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Monkbot 18

Latest comment: 3 years ago94 comments18 people in discussion
I started an "update" thread at the task's talk page and have discussed this on IRC with The Earwig and ProcrastinatingReader, and I feel that we have hit the point where this task needs to be placed   On hold.
While this task has quite strong support from those editors involved in template side of CS1|2 issues, there has been growing pushback from the community at large, and it has reached a point where their valid concerns are clearly no longer just an inconvenience suffered by those with large watchlists. On the plus side, all but 5 of the 40 un-hyphenated parameters have been essentially eliminated. However, there is still the issue of the those five parameters: it will take approximately four months for |accessdate= to be replaced at current edit rates, and 1-2 months for the other four. This, understandably, is unacceptable to many.
Thus, until such matters can be decided, the bot task will be put on hold and a CENT-advertised RFC started on the deprecation of these parameters to hopefully put the matter to rest. Primefac (talk) 00:20, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Requesting re-examination of Monkbot 18, specifically its edits to hyphenate parameters. Concerns were raised about this particular aspect of this task in its BRFA, and subsequently on the bot maintainer's talk page. The maintainer was asked to provide links to discussions demonstrating a consensus either to deprecate all unhyphenated variants, or specifically to deprecate |accessdate=, a particularly widely used example; he was unable to do so. The maintainer subsequently started a discussion to seek confirmation after the fact that this deprecation was acceptable, and although the discussion had limited community representation, it revealed further concerns with both the bot task and the intent to remove support for this parameter. Given the scale of this task, impacting over a third of the site's articles, the maintainer was asked to open an RfC to seek wider community consensus on this issue; thus far no such RfC has taken place, but the task has resumed regardless. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:58, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

I might consider an RfC were it obvious that a goodly portion of the community were up in arms about this bot task. Monkbot task 18 has now made 225k+ edits. All of those edits appear on a large number of watch lists yet there has been no uprising. Yes, there are a few who object. That there have been so few objections suggests to me that the community as a whole are either indifferent to, or approve of, the bot's edits.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:36, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
"There hasn't been an uprising" isn't a go-ahead to disable functionality and change over two million more articles. Please pause this edit until you have obtained consensus for it. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:57, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
You claim that this bot task will disable functionality. I think that you need to demonstrate where that is happening. Yes, the bot task will change over two million ... articles. That was stated in the initial creation of the bot's WP:BRFA; see here.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:06, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
The BRFA stated that the task would "replace all of the to-be-deprecated parameter names". It did not demonstrate a consensus to deprecate specific parameters, nor point to any global consensus on deprecation. Further you have stated here that "At the end of the deprecation period, support for the parameter name will be withdrawn and the parameter name will no longer work". No consensus for removing this functionality has been demonstrated. And yet your bot continues even now to remove these parameters at speed, without establishing a consensus that the community actually deliberately wants them to be removed. Find consensus for that first, and then restart your bot, rather than perpetually restarting it and claiming a lack of pitchforks as a substitute for real consensus. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:17, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Yes, that is what I wrote in the WP:BRFA. Except that it is converting parameter names that will be deprecated to parameter names that will not be deprecated, decisions with regard to actual deprecation are not taken in a BRFA nor by the bot. Yes, when a deprecation period ends, support for the deprecated parameter will be withdrawn, so yes, the once-deprecated parameter will not work and cs1|2 templates will emit error messages to notify editors of that fact. You continue to claim that task 18 is removing functionality but have not shown where functionality is being removed.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:13, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
decisions with regard to actual deprecation are not taken in a BRFA nor by the bot. The bot is removing parameters where no consensus to deprecate currently exists. That is not appropriate. Nikkimaria (talk) 16:41, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
@Nikkimaria: can you provide a diff to a specific edit that you think this bot has made that you think is harmful, and describe why you think it is harmful to readers and/or editors? This is just to see if there should be some sort of urgent injunction while the discussion continues. — xaosflux Talk 16:57, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Here is a sample edit. The problem occurs because the bot run creates a fait-accompli situation with regards to parameter deprecation - see response to GreenC below. Nikkimaria (talk) 17:46, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
@Nikkimaria: thanks for the note, I'm not seeing a reason to do something drastic like block this bot while this is being further discussed - on initial review: (a) this has no impact on readers (b) this is following the formatting for parameters as documented for {{Cite web}}. It could be argued that while there is an alias this is a completely useless or purely cosmetic edit (in that it does not change the reader-facing rendered version of the page). This statement should not be taken as an endorsement or condemnation of the edits - just that it doesn't appear to be rising to level of needing immediate intervention. — xaosflux Talk 17:57, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Umm, Monkbot task 18 is a cosmetic bot; every edit summary that the bot writes states that; the WP:BRFA states that; the bot's documentation states that.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:25, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
@Trappist the monk: I didn't review the BRFA on this, was only jumping in to quickly see if something was running amok and needing emergency action, which I don't think is necessary. — xaosflux Talk 19:19, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Nothing wrong with that edit. The bot did what it is designed to do. It deleted the one empty |accessdate=, renamed |accessdate= to |access-date= (8×), |archivedate= to |archive-date= (4×), and |archivurl= to |archive-url= (4×). There were no cs1|2 errors before the edit and no cs1|2 errors after the edit. Nothing was broken.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:25, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
  • Support Nikkimaria's approach on this, for the given rationale. --Francis Schonken (talk) 15:32, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
  • Support established consensus. The bot had consensus in the BRFA |access-date= was specifically discussed. It had consensus at CS1|2 talk. It has defacto consensus due to the high visibility and very low complaint rate (most complainers were asking questions not demanding it stop). The bot is being copied other people are already doing the same thing manually and AWB. This is now the third forum discussion. Nikkimaria is pushing for a fourth place because the previous discussions and adoptions by the community are not "real". It's time to move on and put the recriminations behind. -- GreenC 16:51, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
    • As above, a lack of pitchforks is not a substitute for actual discussion with the wider community who will be impacted by the proposed deprecation being implemented by the bot. This also isn't the place for that discussion - the only reason we're here is because the bot began removing parameters without an established consensus for deprecation, and then people point to those removals as establishing a consensus. If you (using the generic "you" here) think that all unhyphenated parameters should be disabled and got rid of, then have an RfC that puts that outcome specifically to the community. Running the bot first is putting the cart before the horse. Nikkimaria (talk) 17:46, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
  • I don't have strong opinions on this, but there was a period when the bot was working on linguistics articles and it was mildly annoying. Not enough for me to make a fuss since the bot would be gone soon enough, but I considered it. I would support having an RfC on this just to get some clarity and hear concerns from those outside the bot and CS1|2 communities. — Wug·a·po·des​ 23:48, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
    That's interesting. Monkbot doesn't work on groups of related articles (at least not intentionally). For every day since task 18 began, I have grabbed a list of typically somewhere between 15 and 18 thousand articles from various cirrus searches (usually three or more searches). That list gets filtered for duplicates (because an article might match multiple search criteria). I then give the filtered list to Module:Sandbox/trappist the monk/random sort which scrambles the list. There is, of course, no guarantee that the scrambling won't put related articles together because that is the nature of random. Nor is there any guarantee that the searches won't turn up related articles. Were these linguistics articles edited one right after the other or were they spaced-out in time?
    —Trappist the monk (talk) 00:29, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
    Oh I'm almost sure it's a sampling bias; I do watchlist a lot of language articles after all! For the most part, they were spaced out in time, but given my watchlist habits, I only ever really saw changes to linguistics articles and never really anything else. Like I said, it's not a big deal for me but I think that even if the sample is random, people will still perceive it as working on particular article sets because they only watch particular article sets. Part of why I think a wider RfC would be helpful is that it also has the effect of advertising what the bot's going to be doing, how it's doing it, and ways that editors can opt out if they want. This way people don't feel like it's singling out "their" pages or whatever.
    And while I like the idea of kindly robots roaming articles and fixing stuff, the concept of a robot just passing through as it goes about its business is still kinda strange for most people. Our bot tasks are generally like cell phones--people have to interact with them or trigger them in some specific way. MonkBot's task 18 is more like a roomba--it just goes about its day cleaning stuff. Where phones are essentially really fancy calculators, roombas are in that uncanny valley of kinda having a mind of their own. (If you ever watched arrested development there's a scene where the character "Buster" feeds the roomba trash because it seemed hungry which is funny because they are more like pets than tools).
    So, yeah, I'm not trying to say task 18 should be stopped, but I think there's a human-machine interaction problem that we need to ease into better. Thinking on this more, you might want to make MonkBot more predictable. going off the recent cosmetic bot day RfC, I think we might want to limit it to once a week and just call that Cosmetic Bot Day (like scheduling your roomba). You can have it work through category trees rather than work randomly, so that it can post a notice on WikiProject talk pages in advance letting editors opt out (roombas work room by room rather than vacuuming about randomly after all). Maybe maintain some category black list so that particular "rooms" don't get "vacuumed". Maybe this is a bad analogy, but I think personifying the bot helps us to understand that initial uneasy feeling people get and to come up with changes that help people feel like the bot is working with them not just on its own. — Wug·a·po·des​ 01:46, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
  • Support Nikkimaria's objection because such a wide-ranging cosmetic change should have had wide discussion. Further discussion at Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 74#deprecation and removal of nonhyphenated multiword parameter names.
··gracefool 💬 09:51, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
  • Having these purely cosmetic changes hit my watchlist over and over was disruptive; when bots are constantly hitting your watchlist to install personal cosmetic preferences, it makes it harder to monitor real edits and catch vandalism. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:50, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
    Curious, how many articles are on your watchlist and how many MonkBot task 18 edits do you see per day, on average? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 01:16, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
    If we're talking numbers, I have 2492 pages on my watchlist of which 1691 are articles. And in the last 3 days (including today), I saw MonkBot 18 anywhere from 5 to 12 times per day. Or about 0.5% of the article part of my watchlist per day. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:53, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
    Which are all very easily hidden, since they are all flagged as bot edits. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:55, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
    My watchlist yesterday had 370 entries, 33 by Monkbot. I understand that I can suppress bot entries, but that is generally unwise. Just now, I had to fix unintended, but easily forseeable, effects of a bot removing navboxes. BTW, I don't understand when aliases became expensive or why they are undesirable. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:11, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
    Trappist, shouldn’t these numbers be lower? Depends on if Cirrus is truly random too, I guess. Maybe some kind of cat check can help? If has a cat seen in last 150 articles, skip. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:21, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
    That said, this kind of spam may be normal. MonkBot's current rate is about 22,000 edits per day (15 per minute), it seems. In other words, it will process 3 million articles in 4.5 months (~140 days). So if you have 1691 articles on your watchlist, assuming uniform distribution you should see 12 MonkBot edits per day. If the rate is moved to taking 6 months to complete, the average drops to 9 edits per day for Headbomb, or from 36 to 28 for Euryalus. But I'm not sure this makes the bot run any less problematic for people, to be honest, as that remains quite numerous and extending the run to take, say, a year becomes a bit unproductive and doesn't help much here either. Some kind of cat check may help, but it may also cause certain cats to get clogged together for more spam towards the end of this run. So for this I don't really have any ideas other than WP:HIDEBOTS. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:28, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
    [Shouldn't] these numbers be lower? I don't have an answer for that. If the coin toss creates an edit list that matches your watchlist, your watchlist will be flooded on that day. The coin toss can also land the other way creating an edit list where none of the articles on your watchlist get edited. The odds, as I understand it, are the same for both extremes and all points in between. I suppose that you could give me the content of your watchlist (mainspace only) and a date. With those, I can run the bot against your watchlist on that date. Thereafter you should see only the occasional watchlist hit. Of course, anyone with similar interests will get flooded on the same day so I suspect that editors should probably not ask to have their watchlists processed...
    —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:40, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
  • Doesn't rise to the level of pitchforks but am also finding the current Monkbot watchlist spam a little wearing. I have about 5000 pages watchlisted including many naval vessels, and the Monkbot accessdate changes seem very numerous. Appreciate that watchlist spam is already a regular consideration in bot approval discussions, and thank you to the BRFA regulars for that. Thanks also to Trappist for taking the time to aim for improved and standard template formatting in the first place. However, urge everyone involved to do please keep spam impacts in mind when balancing benefits vs drawbacks for additional bot tasks. -- Euryalus (talk) 13:03, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
    Genuinely out of curiosity, how comparable is that to the number of edits by Citation bot? Primefac (talk) 16:51, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
:@Primefac: And using the totally unscientific analysis of my current watchlist for today (last 17 hours) Monkbot appears 31 times as most recent editor of an article, Citationbot is at 5 and Cluebot and Lowercasesigmabot have 2 each. A bunch of others get a single hit. As above it's certainly not pitchforks at midnight stuff, just a mild request to keep keeping spam in mind with cosmetic approvals. -- Euryalus (talk) 17:20, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
Well, 31 makes sense. See my calculation above - assuming a uniform distribution you'd see 36 per day. I think one solution (for everyone) is turning User:UncleDouggie/smart_watchlist into a gadget, enabling it by default and hiding the cosmetic bots by default (and people can toggle it off, if they want). xaosflux may know more of how bad of an idea this is? A solution for your end only is to install that script yourself (see WP:HIDEBOTS). Even if Trappist makes the bot 4x slower, you'd still see a 'substantial' number of edits, depending on what substantial is for you. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:01, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
That's too niche to be a gadget. But we could update the instructions to mention the one-click script installation via user preferences. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:07, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader: "hiding" someone on watchlist with a client script doesn't fix the problem that it obscures any edit before it - the hiding would make it look like there was no change at all. — xaosflux Talk 23:50, 18 December 2020 (UTC)
If phab:T250856 ever got resolved, it wouldn't be an issue. Primefac (talk) 01:21, 19 December 2020 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: idea: what if "Latest revision only" is disabled in the server-side call, and instead that functionality is implemented client-side (if it's not already)? As in, the results show multiple revisions for this page, then the client trims them down to only one. Then it could also delete any bot revisions too, safely? (also pinging in Enterprisey for this thought, given experience from your section watchlists script). Is this feasible & a good idea? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:59, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

So this is just going to continue even though there isn't consensus on whether it's even achieving something good — let alone the spam issue? ··gracefool 💬 08:33, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

@ProcrastinatingReader: forcing people to use "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" isn't a great solution, and think it will impact recent changes in a different way. — xaosflux Talk 23:32, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
My thought was this is done behind the scenes using JS. Users wouldn't do anything differently compared to now, or see results differently (minus the bot), but I figured what I described would be a technical way to get around the obscuring issue. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:35, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
Yeah, I see what you're saying and it would probably work, but we might as well fix this in PHP (as we'll run into the same issue that's being argued about on Phab about precisely which edits to hide). Enterprisey (talk!) 03:17, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

  A user has requested the attention of a member of the Bot Approvals Group. Once assistance has been rendered, please deactivate this tag by replacing it with {{t|BAG assistance needed}}. So here we are a month later, and it's pretty clear that there is no consensus either here or at Help_talk:Citation_Style_1#deprecation_and_removal_of_nonhyphenated_multiword_parameter_names for what the bot is doing. Despite this the bot continues. Nikkimaria (talk) 16:53, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

  • Support - This had very limited discussion and goes against MOS:STYLERET and WP:COSMETICBOT. I take no issue with the hyphenating, I take issue with the removal of spacing and blank lines of wikitext that are used for formatting and readability. Frankly, I'll be undoing about 250 edits by this bot. - Floydian τ ¢ 00:53, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Tangential discussion on the effects of the bot on templated references

  • Support Nikkimaria's objection. The cosmetic change doesn't seem provide any benefit--the aesthetic benefit is subjective and negligible. On the other hand, there is a tangible problem that is more nefarious than watchlist spam. I think the bot should be stopped from this task because the task does not include a test to see if the bot is damaging articles. It has damaged dozens; here are the ones I know about so far and have recently fixed:


The issue is that MonkBot will edit a template and change a reference definition in that template, but not check the results of the effects of that edit in any of the places where the template is used. I think this is careless and negligent -- if the bot is expected to make hundreds of thousands of edits, shouldn't it have some quality checks to make sure it's not adding errors to articles?
The problem is that many reference definitions are duplicated. An article might define a reference named <ref name="math">, and it might include one (or more!) templates that do so, too. As long as the reference definitions are exactly the same (character for character, including whitespace and casing) the rendering code eats the duplication and considers them the same. MonkBot will come along and change one definition from accessdate to access-date. It won't check the results of that change and instead save the change to move along as rapidly as possible.
Of course, now that the references with the same name are different, articles referencing the template might end up with a message like "Cite error: The named reference "math" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page)" in the references section. A human has to come along and find this error, trace through the template inclusion, and find a way to recover from MonkBot's "cosmetic" edit. I don't think the value of the chanange justify the risk and work to find and recover these problems.
Referencing and inclusion in WikiPedia are surprisingly fragile, despite being core features (and requirements!) of the encyclopedia. For sure, duplicate references are a problem. While I don't think it's up to MonkBot to fix them, I don't think it should be allowed to make the problem worse -- or to be allowed to make any edits without first checking to see if it is introducing new errors or not. To trust those features to a robot which is too lazy to check its own work for errors done's seem like the right way to make progress. -- Mikeblas (talk) 14:46, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
I clicked on 5 of those links and MonkBot did not edit any of them? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:59, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Of the 19 listed references only three were edited. In neither Special:Diff/991972924 nor Special:Diff/991111878 did the bot introduce errors, and the errors seen following Special:Diff/992002956 were already present in the previous revision. This is a nonsense objection due to misunderstanding how the bot works (in addition, the "fix one template but not the other" argument is silly, if it's going to fix one parameter use it will fix them all). GIGO is not a reason to stop a bot. Primefac (talk) 15:22, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
The bot edited templates used by these articles. For example, 1890 Calgary municipal election invokes {{Calgary municipal election, 1890/Position/Councillor}} and {{Calgary municipal election, 1890/Position/Mayor}}, which were both edited by MonkBot. The The edits the bot made to the templates changed named references they have in common, made them different, and created new "Cite error" error messages in the articles I list. Here are some more articles disrupted which were fine before MonkBot edited referenced templates, but were broken afterwards:
-- Mikeblas (talk) 15:33, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Why are articles using (heck, re-defining) citations which are within a template? In any case, should named references be defined within a template of this kind, in the first place? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:40, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
This is exactly my point - it's a one-off GIGO situation. Primefac (talk) 15:43, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Many (like nearly all, right?) articles in Wikipedia include templates. An article can be damaged without editing the article itself. In many (most?) of the cases I list, MonkBot's damage comes from editing a template used by the article. All of the "Leap Year Starting" articles reference {{List of calendars}}, which was edited by MonkBot for this "Task 18" activity. The articles rendered just fine before the edit to the template. After the edit to the template, the articles rendered with errors. Note that, when you look at an old version of an article, it renders with the *current* version of the template. That can be deceiving, so it takes some effort to understand and diagnose these issues. I don't think there's a way to deny they were caused by MonkBot's edits to the templates.
To understand the errors in {{2011 League of Ireland Premier Division table}} and {{2013 League of Ireland Premier Division table}}, please consider the changes that MonkBot made to League of Ireland Premier Division table the 2011 League of Ireland Premier Division table template and the League of Ireland Premier Division table the 2013 League of Ireland Premier Division table. Note that the 2011 table template was manually fixed by User:Trappist the monk after a previous bot edit damaged some of the same the including articles earlier this month. -- Mikeblas (talk) 15:55, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
You are missing my point entirely. If an article is going to define a named reference, then it should be named something other than the named reference that a template is using. Honestly, the template itself probably shouldn't be using a named reference either. This is not the bot's fault, but a "garbage-in, garbage-out" situation created by a series of bad edits between the article writers and the template editors. Primefac (talk) 15:59, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Basically, my point is that if a bot exposes bad practice on the part of other users, we should fix that bad practice, not shut down the bot for exposing it. Primefac (talk) 16:01, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
And I'm afraid you're choosing to ignore my point entirely. At one moment, the articles rendered fine. (Therefore, they're not garbage.) Then, the bot came along and made a change. The bot didn't check to see if its change causes a new and visible error in the article, and instead it just saves the change and moves along. Now, after the bot's change, the article is objectively worse.
Good software (these bots are made of software) checks to see if it is getting garbage input. If it is, it either ignores that input -- even if it means it can't do its intended work; or makes a solid assumption based on the apparent intent of that input
If we give a bot garbage input (Go to the grocery and get a bottle of pickle milk!) we shouldn't accept garbage output (The bot returned with a brand new Mercedes Benz.) with a shrug of the shoulders. Instead, the bot should stop: There is no such thing as pickle milk, and we know that. What did you really mean? (Knowing my luck, the almond milk people have given up and moved along to pickle milk, but ...)
I'm not proposing that we shut down the bot. I propose that we stop it from doing this task until it can be corrected to not do damage when it gets this arguably bad input. It's pretty easy to detect errors after any changes made--just preview the page and look for errors that weren't there before. Why does the bot not do this? We know that the structure of wikicode that builds the corpus is very much irregular and fragile; it's hard for people to write, and difficult for machines to accurately parse. If we take a step back adn recognize that, I think we pretty naturally realize that automata that doesn't check for errors as it works is bad.
The bot could also be enhanced to build a work list that traverse the included texts and identifies the actual location of the duplicate references that you consider garbage. Referencing is difficult, and that difficulty is multiplied by templates and transclusion. Imagine a bot that was helpful in this task rather than regressive.
-- Mikeblas (talk) 16:29, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Check through the archives of User talk:AnomieBOT. There you will see dozens of complaints that the bot has "broken" something, when all it is doing is exactly what it's supposed to be doing. A bot cannot check for every possible way that a page will be broken, or (in this case) how editing one page affects a completely different article entirely! I do not deny that this is an issue, but it's an issue with the editors, not the bot. Primefac (talk) 17:47, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
Most articles include templates. But I do not think most articles include a content template which defines a named reference, and on top of that the article not only reuses the named reference, it redefines it, with the same name. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of why a template would use named references, unless it is part of a collection with other templates that should be used on the same article (and in such a case, it should use an obscure ref name that is not reused outside of that collection). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:59, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Many of these articles are using single-transclusion templates to hold article content, which seems like a nice list of TFD "subst and delete" candidates to me. But I digress. If the bot is going to edit templates that contain named references, it probably needs to immediately perform the same task on articles that transclude that template. That would bring the named references back into sync. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:03, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Some of them do (the Calgary election ones, specifically) but the rest are multiple-use tempaltes. I think the approach you give would be one way to consider; there are probably many other ways, and lots of trade-offs to consider. And that's what I insist: that we recognize how irregular and fragile the corpus is before letting overly simple robots run around and edit it. Really, it makes matters worse. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:24, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Category:Templates that generate named references catalogs more than 600 templates that generate named references. Note that this category is manually built -- I figure the actual count is an order of magnitude higher. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:24, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
4720 templates at the time of this writing, fwiw. Also, if you're going to reply to someone after someone's already replied with a different comment, please put your comments after theirs so the threading is correct. Primefac (talk) 17:54, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
Your search only finds ref name=. There are many other ways to write a template that generates a named reference -- invoking another template, most notably. Also, not always one space between "ref" and "name", might have a "group" parameter, spacing around equals, and so on. And of course, templates are only one facet of this problem; transclusion is a whole 'notha level. Also, some false alarms for templates that generate syntax for named references, but don't generate names references. My point was, though, that this isn't a small problem; and there are plenty of motivations for creation of a template that generates a named reference.
Sorry -- Like the majority of editors, I'm not familiar with the rules for participating in these complicated discussions, and wish that Wikipedia had any amount of tooling for doing so. My vision is quite poor, and counting colons is tedious and difficult for me. In fact, I usually refrain from participating for these reasons (and a few others), but feel strongly enough about disruptive bot behaviour that I tried to join in. I regret that you found my style distracting from my intended messages. -- Mikeblas (talk) 19:14, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
No worries, the indenting comment was not meant as any sort of black mark, just a comment about how things are "usually" done. My prior comments (and edit summaries) came from a place of not knowing where you were coming from, so any perceived annoyance or anger were entirely my fault and I apologize for that. Primefac (talk) 21:16, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
Because they can, I guess. Repeated definitions (that don't differ) are absorbed and rendered correctly. Editors make template inclusion structures that range from trivial to Byzantine, and it can be quite difficult to track down which wiki code defines which references. Many templates rely on the absorption of repeated references in order to simplify their use and implementation. Maybe another case is that editors don't know the reference is redefined; they don't exhaustively unroll the possibly nested template inclusions, read LUA code that implements templates, unwind the three or four forms of partial transclusion, and ...
Point is, though, that this robot comes along and disrupts what was working. Maybe it's not ideal to have repeated references spread across different inclusions, but it works -- and doesn't generate an error. Until this robot changes it, doesn't check for newly introduced problems, saves its change and leaves the article in worse shape (now with an big red error message). If the robot doesn't check that it's doing damage, it shouldn't be trusted to edit autonomously or automatically. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:04, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Referencing and inclusion in WikiPedia are surprisingly fragile, despite being core features (and requirements!) of the encyclopedia. Yes. And references in an article that are mirrored in templates that are transcluded into that article are some of the most fragile of the fragile. I suspect that this fragility is why editors create specific-source templates. Specific-source templates can be transcluded into an article and also into other templates that the article transcludes. This mechanism is as robust as it gets because there is there is only one 'source' for the citation.
Alternately, editors can use a self-closed <ref name="math" /> tag in the body of the template and do this (list defined referencing):
<noinclude>
{{reflist|refs=
<ref name="math">{{cite web|url=http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/calendar/isocalendar.htm |author=Robert van Gent |title=The Mathematics of the ISO 8601 Calendar |publisher=Utrecht University, Department of Mathematics |date=2017 |access-date=20 July 2017}}</ref>
}}
[[Category:Calendar templates]]
</noinclude>
Of course this is still problematic because the article and template references are independent so they can easily fall out of sync. Mirroring of citation templates in articles and the templates that the articles transclude is poor practice and should be discouraged.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:12, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
It's also problematic, @Trappist the monk: because it's not the status quo. Your proposal would require manual edits to a large (and unknown) number of templates and articles, thoughtful considration of layout and declaration order, and so on. At this time, there are countless articles written that render just fineand are only broken as User:Monkbot visits them and makes changes without checking for problems. It's pretty clear that "detecting" referencing problems in this bot action wasn't an intended (or known) consequence of the proposed action for the robot, and so there was never consensus or acknowledgement that the robot should be doing it. Really, this is starting to seem a lot like WP:POINT. Please consider pausing this task until the community can agree upon a way forward. -- Mikeblas (talk) 17:51, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
Specific-source templates are fragile with link rot. When an external site changes [servers, software, ownership, domains, url layout, etc], they never in my years of experience change all URLs equally. This creates problems with custom source templates which treat all URLs equally, which might have been true at the time the template was created. The only solution is to go through every instance of the template, check the new URL is working and if not delete the template and replace it with a CS1|2. This work is laborious and often does not get done, the end result is link rot on Wikipedia. This can be avoided by using standard templates like CS1|2 for which standardized tools are available. -- GreenC 16:28, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Perhaps we are talking about different things? For my meaning of 'specific-source', I mean a template that holds a single complete citation (perhaps single-source is a better term) so a template {{The Mathematics of the ISO 8601 Calendar}} would hold only:
{{cite web|url=http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/calendar/isocalendar.htm |author=Robert van Gent |title=The Mathematics of the ISO 8601 Calendar |publisher=Utrecht University, Department of Mathematics |date=2017 |access-date=20 July 2017}}
{{The Mathematics of the ISO 8601 Calendar}} could be transcluded into into articles and into templates and when those transclusions are wrapped in <ref name="...">...</ref> (where the name="..." attribute is the same) will be seamlessly merged together.
I think that you are describing the case where a template takes an argument parameter that is used to modify a base url?
—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:58, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Sorry I misinterpreted. With a static URL it would be no problem with link rot, actually an improvement. -- GreenC 17:14, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
If that's done, I feel like {{The Mathematics of the ISO 8601 Calendar}} would be better off as a subpage of something (eg "{{Citation dictionary/The Mathematics of the ISO 8601 Calendar}}"), so we don't have citation templates littered around everywhere, most probably with no categories to link them. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:35, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Just as a note, we tried that with {{cite doi}}, which was eventually determined to be not a great idea (i.e. creating thousands of subpages with one-value citations). Primefac (talk) 17:47, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Mikeblas using DiscussionTools will help. It adds a “reply” button next to messages. Go to Special:MyPage/common.js and add: 

if ( $( '#ca-addsection' ).length ) mw.loader.using( 'ext.discussionTools.init' );

ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:31, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll see if I can give that a try. Meanwhile, why was my input excluded from the Monkbot discussion above? Are only certain people allowed to give input about these topics? -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:48, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
Your input was not excluded, but it started a discussion that is now longer than everyone else's opinions listed in the main section, which is why I split it off into its own section. Primefac (talk) 21:16, 24 December 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification. It seems like there's not concensus around this change, and the way the change is implemented is causing damage. How do we stop this bot from continuing this task? -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:04, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Further discussion on potential bot disruption

Note that MonkBot is damaging references that use any transclusion, not just templates. I fixed these this morning:
How do we make the robot stop making breaking changes? -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:04, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
As before, it’d help if you also linked the damaged transclusion. But generally yes, the namespace of the transclusion (whether it be template, article or Wikipedia) is not relevant. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:46, 26 December 2020 (UTC)
Sorry, I didn't see a previous request for links to the transclusions. Here is wider enumeration:

The bot continuously makes these errors since it doesn't check its own work. If more examples are needed, please let me know -- they are easier to find than they are to write up. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:52, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

I randomly clicked on a few of those (e.g [2], [3]), and I've yet to find anything broken. So what exactly is broken, and what exactly caused the break, if anything? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:58, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
Also, really, if there's a bug, really WP:BOTISSUE should be followed, and the bot operator contacted about the bug, rather than come to BOTN first. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:30, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
The author has been contacted at least twice. See my talk page and theirs. -- Mikeblas (talk) 18:32, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
I've already fixed most of those in this set. Usually, the problem is a red error message in the references section of the article that says Cite error: The named reference "licenca" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page). The message indicates that Wikipedia, when rendering the page, has found two <ref name=licenca"> tags in the total source of the article (including transclusions and template expansions, and ...). Those tags surround references that have different definitions; "different" means any binary change in the string, so space and casing are both sensitive.
This example is from 2016–17 Slovenian PrvaLiga at this moment -- of course, if someone edits anything, it can change or go away. The article itself directly defines <ref name=licenca">. But it also includes {{2016–17 Slovenian PrvaLiga table}}, which had an exact duplicate of that reference definition ... until Monkbot changed it. This bot makes changes to articles (including templates) and does not preview or revisit the changed article to see if new errors have appeared. It also doesn't scan the text of the article to test for problems like duplicate reference definitions.
Sure, we shouldn't have references of the same name in the wiki code source stream for an article. Some go as far as to say we shouldn't have named references in templates at all. But in reality, the corpus is full of such constructs and we must assume that any article contains any number of errors (or warnings or regrettable constructs or ... severe, or not) before we edit them. These duplicates are normally handled fine -- as long as the definition text is identical.
Then, concisely: the problem is that Monkbot makes edits without testing for the new rendering errors it might be causing. In this case, it's a common enough problem that I think the bot should be stopped from doing this task. Maybe it can come back if it can be shown that it has been more carefully coded and doesn't so frequently create problems. -- Mikeblas (talk) 18:32, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
Or, the bot's logic could simply be tweaked to edit both the transcluded template and the article one after the other. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:37, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
It might help if Monkbot ran through Category:Pages with duplicate reference names and applied Task 18 periodically (once per day for articles added to the category?) in order to catch these transclusion-related problems. All of the articles listed above, and a half-dozen more from the category that I picked at semi-random, were easily fixed by hyphenating parameters in the articles. Trappist the monk, would that be possible? – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:10, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
Did that yesterday and again this morning. I don't see that it made an appreciable difference. Did it?
—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:52, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
Worth noting that, per the examples Mikeblas gives above, they're all a particular category of articles (eg lots of "YYYY Calgary municipal election", lots of "Leap year starting on ..."). Since the issue is redefined references, I imagine it's a case of certain editors doing this over articles they worked on. So the issue probably crops up in sets of related articles they touched.
That said, just out of curiosity, why does MonkBot end up editing similar sets of articles all within days, often minutes, of each other? See the edit links Mikeblas gives above. Surely randomness working properly would make this and this (+ half a dozen more in series) basically impossible? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:04, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
Why is it possible to toss a coin ten times and get heads ten times? Any list [randomizer] working properly can return a randomized list that is exactly the same as the source list. I recall starting task 18a the first time without having randomized the list. When template names begin with digits, they alpha-sort to the head of the list so these examples may have been part of that group before I recognized my error and scrambled the list of remaining templates.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:37, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
Sure, but when you flip a coin 10 times, get heads each time, and then do it again 5 times and reproduce the same results, one should ask whether they've ended up with a biased coin. Plus, since the randomised list is (I presume) a subset of all articles in each run iteration, I'm not sure they should even so often end up on the same processing list? Just making sure the randomisation isn't broken. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:44, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
I was not thinking of a double-headed coin. The scrambler is at Module:Sandbox/trappist the monk/random sort. The scrambled list of articles that the bot is currently working on is at Module talk:Sandbox/trappist the monk/random sort. If you edit that talk page you can see the alpha-sorted source-list. The source list is (of course) a subset of all articles but is also the result of some number of cirrus searches that, for awb, will return at most 5000 article names per search. The current list was a few different searches plus the content of Category:CS1 errors: empty unknown parameters filtered to remove duplicates and anything not in article namespace. I don't know how cirrus search decides which articles it will return from the many articles that it finds.
I think that the scrambler code is sufficiently documented that you should be able to see how it works. If you can see a way to improve it, let me know.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:15, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
Re "an appreciable difference", the article count in the duplicate reference name category was about 850 fifteen hours ago and is 770 now, so I think that it did make a difference. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:20, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
I've made between 20 and 25 manual fixes. That counts fix actions; it doesn't count how the fixes might fan out to affect the number of articles that fall out of the dupe names error category. It might be difficult to isolate causes and effects, then ... and would be best if the bot itself was checking its own work. -- Mikeblas (talk) 04:26, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
It could -- I'm sure there are several ways to "fix" the issue. I think your proposal has to involve traversing all the templates and transclusions in the article, recursively, to find different definitions that might have been produced. Some articles have simple structures; maybe not much to traverse. Others (like the tropical storms and hurricanes articles; or many of the soccer/football articles; or ...) have very involved structures. This doesn't seem exactly trivial (parameters, LUA templates/modules, redirects, ...) and so I think it's best to stop the bot until it's fixed. That's driven by the opinion the belief that there's a priority on not regressing content, particularly for low-value cosmetic changes. -- Mikeblas (talk) 04:26, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
If the bot can run through the error category once a day, that should take care of many of the problems that creep in as it runs. Another option would be for the bot to run on groups of articles in alphabetical order or within categories instead of its current quasi-random selection, but that would probably bother editors with watchlists containing groups of articles. I think if I were an editor with groups of articles on my watchlist, I would rather get slammed on a single day and get it over than deal with a steady drip, but to each their own. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:22, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
If this issue relates to transcluded templates that have cite templates, then could the bot create an article list of each template needing to be edited, plus the articles transcluding the templates, then process those. That way disruption due to this issue should be even less. Rjwilmsi 15:26, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
It is mostly that, and the bot should probably work in that way, as I suggested above: If the bot is going to edit templates that contain named references, it probably needs to immediately perform the same task on articles that transclude that template. The trickier situation is articles that transclude all or part of another article; those may require working through categories instead of following the bot's current quasi-random approach. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:12, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Starting the Wikimedia Rust developers user group

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Hi everyone,

We are starting a user group for people interested in spreading the adoption of the Rust programming language in the Wikimedia movement. If you're not familiar with it, Rust is a systems programming language that aims to provide the trifecta of safety, concurrency and speed. It's very fun to use (rated #1 favorite language in Stack Overflow's survey 5 years and counting) and has fantastic tooling.

If you're already using Rust or looking to get started - please sign up!

The current proposed goals of the user group are:

  • Develop a rich toolkit of Rust libraries and applications for working with Wikimedia and MediaWiki projects and APIs
  • Make Rust a first-class language in Wikimedia infrastructure like Toolforge
  • Encourage the usage of Rust where appropriate to build safer and better tools
  • Assist others who end up encountering Rust and need help (e.g. when upstreams adopt Rust)
  • Mentor new developers who are interested in contributing technically to the Wikimedia movement, including through programs like GSoC and Outreachy

Have other ideas of what we could do? Please suggest them on the talk page!

Legoktm (talk) 07:50, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm sure enterprisey will be pleased! ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:33, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
Oooh - excellent. I'll watch this with interest! ƒirefly ( t · c ) 15:34, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Bad bot edit

Latest comment: 3 years ago13 comments6 people in discussion

See Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard#Monkbot_18 and Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Survey_(CS1), there is clearly not consensus this edit is appropriate. Given that Monkbot task has been halted, is it possible to stop Citation Bot from being used as a backdoor to make those non-consensus changes? Hog Farm Talk 22:23, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

You're citing an RFC that opened a day ago asking a question that will result in Monkbot either being (re)confirmed or disallowed; there is no consensus at that RFC (yet). It has nothing to do with Citation bot's task or its consensus to run. Primefac (talk) 22:27, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
@Primefac: My question is "if this is so controversial with monkbot that we are having an RFC, why is citation bot changing |accessdate to |access-date?". Shouldn't bother changing of |accessdate to |access-date by bots in general be put on hold until there is consensus as to if that is appropriate? Hog Farm Talk 22:40, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
The controversy is whether we should have a bot making multiple millions of edits to remove a parameter that is deprecated. Citation bot makes many different types of edits as it goes about its tasks, the vast majority of which are non-cosmetic; if occasionally the only thing to fix is a deprecated parameter change like the one you listed, that's not much different than someone using AWB to make changes and occasionally making a "genfixes only" edit. Primefac (talk) 22:48, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
I agree with Primefac. It's one thing for a bot to be making many bad edits. It's another for the code to occasionally result in a cosmetic-only edit (it happens, especially in complex codebases). Many botops are inactive these days and I'm not a big fan of bugging them over an occasional cosmetic edit. The idea behind COSMETICBOT is watchlist spam, not that the edits themselves are bad (ergo, BOTPOL says Keep in mind that reverting a cosmetic edit is also a cosmetic edit.)
There's nothing BAG can do about this anyway. Revoking the approval, or blocking the bot, would not be a proportionate or appropriate response, so contacting the operator and making a request should be the first stage per WP:BOTISSUE. But I imagine such a suggestion for a code alteration would have more weight after the RfC is closed. However, if you believe that a vast number of Citation bot's edits are cosmetic then that would be a different matter, and we may be able to review that. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:48, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
Primefac and ProcrastinatingReader, I sampled the bot's edits during a half-hour period this evening (0100-0130 UTC). During this time by my count the bot made 122 edits that solely changed parameter hyphenation, representing just over half of the bot's total edits. I also looked for but did not locate a bot approval that covered these edits for this bot. Under these circumstances I agree with Hog Farm's assessment: the bot should not be making these edits. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:09, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Keep in mind also that the bot is user-driven, so if there's a common user among those edits they should be notified if there are problematic edits. Primefac (talk) 02:38, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
@Abductive: ↑. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:39, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
I am not the bot operator. Abductive (reasoning) 02:44, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Citation Bot's BRFA history does confuse me a little bit, so I'm also curious which BRFA it's operating under. Not entirely obvious from User:Citation_bot#Bot_approval. Though I recognise many of its authorisations are from the stone age. The most recent BRFA is from 2011 which predates the modern COSMETICBOT provisions. It's probably something to clarify with the botop in the first instance, though perhaps some older BAG here may be able to offer some context too. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 02:53, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
CB's bot basically been converted to a user-activated tool ages ago, and its behavior more or less handled locally. There's plenty of oversight, just not BAG oversight specifically (althought plenty of BAG people watch that page). The main issue here is that the convertion of hyphenated parameters is a cosmetic task, and would be fine to do alongside other edits, but convertion hasn't been coded as cosmetic edits, so they are done on their own (which again, they shouldn't be). So simply follow WP:BOTISSUE, and file a bug report as outlined at User talk:Citation bot explaining the issue (i.e. the bot is making cosmetic edits), and things will get taken care of. There's no need to suspend or revoke anything at this point. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:47, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Is there a list of all kinds of edits Cosmetic bot makes somewhere (that isn't the codebase)? I mean, if this bot has tasks not approved by virtue of being a tool, surely there should be a list of types of edits somewhere that it does, otherwise how does a person triggering the bot know what edits it's about to make? Compare to AWB genfixes, which I think are all documented at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/General fixes and some other pages. Re last sentence: not suggesting suspension/revocation; the operator is inactive and BAG doesn't have the resources to process approvals again anyway, mostly just curious on transparency. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:14, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
There's no databases of cosmetic bots per se that I'm aware. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:23, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Extracting information from the Automatic taxobox template

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

ShortDescBot is currently working on organism articles, and to create its short descriptions needs to extract the taxonomic rank of the article subject. It can mostly do that quite well by naively parsing the text, checking for categories etc, but it has more trouble with articles that use Automatic taxobox, such as Lampshade spider, as the information isn't directly available within the wikitext. Is anyone able to help with some guidance on how I can access the rank (family in that case) via Pywikibot/Python? MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:53, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

If the article uses {{Automatic taxobox}}, extract the |taxon= parameter, then fetch Template:Taxonomy/taxon (Template:Taxonomy/Hypochilidae in this case), then pull the |rank= from the template on that page. — The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 19:35, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
The Earwig, perfect, thank you! MichaelMaggs (talk) 20:58, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Bot to report 3RR violations to AN/3?

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion

I'm surprised there isn't a bot working at AN/3 to report 3RR violations, given AIV has DatBot and the like, and this is arguably a much simpler task. Did a bot like this exist in the past, or is there something I'm not thinking of that makes this a bad idea? --C o r t e x 💬talk 18:50, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

We don't need such a User:JavertBot. If two people get into a 3RR or 4RR edit war and shift from the article to the talk page in the middle of it, the AN3 report would be counter productive. Yes you shouldn't revert war, but there's a lot of context that bots can't detect. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:39, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
It would need to ignore edits exempt from 3RR (which, just guessing, would make up a substantial percentage of naive hits for "a user making 3+ reverts to a single page in 24 hours"). This is unlikely to be a trivial task, and we would not want to fill the noticeboard with obvious vandalism reversions and the like. — The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 19:39, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
While a bot to make reports might be problematic, I still think that a bot that locks articles when there is an active edit war would be rather helpful, and save those dozen-edits-in-as-many-minutes issues with vandalism. Primefac (talk) 22:03, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
Still a protection policy violation in many cases, where it’s just a single editor vandalising and being reverted or some such. Not reasonable to protect a whole article from future editors, for any period of time, due to a single editor I think. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 22:16, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Page-blanking filter for bots

Latest comment: 3 years ago13 comments8 people in discussion

Hello, please see WP:EFR#Page-blanking filter for bots. I've asked that the page-blanking filter be reconfigured so that bots will be filtered from blanking pages (without any way to override the filter), thanks to the occasional error such as https://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?diff=1000987634. Your input would be greatly appreciated, of course. Nyttend (talk) 12:52, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

You should do a thorough check that whatever your proposed filter does exactly doesn't conflict with the actions of properly functioning bots. The existing enabled filters I see that refer to "blanking" seem like they could false-positive on things like archiving a talk page that lacks other sections or many headers, AnomieBOT's TFDTemplateSubster removing a template from a talk page without much other content, bots that maintain lists of pages attempting to reflect that humans have cleaned up pages in the lists, and so on. Anomie⚔ 13:20, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
I also agree that this needs careful thought. Perhaps only enforcing the filter in mainspace, and logging elsewhere, would be worthwhile? ƒirefly ( t · c ) 13:59, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
@Nyttend: suggest you just duplicate the filter, apply it only to group=bot, put it in monitor mode and report back after it has been monitored for a bit. — xaosflux Talk 14:01, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
Also, probably exempt User: namespace unless there are actual issues there as bots have wide latitude to do small tests in their own userspaces. — xaosflux Talk 14:02, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
AWB can also inadvertently blank pages. -- GreenC 15:32, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
Sorry I wasn't clear — my goal was mainspace pages only. I know I said mainspace when I was writing up the request; I guess I deleted it by accident before I posted the request. Nyttend (talk) 15:34, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
@Nyttend: ah OK, no worries - should probably be its own filter; set up in monitor mode for a bit and only apply to rights=bot. — xaosflux Talk 15:41, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
@Nyttend: possibly just call it a "malfunctioning bots" filter, it could end up having other future uses? — xaosflux Talk 15:57, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
It seems a little absurd that we're reaching this point. It should be pretty straightforward to identify that a bot was accidentally given a blank page and abort. Or, check the HTTP status code is OK before proceeding, or use api.php instead of action=raw, etc. I don't know if the AbuseFilter condition limit is still an issue, but deferring this sanity check onto AF instead of just fixing the bot seems backwards. Legoktm (talk) 19:15, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
@Legoktm: I'm 100% on board that this should be fixed bot-side. If the first conditions are bot and mainspace it shouldn't hurt the AF much though - really if any hits are coming to this filter they need to be followed up and addressed by the operators anyway (which should already be getting done for any known issues). — xaosflux Talk 19:19, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
Agreed with Legoktm that going the edit filter route seems to be an over-reaction to what was essentially one poorly written bot task. – SD0001 (talk) 13:15, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
I'd support such a filter. It's been causing issue with several AWB-based bots that accidentally blank the page out of nowhere. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:58, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

WP:PYWIKIBOT

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Apologies if this isn't the right place—couldn't see a project talk page. Is this thing approved to run on en.wp? ——Serial 12:30, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

All bots have to be approved by BAG, as per WP:BOTPOL - how those bots are written is ultimately irrelevant. Many, many bots on enwiki use Pywikibot, so yes, as long as you file a BRFA and get the task approved, using Pywikibot is fine. ƒirefly ( t · c ) 12:35, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
Pretty much what firefly says. It doesn't really matter how a bot is coded or what frameworks it uses (AWB, pywikibot or from scratch) for the purposes of bot policy. Bots coded using pywikibot still have to go through approval like all others. There are also some pywikibot semi-automated scripts editors can use I think - those would fall under WP:ASSISTED like other types of semi-automated editing. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:21, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Inactive bot - 1 April 2021

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Per the bot activity requirements, Flow talk page manager should be deauthorized and deflagged by the end of the day.[4-1] 2A03:F80:32:194:71:227:81:1 (talk) 03:04, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

No, that is a system account. ha-ha, back to business now. — xaosflux Talk 09:54, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Yapperbot on autopilot

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

We probably need someone to take over Yapperbot, which does various things including WP:FRS notification on user talk pages. I've been reporting issues with it (non-"fatal" ones) [4], but it turns out the bot operator has gone missing since 2 August 2020 [5].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:37, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Concerns about MDanielsBot and AIV

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Hi, I don't know if this is the correct forum to raise this. If it's more appropriate for another place, I'm happy to move the discussion there.

Currently MDanielsBot clears the AIV board of reports anywhere from 4-8 hours old, as they are deemed stale. I certainly don't take filing reports there lightly, so I have become concerned when two reports I filed in the last month were cleared out without any apparent attention (Ds Abhishek, Special:Diff/1007893544; Nawzad Shekhany, Special:Diff/1014006514). In the former case, the user went on to post promotional content twice more before being blocked.

I realize this was probably deemed necessary because the board was being overloaded/abused with frivolous and/or illegitimate reports. My concern is that legit reports (particularly of spammers/self-promoters) are being wiped out without ever having been looked at. Is there no better way to manage the backlog? If an admin was able to tag the report with a template to say no action is required, no further explanation needed... or at least increase the time before the bot clears the report, to give more time to investigate... I'd at least have confidence that my reports are not being made in vain. Thanks. --Drm310 🍁 (talk) 20:27, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

This should probably be discussed at a more relevant venue like WT:AIV, or WP:AN, focusing mostly the question of what the bot should do, in an ideal world. After that's decided, Mdaniels5757 could be contacted to implement / update the bot to follow the new desired logic. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:06, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
We can tag reports with no-action required, it's just a lot of admins don't (or AIV is understaffed, a reasonable statement in modern days). I agree that this is not really the place to discuss it however. Izno (talk) 21:43, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

PearBOT 5 starting up again

Latest comment: 3 years ago13 comments4 people in discussion

I just wanted to say that PearBOT 5 has started adding short descriptions to biographies again! The only reason it was away was me not having the time to manage it last spring and me just not bothering to start it up since. I would however suspect there will be some questions about the bot this time around as well so I thought it would be good to inform you all of this. If there are any issues write anything at User:PearBOT/Biography short descriptions/stop page and the bot will stop immediately. Don't hesitate to use it; it's faster for me to clean up any issues if I have to look through fewer edits. --Trialpears (talk) 17:51, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

Forgot to mention but all edits will come from User:PearBOT II (contribs). --Trialpears (talk) 17:52, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
You may need to update the bot as the guidance has been updated since your first run, and short descriptions for biographical articles are now normally recommended to include dates - see WP:SDDATES. Also, the bots=PearBOT 5 parameter should probably be omitted unless you intend to use it yourself. The parameter isn't used by any other bot, doesn't add any information that can't be deduced from the page history, and just adds clutter to the wikicode. MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:26, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
ShortDescBot is able to handle biographies as well, and I was planning to start on that after it has completed its organism runs. There's no reason both couldn't operate, though. As ShortDescBot looks at categories and infoboxes as well as leads, it may be able to sweep up some of the articles that PearBOT 5 skips. I'm essentially aiming at 100% coverage of target articles. MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:37, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
Nice to hear that ShortDescBot is doing well! There shouldn't be any interference so I don't think both running would be an issue. The bot parameter has made it slightly easier to pick up some rare issues, but I wouldn't be fussed if it was gone either. My thought was that it would be mildly useful and the cost very low. With regards to dates I could easily extract it from infoboxes (omitting it if not available). This would however be a significant addition so I don't know what bag thinks on the matter. I've paused the bot until this is cleared up. --Trialpears (talk) 18:50, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
I would imagine that BAG will be OK with amending the bot to add dates as WP:SDDATES does have consensus, and bots ought to follow that. Of course, it's always good to double-check. MichaelMaggs (talk) 19:12, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
Wasn't thinking about consensus but possibly an extra trial or something. Just want to be on the safe side. --Trialpears (talk) 19:21, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
I've implemented the date detection and removed the bot parameter now. I've thouroughly checked a bit over 100 articles and generated description and it works great. When I start running the plan is to double check it for the first few hundred edits and then let it run without manual checking except if problems are found/reported.
@TheSandDoctor and Primefac:, as the BAG members commenting on the original BRFA, do you have any objections to me resuming with these changes? --Trialpears (talk) 23:04, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
@Trialpears: I don't have any objections to this. I imagine that there shouldn't be any issues with it and approve unless Primefac objects. --TheSandDoctor Talk 23:38, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
No objections from me. Primefac (talk) 17:52, 5 April 2021 (UTC)
Great! I just pushed the run button! --Trialpears (talk) 18:02, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Second run

Update: The original run have finished, but like alluded to in the original requests there is room for more! With a couple of regex changes and not anymore ignoring politicians (just not adding the years in office) I can get approximately 100k more descriptions. It worked just as well as the bot previously has on the 300 descriptions I've checked. My plan, if the BAG doesn't object, is to post a note about this at WT:WPSHORTDESC, wait a few days , and if no problems have arisen run it for a few hours fully supervised just like I did when the dates were new and when it has reached over 500 consecutive good edits I let it lose for the rest. It's possible I can find enough improvements after this to do a "PearBOT II 5 3.0" as well but that would probably have a significantly smaller scope in terms of numbers of edits. I also plan on extending this for dead people (perhaps 150k edits) with significant changes to the list generation and date generation. It would be great how I should act with these extensions as well. --Trialpears (talk) 19:40, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

The bot is now running again. --Trialpears (talk) 20:26, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Monkbot 18 (2)

Latest comment: 3 years ago26 comments9 people in discussion

Approval for Monkbot/task 18 was suspended 3 February 2021. There was an RFC started 10 February 2021 and closed by MJL 5 April 2021.

The question to be answered by the RFC was:

Should non-hyphenated parameters be fully removed from the CS1/2 family of templates?

There were three answer options provided of which the closer chose an Option B close with some severe caveats. The B option reads:

  • Option B ("status quo"): Non-hyphenated parameters are formally deprecated, but should not be immediately removed. Deprecation can be bundled into genfixes or performed along with other non-cosmetic changes, but (ignoring a possible Cosmetic Bot Day) should not be done on its own by a bot.

It is not clear to me what the severe caveats (or extra caveats or extra steps) are but, the 'just-what-is-deprecated' question is the topic for another discussion, elsewhere.

This discussion is about Monkbot/task 18. Closer created a separate section for Monkbot 18 in the close summary. What I want to know is:

  • can Monkbot/task 18 come out of suspension?
    • if no, then this conversation is at an end and I will retire task 18
    • if yes, what specific constraints apply?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:57, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

In short, the answer to your question is "no".
The result of the RFC was Option B, which was "deprecated but not specifically removed" (wrt the parameters). This means that Task 18, which is designed to "specifically remove" those parameters, is still suspended. However, for a bot/task such as Citation Bot which does other changes along with the parameter changes, that is acceptable. I would liken this to NicoV's bot, which bundles cosmetic changes along with non-cosmetic changes so that they can both be performed. Primefac (talk) 15:04, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
You write that as if you believe that the only thing that Monkbot/task 18 does is replace (not remove) nonhyphenated parameters. What about those other subtasks?
—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:25, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Only thing, no. Primary thing, and the main reason for the task? Yes. Removal of deprecated parameters can reasonably be looked at as a necessary cleanup task, but from my read of things the remainder are even more cosmetic. Am I misreading that? I'm also happy to wait for input from the other BAG members. Primefac (talk) 16:34, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Yes, I think that you are misreading that. Monkbot/task 18 is and has always been a cosmetic bot task. Certainly replacement of nonhyphenated parameters appears to be the task's 'primary' purpose simply because of the ubiquity of |accessdate=. At the BRFA I mentioned the CBD RFA as inspiration for task 18. At the CBD RFA I wrote:
Editors often complain about citation templates and how they interfere with reading the wikitext of an article. When cs1|2 templates are used inline, there isn't much that can be done to improve the wikitext reading experience. One can convert to list defined referencing but that is the sort of thing that requires local consensus. But, one thing that can be done and is cosmetic, is to remove empty parameters that serve no other purpose than to occupy space (no empty parameters in cs1|2 templates have meaning). I can imagine a Monkbot task that does nothing but remove empty and ignored parameters. cs1|2 is moving to standardize on hyphenated multiword parameter names so replacing the all-run-together forms of parameter names would be a nice adjunct to empty-parameter removal.
The CBD RFC pointed me to WP:COSMETICBOT which has:
Consensus for a bot to make any particular cosmetic change must be formalized in an approved request for approval.
From that I recognized that a cosmetic bot task was possible. It was then a simple thing to recognize that were a bot to be approved to make cosmetic fixes, it makes sense to do as many cosmetic fixes as possible in a single edit.
So yeah, I was thinking about nonhyphenated parameter replacement, not as the primary reason but as one part of the whole.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:17, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
The RFC close says: Monkbot 18 should not be run solely to replace the discouraged non-hyphenated parameters. If the bot can be programmed to ensure that it makes at least one of the other changes listed in its BRFA, in addition to item 5, fixing unhyphenated parameters, that should comply with the RFC close (courtesy ping to MJL in case I am misreading the close). There may be other quasi-cosmetic tasks that it could perform, like deleting redundant |ref=harv parameters, which removes a hidden category. (striking; the bot already does this) – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:25, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Removal/replacement of non-hyphenated parameters should not be a part of Task 18, should it proceed, based on the outcome of that RFC. As far as continuing the task, I would like to get input from other BAG member(s) about the issue. Primefac (talk) 17:31, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Removal of |ref=harv is one of the items listed at User:Monkbot/task 18: cosmetic cs1 template cleanup § delete non-contributing parameters.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:52, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
@Trappist the monk and Primefac: Jonesey95 is right that it would comply with my close, but only because such an outcome wasn't discussed too heavily. I suspect if that was attempted, we would probably just wind up back where we started though (with people upset about watchlist cluttering). Therefore, I would not suggest running Monkbot 18 like that. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 17:58, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
Do I have it right? Citation bot is allowed to make changes like this one, where it hypenates dozens of parameters ... just because it changed year= to date= in just one spot? -- Mikeblas (talk) 15:29, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
In a word, yes. Primefac (talk) 16:15, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
My reading of the close is that editors' main concerns were with volume of edits and watchlist spam. The close suggests entering CBD; whilst it would be up to Trappist to enter task 18 into that or not, due to the volume of task 18 edits I doubt it would be productive in terms of achieving the goals of the task (CBD, being limited to one day, cannot really result in enough edits to make it worthwhile). So the changes should probably be bundled with something more substantive (ie, a difference in visible or HTML output). A possible option may be to include the changes into AWB genfixes. The ideal option is probably for a technical change to the MediaWiki software that may hide (particular?) bot edits from watchlists, by default and in a more simple way, and that may change the consensus on cosmetic tasks. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:35, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
To avoid writing the bot in the first place, I did add |accessdate= and some others to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Rename template parameters. But, that lead to Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Archive 32 § Citation parameter renaming so those changes were ultimately reverted. It seems doubtful to me that AWB genfixes is a solution for any but |origyear= → |orig-date= which is used in only 8300-ish articles.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:52, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Actually, that RFC gives some precedent for adding it to the AWB genfixes. Primefac (talk) 18:23, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
I added a few parameter renaming lines to the AWB genfixes (for relatively rare parameters, avoiding the ubiquitous |accessdate=), but I was reverted by an editor who does not appear to agree with the my interpretation of the RFC closure, or with Primefac's above. I have no interest in edit warring, and I don't use AWB, but other editors may want to engage there. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:09, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
@Jonesey95 and Nikkimaria: The general intent of the close was for it to be added AWB genfixes and for Monkbot 18 (assuming it can't do anything non-cosmetic - except on CPD) to be shelved. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 17:48, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
Thank you for the clarification. That helps us find a path forward. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:27, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
Indeed, the best way to deal with a WP:BOTISSUE is to follow WP:BOTISSUE. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:49, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Clearing bot watchlists

Latest comment: 3 years ago36 comments16 people in discussion

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T258098
  Resolved
 – The high count accounts have been cleared, thank you for your participation. — xaosflux Talk 10:38, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Hello Bot operators,

The following table shows bot accounts that have a very high count of watchlist entries in the database (c.f. phab:T258098).

Bot accounts with large watchlists
Bot WL-Count Operator(s) Last bot edit Notes/Resolution sysadmin note
ClueBot NG 3664794 User:Cobi
User:Rich Smith
User:DamianZaremba		 2021 Operator OK'd removal   Done
SmackBot 1048014 User:Rich Farmbrough 2011 Operator reports this has been cleared. — xaosflux Talk 23:48, 13 April 2021 (UTC)   Done
SineBot 595420 User:slakr 2021 DEVS: Please clear per discussion below. — xaosflux Talk 15:53, 18 April 2021 (UTC)   Done
COIBot 464596 User:Beetstra 2021   Done
HostBot 437022 User:Jtmorgan 2021 Please clear the bot's watchlist J-Mo 21:22, 17 April 2021 (UTC)   Done
RjwilmsiBot 398358 User:Rjwilmsi 2016 Operator OK'd   Done
XLinkBot 372374 User:Versageek
User:Beetstra		 2021   Done
Polbot 332758 User:Quadell 2009 Feel free to clear this bot's watchlist. – Quadell (talk) 18:54, 7 April 2021 (UTC)   Done
AvicBot 313928 User:Avicennasis 2020   Done
ClueBot 292196 User:Cobi 2010 (Dev action will be required)   Done
RussBot 285662 User:R'n'B 2021 Please clear the bot's watchlist. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 19:18, 7 April 2021 (UTC)   Done
LaraBot 233820 User:MZMcBride 2014 Please clear this bot's watchlist. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:33, 13 April 2021 (UTC)   Done
ClueBot III 225346 User:Cobi 2021 Cleared   Done
Citation bot 220294 User:Smith609 2021 DEVS: Please clear per discussion below. — xaosflux Talk 15:53, 18 April 2021 (UTC)   Done

For your bots please review if they require a large watchlist. If your bot requires a large watchlist, please indicate in the notes above. For each entry the recommended actions are to:

  1. Clear the current watchlist - you may do this yourself by using Special:EditWatchlist/clear when logged in as your bot
    Indicate that your bot account's watchlist may be cleared by a developer. — xaosflux Talk 17:15, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
  2. Change the account preference to not automatically add created/edited pages to your bot's watchlist going forward.
    Should not be needed due to phab:T258108

For operators that do not respond, a developer may take one or both of these actions on your bot's account - so please let us know if you have a operational need for the large watchlist entries so that other technical solutions can be explored. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 14:51, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

If you clear and turn off this setting for your bot yourself, please indicate here as well. — xaosflux Talk 14:54, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
AvicBot is   Done. I cleared the watchlist (and disabled the settings to auto-add anyways). Sorry for the trouble and thanks for the heads up! Avicennasis @ 19:59, 4 Iyar 5781 / 19:59, 16 April 2021 (UTC)
All operators notified on their talk pages. — xaosflux Talk 15:01, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for the notice Xaosflux (talk · contribs), I'll get the CBNG and CB3's cleared now... I don't have the password to the OG ClueBot, so please take developer action on that account - RichT|C|E-Mail 15:55, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
Note that all bots stopped auto-watching pages starting in January 7, following phab:T258108. If your bot needs to watch pages, you must explicitly set the 'watch' option when editing via the API.
@Xaosflux @Rich Smith It would probably be better to let the DBAs clear these watchlists. If everyone uses Special:EditWatchlist/clear at the same time, the job queue is going to pile up quickly and we might end up in a situation like phab:T270481#6701379 again. Clearing watchlists is normally very safe, but we're talking many millions of DELETEs here... so if you haven't attempted to clear your watchlist yet, let the sysadmins do it for you. Thanks! — MusikAnimal talk 16:14, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
Citation bot no longer goes back and keeps {{cite pmid}} properly formatted - because it no longer exists. So, the need for a watchlist is gone years ago. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 16:37, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
I'm clearing the watchlist of RjwilmsiBot (it's not retired, just real life gets in the way...). Thanks Rjwilmsi 17:17, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
A follow-up that there have been no unusual spikes in DELETEs thus far, as far as I can tell, and I see RjwilmsiBot's watchlist has successfully been cleared without issue. With that I'm going to guess most of the above bots probably won't have any issues either, but I still have a bit of concern about ClueBot NG and SmackBot, specifically, given there are 1+ million affected rows. We made one tiny but impactful performance improvement to the ClearUserWatchlistJob a while back that is likely helping here, but the DBAs were vocal that any large spikes in DELETEs can cause database lag which is what I was trying to avoid. — MusikAnimal talk 20:05, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
Given that CB3's watchlist had less in it than RjwilmsiBot, I've gone ahead and cleared it. Not touching CBNG's though, I'll leave that to the DBAs - RichT|C|E-Mail 20:21, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
User:Rich_Smith. Hi sysadmin here. We really shouldn't remove millions of rows in one request. I cleared mine by directly deleting in the database with small batches and I can do yours if I have your permission. Ladsgroupoverleg 20:48, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
@Ladsgroup: Hi Amir, if you would be so kind for ClueBot NG. - RichT|C|E-Mail 20:55, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
User:Rich_Smith Done! Thanks. Ladsgroupoverleg 21:12, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I noted that COIBot still had all the options enabled, and that for XLinkBot the addition of new pages it creates (which are many of the user talkpages it edits) was still enabled. --Dirk Beetstra T C 04:50, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

@Beetstra: it's fine to turn those off, but the notes above show that the 'default watch' is now ignored for bot pages created in the api unless the request explicitly requests to also watch so future creations shouldn't be an issue either way. — xaosflux Talk 13:44, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
I, not seeing this, needed to change the enabled options for my bot using BotPasswords and as such thought to check the watchlist while I was logged in and realised that there was several thousand pages on the watchlist which had been added through talk page creation. I've cleared it and disabled the bot from adding pages to its watchlist when it creates them. Although my bot is a very small part of the overall large amount, hopefully its helped. Dreamy Jazz talk to me | my contributions 20:19, 16 April 2021 (UTC)
@Dreamy Jazz: thanks for the help! — xaosflux Talk 21:52, 16 April 2021 (UTC)
  • It's been 10 days, for the non-responsive bot operators, think it's time to let the devs clear their lists; that would be for outstanding bots: SineBot, HostBot, and Citation bot; by operators: @Slakr, Jtmorgan, and Smith609:. Last call for objections! — xaosflux Talk 09:33, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
Smith609 should be emailed, since he doesn't check Wikipedia all that often. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 12:04, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
While that sounds fine, as his bot is currently making active edits he is somewhat expected to be responsive to operator queries on his talk page..... — xaosflux Talk 22:49, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
Especially since the change to WP:BOTPOL last year on the point. Izno (talk) 23:16, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
Although enforcement of that rule is lax and there is, for example, an operator of an active bot who has made no edits in over a year and explicitly says to use email for bot issues on their userpage. * Pppery * it has begun... 23:19, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
Oh, there's another one? Smith609 is the one I was thinking when I suggested that addition to the amendment. :^) Izno (talk) 00:28, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
I was talking about DumbBOT, operated by Tizio. But my main point was about general lax enforcement using that example as an extreme case, not one specific bot. * Pppery * it has begun... 01:16, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
@Pppery: the bot policy explicitly calls out that external communications are allowed but are not a replacement for on-wiki communications - and we are about to enforce that by taking an ignore response to this discussion as not having objection to it. — xaosflux Talk 01:09, 18 April 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: sorry for the delay. Please have the devs clear HostBot's watchlist (I get a timeout when I try to do it myself). Thanks, J-Mo 21:24, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Centralising bot talk pages (v2)

Latest comment: 3 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion

Following up from Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard/Archive_14#Centralising_discussion. I think this continues to be a problem, and various threads posted at one of the many bot-related talk pages would be better suited here. Most recently Wikipedia_talk:Bots#Critique_of_my_bot's_architecture.

Proposing keeping Wikipedia talk:Bot policy and the talk of this noticeboard where it is, but redirecting all the following to here (the bots noticeboard):

ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:59, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Support. That would make a lot more sense. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 15:30, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
Support Makes sense, last time this was brought up I realized I didn't watch several of them and I suspect others who may be interested/could assist don't see all relevant discussions because of the forking. --Trialpears (talk) 23:31, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
Support Centralizing would be good. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:40, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
  •   Partly done with the exception of WT:BAG. That (by policy) is where RFBAGs happen so it's not as easy as adding a redirect and some rcats. If that page is redirected, where should the noms be transcluded? Is it better to leave the page alone? — Wug·a·po·des​ 07:20, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
BOTN is fine for that. Also I noticed you redirected the pages, but did you archive the discussions first? Because that needs to be done. (Edit:Now archived). Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 09:52, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Actually, I kinda like having a BAG-specific discussion space. I'd keep WT:BAG, since it's fairly unlikely that anyone would think to use that page to ask clarifications about anything bot-related. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 09:58, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
No need to transclude them IMO, can just link to them from the usual venues. They only happen like once a year anyway. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:58, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Dunno, RFXs are transcluded on the central page. We might not have them frequently (and I could probably argue that they could/should be un-transcluded as soon as the RfBAG is closed) but it's nice to have a place to quickly read through the request without needing to go to another page. Primefac (talk) 14:11, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:BAG/Status tweak

Latest comment: 3 years ago14 comments5 people in discussion

Out of curiosity, would it be reasonable for AnomieBOT to recognize {{BotOnHold}} for open BRFAs? There are a few open that are waiting on something, and I feel like placing the On Hold tag doesn't really do anything visually for this table (which I would think would be the primary reason for using it). Primefac (talk) 13:04, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

This would be great. I put it on PearBOT 10 believing it would be recognized, apparently not. --Trialpears (talk) 13:06, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
As a thought, I'm not thinking the bot needs to necessarily move any pages from whatever section they are located, as we can just as easily have bots pre-trial on hold as mid-trial. This would only be an update to the /Status table itself. Primefac (talk) 13:21, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
AnomieBOT could recognize it, sure. The question is what should that do to the table? Consider it in the same way as {{BotTrial}}/{{BotTrialComplete}}/{{BotExtendedTrial}} to affect the "status" column? What color should it use (current colors are revoked or denied, withdrawn, expired, approved or trial complete, in trial or operator needed, open (with no trial etc), and unknown, inconsistent, or BAG needed). Maybe light gray? Anomie⚔ 13:59, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Maybe match the colour of  , so pink-ish? Not strictly opposed to light gray either. Primefac (talk) 14:13, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
Personally I lean towards grey because it tends to have a connotation of "you don't need to do anything here", while pink might suggest that there is something to do. Anomie⚔ 16:53, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
If something other than pink is used, it'd be nice if   On hold is adjusted to match. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:05, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
File:Image-Symbol_wait_old.svg exists, and would fit nicely if the change is made. ƒirefly ( t · c ) 17:11, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
{{BotOnHold}} updated - feel free to revert if undesired. ƒirefly ( t · c ) 11:19, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
For the record, just since I was confused, PR is using {{on hold}} above, not {{BotOnHold}}. Primefac (talk) 11:49, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
Must've forgotten the Bot prefix. Honestly I suck at remembering the names of those templates. On the BRFA I just copy the code from {{BAG Tools}} embedded in the edit source. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:52, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
Ok, I went ahead and added this. Used the light grey color for the moment; it's easy to change if consensus decides it should be changed. For the record, the last of {{BotTrial}}/{{BotTrialComplete}}/{{BotExtendedTrial}}/{{BotOnHold}} in the BRFA "wins". Which means to take a BRFA off hold, you'd either need to deactivate the {{BotOnHold}} tag or add a new trial tag below the hold tag (or close the BRFA, of course). Also, since there's no specific section for "on hold", the bot will leave it in whichever section of open, in trial, or trial complete the BRFA would be in otherwise. If we do want to add an "on hold" section, note that I'll need to update the bot's code to handle the new layout. Anomie⚔ 17:50, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
Looking good! Seeing it like this I have to say the gray was a good choice imo. --Trialpears (talk) 19:53, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
Nice, thanks for that. I don't think we need to create any sort of new section, as (based on how it looks now) it's pretty clear which ones are open-and-holding vs in-trial-and-holding. Primefac (talk) 22:03, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Global bot approval request for Neriah bot

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello!

I apologize for sending the message in English. Please help translate to other languages..

In accordance to the policy, this message is to notify you that there is a new approval request for a global bot.

The discussion is available at Steward requests/Bot status#Global bot status for Neriah bot on Meta.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,
—Thanks for the fish! talk•contribs 02:40, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Cyberbot I broken

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

Cyberbot I (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Note history at Spring Championship of Online Poker - repeatedly (every minute) trying to add the AFD template. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 16:21, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

I disabled the task in Special:Diff/1021047155, which didn't work. Also, the previous time Cyberbot I malfunctioned was only two months ago.   * Pppery * it has begun... 16:31, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
It's my own AFD, but maybe somebody can just close it and then re-open it? For the approximately zero other editors with the article on their watchlist this is annoying, but I'm not sure it's so bad to justify blocking the bot. Also @Cyberpower678:. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 16:33, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
Izno has page-blocked the bot, per discussion on Discord. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 16:46, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
力, something unique is happening on that page preventing the bot from seeing it’s own restoration of the template. However when I revert the page back to the revision just prior to its improper removal, the bot sees it again. It’s a very interesting glitch, but I can dive into it right now. I’m leaving the bot unblocked for now as the reversion seems to have made the glitch disappear. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 17:47, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
Will follow up with this admin on their talk, however I'll endorse this unblock for now so long as this is no longer occurring. — xaosflux Talk 16:19, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

The API says "Incorrect username or password entered" but the username / password is correct

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Resolved, operator reset password. — xaosflux Talk 21:49, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I find in the past one day, cewbot can not login and shows the message as title says. I try to login from browser, I need to pass captcha. I change the password, it seems going better. But a few minutes later, the error message appears again. I do not know the reason. Can someone help me? Kanashimi (talk) 12:37, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

@Kanashimi: are you using BotPasswords or OAUTH? If BotPasswords, you may need to regenerate, log on to the WEBUI as the bot account and change at Special:BotPasswords. — xaosflux Talk 16:10, 9 May 2021 (UTC)
Thank you. It seems better now. Although I still don't understand why the right password was treated as wrong one... Kanashimi (talk) 20:57, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Bot flag of TolBot

Latest comment: 3 years ago9 comments2 people in discussion

Hello! I am unsure where to put this, so I figured I'd leave something here. I got a temporary bot flag for my bot's trial of task 1 (BRFA) but it's set to expire in a few days. Task 3 is now approved (BRFA) but I don't currently plan to run it before my bot flag expires. Could someone please either extend the bot flag or grant it indefinitely? Thanks, Tol | Talk | Contribs 19:14, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

  Done, thanks. Didn't get flagged as a temporary assignment on the accepted bots page, so I didn't even think to check. Primefac (talk) 19:30, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
No worries, thank you! Tol | Talk | Contribs 21:55, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
Another note: I'll be adding {{NOINDEX}} to the ten subpages of Local without it soon to test; I believe this is uncontroversial and approved with the rest (I take it that the header template {{User:COIBot/Summary/LinkReports}} is for LinkReports, not Local). Tol | Talk | Contribs 22:22, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
Done, diffs:
  1. diff #1023350052
  2. diff #1023350053
  3. diff #1023350054
  4. diff #1023350056
  5. diff #1023350057
  6. diff #1023350058
  7. diff #1023350060
  8. diff #1023350061
  9. diff #1023350064
  10. diff #1023350066
— Tol | Talk | Contribs 22:28, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
Your first diff duplicated the noindex call. That shouldn't be happening. Primefac (talk) 23:06, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
That was because I clicked it twice; it was entirely human error. It started running the first time and only got to the first, and then I clicked it again and it did all of them (as search is not updated quickly). Tol | Talk | Contribs 23:09, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
That's fair enough, my point was more the bot should be checking if it already exists and not make the edit (even if you tell it to check the page a dozen times). Primefac (talk) 23:17, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
Alright, thanks. I'll redo it so that it searches and stores the pages to edit in an array and then iterates through them separately (once it has the array of pages to edit). Tol | Talk | Contribs 23:23, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Bot service, unreliable source notices.

Latest comment: 3 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion
Not a bot issue. — xaosflux Talk 15:02, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hi Team, I did an edit and added a few refs, and got a warning on unreliable source (FYI's and an aside - Daily Mail the print and website are run by different teams and probably should be treated separately, i.e. DM articles reprinted on website is fine 98%+, mailonlines' own work, include a lot of click-bait opinions and bollocks so fair enough) anyhoo, back to the bot, can the bot report which source it is suggesting is less than OK, I put 3 refs in my edit, telling me one of them is not so good, is not enough detail, especially for inexperienced or new editors, surely a _RETURN message should be easy to implement? Thoughts The Original Filfi (talk) 10:44, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Can you name the bot? The bot's operator should be best-positioned to answer your question. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:02, 5 June 2021 (UTC)
I assume he hit the edit filter. Izno (talk) 17:21, 5 June 2021 (UTC)
I would assume so as well. WP:UPSD would help here if that's the case. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:52, 5 June 2021 (UTC)
@The Original Filfi: please provide a diff of any notice that a bot left you to help identify the bot and its operator. If this is about your recent hits on filter 869 (as seen in this log) please note this has nothing to do with "bots" and you may follow up at Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard. Best regards, — xaosflux Talk 15:46, 9 June 2021 (UTC)
wbm1058, Izno, Headbomb, xaosflux, sorry for late reply, I have been offline for a little while, You are all correct an edit filter triggered this, I had a quick look, it seems to run through two filters then I ran out of clues. The Original Filfi (talk) 10:13, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

BAG IRC channel on Libera.chat

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

@The Earwig: to confirm I'm in control of the Headbomb account on libera.chat Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:07, 23 May 2021 (UTC)

May as well bug The Earwig as well, I'm "NoSQL". SQLQuery me! 23:38, 23 May 2021 (UTC)
Anomie took care of it. Thanks! (Any other BAGgers can ping Earwig or anomie on Libera to get voiced in #wikipedia-en-bag connect.) — The Earwig (talk) 05:17, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Reconsider "K.Kapil77 Bot"

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion

As mentioned in denial : "MOS:DATERANGE-compliant date to a non-compliant form. I don't have the know-how to tell whether [13], [14] are net-positives; they do look like, but surely a bot going around making such edits is going to generate controversy when errors arise. These are more appropriately done via a human account."

Except for DATERANGE, I don't see any reason to deny. Having said that the edits are made by bot but only manually verified makes it as good as a human making those edits except for ease of use. It sure has corrected a lot of Proper names., and will definitely correct general spelling issues whenever they arise.

Please reconsider the BRFA>> — Preceding unsigned comment added by K.Kapil77 Bot (talk • contribs) 19:19, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

The bot page says it's been approved for a trial, but I'm not seeing any link to a BFRA. The bot's operator should be posting here from their own account, not the bot's account. Beyond that, I do not understand what is being said here. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 20:00, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
Link to BRFA. Many of the edits were erroneous (this is why we have WP:CONTEXTBOT), or not edits a bot should make, or cosmetic. That is why the bot request was denied. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:31, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
Closure was correct, the task is not suitable for an automated bot, and the coder has not shown the necessary judgment required for a semi-automated bot. There are also multiple violations of this provision of WP:BOTACC: "In particular, bot operators should not use a bot account to respond to messages related to the bot." If the bot continues to edit like this, it should be blocked. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:49, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
Quite frankly, it does not seem that you are ready to be a bot operator. You should probably spend more time editing as a normal editor to become more familiar with how Wikipedia works before trying to automate your edits. And read through our bot policy and show that you will comply with rules such as the one against using the bot account to participate in discussions. Anomie⚔ 00:41, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
FYI, I've blocked the bot account as it is being used to participate in discussions, which is not allowed per WP:BOTPOL. The user is welcome to continue contributing using their main account. Anomie⚔ 00:48, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

Global bot approval request for Neriah bot

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

Hello!

I apologize for sending the message in English. Please help translate to other languages..

In accordance to the policy, this message is to notify you that there is a new approval request for a global bot.

The discussion is available at Steward requests/Bot status#Global bot status for Neriah bot on Meta.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,
—Thanks for the fish! talk•contribs 14:45, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I wonder whether it's worth having this page on that list at this time. Per English Wikipedia policy, the only global bots that are allowed to run here without local approval are those updating interwiki links, of which there probably will never be any more since iw links are stored in Wikidata now. Any other global bots, such as the one linked to, need local approval through our normal processes if they want to run here. Anomie⚔ 21:19, 4 June 2021 (UTC)
I think leaving this place on the list is reasonable. Having the notification in place should we ever change local policy saves us having to remember to go back and add the advertisement back, and it seems at least a few editors from here went and left feedback there on the proposal. Izno (talk) 04:29, 5 June 2021 (UTC)
Yup. Our local bot community is probably larger than the avg wiki, so probably feedback from users here might be helpful on the meta requests. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:29, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

FYI: Implementing CI on User: RedWarn

Latest comment: 3 years ago13 comments9 people in discussion

FYI: We'll soon be implementing a full CI process for RedWarn - this includes User:RedWarn automatically editing within its userspace. Depending on where we decide to run it, everyone with access to RedWarn's Cloud VPS or Toolforge instance (either now or in future) will have access to the bot password, which in turn means they can update the RedWarn script and perform other actions through the User:RedWarn account. We are currently in the process of rewriting and codifying our security policy to ensure this isn't abused and access is properly handled. This also means that any change merged into master will have to be approved by myself or Chlod to be deployed on-wiki. We'll ensure this process is transparent. If anyone has any objections or comments, please let me know. ✨ Ed talk! ✨ 02:37, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

Note that "Edit your user CSS/JSON/JavaScript" is a separate grant in the Special:BotPasswords interface, so you could in theory set up a bot password that allows the bot to edit other userspace pages without being able to edit the script itself. * Pppery * it has begun... 03:10, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
The bot will still need to edit both the user script, and the approval page. We could use two seperate bit passwords for this, however I'm not sure if it's necessary. ✨ Ed talk! ✨ 03:55, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
Hm. Could you run a local MediaWiki install in the CI? I heard from legoktm that the installation process can be automated (precise quote: "Yep, there's an install.php script you can use. MediaWiki CI uses "quibble" to do setup automatically but you can just clone core, run composer and then install it") Enterprisey (talk!) 03:26, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
There was a very long discussion a few months ago about having bots update user scripts, I think any such process needs to go through a BRFA with appropriate security concerns taken into account *before* it starts running. The bot policy allows for edits that only affect your userspace without approval, this doesn't seem to meet that.
FWIW, we set up User:Pywikibot-test a while back for Pywikibot CI. I would suggest that if your CI needs to make test edits, you use a separate account and test.wiki.x.io, not this wiki. Legoktm (talk) 05:07, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
I think @Ed6767 means CD rather than CI. User:RedWarn editing User:RedWarn/.js (regardless of who's triggering the update) doesn't need a BRFA. – SD0001 (talk) 07:13, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, editing in userspace is exempt from WP:BOTAPPROVAL. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 09:42, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, Ed means CD with this one, not CI. CI is a different story, and will rely on a private testing wiki due to the amount of tests planned — but this is for a later time and won't be implemented with the current version. Even without needing approval (since this is a userspace edit), we still made sure to follow WP:BOTMULTIOP for this (since this is still a bot). I would have honestly preferred the task to be done by a different bot, but since Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DeltaQuadBot 9 expired last May, this is the best option we have. Chlod (say hi!) 12:26, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
@SD0001, @ProcrastinatingReader that's not what the bot policy says. "In addition, any bot or automated editing process that affects only the operator's or their own userspace". Updating a user script that tens/hundreds of users use will clearly have an affect outside the bot's userspace and therefore, seems to me that it needs a BRFA. Legoktm (talk) 22:51, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
The policy's wording, specifically the precise meaning of "affects", needs clarifying anyway. I've been asked to BRFA a task that updated a page in the bot's userspace that was then transcluded elsewhere. Enterprisey (talk!) 23:05, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
This is a pretty broad definition of affect. By this definition, any bots operating in userspace updating a page that is transcluded elsewhere would require approval. De facto, they currently do not it appears. For example User:AmandaNP/SPI case list, transcluded on the heavily viewed WP:SPI. ProcSock (talk) 01:21, 12 June 2021 (UTC)
A user script being changed can also have a much bigger effect. I think the better question now would be whether we'd require a BRFA or not. ✨ Ed talk! ✨ 01:47, 12 June 2021 (UTC)
Considering that I hacked something like this together for spihelper and gave it a botpassword to deploy to my userspace (see [6] and [7]), I'm quite interested to hear whether this needs BRFA as well. GeneralNotability (talk) 12:53, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

Cewbot message

Latest comment: 3 years ago9 comments7 people in discussion

I noticed this bot message at an AfD I started. The second line reads almost like a keep !vote in reverse:

: Related discussions: 2010-01 GT.M ✓ keep

It actually took me several minutes to figure out what the heck it was. I asked Kanashimi about this and they suggested I give an example of better phrasing/formatting. However I know nothing of this bot's purpose, and less about bots in general. Could someone pitch in on better formatting? Thanks. --- Possibly (talk) 07:00, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

  Comment: The bot is using to give some informations. Please see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Cewbot 4. Kanashimi (talk) 07:12, 13 June 2021 (UTC)
I agree the formatting here can be improved, and it's bothered me before but not enough to mention it. As a start, the bot's signature should be at the end of its message, not in the middle. Perhaps:
  • Note to closer for soft deletion: This nomination has had limited participation and falls within the standards set for lack of quorum. There are no previous AfD discussions, undeletions, or current redirects and no previous PRODs have been located. This nomination may be eligible for soft deletion at the end of its 7-day listing.
    Related discussions: GT.M (nominated on 6 January 2010, closed as keep)
    --Cewbot (talk) 00:02, 12 June 2021 (UTC)
(Keeping the bot's message on the same line if there is no "related discussions".) — The Earwig (talk) 07:38, 13 June 2021 (UTC)
I forgot to mention that the bot's timing is off: the AfD had already been relisted (at about he same time) and will run another 7 days. Its message may be moot by the end of that seven days.--- Possibly (talk) 02:52, 15 June 2021 (UTC)
  Comment: The messages now looks like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Spectrum Culture (2nd nomination). --Kanashimi (talk) 10:40, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Improvements to SdkbBot

Latest comment: 3 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion

Hi! I'd like to expand the functionality of SdkbBot in two ways:

  1. Now that I'm running AWB version 6.2.0.0, which fixes the short description layout error among other improvements, I'd like to enable GENFIXes on its edits.
  2. I'd like to add an additional find-and-replace that changes ]] <ref to ]]<ref. I did about a thousand edits with this enabled from my non-bot account earlier, and there do not appear to be any issues.

Would these be alright, or should I file a new task and go through that process again? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:48, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Aside about references following space characters

I don't know much about formal process here, but I've noticed your "ref-edits", and have a question: why parse for ]] <ref when you could just look for   <ref (with one or more spaces before the tag)? Is there ever a time where spacing before the <ref> tag is correct and appropriate? — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 12:06, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
@JohnFromPinckney: Good question. In the vast majority of cases, no, and where I'm heading is for the bot to eventually pay attention to all such instances with the space and only carve out limited exceptions. But there are exceptions, such as when it follows a | or a = (in those cases, the space isn't displaying, and while removing it wouldn't harm anything it'd make the code look a little messier). {{u|Sdkb}} talk 14:50, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
Infoboxes with reference parameters would be a cosmetic edit probably, which Sdkb mentions but not the implication :^). Izno (talk) 19:30, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
AWB's general fixes take care of many REFPUNCT errors in a time-tested manner. There is no need for the bot to reinvent that wheel. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:27, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
@Jonesey95, I haven't looked at what specific parameters GENFIXes uses beyond what's said at the link you provided, but when I was doing testing I noticed that the bot was catching some stuff that GENFIXes was not. The other thing is that the bot can be triggered to run on all pages with the error, whereas if we just leave it as part of GENFIXes it could take years before someone using AWB comes by a given page. The bot has handled a little over 25,000 pages so far, and I suspect that adding the after-brackets component will allow it to handle several thousand more. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:42, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Back to non-aside

So are there any concerns here, or am I good to implement those things for the bot? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 01:51, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't have any concerns. — The Earwig (talk) 02:01, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
Okay, I'll wait another 24 hours to give one last chance for anyone to express concerns, and if there are none I'll begin operating the bot with the two changes. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 06:42, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
Moving forward. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:39, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Heads up for CSRF token change

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

I imagine most people this affects have seen it already, but just in case, I'm giving this more visibility. If you run code that uses CSRF tokens, you'll need to know about this change. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:34, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

What is a CSRF token? wbm1058 (talk) 21:20, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
See Cross-site request forgery#Prevention. I've created the redirect to point there. — Wug·a·po·des​ 21:24, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
Thanks. That helps clear up the unexplained jargon. Note the previous discussion at Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 22#How to use Special:ApiFeatureUsage. There is still some deprecated usage showing on the Special:APIFeatureUsage report from someone likely using an old version of botclasses.php. Is is possible to determine what the ID of the account making these deprecated edits is? I think there's a chance they have a "hearing" problem kind of like the users editing with smartphone apps do. I just noticed that some of the framework functions that I don't use have not been upgraded. function rollback still uses rvtoken and function userrights is still using ustoken. – wbm1058 (talk) 22:49, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
Noting the parallel notice at the Interface administrators' noticeboard. Many userspace scripts are effected by this, as is the GuidedTour extension (Help:Guided tours). – wbm1058 (talk) 18:25, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

SDZeroBot 10

Latest comment: 3 years ago25 comments9 people in discussion

@SD0001, @ProcrastinatingReader In my capacity as a volunteer Toolforge admin, I'm requesting that the approval of SDZeroBot 10 be revoked as a violation of Toolforge Rule #6: "Do not provide direct access to Cloud Services resources to unauthenticated users".

I think this is a cool feature and think that likely could be approved, but that needs to be done with the approval of the Toolforge admin team *before* it starts running. Thanks, Legoktm (talk) 02:46, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

@Legoktm: Wouldn't toolforge issues be handled on toolforge? Also I'm not sure which unauthenticated users have direct access to Cloud Services... my understanding is that SDZeroBot makes queries on behalf of someone else, but does not let that someone else access the cloud services themselves. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:17, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
Yes, but I don't think BAG should be approving bots that are in violation of sites' TOU/Rules...hence I'm asking before going in and using root to disable stuff. And the problem is that SDZeroBot allows for anyone to make arbitrary queries, which is called out in the explanatory text: "For instance, do not allow web clients to issue shell commands or arbitrary SQL queries against the databases." Quarry also allows for that, but it has some tracking features plus it was reviewed/approved by Toolforge admins for that purpose. Legoktm (talk) 04:51, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
I'm disabling this bot task, restricting use to just myself & userspace so that it no longer violates the toolforge rule. I wasn't aware of that rule earlier – it certainly isn't linked from wikitech:Help:Toolforge/Database where one would expect it – and didn't expect it since Quarry and ListeriaBot exist. – SD0001 (talk) 04:54, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
I'm not sure if the enwiki bot approval needs to be revoked as the bot isn't harmful to Wikipedia. If WMCS decides to approve this, the existing enwiki bot approval could be used to continue operations. – SD0001 (talk) 04:56, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
@SD0001: thanks for doing that. And...yeah, that's an embarrassing oversight, fixed it now. I would suggest you file a Phabricator task or send a mail to the Cloud list about how to get approval for this bot. Legoktm (talk) 04:33, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
This doesn't appear to be an enwiki problem, and I don't see any sort of "direct access to Cloud Services" third party activity even happening here. Without doing a more thorough review it appear that the process is:
  1. An editor can make an edit here to request that the bot do something
  2. The bot's code can decide if it wants to do the thing requested or not
  3. The bot goes and does a thing
  4. The bot makes an edit here
This bot isn't funneling any "direct access" though it to something else, the bot doesn't have any sort of user API. Am I missing something here Legoktm? — xaosflux Talk 10:15, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
Even on the abstract "arbitrary SQL queries" part, does putting a single validation component in the bot code make these non-arbitrary? — xaosflux Talk 10:51, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
Xaosflux, I'm not entirely sure that's the right issue here - even if the bot performed very aggressive SQL sanitisation and prevented 'dangerous' statements from being run, it appears that any such tool that takes arbitrary user input requires separate approval by the Toolforge admins to run. In the same way that I argue Toolforge approval or disapproval doesn't affect enwiki processes, our view of the bot's suitability to run on Toolforge is ultimately irrelevant, as (rightly or wrongly) Toolforge has its own processes for such things. firefly ( t · c ) 11:20, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
@Firefly: I agree, whatever the external system wants to require is up to it, I'm only commenting here because Legoktm, as a Toolforge admin came here to talk about it. — xaosflux Talk 13:32, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
Xaosflux, ah, I see - apologies. firefly ( t · c ) 13:36, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: The specific Toolforge rule in question says "...it must be possible to attribute usage to specific LDAP users who are bound to the terms of use". In this case, people editing the wiki pages here have not agreed to the Toolforge terms of use (understandably!), whereas when you log into Quarry with OAuth, you agree to those terms. I don't have a good answer on what level makes it non-arbitrary, I think that's something that should be discussed in coordination with the rest of the Toolforge admin team. Legoktm (talk) 04:31, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
Well the bot is the "specific LDAP user". This doesn't seem to be proxying authentication, the bot is just being triggered by someone's edit here. In any case, doesn't really matter since enwiki doesn't have any say in toolforge's rules any more then the reverse is true. — xaosflux Talk 10:18, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
I can see the unease about this to be honest - the task allows anyone to issue arbitrary SQL commands against the Toolforge replica DBs. Toolforge should (and almost certainly does) have safeguards against DoS-type attacks, and the replicas are read-only for fairly obvious reasons, but this task does significantly increase the attack surface of those systems. That said, I do not think that revoking the bot's approval to run on enwiki is needed - if the bot is effectively denied at the 'other end' of the pipeline, that is not really our business. Should a solution be found to make the bot compliant with Toolforge rules, there's no reason to put it through another BRFA as the enwiki operations of the bot are not in question here. firefly ( t · c ) 10:32, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
I agree there, this would be no different then if some other external site (e.g. internet archive) didn't like what one of our bots was doing - that is something to fix downstream between the bot op and the external site. — xaosflux Talk 10:53, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
This isn't BAG's remit. External sites' TOS' are their problem. BAG can't be responsible for checking the terms of external providers, and if it were where would we stop (would we also have to check the TOS of the hosting provider the botop claims the bot runs on?) I see no reason for the approval to be revoked as approval is in line with the enwiki bot policy, but the operator can choose to pause running the task, and Toolforge's team can take the appropriate actions too, but that's between them. Personally, I can't see how this increases the attack surface, and I'd argue that users are authenticated (at least in the sense of WP:BOTMULTIOP guidance) since the usernames of those who enter a query is permanently in the revision history, and those same users could use that same Wikimedia account to execute a Quarry query, but this would be up to the Toolforge admins of course. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:20, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
(also volunteer Toolforge admin here) It doesn't matter if this increases attack surface at all. The policy is in place and requires approval on the Toolforge side prior to running.
I don't mind if enwiki approval is reused again later, but I do think enwiki BAG should be aware of this rule we have. We could go root and forcefully disable tasks, but communicating the expectations is "gentler" than directly go root.
By the way, since when has Toolforge became external? --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 15:58, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
@Zhuyifei1999: Toolforge is external to the English Wikipedia, it is outside of our community policies, etc. The rule mentioned about this seems to be vague at best, see my notes above, it seems that this may roughly be in the "arbitrary SQL queries" section - so what remediates that, if they do any input filtering that would make the query be conditional instead of strictly arbitrary, wouldn't it? — xaosflux Talk 17:15, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
The remit of BAG in approvals is mostly summarised in WP:BOTREQUIRE. The purpose of BAG is presumably to stop crappy/non-consensus bots from irritating the wider community and generally being disruptive to this project. It's not really (and shouldn't be) the BAG's role to check for the bot's compliance with various terms and laws of external providers (external meaning anything that isn't an English Wikipedia policy, guideline or consensus). SDZeroBot 10, even if it were violating Toolforge's terms, meets all six criteria in WP:BOTREQUIRE. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:45, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
@ProcrastinatingReader: that's...not the response I was expecting. I understand that BAG doesn't go and check other sites' TOS, but I expected that when such an issue was pointed out, BAG would take action. It's hard for me to reconcile you saying "The purpose of BAG is presumably to stop crappy/non-consensus bots from irritating the wider community and generally being disruptive to this project" when I've come here saying that this bot task is disruptive to Toolforge, which is incredibly crucial to the well functioning of this project!! Legoktm (talk) 04:38, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
To start, I agree this isn't a BAG issue per se. The Enwiki consensus is that BAG's job is to screen local bots to make sure they do not cause harm to the encyclopedia. To my knowledge, we allow closed source bots and those using non-WMF resources, so creating a precedent that they should ensure the bot doesn't harm other domains seems difficult to enforce. That said, I appreciate the toolforge admins' courtesy in letting us know, and I think we can extend the same courtesy in making botops aware of their rules when applicable. Adding a link to their rules in our documentation would be helpful for everyone, and BAG pointing them out to botops when the stated task might break them would hopefully prevent issues down the line. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:53, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
  • As far as this discussion, I suppose with my BAG hat on, my response to the original request is that if toolforge admins have an issue with what one of their users is doing on toolforge, they should address that directly with their user - the same as if this was any other external service. If that causes this task to break, that is something that the operator will need to deal with. As toolforge is part of the WMF ecosystem, I agree we can have more awareness about the TOS's etc there then say a site like Google - and tasks like phab:T232403 seeking to coordinate better instructions for TF users seem like a good step towards continuous improvement. As far as this specific task goes, if the operator can find a way to resolve or replace their TF issues I don't see a reason it can't go on; if they can't it won't run anyway. — xaosflux Talk 10:18, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
  • Here's my opinion, also with my BAG hat on. There's nothing I could find in the WP:Bot policy that clearly requires adherence to the rules of any site external to the English Wikipedia, nor could I find anything in a quick look through our general policies and guidelines. In general our policies and guidelines seem to leave the responsibility for complying with external sites' terms on the individual user. We might try to stretch the "is harmless" clause to cover potential harm to the ability for other editors to use Toolforge, or kick it over to the wider community for consensus that this bot violating that Toolforge rule is ok or not, or just WP:IAR. But in this case SD0001 has voluntarily changed the operation of the bot, so we have no need to take those measures in this case.
    It's good for us to know about the Toolforge rules since approving a new bot that would be likely to fall afoul of them would likely be rather pointless as it probably wouldn't be able to run for long. I wouldn't be opposed to a mention of Toolforge's rules (as Wugapodes suggested above) in places where we recommend hosting on Toolforge, but I didn't see such a recommendation on WP:BOTPOL or WP:MKBOT (only passing mentions).
    As for the task itself, in the end it's up to the Toolforge admins what they'll allow but IMO the best chance for something that would address their needs would probably be to move the query configuration to an interface on Toolforge, with the on-wiki activation templates referring to those by some ID. The bot might provide its own Quarry-like interface to define queries, or it might just get the queries directly from Quarry if Quarry supports that. Anomie⚔ 12:14, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
  • I want to clarify that while we can agree that the bot task fell afoul of Rule #6 (which I wasn't aware of), I wouldn't say it was harmful to Toolforge. As hinted in the BRFA, the bot was set to use a maximum of 10 database connections, which is half of the allocation that toolforge permits (which is 20 IIRC). So Firefly it's not possible to do a DoS attack with any individual tool on toolforge, much less with one that doesn't even try to use the full quota available to it. Also, the bot was set to prepend SET STATEMENT max_statement_time = 600 FOR in front of every query, unlike Quarry that allows queries to run for hours and also allows a lot of users to access it at the same time. I'm too a software engineer in real life; I wouldn't have written a bot that had a real chance of disrupting the platform. – SD0001 (talk) 14:50, 25 June 2021 (UTC)
    SD0001, apologies - I didn't intend to imply in any way that SDZeroBot 10 would or could DoS the Toolforge infrastructure, I was speaking more hypothetically about why I imagine rules such as #6 exist. firefly ( t · c ) 14:56, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Server switch

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.

The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, 29 June 2021. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (07:00 PDT, 10:00 EDT, 15:00 WEST/BST, 16:00 CEST, 19:30 IST, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday 30 June).
  • If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
  • There will be code freezes for the week of June 28. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community.

SGrabarczuk (WMF) 01:23, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

RMCD bot notices

Latest comment: 3 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion
  Moved from WT:BOTPOL
Not marking bot edits as a "bot edit"

I was asked on my bot's talk whether I could not mark some of my bot's edits as bot edits. Is there any policy or guidance or convention on when not to mark a bot's edit as a "bot edit"? Just want to make sure I won't get in trouble for not doing so. – wbm1058 (talk) 04:03, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: in general that would be reviewed in a BRFA. Which task, or component of a task, is this in relation to? It is OK for bots to not flag certain edits with the bot flag, and a talk notice may be a good example - but it depends on things like volume as well. Processes that need to send large volumes or high-speed talk notices can still flood recent changes and may be better using WP:MMS. — xaosflux Talk 10:44, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
@Wbm1058: moved to BOTN as we can likely solution your request (not just discuss the policy aspect) all at once better here. — xaosflux Talk 10:48, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
The default is usually to mark as bot, unless there's a good reason for the changes to be reviewed by others. There's no policy on it AFAIK. I suppose if you're updating a page with notice that a requested move has started, it's best not to mark that as minor or bot, because you want to make sure it shows up on as many watchlists as possible. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:08, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
As an example, User:AAlertBot doesn't mark report page updates as bot edits so editors can follow the pages without having to enable bot edits. This is asked about once a year or so, especially in relation to daily recent change "spam" the bot does. No "official" policy/guideline/discussion exists about this, but it has run like this forever. I don't know any other bots that do this and I'm pretty sure AAB is the most non-bot-marked edit bot there is. —  HELLKNOWZ   ▎TALK 10:54, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
@Hellknowz: I haven't actually run a query, but I suspect that AAlertBot is easily eclipsed by ClueBot NG :) — xaosflux Talk 13:20, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
I had no idea ClueBot doesn't use a bot flag! Well then. —  HELLKNOWZ   ▎TALK 14:06, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
@Hellknowz: it is mostly so that watchers can see that the vandalism was actually reverted. — xaosflux Talk 14:11, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
The usecase described (providing a notification) is a good one to not use the bot flag (which is best used for edits that generally require no or less scrutiny/attention). –xenotalk 12:58, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

The default of my bot framework is to not mark edits as "minor" but do mark them as "bot" edits. I don't believe any of my bots have overridden these defaults. I don't think this matter was discussed in either my BRFA or in the BRFA of my bot's predecessor. It's not something I've thought about much until now, but the above makes sense. –wbm1058 (talk) 14:09, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Global bot approval request for InternetArchiveBot

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello!

I apologize for sending the message in English. Please help translate to other languages..

In accordance to the policy, this message is to notify you that there is a new approval request for a global bot.

The discussion is available at m:Steward requests/Bot status#Global bot status for InternetArchiveBot on Meta.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,
--Martin Urbanec (talk) 16:37, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

For the record: Per WP:GLOBALBOTS the only bots allowed to run on the English Wikipedia without local approval are those updating interwiki links. However, InternetArchiveBot is already approved to run here, and more importantly it appears that the global request is for the same tasks that are already approved here. (Probably most people here already know all that, but I find it helpful to state it in case there are people watching who don't.) Anomie⚔ 11:34, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Restoring redirects to recreated pages

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Moved to WP:BOTREQ#Restoring redirects to recreated pages. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:56, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Block of User:Cyberbot I

Latest comment: 3 years ago27 comments11 people in discussion

Today I noticed that Cyberbot I :

The first action is nothing more than annoying; though at least one user has questioned why the RfA statistics aren't in sync. The second is more worrying; a bot should not flood an article like that.

Consequently, I have blocked the bot as malfunctioning. I want to make it abundantly clear that the block is preventative (I have no issues with Cyberpower678 whatsoever and think he's one of our greatest tech admins of all time) and if anyone thinks the block is not necessary, to go ahead and unblock without informing me. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 13:27, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Ritchie333, while I believe the block was done in good faith, I question the preventative reasoning. The bot has been blocked for NOT updating RfX, and blocked for a flooding of a history that stopped occurring hours ago. I don’t think the block is preventing anything right now. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 13:36, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
The simple question is - can you confirm the flooding will not occur again? If the answer is "yes", I'll unblock. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 13:41, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
The bot made ~600 edits to Russo-Ukrainian War which is somewhat disruptive. It seems like it was caused by this accidentally botched removal of the AfD template, but presumably one could do the same thing intentionally to trigger the same behaviour from the bot? May be better to disable the task rather than block though, so it can continue doing its other jobs. Also this line of the bot's code should probably be updated? Relevant template was changed in 2017 but apparently out of sync with {{afdx}}... Second, I don't think that regex would match without the 's' flag? Thirdly, seems like your check here was failing. Or perhaps the repo is just very outdated. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:05, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
ProcrastinatingReader, I like the idea of disabling the AfD bot task rather than the entire bot (I followed the instructions "If you do not know which task the problem is coming from, use this emergency shutoff to deactivate the entire bot. After that, leave me a message."), so I've done that and unblocked so the bot can do other tasks. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:11, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
As Pppery notes below, this happened two months ago and you declined to fix the issue. I agree with Ritchie's block and subsequent turn off and recommend you do not restart the task until the issue is fixed. Izno (talk) 15:58, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
Cyberpower678 - I would suggest a check that prevents editing if the only change is to the timestamp parameter, that would prevent cases like this. firefly ( t · c ) 16:20, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
Although of course that relies on detecting the template at all, which it seems in cases like this does not happen. I should probably avoid backseat-coding... firefly ( t · c ) 16:23, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
This bot should not malfunction and need to be blocked so frequently. The previous time the bot was blocked, incidentally for the exact same reason of making repeated dummy edits to an article up for AfD, was only two months ago. * Pppery * it has begun... 13:55, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
As far as the RfA tally issue goes, I would guess it's erroring out as specified in https://github.com/cyberpower678/Cyberbot_I/blob/master/SoxBot/rfx-tally.php line 32. (I created a test RfA to see if the bot would pick it up - it didn't, which implies exit(1); has been called and the task needs to restart). However, I can't find the file that defines the class "RfA" to progress further. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:39, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
User:Ritchie333/rfatally.py is the sort of functionality I had in mind. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 17:44, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
Or just do the entire thing in Lua instead of relying on bot tasks that are (apparently) prone to malfunction. This bot task dates to 2009, over 4 years before the Scribunto extension was installed. * Pppery * it has begun... 17:56, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
Can we please go for this option? firefly ( t · c ) 18:47, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
OK, I've coded up Module:RfX tally and switched the template to use it. * Pppery * it has begun... 19:21, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
Pppery, fantastic. I’d thrown half of that implementation together in my sandbox but (a) didn’t get time to finish it today, and (b) yours is better anyway! firefly ( t · c ) 20:46, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

The bot is now up again. I'd still be in favor of permanently disabling the bot tasks in question in favor of Lua, because Lua modules aren't prone to the problem that started this thread, and, in the event they do need tweaking, anyone can do it rather than just one bot operator. * Pppery * it has begun... 21:42, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Pppery, Definitely. The in-line tally template should be able to directly work of the page's wikitext (per the function I gave above, but there's probably a better way of doing it), and the report module should be able to work similarly. My only concern is the bot writes data once so everybody reads it, and WP:RFA gets a lot of views which access the report, we don't want to be doing anything lots of times. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 21:53, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
Sounds like WP:DWAP to me. The benefits of this being unaffected by bot issues and maintainable by anyone should far outweigh the runtime cost of the module. — The Earwig (talk) 00:09, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

I notice that Cyberpower reverted Pppery's deployment of the module with the comment "Overriding existing code. Cyberbot I maintains this task." Can we get a consensus on what to do next? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 10:49, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

I think that the module should be used over the bot as long as the module is fully working and updates the tally template as quickly as the bot does. Bots may break and bot operators may go on wikibreaks, but with modules there can be maintenance by several users. Although I get that the bot was previously the only reasonable way to keep this template up to date, forcefully reverting changes to the code of the template by bot is in my eyes disruptive. The edit history shows several times where the template was being legitimately edited, including where the template code has been modified to include a category after a discussion, but these changes are later reverted by the bot as "it maintains the template". Dreamy Jazz talk to me | my contributions 11:04, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
@Dreamy Jazz: That should likely be brought up at WT:RFA - change through consensus is fine, I can see there is some benefit to either method. — xaosflux Talk 12:00, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
Your link shows User:Cyberbot I reverting, not User:Cyberpower678. I see code here that looks like it's responsible for that edit. Anomie⚔ 12:56, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
If we get consensus for the module, we can disable that bot's task, which will make that bit of code moot. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 13:27, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
@Ritchie333: My point was that you were accusing the human of actively doing the revert, when it was the bot. Assuming the task in question doesn't make any other useful edits, I'd say go ahead and disable it pending any human actually objecting. Anomie⚔ 13:38, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
Task disabled, change re-enabled, happy to self-revert or let someone else revert if a consensus re-emerges that the bot is the better way to go. Note that this is (more or less) procedural, since the bot is automatically undoing a discussion that appears to have consensus here (i.e. it's just doing what it's programmed to do, which is no longer desired). Primefac (talk) 13:55, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
@Firefly and Pppery: I just noticed that {{Finaltally}} uses the bot's page instead of the module. Can this be shifted over as well, or are the crats going to be upset when it comes time to close the discussion? Primefac (talk) 14:21, 5 July 2021 (UTC)
I've updated {{finaltally}} to use the module. * Pppery * it has begun... 14:52, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Automated adding of templates to redirect pages.

Latest comment: 3 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion

Could someone point me at the bot-request that Tom.Reding submitted where it was approved to add a template specifically designed to redirect people to off-wiki resources, to redirect pages (which are not seen by the reader)? Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:29, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

There was Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Tom.Bot 6 about addition of {{authority control}}, but that does not cover redirects. I can find no other relevant bot requests, and agree the addition of the template to redirects of pointless. * Pppery * it has begun... 17:38, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
The thing is, even that request is specifically "Add Authority control to all pages with Infobox person" and a load of the recent run is not even people - thats before we get to the issue that its adding a template to a redirect. Only in death does duty end (talk) 17:49, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
@Only in death: edits made by editors (not bots) wouldn't have a BRFA at all (such as in your link above). If an editor is being disruptive, the standard venues for dealing with that complaint should be used. — xaosflux Talk 19:57, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
I believe OID is referring to the behaviour being WP:MEATBOT-like. Speaking just for myself since I hold an opinion on this issue, I agree that these kinds of tasks should require bot approval. Large-scale addition of a template to articles, regardless of whether it's done with a bot flag or not, seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be discussed first. However I don't think there's anything BAG can do here anyway, since the status quo for the authority control template is that this kind of addition is permitted as it wasn't challenged closer to the time it began. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:04, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
BOTPOL specifically covers any bot-like editing. So yes, bot-like editing on an editor requires a BRFA. Since BAG declines to enforce this aspect of BOTPOL, and Tom.Reding has stated they are not going to stop. I am taking this to ANI. Only in death does duty end (talk) 07:49, 16 July 2021 (UTC)
BAG doesn't "decline" to enforce it, BAG has no enforcement power. All we can do is offer "expert opinion" on bot things, and give or withdraw approval for filed bot requests. Glancing at the contributions, I do agree that the activity appears to be an unauthorized bot running on the user account, and should be instead done via a bot account after an approved BRFA. I'm not going to offer an opinion on whether the edits should be made. Anomie⚔ 11:40, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Proposal relating to/modifying WP:MASSCREATE/WP:MEATBOT

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

  You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability § Adding one new thing to the current SNG text. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 05:58, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

FYI: I replied further with respect to these policies (versus the linked proposal) at WT:BOTPOL#Proposal relating to/modifying WP:MASSCREATE/WP:MEATBOT. Anomie⚔ 12:06, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

BOT owners (retired)

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Where would one discuss a useful BOT (User:HotArticlesBot) whose owner seems to have retired (@Kaldari)? I am not currently a BOT operator, but would be willing to, if the choice is to lose a useful bot... (I did leave a note on his talk, and @User:xaosflux does seem to have picked up some runs...so, not urgent. - Mjquinn_id (talk) 15:54, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

@Mjquinn id: You can probably email Kaldari to see if he can provide you the necessities for running it. --Izno (talk) 16:03, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
And the source is open/published as indicated on the bot's user page, so you could also run it on a bot account of your own after a WP:BRFA. --Izno (talk) 16:04, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Server switch

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.

The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic back to the primary data center on Tuesday, 14 September 2021.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, 14 September 2021. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (07:00 PDT, 10:00 EDT, 15:00 WEST/BST, 16:00 CEST, 19:30 IST, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday, 15 September).
  • If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
  • We expect the code deployments to happen as any other week. However, some case-by-case code freezes could punctually happen if the operation require them afterwards.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community.

SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 01:10, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

Using tools like bots

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Should there be a section about using tools like bots, like Halopedia? There might be some people using grammar/spell checkers like LanguageTool or Grammarly that might want to know about using tools like these like bots, such as Halopedia's CIABot or PorpleBot. EthanGaming7640 (talk) 00:56, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Are you looking for WP:MEATBOT? * Pppery * it has begun... 00:59, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Should this job be a bot task?

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Some guidance please on an AWB job which has grown.

For the last few months I have been working on cleaning up WP:Bare URLs. Most of the work is done by Citation bot, to which I feed big batches of articles containing bare urls (via User:BrownHairedGirl/Articles with bare links).

I then follow behind the bot, cleaning up as many as possible of the pages where the bot has made an edit, but not fixed any bare URLs. I use several tools for this, including WP:reFill, which is outdated and has a few vices, such as using the old cite parameter |deadurl=, which is now unsupported and should be converted to |url-status=. Using |deadurl= generates an error message and places the articles in Category:CS1 errors: unsupported parameter.

Rather than fixing this manually, I reckoned it would be faster and more accurate to use AWB to clean up the articles where my use of reFill had created errors.

That worked, and I soon found that it was easiest to just run it on all the pages in Category:CS1 errors: unsupported parameter, cleaning up similar errors created by other editors as well by me. I run it 5 to 10 times per day.

I soon noticed that many of the pages in that category had other simple errors which could be fixed by a regex, so I began adding those regexes. The initially simple AWB setup is now on version 46, with over 40 replace settings. They include mis-spelt and miscapitalised parameters, non-English language parameters which can be translated, and some minor tasks (H:BR fixes, and canonicalisation of some params) which are implemented only if an error has been fixed.

The more I have developed the task, the more pages it has processed. I checked this afternoon and found that it had done 160 edits in the last 7½ days. Should I submit a BRFA for this? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:44, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

PS If it helps, I will post a copy of the settings file. Just ping me if you want it. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:03, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
FWIW, I used to do thousands of these fixes with an AutoEd script, checking each one for errors before saving. As long as I was not making cosmetic changes, I just marked the edits as minor and kept going. I don't think 160 edits in a week reaches the bot-needed threshold; I would sometimes do that many in a day. The only reason to set up a bot, IMO, would be if you were bothered by having to do these changes manually. Also, if you are looking for more patterns to replace, drop a note on my talk page and I'll link you to my regexes. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:28, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

CW Error #48

Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I've be fixing CW Error #48 with Bandersnatch on automatic mode, and have done ~2000 edits, with no incorrect edits that I could see. Is this okay? ― Qwerfjkltalk 17:24, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

I looked at your edits, and they look fine to me. Be careful with internal links, which should be trimmed instead of removed entirely. It looks like there are tens of thousands of errors to fix, so you might want to file a BRFA. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:54, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Anyone know a good archive bot?

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

I'm making a news page and does anyone know a good archive bot for this? Thanks, Jeb andDinnerbone (talk) 08:49, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Might want to specify what a "news page" is and what the bot is supposed to archive? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:00, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
Help:Archiving_a_talk_page#Automated_archiving has some info on this. — xaosflux Talk 10:07, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Semi-automated article creation

Latest comment: 3 years ago13 comments6 people in discussion

Hello! I am currently working on a project which involves semi-automated mass article creation. At the moment, my tool (CreateTaxonPages) requires some manual setup, and then produces one-line stubs based on data from GBIF and Wikidata (it would also edit/create Wikidata items). I would review the article, potentially add more text, and then publish it. I understand that automated article creation requires a BRFA per the bot policy. However, I am currently proceeding very slowly (mainly to test the tool), and I review each edit before saving it (through my main account). I plan to test it for a while, and then slowly speed up article creation while still manually reviewing each page. If it works well, I plan to create a web tool (WebTaxonArticles) for people to use. I plan to eventually have CreateTaxonPages run automatically through my bot account, and I know I'll need a BRFA for that, but would I need a BRFA before this? Thank you! Tol (talk | contribs) @ 03:01, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

I would say yes, a BRFA is required, as that’s bot-like creation of articles. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 03:05, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
That's a very tricky question. The described process, where your tool creates a skeleton article that you then manually review and edit before publishing, would fall under WP:ASSISTED. If you stop giving it adequate human review, even if a human is still pushing the publish button, you may wind up at WP:MEATBOT. I'd recommend that, if you make a tool, it be limited to preapproved people who can be trusted to perform the necessary level of review before hitting publish.
Also of note is that mass creation of taxon articles in particular has long proved controversial, as it turns out to be easy for seemingly-reliable databases to contain errors, outdated information, new taxons that are still in scientific dispute, and/or data that requires intelligent interpretation. See, for example, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anybot's algae articles and various related discussions. IMO any BRFA for creating taxons must be strictly limited in the set of taxons to be created and must require that multiple members of the relevant WikiProject have already pre-reviewed the full list of taxons to be created for accuracy, and should probably also require that the wikiproject discussion was widely advertised to other relevant WikiProjects and possibly WP:VPR as well. Anomie⚔ 12:52, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
@Tol: I'd strongly urge follow up on part of this prior to even opening a BRFA - that the community will be in general supportive of all these assisted creations; this should have a well attended discussion with a consensus found - how attended and how strong of a consensus should be proportional to how large of a job this will be. — xaosflux Talk 13:23, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
@Anomie: I'm not publishing the tool any time soon, though I would probably limit it to trusted users in some way (I was considering just using user groups — perhaps autopatrolled). I'm using GBIF for all data, which is (in my experience) fairly reliable. However, I'm still manually reviewing each article and checking against recent articles if necessary. I'm hoping that manual input and review will mitigate problems such as those found in the AfD discussion you linked. @Xaosflux: Should I request input at the Village Pump before speeding up, or is there another preferred venue? Tol (talk | contribs) @ 20:45, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
@Tol: if these are all on the same topic, I'd start with a discussion on the related wikiproject if it has any active members - get some initial feedback, then link in to it from VP. — xaosflux Talk 21:05, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: I saw this as being fairly wide-ranging. I'm currently doing testing with Phormidium, which would fall under WikiProject Microbiology, but I plan to create all sorts of species. I could try to concentrate in an area for a while after obtaining local consensus, then move on to another area. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 21:17, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
Tol, before you get to BRFA, given that many taxon pages on Wikidata were effectively created as a result of Lsjbot's activities, which are known to be, well, bad, 1) what quality guarantee can you give on the point, and 2) if every species is not notable (no really, they aren't), why do you think you should create pages here? Izno (talk) 17:02, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
(Ah, I see Anomie/Xaos got it from a current revision. :^) Izno (talk) 17:03, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
@Izno: All content is sourced from GBIF. Wikidata is only used to check for existing articles, to match up articles and GBIF IDs, and for populating Template:Taxonbar. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 20:48, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
As for notability, we do have Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Common outcomes#Species. My reasoning is that it's an encyclopedic topic that's generally presumed to be notable, and could be helpful to readers, particularly if additional information is added — though I do believe that a (good) stub is better than nothing. Taxonbars also bring identifiers from Wikidata to a reader-facing article. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 21:05, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
@Tol: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Qbugbot 2 (a bot to create stubs for insects, spiders, and other arthropods) is a good example to follow (including links to relevant WikiProject discussions, a VPP, and an RfC).   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  22:15, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
@Tom.Reding: Thanks; I'll take a look at that. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 00:33, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Bots need to upgrade to Pywikibot 6.6.1

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Dear bot operators, bots running Pywikibot must upgrade to version 6.6.1 otherwise they will break when deprecated API parameters are removed. If you have any questions or need help in upgrading, please reach out using one of the Pywikibot communication channels.

Thanks, Legoktm (talk) 18:02, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

User:RMCD bot has not run after 30 minutes of Requested_move posted to Talk

Latest comment: 3 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Talk:Christ_myth_theory#Requested_move_1_October_2021 has not been listed on Wikipedia:Requested moves/Current discussions. The template states that this will occur after 30 minutes of the posting. --2db (talk) 16:05, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

The bot is down because its operator was blindsided by the September 30 Let's Encrypt root expiry and is still trying to get up to speed and figure out what the hell he needs to do to get the bot back up. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:26, 1 October 2021 (UTC)
See WP:Village pump (technical)#Heads up for possible tool breakage today – wbm1058 (talk) 00:48, 2 October 2021 (UTC)
  Fixed – See also User talk:RMCD bot#‎Bot not working? – wbm1058 (talk) 04:07, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

user:AnomieBOT and "rescuing" bad population updates

Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

Here is a user who is doing half-baked updates to many US city articles: [8]. They've done this to dozens of articles.

Usually, this users' updates change the population in one table in the article. They don't remove the old population estimates (probably from 2019). They don't update other stats, like population density numbers, don't update other mentions of the population in the article, and don't update text like "as of the 2010 Census".

Problem is, AnomieBOT comes along and "rescues" the deleted reference definition that caused a visible referencing error. After that, the article has no visible referencing errors -- but is all screwed-up because of the internal inconsistencies and the half-done statistics update.

To make a correct fix, a human has to undo the robot's fix and actually remove the old estimate numbers. Then, edit the article to clean up the density problems, fix the "as of" dates, and verify a few more things before the article is good again.

Trouble is, once AuomieBOT has touched the article, it doesn't have any visible errors anymore and doesn't appear in a category like Category:Pages with broken reference names and instead has to be manually discovered. I think that user:AnomieBOT is doing more harm than good by burying problematic edits while claiming to "rescue" them.

Can AnomieBOT be stopped? Can we have it undo these changes so that the articles are added to the broken references category? -- Mikeblas (talk) 14:41, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm not seeing the issue here. For example, looking at Brookhaven, Pennsylvania, a user orphans a reference, which the bot then rescues. You come along and remove the content entirely before replacing it with entirely different content.
First off, you shouldn't be using orphaned reference categories to be making content changes. Second off, the data present in the infobox at the time when the bot fixed the orphaned reference is consistent with the provided data. It's not like the bot put a reference for the wrong content. Third, you should be bringing such matters to the bot operator before going above their heads and bringing it up here.
In summary, this is not an issue that BAG or Anomie needs to do anything about. Primefac (talk) 14:49, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
I'll ask you to assume good faith and make an effort to see the issue here. When your first step is to dismiss a concern raised by someone else, then you're not assuming good faith. It comes off as gatekeeping, and not conducive to constructive conversation or collaboration.
The orphaned reference is caused by an editor who (not surprisingly) doesn't understand the side-effects of the template they're editing. Since they remove the reference for the estimate but leave the estimate number, and that's what causes the reference invocation becomes orphaned. Thus, it's not I who removed content -- it was original edit , which removed "estimate=" and "estyear=" parameters from the population history box.
I can utilize the categories in any way I'd like -- thanks, though. The reference that the bot fixes is inconsistent with the first user's intent, which was to remove the population estimate and update it with a decennial census population count.
I've repeatedly brought issues to this bot's owner, and they're also immediately notified whenever I revert the bot's edits. I don't recall that mechanism ever being effective, and don't recall ever receiving a response.
Are you speaking on behalf of the BAG when you explain that this wide-spread and counter-productive editing pattern is acceptable? -- Mikeblas (talk) 15:03, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
I don't know why when I explain exactly why a bot edit is not an actual issue with the bot, people assume I'm assuming bad faith; I'm not, I'm explaining why it's not a bot issue. I try to avoid superlatives and making people feel better about their concerns because quite honestly I don't like typing out more than I have to (i.e. short-and-to-the-point is my preference).
The bot does not comprehend content changes. It comprehends that someone has orphaned a ref, which is "bad", and fixing it is "good". If the editor who removed the named reference didn't do a good enough job cleaning up after themselves, the bot helps out. This happens with orphaned ref fixer, dated template parameters, template substitution, etc (plus other automated bots like SineBot). If the content was also supposed to be removed, but the user did not remove that content, the bot has zero, absolutely ZERO, way of knowing that. All it sees is an orphaned reference that needs fixing.
So again, we're not going to disapprove a bot that works (technically) correctly 100% of the time, but is "an annoyance" when the user causing the bot to be triggered does something silly. That's called a GIGO problem, and (at least in this instance) cannot be fixed on the bot's end. Primefac (talk) 15:23, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
Step one in this process is to cut a hole in the box should have been to speak with Cameron8782 directly, to explain how their edits are suboptimal and to ask them to improve their editing process. If the bot is getting involved because a human editor is making mistakes, the best way to fix the problem is for the human editor to stop making those mistakes. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:46, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
Good point, forgot that step. Primefac (talk) 15:55, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Bot owner has retired, should the bot still be running?

Latest comment: 3 years ago12 comments6 people in discussion
  Moved from Wikipedia talk:Bots/Noticeboard § Bot owner has retired, should the bot still be running?
 – – SD0001 (talk) 09:47, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

HotArticlesBot is operated by Kaldari, who retired on 23 April 2021. This brings up the question as to whether or not the bot should still be running. Editors are responsible for edits made by their bots, and if they are not about to oversee the bot's editing, they can't be responsible, can they?

As I see it, there are two options here, either allow the bot to run as long as it isn't disrupting things, or another editor creates "HotArticlesBot2" to replace HotArticlesBot, which can then be blocked. Mjroots (talk) 08:04, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

If I'm allowed to comment here, I'd like to say it's a useful bot and seemingly pretty harmless. It doesn't edit mainspace - just counts edits. I was the one who flagged that the operator had retired, because I was interested in adding its function to a WikiProject. However, if another editor isn't able to actively run the bot or expand its functions to new applications, then I definitely think "HotArticlesBot2" would be useful. Iskandar323 (talk) 08:06, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
Ah, a discussion on this was already started here: Bots/Noticeboard#BOT_owners_(retired) Iskandar323 (talk) 08:17, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
I think it's ok to let it run until another bot operator takes over the task or until the bot starts creating problems. I see this bot is being run from toolforge (hotarticles account), so the ideal solution would be to ask Kaldari to add a co-maintainer, so that the same bot account can be used and no new setup or BRFA is needed. – SD0001 (talk) 09:47, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Just curious, since I don't see a clear indication on his userpage: has anyone just asked Kaldari "will you be able to maintain the bot even though you're retired?" If the answer is yes, this seems like a non-issue. We need more people who can/will maintain bots, regardless of what else they do on-wiki, and there doesn't seem any benefit to rushing to replace the capable and willing. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 18:59, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: do you not see the big "Retired" banner at the top of Kaldari's user page? Mjroots (talk) 02:46, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
That's ... an odd question. Of course I see it. It's the premise of this thread. It seems obvious that it's worth asking whether or not an active bot operator whose main account is not active will be able to maintain the bot. Not all retirements are equal, and Kaldari's activity on other wikis is one example of that. Beyond that, retirement banners have a funny way of disappearing in time (not always, of course, but it's one of those "indefinite not infinite" sort of things). If someone said "will his bot still run?" you could respond the same way: don't you see the big "retired" banner? Well, yeah, and yet he didn't stop his bot. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 03:07, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
I'm not interested in maintaining the bot, but I would be happy to add someone else as a maintainer on the bot account if someone wants to volunteer. Kaldari (talk) 23:18, 1 October 2021 (UTC)
@Kaldari You can add me, assuming no one else is volunteering. – SD0001 (talk) 08:15, 2 October 2021 (UTC)
I've added SD0001. Kaldari (talk) 02:00, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Updating the guidelines at this noticeboard?

Latest comment: 3 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion

We have now had two posts in fairly quick succession where the original editor has not contacted the bot operator prior or even left them a note that there was a BOTN discussion open about their bot. Both of the issues likely would have been resolved at that stage and thus not needed to waste the time of those at this noticeboard who have to see a notification about (essentially) a non-issue.

Now, I am not going to fault either of these editors for doing this, because the entirety of our banner guideline regarding the issue is If you want to report an issue or bug with a specific bot, follow the steps outlined in WP:BOTISSUE first. While I do not think we need to go to the extremes of AN or ANI where the bot operator must be notified, I think we need to make it more clear that the bot operator should be contacted first, and we should really only get a post here if the botop is unresponsive or it's an issue that needs more immediate attention.

If I'm in the minority here, that's fine, I just see little point to "raising alarm bells" for issues that (so far) can be easily fixed somewhere else. Primefac (talk) 11:30, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Given the volume at this noticeboard, I don't think it's a problem in the sense of the board being overwhelmed, but it does tend to offend botops (almost every time I've seen a botop be 'dragged' here, or an issue being reported here in the first instance, the botop has [understandably] taken it negatively). So I think your idea, to clarify the guidelines here, is a good one. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:43, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
Indeed, it's not a volume issue, it's comments like ...as I've been taken to this noticeboard and threatened with a block... coming from the botops that has me concerned. Primefac (talk) 11:45, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, I don't want to make too big of a deal about this but you know the reputation this board has after certain bot-ops have been taken here repeatedly and failed to "get the message" even after they were desysopped. I too get just a bit aggravated when I see relatively new admins who sailed through their "ordeals" doing this – it's easier to give a pass to less-experienced editors. At the same time the community is having another village chat over how "toxic" the RfA process is. So sorry if I raised the drama bar a tad too much. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:36, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
I'm not trying to make a huge deal about either post specifically, but two in the same week (combined with your comment) made me realise our guidance isn't that great; that's what I'm looking to update. Primefac (talk) 12:42, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
I left the noticeboard notification on the bot's talk page, not the operator's, as 1) I assumed that since that page existed and did not redirect to the operator's talk page, that it was likely where bot-specific communications should go and 2) when I've had bot questions in the past for other bots and there was a separate user talk page for the bot, I've gotten replies after posting it on the bot talk page. I guess what confuses me with this whole situation is that this doesn't count as notifying the bot op? As to the block statement, I simply stated that I was going to p-block the bot from the namespace in which it was malfunctioning, which is what admins are told to do, especially since the bot has been doing these things for almost 4 years. Is there a better thing to do in that case, or should you just let the bot continue to recreate deleted pages? Hog Farm Talk 13:55, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
My fault for not checking the bot's page, as I assumed TNT's post on your thread meant that no message was left at all.* We can't necessarily require bot operators to always be responsive within 48 hours, but after that timeframe it's not unreasonable to make a post with more eyes on it.
That being said, I still think we need to make that "talk to the operator or post on the bot's talk page" message a little more obvious (instead of being placed on a secondary page with big blocks of text to wade through), with potentially a "please include diffs of botop notification" request, just to avoid any future misunderstandings. Primefac (talk) 14:01, 10 October 2021 (UTC) *I'm really off my game today, I thought the bot post was made 8 Oct not 9 Oct. I think it's time for me to log off and catch my flight now... Primefac (talk) 14:31, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
Notices were placed five minutes apart. My biggest issue with virtually simultaneous postings like this is that they place an extra burden on me of needing to respond in two places. Notices placed on bot's talk are preferred and if you feel it's particularly urgent you can ping the bot operator when you post to their bot's talk. Otherwise I may not see it until I check my email and I'm not constantly monitoring my email because it mostly gets spam (which is why I don't do email on my phone). – wbm1058 (talk) 14:21, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, it was wrong for me to take it here so quickly. Hog Farm Talk 15:00, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
I think this would be a good idea. It's largely just summarizing the BOTISSUE text which suggests reaching out on talk first, so I don't think it's too controversial a change. I made an attempt at an updated wording, Special:Diff/1049258395, so feedback on that would be welcome. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:07, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Shared accounts policy

Latest comment: 3 years ago13 comments5 people in discussion

I had a query on my talk page and figure it's worth just clearing up in policy. WP:SHAREDACCOUNT says Exceptions to this rule can be made for ... bot accounts that are maintained by more than one contributor, provided the existence of such an arrangement is made clear and has consensus. This is in the case of a bot account being ran on a server where another individual has technical access to the credentials (perhaps because they're a sysadmin or some similar reason). I've got some of my own thoughts on this, expressed at my talk, but I would say that we don't really enforce any such policy in practice. Many bot accounts have multiple individuals with access to the underlying server (all Toolforge root users, for example, and co-maintainers). Plus I imagine it's more common than disclosed, and even in disclosed cases I'm not aware of any process to gain "consensus" for such an arrangement, or even rubber-stamping by BAG. Does this policy need to be changed to reflect actual practice? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:28, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

@ProcrastinatingReader: well, more than that - we have some bots that literally have shared access, by design, and it isn't about because someone may have access to the underlying server. I suppose policy-wise, if the bot account was used to do something bad and none of the operators would take direct responsibility we would could hold all of the operators responsible. — xaosflux Talk 10:32, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
And that is what I think that policy is really talking about, the sysadmin of a hosting company thing isn't really what's going on there. — xaosflux Talk 10:34, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
I suppose when I say "sysadmin" in this context, I mean a sysadmin who also has their own Wikipedia account (rather than unidentifiable DigitalOcean sysadmins), so more like Toolforge root users/co-maintainers, or if you were the sysadmin for the server hosting ProcBot (of which I'm the coder & listed operator). It's probably not entirely uncommon to have a non-operator involved in the hosting process (especially if the bot is complex). Of course, this individual will likely not be logging into the account and maybe not even editing the bot code, even though they have technical access to view the login credentials. However this case should be treat moving forwards, I don't think the status quo involves any kind of "consensus" process, so don't think the current policy reflects actual practice. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:42, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
Two-part addition: (1) if this isn't referring to underlying access to view credentials at all, I think it should be better clarified what it is referring to (since I really have no idea - maybe push access but I can think of exceptions, like Citation bot, that don't adhere to such a rule), and maybe moved into the bot policy as a more natural place for such a provision. (2) If (1) is true, is there a special case for accounts that have privileged viewing access (eg: admin - regarding deleted material; EFM/EFH - regarding private filters). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:51, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
I think the key phrase is "maintained by". To speak specifically to this case, TNT isn't maintaining or running the bot, even though it is technically possible. If something were to go wrong, Tamzin would be the one contacted, and only Tamzin. More generally, I do not think we need to update or clarify anything in the wording as it stands. Primefac (talk) 10:59, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
There was the similar Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DeltaQuadBot 9, though that was voluntary and since SQL was removed from access that case is probably largely academic at this point. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:11, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
Whether or not a downstream sysadmin has a wiki account or not shouldn't be a consideration. — xaosflux Talk 13:00, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
The and has consensus text should be removed. No "consensus" is needed for a botop to add a co-maintainer. – SD0001 (talk) 11:05, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
I would (weakly) argue that consensus is needed, if we were to use DQBot as an example - folks specifically didn't want SQL to have access. There's no downside to leaving it in, as per SILENCE consensus is assumed unless someone complains. Primefac (talk) 13:22, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
In that sense any action requires consensus. Consensus-by-default (i.e. WP:SILENCE) may well be a decent pragmatic position, but it's straying far from the definition of 'consensus' and I think is confusing to have in policy. If others don't find the prose confusing then perhaps it's just how I'm parsing it, but I think it's more of a case of 'nobody knows that provision even existed' rather than 'it makes sense to most people'. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:18, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
So here is an example: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/OutreachDashboardBot - there are 2 of us that have explicit access to this account's credentials. Either of us would be expected to deal with actions taken under the bot account. It also runs on a cloud services server - but I wouldn't expect those server admins to answer to the enwiki community about that bot. — xaosflux Talk 12:58, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
I would like to see us encourage having more bots with multiple maintainers, it's one of the best ways to ensure sustainability. See also wikitech:User:BryanDavis/Developing_community_norms_for_critical_bots_and_tools#Have_multiple_maintainers. Legoktm (talk) 22:04, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
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