Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 14

Archive 10

←

Archive 12

Archive 13

Archive 14

Archive 15

Archive 16

→

Archive 20

Template:Di-no fair use rationale bot

A lot of images get tagged with {{Di-no fair use rationale}} (aka {{nrd}}). The tagger usually notifies the uploader of the tagging, which is good. However, the template specifically asks the tagger to "Add following to the image captions: {{deletable image-caption}}". Many taggers do not do this. A quick, random check of the first page of Category:Images with no fair use rationale indicates that many such images are not so tagged. This leaves only one interested person, in most cases, aware of the tagging, instead of anyone watching the articles on which the image is included. In most cases, the rationale is obvious -- organization logos on the organization's article, for example -- and article contributors would be happy to add it, especially to avoid the trouble of having the image deleted. Without the {{deletable image-caption}} tag, though, such article contributors will likely be completely unaware of the tagging until the image is deleted.

What I would propose is a bot that could add the {{deletable image-caption}} tag to the captions of any images tagged with {{Di-no fair use rationale}}. This would notify article contributors without overburdening our intrepid and dedicated fair-use rationale patrollers.

Powers ^T 14:56, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Im sorry but I write a bot that does nrd tagging and editing image captions is just far too tricky, template syntax is not standard and adding the caption template would just break stuff. (I know Ive tried). β^_command 14:59, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Yikes. That's too bad. Would posting a notice on the articles' talk pages be an acceptable compromise, or would that be considered "spam"? Powers ^T 15:02, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

that is what BCBot does. ill think about writing this. β^_command 01:51, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

AzaToth has some way of doing it with Twinkle. His way doesn't quite work, so I run a script every couple days to fix some of them. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:27, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Question concerning Interwiki bots

Salutations, I use to translate many articles from Wikipedia in English to Wikipedia in Portuguese; however, I perceive that the Portuguese version link is not added in the English version's Interwiki list. So, my question is: how often do the Interwiki bots function? Can I request for an Interwiki bot to add the Portuguese version to several articles? How do these bots do this? Thank you in advance, Sanscrit1234 22:03, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Remember that the iw bots really only propagate changes, so if your articles don't have any iw links, the bots can't add any. --ST47Talk·Desk 22:55, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

DFBot replacement?

Sorry if this has been asked here before, but User:Dragons flight's bot has stopped functioning b/c of user absence, and I was wondering if there was interest in creating a new bot with the same functions, such as AfD summaries (I think RfA stuff is taken care of right now). ~Eliz81^(C) 05:50, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

reference bot

i've found im incresingly coming by pages that have references (as in <ref></ref>) but no {{reference}}, i was wonderin if theres any way to have a bot built to add in the reference template for pages that dont have one but do have references... if that makes sense, Ancientanubis, talk Editor Review 23:18, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

I've seen a lot of that too. Shouldn't be that hard to do, either (I don't have time to right this second, however...) --SXT4^{$\color {Red}\oplus$} 01:32, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

On second thought, I'm game :P I'd like some input from a more experienced user on the Regex'es I'm using However... Do they cover all the tags? --SXT4^{$\color {Red}\oplus$} 02:22, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

There is also {{ref-section}}, but that doesn't seem used much. -- JLaTondre 02:30, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

I am 100% in favior of this and {{reference}} is good but there is also {{reflist}} and <references/> and maybe more that do the same thing, how would you tell if it really needs the {{reference}}? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeepday (talk • contribs)

Using regex'es, and, an OR(|) operator :) --SXT4^{$\color {Red}\oplus$} 02:56, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

if there is no real difference, then why dont we just use {{reference}} and let who ever doesnt like it to work out the difference???Ancientanubis, talk Editor Review 03:15, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Template:Reference redirects to Template:Reflist. Let's not intentionally place redirects into articles, if it can be helped, please. Cheers. --MZMcBride 03:30, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

That's what I was thinking :) Still gotta look for it, but, likely just to place a {{Reflist}}. I'm done with stage 1, the scraper (can be found here). I'm going to let it run a couple hours, and, see what it generates, It's not looking like a LOT will be generated, so, I may just have it post the list, to a page, and, then attack it by hand... --SXT4^{$\color {Red}\oplus$} 03:34, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Man! This is slow going. Might be a couple weeks :( I probably need to work from dump XML, but, I'm having trouble getting it to parse right...

All I got after 24hrs of checking:

• *MTV
• .au
• .edu.sg
• .gov.sg
• .net.sg
• .per.sg
• .tk
• 1-800-free411
• 11-17-70
• 1172
• 1616
• 1775
• 1879
• 1890
• 1960s
• 1970s

Looking for a more experienced botmaster to pawn this one off on... --SXT4^{$\color {Red}\oplus$} 04:23, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to a kangaroo court, I'm not allowed to do it. But there also are several other ways to find some of the articles: Get the lists of articles calling some citation templates and compare them with the lists of reflist and reflist2. You won't find all the articles, but you'll find many. Another way is to request that cite.php emit a log entry when the end of an article is reached without emitting the citations. The log could be of limited size as it is intended for action rather than for a historical record. (SEWilco 04:49, 31 August 2007 (UTC))

I just manually corrected these ones identified above. I would like to suggest that in stead of looking for <ref> you search for ==Ref* or == Ref* and if not found add

  ==References==
  {{reflist}}

at the bottom of the article unless

"[[Category:*" where the * is a wild card, then add it just above the first "[[Category:*".

Every article should have a reference section, if there are no reference present it will encourage editors to add the references if there unposted references it will post them.

Jeepday (talk) 12:49, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

And what if the article uses {{ref}}/{{note}} for references? MaxSem 13:19, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

I'll have to add support for that, although, those tags are depreciated :) (BTW, This is SXT40... Changed usernames today...) --SQL^{(Query Me!)} 19:20, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

If they use {{ref}}/{{note}} or <references/> then they should have a reference section, if they have a reference section they will have "==Ref* or == Ref*". There are some occasions I have seen where the {{note}} is used to populate a "footnote" section. In my experience this has generally be included with a "references" section that includes a list of books, by the logic above it would not get a reference section by the bot. In the remote case where a "footnote" section exists and a reference section does not, what is the harm in adding a reference section? Jeepday (talk) 12:45, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, there actually turned out to be a few of these :) I'm only to about 'Ai so far, but, here's the list thusfar: User:SQL/Reflist :) --SQL^{(Query Me!)} 02:18, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Done, but...

OK, after a major rewrite, the bot's done running. 4,310 articles identified as broken. The list is here. However, I don't think I'm up to making a bot to fix them, and, that's an awful lot to do by hand.... Anybody up for it? :) (Plain txt file available upon request) --SQL^{(Query Me!)} 07:36, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for making the list SQL. If someone will make the bot, I will help with the verifying and problem solving the bot's work. There is at least one other set (Wikipedia_talk:Bot_policy#Ganeshbot_articles) the bot could be used on so, this bot would get more work. Jeepday (talk) 13:04, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

NP :) I thought it was done running, but, it's not... Maybe a few more hours... Up to well past 13,000 articles! :( --SQL^{(Query Me!)} 14:04, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Whew, finally! The end tally was 16,300+ articles, confirmed as bad. Split the 500K+ list up, into 6 subpages... I've got it in TXT format, if needed. SQL^{(Query Me!)} 20:40, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm running some test, but clearing 95%+ of these seems do-able. Rich Farmbrough, 15:42 11 September 2007 (GMT).

Any chance that you can use {{Reflist}} instead of <references/>? The aesthetic is greatly different, at least for Firefox users. --After Midnight ⁰⁰⁰¹ 02:27, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

See my comment at template talk:Reflist. Rich Farmbrough, 08:05 12 September 2007 (GMT).

List of related topics maintaince

There are various "list of related topics" articles, such as the articles in Category:Lists of topics by country, which are used as watch lists to track all article changes for a specific topic. For example, you can track the Indonesia related changes using this link: Special:Recentchangeslinked/List of Indonesia-related topics. There are two problems with maintaining these lists which a bot could provide assistance with:

1. Whenever an article linked from the "list of related topics" is moved, changes to the article no longer show up in the recent linked changes since the link now points to the redirect page instead of the new article name. A bot could solve this by finding all links on the "list of related topics" article and replacing these with links to the actual article name.
2. (a less significant problem) For any articles which are deleted, the link to the article should be removed from the "list of related topics" article.

Until now I've been doing these tasks manually, but its a huge amount of effort to do so even just for the List of Indonesia-related topics page. (Caniago 11:07, 11 September 2007 (UTC))

There is a standard pywikipedia function to create lists from category's. There not sorted, but if all you do is use Recentchanges this is not a problem. I think WP:AWB does the same if you want to do it yourself. :: maelgwn - talk 11:27, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

What you seem to be suggesting is to recreate the page again from scratch. This would solve one additional problem, how to add newly created pages to the list, but it would create others. To create the list entirely from scratch is not really possible (without alot of work) since there was quite a bit of manual work to tweak the original bot generated list so it covered the right articles. Alternatively, to semi-automatically recreate parts of the list from sub-categories would seem to involve an ongoing manual effort which I'd like to avoid. Maybe a bot could look at the headings which already exist in the list and regenerate the sub-articles from the corresponding category in an automated manor? (Caniago 11:41, 11 September 2007 (UTC))

Um I could create subpages from each category, that could then be transcluded onto the list. Im sure a bot writer out there could do it fairly easily straight onto one page. :: maelgwn - talk 11:58, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Broken anchor finder

There are many links to Somepage that exists#But some anchor that doesn't. A bot should be made... Jidanni 03:20, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Android Mouse Bot used to do this, but the bot is no longer active. I'll consider creating a clone. — madman bum and angel 14:32, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Request bot for image renaming

Currently, in order to rename images to comply with WP:IUP#Image titles and file names, a user must download the image, re-upload the image under the new name, and replace all usages in articles. What I am suggesting is that the template {{ifr}} be modified to include a parameter for a suggested new name for the image, and that a bot then work the images in Category:Images for renaming to upload the image under the new file name and replace all instances of its usage in articles. The old image would then be tagged with {{db-redundantimage}}.

There would probably need to be some warning functionality to be used if the suggested new image name was already in use (or the bot could add an extra character to the image name, or something similar).

Much of the code could probably be recycled from User:PNG crusade bot, which performs an extremely similar function in converting images to PNG format. Videmus Omnia ^Talk 23:57, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I would also suggest a message to the original uploader so that they can watchlist the new image if they so desire. Videmus Omnia ^Talk 00:11, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

give me a week or so and I may be able to do this, My bot does almost the same thing. It uploads images to commons. β^_command 02:52, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

MOTDBot

Can someone make a bot to help in WP:MOTD, especially moving mottos in In Review to Awaiting desicions?--Sunny910910 ^{(talk|Contributions)Neither will alone, nor strength alone} 00:07, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

I'll look at this one. It seems similar to a simple archival bot; it just moves a third-level section to a different parent section based on the first timestamp. Correct me if I'm wrong. — madman bum and angel 18:54, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Request to add template to talk pages in county

Hi, I've never used a bot before & hope I word this correctly. Wikipedia:WikiProject Somerset has just been set up & it would be great if Template:Somerset could be added to the talk pages of all articles in Category:Somerset and all of its sub categories. Is this the sort of thing a bot could do? If you need any further info please let me know— Rod ^talk 16:26, 15 September 2007 (UTC) .

Should be easy. Rich Farmbrough, 12:00 17 September 2007 (GMT).

Australia project category count

Is there a bot available to take on the task to provide a count of articles within the following categories for WikiProject Australia?

• Category:Underpopulated Australia categories (category count)

• Category:Underpopulated (Year) in Australia categories (category count)

• Category:Australia articles needing attention

• Category:Australia articles needing expert attention
• Category:Automatically assessed Australia articles
• Category:Australia articles needing infoboxes
• Category:Australia-centric

• Category:Australia stubs
• Category:Australia collaboration candidates
• Category:Requests for Australia peer review

Information on the article count should then be presented to a table with clickable wikilinks to the category. Any takers? -- Longhair\^talk 10:51, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Why do you need a bot for this? The categories already say the number of articles in them. --Agüeybaná 22:59, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Results are at User:Balloonguy/sandbox. --Balloonguy 23:26, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that. That's very much what's needed. Why do I need a bot to do this? Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in the wee hours of the night when I typed that up sorry. I don't wish to visit those cartegories daily and update the count manually. We simply need a method to track the backlogs for the Australia project so editors looking for something to do can dig into it. Will the bot be able to update a table like that every few hours with the current count? -- Longhair\^talk 00:17, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, unable to do the above--Balloonguy 18:40, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

I can set up a cronjob for this which uses the toolserver database. At the moment the replag for enwiki is 4 days so I don't think it's very useful right now, but this should get better. What do you want the output to be? I can simply use any format you want. Should the counts include only mainspace articles or all pages (in- or excluding subcategories)? Almost anything is possible, e.g. I could list the number of mainspace articles, talk pages and subcategories for each category.--Erwin85 18:55, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Example at User:Erwin85/Scratch1. --Erwin85 19:26, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

That sounds perfect. After raising this with the rest of the Australian community, there's been some changes to the categories. I've listed them at User:Longhair/AUWPtable. We possibly need separate tables. -- Longhair\^talk 23:20, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Protection check bot

I know that this has been brought up before, but I don't think any bot or process can currently do this: would it be possible for a bot (or something else) to check protected pages and generate a list of all of the pages that have protection tags that shouldn't, and generate a list of all the pages that should have a protection tag that don't? Hopefully, this would include all pages, including templates. Thoughts? --MZMcBride 03:43, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

We already have bots that remove protection tags that shouldn't be there, and automatically adding protection tags to protected pages has caused controversy in the past. — madman bum and angel 05:01, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I know that. I wasn't looking for a bot to edit protected pages, just find the ones that need them and make a list. Also, I regularly clean out Category:Protected pages with expiry expired, so I'm not sure there is a bot currently running for this; else it just doesn't run very often... --MZMcBride 01:13, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

User:DumbBOT removes protection tags from non-protected articles. Looking at its contribs, it does that task every few day. -- JLaTondre 01:20, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Wikibot for Portal:British Army

I have created a British Army portal. Unfortunately, all the pages associated to the British Army (every page included within Category:British Army) need the following box added to every page: {{Portal|British Army|Flag of the British Army.svg|65}}. The box needs to go under the See Also section, or similiar as not every page has a 'See Also' section (unless you made the bot create that section). If anyone can create a bot that could do this task for me, I would appreciate it. I am the only Co-Ordinator, so there is no need for discussion on whether the portal's community would like it to happen and I have finished creating the portal, so it is ready to be shown to the public en masse. Jhfireboy Talk 22:43, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Let me look into it :). CO₂ 23:57, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

School IP tagging bot

Selketbot is MIA. Can someone please make a replacement and put it on 24/7/365 toolserv, because I, other users and other administrators are tired of tagging SchoolIPs. Thanks. M.^(er) 08:09, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

First, if you are going to come here and instruct us to help you because you're bored, then tell us how to do our jobs, you'll likely be ignored. This page is not a 'demands page', not a backlog, but a list of ideas.

Second, this section does not yet contain an idea. You need to explain the function, at least basically, so we have something to work with. --ST47Talk·Desk 10:36, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I see no call for such a response. He did not make a demand; he asked a question and even said please (which doesn't occur in most requests). As far as the functionality, he said he wanted a bot that does the same as Selketbot and provided a link to Selketbot's page. Since Selketbot's page provides a description of its task and it links to both the BRFA and a previous discussion on this, I'm not sure what more you are expecting. -- JLaTondre 11:49, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Have you tried contacting Selket? His last edit was a few days ago so he's not completely inactive. -- JLaTondre 11:49, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I have contacted Selket twice in the last month concerning this matter. I agree with you, JLaTondre, I did not deserve in receiving an uncivil response in order for a request to be acted upon. Also, the reason that I am making this response is because there are administrators who are not tagging these IPs with the shared location of the schools, and just blindly blocking without warning. This is the high season for edits from schools and universities. M.^(er) 17:16, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I can do this if Selket doesn't mind having a clone. — madman bum and angel 17:21, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Infobox and comparison-table aggregator

This is a request for a tool to automatically create a database and table-almanac using data from infoboxes and comparison tables on Wikipedia articles. It would probably have three components:

• A tool to gather all instances of an infobox and output a database table of them, where each instance becomes a row and each row of the infobox becomes a column. Wiki markup should be converted to HTML or whatever the database format calls for; links and footnotes should be preserved; and images should be replaced with links. A column called Article should also be added, whose value is the URL each box is found on.

• A tool to do the same for tables on such articles as Comparison of text editors. Where there were two or more tables with similar values in the first column, they would be natural-full-outer-joined.

• A bot to call these two tools nightly or weekly on all infoboxes that have, say, 20 or more instances on the article namespace; aggregate the output into one file; natural-full-outer-join infobox tables to comparison articles where appropriate; and where a link from an infobox to another indexed-infobox-holding article is found (the Article column can be used to detect this), convert it to a link to the other infobox's database record. The combined and linked database would then be made available for download; it could also be given a query interface (both guided and query-language) on the Wikimedia Toolserver, and/or uploaded to Google Base or a similar site.

This database would make it quick and easy (at least for someone who knows the query language) to answer such queries as "What alternative metal bands, active in or after 2002, are based in Ontario?" and "What open-source text editors run on the Mac and support UTF-8?" It would be the start of a print reference book, a great aid to library reference desks, and a way to search for just about anything. (Note that it may require type polymorphism and may-or-may-not-be-foreign-keys, so SQL may not work for it.) NeonMerlin 20:35, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

List of Kodokan Judo techniques

All articles on this page need to be moved to the correct capitalisation (eg O Goshi to O goshi, and internal links fixing to match. A bot to take care of this would be awesome. Neil ム 10:15, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

LegendBot request

Hello, I can't program a Wikipedia bot, but I want a very good bot that's occasionally updated to prevent bugs and do more stuff to help Wikipedia. I want a bot called LegendBot. Thank you,--The source of the cosmos... 21:44, 24 September 2007 (UTC) HELLO?!?--The source of the cosmos... 00:52, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Um . . what is this bot supposed to do. Q ^{T C} 05:02, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Anything to help Wikipedia! Oh, and make sure to identify the version of the bot. Okay?--The source of the cosmos... 22:18, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

You're going to have to be more specific than that. There's lots of bot tasks available: those listed on WP:BOT, anti-vandalism bots, anti-spam bots, archiving bots...

Think of something you've wished would be automated before. Shadow1 (talk) 22:23, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

But, the bot does everything to help Wikipedia, no exceptions.--The source of the cosmos... 01:17, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, I don't know what "everything to help Wikipedia" is, so you'll have to tell me. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 01:27, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Stopping vandals, Fixing articles, that sort of thing, but like a city, it must be built from one subject to another.--The source of the cosmos... 02:04, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you might be interested in AutoWikiBrowser? Its a program for Windows that allows you to make small changes in a very efficient way (though its not really for vandal fighting, but there are other programs for that). If you come up with a task that needs to be done that could be automated with AWB (no need for human judgement) and isn't already being done, it can also be used for a bot after approval. Mr.Z-man 17:31, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Aircraft categories

For a couple weeks, this set of aircraft categories has been requested to change. The change is clearly approvable, but it's complicated to implement. It involves searching templates like [[Template:civil aircraft by nationality]] and switching U.S. for United States, or PRC for People's Republic of China.

• Category:U.S. civil aircraft to Category:United States civil aircraft
• Category:PRC fighter aircraft 2000-2009 to Category:People's Republic of China fighter aircraft 2000-2009
• Category:PRC airliners 1990-1999 to Category:People's Republic of China airliners 1990-1999
• Category:PRC airliners 1980-1989 to Category:People's Republic of China airliners 1980-1989
• Category:PRC airliners 2000-2009 to Category:People's Republic of China airliners 2000-2009
• Category:U.S. airliners to Category:United States airliners

And all of the subcategories of those categories, of course. Can anyone's bot do that?--Mike Selinker 15:59, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

User:Cydebot could probably do this. You might want to leave a message on User talk:Cyde. Mr.Z-man 17:36, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Have an admin add them to WP:CFD/W and cydebot will rename them (or someother bot) β^_command 01:32, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Redirect and template bot

I would like there to be a redirect and template bot. I would like it to be called MacBot. --MacMad (talk · contribs)  16:39, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

What would it do? :) SQL^{(Query Me!)} 17:20, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, it would make loads of redirects to other pages and create and manage lots of templates. --MacMad (talk · contribs)  05:41, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Why is "loads of redirects" desirable? Is it especially hard to find pages on Wikipedia? And how does one "manage" a template? Mr.Z-man 05:54, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

AFD maintenance bot

I just manually added in a bunch of headers in the format:

{{REMOVE THIS TEMPLATE WHEN CLOSING THIS AfD|?}}

:{{la|Article title}} – <includeonly>([[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Article title|View AfD]])</includeonly><noinclude>([[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/Date#{{anchorencode:Article title}}|View log]])</noinclude>

for AfDs in which they were missing. I've done this often, but perhaps a bot could automatically add them in. Also could a bot automatically close AfD debates for articles that get CSDed? This could expand upon the work that DumbBOT already does. ~Eliz81^(C) 20:58, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Updating template

{{Extra chronology}} has been deprecated for {{Extra chronology 2}}. I'm not sure what the exact difference between the two is, but I discovered that the latter fixed the problem with an unwanted line break in The Sweet Escape (song) article (diff). It'd be helpful to have a bot go through and replace the deprecated template so that it can eventually be deleted or redirected. 17Drew 22:53, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I want to work like this

• 1. I get a pagelist from me or other wiki's other user's "contributions page"
• 2. This pagelist is saved to a file "123.txt"
• 3. I run "python ~/pywikipedia/interwiki.py -file:123.txt -autonomous"

How to? HELP ME, please :) -- WonYong ^{(talk • contribs • count)} 00:30, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Try WP:AWB —METS501 (talk) 01:16, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Template:Unreferenced bot request

Hello,

We need someone to write and maintain a bot that will police the use of the controversial Template:Unreferenced.

This template, currently on over 10,000 articles (Maybe it's 100,000; I don't know; I clicked "next 500" until I tired of it), says, "This article does not cite any references or sources." The problem is that this is almost always untrue, and the tag has therefore lost credibility. There is steadfast opposition to changing this statement to say "sufficient" instead of "any"; some other editors enjoy pointing out that there are other template tags such as Template:Refimprove that complain about references without complaining that the article has no references, as "Unreferenced" does; and that the "Unreferenced" tag is needed, despite the widespread inaccuracy of its use (past and ongoing).

It occurred to me that a bot could be written that would fix this problem. It would run through each article that is tagged with Template:Unreferenced, and if there are any single-bracket links in the article at all, the bot would assume it's a reference, and change the template to Template:Refimprove. The run would occur every few days, ideally, and subsequent runs after the first one would involve far fewer tags, since I expect 80% of the thousands of Unreference tags to be converted in that first pass.

This would strengthen the integrity of Template:Unreferenced. Any volunteers?

Thanks - Tempshill 23:40, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Might bring this up on the 'Pump to get a consensus that this is something that's needed. Q ^{T C} 02:40, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Le Pump sent me here. I think the need is self-evident since there seem to be several editors who are steadfast in insisting that the wording stay as-is, and it's on, you know, 10,000 articles. Tempshill 04:08, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

It's on 79,228 articles, i.e. mainspace pages. I agree with OverlordQ, please get consensus that it's needed. --Erwin85 10:58, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

The project Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles exists in part to manually remove {{unref}} and replace it with {{refimprove}} as described by tempshill. Consensus for the project was formed at Template_talk:Unreferenced in general and at details worked out at Template_talk:Unreferenced/Archive_2#Project_Proposal. A look at the progress on Wikipedia:Unreferenced_articles#Tasks will indicate the need and the project should indicate consensus. For this proposed bot an article with an external link or a <ref> would qualify to change to {{refimprove}}. The bot could also check for and add the reference section as discussed in #reference_bot Jeepday (talk) 12:52, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

We can't trust the inclusion of a <ref> tag - those are used for footnotes in general, not just references. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:31, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

For clarification, this was sent from WP:VP/T to WP:BOTREQ, however if discussion needs to occur for this proposal, the proper "Pump" is WP:VPR. Oh, acronyms.... Cheers. --MZMcBride 19:50, 5 September 2007 (UTC) I can get my bot to do it, but I'd need consensus first. And perhaps 2 external links instead of one. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 17:07, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Please describe what would constitute consensus for you. Per Template:Unreferenced#Usage {{Unreferenced}} should be used only on articles that have no sources. The {{Refimprove}} template is appropriate for articles with some sources but not enough. There is a whole list of conversations here that talk about "any" vs "Adequately" the end result is, if there is even a single reference, use {{Refimprove}} if there are no references at all use {{Unreferenced}}. Jeepday (talk) 04:06, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. I don't have my bot on this particular PC, but I'll run it the next time I'm at work (Wednesday). ^demon^{[omg plz]} 05:04, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Great :) Jeepday (talk) 02:06, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Which Wednesday? Jeepday (talk) 02:27, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Today actually. I got sidetracked and forgot. I'm actually about to run the bot right now. First run will change for anything containing at least one <ref>...</ref> ^demon^{[omg plz]} 17:49, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I just did a random check of some of User:^demonBot2's most recent changes looks great :) Can you set it up to run periodically (maybe weekly)? Jeepday (talk) 22:55, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I hit a minor snag in doing it, so I'll be fixing it soon hopefully and then it'll be back to work. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 23:05, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

User:^demonBot2 did more today then I could do in month. But there are still many more to do by hand so back to work I go. Thanks :) Jeepday (talk) 23:25, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

It's a great idea and I fully support it. Go demonBot2! SilkTork *SilkyTalk 23:46, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Teething problems: The bot is not differentiating between a tag placed in an article, and a tag placed in a section, as here: Kidbrooke. The section has no references at all, but the tag reads that it needs "additional". SilkTork *SilkyTalk 23:51, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Will this be started up again? The original suggestion here was unsure of the size of the category, for everyone's information it is listed at 83,256 at WP:WATCH. I don't know how this bot works but if it could go through Category:Articles lacking sources from June 2006 and Category:Articles lacking sources from July 2006 first, that would be most helpful. --BirgitteSB 22:43, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Actually, instead of the bot, why can't we merge with another template? Or, we could run a manual patrol, which seems a better idea. Laleena 12:23, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I am not sure what you mean. Not all articles in this category fit within the parameters the bot is running. We need to weed out the ones that do so we can deal with the articles that are truly lacking a single reference. The problem has been that over time when people add a reference to these articles, they do not remove or change {{unreferenced}} to something more appropriate. The reason we need this category to be accurate is because that exposes articles like the one discussed here. That article was a hoax that has existed for over a year and a half. I only discovered it through this category. As for going through the category manually, that is on-going but it take several months to go a single month in the category. We are losing ground. This bot task would basically grab the low-hanging fruit and allow us doing the manual work to concentrate on the most problematic articles--BirgitteSB 13:09, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Special:Unusedimages

A bot should be created to sift through Special:Unusedimages. There are many images there, some likely without copyright information, some orphaned copyright, many copyleft. I'd imagine this could be sifted in three waves, finding and tagging images without copyright information, then when those are deleted or attributed, finding and tagging those tagged as copyrighted as {{orfud}}, and finding and tagging images with an appropriate copyleft tag to be transwikied to commons. Then, it would be a simple matter to have a bot move the copyleft images over. Doing this will make local management of images easier, as the remaining backlog at Special:Unusedimages will be manageable by a single admin on any given day, making finding prohibited, forgotten, or cv images a lot easier, and as it is, commons is the repository of potentially unused copyleft media, not us. Thoughts? --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 10:55, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, scraping unused images for candidates for the various image speedy deletion criteria was done by BetacommandBot. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 01:23, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Yeah BCBot does ORFU tagging. β^_command 01:25, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm talking about tagging the unused copyleft images for migration as well. Also, maybe a bot to find images that have no copyright tag at all, because recently I came across an image being used ina n article that was untagged for more than a year and a half. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 12:08, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I'll have my bot sift through it. CO₂ 18:42, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

AfD notification bot

See this thread - anyone think they could do this? Dihydrogen Monoxide (H₂O) 01:55, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

First, I think bots to provide notification for xFD have been shot down before, but I could be wrong. Secondly, unless PARC has updated their system, I wouldn't want to use it for such a mass-querying bot, as they were (at one point) working off the live Wikipedia, rather than using a db dump. This is a bad thing. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 14:27, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Interwiki of the List of asteroids subpages

Starting with List of asteroids/1–100, check the interwiki links and match the pages going up by hundreds. Right now, there's only the ast (Asturian), an (Aragonian), ca (Catalan), eu (Basque) and ru (Russian) pages (als is out of sync, hr has just the one page):

• ast stops at ast:Llista d'asteroides/85901–86000
• an stops at an:Lista d'asteroides/136501–136600
• ca stops at ca:Llista d'asteroides/136501–136600
• eu stops at eu:Asteroideen zerrenda (901-1000)
• ru stops at ru:Список астероидов (401—500)

One should be careful of keeping the interwiki links within the ending <noinclude> block. Ideally, th ebot should create the interwikis both ways (ca seems to have all the links to en in place already). Other projects (such as fr, pl, etc.) use a different page step, and will therefore be linked to a different set of en pages. Urhixidur 18:12, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Bot to help fix #10c image tagging (if this is even within the realm of reason, though I doubt it)

The video game project has a special template Template:VGrationale that substs the Template:Non-free use rationale template to help mark images used in articles. However, with the change of the template and the recent push for getting non-free images up to snuff through Betacommandbot and apparently others, the FUR templates generated by VGrationale lack the new Article= field and thus these images are being tagged as #10c violations. I've fixed VGrationale so that new instances of it are fine, and I think there's a possible issue with BCB not looking into the headers, but regardless, there's still a manual job of adding the article name to apparently 100s of images that have already been tagged.

Or, is it really a manual job? VGrationale adds a h2-type header as: "Fair Use rationale for use on [[Page Link]]", followed immediately by the FUR, when the subst is done.

So, the question becomes:

Can a bot identify "Page Name" above and add in the value as the article field in the immediately following FUR template?

Is it even sane to consider the idea of having a bot go through every image on every page that's within the VG project scope to look for this situation, instead of what would likely be a couple hours of manual work to correct, save for the current fault that I don't believe there's a singular page that lists the problematic images?

I'm thinking this is more on the "insane" side of a requests, but one never knows...--Masem 15:12, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

It would probably be easier to just do it manually. That backlog will be cleared... eventually... — madman bum and angel 07:02, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

It looks like someone's already done it manually and deleted the template. Is that true? If so we can close this one.Wikidemo 08:19, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

He just linked to the wrong page. east.718 at 05:11, 10/9/2007

A bot to check for the insertion of text immediatly before a reference

Hello,

At least one (anonymous) editor of New Orleans has developed a habit of inserting contradictory (POV) text between a fact and its citation. This has the obvious effect of changing the meaning of the article and appears to come from the reference when it does not.

Example:

Hurricanes also pose a severe threat to the area, and the city is particularly vulnerable because of its low elevation. According to a recent report by The Weather Channel, the city is the most vulnerable in the country when it comes to hurricanes.

Becomes something like this:

Hurricanes also pose a severe threat to the area, and the city is particularly vulnerable because of its low elevation. According to a recent report by The Weather Channel, the city is the most vulnerable in the country when it comes to hurricanes. The Army Corps of Engineers is going to build more levees so that future disasters will not occur.

Except, of course, that the reference number is still 1.

I wouldn't have the foggiest idea about writing or running a bot, but looking for new text immediately preceding a reference should not be hard. It could draw attention to a lot of misinformation. Thanks, Sagredo 20:44, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

If the anonymous editor is using the same IP every time (or not), maybe you can start treating it as Wikipedia:Vandalism? Jeepday (talk) 02:00, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I actually only saw one occur, when it was done to a change I made, but picked up on other places in the article where edits were fit in in this way. Again because the text no longer fit the reference. But any edit stuck in in that way is likely to separate the fact from its reference and be unintentionally damaging. Perhaps the answer is not a bot, but something in the software, that asks the editor "did you mean to place this text between the previous text and the reference? requires them click on a button. Then if "yes" is clicked that change should be carefully checked. Maybe this should be done for all editors, because the potential for harm is so great. I'll read the section on vandalism. Sagredo 04:09, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_Orleans%2C_Louisiana&diff=prev&oldid=162195813 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_Orleans%2C_Louisiana&diff=prev&oldid=162196274 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_Orleans%2C_Louisiana&diff=prev&oldid=162195813 Three vandalisms to population numbers. Sagredo 08:04, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

This is an interesting idea... I have seen the same problem, and dealing with it as vandalism is not always feasible because I think it's often not intended. My concern would be too many false positives, though... Like if someone was adding more info from the same reference.

At a minimum, I think it should not revert, but it might be interesting to have it move the citation back where it was. i.e. if "Sentence A. (cite)" is changed to "Sentence A. Sentence B. (cite)", then the bot would not remove sentence B, but rather change it to "Sentence A. (cite) Sentence B." Maybe. --Jaysweet 15:32, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Moving the citation back occurred to me, too. It should work even when the new text was an addition to a sentence, although the citation would end up in the middle of a sentence. I think in case of the NOLA article, there's a definite intention to insert POV without being obviously vandalism. My feeling is that some have done so much of it to have become quite good at it. Sagredo 01:55, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

As pointed out above there is a lot of judgment (and reference checking) to decide if it is vandalism or updating. Maybe the thing to do is search for new content placed directly before <ref></ref> where the <ref></ref> preceded the new text by more then 24 hours. This would probably be fairly complex to do real time, so might have to be run off the data dump, then you would need to identify the specific change and list it so a person could manually review it. Or I could just be making things needlessly complex. Jeepday (talk) 02:15, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

So you think it would be more work that it would be worth? Sagredo 02:43, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

"LoveBot"

I've got an idea for a very simple, very narrow-purpose bot, I was thinking of writing myself for fun -- so this is not really a bot request, but I couldn't find another good place to bounce ideas off people to see if this even makes sense.

The page for Love constantly gets vandalism of the form "Randy loves Amy," etc. A very high percentage of it neatly fits the pattern "<Surname>/I loves/LOVES/love/LOVE <Surname>/you". So I was thinking maybe having a bot that would check for edits only on Love that fit that specific pattern and revert them.

I know, it's only marginally useful, but this would almost be more a learning exercise for me than anything else. I am just trying to think of any way in which it would be destructive... I dunno, is this a dumb idea? --Jaysweet 15:40, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

It's not a bad idea, and it's possible. The love page is heavily watched, though, and there would be quite a few false negatives (and, possibly, some false positives) that may outweigh the benefits of having the bot. However, maybe we could make a bot that infers social networks from love vandalism, and finds matches so that vandals can live happily ever after in matrimonial/non-marital/extra-marital/what-have-you bliss (instead of vandalizing). Gracenotes^T § 15:50, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

ha ha ha, that's a good idea. Sounds like a PhD thesis ;D

Yeah, I recognize that false negatives will abound, and yeah, the page is watched pretty heavily (by me, for one!). I'm having trouble coming up with a situation where there'd be a false positive, though... Like I said, this would be as much an exercise for me as anything else, so as long as it would be considered at least marginally useful and does no harm, it would be worth it to me.

Can you think of a false positive situation? Because if there's even one false positive, it is probably a bad idea to make such a bot, because of the negligible benefit (i.e. if the bot even makes one or two mistakes, then the bad it does probably outweighs the good). --Jaysweet 15:55, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Hm. The page does have I love you in the See Also section, which isn't vandalism. Gracenotes^T § 18:12, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I think there is a lot of stuff already in the article that would get dinged, but I am having trouble thinking of something that is not already in the article that would be a false positive.

Although, that raises a good point: If somebody reverts a page blank, gotta be sure that LoveBot doesn't think the revert is a love note! heh.... --Jaysweet 18:24, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

ArtyBot

I would like to make a bot that looks through a users contribs back one month, and determines if a user has made any contributions to an article that is classified as an Artemis Fowl article. This is so that we (Coordinators) can make sure that the Active/Inactive section is constantly updated. This is because it is a pretty menial task that is long and boring. Can I get some feed back on this? Your Grace Lord Sir Dreamy of Buckland ^tm 12:36, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

This can easily be done using a script on the web. No editing is involved, so it's not really a bot per the bot policy. I may slap this script together sometime today (I'll be bored in transit) and put it on the Toolserver. — madman bum and angel 12:56, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for sounding like an idiot, but how will I be able to use this script? Your Grace Lord Sir Dreamy of Buckland ^tm 01:09, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Ever used Interiot's wannabe kate edit counter? It will be something like that. --Chris  G  13:04, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Find/Kill Spam Bot

Not so much on Wikipedia, but on other Wikis on the internet I have noticed a lot of spam on inappropriate material. I propose to create a bot that scans past New Pages and Edits for key words such as "Free Gold" or "Live Sex" and rolls back the page to a earlier edit where the spam is no longer present; some new pages get past extension filters I'm sure, so having a bot to search them out would make things a lot easier.. This would lessen the amount of work that admins on Wikipedia and other wikis would have to do in order to erase past spam in the database.

I know that there are some extensions that do this for posts being posted such as "SpamBlacklist" but I have not seen one that will scan Past pages for this inappropriate content.

If this bot does well, I would like to openly share the coding so that it can be implemented on other websites using the Wikimedia setup to host their own Wikis.

I have limited programming knowledge, and wouldn't know where to start. Even still, I am willing to contribute what I can for this project.

I look forward to everyone's input on this.

GusJustGus1 20:00, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

So you want a bot to fill links from the spamblacklist, then surf the wiki to find and remove those links? Carbon Monoxide 00:53, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

It is a problem—just adding an entry to the spam blacklist doesn't remove its instances. I can get this done easily with my bot, but it's not flagged yet. east.718 at 05:09, 10/9/2007

Generically creating a non-existing, but populated category.

is this possible? It seems to happen a fair bit. For instance - the "Category:Suspected Wikipedia Sockpuppets of Bob": cats like that are populated, but redlinked. Is it possible? -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 09:37, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Should be possible with Special:Wantedcategories, I'll try and do it once I have Chris G Bot 3 completed, unless anyone else has the time? --Chris  G  10:08, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

I would suggest this should only be done for non-article categories because those in mainspace may have another category covering the same purpose and people do not normally intentionally add things to a redlinked cat. :: maelgwn - talk 10:59, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

And of course the bot won't recreate deleted cats. --Chris  G  11:33, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

this isnt a good idea, many many of these shouldnt exist. β^_command 14:15, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, and you can see what would be in the category without creating it. Also, how would the bot know what to create for the category description? CO₂ 20:47, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Something extremely generic. I'll give an example when I tihnk of one. -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 12:43, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

I think it would be fine for creation of maintenance templates because they are nearly all the same but get updated created monthly or wever. :: maelgwn - talk 11:17, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

How will the bot know what to use as a parent category? Creating orphaned categories is probably not a good idea. --After Midnight ⁰⁰⁰¹ 11:26, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Adding hundreds/thousands of people to a single category

Category:Fellows_of_the_American_Academy_of_Arts_and_Sciences is extremely underpopulated despite there being 4000 members in the Academy. Can we add some of these members to this category using a bot? --Yuyudevil 02:43, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

A list of people in a PDF file which only contains last name and first initial probably won't be enough to go on. --After Midnight ⁰⁰⁰¹ 11:23, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Then would the job be more feasible if we were to either get a proper (and more readable) list from the Academy, or the existing list was somehow (rather painstakingly) made in to a bot-readable DB? (I'll need some technical assistance for the latter option.) --Yuyudevil 15:56, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Template:French commune

Would it be possible to create a bot to go through articles using the Template:French commune and removing some formatting that was imported from the French wiki? i.e. would it be possible to create a bot to do an edit like this one. An image and caption have been placed in the parameter for the name of the town. There are optional parameters for these now. The template is currently used in upwards of 2000 articles and would be tedious to go through so many articles. It needs to be done so that the name of the town be made more promiment and to standardise the format of the template infobox. --Bob 15:13, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Category:Non-free images lacking article backlink backlog

Could a bot help clean up the backlog at Category:Non-free images lacking article backlink? This requires simply adding a parameter. The best may be a double verification, first by the article the images is used in and then see if there is a link to that article in the rationale. See Image:3dlemmi screen003.jpg, where both 3D Lemmings is both listed on the page and is the page where the image is used. Then since they match, the bot would just need to add "Article = 3D Lemmings" as a parameter. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 21:51, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Not possible via bot, there is no way for a bot to check and see if the rationale is valid for that article. β^_command 23:24, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not asking about the validity of the rationales. There are already rationales there. I'm just asking about a bot adding in the article parameter. I understand if someone says, as a matter of policy, they'd rather have someone checking these by hand so that we can also check for invalid rationales as well. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 01:05, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Im saying that It should not be done via bot. it just makes a lot harder to check. it would make checking for valid rationales via bot impossible. Also it would introduce a large number if invalid rationales. β^_command 01:09, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree, this needs to be done by a human. Just because an article has a rationale and is used in an article does not mean the rationale and/or usage is valid. Videmus Omnia ^Talk 01:50, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Ok, that makes sense; I understand. Thanks anyways! -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:47, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

What if the bot added "|Article =" to the template. This would make it easier to clean up this category. 129.177.156.248 14:32, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

That was the original request, which was declined. — madman bum and angel 15:45, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Here's a more modest idea that shouldn't be controversial. Sort through the images in this category to look for articles missing the "article=" parameter, that (1) have a single blue link to an article somewhere inside the template, and (2) are used in that single article as per the file page. You can safely assume that the blue link in the template refers to the article use, so add the name (without brackets) to the Article= field of the template. Wikidemo 08:44, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

An even less controversial thing for a bot to do is to add the article parameter without adding the article. It will then add "|article =" and not "|article =ARTICLENAME". This would be a one time run and also make uploaders who have their images watchlisted aware of the change in the rationale template. This will recruit uploaders to fix their own images. The change will also make image cleanup easier since you can just fill in the article when the rationale is ok. Rettetast 13:12, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Meanwhile, I've written a user script to help with this: see User:Ilmari Karonen/nfurbacklink.js. Since the script requires user confirmation, I've made it quite a bit simpler than the suggestions above; it simply suggests an automatic fix if the image has one rationale tag, no backlink and one entry in the "File links" section. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 01:51, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Bot to deliver WP:UNI newsletters

I'd like a bot to help me deliver WikiProject Universities newsletters, which will occur on a monthly basis. I'm not sure if I should make my own bot (as I don't know how the software works with that) or request for someone else to create it. The bot would serve a similar purpose as Grafikbot. The newsletters can be found here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Universities/Outreach. Anything else I need to do just let me know! Thanks -- Noetic Sage 19:13, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

my bot will do it. Just notify me what you need delivered on my talk page. Carbon Monoxide 00:02, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Tag chemical pages needing images

I've never done this sort of thing before, so someone tell me if I have a good idea or not. Basically, what I envision is a bot crawling through Category:Chemical compounds looking for pages without images. If the bot finds a page without a typical image extension (jpg, png, etc.) or a page with a link to a non-existent picture, it goes to the associated talk page and slaps {{Chemical drawing needed}} on it. This also adds it to Category:Chemistry pages needing pictures so someone can go make the needed images. Of course, the bot will be smart enough not to tag an article that's already tagged. Input? shoy 23:55, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

You could search for \[\[[Ii]mage:.*?\]\] instead of searching for an image extension. In case you have access to the toolserver you could simply select all pages in this category without imagelinks. --Erwin85 09:59, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Who the what now? Toolserver? shoy 21:29, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

The Toolserver is a Wikimedia-owned server that has a relatively-recent copy of the project's database. It's possible to write a SQL query to create a list of pages without images. I have an account on the server, if you would like me to generate this list. Shadow1 (talk) 18:45, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

What Erwin85 saying is that instead of the bot checking if its an image by its extension, the bot will check if the page has [[Image:SomeNameHere|PossiblySomethingHere|AndHere]] on it and as for the toolsever take a read here. I think that's it anything I missed? --Chris  G  02:01, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

I've never programmed in C before, but I'll give it a shot. Thanks! shoy 03:00, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

As a substitute to regex searching, you could also access the information in a more accessible form here (using formats such as JSON, XML, YAML, WDDX, or serialized PHP). You can also use a generator to check if an image is missing; unfortunately, images on Commons are marked as missing, but this can be checked with a query like this to Common's API. Gracenotes^T § 23:05, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Will I need a separate bot account at Commons, then? shoy 19:52, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

You won't, since api.php is publicly accessible to all who request it. If you want your bot to edit at Commons, you'd need the bot to be approved there too, but you're only accessing information from its API. One caveat, though: an api.php query made from a regular user account can't request as much information as one made from a bot account (see the API's documentation, e.g. "No more than 50 (500 for bots) allowed").

Note that this all could be handled by screen scraping an article's HTML, although I think the APIs are a bit easier to work with. An SQL query might be partially effective, although stub images (for example, those on Iodargyrite) might result in a fair amount of false negatives. One solution not involving a bot would be to add a maintenance category to transclusions of chemboxes without an image parameter (example of a similar category), but this only works if the article has a chembox in the first place. Gracenotes^T § 21:50, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Forgive my ignorance, but what other programming languages "play nice" with API requests? Say for example that I'd rather not code in XML or PHP. Do I have other options, or am I limited there? shoy 01:36, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I made a brfa for this task. Now, what categories do you want to be scanned? Do you want all categories, sub categories, sub sub categories, etc in Category:Chemical compounds to be scanned, or just the category and subcategory of Category:Chemical compounds? (Px)Ma 02:24, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, all the sub-sub-(etc)-categories as well. Thanks! shoy 02:42, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

(undent) Pretty much every higher-level programming language either has native support for XML or has a well-supported XML parser library available. — madman bum and angel 06:07, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Now on Commons bot

• Could a bot be created which tags images on Wikipedia with the "now on Commons" tag if it verifies that a certain image is on commons, or does this exist already? There are a lot of images which have been uploaded to Commons from Wikipedia through the Commonshelper device, but the images remain on Wikipedia. That creates problems if users from foreign language Wikipedias want to use such images, as it seems like the image only exists on the English Wikipedia. Funkynusayri 23:14, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

You could use CommonsClash. However the replag for enwiki is quite large at the moment. --Erwin85 09:52, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

• Looks cool, though I'll have to figure out how it works. But it seems like quite a repetitive task, so wouldn't a bot be nice? Funkynusayri 20:05, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

General biographical sort key clean up

It is possible to get a bot to (at least partially) tidy up biographical sort keys so special characters and accented characters are replaced, and punctuation (except hyphens) removed, and all words in the sort key start with a capital letter? Have a look at Wikipedia:Categorization of people#Ordering names in a category. It says the following:

"(1) Punctuation, such as apostrophes and colons (but not hyphens) should be removed, and accented letters and ligatures should be replaced by their unaccented or separated counterparts. (2) The first letter of each word should be in upper case, and all subsequent letters should be in lower case, regardless of the correct spelling of the name. Thus, Lena D'Água sorts as [[Category:Portuguese female singers|Dagua, Lena]]. Without these last alterations, all punctuation marks and internal capital letters would be sorted before A, and all accented characters and ligatures would sort after Z." (my emphasis)

What the bot should do is look for sort keys in category tags, plus any DEFAULTSORT sort keys, and remove punctuation such as ' and : (removing ' entirely and replacing : with a space, I think), and replaced an accented 'e' with an unaccented 'e', and so on. It should also run the end result through a program that makes the start of every word a capital letter, and removes capitals that appear within the words. Thus le Guin becomes Le Guin, and McCallum becomes Mccallum. If this is not done, the results is what is seen here, with lots of stuff appearing at the end of the category listing. This example uses the listas parameter, which is a talk page sort key, but this applies to all sort keys wherever they are used. So, is this possible? It would require a very long list of accented and other special characters to look for. The removal of apostrophes and suchlike should be easier, and the capitalisation issue should be really easy. Can this be done? Carcharoth 13:32, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

This should also apply to non-biographical sort keys as well. Carcharoth 13:34, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

About time I had a challenge, Im going to start on the dictionary of special characters and what their replacements are. β^_command 23:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

It might be worth having the bot add a comment after the DEFAULTSORT key explaining that the altered name is correct per the above link. I know if I saw one of these in an article, I might assume it was a mistake and "correct" it. I wasn't aware of that limitation in the sorting and I'm sure others aren't as well. -- JLaTondre 21:24, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Tracking use of magic words

Copied from Wikipedia:Village pump (technical).

I'd like to raise this issue again, or if no-one here has any further advice, to ask where to go next. See here for the previous discussion. What I'd ultimately like to see is something like Category:Default sort key missing for biographical articles (probably on the talk page), so they can be worked on. At the moment, there is Category:Biography articles without listas parameter, but that only works from a talk page template parameter (specifically, listas in {{WPBiography}}) and doesn't truly reflect DEFAULTSORT usage (it would only reflect the usage if the two values were synchronised on all pages). Ultimately, it all comes down to this simple question:

"Which biographical articles lack DEFAULTSORT"?

Surely a simple question like that can't be that difficult? :-) Carcharoth 04:43, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

End quote.

The response over there was to suggest I post a request here. I'd also like the bot to cross-reference the list of category with Category:Biography articles without listas parameter, which refers to a talk page sort key parameter. This is closely tied to the function that was developed under Polbot 3 (Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Polbot 3). That was probably too ambitious, so I'm trying to break up the task into manageable chunks. Ideally, I'd like to replace Category:Biography articles without listas parameter, with Category:Default sort key missing (not that they are the same at the moment - I mean deprecate listas after synchronising the two systems). Failing that, I'd like to see the DEFAULTSORT and listas sort keys synchronised by a bot. Carcharoth 13:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

I can do several parts of that now, Ill sort the WPBIO pages into two groups one listing pages wtih defaultsort and the other lacking. β^_command 23:43, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Cool. 400,000+ pages. Remember to use the transclusion list of {{WPBiography}}. I think working from bot-generated lists is the only way to go here. Turning the list into a category won't work, because then people have to do two thing: (1) Add DEFAULTSORT to the articles and (2) Manually remove the category. Of course, if DEFAULTSORT included its own category... Anyway. I look forward to seeing the lists. Maybe the bot could also suggest a DEFAULTSORT value, and if the list was split into chunks, people could scan the list and approve/correct it for the bot to use the suggested DEFAULTSORT values. It would also be a good idea for the bot to list the existing DEFAULTSORT value, as some of those might be wrong. Oh, dang. This is turning back into the complicated Polbot 3 proposal (linked above). That was a good idea, but too much work. I think getting the list you talk about is a good first step. Carcharoth 17:48, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Bot to do bulk template inclusion modifications on request

At WP:TfD, we occasionally get templates that have a lot of calls on various articles, which need to either be modified to call a different template (so that the first can be deleted), substituted or simply removed. Other, more complicated things can also be needed infrequently. To date, this has been done by User:^demonBot2; however, he's currently too busy.

Is there anyone here that's willing to take up this task? The jobs could easily be done using WP:AWB, and information on exactly what needs doing in each case would be provided in the request.

An example: Template:Link GA (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) needs all template calls removing so that the template can be deleted. Another example: Template:Hqfl logo (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) needs converting to Template:Non-free logo (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs), but the text describing the source needs to be put either in the "source" field of an info template, or adding onto the end of the image description text.

Thanks in advance. Mike Peel 20:19, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

This doesn't look too hard if no one else is up to the task I might do it. I may even be able to create a cgi page to make the procces easier. --Chris  G  09:20, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Changing piped links

I have a small problem. I have to change hundreds of piped links, and I'm hoping a bot could save me a lot of work. I have to change every piped link that currently contains User:Lincalinca (i.e. [[User:Lincalinca|Foo...]]) to another piped link (i.e. [[Correct link|Foo...]]). I've done this change manually to show what I'm trying to accomplish (see here). Any suggestions on how to change this in as little effort as possible are most welcome. If anyone's up for the task, I'll be glad to share the details. Thanks! - Mtmelendez ^{(Talk|UB|Home)} 01:42, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

It looks like MelsaranAWB (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) can do this for you; I have left a note on its operator's talk page. — madman bum and angel 02:13, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Seems like a pretty simple task. I'm running my bot now, see Special:Contributions/MelsaranAWB. Should be done shortly. Cheers, Melsaran (talk) 09:27, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

And so shines a good deed. Many thanks, Mel. - Mtmelendez ^{(Talk|UB|Home)} 09:48, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Good work, Melsaran!  :) My only comment is that in the future, you may wish to exclude the RfD log. Changing that makes things slightly confusing.  ;) Cheers! — madman bum and angel 15:19, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Automatic name disambiguation pages using DEFAULTSORT on biographical pages

I recently updated a disambiguation page (Aaron (name)) by looking at Category:Living people, which is fairly well sorted. I am wondering whether a trial "suggested disambiguations" bot could be run over this category to generate suggestions for disambiguation pages. I'm not sure, but I think Polbot does something similar, but I don't know how it does it. Anyway, what the bot would do is scan the category and find articles that were sorted using the same "first part" of the sort key. This would generally be the surname. ie. it would find articles sorted "Lane, Gary" and "Lane, Percy" and suggest they be added to either Lane (name) or Lane (surname). This won't be complete disambiguation, as it won't cover dead people. That will hopefully be possible if a supercategory is created to contain all people articles. Of course, people would still be needed to annotate the dab pages, unless infobox information could be used to do that... I'm throwing this idea out here to see if people think it sounds feasible and worth the effort of finding people who could make this work? Carcharoth 13:57, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

The bot couldn't create the pages, though, or keep them up-to-date, as people would need to be able to add redlinks to the pages. Carcharoth 17:17, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Actually, that's not too much of an issue for a bot as it could simply add missing ones (accounting for possible redirects being already present) and not remove existing content. The problem with a bot doing it, however, is it coming up with a meaningful descriptive sentence fragment. I suppose it could pull info from the categories, but I think leaving it to a person would be better. -- JLaTondre 21:59, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Maybe stick the suggestions on the talk pages and stick the talk page in a category for humans to clean up? Carcharoth 00:48, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I think it would be useful. I've seen multiple cases of an article at "First Last" with no dab header or disambiguation page and yet there are other articles on people with the same name. This makes it harder for people to find those alternate pages. This should be pretty straightforward. I'll put something together that queries a category, looks for common names and finds cases where they are not listed on a disambig, name, or surname page. I'll also look for cases where there is a "First Last" that needs a dab hat. It will take me several days based upon available time, however. -- JLaTondre 21:59, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

A good way to generate a description should, in theory, be to use the first sentence of an article. Think of the mouse-ups you get when hovering over a link in some systems, showing you the first few sentences of the link you are about to click on. Either that, or use Wikipedia:Persondata (if present) or infoboxes (if present). Using categories is another option. Of course, only Wikipedia would have this biographical metadata spread out and duplicated like this... Carcharoth 00:46, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Status Update: I have it properly querying a category and parsing names to determine first, middle, last (as appropriate). It will also find the duplicates. Next, I need to implement the matches against potential disambig pages. I've had less time that I thought, so it'll take me a bit longer. -- JLaTondre 23:36, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Deletion request notification

Currently, our Wikipedia:Guide to deletion states:

It is generally considered civil to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors of the articles that you are nominating for deletion.

and lists several bullets and paragraphs of details that the nominator need to carry out. From my experience, depending on where you draw the border between "main" and non-main contributions, this can take more than an hour for a medium sized article. A bot could do that in fractions of a second. The bot would simply notify every non-bot who did non-minor edits. (Criteria could be refined in a later version.)

Currently, the distinction between "main" and non-main depends on each nominator's goodwill. This means, that particularly the nicest editors end up spending the most time with menial tasks. I don't think that's fair. More importantly, we are creating an unnecessary gray area: Nomination is nomination, it should be reported regardless of the character of the nominator. If anything, then we want better, not worse reporting of nominations by uncivil nominators. — Sebastian 07:09, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure how much support there would be for this idea. The argument over whether or not it is required to notify people of an AfD has come up time and time again (and is a familiar debate to anyone who patrols DRV) and the outcome has been consistenly that notifications are a courtesy only. The argument has also been made that this is precisely what the watchlist exists for - to monitor articles someone "cares about". Making a bot to automatically notify non-minor editors of an article up for AfD is likely a controversial subject. ɑʀкʏɑɴ 20:19, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, this does not make sense. Our guides tell everybody who considers a deletion that they should do it, so we can not here on this page say "yes, we say so, but we don't really mean it". This clause has been part of our guides for more than a year [1]. If you disagree with that, please raise your concerns on WT:AFD or Wikipedia talk:Guide to deletion.

As long as our guides recommend a certain chore, we should look for ways to make that chore easier, fairer and more effective. I think, bots provide such a way; hence this request. Please, help me with this and let's discuss here if this is technically feasible and how it could be implemented. — Sebastian 20:59, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

From a technical perspective it is not that difficult to do. I'm familiar with AFD procedures, and I know that the recommendation to notify major contributors has been around a while - long enough to often become a point of contention. In any case, since it is nonetheless an optional step (saying it is civil to notify major contributors is not the same as saying it is incivil not to notify them) I'd like to see more of a community mandate for such a bot before considering working on it.

I do have a bot that processes AFD discussions and it likely would not be difficult to add that kind of functionality to it as well. If there was a little more discussion on the matter other than just between a couple of us here at BOTREQ I'd be happy to take a look at it. ɑʀкʏɑɴ 18:08, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your great reply; I see your point now and I absolutely agree with you. I will try to get some clarification on Wikipedia talk:Guide to deletion first. — Sebastian 02:13, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Sandbox the newbies

Many vandalism events involve two or more sequential edits with sample text, inane comments, or vandalism, which the authors immediately try to delete. Usually the articles are left in the same condition as when they began. Often the same editors continue doing this to various articles, consuming resources and RC Patrollers. I invite a bot to detect such test edits and provide on the User Talk page one of the usual how to edit and use the sandbox messages (perhaps also an appropriate Welcome if the user Talk page was empty). (SEWilco 18:13, 15 October 2007 (UTC))

If a bot could reliably detect such "test" edits, the anti-vandalism bots would probably already do this. As it can be hard to determine (without human thought) what is a test edit and what is a good contribution by a new user that may just use poor formatting/grammar, there would probably be a lot of false positives. Also, current consensus is that bots welcoming new users is generally a bad idea for being impersonal and welcoming users who are only here to vandalize. Mr.Z-man 17:54, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

The simplest test is to look for consecutive edits which alter content but the last edit returns the article to the original content. Then emit a "Thanks for contributions to ARTICLE-mention Help-mention Sandbox" message. The message should assume good faith, while trying to divert tests out of article space. It also helps create a record for humans who later come to add appropriate notices. I'm seeing a lot of such edits but no bot notices about them, and they waste RC Patrol time when finding obvious vandalism in progress which evaporates by the time the patroller begins cleanup (as well as causing the vandals carrying erasers to get serious vandalism warnings while they're lifting their erasers to clean up their scribbling). I'm sure there are several each hour, as I casually find several each day. (SEWilco 18:17, 16 October 2007 (UTC))

I haven't seen any existing bots handling this; vandalism bots probably haven't been told to look for self-reverted vandalism (particularly because much of it is a few words which might not be noticed by the bot). The reason for the requested bot is to direct tests toward the Sandbox and reduce the ongoing rain of noise which interferes with RC Patrol. (SEWilco 15:42, 23 October 2007 (UTC))

Request bot to DEFAULTSORT

At Category:Australian rugby league biography stubs (and presumably other categories of rugby league articles), there are a lot of players that are sorted by first name. I'm not sure if there's a bot that does DEFAULTSORT, but if there is, that would be much appreciated. Damanmundine1 (Talk) 01:21, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

There are several bots that do defaultsort. I know the operator of User:SmackBot has an approved task to do DEFAULTSORT for people stubs )see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SmackBot XIII), but that only applies when "there is an unambiguous sort key given to existing categories". There is also Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/BOTijo 5, but that too has the restriction "Only put DEFAULTSORT when all categories in article have the same SORT".

Essentially, these restrictions is because a human is needed to judge whether the name is of the form "GIVEN NAME, FAMILY NAME". You might think that the last name is the family name, but sometimes you have double surname that are not hyphenated, or you have some Asian names (and other countries as well) that are in the form "FAMILY NAME, GIVEN NAME", so they need to be sorted by the first word in the the title, not the last. It is possible that the category sort keys are wrong, but in that case the bots are only perpetuating errors, not introducing new ones.

I'm going to list these bots at Template talk:DEFAULTSORT (the next best thing to a Wikipedia namespace page on defaultsort). Do the bot operators watching this page know of any more defaultsort bot operators? Is there a DEFAULTSORT suggestion built into AWB for instance? Carcharoth 17:58, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

but in that case the bots are only perpetuating errors, not introducing new ones This assumes something that we know to be wrong - that everyone should be sorted the same way in every category. I've seen Smackbot make bad edits because of this assumption. Haukur 09:02, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

This particular category has no people whose names are written in the form GIVEN NAME, FAMILY NAME FAMILY NAME, GIVEN NAME - I've been through the complete list.Damanmundine1 (Talk) 01:08, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Then you should make a list from the category (as the category might change by the time the bot runs) and ask for a bot to do the additions, or get someone to use AWB to run through the list (AWB has an "add DEFAULTSORT and tidy the category sort keys" function, I think). You could even provide the defaultsort values yourself, as it is not too hard to manipulate a list so that the last words appear first. One word of warning. This only works because the "rugby league players" stub template has a category with no piping. Some templates I've seen use {{PAGENAME}} to pipesort articles, and that over-rides DEFAULSORT everytime. Carcharoth 10:37, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Request bot to convert .28 and .29 to parentheses

Discussion moved to: Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature_requests#Convert_.28_and_.29_to_parentheses. Lightmouse 13:28, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Transwiki work for WP:DIGI

I've gotten sysop access on Wikia:Digimon, which will allow WP:DIGI to do a full transwiki without having to keep the articles on Wikipedia's side for the page histories (via export/import). I've done a few very basic things with pywikipedia (User:NedBot), mostly because there's nothing like AWB for Mac OS X. I was planning on manually using Special:Export and Special:Import to move some articles, but the process is time consuming, and exporting only works for 100 versions at a time. I'd also like to move the images over, which I did see is a script for pywikipedia bot, but I'm having a hard time understanding even getting the bot to work on another wiki.

I'm very lost at this point, but I do tend to catch on quickly. Ideally I'd like to be able to run the bot/script/whatever so we don't have to keep bothering other people in the future, and because importing requires sysop access. But even if it's just with the images, any help at this point would be greatly appreciated, and would likely make future transwiki projects far more attractive options. -- Ned Scott 04:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I've been told that Wikia's staff / techs can do a mass importing for us, which makes the situation simpler. I suppose that makes the main request right now is assistance in exporting a group of articles to xml files, and another request for help with moving the images over. -- Ned Scott 19:14, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Archiving on MediaWiki_talk pages

The spam blacklist/whitelist pages are getting incredibly backlogged, and it would be nice if a bot was capable of archiving completed requests marked with {{Done}} or {{Notdone}}. Thanks, ^demon^{[omg plz]} 20:02, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

request bot that can removed non-cited info on wrestling and wrestlers

I have been looking over at wrestlers information here on Wikipedia and somehow the birthdates are not cited. Plus other information of the wrestlers have also been not cited as well. I am not sure if there is one, but if there is one, that would be taking care of.LindsieandLance 01:57, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

• That's not really a bot type of job. Sometimes the article creator or editor just fails to properly format references and a quick search to the provided links in the article will give you birtdates quite easily. Also, it happens (and not only in wrestler articles) that multiple sentences or an entire paragraph is sourced with one link. A bot cannot adequately determine which sentences a ref link is supposed to be sourcing. - Mgm|^(talk) 20:21, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Plagiarism checker bot

A bot that could see the difference in articles. Check whether the added statements are plagiarized (by searching Google), If a match is found, check whether attribution is proper. We could eliminate a lot of copyright violations and plagiarisms if this bot is done. i don't know whether such a bot exists. But if it does, please let me know.. I've got some more suggestions... Mugunth 18:45, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Both CorenSearchBot and Wherebot do this.--Balloonguy 21:56, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Just a thought, and I'll probably contact the bot operators directly about this idea, but this might be a great idea for episode articles and lists of episodes. They probably don't get triggered, since they're normally already created and simply waiting for content to be filled out, and they often have copyright issues. -- Ned Scott 19:23, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I once considered doing checks from older pages and/or recent changes, but the potential for problems is large and the benefit is hard to estimate. You can, however, check articles by listing them in User:CorenSearchBot/manual; if you have a good list to work from a simple copy-and-paste might be all you need to do the occasional round. Manual checks, however, do not tag the article. Only lists the results for human review.

I could revive the suggestion to check RC, but that would make my load on WP (and on Yahoo!) an order of magnitude greater than it currently is. — Coren ^(talk) 01:53, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Tagging for WikiProject Ireland

Like other wikiprojects, WikiProject Ireland uses the assessment process to track articles within its scope, but many articles and categories are currently untagged. As a result they don't show up in the statistics on the WP:IRL Assessment page, and are missing from the project's monitoring categories.

Please could a bot run through the talk pages of these articles and categories add the {{WikiProject Ireland}} tags as set out below (unless already present)? (I have been started the job with AWB, but decided that life is too short to manually click the save button on a squillion articles)

It would be most useful if the template could be added with the parameters included, but left blank so that editors don't have to type them when filling in the field, as follows:

{{WikiProject Ireland
 |small=
 |nested=
 |class=  
 |importance=
 |attention=
 |peer-review=
 |old-peer-review= 
 |image-needed=
 |needs-infobox=
}}

However, it would be great if categories could be set with the class parameter set as

class=  Category

, since all categories are assigned this to class. (For article talk pages, all parameters should be left blank)

There are a few other points:

1. The Category:Ireland tree can be included if it is possible to tell the bot not to include Category:Unionism, which is a British-Irish intersection category and includes (inbter alia) Scottish Unionism and the British Conservative party (including all Conservative MPs).
2. Otherwise the scope can safely be all articles and sub-categories of Category:Republic of Ireland
3. The bot should avoiding talk pages which already have a {{Irelandproj}} tag -- that's a duplicate of {{WikiProject Ireland}}.

Is this feasible? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:05, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

/me dusts off some old code. Sure Ill get a pre-run data shortly. β^_command 00:29, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll look fwd to seeing what you come up with. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:26, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Please look at User:BetacommandBot/Sandbox 3 β^_command 18:36, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Wow, so many Irish categories. I hardly thought there would be that many. Cheers ww2censor 20:26, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for the very slow reply (got sidetracked into something else), but thanks v much for the category list. I have looked through it, and it seems mostly OK, so it would be great if you could go ahead and tag the categories (but not the articles yet), with three caveats:

• Since I first posted here, I have created a category-specific tag {{WikiProject Ireland category}}, so it would be best to use that rather {{WikiProject Ireland}} ... but the bot will need to avoid duplicate tagging category talk pages which use either format.
• The only category I can see which shouldn't be there is Category:Conservative Party (UK) (its subcats have been successfully excluded). Please can you remove it from the list?
• Since you made that list, I have added dozens of new categories under Category:Years in Ireland. Please can you ask the bot to build a new list of the subcats of Category:Years in Ireland, and tag them too?

The reason I suggest holding off on the articles is that there is a massive number of biographical articles (probably the majority are biogs) and I want to discuss the implications of tagging them. I'll get back to you on the outcome of that discussion.

Thanks again for your help. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:27, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Search and replace-bot

I've moved {{Architecture}} to {{WikiProject Architecture}} (+ template arguments) in line with common naming conventions. It also opens up the floor to a navbox at the former title. Unfortunately, I found out that I can no longer do fully automated edits with AWB. Is there a bot that is approved to do a search-replace in about 8000 articles? - Mgm|^(talk) 18:33, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

• Or perhaps it would be possible for my account Mgmbot (talk · contribs) to get a temporary 24 hr bot flag to run this task with AWB? Would save the rest of you a lot of work.- Mgm|^(talk) 18:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
• See also my request at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval. - Mgm|^(talk) 18:30, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
• Update: my request was approved for a trial run. - Mgm|^(talk) 09:27, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Section bot

I would like to request a bot to scrutinize Anon deletions of sections. I lurk with VandalFighter; and I can easily discern (based on characters removed) where an Anon has come in and removed significant (or even all) text from a section from a stable article. They may even do this multiple times to the same article, in effect deleting the article piecemeal. Perhaps the bot could also be more aggressive in reverting deletions from articles over a certain age (like a 1 or 2 years old), which are more likely to be decent articles and are unlikely to need sections removed. - RoyBoy ⁸⁰⁰ 16:04, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

You want a anti vandal bot, no? I could do it... CO 21:37, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Except that we have at least 2 other anti-vandal bots running. User:MartinBot, User:Cluebot, to name but a few. Shadow1 (talk) 23:32, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

True, but I'm unsure if they are picky enough about section deletions. - RoyBoy ⁸⁰⁰ 21:51, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Um, Martin Bot is kind of dead. --Chris  G  07:31, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Special Archiving Bot that works differently

I'm thinking of a bot that will not go by length of unused topics, but will archive when a talk page reaches a certain amount. This is for slowly-growing user talk pages. For example, the bot will notify anyone with a long talk page with a template, then on a requests page there can be discussions and the bot op can set it to archive certain pages. I do not know any coding languages except HTML, with is really, really, really, really useless. But I just need a source code and make a bot of my own, but basically I can modify any coding language when simple errors come, but I can't make an archiving bot like this from scratch. --Coastergeekperson04 00:21, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Most of the Archive bots already can archive based on Date, Size, or Number of Sections. Q ^{T C} —Preceding comment was added at 01:12, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

If you need a separate bot (that is, you want to do it by length, which I do not believe is currently a feature of other bots) then I can throw something together. --uǝʌǝsʎʇɹnoɟʇs 01:45, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't need it, but my talk page is very slow and it'd be better if I could only archive it when it is actually long. Maybe it can do this. --Coastergeekperson04 03:01, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I stand corrected, looking at the bot again, it archives after no discussion on a certain date, and it increments the archives when they reach a certain length. Q ^{T C} 10:16, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

You might achieve a similar effect with MiszaBot, by specifying the 'minthreadsleft' parameter. This is not quite the same as a size criterion, but might work anyway. EdJohnston 15:44, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

RfA edit counts/analysis

What are some thoughts on a bot that...

• detects when a new RfA is added to Wikipedia:Requests for adminship
• checks to see if Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Foo exists
• if no, reads edit count information from wannabe_kate or some other counter
• and creates Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Foo with the edit count information

WODUP ^(?) 22:23, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

An interesting idea. Could User:Mathbot do this when it adds the link to the edit summary? Dreamy ^§ 00:40, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

I asked Oleg Alexandrov about it. WODUP ^(?) 02:15, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

It appears to be easy enough to add this functionality to Mathbot. I will look into it in a day or two. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:34, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

I implemented this. Here is a sample run. Let's see how it works in the next few days. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:27, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

That's great. Thanks for working on it. WODUP 03:32, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

That is a good thing. Would it be possible to have him copy all of the boxes as well though? Where it shows the primary pages edited in the namespace? This is just as helpful as the total number. i ^(talk) 05:34, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Additional request: could it please add the other information listed on wannabe_kate? I'm talking about the monthly breakdown of edits, and (especially) the list of most-edited pages in each namespace. The former helps to track overall editing patterns, and the later provides valuable information about where reviewing editors should focus some of their attentions. Thanks. EVula // talk // ☯ // 05:37, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

AntiMalBot

Fixes malfunctioning bots and blocks malicious bots. --Gp75motorsports 13:01, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

So, a second admin bot? Dreamy ^§ 14:16, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

There was an admin bot? I didn't know. --Gp75motorsports 14:18, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Admin bot or not (I'm not opposed to the principle when a useful function requires the bit), I doubt a bot can reliably decide if another bot is behaving correctly or not. Given that the possible trouble blocking a bot people rely on is large, and that admins keep enough of an eye on bots to block a misbehaving one when it happens, I doubt I could be convinced to agree with a bot like that. — Coren ^(talk) 15:21, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Two thoughts: 1) A bot fixing another bot? Don't think that's going to happen! 2) Blocking malicious bots - Would it be possible for a bot to watch other bot activity and after X number of edits, simply check it against the approved flagged bot list? If it's not on the list, it would stop the questionable bot and put a message at the Bot owners' noticeboard or the Administrator intervention against vandalism? Not sure if User:HBC AIV helperbot4 catches these or not... Don't really know if there would be a huge need for this, as the steps in place for turning off an approved bot that's misbehaving work quite well. SkierRMH 00:33, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

This idea is simply impossible to do correctly. I don't think we need to keep commenting on it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:40, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Images for renaming

The process for renaming images is obscenely time-consuming and tedious. Needless to say, the backlog is comparably heinous. I imagine this would need to be semiautomated, as a bot cannot find an appropriate name for an image. But, I thought this could be handled with a template on that page with a new name. Say {{rename this image|Raggedy Ann and Andy}}. Then the bot could detect the new image name, create a new page for the image with that name and then tag the original image page with a speedy deletion tag. If the suggested name were already in use, the bot could add "(1)" to the image name and procede (a al File Upload Bot Magnus Manske). It would be much easier for editors to tag images with a name template than do the whole darn thing.--Esprit15d 16:58, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

This sounds like an excellent idea, except that I would have the bot reject the rename entirely if the destination name is already in use. (Someone might have already done the copy; or someone might have uploaded an alternative). — Coren ^(talk) 17:56, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Im working on such a bot but I need help setting up the on wiki process, please see, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive105#Heads_up_.26_request, Ill repost my needs.

Per several request and comments Im working on writing a image re-naming bot, I am going to make it like WP:MTC, the bot will re-upload the image and then replace the image with the new name. What I would like is help creating a new set of templates specifically for the bot to use.

1. For the image rename {{template|Image:NEWIMAGENAME.jpg}}
2. One for a conflict that a image with the same name exists
3. a template for images with invalid new file name.
4. one for noting an image was tagged by someone not on the approved list
5. tagging image after rename

β^_command 23:07, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Number 1

Well, I created {{Image move}}, which uses |name=Image:newname. Will that work? Ρх₥α 23:49, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

lets get rid of the name=, /me hates parameters with bots. But other than that yeah. β^_command 23:51, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Fixed Should the parameter include Image:, or not? (Like {{Image move|Image:test.jpg}} or just {{Image move|test.jpg}}). Ρх₥α 00:10, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

No need to duplicate the Image name. the second option looks best. β^_command 00:14, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Fixed Any other templates need to be created? Ρх₥α 00:17, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion, the new template {{Image move}} has rendered {{rename image}} obsolete. Why have two templates, when one is just as good and gets you closer to the ultimate goal of renaming the image? The only use I could see for {{rename image}} is if a bot were created that could automatically tag images that have names that are totally composed of integers or contains special characters, which are generally discouraged. But really, to handle this, we could just add a parser function to the {{Image move}} to request that a user suggest a new name if field {{{1}}} is left empty. I will go ahead and do that actually.--Esprit15d 17:51, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I've modified {{image move}} to prompt a user to suggest a new name if a suggestion is not already provided. So in theory, this could even be used by a bot, with follow up by a human user.--Esprit15d 18:41, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

See Numbers 2,3,4,5 β^_command 00:20, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Number 2

I can work on #2 right now. But this will be one that the bot uses? I am just clarifying. It seems that PxMa has already addressed this, since in the template {{image move}} he or she added a function that if the new title is already taken, it returns an error message. Based on discussion above, if the bot will not create an image if the name is already taken, I would suggest that the bot be designed to detect this error message and not even process such an image. If this is what you already meant, Betacommand, then I will make the template reflect that a bot has discovered that the suggested name is unsuitable and another should be chosen.--Esprit15d 17:51, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

This template will just be for catching errors that users miss. Instead of me just logging this to a log file and skipping it will post it to the wiki. β^_command 22:56, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I've made template #2 and you can find it at {{Image move delayed}}. There is still a chance, however, that it is redundant, considering the error message on #1.--Esprit15d 19:24, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Note:Would it also be possible to make sure that the name isn't on this list as well? (might be concern #3 above as well) SkierRMH 00:06, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

those Images exist and thus cannot be re-named to. β^_command 00:30, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Number 4

This template is odd, since, according to Wikipedia:Moving images to the Commons, anyone can move an image to Commons. I've done it many times, and I am not on the list (since I don't use that bot) and I'm not yet an admin (although it seems that will change soon). Should we talk about this matter more?--Esprit15d 20:48, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

for security reasons, I implement a list of "trusted" users, that way the risk of abuse is very limited and the chance that some vandal will be able to abuse such a tool will be eliminated. Currently anyone who wants to can re-name an image by hand. The issue is once this bot is operational the bot will re-name the image, and then replace the old image with the new image name. (something that would be a High Risk vandal target). β^_command 23:13, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Number 5

The already existing {{Db-redundantimage}} should work for template number 5.--Esprit15d 20:41, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

London Gazette references

About a month and a half ago the London Gazette changed its website (http://gazettes-online.co.uk) (this change also affects the Edinburgh Gazette and Belfast Gazette) meaning that all references to it that actually linked direct to a pdf copy of the relevant gazette on the website (created prior to this change) are now broken. Links to search results pages are similarly broken. An example of an old style link is as follows:

• http://www.gazettes-online.co.uk/archiveViewFrameSetup.asp?webType=0&PageDuplicate=x0%20%20%20%20%20%20&issueNumber=24602&pageNumber=0&SearchFor=charbonnel&selMedalType=&selHonourType=

The most important parameters in this are:

• • webType - which indicates whether it is a London (0), Edinburgh (1), or Belfast (2) Gazette which is being referred to and
  • issueNumber which surprisingly enough refers to the number of the Gazzete issue

The equivalent "new" url (in its minimal form) would be:

• http://www.gazettes-online.co.uk/ViewPDF.aspx?pdf=24602&geotype=London

where:

• • pdf is equivalent to the old issueNumber and
  • geoType is equivalent to the old webType, but now takes a text input

The main problem is that we lose the specific page being referred to, this is becuase the new url scheme uses the absolute page number, this numberings starts at 1 for the first page of the first issue each gazette of a new year. The old scheme simply numbers each page within an issue (starting with 0). Appending &page=<old page number> to the new url doesn't seem to break anything, but doesn't take you to the right page either - it would however preserve this information for our readers.

The nature of this conversion naturally suggests a bot process, assuming we can easily identify the pagess containing broken links. I've tried using special:linksearch to identify pages linking tothe Gazette website, but this seems to be returning only a fraction of the actual pages, try searching Wikipedia for either "London Gazette" or "gazettes-online" to see what I mean.

Also, User:DavidCane has created {{LondonGazette}}, if references to the Gazettes consistently used this, ongoing maintenance should be easier, since any future changes to the urls could probably be fixed simply by a template change, and it would in any case be easier to identify affected pages by checking transclusions of the template. However, at the moment this also requires the date the Gazette was issued and the (absolute) page number of the first page being referred to, which are generally not easy to identify. If these were not mandatory, a bot could also be sued to turn the broken urls into templated references. If such a bot logged its changes, then this data could be manually inserted at our leisure by working through the logs.

It would also be necessary to update references which link to search results pages e.g.

• http://www.gazette-online.co.uk/searchResultsView.asp?webType=0&searchString=shall+be+erased+from+the+Register&selDateFromDay=1&selDateFromMonth=1&selDateFromYear=1998&selDateToDay=2&selDateToMonth=1&selDateToYear=2007&searchIn=Notice&PageNumber=13

maps to

• http://www.gazette-online.co.uk/SearchResults.aspx?GeoType=London&st=adv&sb=date&FDay=1&FMth=1&FYr=1998&TDay=2&TMth=1&TYr=2007&all=shall%20be%20erased%20from%20the%20register&

It seems the search engine has also been updated, so different results are returned, so it is not worth trying to preserve the parameter indicating which results page we were on. Anyoje any thoughts on how best to proceed? David Underdown 17:03, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Trivia sections

A good bot would be one that marks all of our Trivia sections with the "Trivia section discouraged" template (not sure which that is). There are too many Trivia sections on WP right now, and it could be a good awareness campaign. Or is it too active/aggressive? If so, why even have the template? Nate Berkopec 02:09, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

It would likely be seen as too aggressive to do this by bot. See WT:TRIVIA for examples. -- Ned Scott 20:54, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Android Mouse Bot 3 performed this task for a short period in May 2007; it ran only about a week bedfore being stopped due to a deluge of protests. The bot operator has not edited for over two months, but seems to have released the source code into the public domain and has stated a willingness to provide the code at request (however, this was several months ago, so...). Anyone interested may wish to contact the operator via his talk page or by e-mail. – Black Falcon ^(Talk) 04:50, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Bot for Sockpuppet stuff

So I got the idea when I fixed a tag for SockPuppet stuff, and i got the idea that makes tags for sockpuppet sockpuppet stuff (I think it's sockpuppetry). It will be called SockPuppetBot and its for SockPuppet socpuppetstuff. (Maybe I have typos) --MyMii 22:56, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Could you please tell us what you want this bot to do? Dreamy ^§ 00:23, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Is this a hoax nom?--Esprit15d 19:35, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't think it's a hoax, basic on this recent edit from MyMii, but it's not clear to me what he/she wants the bot to do.. fix broken Wiki-tags, perhaps? --Jaysweet 20:01, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

EBot2 archives Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets if that is what you're after... — E ^talk_BAG 07:05, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Question/advice re annoying repeat vandalism

Unsure if this is a normal type request, or if this is something bots do I'd just like to ask the experts: The article Nil by Mouth (film) repeatedly gets hit by a very specific type of vandalism from a vide variety of IP addresses, rarely the same twice, but a very distinct MO. I am hoping there is something that can be done about this in the automatic sense. This particular vandalism consists of adding an "s" to the word Nil, sometimes just one occurrence, some times every one. To no end this person is amused by inserting the name Nils into this article, so I wonder, is there a way and possibility to have a bot add to its patrol to revert such edits? MURGH ^disc. 03:39, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

That is to specific, as we have two anti-vandalsim bots. Dreamy ^§ 15:06, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah, ok, in that sense. Thanks for simple explanation. MURGH ^disc. 15:54, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

AFBot

I would like a bot, that checks contribs, and for WP:FOWL, or any other WikiProjects, moves a user to the inactive part of a list of participants, and vice versa. It will check for contribs towards a WikiProject like here. Dreamy ^§ 23:35, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Pokébot (or Projectnotifybot)

See also: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pokémon § Use the noticeboard people

This is a request for a bot to be used by Wikipedia:WikiProject Pokémon. The idea is for a bot to look at all of the nominations in discussion areas such as XFD and FAC. It will then check the talk pages of the nominated article's (or whatever it is that was nominated) talk page for {{Pokeproject}}. If the template exists then the bot will proceed to add a notice to Wikipedia:WikiProject Pokémon/Noticeboard informing members of the WikiProject about the discussion. FunPika 17:48, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

If such a bot is to be implemented, why not make it do the same job for all wikiprojects? Whenever anything is listed at Xfd, FAC etc, notify any wikiprojects listed on the talk page. If the bot is trawling all these articles anyway, why not have it notify all the affected projects? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:19, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

That would be a good idea. :) FunPika 19:53, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Although I find the idea appealing, I think some form of control is necessary; otherwise, the talk pages of projects like WikiProject Biography, WikiProject Military history, and the like (i.e. any project with a large scope) would soon be overwhelmed with notices. – Black Falcon ^(Talk) 04:32, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Goo point. It should be done on an opt-in basis. --17:20, 3 November 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by BrownHairedGirl (talk • contribs)

Peer review automation bot

I'd like to request a bot writer to work with the Wikipedia talk:Content review/workshop on a suggested change to Peer Review. There has been quite a bit of talk at the workshop about possible changes to PR and the current plan is to implement categorization on it. Because the page is currently manually archived, this would require a bot -- the manual process is already tedious and would become unmanageable without automation if categorization were introduced. We'd also like to change the page to list only links, rather than the whole existing review. Here's a mock-up of how the peer review page might look: Wikipedia talk:Content review/workshop/Peer Review mockup.

We are hopeful that this is the first step in a reinvigoration of Peer Review. If this works, we hope to come up with more ideas to help improve not only peer review but other content review processes. However, this first step is in some ways the most important: peer review is a key part of Wikipedia, and it's not working as well as it could. We believe organizing the page will really help participation, and we'd like to work with someone who would be interested in continuing to participate and who can help us improve our ideas and make them implementable.

If you're interested, post a note either here or at the workshop page, and we can talk about implementation details. Thanks. Mike Christie (talk) 19:22, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Bulk image move to Commons -- tarot cards

Could someone please fetch all the cards transcluded in Minor Arcana, upload them to the Commons and then nominate the originals for deletion? The Commons doesn't currently have any images of these cards. NeonMerlin 01:54, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

See WP:MTC 71.124.42.226 02:00, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Commons deletion log checker

Commons admins theoretically are supposed to check instances of all images they delete on all projects--for which they have a marvelously reliable tool--but much of the time they don't (there aren't many of them and they're overworked, in their defense). So could we have a bot that watches the Commons deletion log, checks to see whether the deleted images are in use on article pages here (article pages only, please! no need to remove red links from people's user pages since they'd probably rather see them and thus be alerted to the deletion), and then either removes them or makes a list so that a human could easily do so? Thanks. Chick Bowen 02:16, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

This task is already performed by CommonsDelinker. It's a part of pywikipedia, (code here) if you want to run a copy. MER-C 11:06, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. OK, thanks. I'll put together a list of instances it missed and see what Siebrand thinks of them. Chick Bowen 23:30, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Question, (moved from VP technical)

Would it be possible to program a bot to automatically update the RfA !vote count? —Cronholm¹⁴⁴ 20:15, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Ask here. Tangobot updates the chart here; perhaps it could do it. Cheers. --MZMcBride 22:07, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

...Could Tangobot do the job?—Cronholm¹⁴⁴ 06:57, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

User:Wenli is currently seeking approval for this task. See here. — madman bum and angel 15:01, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. —Cronholm¹⁴⁴ 16:33, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Spaces in references?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this, but I thought I'd give it a try. :) Anyway, I don't know if a new bot needs to be created or an old one can do it, but I've recently been working on the article Vampire in order to get it to Featured Status. It's quite long, so I started to look as to how I could cut down on space. I found that a number of the references had extra spaces in them that needn't be there (For example, <ref name = example>{{cite journal |last = Jones|first = B. |title = Bob's world of examples|journal = Journal| issue = 1(17)| date = 1998|url = blah blah blah|accessdate=2002-03-28 }}</ref> - Note all the extra spaces in the reference between the '|' and the '='?. This reference can be turned into <ref name=example>{{cite journal|last=Jones|first=B.|title=Bob's world of examples|journal=Journal|issue=1(17)|date=1998|url=blah blah blah|accessdate=2002-03-28}}</ref>) I went through by hand and managed to get rid of around 500 bytes of used space just by deleting the extra spaces. Not a lot in the scale of the vampire article, but I was thinking, on the scale of wikipedia it could be massive! So I was wondering, could a bot be programmed to delete any extra spaces in the references on wikipedia. I think it would save tonnes of space, considering that every article with references is bound to have a few extra spaces in them. I don't think anyone's cared before as it's pretty small getting rid of a couple of hundred bytes on a given article; but together the amount sabed would be much more important. Get back to me on my talk page, here or somewhere else. Cheers, :) Spawn Man 00:45, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that a bot that did this would be useful per the bot policy, and we are not to worry about space; the servers have unlimited space, as far as editors are concerned. Cheers! — madman bum and angel 01:04, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I'd find it useful - and if we have unlimited space, why do we need to fundraise for page views? If we cut down on the amount of kilobytes downloaded, then we would need far less page views. The bot would make up for itself in a short time, with the average article having about a few hundred bytes extra... Spawn Man 01:49, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

As a computer science person myself, the few bytes that are saved while removing spaces will not matter. As for the fundraiser that covers a large number of items besides our bandwidth. β^_command 02:05, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Those spaces have no effect on the visible text, so I suspect they have no effect on the html page served by the servers. However, they help make the edit text more readable. Quite a few editors find wikitext laden with cite templates difficult to read, and these breaks help somewhat. Sometimes, each field in a cite template is separated not by a space, but by a line break. Gimmetrow 02:40, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Fine, shoot me down then! ;) Spawn Man 04:05, 11 November 2007 (UTC)