User talk:AnomieBOT/Archive 2

my hero!!

Thanx 4 repairing Bank Medici 4 me. i don't know how i lost them in transit (copy and paste).

Furtive admirer (talk) 06:55, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Would someone please tell me what problem this message is referring to?

I'd be happy to fix whatever problem is there, but I can't understand what's wrong with the references on the pages that the bot's messages are referring to. [1] Thanks, Reconsideration (talk) 23:18, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

It looks like you managed to fix it in this edit. What happened is that in the previous edit you had copied <ref name=skdhil/> from some other article; AnomieBOT noticed that there was no definition for "skdhil" in 1940 in poetry, and found three different (but in this case, almost identical) possible matches in related articles. Since it can't tell by itself whether they are almost identical, much less which one is correct or "best", AnomieBOT posted the message on the talk page so a human could choose the right one without having to dig through all those related articles in the same way the bot did. Anomie⚔ 01:25, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

I see. Thanks. Reconsideration (talk) 21:36, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Citation Barnstar
		Thank you for rescuing my ref! • --MoHasanie (talk) 20:02, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBOT thanks you! Anomie⚔ 02:01, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Category:Pages with missing references list

There are almost a hundred pages in Category:Pages with missing references list every day. A lot more than any one editor can handle. Many are new articles, or old articles which jave only now received their first reference. Some are vandalism or careless edits. Any suggestions? Debresser (talk) 01:05, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Not really, especially since a fair number seem to be due to vandalism. But it looks like people are keeping up: at the moment, the category has only 16 articles in it. Anomie⚔ 02:06, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

There are about 80 of them every day. SmackBot is taking care of part of them and I and other editors fix the rest. Debresser (talk) 23:56, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

removal of refs

I thought we should just remove a reference because we can't find it. The bot did that here. I revertedit and fixed it here. I'll admit that no bot would be able to think of that, but Category:Pages with broken reference names says clearly "please do not delete the ref nor comment it out". Debresser (talk) 21:38, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I'll look into adding detection of that sort of thing. It's not that the bot couldn't find it, it's that the bot looked at <ref namemcg/>, removed the unknown parameter "namemcg", and then saw that <ref/> is just useless and removed that too. Anomie⚔ 23:16, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I see. Good luck! Debresser (talk) 23:54, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

You're fast

I've twice started fixing a broken reference yesterday and today, and when I made the fix, I found you had already done that. Which may be a little frustrating, after spending sometimes 15 minutes on finding it. :)

What's with all other 220 articles? The bot will be able to fix them? Debresser (talk) 13:01, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

I've updated the bot to start including an indication in the log when it is done with a page, so soon you should be able to just look for the ones marked "b0rken" or "Scan completed" (you could start looking at the "b0rken" ones now, if you want). Hopefully that will help you. Anomie⚔ 20:02, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

That's a nice feature.

I noticed the bot still tries to fix pages from Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting although I remember you said somewhere that it couldn't fix those errors that make an article end up there, after the real and regular broken references were moved to Category:Pages with broken reference names. Debresser (talk) 00:02, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

It can fix some of them: MediaWiki:Cite error ref no input (removed), MediaWiki:Cite error ref no key (removed), MediaWiki:Cite error ref numeric key (renamed), MediaWiki:Cite error ref too many keys (extra parameters removed), MediaWiki:Cite error references invalid input (tag contents removed), and MediaWiki:Cite error references invalid parameters group (extra parameters removed). Anomie⚔ 02:28, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I see. What about all the old pages in Category:Pages with broken reference names. Has the bot checked all of them? Debresser (talk) 02:50, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

It looks like it has, except for Al-Qaeda in Iraq which has been hitting T20601. Which, unless the bot has bugs, means the missing refs are not in the article history and are not in the current version of any articles linked to or linking to the article in question. Although "linked to" isn't checked if there are more than 1000, as that probably means the article is in some widespread template.

Someday I should see if I can convince the new search to find articles with exactly the "blah blah blah.<ref name="missing"/>" text from the article, to cast the copy-paste net a little wider. Anomie⚔ 04:08, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

that's bad. Because there are about 225 of them. And each one of them is between 5 to 45 minutes of searching and thinking. I do about 3-5 of them a day, and the list stays at the same length. What about some incitive? :) Debresser (talk) 04:15, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Moving refs out of templates

Hi, recently AnomieBOT moved some references from within {{Graphic novel list}} to the lead on the article List of Hot Gimmick chapters. I then reverted, and AnomieBOT re-moved the refs, and left a note on my talkpage telling me to come here and leave a message. So, just so you know, WP:ANIME leaves refs in {{Graphic novel list}} on purpose, for several reasons, and AnomieBOT should not move them out (if you want more detail, feel free to ask). Thanks! 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 17:59, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I am interested in the detail, although I'm not going to wait on that before adjusting the bot. In case you're wondering, the rationale behind AnomieBOT doing that is that whenever someone edits an infobox (or similar template) to delete an obsolete parameter, any existing uses of that parameter where that parameter contains the ref body will suddenly result in orphaned references. Anomie⚔ 02:10, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

The rationale certainly makes sense (and it's more or less for that reason that WP:ANIME generally doesn't like references in the infoboxes on our articles). There are two main reasons behind having the ref bodies in {{Graphic novel list}}: First, the parameters in GNL are stable, so there is no danger of a reference being removed in the course of updating transclusions after a template edit (if an entire parameter *is* removed from a transclusion, it's actually quite likely the result of vandalism). And second, the information which is typically referenced (release dates) is duplicated in the lead of the article, along with the references, for the first volume and the current volume. For ongoing series, though, the current volume changes regularly, and it's very inconvenient to have to move ref bodies around in the course of updating the volume number. With the ref body in the template, though, we simply have to change the number in the ref name to update the ref accordingly. Hope this helps some! 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 04:13, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Good reasons, especially the part about the current volume changing regularly. Anomie⚔ 11:49, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. =D 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 12:02, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Bot problem

Hi Anomie, a problem with your bot. I'm currently working to improve the refs for Marshalsea. As I'm making changes, your bot is making others, which is leading to some confusion. Are you able to fix it so that it doesn't respond to my Marshalsea edits? SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 23:15, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Replied at User talk:Anomie/Archives/2015#Bot problem Anomie⚔ 02:19, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Error

The AnomieBOT removed external links, stub-type, categories and interwiki. --Snek01 (talk) 12:08, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

See User talk:AnomieBOT/Archive 1#Reflist above; I thought I had fixed all the problem articles though, I don't know how I missed that one. Anomie⚔ 13:14, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

First Harrogate Trains

Hi. In this edit, to First Harrogate Trains, the bot "fixed" the reference error simply by removing the second reference. However what I was trying to do was cite the same source in two different parts of the article. Despite following the instructions here to the letter, I kept getting the same error.

So now we have an article without an ugly error message but which is now lacking a citation..... --RFBailey (talk) 18:39, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

You didn't quite follow the instructions to the letter: you used two single-quotes ('') instead of one double-quote (") to delimit the name. I'll adjust the bot to correctly handle that in case someone makes the same mistake in the future. Anomie⚔ 20:30, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Ouch. (A lame excuse is that I'm used to using LaTeX, where you have to use two single quotes to get ".....) Thanks for pointing out the mistake--although 7 minutes after your edit, the bot came along again and did this: it seems that you only fixed one set of quotes. Perhaps the bot could be set to fix instances like that? Thanks, --RFBailey (talk) 02:24, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

I did fix the bot, but not until 16 minutes after :( Too slow, I guess. Let me know if it screws it up again. Anomie⚔ 11:01, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

WP:LONDON and WP:LT (revisited)

As the discussion has now been archived without anyone objecting, when the bot gets the chance (no rush at all), would it be possible to go ahead with the tagging run? That will be:

• All articles in the categories listed here (no subcategories) to be tagged {{WikiProject London Transport}}
• Once that's complete, all articles in the categories listed here to be tagged {{WikiProject London}} unless already tagged with London Transport.

I'm pretty sure we've now weeded all the false-positive categories out. As discussed, there may be a few false positives from (for example) Category:King's College London, in that it may pick up people who briefly attended the college but otherwise don't have a strong connection (although I'd hope they're only in the categories if there is a strong connection), but any false positives can be manually removed when we go through the newly-tagged articles to assess the importance. – iridescent 20:13, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

I can actually run the two at the "same" time by changing the condition on the second to "unless already tagged with WPLT or in any of these categories"; due to the way the code is structured it'll process both lists of categories in a random order, but the results will be as requested. I'll start the bot in a few minutes (watch User:AnomieBOT/TaskList for WikiProjectTagger to move from "On demand" to "Current"). Anomie⚔ 02:17, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi, please take a look at Talk:Hackney Central railway station. Some instances of WP:Lon Transport are already embedded as a sub-project in one of the parent projects - WP:Trains. If I remember correctly, it is quite common. HTH Kbthompson (talk) 13:13, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

I'll adjust the bot to have it detect any of the "*-Class London Transport articles" categories to handle the WP:Trains case.

Also, someone has apparently thought it necessary to stop the bot for one article (English Short Title Catalogue) that objects to (I can't tell if the objection is because this person thinks it is not in WP:LONDON's scope, or just because no other project has bothered to tag it yet). Iridescent, once you've dealt with whatever needs to be dealt with on that one, please blank User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/WikiProjectTagger to restart the bot. Anomie⚔ 18:12, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

The article is a child of category:British Library - which is-a Library in Camden - which is-a Library in London ... it's a meta-characteristic of British Library! Kbthompson (talk) 19:14, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

I've removed four false positives (National Preservation Office, Archival Sound Recordings, Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, Turning the Pages (they're all marginal false positives, in that they are on institutions based in London). The rest of the contents of category:British Library looks correctly tagged. On a skim over Category:Unknown-importance London-related articles, there aren't any obvious false positives glaring out at me. We always knew there would be the occasional one slip through; as long as it's only 10 false positives per 1000 articles (say) I'd consider it an acceptable level. I'll restart the bot and see who's next to complain. KBThompson, good catch with that WP:Trains problem! – iridescent 20:18, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

We aim to please .... 8^) Kbthompson (talk) 07:17, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Windsor and Maidenhead

I don't think W&M should be in the London cats - it's in Berkshire.--Cavrdg (talk) 17:09, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

This is crazy - can someone stop it tagging upstream locks Motmit (talk) 17:37, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Can you give an example of something that's been inappropriately tagged so we can work out what's causing the problem – it's only tagging articles in these categories, all of which should relate directly to London. (Regarding the locks, there will be a few in Category:Locks of the River Lee Navigation on the Herts side, but those will be manually removed; I intentionally left this category in to ensure we caught all of the London ones.) – iridescent 2 14:49, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Striking my comments above – yes, Category:Buildings and structures in Windsor and Maidenhead is on the list and shouldn't be. I've shut off the bot; Anomie, can you do what's necessary to stop it tagging any more in this category – thanks. When I'm back at my desk I'll manually check all the Windsor & Maidenhead ones and un-tag if appropriate (given its proximity to London, some will be appropriately tagged). – iridescent 2 14:52, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Y Done Not that it matters, since all the articles in that category were tagged between 16:13 and 16:26 UTC yesterday. Anomie⚔ 16:23, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Can I take it the un-tagging review will happen in the next day or two?--Cavrdg (talk) 17:39, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Category:Buildings and structures in Windsor and Maidenhead has been checked and those that were inappropriately tagged reverted. (Some, such as the railway stations which were formerly served by London Transport, are correctly tagged). For the remainder of the articles it will take a couple of months to sort them all (currently over 9,000 articles tagged) but they will all get looked at at some point. – iridescent 15:34, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Can AnomieBOT do it this task?

Task. Thanks. AHRtbA== ^Talk 20:06, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBOT certainly could, quite easily, but first I have to get back from my vacation and then find time to work around Domas breaking part of the API in my existing tasks before I take on any new tasks. Anomie⚔ 20:45, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Translated page, Bot claimed error, "Translated" deleted

See the case [2]. This bot claimed an error and deleted my {{Translated}} note. Why? I really translated a part of CS article. --Franta Oashi (talk) 15:50, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

The bot didn't actually delete the translated note, it just moved it to the talk page (see [3]) because that's where {{Translated page}} is supposed to go. The part about errors is saying "If this bot is making errors, please report it at User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/TalkTemplateMover"; posting there will also stop the bot. I'll make that more clear in the edit summaries for that task, since the bot will be affecting people who may not understand colloquial English so well. Thanks for the suggestion! Anomie⚔ 20:04, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, you have shown me. ;) Thanks. --Franta Oashi (talk) 05:04, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Dubai Airport

Can you please fix refrences on Dubai Airport. Thanks --MoHasanie  Talk  01:51, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

As the banner in the header states, certain tasks are not running at the moment thanks to Domas breaking the API in rev:53052 (and syncing it live immediately). The fix is waiting in rev:53304, but someone needs to sync that live yet. Anomie⚔ 03:30, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Banner Shell adding blp

Minor thing but thought if you work on this further, you might like to enhance the operation. When a page already has a {{blp}}, it still adds another like this Talk:Roy_Shivers&diff=next&oldid=270415733. DoubleBlue (talk) 18:44, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Good idea. The change will be live in a few minutes. Anomie⚔ 01:00, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Tagging for Wikipedia:WikiProject Energy

Hi, Anomie,

I would like to ask if it is possible to use AnomieBot for the following tagging tasks for the WP:Energy

1) Adding {{WikiProject Energy|class=category|importance=N/A}} to the talk page of categories under WP:Energy. As there are hundreds if not thousands categories (mainly because of countries series, like Energy in ..., Power stations in ..., Oil and gas companies of ... etc), I wonder if it is possible to search categories words and phrases in the category's name, such as "energy" (the only exception would be Energy drinks), "power stations", "power plants", "power companies" "oil companies", "oil fields", "oil shale", "oil sands", "petroleum", "natural gas", "oil and gas", "coal", "oil industry", "electricity", "electric power", "electrical power", "fuel", "fuels", "wind power", "hydropower", "hydroelectricity", "hydroelectric", "bioenergy". Probably there are more categories, but for start I think these are enough. Additional string could be if the category has {{EnergyPortal}} tag on the main page.

2) Adding {{EnergyPortal}} to the main page of categories tagged with {{WikiProject Energy|class=category|importance=N/A}}.

3) Adding {{WikiProject Energy|class=|importance=}} to all articles in the above mentioned categories, if they already don't have more precise assessment.

Do you think it could be done? Beagel (talk) 13:21, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I can do #1 and #3 easily under the approval for AnomieBOT 14, but I do need a specific list of categories and a link to a discussion (probably at WT:WikiProject Energy) showing consensus for that list of categories to be tagged. See the box titled "Before requesting a WikiProjectTagger run, please read the following" at the top of this page for more questions that should be discussed in that discussion. #2 could also be done easily enough, but would require separate approval.

BTW, there are 1865 categories matching your search at this time, including categories such as Category:Airliner accidents and incidents caused by fuel exhaustion and Category:Books about petroleum politics which are probably not relevant to your project. You can use (and edit) that list during the WikiProject discussion. Anomie⚔ 17:58, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. I will start a discussion at the WP:Energy talk page. Concerning categories, there is no problem with listing single categories, but what to do with country series such as Category:Energy in ...; Category:Power companies of ... etc? E.g. there is Energy in ... category for almost all countries and it would be very time consuming to list all these categories. Could it be possible include only general name on series? As of examples you provided, I agree that Category:Airliner accidents and incidents caused by fuel exhaustion does not belong to the WP:Energy. On the other hand, Category:Books about petroleum politics certainly belongs as WP:Energy deals also with energy policy.Beagel (talk) 10:48, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I've already created the list at User:Anomie/Sandbox5, just refer people to that page (or copy it to some other page, it doesn't matter). What's more important is that people look through the list, remove any categories that are not entirely populated with pages in your project's scope, and debate any questionable ones. I'm fine with whatever the final list is, as long as it's approved by your project. Anomie⚔ 16:50, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I created alphabetical list about misplaced and dubious categories. Will remove these categories from the list at the User:Anomie/Sandbox5 after discussion and consensus finding at the project talk page. Beagel (talk) 17:48, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately no active discussion. However, I removed false and dubious categories from the list. Beagel (talk) 17:10, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Per WP:SILENCE, I'm going to start on the tagging. Anomie⚔ 03:11, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

There is a list about categories on the WP:Energy talk page, which would be better to be removed from the tagging list. Although most of these categories are belong to the scope of the WP:Energy, they also include other articles. Beagel (talk) 17:37, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

I'll need to see indication in the discussion there that at least two other people have checked over the remaining huge list of categories. Anomie⚔ 17:58, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

There has been more discussion about the potential list. Do you think this is enough for going forward with tagging or we should wait for more discussion? Beagel (talk) 19:06, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Looks like a fair number of people have weighed in there. But J JMesserly's suggestion should be considered, IMO. It would be as simple as adding {{#if:{{{autotagged|}}}|[[Category:Automatically tagged WikiProject Energy articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]}} between the "}}" and the "<noinclude>" near the end of the template, and then having the bot set "autotagged=yes". Anomie⚔ 02:05, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, of course. I linked your comment also to the WP:Energy talk page. Beagel (talk) 15:27, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

As there is no discussion during last 2 months, could we re-assign the bot task? As of your last comment, I think we could go forward with this. Beagel (talk) 16:14, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Possibly unfree files

Hi there-

User:Legobot hasn't been running for quite awhile and its operator seems to be more or less inactive, at least for now. Since this bot manages holding cell updates and automatic closures at WP:FFD, I was wondering if it could do the same at WP:PUF? It works pretty much the same way, and having a bot is really helpful. Thanks! –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 02:52, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

California bot run number 2

I've only just brought the discussion, but I may need your help on another round of WikiProject California related tagging. I've got a few questions first though. Is it possible to perform assessment based on the population parameter in Infobox settlement (I'm thinking population_total)? Also is there anything limiting the bot from tagging for multiple task forces on the same page? I'm looking at a couple daughter projects of the Southern California task force and wondering if there was any limitations to consider. I remember there were a few issues with the Southern California/Santa Barbara overlap on that last run. The new discussion is at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject California#Importance assessments of California settlement articles and Quality assessments. I'm trying to make this one pretty big so we don't have to revisit this every few months, and to limit the number of talk page writes by the bot. Thanks -Optigan13 (talk) 05:01, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Both can be done. I don't recall, what were the issues besides "let's do them all at once"? Anomie⚔ 13:53, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

I thought there was an issue with not being able to tag for two different task forces when both project tags were on the same page? I'm just looking at what to do with the LA and Inland Empire So Cal sub-task forces, and was wondering if there were any limitations. I think I might have been just thinking about those last two usages which were on user talk pages. Thanks, -Optigan13 (talk) 05:19, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Ok, all the discussions are done and I've placed the formal wording with oldid links to discussions for the various consensuses at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject California#Task force replacement and assessment bot request. Here it is again for convenience

• Replace all transclusions of {{SFBAProject}} with {{WikiProject California|sfba=yes}}. Discussion
• Replace all transclusions of {{WikiProject Los Angeles}} with {{WikiProject California|la=yes}}. Discussion

For the remaining ones see above for the discussion

• Assess all articles in Category:Unassessed California articles for quality using the higher of any existing ratings, or stub tags if present.
• Assess all articles in Category:Unknown-importance California articles for importance. With the settings:
  • High = Population >= 100,000
  • Mid = Population >= 25,000
  • Low = Population < 25,000 ; including all settlements listed in Category:Unincorporated communities in California and Category:Ghost towns in California
• Tag with the project banner all pages in Category:California ranchos and setting importance to mid.

Thanks again. Can AnomieBOT pull this off at the moment with all the various bugs and database issues? -Optigan13 (talk) 02:21, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Fixed: IFDCloser: Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 August 7 is broken

Help! A section in Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 August 7 contains the "is_closed" regex but not at the beginning of the section. Probably someone put the {{ffd top}} before a section header instead of after. Anyway, I can't do anything to that page until someone fixes it. When you have fixed this issue, please change the section title (e.g. append " - Fixed") or remove this section completely. I will repost the notice if the page is still broken or is re-broken. Thanks! AnomieBOT⚡ 20:11, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 20:31, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Broken references

Is fixing broken references one of the tasks that the bot can't do temporarily? I ask because I've been on a wikibreak, and found that the number of broken references had doubled from 225 to 450. Is there a timeframe when the bot will be able to resume this task? I've started fixing some, but every fix takes anywhere from 2-15 minutes, and there are just too many of them. Debresser (talk) 00:29, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, unfortunately it is. As soon as someone syncs r53304, I will be able to re-enable the task. In fact, if you happen to notice that this API query returns zero results (like this) you can feel free to blank User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/OrphanReferenceFixer yourself. Anomie⚔ 02:42, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm really sorry to hear that. Your bot , together with SmackBot is one of the most usefull maintenance bots in article mainspace. Hope he'll be back in action soon. About the technical detailes you mentioned... sorry, but that is worse than Latin. Debresser (talk) 16:46, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, the bottom line is "Bug the people with appropriate access to sync r53304"; which basically means that you're asking them to make the software changes in r53304 take effect immediately here on enwiki. Anomie⚔ 19:16, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

I am really pissed off at them for this, but the link above doesn't open anything for me. Please bug them hard for me. Debresser (talk) 00:23, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

I tried, but they ignored me. Anomie⚔ 02:39, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Motorcycling WikiProject

Is it possible that one of your bots can tag all the project articles as stub-class which have the motorcycling stub {{Motorcycle-stub}} in the articles for our recently formed assessment department? I estimate about 500+ articles use the stub. The talk pages that are already (mainly incompletely) tagged use the {{Motorcycling}} project banner. If you are not the best person to deal with this, please advise me. Cheers ww2censor (talk) 01:43, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Bot parameter for {{adminbacklog}}

I notice that this bot automatically adds and removes the {{adminbacklog}} template from WP:FFD (and possibly other pages). I recently suggested to User:Harej (owner of User:RFC bot) that a parameter be added to the {{adminbacklog}} template to say it is updated by a bot as the message "Please remove this notice when the backlog is cleared." doesn't make much sense when a bot is doing the updating, so now use of the bot=name parameter produces the message "This notice is automatically updated by name (talk) and will no longer be displayed when the backlog is cleared". The template documentation has been updated. I'm not sure exactly how the process works on WP:FFD but thought I'd inform you of this change in case you considered it appropiate for your bot to use. Dpmuk (talk) 10:38, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Looks good. Anomie⚔ 11:39, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Wrong Fix to Pittsburgh mayoral election, xxxx

The fix that has been done to: Pittsburgh mayoral election, 1965 Pittsburgh mayoral election, 1969 Pittsburgh mayoral election, 1973 Pittsburgh mayoral election, 1977 Pittsburgh mayoral election, 1985 Pittsburgh mayoral election, 1989 Pittsburgh mayoral election, 1993 Pittsburgh mayoral election, 2001 Pittsburgh mayoral election, 2005 and is probably going to be done to: Pittsburgh mayoral election, 1981 Pittsburgh mayoral election, 1997 is wrong. That source is election results for Pittsburgh mayoral special election, 2007 only. The problem is that the pages were originally copied from the 2007 page and the ref tags were not changed. 75.69.0.58 (talk) 03:42, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the bot has no way to know that and in most cases that fix is correct. The best thing to do is to just fix the problem. Anomie⚔ 03:56, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

IFDCloser: Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 August 25 is broken - Fixed

Help! A section in Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 August 25 contains the "is_closed" regex but not at the beginning of the section. Probably someone put the {{ffd top}} before a section header instead of after. Anyway, I can't do anything to that page until someone fixes it. When you have fixed this issue, please change the section title (e.g. append " - Fixed") or remove this section completely. I will repost the notice if the page is still broken or is re-broken. Thanks! AnomieBOT⚡ 20:09, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

These edits should have fixed it if I understood the instructions correctly. -Optigan13 (talk) 20:53, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

It worked Anomie⚔ 22:42, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Over-conscientious bot

You might want to have a look at this.[4] The Bot seems to have duplicated the text unnecessarily. It might have got confused because I copied the refs from Sérvulo Gutiérrez to Doris Gibson, where I found, after saving, that the link was already in use with the ref name "BBC" which I changed to "collyns", and the Bot came after me! Ty 02:34, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Because you said "<ref name=collyns/>" instead of "<ref name=collyns>", both MediaWiki and the bot saw an orphaned reference followed by some random text rather than the ref you intended. Anomie⚔ 13:31, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Bot broke references

The bot just broke just about every reference I have in List of Oklahoma Sooners in the NFL Draft (here). It uses the new list-defined references function of {{reflist}} and I guess the bot doesn't like references inside of a template. Probably something that needs to be addressed.↔NMajdan•talk 04:35, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

It did it again and left a message on my talk page. I'm going to disable this function of the bot.↔NMajdan•talk 15:20, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Nevermind, I see it has already been disabled. Thank you.↔NMajdan•talk 15:21, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

It should be fixed now, feel free to stop it if it does it again. Anomie⚔ 18:00, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

IFDCloser: Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 September 20 is broken - fixed

Help! A section in Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 September 20 contains the "is_closed" regex but not at the beginning of the section. Probably someone put the {{ffd top}} before a section header instead of after. Anyway, I can't do anything to that page until someone fixes it. When you have fixed this issue, please change the section title (e.g. append " - Fixed") or remove this section completely. I will repost the notice if the page is still broken or is re-broken. Thanks! AnomieBOT⚡ 18:08, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

I think this edit by Beeblebrox should have fixed it. -Optigan13 (talk) 19:51, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

IFDCloser: Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 September 20 is broken -fixed

Help! A section in Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2009 September 20 contains the "is_closed" regex but not at the beginning of the section. Probably someone put the {{ffd top}} before a section header instead of after. Anyway, I can't do anything to that page until someone fixes it. When you have fixed this issue, please change the section title (e.g. append " - Fixed") or remove this section completely. I will repost the notice if the page is still broken or is re-broken. Thanks! AnomieBOT⚡ 03:02, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

fixed. -Optigan13 (talk) 03:57, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Is the API finally fixed?

It seems so. I'm going to restart the stopped tasks, let me know if anyone sees any problems. Anomie⚔ 20:44, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Any idea on when you'll be able to run the project tagging? -Optigan13 (talk) 22:02, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Rescuing orphaned reference - renamed and converted from bare

Here (Line 14) I converted a bare URL used as a named reference to {{cite web}} with a different name. I forgot to change other instances of the named reference to the new name (this is why I love your bot). AnomieBOT then rescued the orphaned reference name by restoring the bare reference from the previous version. Would it be possible to arrange for the bot to check the url= parameter or otherwise recognize a renamed and tweaked reference? Many thanks for your bot regardless, - 2/0 (cont.) 14:22, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Rescuing orphaned references - List-defined references in a group

Hi, on the article William Stanley (Victorian inventor), the references in group "akpan" are all defined within the reflist (as per Wikipedia:Footnotes#List-defined_references). The bot left the references which were not in a group (i.e. all the others, which are also List-defined), but the group ones were all re-inserted (meaning that the full reference was both at the first occurrence and in the reflist!). Just thought I'd let you know, as this seems like a bug in the bot.

Regards, -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 19:03, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm... Apparently the new "list defined refs" feature lets the list-defined refs have their group be implicitly defined. Since the bot didn't know this any more than I did until just now, it saw "<ref name="akpan-12">Akpan p. 12</ref>" as being in the default group rather than in the group named "akpan". Should be fixed now, if you see the same error after the timestamp of this post please let me know. Anomie⚔ 04:03, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Robot for WikiProject Gastropods

Hello, finally you can run this task from March 2009: Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 26#Robot for WikiProject Gastropods. After three months of announcing at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Gastropods#Bot task waiting for approving as you recommended User talk:Snek01#Re: Your email, the User:Invertzoo finally agreed User talk:Snek01#Your bot request. Thanks. --Snek01 (talk) 20:45, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

And others in the project will also agree if this is needed, just let me know. Invertzoo (talk) 21:51, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

To recap, the task request was as follows:

1. Articles with {{taxobox|classis=Gastropoda}} should have the talk page tagged with {{WikiProject Gastropods}}.
2. Articles tagged with {{WikiProject Gastropods}} and lacking a "needs-photo" parameter should have that parameter set depending on whether the "image" or "image2" parameters in the taxobox are non-empty.
3. Articles tagged with {{WikiProject Gastropods|needs-photo=yes}} should have that parameter set to "no" if the "image" or "image2" parameters in the taxobox are non-empty.
4. Articles tagged with {{WikiProject Gastropods}} should be auto-assessed as follows:
   • class=Stub if no class is specified.
   • Articles with names ending in "idae" and with the taxobox "familia" field filled and with none of the "genus", "subgenus", or "binomial" fields filled should be auto-assessed as importance=High if no importance is specified.
   • Articles with any of the taxobox "genus", "subgenus", or "binomial" fields filled should be auto-assessed as importance=Low if no importance is specified.

It would be best to bring that to the project's talk page to get other editors to look it over and "sign off" on it, particularly item #4. Anomie⚔ 02:43, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

OK. To other articles than above can be added just a text "importance=" {{WikiProject Gastropods|importance=}} and we will assess it by hand more easily later. ;) --Snek01 (talk) 10:57, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

I am in agreement with all these suggestions, including #4. Invertzoo (talk) 17:28, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Edit conflicts

To reduce edit conflicts, could the bot avoid editing articles tagged with 'underconstruction'? Thanks, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 10:02, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

OrphanReferenceFixer already does avoid articles tagged {{inuse}}. But underconstruction is intended to be in place for several days, and specifically says "You are welcome to assist in its construction by editing it as well." Why should that not apply to bots? Anomie⚔ 02:43, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Hm, fair point. In an unrelated question, could you tell me how you get the bug-reporting message to appear on your talk page? I'd find it useful for my own bots. Thanks, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:00, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

You mean the edit notice? It's at User talk:AnomieBOT/Editnotice; create a similar "/Editnotice" subpage of your bot's talkpage to do the same. Anomie⚔ 13:12, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Redlink in bot edit summary

The request link for your bot's SFBAProject edits is a redlink. Can you redirect it to whatever page the request was on? — RockMFR 02:59, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

D'oh! I had the page ready to be saved, then my browser crashed and I forgot about it. Sorry. Anomie⚔ 11:17, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Monarchy of Canada

Your bot has been causing a nuisance at Monarchy of Canada: Instead of fixing refs, it is destroying notes. Please regard the status quo before your bot's intervention: [5], and the result following [6]. I don't believe the notes are formatted incorrectly, as they appear normally at the foot of the page; so, I suspect the fault lies in your bot. But, please let me know if I'm wrong in this take! Cheers. --Ħ MIESIANIACAL 17:40, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

There's certainly something wrong there, I've stopped the bot until I can sort it out. Thanks for the notification! Anomie⚔ 18:32, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Should be fixed now, let me know if it happens again. Anomie⚔ 20:14, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Energy run

I noticed that articles in [[Category:Coal County, Oklahoma]] have been added the WP: Energy, though they aren't related to that WikiProject. There are just a few articles in the category and removing them from the WikiProject isn't difficult, but there may be other unrelated categories that were caught that had "Coal" or something similar in their titles. Just wanted to give a heads up. Narthring (talk • contribs) 04:41, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Can't imagine how this category staid in the list after a number of checks run by several people. Of course this category is not in the scope of the WP:Energy. Beagel (talk) 14:30, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

1963-64 Television Schedule

I was trying to add a more complete reference than what was supplied. Thanks to you I'll have to try again tomorrow. Please refrain from interfering.97.120.137.22 (talk) 05:35, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Do you realize you're talking to an automated process, and that you have not specified just what your problem is? Anomie⚔ 11:19, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

You're back again?

So your back again to fixing reference error, I see. And boy, am I happy with that! I was shocked to see how fast new broken references show up. Now that we are back to normal figures again in Category:Pages with broken reference names, I am trying to eliminate the last few instances. A few a day. In the last half hour I saw 5 new broken references! Debresser (talk) 21:32, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, they finally applied the fix to the bug that was preventing the bot from running. Anomie⚔ 23:55, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

See also Category_talk:Pages_with_broken_reference_names#Last_ten. I couldn't help myself trying to fix more and more of them, now that we are so close, and that post is the result. Debresser (talk) 21:28, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for writing and running this bot. I can't tell you how often I've seen it identify and even correct reference errors. This project is better because of your participation.   Will Beback  talk  08:42, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the kind words! Anomie⚔ 15:19, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

help with a deleted file

I loaded a file File:EE Berkeley 1968.JPG onto wikipedia, marking it not-free and noting it was copyright but that I had received permission to put it up on wikipedia. nevertheless someone marked it as possibly UNFREE and deleted it from my article (or it got screened out because tagged?). I see from the Possibly Unfree listing that you have added a note that unless there is another reason the listing will be deleted and the image kept. Do I need to do anything now to keep my image? Will the image be automatically restored in my article? (Sorry for these q's - am a relatively novice wikipedia user). Would appreciate reply to my talk, which I hope will happen with the box here, {{Talkback|DuncanCraig1949}} thanks! DuncanCraig1949 (talk) 10:39, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

It seems Verbal screwed up. WP:PUI is for files that the uploader claims are free but someone doubts it. Your file is clearly claimed as non-free, so PUI isn't the place for it. Most likely an admin will come along and close the discussion for that reason; Verbal may or may not take it to WP:FFD if that was his original intention. Anomie⚔ 12:41, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Automatic or per request?

This a great tool, I would like to know if it is completely automatic, that is it will crawl every wiki page and fix orphan links or is it that it should be requested which pages to fix. In that case I would like to know how could I set it up and use it. Thanks. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 23:44, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

The OrphanReferenceFixer is automatic. Things are set up so citation errors put the page into Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting and/or Category:Pages with broken reference names (see Help:Cite errors for details on that). The bot periodically checks those categories and fixes what it can; obviously, sometimes the errors require human judgment to fix. Anomie⚔ 01:09, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I see, thank you! --HappyInGeneral (talk) 08:16, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Status of WikiProject tagging requests

Do you know if you'll be able to restart the WikiProject tagging runs anytime soon? Also, what script/font support should I have for the last character in your signature? -Optigan13 (talk) 21:45, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I've been dealing with personal issues and a bit of general wikiburnout after it took them 2 and a half months to fix the one issue. I started yesterday looking over the page to see which requests still needed attention, hopefully I can manage to get started on them today.

I don't know which fonts might have it, it's a part of the Miscellaneous Symbols block in Unicode. Anomie⚔ 12:59, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

No problem, totally understandable as that wait was driving me nuts, while trying to juggle various other crap. If you would like I can just float my request over to the general WP:Bot requests pool to see if someone else can handle it. -Optigan13 (talk) 22:07, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I'm just doing the final testing now before turning the bot loose on your request. (I decided I needed a wikibreak this weekend) Anomie⚔ 00:36, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Doing... Post here to stop the bot if something goes wrong. Anomie⚔ 01:11, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Y Done Also, BTW, it seems at least DejaVu Sans contains the character in question. Anomie⚔ 02:00, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. -Optigan13 (talk) 05:29, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

I just noticed that there are still about 500 or so pages transcluding {{SFBAProject}}. Do you think you could make another pass with the bot? -Optigan13 (talk) 10:00, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I see where I screwed up: all the other bits of the request applied only to article space, so I forgot the merging needed to be done in other spaces too. Anomie⚔ 12:55, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Y Done There seems to be 3 transclusions left, 1 looks like a testing page and the other two someone has the template included in a discussion section. Anomie⚔ 18:32, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Gary Allan article vandalism repair

You did and re-did your edits to the Gary Allan[[Link title]] article in the middle of vandalism repair. I have solicited for help on the vandalism that was done in numerous anonymous earlier edits. The repairs to vandalism are in progress.Wikibones (talk) 20:30, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Err, do you realize you're talking to an automated process? Anomie⚔ 22:19, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Fixed

Any reason why the bot didn't do this one as well? Debresser (talk) 19:49, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

See Talk:Madras State#Orphaned references in Madras State; the bot found two different candidates for "Swarna", one using "date" and one using "year". Since the bot can't determine that those result in the same output, it posted on the talk page for a human to figure it out. Anomie⚔ 03:24, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I see. And I didn't even notice that. Sometimes it is a blessing to be a fallible human. :) Debresser (talk) 07:30, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Thread of interest

You should probably be aware of Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_National_Register_of_Historic_Places#User:AnomieBOT, if you aren't already. --ThaddeusB (talk) 02:56, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Too bad people have to be needlessly reactionary instead of just asking me about it. BTW, AnomieBOT doesn't actually try to combine identical references; the change in question is slightly different, see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 3 for details. Anomie⚔ 03:38, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Avatar 2009 film references

Is correcting citation style, such as the style on the page Avatar (2009 film), one of the tasks of this bot? Flash Man999 (talk) 13:26, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

No, it is not. At a quick glance, I'm not even sure what the problem is. Anomie⚔ 13:42, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Bot failed to fix mistake

FYI, the bot failed to fix a mistake where I forgot "name=" in the ref. See here. The "fix" it applied made things worse. Colin°^Talk 21:17, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Proposal for Book Stubs, based on Public Domain available through Google Books

AnomieBOT,

I'm contacting you because of your extensive experience and special expertise with bots.

I wanted to get your opinion on an idea I had for creating new Wikipedia article stubs based on Public Domain Books hosted by Google Books. I got the idea when reading the Wikipedia Article on Wikipedia's Growth, link included here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Modelling_Wikipedia's_growth At one point in the article it mentioned that (Ram-Man) created an article stub for every town in the United States using Rambot in October of 2002. Here is the quote from the article.

"The sudden jump in article count in October 2002 is due to roughly 30,000 stub articles on U.S. towns and cities generated from a database being added by an auto-posting robot, Rambot, during an eight-day period. Although initially controversial as to whether these were "real" encyclopedia articles or merely "stubs", most of the Rambot articles have since been substantially expanded."

That got me thinking that other large data sets of notable and important information might also be worth automatically creating stubs for which can then later be expanded upon. With this information still fresh in my mind I was checking up on the progress of Google Books and noted that they are now hosting more than 1,000,000 public domain books as part of their Google Books project. http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-over-million-public-domain.html

I think it would be an incredibly valuable resource to have a bot like Rambot create, 1,000,000 stubs for the public domain books hosted on Google Books. This is a resource of already vetted and notable material, hopefully in a standard format at Google including author name, book title, year of publication, name of publisher, summary of the book and more.

Please let me know what you think of the idea and if you would be willing to create a special bot for the task. I'm happy to assist, but I lack the technical programming skill required to create the bot.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

OrangeCorner (talk) 08:18, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

There are a number of things that must be done before such a bot can run:

1. You must obtain access to the information in some machine-parsable format, so we don't have to crawl a million Google pages scraping the information. This need not be direct access to a live database of any sort, a dump of the necessary metadata or a way to download the list of PD books and the metadata for each book is fine. Periodic notification of new and updated PD books would also be nice, even though it would probably take over a year for the bot to get through the first million at normal editing rates (10 seconds per book that doesn't already have an article, plus 10 seconds per image if applicable, plus downtime whenever the Wikipedia servers are more than 5 seconds lagged).
   • In fact, the ability to download a list of all PD books last modified in a given date range plus the ability to download the metadata just for specific books would probably be the most convenient, especially if the server supports HTTP persistent connection. The bot could then just download each month's worth of titles, check if each book's article already exists, and download the metadata for just the books it needs.
   • The metadata should contain as many of the fields in {{Infobox Book}} as possible, the more you have the better your chances of getting community consensus for the proposal. Also, if available a synopsis would be helpful for including more than just "X is a book written by AUTHOR and published by COMPANY in YEAR" in the stub. And, of course, we need whatever information is necessary to generate a link back to Google's human-readable page for the book.
2. If the metadata does include the synopses, you'd probably need to get permission sent from Google to WP:OTRS for those synopses to be uploaded as part of the article under the CC-BY-SA (or, better yet, Wikipedia's CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual license) as there may be sufficient original work in summarizing the book to garner copyright protection for the summary. Or get Google to just officially and explicitly state somewhere on their site that their synopses of PD books are themselves PD or CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual licensed.
3. If the metadata contains images (or reference to images) appropriate for the infobox, you'd also need to either determine that those images must be PD (e.g. as slavish reproductions of a 2D image; asking at an appropriate Commons page (e.g. Commons talk:Licensing) would be your best course of action for that), get permission sent from Google to WP:OTRS for those to be uploaded to Commons under a free license of their choice, or get Google to just officially and explicitly state somewhere on their site that their images of PD books are themselves PD or are released under an appropriate free license.
   • Even if the bot proposal doesn't get community support, such permission would be beneficial to the project anyway for use in manually-created articles on these books.
4. A strong community consensus must be obtained for a bot to create all these stubs. This probably means a full 30+ day RFC advertised on WP:VPR, Template:Cent, WT:BOOKS, WT:BK, and anywhere else you can think of. Since the details of the proposal in the RFC will depend on just what metadata is available (e.g. having synopses and images would be a big plus), it may be best to wait on this until the above are successfully completed.

Only after all of the above are successfully completed is it really worth starting to write the bot. If you do manage to successfully complete all of the above, I would be happy to create and run the bot. If you manage to successfully complete the first three, I'll even help draft the proposal (particularly samples of articles the bot would generate). Anomie⚔ 16:35, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Just to throw my 2¢ out there, with the hopes it is a little bit helpful... Bot creation of stubs is extremely controversial. A sizable percentage of the community is "afraid" of bots. I personally think their fear is misguided, but be aware any attempt to bot create material will be an up hill battle.

Additionally, you have the challenge of explaining how these books meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria. Personally, I am rather doubtful that just because Google scanned the book that it is notable, but maybe I am missing something. --ThaddeusB (talk) 22:25, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Which is why I emphasized a full 30+ day RFC spammed all over the place. Anomie⚔ 22:58, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

ThaddeusB, Thanks for your note as well. I agree it will absolutely be important to establish notability of the works. OrangeCorner (talk) 06:17, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBOT,

Thank you for the quick response to my message.

I appreciate the logical way in which you have presented the items that need to be accomplished before the BOT can tackle this type of project.

I agree with the path you have detailed and I will begin the process of, 1. obtaining access to the information in some machine-parsable format, 2. get permission from Google to access those synopses to be uploaded as part of the article (if there are synopses available which there may not be) 3. determine that any images are PD, for those synopses to be uploaded as part of the article.

I will work to accomplish those first three items on the list. They should just be a matter of time, negotiation, or workarounds. I agree with you that getting community consensus will be the most difficult part of the equation and I appreciate your offer to help write the proposal once the first three items are in place. I will certainly be taking you up on that offer.

As for use of BOTs I agree with you that they can be extremely useful in matters where pure tedium is preventing a positive contribution to Wikipedia. I certainly believe a project of this type falls squarely in that corner.

As for the question of notability I think it can be well argued that given these public domain books secured publication of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of copies they had an impact on enough people and other literature to be worthy of inclusion. As way of comparison if an American town of a few hundred residents is worth consideration given the effect it had on the lives of those people and all those who may have traveled through it, certainly a book which has achieved at least the same level of notice deserves the opportunity to be included and later expanded by those who it had an important effect on. Certainly just as we can't pre-judge the effect or history a small town had on the nation until its content is explored, neither can we fathom the importance of the literary history of our world until we open the page and see the connections to the other books we know so well. Just imagine the depth of knowledge it would give Wikipedia access to if we could summarize and map the timelines, connections, and authors of our literary history. In a way I see it as an opportunity to finally unlock the remaining depth of knowledge still outside of the internet. While Google may have scanned them in, only by linking them on Wikipedia to real world topics or other books of interest, could someone ever hope to find and unlock their value.

Again I appreciate the assistance and the detailed analysis of the tasks required. That is exactly what I needed to help kick this project off.

Talk with you again soon.

Cheers,

OrangeCorner (talk) 06:14, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

St. Florian Church (Hamtramck, Michigan)

Thanks for the helping hand. The errors were driving me crazy, and I was having no luck fixing them. 7&6=thirteen (talk) 14:07, 4 December 2009 (UTC) Stan

template renaming request

Is this the right place to ask about renaming template transclusions?

We have a template {{IPAr}} for transcribing pronunciations; nearly all of the 30k+ transclusions are automated transcriptions of Polish, using the |pl switch. It's hard to maintain these because they go beyond what AWB can handle. The template is now deprecated, and I'd like to move all transclusions with the pl switch, {{IPAr|pl|, to {{IPAc-pl}}. Then I can go in manually or with AWB and mop up any remaining transclusions of IPAr.

If you spell out the relevant parameters for me so I don't screw up s.t. basic, I could do it myself, and maybe save you some time.

Thanks, kwami (talk) 01:21, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, AnomieBOT can do that. I'll need a link to the discussion that led to the deprecation for the bot's edit summary, though. Anomie⚔ 02:41, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Is Template talk:IPAc-pl good enough? User:Kotniski (who created the template) & I discussed this, but I can't find where. (He marked it deprecated here. I'll leave a note on his talk page.

In case I wasn't clear, we'd like the pl switch removed when the move is made, which is why a simple redirect wouldn't work. kwami (talk) 03:18, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see any actual discussion there, just your note at the bottom of the page. Slightly more useful is the discussion I see at User talk:Kwamikagami#IPA-pl, combined with the fact that it has been deprecated since October 19 and no one has cared. Anomie⚔ 05:52, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't remember where we discussed it either (on our user talk pages?), but certainly IPAr is exclusively my work, and I'm in favour of its being deprecated in favour of IPAc-pl (which provides exactly the same result anyway), so I don't see that there can be any objection.--Kotniski (talk) 13:52, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I'll run it per WP:SILENCE as no one but the creators cared to comment in the month since it was deprecated, with an edit summary "Replacing {{IPAr|pl}} with {{IPAc-pl}} per request. Errors or discussion? Post a note here to stop the bot." If anyone does object, I'll stop the bot until a more in-depth discussion takes place. Anomie⚔ 15:06, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good, You might also want to let User:Chris G know, as he's been doing some of these replacements (just so he knows he doesn't have to do any more).--Kotniski (talk) 15:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I added a 'never mind!' note to my reminder on his page. (The original request is archived.) kwami (talk) 21:40, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Wow! 25,000 done already. Please make a note here when you're done, so I can clean up anything left behind. kwami (talk) 01:18, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Y Done Anomie⚔ 15:50, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! kwami (talk) 21:49, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Trains tagging

If I give you a list of articles (not categories but the articles themselves), would you be willing to run a one-time tagging for WikiProject Trains? Thank you. --NE2 01:26, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes. Anomie⚔ 04:34, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Should I link the list here when it's ready? --NE2 04:36, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, here it is, all 13000: User:NE2/TWP (yes, I went through and removed any false positives I could find). Would it be possible to tag any with 'station' or 'depot' in the name as "stations=yes"? Otherwise they just need {{TrainsWikiProject}} and whatever else your bot does (auto-stub?). Thank you very much. --NE2 08:31, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Getting cold feet? :) --NE2 01:23, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

No, I had to take care of some other stuff. Check the "Last BAG Edit" column on WP:BAG/Status ;) Anomie⚔ 03:53, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Doing... Note that AnomieBOT is reading the links off of that page, so don't blank or replace it until the bot is done. Anomie⚔ 17:34, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Awesome... --NE2 21:40, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I have spotted this 'bot in action, and it is not adding two fields which all UK station articles should have: these are |UK=yes |UK-importance= (the second is left blank for unassessed articles). --Redrose64 (talk) 22:27, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Is there an easy way to identify that it's a UK station? If not, that might be better done as a separate task. --NE2 22:34, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't know how 'bots generally operate, but if it's possible to look at the article page for the talk that's being processed, the article for a station in the UK will often have one of the following infoboxes at or near the start: {{Infobox Closed London station}}, {{Infobox GB station}}, {{Infobox London station}}, {{Infobox UK disused station}}, {{Infobox UK heritage station}}. That won't cover every UK railway-related article, but it'll catch the vast majority of the stations. Further, any talk page which already has {{WikiProject London Transport}} is highly likely (>99%) to be UK, whether or not it's a station. Consider Talk:Bakerloo line, for example. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:55, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't know if other bots do it, but AnomieBOT can handle that easily. Anomie⚔ 23:49, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Y Done The bot has finished the list. Anomie⚔ 16:47, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect tagging

• Talk:South African Airways Flight 295 was incorrectly tagged during this run. I have reverted it. --NJR_ZA (talk) 20:51, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
• Talk:Transnet Pipelines was incorrectly tagged. Beagel (talk) 07:50, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
• Ah - both of those are because Category:Transnet is in Category:Rail transport in South Africa, and I missed that in my skimming for false positives. I've gone through and checked the rest in that category, removing a few more. --NE2 12:06, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBOT didn't fix ref errors

The bot incorrected fixed reference errors here on the Bolton article. Although the references had different URLs, the bot gave them all with the name "ref". I've now corrected them. HLE (talk) 16:05, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

If you look closer, those refs all had two names on them: all had "name=ref" followed by a second, unique name. Apparently in a case like that Mediawiki silently uses the second of the names, while AnomieBOT was keeping the first. I'll a fix uploaded momentarily. Anomie⚔ 17:50, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

The bot incorrected fixed reference errors on the page for No. 107 Squadron RAF. Though the reference was clearly for page 150 (ref name="Moyes1976">Moyes 1976, p. 150.</ref further in the text as ref name="Moyes1976"/) the bot "corrected" it for No. 487 Squadron RNZAF, by letting it point to page 261. Dirk P Broer (talk) 14:45, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

It looks like you figured it out in this edit 5 minutes later: To computer programs "Moyes 1976" (with a space) is different from "Moyes1976" with no space. And in this case, it turns out that No. 487 Squadron RNZAF is the only related article that uses a reference to Moyes named with the space. Anomie⚔ 04:57, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBOT for WP:PUF holding cell?

Hey there, I noticed that this bot maintains the old discussions over at WP:FfD. I was wondering if it could be possible for AnomieBOT to do the same for the holding cells over at WP:PUF. The bot that used to carry this task, Legobot (talk · contribs), hasn't run since November 20; its owner, Legoktm (talk · contribs), hasn't edited since October 21. It would be amazingly helpful for the bot could be set up to do this. I update the list most of the time, but tend to forget and am too lazy for the file count. Is there any way this bot could be set up for this task? — ξ^xplicit 05:51, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Has anyone tried to contact Legoktm (at User talk:Legoktm) to ask about the bot? I see at the top of his talk page a note that he will be busy but will be checking his talk page. Anomie⚔ 13:24, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

I left a note on the bot's talk page, which the notice atop Legoktm's talk page says he will keep an eye on his running bots in addition to his talk page. Not entirely sure if Legobot is even going to run anymore, though. — ξ^xplicit 04:58, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

...And the bot has begun running again out of the blue. I guess this request is redundant. Thank you for your time, though. — ξ^xplicit 06:04, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Rescuing orphaned refs

Really cool feature, nice work! --kingboyk (talk) 19:00, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Seconded. This has just rescued a reference I had carefully created and which had then got inadvertently removed. Very clever! Thincat (talk) 21:28, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, very well conceived and implemented. ATren (talk) 13:11, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Fix broken references errors

I'd like to draw your collective (User:Rich Farmbrough and User:AnomieBOT) attention to the last three edits on 2006 Iditarod. I think this type of mistake can be easily avoided by AWB aided tools, and bots can easily fix them. Thank you for your efforts. Debresser (talk) 12:34, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Another type of fix that a bot or other tools can easily fix is this trivial one. Debresser (talk) 12:40, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

And yet another easy type in this edit. Debresser (talk) 12:44, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

I'll have to think about the first two. For the third, how can the bot tell it's supposed to change "<ref name="foo"/>{{cite bar}}</ref>" to "<ref name="foo">{{cite bar}}</ref>" rather than "<ref name="foo"/><ref>{{cite bar}}</ref>"? Anomie⚔ 02:32, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

I'd say the first is by far the most likely. Debresser (talk) 06:57, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

References in templates

Just out of curiosity, is there any particular reason for removing references from templates? Yours aye, Buaidh (talk) 18:47, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

When someone edits an infobox (or similar template) to delete an obsolete parameter, any existing uses of that parameter where that parameter contains the ref body will suddenly result in orphaned references. Anomie⚔ 02:29, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Good reason. Thanks, Buaidh (talk) 18:31, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Infobox television film

Hello there Anomie...BOT. Sorry in advanced for my lack of knowledge with bots. Could set up a run to move external links linked in {{Infobox television film}} into the proper External links section of the article. It would be the same as this run. Thanks! BOVINEBOY2008 :) 14:30, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect fix of reference error

This edit that broke a <ref>, was “fixed” by AnomieBOT in a way that only created another error. Svick (talk) 01:36, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed Thanks for the bug report. Anomie⚔ 12:24, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Major bot error

This edit deleted paragraphs of content! Cheers, — sligocki (talk) 05:06, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

This one also seems to have deleted content (although that article was pretty messed up already). Cheers, — sligocki (talk) 05:35, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

 Fixed The vandalism was making it look like a ref tag had tons of bogus parameters. I've adjust the code to only strip real key=value bogus parameters, leaving any other bogus parameters in place (which will then probably result in the bot declaring the page "too broken to fix" and leaving it for a human). Thanks for the report! Anomie⚔ 15:48, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Your welcome. BTW, I was looking through the Bot contributions and I really appreciate all the orphaned refs you save. That's a great service you're providing. Thanks! — sligocki (talk) 16:36, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Adding white space

In this edit, the bot is adding white space to closed references. For example, <ref name="whatever">...</ref> is being turned into <ref name="whatever" >...</ref> with additional space at the end of the opening element tag. This makes sense on constructs like <ref name="whatever"/> being turned into <ref name="whatever" />, but not with reference elements with actual closing tags. -- Scjessey (talk) 21:46, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

And now the bot has reverted back to its fail, and pointlessly requested I notify it of the problem here. Of course, I had already done so. -- Scjessey (talk) 22:01, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

 Fixed Anomie⚔ 02:02, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Awesome. Thank you. -- Scjessey (talk) 14:07, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Can't handle refs= inside the {{reflist}}?

The bot do not understand refs= as this edit suggests? It should have changed the location of the {{reflist}} ending }}<!-- end of reflist --> The two last ref. was placed after this ending code, see the diff [7].

Note that this is directly related to the issue in the previous section (about whitespace). -- Scjessey (talk) 22:34, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Not related at all. And the bot handles WP:LDR fine, it just doesn't fix the error you are complaining about. Anomie⚔ 02:03, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Ok, will the bot correct this example (here's my adding of the two references }} below end of reflist):

{{reflist|group="."|refs=
<ref name="refname1">This is reference 1.</ref>
}}<!--end of reflist-->
<ref name="refname2">This is reference 2.</ref>
<ref name="refname3">This is reference 3.</ref>

to

{{reflist|group="."|refs=
<ref name="refname1">This is reference 1.</ref>
<ref name="refname2">This is reference 2.</ref>
<ref name="refname3">This is reference 3.</ref>
}}<!--end of reflist-->

This was the case here. Thanks anyway! Nsaa (talk) 20:31, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Cite error

This edit caused a citation error. Sole Soul (talk) 23:20, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

After reviewing, it was not the bot fault, but can you make it check if there is a parent after such edit. Sole Soul (talk) 23:32, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

List of Afghan security forces fatality reports in Afghanistan(Update)

Please add below information this in this article.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_security_forces_fatality_reports_in_Afghanistan

Afghan security forces losses in other time periods

2010

In 2010, 21 policemen and 16 soldiers were reported killed.

• January 14, 2010 - A police officer was killed and six others were wounded Wednesday in a roadside bombing in Ghazni province.

• January 17, 2010 - Various taliban attacks in country killed 2 Afghan soldiers, 5 policemen and an Afghan district chief.

• January 18, 2010 - A policeman killed in explosions and heavy machine-gun in Afghan capital, Kabul.

Afghan private security guard losses

• January 13, 2010 - An Afghan PMC killed by a gunfire during a protest. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.152.131.120 (talk) 14:36, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

AnomieBOT is an automated process, and cannot understand what you are asking much less carry it out. And I am not interested. You would have better luck asking on the talk page of the article in question (possibly by using the {{editsemiprotected}} template), or on the talk page of someone who cares about the article. Anomie⚔ 01:38, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Removed Wikiproject Physics from article "Sundowner (wind)"

AnomieBOT seems to have automatically included articles in Category:Winds (cf. relevant section in AnomieBOT's talk archive) but the article Sundowner (wind) clearly belongs in that category but really shouldn't fall under Wikiproject Physics. I'm removing the project from the article's talk page. Jason Quinn (talk) 15:53, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Clint Eastwood

Wouldn't you agree that the "early career" section should be condensed? Seriously, you won't find more than a stub for the 1950s film that he made uncredited cameos in, yet there are over 20 paragraphs about them on his page. Discussing plots, production, etc. This belongs on the page for those movies, not on Eastwood's. The same thing goes for the Dollars trilogy - nearly 50 large paragraphs that cover a total of three films. There's not even that much written on the articles for those movies. There is too much written in those sections - it's uneven and doesn't fit with the rest of the article. This has been brought out before on the talk page but no one writes anything on there. Please help me improve the article.66.233.23.3 (talk) 09:13, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

AnomieBOT is an automated process, and lacks the capacity to agree or disagree with editing decisions such as that. Anomie⚔ 16:20, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Overzealous? section removal a red flag

[8] the bot rescued dead links shortly after vandalism, making it harder for RC patrol to find it. I would recommend delaying orphan fixing for a day, and/or not allowing the bot to act if the previous edit removed an entire section. - RoyBoy 07:33, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

RC patrol catches the majority of vandalism in less than 5 minutes and 75% in under an hour, and the bot now waits 1 hour if the removal was done by an "untrusted" editor (i.e. an IP or someone with less than 1000 edits) unless a "trusted" editor (i.e. someone with over 2000 edits) has edited since. If an edit slips by the RC patrol for that long, it's quite likely that it will not be caught by RC patrol at all. A day is far too long to wait to correct non-vandalism errors, and I have yet to hear a workable suggestion for telling the difference between vandalism and the type of legitimate major edit that specifically requires AnomieBOT's attention. For example, your "do not edit if a section was removed" heuristic would specifically kill the bot's ability to rescue references that were orphaned when someone legitimately trims excess trivia and cruft from an overly-long article, or when someone splits an article per WP:SUMMARY, or when someone removes large-scale WP:POV and WP:BLP violations. Which are all exactly why this bot exists.

As far as "hiding" things from RC patrol, I've seen people (and anti-vandal bots like ClueBot!) revert only the latest in a series of vandal edits, which "hides" things just as well. And I've seen people replace a section with "poop" and another well-meaning editor just remove the "poop" without restoring the section, which also "hides" things. At one point someone suggested an "AnomieBOT patrol" to watch AnomieBOT's fixes for missed vandalism, which is probably a much better idea and is even easier now since the bot logs every page it checks with convenient diff links and statistics for the edit that removed the reference. Anomie⚔ 14:20, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Sounds good, though not correct "will never be caught". I specialize in exactly such patrolling (RC patrol lost its shine when BOTs and others do the obvious), my average reverts are 3-4 hours old... incrementally going down as I go through the backlog. I'm old school; that's why I noticed. - RoyBoy 04:16, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Adding unneeded wikiproject banners

Don't see a way of stopping this.

The bot has added the Wikipedia:WikiProject London Transport banner ({{WikiProject London Transport}}) to a number of article talk pages where this is not needed. While the WPLT banner is used on many of the project's articles, WPLT is an associated project of Wikipedia:WikiProject Trains and article assessments for WPLT on railways related subjects can be set using code in the {{TrainsWikiProject}} banner without the need for the WPLT's banner as well.

The effect of the bot's edits in adding the WPLT banner where the Trains Project banner already exists is to add a second, unnecessary, importance category. An example is Talk:London Necropolis railway station, where it can be seen that the article is categorised as both low importance and unknown importance. The former is set in the Trains Project banner and the latter in the WPLT banner.--DavidCane (talk) 19:40, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

That was completed 6 months ago, you're far too late to do anything about it here. Anomie⚔ 01:13, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Adding back unverifiable sources

Please do not continue to add back fan site sources to the Minor characters of Days of our Lives article. They are deemed unreliable per WP:V. Rm994 (talk) 00:58, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Ok, I understand now. Thank you! Rm994 (talk) 01:22, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Jimmy Lopez

I made an incorrect rollback using Twinkle identifying you as a vandal. I apologise: the vandalism took place immeadiately before your edit so I reverted myself and then correctly rolled back to the version prior to the vandalism. Hope that makes sense and that I haven't gotten you into trouble? --Jubilee♫clipman 21:36, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

No problem, AnomieBOT doesn't mind. Anomie⚔ 23:57, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Ref fixer suggestion

I would suggest upping the wait time to 15 or even 30 minutes. I'm pretty sure the only times I've seen the bot's work on my watchlist was due to a ref being removed from vandalism, thus some extra work to revert the original vandalism as rollback won't work. A little more time and people have a better chance to fix the problem. Aboutmovies (talk) 21:44, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

See previous discussion in the archives. Anomie⚔ 01:03, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Which ones? All of them where you basically say the same thing, and it comes across as rather arrogant to tell people "did you read the thingy at the top"? (as in not particularly inline with the bot policy: "bots will generally expect a high standard of cordiality and information, backed up by prompt and civil help from the bot's operator if queries arise"). You complain that not every IP editor is a vandal, but apparently you seem to think that everyone who comes here to complain about the bot must not have read your note. And also, a change to new arbitrary number (90 minutes has been suggested previously) should not be a defense, as in you don't want to just go with some arbitrary number. Odd, since 5 minutes is rather arbitrary, unless you say it is based on the amount of time vandalism is dealt with by several bots. Well, did you look at how long the average time is for vandalism in general to be reverted? If you factor that in, then maybe 15 or 30 minutes isn't arbitrary. Or to sum up many of the complaints, this bot makes for more work, not less, in many instances. And you seem to refuse to accept that (just revert the bot!) and brush aside the complaints instead of trying to work out a solution or compromise. It's not as fast to revert the bot as it is to revert the vandalism. I.e., not "Harmless". It's a useful bot when implemented right, but apparently some people think there should be some tweeks to get it there. Aboutmovies (talk) 03:19, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

5 minutes is a nice round number that gives RCP a decent chance to catch vandalism while not leaving broken references and in articles for too long. I did collect some statistics in the past, which you would have found had you actually read the previous discussions. It turns out that the majority of identifiable vandalism reverts in the sample period occured within 5 minutes of the vandalism, and beyond that you're well into diminishing returns. And since anecdotally much vandalism is by IP users or users with few edits (note the reverse is not true), I changed my position on that in February 2009 and adjusted the bot to wait a full hour after their edits unless someone with a relatively large edit count has edited the page since. If you have something new to contribute please do so, otherwise don't expect further reply from me on this topic. Anomie⚔ 17:04, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Problem is, how old is your data? 5 minutes may have used to work, but if RC patrol is like the rest of Wikipedia, we are bleeding editors (see the big RFC on BLPs advertised on the top of pages for some discussion on that), and your five minutes sort of doesn't work anymore. Anecdotally, a year ago and more I rarely had to revert vandalism as the vandal fighters and RC folks got to it before me, but now I find vandalism on high traffic articles like Liberia much more often that have been sitting there for hours, which is where the problem with your bot has reared its ugly head. It's a top 5000 articles by traffic, yet vandalism takes longer now to remove, and your bot isn't helping. So hopefully that is new for you. Otherwise we can take this to Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard to see if there is still consensus on your bot in its current state compared to the current state of Wikipedia. Aboutmovies (talk) 18:45, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

More detailed edit summary

I am looking to find and review more the this sort of wrong forum closure for a discussion . Would it be possible for AnomieBot to leave a clearer edit summary ? Gnevin (talk) 21:52, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Nevermind, not needed Gnevin (talk) 22:02, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

FYI, your discussion there seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Anomie⚔ 01:20, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Aye but no one can tell me what to do with commons images we no longer want on Wiki apart from remove all link to the image which isn't a solution. Gnevin (talk) 09:02, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Sure it is, and it's what we do now. You want some sort of general-purpose blacklist for blocking any random image someone complains loudly enough about rather than the relatively strict criteria used by MediaWiki:Bad image list, but you haven't really shown that there is a problem that existing mechanisms can't handle. But whatever, I'm trying not to care about wikipolitics anymore so I'll leave it to people who do still care to discuss it elsewhere. Anomie⚔ 16:46, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks

I just wanted to thank you for this bot, Anomie. Hipocrite (talk) 20:34, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Literary Sources on Origin of ROmanians

hello, i am in process of restructuring Literary sources for the origin of the Romanians Criztu (talk) 21:47, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

University of Miami

I find it a bit disruptive for this bot to change the location of the main citation as placed by the editor. There is nothing inherently wrong with putting the materials in the first occurrance of a reference, even if it is in a template. We are trying to keep thing moving and don't need a bot shifting things around requiring us to search for them. Racepacket (talk) 17:39, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

The issue with references in templates is that it causes hard-to-find breakage if the relevant template field is renamed or removed; for example, a while back they removed a "genre" parameter from some music-related infobox which broke the refs people had been using to "source" the listed genre. But if you want to override the bot in this instance, add <!-- AnomieBOT: Don't move --> anywhere inside the relevant <ref> tag. Anomie⚔ 22:24, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Inserting references in the running text instead of in the refs section?

What happends here? All the refs should go down to the reference section per Wikipedia:LDR#List-defined_references in the refs= list (per , not in the text. See also User_talk:AnomieBOT#Can.27t_handle_refs.3D_inside_the_.7B.7Breflist.7D.7D.3FNsaa (talk) 14:14, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Here I've done what I'm outlining above for the first of a lot of references in the article. Nsaa (talk) 15:22, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

List-defined references are optional. I may at some point in the future try to detect if list-defined references are in use in an article, but there are a few tricky corner cases that prevents it from being trivial to implement. Anomie⚔ 23:00, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Ahh.. thanks! Nsaa (talk) 11:12, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Kudos

		The Citation Barnstar
		As I was busy with some very cumbersome (read: 200kB) merges and forks, these two orphaned reference fixes came after my edits, and I was quite impressed. This is an incredibly useful and robust bot. —Akrabbimtalk 15:18, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

I wonder if it could also close IFDs that were "kept" ? ...

...by reproducing the closing admin's edit summary or something? –xeno^talk 21:48, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Fix that didn't quite work

In this edit AnomieBOT corrected a ref that had the formatting error "<ref nane="bridges1"..." in both the body and the references area by removing the reference altogether. Perhaps a list of obvious typos such as this ("nane"->"name") could be developed? Or perhaps something better could be done with a ref with an invalid parameter than simply removing entirely? I grant that the ref as it stood was broken, and the bot edit drew attention to it so a human could fix it. But had there been several other edits before the bot edit was noticed (as could easily occur on a busy page), then the ref might well have been lost. Not sure what the best way to handle this would be, and it isn't strictly speaking an error by the bot. DES ^(talk) 01:43, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

A list of "obvious" typos could certainly be included, but what determines an "obvious" typo? The reason "<ref nane="bridges1"/>" was removed was because after removing the invalid parameters all that was left was "<ref/>", which is itself invalid. Anomie⚔ 12:41, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

I can see the problem. Perhaps if removing parameters creates an invalid ref construct, then the original ref, with invalid parameters intact, could be left in place but inside an HTML comment, so that it will be easier for a human editor to find and fix? Or perhaps if a change to a single character gives a valid parameter, it might be considered a typo? But that might mean too many checks for reasonable performance. DES ^(talk) 00:35, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

AnomieBOT, you are the first bot I have ever conversed with. Thanks.

I know you aren't sentient, but I still enjoyed our conversation. Someday, when you or your grandkids are sentient, we'll all look back and have a good laugh. Excellent work rescuing orphaned refs. Cheers, — ¾-10 17:44, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:BAG/Status‎

Thanks for keeping this up to date. I'd like to request a non-trivial change: if a BAG member created a BRFA, could they, for the purposes of that BRFA, be considered not a BAG member for the purposes of the "Last BAG edit" column? When I have BRFAs running, naturally I keep commenting on them - but now that I'm also a BAG member, that it appears that the BAG is providing my BRFAs with plenty of attention! Thanks again, Josh Parris 22:47, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

 Done I had to poke the bot in the database to get it to update the rows for the existing BRFAs without waiting for a new edit to each. Anomie⚔ 04:28, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Wow, for some on a wikibreak you sure turned that around quick! Josh Parris 22:41, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

It's an odd sort of wikibreak, I mostly only have a few minutes a day to check my watchlist for edits I care about. Fortunately your request came on a weekend ;) Anomie⚔ 02:39, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Further to this: I'm not sure if AnomieBOT ought to be considered an editor for the Last edit column, but at the same time can see a reason to note that the bot has notified the operator - I'll leave the call to your discretion. Josh Parris 02:18, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

That's a good question. As a third option, maybe any minor edit shouldn't be counted? Maybe someone should bring it up on WT:BRFA or WP:BON to get more opinions. Anomie⚔ 03:07, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Breaking LDR

AnomieBOT broke Lichen in this edit. It apparently tried to move refs out of templates and so it moved them out of {{Reflist|2}} which broke the refs. Svick (talk) 01:29, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

The problem stems from the unclosed {{cite web}} in the Casselman1999 ref. Because of that, the bot didn't see the {{reflist}} as an actual template, because it thought the reflist's }} belonged to the Casselman1999 ref's cite web instead. It doesn't cause such a problem for Mediawiki's parser, because Mediawiki strips out the <ref>...</ref> before processing templates. Anomie⚔ 02:34, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

 Done The bot will now deem a page "too broken to fix" if it looks like there is an unclosed "{{reflist". Anomie⚔ 02:49, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia ref

Restoring lost refs from previous diffs is an awesomely useful task, but in this diff, the bot restored a WP:CIRCULAR ref. --Geniac (talk) 00:54, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

The bot has no idea if a reference is good or bad, and really no way to tell. The appropriate response in this situation is to remove the second use of the reference that the bot identified, and any others as well. Anomie⚔ 01:41, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Cool beans; I will do so in future. --Geniac (talk) 02:16, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Complaint by Dirk P Broer

Moved from in the middle of a discussion above, and <nowiki> added

• Completely missing the point! you replace <ref name="Halley1988"/><ref name="Jefford 2001, p. 102"/><ref>Moyes 1976, p. 285.</ref>

with <ref name="Halley1988">Halley 1988, p. 436.</ref><ref name="Jefford 2001, p. 102">Jefford 2001, p. 102.</ref><ref>Moyes 1976, p. 285.</ref> But the whole poit of using ,<ref name="placeholder">Someone year, p xx.</ref> is that you can use ,<ref name="placeholder"/> for the same reference/page in the rest of the text so it will be combined into 1 a,b Someone year, p xxDirk P Broer And next time wait till I am finished editing as well, please(talk) 16:40, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

I guess you are referring to this AnomieBOT edit, although I really have no idea what exactly you're complaining about. You removed the "Halley1988" and "Jefford 2001, p. 102" references in this edit, apparently intending to rename them to "Halley1988p436" and "Jefford2001p102", but you did not rename all instances. AnomieBOT helpfully rescued the removed references, and in this edit you (correctly) undid AnomieBOT's edit and completed your rename.

As for waiting until you are finished editing, the bot can't read minds to determine whether or not you're done. If you're making a series of edits to a page in a short period of time, stick {{inuse}} on the page to tell both AnomieBOT and human editors that they should hold off on editing while you finish. Anomie⚔ 18:05, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm amazed

I was just trying to rescue some references, when I realized the bot had done just that much faster than I did. Thank you! — Sebastian 23:59, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

You're welcome! If you want to look at the ones AnomieBOT couldn't figure out, User:AnomieBOT/OrphanReferenceFixer log is the place to check. Anomie⚔ 03:04, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm amazed too -- what a great bot! --Melty girl 05:08, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

thank you

Thank you for this wonderful bot; it caught my carless mistake on The Concert and got it just right! — Robert Greer (talk) 20:56, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

I also want to add a thank you. You are a very intelligent bot. It's high time we raise the standard for our human material as well. Dc76\^talk 22:02, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

I know you're probably getting embarrassed by all this, but I just wanted to add that OrphanReferenceFixer is the best feature I've ever seen from a bot. It's spared my carelessness on at least three occasions so far, and has doubtless saved countless hundreds of positive contributions from being lost due to a small but significant mistake. Well done! WFCforLife (talk) 16:41, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Actually, no, I like having my work appreciated. Thanks, all of you, for the kind words! Anomie⚔ 19:04, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Oh bot, thank you for coming back from the unfortunate break you were given for a few months back. I missed you something terrible. I'm glad to see that you are not taking a vacation like your owner. You don't deserve it after your long rest this year. But I hope s/he is enjoyed one all the same. --Slp1 (talk) 02:28, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Brilliant! Rescued a link reference at Marriage for a reference I (and I suspect some other editors) thought had, due to editing history, never actually been spelled out. Thank you, and Bravo! --Joe Decker (talk) 13:53, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

I've seen AnomieBOT on so many pages, mostly rescuing and repairing references. AnomieBOT just fixed my referencing mistake on MacBook Pro, and I just had to drop by and offer my many thanks to this wonderful bot. What would we do without AnomieBOT? Airplaneman ^talk 05:55, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Rescuing orphaned references: what a great idea for a bot! Thanks and congratulations!! ☺Coppertwig (talk) 16:13, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Suggest new function

Specifying which edit made the error would make it easier for humans to fix. I suggest a page that list errors not fixed by the bot in the form of:

• [[Article]] [diff of edit that made the error] date of that edit

Sole Soul (talk) 21:42, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Something like User:AnomieBOT/OrphanReferenceFixer log? Anomie⚔ 01:03, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

No. The log contains errors not fixed by the bot. I want in addition, which edit caused the error. For ex. the error on The E.N.D. which the bot was not able to fix was caused by this edit. Sole Soul (talk) 01:57, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you!

Heya, AnomieBOT. Thank you for your help here. --Shirt58 (talk) 14:24, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Same subject - Thank You!! you rescued an orphaned reference I made (after 1.5 hours of fixing article NPOV and squirrelly rearranging it) only 9 minutes after I finished editing! I'd never have noticed it. *hugs* to you! Tkech (talk) 20:25, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Completely agree with Tkech. Bots deserve wikilove too! --Shirt58 (talk) 11:36, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Moving references outside template

Please don't do what happened here, (yes to rescuing refs, no to moving them outside transcluding parts) it breaks the references on the main page. Thanks. _Xeworlebi ^(t•c) 11:15, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

I have added {{Episode list/sublist}} to the bot's list of templates not to move refs out of. If there are any other templates used in the same sort of situation, please let me know. Anomie⚔ 18:04, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Possible modifications to AltLinkTemplateSubster

I was wondering if the bot catches cases where no title is specified. In these cases, the link is not piped, and the link text simply reflects the article chosen by the template. DeFaultRyan 21:23, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

It does.

return ($pg,defined($p{'title'})?"[[$pg|$p{title}]]":"[[$pg]]");

Anomie⚔ 02:19, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

AnomieBot is embedding vandalism

Please view recent history of CheyTac Intervention. Deletionist vandal was missed by subsequent editors due to bot overlay. - Leonard G. (talk) 16:04, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you.

I just wanted to thank you for helping to fix the problems in the article [[List of area seventies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I love ensuring accurate information, and the help you gave was instrumental for the accuracy of the article. I will be posting an expression of gratitude on the talk page of that article, but wanted to take the opportunity to thank you personally. --Jgstokes-We can disagree without being disagreeable (talk) 23:17, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

ihiphop.com

This site attempted to download a virus on my computer, so I've removed all links to it from Wikipedia and reported it at the Wikimedia Spam Blacklist. In this edit, AnomieBOT effectifely attempted to undo one edit I had made just minutes before. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 14:01, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

What happened is that you deleted the content of the named reference <ref name="ihophopreview">...</ref> but left <ref name="ihophopreview"/> elsewhere, which results in a in the article. The bot detected this situation, and replaced one of the remaining <ref name="ihophopreview"/> with <ref name="ihophopreview">...</ref>; note it did not add the reference back to where it was deleted, it added the content to one of the remaining uses in the article.

If you want to remove the reference named "ihophopreview" completely from the article, make sure you go through and remove every <ref name="ihophopreview"/> so as to not leave any . An easy way to check is to see if the page ends up in the hidden category Category:Pages with broken reference names after your edit. Anomie⚔ 23:12, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Sarah Leah Whitson footnotes

Thank you.AMuseo (talk) 17:25, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

"Means well"

I remember hearing someone described as "he means well" which was just a nice way of saying he got it wrong all the time. AnomieBOT means well when it rescues orphaned references but I haven't seen a case yet when it was not better to revert the damage done by the editor who removed a reference without thinking about it. Named references used in more than one place tend to be much better quality than most. So while it was worth a try and maybe seems like a good idea it just doesn't work in practice and AnomieBOT should be more serious and revert the changes or do nothing at all, so that at least there will be a slightly better chance of editors noticing the link breakages and reverting the vandalism/misguided edits. -- Horkana (talk) 01:11, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps you should look at the articles people thanked AnomieBOT for fixing above and in the archives. It seems that many people find this task quite helpful. Anomie⚔ 02:43, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Entente intervention in the Russian Civil War

Hello, I've been doing some work on the Category:Pages with broken reference names, which I have seen your Bot has helped some and hurt others. In this diff, the Bot repaired some refs where the names had spaces in them (which makes them not work) by adding quotes around them, which in this case puts the in the broken ref category, because an editor shouldn't have put the spaces int he name int he first place (the original ref was named "Humphreys,p.26"; the "bad" ones that the bot fixed were named "Humphreys, p. 26". In this particular situation, it would have been safer to remove the spaces, although making it kick out an error is better than it never being seen, which was the case before. I don't know if the bot checks for existing ref names (or even can). But it would be nice!
In another example in the same article, I made an error when combining other refs, by typing "name=" twice - i.e. name=name=HistoryRussia/>. AnomieBot came along, rightly saw it was a bad name, but changed it to name=name/> ... brekaing the link and re-adding it to the list, which is how I discovered the problem. Can you add a parameter where if the bot comes across "name=name=" that it will just remove one of the "name=" ? I doubt I'm the first person to make this mistook.
Thanks for the Bot, it does good work (although I did call it stupid because I was annoyed with it earlier. Sorry!). Salamurai (talk) 17:13, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I've done the "name=name=" thing, but I'm not sure how to code the other bit. It's obvious to us humans, but not so much for a bot. Anomie⚔ 13:36, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

www.behavior-analyst-online.org

www.behavior-analyst-online.org was moved to www.baojournal.com many months ago. Check out for yourself and please don't revert. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.92.124.65 (talk) 04:15, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

AnomieBOT is an automated process that fixes orphaned references. What happened in that article is that someone did not completely replace "behavior-analyst-online.org" with "baojournal.com", and in particular they changed one <ref name="behavior-analyst-online.org"> without changing all of them. Anomie⚔ 13:36, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Another suggestion

Hello again, I'm still working on the Category:Pages with broken reference names, and I've encountered several instances where an editor mistakenly adds a link to a source formatted like <ref name="http://thisisislinktoawebpage.com/subpage/numbers/blah"/>, without there being any other ref by that name to crossref to. Is there a way to make AnomieBOT fix those to be <ref>http://thisisislinktoawebpage.com/subpage/numbers/blah</ref> ? It would probably have to check to make sure there isn't already a properly named & sequenced ref, some articles have ridiculously descriptive ref-names. If not, oh well. Thanks! - Salamurai (talk) 02:18, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

New template duty for NBA

{{NBA Year|1994|team=Washington Bullets|title=Bullets}} is an example of the new functionality added to {{NBA Year}} to make it work like {{cbb link}} and {{cfb link}} in the sense that it will link to Washington Bullets until a bot notices that 1994-95 Washington Bullets season has been created. Can your bot watch this template for such instanced to reduce unnecessary template usage.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 07:40, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Certainly, but the template must be edited to add pages to a tracking category such as Category:Excessive uses of NBA Year when the bot is needed; rather than checking the (potentially large) number of uses of the template, the bot just works to keep the corresponding category clean. Also, FYI, you might be able to make your template code a little more readable by using a template such as {{dash year}} to format the years (and it won't break if someone has reason to use 1899–1900 or 2099–2100). Anomie⚔ 11:11, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:BAG/Status

That Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 38 became a redirect seems to have freaked AnomieBOT out - it lists AnomieBOT 38 as status Unknown. Josh Parris 01:20, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Hopefully fixed. Anomie⚔ 02:58, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! Josh Parris 22:11, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

Another tweak: a different background colour for the most recently editor/edit-time - so if a BAG member was the most recent editor, colour one, otherwise colour two. For extra credit you could put those colours only under the editor/edit-time. Unspecified colour is a colour, so you might only colour the most recent editor cell/line lightgrey for the alternate case. Josh Parris 22:11, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

I couldn't come up with anything that didn't look ugly, so I just added a class "MostRecentIsBAG" to those two cells. You should be able to use your skin.css to style them however you like. Anomie⚔ 12:52, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm impressed

I transferred a section from one article into another and forgot that one of the references was only a shortcut (and would therefore link to nothing in the new article). This bot found the error and fixed it by copying over the full original reference! Thanks. :) Esn (talk) 20:50, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

That is one smart bot

		The Chicago Barnstar
		You saved me several hours of ref fixing in my next WP:FAC (Millennium Park) by completing copied refs from other articles. This was quite a time saver and may help salvage WP:CHIFTD.TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 02:03, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

.

AnomieBOT thanks you. Anomie⚔ 02:56, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II on the PC

The reliable source is here. And on Wookieepedia they tell that the PC version will be developed by Aspyr. 84.86.199.99 (talk) 14:06, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Are you aware you're spamming an automated process? Anomie⚔ 16:40, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Mistaken edits at Rachel Maddow

Anomiebot mistakenly reverted to a vandalized version of the Rachel Maddow page; an editor had changed a source, actually misquoting it in the process and relabeling it to avoid detection. I'm not sure if this is an error that can be prevented, but I just wanted to let you know. Qwyrxian (talk) 06:34, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

AnomieBOT doesn't actually revert anything; it sees that the current version of the article is displaying a because of an orphaned ref and the ref wasn't orphaned in an earlier revision of the article, so it copies the body of the ref from the history into the current orphaned ref to de-orphan it. Looking at the article history, are you saying that AnomieBOT pulled a vandalized version of the ref out of the history? If so, just fix it instead of re-orphaning it and everything should be fine. Anomie⚔ 11:35, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

References in templates

With a cold tone, I'd rather that you keep references in templates, as at Austin, Texas, where finding them can be facilitated. And who knows when someone would wish to create a template from all that data? ---华钢琴49 (TALK) 23:13, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Ages Old Bot Request

Nearly two years ago, it was requested that the orientation parameter be removed from {{Female adult bio}} (now {{Infobox adult female}}). Was the same thing done for {{Male adult bio}} (now {{Infobox adult male}}) and {{Adult bio}} (now {{Infobox adult biography}})? I ask because I just found a leftover at Kyle Bradford. Thanks! —RobinHood70 ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:29, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

No, no one ever asked for that. Anomie⚔ 00:25, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

If you've still got the code, it might be worth running it again on the other templates. If not, it's probably not a big deal. Does a bot request need to be submitted first? I have no idea of the process for something like this. —RobinHood70 ^{(talk • contribs)} 01:13, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Delay

Can you set yourself to delay a certain amount of time before jumping in?

I was editing and hit the "Save page" button by accident instead of the "Show preview" and then when I went to continue, I made all of my changes and then you came along and "Edit conflict"ed me out of my changes. Aaaarrrggghhh! Just give me a few minutes. Set yourself on a timer to fix the error, say, 1-hour after the last edit. Thanks. > Best O Fortuna (talk) 22:24, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

You are given a few minutes, 5 to be exact. If you were a new editor you'd be given an hour, on the assumption that your edits might be vandalism so recent changes patrollers should be given extra time to revert your edit. Anomie⚔ 04:11, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Trolling, using dirty Filipino phrases I now thank you for the info because of finding me oversighting

I saw that the template became a red link and shown Template: Infobox nasa language ang pagtatae ng tao! Luckily, it was reverted. Please don't do such things again. If it was an accident, it's okay for me. I accept any apology. --Sir Jazer 13 (talk) 11:33, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

I guess you're talking about Tagalog language. You need to look closer at the article history. The vandalism was done by 120.28.125.135 in this edit. Also, are you aware you're talking to an automated process? Anomie⚔ 14:28, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I thought that bots are controlled humans, and I forgot to write because of hurrying. Sorry, I forgot you're automated. And also thanks to the info.

--Sir Jazer 13 (talk) 08:04, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Undocumented Ref issue

This, presumably triggered the ever-vigilant bot's subsequent edit in a failed bid to fix the vandalism. It's no big deal and I don't have a suggestion but thought it was worth reporting. Ben MacDui 15:49, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion on notifying users

Hi, I'm a human being and I screw up once in a while, for example here I reverted some refspam but overlooked a second reference to it. Please consider notifying the most recent editor, if the diff for the most recent edit contains the deleted reference, that they have broken a reference, to give them a chance to revisit their edit and finish it properly. As an alternative, have AnomieBOT simply revert the bad edit (assuming it is topmost) and notify the user. Thanks, CliffC (talk) 22:54, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Can you do smaller edit summaries? I get several lines like "Archiving closed XfDs to Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Comics and animation/archive Errors? User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/DeletionSortingCleaner" on my watchlist, and it clutters things up. If not, that's fine. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 17:23, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Suggestions? Anomie⚔ 23:10, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

What I'd like is shorter links to the same pages.

"[[Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Comics and animation/archive|Archiving closed XfDs]], [[User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/DeletionSortingCleaner|problems?]]"

or something. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:17, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Ok. Anomie⚔ 13:29, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Cool. Hopefully that doesn't displease anyone, but I like it a lot. I don't think people go and look at the archive much anyways. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 18:17, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Citation needed cleanup

In the instances (TemplateReplacer15, I think) where the bot is changing parameter 1 of {{citation needed}}, would it be possible to check whether it contains a date, and if so, make it into a properly formatted date parameter? It would be even better if you could have the bot reprocess recent changes under this task, in order to fix this for instances already changed by the bot. (I noticed this here.) TheFeds 23:10, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Did that at 2010-07-25 12:11, thanks for the suggestion though. I had originally assumed SmackBot would have already added the needed date parameters to all of those. I'll think about the recent changes one. Anomie⚔ 03:04, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Template:NFLDraft-row use of Template:Cfb link

AnomieBOT has recently (twice) replaced {{Cfb link}} in {{NFLDraft-row}} with an inferior substitute. It is attempting to replace Cfb link with a simple wikilink: [[YYYY CollegeTeamName football team]] (e.g. [[2009 USC Trojans football team]]).
The entire purpose of using Cfb link in this template is that in many cases and for many schools that page simply does not exist! I understand that {{Cfb link}} uses an "expensive parser function", but it also provides functionality that simply isn't replaced by this simplistic solution. Please call off your bot. — DeeJayK (talk) 13:48, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

 Fixed There was a small bug in the bot that caused it to not realize that the seemingly-attempted link to "{{{collegeyear}}} {{{collegeteam}}} football team" inside the template was an invalid page (as opposed to a missing page), so it incorrectly substed the cfb link template; it was attracted in the first place because the doc page results in the template being in Category:Excessive uses of cfb link.

I've also added a parameter "cfb page exists" to {{NFLDraft-row}} which will cause it to output the simple wikilink instead of calling {{cfb link}}, and added logic to the bot to add that parameter to invocations of {{NFLDraft-row}} where the cfb page exists. Note that the bot will only add this parameter when the final page exists; for example, it would add the parameter to a use of {{NFLDraft-row}} for 2008 Georgia Bulldogs immediately since 2008 Georgia Bulldogs football team exists, but would not to a use for 2012 Georgia Bulldogs until 2012 Georgia Bulldogs football team is created. Anomie⚔ 17:23, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Great solution. Thanks for your help. — DeeJayK (talk) 16:28, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

The bot has gone a bit off the rails in implementing this solution. It recently added the "cfb page exists" tag to many entries in the 2007 NFL Draft list for the second or third time. Please take a look when you get a chance. — DeeJayK (talk) 21:18, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Ick, should be fixed now so the bot doesn't do that again. Anomie⚔ 20:59, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Comment from a confused IP user

The information is erroneous as to the criteria used for a PTSD diagognosis. No doctor I know would make a PTSD diagnosis on the information in the article, the described issues in the article may be some co-morbidity issues with depression being a secondary diagnosis, but the DSM IV-R mentions nothing about a movie causing PTSD, and the PTSD diagnosis was related to 1966 - not the 1977 movie.74.243.182.120 (talk) 18:55, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Why are you telling this to an automated process? Anomie⚔ 19:02, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Putting my Cart before my Horse Request

Barring any unforeseen circumstances with this AN thread, I was wondering (if I gain consensus) if your BOT could go through and change all instances of </references> to {{reflist}}. This is not controversial as </references> is outdated to the far more accepted {{reflist}}. If consensus can be established, could your BOT do this? - Neutralhomer • Talk • 22:24, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

User:Department of Redundancy Department posted and User:Xeno agreed, that on ANI people have suggested this before and it was frowned upon...alot. So I withdrew my proposal on AN and I guess this makes the above moot. Sorry to bother you. :S - Neutralhomer • Talk • 01:43, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Quite so. I don't know that I could have done it easily with AnomieBOT anyway, as there is no way to track the use of <references /> besides using a database dump. Anomie⚔ 05:40, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

I guess so, I thought it was a good idea. Oh well. :) Hope your day is going well. :) Take Care...Neutralhomer • Talk • 14:42, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Articles for deletion nomination of Talk:Brazil national football team competitive record

I have nominated Talk:Brazil national football team competitive record, an article that you created, for deletion. I do not think that this article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and have explained why at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Talk:Brazil national football team competitive record. Your opinions on the matter are welcome at that same discussion page; also, you are welcome to edit the article to address these concerns. Thank you for your time.

Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message. Nergaal (talk) 23:57, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

FYI, AnomieBOT doesn't care. Anomie⚔ 01:02, 18 August 2010 (UTC)