User talk:Merge bot/Task 2

History merging

Moved from User talk:wbm1058

Category:Possible cut-and-paste moves

I saw your comment at category talk:Possible cut-and-paste moves. That's really interesting. So, Mikaey had himswlf requested the category to emptied. What's more, the task is even listed as a potential ine for AarghBot at its user page. So, why are u wasting ur time decatting pages manually? Why don't u nominate it for deletion. As u must be aware, Cydebot automatically empties all categories upon a CFD discussion closing with consensus to delete. Here, it's almost a G7 case - I don't see why anyone would object to the cat being deleted. Most of the entries are false positives and the ones wbich aren't are alrady listed at WP:WPHM. 103.6.159.72 (talk) 15:06, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Five months after I made those comments, it was nominated for deletion: Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2016 July 12#Category:Possible cut-and-paste moves. I missed that discussion, which happened when I went on my summer break. Sigh, none of those voting keep are helping to clear it. I did an edit summary search and found that when I was last working this backlog on October 30, 2015 I got as far alphabetically as Rakim & Ken-Y (Ke) and when I resumed on January 19, 2017 the first one I did was Kadar Khan (Kh) so substantially nobody else has been working this in a meaningful way. I've been trying to find a way to more efficiently clear this. Cats for discussion is an area that I'm not very active in. wbm1058 (talk) 18:58, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

FInally, after slogging through this on-and-off for the past ~four months, this piece is  Done! – wbm1058 (talk) 21:03, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

I see you made a somewhat related bot request, Wikipedia:Bot requests#Bot for category history merges. I've thought about the possibility of admin-bots helping out with hist-merges in article-space, and a bot doing hist-merges in category-space probably wouldn't be all that different. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:23, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Brfa

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Merge bot 2

For an adminbot that's good to perform hundreds of thousands of admin actions, your BRFA, I apologise, is quite lacklustre. (I just fixed a big typo) I would suggest that you expand the function overview to completely describe everything the bot's gonna do. You see, you have to convince the BAG that you are responsible and capable of running a bot with advanced permissions. 103.6.159.74 (talk) 14:26, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

I am sure that Od Mishehu wanted you to revdelete cydebot's edit summary only when it contains the name of a now-vanished user. If the bot can't recognize such users or if it's too much trouble to implement, I'd suggest leaving out that part altogether. I personally don't see the need for doing that at all, since the vanished user's original username can anyway be known by looking at their rename log or just by reading the signatures on their talk page. In any case, revdeleting all of Cydebot's edit summaries makes no sense. 103.6.159.74 (talk) 14:32, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing my little mistake. I guess I was a little tired when I wrote that up. I trust that whichever BAG member reviews this will also read the longer linked bot-request page discussion, and ask me any questions they have. I'll just wait to see what questions they have, and then answer them. Some thought my self-nomination for RFA was lacklustre too, but I still managed to pass that. Regarding the revdeletes, I believe the thinking there is that we want to hide them preemptively in case anyone wants to vanish in the future. If not, then I'll need a list of usernames to check for, to determine which ones to hide. I think the idea is to make it harder to find vanished users. Also the list in the edit summary isn't necessary because all of the users named in it would now be in the merged edit history. But I'm ambivalent about the need to hide the edit summaries. You can bring that up on the bot requests or BRFA page to see whether there is consensus for hiding or not hiding. Hundreds of thousands, I guess you're right: 87,000 × 4 = 348,000. I'm sure the BAG will ask for shorter trial runs before they let me unleash it at full-throttle. wbm1058 (talk) 15:01, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

fixed another typo. 103.6.159.68 (talk) 06:16, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Trial

Your bot task has been approved for an extended trial. See here for details. Please take special note of the extended pause due to the lack of bot flag during the trial. Let me know if you have any questions, and thank you for your work. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 03:15, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Cats about 1921-1922 in Turkey

I see you have directed cat:1921-1922 establishments in Turkey to Cat:1921-1922 establishments in the Ottoman Empire. Well that requires some consideration. After 23 April 1920 the Ottoman Empire and Turkey were different states with different constitutions and different governments. It is true that the Republic was proclainmed in 1923, but even before the proclamation of the Republic, Turkey was a soverign state independent of the Ottoman Empire. Nedim Ardoğa (talk) 13:17, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

These automated administrative actions were performed as part of the bot trial authorized in the section above. All I did was to history-merge categories which had previously been renamed. wbm1058 (talk) 13:55, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

1. Category:1920 disestablishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1920 disestablishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:11:32Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:11:37Z (5)
2. Category:1915 disestablishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1915 disestablishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:11:18Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:11:27Z (9)
3. Category:1914 disestablishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1914 disestablishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:11:08Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:11:13Z (5)
4. Category:1913 disestablishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1913 disestablishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:10:57Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:11:03Z (6)
5. Category:1912 disestablishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1912 disestablishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:10:46Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:10:52Z (6)
6. Category:1909 disestablishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1909 disestablishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:10:35Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:10:41Z (6)
7. Category:1922 establishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1922 establishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:10:15Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:10:31Z (16)
8. Category:1921 establishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1921 establishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:09:56Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:10:10Z (14)
9. Category:1920 establishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1920 establishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:09:24Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:09:51Z (27)
10. Category:1919 establishments in the Ottoman Empire <-- Category:1919 establishments in Turkey 2015-02-26T22:09:13Z <-- 2015-02-26T22:09:19Z (6)

Bot task approved

Your recent bot task has been Approved. Please see detailed comments at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Merge bot 2. Your bot should receive the sysop flag shortly. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 15:33, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Flagging has been complete. Please note, your bot account now qualifies for WP:2FA which I strongly recommend. You can use BotPasswords or OAUTH authentication to limit your bot's administrative permissions to the ones needed for the task. Once this task is completed, the +sysop flag should no longer be required and you can notify WP:BN to remove it. Thank you, — xaosflux ^Talk 15:43, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Hah! § BotPasswords issue – wbm1058 (talk) 17:22, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

Another bot

I don't recall being told that RobotG also handled Cydebot's task. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:19, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, you weren't, probably because it last edited in 2007. There's also Kbdankbot, which annoyingly didn't specify the source category in it's edit summary, and BetacommandBot, and almost certainly a few others. Cydebot's code was a standard pywikibot script, so it's not surprising that other bots have done the same thing. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:45, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I spent a ton of time looking at the history of WP:CFDW to see if any bots were overlooked, and found Drinibot, as well a lot of bots that just moved the contents of the category and left the task of updating category pages to humans, which aren't relevant to this task. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:10, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Also Legobot. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:53, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Also Whobot and Pearle, if you want to delve into really ancient (2004-2005) history. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:44, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Also JdforresterBot. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:46, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Also Bluebot. This is by no means a complete list. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:19, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Also COBot and Eivindbot and Locobot and Scepbot and Snowbot. Some of these have a very tiny number of moves, so may be better to process manually. To be honest, I'm impressed by how many different bots moved categories. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 02:42, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Also MondalorBot and MonoBot and PbBot and SoxBot. I recognize that this list is probably becoming too large for you to handle, but I figured it would still be better to have a (hopefully) complete list rather than an incomplete one. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 02:41, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Also DavidLeighEllis, who ran the exact bot script Merge bot cleans up after on their main account. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:11, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

... and then later applied to run a proper bot, and was denied. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:21, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Also DomBot * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:43, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Task 2 – first run since full approval

Overlapping timestamps, #1

An unexpected error occurred:

Merge history failed!! 890: Category:Former Roman Catholic dioceses <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Defunct Roman Catholic dioceses.
Authors: Amit6, VolkovBot, EmausBot, DSisyphBot, Jaraalbe, Benkenobi18, Cydebot, Good Olfactory, ZéroBot, Place Clichy, JASpencer, Vanished user ewfisn2348tui2f8n2fio2utjfeoi210r39jf, Francvs...

[error] => Array
        (
            [code] => mergehistory-fail-timestamps-overlap
            [info] => Source revisions overlap or come after destination revisions.
            [*] => See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce> for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes.
        )
    [servedby] => mw1284

Walking through the algorithm:

Selection set item is:

• 17:57, 3 February 2015 (diff | hist) . . (+211)‎ . . N Category:Former Roman Catholic dioceses ‎ (Robot: Moved from Category:Defunct Roman Catholic dioceses. Authors: Amit6, VolkovBot, EmausBot, DSisyphBot, Jaraalbe, Benkenobi18, Cydebot, Good Olfactory, ZéroBot, Place Clichy, JASpencer, Vanished user ewfisn2348tui2f8n2fio2utjfeoi210r39jf, Francvs...)

There is mergable history:

• 16:00, 12 July 2017 Merge bot (talk | contribs | block) restored page Category:Defunct Roman Catholic dioceses (21 revisions) (for history-merge to Category:Former Roman Catholic dioceses)
• Category:Former Roman Catholic dioceses does not have deleted history, but...
• 17:59, 3 February 2015 Fayenatic london (talk | contribs | block) restored page Category:Former Roman Catholic dioceses (4 revisions restored: re-created per CFD)

That's 2 minutes after Cydebot's move. Should those 4 revisions have been restored? They're blocking the way for history-merging the revisions that Cydebot would have moved back on 3 February 2015, if that were possible. On the other hand, Cydebot may not have moved anything if Fayenatic london had restored the 4 deleted revisions three minutes earlier. Is this sort of like an edit conflict?

• See Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 January 26#Category:Defunct Roman Catholic dioceses
  • Propose renaming Category:Defunct Roman Catholic dioceses to Category:Former Roman Catholic dioceses

The result of the discussion was: rename. – Fayenatic London 17:43, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

It appears that Cydebot properly executed the rename. I don't understand why the 4 deleted revisions were restored.

Pinging @Od Mishehu: since you took the most interest in this BRFA, other than IPs. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:15, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Hi. I see that it was Feb 2015 so Cydebot renamed the category in the old way, deleting Category:Defunct Roman Catholic dioceses and creating Category:Former Roman Catholic dioceses. This was a few months before editors or bots could move category pages with their page history. Evidently I noticed that there was former page history from 2009 at the new name, and I considered that it would be useful to undelete the 2009 versions, so I did so.

As one page had history going back to 2008 and the other to 2009, i.e. they are almost equally old, I would have been inclined even now to keep the 2009 page history of Category:Former Roman Catholic dioceses, rather than merging the 2008–2015 page history from the "Defunct" name. However, if somebody thinks we should merge the history, then go ahead. Let me know if you need me to re-delete the 2009 page history.

Please note that if Merge bot is going through all category histories, there will be other cases like this. I have undeleted (or kept) page history at the target name after, I estimate, two dozen merges and a dozen renames. I have not kept any records of these cases from which I could trace them in advance for you. – Fayenatic London 21:49, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

I just deleted the old revisions and did a history merge. And I believe that if not for thre history mege needing to be done, Fayenatic london would have been correct in this restoration - and the restoration was done before any option for moving category hiatory was possible. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 03:00, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Od Mishehu. IMHO, the result of the history merge is now confusing in a new way, because the move is not explicitly recorded. I suppose the edit by Cydebot, with the edit summary removed, is the clue that a move happened. – Fayenatic London 07:08, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

The BRFA consensus was not to preemptively remove Cydebot's edit summaries; I agree that seeing them provides reassurance that my bot performed its task as intended. The last trial did 250 hist-merges. My first post-approval run was intended to do 1000 (I'm doing a cautious roll-out) but stopped at 508. I'll restart it do do up to 1000 more, and see how far it gets this time. wbm1058 (talk) 16:00, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

OK, that one ran all the way through, #509 was manually merged, now 1000 more done without a hitch. Ramping up to 3000 for the next run. wbm1058 (talk) 19:45, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Wiki in read-only mode

[error] => Array
       (
            [code] => readonly
            [info] => The wiki is currently in read-only mode.
            [readonlyreason] => The database has been automatically locked while the replica database servers catch up to the master.
            [*] => See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce> for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes.
        )
    [servedby] => mw1282

First time I've seen that. Just 201 merged before that happened. wbm1058 (talk) 21:07, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

After restart, a successful run that hist-merged 3,000 categories yesterday. Just under 5,000 processed so far. Starting another run to do 3,000 more today. wbm1058 (talk) 16:10, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

Overlapping timestamps, #2

Ran into the second case of overlapping timestamps today:

• Category:Bishops of Stockport <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Bishops of Stockport Borough. Authors: Bencherlite, Fayenatic london, Cydebot
  • 12:00, 23 July 2014‎ Bencherlite‎ . . Category being considered for renaming; see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2014 July 23#Category:Bishops of Stockport Borough.
  • 11:48, 23 July 2014 Cydebot deleted page Category:Bishops of Stockport (Robot - Moving category Bishops of Stockport to Category:Bishops of Stockport‎ Borough per CFD at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2014 April 30.)
  • 05:55, 28 July 2014 Fayenatic london restored page Category:Bishops of Stockport (6 revisions restored: Renaming was a mistake)

Again the bot halted processing, pending resolution of this. 642nd item to be processed today. We have two different discussions linked here, is that the source of the mistake? wbm1058 (talk) 20:17, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

Ah, this was me again. An unusual case: it was moved from X to Y on 23/7/14, then immediately re-nominated and speedily moved back from Y to X. (I misunderstood Bencherlite's re-tagging the page when it was at Y, undid his edit, then reverted my own edit.) After the speedy move back by Cydebot on 27/7/14, I undeleted the old history at X up to 23/7/14.

It may be best to manually merge the history in this case. (I'd do it for you, but I fear making it even more confusing.) – Fayenatic London 20:41, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

Indeed complicated. Five admin-actions later (delete, restore, merge, delete, restore), I believe I have it sorted out. Onward to restart the bot. wbm1058 (talk) 18:28, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Overlapping timestamps, #3

Category:American actor-politicians <-- Robot: Moved from Category:American actor–politicians. Authors: Fayenatic london, Miniwildebeest, Addbot, Luckas-bot, KConWiki, Cydebot, HandsomeFella, Johnpacklambert, Bearcat, BizarreLoveTriangle, Good Olfactory, GenQuest, Armbrust

I just went ahead and fixed this one. Similar 5-step process as #2 above. wbm1058 (talk) 02:57, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Stopped by maxlag

Merge history failed!! 7348: Category:Skeleton World Cup champions navigational boxes <-- Robot: Moved from Category:SkeletonBiathlon World Cup Champions navigational boxes. Authors: Nickst, Cydebot
Array
(
    [error] => Array
        (
            [code] => maxlag
            [info] => Waiting for 10.64.32.25: 28.243166208267 seconds lagged.
            [host] => 10.64.32.25
            [lag] => 28.243166208267
            [type] => db
            [*] => See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at &lt;https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce&gt; for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes.
        )

    [servedby] => mw1189
)

I manually merged Category:SkeletonBiathlon World Cup Champions navigational boxes into Category:Skeleton World Cup champions navigational boxes. That was the first and only hist-merge performed by this run. But before that, it churned through 6669 not-mergeable items (that had previously been merged). Maybe I should tweak the script to skip those, as they've already been processed multiple times. wbm1058 (talk) 19:38, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

Discussion from August 2017 which referenced this bot task

I just noticed this item in my ping list now when I logged in to increase my password's length from 8 to 10 characters. – Merge bot (talk) 16:22, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

• User talk:Xaosflux/Archive35 § Misbehaving bot

Articles left behind after category deleted

I'm seeing a bunch of categories where Mergebot appears to have moved the category to merge in with another one, but left the articles behind. So for instance Category:Taoyuan City, Category:People from Taoyuan City from 15 August and a load of Sport in (Manchester borough) categories like Category:Sport in Bolton, Category:Sport in Stockport etc from 18 August. Something is clearly going badly wrong - can this be tidied up and the bot changed to stop doing this? Le Deluge (talk) 12:29, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Just found Category:Bishops in Poland, Category:Bishops of Turku, Category:Buildings and structures in Bolton and Category:Buildings and structures in Bury as well.Le Deluge (talk) 12:37, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

OOPS, thanks for reporting this. I should have checked to see whether a category had been re-created before restoring the deleted revisions for history-merge. At least the history-merges appear to have been all correctly executed. Now I need to go back and find all the other cases like these. There's likely more than what you've found. wbm1058 (talk) 19:50, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Is it useful for me to report more as I come across them, or have you got it under control? Category:Cassella is the latest one I've found.Le Deluge (talk) 12:54, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

I'm working on the fix right now; it should be done soon. No harm in reporting more cases, in case you find something caused by a different bug in my bot's program. wbm1058 (talk) 13:45, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Still making progress on this, but taking longer than expected due to multiple scenarios where I need to clear false-positives. Still hoping to finish this later today. wbm1058 (talk) 16:05, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

@Le Deluge: User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: pages to be restored lists 73 pages that I will instruct my bot to restore, including the 9 you reported above, unless there is a reason why some of them should be kept deleted. I'm not restoring any deleted pages that are #REDIRECTs or {{Category redirect}}s, or have CFD templates. That's 73 out of 6,669 categories history-merged by the bot so far. – wbm1058 (talk) 22:09, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

From my point of view, I'm more than happy for them all to be restored, I'm only seeing them because they show up in a report of red-linked categories - I see the prince-bishops are there as well. But I'd be a wee bit cautious - some that stand out are the early 20s in the Ottoman Empire which were moved correctly - it's a bit debatable during the civil war but technically the Ottoman Empire existed until 1922. I suspect you might need to whitelist some of the movers like Tim! and Cydebot (who I think implements many of the speedies?). The likes of BrownHairedGirl and Marcocapelle also can be trusted. But the sooner they get off my report the better! <g> Le Deluge (talk) 23:49, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

OK, these 73 categories have been restored. These should all be categories that were re-created after Cydebot "moved" the category to a different title. My bot's hist-merge is intended to more formally complete Cydebot's "move" that was done before it was technically possible to move categories. The only whitelisted users are myself and Merge bot because we created a lot of redirects as a side-effect of our hist-merge operations, and those redirects are intentionally deleted. It's anything else that was unintentionally deleted; I was not looking for editors to re-create the category after it had been merged to another category, though I should have been. – wbm1058 (talk) 01:34, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

@Le Deluge, Mikemor92, Spiderjerky, Bearcat, Borsoka, and Rikster2: You created some pages to fill the gaps left by Merge bot's erroneous deletions; now the history is restored so you can compare your version with the previous version, e.g.:

• Category:United Soccer League seasons
• Category:United Soccer League players
• Category:United Soccer League coaches
• Category:United Soccer League
• Category:European Union case law
• Category:Bishops of Csanád
• Category:Austin Toros coaches
• Category:Austin Toros players

@BrownHairedGirl, John Tann, and DinosaursLoveExistence: Alas, some categories may have been emptied as a result of the erroneous deletions, so now are empty cats upon restoration, e.g.

• Category:Lists of Summer Olympic medalists by sport
• Category:Lists of Winter Olympic medalists by sport
• Category:Anisoptera
• Category:Textiles education
• Category:Austin Toros

Sorry for the inconvenience I've caused y'all. – wbm1058 (talk) 11:53, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Restarting

After a seven-month hiatus, I'm back on this task. Another run through the selection set found 6436 categories which have been restored after Cydebot merged and deleted them. As this makes the processing more complex, I'll defer these to later. I'm surprised this issue wasn't caught during the request-for-approval process, given this many. I see that a lot of them have been resurrected as soft redirects ({{category redirect}}) or category disambiguation ({{category disambiguation}}) pages.

That still leaves 53,797 categories in the main, basic set of categories to be merged, which haven't been culled to any of the various sets with exceptions that have been deferred for later processing.

The last run got back as far as 26 June 2014‎. The current queue of cats to merge shows nine categories newer than that. These should be categories which have already been hist-merged in earlier processing, which has now exposed older moves still needing to be histmerged.

I'll start ramping up slowly again. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:54, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Overlapping timestamps, #4

...and on the ninth one processed...

Merge history failed!! 2898: Category:Public Image Ltd albums <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Public Image Ltd. albums. Authors: Koavf, EmausBot, Tassedethe, Xic667, Cydebot, Bearcat, LongLivePunkRock, Alexbot

    [error] => Array
        (
            [code] => mergehistory-fail-timestamps-overlap
            [info] => Source revisions overlap or come after destination revisions.
            [*] => See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce> for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes.
        )
    [servedby] => mw1289

The culprit:

• 14:43, 18 December 2017 BD2412 restored page Category:Public Image Ltd albums (8 revisions) (restore buried history under blue link)

Similar 5-step (delete, restore, merge, delete, restore) process to repair as #2 and #3 above:

1. delete page Category:Public Image Ltd albums (Re-delete the 8 restored revisions for history-merge)
2. restore page Category:Public Image Ltd albums (5 revisions) (restore the 5 revisions after & including Cydebot's cut-paste move)
3. merge Category:Public Image Ltd. albums into Category:Public Image Ltd albums
4. delete page Category:Public Image Ltd. albums (history-merged)
5. restore page Category:Public Image Ltd albums (8 revisions) (the 8 revisions deleted earlier)

We now have a complete continuous history, except... there were two revisions transcluding {{category redirect}} to make a soft-redirect. I temporarily deleted the page again to split this discontinuous page history, then restored all but those 2 revisions which would have been deleted by a conventional move-over-redirect.

@BD2412: please take care to look for cut-paste moves by Cydebot before restoring buried history under category blue links. Thanks, wbm1058 (talk) 16:02, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

At the risk of sounding horrible, I would rather restore category edit history under a post-cut-and-paste-move redirect than have that history remain buried altogether. We have had a sea change in policy regarding category redirects following the development of the ability to rename categories. Histories that were historically deleted outright when a category was renamed are now preserved. Furthermore, we find that a lot of categories that have been renamed would be better off having the incoming redirect remain rather than be deleted because this allows hotcat to populate the category even by an editor who only knows (or guesses) the previous name. Frankly, edit history attribution is usually far less important for the content of a category than for the text of an article. I think it would suffice to restore the deleted version as a redirect, and then drop a note on the category talk page indicating that some edit history can be found in the edit history of the redirect. bd2412 T 16:41, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Stopped by maxlag, #2

After I deleted Category:Nigerian sportsperson–politicians, it landed in the source has multiple deletions bucket on the next run. Tweaked the bot code to sleep a bit and try again after maxlag errors. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:52, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Overlapping timestamps, #5

Just 38 more processed before the next stop for overlapping timestamps, Category:American athlete-politicians <-- Category:American athlete–politicians 2014-06-23T21:19:32Z <-- 2014-06-23T21:26:55Z (443) – wbm1058 (talk) 01:32, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

So after taking time to get up to speed on where I left off seven months ago, resolving the issue reported on August 21, 2017 so the bot wouldn't do that again, and restarting, the bot has already been stopped 3 times and has just increased the merged-count from 6,669 to 6,728 (by 59). 8 + 19 + 38 = 65 merged in the 3 runs. This is still taking too much babysitting time. wbm1058 (talk) 02:00, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Is there some reason you don't just code the bot to re-delete the category it failed to merge (thereby bringing things back to the state they were before any bot actions) and keep running when it encounters an "overlapping timestamps" error instead of crashing? * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 04:18, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't know, I haven't worked on this task for two years now; it kind of got pushed on my back burner as I got tired of "babysitting" it. Thanks for the nudge, I'll try to get back to this soon. It will take me some time to get back up to speed on how this bot works and to see whether I can make the fix you suggested. wbm1058 (talk) 14:33, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Has this been forgotten about? * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 16:07, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

No, alas, I am juggling three or four time-consuming "top priorities" at the moment. I need a good block of time alloted to focus on this. Sorry. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:05, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

DOH! So I finally figured out why I must have given up back here. After cleaning up the overlapping timestamp #5, I restarted it for another run without doing anything to address the overlapping timestamps in a more robust way as suggested to just recover, report and keep processing. The next run processed exactly 300 categories, as shown by these 900 log items (each category merge takes three logged actions to accomplish). Clicking to the next older 900 logged actions and the next one is the last from the previous run, Category:American athlete–politicians.

Why did it stop at 300? Because I had lowered my limit from 3000 to 300 after having been bitten by the #Articles left behind after category deleted incident! So that run just ended normally after doing just what I set it up to do. But I think I was confused because I forgot I'd set that limit and I couldn't figure out why it stopped without explanation (no error). Combine that with the 3 brief runs above and I think my frustration with "babysitting" this while trying to stay focused on other tasks hit a wall.

So, updating the merged-count I think it should be 6,728 + 300 = 7,028. Not mergeable: 7059 from the full dry run I did yesterday is in the ballpark. The numbers won't be exact, because, well its been over 2 years. wbm1058 (talk) 22:32, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Restarting again

Hiding edit summaries no longer needed for attribution

My last restart, in April 2018, was short-lived. Now after a longer (2 years, 2 months) hiatus, I'm back on this. The first change I noticed is that the bot is getting PHP warnings that it wasn't before. My code assumes that Cydebot always left an edit summary. However Cydebot's summary may have been hidden. An example is Category:Shipyard associates of The Wire. Cydebot's edit summary of 05:39, 24 March 2015:

(Robot: Moved from Category:Shipyard Associates of The Wire. Authors: Grandtheftauto1988, Koavf)

was revision-blanked at 18:10, 27 March 2017 by Od Mishehu:

changed visibility of a revision on page Category:Shipyard associates of The Wire: edit summary hidden (No longer needed for attribution, but prevents listed users from vanishing)

Recall from the BRFA that per the discussion HERE I had coded the bot to do this edit-summary hiding but removed (commented out) that function after finding that the BRFA consensus was not to do that.

@Wbm1058: Did you exclude the pages that have already been histmerged (by Od Mishehu and probably a few by other admins also)?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.6.159.67 (talk • contribs) 12:39, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

I was about to mention that. My next step is to check the deleted revisions for mergeable history. No point in undeleting if there is no mergeable history. Working on that now. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:40, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Note this example of a past histmerge by Od Mishehu: Category:People from Stockport

• 07:04, 26 August 2014 Od Mishehu changed visibility of a revision on page Category:People from Stockport: edit summary hidden (No longer needed for attribution, but prevents listed users from vanishing)

Should this bot do that with its histmerges too? wbm1058 (talk) 21:51, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes, when there is a list of users present (there were periods when the bot didn't do it, but most of the time it did). עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 22:24, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

I think the reason I didn't notice this in April 2018 is that I was running an older version of PHP that did not issue a warning message in this case, and I've since upgraded to a newer PHP version that does warn when an invalid argument supplied for foreach() the invalid argument being a null string rather than the pagename of a category.

Ironically Od Mishehu has since been blocked indefinitely because CheckUser evidence confirmed that the account's owner abusively used multiple accounts. Maybe that's why they wanted to allow listed users to vanish.

These are the 32 cases showing <-- [[:]] reported in User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: no deleted revisions.

Somehow Category:Shipyard associates of The Wire fell onto the Category history merges: destination has deleted history report before.

I'll update my code to trap these cases into a separate report. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:32, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: no edit summary. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:08, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

And now Category:Shipyard associates of The Wire is back in User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: destination has deleted history. Go figure. wbm1058 (talk) 21:18, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

BotPasswords issue

Merge history failed!! 316: Category:Beauty pageants in North Macedonia <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Beauty pageants in Macedonia. Authors: Tassedethe, Ser Amantio di Nicolao
Array
(
    [error] => Array
        (
            [code] => mergehistory-fail-permission
            [info] => Insufficient permissions to merge history.
            [*] => See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at &lt;https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce&gt; for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes.
        )

    [servedby] => mw1358
)

@Pppery: see Wikipedia talk:Bots#BotPasswords permission for merge history. As soon as the new version of MediaWiki goes live that lets me grant this bot mergehistory rights, this task should be back in action. Previously this bot just logged in directly, but that's been deemed to be insecure. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:18, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

The mergehistory grant for mergehistory is a core change in mw:MediaWiki 1.35/wmf.40. The current MediaWiki version is 1.43.0-wmf.2 (ce9d259). – wbm1058 (talk) 17:58, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Y mergehistory granted, all systems go. wbm1058 (talk) 21:55, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Category:Beauty pageants in Macedonia manually merged after landing in User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: source has multiple deletions. wbm1058 (talk) 21:10, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Overlapping timestamps, #6

This run did 513 merges before hitting

Merge history failed!! 8370: Category:Nguyễn lords <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Nguyễn Lords. Authors: The Bushranger, Callanecc
Array
(
    [error] => Array
        (
            [code] => mergehistory-fail-timestamps-overlap
            [info] => Source revisions overlap or come after destination revisions.
            [*] => See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at &lt;https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce&gt; for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes.
        )

    [servedby] => mw1283
)

In this case I think the only thing to do is delete Category:Nguyễn Lords as there is actually nothing there to merge. The two restored edits that I re-deleted:

• 04:00, 24 May 2014 . . The Bushranger 637 bytes (Fixing breaking of the moving bot)
• 02:16, 24 May 2014 . . Callanecc 54 bytes (Callanecc moved page Category:Nguyễn Lords to Category:Nguyễn lords: WP:C2C, requested at WP:CFD)

and the log at Category:Nguyễn lords:

• 11:25, 25 May 2014 The Bushranger restored page Category:Nguyễn lords (13 revisions restored)
• 04:00, 24 May 2014 The Bushranger deleted page Category:Nguyễn lords (G6: Housekeeping and routine (non-controversial) cleanup: This breaks the moving bot!!)

— wbm1058 (talk) 15:04, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

So, what's happening with this task? In this specific case, the fix I proposed above (re-delete the category it failed to merge (thereby bringing things back to the state they were before any bot actions) and keep running would have been the correct bot action. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 03:17, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

@Pppery: sorry, after a short burst of activity in July this quickly fell back to my back burner. Your suggestion makes sense; I will try to make another run at this task soon. Please ping me when you post on this page, thanks. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:28, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

December 2020

16 December 2020

Back up and running today, latest run went normally and processed 3284 merges, Did not run into overlapping timestamps, #7 yet. – wbm1058 (talk) 04:38, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

17 December 2020

Today's run went normally, processed 5000 more. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:34, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

18 December 2020

Today's first run processed 2130 history-merges before stopping at overlapping timestamps, #7, Category:Laser communication in Space. The bot deletes these now before stopping, but I just restored it again to do a manual hist-merge after deleting the blocking edit at the target page. So 3284+5000+2130 = 10,414 processed between #6 and #7. As long as they're this rare I'll just let the program stop, fix it manually and then restart, rather than put more effort into tracking them for later processing. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:38, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

Today's second run processed 1458 history-merges before stopping due to this error:

Merge history failed!! 25737: Category:Songs written by Gabrielle (singer) <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Songs written by Gabrielle. Authors: Richhoncho
Array
(
    [error] => Array
        (
            [code] => assertuserfailed
            [info] => You are no longer logged in, so the action could not be completed.
            [*] => See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at &lt;https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce&gt; for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes.
        )

    [servedby] => mw1339
)

Since my code is not checking for this error and logging back in after it happens, and I patched botclasses.php to prevent editing while logged out, the bot did not write its online reports at the end of this run, so all I have is the console report.

Today's two runs processed 2130+1458 = 3588 history-merges. – wbm1058 (talk) 05:19, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

19 December 2020

I patched the code to log back in after "assertuserfailed" errors, and resume processing in similar fashion as recovery from "maxlag" errors (where it sleeps 10 seconds rather than log back in). – wbm1058 (talk) 14:49, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Today's run processed 4827 history-merges, stopping at overlapping timestamps, #8, Category:Israeli people of Yemeni origin, which I manually merged after deleting 3 revisions of Category:Israeli people of Yemeni descent which had been restored that were blocking the history-merge. – wbm1058 (talk) 03:47, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

20 December 2020

Sigh, today's first run just processed 52 before stopping at overlapping timestamps, #9, Category:Israeli people of Uzbekistani descent <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Israeli people of Uzbekistani origin. The deeper into this processing gets, the more inefficient and time-consuming it gets to restart after a fail. Manually merged after deleting 3 revisions of Category:Israeli people of Uzbekistani descent which had been restored that were blocking the history-merge. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:49, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: This is probably going to be a problem for all of the categories renamed at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2012 May 23#Israeli people of FOOian origin. You may want to manually merge all of them now instead of waiting for the bot to fail at each one individually. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 16:43, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

Not all of them, but I think most of them. The bot successfully merged Category:Israeli people of Uruguayan descent as there were no blocking edits there. I deleted the blocking revisions for next four in that list, working from the bottom up, and that caused the bot to put them at the end of the "destination has deleted history" list:

1. Category:Israeli people of Ukrainian descent <-- Category:Israeli people of Ukrainian origin
2. Category:Israeli people of Turkish descent <-- Category:Israeli people of Turkish origin
3. Category:Israeli people of Tunisian descent <-- Category:Israeli people of Tunisian origin
4. Category:Israeli people of Syrian descent <-- Category:Israeli people of Swiss origin

There are different reasons for categories landing in this list. Looking at the first one on the list, Category:Shipyard associates of The Wire, I found that both segments to be hist-merged were deleted per a CfD discussion but then someone re-created the category sometime after it was deleted. I suppose restoring deleted histories to hist-merge them only to delete them after they were merged is a low priority. Thus it makes sense to treat Israeli people of FOOian origin categories as a one-off and process them manually now rather than half-fix them into a category where they get lost among many low-priority items.

The second run of the day just processed 2 hist-merges... relaunch of the bot is on hold for weather delay until the "Israeli people of FOOian origin" clouds are cleared. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:25, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Note from the fourth item listed above, Syrian and Swiss were accidentally mixed. I think I've sorted them out. The bot stopped on the next one after those four/five, Category:Israeli people of Swedish origin to Category:Israeli people of Swedish descent. I've fixed that one, still a lot more to do. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:14, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

January 2021

4 January 2021 – Wiki in read-only mode, #2

I finished clearing the "Israeli people of FOOian origin" clouds yesterday. Today's run processed 973 history-merges, stopping with this error:

Merge history failed!! 33301: Category:Iranian blues singers <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Iranian Blues Singers. Authors: Good Olfactory, Pouyakhani
Array
(
    [error] => Array
        (
            [code] => readonly
            [info] => The database has been automatically locked while the replica database servers catch up to the master
            [readonlyreason] => Waiting for 5 lagged database(s)
            [*] => See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at &lt;https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce&gt; for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes.
        )

    [servedby] => mw1386
)

That's the second time this has happened, see #Wiki in read-only mode. I suppose I should patch the code to sleep for a while when this happens, then try again, similar to "maxlag" errors. I don't know how long it takes for the replica database servers catch up to the master, but I don't image it's more than a few seconds. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:35, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

5 January 2021

Smooth sailing today, 5000 history-merges done. – wbm1058 (talk) 05:15, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

6 January 2021 – overlapping timestamps, #10

Category:NOAA Weather Radio <-- Robot: Moved from Category:NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards

• at 00:52, 4 March 2016 SQL merged Category:Weather radio stations in the United States into Category:NOAA Weather Radio (revisions up to 17:32, 23 January 2011) (merge cat per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2016_January_17#Category:NOAA_Weather_Radio)

4421 more done. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:48, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

7 January 2021 – overlapping timestamps, #11

Category:Residential condominiums in Washington, D.C. <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Condominiums in Washington, D.C.

407 more done. – wbm1058 (talk) 04:59, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

8 January 2021 – overlapping timestamps, #12

Category:Residential condominiums in San Francisco <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Condominiums in San Francisco, California

Sigh. Launch failure due to clouds hovering over residential condominiums in the United States. I will look for more and clear any found. Hopefully there aren't too many. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:06, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Category:Unclassified miscellaneous vessels of the United States Navy <-- Robot: Moved from Category:United States Navy unclassified miscellaneous

Not just condos. User talk:Hazard-SJ/Archive 3#Speedy category renaming:

Hi there! Your work at Categories for discussion/Speedy is appreciated. However, you shouldn't rename categories before a full 48 hours has passed, and you also need to use the process through WP:Categories for discussion/Working, which has Cydebot perform the moves while maintaining attribution for the categories in question - there is an existing bot that does this work. I have stopped the bot pending resolution of this - please discuss at WT:CFD - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 20:36, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Archive 13#Hmmmm.

• Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Hazard-Bot 2
• Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Hazard-Bot 3

Logs:

• The Bushranger – wbm1058 (talk) 23:22, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
• Hazard-SJ edits
• Deleted Hazard-SJ contributions

I've found and cleared a total of 18 Hazard-SJ-generated clouds. None of these were from the bot account. – wbm1058 (talk) 04:02, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

14 January 2021

Smooth run, processed 2663 hist-merges before hitting the end of my limited selection set. Will open up to the full set for the next run. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:05, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Second run processed 4710 hist-merges, stopped at:

Category:British culture <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Culture of the United Kingdom – [code] => mergehistory-fail-timestamps-overlap

at 03:24, 12 October 2011 BD2412 restored page Category:British culture (88 revisions restored: restore buried history)

Hopefully this is a one-off. Resolved by manually doing two history-merges. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:48, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

15 January 2021 – JobQueueError

Processed 1073 history-merges before running into an error I don't recall seeing before:

Delete failed!! 56869: Category:Athletes (track and field) at the 1964 Summer Olympics <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Athletes at the 1964 Summer Olympics.

Array
(
    [error] => Array
        (
            [code] => internal_api_error_JobQueueError
            [info] => [YAHVPwpAMNoAAqF4NksAAACX] Caught exception of type JobQueueError
            [errorclass] => JobQueueError
        )

    [servedby] => mw1376
)

— wbm1058 (talk) 18:58, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

After manually doing that delete, the second run of the day processed 5000 history-merges. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:56, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

16 January 2021 – overlapping timestamps

Processed 1445 hist-merges before: Merge history failed!! 65406: Category:Booker T. & the M.G.'s albums <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Booker T. & the MGs albums

• at 16:22, 26 July 2010 BD2412 restored page Category:Booker T. & the M.G.'s albums (6 revisions restored: restore buried history) – wbm1058 (talk) 23:09, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

17 January 2021 – overlapping timestamps

Processed 3145 hist-merges before: Merge history failed!! 69605: Category:Populated places in the Central African Republic <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Settlements in the Central African Republic

• at 10:23, 11 August 2015 Od Mishehu restored page Category:Cities, towns and villages in the Central African Republic (17 revisions restored: History merge)
• at 10:23, 11 August 2015 Od Mishehu merged Category:Cities, towns and villages in the Central African Republic into Category:Populated places in the Central African Republic (revisions up to 15:51, 28 May 2010) (History merge)

---

• Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 May 15#More settlements

  c. 244 country categories

  The result of the discussion was: Rename Category:Settlements in the Central African Republic to Category:Populated places in the Central African Republic — ξ^xplicit 22:37, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 May 17#Many more settlements

  The result of the discussion was: relisted at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 May 28#Many more settlements. We have consensus to rename, but the original plan to have a bot tag these thousands of categories has fallen through. So we are relisting with hopes of either a new bot plan or consensus to rename without tagging.--Mike Selinker (talk) 03:50, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

  c. 100 cities, towns and villages by country categories

  Merge Category:Cities, towns and villages in the Central African Republic to Category:Populated places in the Central African Republic

– wbm1058 (talk) 14:50, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

18 January 2021 – overlapping timestamps

Processed 1931 hist-merges before: Merge history failed!! 72867: Category:Case Closed anime DVD covers <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Case Closed Anime DVD covers – wbm1058 (talk) 02:07, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

19 January 2021

Today's run went normally, processed 5000 more. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:50, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

20 January 2021 – "easy" case processing completed

First run of the day processed 1148 history merges before hitting the end of the (full) selection set.

First attempt at a second, mopup run to process needed hist-merges uncovered by the previous run inexplicably failed when trying to undelete the first item found for hist-merge.

Second attempt was successful – it successfully processed the item it failed on before, and that turned out to be the only item needing to be mopped up.

So the "easy" cases approved by the BRFA are done, leaving the "edge cases" that were deferred for later processing. Final run stats:

92519 user contributions
Found count: 89850
   Destination has deleted history: 4995
   Mergeable: 23109
     Source was not deleted by Cydebot: 14579
     Source has multiple deletions: 3935
     Category was restored: 4594
     Hist-mergeable: 1 -- max. time difference = 7 -- min. time difference = 7
     Self-mergeable: 0 (see § Recovering self-merges needing to be done)
   Not mergeable: 61746
No edit summary (likely was hidden): 0
Self-mergeable, no deleted revisions: 36
Other no deleted revisions: 2633

This task has history-merged over 60,000 categories, as reported in the "Not mergeable" reports. — wbm1058 (talk) 15:55, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Recovering self-merges needing to be done

I just observed that when I created User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: destination has deleted history on 4 February 2017‎, that usurped all items in User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: self-merge, blanking it. These "self-mergeable" items are a special case of "destination has deleted history" where the item can be history-merged simply by restoring the deleted history. I'll restructure the code to recover this list and rerun the full scan to regenerate the reports. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:12, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

92519 user contributions
Found count: 89850
   Destination has deleted history: 4996
     Self-mergeable: 1688 (report)
   Mergeable: 23107
     Source was not deleted by Cydebot: 14578
     Source has multiple deletions: 3935
     Category was restored: 4594
     Hist-mergeable: 0 -- max. time difference = 0 -- min. time difference = 999
   Not mergeable: 61747
No edit summary (likely was hidden): 0
Self-mergeable, no deleted revisions: 36 (report)
Other no deleted revisions: 2633

1688 instances of this special case. After these are "hist-merged" by simply restoring the deleted revisions, they will fall into the "Self-mergeable, no deleted revisions" bucket; the items there were already "hist-merged" by human administrators, by simply restoring the deleted revisions. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:33, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Category:Adele songs (populating User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: self-merge) and Category:Adele albums (populating User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: self-merge, no deleted revisions) represent a couple of "gotchas" to check for.

• The deleted history of Category:Adele songs has 6 newer revisions which are a deleted fork which should remain deleted. The 25 older revisions should be restored.
• The 37 revisions of Category:Adele albums restored on 7 November 2015 include 9 newer revisions that probably shouldn't have been restored, as well as the 28 older revisions restored to complete the "hist-merge". Now there is a mixed parallel-history stew; those nine revisions need to be picked out if re-burial is desired. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:04, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Missed history merge?

@Wbm1058: I just stumbled across Category:Replaceable non-free use Wikipedia files disputed, which was moved from Category:Replaceable fair use images disputed by Cydebot in 2009 and seems to have been completely missed by Merge bot. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:17, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Looking at it more closely, it appears that a rare Cydebot bug cause the bot to omit the list of authors in the edit summary, and then Merge bot failed to parse the resulting summary properly. As a result, it (and several other categories) ended up in User:Wbm1058/Category history merges: no deleted revisions with an extra "Authors:" in the source title. You should probably fix that edit summary parsing bug and rerun the bot. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:25, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I'd coded the regex to assume that there was always a space after the colon in Cydebot's edit summary:preg_replace("/\.\sAuthors:\s.*/", "",
I removed the \s and reran the bot... wbm1058 (talk) 11:34, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

24 March 2021 – overlapping timestamps

Today's run processed 5 history-merges. Apparently these were opened up for processing by moves that happened after the last Merge bot run on 20 January 2021.

1. Category:Jewish-American gangsters <-- Category:Jewish American mobsters 2013-07-26T21:30:45Z <-- 2013-07-26T21:34:49Z (244)
   • At 05:23, 17 February 2021 JJMC89 bot III moved page Category:Jewish-American mobsters to Category:Jewish-American gangsters without leaving a redirect (Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 February 8#Category:Mobsters)
2. Category:CF Montréal coaches <-- Category:Montreal Impact (MLS) coaches 2013-06-01T01:39:07Z <-- 2013-06-01T01:39:28Z (21)
   • At 03:05, 25 January 2021 JJMC89 bot III moved page Category:Montreal Impact coaches to Category:CF Montréal coaches (Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 January 16#Category:Montreal Impact)
3. Category:Tabernacle Choir members <-- Category:Members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir 2012-06-01T11:05:54Z <-- 2012-06-01T11:08:38Z (164)
   • At 02:36, 6 February 2021 JJMC89 bot III moved page Category:Mormon Tabernacle Choir members to Category:Tabernacle Choir members (Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Speedy)
4. Category:Kyrgyzstani gangsters <-- Category:Kyrgyz mobsters 2011-12-07T09:54:46Z <-- 2011-12-07T09:54:53Z (7)
   • At 06:01, 17 February 2021 JJMC89 bot III moved page Category:Kyrgyzstani mobsters to Category:Kyrgyzstani gangsters without leaving a redirect (Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 February 8#Category:Mobsters)
5. Category:Government of Singapore <-- Category:Executive branch of the Singapore Government 2011-04-25T19:38:16Z <-- 2011-04-25T19:39:32Z (76)
   • At 08:47, 12 March 2021 JJMC89 bot III moved page Category:Executive branch of the Singapore Government to Category:Executive branch of the government of Singapore without leaving a redirect (Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 February 26#Category:Executive branch of the Singapore Government)
   • Merge history failed!! 55083: Category:Government of Singapore <-- Robot: Moved from Category:Executive branch of the Singapore Government. Authors: Jacklee, Laurel Lodged, Cydebot
     • At 02:33, 31 October 2011 BD2412 restored page Category:Government of Singapore (15 revisions restored: restore buried history)

Didn't get to any of the "\s merges" before processing stopped. I'm guessing these are all clustered towards the end, as processing proceeds backwards in time, and this Cydebot bug was likely fixed at some point. – wbm1058 (talk) 11:34, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

• 22 January 2021: destination has deleted history: Category:Jewish-American mobsters <-- Category:Jewish American mobsters
  • On 17 February 2021 Category:Jewish-American mobsters moved to Category:Jewish-American gangsters, where there was no deleted history.
• 22 January 2021: destination has deleted history: Category:Montreal Impact coaches <-- Category:Montreal Impact (MLS) coaches
  • On 25 January 2021 Category:Montreal Impact coaches moved to Category:CF Montréal coaches, where there was no deleted history.
• 22 January 2021: destination has deleted history: Category:Mormon Tabernacle Choir members <-- Category:Members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir
  • On 6 February 2021 Category:Mormon Tabernacle Choir members moved to Category:Tabernacle Choir members, where there was no deleted history.
• 22 January 2021: destination has deleted history: Category:Kyrgyzstani mobsters <-- Category:Kyrgyz mobsters
  • On 17 February 2021 Category:Kyrgyzstani mobsters moved to Category:Kyrgyzstani gangsters, where there was no deleted history.
• 22 January 2021: category restored: Category:Government of Singapore <-- Category:Executive branch of the Singapore Government
  • On 12 March 2021 Category:Executive branch of the Singapore Government moved to Category:Executive branch of the government of Singapore, moving the "restored category" off the top of the deleted history.

This explains why my test runs always got slightly different results – the targets are always moving. – wbm1058 (talk) 11:55, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Category:Government of Singapore and Category:Executive branch of the government of Singapore were a tangled mess including a scope-changing move and a copy-paste to undo that. I've sorted them out. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:59, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

26 March 2021 – "\s merges" done

Processed 1451 history merges before hitting the end of the (full) selection set. – wbm1058 (talk) 01:11, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

28 March 2021 – "easy" mop-up done

Processed 20 history-merges which were uncovered by the previous run. At this point I'm ready to move on to start processing the first of the "edge cases" that were deferred for later processing. Next up is those items which were deleted by Cyde. I believe most or all of these were from before he set up his bot account to do the deletions. My report of these shows about 7300 items dating from 2008-09-28 back to 2006-04-28. The end of the not mergeable report shows just 10 items older than Category:New South Wales state politicians (2008-10-01T09:17:07Z), which was the last merge processed on my last big run (1148 items) in January. I verified that all 10 were manually hist-merged by various administrators. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:45, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Processing items deleted by Cyde

1 April 2021 – test run

Processed 50 items. Will wait a while to see if any problems reported, before opening up the throttle. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:02, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

6 April 2021 – bigger run

Processed 250 items. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:40, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

7 April 2021

First run of the day processed 472 history merges before stopping with an "assertuserfailed" error when trying to delete a merged category. Somehow within a fraction of a second between successfully hist-merging a category and trying to delete the hist-merged category the bot got logged out. Murphy's law. I updated the code to check for this and log the bot back in before resuming processing. No reports were produced from this run due to the logout glitch. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:43, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Second run of the day processed 2896 items before stopping with a "readonly" error [The database has been automatically locked while the replica database servers catch up to the master. Waiting for 5 lagged database(s).] Another error for which I could code a more robust recovery. – wbm1058 (talk) 23:36, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

8 April 2021

Normal run to the end of the Cyde-selection set, processed 3553 history-merges. Running a "mopup" on the full selection set today, to catch any remaining items and produce complete status reports before deciding what to do next. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:31, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

9 April 2021

Today's run processed 58 history-merges. wbm1058 (talk) 22:15, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Some more ideas

1. I've never understood why you are excluding pages where the destination has deleted history, since Merge bot, were it to run, wouldn't do anything with that deleted history. You seem to have added that check in response to a comment by User:Slakr on the BRFA, however his concerns seem to be addressed by the "source has multiple deletions" check.
2. You can probably safely process self-merges where the sole admin to delete the source category was Cyde or Cydebot and the source category was only deleted once (these happen when a category is moved by cut-and-paste from A to B and then moved back from B to A using a history-preserving move). It's probably necessary to separately make sure to only restore revisions earlier that the recreation of the category in this case, since the undelete API won't protect you in the way the mergehistory API does with overlapping timestamps.
3. You can probably safely process "category restored" entries that otherwise would be mergeable by just doing an undelete and a history merge and skipping the delete at the end. After all, the history merges that caused the #Articles left behind after category deleted incident were performed correctly aside from accidentally deleting the recreated category.

@Wbm1058: * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:19, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: Any update on this? * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:18, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm just swamped with other work, and new stuff keeps coming into my domain. Eventually I hope to make time for this again. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:23, 3 April 2022 (UTC)