User talk:AnomieBOT

Welcome, Bot

Just saying "Hi" to the bot so the redlink will go away. You're showing up in my watchlist a lot. Keep up the good work. Katr67 (talk) 19:36, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

AnomieBOT says "thank you" as he moves on towards his 200th article removed from Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting. Then I get to look and see if we can teach him to get any of what he misses in the first pass. Anomie⚔ 23:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Blessthefall

For this article, the bot actually autocorrected what amounted to vandalism (the removal of sourced information). Can we get it to revert rather than cleanup? Chubbles (talk) 20:27, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, that's a hard problem. How is the bot supposed to know if the removal of "Screamo" was a legitimate correction or not? Anomie⚔ 23:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I just don't want to see the bot hiding vandalism; it contradicts the dictum to do no harm. Chubbles (talk) 14:01, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

How exactly is the bot "hiding" anything? Anomie⚔ 17:53, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

If a user deletes content sourced by a multi-ref citation, and the bot comes by (in a matter of minutes) to restore the ref naming, it masks the deletion of the sourced content. We'd want the broken refs to stick out, so that it's apparent to another user that someone has been monkeying with the article's sourcing. Chubbles (talk) 17:59, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Other bots and even human users do the same thing; I've rather often seen someone revert the latest vandal edit in a series but leave the previous edits that were just as bad (for example, [1]; not that I blame the vandal fighters for missing it, they do good work). The solution isn't to not fix things, the solution is to look at more than just the single previous edit when you're looking at changes to the article. Anomie⚔ 20:10, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

My problem is that a bot is doing it. I can tell a user about his mistake; bots don't learn unless their owners do. Chubbles (talk) 20:17, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm impressed by this bot's ability to rescue orphaned references

EVCM (talk) 21:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, he's a hard worker. Anomie⚔ 23:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, you did a great job, Anomie! -- ReyBrujo (talk) 21:00, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

USS Nevada (BB-36)

This edit broke the reference! Sorry, ^-talk- the_ed17 ^-contribs- 23:30, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Nope, I lied...the ref was off (a typo by me), but it did point it to the wrong <ref name=> thing....it should have made it point to <ref name="Naval Engineers"/>, not <ref name="Naval"/> ... Sorry for my confusion!! ^-talk- the_ed17 ^-contribs- 23:36, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

That might be a common typo, and I have already added code to correct <ref name=foo bar> to <ref name="foo bar"> instead of just <ref name=foo> so this wouldn't be that much of a stretch. Thanks for letting me know. Anomie⚔ 01:29, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Excellence

I've got an annoying tendency to accidentally orphan refs, so seeing this bot fix Valerie Plame gave me a big grin. Cheers! Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:26, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

AnomieBOT says "You're welcome!" Anomie⚔ 14:25, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

A goof?

In Mount Hood, this edit by the bot suggests it thinks it is fixing a reference, but it deleted the cite reference—which didn't have a problem. It might have been triggered by a reference I forgot to provide in the previous edit. Could a missing definition for [17] confuse the bot whether [9] was valid? —EncMstr (talk) 05:01, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

It's actually an invalid reference, someone left out the "=". I'm actually shocked that the software accepted it at all; it actually interprets the ref as <ref name="name">. I suppose I can add yet another special case to try to catch this sort of error.

The missing definition on #17 was what flagged the page with Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting and attracted the bot, but otherwise it had nothing to do with the issue. Anomie⚔ 12:16, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Need to be kept under control

Twice in the last 2 days I've been reorganising content, including refs, and AnomieBOT has caused edit conflicts. In the second instance, Physiology of dinosaurs (see hist), I'd put an "in use" template on the article. This bot should be house-trained to edit only articles that have not been edited for a while (e.g. 1 hour), and to leave strictly alone articles that have "in use" templates. -- Philcha (talk) 12:49, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

AnomieBOT does only edit articles that have not been edited for a while, see lines 135–141 of the source. Looking for {{in use}} is a good idea, and I will add that feature later today. You could also use {{nobots}}, which is specifically designed to exclude bots. That template doesn't have a timeout like {{in use}} does, though, so you would have to remember to remove it when you are done. Anomie⚔ 16:04, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Your first statement is false - AnomieBOT edited Physiology of dinosaurs while I was in the middle of an edit that took me 19 minutes, including looking up and formatting refs - see article's history.

Suggesting another "bots keep out" template is unhelpful, as there as very many templates and they are hardly indexed at all. AnomieBOT should respect all "keep out" templates, as well as waiting for longer after the last edit.

The edit summary for your last comment in this thread, " Hey, don't lose your cool," is mildy insulting. The language of my initial comment was polite and quite unemotional, it simply explained how AnomieBOT's behavior caused inconvenience annd needs to be modified. -- Philcha (talk) 16:35, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I can confirm that this bot does not wait very long before making a fix. In the article McLaren F1 it fixed references that were broken by vandalism just 14 minutes prior. I had to spend extra time looking at diffs to make sure my reverting of the vandalism was correct. If the bot had just waited a hour or so the vandalism would have been reverted and no change would have been necessary. swaq 18:30, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

On the other hand, "hours" is a rather long period of time to wait to fix non-vandalism-related reference errors. This was discussed at the BRFA, and it was determined that 5 minutes was sufficient to allow anti-vandal bots and RC patrollers sufficient chance to catch the vandalism. Beyond that, it might be days until a "normal" person catches the vandalism. If you can provide useful vandalism time-to-reversion statistics I will review them and consider adjusting the wait time. Anomie⚔ 18:52, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I understand the problems with waiting too long, but I feel five minutes is too short. I just went through my watchlist and made a note of how long it had been since the vandalism each time rollback was used. 27% of the rollbacks occurred between five minutes and an hour after the vandalism. Most of the rest were recent change patrollers, bots, and repeat vandals that were vandalizing again immediately after being reverted. This was a sample size of 26 rollbacks. Only two (8%) of the edits were longer than 15 minutes. Perhaps a wait time of 30 minutes might be a good compromise? swaq 19:36, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, Philcha, but you are completely incorrect in your first statement; go read the code as I suggested instead of accusing me of lying. As for templates, {{bots}}/{{nobots}} is the only standard bot exclusion mechanism that I am aware of; if there are any others they are not mentioned at WP:BOT. {{in use}} is intended for human editors, not for bots, but I do intend to implement checking for it in the near future anyway. As for my suggesting you keep your cool being "mildly insulting", I find your comment that my bot "should be house-trained" more than mildly insulting. If you cannot be civil and constructively discuss this issue, please do not post here again. Thank you. Anomie⚔ 18:52, 12 September 2008 (UTC)