Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 5
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Archive 1 | ← | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | → | Archive 10 |
Bot for replacing images
Currently, png flag images are being replaced by superior svg versions. Replacing all of the instances personally will be rather tedious, and I think a bot would be much faster and more effective; alas, I don't know anything about bot programming, so I'd like to request assistance with this endeavour. ナイトスタリオン ✉ 07:55, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
- There has recently been a development of the Python wikipediabot to do this exact task. If you are still interested I'll investigate further.--Commander Keane 16:35, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
- I am also interested in something like this. While I will try out the new pywikipediabot function, I hope that something could be done to solve this issue. Zach (Smack Back) 22:57, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
- Has someone run a bot to replace all of the flags? I can do it if it still needs doing. Tawker 09:19, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
- I am also interested in something like this. While I will try out the new pywikipediabot function, I hope that something could be done to solve this issue. Zach (Smack Back) 22:57, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Duplicate link removal
Constantly edited articles, especially current events, are severely susceptible to linking to the same subjects more than once. Subjects linked in an article should be linked only once at usually the first instance of the subject keyword. Is there a bot that performs duplicate link removal? I imagine how the bot would function is first by indexing the links on a page, identifying links that occur more than once, and removing the additional links from the bottom of the article upward. Adraeus 19:16, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
- Anyone? Adraeus 03:46, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
- My citations bot is being rewritten, and logic to recognize several types of duplicate information is part of the tasks to be done. A side effect of the rewrite is that it will be easy to examine all the wikilinks. If nobody else tackles this, remind me in a few weeks or grab the code for parsing WikiSyntax from pywikipedia's standardize_notes.py. (SEWilco 08:16, 23 December 2005 (UTC))
- WP:AWB software has logic to do this, although it deliberately does not automatically remove the links. Martin 12:45, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
- I think this is a bad idea. If you use the table of contents at the top of an article to jump to a particular section, you would get many linkable topics without any links. Not very useful for navigation. First mention in a section might be a better policy. First mention of a topic only is too strict. Enforcing this policy via bot is too strict. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 14:47, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
- Well you should take it up with the manual of style, but it is for the reasons you give that software does not do it automatically, and it certainly shouldn't be done with a fully automatic bot. Martin 14:56, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
- I wasn't aware of this in the MOS. I just updated Hairspray_(movie) because Divine was listed in the intro as a link but not elsewhere. Further down the page, there is a list of the cast, where he isn't linked, which looks really strange (because everyone else is linked). Linking only once makes sense but not in an instance like this. --geekyßroad 01:44, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
- The manual of style states "a link is repeated in the same article (although there may be case for duplicating an important link that is distant from the previous occurrence)" so i think its quite clear that human judgement is needed before removing additional links. Plugwash 01:48, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
- I used to share your thinking about redundant links, but eventually I came to realize the same thing as Martin above. It makes a lot more sense to make this a one-link-per-section enforcement bot. But even that could be too restrictive in particular cases, like when a link is represented in different ways, on purpose. — Stevie is the man! Talk | Work 21:30, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Backlog bot
Looking over Category:Wikipedia backlog, I notice several perennial backlogs for which a bot may be of assistance. I would like to hear the opinion of people more versed in botting than I am. In particular, I think the Move To Wiktionary/Wikibooks/Meta may be bottable (it probably requires a human doublecheck to see if things are properly tagged, but after that transwiking is still a lot of work and a bot would automatically fill in the transwiki log)
Wikipedia:Duplicated sections is about the old bug that doubled parts of pages. This sounds like something a bot could plausibly fix.
Would it be feasible to help out Special:Uncategorizedpages and/or Wikipedia:List of lists/uncategorized by using bots to categorize them using some keywords found on the page?
I don't suppose Category:Articles that need to be wikified could be meaningfully aided by a bot?
My first thought about Wikipedia:Templates with red links would be to employ a bot to strip the redlinks from the templates, but that's probably not what people want.
And finally, Category:NowCommons sounds mechanical enough that a bot might work but I'm not sure about that.
Comments please? Radiant_>|< 23:53, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
- All those things critically need some human interaction, at the moment I am working on a browser-cum-bot that will be able to function in this manner, in a similar fashion to User:Humanbot, but much more advanced and versatile ;) well thats if I ever get it finished anyway. Martin 00:13, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
UTC/DST bot?
This is probably a stupid point (and a bot may be doing it already), but I noticed on a visit to a random US city that an anon had corrected the infobox to account for an additional hour of difference with UTC after Daylight Saving Time ended. Could a bot, or other automation, do this sort of thing en masse on the appropriate dates instead? Xoloz 19:22, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
- imo really shouldn't be making periodic (twice anual) changes to articles in this way for a periodic change. we should be documenting what the periodic change is (in this case mentioning both the base timezone and the dst rules)!
- Would a template that does this add too much load?
Convert infoboxes
There are many album articles that use an old infobox, see here. I'm sure a well-programmed bot could do these conversions quickly and easily. It would save a lot of work for us (members of the project). Thanks for listening, I hope someone's up to the task. Gflores Talk 06:36, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
- Could you provide a diff of an infobox being properly converted? —Cryptic (talk) 06:54, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
- Here you go. [1]. Gflores Talk 07:00, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
- Hrm. So it's not just a conversion of an old template to a new one, but changing hardcoded tables. Glancing through a dozen or so of the articles listed on Wikipedia:Wikiproject Albums/Needs infobox conversion, I'm finding a lot of variance in the formatting used. Are there a lot more to do than what's currently listed there? If that page is exhaustive, it would be almost as easy to do them all by hand. —Cryptic (talk) 07:47, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
- Not as bad as I thought; all the ones I checked seem to be direct substs of various revisions of {{Album infobox}}. This looks feasible. I'll see what I can put together. —Cryptic (talk) 08:09, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
- That would be fantastic. On the talk pages, users are saying there may be twice or maybe three times as many articles with old-style infoboxes than what is listed. Believe me, it's not fun doing it manually... ;) I did notice that there is some variance in the formatting used... some don't even have the Professional Reviews header at all. Hopefully you can use your 1337 Perl hacking skills to find a way. If not, oh well. Thanks for considering this. :) Gflores Talk 08:59, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
- Mh. Do you think the same bot, or a slight modification of it, could be used to make all country articles use the standard infobox? ナイトスタリオン ✉ 12:09, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
- Do you have a list of country articles that need fixing? —Cryptic (talk) 01:33, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
- I'll start discussion at Template talk:Infobox Country and get back to you soon, okay? Thanks in advance! ナイトスタリオン ✉ 10:01, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
- As mentioned in Tt:Infobox Country, I'm working on a template extraction bot for the country infoboxes. As a side effect of a new design, that bot will probably be easily extended to understand the structure of the templates so translations between variations of those infoboxes can be done. At present I'm coding the action logic for this specific task as I haven't identified a way to generalize the tasks for more general manipulations. (SEWilco 08:06, 23 December 2005 (UTC))
- I'll start discussion at Template talk:Infobox Country and get back to you soon, okay? Thanks in advance! ナイトスタリオン ✉ 10:01, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
- Do you have a list of country articles that need fixing? —Cryptic (talk) 01:33, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
- Here you go. [1]. Gflores Talk 07:00, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
NowCommons
Hi, A bot for clearing the never-ending backlog at NowCommons is needed to do the following tasks:
- The {{NowCommons}} on images should be replaced with {{NowCommonsThis}}, if the image is uploaded to commons with the same name.
- It should check whether the file exists on commons.
- And whether The entry has proper copyright information on the commons page and proper attribution is given to the uploader/creator and the file history is copied in the case of GFDL'ed images.
If the bot can do task 1, that alone would considerably speed up the whole process. Thanks in advance. --Pamri • Talk 07:00, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
- Another crucial task for the bot would be to point to the images at commons in articles, in the case of images that are uploaded to commons with a different name. --Pamri • Talk 07:25, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
- Funny that you mention it...on es: just last week we did something similar. I wrote a bot that checked all of es:'s images and checked if commons had an image with the same title. If it did, the image description was marked with a template. This not only helped us to find images that we had on es: as well as on commons, it also helped us find images with name conflicts. Ex: "Mango.jpg" on es: and "Mango.jpg" on commons were not the same picture and consequently "mango.jpg" was inaccessible from es:. Humans than came by and confirmed whether they were identical images or they were a problem name, and acted accordingly. I would be more than willing to run this bot on en:, but I don't have a flag...perhaps I could pass the code to a bot operator here? Cheers--Orgullomoore 08:44, 5 December 2005 (UTC) Oh yeah, its in python and based heavily on pywikipedia
- Thanks for the info. We may possible need to modify it here, since it need not run on all images, but just the ones tagged at nowcommons. I think we can contact someone listed at Wikipedia:Bot who has a flag to run it. Or someone could apply for it. If you don't want to run it, I could do it too, but only after january. --Pamri • Talk 17:52, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
Spell Check
Could a bot be made to check commonly mispelled words? it sounds obvious but a lot of articles are hard to find because of spelling errors in the titles Veritas Liberum 22:29 6 December 2005 (GMT)
- No, according to WP:BOT#Spell-checking_bots, theses bots should never be used. Unless I suppose you did not wish to fix them, but just find them, that's OK.--
Max
Talk (add) • Contribs • 06:16, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
close parens SPACE character
There is a popular grammar error of entering a parenthetical remark, and then not putting a space between the close paren and the rest of the text. A bot could look for these fairly easy. Sample: George Bush (the current President)doesn't like brocolli. SchmuckyTheCat 22:39, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
- (Yes, that would more properly be an appositive. It's an example, get over it.) SchmuckyTheCat 22:40, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
- Doing this is a bit more complex than you'd first think. There are lots of exceptions, such as 501(c)3; blocks of code like
printf("Hello world\n")
; mathematics like ; markup (particularly CSS styling); plurals like 'enter your modification(s) in the text box; brackets used as delimiters for groups of letters in a word in linguistics; and probably more... Cmdrjameson 15:15, 18 January 2006 (UTC) - Close parens,2+non space chars. There are about 6500 of these, most (90%+) are errors. I'll see what I can do. Rich Farmbrough 00:22 8 March 2006 (UTC).
Small-image batch uploader
For Wikibooks:Castle of the Winds, I need to upload dozens of 32x32x4bpp icons to use in the monster and item tables. Could a bot be written to do this as a batch operation and convert them to PNG? The most convenient way, for this use, would be to extract all the icons from the Windows executable (which I could upload). Seahen 16:19, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
- Would that be ok in terms of copyright? I don't know if that would really count as fair use - anyone want to clarify? BadgerBadger 21:34, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
- the entire game, data and binaries, was released into the public domain according to the wikibook. Sparr 22:16, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
- Check out Reshacker: http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/, that can extract the images. Insomniacity 11:09, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
- Reshacker won't handle CotW because it's a 16-bit program. Even if it would, that wouldn't solve the problem of uploading. Seahen 19:38, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
Bot request for fixing movie infobox
Currently template:Infobox Film has parameters like this:
{{Infobox Film | name = | image = | caption = | director = | producer = | writer = | starring = | music = | cinematography = | editing = | distributor = | release_date = | runtime = | language = | budget = | imdb_id = }}
However, many old movie pages used differnet titles for the same thing. For example, some use "movie_language" instead of the (now) correct "language". Could someone write a bot to change the incorrect titled fields in all the movie pages to the correct titles for these fields. Here's a list of what we would need (and this would be for all pages that use the Infobox Film template only):
- movie_language should be changed to language
- image caption should be changed to caption
- movie_name should be changed to movie
- original_score should be changed to music
- "awards" field and what ever follows "=" in the template should be removed, same for
- "proceeded by" and "followed by" (these were in some old movie templates but are no longer used)
This bot was first mentioned by Bobet 17:22, 10 December 2005 (UTC). This would be very helpful, then we could finally get all the movie page templates to be the same.
I know this is a very tough task but it would help greatly. Going to see King Kong Steve-O 13:47, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Whoops, for some reason you can't see the template here. I suck. You can see it at the talk page for the template.... —preceding unsigned comment by Steve Eifert (talk • contribs) 13:48, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
- Should instead be fixed with default template parameters (ie, instead of using {{{language}}}, use {{{language|{{{movie_language}}}}}}). Otherwise, this is a very large amount of work (every article that transcludes {{Infobox Film}} - there are about 2250 - would need to be checked) for no enduser gain whatsoever (the only difference is what you see when you edit the article). —Cryptic (talk) 16:48, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I am handling this request with User:NetBot. -- Netoholic @ 18:22, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Supreme Court Cases bot
There should be a bot that generates nice information for Supreme Court cases, possibly also including links to Oyez, etc. wdaher 07:51, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
- Hi Wdaher, this sounds interesting, can you post something on my talk page explaining exactly what you would like? Bear in mind I am a complete lay person with regards to legal matters, so use small words and talk slowly ;) Smitz 20:18, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
Bot for uncategorized pages
Could a bot go over the articles and tag uncategorized ones with {{uncategorized}}? Maintenance categories should be ignored (like stubs, clean ups) also categories like from {{1911}} or Category:xxxx births/deaths. This would create real-time editable uncategorized pages storage. Now Special:Uncategorized are not editable, are limited to 1000 pages, often neglected to refresh, etc. It would really foster categorization efforts. Renata3 20:52, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Reference desk bot
Could a bot be used to notify users when they get a reply to their question on the Reference desk? Bart133 21:13, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
- I think that would be a great idea. They should also notify users when the question is archived, with or without an answer, and where it may be found. Seahen 23:31, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
Typo fixer
I'm part of Wikipedia:Typo and I've been fixing typos in this way: Using this google search, I extract the names of the pages unto a text file using a simple program I wrote. From there I load it up on AutoWikiBot and fill in the appropriate search and replace fields and make the necessary changes. I hit save for each one and very rarely is there a false positive. However, I know that this could easily be done with a bot, which would save time doing this manually. Any takers? Gflores Talk 03:04, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
- I dont think auto spell checking bots are allowed, see Wikipedia:Bots#Spell-checking_bots. Martin 11:58, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
- Yes, I realize that, but I think that rule applies for searching in an article for any spelling mistakes. What I'm saying is changing one specific type of spelling error (decieved --> deceived). The issues in that page don't apply (US/British spellng) and there is virtually no chance of error for most words. Again, only the pages listed under the google search would be corrected. I don't see what's the difference between a bot doing it and someone else doing it using AWB. I corrected about 1000 or so and I did not find one correction that was a mistake. Gflores Talk 01:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
- The hard part is parsing google's output, which you already seem to have done. From here, it's a simple matter of fetching each page, doing a search and replace, and posting it. If you have access to a system that can run perl, I can write the bot for you; I'm not going to run it under my own bot's account, though. —Cryptic (talk) 16:13, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
- Well, I'm using the AutoWikiBrowser by User:Bluemoose (who recently quit). It gets the results from google and does the find and replace. I'm using that, but it looks like I'm going to have to get a bot account, b/c I'm making too many edits in a short amount of time. It's only semi-automatic, I still have to hit 'Save' again and again. I'm also uncertain how other users feel about this method of fixing typos. Gflores Talk 22:38, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
- It's conceivable that there might be some places where a word is intentionally mispelled for some purpose, e.g. Spelling Pimlottc 13:07, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
- The hard part is parsing google's output, which you already seem to have done. From here, it's a simple matter of fetching each page, doing a search and replace, and posting it. If you have access to a system that can run perl, I can write the bot for you; I'm not going to run it under my own bot's account, though. —Cryptic (talk) 16:13, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
- Yes, I realize that, but I think that rule applies for searching in an article for any spelling mistakes. What I'm saying is changing one specific type of spelling error (decieved --> deceived). The issues in that page don't apply (US/British spellng) and there is virtually no chance of error for most words. Again, only the pages listed under the google search would be corrected. I don't see what's the difference between a bot doing it and someone else doing it using AWB. I corrected about 1000 or so and I did not find one correction that was a mistake. Gflores Talk 01:48, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
subst ll template
Can someone run a one time bot to subst all uses of the ll template. i.e. replace all: {{ll|Foo}}) with {{subst:ll|Foo}})
You can use this page to feed the bot. 67.165.96.26 23:30, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
Featured Article Review
See WP:FAF, which documents how featured articles have changed so they can be continually evaluated with WP:FAR. FAF lists articles with a link to the version that was originally approved and a diff showing the changes since then. It is quite tedious to crawl through the history of the talk page, find the date the featured template was added, compare it to the history of the article and add the revision id to FAF. Could this be automated? All or virtually all of the talk pages had the featured template added in an edit with the summary "{{featured}}" or "{{msg:featured}}". Using the date of that revision, a bot could presumably get the id of the version that was current at that time, and add it to WP:FAF. Tuf-Kat 06:05, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
Q) bot usage
I want to know about bot commands :
- 1. to delete "all" articles or images command in a specific category daily.
- 2. to get a article list "by written date" AND article summary="delete request" in a specific category.
- 3. to get a article list "by user" AND article summary="delete request" in a specific category.
- 4. to notify "{{sample}}" to article's first and second write user talk page, and write a summary="{{sample}}"
- 5. to find recent 7 days articles as summary="aa" -- WonYong 23:11, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
Redirect bot
It would be really awesome if someone could write a bot to automatically fix single redirects (that is, when A links to B, and B is a redirect to C, the bot would insert C into A, piping B, [[C|B]], that is.) --maru (talk) Contribs 02:03, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
- personally it pisses me off when people "fix" single redirects. it puts trash in my watchlist display and loads of piped links make wikitext harder to read (which is never a good thing). Plugwash 02:07, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
- Agreed. Many such redirects should not be fixed, e.g. Category:Redirects with possibilities. A bot to do this for some of the other redirect categories (particularly Category:Redirects from misspellings) might be in order, but certainly not for all redirects. —Cryptic (talk) 02:16, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
- What would be great is changing links that are already piped, and that point to redirects that are not in Category:Redirects with possibilities, to point to the real target article. I have seen and manually fixed a bunch of these, so they seem common enough to deserve a bot. I don't know of any situation in which that would be an undesirable edit (if such a thing was a bot, I believe its edits would not show up on recent-changes pages, which includes watchlists?).
- If this proposal or a variant of it is okay, I'd like to write the bot to do it (because, e.g., programming is fun). (Is looking at the pywikipedia bots' code and wikipedia.py a right way to go about figuring out how to write a bot? Is there more bot-coding-related documentation somewhere?) —Isaac Dupree(talk) 21:54, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
- I still disagree with the idea of a bot changing non-piped links into piped ones. both because it makes the wikitext harder to read and because Category:Redirects with possibilities is unlikely to be comprehensive. Chaging known misspellings (don't pipe in this case just replace). Really stupid stuff like linking to one redirect to a page whilst using the title of another and linking to a redirect and titling it with the articles real name would be good to clean up too. Other existing piped links should probablly require manual approval of the change after a human has checked for a pluralisation piping for a redirect with a possibility. Plugwash 23:28, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
- We need to make things clearer; it looks like, e.g., Plugwash thought someone had disagreed with his first comment, when it seems neither Cryptic nor I did. Therefore I present a list of cases that may be considered wiki-editable by anyone, including adding to the list; the analyses presented there should reflect the discussion, though, which may continue after the list. —Isaac Dupree(talk) 11:33, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
- Agreed. Many such redirects should not be fixed, e.g. Category:Redirects with possibilities. A bot to do this for some of the other redirect categories (particularly Category:Redirects from misspellings) might be in order, but certainly not for all redirects. —Cryptic (talk) 02:16, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
- [[Redirect]] -> [[Direct|Redirect]]: A bot should never do this without more information (such as in disambiguation); there is disagreement over whether it should be done at all, aside from disambiguation.
- [[Redirect|text]] -> [[Direct|text]] where Redirect is in Category:Redirects with possibilities: Should not be done.
- [[Redirect|text]] -> [[Direct|text]] where Redirect is not in Category:Redirects with possibilities: Usually fine. A bot wouldn't notice if Redirect should be in Category:Redirects with possibilities, despite not being there. I may note that many humans wouldn't notice either, not knowing that redirects may have possibilities.
- [[text|texting]] -> [[text]]ing: Good.
Article list for "related changes"
I wrote a java program to generate a list of all articles which link to {{Numismaticnotice}} and are thus part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Numismatics. Actually, I manually use "What links here" and cut and paste into a file. The program then takes that file and formats it so I can cut and paste back to Wikipedia:WikiProject Numismatics/Articles. I try to do this about once a week. I also ran it for the folks at Wikipedia:WikiProject Hawaii, and someone asked if I could make it a bot. I am relatively new here and know nothing about bots. Is this the sort of job that could be done by a bot? I'm sure other projects would appreciate it too. Ingrid 18:24, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
- How much Python do you know? There is a Python Wikipedia Robot Framework in which you could work out of, or I could assist you with. --AllyUnion (talk) 00:54, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
- I've never heard of Python. In my past life (5+ years ago) I was a programmer, so I was going to say that I should be able to pick it up quickly. However, in my current life, I'm a mom who is constantly distracted and doesn't get enough sleep, so who knows. Ingrid 04:51, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
To make matters more complicated, the list that I get from "what links here" suddenly got a lot smaller. It appears to be because some of the template references include "template". So, instead of having {{Numismaticnotice}}, lots of pages have {{template:Numismaticnotice }} or sometimes {{Template:Numismaticnotic}}, and unfortunately there may be others slight changes but I don't know. I haven't updated the list, so the one at articles (link above) is still the full list. Is there a bot that can go through those articles and fix them? Or is it a bug? The template looks right on the page. An example is at Talk:History of the English penny (1066-1154). Ingrid 05:15, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't know if I should post here or start a new entry at the bottom of the page. I guess I'll start here, and see if I get any replies. I have ported my java code to python, and have downloaded the pywikipediabot. Would someone mind helping me get started? Pywikipediabot intimidates me, and I just don't know where to begin. Ingrid 02:11, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
Bot for collecting similar type of information from the net
Hi, I need a bot which I can use to gather some information of the same kind from the net. I will also edit part of it by hand. More specifically I would like to have a bot so that I can organize the World Univeristies: basic information, their history, famous people taught or educated at these institutions, etc, etc. Is there a bot I can use for this purpose? If not, can anybody generate it for me? I would appreciate if somebody could help. I am pretty new to the bot business so the information you will provide should be rather soft. Thanks,
Resid Gulerdem 03:48, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
- If you know a resource which has a lot of the information you need available to the public without copyright, and in a predictable format it might be possible.
For example, you can find just about any movie at IMDB and it will tell you the date released, who is in it, and all sorts of other information. The problem with a resource like IMDB is that the information belongs to IMDB (see IMDB#Copyright_issues). However, since it sounds like you are after statistics and factoids it might be legal to use a bot to collect this information which you then interpret and enter into wikipedia.
Unfortunately, without a resource which has already organized this information once, it would require a bot of extraordinary abilities to make any sense of the internet and find what you need. I hope I understood your question. --Phil Harnish (Info | Talk) 08:59, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
- If you know a resource which has a lot of the information you need available to the public without copyright, and in a predictable format it might be possible.
Nowiki templates in log archives
Wikipedia:Deletion log and Wikipedia:Upload_log are both repositories for the old logs from before 2005 that are not recorded in the current logs. However, since they are now in the Wikipedia namespace, all the wiki syntax in the deletion reason fields and upload summaries become real. As a result, any dozens of templates named in those fields have become real templates, like {{stub}}s in deletion reasons and {{GFDL}}s in upload logs, and the pages are now inappropriately in categories. Could someone create a one-time script that will go through all those log archives and <nowiki> any templates contained in them (there should be none)? Dmcdevit·t 07:28, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
- If it is true, that templates should be disabled in log reports, perhaps a bug report would be apropriate? Really, I'm asking. --Phil Harnish (Info | Talk) 20:50, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
- It's not the currect log reports, like at special:log or special:log/protect, etc. but the old ones, which were stored in the Wikipedia namespace. Similar to how you can put {{stub}} in an edit summary and it doesnt show up, but when you write it in the edit field it does. Dmcdevit·t 03:25, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Bot to add a template table to the end of list of articles
A bot would be really helpful to add Template:Time Person of the Year to all of the different pages that the template links to. Thanks for your help. P-unit 00:04, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
- Has the usefulness and validity of this template been discussed anywhere?--Commander Keane 00:31, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Mass move bot
Looking for a bot that can or which can be modified (by me) to perform a large series of simple moves on articles with a certain name format. Something that can take regular expressions would be ideal, and perform a substitution on the name a la sed to form the new name. It should use the normal WP move operation to retain redirects on the old names. Prefer something that runs under Unix and preferably not Python unless it can work out of the box with only configuration or arguments.
Purpose is for a move of area codes to be non-US-centric as per discussion in Talk:North American Numbering Plan. - Keith D. Tyler ¶ 22:37, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
- Suggest the name User:WillyBot (In Memory) ;) —Ilyanep (Talk) 22:39, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
- User:Uncle G's major work 'bot has moved the occasional mountain before. ☺ If this is a once-off thing, I might be able to help. Uncle G 16:13, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
- I'm still awaiting a consensus on the relevant talk pages. It appears that whilst there's agreement that the current article titles are ambiguous, there's no agreement on what the new article titles should be. Uncle G 11:34, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
It is a company with a major specialization in military history and is frequently cited as a reference on Wikipedia military history pages. I recently created a stub article on it, and would like a bot to go through and Wikify the current plaintext on the several hundred pages to read Osprey Publishing instead of Osprey Publishing. Palm_Dogg 19:47, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
That shouldn't be too hard :) Xxpor 14:36, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
I started working on it with User:Xbot
Disambiguation bot for music genres
I was wondering if it is possible to create a bot to handle music genre links that point to disambiguation pages, such pop, rock, LP, heavy metal, folk, indie, punk, rap, emo, hip hop, album, EP, hip-hop (should point to hip hop music, country, bluegrass. and probably a couple others, and exchange them with their proper links. The bot would only search in articles with the Template:Album infobox and Template:Infobox Band, so as to avoid incorrect edits. Any takers? Comments? Gflores Talk 03:59, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
- I'm on it. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 02:21, Jan. 19, 2006
- That's great! I added a few more things for dabs. Let me know if you have any questions. You can also post on the WP:ALBUMS talk page. Gflores Talk 02:59, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
- Note that album (music) got moved to album at some point, so all infoboxes linking to album are now correct. Perhaps there are a few false positives mixed in with them, though. I've pretty much finished with most of them, but "country" will be hard, because it's not a disambiguation page being linked to. I need some sleep, I've been at this almost 30 hours. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 09:00, Jan. 21, 2006
- That's great! I added a few more things for dabs. Let me know if you have any questions. You can also post on the WP:ALBUMS talk page. Gflores Talk 02:59, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Capitalisation
I'm requesting a bot to change pages linking to the wrong capitalisation pages to the correct titles:
- XBox -> Xbox
- Playstation -> PlayStation
- Playstation 2 -> PlayStation 2
- Gamecube -> Nintendo GameCube (or [[Nintendo GameCube|GameCube]])
Will this be possible? --Thorpe | talk 18:41, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
- Some similar ones:
- [[Gameboy]] → [[Game Boy line|Game Boy]]
- [[Gameboy Advance]] → [[Game Boy Advance]]
- [[GameBoy Advance]] → [[Game Boy Advance]]
- [[Gameboy Color]] → [[Game Boy Color]]
- Nikai 13:05, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
Malformed external links
There are a large number of external links which are not functioning because the editor who added them mistakenly used the pipe symbol (|) as it is used in internal wikilinks rather than just a space, or sometimes a pipe and then a space.
E.g. Wrong [http://www.bbc.co.uk|BBC Website]
- Wrong [http://www.bbc.co.uk| BBC Website]
- Right [http://www.bbc.co.uk BBC Website]
Can a bot be created to automatically put these external links in the correct format? --Spondoolicks 16:29, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
Dead external links
Is anyone working on bots for Wikipedia:Dead external links? Please reply on my talk page as well as below. Thanks. --James S. 05:45, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Cycle hitters
I would like a bot that could add a Category tag (Category:Hit for the cycle)to all the baseball players who have hit for the cycle (there is a list at that page). zellin t / c 17:47, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
- DOne - cat Baseball players who have hit for the cycle.Rich Farmbrough 22:36 11 June 2006 (GMT).
Subst a few templates
The {{cl}} and {{tl}} templates are widely used on wikipedia, however, it would probably be beneficial to subst: most of their use), if only because they are solely sued as a quick shortcut. This would be best doneon a semi-regular basis so that some pages where the templates are actually useful, such as WP:WSS/ST or pages listing templates can be reverted and removed from later substing. This could cover several of the templates in Category:Internal link templates. Circeus 20:06, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
- Yes, they are widely used, AND Wikipedia:Template substitution#Templates that should NOT be subst'd, and confirmed on the talk page.... This is a bad idea!
Duplicate image finder
- Not sure if it's a good idea for bandwidth, etc. but a bot that went around all the languages and commons and checked for duplicate images would be nice.
- If not actually downloading them and checking that the files are the same, it could at least add links from identically-titled images to each other (on various languages and commons). — Omegatron 00:38, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
I'll give it some thought... But how would one go about this? downloading each file individualy and checking md5sums? Honestly, this seems like something that would be best performed by someone with access to the boxes, so to preserve bandwidth and time. Jmax- 23:19, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
- You can compare the files bit by bit. Computing md5s would be counterproductive. Yes, it would be better for someone with access to the servers to do it. Or maybe have it download the database dumps and run on those? — Omegatron 00:03, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
- Actually, you could run an image comparison algorithm and find copies of the same images that have been resized, too. :-) — Omegatron 00:04, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
"Future" bot
It seems there are many pages that change yearly (logo of Super Bowl winner, picture of Miss America winner, names/cabinet/etc. of presidents, etc.) that could use one of two things. a) a {future} tag to high-light the fact that yearly changes need to be made. and/or b) have the bot automatically submit edit requests. Waarmstr 04:27, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
- Great idea. I can see three cases to handle here:
- Regular periodic events (President of the United States, Miss America) - Automatically submit edit requests each period.
- Determinate expected events (2018 Winter Olympics, 79th Academy Awards) - Automatically submit an edit request after a specified date.
- Indetermate expected events (Harry Potter: Book Seven, Indiana Jones 4) - Automatically submit an edit request after a specified (best-guess) date. Users should manually reset this as necessary if the event still hasn't occurred yet.
- Pimlottc 13:35, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
banned-user image finder
I have been asking around about whether it would be possible to write a bot that would produce a list of all images uploaded by indefinitely blocked users. Based on my own experience, it seems like at least 75% or so of such images are unencyclopedic, orphaned, copyvios, or similarly inappropriate. Thoughts? Thanks, Chick Bowen 18:19, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
- Note that these users are listed at Special:Ipblocklist with an expiration of "infinite." Chick Bowen 18:22, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
- Yes, it's possible. Would it be easier to do it manually, though?--Orgullomoore 03:11, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
- I'm working an a script to detect these. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 03:36, Feb. 15, 2006
- Thanks, F of N! I tried doing it manually as Orgullomoore suggested; since there are thousands of blocked users and many of them have no edits at all (all edits deleted, or blocked for username violation before they could edit), but since you can't tell that until you look at the contribs, it was unbelievably inefficient. You can't even sort the list by block length, which would be helpful. Chick Bowen 05:43, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
- Yes, it's possible. Would it be easier to do it manually, though?--Orgullomoore 03:11, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
Album (music ) to Album bot
There are thousands of music albums on Wikipedia that link to Album (music). However the Album (music) page just redirects to the actual Album page. Can a bot be written to repoint these to the Album page instead of continuously going through a redirect. I'd write one myself and get approval but I don't know how to write one to do this. I've been changing the links when I've come across them but there are thousands of them (and thousands that link directly to Album so just moving and redirecting the other way won't work). Ben W Bell 10:54, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
- See Wikipedia:Redirect#Don't fix redirects that aren't broken. If we tell human editors that they shouldn't be fixing these, we shouldn't have bots do it (unless they're already editing the article for a different reason anyway). —Cryptic (talk) 16:02, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
- Agree... only double-redirects and links directly to disambiguation pages are problem. -- Netoholic @ 03:07, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
Perverted-Justice conviction/bust update bot
The Perverted-Justice.com article lists an ongoing total for the number of convcitions and number of busts that are listed on the website the article is about. Since this number changes so frequently, and I think it wouldn't be difficult to automatically retrieve it, I thought it might be a good idea if someone could write a bot to automatically update this. I was thinking that the bot could run once weekly, pull the recent conviction/bust count, and update the approprait sections in the article. Possible? Reasonable? Fieari 16:21, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
- Possible? yes. Reasonable? Personally, I don't think so. Jmax- 04:26, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
- If the number changes frequently, rewrite the article so it doesn't need the exact number. Instead of "43 convictions", for instance, use "more than 40 convictions" (and include an as of link). --cesarb 00:34, 2 February 2006 (UTC)