Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard

Bots noticeboard

Here we coordinate and discuss Wikipedia issues related to bots and other programs interacting with the MediaWiki software. Bot operators are the main users of this noticeboard, but even if you are not one, your comments will be welcome. Just make sure you are aware about our bot policy and know where to post your issue. Do not post here if you came to discuss non-urgent bot issues, bugs and suggestions for improvement. Do that at the bot operator's talk page discuss urgent/major bot issues. Do that according to instructions at WP:BOTISSUE discuss general questions about the MediaWiki software and syntax. We have the village pump's technical section for that request approval for your new bot. Here is where you should do it request new functionality for bots. Share your ideas at the dedicated page

Hard to edit Greek letters

User:Yobot and its owner Magioladitis have decided to ignore my complaint that changing Greek letters from html entities such as ν to the equivalent Unicode character ν makes articles hard to edit. While an editor skilled in the topic of the article can usually tell the difference when reading the article, it is often difficult to tell in edit mode, and an editor who is, perhaps, cleaning up vandalism but is not too skilled in the article topic doesn't have a prayer. Therefore I am contesting Magioladitis's decision in this forum and request that his bot be forbidden from converting the html entities for Greek letters to Unicode characters. (Just in case you think it's easy to tell "v" from "ν", try telling "A" from "Α".)

I have also added {{nobots}} (with Yobot in parameter list) to Equation of time which has been repeatedly disturbed by this action. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:45, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

This discussion should be in the Manual of Style. Where in the manual is written what you claim? -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:16, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

The only relevant statement in WP:MOS I can find is this:

Keep markup simple

Use the simplest markup to display information in a useful and comprehensible way. Markup may appear differently in different browsers. Use HTML and CSS markup sparingly and only with good reason. Minimizing markup in entries allows easier editing.

I contend that converting Greek letter HTML entities to Unicode makes editing harder and thus runs against the MOS advice. I further contend this is only a problem when bots edit-war with human editors over this, and therefor this is the appropriate discussion forum. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:38, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

OK but I really think you should start a discussion in the manual of style somewhere. This is something AWB does anyway. Not only Yobot. If we have specific instructions of the matter I think it will be helpful. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:17, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

I have mentioned this issue at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy. I believe that, as a matter of policy, changing Greek HTML entities to Unicode should be considered a context-sensitive task and not be performed by bots. I consider it context-sensitive because it makes it hard to recognize and edit isolated Greek letters, but it is obvious to a human editor that in a passage of Greek text, it is highly probable that all the letters in the passage are Greek rather than Roman. Jc3s5h (talk) 10:32, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Let's see if we get any feedback. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:35, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

• I donno about policy, but I think that whenever possible, avoiding the &random-letter-random-number-soup stuff is actually best. I'd put it in Greek, with a <!--This formula uses Greek characters.--> or <!--This formula uses Greek characters, do not insert English characters into the formula.--> next to it. Sven Manguard Wha? 16:53, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
  • I think that the proper conclusion of this discussion would bne to discuss the issue of Greek letters vs. Unicode on an appropriate MOS page, and that Yobot not do any more replacements of this type until such discussion is finished. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 03:55, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

How exactly does changing &nu; to ν make the article "hard to edit"? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:14, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Would this be possible?

Could there be a bot that requests pages be protected at wp:rpp if an article is vandalized more than a certain amount of times (like 3) in a certain time (like 24 hours)? The bot could also automatically protect the page without requesting.Heyitsme22 (talk) 12:45, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi, I was thinking about a bot that reports pages for protection, much like one reports pages at WP:AIV and WP:UAA. I would support a bot that adds pages to WP:RFPP, but I would not support a bot that automatically protects the page, pages still need to be checked manually by a human admin, initially at least as "vandalism" in a bot's eyes could be false positives. The Helpful One 15:51, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

The bot wouldn't necessarily need to detect vandalism, only find edit summaries that identify the reverted edits as vandalism several times (huggle messages, twinkle messages, cluebot message, common expressions like "rvv", "revert vand", etc.). In addition checking only non-anon, autoconfirmed editors would give almost no false positives (and a quick BRFA ;)). You could also ping ClueBot operators to see if they would be interested in doing this. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 16:11, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

If everyone is OK with it, I can poke Cobi to try and add this in to ClueBot NG - Rich(MTCD)^T|C|E-Mail 13:28, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Please let me know if there is a public code for such a bot, because I would like to implement it in huwiki. Bináris (talk) 16:25, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Dead link reporting -- approval needed?

Hi everyone. As part of an ongoing research project, I am parsing out all external link additions to en.wiki to do some machine-learning to detect link spam (see [1]). As part of this processing, I obtain the HTML source of the URLs being added. Occasionally, I get a 404 error (file not found), and it would seem beneficial to report these somewhere so people could manually investigate, if desired.

The question is whether or not this needs BAG approval. My program would only post to a single page, and not in the article-namespace (probably something like WP:STiki/Dead_Links). Thoughts? West.andrew.g (talk) 01:20, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Unless you are editing only in your own user space you will need approval. Peachey88 ^{(T · C)} 01:56, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

To clarify: WP:BOTPOL#Requests for approval states "any bot or automated editing process that affects only the operator's or their own userspace (user page, user talk page, and subpages thereof), and which are not otherwise disruptive, may be run without prior approval." But I do hope you're working from a database dump rather than trying to load the entire list of of external links from the API. Anomie⚔ 02:07, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

FYI: Are you aware of User:COIBot which monitors all external link additions? Johnuniq (talk) 02:24, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, it's not important that it reports to a sub-page of WP:STiki (which I operate) -- having it dump to a sub-page of my own user-page would be the moral equivalent -- so I'll proceed down that route. This does not concern the issue of link rot (in which case a DB dump would be appropriate), as I am already monitoring link additions in real time as part of WP:STiki project, so this was just going to be a trivial modification for the community's benefit. I am aware of User:COIBot, but the issues here seem orthogonal. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 02:39, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

What I sometimes do for this kind of task is to edit a use subpage and then transclude the page to WP:STiki/Dead_Links with a template. Tim1357 ^talk 04:09, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Otherwise I'd speedy-approve it for you. Tim1357 ^talk 04:13, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Free bot to new home (paper trained & has all shots)

Any botops have room for one more? HBC Archive Indexerbot is broke because its server has died. Krellis is offering it to whomever would like to give it a new home here.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 02:13, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Krellis has it running again...he's keeping it. :)
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 21:14, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Bot needed

I am wanting a bot to add a link to drugs.com pages from The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists to all Template:Drugboxs for medications. User:Boghog has offered but is exceedingly busy. The lisinopril article is an example of where this was done. Wish to look at the effect this link on all Wikipedia medication articles has on drug.com internet traffic. Have been discussing with a number of organization the possibility of them becoming involved with donating content or time to improve Wikipedia (ie. collaborting with us) and need some data to show that Wikipedia "does matter". Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:27, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Is there consensus for what some would call "spamming" these links across Wikipedia? Anomie⚔ 07:26, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

If there's no prior discussion about this, I suggest you try WP:MED.Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:16, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes consensus is here [2] [3] and it is WP:PHARM. The drugbox was recently rearranged based on the discussions to specifically include "The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists" and "MedLinePlus" similar to how the infobox disease has "MedLinePlus" and "eMedicine" in it. Emedicine's drug info is very poor which is why we are using the AHFS. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:18, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Needs wider discussion. I see no discussion of the issue in the section linked by the first link, and discussion between just you and one other user at the second link. I'd suggest starting a discussion at WP:VPR, and advertise it at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pharmacology and possibly WP:ELN, specifically framed as "Should we have a bot add links to drugs.com to most/all articles using {{drugbox}}?".

To understand why we're being careful about this, you may want to read through this discussion and the discussions linked from it regarding a previous bot that effectively added links to one site to many articles, although to be fair much of the controversy there stemmed from one now-banned user. Anomie⚔ 16:51, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

I think you're a bit overly cautious here Anomie. It's a link to a reliable source on drugs. There's no reason why it shouldn't be present in the infoboxes (especially since the drug infobox already does this with other reliable medical databases). A notice at WP:MED/WP:PHARM saying there's been a bot request for a bot to add them links automatically would suffice, since whoever codes the bot will have questions about this and will benefit from the extra eyes to make sure the bot will work as intended and not make avoidable mistakes. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:02, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, I wouldn't approve without an attempt at wider community discussion, since bot-adding of links to many articles has historically been controversial even if the individual links themselves seem acceptable. Anomie⚔ 17:39, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Alright, then how would someone know which link to add to the drugbox? Simply take {{Drugbox/Foobar}} and add |Drugs.com=foobar to it? Are there cases where this would create mistakes, or dead links? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:53, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

There has been discussion. The reason why there are not many people involved is that their are not many of us actively involved at WP:PHARM and WP:MED. A group of us recently published this paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21282098 but have not seen a stream of people joining yet.

• Posting at WP:PHARM asking for input here in May [4]
• Discussion occurred here [5]
• Have posted at WP:MED here just now [6]

I am not sure on the exact technical details. Thus I have posted here for help. User:Boghog has some suggestions on his talk page.

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:30, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Here is what Boghog states "Writing a bot script to add fields to a infobox is easy. And while I have not done this before, I think it will be relatively straight forward to script the creation of a special purpose drugbox template for each drug article and transclude this back into the article. The hard part is compiling the data to populate the new fields in the drugbox templates. It appears that the trade names and drugs.com link can be obtained from Drugbank download data. However I still need a mapping of the "INN drug name" → "Medline Plus accession number" (e.g., Linezolid → a692051). It is a bit messy, but it appears that I can capture this from the html sources of the Medline Plus tables of contents. I am very busy at the moment, but I may have time in a few weeks to awake BogBot from its hibernation to complete this job. Cheers." Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:44, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

OK, if you can wait that long, I will have time next weekend to complete the job. As Jmh649 (talk · contribs) stated above, we have already asked input from WP:PHARM to add extra links to the {{drugbox}} template here and there were no objections raised. Furthermore the drug infobox has been updated to include these additional fields. Hence I do not see any controversy populating fields that have been previously discussed and have already been added to the infobox. Concerning transcluding special purpose drug box templates back into drug articles Beetstra (talk · contribs) has expressed some concern about doing this. Hence I suggest that we proceed with populating the new fields but hold off on the transcluded templates. Is this OK with everyone? Boghog (talk) 21:42, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Bog that would be perfect. If I get something published and you wish your name on it will make sure that happens. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:53, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Unregistered bot

Resolved

 – Blocked by Mifter. Singularity42 (talk) 23:55, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Bslwikicorporation (talk · contribs)

Claims to be a bot on the account's userpage; some edit summaries indicate it is a bot. Not registered. Singularity42 (talk) 19:18, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

How to tell if the bot flag is set for an edit

I notice that the "m" flag is shown in a bot's contributions, but the "b" flag is not, although both flags do appear in my watchlist. Is there a way to tell that a particular edit (e.g., this one) was marked as a bot edit? 28bytes (talk) 18:06, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

In revision table only the minor flag is stored. The recentchanges table stores minor flag AND bot flag. So on queries related to the revision table like article history only the minor flag is shown and on queries using the recentchanges table like watchlist or special:recentchanges both flags are shown. The entry at the recentchanges table will be deleted after 30 days. Merlissimo 20:07, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Ah, interesting. Thanks! 28bytes (talk) 06:42, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

BRFA needed for new feature?

Hi,

I recently added a feature to SuggestBot so that it's capable of replacing an existing set of suggestions, rather than simply append them. Would this kind of feature require a separate BRFA and some trials before I add it to the bot's documentation, or is it not such a critical piece of functionality? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:03, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. A BRFA tends to be a magnet for editors who love to argue for the sake of arguing. The change you made seems pretty minimal, I think you'd be fine to implement it without a BRFA and see if there are any complaints. It's pretty much up to your discretion, per WP:BOTPOL: "Should a bot operator wish to modify or extend the operation of a bot, they should ensure that they do so in compliance with this policy. Small changes, for example to fix problems or improve the operation of a particular task, are unlikely to be an issue, but larger changes should not be implemented without some discussion." —SW— ^confer 19:12, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think a new BRFA would be needed, especially as this is an opt-in change for an already opt-in bot. –xeno^talk 19:15, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. A good reminder that I should study WP:BOTPOL again, just to refresh my memory. As xeno mentions, it's an opt-in change, the default behaviour of the bot hasn't changed. Once I've read the bot policy again I'll probably go ahead and add the documentation for it. Thanks again for your help, both of you, much appreciated! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 23:19, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Using own functions with replace.py

Hi folks,

I came from huwiki to gladly tell you that I have written a HOWTO on using functions in your fixes.py/user-fixes.py. See hu:user:Bináris/Fixes and functions HOWTO. This is a mostly undocumented feature of replace.py and will improve your fixes (for those who are a bit familiar with Python programming). Useful for complicated replacement tasks. Enjoy! Bináris (talk) 11:22, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Python Unicode Bug

Python 2.7.2 has been released at Sun, 12 June 2011. This release does no longer trigger unicode bug 3081100, which happened for characters with multiple accents (for example on hak-, hi-, cdo- and sa-wiki). I guess it is highly recommended to migrate to this new release if the local version has this bug. Xqt (talk) 13:19, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

DASHBot is not doing image resizing again

Resolved

Hi there. DASHBot is supposed to clean out Category:Non-free Wikipedia file size reduction request nightly, at least of all of the images (95% of what's there). It went for over a week not doing it, then ran on July 6, but failed to run yesterday. (Task here)

I can keep that category trimmed, but it sucks up lots and lots of time. I'd like for either DASHBot to be brought back up, or some other solution to be found. Please? Sven Manguard Wha? 07:50, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Procedural: Tim1357, the bot's owner, was notified. Sven Manguard Wha? 19:03, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

The stupid crontab is being stupid. I'm trying to figure out why it keeps giving up. Gimme a minute. Tim1357 ^talk 23:55, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Could nice be killing it? Tim1357 ^talk 23:55, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Aannyways I started it again manually and changed the crontab so that it no longer uses "nice" and runs at a different time so that the server isn't so loaded. Tim1357 ^talk 00:20, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, saw it run. Will it run every day again? Also, if you're looking for a slow time, it's about three hours and 20 minutes from this timestamp ( 03:38, 9 July 2011 (UTC) ). Too early for the Brits to be editing, after midnight for the US West Coast, after 3AM for the US East Coast. IRC channels for Wikipedia, at least, go dead around then. Sven Manguard Wha? 03:38, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Yep, it looks like it ran on its own today [7] so I think it should work from now on. Just for the record, I was worrying about the toolserver (where DASHBot is hosted) being overloaded, not the wikipedia server. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Tim1357 ^talk 03:02, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

No problem. If the bot ever croaks, I get stuck with doing the resizing manually, so I check up on it from time to time. Sven Manguard Wha? 08:18, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Two things, firstly, if nice was killing it, doesn't that raise serious issues in itself?

Secondly, when I consulted the log, it said something like "identified 4 files" when there were more than 4 in the category...? - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 10:29, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

It can't tackle sound or video files. A dozen of those have been in the category for over a month, and the video has been there as long as I've been checking that category, so going on a year. It does, however, get all the images. Sven Manguard Wha? 01:13, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Hi! Work request

Hi! I've been editing Latin American people's names to include the proper accent marks. During the last days I've included thousands of accent marks, but the task is showing itself to be too huge to do it manually. Would some of your bots care to help me with this, please? I have a first list here for your orientation on what to do. When disambiguations are no provided for common names, it is safe to add the accent marks to those names in sports articles (I've checked it out). Please let me know if you decide to give me a hand and do this. Thanks you! Againme (talk) 17:56, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

• As the notice at the top of this page says, this is not the place for requesting work to be done by a bot. I'm sure you'll get a better response to your request at Wikipedia:Bot requests. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:29, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

User:Mathbot reverting my categorisation edits

User:Oleg Alexandrov operates User:Mathbot. Mathbot has been reverting my re-categorisation of some Wikipedia namespace articles. They are visible in Category:Indexes of articles and Category:Mathematics-related lists but they should only be in Category:WikiProject Mathematics. Oleg does not seem to check the Mathbot talk page regularly and he is yet to reply to my request on his talk page. How can I get Mathbot to stop my reverting my edits? -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 08:42, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

I changed it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:58, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

User:SmackBot tasks => user:Helpful Pixie Bot tasks and bot-flag

Further to User_talk:Rich_Farmbrough/Archive/2011Jul#Bot.27s_name and an email from Phillipe@WMF, I have created a new account with a more "friendly" name. I plan to transition SmackBot's activities to this account, once a bot flag is set.

Can BAG please make the necessary arrangements with the 'Crats?

Rich Farmbrough, 13:10, 12 July 2011 (UTC).