Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser

AutoWikiBrowser 6.3.0.0

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  How to use AWB
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  Discuss AWB, report errors, and request features
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  Request or help with AWB-able tasks
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  Technical documentation

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Before you post

Do you want to ...	Please use
Report a bug in AWB?	Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs
Request a feature for the next version of AWB?	Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests
Request approval to use AWB?	Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage
Ask a question about AWB or ask for help?	This page

Frequently asked questions

• When I start it up I get error "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click on OK to terminate the application."

  This error means your computer does not have the .NET framework version 2 installed properly. Download

• Will it ever work on Linux or Mac?

  Probably not, at least not until mono gets .NET 2.0 fully supported.

  However, pyAWB (pythonAWB), is being developed for Linux

• Does AWB work on other projects/languages?

  Many WikiMedia projects and languages are supported, see the "Select language and project" option in the file menu. Other languages will be added on request, though at the moment the interface is always in English. You are also able to use other 3rd party wiki's, by entering the URL where index.php of this wiki resides. The wiki must support Query API and Bot API required by AWB. This means that it should have latest HEAD version of MediaWiki or something close to that.

• What interwiki link order does AWB use?

  It uses the orders specified at m:Interwiki sorting order, as all other bots do.

• I don't like or use Internet Explorer, please use FireFox instead.

  AWB does not use Internet Explorer. It does, however, happen to use the same web browser control that Internet Explorer does; the equivalent FireFox component does not provide the needed functionality.

• How do I open the page in another browser if I can't use the one in AWB?

  Right click on the edit box in the bottom right side of your screen. Select "Open page in browser"

• How do I edit a page that doesn't exist?

  Uncheck "Ignore non existing pages" in the "Skip articles" box.

• How do I skip certain articles?

  Use the "Skip if contains" and "Skip if doesn't contain" in the "(2) Set options" tab

• Can't you leave up a "stable" version, so I don't have to download new versions?

  It is important to keep people up to date with the latest versions, because their use of the software doesn't just affect them, but the whole of wikipedia. As any bugs that remain will be trivial, hopefully releases won't be so frequent anyway.

• How can I stop AWB clicking when it changes pages?

  This is an Internet Explorer setting. This page explains how to turn off the clicking sound.

Discussion

This talk page is automatically archived by Shadowbot3. Any sections older than 5 days are automatically archived to Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Archive 16. Sections without timestamps are not archived.

AWB Causing Errors

User:Vagish, has used AWB to changed 'Correspondance' to 'Correspondence' and called it a 'correction'. Yet on many articles 'Correspondance' appeared in French language (such as a title in French or quote in French). 'Correspondance' is correct spelling in French language; AWB is causing errors. User:Vagish has not answered my comment on his talk page and has not reported the error here as asked by another user. Please correct this error with AWB.--Bryson^{{Talk}{Edits}} 15:14, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

User:Vagish has answered my comment on his talk page and promised not to use AWB anymore, but what about other users using it.--Bryson^{{Talk}{Edits}} 15:21, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Im pretty sure this came up before, and i thought it was removed from the typo page... If it wasnt, as it seems, it needs doing so that other users cant. Reedy Boy 17:17, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

I didn't report it because I thought it was an error by me than by AWB itself. And I didn't promise not to use AWB anymore. I said I did not plan to fix typos using AWB in the future because of the problems that it caused. I only realised the problems caused by those fixes many hours after I had logged out when Nunh-huh had kindly taken a lot of time to revert those fixes. I found the problem came because I googled 'Correspondance' and used AWB to fix the pages with those typos as I seemed it was much quicker and had less strain on the server because nearly every page had that typo on it. But that was what caused the major problem, I did not realise that there was a french word called 'Correspondance'. You can see the conversation I had on my talk pages here and with Bryson here.

Since that conversation I have not corrected typos. I have only used AWB to make film articles for a majority of Rajinikanths films here and the method I used is described here where I was explaining to Universal Hero who is a major contributer to the Sivaji: The Boss article (which is how I met him).

Please can you review the situation and tell me what I should do. Should I go back to editing typos? Should I quit using AWB (because your going to remove me from the list)?

~~ Vagish ^{T C}_VPS 11:16, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

You won't have your priveledges removed because of a good faith error, unless you seem to be incompetent to use the tool. Don't worry about that.

I'm not commenting on the "technical" question as I don't use this feature nor have I ever looked at the code. --kingboyk 11:21, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

All spell fixing should be manually checked as you go along. Foreign language context should always raise a flag. It is still possible to make mistakes, but that applies ot any editing activity. Rich Farmbrough, 10:31 26 April 2007 (GMT).

Strange problem FYI/feedback welcome

I have a file in my IE cache which won't delete (or rename), it has a very long name with %s in. If I attempt to delete it from dos i get (paraphrased)

delete *.*

delete <long file name> are you sure? (Y/N): Y

File not found.

THis may be the root cause of the AWB/.Net error I've been getting:

The system cannot find the file specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070002)

Any suggestions welcome. Will update.

Rich Farmbrough, 11:14 25 April 2007 (GMT).

I cleaned my IE cache out by using Cygwin (a Unix-like shell), finding all the cache files and hidden folders, and forceably deleting them (rm -frv *) (they're hidden/protected in the normal Windows command shell). A similar sledgehammer approach might work for you. An alternative would be try one of the various IE cache cleaning utils. --kingboyk 12:08, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

I've reinstalled IE, updated AWB, and moved the cache onto another disc. I'm getting the above eror on almost (?) every load of a page. It doesn't seem to affect the functioning, but I have to click OK for each save (in effect). I'm pretty much out of ideas, but I can't use AWB in ernest until this is resolved. Rich Farmbrough, 10:25 26 April 2007 (GMT).

OK here is a possible clue, I've disabled images and it's (it sems to have) reduced the frequency of the error. Rich Farmbrough, 10:33 26 April 2007 (GMT).

I've been getting that message now too (already have images disabled). (Bah! Just got it as I typed). --kingboyk 10:42, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Thank goodness it's not just me! I'm seeing a lot of nudges as well... 1/8. Rich Farmbrough, 10:51 26 April 2007 (GMT).

I'm not getting many nudges, and I have a slow machine at the moment and not much of a connection. At one point the nudging was erroneously aggressive (I left a zero off the timer value, whoops ;)), if you don't have the very latest release please switch so we're singing off the same hymn sheet :) --kingboyk 11:13, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I manually updated to 3.9.1, hoping the problem might "go away". Rich Farmbrough, 11:54 26 April 2007 (GMT).

Probably symptomatic of another problem then, rather than timer breakage. --kingboyk 12:13, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Later on I'll try AWB in the debugger and see if I can catch anything. I think we both suspect this is an IE message box, though. --kingboyk 11:13, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

You might be able to narrow down the cause, nonetheless. Rich Farmbrough, 11:28 26 April 2007 (GMT).

public bool GetLogInStatus()
        {
            if (this.Document == null)
                return false;

            Match m = LoginRegex.Match(this.DocumentText);

Seems to be happening in webcontrol.cs at the last line shown above. Just hit this; haven't looked into cause/solution yet. --kingboyk 13:50, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

System.IO.FileNotFoundException was caught
  Message="The system cannot find the file specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070002)"
  Source="System.Windows.Forms"
  StackTrace:
       at System.Windows.Forms.UnsafeNativeMethods.IPersistStreamInit.Save(IStream pstm, Boolean fClearDirty)
       at System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser.get_DocumentStream()
       at System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser.get_DocumentText()
       at WikiFunctions.Browser.WebControl.GetLogInStatus() in D:\Work\SVN\AWB\AWB\WikiFunctions\WebControl.cs:line 232

I'm not really sure how to deal with this. Trapping an error is easy enough; but what then? GetLogInStatus() returns a boolean, that's true (logged in) or false (not logged in). When an error occurs it's really a status of "don't know".

It's being called from MainForm.loadSuccess(). Perhaps the call there could be wrapped in a try block, and if it fails stop and restart AWB? --kingboyk 15:36, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

rev 1119 - first attempt at trapping and working around the error; will continue testing if my laptop doesn't die of exhaustion first! :( --kingboyk 16:00, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Works for me! The only concern I have is that it theoretically possible (but unlikely) now for AWB to get stuck in a loop: catch error, stop and restart, catch error ... --kingboyk 18:35, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Removal of blank lines before categories and stub templates

AWB seems to be getting a bit zealous about removing blank lines: I've noticed it doing with the only blank line between the final section, and the categories (where I don't think it makes a difference to the rendered page, but certainly makes the wikimarkup less clear), and removing the double blank lines frequently added before stub tags -- these are generally deliberately added for the converse reason, avoiding the tags becoming "squished up" to the served text. Can these be taken account of when removing vspace? On a more general note, would it be possible to make the individual "general fixes" separately toggleable? Alai 04:57, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

that's probably fixed in next version, but don't know when this wersion will be out, I stopped editing for now anyway --84.234.42.68 10:45, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Cool. AWB versions seem to generally be often enough that between one spell of using it and the next, I find my current version's been disabled, so I'm content enough with that. Alai 04:13, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Two or more blank lines (that is, three or more line breaks) in a row do create a noticeable and awkward increase in the space between paragraphs in the rendered page. It probably would be best to shorten all exaggerated whitespace areas to two carriage returns (one blank line in the wiki text), or maybe just one carriage return (no blank line) if it is part of a indented/bulleted/numbered list, but doing that for regular paragraphs make them run together. Sometimes unusually large gaps will also have other invisible stuff like spaces and tabs on the blank lines so you want to use something that will account for that too. It could be a sign that the text was copied and pasted into the edit box, rather than typed on the user's keyboard, so check for copyvio as usual. I haven't used AWB for a while so I don't remember how it behaved regarding this, but when I edit I generally try to leave about this much space at the end:

 ...happily ever after.

 {{DEFAULTSORT:Tale, Fairy}}

 [[Category:Foo]]
 [[Category:Bar]]

 {{myth-stub}}

 [[he:התיקון הרביעי לחוקת ארצות הברית]]

Does that look like enough room, Alai? — CharlotteWebb 11:45, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Mostly, but there seems to be some thinking that an extra blank link before the first stub template is desirable. I won't claim to be rigorous in adding them myself, and in the longer run it will hopefully not be necessary at all, if the CSS for the stub templates can be tweaked appropriately, but for the time being it would save some to-ing anf fro-ing if AWB left that, if already present. Alai 04:13, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

AWB Approval Sanity Check

I ran into a new situation with AWB approvals today. A user with less than 200 mainspace edits is asking that I be bold and add him to the AWB list so that he can increase his edit count to become an admin (this could be an oversimplification, but it's my read on the situation). When I responded by denying his request, he assured me that "When I come back I'm pretty sure that there will be another admin who will be too happy to allow me to use it". Ordinarily, this type of arrogance wouldn't be a significant issue, but I'd like to be 100% sure I'm making the right choice in declining OhanaUnited's AWB request.

Thanks, alphachimp 03:00, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Yep, agree. Looks like this is where this came from. Prodego ^talk 03:03, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I fully endorse this. The main and only reason for using AWB or other automatic tools should be desire to improve Wikipedia, not promotion to some status. In this particular case the candidate is not sure where he will use AWB, so how can we be sure that he will not use it for making controversial or useless edits? He doesn't have enough mainspace experience for us to judge. MaxSem 18:13, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

If that's a future admin lord help us. And why is his "mentor" not pulling him up over this? Using AWB is a priveledge not a right, and it's certainly not there to help folks notch up an edit count! --kingboyk 18:34, 3 May 2007 (UTC)