Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval
![]() | Please remember that all editors are encouraged to participate in the requests listed below. Just chip in – your comments are appreciated more than you may think! |
If you want to run a bot on the English Wikipedia, you must first get it approved. To do so, follow the instructions below to add a request. If you are not familiar with programming it may be a good idea to ask someone else to run a bot for you, rather than running your own.
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Bot-related archives (v·t·e) |
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Bot Name | Status | Created | Last editor | Date/Time | Last BAG editor | Date/Time |
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ProcBot 10b (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2022-04-04, 14:05:37 | Anomie | 2022-04-04, 22:56:40 | Never edited by BAG | n/a |
DoggoBot 7 (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2022-04-03, 22:49:12 | ProcrastinatingReader | 2022-04-04, 13:38:56 | ProcrastinatingReader | 2022-04-04, 13:38:56 |
WOSlinkerBot 22 (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2022-03-30, 16:41:56 | WOSlinker | 2022-03-30, 21:47:53 | Never edited by BAG | n/a |
Aidan9382-Bot (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2022-03-23, 08:09:12 | Aidan9382 | 2022-04-05, 12:33:17 | TheSandDoctor | 2022-04-03, 17:23:10 |
TolBot 13B (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2022-03-18, 19:15:56 | ClueBot III | 2022-04-06, 18:40:41 | Primefac | 2022-03-27, 12:28:17 |
ButlerBlogBot (T|C|B|F) | On hold | 2022-03-07, 14:03:04 | Primefac | 2022-03-10, 10:29:19 | Primefac | 2022-03-10, 10:29:19 |
Gaelan Bot 2 (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2022-02-07, 12:07:35 | TheSandDoctor | 2022-04-03, 17:09:13 | TheSandDoctor | 2022-04-03, 17:09:13 |
ZabesBot (T|C|B|F) | On hold | 2022-01-15, 22:43:07 | Primefac | 2022-02-16, 12:39:30 | Primefac | 2022-02-16, 12:39:30 |
ElliBot (T|C|B|F) | On hold | 2021-01-23, 14:46:12 | Heanor | 2022-02-08, 18:20:15 | ProcrastinatingReader | 2021-11-08, 01:07:48 |
BareRefBot (T|C|B|F) | Extended trial | 2022-01-20, 21:37:46 | BrownHairedGirl | 2022-03-29, 19:32:07 | Primefac | 2022-03-28, 18:32:02 |
AssumptionBot (T|C|B|F) | In trial | 2022-02-16, 11:35:09 | Primefac | 2022-03-27, 12:37:16 | Primefac | 2022-03-27, 12:37:16 |
Qwerfjkl (bot) 9 (T|C|B|F) | Trial complete | 2022-04-02, 08:12:17 | TheSandDoctor | 2022-04-04, 02:38:24 | TheSandDoctor | 2022-04-04, 02:38:24 |
IndentBot (T|C|B|F) | Trial complete | 2021-10-15, 03:20:20 | David Eppstein | 2022-02-27, 20:26:29 | Primefac | 2022-02-27, 14:18:35 |
Current requests for approval
ProcBot 10b
Operator: ProcrastinatingReader (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 14:05, Monday, April 4, 2022 (UTC)
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic
Source code available:
Function overview: Removing {{current related}} templates from articles that no longer require the template (no changes in an extended amount of time)
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ProcBot 10
Edit period(s): Cont
Estimated number of pages affected: ~140 initially
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes
Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): Yes
Function details: Extends Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ProcBot 10 to the {{current related}} template, which is meant to serve the same purpose but on articles 'related' to a current event. Has the same guidance w.r.t. the page actually being actively edited. Right now we have a lot of stale articles like Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant tagged, even though the current event referred to no longer has the template (it having been removed due to staleness).
Will use the same filter logic and code as task 10, but adding the extra template name for processing.
Discussion
DoggoBot 7
Operator: EpicPupper (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 22:49, Sunday, April 3, 2022 (UTC)
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic
Programming language(s): AWB
Source code available: WP:AWB
Function overview: Make issue templates more specific
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):
Edit period(s): Weekly
Estimated number of pages affected: 15,271 on first run for {{refimprove}}, 919 for {{primary sources}}
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes
Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): Yes
Function details: Using AWB, the bot would do the following:
- Run against articles in {{refimprove}} and Category:Living people, changing {{refimprove}} to {{BLP sources}}
- Run against articles in {{primary sources}} and Category:Living people, changing {{primary sources}} to {{BLP primary sources}}
This would make the issue templates more specific, allowing for a range of benefits, such as prioritization for volunteers of which articles to work on (BLPs). General fixes will be enabled. Pinging GoingBatty, who originally had this listed as an idea on User:BattyBot
Discussion
- Fine in theory, but it makes me wonder why these templates aren't merged in the underlying code, with the output changing based on whether the BLP cat is present. It would make the template slightly easier to use, automatically changes when a living person deceases, and (during the initial merge run) helps a bit in ensuring BLPs are tagged with the BLP cat. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:35, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
- Also see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/OmniBot 2 ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:38, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
WOSlinkerBot 22
Operator: WOSlinker (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 16:41, Wednesday, March 30, 2022 (UTC)
Function overview: Fix pages with the Old behaviour of link-wrapping font tags lint issue.
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic
Programming language(s): Javascript
Source code available: At User:WOSlinkerBot/linttask22.js
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):
Edit period(s): one time run
Estimated number of pages affected: currently 90,000 of those lint errors, but multiple errors per page so guessing about 30,000
Namespace(s): wikipedia & talk pages
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): No
Function details: Similar to previous tasks, such as task 21, fixing lint issues. This task will be fxing the Old behaviour of link-wrapping font tags lint issues. While fixing though pages, some additions will be made to the javascript code as additional combinations of the font tag and wikilinks are found.
Discussion
Shouldn't this actually be a supervised task? There are lots of different cases involved that would make it difficult as an automatic task. I tested User:WOSlinkerBot/linttask22.js against a variety of cases here. It had one false positive of replacing <font color="#AFFFF">[[User:abc|abc]]</font>
with [[User:abc|<span style="color:#AFFFF;">abc</span>]]
. You can add more regexes to catch the ones it skipped. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 18:41, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
- I support this task, of course, but I think Malnadach is correct. I think instead of
\#[a-f0-9]*
, the bot op may need to specify only three or six characters in the font color. It should probably skip any other number of characters. I also recommend a supervised task with inspection, or at least starting with known signatures, as collected here. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:27, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
Aidan9382-Bot
Operator: Aidan9382 (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 08:09, Wednesday, March 23, 2022 (UTC)
Function overview: Replace clear-cut cases of improperly used "|format=" in citations
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Supervised
Programming language(s): Python
Source code available: Not for now
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):
Edit period(s): one time run
Estimated number of pages affected: A couple hundered, as there are about 1200 pages in the related catagory, but only a small amount are actually clear-cut
Namespace(s): Mainspace
Exclusion compliant No: Only edits mainspace
Function details: For now, it will simply replace clear-cut cases of misused format without url (Paperback, e-book, etc.) by swapping the field from format to type. It applies citation-error edits to only mainspace, so i dont imagine an exclusion compliance is going to be needed, but i may be mistaken.
Discussion
If there are only a "small amount" that are straight-forward as claimed, this might be better for a quick AWB run, no? Primefac (talk) 12:13, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
- Im relatively new to wikipedia, and i wasnt aware about AWB. If you think an AWB run would be better, feel free to reject this and go for that instead. I just didnt feel like doing all the clear-cut cases manually, and didnt realise AWB existed. Aidan9382 (talk) 17:47, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Aidan9382: What would you consider a "clear-cut" case? Curious the sort of rule set you built for this. Could you give some examples? --TheSandDoctor Talk 17:23, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
- @TheSandDoctor: Sorry for the late-ish reply, I was having an internal conflict on whether or not to withdraw this (Ive decided against it for now). Im gonna be considering fixing these terms:
- e-Book / Google e-Book / Kindle e-Book (You get the point)
- Hardback / Paperback
- DVD / Blu-ray (I may consider replacing format with medium and not type here. Functionally its the same, but it may make more sense to people)
- Novel
- Newspaper / Magazine
- (I may come up with more later, but these are my main ideas right now)
- (Note: The relevant catagory is Category:CS1_errors:_format_without_URL, i just didnt realise how to properly reference when submitting)
- If you have any other suggestions, do say, but these are the most common simple mistakes i see when going through the catagory. Thanks. Aidan9382 (talk) 11:27, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
- @TheSandDoctor: Sorry for the late-ish reply, I was having an internal conflict on whether or not to withdraw this (Ive decided against it for now). Im gonna be considering fixing these terms:
- @Aidan9382: What would you consider a "clear-cut" case? Curious the sort of rule set you built for this. Could you give some examples? --TheSandDoctor Talk 17:23, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
TolBot 13B
Operator: Tol (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 19:15, Friday, March 18, 2022 (UTC)
Function overview: Creates redirects for tennis articles
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: supervised
Programming language(s): Python
Source code available: simple mass creation
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):
Edit period(s): one-time
Estimated number of pages affected: 2175 531 (new redirects; no article changes)
Namespace(s): (Article)
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): not applicable
Function details: Creates redirects based on this list (permalink), from the first link to the second link in each list item.
Discussion
- This is a followup to the moves done by Tolbot 13A, where we moved all the non-redirects, but probably should have moved redirects, too, such that when we updated the case in links we wouldn't have created redlinks. But since we did create redlinks in some cases, where redirects only existed in the wrong-case versions, the easy fix is just to create the right-case versions of all those wrong-case redirects (it's not clear which ones we actually need, so let's do them all). So I requested and support this BRFA. Dicklyon (talk) 20:37, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
- Just to better understand the purpose of this BRFA: what's an example diff showing where some of these (current redlink) redirects would've been necessary? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:41, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
- Here's a diff where the editor who found and reported the problem on my talk page did manual fixes by bypassing the redirects. There are an unknown number of these (probably hundreds). Dicklyon (talk) 02:00, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
- Could we use "WhatLinksHere" in mainspace to check there are actually incoming links before creating the redirect? e.g. with Special:WhatLinksHere with 2008 Canada Masters – Men's doubles (one instance of which was fixed in the diff you link) we see there is an incoming mainspace link at 2008 Tennis Masters Cup, so there's a problematic redlink there. A lot of the pages don't have any incoming links though; would prefer to see a more targeted task than the creation of 2175 redirects. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:41, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
- @ProcrastinatingReader, I could trim the list with such checks. I'll put something together to remove titles with no incoming links from the list. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 13:42, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
- Could we use "WhatLinksHere" in mainspace to check there are actually incoming links before creating the redirect? e.g. with Special:WhatLinksHere with 2008 Canada Masters – Men's doubles (one instance of which was fixed in the diff you link) we see there is an incoming mainspace link at 2008 Tennis Masters Cup, so there's a problematic redlink there. A lot of the pages don't have any incoming links though; would prefer to see a more targeted task than the creation of 2175 redirects. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:41, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
- See original report/discussion at User talk:Letcord#Inquiry about Doubles → doubles. Dicklyon (talk) 06:15, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
- Here's a diff where the editor who found and reported the problem on my talk page did manual fixes by bypassing the redirects. There are an unknown number of these (probably hundreds). Dicklyon (talk) 02:00, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
- Just to better understand the purpose of this BRFA: what's an example diff showing where some of these (current redlink) redirects would've been necessary? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:41, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
- I find myself mostly agreeing with PR on this one - if there isn't a reason other than "because they might be used in the future" to create over 2k redirects, I'm not overly inclined to push this task. Primefac (talk) 12:28, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
- OK, let's just create the ones that are used, and delete the wrong-case other ones then. Dicklyon (talk) 15:42, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Tol, Qwerty284651, and Letcord: To get this done, someone will need to compile the list of which redirects are needed, and which should be deleted. I don't know how to do that. Dicklyon (talk) 23:17, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
- But hold off a few days, as the link case fixing we're doing is creating a need for more that are presently not needed (e.g. multiple years of these two I just fixed: 2009 Internazionali BNL d'Italia – Men's doubles, 2007 Internazionali BNL d'Italia – Men's singles Dicklyon (talk) 23:39, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
- @ProcrastinatingReader and Tol: We are done preparing the pruned list of used/redlinked redirects needed, at User:Letcord/sandbox/TennisRedirects. PTAL. Dicklyon (talk) 23:41, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
ButlerBlogBot
Operator: Butlerblog (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 14:03, Monday, March 7, 2022 (UTC)
Function overview: Remove "name=" parameter from {{Infobox television}} for pages where this value matches the {{PAGENAMEBASE}} value (to handle the Category:Pages using infobox television with unnecessary name parameter maintenance category).
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic
Programming language(s): AutoWikiBrowser
Source code available: AWB
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):
Edit period(s): Daily, until maintenance category is reduced to a manageable number.
Estimated number of pages affected: ~32,000
Namespace(s): Mainspace/Articles
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes
Function details: An AWB regex to remove instances of |name=
in {{Infobox television}} when page is in Category:Pages using infobox television with unnecessary name parameter.
My main account is already enabled for AWB, and I have been successfully running this regex on the maintenance category manually. My manual runs included AWB genfixes, but I would not run genfixes in automatic (depending on recommendations in discussions).
Discussion
Two things of note: first, there is a discussion about whether this is an appropriate task, see Template_talk:Infobox_television#Bot_needed. Second, if the consensus there is that this is an appropriate job for 32k essentially cosmetic edits (you can see where I'm falling on this side of the debate...), my bot is already approved to run it. In other words, this task is not necessary. Primefac (talk) 14:23, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
- Since you're right, I thought about withdrawing this request. However, after some thought, I decided to leave it for consideration as it is my desire to expand my skills in this area. This task is a basic step to feeling more confident taking regexes I have used manually and moving them to an automated process (the regex for this task is already being used via AWB by me manually). It doesn't hurt my feelings if it's denied on the basis of "already exists in another bot", but it would be a confidence builder if approved. ButlerBlog (talk) 13:52, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
On hold. Pending the outcome of Template_talk:Infobox_television#Bot_needed. Primefac (talk) 10:29, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Gaelan Bot 2
Operator: Gaelan (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 12:07, Monday, February 7, 2022 (UTC)
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic
Programming language(s): JS, Rust
Source code available: a bit of a mess at the moment, but happy to publish on request
Function overview: On file pages, remove {{fair use rationale}} and friends for pages that no longer use that file.
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Remove_redundant_FURs_from_file_pages
Edit period(s): one time run for now
Estimated number of pages affected: <5,842
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): No
Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): No
Function details: Many file pages include fair-use rationales that are no longer necessary. For example, File:AppleIIGSOS.png has a FUR for Palette (computing), but that article doesn't actually use that image. This bot finds those cases as follows:
- A xml dump and parse_wiki_text are used to find all File: pages containing one of these templates with an Article parameter.
- This is cross-checked against the results of this query (and a list of redirects, also extracted from the xml dump) to find which FURs are unused.
The resulting data is here. I've hand-checked a few dozen of these, and they seem fine. There are some cases like File:ContinentalSquare.JPG which have an FUR that accidentally links to the wrong article (the FUR links to Continental Center instead), which'll get removed by this bot. My thinking is that this is fine - it should get flagged up as having no FUR, and someone can rescue it from history? Not sure.
The actual editing part of the bot isn't implemented yet, but it should just consist of using pywikibot or mwn to loop over the JSON linked above, double check that the FUR still exists and is unused (as I'm working with a dump that's a week old at this point) and remove it.
For now, this'll just be a one-time run; I'd like to figure out an efficient way to run it continuously, but I'll file a new BRFA when we get to that point.
Discussion
My thinking is that this is fine - it should get flagged up as having no FUR, and someone can rescue it from history?
But will someone? Or will some other bot or bot-like human come along and tag it for lacking a FUR? Keep in mind that fair use bots have historically been highly controversial. To what extent that was inherent in the task versus was due to the attitude of the operator I don't know, but people still may be touchy about the whole idea. It might be safer to limit the initial version to just those images that will remain fully FURred after the bot's edit, and to tag images also lacking a needed FUR for human attention (or ignore them for now). Anomie⚔ 12:48, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
P.S. If you do get to the point of wanting to run it continuously, the fact that the current version gives time for humans to revert vandalism that may have removed the images from the articles (by working from a week-old dump and only removes the FURs that were unused then and are unused "now") is a good thing that should be preserved. Anomie⚔ 12:48, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
- I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a bot removing fair use rationales at all, but at minimum it must account for vandalism (it seems to do this) and page moves, mergers and splits (I'm not certain it attempts this). In the case of page moves and at least some mergers, the bot should follow any redirects and update the FUR if the image is used on the target page. If a redirect has been nominated at RfD then the bot should still follow the redirect - while most redirects from moves should be kept, there are occasional exceptions and there is going to be a large overlap between editors who don't know they are usually kept and those who don't know that FURs will need updating. I don't know how splits can be automatically detected. If there is consensus to remove FURs that are unusued, it would be much better for the bot to move them to the talk page with an explanation, perhaps something like:
- "On <date> Gaelan Bot found that this image was not in use on the article(s) listed in the template below.
- If the image has been restored or moved to a different article or title and the file page has no Free Use Rationale (FUR) for the current location, you should either move the template below back to the file page and update it appropriately or write a new FUR.
- If the file page does contain a FUR for all current uses there is no action you need to take.
- If you think the bot got something wrong, please leave a message with details at <preferred contact location>."
- "On <date> Gaelan Bot found that this image was not in use on the article(s) listed in the template below.
- Thryduulf (talk) 10:49, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
- I am not seeing a lot of confidence from those who have commented that this will be able to effectively deal with the issue presented at the BOTREQ without creating too many false positives and situations where images might be improperly altered after this removal. If these issues can be accounted for (noting that the bot operator has yet to respond to any of the above comments) then discussion can go further, but at the moment I am leaning towards declining this. Primefac (talk) 13:58, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
- Hi. Sorry, Real Life has been a lot these past few weeks. I'll try to come back to this soon, but some quick notes:
It might be safer to limit the initial version to just those images that will remain fully FURred after the bot's edit
: This is a good idea. If we went ahead with this, I'd limit it to files that have at least one other FUR, and maybe separately maintain a list of pages that seem to have no valid FURs.In the case of page moves and at least some mergers, the bot should follow any redirects and update the FUR if the image is used on the target page.
This is partially done: if a FUR refers to a redirect, that redirect is followed, and the destination page considered. I wasn't planning on updating the FUR to link to the redirect target, but that might be a good idea at some point.
- One other possibility—and I haven't looked at the data to see how many useful edits this would exclude—is to only remove FURs when every current usage of the file is covered by an existing FUR. That (along with the anti-vandalism delay) should remove most of the issues with removing useful FURs—if every existing usage is covered, further FURs are (I think) pretty clearly not useful. Gaelan 💬✏️ 23:30, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
One other possibility—and I haven't looked at the data to see how many useful edits this would exclude—is to only remove FURs when every current usage of the file is covered by an existing FUR.
That's what I was suggesting by saying "fully FURred". It's easier to start small and expand than to start too big then have to fight pushback. Anomie⚔ 12:50, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
- Hi. Sorry, Real Life has been a lot these past few weeks. I'll try to come back to this soon, but some quick notes:
- I am not seeing a lot of confidence from those who have commented that this will be able to effectively deal with the issue presented at the BOTREQ without creating too many false positives and situations where images might be improperly altered after this removal. If these issues can be accounted for (noting that the bot operator has yet to respond to any of the above comments) then discussion can go further, but at the moment I am leaning towards declining this. Primefac (talk) 13:58, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
- @Gaelan: What is the status of this request? Following up as it's been over a month since the last activity on this page. Are you still wanting to pursue this? --TheSandDoctor Talk 17:09, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
ZabesBot
Operator: Zabe (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 22:43, Saturday, January 15, 2022 (UTC)
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic
Programming language(s): Python
Source code available: pywikibot interwikidata.py script
Function overview: cleaning up old interwikilinks
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):
Edit period(s): one time rum
Estimated number of pages affected: Did not count, probably between a few hundret and a few thousand
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes
Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): No
Function details: There are still quite a few articles that contain old interwikilinks. I would like to clean them up. The bot basically goes through all pages and then removes the interwiki links if the article is linked in the corresponding Wikidata object and there are no conflicts with the interwiki links.
Discussion
Could you give an example or three of what edits you will be making with your bot? (please do not ping on reply) Primefac (talk) 09:31, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Note: This bot appears to have edited since this BRFA was filed. Bots may not edit outside their own or their operator's userspace unless approved or approved for trial. AnomieBOT⚡ 12:17, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
I made 3 test edits ([1], [2], [3]). --Zabe (talk) 12:18, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
- I apologise but I should have asked this the first time - how are you finding these and could you give a slightly more accurate indication of how many edits are being planned? Primefac (talk) 19:05, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
On hold. Pending numbers-crunching. Primefac (talk) 12:39, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
ElliBot
Operator: Elliot321 (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 14:46, Saturday, January 23, 2021 (UTC)
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic
Source code available:
Function overview: Automatically apply {{redirect category shell}} templates to redirects with Wikidata, and remove redundant {{Wikidata redirect}} templates.
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):
Edit period(s): one time run
Estimated number of pages affected: 50,000-100,000
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes
Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): No
Function details: I recently modified {{Redirect category shell}} to automatically detect Wikidata links and apply the template {{Wikidata redirect}} if they exist. This was previously already done with protection levels, and there is no reason that {{Wikidata redirect}} should not also be applied.
There are currently 100,000 redirects in the category Category:Redirects connected to a Wikidata item, which is applied by the software. There are currently 30,000 redirects in the category Category:Wikidata redirects. Nearly all of these were put into that category by applying {{Wikidata redirect}} manually, meaning they will need the tag removed (as it will be a duplicate).
Many of the remaining 70,000 pages will need the template {{rcat shell}} added. As the change to {{Redirect category shell}} was recent, many redirects connected to Wikidata items, without {{Wikidata redirect}}, but with {{Redirect category shell}}, have not been added to Category:Wikidata redirects. The difference in count between Category:Wikidata redirects and Category:Redirects connected to a Wikidata item is the number of pages that will be modified.
The edits will be carried out with AWB running as an automated bot. There is very low risk of disruption in this task, though the number of edits is significant. Using AWB, this bot can also carry out other generic fixes to redirects, though this is not a significant part of its functions.
A somewhat similar failed request was Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/TomBot, but that that request was for a bot that would edit ~30-60x more pages, with less benefit overall. This is a much more narrow and useful request.
Discussion
- Any prior discussions on doing this that you're aware of, which establish broader consensus for this task?
- Will this BRFA cause Template:Wikidata redirect to become redundant? If I understand correctly, this task will orphan all of its transclusions? If so, and especially if there's no prior discussion, I suggest sending that template to TfD (and then this bot task can be technically implementing that TfD). That would be one way to test the wider consensus for this task, too.
ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:01, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
- There are no discussions I know of establishing consensus around this particular task. {{Wikidata redirect}} will not become redundant for two reasons. {{redirect category shell}} transcludes it. However, this usage could be subst, of course. The other usage is in cross-Wiki (such as to Wiktionary) and category redirects, the "soft" usage. The "hard" usage could be deprecated from the template, however (they are implemented slightly differently, with an automatic switch). Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 16:20, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
- To begin with, I'd say stylistically this presentation is inferior. See eg here. The one on the top (caused by the edit) doesn't look as good as the manual one & looks slightly out of place with the plaintext.
- If the rcat shell has to be manually added by bot, is there really a point to this? Why not have a bot add {{Wikidata redirect}} to pages in Category:Redirects connected to a Wikidata item? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 00:39, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
- Sorry - that was due to my changes being misunderstood and reverted. If you check now, you can see the way they were intended to look.
- The reason for adding {{redirect category shell}} over {{wikidata redirect}} is for automatic detection. If the link on Wikidata is removed, no update on Wikipedia is necessary (likewise, if a link on Wikidata is added to one using the shell, no update is necessary). Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 07:52, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
- Okay, makes sense. I'd suggest dropping a link to this BRFA from the template talk pages for the two templates, to allow some time for comments. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 09:37, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
So the idea is that {{RCAT shell}} should add the Wikidata box by checking for the connected item. Manually adding the template wouldn't be necessary then because the software can already detect if a page is connected to a Wikidata item. Is that correct? --PhiH (talk) 13:20, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
- @PhiH: pretty much. The shell will automatically detect a link to Wikidata, and if found, transclude the template. Therefore, this bot will remove the redundant manual transclusions of the template, and add the shell to automatically transclude on any redirect linked to Wikidata. Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 15:36, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
If I understand what changed with {{wikidata redirect}} and {{redirect category shell}} correctly, redirects that only have {{wikidata redirect}} will be changed to an empty {{redirect category shell}}, which then results in an error. This means that manual inspection is needed to determine another redirect category to apply, which obviously this Bot task cannot do. —seav (talk) 01:02, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- FYI, an empty Rcat shell results in sorting the redirect to the Miscellaneous redirects category, which is monitored by editors who will then tag the redirect with appropriate categories. P.I. Ellsworth ed. put'r there 03:41, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- Would that be a problem then, Paine Ellsworth? Filling the cat up with some tens of thousands of pages? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 08:12, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- An empty RCAT shell with a Wikidata item doesn't need to be categorised in Category:Miscellaneous redirects because it generates the Template:Wikidata redirect. I didn't check if that is implemented yet. A page with that template and no Wikidata item is a problem as well. They just move from one tracking category to another. --PhiH (talk) 08:44, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- Why doesn't it need to be categorised into misc redirects? Having a Wikidata item connected/existing isn't really an explanation of why there's a redirect on enwiki. Surely the redirect still needs to be categorised? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 09:06, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- @PhiH: @ProcrastinatingReader: the {{redirect category shell}} template should not be applied without any categories by a bot as the Category:Miscellaneous redirects should be filled manually. Consequently, I don't plan to do that with this bot. I can manually categorize the redirects that do not have any categories.
- (though, a tracking category for uncategorized redirects that can be applied by a bot would probably be useful. I don't feel like gaining consensus for that, though, as that would likely be much more contentious than this proposal) Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 11:37, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- I think my point is easier to demonstrate with an example, or I’m mistaken about exactly what is proposed here. Can you make 5 edits as a demonstration, either with the bot or by hand if you don’t have the bot coded yet? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 12:10, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- Maybe a page demonstrating what changes would be made would be more useful, since there are a few differing cases here? Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 03:46, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
- An actual edit or two of each case would be preferable, as that's the least confusing way to see what is actually proposed. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 09:57, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
- Maybe a page demonstrating what changes would be made would be more useful, since there are a few differing cases here? Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 03:46, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
- But you want to add an empty RCAT shell to pages that currently only use {{Wikidata redirect}}, don't you? Should they be added to Category:Miscellaneous redirects if they are connected to a Wikidata item or not? --PhiH (talk) 12:32, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- I think my point is easier to demonstrate with an example, or I’m mistaken about exactly what is proposed here. Can you make 5 edits as a demonstration, either with the bot or by hand if you don’t have the bot coded yet? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 12:10, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- To ProcrastinatingReader: as long as there is at least one rcat template within the Rcat shell, such as the "Wikidata redirect" template, then the redirect would not be sorted to Category:Miscellaneous redirects. As the proposer suggests, that would not be a problem. The proposer appears to know that a bot should not add an empty Rcat shell to redirects, which would bloat the Misc. redirects category. P.I. Ellsworth ed. put'r there 15:35, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- An empty RCAT shell with a Wikidata item doesn't need to be categorised in Category:Miscellaneous redirects because it generates the Template:Wikidata redirect. I didn't check if that is implemented yet. A page with that template and no Wikidata item is a problem as well. They just move from one tracking category to another. --PhiH (talk) 08:44, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
- Would that be a problem then, Paine Ellsworth? Filling the cat up with some tens of thousands of pages? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 08:12, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
I think there are multiple cases we have to discuss, feel free to comment below.
- Redirects that already use the RCAT shell
- This should be uncontroversial: Where {{Wikidata redirect}} is used it gets removed and the template is transcluded by the RCAT shell.
- Redirects without the RCAT shell…
- …that use {{Wikidata redirect}} and are connected to a Wikidata item
- The template gets removed and the RCAT shell is added. Should the RCAT shell be programmed to add these pages to Category:Miscellaneous redirects?
- …that don't use {{Wikidata redirect}} and are connected to a Wikidata item
- The RCAT shell is added. Same question as above arises.
- …that use {{Wikidata redirect}} and are not connected to a Wikidata item
- The template gets removed. Adding the RCAT shell would cause them to be added to Category:Miscellaneous redirects.
Currently these pages are tracked in Category:Unlinked Wikidata redirects. Before this bot task begins someone should work through this list and add the pages on Wikidata if necessary.
- The template gets removed. Adding the RCAT shell would cause them to be added to Category:Miscellaneous redirects.
- …that use {{Wikidata redirect}} and are connected to a Wikidata item
--PhiH (talk) 14:46, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
If I understand correctly, this bot will add the Rcat shell along with an internal {{Wikidata redirect}} tag when it senses any redirect that is already itemized on Wikidata. If that is what happens, then the redirect will not be sorted to the Misc. redirects category. I also sense a possible challenge where the {{NASTRO comment}} template is applied. One of many examples is at 3866 Langley. Would this bot do anything to those many redirects? I actually like the idea of more Rcat shell transclusions. I wonder if the bot will continue checking for new redirects that become connected to a Wikidata item? P.I. Ellsworth ed. put'r there 21:57, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
- The bot won't touch the {{NASTRO comment}} redirects, since it has no need to.
- I could run this after the main clean-up job (probably a weekly run would be sufficient). Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 05:25, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
- NASTRO comment applies the Rcat shell and so would auto-apply the Wikidata redirect template. There will then be two renditions of Wikidata redirect. Won't one of them have to be removed? P.I. Ellsworth ed. put'r there 18:49, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
- I thought the point of this bot is that these edits wouldn't be necessary anymore. Here you said If the link on Wikidata is removed, no update on Wikipedia is necessary (likewise, if a link on Wikidata is added to one using the shell, no update is necessary) --PhiH (talk) 19:00, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
- A weekly run would handle any new redirects that have been created. Editors LOVE to create new redirects; however, they generally leave it up to bots and Wikignomes to categorize their new redirects. P.I. Ellsworth ed. put'r there 17:11, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
- I thought the point of this bot is that these edits wouldn't be necessary anymore. Here you said If the link on Wikidata is removed, no update on Wikipedia is necessary (likewise, if a link on Wikidata is added to one using the shell, no update is necessary) --PhiH (talk) 19:00, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
- @PhiH: "Redirects that already use the RCAT shell: This should be uncontroversial": Have you thought about the cases where the rcat shell only contains the Wikidata rcat? 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 21:25, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
Also curious as to why AWB is used? Don't get me wrong; I love AWB. However it's not known for its speed or lack of clunkiness. According to the manual, ...any edit to the bot's talk page will halt the bot. Before restarting the bot, the bot operator must log in to the bot account and visit the bot's talk page, so that the "new messages" notification is cancelled.
So why not make a non-AWB bot to do the task? P.I. Ellsworth ed. put'r there 22:14, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
- Mainly because I know AWB and regex better than I know any other frameworks to interface with Wikipedia. I could write custom code, if that would be preferred. Elliot321 (talk | contribs) 05:26, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
- I was just curious, so it would be up to you, of course. I just know how it drives me crazy sometimes when I have to stop in the middle of something, log out of AWB, log in to Wikipedia just to check notifications, log back out and into AWB to commence. That happens with non-bot-auto work as well. P.I. Ellsworth ed. put'r there 18:53, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
So just to clarify what I'm waiting on: An actual edit or two of each case would be preferable, as that's the least confusing way to see what is actually proposed.
After that, it'll be more clear to have the discussion on which edits are good and which need further discussion. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:32, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
- Re: the message above. Primefac (talk) 13:44, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
- @Primefac and ProcrastinatingReader: thanks for the ping. I've actually expanded the scope of what I'm intending to do here a bit (see User:Elli/rcat standardization) - and planning on getting consensus for the changes elsewhere first, before going through with this, so if I could put this request on hold or something that would be ideal (sorry, I'm not sure exactly how this type of situation works, but getting approval for the narrow task of shelling and removing one rcat doesn't really make sense given my goal to deal with ~20 of them). Elli (talk | contribs) 18:38, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
On hold. Just comment out the template when you're ready to go (no harm in having it sit here for a while). Primefac (talk) 19:29, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
- This very productive discussion probably should have happened somewhere else prior to the BRFA being filed. Maybe this BRFA should be withdrawn pending a full discussion and manual demonstration of various test cases, and then resubmitted with a link to that discussion and a better explanation of the task. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:25, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
- @Primefac and ProcrastinatingReader: thanks for the ping. I've actually expanded the scope of what I'm intending to do here a bit (see User:Elli/rcat standardization) - and planning on getting consensus for the changes elsewhere first, before going through with this, so if I could put this request on hold or something that would be ideal (sorry, I'm not sure exactly how this type of situation works, but getting approval for the narrow task of shelling and removing one rcat doesn't really make sense given my goal to deal with ~20 of them). Elli (talk | contribs) 18:38, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
- @Elli: Just to follow up here: do you still intend to go through with this BRFA? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 01:07, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
- @ProcrastinatingReader: yes, just been busy with other stuff and not completely sure of the technical details yet. I'll try to follow up on that soon-ish. Elli (talk | contribs) 01:10, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
- I have another proposal: Wikipedia:Bot requests#Place or remove T:Wikidata redirect. Why my proposal is better:
- it keeps Qids ("Q" number), thus we can track if someone moves the redirect to another wikidata entry.
- it does not mess up with RCAT which is only for categories. Heanor (talk) 18:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Bots in a trial period
BareRefBot
Operator: Rlink2 (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 21:35, Thursday, January 20, 2022 (UTC)
Function overview: The function of this bot is to fill in Bare references. A bare reference is a reference with no information about it included in the citaiton, example of this is <ref>https://wikipedia.org</ref> instead of <ref>{{cite web | url = https://encarta.microsoft.com | title = Microsoft Encarta}}</ref>. More detail can be found on Wikipedia:Bare_URLs and User:BrownHairedGirl/Articles_with_bare_links.
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic, mistakes will be corrected as it goes.
Programming language(s): Multiple.
Source code available: Not yet.
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): WP:Bare_URLs, but citation bot already fills bare refs, and is approved to do so.
Edit period(s): Continuous.
Estimated number of pages affected: around 200,000 pages, maybe less, maybe more.
Namespace(s): Mainspace.
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes.
Function details: The purpose of the bot is to provide a better way of fixing bare refs. As explained by Enterprisey, our citation tools could do better. Citation bot is overloaded, and Reflinks consistently fails to get the title of the webpage. ReFill is slightly better but is very buggy due to architectual failures in the software pointed out by the author of the tool.
As evidenced by my AWB run, my script can get the title of many sites that Reflinks, reFill, or Citation Bot can not get. The tool is like a "booster" to other tools like Citation bot, it picks up where other tools left off.
There are a few exceptions for when the bot will not fill in the title. For example, if the title is shorter than 5 chacters, it will not fill it in since it is highly unlikely that the title has any useful information. Twitter links will be left alone, as the Sand Doctor has a bot that can do a more complete filling.
There has been discussion over the "incompleteness" of the filling of these refs. For example, it wouldn't fill in the "work="/"website=" parameter unless its a whitelisted site (NYT, Youtube, etc...). This is similar to what Citation bot does IIRC. While these other parameters would usually not filled, the consensus is that "perfect is the enemy of the good" and that any sort of filling will represent an improvement in the citation. Any filled cites can always be improved even further by editors or another bot.
Examples:
Discussion
Pre-trial discussion
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{{BotOnHold}} pending closure of Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Rlink2. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:25, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Initial questions and thoughts (in no particular order):
ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:25, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Opening comments: I've seen <!--Bot generated title--> inserted in similar initiatives. Would that be a useful sort of thing to do here? It is acknowledged that the titles proposed to be inserted by this bot can be verbose and repetitive, terse or plainly wrong. Manual improvements will be desired in many cases. How do we help editors interested in doing this work?
Like ProcrastinatingReader I am interested in understanding bot permission precedence here. I'm not convinced that these edits are universally productive. I believe there has been restraint exercised in the past on bot jobs for which there is not a strong consensus that the changes are making significant improvements. I think improvements need to be large enough to overcome the downside of all the noise this will be adding to watchlists. I'm not convinced that bar is cleared here. See User_talk:Rlink2#A_little_mindless for background. ~Kvng (talk) 16:53, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
It looks like a lot of cites use
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Source code
- Speaking of fine tuning, do you intend to publish your source code? I think we may be able to identify additional gotchas though code review. ~Kvng (talk) 22:44, 25 January 2022 (UTC)
- Hopefully, but not right now. It wouldn't be very useful for "code review" in the way you are thinking. If there are bugs though, you can always report it. Rlink2 (talk) 22:54, 25 January 2022 (UTC)
- @Rlink2: I have to disagree with you on this. As a general principle, I am very much in favour of open-source code. That applies even more strongly in a collaborative environment such as Wikipedia, so I approach bots with a basic presumption that the code should be available, unless there is very good reason to make an exception.
- Publishing the code brings several benefits:
- it allows other editors to verify that the code does what it claims to do
- it allows other editors to help find any bugs
- it helps others who may want to develop tools for related tasks
- So if a bot-owner does not publish the source code, I expect a good explanation of why it is being withheld. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:35, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl: Ok, nice to see your perspective on it. I will definetly be making it open source then. When should I make it avaliable? I can provide a link later in the week, or should I wait until the bot enters trial? Where would I even post the code anyway? Thanks for your opinion. Rlink2 (talk) 00:39, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- @Rlink2: Up to you, but my practice is to make it available whenever I am ready to start a trial. That is usually before a trial is authorised.
- I usually put the code in a sub-page (or pages) of the BRFA page. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:06, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl: Sounds good, I will follow your example and make it avaliable as soon as I can (later this week). Subpage sounds great, good idea and keeps everything on wiki. Rlink2 (talk) 01:11, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- There is preliminary code up on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/BareRefBot/Code. There is more to the script than that (eg: networking code, wikitext code ) but this is the core of it. Will be releasing more as time goes on and I have time to comment the additional portions. Rlink2 (talk) 20:08, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- Code review comments and discussion at Wikipedia talk:Bots/Requests for approval/BareRefBot/Code
- There is preliminary code up on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/BareRefBot/Code. There is more to the script than that (eg: networking code, wikitext code ) but this is the core of it. Will be releasing more as time goes on and I have time to comment the additional portions. Rlink2 (talk) 20:08, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl: Sounds good, I will follow your example and make it avaliable as soon as I can (later this week). Subpage sounds great, good idea and keeps everything on wiki. Rlink2 (talk) 01:11, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl: Ok, nice to see your perspective on it. I will definetly be making it open source then. When should I make it avaliable? I can provide a link later in the week, or should I wait until the bot enters trial? Where would I even post the code anyway? Thanks for your opinion. Rlink2 (talk) 00:39, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- Hopefully, but not right now. It wouldn't be very useful for "code review" in the way you are thinking. If there are bugs though, you can always report it. Rlink2 (talk) 22:54, 25 January 2022 (UTC)
Trial
Trial 1
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Couple thoughts:
-- GreenC 15:18, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
I went through all 52 so that my contribution to this venture wouldn't be limited to re-enacting the Spanish Inquisition at ANI.
I wonder if the concerns in #1-4 could be addressed by simply adding
I've taken the time to review the first 25 edits. My findings:
Problems with bare link titles are mostly about the
Most of my concerns have to do with dead link detection. This is turning out to be the distraction I predicted. There were only 3 articles with bare link and dead link edits: [30], [31], [32]. Running these as separate tasks will require 12% more edits and I don't think that's a big deal. I again request we disable dead link detection and marking and focus on filling bare links now.
It's now over 7 days since the trial edits. @Rlink2: have you made list of what changes have been proposed, and which you have accepted? I think that a review of that list would get us closer to a second trial. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:47, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
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Trial 2
Trial 2
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VAR thisURL = "http://exmple.com/fubar" VAR domainName = FunctionGetDomainNamefromURL(thisURL) VAR articleTitle = FunctionGetTitleFromURL(thisURL) // start by setting default value for websiteParam VAR websiteParam = domainName // e.g. "magicseaweed.com" // now see if we can get a website name VAR foundWebsiteName == FunctionToFindWebsiteNameAndDoAsanityCheck() IF foundWebsiteName IS NOT BLANK // e.g. "Magic Seaweed" for https://magicseaweed.com/ THEN BEGIN websiteParam = foundWebsiteName IF articleTitle INCLUDES foundWebsiteName THEN BEGIN VAR trimmedArticleTitle = articleTitle - foundWebsiteName IF trimmedArticleTitle IS NOT BLANK OR CRAP THEN articleTitle = trimmedArticleTitle ENDIF END ENDIF END ENDIF FunctionMakeCiteTemplate(thisURL, articleTitle, websiteParam)
@Rlink2 and Primefac: it is now 4 weeks since the second trial, and Rlink2 has resolved all the issues raised. Isn't it time for a third trial? I suggest that this trial should be bigger, say 250 edits, to give a higher chance of detecting edge cases. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:14, 12 March 2022 (UTC)
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BareRefBot as a secondary tool
I would like to ask that BareRefBot be run as a secondary tool, i.e. that it should be targeted as far as possible to work on refs where the more polished Citation bot has tried and failed.
This is a big issue which I should probably have raised at the start. The URLs-that-Citation-but-cannot-fill are why I have been so keen to get BareRefBot working, and I should have explained this in full earlier on. Pinging the other contributors to this BRFA: @Rlink2, Primefac, GreenC, ProcrastinatingReader, Kvng, Levivich, Pppery, 1234qwer1234qwer4, and Thryduulf, whose input on this proposal would be helpful.
I propose this because on the links which Citation bot can handle, it does a very thorough job. It uses the zotero servers to extract a lot of metadata such as date and author which BareRefBot cannot get, and it has a large and well-developed set of lookups to fix issues with individual sites, such as using {{cite news}} or {{cite journal}} when appropriate. It also has well-developed lookup tables for converting domain names to work titles.
So ideally, all bare URLs would be filled by the well-polished Citation bot. Unfortunately, there are many websites which Citation bot cannot fill, because the zotero provides no data. Other tools such as WP:REFLINKS and WP:REFILL often can handle those URLs, but none of them works in batch mode and individual editors cannot do the manual work fast enough to keep up with Citation bot's omissions.
The USP of BareRefBot is that thanks to Rlink2's cunning programming, it can do this followup work in batch mode, and that is where it should be targeted. That way we get the best of both worlds: Citation bot does a polished job if it can, and BareRefBot does the best it can with the rest.
I am systematically feeding Citation bot with long lists of articles with bare URLs, in two sets:
- User:BrownHairedGirl/Articles with new bare URL refs, consisting of the Articles with bare URL refs (ABURs) which were in the latest database dump but not in the previous dump. The 20220220 dump had 4,904 new ABURS, of which there were 4,518 ABURs which still hsd bare URLs.
- User:BrownHairedGirl/Articles with bare links, consisting of articles not part of my Citation bot lists since a cutoff date. The bot is currently about halfway through a set of 33,239 articles which Citation bot had not processed since 1 December 2021.
If BareRefBot is targeted at these lists after Citation bot has done them, we get the best of both worlds. Currently, these lists are easily accessed: all my use of Citation bot is publicly logged in the pages linked and I will happily email Rlink2 copies of the full (unsplit lists) if that is more convenient. If I get run over by a bus or otherwise stop feeding Citation bot, then it would be simple for Rlink2 or anyone else to take over the work of first feeding Citation bot.
What do others think? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:25, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- Here is an example of what I propose.
- Matt Wieters is page #2178 in my list Not processed since 1 December - part 6 of 11 (2,847 pages), which is currently being processed by Citation bot.
- Citation bot edited the article at 11:26, 2 March 2022, but it didn't fill any bare URL refs. I followed up by using WP:REFLINKS to fill the 1 bare URL ref, in this edit.
- That followup is what I propose that BareRefBot should do. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:42, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- I think first and foremost you should look both ways before crossing the road so you don't get run over by a bus. :-D It strikes me as more efficient to have BRB follow CB as suggested. I don't see any downside. Levivich 19:28, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl
- This makes sense, I think that citation bot is better at filling out refs completely. One thing that would be intresting to know is if Citation Bot can improve already filled refs. For example, let's say we have a source that citation bot can get the author, title, name, and date for, but BareRefBot can only get the title. If BareRefBot only fills in the title, and citation bot comes after it, would citation bot fill in the rest?
and it has a large and well-developed set of lookups to fix issues with individual sites, such as using cite news or cite journal when appropriate.
I agree .It uses the zotero servers to extract a lot of metadata such as date and author which BareRefBot cannot get, and it has a large and well-developed set of lookups to fix issues with individual sites
Correct.It also has well-developed lookup tables for converting domain names to work titles.
Yes, do note that list could be ported to Bare Ref Bot (list can be found here)That way we get the best of both worlds: Citation bot does a polished job if it can, and BareRefBot does the best it can with the rest.
I agree. Let's see what others have to say Rlink2 (talk) 19:38, 2 March 2022 (UTC)- Glad we agree in principle, @Rlink2. You raise some useful questions:
One thing that would be intresting to know is if Citation Bot can improve already filled refs.
- yes, it can and does. But I don't think it overwrites all existing data, which is why I think it's better to give it the first pass.
For example, let's say we have a source that citation bot can get the author, title, name, and date for, but BareRefBot can only get the title. If BareRefBot only fills in the title, and citation bot comes after it, would citation bot fill in the rest?
- If an existing cite has only
|title=
filled, Citation Bot often adds many other parameters (see e.g. [45]). - However, I thought we had agreed that BareRefBot was always going to add and fill a
|website=
parameter? - My concern is mostly with the
|title=
. Citation Bot does quite a good job of stripping extraneous stuff from the title when it fills a bare ref, but I don't think that it re-processes an existing title. So I think it's best to give Citation Bot the first pass at filling the title.
- If an existing cite has only
- Hope that helps. Maybe CB's maintainer AManWithNoPlan can check my evaluation and let us know if I have misunderstood anything about how Citation Bot handles partially-filled refs. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:27, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- I think you are correct. Citation bot relies mostly on the wikipedia zotero - there are a few that we go beyond zotero: IEEE might be the only one. A bit thing that the bot does is extensive error checking (bad dates, authors of "check the rss feed" and such). Also, almost never overwrites existing data. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 20:35, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- Many thanks to @AManWithNoPlan for that prompt and helpful clarification. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:51, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl @AManWithNoPlan
But I don't think it overwrites all existing data, which is why I think it's better to give it the first pass.
Yeah, i think John raised up this point at the Citation Bot talk page, and AManWithNoPlan has said above that it can add new info but no overwrite the old ones..However, I thought we had agreed that BareRefBot was always going to add and fill a
Yes, this hasn't changed. I forgot to say "title and website" while Citation Bot can get author, title, website, date, etc.....So I think it's best to give Citation Bot the first pass at filling the title.
This makes sense.Citation Bot does quite a good job of stripping extraneous stuff from the title when it fills a bare ref,
I agree. Maybe AManWithNoPlan could share the techniques used so they can be ported to BareRefBot? Or is the stripping done on the Zotero servers? He would have more information regarding this.- I also have a question about the turnaround of the list making process. How long does it usually take for Citation Bot to finish a batch of articles? Rlink2 (talk) 20:43, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- See https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#/Citation/getCitation and https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot/blob/master/Zotero.php it has list of NO_DATE_WEBITES, tidy_date function, etc. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 20:45, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Rlink2: Citation Bot processes my lists of ABURs at a rate of about 3,000 articles per day. There's quite a lot of variation in that (e.g. big lists are slooow, wee stubs are fast), but 3k/day is a good ballpark.
- The 20220301 database dump contains 155K ABURs, so we are looking at ~50 days to process the backlog. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:47, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl
- So every 50 days there will be a new list, or you will break the list up into pieces and give the list of articles citation bot did not fix to me incrementally? Rlink2 (talk) 21:01, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Rlink2: it's in batches of up to 2,850 pages, which is the limit for Citation Bot batches.
- See my job list pages: User:BrownHairedGirl/Articles with bare links and User:BrownHairedGirl/Articles with new bare URL refs. I can email you the lists as they are done, usually about one per day. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:27, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- I think you are correct. Citation bot relies mostly on the wikipedia zotero - there are a few that we go beyond zotero: IEEE might be the only one. A bit thing that the bot does is extensive error checking (bad dates, authors of "check the rss feed" and such). Also, almost never overwrites existing data. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 20:35, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
- Duh @me.
- @Rlink2, I just realised that in order to follow Citation Bot, BareRefBot's worklist does not need to be built solely off my worklists.
- Citation Bot has 4 channels, so my lists comprise only about a quarter of Citation Bot's work. The other edits are done on behalf of other editors, both as batch jobs and as individual requests. Most editors do not publish their work lists like I do, but Citation Bot's contribs list is a record of the pages which the bot edited on their behalf, so it is a partial job list (obviously, it does not include pages which Citation bot processed but did not edit).
- https://en.wikiscan.org/user/Citation%20bot shows the bot averaging ~2,500 edits per day. So if BareRefBot grab says the last 10,000 edits by Citation Bot, that will usually amount to about four days work by CB, which would be a good list to work on. Most editors do not not choose their Citation bot jobs on the basis of bare URLs, so the incidence of bare URLs in those lists will be low ... but any bare URLs which are there will have been recently processed by Citation Bot.
- Also, I don't see any problem with BareRefBot doing a run in which the bot does no filling, but just applies {{Bare URL PDF}} where appropriate. A crude search shows that there are currently over such 30,000 refs to be tagged, which should keep the bot busy for a few days: just disable filling, and let it run in tagging mode.
- Hope this helps. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:20, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl:
BareRefBot's worklist does not need to be built solely off my worklists.
Oh yes, I forgot about the contribution list as well.So if BareRefBot grab says the last 10,000 edits by Citation Bot, that will usually amount to about four days work by CB, which would be a good list to work on.
I agree.Most editors do not not choose their Citation bot jobs on the basis of bare URLs, so the incidence of bare URLs in those lists will be low ... but any bare URLs which are there will have been recently processed by Citation Bot.
True. Just note that tying the bot to Citation bot will mean that the bot can only go as fast as citation bot goes, that's fine with me since there isn't really a big rush, but just something to note.Also, I don't see any problem with BareRefBot doing a run in which the bot does no filling,
Me neither. Rlink2 (talk) 01:44, 5 March 2022 (UTC)- Thanks, @Rlink2.
- I had kinda hoped that once BareRefBot was authorised, it could start working around the clock. At say 7 edits per minute. it would do ~10,000 pages per day, and clear the backlog in under 3 weeks.
- By making it follow Citation bot, we restrict it to about 3,000 pages per day. That means that it may take up to 10 weeks, which is a pity. But I think we will get better results this way. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:58, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl: Maybe a hybrid model could work, for example it could avoid filling in refs for websites where the bot knows citation bot could possibly get better data (e.x: nytimes, journals, websites with metadata tags the barerefbot doesn't understand, etc..). That way we have the best of both worlds - the speed of barerefbot, and the (higher) quality of citation bot. Rlink2 (talk) 02:02, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Rlink2: that is theoretically possible, but I think it adds a lot of complexity with no gain.
- The problem that BareRefBot exists to resolve is the opposite of that set, viz. the URLs which Citation bot cannot fill, and we can't get a definitive list of those. My experience of trying to make such a list for Reflinks was daunting: the sub-pages of User:BrownHairedGirl/No-reflinks websites list over 1400 sites, and it's far from complete. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:16, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
- @BrownHairedGirl: Maybe a hybrid model could work, for example it could avoid filling in refs for websites where the bot knows citation bot could possibly get better data (e.x: nytimes, journals, websites with metadata tags the barerefbot doesn't understand, etc..). That way we have the best of both worlds - the speed of barerefbot, and the (higher) quality of citation bot. Rlink2 (talk) 02:02, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
- Some numbers. @Rlink2: I did some analsysis of the numbers, using AWB's list comparer and pre-parser. The TL;DR is that there are indeed very slim pickings for BareRefBot in the other articles processed by Citation bot: ~16 per day.
- I took CB's latest 10,000 edits, as of about midday UTC today. That took me back to just two hours short of five days, on 28 Feb. Of those 10K, only 4,041 were not from my list. Only 13 of them still have a {{Bare URL inline}} tag, and 93 have an untagged, non-PDF bare URL ref. After removing duplicates, that left 104 pages, but 25 of those were drafts, leaving only 79 mainspace articles.
- So CB's contribs list gives an average of only 16 non-BHG-suggested articles per day for BareRefBot to work on.
- In those 5 days, I fed CB with 14,168 articles, on which the bot made just short of 6,000 edits. Of those 14,168 articles, 2,366 still have a {{Bare URL inline}} tag, and 10,107 have an untagged, non-PDF bare URL ref. After removing duplicates, that left 10,143 articles for BareRefBot to work on. That is about 2,000 per day.
- So in those 5 days, Citation bot filled all the bare URLs on 28.5% of the articles I fed it. (Ther are more articles where it filed some but not all bare refs). It will be great if BareRefBot can make a big dent in the remainder.
- Hope this helps. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:03, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
- For what it's worth, I dislike the idea of having a bot whose sole task is to clean up after another bot; we should be improving the other bot in that case. If this bot can edit other pages outside of those done by Citation bot, then it should do so. Primefac (talk) 12:52, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Primefac, well that's also a good way of thinking about it. I'm personally fine with any of the options (work on its own or follow citation bot), its up to others to come to a consensus over what is best. Rlink2 (talk) 12:55, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Primefac: my proposal is not
clean up after another bot
, which describes one bot fixing errors by another. - My proposal is different: that this bot should do the tasks that Citation bot has failed to do. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:37, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
- BrownHairedGirl is right, the proposal is not cleaning up the other bots errors, it is with what Citation Bot is not doing (more specifically, the bare refs not being filled). Rlink2 (talk) 17:55, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Primefac: Also, there seems to me to be no scope for extending the range of URLs Citation bot can fill. CB uses the zotero servers for its info on the bare URLs, and if the zotero doesn't provide the info, CB is helpless.
- It is of course theoretically conceivable that CB could be extended with a whole bunch of code of its own to gather data about the URLs which the zoteros can't handle. But that would be a big job, and I don't see anyone volunteering to do that.
- But what we do have is a very willing editor who has developed a separate tool to do some of what CB doesn't do. Please don't let the ideal of an all-encompassing Citation Bot (which is not even on the drawing board) become the enemy of the good, i.e. of the ready-to-roll BareRefBot.
- This BRFA is now Rlink2 in it tenth week. Rlink2 has been very patient, but please lets try to get this bot up and running without further long delay. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:25, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
- Maybe I misread your initial idea, but you have definitely misread my reply. I was saying that if this were just a case of cleaning up after CB, then CB should be fixed. Clearly, there are other pages to be dealt with, which makes that entire statement void, and I never suggested that CB be expanded purely to take over this task. Primefac (talk) 18:31, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Primefac: maybe we went the long way around, but it's good to find that in the end we agree that there is a job for BareRefBot to do. Please can we try to get it over the line without much more time? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:11, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
- Maybe I misread your initial idea, but you have definitely misread my reply. I was saying that if this were just a case of cleaning up after CB, then CB should be fixed. Clearly, there are other pages to be dealt with, which makes that entire statement void, and I never suggested that CB be expanded purely to take over this task. Primefac (talk) 18:31, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
- BrownHairedGirl is right, the proposal is not cleaning up the other bots errors, it is with what Citation Bot is not doing (more specifically, the bare refs not being filled). Rlink2 (talk) 17:55, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
- @Primefac: my proposal is not
- @Primefac, well that's also a good way of thinking about it. I'm personally fine with any of the options (work on its own or follow citation bot), its up to others to come to a consensus over what is best. Rlink2 (talk) 12:55, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
Trial 3
Approved for extended trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Primefac (talk) 12:48, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
AssumptionBot
Operator: AssumeGoodWraith (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 11:34, Wednesday, February 16, 2022 (UTC)
Function overview: Adds AFC unsubmitted templates to drafts.
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic
Programming language(s): Python
Source code available: I think this works?
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Bot proposal (AFC submission templates)
Edit period(s): Meant to be continuous.
Estimated number of pages affected: ~100 a day, judging by the new pages feed (about 250 today) and assuming that not many drafts are left without the afc template
Namespace(s): Draft
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes (pywikibot)
Function details: Adds AFC unsubmitted templates ( {{afc submission/draft}} ) to drafts in draftspace that don't have them, the {{draft article}} template, or anything that currently redirects to those 2. See the examples in the VPR proposal listed above.
Discussion
- I'm not going to decline this outright, if only to allow for feedback and other opinions, but not all drafts need to go through AFC, and so having a bot place the template on every draft is extremely problematic. Primefac (talk) 12:22, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
- {{BotOnHold}} until the RFC (which I have fixed the link to) has completed. In the future, get consensus before filing a request. Primefac (talk) 12:22, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
- @Primefac: Not sure if this is a misunderstanding, but it's the unsubmitted template, not the submitted one (Template:afc submission/draft). — Preceding unsigned comment added by AssumeGoodWraith (talk • contribs) 12:28, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
- I know, and my point still stands - not every draft is meant to be sent for review at AFC, and so adding the template to every draft is problematic. Primefac (talk) 12:38, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
- @Primefac: I thought you interpreted the proposal as "automatically submitting all new drafts for review". I'll wait for the RFC. – AssumeGoodWraith (talk | contribs) 12:49, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
- I know, and my point still stands - not every draft is meant to be sent for review at AFC, and so adding the template to every draft is problematic. Primefac (talk) 12:38, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
Note: This bot appears to have edited since this BRFA was filed. Bots may not edit outside their own or their operator's userspace unless approved or approved for trial. AnomieBOT⚡ 12:41, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
- I'm not a BAG member, but I'd like to point out that your code won't work as you expect for multiple reasons. First, Python will interpret
"{{afc submission".lower()
,"{{articles for creation".lower()
, etc. as separate conditions that are alwaysTrue
, meaning the only condition that is actually considered is"{{draft article}}".lower() not in page.text
. Also, yourtime.sleep
call is outside the loop, meaning it will never actually be run. Bsoyka (talk · contribs) 04:59, 25 February 2022 (UTC)- I'll figure it out when approved. – AssumeGoodWraith (talk | contribs) 05:09, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
- ... Or now. – AssumeGoodWraith (talk | contribs) 05:09, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
- I'll figure it out when approved. – AssumeGoodWraith (talk | contribs) 05:09, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
- I'd like to note that I've closed the RfC on this task. From the close: "There is consensus for such a bot, provided that it does not tag drafts created by experienced editors. The consensus on which users are experienced enough is less clear, but it looks like (auto)confirmed is a generally agreed upon threshold." Tol (talk | contribs) @ 19:06, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
Approved for trial (50 edits or 21 days, whichever happens first). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. This is based on the assumption that the bot will only be adding the template to non-AC creations. Primefac (talk) 12:37, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
Bots that have completed the trial period
Qwerfjkl (bot) 9
Operator: Qwerfjkl (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 08:12, Saturday, April 2, 2022 (UTC)
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic
Programming language(s): JavaScript
Source code available: Just some regexps
Function overview: Mass-remove statement from articles
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia:Bot requests#Removal of a WP:RSUW statement from around 3,000 Poland related stub articles covering small villages and rural communities
Edit period(s): One time run
Estimated number of pages affected: ~3000
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): No
Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): Yes
Function details: The bot will remove a WP:RSUW statement..."Before 1945 the area was part of Germany", per the reasons described at the BOTREQ linked above.
Discussion
Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Let's make sure this works and there aren't any further objections. Please link to this page in the edit summary. --TheSandDoctor Talk 17:00, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
- @TheSandDoctor: See these 50 contributions (I accidentally ran this on my main account, not my bot account). ― Qwerfjkltalk 18:12, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
Trial complete. For the sake of updating the status. --TheSandDoctor Talk 02:38, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
IndentBot
Operator: Notsniwiast (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 03:20, Friday, October 15, 2021 (UTC)
Function overview: Adjust indentation on discussion pages.
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic
Programming language(s): Python, pywikibot
Source code available: On Github
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_83#Bot_to_fix_indents
Edit period(s): Continuous (tracking recent changes on a delay)
Estimated number of pages affected: Depends on parameters. With delay of 10 minutes, around 20-30 pages are checked per 10 minutes (see function details below). Initially, most pages having substantial content will be edited, but since the bot processes the entire page, this will get reduced over time as it covers more ground.
Namespace(s): All talk namespaces, and the project namespace. Not sure if any other namespaces have discussion pages.
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes, uses pywikibot's save function.
Function details:
First, the wikitext is partitioned into lines in the usual manner using \n
as a delimiter, except that certain newlines, such as those immediately preceding table, template, or tag (as detected by WikiTextParser), are not considered the end of a line. Then we apply fix_gaps
, fix_extra_indents
, and fix_indent_style
to the sequence of lines.
Definitions
- The indentation characters are
*
,:
, and#
. - Given a line
X
, we denote the indentation characters of the line byindent_text(X)
, and we denote the indentation level bylvl(X)
. In particular, ifX
is not indented thenlvl(X) == 0
. - A blank line is a line consisting of whitespace only.
- A gap is a nonempty contiguous sequence of blank lines sandwiched between two indented lines, which are called the opening line and closing line.
- The length of a gap is the length of the sequence of blank lines.
Fixes
fix_gaps
: This fix has many variations. LetA
andB
be the opening and closing lines, respectively. No gap with an opening or closing line beginning with#
is removed. Otherwise, all length 1 gaps are removed, and longer gaps are removed only iflvl(B) > 1
.fix_extra_indents
: We iterate over the lines from beginning to end. If we encounter a lineA
followed by a lineB
such thatlvl(B) > lvl(A) + 1
, then the subsequent chunk of lines which have indentation level greater than or equal tolvl(B)
, beginning withB
, is shifted to the left bylvl(B) - lvl(A) - 1
positions. This is done by stripping outindent_text[lvl(A):lvl(B)-1]
(in Python notation) from these lines.fix_indent_style
: We iterate over the lines from beginning to end and adjust theindent_text
of each line to use corresponding characters from the closest previous line with the same or smaller level, except that#
characters are not removed from, introduced to, or shifted inside a line.
The above description leaves out some details (namely some exceptions for edge cases). The fixes are repeatedly applied in the above order until another round won't alter the page (one round is almost always enough).
It's basically impossible to handle all edge cases and it's not difficult to come up with some of them, especially when you use ordered lists and combinations of possible mistakes. The hope is these are rare enough to be acceptable.
The bot tracks recent changes with a delay
minute delay in chunks of chunk
minutes, checking for non-minor non-bot edits which include a user signature with the edit that have not been superseded in the most recent delay
minutes. The effect of this is that IndentBot is activated by signature-adding edits only, and does not edit any page which has had a signature-adding edit in the most recent delay minutes. I believe delay should be set to 10 to 30 minutes. Too long of a delay results in editors manually fixing indentation in active discussions, partially defeating the purpose of the bot.
Non-talk pages must have at least 3 signatures to be edited, ensuring that a single accidental signature to a non-discussion page doesn't trigger the bot. Most sandboxes are avoided.
Discussion
- Also, can someone make IndentBot a confirmed user so that it can bypass CAPTCHAs? Winston (talk) 04:01, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
- Does anyone know why I still see some bots when filtering recent changes for human edits only? Winston (talk) 08:25, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- Answered here. Winston (talk) 01:51, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
Note: This bot appears to have edited since this BRFA was filed. Bots may not edit outside their own or their operator's userspace unless approved or approved for trial. AnomieBOT⚡ 23:07, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
- Thanks for working on this. In response to
Not sure if any other namespaces have discussion pages
, DYK noms are the odd example that always comes to mind, e.g. Template:Did you know nominations/La Folia Barockorchester. It's probably fine if we skip these to keep things simple, though. — The Earwig (talk) 03:39, 20 October 2021 (UTC) - The code has pretty much settled and the bot is ready for a short trial if the example diffs given look good. Winston (talk) 04:07, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Approved for trial (50 edits or 7 days, whichever happens first). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Primefac (talk) 07:35, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
Trial complete. See the diffs here.
- Haven't looked too carefully yet, but one edge case I saw was Line 80 in the diff Wikipedia:Arbitration enforcement log/2021 involving {{Div col}}. It would be fine if {{Div col}} started on the same line as the comment. Winston (talk) 12:56, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
- Possible fix is to not adjust style if the previous line contains an exceptional newline character, in this case the exceptional newline is the one just before
{{Div col}}
(since newlines just before templates do not count as delimiters in the line partitioning phase). Winston (talk) 13:03, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
- Possible fix is to not adjust style if the previous line contains an exceptional newline character, in this case the exceptional newline is the one just before
Note: I suspect the easiest way to handle edge cases as they come up is to simply prevent the bot from making certain edits to certain lines, rather than trying to handle every case correctly. Winston (talk) 13:07, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
- Not sure if this is open to all comments, feel free to remove if not. I came her after seeing the edit at Talk:List of Ayatollahs and I was interested. If you look at the edit it made, it didn't manage to get it correct. Although it start well it fails at the signature section starting "please study the answers", which should have been indented. Because it missed this, all the edits made afterwards are wrong.
Also the messages it changed are over a decade old, will it be normal practice for it to change messages that are that old or was this part of the test? ActivelyDisinterested (talk) 23:34, 20 October 2021 (UTC)- The edit looks better formatted to me and I don't see unintended edge cases, though I'm interested in others' opinions. Be sure to check out the links at User:IndentBot#IndentBot to understand why and how the indentation is being adjusted.
- As for old messages, the bot does not take that into account. It adjusts indentation on the entire page at once. For more active talk pages, old discussions are often stored in archives. Since the bot is only activated by a recent edit with signature, archived pages shouldn't be touched. Winston (talk) 00:07, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- It's indented part of a message, and left the last section unindented (the second grey unedited section). That's definitely not right. ActivelyDisinterested (talk) 00:46, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- Could you partially quote the lines you are referring to? Note that the bot does not fix indentation completely—in particular, it does not add extra indentation (so unindented lines will remain unindented). It only changes indentation characters, removes blank lines, and reduces over-indentation. Winston (talk) 00:56, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- Ah! I see what happened. The section at issue in full is:
please study the answers in his discussion pages in different languages. Academycanada (talk) 03:21, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
This is the end of the message that began in full:
:By a simple search, you can find the sources such as Islamic organizations, independent websites and academic institutions which introduced him as one of Marjas and Grand Ayatollahs. Here are some of them in different languages:. note the message starts with an indent
The start of the message was indented, the bot correctly indented the middle lines of the message, but the end section was not originally indented and so the bot ignored it. As you said unindented lines remain unindented, but that does leave one message with two levels of indents. ActivelyDisinterested (talk) 01:08, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- Ah! I see what happened. The section at issue in full is:
- Could you partially quote the lines you are referring to? Note that the bot does not fix indentation completely—in particular, it does not add extra indentation (so unindented lines will remain unindented). It only changes indentation characters, removes blank lines, and reduces over-indentation. Winston (talk) 00:56, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- It's indented part of a message, and left the last section unindented (the second grey unedited section). That's definitely not right. ActivelyDisinterested (talk) 00:46, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
- Made minor improvements to the line partitioning. Also,
fix_indent_style
now resets its "memory" after list-breaking newlines. This behavior makes more sense and is more faithful to the original indentation. It solves quite a few bugs including the {{Div col}} one I mentioned earlier. Winston (talk) 05:08, 22 October 2021 (UTC) - @Primefac: Can I do another trial to draw more scrutiny? (Also want to test it on Toolforge this time.) Winston (talk) 08:42, 22 October 2021 (UTC)
- Regarding [46]: this is not the bot's fault, but on AFDs its convention to use bullets for voting, but delsort notices use colon indent. In this case, the bot changed all bullets to colons after the first delsort notice – and this would happen on literally every AFD. Can something be done about this?
Approved for extended trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. I would suggest citing a policy/information page in the edit summary. Also, consider using minor edit flag for user talk pages even in trial as otherwise the users would get new messages alert. – SD0001 (talk) 12:24, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- Ok, edits to user talk pages will get minor edits. Also, I can add a simple exception for comments beginning with
<small class="delsort-notice"
. Added link to MOS:INDENTMIX to the edit summary. Winston (talk) 12:31, 24 October 2021 (UTC) - @SD0001: Actually, how are these delsort notices inserted? Are they manually typed out or is there some automation involved? I noticed one of them just used <small> without the "class" attribute. Winston (talk) 12:48, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- Found it. It is {{Deletion sorting}}. But I guess every now and then someone adds it manually. I'll just use a regex for a small tag followed by "Note:". Winston (talk) 12:57, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- Yes, that template is substed by a couple of tools – MediaWiki:Gadget-twinklexfd.js and User:Enterprisey/delsort.js being the two common ones. – SD0001 (talk) 12:58, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- @Notsniwiast Actually, I went ahead and boldly edited that template to use a bullet instead. If no one reverts my edit, then an exception would be unnecessary. – SD0001 (talk) 13:02, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- Yes, that template is substed by a couple of tools – MediaWiki:Gadget-twinklexfd.js and User:Enterprisey/delsort.js being the two common ones. – SD0001 (talk) 12:58, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- Ok, edits to user talk pages will get minor edits. Also, I can add a simple exception for comments beginning with
Trial complete. See the contributions here, or see the diffs in alphabetical order here. Winston (talk) 14:50, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- It seems Wikipedia:Categories for discussion also uses some templates which trigger the bot. Winston (talk) 14:53, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- See Template talk:Cfd2#Remove leading colons regarding those templates. – SD0001 (talk) 16:58, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- I think this edit should not have been made. It divided User:Salimfadhley's comment into 3 bullet points, when it looks like they intended to create an effect similar to parabreaks. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 15:53, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
- Special:Diff/1051601137 is a worry for me. Not necessarily because the bot shouldn't have made the edit, but because those entries were all made by the default templates. Either we change the template, exclude the PERM pages from the bot, or accept the fact that every time someone requests a permission the bot will follow behind and fix it. I think option 1 (changing the pre-set layout) is likely best but that will likely require further discussion and/or consensus, especially since there's a bot that needs to clerk (not sure how that will affect it). Primefac (talk) 17:08, 24 October 2021 (UTC) sorry for the no-show today, dealing with a rather heavy headache for some reason
- Yeah it seems there's a couple of these templates around. I guess the plan right now is to exclude the relevant pages, and include them later if the templates are changed. But I'm still not sure if all the relevant entries are made using templates. I see some variation in the delsort notices, e.g.
<small class="delsort-notice">
versus just<small>
, so unless there's more than one version of the templates or editors are doing it manually, there might be some other tools involved (I don't know anything about assisted editing tools). Another example is Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Metropolitan_Gazette_(2nd_nomination) where the delsort notices still use:
even though it was made after SD0001's edit. For now, I will skip "Wikipedia:Requests_for_permissions/" and "Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/". The notices using <small> tags were already handled for the trial. Winston (talk) 02:16, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
- Yeah it seems there's a couple of these templates around. I guess the plan right now is to exclude the relevant pages, and include them later if the templates are changed. But I'm still not sure if all the relevant entries are made using templates. I see some variation in the delsort notices, e.g.
Note: (This is in reply to ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ's comment, but I'm posting it here since it's more generally relevant.) Unfortunately, there’s not much to do in these inevitable cases. SD0001 brought up a similar example before. The nature of the problem requires that the bot operate on entire discussions at once. As a result, anything more than a single minor “violation” in a discussion makes it impossible to create a consistent and accessible list without sometimes changing an editor’s indentation visually. Making exceptions leaves broken lists/markup, and often just shifts the issue to a different part of the list. Since the change is usually minor and doesn’t alter core content, I hope this is acceptable. I also hope the bot’s work will increase awareness of templates such as {{pb}} and {{HTML lists}} which address the most common reasons (that I’ve seen) for incorrect markup. I have links to these templates and other guidelines on the bot's user page. Winston (talk) 02:26, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
- I have noticed the bot doing useless edits removing blank lines, which is not needed. In fact everything listed for this bot to do is useless. I will deliberately indent more or change style of indent , so it looks as if this will try to undo that. Looks like this bot is trying to fix a non-problem. Surely tehre are more useful things to do with bots around here. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:24, 26 October 2021 (UTC)
- @Graeme Bartlett Could you provide an example of your using over-indentation or changing indent style, for which normal indentation would be inadequate and for which an accessible solution is impractical? From what I've seen, this is quite rare, but it could be an edge case that can be avoided. Winston (talk) 02:46, 27 October 2021 (UTC)
![](http://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20220407194908im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/Purple_arrow_down.svg/20px-Purple_arrow_down.svg.png)
This ?bot? made a useless edit here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Bicarbonate&curid=1450293&diff=1051599806&oldid=1051598562
which has no effect on the output we see. I thought that bots were not permitted to make cosmetic only changes. Even if the extra blank line is redundant, ether is no need to remove it! Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:18, 26 October 2021 (UTC)
- It's not strictly a cosmetic edit since it both slightly changes the visual output (which is easier to see if you open two tabs and switch back and forth), and more importantly changes the HTML to be more accessible per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lists § List styles, MOS:INDENTMIX, and Help:List § Common mistakes. In larger discussions the visual improvement can be significant. Winston (talk) 11:10, 26 October 2021 (UTC)
- The bot fixes issues with MOS:ACCESSIBILITY which is useful for users of screen readers. It also makes talk pages more accessible for tooling like the new WP:REPLYTOOL. The changes are not about visual improvements. – SD0001 (talk) 12:59, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
Break
What's the status of this? Not sure where to go from here. I've noticed that on mobile, bulleted and unbulleted comments don't line up (check here for example), so the bot is even more effective there. Winston (talk) 01:06, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
- {{BAG assistance needed}} Winston (talk) 09:17, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
- I think this needs another round of trial, this time a larger one. The CfD templates have been fixed per talkpage note, and I see you've edited the PERM template too. As for WP:RFUD, which is where I assume @Graeme Bartlett is coming from,
the issue seems to be that {{UND}} when substed produces a bullet indent, but most users haven't noticed this and are anyway adding a indent character of their own.
Also, I think the issue of changing the final indent character should be discussed. I don't have any preferences, but I think changing a visible bullet to no bullet (or vice versa, see several cases in [47]) can be seen as intrusive. Would like to hear others' thoughts on this. – SD0001 (talk) 12:59, 31 October 2021 (UTC) - Apologies for radio silence on this one, it's relatively low-priority at this point in my life, but I do agree based on a read-through here that a further trial would probably be good. Primefac (talk) 13:03, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
- I did realize that changing the final (and hence visual) character could be annoying, but the point is that mixing characters shouldn't happen in the first place. So if the final indent character is not changed, it neuters a large portion of the fixes. Even a simple single-level list such as would be left as four separate lists in HTML and to screen readers. Let me see if I can compute approximately what fraction of indentation style fixes occur in the final character. Winston (talk) 13:17, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
* Comment 1. : Comment 2. * Comment 3. : Comment 4.
- In Category:Non-talk pages that are automatically signed (just using this to get a quick collection of pages), 2770 lines would have indentation characters altered, and 839 of those lines would have an altered final character. Each altered character represents (almost always) a new list being started where there shouldn't be. Winston (talk) 13:31, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
- @SD0001 I'm confused about the {{UND}} template. When I substed it into my sandbox I didn't see a bullet point, and the template's doc doesn't show bullet points either. I believe Graeme Bartlett noticed the bot through the diff they linked. Winston (talk) 14:26, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
- I think this needs another round of trial, this time a larger one. The CfD templates have been fixed per talkpage note, and I see you've edited the PERM template too. As for WP:RFUD, which is where I assume @Graeme Bartlett is coming from,
@SD0001 I reviewed the "last character issue" and I see how it can be intrusive when, for example, the first comment in a level is unbulleted, but the following comments are all or mostly bulleted which then get changed by the bot. Two examples are in the sections "Unban request for Soumya-8974" and "SoyokoAnis unban appeal" in this diff. Perhaps I could implement a compromise where the bot first computes which type (bulleted or unbulleted) is more common for each level, then when it encounters an INDENTMIX violation, it uses the more common type. Winston (talk) 10:10, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
- With this strategy, the number of lines with altered final character gets reduced by 25% to 630. Winston (talk) 13:27, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
I've made a number of slight improvements to each of the three fixes and I think the bot is ready for a third trial. I don't think the final character issue can be mitigated any more without simply ignoring final character INDENTMIX violations. I guess we can see whether anyone complains during/after the trial. I'll continue the non-minor edit policy except for user talk pages for the trial to draw more scrutiny. Winston (talk) 13:56, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
@SD0001: I realized the bot wasn't conservative enough and would sometimes make the text harder to understand by not preserving the original editor's indentation style. After some brainstorming and trial and error, I've managed to make the bot respect the original indentation much more while sacrificing a bit of accessibility, i.e. it defers to the original text for certain INDENTMIX violations. The number of final indentation characters changed has been reduced a further 48%. Can we start a third trial? Winston (talk) 11:04, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
- Sure go ahead.
Approved for extended trial (200 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. – SD0001 (talk) 06:48, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- An indent-bot is definitely required. Some editors make mistakes with their indents. Some simply don't know how to indent. Most frustrating? some deliberately mis-indent (usually after their mistakes have been pointed out) & when they 'continue' to deliberate mis-indent? it's basically their way of giving you (the adviser) the figurative 'middle finger'. GoodDay (talk) 17:47, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
Trial feedback
- Examples
- I just reverted this massive refactoring when I saw this bot editing my discussion; I chose bullets on purpose to break that section apart. — xaosflux Talk 13:53, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Here is another example: diff - this doesn't make sense, that first line was clearly not intended to be part of the "discussion" - so was stylized differently. — xaosflux Talk 14:01, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- More bad edits (already reverted by another editor). — xaosflux Talk 14:03, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Lets not chase around another bot example that I can assume was specifically programmed to edit one way already. — xaosflux Talk 14:09, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Another example diff that made the new list worse, see the section around "Person who is autistic" - where this bot has introduced double bullets. — xaosflux Talk 14:54, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Discuss
-
- I think this task is going to need a much larger discussion before being released on all edits, all the the time; I expect it will continue to make contentious edits that don't have a policy to support them (i.e. a policy that only certain indentation or list styles are allowed to be used). — xaosflux Talk 13:58, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- The more I look at these edits, the more fundamentally broken I think this is. Perhaps as an OPT-IN-ONLY on certain pages it could be useful? — xaosflux Talk 14:04, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- I guess I should disable altering the final indent character completely for now. Too many edge cases. Sorry about that. I'll review the diffs you posted and see if the bot would still have made those edits after disabling this behavior. The final character issue was brought up before, but I underestimated the problem. Winston (talk) 14:09, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- I don't know what you people were thinking when you approved this thing, but it's completely screwing up existing discussions [49]. And BTW, according to a friend who actually uses a screen reader, the whole idea that indenting patterns are this big deal is a myth. This has the potential to make literally hundreds of thousands of discussions and posts unintelligible. Cut it out RIGHT NOW. EEng 14:10, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- EEng, this is a trial run, which is done specifically to see if these sorts of issues arise. Clearly, there are major concerns, and based on the last few posts here I'm starting to think that this bot will not be approved without significant overhaul. Primefac (talk) 14:12, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Ya think? How can you possibly have ever thought this could fly? Above I read
I've managed to make the bot respect the original indentation much more
-- oh, he's respecting the indentation used by discussants, which is critical to following the flow of the discussion, much more? You mean, like, you guys are willing to compromise on that and only make discussions somewhat impossible to follow? EEng 14:19, 5 November 2021 (UTC) - Maybe it would be better not to do a trial run on userpages without pre-approval by the users involved? I've reverted the bot at EEng's talkpage, just because it seemed really hard to believe EEng would like the effect. Remember, his talkpage can be seen from space. Bishonen | tålk 14:23, 5 November 2021 (UTC).
- You're right, I've removed the user talk namespace. Winston (talk) 14:25, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- You've removed the user talk namespace, so you're only going to fuck up article talk pages and project guideline talk pages? Well, I guess that's a start.You're not getting this. There is no possible way to do what you're doing without screwing up existing pages, because there's a fundamental conflict between the assertions in INDENT (or wherever) and the way people actually format their discussions. What you're trying to do inevitably changes the formatting of existing discussion so that the meaning of editors' comments is changed. You're trying to square the circle, and need to give it up completely. EEng 14:56, 5 November 2021 (UTC) P.S. I just noticed above that the plan is to fuck of project pages (e.g. actual guidelines and policies, not just the talk pages) as well. The lunatics have clearly taken over the asylum.
- You're right, I've removed the user talk namespace. Winston (talk) 14:25, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Ya think? How can you possibly have ever thought this could fly? Above I read
- There were 2 trials already done (50 + 50 = 100 edits) which drew basically no negative feedback, which was why this was approved for extended trial of 200 edits. Something looks to have regressed in the newer code that's causing the issues. It looks like @Notsniwiast has stopped the bot now. – SD0001 (talk) 14:25, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- EEng, this is a trial run, which is done specifically to see if these sorts of issues arise. Clearly, there are major concerns, and based on the last few posts here I'm starting to think that this bot will not be approved without significant overhaul. Primefac (talk) 14:12, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Agree. This thing is jacking up the formatting on talk pages. Sometimes the formatting is there intentionally. Just undid the bot at Talk:Stanley Kubrick for an example. Jip Orlando (talk) 14:14, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Jip Orlando Sorry about that, was the issue the swapping from bullet/no bullet issue? If the issue was isolated, could you mention which part? Winston (talk) 14:27, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- [50] here, it looks like it's tweaking the replyto stuff by moving the discussions to the left and adding bullets where colons where. I understand that it is making the formatting appear consistent, but it is undoing what appears do have been done intentionally. I see the bullets as used for making a salient point and the indents as a reply to the point. Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but having a sudden sea of bullets doesn't make things look organized. Jip Orlando (talk) 14:38, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Jip Orlando Sorry about that, was the issue the swapping from bullet/no bullet issue? If the issue was isolated, could you mention which part? Winston (talk) 14:27, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Not a fan of having an alert pop up wrt my account talkpage, only to find out it's a semantically void whitespace twiddle. If it had been another person doing the same thing I'd be miffed. More so when it's a mindless thing. ☆ Bri (talk) 14:21, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Yeah sorry, I should have respected the user talk space more. It's been removed from the bot for now. Winston (talk) 14:29, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- USER TALK testing should not happen unless this has a bot flag. By combing +bot and +minor attributes this could make use of the
(nominornewtalk)
feature to not trigger the new message notifications. (This is not an endorsement that this should be currently tested). — xaosflux Talk 14:39, 5 November 2021 (UTC) - @SD0001: I suggest that the operator, @Notsniwiast: needs to go manually review every edit they just made and revert anything that possibly made the page worse. — xaosflux Talk 14:56, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- I don't think he can be trusted to do that. What he needs to do is revert everything immediately, and where a page has been edited subsequent to the bot's edit, post a message or something warning watchers to take a look themselves. This is really serious. I cannot believe this got anywhere at all. EEng 14:59, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- From my watchlist: I don't want to pile on, but [51] this changed the placement (and hence meaning) of, at least, AlwaysInRed's message. Many of the diffs have large changes, so it is hard to figure out which are problematic. Urve (talk) 15:51, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Urve Could you partially quote the message so I can find it? Is it "I am the lead-moderator and one"? Winston (talk) 15:53, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Yes. Even if that was an unintentional error, people do purposefully comment in this way (several indents after an outdent), to continue reply to the comment that isn't outdented. Why people do this (instead of a message directly underneath what they wish to reply to), I'm not sure. But the problem is that the meaning is changed if these are all outdented without regard to what they're replying to. Urve (talk) 15:57, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Urve Could you partially quote the message so I can find it? Is it "I am the lead-moderator and one"? Winston (talk) 15:53, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- I think this bot is doomed to failure, should not be approved for ongoing use, and should never have been approved even for the limited testing runs it made. The first thing I saw here was several diffs of completely wrong talk page refactorings and the diff-posters were correct that they were completely wrong. People on discussion pages use indentation to mean different things, that cannot adequately be guessed by a bot, because the meaning of the indentation is in the semantics of what they're saying rather than in the syntax of their comment. Just to pick an easy example, people will choose the indentation level of a comment (among several different indentation levels for a comment placed in the exact same place in the discussion) to indicate to whom they are replying; unless the bot can understand that part of the back-and-forth (and it can't) it cannot correctly adjust the indentation. People will sometimes deliberately choose between *-indentation of their comments or :-indentation of their comments according to how prominent they want that comment will be, and will use both *-indentation and :-indentation for sub-elements within comments as well as for whole comments. Additionally, editors often take significant offense even at careful human refactoring of their comments. This is not a task that can be solved without full human-level AI, which does not exist, and even then is of dubious value. A bot rampage that changes what is meant is a bad thing, and completely unnecessary. We do not need our talk pages to be well structured according to some spec. We need them to communicate with each other. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:16, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- @David Eppstein: What if only edits with no visual difference were made? That is, edits of the sort to
* One. :: Two.
Winston (talk) 16:25, 5 November 2021 (UTC)* One. *: Two.
- Look at your example above. Look at the wikicode. If you ran your bot on this very page, it would "fix" your first example, rendering your message meaningless. That is the inherent problem here: you can't write logic that will know that this particular instance of "*" followed by "::" should remain because it's an intentional example of an error. You need a human brain for that. Levivich 16:33, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- The bot wouldn't fix the first example since it is inside a "syntaxhighlight" tag. Winston (talk) 16:34, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- I realized that as soon as I hit publish :-) But most editors wouldn't know to use such a tag. Anyway, what can the bot do about this: Can it tell if "Two" is a new comment or the second paragraph of "One"? What if One were unsigned? Etc. Levivich 16:40, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
* One. : Two.
- It would do nothing, since final indentation characters would no longer be altered at all since that would change the visual appearance. Winston (talk) 16:43, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- OK, then what about this: Should Two and Four be bullets? Or, alternatively:
* One. : Two. * Three. : Four. * Five.
Is this all one comment with two bullet lists in it, or five different comments? Are we changing to colons to bullets or bullets to colons or nothing? Levivich 16:45, 5 November 2021 (UTC): One. * Two. : Three. * Four. : Five.
- Nothing would change. Sorry I should clarify, by final indentation character I mean the last indentation character for a line. So for
*:
it would be:
. Winston (talk) 16:48, 5 November 2021 (UTC)- Only basic list gaps and non-final characters could be altered. So indentation levels and final bullet/no bullet would not be changed at all. Winston (talk) 16:49, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Heh, you anticipated my next question about indentation levels :-) So these two changes (no change to indentation level, no change to final character) would be two things that are different from the last trial run that was just run? Levivich 16:56, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Correct. The visuals should not change. Winston (talk) 16:57, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Well, technically the visual would change if there was something like
:::
followed by***
, since the bot would change the latter to::*
. Winston (talk) 17:01, 5 November 2021 (UTC) - Yeah, but it seems like that particular example (::: followed by ***) is just a flat-out mistake, so the change would be for the better for both sighted and non-sighted readers. I think you're right that not changing the indentation level, and not changing the final character, are key to not making a visual change. I'm not a BAG member or anything, but it seems reasonable to me to do another trial run with those modifications you've suggested (and limiting the namespaces for the trial, etc.). It does seem like limiting the bot as you're describing would make the changes invisible to sighted readers. I recognize it won't totally fix the problem that you're setting out to fix (which can't be fixed, because editing text files and using indentation to separate one comment from another is downright stone-age archaic, we might as well use vacuum tubes), but it could improve things without pissing editors off. :-D Levivich 17:05, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Well, technically the visual would change if there was something like
- Correct. The visuals should not change. Winston (talk) 16:57, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Heh, you anticipated my next question about indentation levels :-) So these two changes (no change to indentation level, no change to final character) would be two things that are different from the last trial run that was just run? Levivich 16:56, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Only basic list gaps and non-final characters could be altered. So indentation levels and final bullet/no bullet would not be changed at all. Winston (talk) 16:49, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Nothing would change. Sorry I should clarify, by final indentation character I mean the last indentation character for a line. So for
- OK, then what about this:
- It would do nothing, since final indentation characters would no longer be altered at all since that would change the visual appearance. Winston (talk) 16:43, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- I realized that as soon as I hit publish :-) But most editors wouldn't know to use such a tag. Anyway, what can the bot do about this:
- The bot wouldn't fix the first example since it is inside a "syntaxhighlight" tag. Winston (talk) 16:34, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Look at your example above. Look at the wikicode. If you ran your bot on this very page, it would "fix" your first example, rendering your message meaningless. That is the inherent problem here: you can't write logic that will know that this particular instance of "*" followed by "::" should remain because it's an intentional example of an error. You need a human brain for that. Levivich 16:33, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) This would run afoul of WP:COSMETICBOT. Jip Orlando (talk) 16:35, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Nevermind, this is an exception. Either way, you'll have a horde of mad users cluttering their watchlists. Jip Orlando (talk) 16:37, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- The COSMETICBOT argument is compelling to me but there's more to it than that. If you think that changing talk pages to normalize indentation coding without changing the appearance is helpful as a way to produce semantically clean wikimarkup, you're deluded. :-indentation is never semantically clean. :-formatting is only proper within definition lists, where its actual purpose is to delimit the body of a definition and the indentation is merely a side effect of how this kind of list is formatted. Its use on talk pages for indentation is a hack. As such, the bot's task would be to fill our watchlists with edits while polishing a hack rather than accomplishing anything useful. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:56, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- It's not about the semantics. The changes are to help screen readers. I was simply overzealous with the bot, and unfortunately it took until this trial to become apparent. The limited version described above in the comment chain with Levivich should be much better. If you use macOS, you can try reading a list with gaps and/or mixed indents with VoiceOver to see how screen readers are affected. Winston (talk) 18:39, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- The COSMETICBOT argument is compelling to me but there's more to it than that. If you think that changing talk pages to normalize indentation coding without changing the appearance is helpful as a way to produce semantically clean wikimarkup, you're deluded. :-indentation is never semantically clean. :-formatting is only proper within definition lists, where its actual purpose is to delimit the body of a definition and the indentation is merely a side effect of how this kind of list is formatted. Its use on talk pages for indentation is a hack. As such, the bot's task would be to fill our watchlists with edits while polishing a hack rather than accomplishing anything useful. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:56, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Nevermind, this is an exception. Either way, you'll have a horde of mad users cluttering their watchlists. Jip Orlando (talk) 16:37, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- @David Eppstein: What if only edits with no visual difference were made? That is, edits of the sort
- This would be better as a script than a bot. Preferably, a script that worked on just one section of a talk page. As a script, editors could manually review/correct mistakes before publishing. Levivich 16:31, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Look, Winston, I know you're trying to help, but you have only 1800 edits to Wikipedia, and only a handful of those are to talk pages. You don't have the experience to even begin to understand the subtleties of what you're getting into. It's like having someone who's never driven a car start redesigning the highways. EEng 16:44, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- We most certainly do need an Indent Bot. Some editors don't know how to indent, or make human mistakes or simply refuse to, after being given advice. GoodDay (talk) 17:49, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- That's not something a bot is capable of fixing. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:56, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- It's a good idea and I'm sure there's some sort of bot task that could be approved someday. Editing the wikitext of discussions happens to be just about the hardest bot task I can think of to do correctly. I think starting with the LISTGAP change or otherwise trying to limit the amount of change the bot does would be a good idea. Please ask me if you have any questions; I (unfortunately? lol) have a few years of experience with manipulating discussion wikitext. Enterprisey (talk!) 21:15, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
- Basically I caught feature creep. I've pared the bot back to simple LISTGAP and non-final-indentation-character INDENTMIX changes. Winston (talk) 21:37, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
Changes to bot
In the original bot request for a bot to fix indentation, two examples were given. The first example was the removal of a single extra indent (a general fix), and the second was a non-final-indent-character indentmix fix (an accessibility fix). I decided to tackle this request, but caught feature creep and took the idea too far. This ended up making some "fixes" the very opposite, as the last trial demonstrated. I believe the issues brought up (other than procedural issues like editing user talks and missing the bot flag) were due to the features I implemented beyond the original request, and I apologize.
I have limited the bot to listgap and non-final-character indentmix fixes only. Indentation levels and final indentation characters are not changed (so the first example in the original bot request would actually be left alone). Here are some sandbox diffs. These are accessibility changes, and the only noticeable change for sighted readers should be the hiding of “floating bullets” which are bullet points that appear not as the last indent character. For example,
Markup | Renders as |
---|---|
|
|
would become
Markup | Renders as |
---|---|
|
|
Winston (talk) 10:56, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Notsniwiast: here is just a sample mixed up list - what, if anything would you do to it?
Extended content
|
---|
|
- — xaosflux Talk 13:05, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
- I've just tested it on this list. It does nothing. Winston (talk) 13:09, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
- @Xaosflux: Please see the above. --TheSandDoctor Talk 07:39, 29 December 2021 (UTC)
- I've just tested it on this list. It does nothing. Winston (talk) 13:09, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
Trial complete. Closing out the previous trial which was aborted. Winston (talk) 06:29, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
- {{BAGAssistanceNeeded}} I'd like to try out the limited version as described above. To recap, there shall be no changes to indentation levels and no changes to the final indent character. The only noticeable visual difference should the hiding of "floating" bullet points. The other changes are reductions in the number of list gaps and amount of indentation-style mixing, which should not be visually noticeable. Here are some fresh diff examples. I can do more sandboxed runs if we're still wary of a trial on the live wiki. Winston (talk) 06:29, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
- ...Sure.
Approved for extended trial (200 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. I totally support approving this task in some form. But: although I'd rather not say this, recognizing that people really don't like discussions getting messed up (as you can see above), I must warn you that any more edits that change the meaning of discussions (even in the most insignificant way) or mistakes aren't going to look too good for the request. I'd err on the side of being cautious. From my experience developing reply-link, in the land of Wikipedia talk pages, even if something looks like a mistake, there's a decent chance that it's intentional. Enterprisey (talk!) 07:02, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
- Understood. If we find a legitimate use of floating bullets affecting meaning, then I can simply prevent the bot from changing
*
to:
, thus preventing bullets from disappearing whether floating or not. I'll do this trial in smaller chunks, posting the diffs for each chunk after I review them and point out diffs where bullet points have been removed. Winston (talk) 07:19, 5 January 2022 (UTC) - @Enterprisey Before starting, should the bot be given a (temp) bot flag? Also, minor edits or not minor? Winston (talk) 07:22, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
- If the previous trials weren't flagged, I wouldn't think this one should be; and I'd mark them as not minor (even though the distinction isn't very important these days) because it's a trial and I think people would be slightly more likely to pay attention to non-minor edits. Enterprisey (talk!) 07:34, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
- @Notsniwiast, I'd even recommend, to be extra cautious, making sure that the edits don't change the visual appearance of the page (besides removing the "double bullets" error); we can always add more tasks to the bot later. Not sure if you were doing that already (I didn't check); just making a note. Enterprisey (talk!) 08:12, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
- If the previous trials weren't flagged, I wouldn't think this one should be; and I'd mark them as not minor (even though the distinction isn't very important these days) because it's a trial and I think people would be slightly more likely to pay attention to non-minor edits. Enterprisey (talk!) 07:34, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
- Understood. If we find a legitimate use of floating bullets affecting meaning, then I can simply prevent the bot from changing
Chunk 1 (20 diffs)
- See here. I'm pausing here to see if any concerns are raised. Winston (talk) 08:54, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
- The few I checked look fine. If nobody objects in the next day or two, feel free to keep going. Maybe pause again after 100 edits have been made? Enterprisey (talk!) 01:48, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- @Notsniwiast, I notice the bot is currently editing your sandbox. If the sandbox edits aren't part of the trial, keep going and ignore this message. However, since you linked to one of them just above, I'm assuming you're counting the sandbox edits as the trial. Since the bot task is for editing actual discussion pages, the trial should be as similar to that usage as possible. That means the bot should edit the actual pages, not just its sandbox, for this trial. Part of the trial, in my view, is making sure that people won't object to the edits, and they won't have the opportunity to object if the edits are made to the sandbox. Enterprisey (talk!) 08:10, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- Yup the sandbox edits aren't part of the trial. Not sure which link you're referring to, but when I link to the actual trial diffs I use a permanent url to a revision of my sandbox where I put the diffs, so as not to clutter up this page. Winston (talk) 08:21, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- Sounds good. My bad; misread. Enterprisey (talk!) 08:41, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- Yup the sandbox edits aren't part of the trial. Not sure which link you're referring to, but when I link to the actual trial diffs I use a permanent url to a revision of my sandbox where I put the diffs, so as not to clutter up this page. Winston (talk) 08:21, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- @Notsniwiast, I notice the bot is currently editing your sandbox. If the sandbox edits aren't part of the trial, keep going and ignore this message. However, since you linked to one of them just above, I'm assuming you're counting the sandbox edits as the trial. Since the bot task is for editing actual discussion pages, the trial should be as similar to that usage as possible. That means the bot should edit the actual pages, not just its sandbox, for this trial. Part of the trial, in my view, is making sure that people won't object to the edits, and they won't have the opportunity to object if the edits are made to the sandbox. Enterprisey (talk!) 08:10, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- The few I checked look fine. If nobody objects in the next day or two, feel free to keep going. Maybe pause again after 100 edits have been made? Enterprisey (talk!) 01:48, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
Chunk 2 (50 diffs)
- See here. Winston (talk) 10:07, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- This is the first I'm aware of this bot, and I've not read all the text above so sorry if this has been addressed before, but could the edit summaries be improved please: e.g. "Adjusted indentation per MOS:ACCESS#Lists. Trial edit. (1, 10)" has three parts:
- "Adjusted indentation..." is sort of OK, but could imply that it is changing the indentation level (which it isn't), "Fixing indentation markup" would be better imo.
- "Trail edit." is entirely unproblematic
- "(1, 10)" is cryptic and while potentially useful to the operator for debugging is just confusing for editors who aren't intimately familiar with the bot.
- The edits summary does not mention that it removed multiple blank lines from lists, or why. Personally I know that this is per MOS:LISTGAP, but not everybody will. I recommend including it in the summary as (a) noting what the bot has done, and (b) noting why it has done it so that people aren't tempted to revert the bot and also learn why they shouldn't leave blank lines in the first place. I do a bit of fixing of lists, and Redrose64 does even more, both of us mention LISTGAP in edit summaries and I've seen positive responses to that. Thryduulf (talk) 13:02, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
- Good points. I changed the edit summaries to "Adjusting indentation markup per MOS:LISTGAP and MOS:INDENTMIX. X blank lines removed. Y adjustments of indent markup. Trial edit." Winston (talk) 15:18, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
Chunk 3 (60 diffs)
- See here. I am stuck figuring out an error in this one: Diff for Talk:Mass killings under communist regimes. The bot apparently introduced floating bullets to the line beginning with "I don't think it is fair". But when I copy the wikitext into my sandbox here, it looks fine (can anyone confirm this). It also looks fine in the edit preview of Talk:Mass killings under communist regimes. Is wikitext displayed differently in User talk vs Talk or something? I can't reproduce the error (though I haven't tried reproducing it in actual Talk pages and there doesn't seem to be a sandbox Talk page). Winston (talk) 20:22, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
- Ok so I copied the entire wikitext rather than just the section, and indeed the floating bullets showed up. So I tried to produce a minimal reproducible example (the original talk page is over 600k bytes), and have discovered that it has something to do with links. Consider this revision (excuse the gibberish, I did some transformations to reduce the page size). The line we are interested in is the one containing "conclusions were rejected". Notice the floating bullets. Now edit the page and delete the wikilink to water at the end of the wikitext (deleting some other wikilink may work too). Notice how the floating bullets are gone. Instead of deleting a wikilink, you can delete the first template on the page and the floating bullets also disappear... Not sure what's going on. Winston (talk) 01:42, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
- From a discussion at WP:VPT, this is probably a GIGO issue due to a newline inside a wikilink. I had thought that such newlines were allowed since they seemed to work ok, but apparently not. To keep the fix simple and to be extra conservative, I'm having the bot simply refuse to perform any indentmix fix on the page at all if it encounters a wikilink containing
\n
.I did not see anything unexpected in the other edits for this chunk. Winston (talk) 00:13, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
- From a discussion at WP:VPT, this is probably a GIGO issue due to a newline inside a wikilink. I had thought that such newlines were allowed since they seemed to work ok, but apparently not. To keep the fix simple and to be extra conservative, I'm having the bot simply refuse to perform any indentmix fix on the page at all if it encounters a wikilink containing
- Ok so I copied the entire wikitext rather than just the section, and indeed the floating bullets showed up. So I tried to produce a minimal reproducible example (the original talk page is over 600k bytes), and have discovered that it has something to do with links. Consider this revision (excuse the gibberish, I did some transformations to reduce the page size). The line we are interested in is the one containing "conclusions were rejected". Notice the floating bullets. Now edit the page and delete the wikilink to water at the end of the wikitext (deleting some other wikilink may work too). Notice how the floating bullets are gone. Instead of deleting a wikilink, you can delete the first template on the page and the floating bullets also disappear... Not sure what's going on. Winston (talk) 01:42, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
Chunk 4 (70 diffs)
- See here. There was only one error here where a bullet point was introduced. This was due to a template creating a table which the bot did not anticipate. The bot now expands templates to check for tables.
Trial complete. Winston (talk) 06:59, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
Gonna take a break. Code is still available. Withdrawing this request. {{BotWithdrawn}} Notsniwiast (talk) 05:15, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
- Well, as the trial has been completed, assuming no issues are found, you don't have to do anything more as of now. If this is approved, you can start running the bot whenever you return. – SD0001 (talk) 09:51, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
Back
Hi I'm back from break. If people feel this bot will be useful let's continue. Only thing I'm worried about is if people think it's a nuisance relative to the number of people it helps. Winston (talk) 20:01, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
- David Eppstein, sorry to put this on you, but you pursued the issues here farther than I did. Are your (our) concerns all addressed? EEng 20:21, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
- I think my concerns are addressed by
"I have limited the bot to listgap and non-final-character indentmix fixes only. Indentation levels and final indentation characters are not changed"
. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:26, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
- I think my concerns are addressed by
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