Wikipedia:Bot requests
| Commonly Requested Bots |  |
This is a page for requesting tasks to be done by bots per the bot policy. This is an appropriate place to put ideas for uncontroversial bot tasks, to get early feedback on ideas for bot tasks (controversial or not), and to seek bot operators for bot tasks. Consensus-building discussions requiring large community input (such as request for comments) should normally be held at WP:VPPROP or other relevant pages (such as a WikiProject's talk page).
You can check the "Commonly Requested Bots" box above to see if a suitable bot already exists for the task you have in mind. If you have a question about a particular bot, contact the bot operator directly via their talk page or the bot's talk page. If a bot is acting improperly, follow the guidance outlined in WP:BOTISSUE. For broader issues and general discussion about bots, see the bot noticeboard.
Before making a request, please see the list of frequently denied bots, either because they are too complicated to program, or do not have consensus from the Wikipedia community. If you are requesting that a template (such as a WikiProject banner) is added to all pages in a particular category, please be careful to check the category tree for any unwanted subcategories. It is best to give a complete list of categories that should be worked through individually, rather than one category to be analyzed recursively (see example difference).
- Alternatives to bot requests
- WP:AWBREQ, for simple tasks that involve a handful of articles and/or only needs to be done once (e.g. adding a category to a few articles).
- WP:URLREQ, for tasks involving changing or updating URLs to prevent link rot (specialized bots deal with this).
- WP:SQLREQ, for tasks which might be solved with an SQL query (e.g. compiling a list of articles according to certain criteria).
- WP:TEMPREQ, to request a new template written in wiki code or Lua.
- WP:SCRIPTREQ, to request a new user script. Many useful scripts already exist, see Wikipedia:User scripts/List.
- WP:CITEBOTREQ, to request a new feature for WP:Citation bot, a user-initiated bot that fixes citations.
Note to bot operators: The {{BOTREQ}} template can be used to give common responses, and make it easier to keep track of the task's current status. If you complete a request, note that you did with {{BOTREQ|done}}, and archive the request after a few days (WP:1CA is useful here).
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| Bot-related archives (v·t·e) |
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Replacement of a redirect to free up a name
The content and titling of some of our fair use rationale templates has got out of sync and I'm attempting to rationalize the situation. It's explained in detail here, but the short version is that there are about 5,000 uses of the redirect {{Non-free media rationale}} that need to be replaced with their target name {{Non-free use rationale}}. This should be achievable in a single bot run. Anyone up for helping out? Many thanks. — Hex (❝?!❞) 12:53, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
- I've started working on a bot to do this. Expect a BRFA by the beginning of the week. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 05:00, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
- One concern: What if someone doesn't know and/or forgets that the template has been changed, and accidentally uses {{Non-free media rationale}} instead? Unless you can be sure that nobody will ever use the template again (a difficult proposition with 17,875,399 users), it's probably a good idea not to change the template to something entirely different. If you'd like, I can analyze who's been using the template and when they put it on the page, so you can determine whether it's being used anymore. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 05:48, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
- I ran an analysis last night, and it looks like people are still using the old template. It's only an average of two per month, but that's still enough to cause confusion if you change the template. Some statistics:
EDIT: I had a lot of data and some analysis here, but it turned out to be completely bogus. My code was analyzing the data for the revision before the one in which the template was added. My apologies and I'll re-analyze the data shortly. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 02:12, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
This means that if you change the meaning of this template you're likely to get users accidentally using the wrong one. Admittedly, there wouldn't be very many, but it would still cause confusion. My suggestion, if you still want to go through with the change, would be to:
- Change all of the usages of the template
- Make sure all of the documentation has been updated (including mentions of the template elsewhere besides the official documentation!)
- Wait a few months to make sure nobody is still using the template.
Let me know if you still want to go through with the rename. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 18:58, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
- Hello Wolfgang, thanks very much for stepping up to this one. Your concern is a good one that hadn't occurred to me, and you've addressed it excellently. I concur with your suggestions in full. We should go ahead with your suggested plan of action; I've notified ShakespeareFan00. I'll do a check after a month to see for any more people using the redirect, and let them know too, and again at the two-month mark; by which point I would think it safe to update the redirect. Sound good? — Hex (❝?!❞) 12:22, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
BRFA filed — Wolfgang42 (talk) 21:01, 19 November 2012 (UTC)- Another thought also occurred to me: changing this template will break old page history. If somebody looks at an old version of a page that has {{Non-free media rationale}} it won't display the right template. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 12:58, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
- Unfortunately I think that's an egg we have to break for this omelette. Broken/changed templates in historic versions of articles is a known problem; unless MediaWiki gets changed to date-match transclusions in article history (I wish!) then there's not much we can do. I think historic versions of file metadata are probably fairly rarely viewed, though, so it shouldn't really prove to be a problem; and certainly people should only expect to find accurate licensing data on the newest version of a file, anyway. — Hex (❝?!❞) 13:08, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
- As mentioned in my edit above, the analysis I had was completely off base. I reused some code that was already working, but didn't refactor a variable properly. I redid the analysis after I fixed the bug, and it seems that it's not nearly as clear-cut as I thought it was. ShakespeareFan00 has absolutely nothing to do with this template. Instead, it's a smattering of people who use it occasionally. My suggestion above still stands, but you may find that you need to wait longer than two months. My apologies for any confusion I caused. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 16:43, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
- Rather fortunate you mentioned this to me - see also User:Legoktm/AWB/TR Sfan00 IMG (talk) 17:02, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
- That is lucky. I've dropped Legoktm a line. — Hex (❝?!❞) 18:37, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks for the heads up. I just removed the template from the list, so Legobot should be fine. Legoktm (talk) 00:50, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
- That is lucky. I've dropped Legoktm a line. — Hex (❝?!❞) 18:37, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
Doing... — Wolfgang42 (talk) 08:30, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
Done — Wolfgang42 (talk) 17:09, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
Thank you! That's great. — Hex (❝?!❞) 18:47, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
I am requesting bureaucratization
Thank you so much! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dt7607 (talk • contribs) 20:20, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
- Done Wikipedia has now been bureaucratized. The bureaucracy has been expanded to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 20:24, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
- If you could explain your request a bit clearer, please... Rcsprinter (babble) @ 17:43, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
Bot request
Hello, I am entering a bot request for for replacing {{BPN}} with {{Authority control}}. See the discussion here: Template talk:Authority control#TSURL and BPN. Apparently I have made 360 of these links, which is a lot to fix by hand. I would like to see all of the BPN numbers in the Authority control template. Thanks, and if any more info is necessary, pls let me know! Jane (talk) 11:55, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
- I'm doing something very similar above. Once I do that and make sure it works, I'll tweak my code so it can be used for your task as well. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 20:52, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks! I just noticed from the talk page of Authority control that they are concerned about the name of the template though, so you may want to wait until that discussion is cleared up. It also looks like some more mergers may be done (I don't know the details though). Jane (talk) 15:06, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
- BRFA filed I asked on Template talk:Authority control, and they don't plan to change the name of the template. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 22:37, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
Could a bot remove the {{RFD}} from those redirects and add the following to the redirects talk pages: Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 11:29, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
{{oldrfd | date = 2012 November 2 | action = delete | result = keep | page = 2012 November 2#Template:UCIProTour-teams }}
Replace wikitravel, wikitravelpar templates with WMF sibling wikivoyage-inline
There are currently more than 2600 links to {{wikitravel}} and a few hundred to {{wikitravelpar}} which need to be replaced with a link to the corresponding Wikimedia project, Wikivoyage: {{wikivoyage-inline}}
- Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 50#Replace wikitravel.2C wikitravelpar templates with WMF sibling project wikivoyage
- Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2012 November 10#Template:Wikitravel
TfD has already been closed yesterday as "delete after replacement"; mere redirection of the deprecated templates is not an option due to trademark issues (this is a company which is already suing our volunteers, WMF has countersued[1][2]) but there are too many of these for manual replacement (as was already done on fr: and simple:) to be viable on en: K7L (talk) 15:25, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
- Doing... Legoktm (talk) 15:38, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
- Looks like Hazard was planning on doing this with Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Hazard-Bot 15, so I'll let him do it. Legoktm (talk) 17:40, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
Correcting author to agency in cite templates
There are around 800 articles containing a cite template with a parameter author=Associated Press or AP or Reuters or UPI or United Press International (sometimes wikilinked, sometimes not). These should all be agency=agency-name. In some cases, this would also require changing the template type from cite web to cite news, and in some cases also removal of an associated authorlink=agency-name parameter. Is this a possible task for a bot? Colonies Chris (talk) 15:53, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
- It depends on what you mean by 'some cases'. If there's a well-definable rule—for example, if the url starts with http://news.com/ then the template should be {{cite web}}—then it's possible. If it requires human judgement, such as looking at the website and deciding if it qualifies as news, then it's not. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 20:32, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
- I've never yet found a case of this type where it wasn't legitimate to just change 'cite web' to 'cite news'. If the information source is a news agency, then 'cite news' is always going to be correct. I suspect the background is that occasionally an editor using the 'cite web' template has tried to supply an 'agency', discovered that the template won't accept that parameter and then tried to get around the restriction by misusing the 'author' parameter, instead of realising that they should be using 'cite news' instead. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:16, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
- I don't already have a framework to do this, and I don't have the time to write one right now, so if someone else wants to work on this project they're welcome to do so. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 08:30, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
Additional note: including other news agencies Xinhua, Canadian Press and Agence France-Presse, the number of articles concerned is about 1000. Colonies Chris (talk) 09:22, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
- Any chance that some of these were caused by indiscriminate use of 'webreflinks' and the like to convert bare links to references? K7L (talk) 19:15, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
RMCD bot
Is there anyone here willing to take over (the functions of) User:RMCD bot? The source code has approval but the bot is down and the bot-operator absent. DrKiernan (talk) 13:12, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
- Based on a quick scan of the source code, it should be very easy to integrate into the existing WolfBot framework. I'll look into doing this shortly. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 16:30, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
- Thank you very much. DrKiernan (talk) 23:10, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
- BRFA filed — Wolfgang42 (talk) 08:30, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
- The other bot is back. Apparently its operator went on vacation and the antivirus broke. — Wolfgang42 (talk) 14:38, 26 November 2012 (UTC)
RFD/W
Ok, so we're spoiled having the bots help out at CfD : )
I went to help out closing at RfD, and discovered that there is no "working" page to handle retargeting redirects (Whatlinkshere).
So I copied CFD/W, and reworked it for RfD.
Any chance it's possible for a bot to regularly take care of this?
And of course, I'm happy to discuss this to see if we can work out whatever details. - jc37 09:34, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
- As someone who isn't very familiar with how RfD works, do you mind explaining what "retargeting" entails? I didn't see anything on Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Administrator instructions that explained it well. Legoktm (talk) 09:38, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
- When you do Whatlinkshere on a redirect page, you can see all the pages which have the redirect on their pages. So to retarget a redirect, first you have to edit each of those pages to dab the link from the redirect page name to what the redirect's current target full page name is (possibly using a pipetrick). Then once that is done, the redirect page can be edited to change from the current target to the new target.
- In the case of template redirects it's a little more complex since you have to deal with {{ and not just [[
- - jc37 10:14, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
Page move bot?
Is there an existing bot that I can ask to help tidy up a page move I just made, to avoid redirects in articles? --Dweller (talk) 11:22, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
- I doubt it would have even been approved, because it's not like those links are broken. Hazard-SJ ✈ 21:07, 24 November 2012 (UTC)
- Well there are legitimate uses to do that. (See the exceptions section of WP:R2D). Legoktm (talk) 23:55, 24 November 2012 (UTC)
- There is no official bot approved to do that, but AWB can be used to do it reasonably quickly. You can post a request at WP:AWB/Tasks. Legoktm (talk) 23:55, 24 November 2012 (UTC)
- Doing this on a large scale with AWB would be a violation of the AWB rules of use; see WP:AWB#Rules of use number 4 in particular. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:04, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- No, if there is a consensus to do a specific change. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:08, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- Unless we're talking about links to a disambig page, which I don't believe we are, the sort of consensus you are talking about would be a BRFA. Otherwise, someone who does this with AWB might have their AWB access removed for violating that AWB rules. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:16, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- Well it would help if we knew what page it was, and based on Dweller's move log, I'm guessing it's Jewish holidays (move discussion). Legoktm (talk) 00:19, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- (ec)I think we need to know what the page is and the changes being needed but if a consensus were gained in an approved venue such as Village pump or AFD then there shouldn't be a problem. The bag would certainly want to review that the changes are made correctly but they would hardly have the authority to override a consensus, unless I am misunderstanding and you are saying that BAG has powers that allow them to overrule a community consensus decision. Which I do not think you are. Wow me and Legoktm are thinking similar thoughts. Kumioko (talk) 00:21, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- I thought it was Jewish holiday → Jewish holidays. Neither page is a disambig page, just a normal redirect left behind after a page is renamed. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:25, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- Yes. We could have bot like these the same way we have bots to create redirects. AWB can't be used to create a page move bot. Moving pages can't be done automatically with AWB. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:31, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- A bot to eliminate all redirects? Hazard-SJ ✈ 04:04, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- Yes. We could have bot like these the same way we have bots to create redirects. AWB can't be used to create a page move bot. Moving pages can't be done automatically with AWB. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:31, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- Well it would help if we knew what page it was, and based on Dweller's move log, I'm guessing it's Jewish holidays (move discussion). Legoktm (talk) 00:19, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- Unless we're talking about links to a disambig page, which I don't believe we are, the sort of consensus you are talking about would be a BRFA. Otherwise, someone who does this with AWB might have their AWB access removed for violating that AWB rules. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:16, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- No, if there is a consensus to do a specific change. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:08, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- Doing this on a large scale with AWB would be a violation of the AWB rules of use; see WP:AWB#Rules of use number 4 in particular. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:04, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
Yes, thanks, I was looking for a bot to change all the Jewish holiday links to Jewish holidays. --Dweller (talk) 12:44, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- Thanks for confirming. One reason that we can't automatically just change the link is that it depends on the text around it. For example the sentence "Yom Kippur is a Jewish Holiday" can't change to "Yom Kippur is a Jewish Holidays". The only thing a mindless bot could do in an automated way is pipe all of the links, making them look like [[Jewish holidays|Jewish holiday]]. But that's not really much of an improvement: it does not have any significant effect on the page loading time, it does not make the article easier to read, and it doesn't make the article easier to edit. This all gets back to motto that redirects are "not broken". — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:03, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
Move all categories X-gu under Category:Districts of Seoul
Moving category X-gu to Category:X District per WP:CFD at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2012 November 2. Sawol (talk) 06:12, 26 November 2012 (UTC)