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A bot to add missing diacritics

Many articles omit diacritics from place names and personal names, but they can't generally be fixed by a bot because it's not possible to distinguish automatically when diacritics should be added and when not. However, there are a lot of redirects to ensure that links go from the no-diacritic version to the correctly titled article (e.g. Dusseldorf, Amelie Mauresmo). The presence of such a link could be used by a bot to make the necessary determination about what to fix. What I propose is:

For every link whose text contains no diacritics and which leads to a redirect whose target is exactly the same except for the addition of diacritics, replace the original link text by the redirect target. And then scan the article for any occurrences of the same source string and make the same replacement.

It would need to bypass disambiguation pages, which are likely to legitimately contain several variations (Valparaiso (disambiguation), for example), and it would need to exclude pages in the purview of Wikipedia:WikiProject Ice Hockey, as they've evolved their own naming conventions for player names, but otherwise it should be able to operate everywhere. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:41, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

This seems like it would have issues with WP:R#NOTBROKEN and WP:BFDB#Spell-checking bots. Mr.Z-man 19:19, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

There are no issues with WP:R#NOTBROKEN because what it would fix is the source text, not the redirect. And there are no issues with WP:BFDB#Spell-checking bots because it wouldn't be working blindly from a predefined set of spelling corrections, it would be using the redirects that human editors have created as its guide to what needs to be changed. Colonies Chris (talk) 22:25, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

There should almost never be a reason to replace [[redirect]] with [[target|redirect]]. Isn't that pretty much what its doing? Mr.Z-man 02:13, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

No, that's not what it would be doing. It would, for example, replace "Dusseldorf" by "Düsseldorf" in the source article. NOTBROKEN prohibits redirect/piping fixes where what's visible to the reader doesn't change, which is not the case here. What I'm suggesting here is a special type of automated spelling correction which would operate on a tightly circumscribed domain and use the presence of human-created redirects to discover what corrections should be made . Colonies Chris (talk) 10:59, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

NOTBROKEN's piping example is only an example. It also covers, as specified in the first paragraph, replacing [[redirect]] with [[target]]. However, I'm not that concerned about NOTBROKEN as it does allow for occasions when it would be is beneficial (like spell errors). Correcting diacritics could be considered beneficial.

I'm just not sure this is a good idea for bot. Possible it could be done for a predefined set, but I don't think it should done automatically for all redirects in Category:Redirects from title without diacritics. I'm not sure that there would be clear consensus on all of them as to which is the "proper" form. This may be better suited for a semi-automatic task. -- JLaTondre (talk) 16:43, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

The issue of what is the 'proper' form can only be resolved by looking at the title of the article. Even if there's a dispute, that is de facto the consensus at the time, and the bot would just make sure that references to that article all use the same form as the article's title. However, to avoid getting caught in the middle of a naming war, the bot should perhaps only operate on articles whose name has been stable for a while - say a month. Colonies Chris (talk) 07:45, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it's that simple. Diacritics can be considered similar to regional spelling variations. For example, color and colour. The article is at color with colour being the redirect. However, we don't "correct" all occurrences of colour to color per WP:ENGVAR. You gave Dusseldorf as an example above. A Google News search shows that many English newspapers use Dusseldorf instead of Düsseldorf. In English, many times diacritics are dropped.

There is a small number of words (such as café/cafe, perhaps) where both versions are acceptable - these could be excluded, but in general, the name that WP has agreed on (the title of the article) should be the one we use throughout the encyclopaedia. The fact that English-language media often omit diacritics doesn't affect that. Colonies Chris (talk) 17:27, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Unless you can point to an established guideline, that seems like a personal preference. It's one I share, but I'm not sure a bot should implement such changes without wider agreement (such as after a Village Pump discussion). However, I wouldn't object to the bot operation on those grounds. It's merely a suggestion to avoid potential issues. -- JLaTondre (talk) 18:37, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

However, my biggest concern with using the category to automatically populate a bot is that there are many redirects in there that are not simply diacritic changes. Random example: Duesseldorf-Altstadt redirects to Altstadt (Düsseldorf). If this goes forward, the list should be built manually vs. taken from the category. -- JLaTondre (talk) 14:03, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether you're objecting that the bot would do the wrong thing with your example - it wouldn't: as the source and target text differ by much more than diacritics, it would do nothing - or that it wouldn't fix it, which is true, but it's not trying to do everything. Colonies Chris (talk) 17:27, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

If the bot operates against everything marked as a diacritic redirect, it most certainly will make replacements like that. The point I'm making is that the diacritic redirect template is not used on just diacritic differences and the bot cannot work from the template alone without causing problems. It would need to work from a filtered list. While it may be possible to do that programmaticaly, I think a human generated list would cause less problems. -- JLaTondre (talk) 18:37, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I've never suggested that it would operate on everything everything marked as a diacritic redirect. I stated explicitly in my proposal that it would only take action where the source and the target of the redirect are identical except for the diacritics. The redirect category list would be a good source for the candidates for replacement, that's all. Colonies Chris (talk) 21:50, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

It's still got the problem that bots can't reliably tell the difference between a direct quotation from a source (which should not be changed) and prose written by Wikipedia editors (which can be changed). --Carnildo (talk) 04:31, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

This is always an issue with bots, but bots can be made to exclude text inside blockquotes and similar constructs. This can't cover every possibility as not all direct quotes have been tagged as such, but the number of changes made in error would be very small, I would think. Also, just because it's in a direct quote doesn't mean the use of diacritics in the original statement is accurately quoted - I suspect there are quotes in WP that were edited by people who didn't know how to enter diacritics so they just omitted them. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:59, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I had a similar idea a while back, but changing casing. So Playstation would become PlayStation, with the possible exception of playstation. — Dispenser 02:50, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Dermatology task force needs a bot to add loads of links

List of skin diseases contains a huge list of.. well.. skin diseases. However, they aren't linked to articles and they are bare text. Is there a bot available which can go through this list and wiki-link everything? Don't worry about red links, we can go through and correct typo's and create missing articles manually. Thanks! —Cyclonenim (talk · contribs · email) 16:45, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Until a bot gets to this, here's what Can We Link It? has to say. It will auto add some links. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 17:35, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Y Done via Javascript. Xclamation point 18:27, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

I've reverted the edit. It removed the first letter from every line. I set the BOTREQ|done to null so this doesn't get auto-archived. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 18:44, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Fixed again. Xclamation point 01:34, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikimarkup

Is there any bot that converts from HTML markup to Wikimarkup? =Nichalp «Talk»= 10:13, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

What markup do you need to change? This tool might do what you need. Sam Korn ^(smoddy) 11:16, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Needed to convert mostly tables. Used the tool to do this [1] =Nichalp «Talk»= 13:49, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

There's also m:table2wiki.py which does table and is ported to the web on the toolserver. — Dispenser 14:32, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Birmingham, England

There are over 300 links to Birmingham, England, which is a redirect to Birmingham. Could someone please change them to

[[Birmingham]], [[England]]

unless they are followed by the sting "England" in, say, the next 20 characters, in which case change to

[[Birmingham]]

Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:01, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

A better set of replacement rules might be

• "[[Birmingham]], [[England]]" → "[[Birmingham]], [[England]]"
• "[[Birmingham]]" → "[[Birmingham]]"
• "[[Birmingham, England|" → "[[Birmingham|"

That is, simply bypass the redirect if the link is piped (and simplify where appropriate), otherwise append a link to England to preserve the rendering. And of course this should be done with AWB or some other semiautomated tool, not as a fully automated bot run. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:14, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Doing... semi-auto LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 04:01, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

On hold until the next dump. (3 days) LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 02:03, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I have a list of what changes a bot would make, at User:Matthew_Brandon_Yeager/Birmingham,_England. I would review these changes (along with the person requesting this to be done) before this would be done (in additional to normal BAG approval). With that said, does anyone see a problem with having a bot make these changes (automated) if ALL the changes were reviewed beforehand? Thank you for your time, MatthewYeager 07:27, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Left message on users talk page to see if they wish to pursue this via a bot or not. MatthewYeager 17:27, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm the requester, but you didn't leave the note on my talk page, you left it with Ilmari Karonen. In any case yes, thatr looks fine, thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 17:50, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Doing... With only 300-ish pages I will just run and watch the script. It will take about 35 minutes to run(6 secs\edit).MatthewYeager 00:56, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Y Done There are only 11 links left, which are due to link being constructed via a template. You should be all set now, let me know if you need anything else. MatthewYeager 02:02, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Splendid. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 09:45, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I think it would be worth repeating that for London, England, which has over 500 links. Also several others; such as those listed on I'm Not Dead Tour. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:16, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good, I can help you out. We can move conversation to my talk page and close out this request. I will request bot flag if needed, based on the request. MatthewYeager 02:11, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Article assesser

Description: Assess articles based on already present assessments

Tasks: Browse article talk pages and look for the |class=XXX in the project templates. If another project's template is present on the same page, then it would add |class=XXX to that template (or the lowest class rating given if there are more than one). It would never override an already present assessment, only fill the unfilled ones. It would be based on subscriptions, so Wikiprojects who do not wish to have a bot fill the |class= argument of their projects wouldn't be affected by the bot. Edit summary would be reflective of what change it made, and prompt editors to verify that the assessment makes sense, especially if there were different class ratings given on the talk page.

Example:

Before:

{{physics|class=A|importance=High}}
{{chemistry|class=B|importance=Mid}}
{{WPAstronomy|

After:

{{physics|class=A|importance=High}}
{{chemistry|class=B|importance=Mid}}
{{WPAstronomy|class=B}}

Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 23:55, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

We have a couple of bots that do this. Just not on a wide-scale. But if a specific WikiProject has a request they'd like to file they should do it here. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:45, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Alright, well sign up WikiProject Physics on one of these bots. But the wide-scale bot would be nice to have. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 02:01, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

I can code a bot for this. I'll just be awhile as I'm busy putting finishing touches on User:John Bot II. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 02:04, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

No rush. Take your time.Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 02:24, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Alright added to my todo list. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 02:27, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Cool beans. Thanks a bunch.Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 02:31, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

TinucherianBot can do something similar. see BRFA. But it works on the other way : Assessment should be based on the highest assessment if there are more than one. If the assessments are same, just copy the rating to our project.

Example:

Before:

{{physics|class=Stub|importance=High}}
{{chemistry|class=Start|importance=Mid}}
{{WPAstronomy|

After:

{{physics|class=Stub|importance=High}}
{{chemistry|class=Start|importance=Mid}}
{{WPAstronomy|class=Start}}

Actually this sounds more logical and already done by many projects. The highest rating is more likely to more recent ( trusting the work of human assessers ) . Running on Unassessed categories of your project ensures that previous assessments are not overridden. If that is OK, my bot can certianly help you -- Tinu Cherian - 13:04, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

It's alright with me. I was under the impression that people were against the idea of given the highest of assements, but hey if I'm wrong about that, then let's place the highest assessment.Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 20:45, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

If you want to sent TinucherianBot on the hunt for assessment of the physics articles, go right ahead. The category is Category:Unassessed physics articles.Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 22:07, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Perfect ! Doing... : Get to hear from TinucherianBot soon. Btw I assume there are no issues regarding this autoassessment from your other project members -- Tinu Cherian - 11:25, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Well I haven't explicitly run the idea with other members, but from my interactions with them no one ever raised a concern about bots assigned the stub-class automatically. I really don't see a problem with this, especially since the bot wouldn't give an importance rating, and articles with assessments (start-class and upwards) but without importance ratings get reviewed very quickly (usually within a few days). Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 13:54, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Y Done : Approx 223 of 1583 unassessed articles checked of WP:PHYSICS were autoassessed by TinucherianBot. -- Tinu Cherian - 09:12, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Headbomb, btw we can't blindly autoassess for all projects on the talk pages. Like the comments in my bot BRFA , we can do it per request by the project members or consensus from the specific WikiProjects. Anyways this process saves hours of work (some projects have 9000+ unassessed articles!) for human editors, leaving them free to actually improve the articles in question.Over 10K articles were autoassessed for WP:COMPUTING :) alone . Think of human editors having to do it manually ! Most importantly it relies on actual assessment done by human editors and it is being reused by other projects. We may get a few false positives (less than 5% max I would imagine) but it's a small price to pay for the huge benefit of automation. Also, a false positive is likely to result in the article being identified and properly assessed, which might not otherwise happen.If you would like to this for any Wikiproject, feel free to make a bot request. -- Tinu Cherian - 09:39, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I never asked for a blind assessment of all projects on talk pages. I asked for automatic assessment upon request. Which is what I got, so I'm happy with that. WP:AST might be interested in a similar autoassessment. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 14:18, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

A couple of other things

Could your bot tag article with "redirect-class" when they are redirects? If yes, could you run your bot on all articles tagged by {{physics}}? Quickest way to run through all of them would be to go through Category:Top-importance physics articles, Category:High-importance physics articles, Category:Mid-importance physics articles, Category:Low-importance physics articles, Category:NA-importance physics articles, and Category:Unknown-importance physics articles. Also could it be possible to tag all redirects with |importance=NA?

A couple of other things:

• Could the bot tag {{physics}} found on category pages with |class=category |importance=NA ?
• Could the bot tag {{physics}} found on template pages with |class=template |importance=NA ?
• Could the bot tag {{physics}} found on disambiguation pages with |class=disambig |importance=NA ?
• Could the bot tag {{physics}} found on image pages with |class=image |importance=NA ?

Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 01:33, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

The bot, TinucherianBot uses AWB and hence can differeniate article,category, template and image pages only. If you can provide lists ( manual made by you) of redirect and disambig pages , she can tag them as needed. Instead of having to add |importance=NA for cat,image, disambig etc talk pages, I suggest to tweak the banner template to have all Non-article pages as |importance=NA. -- Tinu Cherian - 17:27, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, I found a simple way to tag them. This can now be archived. Thanks for everything. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 04:12, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. -- Tinu Cherian - 08:18, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Sighs. CWii_{(Talk|Contribs)} 20:11, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

CWii , :P -- Tinu Cherian - 02:26, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Dido often vandalised by changing "Dido" to "Dildo"

I am sure that this type of vandalism is common elsewhere, where the subject's name is changed by a single character. In the Dido (singer) article, it is common for vandals to change all instances of "Dido" to "Dildo". It would be good if this vandalism was automatically reverted and the vandalism reported.Thank you, Labalius (talk) 01:45, 18 October 2008 (UTC).

Cluebot probably already does this. LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 23:23, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

It does not seem to. I do not believe that it can afford to respond to Dildo as typical vandalism, when it may appear quite innocently in other articles. I have left a message on Cluebot's talk page. Labalius (talk) 16:13, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Mass moving of Prison Break episodes

Could u change all the episodes in Category:Prison Break episodes from "Show episode " to just "show". Example: Allen (Prison Break episode) to Allen (Prison Break). Cause this is the standard used in most tv episodes like lost Tabula_Rasa_(Lost).--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 09:20, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Coding... LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 23:56, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

You have done a great job. The episodes can be found at Category:Prison Break episodes. Thanks a lot for your help. User:TJ Spyke and User:Legoktm you have helped in this problem a lot. Thanks again and again and again. :) --Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 17:51, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Y Done except for one, which I have asked an admin to do for me. LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 04:22, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Category redirects

Can we have (or do we already have? I understand we may have had in the past, at least) a bot that automatically moves pages out of redirected categories into the target categories? (I mean scans for such cases automatically, not just responds to one-off requests.)--Kotniski (talk) 09:45, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

RussBot is approved for this as it did run that task earlier today. If you think it missing something, you may want to contact the operator. -- JLaTondre (talk) 13:03, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, I will, thanks.--Kotniski (talk) 13:14, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Tagging and assessing {{Physics}} and {{WPAstronomy}} redirect and disambiguation pages

Right now I'm running through all the articles manually with AWB and it's a real PITA. This seems like could easily be done by a bot, hence the request.

What I do is load "what transcludes here" for both {{physics}} and {{astronomy}}. Then I convert everything from talk pages to articles, and I remove everything non-mainspace. If #REDIRECT is present, then go on the talk page and replace the {{physics}}, with {{physics |class=redirect |importance=NA]} and replace {{Astronomy}}, {{WPAstronomy}}, {{WikiProject Astronomy}} with {{Astronomy|class=redirect |importance=NA}}. Then I do the same, but this time looking for {{disambig}} on the mainpage, and setting class=disambig and |importance=NA on the talk pages.

Thanks. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 21:37, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Coding... Anomie⚔ 02:16, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Superduperfic. Many thanks. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 05:28, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 8 Anomie⚔ 12:42, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Anomie⚔ 12:40, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Y Done There weren't as many as I thought there would be, only 326 pages to process and 70 of those didn't need editing. Anomie⚔ 18:20, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a bunch. It saved me and others a lot of trouble. Perhaps advertise on the Signpost to see if other projects are interested in having similar redirect and disambig tagging done. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 18:39, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Member activity check

Hi there,

I was wondering if someone here would mind running some stats for us at WikiProject Ohio. Our member list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ohio/Participants is outdated to say the least. What I would like is a bot to check every User: name's contribs. Then to sort the names by "have not edited in the last 6 months", "have not edited within the past year", and "active" (Which would be within the ast 6 months (ie by deadline May 1 if the bot was ran today)). I was also wondering if we could have "have not edited ever" and "less than 25 edits". Anyone up for it? Thanks! §hep • ¡Talk to me! 04:07, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Coding... MatthewYeager 02:03, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

I have developed the code to do this for you... could you give me an example of how you would want the output to be? Would this be fine:

Username	Description	Last Edit	Notes
Matthew_Yeager	funnn yayayaya	edited within last 6 months	Less than 25 edits to Wikipedia.
Example	yayaya funnn	Has no edits to Wikipedia.

Just let me know how you want it outputted and I can run the script for you. MatthewYeager 05:33, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Would it be possible to sort them by second level headings? If not a sortable wikitable would work just as well. Thank you for your help! §hep • ¡Talk to me! 21:21, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Also, the table would be useful, but with just username and description. Could you do that as well? Sorry to add on to the project. Thanks again. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 23:09, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ|done}} Sorry Yeager about stealing this one, but I had wanted to improve my SQL knowledge. It's a one off tool just put the title of members list page. — Dispenser 03:29, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Your tool doesn't seem to handle usernames with spaces, eg results for Wikipedia:WikiProject Heraldry and vexillology. Dr pda (talk) 03:55, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm that's strange the user table names doesn't use underscores for spacing like everything else in the database. Fixed now. Thanks. — Dispenser 04:28, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, that's not what I'm looking for. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 04:45, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Matt, if you have the time I still have interest in your tables. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 23:17, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

IT DID IT AGAIN! YAY! I give up. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 23:27, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Y Done Let's see what this does. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 02:12, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ|LOL}} ClueBot III has several issues, among them that it will hang indefinitely (until it gets a server error from the API call) when the archive page gets over maxarchsize bytes, that it will keep spawning processes each hour even though the previous hour's process is hung there, and won't even try to detect edit conflicts. Anomie⚔ 02:32, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Category:FA Cup seasons

Now that all FA Cup season articles have been completed, I would like to request a bot that can move all of the articles so that their titles use endashes in the date range rather than simple hyphens. This is already the case with a few of the articles in the category, but there are still over 100 articles that need moving. Thanks in advance. – PeeJay 15:41, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

In fact, while I'm at it, can I request that the same bot attend to the articles in Category:Football Conference seasons, Category:Football League Cup seasons and Category:The Football League seasons? – PeeJay 15:47, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Category:FA Cup seasons, I can do the other ones when I get time. LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 00:35, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Y Done I think I got them all. LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 05:12, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much. – PeeJay 10:34, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Timeline of web browsers

Is there any bot or maybe an option to add every month/year the new row automatical/by bot?mabdul 0=* 20:22, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Ewwww. Use this instead. CWii_(BOO!|Eeek!) 23:57, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Image Mover bot

one thing that's always bugged me when browsing through articles is that most images are on the right side of the screen, most by default. I've spent alot of time (don't ask why...) moving every other image on pages to the left to better balance out the page. Anyone interested in creating a bot that would to this? - -' The Spook (TALK) _{(Share the Love with Barnstars)} 01:10, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

I guess I don't see the point. What if the image screwed with the way the text looked when it was on the left? This is something that should be up to human discretion and not just a drive-by moving. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:22, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

My point is alot most articles have absolutely no images on the left side. It's as if people don't know that you can put images on the left. for some reason, it really bugs me. and if a bot was to screw up the text, then it can simply be reverted. - -' The Spook (TALK) _{(Share the Love with Barnstars)} 01:33, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

The point being that people don't just "revert" bots, the vast majority like to whine and stamp their feet. I still don't see a good reason for this task to be done. Besides that it "bugs" you. If you have one then by all means "shoot". §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:38, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Stepshep, this type of task is based too much on human judgment ("What looks nicest") to be suitable for a bot. We have bots to do tasks that are too tedious to do manually and can safely be automated. Bots should have an acceptably low error rate, especially bots that work in articles. If someone has to follow the bot around making sure it didn't screw stuff up, and reverting it where it did, not only is it not saving much time, but its making pointless edits. If something like this is done, it would have to have full manual review and confirmation for each edit (like WP:AWB in non-bot mode), though problems like Stepshep describes are often browser dependent. What looks fine in Firefox may look terrible in Internet Explorer or vice versa. Mr.Z-man 02:19, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Statistics

I have looked around and I don't think there are any other bots that do this, but I might have missed one. So here goes:

I would like for myself or someone else to operate a bot that keeps a daily record of some of the statistics found at Special:Statistics. This record could be kept on a subpage of the bot's user account. Click here for an example of what this page should look like. It would be very easy for me to manually update this page with just a few clicks in AWB. However, for me to make the most use of the statistics, they need to be recorded at roughly the same time each day (17:00 UTC) and I will not always be available to do that. So here is what the bot would need to do at 17:00 each day:

1. Find the following:

|}

2. Replace it with:

|-
| {{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTDAY}}, {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}
| {{subst:NUMBEROFARTICLES}}
| {{subst:NUMBEROFPAGES}}
| {{subst:NUMBEROFEDITS}}
| {{subst:NUMBEROFUSERS}}
| {{subst:NUMBEROFADMINS}}
| {{subst:NUMBEROFFILES}}
|}

3. Leave an edit summary along the lines of "Automatically updating statistics."

That's it. It would have to run from the toolserver so it will always be available at 17:00. I know this is probably very simple to code in PHP, but I do not know how to program it to run automatically. I can maintain the bot if someone codes it for me, or you can maintain it yourself. I would, however, like to have the stats posted to a page in my userspace so I can do with them as I please. I would like to be able to make slight modifications to the bot so I can play around with the formatting, but if you prefer to keep the source to yourself then that's fine.

If this has already been discussed before, I am sorry for bringing it up again. I am not aware of any previous discussions.

--Andrew Kelly (talk) 11:59, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Ok, ive set it up to run at 1700 toolserver time but I cant remember what time zone that is! So we will see what happens and then let me know if you want it changed. My talk page is likely to get responded to quicker than here. -- maelgwn - talk 03:00, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you! I'll keep an eye out for it. --Andrew Kelly (talk) 03:07, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Delete repeated coordinates in a set of US town articles

There is a set of US town articles inserted by user:rambot some eons ago. Each is characterised by having its coordinates in three places:

• The infobox
• The geography section
• External links

A (partial) list of affected articles is at Category:Coord template needing repair. However this list does have other articles in it.

As the articles were created by a bot, there are patterns to look for:

• The presence of coordinates in the infobox
• Ignoring my nowikie statements, a string in the form: <First part of articlename> is located at {{coord|??|??|??|N|??|??|??|W|city}} (35.880612, -89.399974){{GR|1}}.<nowiki> *Ignoring my nowikie statements, a string in the form: <nowiki>{{Mapit-US-cityscale|35.880612|-89.399974}}

You can check out the pattern yourself at, for instance, Halls, Tennessee.

An article having all three of these should have the second & third deleted, leaving only the infobox, according to the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Coordinates in US cities articles: where to display. This declutters the article and avoids the risk of conflicting information being given in the article.

If anyone is up for taking on this task, I'd be obliged. There may also be more of the towns than are in the category I've pointed to, above, but I can't think right now of an easy way to find them. Finally, part of the purpose of the ask is to declutter the above category so that we can see other articles with problems which are better candidates for human intervention. thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:54, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

I ran a test on these five articles using AWB:

• Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin
• Atlanta, Texas
• Blountville, Tennessee
• Calpet, Wyoming
• Cannonville, Utah

If this is what you want, I don't mind doing the rest. --Andrew Kelly (talk) 03:39, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Andrew. You'd better hold off for the time being, since your changes elicited objections from someone who thinkis we should in fact be triplicating the coordinates in the article. Rather than a revert war we'll - I hope - have a discussion. Apologies for the inconvenience. --Tagishsimon (talk) 04:48, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I got told off for it on my talk page. I'm willing to do whatever you guys decide to do. Let me know if you would like me to help. --Andrew Kelly (talk) 05:18, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Adjust formatting of date articles

The date articles (January 1 ... December 31) all have css formatting at the top of the page to align the calendar and date in recent years boxes. I've updated those template to allow the formatting as parameters to the templates. I am requesting the following changes to the date articles.

Replace this:

 {| style="float:right;"
 |-
 |{{JanuaryCalendar}}
 |-
 |{{ThisDateInRecentYears|Month=January|Day=1}}
 |}
 

With this:

 {{JanuaryCalendar|float=right}}
 {{ThisDateInRecentYears|Month=January|Day=1}}
 

This request applies to the date articles January 1 ... December 31 excluding February 29 because it uses a different template and I'll do it manually. The example above is using January 1. This change will have no visible effect on the articles. -- Mufka ^{(u) (t) (c)} 18:57, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Doing... --Andrew Kelly (talk) 06:59, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Y Done --Andrew Kelly (talk) 08:37, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Anchor Links

Up until July of last year, we had Anchor Link Bot, run by Android Mouse. Android Mouse has since left Wikipedia, and his bot no longer runs. I think the bot's function was a very good one. The source code was said to be public, with the bot's userpage providing this link, which now gives (me, at least) a pageload error. The idea was approved, so as far as I can see the only problem would be coding it again. Would this be possible? Would anybody be willing to give it a go? seresin ( ¡? )  03:47, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Adding a basic Settlement template to all of the Moshavim in Israel

I need the template:Infobox Settlement to be added to all the Israeli moshavim, preferably with the Coordinates and basic data inside if possible. some moshavim articles use the kibbutzim template instead - needs to be changed to use the infobox settlement template instead (such as this one). 24.12.234.123 (talk) 20:03, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

DYK Tag bot

Im looking for a bot that will parse the archives of Wikipedia:Recent additions. The bot will have to identify which article is boldened, then edit the {{dyktalk}} of the boldened article's talkpage.

Example - Pencil sharpener

• Bot parses Wikipedia:Recent additions 1
  • Identify string that begins with {{*mp}}
  • Identify boldened link pencil sharpener within string
• Go to Talk:Pencil sharpener, find {{dyktalk|DD M|YYYY}}
  • ifexist: Append parameter |entry=X Example
  • if it's not there: look for {{Article history}}
    • ifexist: Append parameter |dyklink= Wikipedia:Recent additions 1
• Repeat

Is this feasible? There's over 230 archives. Thanks. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 21:01, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia Did you know archives

For each page listed at Wikipedia:Recent additions, please add Category:Wikipedia Did you know archives. If the page has either Category:Main Page help and/or Category:Wikipedia Did you know, remove them. Thanks. -- Suntag ☼ 17:32, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Coding... §hep • ¡Talk to me! 17:41, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Y Done §hep • ¡Talk to me! 18:27, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Wow! That was quick. I feel as though I should be waving the checkered flag. Thanks! -- Suntag ☼ 18:45, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

ProQuest Archiver strings

Many newspaper url links in Wikipedia link to ProQuest Archiver. The url strings begin with http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com. The ProQuest Archiver string include a parameter |pqatl=. The url strings work with and without |pqatl=. However, |pqatl= within Wikipedia often is set equal to google (as in pqatl=google) since the newspaper stories usually are found through google news. Thus, when anyone clicks on a Wikipedia footnote linking to ProQuest Archiver, Google gets the credit from ProQuest Archiver for the hit and likely is compensated by ProQuest Archiver in someway. (ProQuest Archiver probably gets money from the newspapers, probably a certain amount for each archived news story sold). For each url string in Wikipedia beginning with http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com, a bot should go around and change pqatl=google or pqatl=whatever to pqatl=wikipedia. That way, ProQuest Archiver will receive a clearer understanding of how many click throughs are coming to ProQuest Archiver from Wikipedia. This may result in ProQuest Archiver donating money to Wikipedia. As it is now, ProQuest Archiver likely has little interest in Wikipedia because it thinks that Wikipedia click throughs are from Google. The bot also should add pqatl=wikipedia to the end of any url string begins with http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com that does not have |pqatl=. Before the bot runs, someone should confirm that such changes will be valid for all urls in Wikipedia beginning with http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com. Maybe running this through bot approval would be the way to go. -- Suntag ☼ 23:11, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

WP:VPR might be a better place to confirm that. Anomie⚔ 02:16, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Project Monitoring Bot

Would it be possible to create a bot that would keep track of statistics for the various projects on wikipedia and generate a list of the top ten or so most active projects on a month by month basis? It seems that this would be best left to a bot, and in light of the fact that I can find no statitistics on whoch wikiproject is most active I dare say such a bot may well be overdue for an appearence on Wikipedia. For example, it would be nice to know which projects:

• Have (at present) the most members
• receive the largest amount of new members each month
• Have the largest collection of GA/A/FA class articles
• Promoted the most articles to GA/A?FA class each month
• Add the most new articles to wikipedia each month
• Have the most DYK metions for any given month
• Have the largest collection of FP or other audio/visual media
• Promoted the most FP or other AudioVisual media each month

...and so forth in that manner. Would anyone out htere be interested in creating such a bot to moniter these statisitics? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.108.230.99 (talk) 00:49, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Only some of these will be amenable to a bot, I think. See related discussion at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index#Master scorecard of wikiprojects? and Wikipedia:Reference desk/Miscellaneous#What are the largest projects on wikipedia?. And note a first result: Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index/Comparison. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:55, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Bad music charts

We have a list of charts that have been deemed unreliable in WP:BADCHARTS. Unfortunately, we are having to take care of enforcement manually, and it is a neverending job: new editors are constantly adding these charts to articles.

What I would like is a bot that can take care of the two major cases: the one chart per row format (see Womanizer_(song)#Charts), where the bot should delete all rows that correspond to bad charts, and the one chart per column format (see Pussycat Dolls discography#Singles. It should detect the more complicated cases, where formatting has created double rows or columns and flag them somewhere without attempting the edit directly.—Kww(talk) 15:15, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Agree, this would be very helpful. — Realist² 15:20, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Would someone comment on this? Excessively difficult? Poorly defined? Overly controversial?—Kww(talk) 16:35, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Allmusic links

A few months ago, AllMusicGuide changed its name to Allmusic. Apparently, at the same time they dropped all their sub-servers and are now using only the "www.allmusic.com" address. This leaves all sorts of orphan links all over Wikipedia to http://wm06.allmusic.com, wm07.allmusic.com, wm08, and wc03 -- these are the ones I've noticed so far, all of which have over 200 links apiece. Can someone make a bot to go around and fix any wXXX.allmusic.com link to www.allmusic.com, where XXX is a wildcard to cover any of these various server links? Because, while I edit a lot of music articles, I really don't want to spend my time making this little change if it can be automated. It would be a one-time only change. (well, unless Allmusic changes itself again.) Thanks for help please!! Salamurai (talk) 03:50, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

If no one beats me to it (or has objections), I'll start coding for this sometime tomorrow. Anomie⚔ 04:32, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Salamurai (talk) 16:05, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Preferably drop the www, see no-www.org. — Dispenser 05:01, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Point taken, I agree Salamurai (talk) 16:05, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Is this "no-www.org" a reliable source? ;) Anomie⚔ 16:43, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Coding... Anomie⚔ 16:43, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 9 Anomie⚔ 18:43, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Anomie⚔ 12:08, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

doing nicely as it looks --Say Headcheese!--hexaChord² 12:53, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Greetings Bots and All, I noticed on my watchlist that this bot was fixing broken links, but just by chance I happened to add an allmusic link to Ben and "Sweets" today - perfectly OK (I checked it) and suddenly it appears that AnomieBOT had to fix it. This is way over my head, but maybe someone out there can look into it. Cheers! --Technopat (talk) 22:58, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I looked. The bot done good. The URL you used has what appears to be a redundant sub-domain in it - wc08 - which certainly worked at the time you used the link, but which cannot be guaranteed to continue to work. The bot is standardising on a convention for minimal allmusic links, against a supposition that these will survive whatever reorganisations of subdomains go on within that organisation. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:22, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The link AnomieBOT fixed in that article was added almost a year ago. The link you just added wasn't touched, although if it weren't for a bug the bot would have removed the "www." as requested above. Anomie⚔ 23:26, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanx for checking that! I hadn't noticed. Regards, --Technopat (talk) 00:20, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Y Done 5037 pages were edited. Anomie⚔ 01:21, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Repeat edit

I actually wanted to check to see if this already exists, but I didn't see a listing. I understand that spell checking bots are problematic. As I was editing an article that said "the first and only" to "the only," I thought this is really something that could be automatically applied to all of Wikipedia. Barring a direct quote, it should be an improvement wherever it is applied. To mitigate the quotation problem, would it be possible to check for the opening quote and skip all of the string until it finds another quote? It would also have to skip the citations, since titles of books and articles can be something we would not want to change. If the quotation is improperly punctuated, there is an existing problem that is not made worse, IMO. This is something that has to be entered manually, the list has to be very carefully selected, but I would think that there are many similar instances. 75.3.225.43 (talk) 08:27, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

There are over 5,400 occurrences of that phrase, at the time of writing, according to Google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?&q="the first and only"&sitesearch=en.wiki.x.io including may as "the first (and only)". However, there are over 65,000 for "first and only": http://www.google.co.uk/search?&q="first and only"&sitesearch=en.wiki.x.io These include such uses as "its first and only", "India's first and only", "the band's first and only album", "His first and only" (also "his first -- and only --") & "Frank's first and only". However, I think there would be too many false positives to allow a bot to fix this; for example First and Only (book) and "the first (and only the first)". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:09, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

It is definitely a common phrase, but it is redundant and not encyclopedic language. I agree with you about the false positive problem. I think "first (and only" should definitely be excluded from any search. The string should only be the exact characters "first and only." If such a bot were created, I would be willing to hand check a random 3% of the occurrences identified. Those could be changed immediately, and if the false positives are not too high, the bot could be automated.

I do think the bot would be useful for other possibly suspect phrases to be checked, possibly with less likely chance of false positives or simply needing a flag. For instance, I did a search for "would of" (5,520,000 total google, 1,990 on wikipedia using google, 96 wikipedia's own search engine). Google's results have a much larger instance of false positives since the bot could be programmed to exclude titles of articles, lists, redirect pages, talk pages, policy pages, etc. I checked each instance by looking at the search page's quoted text. All the true positives should have read: "would have", "would, of course," or "would, of necessity,". 1 false positive: "as they would of any other." 1 false negative: inside quotation marked text that is not a quote.

I think that a nomination and approval process would be required for such a thing. At the very least, it could be implemented as a tool. I would really have appreciated a replace function that would search for a certain string, quote the complete paragraph or complete page, and allow me to manually provide the correct string or choose it from a list without having to visit and edit each by hand.

As a first step, though, I think it would be helpful to have a bot that simply finds and provides a list of pages with suspected phrases. It would be harmless to implement. People could simply include phrases the consider suspect with some instruction as to why it is suspect and what the replacement would be. If the bot can maintain a list of all the suspect phrases with 1 or more instance found with a count, provide a sub-page that has the reasoning on top and just a link to the pages, manual editing would be a lot easier. Such a thing may exist already, and what I am proposing could build on it. 71.156.33.248 (talk) 21:25, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

I'd suggest you lobby whoever maintains Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos since the phrases appear to be patterns that are mostly inexcusable. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:32, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

And I've left a note for them. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:44, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

WP:AWB/FR#Snippets from DB search. — Dispenser 15:35, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

WP:WikiProject Iran football assessment tagging

I would like a bot to please tag the talk pages of articles in any of the following categories with {{Football|Iran=yes}} retaining original assessments if any.

Categories:

Category:Football in Iran, Category:Iran football club seasons, Category:Esteghlal F.C. seasons, Category:Persepolis F.C. seasons, Category:Sepahan F.C. seasons, Category:Iranian football chairmen and investors, Category:Iranian football clubs, Category:Defunct Iranian football clubs, Category:Esteghlal FC, Category:Esteghlal FC players, Category:Esteghlal F.C. seasons, Category:Persepolis F.C., Category:Persepolis F.C. managers, Category:Persepolis F.C. non-playing staff, Category:Persepolis F.C. players, Category:Persepolis F.C. seasons, Category:Persepolis F.C. templates, Category:Sepahan F.C., Category:Sepahan players, Category:Sepahan F.C. managers, Category:Sepahan F.C. seasons, Category:Sepahan F.C. templates, Category:Iran football club stubs, Category:Iranian football competitions, Category:Defunct Iranian football competitions, Category:Expatriate footballers in Iran, Category:Serbian expatriate footballers in Iran, Category:Iranian footballers, Category:Iran international footballers, Category:Iranian expatriate footballers, Category:Olympic footballers of Iran, Category:Iranian football biography stubs, Category:Footballers in Iran by club, Category:Aboomoslem players, Category:Bargh Shiraz players, Category:Damash Gilan players, Category:Esteghlal Ahvaz players, Category:Esteghlal FC players, Category:Fajr Sepasi players, Category:Foolad FC players, Category:Malavan players, Category:Mes Kerman players, Category:Pas players, Category:Paykan players, Category:Pegah Gilan players, Category:Persepolis F.C. players, Category:Rah Ahan players, Category:Saba Battery players, Category:Saipa players, Category:Sepahan players, Category:Shirin Faraz Kermanshah players, Category:Zob Ahan players, Category:IPL Club Templates, Category:Iranian football managers, Category:Football managers in Iran, Category:Football managers in Iran by club, Category:Persepolis F.C. managers, Category:Sepahan F.C. managers, Category:Non-Iranian football managers in Iran, Category:Iran national football team, Category:Iran international footballers, Category:Iran national football team managers, Category:Iran national football team templates, Category:Iranian football referees, Category:Iranian football squad templates, Category:Iran national football team templates, Category:Football venues in Iran, Category:Women's football in Iran, Category:Iran football (soccer) templates, Category:Iran football (soccer) club templates, Category:Persepolis F.C. templates, Category:Sepahan F.C. templates

Thanks —Borgarde^talk 02:59, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Messenger bot

I need a bot to send a talk message to everyone at WP:BARD. Wrad (talk) 03:17, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I'd point you to the template above, but here you go. Take your pick. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 03:32, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm wary of using one. I tried to send a message out on one of those before and it's just sat there for months and was never sent. I see one of the bots is yours, though. Does it deliver? Wrad (talk) 03:34, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Yep. Do you have a specific date or would immediately be best? §hep • ¡Talk to me! 04:09, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Woohoo! It was even in alphabetical order. That was so cute. Wrad (talk) 04:24, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Y Done Glad you enjoyed it. hehe §hep • ¡Talk to me! 04:30, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps we should remove inactive bots from the category... –xeno (talk) 19:29, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Ya, good to keep it weeded to those who are active. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 20:57, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Add SharedIPEDU notices to User Talk pages (Specifically: University of Waterloo)

The block of 129.97.*.* IP addresses belongs to the University of Waterloo. (http://samspade.org/whois/129.97.0.0) Looking in the Special:PrefixIndex page for those IP addresses (http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixIndex&from=129.97&namespace=3), many don't display the {{SharedIPEDU|University of Waterloo}} notice. Some of these IPs are static and tied to public computers in labs, or individual network ports in residences, etc., so there's a high probability that many of these IPs will be used be different people over time.

Are there any bots able to tag them with {{SharedIPEDU|University of Waterloo}}, so that moderators can immediately recognize that the edits are coming from a shared computer on the University of Waterloo's network?
TheFeds 03:40, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Saint Categories

Can someone populate 1th - 5th century Saint Categories from my lists at User:Carlaude/Sandbox2 and remove pages from the Parent Category:Ancient Roman saints as the occur?

User:STBot was made at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/STBot_13 do this sort of stuff but the bot owner is MIA to my reqests. It maybe a bot someone else can use? --Carlaude ^(talk) 01:06, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Coding... On it. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:12, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Check progress here. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:22, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Process halted I ran across this diff, I do not believe all of these saints are 2nd century. Task will continue when I can get verification that you don't have any disambig pages in your lists. Thanks. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:31, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

I have finished checking by hand all the pages of form Pope Name (no number) and Saint Name and found no more disambig pages. Please comlpete this task for me-- thank you. It look like many are already done but please be sure to do the 5th cent list as beforre they were all put in the 6th cent cat. --Carlaude ^(talk) 19:07, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Seems another bot added a bunch of these categories on the 9th. At this point there might not be anything left to tag? §hep • ¡Talk to me! 20:57, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Looks like User:STBot is back. If there is a category they didn't do let me know. Other than that is looks Y Done. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 17:29, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Superscript exponents

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but it seems like a bot could be useful in replacing unicode exponents like this ², with superscript exponents like this ², per WP:MOS. This would save a large amount of time and effort on many articles such as the larger magnitudes in Template:Area, where there are long lists of areas that use solely the unicode exponent. Wrelwser43 (talk) 02:51, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

It would be useful if the code to do it could be added as an AWB general fix too. Rjwilmsi 00:06, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I would say that this would be too minor a change for anything but something like AWB general fixes. Mr.Z-man 17:31, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Paris metro coords

Hi,

Someone recently filled all coords based on nl wiki (example Châtelet (Paris Métro), Raspail (Paris Métro)), I don't know why, but the fact is that they're even more incorrect than googlemaps, and not complete. Paris metro network is very dense, so precise coords are important. fr:Projet:Transports en Île-de-France is working to enhance quality of french articles on this matter, hoping it will be a quality source for other languages.

We are using «region:FR_type:landmark_scale:2000|format=dms|display=title» parameters (closer view, dms) in fr:Modèle:Station du métro parisien, all stations are localised.

Could you change the coords taking french wikipedia as source, and marking it as such?

Thanks...

Gonioul (talk) 22:48, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

IfD/RfD/etc. discussion closing

Some pages, especially WP:IFD and WP:RFD, have huge backlogs at times. Now you cannot write a bot to assess consensus and act upon it. But especially on IFD, many images are deleted but their relevant IFD sections are not closed by the deleting admin. See this page for November 1 for example. Most links are red, indicating the image is gone but yet the sections are not closed using the appropriate instructions. It is a tedious task to close them all by hand. So I want to request a bot that does these simply yet tedious tasks:

1. Check the sub-article for nominations for which discussion has ended (5 days period)
2. Follow each redlink to an image
3. Check if it has been deleted and if so, copy deleting admin's username
4. close the section down (following the admin instructions and adding something like "result was delete; deleted by {{admin|<adminname>}}"
   • If there is no open discussion anymore on this page, it should also:
     1. Remove the link to the sub-article from the main page (for example from the "Old discussions" section of IfD)
     2. If the old discussion section is empty after doing so, it should remove the adminbacklog-notice.

I think that should be easy to do and it would save a lot of manual work there. Soooooo...any takers? :-)
Regards SoWhy 13:34, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Coding... for the WP:IFD part of it, anyway. Anomie⚔ 22:00, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Comment: Thanks. I think adding "plugins" for other XfD boards can't be too hard once the basic code is done.

Oh, I forgot this above: Is it possible that the Bot determines whether the deletion reason contains a WP:CSD criterion and if so, includes it when adding the "deleted by xxx" part (e.g. "deleted (as WP:CSD#I1) by xxx")? Regards SoWhy 22:11, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

It depends. The IFD code I've written depends on the section header being the link to the image being discussed and everything being on a daily subpage. If the other XfD board commonly doesn't have such an easily-bot-parsable way to find the thing being discussed it would be more difficult, and if it does like AfD and uses a subpage for each thing that would need adjustment too. The CSD detecting isn't too difficult, as long as the admin uses "CSD [GI]n", "db-[gi]n", or one of the named db-* template names in the comment it'll pick it up. I also added in some code to detect if someone nominates an image that doesn't exist or is on Commons. Anomie⚔ 03:45, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 11 Anomie⚔ 03:45, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Historical "What links here" function

I am interested in "what links here" feature of wiki. But it seems that we can only check the latest information of the backlinks to one article. Can we get the historical information of it like the revision history of main articles and talk pages? Yuzhong 21:00, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I guess the content listed in "what lins here" is chronological. How can I retrieve the exact date about when those wikilink were created? I am doing a study about wikilinks now. I have to check backlins for 200+ articles. And better to get the yearly backlink data for each individual article. It would be to tedious to do it manually. So I hope there could be a bot to help me. Thanks a lot.Yuzhong 15:00, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

The best solution is to get the full database (you can either download it or get a Toolserver account). Then you can query the current state, this is also be done to a lesser degree via the API. However, if you want information about when it was linked you'll need to parse the revisions and it will likely be unlinked and relinked in many revisions because of vandalism. — Dispenser 14:59, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

There is no log of any of the following:

• When categories are added and removed from articles. For articles that are in a category, the most recent time they were added is available.
• When templates are transcluded or untranscluded in a page. No dates are available.
• When links are added or removed from one page to another. No dates are available.

The only way to get historical data would be to download the complete set of revisions of an article and then parse each revision. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:12, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. I have tried to download the "pagelinks" dumps. But it seems that the earliest one is to March 2008. So how can I get the dump before 2008, see 2001-2007? Yuzhong 02:00, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Alternatively, I have a rough idea.

I use the "what links here" function of article "A" to get the list of articles linked to article "A". And then search the key word "A" in historical versions of thoes articles linked to "A" to see when were they linked to article "A". I am now doing it manaually. It is very slow and tedious. Anyidea to make it automatic or semi-automatic? Thanks a lot for your suggestion！ Yuzhong 02:00, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Category:Unknown-importance anime and manga articles

I would like to have a bot add |importance=low to {{anime}} or {{WikiProject Anime and manga}} of all of the pages in the above mentioned category. Converting {{anime}} to {{WikiProject Anime and manga}} would be a bonus, but is not essential. This parameter should be added after the |class= parameter, or after |B6= parameter (where applicable). The recommended edit summary is Automatically assessing importance as low per WP:ANIME/ASSESS.

I have am using AWB to do this for me during the tag & assess, but find that I can do the T&A much quicker if I do not have to add the importance parameter to almost all of the articles.

I will correct all instances where importance ≠ low during the tag & assess. (Please do not add parameters or comments that the assessment is automatic, as these would have to be removed, leaving me with the same problem as currently).

Regards,

G.A.S^talk 05:50, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Doing... LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 00:28, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much:) G.A.S^talk 04:35, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

About 531 articles remains in this category. It seems that this is due to the use of {{manga}}, or the use of multiple lines in the template. G.A.S^talk 08:09, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Y Done as far as the bot can go. LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 05:24, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

tagging sockpuppet categories

I wish we had a bot that would go through and add {{sockpuppet category}} to any sockpuppet categories (and suspected sockpuppet categories) that don't already have it. - Stepheng3 (talk) 08:17, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Is there a parent category? §hep • ¡Talk to me! 17:24, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

There is, but not all sockpuppet categories are in it. Part of the reason for wanting the categories tagged is to keep them from showing up in the Uncategorized categories report. The way you recognize these categories is by their names, which always begin with either the phrase Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of or the phrase Wikipedia sockpuppets of. - Stepheng3 (talk) 18:08, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Need help filling in data

Under construction is a set of country outlines or profiles - one for each country of the world (247 pages). This will greatly expand the coverage at Portal:Contents/Lists of basic topics, which is part of Wikipedia's table of contents system, intended to make it easier to browse subjects and see how they are structured. So far, twenty-nine of these outlines have been completed enough to move to article space and are listed on the Portal:Contents/Lists of basic topics page.

For your convenience, the country outlines are all listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list.

There is a huge amount of work to be done on this set of drafts, and I believe much of it can be automated. That is why I'm turning to you for help.

What I need help with right now are two items in the "Geography of x" section (where "x" is the name of the respective country) that need to be filled in.

Can you use one of your bots, or create one, to pull pieces of data from one set of pages and place them on another set of pages? (into the "Geography of x" section mentioned above)

The two items are:

"Population: "

And

"Size: "

A few of them are already filled in. (I hope that doesn't present any problems).

The data is located in the infobox on the corresponding country articles.

Is this something you could do?

If so, it would sure save a lot of man hours. I don't currently have access to a machine upon which I could use macros or learn and apply Python, and I'd really like to avoid having to do these chores manually.

I requested bot approval at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Worldbot and was told that these tasks don't need bot approval - we can just go ahead and create and use bots on 'em.

The desired format for the data is presented at Topic outline of Algeria#Geography of Algeria, Topic outline of France#Geography of France and Topic outline of Germany#Geography of Germany.

I look forward to your reply.

The Transhumanist 00:00, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

I should be able to help you out. A few questions though. Is this for just the population and size fields or are there others that need to be filled in as well? --T-rex 00:24, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

There are other entries/fields that need to be filled in, but I don't know if they can be done automatically:

• Pronunciation:
• Form of government:
• Head of state: (title, incumbent)
• Head of government: (title, incumbent)
• Commander-in-chief: (title, incumbent)
• Currency of x: (where "x" is the name of the country)

And in the International organization membership section, it needs a list of the organizations the country belongs to.

Are those automatable? I think it would depend on if there was a standard method of the information being presented with some kind of format element you could key off of.

The Transhumanist 05:54, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Some of these probably are. I'll try to do as many as possible. --T-rex 16:34, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. The Transhumanist 23:13, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

I've gotten the task approved. Hopefully I can get this running soon --T-rex 17:48, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Question? do we want to use population_census or population_estimate? These figures vary greatly --T-rex 18:16, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I should be able to do the population run shortly --T-rex 19:10, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale disputed but no actual dispute

Ok, after User:Thatsineed's large number of uploads like this, could someone have a bot produce a list of images located in Category:Replaceable fair use images disputed but not located in one of the actual fair use image categories? Sort them by number of file links so that I can get through the orphaned ones quickly. Perhaps then a second list of just disputed without actual disputes. Thanks! -- Ricky81682 (talk) 07:29, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Image renaming

Well, long story short: Since Betacommand (talk · contribs) won't be doing this with his restriction to not run bots anymore, someone else should take on this task. We need a bot to go through Category:Media requiring renaming and process the requests generated by {{rename media}}. Any takers? Regards SoWhy 11:55, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

It would be wise for the bot operate only with human assistance or to establish a "white list" among users adding the "rename" tag. Otherwise it may unintentionally aid and abet vandalism, e.g. moving "George_W._Bush.jpg" to "Penis.jpg" or vice versa.

Additionally it will want to reject good-faith requests which are guaranteed to cause problems such non-matching file formats, or uploading over any image which already exists (either locally or on commons). — CharlotteWebb 16:46, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

The first is actually covered in the category description: if {{rename media}} was added by a "trusted user" the move is supposed to be done by the bot, while if it was added by an "untrusted" user then the bot is supposed to be somehow changed to put it in Category:Media renaming requests instead. Who these "trusted users" are and how exactly to change the category is not clear. It's also not clear if the bot should re-upload all old versions of the file or just the most recent, what exactly the metadata is that should be preserved (Upload history, of course. Also the page history? The talk page? Anything else?), whether the bot should try to correct references to the old image, and whether the bot should tag the old image with {{isd}} or another deletion template.

I also wonder whether T17842 will be resolved any time soon, which would make the task as specified obsolete. Anomie⚔ 18:21, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

@CharlotteWebb: You are correct of course. I posted it short here because I am sure that someone who is around bot noticeboards more than me knows what this bot was planned to do. SO yes, there should be a whitelist, maybe restricting it to admins and everyone on a certain list. Can't be too hard to do.

@Anomie: See above. I think someone knows more about this than I do. And yes, T17842...I doubt it will be enable anytime soon and even if it does get enabled, there will be restrictions on the users who may do so. And even in this case we'd need a bot to clear aforementioned categories, just in a different way... SoWhy 20:00, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

The 'trusted user' list it at WP:Image renaming. Dendodge Talk^Contribs 20:32, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Free images should just be moved to Commons with the new name. Maybe we should have a template like {{rename to Commons|newname}}. multichill (talk) 15:39, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

DYK Copyvio bot

DYK would benefit from a bot that could detect potential copyvio for posts at Template_talk:Did_you_know and post positive hits under the DYK suggestion. See Wikipedia talk:Did you know#Copyright again. Any suggestions? I'm not sure if User:CorenSearchBot or User:Cobo are fine tooned enough. The DYK Copyvio bot doesn't have to be too accurate, just enought to flag the DYK nomination so that the DYK review will know to give a more detailed review of the article. Thanks. -- Suntag ☼ 08:30, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

• I'm not sure this would be useful. The sentence used as the hook in DYK is usually a really small part of the entire article and the smaller section is 'copied' the less likely it is to be copyright violation. Some statements simply can't be made in another way and still be grammatical. I think using CorenBot on the articles the hooks come from is a better solution. - Mgm|^(talk) 21:39, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Bot for Categorizing Images

It has recently come to my attention that there is a category known as [[Category:Image-Class Bulgaria articles]]. It seemed a good idea to have some sort of list for images that are bulgaria-related, however it is extremely tedious to go through every page that has them, create a talk page for each and add the template {{WikiProject Bulgaria|Image}} to each, (as well as having to add a edit summary).

I would really like to make a bot to save people the effort of having to categorizing all the images, however i have very little previous experience of programming. The good thing about having such a bot is that a modified version could be used to categorize other things for wikiprojects. If anyone is willing to help, or create the bot,(for which I would be really grateful), please contact me on my talk page.--P.Marlow (talk) 00:41, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

As a general rule here programmers don't code bots for other people to run. For the project of adding {{WikiProject Bulgaria|class=Image}} to Bulgaria-realted image talkpages you might be interested in registering for AWB or asking one of our botops in this category to tag the images for you. Good luck, §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:11, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Convert projects to taskforce

Wikipedia:WikiProject Relativity, Wikipedia:WikiProject Fluid dynamics, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Acoustics were turned into Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics taskforces. If someone could replace {{Fluid}}, and {{Relativity banner}} by {{physics}} with the parameters fluid-dynamics=yes and relativity=yes, that would be appreciated. Tagging all the articles in Category:Acoustics with the physics banner with the parameter acoustics=yes should do it for the acoustics project.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 13:27, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Coding... Anomie⚔ 17:18, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Is that "Tag all articles in Category:Acoustics with {{physics|acoustics=yes}}", or "For all articles in Category:Acoustics that already have {{physics}}, add acoustics=yes"? Also, which (if any) subcategories would you want included in that? Anomie⚔ 17:29, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

By the end of the bot run, any and all articles in Category:Acoustics should at have {{physics|acoustics=yes}} (plus class ratings). The only subcategory that should be tagged is Category:Sound measurements and Category:Ultrasound (but not subcategories of them), all the others are outside the scope of the acoustics taskforce.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 17:35, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 13 and Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 14. I ended up splitting the request into two parts. Replacing the banners is a simple variation on several of my previous tasks, while the Acoustics tagging is something new. Anomie⚔ 01:14, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Anomie⚔ 13:30, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Y Done 237 Acoustics articles tagged (and one template), and only 37 talk pages edited for the other two projects. You can TFD {{Fluid}} and {{Relativity banner}} now. Anomie⚔ 15:56, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:49, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I just manually removed the physics project tags from Music theory and Psychoacoustics since they don't seem to fall within the scope here. Not a member of the task force, so it's really none of my beeswax where you apply your efforts; bring them back into the fold if you like. __Just plain Bill (talk) 16:12, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm fine with that. The tags will be reviewed over the course of the next few weeks, so whatever's not supposed to be in WP Physics will be removed.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:49, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Sub-categorise 30,000 articles....

Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates has identified about 100k articles needing coordinates, and placed {{coord missing}} on each. By some magic which I guess you'd be able to reverse engineer, articles needing coordinates are categorised by country. We could do with articles for a couple of the countries - the US & UK - being pushed down into subcategories based on, for instance, Counties or States, and optionally major cities, so that we can provide regionally based wikiprojects with lists of articles of interest to them, so that we can work on groups of articles by place ... and, mainly, because wading through categories of 10,000 or 20,000 length is inhumane.

The two top level categories are:

• Category:United Kingdom articles missing geocoordinate data
• Category:United States articles missing geocoordinate data

Subcategories created should be members of these top level categories. The majority of articles will have been categorised to indicate state, county and perhaps city, town, affiliations. However I can't give you much better guidance on how to scrape together the additional information you'll need in order to subcategorise the articles: something like a catscan. If you've grokked what we're after, I'm sure I don't need to say much more. Pretty much any subdivision schema is better than what we've got. thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:29, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

A few things first if you don't mind... First off, have you asked The Anome to do this?, as I believe they did the original tagging. Also, I don't see any consensus to make such a huge change, especially as these article were fairly recently tagged. Thanks. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 00:57, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I have asked The Anome, but he's quite busy with a range of other tasks. I'm working reasonably closely with him/her on geocoding disused UK railway stations as we speak, and on the geocoding initiative which gave rise to the recent 100K or so {{coord missing}} tags & categorisation. The subcategorisation has been listed for the past few weeks as an outstanding task in the ToDo list at Wikipedia Talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:53, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

This segment of discussion, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/outreach may reassure you that there's an expectation that we'll subdivide the coord missing articles so as to outreach. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:00, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

See also User talk:The Anome#FYI#2 --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:03, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

That's very assuring, thank you for your time with that. I did break out Ohio awhile ago, and would be happy to do the rest of the states. If someone else would like to take the UK, or the bottom of the US (alphabetically) we should be able to knock this out fairly quickly. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 23:02, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I've started with all Maine articles, as that category already existed. I compared the US Geodata category against Category:WikiProject Maine articles and came up with 93. If someone on here thinks there's a better way to do it, please let me know. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 18:57, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed §hep • ¡Talk to me! 20:11, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

That's much appreciated, Shep; thank you. Should anyone else want to join in & do the UK, that would be great. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:22, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Im not a brit, but if you know a good way to subdevide the UK artilces Ill gladly give a hand, I already did New Jersey. Canis Lupus 23:27, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I can only point you at the catscan example showing the intersection of articles categorised beneath one of the English counties, and categorised by {{coord missing}}. Shep might be able to tell you some more how he is approaching the US. Category:Counties of the United Kingdom has subcategories of England, Scotland, etc, counties.

BTW, the promised or inferred outreach to wikiprojects is underway; you can follow progress here. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:56, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Per discussions with The Anome, I will be pulling my BRFA and letting them finish the project of recategorizing. Since they(he/she? don't know so I'll use they) paln to be finished with the US by the end of the week, I feel having two bots doing the same thing would probably just cause more headaches than needed. Thanks for the comments and if you need any help in the future feel free to drop by my tp. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 02:32, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Help with subpages move on Portal:Textile arts

I moved Portal:Textile Arts to Portal:Textile arts - but the toolserver only allowed me to automatically move 100 subpages of the portal in one move. This seems to have temporarily broken the portal, as many underlying templates rely on each other. Can a bot please move the remaining subpages from Portal:Textile Arts to Portal:Textile arts? Thank you so much. Cirt (talk) 04:40, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Coding.../ Doing...§hep • ¡Talk to me! 04:45, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Phew! Thank you!!!! Cirt (talk) 05:04, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Y Done That should do it. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 05:11, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

UnreferencedSortingBot

Category:All articles lacking sources is massive and still growing. It is subdivided in categories by month like Category:Articles lacking sources from August 2006 or the more recent Category:Articles lacking sources from November 2008. This is unfortunate, because it doesn't help getting the right eyes on the articles to actually have them improve at a useful rate and stop the growth of these categories.

I'd like to propose a bot that (on request) makes an intersection of articles in one or more relevant categories (depending on either user or project interests) and an unreferenced category to automatically post on userpages or project pages to help better coordinate reference cleanup efforts. (To avoid spamming, I'd say the bot should include a maximum of entries to post) If it's technically feasible, I'd be happy to take charge and run it myself on request (if it makes any difference).

Hopefully this idea could help spark referencing taskforces in multiple wikiprojects so the WikiProject Fact and Reference Check and WikiProject Unreferenced Article Cleanup don't have to fight the battle on their own. - Mgm|^(talk) 21:52, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I believe this bot does what you're asking for (and a lot more). But instead of using categories directly as input, it uses WikiProject Banners. If that's not what you're talking about, then sorry for an irrelevant response. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 22:09, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

• I suppose it could work with banners as well. So I'll definitely contact them. But I'd still like to see something aimed at users. SuggestBot doesn't seem to be able to focus on the articles I want it to. - Mgm|^(talk) 23:19, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
  • I already responded on my talk page; but in short: Yes, WolterBot does this "category intersection" on a per-project basis, though not on a per-user basis. For users I'd recommend that either the user subscribes to WolterBot for the project or work group they're interested in; or to add functionality to SuggestBot as needed. It seems though that SuggestBot already has a similar functionality, at least it outputs an "Add Sources" section. --B. Wolterding (talk) 13:35, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Unblock request bot

Not sure if this is the right place to suggest this or not but here goes:

It would be really great if when a blocked user requests an unblock the blocking admin automatically got a notification at their user talk. What would be even better would be if this worked even for rangeblocks. And it would be even betterer if it worked for autoblocks too.

How practical would it be to have an automated account that performed such tasks and are there any undesirable aspects I haven't thought of?

More importantly, would anybody be interested in making such a thing?

CIreland (talk) 16:28, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I personally think it would be rather annoying. If the reviewing admin finds that there might be some merit to the unblock request, they'll generally leave a message for the blocking admin. But the majority of requests are completely meritless and a significant number are just vandalism. If this is done it would definitely need an opt-out system, or possibly even be opt-in. Mr.Z-man 18:58, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

As a sysop, I'd find this very pretty annoying, as it appears that there are admins watching Category:Requests for unblock, which doesn't appear to get backlogged. I 2nd the Z-man's observation that most of them are simply vandalism :( Skier Dude (talk) 05:20, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, I guess I'm just "different" then. When I block someone I like to know if they request unblock whether the request is frivolous or not. CIreland (talk) 05:50, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I third Mr. Z-man, but I'd happily code it. I would, however, make it "opt-in". Would you want me to code it? _David^WS _(contribs) 14:32, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, I'd use it but if I'm the only one I'm not sure it's worth putting you to the trouble. CIreland (talk) 14:34, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Just let me know. I love programming, so I want to do this. If you decide yes, leave me a message on my talk page. _David^WS _(contribs) 14:43, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

As opt-in I think it would be useful for admins who like to track their blocks, for example those who are usually not just blocking AIV-reports but more complex cases. I don't think it could hurt to have the possibility for admins to choose such services. And you know how they say: Build it and they will come :-) SoWhy 14:51, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Coding... _David^WS _(contribs) 14:52, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed here _David^WS _(contribs) 16:28, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Mass template detransclusion

I have just closed this TfD discussion as delete. Unfortunately, the template to be deleted is transcluded over 1400 times. I do not currently have access to AWB, a bot would be more than helpful here. RyanGerbil10(Unretiring slowly...!) 21:41, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 16. Anomie⚔ 23:53, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Template: Earthquake - add/ change sub templates

Please will someone's bot do the following:

For pages using {{Earthquake}}, convert dates (if after 1750AD) to use {{Start date}}, and change coordinates display parameters to |display=inline,title as in this edit. The former will make the date appear in the template's hCalendar microformat; the latter will make the articles appear in Google Earth/ Maps mashups.

Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:50, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I swear I'll have AWB back soon

Another ~300 transclusions at Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2008_November_14#Template:Internet_memes, with the bonus that it might get overturned at WP:DRV! RyanGerbil10(Four more years!) 20:42, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

A simpler Badchartbot request

I'm doing my best to eliminate the bad record chart listings, but I'm bailing a boat with serious leaks. Too many editors just go to the various chart sites and add any chart that's there, without any regard to whether the chart is appropriate. That means that I may, in a full day, eliminate 200 references to the United World Chart, but people will add 50 back in. I really need to have a bot to look at new additions and keep it from happening. There's probably an existing bot that could be modded to do this (XlinkBot comes to mind): what I need the bot to do is:

1) Monitor all additions to article space 2) Revert any additions that match a limited set of regular expressions 3) Implement usual safeguards (whitelisted editors, don't get into reversion wars, log all changes that it fails to revert because of safeguards)

The regular expressions would be based on WP:BADCHARTS:

• United World Chart
• "UWC" in any article that contains the word "chart"
• Polish National Top 50
• Euro 200
• Bulgarian Singles Chart
• Chile Hot 100
• Chile Top 100
• LCC Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
• Lithuanian Airplay Chart
• Philippines Hot 100
• Phillippines Hot 100
• Phillipines Hot 100
• Brazil Hot 100
• Brazil Singles Chart
• Brazil Albums Chart
• Brasil Hot 100
• Brasil Singles Chart
• Brasil Albums Chart
• Brazilian Singles Chart
• Brasilian Singles Chart
• Hot 100 Brasil
• Hot100Brasil

—Kww(talk) 19:57, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

That seems really restrictive to editing. Is there a project that goes into deciding this? If so, perhaps split the articles up or just have a bot list articles with known bad listings and manually remove them. I don't like the idea of a bot going through editorial content like that. If nothing else, have you considered a hidden comment that says basically "the listings have been debated and if you add one not found at blah, it will probably be deleted quickly"? A bot could do that. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:46, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Strike part of that. I didn't see badcharts above. I still wonder about using hidden comments and a bot that just lists the articles using that text once in a while. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:51, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Sneak a peek at my contribution history, and you will get a feel for the magnitude of the problem. I've been at this for 10 days now. I estimate that I have around 5000 more articles to go, and, all the time that I'm working on it, editors that are simply unaware that the chart they are adding is a bad chart are undoing my work behind me. I think that as long as the bot implements the standard behaviour of not undoing reverts of its own edits, there'll be enough editorial freedom.—Kww(talk) 00:02, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

And just to be sure it's clear, the problem isn't just charts: it's text and succession boxes, too. That's the hardest part about the initial removal, and the reason no bot could do that: the charts are bad enough, but fixing a sentence like "The single was in the Top 10 in Poland, Argentina, England, and number 36 on the United World Chart" means that I have to look at sourcing, determine whether it's based on the valid Polish and Argentine charts, and then transform the sentence into one of four possible correct results. Augh.—Kww(talk) 00:06, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I feel Kww's pain here - music articles (particularly current music articles, pop, r&b, hip-hop, etc.) are absolutely flooded with this kind of stuff. Charts are being replicated from anywhere and everywhere, including blogs and iTunes listings. It's a neverending cycle - manual editing isn't really doing the trick with some of these anymore. - eo (talk) 00:32, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Oops

Per this message, something I did mistakenly added categories to 60 talk page. Please have a bot remove

[[Category:Wikipedia GA templates|{{PAGENAME}}]]

from each page listed here. Thanks. -- Suntag ☼ 05:08, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Found 66. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 21:03, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Y Done §hep • ¡Talk to me! 23:19, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Template substitution

Hi all. A few months ago, WikiProject Aircraft started splitting the parameters of our old {{Infobox Aircraft}} between two templates of a modular system: {{Infobox Aircraft Begin}} and {{Infobox Aircraft Type}}. The new system has now been implemented on over 500 articles, and no opposition was raised to a suggestion that we recruit a bot to convert the rest (archived here).

In practical terms, it means we need a bot that will go through all articles that include {{Infobox Aircraft}} (around 4,000 articles) and split that template's parameters appropriately. There are no new parameters to add and none to rename – should hopefully be straightforward. Any volunteers? --Rlandmann (talk) 01:50, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Can you provide a diff of what needs to be done? Thanks. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 01:52, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Sure - take a look at this. The only cases where this wouldn't be as straightforward as this example would be instances where the order of the parameters in the article differs from the norm (which of course doesn't affect the output, but means that a bot has to be able to sort the parameters, not just insert }}{{Infobox Aircraft Type in front of every instance of |name=). --Rlandmann (talk) 02:13, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

If §hep doesn't want to do it, AnomieBOT could do that easily. Anomie⚔ 04:34, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I'll happily code it. Just tell me if you want me to do it... _David^WS _(contribs) 15:42, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I actually object to the fact the way it's coded it required a table to be placed in the page. This is not good practice. — Dispenser 16:24, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree. The {| should clearly be part of the first template. Please stop and think about what you're doing here. — CharlotteWebb 16:36, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree as well. I'm also not quite sure I see the point in splitting it into separate templates, when each article uses both templates. Besides being more confusing and increasing server load from loading 2 templates instead of 1, how is that any different from just having 1 template? If there is actually a reason for using 2 templates, it should be done like the {{userboxtop}}/{{userboxbottom}} system and not require wrapping it in a table. Mr.Z-man 18:22, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

@Dispenser: the table elements have been placed outside the template to allow different elements of this system to be placed in different articles as appropriate; for example, articles that require {{Infobox Aircraft Type}}, {{Infobox Aircraft Career}} or both. Did you read the documentation?

@CharlotteWebb: I guess the opening {| could be placed within the first template; but I think that would be confusing when the closing |} can't also be placed within a template (since there's no way of knowing how many or which template(s) will be following in any particular article.

@Mr.Z-man: The point is that each article doesn't use both templates. With respect, if you'd actually read the docs, you'd know this...

The approach was actually borrowed from WP:SHIPS who have just such a modular system of Infobox templates working well right throughout their scope. A read of their documentation might prove further illuminating. We don't have nearly as many elements to choose from as they do yet, but we're slowly growing. --Rlandmann (talk) 19:23, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't want this one right now, I was just curious what was needed. I couldn't get what I thought someone here would need from the text; so I asked for a diff. Good luck, §hep • ¡Talk to me! 19:44, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Just because other projects are doing it doesn't mean its a good idea. It doesn't matter if you have an unknown number of intermediate templates if you use a start-inner-end approach, which is why I linked the userbox templates - they work the same way but don't require people to add tables to the page. The top template starts the table, the bottom template finishes it. There are several other types of templates like this. Most of the discussion archive templates ({{at}}/{{ab}}, etc.) work this way. It doesn't matter how many templates are in the middle. With respect, if you had looked at my examples, you would have known this. Mr.Z-man 20:00, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Where did I say that just because WP:SHIPS is doing it, it must be a good idea? I simply pointed out that they've been using this model with success for some time (and across around 13,000 articles) and they sky hasn't fallen - it's demonstrably not too confusing.

I did look at your example; but it seems strange to me that if you're concerned about transcluding two templates instead of one, that you would now be advocating transcluding three instead of two. An extra template simply to add a "|}" seems unnecessary. --Rlandmann (talk) 20:54, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 12 Anomie⚔ 01:53, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

(unarchive) Hopefully I can start running this soon. Anomie⚔ 13:30, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Doing... Anomie⚔ 12:10, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Y Done Anomie⚔ 23:02, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Link changes: Ireland-related articles

Resolved

There has been a move of three major Ireland-related articles:

	Was	Now
1.	Ireland	Ireland (island)
2.	Republic of Ireland	Ireland (state)
3.	Ireland (disambiguation)	Ireland

Would it be possible for a bot to fix the links to these pages across all articles? (There are a lot e.g. about 30,000 articles have links to Ireland, all of these should be changed to Ireland (island).)

It is especially important for links that currently point to Ireland to be changed to Ireland (island) in order save the boys over at Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation from cracking up. Changing links from Republic of Ireland to Ireland (state) and from Ireland (disambiguation) to Ireland, is less important as redirects are in place - but would tidy things up. --89.101.221.42 (talk) 12:17, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

If this is done, only the first one should be done at all. WP:R#NOTBROKEN applies to the other 2. Mr.Z-man 17:02, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately all the links to Ireland, now Ireland (island), are not necessarily correct. Some are intended for the island but some for the state, so changing them all without any oversight will still leave many errors, just different ones. This was one of the valid reasons for not making the page move in the first place. The errors will remain until an editor looks at the page and checks if the link is proper in the first place. ww2censor (talk) 18:41, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't follow. If the link was right before the bot, it will be right after. If the link was wrong before the bot, it will be wrong after. Garbage In, Garbage Out. I don't know of any bot clever enough to maliciously change a link so as to point to Ireland (island), when Ireland (state) would be more appropriate. --89.101.221.42 (talk) 18:57, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

'Do not do this request. The page move that necessitated it has been reverted. --78.152.242.239 (talk) 19:06, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Spit out lists of articles in categories

Hi. I looked but could not find a bot on the list that does this but it seems like a simple, ordinary job. I'd like a list of articles, wikilinked, to be generated and occasionally updated from the category Category:Canadian football and its subcats to Wikipedia:WikiProject Canadian football/Articles as a list of articles within that topic. It appears that somebody started to try to do that manually a long time ago and quit. The intention is to use related changes to use it as a sort of watchlist. Thanks, DoubleBlue (talk) 03:07, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Legobot 8 LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 06:04, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Cleanup from Obersachsebot

Obersachsebot recently added a slew of interwiki links to templates, adding some of them outside of noincludes. I've been going through its contribs by hand fixing the ones I find, but this is tedious enough that it seems a bot might be better. In fact, as far as I can tell any template that has "bare" interwiki links in it is probably broken. Anyone interested? -- Rick Block (talk) 02:06, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Just a quick question about the issue. Have you talked to the botop to let them know about our practices? That way people don't have to constantly cleanup after it. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 20:41, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I sort of assumed it was an approved bot, but it seems not to be. I'll talk to the botop. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:42, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

No, it's approved. See BRFA §hep • ¡Talk to me! 04:20, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm again (it's not listed yet in Wikipedia:Bots/Status). So this issue didn't show up in its trial run, but it has clearly broken things. I don't know if the botop has prevented it from updating templates (it's still running, but hasn't touched a template since Nov 28). I've manually examined several hundred of its contribs in template space and fixed a couple dozen. The point still stands - interwiki links added outside of a noinclude in template space (by this or any other interwiki bot) need to be found and fixed. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:52, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Per this message, the botop says he's fixed all the issues. I still think it wouldn't be a bad idea to scan template space for errant interwiki links. -- Rick Block (talk) 20:06, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

WikiVoices importer bot

NotTheWikipediaWeekly has moved to meta as WikiVoices, but we need a bot to take the episodes from the meta page and update the list on en.wikipedia. Extra points if it can leave messages on a set list of talk pages.

The code at User:Wikinews Importer Bot#Source might help, and we can set up any categories/pages required. Dendodge Talk^Contribs 23:47, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

This would be a really useful bot. We've moved the main undertaking to Meta in order to put all the WMF sites on an equal footing, but this is the largest project with the most people. Automation is needed to keep things unified. :) Durova^Charge! 23:49, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

So, copy m:Template:Wikivoices subscription to Template:NTWW-subscription? LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 03:34, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes (but not yet because, as you can see, the meta template is broken). Would it be possible to deliver the episodes to users on a list too? Densock|Dendodge^{in public} 12:33, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Coding... Where is the list located? LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 05:40, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

We don't have a list yet - code it under whatever name you like and we'll create it there. Dendodge Talk^Contribs 16:19, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Legobot 9. Please start the list at Wikipedia:NotTheWikipediaWeekly/Subscription. LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 00:44, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

WP:WikiProject Iran football assessment tagging

I would like a bot to please tag the talk pages of articles in any of the following categories with {{Football|Iran=yes}} retaining original assessments if any. This was originally requested with no responses and automatically archived.

Categories:

Category:Football in Iran, Category:Iran football club seasons, Category:Esteghlal F.C. seasons, Category:Persepolis F.C. seasons, Category:Sepahan F.C. seasons, Category:Iranian football chairmen and investors, Category:Iranian football clubs, Category:Defunct Iranian football clubs, Category:Esteghlal FC, Category:Esteghlal FC players, Category:Esteghlal F.C. seasons, Category:Persepolis F.C., Category:Persepolis F.C. managers, Category:Persepolis F.C. non-playing staff, Category:Persepolis F.C. players, Category:Persepolis F.C. seasons, Category:Persepolis F.C. templates, Category:Sepahan F.C., Category:Sepahan players, Category:Sepahan F.C. managers, Category:Sepahan F.C. seasons, Category:Sepahan F.C. templates, Category:Iran football club stubs, Category:Iranian football competitions, Category:Defunct Iranian football competitions, Category:Expatriate footballers in Iran, Category:Iranian footballers, Category:Iran international footballers, Category:Iranian expatriate footballers, Category:Olympic footballers of Iran, Category:Iranian football biography stubs, Category:Footballers in Iran by club, Category:Aboomoslem players, Category:Bargh Shiraz players, Category:Damash Gilan players, Category:Esteghlal Ahvaz players, Category:Esteghlal FC players, Category:Fajr Sepasi players, Category:Foolad FC players, Category:Malavan players, Category:Mes Kerman players, Category:Pas players, Category:Paykan players, Category:Pegah Gilan players, Category:Persepolis F.C. players, Category:Rah Ahan players, Category:Saba Battery players, Category:Saipa players, Category:Sepahan players, Category:Shirin Faraz Kermanshah players, Category:Zob Ahan players, Category:IPL Club Templates, Category:Iranian football managers, Category:Football managers in Iran, Category:Football managers in Iran by club, Category:Persepolis F.C. managers, Category:Sepahan F.C. managers, Category:Non-Iranian football managers in Iran, Category:Iran national football team, Category:Iran international footballers, Category:Iran national football team managers, Category:Iran national football team templates, Category:Iranian football referees, Category:Iranian football squad templates, Category:Iran national football team templates, Category:Football venues in Iran, Category:Women's football in Iran, Category:Iran football (soccer) templates, Category:Iran football (soccer) club templates, Category:Persepolis F.C. templates, Category:Sepahan F.C. templates

Thanks —Borgarde^talk 10:52, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

BRFA filed Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Legobot 7 LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 05:56, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for getting this going :) —Borgarde^talk 13:51, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Doing... LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 06:27, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Y Done LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 02:47, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Uncategorized files

Looking at Special:UncategorizedFiles, I see close to 1,000 images all without any category. Most of them are just blanks that users have figured out how to bypass our system. For the blank ones, could a bot just go through and list them as no source/no license? For others, we'll have to look by hand. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 09:16, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I can have ImageTaggingBot do a run through there. --Carnildo (talk) 10:39, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, I suspect that the list is only the first thousand files. I'm not sure what order it is in but it's only going A-G plus some numbers, so it might be worth doing once in a while. What it doesn't get to, I'll manually review or perhaps it can spit otu a list of files it doesn't want to touch. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:43, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

The bot's done a first run through; anything left in the A-G range after the page refreshes is something the bot didn't know what to do with. Most of it's image description pages for images on Commons. --Carnildo (talk) 11:53, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

And it's done through the "M"s. Next refresh should be on the 7th. --Carnildo (talk) 03:19, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Template:Infobox Football biography conversion

The parameter syntax for Template:Infobox Football biography is being changed so the resultant HTML is more accessible, see Template talk:Infobox Football biography#Accessibility issue. There are nearly 40,000 references to this template, many of which will need to be changed. The basic idea is to convert an invocation like this

{{Football player infobox
| playername = George Burley
| image = 
| fullname = George Elder Burley
| nickname = 
| height = {{height|ft=5|in=9}}
| weight = 
| dateofbirth = {{birth date and age|1955|12|17|df=y}} 
| cityofbirth = [[Cumnock]], [[East Ayrshire]]
| countryofbirth = [[Scotland]]
| currentclub  = [[Scotland national football team|Scotland]] ([[Coach (sport)|Manager]])
| position = [[Defender (football)|Right-back]]
| youthyears = 
| youthclubs = 
| years = 1973–1985<br>1985–1988<br>1988–1989<br>1989–1991<br>1991–1993<br>1993<br>1993–1994<br>1994
| clubs = [[Ipswich Town F.C.|Ipswich Town]]<br/>[[Sunderland A.F.C.|Sunderland]]<br/>[[Gillingham F.C.|Gillingham]]<br/>[[Motherwell F.C.|Motherwell]] <br/>[[Ayr United F.C.|Ayr United]]<br/>[[Falkirk F.C.|Falkirk]]<br>[[Motherwell F.C.|Motherwell]]<br>[[Colchester United F.C.|Colchester United]]<br>'''Total'''
| caps(goals) = 394 {{0}}(6)<br>{{0}}54 {{0}}(0)<br>{{0}}46 {{0}}(2)<br>{{0}}54 {{0}}(0)<br>{{0}}67 {{0}}(0)<br>{{0}}{{0}}1 {{0}}(0)<br>{{0}}{{0}}5 {{0}}(0)<br>{{0}}{{0}}7 {{0}}(0)<br>'''{{0}}628 {{0}}(8)'''
| manageryears  = 1991–1993<br/>1994<br/>1994–2002<br/>2003–2005<br/>2005<br/>2005–2008<br/>2008–
| managerclubs  = [[Ayr United F.C.|Ayr United]]<br/>[[Colchester United F.C.|Colchester United]]<br/>[[Ipswich Town F.C.|Ipswich Town]]<br/>[[Derby County F.C.|Derby County]]<br/>[[Heart of Midlothian F.C.|Heart of Midlothian]]<br/>[[Southampton F.C.|Southampton]]<br/>[[Scotland national football team|Scotland]] 
| nationalyears = <br><br>1979–1982
| nationalteam = [[Scotland national under-21 football team|Scotland U21]]<br>Scotland U23<br>[[Scotland national football team|Scotland]] 
| nationalcaps(goals) = {{0}}{{0}}5 {{0}}(0)<br>{{0}}{{0}}2 {{0}}(0)<br>{{0}}11 {{0}}(0) 
}}

to this

{{Template:Infobox Football biography 2
| playername = George Burley
| image = 
| fullname = George Elder Burley
| nickname = 
| height = {{height|ft=5|in=9}}
| weight = 
| dateofbirth = {{birth date and age|1955|12|17|df=y}} 
| cityofbirth = [[Cumnock]], [[East Ayrshire]]
| countryofbirth = [[Scotland]]
| currentclub  = [[Scotland national football team|Scotland]] ([[Coach (sport)|Manager]])
| position = [[Defender (football)|Right-back]]
| youthyears = 
| youthclubs = 
| years1 = 1973–1985
| years2 = 1985–1988
| years3 = 1988–1989
| years4 = 1989–1991
| years5 = 1991–1993
| years6 = 1993
| years7 = 1993–1994
| years8 = 1994
| clubs1 = [[Ipswich Town F.C.|Ipswich Town]]
| clubs2 = [[Sunderland A.F.C.|Sunderland]]
| clubs3 = [[Gillingham F.C.|Gillingham]]
| clubs4 = [[Motherwell F.C.|Motherwell]]
| clubs5 = [[Ayr United F.C.|Ayr United]]
| clubs6 = [[Falkirk F.C.|Falkirk]]
| clubs7 = [[Motherwell F.C.|Motherwell]]
| clubs8 - [[Colchester United F.C.|Colchester United]]
| caps(goals)1 = 394 {{0}}(6)
| caps(goals)2 = {{0}}54 {{0}}(0)
| caps(goals)3 = {{0}}46 {{0}}(2)
| caps(goals)4 = {{0}}54 {{0}}(0)
| caps(goals)5 = {{0}}67 {{0}}(0)
| caps(goals)6 = {{0}}{{0}}1 {{0}}(0)
| caps(goals)7 = {{0}}{{0}}5 {{0}}(0)
| caps(goals)8 {{0}}{{0}}7 {{0}}(0)
| totalcaps(goals) = {{0}}628 {{0}}(8)
| manageryears1  = 1991–1993
| manageryears2 = 1994
| manageryears3 = 1994–2002
| manageryears4 = 2003–2005
| manageryears5 = 2005
| manageryears6 = 2005–2008
| manageryears7 = 2008–
| managerclubs1  = [[Ayr United F.C.|Ayr United]]
| managerclubs2 = [[Colchester United F.C.|Colchester United]]
| managerclubs3 = [[Ipswich Town F.C.|Ipswich Town]]
| managerclubs4 = [[Derby County F.C.|Derby County]]
| managerclubs5 = [[Heart of Midlothian F.C.|Heart of Midlothian]]
| managerclubs6 = [[Southampton F.C.|Southampton]]
| managerclubs7 = [[Scotland national football team|Scotland]] 
| nationalyears1 = -
| nationalyears2 = -
| nationalyears3 = 1979–1982
| nationalteam1 = [[Scotland national under-21 football team|Scotland U21]]
| nationalteam2 = Scotland U23
| nationalteam3 = [[Scotland national football team|Scotland]] 
| nationalcaps(goals)1 = {{0}}{{0}}5 {{0}}(0)
| nationalcaps(goals)2 = {{0}}{{0}}2 {{0}}(0)
| nationalcaps(goals)3 = {{0}}11 {{0}}(0) 
}}

Work on the new version of the template is not quite complete yet. This is mostly a heads up to see if there's anyone interested in taking this on. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:33, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Eminently do-able if no-one else picks it up. Rich Farmbrough, 11:18 5 December 2008 (UTC).

UnreferencedBot

I thought I asked this before, but I can't find it. Based on my VP proposal: Since a lack of any sort of references in articles is such a large problem, I fully believe it should be addressed in a way that doesn't allow the issue to grow faster than it can be addressed as is currently the case. But even proposals to delete recently created fully unreferenced articles after a 30-day grace period don't gather consensus.

One major issue is, that keeping them around for extended periods of time makes finding references impossible because it's no longer possible to know if what you find online is a reference or some botched copy of the Wikipedia article you're trying to reference.

I'd therefore like to suggest a bot that nips this in the butt and warns users if they create a page (in article space) without any form of referencing (inline, ISBN), or alternatively, spews out a list of articles for human review who can then use an semi-automated script to post reminders/warnings to user talk pages.

Is there a bot that can do this? Or is someone willing to code this? - Mgm|^(talk) 13:58, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure, but it will probably be very hard to determine automatically whether a newly created article has references or not. There are just too many format options for references. (Much less even can a bot determine whether the references indeed back up a relevant portion of the article.) So one might rather evaluate {{unreferenced}} tags added by humans. On the other hand, these are often added months or years after the aricle has been created. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:23, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

• Simply having the most common formatting methods expunged from the list, would leave a lot less to be checked; a semi-automated process is probably best. of course a bot is not suitable to check if the refs back up the content, that is something that should be left to human evaluation entirely. - Mgm|^(talk) 23:35, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Template Substitution for Top Albums According to Rolling Stone

There seems to be a consensus on Template talk:RS500 that Template:RS500 should be substituted for its actual text wherever it is used in the article namespace. There should be about 500 articles that use this template, so I was wondering if it would be possible for a bot to perform template substitution on all of them. Thanks, and my respects to the people who write these bots! —Pie4all88 ^{T C} 05:58, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Doing... LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 06:03, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Wow, that was fast--thanks, Legoktm! —Pie4all88 ^{T C} 06:25, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Y Done just a few left to do manually. LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 08:11, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Excellent. I substituted it for the remainder of the articles, so this template should be done with. Thanks again for your help! —Pie4all88 ^{T C} 09:42, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

"Crat tasks status info boxes"

Per my message at Wikipedia:Bureaucrats'_noticeboard#.22Crat_tasks_status_info_boxes.22, I'd like WP:BN to have some additional infoboxes, giving the current status of and links to open Crat tasks, so we can track where our backlogs are.

We already have a useful bot-generated tool that shows and links to open RfAs and highlights ones that are overdue, but our various rename pages and the BAG flagging tasks are not currently highlighted.

We'd request that if a helpful coder is interested in working on this for us, that they'd post in that thread at BN, so we can discuss specific parameters for the task and you can tell us what is and is not achievable.

Many thanks, --Dweller (talk) 13:26, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

(cross post) I'll work on coding it, once consensus forms. Or I can just do it now, as it's not too difficult. I can just reuse some code from existing bots (e.g. SoxBot II, SoxBot VI, ClueBot VI, and BAGBot). Xclamation point 20:39, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

 Done Xclamation point 22:09, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

IRC

There are two templates for the same topic. Template:IRC clients and Template:IRC footer I added to the first template the information that there mising of the second template. can somebody write a bot, that the irc clients - template will be renamed in irc and added to every page which is in the template? (and the second template should be removed) mabdul 0=* 15:23, 18 January 2009 (UTC) oh and there is a third template, called Template:IRC networks mabdul 0=* 15:28, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

So you basically want to replace those three templates with a new one called {{IRC}}? Unfortunately {{irc}} exists already and is used, so you need to decide on another name (I think {{IRC footer}} works nicely actually). I suggest you ask Anomie (talk · contribs) directly for this task if he does not read this request - he got the needed scripts for template replacement in his bot already. Regards SoWhy 15:43, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

oh ok didn't know/looked up if there is any template called irc. what about Template:Internet Relay Chat? ok, I will ask him. thx mabdul 0=* 15:50, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

I like the organization of {{IRC footer}} better than {{IRC clients}}, the latter template is just too large. {{IRC footer}} needs cleaning up to remove the plethora of redlinks, though. I think some input from WP:WikiProject Computing would be helpful to gain a consensus of what exactly should be done here. Anomie⚔ 17:16, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Changing assessment classes on template talk pages using WikiProject College football banner

Category:NA-Class college football articles has several hundred pages in it that are in the Template Talk namespace, and have the {{WikiProject College football}} banner, with "class=NA" set as a parameter to the banner. I'd like to have a bot run through this category, and for each article in the Template Talk namespace (e.g. Template Talk: ACC Championship Game), replace "class=NA" with "class=Template" in the College football banner to tag them as Template-Class and put them in Category:Template-Class college football articles. Talk pages in non-template namespaces are fine where they are. I'm not aware of any sub-categoriesDeFaultRyan (talk) 18:23, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Actually, since that banner use WPBM the entire |class=X can be removed. It has automatic namspace detection for categories and templates. §hep^Talk 18:28, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that would work as well. Doesn't shepbot do something along these lines? DeFaultRyan (talk) 18:33, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes it does. I'm having issues with Trend Micro right now and it barely allows me to open AWB. It traces a "suspicious activity" back to Foundation severs that I've been trying to figure out. Seems I've been breaking computers lately (or AWB has, dundundun) as 2 others I have access to are sitting in the garage completely fried. I expected it out of the Win7 computer a bit, but not the other. (Read:Sorry, can't help right now.) :D §hep^Talk 18:55, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Is this really worth doing? It makes no difference to the output of the template. If it is worth it, I have the code written and can file a BRFA, but it doesn't seem worth the edits. [[Sam Korn]] ^(smoddy) 18:11, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Why don't you edit the template so if the namespace is template talk, automatically assess it into the template class. LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 22:42, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

My understanding is that this already happens... [[Sam Korn]] ^(smoddy) 22:55, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Seems someone got to it. Can this be marked resolved? §hep^Talk 01:03, 22 March 2009 (UTC)