Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Automation

Category:United States military biographical stubs
About 800+ articles - I did this Friday plange 23:02, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

ACW stubs
I'd already set aside today to rip through those and I see it here as a task. Is it okay to assign myself? plange 23:04, 27 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Yeah, self-assignments are probably the best way to go with this; we're probably not going to have much luck forcing people to work on tasks they don't want to do ;-) Kirill Lokshin 23:19, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Sure, just edit the table so everyone knows it :) And move it to done section once it's done :) Thanks for your help! :) -- Grafikm  (AutoGRAF)  23:27, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

American Revolution
are there no stub categories for this? plange 02:06, 28 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Apparently not, at least not official ones; the list I put up is everything that's up on the main list of approved stub types. Kirill Lokshin 02:09, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

AWB bug report
Warning: it would seem the current version of AWB has a bug blanking talk pages. It was reported, but take double care when tagging articles :) -- Grafikm  (AutoGRAF)  11:37, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Just corrected, the version 3.0.2.5 fixes it. Yay to Bluemoose! :) -- Grafikm  (AutoGRAF)  12:05, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Stub search
Could you keep track on stubs concerning military history in the new article page, perhaps with the use of keywords? This way we could be enabled to run a basic review process on them to avoid the creation of dubious content. We discuss this project here: Stub review Wandalstouring 17:20, 28 August 2006 (UTC)


 * And not only stubs, for that matter. What would be really useful is some sort of script or bot which could parse the day's list of new pages for a selection of keywords (e.g. "battle", "war", "regiment", "siege", "division", etc.) and dump the resulting list of articles onto the new article subpage for inspection.  Kirill Lokshin 18:08, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
 * That doesn't sound too difficult. When I've finished my current todo list I'm gonna take a break from programming my plugin for a while, but I have thought about making version 2.0 into a "proper" bot which can find tasks to do and build it's own lists without the operator feeding it a list of articles as currently happens. I don't see any reason why this feature couldn't be added (but you'd have to remind me, and - repeat - not until I start talking about the next version :)) --kingboyk 09:59, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

New plugin for AWB!
kingbotk now supports tagging with MILHIST!! It's very cool, just testing it out now and it makes things so much easier! --plange 21:35, 16 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Nice! Kirill Lokshin 21:39, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Think I might need to apply for the full bot permission as this plugin works so well all I was doing was hitting save for ~500 articles! --plange 23:02, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Trouble is, you can't check stub-class in auto mode... at least that's what the description says... -- Grafikm  (AutoGRAF)  23:21, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Right. There's a stubclass template which WPBiography has integrated into our template with an auto=yes parameter. If WPMILHIST wants to implement that it's trivially easy for me to add the feature. Frankly the only reason I didn't do it is that I felt Kirill wouldn't like it and might bite my head off ;) I don't allow a normal "class=Stub" in bot mode because I think if an article is being assessed as Stub without someone reading it that fact should be recorded, and the article added to a category so a human can check it later. --kingboyk 08:51, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, what I would like to have is the following:
 * I take a whole "XXXX stubs" category (or rather their talk pages) as an input.
 * For each talk page:
 * If the article is already assessed, no matter the mark, skip it.
 * If not (or if the talk page does not exist) either update the existing tag by sticking "Stub" or by creating the whole WPMILHIST template.
 * Next article.
 * The whole thing would preferably be in wholly auto mode. Is this possible? :)
 * Thanks! -- Grafikm  (AutoGRAF)  16:18, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's what the plugin does. You just need to add an auto=yes parameter to your template and have me support it. (It doesn't matter what auto=yes does as far as I am concerned, just so long as you have it ;)). I suppose I could disable the code that turns off the Stub-Class checkbox in bot mode, but I think autotagging stubs is controversial enough without leaving behind a record that it's been done and inviting other editors to reassess. Thoughts?


 * I'm actually doing the same task right now for WPBiography (Category:Politician stubs) so if you have a look at my bot's contribs you can see it in action. --kingboyk 16:34, 17 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Hmm. It would be easy enough to add an "auto" parameter to the template; that might be the most convenient option here.  (It also gives us the ability to hide the tags later, if too many people start compaining ;-) ) Kirill Lokshin 16:57, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Okay, I've added a  parameter to WPMILHIST.  Kirill Lokshin 17:14, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Grafik, do you need this now (I'm doing a big new feature but I'm currently error free, so it will compile! :)), or can it wait until next version? (I'm happy to do it now, if you need it now). --kingboyk 17:18, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Not quick enough ;) I'm deep into coding changes now (User:Kingbotk/Plugin/Generic WikiProject templates) so I'll support this in the next release - probably tommorow, possibly tonight if I'm quick. --kingboyk 19:17, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * NEW VERSION with auto=yes ready. --kingboyk 21:26, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Here's a diff where the talk page already had an assessment, so the bot just added one missing parameter and reformatted it. If there's no changes at all it skips it. If it can't find a template using a strict regex, it searches with a looser regex and if that's positive it skips the page and logs it as a bad tag. If a talk page doesn't have an article (it's been deleted since the list was built) it skips it. If the template uses a different name but is a redirect, it recognises the different name and changes it to the preferred name (in your project's case it recognises "WPMILHIST|WikiProject Military History|WikiProject Military history" (actually the last one is redundant in my regex as I ignore case). In other words, it should be pretty robust and deals with most of the complaints I used to get (placing a second tag when the first one broke the regex, tagging a redlink page, etc). --kingboyk 17:10, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm tagging a small category from your todo list to test the auto-stub feature, and I noticed some template instances with an importance parameter. You've abandoned that, right? Do you want the plugin to remove any importance= params it finds? (I can do it the same as I deal with importance= for WPBio: if there are other changes, remove the param; if there are no other changes don't remove it unless the operator has selected the "force removal" option. --kingboyk 19:27, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
 * If it's not too difficult, that would be nice; but it's a minor enough point that you needn't bother if it's a lot of extra work for you. Kirill Lokshin 20:06, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Shouldn't be too difficult. I'll try and do it in the next update (i.e. the one after I release a new version shortly). --kingboyk 20:08, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, I've added that feature and it will be in the next release later this evening. --kingboyk 19:21, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

(unindent) adding the auto=yes is awesome, that was going to be my request too, since right now I'm going through the bio mil stubs and so just use the auto=yes in the bio tag, but will be done with that soon and so would need it for non-bio stubs...--plange 18:38, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Hey Plange, don't get neglecting WPBio now will you? There's a few outstanding topics on our talk page including a suggestion that we steal some ideas from (cough) the Military History WikiProject. Just don't get telling anyone, OK? - especially not that Kirill guy! ;) --kingboyk 19:26, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I won't :-) I saw that suggestion but I don't know how Kirill did it so will have to ask him... --plange 19:42, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

My bot is tagging Category:Royal Air Force stubs, so you can mark that category as done. (Sorry, I go into luddite mode when I see wiki tables). --kingboyk 21:26, 18 September 2006 (UTC) And Category:South African military stubs has also been done by kingbotk. --kingboyk 18:22, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm currently finishing up and testing the automatic upload of logs by my plugin. It uploads to the user's choice of destination, and - again if the user chooses - will upload any MilHist jobs to WikiProject Military history/Automation/Logs. In my testing phase I've been uploading very small logs, but in real operations I'll be recommending making them much larger (perhaps 1000 lines). Also, as the plugin is well tested now I don't see any real need for folks to use verbose logging (I use it, to check for problems).

Not sure how useful it is, but it didn't cost you anything! :) --kingboyk 10:04, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Maintainance of the request page
a bot could perhaps help us to maintain the requested articles page. if an requested article is found by the bot, it delets the request from the list.

Perhaps we could also apply this to the image requests. My proposal is to run it like the peer reviews, with a small template on the spot in the article where the image should be or below the article and above its categories. Wandalstouring 10:10, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships
Seeing the Encyclopædia Britannica articles category, I recently created a category for DANFS-sourced articles here. Just looking at "What links here" for the DANFS article, I see over 3,500 articles that might fit in such a category. Could someone create a bot to add them into the category? I don't have time to do it manually (obviously!), and I don't have the technical knowledge to make bots. Nyttend 16:13, 4 November 2006 (UTC)


 * If this category is necessary, (a) how about a shorter title? (b) can't you just add something to the template, DANFS?
 * —wwoods 18:45, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Automating status lists by category?
Not having worked with wikibots at all, I don't know how practical it is - but can this list be automated? Basically a list of articles belonging to a given set of categories, and their current article status. - Vedexent (talk) - 16:34, 19 November 2006 (UTC)


 * It would probably be possible in theory; but I'm not aware of any bots currently available that are capable of doing anything like that. Kirill Lokshin 17:07, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Then who, or what, is doing this: Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Military history articles by quality/1? :) - Vedexent (talk) - 19:32, 19 November 2006 (UTC)


 * That uses a (standardized) talk-page category, though. In other words, it's built based on the sub-categories of Category:Military history articles by quality; what you're looking for is reading an arbitrary article category and then trying to figure out what rating, if any, is on the corresponding talk page.  That's somewhat more complicated. Kirill Lokshin

Only somewhat. Such a bot can look up a category, extract the article names. Then is simply has to append Talk: to the front, go there, and parse out the quality tag from the WMPHIST tag, just as that bot does. It's one more web-retrieval operation, as far as I can see.

I guess what would be a good "next step" is contact the people who generate the automated list for Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Military history articles by quality/1, and see if the existing bot can be used, or perhaps modified. Who generates the lists for WPMHIST, and how does one find them? :) - Vedexent (talk) - 19:46, 19 November 2006 (UTC)


 * If you're curious: WP:1.0/I is where you want to look.
 * I should point out, though, that the bot doesn't work the way you think it does. It generates the tables from the categories directly; in other words, it doesn't parse the WPMILHIST tag (or any other project's tags) at all (and doesn't know how to).  Having the bot do any parsing of the actual tags would be a massive change to how it works.  (More to the point, the bot is designed to do 1.0 assessments; I don't really think trying to extend it to arbitrary computations would be practical in terms of either server load—it already takes half a day to run through the 1.0 lists—or programming necessity.) Kirill Lokshin 20:08, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Haven't read through all the above, but PockBot is a bot that does the above. It is currently in trial. Anyq uestions, please post up on my talk page. Cheers - PocklingtonDan 12:27, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Major issues
Going through some of the possible tagging routes, I've discovered an unfortunate issue. Consider, for example, Category:Wars involving the United States; one would expect that everything in it would be a military-related topic. In reality, however, it contains a number of single-topic sub-categories (e.g. Category:World War II) that contain a huge number of false positives.

The immediate effect of this is that automated tagging from high-level categories is out, except for a few limited cases. In the long run, we'll probably need to construct an explicit tree of sub-categories and verify each for tagging one-by-one. Kirill Lokshin 04:59, 21 February 2007 (UTC)