Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Smallbot

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Smallbot

• (BRFA
• Approved BRFAs
• talk
• contribs
• count
• SUL
• logs
• page moves
• block log
• rights log
• flag)

Operator: Smallman12q (talk · contribs)

Time filed: 00:59, Thursday December 16, 2010 (UTC)

Automatic or Manually assisted: Manually

Programming language(s): C# w/LINQ

Source code available: Available on request

Function overview: The bot will update the Board of Directors sections for Federal Reserve Banks and branches.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): One-time/Annually

Estimated number of pages affected: 24 branch articles and 12 bank articles so about 36.

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): No

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): No

Function details: The bot will update the Class A/B/C and Appointed by the Federal Reserve Bank/Appointed by the Board of Governors tables in the relevant articles. A sample table can be seen at Federal_Reserve_Bank_of_Cleveland_Cincinnati_Branch#Cincinnati_Board_of_Directors.

Discussion

Where are you getting the information from? And if you are scraping a website, do you have permission to do so? LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 22:51, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Its a single federal page (~118kb). I don't see why I'd need permission for downloading a small publicly available federal page once/year=P.Smallman12q (talk) 12:51, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

I think it's OK to scrape the website, no harm done, in fact the opposite. For the benefit of extending the human knowledge. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 14:15, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

{{BAG assistance needed}} Smallman12q (talk) 14:09, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Could you provide some examples of this web-page from which the data is retrieved. If the page has no robots.txt restrictions, then there should be no issues. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 12:22, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

http://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/listdirectors/default.cfm Smallman12q (talk) 13:25, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Approved for trial (4 branch articles and 2 bank articles). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Please put a {{bot|Smallman12q|status=trial}} or similar indication on the bot's userpage. Can you also list the articles that will be modified? Are they from a category/some list or do you manually select them (as in, how do you specify to the bot which ones to edit)? —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 13:37, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

The bot goes down the list...I'll run the bot next year, as apparently its getting quizzed with captchas for adding a url in its citation.Smallman12q (talk) 19:39, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Flagged the bot as confirmed to avoid this problem. Courcelles 22:02, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Trial complete.-I did Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Cincinnati Branch. The only problem was with New York, with Jamie Dimon who isn't correctly formatted on the list. New York is also the only one to have something other than tables in the section, so I'll that back in. But otherwise, looks fine.Smallman12q (talk) 23:13, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Links for convenience: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

It seems that some articles may contain information relevant directly to current positions, as the New York example. You have to manually verify each article after the bot edit to make sure nothing is removed or becomes outdated/incorrect after the bot's edit.

As far as I know company names on Wikipedia don't include their types, e.g., Ltd., Inc., etc. As an example, there is PNC Financial Services article and redirect from PNC Financial Services Group, but bot's addition of The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. creates a redlink.

Similarly, bio articles are often aliases and exclude middle names, so James E. Rohr is actually located at Jim Rohr.

I didn't check too many redlinks/links. In any case, I'm afraid I do not see this being approved as an automated tool, rather supervised. Any inaccuracies like these have to be fixed by a human one at a time. You are welcome to improve the tool to assist you as best as possible, but it currently needs to be supervised very closely. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 17:10, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I'll go through after the tool (I created most of the branch articls) does its edits and make redirects for the redlinks. There are some redirects at company types such as at Google inc.(2k+ views/month) and Google Inc.(10k+ views/month) which receive traffic. I'll change it to "manually assisted." So is the bot tool approved? Smallman12q (talk) 19:29, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

{{BAGAssistanceNeeded}}Smallman12q (talk) 20:26, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

As far as BAG approval goes, I can approve this as a tool whose edits must be immediately manually reviewed. This means you shouldn't make 20 edits and then review them later, rather make an edit and review it. Like checklinks or automatic taxobox maker does. Personally, I would consider more than an edit per minute something that cannot receive due human attention. I understand the article scope is very small and not too high-traffic. But the bot's edits are expected to be uncontroversial, and you should apply fixes immediately. Are you OK with this? —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 14:38, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Ye, that's fine. I agree.Smallman12q (talk) 16:53, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

 Approved. as manually assisted tool with human review of edits. Happy sailing!

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.