Wikipedia:Bot requests

For the policy on bot requirements, see WP:BOTREQUIRE.

This is a page for requesting tasks to be done by bots per the bot policy. This is an appropriate place to put ideas for uncontroversial bot tasks, to get early feedback on ideas for bot tasks (controversial or not), and to seek bot operators for bot tasks. Consensus-building discussions requiring large community input (such as request for comments) should normally be held at WP:VPPROP or other relevant pages (such as a WikiProject's talk page).

You can check the "Commonly Requested Bots" box above to see if a suitable bot already exists for the task you have in mind. If you have a question about a particular bot, contact the bot operator directly via their talk page or the bot's talk page. If a bot is acting improperly, follow the guidance outlined in WP:BOTISSUE. For broader issues and general discussion about bots, see the bot noticeboard.

Before making a request, please see the list of frequently denied bots, either because they are too complicated to program, or do not have consensus from the Wikipedia community. If you are requesting that a template (such as a WikiProject banner) is added to all pages in a particular category, please be careful to check the category tree for any unwanted subcategories. It is best to give a complete list of categories that should be worked through individually, rather than one category to be analyzed recursively (see example difference).

Alternatives to bot requests

• WP:AWBREQ, for simple tasks that involve a handful of articles and/or only needs to be done once (e.g. adding a category to a few articles).
• WP:URLREQ, for tasks involving changing or updating URLs to prevent link rot (specialized bots deal with this).
• WP:SQLREQ, for tasks which might be solved with an SQL query (e.g. compiling a list of articles according to certain criteria).
• WP:TEMPREQ, to request a new template written in wiki code or Lua.
• WP:SCRIPTREQ, to request a new user script. Many useful scripts already exist, see Wikipedia:User scripts/List.
• WP:CITEBOTREQ, to request a new feature for WP:Citation bot, a user-initiated bot that fixes citations.

Note to bot operators: The {{BOTREQ}} template can be used to give common responses, and make it easier to keep track of the task's current status. If you complete a request, note that you did with {{BOTREQ|done}}, and archive the request after a few days (WP:1CA is useful here).

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Please add your bot requests to the bottom of this page.
Make a new request

#	Bot request	Status	💬	👥	🙋 Last editor	🕒 (UTC)	🤖 Last botop editor	🕒 (UTC)
1	Creating archive page for added ITN items	BRFA filed	17	3	Usernamekiran	2023-10-19 19:18	Usernamekiran	2023-10-19 19:18
2	Automatic AFL stat updates		2	2	GreenC	2023-10-20 23:00
3	Redirects from organization/newspaper domain names		11	5	Usernamekiran	2023-10-20 23:08	Usernamekiran	2023-10-20 23:08
4	Bot to add archiving bots to talk pages		9	6	Pppery	2023-10-26 01:28	Primefac	2023-10-25 09:34
5	Add parameter script=Latn to template:lang-ku using Latin		1	1	Revolution Saga	2023-10-28 22:00
6	From "Province of..." and "Provincia di..." to "province of..." and "provincia di..."		2	2	Jonesey95	2023-11-04 22:09
7	SVG		2	1	Minorax	2023-11-07 11:23
8	Disabling categories on drafts		14	7	Wikiwerner	2023-12-02 20:48	GoingBatty	2023-11-09 04:16
9	Reuters in inappropriate parameter	Y Done	5	3	Leyo	2023-11-09 20:46	GoingBatty	2023-11-09 19:17
10	Major task: Update Template:Ct to Template:UCI team code	BRFA filed	4	3	Robertsky	2023-11-12 00:54
11	Correct use of italics	Not a good task for a bot.	3	3	Usernamekiran	2023-11-11 12:50	Usernamekiran	2023-11-11 12:50
12	Fixing duplicate banners		6	2	PARAKANYAA	2023-11-21 04:43	GoingBatty	2023-11-16 04:17
13	Date ranges for noticeboard archives		4	3	Primefac	2023-11-12 08:10	Primefac	2023-11-12 08:10
14	Would this need a bot?		1	1	BOZ	2023-11-14 05:42
15	Automatic NOGALLERY keyword for categories containing non-free files		4	2	Gonnym	2023-11-15 06:23
16	Archiving washingtonindependent.com	Deferred	4	3	Queen of Hearts	2023-11-19 03:19
17	Implement project-independent quality assessments	BRFA filed	13	6	Qwerfjkl	2023-11-19 18:07	Qwerfjkl	2023-11-19 18:07
18	Convert links to Wikimedia sites in body text to normal interwiki links		24	8	Certes	2023-11-17 18:59	GoingBatty	2023-11-17 17:11
19	Replacement for MalnadachBot?		3	2	Liu1126	2023-11-20 09:27	Qwerfjkl	2023-11-19 21:49
20	Request for Bot		3	3	Novem Linguae	2023-11-20 19:56	GoingBatty	2023-11-20 18:32
21	Translate Article Pages from English to Gagana Sāmoa		7	4	IonaPatamea	2023-11-21 07:12	Usernamekiran	2023-11-20 21:51
22	Apply page move for Power forward	Not a good task for a bot.	9	4	Certes	2023-11-22 21:51	GoingBatty	2023-11-22 19:57
23	author-link		7	4	Folly Mox	2023-12-06 14:29
24	Extending copyright expiration date on Pablo Picasso's works from 70 years (January 1, 2044) to 80 years (either April 8, 2053 or January 1, 2054)		3	3	Adam Cuerden	2023-11-23 20:01
25	Early idea		12	6	WhatamIdoing	2023-12-08 18:54	Legoktm	2023-12-07 07:43
26	Protection fallback adminbot		3	2	Suffusion of Yellow	2023-12-02 19:39	0xDeadbeef	2023-12-02 06:08
27	the Bad Guy Patrol bot	N Not done	3	3	GoingBatty	2023-12-07 04:42	GoingBatty	2023-12-07 04:42
28	Automatic tagging of some easily-identified non-English language text		3	2	Remsense	2023-12-07 14:24
29	template change		4	2	Certes	2023-12-07 13:57

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In the last week
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When exceptions occur, please check the setting first.

Creating archive page for added ITN items

While we currently archive the WP:ITNC page to review past candidates for In The News, we don't have a similar function for the ITN items that are actually added to {{In The News}}. Is it possible that, given a date range and a target page, for a bot to capture "significant" additions to the template along with the date added. So for example, the bot should be able to review this diff, and create a line on the target page with the date of the change, the editor that added it, and the text of the addition (here being "Tharman Shanmugaratnam is elected as the next president of Singapore.")

The end goal would then to have the bot initially make monthly pages from the start of ITN, and then on a monthly basis create a new monthly archive.

I think the one constant is that all blurbs as well as RDs added start with a "*" mark, as to distinguish from minor typos or wording corrections or changes in the picture. However, I would rather the bot be overzealous and include false positives. Masem (t) 13:14, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

@Masem: Hi. I'm not 100% sure, but I think I can do that. Also, can you provide an example diff of bot's edit based on this diff? It can be your sandbox for the example. —usernamekiran (talk) 19:00, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

@Masem: Kindly check User:KiranBOT/sandbox, I made these edits using the bot. I think you expect blurb, editor name, timestamp format, correct? courtesy ping: Qwerfjkl (I couldnt have solved the diff issue without their help). —usernamekiran (talk) 17:00, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, having the blurb, editor name, and timestamp would be good. It would also be nice to add, as a header, the time period it ran through. Can you run that for a larger period as I would like to see how it handles Recent Death additions too. Masem (t) 17:04, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Masem: The output you saw earlier did not include recent deaths, intentionally. I thought you wanted only the blurbs. I can add the time period it ran through, but I think it should not be in header. How about: *[[Bill Richardson]] − added by <username> at <date of addition>, removed by Stephen at 00:12, September 8, 2023. Thats just an example, the wording can be changed. —usernamekiran (talk) 10:44, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

If you can figure out when things were removed, that would be amazing, however, that is not essential. Its more the date added. Also probably should be clear that perhaps both the oldid and diff link for the point of addition (and also for point of removal, if possible) would be good to include. I did mean to also include the RDs, since they also should appear with a "*" in front of the entry. Masem (t) 12:10, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

@Masem: Hi. In this older version, you can see some lines beginning with | . They are from the "Main page image/ITN" template. In the current version, I have updated the program so that it will skip such lines. In this version, the bot excludes the lines beginning with | . I have also updated it so that lines beginning with *[[ are considered as recent deaths. Let me know what you think, and what other functionality would you like. —usernamekiran (talk) 13:14, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I think this is in a good place (the second version where you are ignoring the pipe). As this is something that came up in ITN discussions I will check there to see if there is anything else before doing a full scale implementation. Masem (t) 17:31, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

@Masem: I have also updated the format of the timestamp. Now it is similar to a signature. And the archive pages will be created in "<month name> YYYY" format. e.g. "/September 2023". The only issue I couldn't resolve is the repetition of entries - when a line is edited, like the Morocco earthquake, every time it was edited, it was added as a separate entry. This happens because of the way diffs are presented. —usernamekiran (talk) 18:26, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks so much for this! It would be nice to add a header for each day, which would help to add some separation. For example ==September 10== and ==September 9==. I also think the "added by [Username] on [date]" part could be set off in a smaller font or otherwise separated from the main blurb, but I'm not sure exactly how that would be best formatted, and even as it currently is I don't particularly mind it. The single most important thing for readability, though: would it be at all possible to detect at least some cases of modification as distinct from addition? I can suggest some approaches. If in the same edit, one non-RD line is removed and another non-RD line is added in the same line number position, it is generally a modification. This is because new blurbs are usually added to the top and old ones are usually removed from the bottom due to staleness, so if the same line is added and removed it's a good indication of an intentional swap. I understand that this may not be a 100% accurate check, but you could also combine it with a second check like making sure the bolded link target is the same. Other approaches like textual similarity metrics based on edit distance or NLP algorithms are probably overkill, but could be attempted. I still think that checking the placement within the document and the bolded link target is good enough to reduce most of the duplication. In the case that you do detect duplication, I would probably try to put it underneath the original version, and have them listed as a chronological progression of edits. Example. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 01:45, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

the bot created "User:KiranBOT/September 2023". This is one of the many versions. I like the concept of adding updated blurbs below the original ones. I have implemented that in the program, and I think I may have tested it. I've created a method to find out updates, but two things I couldn't tackle so far are location swap of lines, and "ongoing" section. I'm currently out of town for a couple of days. I will do some more experiments after I get back. —usernamekiran (talk) 08:20, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

• PS: this is very important: currently - while testing, the bot is using one chronological order, but finally, it will be reverse chronological order. ie, the oldest entry will be at the top of the page, and latest at the bottom. For example, entry of 1 January, 2005 will be at the top of the page, and of 31st January will be at the bottom. —usernamekiran (talk) 08:26, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

  that page is looking good. The reverse order makes sense.

  Is it possible for each diff, that you can figure out what the most recent diff just prior to the template change on both WP:ITNC and WP:ERRORS as to add them after the information you have presently?

  Also, and this is probably much easier: since clearly doing it by month makes the most sense, providing a header link to the same month in our ITNC archives, such as Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates/September 2023 (only the first archives would need to be manually reset). Masem (t) 12:33, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

  I didn't understand your comment regarding the diffs. I'm not fully familiar how ITN stuff works in the background, I'll work on that. I can change the date format of archive page to be consistent with ITNC archives, and we can link them. But that might be confusing for the readers, I think we should keep the header format different. I'm not adamant about it though. —usernamekiran (talk) 14:42, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

  I am currently having some health issues, so I will probably be off the grid for a few days. Just wanted to let you guys know. Also, I'll finish the work as soon as I make recovery. Thank you for your patience, and understanding. —usernamekiran (talk) 15:29, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

  Please, take the time you need, there's no rush and the fact we have the basic of the solution are fine.

  By the diffs, I was wondering if it was then possible to find the diff on either (or both) pages WP:ITNC or WP:ERRORS which would be the last change made before the ITN template diff date. For example, if I use this template diff [1] which is around 18:00 on 15 September, then a link to this diff from WP:ITNC [2] which is the last change before 18:00 15 September on that page. While in this case, that specific diff does not point to the nomination that was implemented, I can see from going one diff forward that the posting editor also indicated that the nominations were posted. Masem (t) 15:37, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

• BRFA filed —usernamekiran (talk) 19:18, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Automatic AFL stat updates

I'd like to harness the data from afltables.com to automatically update all AFL players at the conclusion of every round. Some of the players are years out of date, which is a shame. The stats box (goals and games) could also be updated. Electricmaster (talk) 04:23, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Do not recommend a bot that edits every article at the end of every round, it's not efficient and arguably disruptive. Rather a bot that updates Commons in JSON, then a Lua template that pulls and displays data from Commons. The articles magically stay up to date without any bot (or human) edits. Such a system would work universally on any language wiki. However, should be careful of copyright, because maybe the website doesn't want their data replicated elsewhere. There's also a question of reliability. Before you start this project, to avoid problems in the future, query two places: the website contact here and WP:RSN. -- GreenC 23:00, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Redirects from organization/newspaper domain names

I would be interested to see a bot go through the |URL= parameter of all instances of {{Infobox newspaper}} and {{Infobox organization}} and create redirects if they do not already exist from the domain name to the article with the transclusion, tagged with {{R from domain name}}. This task could potentially be expanded to other infoboxes as well, but I think those two are a good place to start given that they'd help make linking to articles on sources in citations easier. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 08:26, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Do we massage the domain name in any way, e.g. remove initial "www."? Suggested easy by-product: a list of the domain names for which a page exists but is not a redirect to the article title. Certes (talk) 09:29, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Removing the .www is the only tweak I'm aware of. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 15:29, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

@Sdkb: Why would you create a citation with a link to an organization's/newspaper's domain name instead of their real name? (e.g. nytimes.com instead of The New York Times)? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 14:59, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Using the real name is always better. But a lot of citation tools just create the URL, so a lot of lower-quality pages have them. When I'm editing those pages to change to the full name and add a link, it often takes me a few moments to locate the page (particularly for local newspaper names that often need to be disambiguated since seemingly ever paper using some combo of a set of ~a dozen words). Having the domain name more consistently redirect to the article would make those edits easier. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 15:36, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

@Sdkb: How about requesting a query that will go through the |url= parameter of those infoboxes to generate a list, and then proposing a bot that use said list to make those edits (e.g. changing |website=nytimes.com to |website=The New York Times)? You could also provide the list to Ohconfucius, whose Fix Sources script makes some of those corrections. I'd also suggest asking the citation tool owners to adjust their tools, but some tools aren't maintained. GoingBatty (talk) 16:28, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

My Sources script already changes |website=nytimes.com to |website=The New York Times, among others, but I would be happy to add more similar converts that are not already included. Feel free to check here to see which journals are converted. -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 14:39, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

This is straying from the bot request. Knowing about the script is nice, and I've used it before, but not all editors will be using it, and it will never cover all local newspapers for which we have articles. And readers, not just editors, may search for newspapers using their domain name. So for all these reasons, creating the redirects would be desirable. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 15:49, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

• @Sdkb: if nobody is working on this, I could give it a try, but I'm sure if I can create the program for the task. as I'm not 100% sure what the bot needs to do. Can you kindly provide an example, or diff(s)? —usernamekiran (talk) 22:15, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

  Beware that some newspapers, such as the New York Times, conceal the URL in WikiData and extract it with website={{Official URL}}. There are url= parameters within the NYT's infobox, but they're nested in citation templates and are the URLs of sources that verify NYT's headcount, editor, circulation, etc. rather than the URL of the NYT itself. Certes (talk) 22:34, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

  well my schedule seems pretty busy, so it would be better to defer the task for the better. —usernamekiran (talk) 23:08, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Bot to add archiving bots to talk pages

Sorry if I've missed a past discussion on this suggestion.

Manually setting up archiving bots on talk pages is time consuming, and there are an enormous number of pages were it hasn't been set up, leading to clogged talk pages. It would be useful for a bot to add one to talk pages that don't have one, with notional parameters (30d, 2 minimum, etc).

I think it would be important for editors to be able to exclude it, too, if consensus was that an archiving bot wasn't wanted for some reason. Cheers. Riposte97 (talk) 05:56, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

@Riposte97: are we talking about article talk pages, or user talk pages? Getting a consensus to force editors to archive their talk pages has extremely low chances of getting the consensus. Regarding article talk pages, there's a possibility of consensus, but from technical perspective I'm not sure if it is worth it. We shouldn't flatly/indiscriminately add archive bot's parameters to thousands of pages. A lot of the talk pages don't get edits other than wikiproject banners, and IA bot. If a talkpage is getting bulky, then it also means it is coming across the editors. Someone will eventually setup the archive. It is not that difficult :-) —usernamekiran (talk) 06:10, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Concur with kiran; we cannot force users to archive their talk pages, and a low-traffic talk page (a category which I would would guess 90% of existing talk pages fit into) does not need an archive bot to check it. Primefac (talk) 09:34, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

I'd estimate low traffic talk pages at a much higher percentage, closer to 99% (which gives ~60,000 moderate– to high-traffic talk pages, which seems still too many). I agree that autoarchiving is unnecessary for the overwhelming majority of article talk pages, and probably unnecessary or unwanted for the majority of user talk pages.

There's also not really a good way to estimate when archiving is going to be helpful or unhelpful. If an article has been relatively content-stable for a decade, very old talk page messages may still help inform a rewrite; if a major rewrite has occurred over the past week, even messages from a few months ago may no longer apply to the current revision. Folly Mox (talk) 11:30, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough! I was just talking about article talk pages. Thanks for the responses - I take your points. Riposte97 (talk) 00:18, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

IMO archiving talk pages is a necessary evil when they get too long. Otherwise it's easier to navigate one page. If such a bot existed it could have limits like when the page gets too long (whatever that means). Something like this would really need strong consensus. Lot of potential for ruffled feathers. I've often come across talk pages with only a few entries, then I check the archives, and there is a [1] page that is super long with lots of interesting conversation from 2003-2013 or whatever. Meanwhile from 2013-present there is hardly anything. In retrospect it seemed like a bad decision, in 2013, to dump everything out of sight because it killed the momentum of the talk page. They are sort of like villages, people see a lot of activity and join in. When the village is "destroyed" in the name of progress/cleanup/clutter, it may take a long time to recover the same intensity and variety of discussion. -- GreenC 01:07, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, I requested a query related to this thread, which found seven article talk pages without autoarchiving set up and with at least one edit per day over the past thirty days. Folly Mox (talk) 01:17, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

The top-edited one (by a very wide margin) is just an edit war between User:AnomieBOT and User:Bot1058. Folly Mox (talk) 01:21, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

User_talk:Bot1058#BOT fight: AnomieBOT vs Bot1058 * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:28, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Add parameter script=Latn to template:lang-ku using Latin

I noticed that a very large number of uses of the template:lang-ku display Latin text incorrectly (non-italics, in Arabic font; see, for example, here in the lead). Since it would take a very long time for anyone to go through and add the parameter script=Latn to make the text display correctly, is there any way that a bot can complete this task? Thanks in advance. Revolution Saga (talk) 22:00, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

From "Province of..." and "Provincia di..." to "province of..." and "provincia di..."

This is unmanageable. I have tried to do what I can, but considering the infinity of Italian municipalities and provinces, I wonder if you could ask bot to make all "Provinces" (with a capital 'P') "provinces" (with a lowercase "p"). I have done what I can, more than that I cannot, there are really too many corrections for one person. Examples: Province of Caserta; Comitini; Province of Trapani; Province of Udine. Thanks in advance. JackkBrown (talk) 21:03, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

This sort of task typically runs afoul of WP:CONTEXTBOT. Happily, there is no deadline. Make a list and work on it over time. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:09, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

SVG

Good day, can someone make a bot to run through this and append {{SVG-logo}} below the Non-free xxx template and add ==Summary== above the FUR template to files that don't have it? --Minorax^«¦talk¦» 11:22, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Something like Special:Diff/1183936918 --Minorax^«¦talk¦» 11:23, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Disabling categories on drafts

Ever since the idea of immediately moving inadequate articles to draftspace emerged as a common alternative to deletion, the amount of time that has had to be invested in cleaning up polluted categories that have draftspace pages in them has gone way up, because the people who do the sandboxing frequently forget to remove or disable the categories in the process — so I wanted to ask if there's any way that a bot can be made to clean up any overlooked stuff.

Since there's already a bot, JJMC89bot, that detects main-to-draft page moves and tags them as {{Drafts moved from mainspace}}, the easiest thing would probably be to just have that bot automatically disable any categories on the page at the same time as it's tagging it — but when I directly approached that bot's maintainer earlier this year to ask if this could be implemented, they declined on the basis that the bot hadn't already been approved to perform that task, while failing to give me any explanation of why taking the steps necessary to get the bot approved to perform that task was somehow not an option. As an alternative, I then approached the maintainer of DannyS712bot, which catches and disables categories on drafts that are in the active AFC submission queue (which newly sandboxed former articles generally aren't, and thus don't get caught by it), but was basically told to buzz off and talk to JJMC89bot.

So, since I've already been rebuffed by the maintainers of both of the obvious candidate bots, I wanted to ask if there's any other way to either get one of those two bots on the task or make a new bot to go through Category:All content moved from mainspace to draftspace disabling any active categories, so that editors can cut down on the amount of time we have to spend on DRAFTNOCAT cleanup. If possible, such a bot would ideally also do an ifexist check, and outright remove any redlinked categories that don't even exist at all, though just disabling redlinks too would still be preferable to editors having to manually clean up hundreds of categorized drafts at a time — it's just that merely disabling the redlinks creates another load of cleanup work later on when the draft gets approved or moved by its own creator without AFC review or whatever, so killing redlinks right away is preferable to simply deferring them for a second round of future cleanup. Bearcat (talk) 16:18, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Technically, this is doable — without interfering DannyS712bot's task. But I also would like to know why this was rejected by these two bot operators, and at the BRfA as well. —usernamekiran (talk) 18:22, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

This seems like something we can also tackle at the source. Hey MPGuy2824. Does the WP:MOVETODRAFT script disable categories when draftifying? If not we should consider adding this feature. If so we may need to look at diffs to see where these undisabled categories are coming from (manual moves? old script?) –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:02, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

The MTD script wraps categories within {{Draft categories}} which disables them. (e.g. [3]) The older script disables categories by adding a ":" before the word "Category:". That leaves two possible culprits. 1. manual moves and 2. the regex in my script isn't catching all categories. Let me see if I can narrow it down by running a quarry or two. -MPGuy2824 (talk) 04:07, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Maybe Bearcat can provide some diffs for us to examine. Would be interesting to see if any of these are being created by MoveToDraft, or something else. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:24, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

I've only ever seen manual moves; in fact, I wasn't aware that MTD even existed. Bearcat (talk) 12:41, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

@Bearcat: I already have a bot task approved for adding {{Draft categories}}. The challenge for me is identifying which drafts have article categories. There's Wikipedia:Database reports/Polluted categories to find user pages with article categories, but I'm not aware of anything comparable for drafts. Going through Category:Pending AfC submissions looked like an easy start, especially since it's so small at the moment, but I didn't find any drafts with article categories. I'm open to further discussion. GoingBatty (talk) 21:36, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Database reports/Polluted categories (2) catches categories with drafts in them; the minor flaw is that it's currently not correctly recognizing the {{Polluted category}} template that used to flag maintenance categories as "don't bother with this because we don't care about it", so it's picking up things it doesn't need to pick up like Category:Miscellany to be merged and Category:Wikipedia Student Program. But even if that report is failing to react to that template properly, a bot could potentially be programmed to react to that template around whatever's stopping that report from reacting to it.

In the case of the particular issue I was asking about, just working directly with Category:All content moved from mainspace to draftspace itself is also an option: have a bot go through that, and disable categories that are on the pages in that category. That won't catch all categorized drafts by itself, but it will certainly catch the ones that are categorized because they're former articles that got moved into draftspace without the mover disabling the categories in the process — and at this point, that accounts for the majority of categorized drafts, so it would become easier for human editors to catch whatever's still left if we only have to deal with 25 or 30 per cent as many pages as we do now.

I genuinely doubt that there's any way to make a bot perfect at catching all improperly categorized drafts without ever missing any — but if we can get bots to deal with as many as possible, that still reduces the amount of time that human editors have to invest in worrying about it. So I don't think we need to shoot for "the magic bullet that will make a bot infallible at instantly catching every draft that ever gets categorized at all" — let's just aim for "where can a bot make as many dents in the problem as feasibly possible by working on defined targets". Bearcat (talk) 22:48, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

@Bearcat: Aha - thanks for telling me about that report! I ran the bot over the report, and manually cleaned up some drafts that had incorrect categories. I've added it to my favorites, so I can run the bot when it gets republished. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 04:16, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Ah, ok. I think the reason you didn't know about it might be that the report you already knew about used to catch both user-polluted and draft-polluted categories in the same place — but then they were split up into two separate reports later on for whatever reason, so you might simply never have found out about the newer draft report. Bearcat (talk) 12:41, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

If you don't want to have your bot churn through 8000 pages most of which don't need action, then Category:Content moved from mainspace to draftspace from November 2023 (using the current month instead) would also work fairly well. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:32, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Actually, yeah, that's a good alternative too. In reality, categorized drafts will virtually always be new pages that became categorized drafts within the past couple of days (and humans can catch the less common exceptions where a much older draft gets recategorized more than a month later), so the dated categories are likely more manageable chunks for a bot to grind through. Bearcat (talk) 23:48, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

• The other thing is, just having a bot go through the polluted category reports doesn't solve the problem all by itself — sometimes drafts are categorized not by direct declaration of categories on the page itself, but by artificially smuggling in transcluded categories from a template or infobox. (There is a rule that templates aren't supposed to be transcluding categories at all, but people don't actually obey it, so in reality it happens quite frequently anyway.)
  A bot can't fix cases like that, which means that even if a bot is pounding through that report a human still has to go through it every few days anyway to suppress any transcluded categories that the bot couldn't fix — but if most of the categories on the report have already been cleaned up by a bot, but I still have to inspect all of them anyway to look for one or two pages that might have been missed, then that's a huge imposition on my time. So what we also need is a bot that's catching and killing categories on drafts before they even get picked up by that report at all, so that the size of the report itself is reduced — which means that there does need to be a bot that whips through Category:All content moved from mainspace to draftspace, or a dated subcategory of that, on a daily basis so that a larger percentage of categorized drafts get resolved before they even show up on the polluted categories report in the first place. Bearcat (talk) 13:43, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

  Does something like searching the Draft namespace with insource:/\[\[\s*[Cc]ategory\s*:/ -hastemplate:"Draft categories" -insource:/\[\[\s*[Cc]ategory\s*:[^]]*[Dd]raft/ or a variation do the job? Wikiwerner (talk) 20:48, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Reuters in inappropriate parameter

There are a few hundred cases with |last=Reuters (Reuters insource:/\{\{Cite news[^\}]+last *= *Reuters/i). Correction as in this example would fix the issue. Would anyone be willing to perform this task? Leyo 13:26, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

It's a small enough task, WP:AWB/TASKS might be a better place to ask. Primefac (talk) 13:34, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

@Leyo: Doing... GoingBatty (talk) 15:34, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

@Leyo: Y Done! This took a chunk of articles out of Category:CS1 errors: generic name. Trying some variations to fix more articles. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 19:17, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Great work, thank you. --Leyo 20:46, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Major task: Update Template:Ct to Template:UCI team code

Please see the Template_talk:UCI_team_code#Requested_move_30_October_2023 where there was rough consensus to usurp the ct shortcut. Essentially, replace the 12,000 transclusions to bypass the redirect so that Template:Ct can redirect to Template:Contentious topics. Awesome Aasim 23:08, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Running through the 98 remaining templates that transclude {{ct}} might make a nice dent in the overall page count. I did eight or ten of the core ones that needed human attention. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:07, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Have worked on the rest of the templates with AWB. – robertsky (talk) 00:47, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

BRFA filed. – robertsky (talk) 00:54, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Correct use of italics

On most (about 80%) of the food and drink pages italics are used improperly (I have spent many hours of my days correcting errors of this kind), for example: many times on a page a food is put in italics and on the same page many times it's not; on one page a food is made italic and on others the same food is not made italic; it almost always happens that when one enters a wikilink of a food put in italics, one is confronted with a page without that food in italics. I myself struggle to continue reading foods and drinks pages, I don't want to imagine in the mind of a reader how much bloody confusion is created. I would propose to have a bot act by removing all italicised food and drink terms, or, even better, selecting every existing food, deciding whether to make it italic or not, and, again through the bot, changing everything at the same time, without (which is impossible) doing it without bot. I, however, have done my best, but I will announce that I will never again spend time on this problem, as I am in an endless loop. I wonder what's the point of italicising a food If there is zero uniformity. JackkBrown (talk) 07:07, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Please do not post the same text in multiple places, per WP:TALKFORK. The above is not a valid bot request. There is no way that a bot could know which text to wrap in italics (or, more properly, the {{lang}} template for foreign terms). – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:42, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

as explained by Jonesey95 above: Not a good task for a bot. —usernamekiran (talk) 12:50, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Fixing duplicate banners

I asked at the help desk and I was told to ask here. The Organized crime task force and the Serial killer task force banners recently got added to the banner of Template:WikiProject Crime and Criminal Biography using parameters. The previous banners (as wrappers of the new one with the parameters) were mass substituted. This has left ~6700 (see Category:Unknown-importance Crime-related articles, not counting ones that didn't have an initial basic crime importance) duplicates, that have both the original crime importance and task force importance but split between two duplicate banners.

Is there any bot that can merge the importance values on the pages that have both templates so there aren't so many duplicates (for example if there's two duplicate banners, one of which has the importance for wp crime and one which has the task force importance, add them together)? Of course the ones that were not initially tagged with the original crime ones will have to be manually tagged as they don't have the basic importance parameter, but that's less than 500 which isn't as bad (compared to 6700 that already HAVE all the required importance parameters) PARAKANYAA (talk) 17:56, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

@PARAKANYAA: I just ran my bot against Category:Pages using WikiProject banner shell with duplicate banner templates, which edited about 550 talk pages (many WP:CRIME related) to remove a WikiProject template only if every parameter is included in a duplicate WikiProject template on the same page. You'll need someone else to clean up those where the two templates have different parameters that need merging. GoingBatty (talk) 06:16, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@GoingBatty Someone else meaning it must be done manually or someone else's bot? PARAKANYAA (talk) 04:03, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

@PARAKANYAA: Other bot operators may be able to fulfill your requests. Doing things manually is also an option. GoingBatty (talk) 04:17, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Well, I sure hope that someone's bot can... that would take a while. PARAKANYAA (talk) 04:21, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

to elaborate further on the problem and what I imagine the solution to be

a hypothetical bot should merge

{{WikiProject Crime and Criminal Biography|serialkiller=yes|serialkiller-imp=low|organizedcrime=yes|organizedcrime-imp=low}} (or having 1 or the other task forc parameters, just showing both for sake of example)

on the same page as either

{{WikiProject Crime|importance=low}} OR {{WikiProject Criminal Biography|importance=low}} (also called WikiProject Criminal which iirc has quite a few transclusions)

would combine to be

{{WikiProject Crime and Criminal Biography|importance=low|serialkiller=yes|serialkiller-imp=/nowiki>low|organizedcrime=yes|organizedcrime-imp=low}}

95% of the articles I've seen that have a crime duplicate have either the basic crimebio banner or normal crime (which doesn't matter, Crime/Crimebio/Crime and Crimebio are all the same now) with a crime importance parameter, and a separate banner with either the serial killer importance or the organized crime importance that lacks the crime project importance, so wiki categorizes it as unknown importance (though strangely WP 1.0's bot does not) PARAKANYAA (talk) 04:43, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Date ranges for noticeboard archives

This seems uncontroversial.

It would be pretty cool if some kind bot could go through the pre-current (should never change) archives of the boards listed in the dramaboard archivebox series, extract the earliest and latest timestamps, truncate them to dates, and use those dates to annotate the links somehow. Inactive archives at time of writing are:

• 355 at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archives
• 1140 at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchives
• 474 at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RRArchives
• 323 at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive

User story: I was recently trying to find an archived conversation from a few months ago, and the best tools I had available were a scattershot "tap an archive number, wait for the entire page to load, check top and bottom timestamps" and "search archives for exact string matched date". Improved navigability gained from annotating the archive links with date ranges should save people time.

Implementation ideas: The quickest implementation would just be a plaintext date range edited onto the archive list pages linked above. A further step could be to add a |date-span= (or similar) to {{Administrators' noticeboard navbox all}} which, if present, would display the date range of comments posted at the top of the page itself, so the information is available both on the archive page and the index of archives. The most elegant, stupid, and expensive implementation would be to add {{shortdesc}} to all the archives, set the |1= to the date range, and convert the indices to use {{annotated link}}.

Anyway though: Anyway though the first step is getting the date ranges. Maybe this is already in a report somewhere? Folly Mox (talk) 18:30, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

@Folly Mox, I suspect you'd need consensus to go through with this. Perhaps trying asking at those noticeboards first? — Qwerfjkltalk 19:06, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Oh right I tacked on all those expanded scope ideas in the process of making the edit. Folly Mox (talk) 20:22, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Just noting, an Index of some variety would probably be easier than going through the thousands of archives and amending them. Primefac (talk) 08:10, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Would this need a bot?

Does the task at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Implementation of Template:Refideas editnotice require a bot, or is there another way to accomplish that? You can respond there if you like. BOZ (talk) 05:42, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Automatic NOGALLERY keyword for categories containing non-free files

I have noticed that many categories, especially content categories, include non-free files without the __NOGALLERY__ magic word, which is against WP:NFCC#9. I'd suggest using a bot to auto-tag such categories, skipping a whitelist for those categories covered by WP:NFEXMP (generally those categories concerning reviews of questionable files, such as CAT:FFD, and some maintenance categories that should contain no non-free files). –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 12:01, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that most categories on en.wikipedia should have __NOGALLERY__ and it would be actually smarter and less work to disable image showing on all categories by default (without requiring any code per page or bot work) and have a __YESGALLERY__ magic word for the much less instances of categories that actually could show images. Gonnym (talk) 12:38, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

I doubt that would be possible, since as a MediaWiki tweak that would have to apply to all Wikimedia wikis, many of which don't allow non-free files. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 02:48, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

From a coding perspective it could just be a setting that can be activated per wiki. I'd be opposed to any bot before other solutions are researched. --Gonnym (talk) 06:23, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Archiving washingtonindependent.com

See Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Washington Independent.
But archiving those links is not quite straightforward. We should probably get rid of any link to the live domain (which is garbage) and we should only use archive.org snapshots that are older than, say, 2016. When there is no older snapshot, the link/reference should be removed entirely. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 01:34, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

I think WP:URLREQ is the correct board for this. I think GreenC has a bot that can easily fix usurped domains en masse, and that is the board that they monitor for this. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:17, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Novem Linguae, thanks: Wikipedia:Link rot/URL change requests#washingtonindependent.com — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 14:40, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Deferred. Queen of Hearts ❤️ (no relation) 03:19, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Implement project-independent quality assessments

Looking for a willing bot operator to implement WP:PIQA by migrating quality assessments from WikiProject banners into {{WikiProject banner shell}}. To be more precise,

1. If there is a banner shell already on the page, then add |class= parameter and remove from project banners, e.g. [4]
2. If there is no banner shell, then add it and move class rating from project banners, e.g. [5]
3. If there are no assessments on page, then add empty |class= parameter to encourage editors to add a rating, e.g. [6]
4. If assessments of projects differ, then add the majority rating to the banner shell and leave any different assessments on those banners, e.g. [7]. These will be manually reviewed by human editors.
5. If assessments of projects differ, but there is no majority rating, then add banner shell with empty |class= parameter. These will be tracked and reviewed manually.
6. If the page has {{WikiProject biography}} with |living=yes or |blp=yes then add |blp=yes to {{WikiProject banner shell}}.
7. If any project banner has |listas= then move this to {{WikiProject banner shell}} and remove from project banners, e.g. [8]
8. For any of the projects which have opted out, the class parameter should not be changed or removed.

Thanks in advance — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:18, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ: How should the bot (or a manual user) handle a banner shell with two {{WikiProject Articles for creation}}, like Talk:1975–76 Notre Dame Fighting Irish men's basketball team? GoingBatty (talk) 04:47, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

For WikiProject tags that have different ratings but located on the same talk page, perhaps the bot should note these on a log page somewhere, then skip them. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:31, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

I've previously tested code at [9] that could add additional parameters to handle this situation. Gonnym (talk) 06:25, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

We are tracking these (and many others) at Category:Pages using WikiProject banner shell with duplicate banner templates but have not yet made any serious effort to fix them. Last time I asked the AfC project, they were happy for any duplicates to be removed and I would suggest leaving the one with the most recent time stamp — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:57, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Uh...false. We don't want duplicates removed, we indicated that they should be merged so that no information is lost. Primefac (talk) 13:01, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Novem Linguae said "You can just use your best judgment on which one to save" and you agreed with that ... but okay if you want to merge/consolidate somehow then go ahead — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:44, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

NL also said it'd be fine to boldly consolidate duplicate AFC banners on article talk pages. There are two possibilities - actual duplicated banners (in which case one should be removed) and two different banners, which should be merged, to best save the review history. Primefac (talk) 13:48, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ: How should the bot (or a manual user) handle a banner shell with two different {{WIR}} templates, like Talk:Ruth M. Davis? GoingBatty (talk) 04:52, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

These two WIR templates don't appear to have any class or importance specified, so I don't think it would confuse the bot. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:39, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Agree with Novem Linguae. Would like to get these merged one day, but hopefully will not affect this task and this task is already complicated enough! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:55, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Hopefully when running, the bot can also preform User:Magioladitis/WikiProjects. Gonnym (talk) 15:04, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ, BRFA filed. — Qwerfjkltalk 18:07, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Convert links to Wikimedia sites in body text to normal interwiki links

A lot of pages have links to Wiktionary pages in the body text. This is fine, though I think the links are supposed to be like this (interwiki) and not this (external).

Would it be possible to create a bot that turns these into the first example? LOOKSQUARE (👤️·🗨️) talk 21:05, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm curious why you're using the heavy formatting. Your two links are this and this without them, which to me appear exactly the same. Primefac (talk) 21:07, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

oops it didn't work 💀

this diff is what I meant LOOKSQUARE (👤️·🗨️) talk 21:22, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

You mean this: Special:Diff/1162303860/1185448120 -- GreenC 21:49, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

*falls over on the floor*

*life support unplugs*

yes LOOKSQUARE (👤️·🗨️) talk 21:57, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

@LOOKSQUARE: Like this edit and this edit for the English Wiktionary, and this edit for the German Wiktionary? GoingBatty (talk) 23:00, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

As the section heading implies, there are also plenty of "external" links to en.wikipedia.org/.../Article_title, and presumably the mobile and non-English variants too. (A tiny number of them may be valid primary-source citations of Wikipedia in articles about Wikipedia.) Certes (talk) 23:12, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

all by itself, it is cosmetic editing. —usernamekiran (talk) 23:08, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

oh ok nvm LOOKSQUARE (👤️·🗨️) talk 23:13, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure it is merely cosmetic. It's replacing external links by wikilinks, which has a positive visual effect and clarifies that the target is internal to the WMF ecosystem and possibly this wiki. Certes (talk) 23:38, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

I agree, it's not cosmetic. There are only around 2,000, not all should be converted. -- GreenC 02:19, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@GreenC: Where should consensus be built to decide which should be converted and which are acceptable as is? GoingBatty (talk) 03:40, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@GreenC: Your search is only for en.XXXX.org. There are links to many other languages that could be changed (e.g. de.wiktionary.org). Expanding to this search gets us to over 4,200. GoingBatty (talk) 03:44, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Add "wikipedia" and that is another ~500 results. Gonnym (talk) 06:54, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

yes, just saw this conversation/diffs from computer again, this is not cosmetic. —usernamekiran (talk) 02:42, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

LOOKSQUARE, consider using a gadget or userscript to take care of this. [spam] User:Alexis Jazz/Factotum converts many external links automatically to wikilinks. Special:Diff/1185452015, Wikipedia:Bot requests (history), m:User:LOOKSQUARE, etc. is just me wikt:en:copy-pasting URLS. If you enter an additional custom regex in the settings it could also update existing named links. (normally it avoids named links)[/spam]
As for having a bot do this: hmmm I don't know. You need to be very careful as sometimes it's on purpose, especially when there are extra parameters like ?useskin=monobook or ?uselang=de. But it's also used to show the difference between Wikipedia's mobile site and the desktop site. If the URL is a template parameter value you also shouldn't change it. It may seem easy but there are quite some edge cases. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 07:00, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, maybe there could be some kind of template, similar to {{Not a typo}} so that bots didn't accidentally convert an external link to normal. LOOKSQUARE (👤️·🗨️) talk 10:35, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz: Are those edge cases in articlespace? I'd imagine there could be many in Help: and/or Wikipedia: and/or talk pages. GoingBatty (talk) 16:49, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

We have a few, such as the last item in List of Wikipedia controversies#Further reading. Of course, there are many Wikipedia URLs within citations (some legitimate, others unreliably circular sourcing) which I assume are not covered by this exercise. Certes (talk) 17:07, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@Certes: Thank you for providing the example. Why shouldn't that link be changed to Wikipedia:Wikipedia as a court source to make it obvious that it is a page that exists within Wikipedia? GoingBatty (talk) 17:11, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Good question. It probably should. My usual yardstick is "if we created Forkpedia, would we want this link to lead to Forkpedia or to Wikipedia"? If Forkpedia then it should be an internal link; if Wikipedia then an external link. I think my example is a misplaced "See also" entry rather than further reading, so it should be internal. There's a better example in Circular reporting#Examples on Wikipedia. The 2008 link is about Wikipedia (and so would be external on Forkpedia) but it has an oldid= URL parameter and we can perhaps exempt those from any bot. Certes (talk) 17:28, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Other examples about Wikipedia include List of Wikipedia pages banned in Russia. We also have technical articles where Wikipedia is used as an example website, e.g. URL redirection#Redirect chains, HTML#Elements. Certes (talk) 17:38, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I meant that it would only replace Wikimedia links in the article text, not the "Further reading" or "References" sections. LOOKSQUARE (👤️·🗨️) talk 18:48, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

I wonder if the task can be split into two parts, one suitable for a bot and the other needing manual help with AWB or similar. Certes (talk) 18:59, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Replacement for MalnadachBot?

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I noticed that when User:MalnadachBot was procedurally blocked, its tasks 12 and 13 were still marked as active. I don't know if it has finished running through all lint errors on wiki, but task 13 is certainly an ongoing effort. Would we need a replacement bot to pick up these tasks, or do we have existing bots/procedures handling these things? Liu1126 (talk) 20:17, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

@Liu1126, this was previously discussed at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard/Archive 18#MalnadachBot -- owner indeffed, what now? — Qwerfjkltalk 21:49, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I somehow failed to find that discussion when searching the archives earlier. I was sure I wouldn't be the first person to notice this! Liu1126 (talk) 09:27, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Request for Bot

Hello Wiki world. I am in Wikipedia for the past 8 months making a little bit contributions. It would be so helpful for me if you can enable the bot in my account. Thank youu!! EEverest 8848 (talk) 15:47, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

@EEverest 8848: Hi there! Please read Help:Creating a bot to see the process for requesting bot access. GoingBatty (talk) 18:32, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

EEverest 8848. We don't usually give bot flags to main accounts, only separate bot accounts after passing WP:BRFA. What did you have in mind? –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:56, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Translate Article Pages from English to Gagana Sāmoa

I am in the midst of translating articles from English to Gagana Sāmoa which is a very necessary task given the massive inequality in the available information in each language. My hope is that more Sāmoa users will find Wikipedia to be a more hospitable site and access it to find information in their language. There is a massive disparity not only between English and Gagana Sāmoa but even between other languages and the languages of the Pasifika by and large. I would like to request a bot to help translate these articles as this task is overwhelming and this disparity will only grow given the population, internet access, and specialization of Sāmoa users. Something has to be done otherwise the language will likely go the way of 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi. IonaPatamea (talk) 20:57, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Machine translations usually do a poor job. From other languages to English, they may create fluent-sounding text, but when you read it a little more closely, it doesn't make sense and contradicts itself. I imagine the same is true from English to other languages. Are you sure you want to do a bunch of mass translations on your wiki? –Novem Linguae (talk) 21:02, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I completely understand the concern. My only qualm is that there is a dearth of users translating pages to Gagana Sāmoa and my concern is that this is a collective action dilemma, or something like it, insofar as Sāmoa users will not necessarily use or contribute to Wikipedia until there is a sufficient amount of material available in the language. I feel that once that threshold is crossed there will be more incentive to both contribute, edit, and admin articles. Although I appreciate the concern for accuracy, which I also share, I think that the situation of the disparity between English and Gagana Sāmoa as sources of knowledge is not truly appreciated by those unfamiliar with the context. Sāmoa users are shifting their sources of information, and thus knowledge, from Gagana Sāmoa to English on an unprecedented level and this shift is having an unprecedented effect on the social structure, cultural continuity, and even viability of the Gagana Sāmoa itself which once lost will likely disappear for future generations. So, for the short-term, and in short, I feel that using machine translations are the best solution and I would like to use them in lieu of other options, which I must admit, I am not familiar with. Perhaps there are other suggestions? If not I would argue machine translation would be a good option. IonaPatamea (talk) 21:23, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

@IonaPatamea: Hi. We had similar issues on Marathi Wikipedia, and we organically reached 70k articles a couple of years ago. Currently we have around 75k articles, but most of these articles are promotional. Marathi has huge number of native users in the world — it's among the top languages with rich history, and still, very few are genuinely interested in Wikipedia. —usernamekiran (talk) 21:51, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the message! How was this content in Marathi generated organically if I may ask? Was there a concerted effort to get users to contribute or was this something that happened over time? Yes, as you stated the community for Sāmoa is much smaller. I hope that more content for Marathi will continue to be generated. Although I cannot speak the language it undoubtedly has a rich history and much to offer users. IonaPatamea (talk) 07:08, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Everyone's tolerances of machine translations differs. I would argue that machine translations can be used as a basis of writing new articles, but whatever that's generated from these translations should be vetted through, and edited, before publishing.

As for requesting for a bot that will ultimately affect Gagana Sāmoa wiki, this is not the right venue since the bot requests here are generally for edits on enwiki.

Alternatively what you can do is to create stub articles like what the Minnan wiki is doing and hopefully one day someone will come by to expand the content. In this manner, you can generate interests when getting press attention (X wiki has now N number of articles in effort to <do something with the language>) and as well as having more existing content as start points for anyone else whose interested in that particular topic while having a mild interest in the language. – robertsky (talk) 05:05, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Talofa! Thank you for your response and very helpful suggestion. I believe this sounds like a good way to generate, and sustain, enough interest for users. I appreciate the help and I will be sure to look into Minnan wiki. Fortunately, I am currently at one place where there are academics that teach Gagana Sāmoa at the tertiary or university level so they may be able to help with generating interest and press attention. The stub articles would be an efficient way to start getting more information out to contributors, academics, and the press alike. IonaPatamea (talk) 07:12, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Apply page move for Power forward

Could a bot please change all instances of “power forward (basketball)” to “power forward” to correct the links to Power forward, which was recently moved? Thank you Rikster2 (talk) 19:43, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

@Rikster2, this seems WP:COSMETIC. — Qwerfjkltalk 19:45, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

It would remove a redirect for hundreds of articles in favor of a direct link. It seems like that should be standard for a page move. Rikster2 (talk) 19:47, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

@Rikster2, no, because there is no difference in how the page appears. See WP:NOTBROKEN. — Qwerfjkltalk 19:49, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

@Rikster2: As explained above this is Not a good task for a bot. If there were any links in the form [[power forward (basketball)]] without a pipe, it would be appropriate to change those. However, I could not find any in articlespace. GoingBatty (talk) 19:57, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

OK Rikster2 (talk) 20:22, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Apart from WP:COSMETIC arguments, there's also a practical advantage to leaving the links as they are. The term sometimes refers to Power forward (Australian rules football), Power forward (ice hockey) or Power Forward (album). A quick search for linksto:"Power forward" -basketball finds wikilinks which might lead to the wrong article and need improving. (There's currently only one result, and it's a false positive.) Changing the links would raise the number of false positives to 50, making any actual errors harder to spot. The qualifier is acting a bit like "(disambiguation)" in an INTDABLINK by marking these links as checked and correct. Certes (talk) 20:55, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Look, it’s fine for the change not to be made but I really don’t think it makes sense to leave redirects for that reason. What if the page had been created as “power forward?” You’d have the same situation. Why have primary pages at all if that tracking is so important? Let’s just leave it at “it’s only cosmetic so not a good use of the bot.” Rikster2 (talk) 21:27, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

OK; let’s just leave it at “it’s only cosmetic so not a good use of the bot.” Certes (talk) 21:51, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

author-link

We have a lot of citations that could be improved using |author-link= eg. Special:Diff/1186331321/1186342802. The problem is it's difficult to match the correct author, it requires a human. Thus wondering if/how this might be automated in certain cases. It doesn't require every case only those it can match with greater certainty. For example we know, per the above diff, there is only one Steven Poole there is no dab page. And we know Steven Poole writes for a publication called Quercus. Thus any other cites that match those criteria, is a good bet that is the same person, and where an |author-link= could be added.

Is this method 100% foolproof? Probably not, but is it at least 99% accurate in matching names? Probably. I think a test run would show how reliable it is. I don't have the time right now but wanted to mention in case anyone wants to run an experiment. Or had other ideas. A dump of CS1|2 citations on enwiki - not including cite web - can be found here. I currently have updates disabled, but can restart if anyone wants. -- GreenC 20:27, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

One could involve Wikidata: if the corresponding item is a writer, then the author link can be added. Wikiwerner (talk) 20:58, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't think that will help that much. Many authors cited on Wikipedia aren't "writers": probably as many or even more are scientists of some vein.

I'm not sure I have a better idea how to automate this though. Apparently Growth Team have a pretty good algorithm for suggesting appropriate wikilinks given topic and text, and I doubt their application will interface with template parameters, but solving the "what should link here" problem – of which this is a subtype – is not easy. Folly Mox (talk) 14:57, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

For a first pass, you might limit the suggestions to publications mentioned in the author's article. Perhaps exclude citations, so we don't link to a footballer of the same name whose transfer was reported in another edition of the same newspaper. Certes (talk) 15:21, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

I think look at existing uses of |author-link= and build a 2-column database: "Steven Pool = Quercus". Then find all other citations that cite Steven Pool and Quercus, and add the |author-link= if missing. It works backwards from what is know to be true. -- GreenC 19:42, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Good plan. For extra safety, any names with two author-links that don't redirect to the same article can be filtered out into a log file without attempting to fix them. There probably won't be many. Certes (talk) 23:00, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I really like this idea. Folly Mox (talk) 14:29, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Extending copyright expiration date on Pablo Picasso's works from 70 years (January 1, 2044) to 80 years (either April 8, 2053 or January 1, 2054)

I have seen Pablo Picasso's files on English Wikipedia that his works will be transferred to Wikimedia Commons on January 1, 2044, 70 years after his death. However under Spanish copyright law, the copyright term for Spanish authors who died before December 7, 1987, including Picasso who died on April 8, 1973, have life term plus 80 years, and for those who died otherwise have life term plus 70 years, though it is unclear if the copyright expires on his 80th death anniversary or January 1 following it. So for sure, there is no room to have his copyright expired on January 1, 2044. It's either April 8, 2053 or January 1, 2054. I am hoping for a consensus if his copyright expired on these bolded dates. Here are his works to have his copyright expiration date edited or added (if not) one-by-one. Ishagaturo (talk) 09:07, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

A better forum for this question is Wikipedia:Media copyright questions. Suggest moving this discussion there. (FWIW I think copyright on Wikimedia servers follows US law because that's where the content resides.) -- GreenC 16:24, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Not on Commons, though, where all the files will be deleted immediately after transfer. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.6% of all FPs.} 20:01, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Early idea

"The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch, and a user with an idea."

— Rick Cook, The Wizardry Consulted

So I have an idea, and...

Is it possible for a bot to find articles that:

• contain a number of words of readable prose (e.g., as calculated by Wikipedia:Prosesize) between x and y (e.g., 150 and 2,000) and also
• contain fewer internal links per word than some simple mathematical formula (e.g., "less than three total" or "less than one link per 100 words")?

If a bot could automatically detect such articles, then I'd like to have it add the {{underlinked}} template, on a schedule of perhaps a few articles being tagged per hour, to feed the seemingly popular Category:Underlinked articles for the Wikipedia:Growth Team features, without giving a large number of articles to the first editor and then leaving none for anyone else.

I realize that this would require a demonstration of consensus, but I don't want to make the suggestion, get people's hopes up, and then find out that bots can't count the number of words or links in an article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:21, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

The tagging part seems like a CONTEXTBOT problem, but I can imagine a bot-generated report that listed the 1,000 articles with the fewest links per 100 prose words. Humans could then look through the report and refine the bot's criteria. If somehow the bot can be made to correctly identify underlinked articles without false positives, tagging might be possible. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:22, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Related question, for WhatamIdoing: What can we do to provide feedback about this newcomer linking activity? I see that at least some edits are adding undesirable disambiguation links. Is the tool suggesting these links? – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:25, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

The tool doesn't suggest any specific link. It pops up a box that says things like "All you need to do is add one or two links to make a difference." They're using the visual editor, so its link tool will de-prioritize (in the search results) and label dab links (so you can see that it's not the kind of page you were expecting). However, it doesn't tell you what a redirect points to, so if you have a redirect to a dab page, then you'll see 'redirect' and not know that it's a redirect to a dab page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:25, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

It might be worth mentioning that the Suggested Links task, scheduled to be enabled on en.wp next year, does not use maintenance templates as an inclusion criterion. So if timetables are not further extended, any success in this effort will apply only to a few months of newcomer activity. Folly Mox (talk) 15:01, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Is word-counting and link-counting a realistic task, then? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:28, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, I don't know of any way to do it using queries, but running a bot on a database dump probably wouldn't be that hard. — Qwerfjkltalk 14:23, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

From a technical perspective, word counting and link counting are pretty straightforward to do. I explained how to implement prosesize word counts on my blog a while back, and that technique is used to power, among other things, Wikipedia:Database reports/Featured articles by size. Link counts are a simple database query or extraction from page HTML/wikitext. Unfortunately much of this work is blocked on the fact that the HTML dumps are currently created using proprietary source code. Legoktm (talk) 07:20, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for that, @Legoktm. It sounds like word-counting could be done "today" (i.e., by adapting existing code). I'm not sure how to summarize what you said about link-counting. On the one hand, you say it's a "simple" query, but on the other hand, that it's blocked.

Is the database report for FAs the size at time of promotion, or the size today? Tpbradbury had been looking into that recently. (He's been hoping to find out whether there was a trend in FA size over time.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

The report I threw together shows the size at time of promotion, as requested. There may be other reports based on current size. Certes (talk) 18:56, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't very clear @WhatamIdoing. Individually, getting an article's prose size and link count is simple. Finding articles out of the entire wiki that meet those criteria isn't really feasible right now because of the lack of HTML database dumps. So if there's some other way to limit the number of articles to check, e.g. just looking at a few categories, that's probably doable. Legoktm (talk) 07:43, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

If I wanted to get this for, say, all the articles in Category:WikiProject Medicine articles, excluding articles in Category:Society and medicine task force articles, then it sounds like we (i.e., you/someone/not me) could make a one-time report that lists each article and the number of words and links in it, but an ongoing "monitoring" process would be less feasible. Am I closer to understanding this now? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Protection fallback adminbot

Simple idea: monitor the protection log, and any time the protection level is increased, but the expiration time is decreased, wait until a few minutes before the expiration, and restore the status quo. If it really is the intention of the protecting admin to leave the page unprotected at expiry, they can leave a keyword like NOFALLBACK or something in the protection summary. An obvious complication would arise if the bot is lagging, and some edits slip in before protection can be restored, but that's a minor detail. Yes, I know about the PC trick, but people sometimes forget, and sometimes PC is isn't enough. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 03:58, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

From WP:ADMINBOT this needs a wider discussion on WP:AN or WP:VP, though I think this is a good idea. 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 06:08, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be best to find someone willing to operate the bot before proposing it to the wider community? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 19:39, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

the Bad Guy Patrol bot

I would like to request a bot and I would like to name it, the Bad Guy Patrol (BGP) and it would help me restore order on Wikipedia. It will help with vandalism, blocking and cleanups. Harley Quinn on duty (talk) 14:07, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

It could have a button that says "Go on patrol", with CGI animation police light. Or one that says WP:NOTHERE see Special:Contributions/Harley_Quinn_on_duty. - GreenC 15:01, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

N Not done. GoingBatty (talk) 04:42, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Automatic tagging of some easily-identified non-English language text

This probably should not be implemented trivially for languages written in the Latin script, but with a few caveats, it seems pretty doable to write a bot that scours articles, and while staying out of appropriate templates, tags text using existing templates like {{lang}} as either being in a specific language, or at least being in some language written in a particular script, e.g. und-Hani or und-Cyrl as per the obligatory HTML |lang= parameter and ISO 639. If there is und text already tagged, it makes it much easier to see whether 漢字 is lang=ja-Hani or lang=zh-Hant, and also to quickly retag everything en masse.
If we are getting dangerous, I can think of multiple ways to further discriminate between, say, Japanese and Chinese-language text beyond simple checking for strings of CJK ideographs. Remsense留 21:16, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm wondering if this may fall afoul of WP:COSMETICBOT, since it doesn't alter the rendering of the page, but I feel like COSMETBOT exceptions have been carved out before for changes that alter the presentation of a page via speech synthesis, which this would do (and, AFAIA is the primary reason we tag non-English terms like this). As a minor note, I don't think it's necessary to specify in these templates the distinction between zh-hant and zh-hans or whatever they're called in the appropriate standards. Folly Mox (talk) 13:29, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh no, I think a cosmetic argument is a non-starter, since it's a fundamentally semantic change core to the HTML standard itself. Not to be overly dramatic, but every HTML page that doesn't tag foreign language content is meaningfully running afoul of the standard, because it has likely explicitly declared at the top that the whole thing is in English. And no—I don't think Hans versus Hant is useful for most end users, but it's a further specification one could make that I decided to spell out for some reason. Remsense留 14:24, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

template change

Hi, I would like to know whether a bot would be able to do this particular task or not. The task is to replace the existing format with the template like I did here on my sandbox to explain it better: [10]

The following articles: 2004 Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly election and 2009 Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly election require these template changes. Since I am finding this monotonous task quite difficult to do it myself, I am looking for help probably a bot might help I believe? Any info or help is appreciated. Thank you 456legend (talk) 05:52, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Depending how many pages need editing, this could be a good job for AWB. Certes (talk) 09:39, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

@Certes All the following articles will need this template changes:

1. 2004 Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly election

2. 2009 Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly election

3. 2014 Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly election

4. 2004 Karnataka Legislative Assembly election

5. 2008 Karnataka Legislative Assembly election

6. 2013 Karnataka Legislative Assembly election

7. 2021 Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly election

8. 2016 Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly election

And there are few more in addition to these articles.. 456legend (talk) 13:41, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. With a list that size, using AWB will be much quicker than writing a bot. Once you have a final list of articles, WP:AWB/Tasks should be able to help. Alternatively, a good programmers' text editor with regexp features should be able to do the job. Certes (talk) 13:57, 7 December 2023 (UTC)