Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/VedeBOT

VedeBOT

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Operator: Ceradon (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 22:14, Tuesday May 1, 2012 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic unsupervised (But for now, I'm watching it closely)

Programming language(s): PHP / Peachy

Source code available: Yes. (Well, it will be as soon as I upload the code to GitHub. I'm finished coding and ready for a trial at any time.)

Function overview: Remove {{uncategorized}} from articles with categories.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): Hourly

Estimated number of pages affected: ~600

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes.

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): No.

Function details: The bot retrieves the backlinks to Template:Uncategorized and its alternates (redirects, etc.) using an api query. It then uses regular expressions to determine whether the page has categories or not. If the bot finds that it does, It removed the uncat template. If it doesn't have categories, then it simply skips it and moves on.

Discussion

A few questions:

• Is there some reason you're using regexes to find the categories instead of the API queries?
  • A: I can easily change the regexes to API queries, if necessary.
• Why run this hourly? I doubt these pages get updated that frequently, your bot's going to end up doing a lot of unnecessary rechecking of pages.
  • A: The bot's running times can be changed however I'd like to catch the new additions to the template fairly swiftly.
• Do you feel you'd need a bot flag for this?
  • A: I do. The main reason for the bot flag is too hide bots from RC and the bot could possibly make a fairly large amount of edits in one time.

The task itself seems pretty straight-forward, although I thought there was already a bot that did something like this... Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 22:52, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

In relation to your note about the task already being done, X!'s bots once did it however, sadly X! has retired and his toolserver account has expired. --Ceradon ^talk_contribs 00:17, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Ah. Ok then. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 00:18, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. MBisanz ^talk 23:43, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Regexes are better than regexes, since this bot only cares about categories linked directly in the page text, not tracking/maintenance/hidden categories. 124.149.84.97 (talk) 07:21, 7 May 2012 (UTC)