it added in the past month. Bgwhite (talk) 21:50, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Interesting. Well, alternatively or concurrently with my request above, if AWB could tag those pages with a new section at the bottom of the page with that template, they would be easier to find, no?  Unfortunately, I'm not an admin (not sure I want it although I've played with the idea in my head to be more useful in technical areas), so I can't delete and currently, AWB offers me no way to go back and find which pages those were without running the queue over again from scratch, which takes forever when you have ##,### articles to go through... Technical 13 (talk) 22:01, 1 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Don't they show up in the log? That's how I find them.  — kwami (talk) 22:04, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't have logging enabled. Last time I had it enabled, I couldn't find anything in it anyways because it was too cluttered and there isn't a good filtering option. Technical 13 (talk) 22:45, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I find it helpful to click on the Skip Reason column header to sort the results by skip reason - this might work for you too. GoingBatty (talk) 17:39, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

AWB can not edit these pages because unintentional things happen when saved by AWB. For instance, characters may change and text may be altered in a way we do not control. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:52, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * , I'm not suggesting it should edit the page, I'm suggesting it should append a category to the bottom in a new nameless section (so it doesn't touch the existing code at all) using &action=edit&section=new and for these pages to be logged in my false positives text file so I can go back and fix them after. Technical 13 (talk) 23:17, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I think it should be explored to see if editing/submitting the page in safemode would enable AWB to edit these pages (perhaps just to ID and/or remove the PUA characters). Safemode is automatically entered if the requesting browser is identified as being on the blacklist.  The blacklist is a list of browsers known to not properly handle unicode characters. When in safemode all "the non-ascii characters in the initial content of the textarea are converted into the form   and the value   is hidden in the form".


 * In a brief look, I did not see a direct way to request for the data to be delivered with the conversions to  already done. However, if AWB is unable to perform such conversions itself and submit the data using safemode, AWB could spoof the browser ID to have the data sent pre-converted. However, doing this would be a much larger/different RFE than just logging the event.  It is also possible that this method of handling PUA characters has already been investigated and found to not be viable. Makyen (talk) 19:46, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Option to turn off re-ordering of references
The option would be to uncheck the Apply general fixes box and run a custom module, such as AutoWikiBrowser/Custom Modules. GoingBatty (talk) 04:07, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Modification to the append/prepend function
See AutoWikiBrowser/Order of procedures, which does not take into account the Sort meta data after option. Could you please confirm that using the Sort meta data after option does not meet your needs? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:34, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the quick response. Because I am editing at Wikia the majority of the general fixes don't apply and most of my logic is built into either modules or the Find and Replace functions. It does not appear that checking the sort meta data after has any effect on either of those things. I have figured out how to prepend things by coding it into a module but I have not yet been able to do so with the append stuff. Do you happen to know if there is an example of how this can be done? Reguyla (talk) 03:43, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I found AutoWikiBrowser/Custom Modules, which you might be able to adapt to your needs. GoingBatty (talk) 04:05, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks, your right that will work for somethings, but it still seems like its a lot harder than it needs to be. I'm fairly technical so I will figure it out but not everyone can or should be required too IMO. Thanks for the help though. Reguyla (talk) 04:35, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Beep sound when done

 * So you mean beep on completion of pre-parse mode? Rjwilmsi  11:29, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually, I was thinking about any edit, which takes a few minutes or even sometimes hours. Blackfish (talk) 13:57, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Alert when adding a red link

 * It would definitely be a good idea - and this should also include transclusions of red-linked templates. Of course, the extra work involved with detecting these (including geting data from the wiki) would make it undesireable for anyone who doesn't actually want it. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:02, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, definitely optional, but I'd hope it can be limited to noting where text has been changed within |... and, given your suggestion,  and only rechecking those links. However, it may be rather simpler to just render the page and look for new red links. Mark Hurd (talk) 09:33, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Generate a list of user pages/user talk pages based on editors who have commented on a particular page (or better yet, particular section of a page)
This would be very useful for notifying people of RFCs, ANIs, AFDs, or the resolution of those processes. Gaijin42 (talk) 16:45, 3 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Links on page (talk page), then filter for user pages -- this doesn't work? Stevie is the man!  Talk • Work 17:28, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
 * To do this for a section, you could copy the section into a sandbox and ask AWB to list the links in the sandbox. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:31, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
 * To be more precise: get the list of links; change to talk pages (some users have links to both their user page and their talk page, while others only have one); and remove duplicates. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:48, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Confirmation for Stop
This is a good idea for when an editor has made additional edits on top of the automated ones. Otherwise, 'Stop' isn't really a problem as the article can be submitted again. This idea could be applied to 'Skip' as well. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 12:58, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, my thought. I wouldn't want to interrupt the workflow in cases where the user wants an immediate stop. Is there a simple test the code can make for the editor having made manual edits? David Brooks (talk) 17:08, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The simplest one would be: create a boolean flag. When loading a page, set it to  ; as soon as the user makes any manual change, set it to  . עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:25, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Warning on closing the program should be improved
עוד מישהו In the options menu we provide a "warn on exit" option. You can select it or not. Is this what you are looking for? -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:40, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
 * No. If I have that set, then it will remind me even if I had just saved the settings; and if I hadn't, I need to closew that window, save the settings, and then give the exit command again. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:46, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Have a settings find-and-replace feature
Have you considered using F&R to delete the first stub (whether it's there or not) and combine this with Append to add the new stub? Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 16:11, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
 * This works correctly when that stub tag is the last one; however, if there are other stub tags afterwords (such as Harrison Bay State Park), ther stub tags end up in the wrong order - I replace one stgub tag with an other, but it's in a different place.
 * How can stubs be in the wrong order? Is that another facet of stubs I've been missing?  Stevie is the man!  Talk • Work 18:58, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
 * There is no prescribed order for stub templates. The only rule about their positioning (see MOS:LAYOUT or the doc page of any stub template) is that they be at the very end of the page, except that any interlanguage links that may still be present should be after the stubs. -- Red rose64 (talk) 23:11, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
 * That was my understanding. Thanks for confirming I hadn't lost my marbles (yet). :)  Stevie is the man!  Talk • Work 00:00, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
 * There may be no MOS reason that the stub tags already prewsent are in that order, but I want to make it easy to see what I'm doing; if the removed tag and the added tag are in the same place, that's musch easier. And some times I also add the template in question to the summary (in the form of  ), which means that it's there 2 more times. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 10:31, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

And even for this task, the external tool I have been using to create the county geo-stub lists is no longer working, so I have an other use of the county name in the settings - in the list generator, where I use "Geography of * County, Tennessee". עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:33, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Od Mishehu, you can also carefully perform a find & replace on the settings file, which is human-readable and intuitively structured. It's not exactly user-friendly, but it works.  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  17:39, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I've been doing this; I want a more user-friendly solution. This would also make sure that I son't accidently mess up any of the mainingful strings (words like "true" and "false", the xml tag names, etc.) עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:03, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Option to increase number of articles loaded from Random pages
Very expensive query. Already requested, discussed and declined. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:09, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Can you give me a link to the discussion? I'm unable to find it by the search function. ... disco spinster   talk  13:11, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Update
I'd like to request a programming update the next time a new version is released. My apologies if this is something that's already been dealt with, but I thought I should raise it just in case.

What I'm finding is that when I do disambiguation runs, I'm running into an increasing number of links where the pipetext has been set off from the dablink by means of | instead of the conventional |. But the result of that ends up being that AWB doesn't recognize it as a link to be disambiguated — so instead of being able to fix it within AWB, I end up having to manually edit that link.

So is it possible to update AWB to recognize | as equivalent to pipe in a dab run? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 23:50, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Request
User:AryanSogd This has no use now in Wikipedia since all info is kept in Wikidata. Do you need these for Wikia? -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:47, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Make user-defined rules able to handle nested templates

 * Workaround: at the beginning of your rules/script, replace  (and variants) with   and create a subsequent rule to remove "REMOVE-CLOSING-BRACES}}" at the end of your script/rules. This speeds things up dramatically, but it would still be good to have a proper solution.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  17:31, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Add a "skip if page </> x bytes" option, where x is user-defined
Tom.Reding try: Skip if contains .{1,x} with Regex on. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:42, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Nice! I like it.  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  15:32, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
 * There seems to be a limit at "Skip if Contains: .{935,}". This 17 kB page is skipped only if ".{935,}" and lower, but not ".{936,}" and higher. ".{936,100000}" doesn't skip either. Is this an AWB problem or a regex engine one?
 * I haven't looked through bug reports yet, but will post✅ there if I can't fine one.  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  20:21, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I think the "skip" regex is being run against each paragraph separately, not the whole article. The longest paragraphs in that article have 935-ish characters. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:32, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Nope,  doesn't skip either.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  20:42, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Fix ref tags missing name

 * Rjwilmsi 11:06, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for making this change. Where should it be documented in WP:AWB/GF?  I added it to AutoWikiBrowser/History.  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 01:09, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Persistent crosswiki login for WMF wikis, and interwiki links

 * I came to request essentially the same thing, though in my case it's that all Wikia sites share the same accounts.JoshuaJSlone (talk) 16:51, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Remove format from Infobox television
See this discussion. It was suggested that I place a request here, so I am doing so. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:25, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
 * This has been completed by bots. GoingBatty (talk) 03:53, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Don't erase 'Edit box' text after being disconnected!

 * Are you aware of the "Replace text with last edit" option at the bottom of the right-click menu in the text box? I think that's supposed to handle this case; after the re-start, you should be able to select this and have a second attempt at saving your changes. -- John of Reading (talk) 05:22, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
 * No I was not; I'll give it a shot next time (or force it) and see if it solves this problem. Thanks!  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  12:31, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that works. I updated the status to exists.  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  15:57, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Make a "Skip list" tab that skips pages on the main list that are also on the "Skip list".

 * Does the list comparer not suffice? SiBr4 (talk) 17:03, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I wasn't familiar with this feature. It took me some time to find, but it looks fantastic.  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  17:21, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Move
See also== above ==Notes==, automatically ==

Add the full Disambiguation needed template when tagging a link
Jamesmcmahon0 I replaced dn with Disambiguation needed. Still not adding date parameter. It should be doable by just refreshing the page after adding the tag. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:07, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
 * There is a problem that if you reparse the page, AWB finds the Disambig link again and brings up the disambig dialogue box. Could the AWB logic be changed so that the disambiguation is done before general fixes etc. are applied? Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 15:31, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Add keyboard shortcut Alt+f to toggle between "If" and "Find" tabs in the "Replace Special" window

 * In most Windows browsers, brings down the File menu. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:31, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
 * The "Replace Special" window has no File menu :)  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  22:42, 21 March 2015 (UTC)