Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Helpful Pixie Bot 46

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

Helpful Pixie Bot 46[edit]

Operator: Rich Farmbrough (talk · contribs)

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic

Programming language(s): Perl/AWB

Source code available: AWB, yes; Perl no.

Function overview: General editing per CfD, TfD.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Appropriate CFD/TFD

Edit period(s): Continuous, as and when.

Estimated number of pages affected: Variable

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Yes

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Yes

Function details: Using AWB or perl scripts to edit articles from a list. [ Replace, remove, adjust or rename templates or categories. ] Useful for CfD, TfD. I have done many such tasks with no issues.

  1. Rename templates. Example, a template Foo is to be deleted in favour of a functionally compatible template Bar. Template Foo is renamed with Bar.
  2. Replace templates. Example, a template Foo is to be deleted in favour of a template Bar. Template Foo is replaced with Bar.
  3. Adjust templates. Example, a template Foo has a parameter bar which is renamed, repurposed, deprecated, deleted, added, merged or split.
  4. Remove templates. Example template Foo is to be deleted. It is deleted.
  5. Rename/replace categories. Example, a category Foo is to be renamed Bar. Category Foo is renamed to Bar in all it's erstwhile members.
  6. Adjust categories. Example, a category Foo is to be split into categories Bar and Baz depending on whether members are quocks or a quods. It's members are recategorized accordingly.
  7. Remove categories. Example category Foo is to be deleted. It is removed from its members.

Discussion[edit]

Rich Farmbrough 21:23, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have anything specific in mind, or are you requesting blanket authorization to run basically any automated task you desire, so long as a list is involved? --slakr\ talk / 07:12, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) No. This current task description/function is far to short, vague and broad. Please refine it, and add a lot more detail as to what the bot will actually be doing. --Chris 07:13, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Specifically, {{Portal box}}and {{Infobox Indian jurisdiction}} spring to mind. See Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/VeblenBot 4 for a similar bot task. Rich Farmbrough, 19:06, 8 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]
What are you intending to do to them? With neither source code nor further explanation, we have no idea what you're intending to do. --slakr\ talk / 19:10, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
They are deprecated in favour of {{Portal}} and {{Infobox settlement}} respectively. Rich Farmbrough, 20:33, 8 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]
In that case, the correct function details would be along the lines of, "replacing {{Portal box}} with {{Portal}} and replacing {{Infobox Indian jurisdiction}} with {{Infobox settlement}}." Is that what you're requesting on this task? If there are more, please update the function details accordingly. --slakr\ talk / 23:39, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Just noting, unless the function details/description change dramatically, I move that this bot be denied. --Chris 12:18, 11 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Fine. So changed, tightening scope to CfD/TfD.IF you want me to I can submit a BRFA for every template, or even every edit. Rich Farmbrough, 13:02, 11 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]
Do not exaggerate what BOTPOL actually asks. Your new details are not really any more descriptive, just less broad. Phrases like "per CfD, TfD" or "adjust" can mean very many things. BRFAs need to list specific changes so that BAG and any other editor can tell where the limit of approval lies. At the current wording, I have to concur with slakr and Chris, that it may mean many arbitrary tasks. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 13:27, 11 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
(Note I was reflecting what Slakr suggested above, that indivdual tempaltes need to be named in the BRFA) Rich Farmbrough, 16:07, 11 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]
OK easy enough. Rich Farmbrough, 13:43, 11 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]

In the description (as currently phrased), does "is to be deleted in favour of a functionally compatible template Bar" mean "There is a closed TfD discussion with the outcome delete"? In short, what does "is to be deleted" mean? The same applies to the other descriptions. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:26, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

This is self evident. Rich Farmbrough, 18:00, 11 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]

Task 3 is too broad for approval, since "renaming a parameter" is not something that would generally have a TfD or CfD behind it. Such tasks really ought to be approved individually if the change is really needed. It is virtually always possible to simply make both parameter names work, so that it is not necessary to edit the pages at all; only exceptional circumstances should require that sort of bot task. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:27, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Non sequitur. Nonsense. Irrelevant; wrong. Rich Farmbrough, 18:00, 11 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]

Note: this and Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Helpful Pixie Bot 46/ad hominem --Chris 16:25, 11 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

OK, so the function details now set the general idea of what tasks are to be performed. There are clarification still needed though.

  1. Does this only affect article space?
  2. Are bot's actions automatically (does it try to detect closures) or manually (you enter needed info) triggered?
  3. For all points you mention "example", yet keep generic template names ("Foo", etc.). Does that mean there are other possible variations of those sub-points, or just the one you list?
  4. When you say "to be deleted/split/xxx", does this refer to and only to CfD and TfD closure results?
  5. What's the difference between template rename and replace (they seem to act the same and you group that for categories)?
  6. Clause 3 ("adjust templates.") seems too broad. How often do CfDs and TfDs end up with such results? We'd need to test or at least go through each case.
  7. Wouldn't it be easier to do this in AWB than have a bot exhaustedly approved for each scenario?
  8. Clause 6 is too unspecific.
    1. For example, how are members determined?
    2. How many members could it be split into?
    3. Can there be overlap?

Bots are often trialled for much smaller changes, and I would see these tasks as at least several BRFA material, but I guess it can live in one. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 16:54, 11 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  1. No.
  2. Manual.
  3. Should be clear form context - for example splits can clearly be n-way.
  4. Yes I am focussing on TfD/CfD since it has been suggested that our heads will explode if we try to consider other wider fora for determining consensus.
  5. I am considering as distinct examples where, for instance, a parameter would have to be set, e.g. {{Infobox British monarch}} => {{Infobox monarch}}. They are both trivial.
  6. Reasonably often
  7. It's often easier to do something with AWB than have a BRFA approved. The break-even seems to vary between a few hundred edits and, currently, about 20,000. That doesn't mean it is the right approach.
  8. Seems straight forward to me.
    1. Members are those pages returned by the API category call
    2. There could be any number of sub-categories, depending on the actual situation
    3. Yes, someone can be a Senegalese trumpeter and a Jamaican trumpeter.
We could split this, but we could end up with hundreds of BRFAs, depending on granularity. Rich Farmbrough, 18:00, 11 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]
Re #6, please give an example of a TfD in which the closing decision said to rename a template parameter. Note that "merge" does not require this, because the merged template can support both syntaxes, and our general policy is to avoid having to edit all the articles with a bot if we can edit the template to achieve the same goal. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:19, 11 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It may be your general policy, but stating it is "our general policy" is rather sweeping. Rich Farmbrough, 19:00, 11 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]
It's described somewhat at WP:COSMETICBOT, and mirrored in the AWB rules of use. It takes a strong argument to approve a bot just to bypass a redirect when the redirect itself is not going to be deleted, or to change one parameter name to another when both work equally well. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:35, 11 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Didn't stop you doing it, when it suits you. Rich Farmbrough, 21:44, 16 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]
Comments like that don't help the approval process at all. In fact, I'm half tempted to move it to the ad hominem subpage --Chris 15:12, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
1. What namespaces does this work on then? As an example, if I had a template in my sandbox, would it remove it?
3. coupled with your 3. would give a blanket approval to potentially change/merge/rename/adjust/remove any to all parameter for a template. I'm not sure this is something we want a bot approved to do unless there is community operator confidence and good track record. Without sounding personal, I'm having trouble endorsing this.
6. "Adjust templates", even if it happens often, is still too broad. I'd ideally would like to examine some actual past cases with these results and where a bot was actually needed. You say in 7. there can be cases with up to 20k pages, which is big enough for its own BRFA and would certainly not be the first or last BRFA for such a task. With a dozen of these behind ones back and no outstanding problems, I could see it being approved on a semi-blanket basis. This is the case I think slakr meant by individual BRFAs.
8.1. What I meant is, how does the bot know who is Jamaican and who is Senegalese? WP:CONTEXTBOT springs to mind. Do you have rules how these are determined? Is there a real example? —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 19:52, 11 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
1. This is fine detail, it depends on the nature of the template. For example some templates are designed for categories, to limit the BRFA to articles would hence be ludicrous. Further more it is an operational decision it is in the nature of each individual run to decide which name-spaces to target automatically, and which manually. It would, for example, be crazy to have done the work I did on {{Infobox French commune}} and leave sandboxes unfixed, and effectively broken. Conversely for other templates it might make more sense to drop a note to the editors involved about their sandboxes - as I have done when people have had bad monobook.js pages - with suggested fixes. And even if sandboxes were to be changed it might be worth doing them manually rather than automatically.
3. Not blanket, only for changes where there was a consensus.
6. I think a good example was {{Infobox weather}} => {{Weather box}}, though I can't re. member all the details. This is a sample conversion.
8.1 Again that would depend on the category in question, probably lists would be prepared from other categories, for example Category:Senegalese musicians.
Rich Farmbrough, 00:48, 12 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]
Some comments at this point:
  • Remove categories. Example category Foo is to be deleted. It is removed from its members. / Rename/replace categories. Example, a category Foo is to be renamed Bar. Category Foo is renamed to Bar in all it's erstwhile members.
Cydebot (talk · contribs) already handles this.
  • Remove templates. Example template Foo is to be deleted. It is deleted.
There are numerous client-side scripts that handle template removals after closed TfDs. Because *fd closures can be complex (e.g., "delete some, but leave others"), the job of removing templates is typically left to the closing admin due to difficulty in a bot correctly understanding potentially-complex close reasons. If you'd like to create a bot that functions similarly to CydeBot (e.g., an admin without a script can list an action on a page for the bot to do), that'd be an acceptable fully-automated task.
All in all, however, this entire request is still a combination of being woefully vague and extremely broad for what's labeled as an automatic, continuously-running bot. I have a feeling this could continue to go on for weeks without any real progress, purely because the owner seems to be set on leaving the bot open-ended in task and function. Speaking for myself, I'm not going to suggest that we approve a bot that's this broad and gives no real function details whatsoever. If you're making one-off changes that you're personally supervising, you have clear consensus, and you have a relatively low affected-page count, then run them from your main account and tag them as AWB-assisted in the edit summary, as you'd be doing the equivalent of editing with a WP:SCRIPT.
--slakr\ talk / 06:52, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Denied. Per editing restriction, problems with scope, and a lack of civility in response to feedback that is utterly unacceptable for a bot operator. — madman 21:09, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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