Wikipedia:Bot requests

For the policy on bot requirements, see WP:BOTREQUIRE.

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:USURPREQ, for reporting a domain be usurped eg. |url-status=usurped
• 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).

---

Please add your bot requests to the bottom of this page.
Make a new request

#	Bot request	Status	💬	👥	🙋 Last editor	🕒 (UTC)	🤖 Last botop editor	🕒 (UTC)
1	Bot to remove template from articles it doesn't belong on?		4	4	Wikiwerner	2024-09-28 17:28	Primefac	2024-07-24 20:15
2	Removing redundant FURs on file pages		5	3	Wikiwerner	2024-09-28 17:28	Anomie	2024-08-09 14:15
3	de-AMP bot	BRFA filed	13	7	Usernamekiran	2024-09-24 16:04	Usernamekiran	2024-09-24 16:04
4	QIDs in Infobox person/Wikidata	BRFA filed	11	4	Tom.Reding	2024-10-06 14:23	Tom.Reding	2024-10-06 14:23
5	Remove outdated "Image requested" templates		3	2	7804j	2024-09-21 11:26	DreamRimmer	2024-09-19 18:53
6	"Was" in TV articles		6	4	Pigsonthewing	2024-11-11 12:30	Primefac	2024-09-29 19:34
7	Films by director	done	9	4	Usernamekiran	2024-10-03 13:30	Usernamekiran	2024-10-03 13:30
8	altering certain tags on protected pages?		10	5	Primefac	2024-10-20 14:47	Primefac	2024-10-20 14:47
9	Request for Bot to Remove ARWU_NU Parameter from Articles Using Infobox US University Ranking Template		4	2	Primefac	2024-10-13 12:50	Primefac	2024-10-13 12:50
10	Removal of two external link templates per TfD result		6	4	Primefac	2024-10-14 13:48	Primefac	2024-10-14 13:48
11	Replace merged WikiProject template with parent project + parameter	Done	7	3	Primefac	2024-10-21 10:04	Primefac	2024-10-21 10:04
12	Bot Request to Add Vezina Trophy Winners Navbox to Relevant Player Pages		3	3	Primefac	2024-10-19 12:23	Primefac	2024-10-19 12:23
13	Replace standalone BLP templates	Done	7	3	MSGJ	2024-10-30 19:37	Tom.Reding	2024-10-29 16:04
14	Assess set index and WikiProject Lists based on category as lists		19	5	Mrfoogles	2024-11-06 16:17	Tom.Reding	2024-11-02 15:53
15	Request for WP:SCRIPTREQ		1	1	StefanSurrealsSummon	2024-11-08 18:27
16	LLM summary for laypersons to talk pages of overly technical articles?		10	7	Legoktm	2024-11-12 17:50	Legoktm	2024-11-12 17:50
17	Redirects with curly apostrophes		6	5	Pppery	2024-11-11 17:30	Primefac	2024-11-11 16:52
18	Bot for replacing/archiving 13,000 dead citations for New Zealand charts		3	2	Muhandes	2024-11-14 22:49	Muhandes	2024-11-14 22:49

Legend
In the last hour
In the last day
In the last week
In the last month
More than one month
Manual settings
When exceptions occur, please check the setting first.

ReminderBot

I request an on-Wiki bot (way) to remind tasks. "Remind me in N days about "A" etc. Talk page message reminder or anything is okay. --Tito Dutta (talk) 17:09, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

See previous discussions at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 143#Reminderbot? and Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 37#Reminder bot. It needs more definition as to how exactly it should work. Anomie⚔ 17:22, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

• This may work in the following way:

a) a user will add tasks in their subpage User:Titodutta/Reminder in this format {{Remind me|3 days}}. The bot will remind on the user talk page.

b) Anomie in an discussion, one may tag something like this {{Ping|RemindBot|3 days}}.

Please tell me your views and opinion. --Tito Dutta (talk) 18:31, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Outside of a user subpage, how will the bot know who to remind - i.e. how can it be done so that other editors aren't given reminders, either accidentally or maliciously? - Evad37 [talk] 22:40, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

I don't know if a bot can do it. {{ping}} manages to do this right. When you get a ping, the notification tells you who it is from, so we can see that it keeps track somehow (signature?). I realize that ping is deeper into MW than a bot, but personally, I wouldn't use a reminder system that requires me to maintain a separate page. {{ping}} is useful exactly because you can do it in context and inline. Before ping, you could just manually leave a note at someone's page but the benefits of ping are clear to everyone. I draw the same parallels between a manual reminder system and the proposed {{remind}}. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 22:49, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, being able to leave reminders on any page will make it more useful – but how can it be done in a way that isn't open for abuse? - Evad37 [talk] 23:23, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Maybe this is a better way to think about it: A reminder could be little more than a ping to oneself after a delayed period of time. Ping doesn't suffer from forgery issues (you can't fake a ping from someone else) and reminders could be restricted to ping only oneself (so that you can't spam a bunch of people with reminders). But as I allude to above, ping is part of mediawiki so I imagine that it has special ways of accomplishing this that a bot can't. I think that this discussion is becoming unfortunately fragmented because this is a bot-focused board. I think I was asked to join the discussion here because I previously proposed this on WP:VP/T and was eventually pointed to meta. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 03:09, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Agree; this is a potentially useful idea (although outside reminder software can always suffice), and might make sense as a MediaWiki extension, but if we did it by bot it would end up being a strange hack that would probably have other issues. — Earwig ^talk 03:12, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

• It would be great if we have this. User:Anomie, any comment/question? --Tito Dutta (talk) 23:48, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

How would a bot go about finding new reminder requests in the most efficient way? The Transhumanist 01:11, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

The Transhumanist, what if we pinged the bot instead? So, for instance, I could say {{u|ReminderBot}} at the end of something, and the bot would be pinged and store the ping in a database. Later on, the bot could leave a message on my talkpage mentioning the original page I left the ping in. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 04:10, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

• Agree this would be badass. I sometimes forget in-progress article or template work for years, after getting distracted by something else.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:02, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
  • I love this idea. I think the obvious implementation of this would be to use a specialized template where the editor who places the template receives a talk page message reminding them after the specified number of days/weeks, etc. The template could have a parameter such as "processed" that's set to "yes" after the bot has processed the request. A tracking category of all transclusions without the parameter set to the appropriate value would be an efficient method of searching. ~ Rob^Talk 02:01, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
    • @BU Rob13: Am going to code this with Python later on. Philroc^{My contribs} 15:02, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
    • @BU Rob13: By the way, would you want the user to input the thing they wanted to be reminded about too? Philroc^{My contribs} 15:02, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
      • Philroc, I'm not Rob, but yeah, I think that would be a great feature to have. APerson (talk!) 02:31, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

For the record, I've started working on this - at the moment, I'm waiting for this Pywikibot patch to go through, which'll let me access notifications. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 19:59, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

Patch went through, so I can start working on this now. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 03:35, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Gotta keep this thread alive! Unbelievably, Pywikibot had another bug, so I'm waiting for this other one to go through. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 00:56, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Status update: Coding... (code available at https://github.com/APerson241/RemindMeBot) Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 04:53, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Status update 2: BRFA filed. Requesting comments from Tito Dutta, Evad37, SMcCandlish, and Philroc. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 04:30, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

@Enterprisey: What happened? I was waiting for it to go live and you......never tried it! Can we have a another BRFA filed and have it go live soon! Please {{Alarm Clock}} is one useless bit of..... Don't you agree Xaosflux VarunFEB2003 ^{I am Online} 14:21, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

The BRFA expired as there was no action, however it may be reactivated in the future if the operator wishes. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:27, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

I was having a few issues with the Echo API. I'll continue privately testing (testwiki, of course) and if it starts looking promising, I'll reopen the BRFA. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 18:22, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Great! VarunFEB2003 ^{I am Offline} 14:37, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Commonscat

How about a bot that looks for missing Commons category link in articles where such a Commons category exists with lots of images? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 04:44, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

@Anna Frodesiak If I'm not mistaken, there is a basic form of this is implemented via Wikidata; did you have something more specific in mind? -FASTILY 06:34, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Fastily, I think Anna means that plenty of articles that doesnt have the Commons template for whatever reason. And that a bot that locates and adds the Commons template to the said articles would be beneficial.--BabbaQ (talk) 18:03, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

I suppose the bot would find Commons categories by checking if there's a Commons link under the sitelinks listed in the Wikidata item for a given article? Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 00:59, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Doing... I'm working on this. KSFT^C 04:46, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

N Not done but Possible – I have run into problems that I don't know how to fix. Maybe someone more experienced can do this. KSFT^C 20:15, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Automatic change of typographical quotation marks to typewriter quotation marks

Could a bot be written, or could a task be added to an existing bot, to automatically change typographical ("curly") quotation marks to typewriter ("straight") quotation marks per the MoS? Chickadee46 (talk|contribs) 00:16, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

I think this is done by AWB already. In citations AWB does it for sure. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:25, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Potentially this could be done, but is it really that big an issue that it needs fixing? It seems like a very minor change that doesn't have any real effect at all on the encyclopedia. Omni Flames (talk) 11:14, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

This is a "general fix" that can be done while other editing is being done. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 16:10, 13 August 2016 (UTC).

Replace ambiguous links to New York

Following the recent decision to move New York to a disambig page, a lot of preliminary work is ongoing to point existing links to either New York City or New York (state). A frequently occurring case is the |location= parameter in citations, which often reads |location=[[New York]]. This request aims to patrol citations in all articles and replace |location=[[New York]] with |location=[[New York City|New York]]. There is no ambiguity because pointers to a place in New York State would have the city name prepended. — JFG ^talk 16:47, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Some other frequently-occurring substitutions to consider:

1. [[New York|NY]] → [[New York (state)|NY]]
2. [[Manhattan]], [[New York]] → [[Manhattan]], [[New York City|New York]]
3. [[Queens]], [[New York]] → [[Queens]], [[New York City|New York]]
4. similar changes for all other NYC boroughs
5. [[Long Island]], [[New York]] → [[Long Island]], [[New York (state)|New York]]
6. [[Monroe County]], [[New York]] → [[Monroe County]], [[New York (state)|New York]]
7. similar changes for all other NY counties
8. [[New York]] Governor → [[New York (state)|New York]] Governor
9. [[New York]] Senator → [[New York (state)|New York]] Senator

Lots of work ahead… — JFG ^talk 20:55, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

@JFG: Doing... I'll likely have questions. One preliminary question is whether it's really desirable to list Manhattan, New York (etc) as "Borough, City" rather than "Borough, State"? The latter seems more typical of the "City, State" model. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 21:57, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

The mention of boroughs is mostly found in infoboxes with birth/death places or landmark locations. There is no uniform notation: we see "Manhattan, New York City" (3,109 pages), "Manhattan, New York City, U.S." (90 pages), "Manhattan, New York" (2,583 pages, meaning of New York unclear in that case), "Manhattan, New York, U.S." (313 pages); the latter form looks more inclusive, however I'd like to know what "New York" means there. When the text only says "Manhattan, New York" I would tend to link to the city as the most precise target. I asked the question on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject New York City: surely natives know best! — JFG ^talk 23:43, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Got a first answer at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject New York City: If "Manhattan, New York" is used, it can only mean "Manhattan, New York City". I don't think it has to be spelled out that way, though, because it wouldn't add anything. As for linking and disambiguating: any wikilink after Manhattan is unnecessary per WO:OVERLINK. In fact, even mentioning "US" is unnecessary. So, this speaks in favor of substitutions #2, #3 and #4 above. The overlinking remark is interesting but I think a New York disambig bot should leave links as is; whether an existing link to New York is superfluous is a human judgment call, out of scope for the bot's disambiguation purposes. — JFG ^talk 08:58, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

It looks like there is a move review currently open. Shouldn't we wait for it to reach a consensus before we make these mass changes? KSFT^C 21:59, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, I just independently discovered that move review and was holding off as a result. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 22:08, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Yes, the move review is underway, however irrespective of the outcome there are about half of the New York links which are meant to point to the city (found 80 out of 147 in a manual sample). I totally agree that we can prepare the bot, test it on a few pages (pointers to New York (state) are harmless even if the move is not endorsed) and wait until the outcome is cemented. — JFG ^talk 23:43, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

WP:COSMETICBOT forbids such edits, and besides, there's no way anyone would get approval from the BAG to trial a bot to fix links with an unresolved RM. Rightly so. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 06:45, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

@BU Rob13: Sure, links to New York (state) must wait for the outcome of the new New York debate. However we'll need to fix pointers to New York City irrespective of the eventual fate of New York. — JFG ^talk 13:43, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

@BU Rob13: Wait, hold on with replacing the links of [[Queens]], [[New York]] → [[Queens]], [[New York City|New York]], and so on for all the boroughs. When I say "Queens, New York", I may mean "Queens, New York State" like Buffalo, New York or Rochester, New York. I don't necessarily mean "Queens, New York City". Eh, it doesn't matter anyway. "Queens, New York" is usually for postal codes and addresses... Kylo Ren (talk) 23:02, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

@Epicgenuis: I already had filtered that out of what I had planned to do; I agree that it's questionable. In location parameters, it should almost certainly have the state. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 23:03, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

@BU Rob13: Thanks for the response. I think the changes of [[Queens]], [[New York]] → [[Queens]], [[New York City|New York]], [[Manhattan]], [[New York]] → [[Manhattan]], [[New York City|New York]], etc. (2 and 3), should possibly also be discussed at Talk:New York (state), or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject New York. Otherwise, all the other changes are fine Kylo Ren (talk) 23:57, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Her's another pattern that arose from the move debate: links to US settlements in the form [[Town]], [[New York]] → [[Town, New York]], which is the recommended WP:USPLACE style and avoids MOS:OVERLINKing. — JFG ^talk 23:15, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure that's guidance about linking: I think it's rather about titles. Many editors prefer "[[Little Rock, Arkansas|Little Rock]], Arkansas," which renders as "Little Rock, Arkansas," - this avoids overlinking, but also avoids people clicking the "Arkansas" and expecting to go to the state. (There were lengthy discussions, and even a project about this way of doing things, but I can't remember where.) All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 16:19, 13 August 2016 (UTC).

extract cite: journal template information from history articles

Hello, I'm currently working on a project that assesses the use of scholarly journals in history on Wikipedia. Some years ago a researcher performed the analysis on scientific journal citations on Wikipedia: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1997/1872 . I lack the requisite computer skills to download the cite journal template so I was wondering if anyone could help me get the text--journal titles--from the cite journal template for the category of history articles AugusteBlanqui (talk) 19:47, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

@AugusteBlanqui: Finding all "history" articles will be tricky. Category:History and its subcategories should theoretically work, but such a broad category tree is likely to be horribly broken if you go down far enough. For instance, bizarrely enough, Category:Aquaman is in the tree (History --> Pseudohistory --> Atlantis --> Atlantis in fiction --> Aquaman). There's several ways you can go about this, in my opinion.

1. Find a list of journals you're interested in. Pull all {{Cite journal}} data, regardless of article, and then pare it down to only include the history journals on your list.
2. Find a WikiProject or list of WikiProjects you're interested in, possibly Wikipedia:WikiProject History and others, and then pull {{Cite journal}} data from all articles that are tagged for that project on the talk page. Note that this won't get you all history articles, but it will make sure the list you do get contains only history articles. There may be issues of bias here, though. An editor who works at that WikiProject may favor one journal even though that journal isn't systematically favored. Since a relatively small number of editors tag pages for WikiProjects, this is a fairly serious methodological concern.
3. Find some sub-set of the Category:History tree and check it thoroughly to ensure it doesn't contain any broken subcategories. Use that subset to pull your data.
4. Say screw it and be content with Aquaman-related articles and other oddities appearing in your dataset. The positive news is that those articles likely won't cite many journals that would influence your data.

Before a bot operator will be able to help you, you'll need to pick some method of grabbing the articles. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 06:58, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

@BU Rob13: Option #1 would be fine. I don't mind sifting through all of {{Cite journal}} and cross-referencing with a list of history journals based on Impact_factor. The issue is getting the template data in a text format that I can sift through (plain text...anything). I have a good start by just manually looking at a few key history articles on Wikipedia and comparing their references/bibliographies/further reading lists with under-graduate and graduate course syllabi. There's a few python programs on GitHub ( https://github.com/attardi/wikiextractor ) that look like they might do the job but I'm starting from scratch in terms of programming knowledge. AugusteBlanqui (talk) 22:01, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Alright, this isn't something I can personally do, but other bot operators will likely be able to help you with creating a CSV file (or similar format) with data from all transclusions of {{Cite journal}} transclusions. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 22:23, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Whatever botop picks this up, I encourage you to spin this off into a tool that creates similar CSV files for any requested template on-demand. That would be immensely useful. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 22:24, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

There's an additional possible spin-off - use in detection of self-promotional reference spam. To quote in its entirety a WP:VPM post:

By mere coincidence, I found two cases of self-promotional reference spam within the past two months: Jojojava and 151.72.6.77, both adding numerous references to published articles of J. Benchimol and F. G. Santeramo, respectively, to various Wikipedia articles. I doubt that those two are the only cases out there, so I wondered if we could think of a way to automatically detect this sort of edit behavior: IPs or single-purpose accounts adding identical references to numerous articles (while adding no content). Maybe we could have a bot flagging this type of edits, because it is very hard to spot for the human eye. - posted by Bender235 [1]

A bot harvesting additions of cite journal will be able to spot sequences of additions of pointers to the same article / same author, presumably. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:03, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

@AugusteBlanqui: what is the list of history journals you're interested in? And as many aliases for them as you can think of... It will be better to use your sandbox or create a page in your user space for this and then link to it here, instead of updating a list directly on this page.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  11:25, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I'll mentioned WP:JCW here, which is similar to what you want. JLaTondre (talk · contribs) may be interested in working with you on something more specific. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 22:52, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Backing up spam blacklist and whitelist requests

Maybe this can be done by one of the currently existing archiving bots, but I'd like help with the following: On some discussion pages, discussions are 'grouped' in themes - WT:SBL and WT:SWL are two typical examples. Both mentioned pages (and some others) have two main sections, one for 'additions' and one for 'removals' (and some other discussion sections), and editors make subsections inside these sections depending on the nature of their request. These are currently manually backed up into archives with the same structure ('additions', 'removals', etc.) as I am not aware of a bot that is capable of handling this. I would like to see this done by bot, archiving sections ## days after last timestamp into archive pages following the same structure. Any ideas? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 06:17, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

How does the bot that archives WP:RFPP work? It also has separate sections, for protection requests and unprotection requests. ~Amatulić (talk) 06:38, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

@Amatulic: the bot there takes the subsections from the different sections, but archives them all into the same section. I'd like here to keep them in the archives also archived by section (or we would have to overthrow the whole system further, which may also be an option). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 06:55, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Well, let's ask ourselves, what would be the use case for retaining major page sections in the archive?

I can only speak for myself... From my point of view, when I need something from an archive, I use the search form that appears conveniently in the page header on most pages that have an archive. In that case, I don't really care what section of the archive contains the information I'm seeking, all I care about is that I find the information I'm seeking. In the case of the spam-blacklist talkpage, the search results don't distinguish whether a result is in the 'requests for addition' or 'requests for removal' sections anyway. I guess it's possible that someone would actually browse through an archive page to find something, but I suspect it's unlikely if there's a search form available. ~Amatulić (talk) 06:30, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Infobox video game related edits

Hi everyone,

I am a frequent editor of video game-related articles. I'm not really familiar with bots, so if this is a stupid question, my apologies. In the {{Infobox video game}}, the |modes= is for single-player, multiplayer, or both. Often other modes are introduced, like multiplayer online game, or specifically mentioning "2 player". The |engine= is intended for game engines with an established, independent article, and not for middleware, such as Havok (see Wolfenstein (2009 video game). Some games use an engine based upon the engine used in previous game and add a link to the game in the infobox (see South Park; sometimes the word "modified" is added, which doesn't say anything on how it modified (see Garry's Mod. Is there a way for a bot to systemically go through all of the WP:VG articles and change these things accordingly? soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 15:45, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

What are the changes you want to be made? KSFT^C 15:56, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Could it be so that only video game engines with their own article are mentioned in the engine parameter? That "modified" or a link to another video game is automatically removed? And that in the modes parameter, if that is the case, only [[Single-player video game|Single-player]] or [[Single-player video game|Single-player]], [[Multiplayer video game|multiplayer]] or [[Multiplayer video game|Multiplayer]] is listed? soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 16:06, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry if this sounds all too vague. soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 16:07, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

(I'm not a bot operator here, so I won't make the real changes, but...) OK, |modes= will be pretty easy to do. |engines= will be a little bit harder. Such edit probably won't be hard to make, but determining, if the target article is about video game or video game engine - that will be a bit harder. So video game engine will have {{Infobox Software}}, right? If target article doesn't have it, then remove it? Of course, we can give you a list of infobox parameter values for manual review, if it would suit you. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:58, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

It might be better to add code to the infobox template that detects unsupported values for |engine= and |mode= and places the articles in a maintenance category. That way, you would not need a bot. If you start a discussion at WP:VG or elsewhere, ping me and I can try to help with the template code. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:02, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Bot to automatically add Template:AFC submission/draft to Drafts

Let me explain my request. There are quite a few new users who decide to create an article in the mainspace, only to have it marked for deletion (not necessarily speedy). They might be given the option to move their article to the draft space, but just moving it to the draft space doesn't add the AfC submission template. Either someone familiar with the process who knows what to fill in for all the parameters (as seen in drafts created through AfC) or a bot would need to add the template, as the new user would definitely not be familiar with templates, let alone how to add one.
My proposal is this: Create a bot that searches for articles recently moved from the mainspace to the draft space and tags those articles with all the parameters that a normal AfC submission template would generate. For those who just want to move their articles to the draft space without adding an AfC submission template (as some more experienced editors would prefer, I'm sure), there could be an "opt-out" template that they could add. The bot could also search for drafts created using AfC that the editor removed the AfC submission template from and re-add it. Newer editors may blank the page to remove all the "interruptions" and accidentally delete the AfC submission template in the process, as I recently saw when helping a new editor who created a draft. Older editors could simply use the "opt-out" template I mentioned above. If possible, the bot could mention its "opt-out" template in either its edit summary or an auto-generated talk page post or (because it'll mainly be edited by one person while in the draft space) in an auto-generated user talk page post.
I realize this may take quite a bit of coding, but it could be useful in the long run and (I'm assuming) some of the code is there already in other bots (such as auto-generated talk page posts, as some "archived sources" bots do). -- Gestrid (talk) 06:55, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like a sensible idea; maybe the bot could check the move logs? Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 01:59, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay in the reply, Enterprisey. I forgot to add the page to my watchlist. Anyway, I'm guessing that could work. I'm not a bot operator, so I'm not sure how it would work, but what you suggested sounds right. -- Gestrid (talk) 07:44, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't think this should be implemented at all; adding an AfC template to drafts should be opt-in, not opt-out, since drafts with the tag can be speedely deleted. A bot can't determine whether an article moved to draft comes from an AfC or some other review or deletion process. Diego (talk) 10:12, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Primary School articles

Following this discussion, could anyone help set up a bot task that would

• Look for any article talk page tagged with Category:Articles in Wikipedia Primary School Project SSAJRP. Rename the category Category:Wikipedia Primary School articles
• Look for any article tagged with Category:Articles in Wikipedia Primary School Project SSAJRP in the main name space
• Remove that category from the main namespace
• Add the category in the article talk space with a category name change into Category:Wikipedia Primary School articles

Thank you for your help

Anthere (talk) 07:51, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Well, thank you anyway if you read me at least. I take it I will have to do it by hand. Oh well. Anthere (talk) 17:54, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

• This doesn't have to be done by hand. This can be done by WP:AWB fairly quickly as well. There's about 280 or so pages either way. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 20:28, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Uncatted stubs

Could someone please update Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Uncatted stubs? This should be done once in a while, ad it hasn't been done since March 2015. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 04:10, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Od Mishehu, how often do you want it updated? Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 03:41, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Monthly would probably be best. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 03:43, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Great, that's what I was thinking. I'm setting up the task now; it'll probably end up in APersonBot's userspace (so a BRFA isn't required), but I can transclude it in the stub sorting project's space. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 03:44, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

So apparently running write queries on labs is hard without proper configuration; I'll continue working on this, but any other bot operator is free to take this task and run with it. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 05:30, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Progress report: The bot currently does a good job of printing uncatted stub titles, but it isn't good at counting transclusions. Fix coming soon. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 04:03, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

External Links

Resolved

For the articles found using insource:/== *External Links *==/ please correct the following:

External Links → External links

--Leyo 19:13, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

I can do this with AWB if you like. I don't think a bot is all that necessary. Omni Flames (talk) 22:04, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Actually, there are more pages than I expected (around 1500). I think I'll file a BRFA. Omni Flames (talk) 00:57, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

BRFA filed Omni Flames (talk) 01:05, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

@Leyo: Y Done Omni Flames (talk) 07:24, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

I fixed insource:/== *External Link *==/ and started fixing insource:/== *External link *==/. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:00, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Y Done -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:04, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

I started fixing insource:/== *Source *==/. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:11, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

I started fixing insource:/== *Reference *==/. -- Magioladitis (talk) 20:27, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

I started fixing insource:/== *Also see *==/. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:54, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

I started fixing insource:/== *Also See *==/. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:01, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Omni Flames check the extra things I did based on this botreq. I also left a message on my BRFA. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:02, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

@Omni Flames and Magioladitis: I removed {{Resolved}} as several of the above searches still need to be done. --Leyo 07:43, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

BRFA filed -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:48, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Funnily enough this was one of SmackBot's first tasks. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 13 August 2016 (UTC).

I fixed everything in the database and I'll be running it regularly. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:05, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Some pages with insource:/== *External LInks *==/ found. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:09, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

I did a database scan. All fixed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:30, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

List of navboxes using bodystyle=width:auto

My July 15 edit to Module:Navbox (diff) changed its outer container from a single cell layout <table> to a <div>. It was later reported that this broke navboxes such as Old revision of Template:Events by month links/box that used |bodystyle=width:auto to reduce the container's width to the width of its contents — this works with tables, but not divs.

I suspect there are at least a few other navboxes that do this. I'd like a list of Template namespace transclusions of {{Navbox}}, {{Navbox with collapsible groups}}, {{Navbox with columns}}, and their redirects, that use either |bodystyle=width:auto or |style=width:auto, so I can fix them manually, but I'm not sure how to compile such a list myself. The regex would be tricky, for starters, since there may be spaces, newlines, and style declarations preceding width:auto. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 11:10, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Doing... Omni Flames (talk) 11:19, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Bot idea: Redirect Refining Bot

Sometimes a redirect has the same exact name as a subheading of the article the redirect points to.

Finding and sectionalizing redirects of this kind looks like something that could easily be automated using a bot.

For example, the redirect "Map design" leads to "Cartography", which has a subheading titled "Map design".

The redirect didn't lead to the section until I manually added "#Map design" to the redirect's target, making it a sectional redirect, like this:

#REDIRECT [[Cartography#Map design]]

Is making a bot that does this feasible and worthwhile?

What are the design considerations? The Transhumanist 12:12, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Coding... KSFT^C 20:15, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Is this always a good idea, though? Sometimes you might want to link to the lead of the article as it provides context. — Earwig ^talk 20:16, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I think it is. There are many redirects to page sections. If someone's looking for a particular part of the information on a page, they probably already have the necessary context. They can also scroll up if they don't. KSFT^C 20:20, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I would like to see a sample of 50 random cases before letting a bot make the edits. If human evaluation is deemed necessary then a bot list of all candidates will still be useful. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:30, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I assume that will be part of the BRFA. KSFT^C 03:11, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

How would a bot go about finding them in the first place? The Transhumanist 01:45, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist:I'm not sure what you mean. It isn't difficult to tell whether a page is a redirect. KSFT^C 13:17, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Finding redirects the titles of which are subheadings of the target article. ("Map design" redirects to Cartography, which just happens to have a section titled "Map design"). So, regex aside, to find other redirects like this, you'd have to search the target article of ALL redirects for the title of the redirect with equals signs around it like this: =Map design=. Right?

If the search was positive, then you would know to change #REDIRECT Cartography to #REDIRECT Cartography#Map design, for example.

So my questions are, "How does a bot search all redirects, and then access all target articles to search for the title of the redirects?" Do you have to get and scrape every redirect page and every target page?

What kind of resources (bandwidth) would this take up? Or would you do this with the database offline, and then overwrite online the redirects needing to be changed?

There are millions of redirects, right? 5,000,000 server calls limited to one per second takes over 57 days. I'm just trying to understand what the whole task entails.

What would the bot actually have to do, step by step? The Transhumanist 22:50, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

@KSFT: The Transhumanist 20:24, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I have seen this; I just kept forgetting to respond. I don't have much experience with bots, so if this is infeasible, we can decline it. I don't know how it would be done, exactly. KSFT^C 20:25, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

@Rich Farmbrough and Cacycle: We need further comments. The Transhumanist 23:42, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

The Transhumanist, we don't have to worry about the database hits, as just running SQL queries directly on the redirect table will work fine for our purposes. The chunk sizes I'm envisioning for a task like this is redirects fetched perhaps 50 at a time, and then the targets' section headers parsed 50 pages at a time, which will (with sensible delaying) probably result in an acceptable six edits per minute or so. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 03:54, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

@Enterprisey: What's the next step? The Transhumanist 20:44, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I'll get around to writing it eventually. I should have time this week. KSFT^C 04:39, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

@Enterprisey: How goes it? The Transhumanist 21:02, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: I think you pinged the wrong person. I have not gotten around to this yet. If someone else wants to, feel free. Otherwise, I still plan to eventually. KSFT^C 02:30, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

Another redir issue

@The Earwig, Enterprisey, KSFT, and PrimeHunter: Above we talked about fixing a redirect that points to a page that has a subheading that is the same as the title of the page being redirected.

Well, a similar situation is a redirect that does not match any subheadings in the target page, but for which we know should have a section. For example, History of domestication redirects to Domestication. But Domestication has no history section for History of domestication to point to. Should the bot discussed above be programmed to handle this type of situation too, and create empty sections? The resulting link in the redirect in this example would be Domestication#History. The availability of such sections may prompt editors to write about the history of the respective subjects. The Transhumanist 20:49, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

This is definitely beyond what bots are smart enough to handle, I think. Maybe a web tool that gives suggestions for sections to create, but not an automated bot. — Earwig ^talk 20:59, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Agree. Empty sections are annoying enough when humans make them. A bot would make many empty sections for things already covered in existing sections, and often place the section oddly. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:18, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Conversion of links

I was kindly redirected here by User:Madman,

consulting this thread that I left in his botpage (please see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Madman) and following the leads I provided therein, can anyone help out in "resurrecting" these WWW.FPF.PT links? Site has changed configuration it seems.

Attentively --Be Quiet AL (talk) 18:05, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

@Be Quiet AL: just to clarify, you want to replace all instances of http://www.zerozerofootball.com/jogador.php?id=XXX&search=1 with {{Zerozero profile|id=XXX}}? -- samtar ^{talk or stalk} 18:10, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

No, sorry, wrong diff, what I was trying to show with that one was that I messaged Madman! The Zerozero situation has already been dealt with totally, the situation I meant is this one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Football/Archive_103#Portuguese_Football_Federation), for example Anthony Lopes contains the already revived form, whereas Carlos Manuel Santos Fortes is still "dead". --Be Quiet AL (talk) 18:12, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

@Be Quiet AL: Do the links follow some sort-of pattern? Are there any similarities between the original links and the ones they need to be replaced with? Because from what I can tell going by your comments at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Football/Archive_103#Portuguese_Football_Federation, they don't, and if that's true, this wouldn't be possible with a bot. Omni Flames (talk) 10:54, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

As far as I know, in some cases (not sure if all) old URL has a different set of numbers attached to it than the new one (for example Simãozinho). So this is bad news, no? --Be Quiet AL (talk) 16:16, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Unless the site has some kind-of internal API, then this isn't going to be possible I don't think. A bot can't just conjure a number for the player out of nowhere. Omni Flames (talk) 06:44, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

N Not done because this task is Impossible to do with a bot. Omni Flames (talk) 06:04, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Pages without infoboxes

I am trying to take on a new task of adding infoboxes to any page that doesn't have one. It would be great to have a bot that helps categorize these. At the moment I am working off of pages that link to {{Infobox requested}}. The problem is that when people add an infobox to a page, they rarely remove that template from the talk page. So I see two things that this bot could do...

1. If a page has an infobox, remove {{Infobox requested}} from the talk page
2. If a page does NOT have an infobox, instead of worrying about adding a template to the talk page, add the page to a hidden maintenance category Category:Pages in need of an infobox

Just my thinking. --Zackmann08 (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 17:56, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

• The first task seems a great idea to me, there are far to many irrelevant and outdated templates on the site and this would cull some unneeded ones. The second idea assumes that all pages need an infobox. Welcome to the infobox wars. I suggest you drop that idea until such a time as we have consensus to create infoboxes on all pages. ϢereSpielChequers 18:11, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Let me ping all editors from the Zeta-Jones RfC so we can discuss this further. (Kidding, of course.) The first idea is interesting, and I might take it up. Let me see if it's feasible with AWB. It should be. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 18:17, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
    • I can do the first task easily, either manually with AWB or using a bot running on AWB. As for the second task, I think you should probably seek consensus for it first. Omni Flames (talk) 06:06, 30 July 2016 (UTC)
      • BRFA filed Omni Flames (talk) 07:55, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Israel population bot

There are up to 900+ localities in Israel that need a population update (A list can be seen here: User:Number 57/sandbox, these are also the names that should be used in the templates). There is a template for population:

| popyear        = {{Israel populations|Year}}

| population     = {{Israel populations|}}

| population_footnotes={{Israel populations|reference}}

These should be placed in infoboxes of locality articles (except for localities located in the Judea and Samaria area which has a newer population figure).

In addition to that, it is also needed that the first paragraph will also have at the end:

In {{Israel populations|Year}} it had a population of {{Israel populations|Ramat Hashofet}}.

When all the templates will be placed, there will be no need to update the population in every article, but insteed, the template it self will be updated when a new population figure will be published by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. I think there is such bot in the Hebrew Wikipedia and it will be good to have one here as well, because it will take a lot of time and efort to update every single locality.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 15:03, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

@Bolter21: Is there consensus that these changes should be made? I could probably do this, but I wouldn't feel comfortable running a bot unless I knew that the community agrees that these edits should be made. Omni Flames (talk) 07:47, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Well, the template has the newest population figure and it is needed that articles on localities would have the latest population figure.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 08:55, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

@Bolter21: The addition of the population in the navbox parameters seems fine, I'm mostly worried about your second request. Is there consensus for it? Omni Flames (talk) 09:27, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

This figure already exist in many articles but is outdated. Only updating the infobox will be half of the job. I am calling Number 57 to see what he has to say about this.--Bolter21 (talk to me) 13:20, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

I think we need to do this manually for two reasons: Firstly, it's not as straightforward as a simple addition to articles – some infoboxes already have the population figures in, but not from the template, and these will need replacing. This is further complicated by the fact that sometimes the reference used in the infobox is also used in the article text, so if a bot removes the existing bit in the infobox, it will remove a reference from the text. Secondly, there are several slightly different configurations of how the population is stated in the intro (and referenced), and I don't believe a bot would be able to replace this properly. Number 57 13:29, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

N Not done per Number 57. Omni Flames (talk) 23:43, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

"a" before initial vowel in double square brackets

Anyone interested fixing this? See T100721 for more details in necessary. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:47, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: I don't think this is suitable as a bot request. There are always cases where the "a" isn't the English indefinite article, or the initial vowel isn't pronounced as a vowel sound. There are lots of examples at User:Sun Creator/A to An. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:11, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

John of Reading OK this means, this task is not suitable for AWB neither. We need someone to create a list of pages then and see how many occurrences are there. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:17, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

I mean as a general fix. Any other suggestions are welcome but they should be tested before. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:34, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

migrate Library of Congress thomas links to congress.gov

the Library of Congress has refreshed their website, but the archiving is a problem. could we have a bot correct all the references & links to thomas to the congress.gov domain? Beatley (talk)

here is a target list https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?target=http%3A%2F%2F*.thomas.loc.gov&title=Special%3ALinkSearch

@Beatley: This doesn't seem to be really all that necessary. All the links retarget to the new page, so why do we need to update them? Omni Flames (talk) 00:42, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

i understand "if it ain't broke", but it's easier to fix before the links rot? and the nice librarians at the LOC did ask. Beatley (talk) 20:37, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Coding... trying my hand. ProgrammingGeek (Page! • Talk! • Contribs!) 16:44, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

UserStatus changing bot

It would be nice if there was a bot that would go around to the userpages of users who haven't been active after x amount of time and change their UserStatus subpage to away (and then to offline after some more time). That way users that forget to change it before going away or offline for a bit wouldn't be shown as being online when they aren't actually online. And of course, the bot would only do this to willing users who sign up for it (perhaps by adding a new parameter to the template that signals the bot?) Perhaps this is too social of a suggestion or not enough people use the template to warrant this kind of bot, but I thought I'd suggest it to see if anything comes of it. -- MorbidEntree - _{(Talk to me! (っ◕‿◕)っ♥)}(please reply using {{ping}}) 05:26, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Needs wider discussion.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 16:23, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support - as it would be beneficial.--BabbaQ (talk) 11:57, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Fix thousands of citation errors in accessdate

Since the recent changes in the citation templates (see Update to the live CS1 module weekend of 30–31 July 2016), the parameter access-date now requires a day and no-longer accepts a "month-year" formatted date such as August 2016 and displays a CS 1 error (Check date values in: |access-date=) error, as soon as the article has been edited.

• See example
• I have no idea how many articles this concerns on wikipedia.
• In the last 10 months I have used this now deprecated format in several thousand citations (in about 1000 articles).
• TODO: change/fix access-date or accessdate from, for example, August 2016 to 1 August 2016, by adding the first day of the month.
• Special case: if the parameter date contains a more recent date (e.g. 4 August 2016) than the fixed accessdate parameter (i.e 1 August 2016), the value in access-date would be older than that in date. Although accessing a cited source before its (publication) doesn't seem very sensible to me, there is (currently) no CS 1 error, so adjusting for "accessdate == date" is purely optional.
• Add a 1\s in front of the outwritten month ("August"), maintaining the original spacing, i.e. a white space between "=" and the date-value.

Adding a day to the accessdate parameter seems like a straight forward change to me. However if I am the only editor on wikipedia that used such date format, or if my request causes some kind of controversy, I'll prefer to do these changes manually. Thx for the effort, Rfassbind – talk 12:15, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Like this? If so, I can fix at least some portion of them.

As for the special case, it is not unusual for access-dates to precede publication dates, since some publication dates are in the future. Putting "1" in front of the month gets us within 30 days of the actual access date, which is close enough for verification. – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:55, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Oppose. Only the editor who accessed the information knows on what day the information was accessed. Only the editor who added the access date should fix this so-called error. I personally see no need to fix this "problem". Jc3s5h (talk) 13:29, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

@Jc3s5h I expected this kind of unhelpful comment, and that's why I was reluctant to post this request in the first place. It's depressing sometimes, yes, but that's the way wikipedia works. @Jonesey95 yes that's a perfectly good fix. Rfassbind – talk 15:47, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

I won't hesitate to propose a community ban against any bot that is designed to falsify information. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:56, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Access dates can be easily determined by looking at when the URL was added. That can then be used to reasonably extrapolate the access dates. InternetArchiveBot does the same when determining archive snapshot dates.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 16:16, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Access dates for journal citations with DOI or other identifier values can also be removed. Per the {{cite journal}} documentation, "access-date is not required for links to copies of published research papers accessed via DOI or a published book". – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:27, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678: Doesn't always work, particularly if text is copypasted between articles, see my post of 14:54, 4 August 2016 at User talk:Corinne#Sol Invictus. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:45, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

We can even check whether the link is still alive and put the current date. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:24, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

• oppose to adding day. The format should not insist on it and that should be reverted as I doubt that a well attended RfC has been held to see if there is a consnus for such a change. The change opens up a can of worms of the correct place for the day "January 16, 2016" or "16 January 2016" or 2016-01-16. The reason for access date is to help editors in the future to find an archive version of the page if necessary. A granularity of a month is sufficient for that. -- PBS (talk) 18:34, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

The day is useful for recent events, especially for web pages that are likely to be revised. Knowing whether a site was accessed before or after a late-breaking revelation can help an editor decide whether a site should be revisited, with an eye to revising the article to incorporate the latest information. But for older sources, the day is seldom useful. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:17, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Then leave it up to the judgement of the editor and do not impose the day automatically with a bot. -- PBS (talk) 20:25, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support if narrow in scope Since Rfassbind has personally revised many 100s (or more) of these pages, if he can attest to the access-date of each reference, I see no problem adding the day corresponding to his article revisions, which only comes to light after the module update. I don't know enough about the |access-date= portion of the module update to have a further option yet.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  22:44, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Methodology: Since Rfassbind has been consistent with his edit summaries, they can be searched for text such as "overall revision". These are all exclusively minor planet pages (as can/will be double checked as such), and all share similar online sources from which their references are built, so I have no problem taking this list, organizing it by date, and applying that date to all |access-date= parameters on the corresponding page (or whichever references Rfassbind confirms checking). As a further check, I'd only edit the "old" access-dates which match the corresponding month & year of the overall revision.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  00:06, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support as it would benefit the project.BabbaQ (talk) 11:57, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

• @BabbaQ How? -- PBS (talk) 19:46, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose per Jc3s5h and Cyberpower678. Providing a source answers the question: "where exactly did you get this information from", not "where else you can probably find this information, maybe". It is a bit dishonest to change the accessdate to something that for any given day has only about 3% chance of being the actual accessdate. It's also an important principle that people who use citation templates should read the template documentation and comply with it, instead of relying on others to "fix" things for them, especially in cases such as this when we aren't mind readers. Cyberpower678's point has merits: we should limit ourselves to what archive bots do. It doesn't fix all cases, but it does not introduce what are probable mistakes either. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 20:16, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

  I think you misunderstand. The CS1 and CS2 templates have been updated to reject citation templates when the accessdate parameter is missing a date and only has the month and the year. The idea of this request, since there are now thousands of citation templates giving nice red errors everywhere is to have a bot add a date to these access dates to fix the error. My idea is that a bot can extrapolate the access date based on when the link is added since in 95% of the case, the link is added the same day it was initially accessed when sourcing.—^cyberpower_{Chat:Limited Access} 20:22, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

• It would be better to make the templates recognize just the year, or just the year and month, for access dates that are older than the "improvement" to the templates. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:02, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

• @Cyberpower678 where is the RFC where a substantial number of editors agreed to this change? If no such RfC was held then no bot changes to enforce it should be made; and the obvious solution is to removed the red error message. If there are thousands of them then a lot (some added by me) were added with the day date deliberately miss out, so where is the RfC justifying changing them? -- PBS (talk) 14:41, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

  I wouldn't know. I didn't make the change to the CS templates. I'm just suggesting what a bot could do to fix the red error messages.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 14:44, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

• Comment Original discussion on incomplete access dates. The CS1 forum is the correct place to discuss if a CS1 error should be generated or not. I'm afraid this discussion is deadlocked due to questions about legitimacy of the CS1 error which can't be resolved here. -- GreenC 15:07, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Here are the stats:

• Articles with a bad access-date: 14665
• Cites with a bad access-date: 32255

Full list available on request (from the 8/20/2016 database) -- GreenC 17:35, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support—and base the day added on the day the edit was made, not the first or last of the month. Major style guides specify that an access date needs to be complete to the day, and so should we. I would also add a piece of logic so that the date added can't be earlier than the publication date if a full date is specified there, for obvious reasons. Imzadi 1979 → 22:47, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose and change the citation template back to accepting month and year. There is no valid reason for it to not accept it. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 00:48, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Convert dead Google Cache links to Wayback Machine

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T142178

Something related was discussed by Sfan00 IMG and Redrose64 in October 2012, but not further pursued.

We have a whole lot of Google Cache links, unfortunately most of them dead (it seems, unlike the Internet Archive, Google Cache is only a temporary thing). It would be nice to have a bot convert these links to Wayback Machine links, like I manually did here. The Google cache links contain the URL information:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:umS520jojVYJ:www.aals.org/profdev/women/clark.pdf+%22Joan+Krauskopf%22+%22Eighth+Circuit%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us → [2]

to a {{Wayback}} link like

{{Wayback |url=http://www.aals.org/profdev/women/clark.pdf }} → Archived at aals.org

I don't know how hard it would be for a bot to also fill the |date= and |title= parameters of {{Wayback}}, but that would be optional anyways. Maybe it could if the raw Google Cache link above had [http... some title] to it. Anyhow, just fixing the dead Google Cache links would be a valuable service in itself.

Of course, the above mentioned usage of {{Wayback}} goes for raw links like the one I fixed. If the Google Cache link was in a citation template's |archiveurl= parameter, then the fix should be

|archiveurl=http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:umS520jojVYJ:www.aals.org/profdev/women/clark.pdf+%22Joan+Krauskopf%22+%22Eighth+Circuit%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us

to

|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.aals.org/profdev/women/clark.pdf

--bender235 (talk) 14:01, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

This can be added to InternetArchiveBot's functionality. It's easy to add acknowledgement of archiving services and whether to flag them invalid or not. If you're patient I can try and add it in the upcoming 1.2 release.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 16:22, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Sure, we're not in a rush. Thank you. --bender235 (talk) 17:33, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Some points I should point out, some snapshots don't exist in the Wayback machine. Since it's obvious that google cache is only temporary, and that when a site dies, its respective cache will too. That being said, it's probably better to simply remove the cache and tag the URL as dead.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 09:46, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

If there's no snapshot on WBM either, then yes. But if Google Cache (and the original URL) are dead, repair it as a WBM link. --bender235 (talk) 13:32, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Events by month

• Please create the subcategories for each month&year in the Category:Events by month tree. Since 1901 till 2017, I think. See the correct structure in Category:2016 events by month. Also with subcats for Category:Sports events by month. Each subcategory must be similar to Category:July 2016 events / Category:July 2016 crimes / Category:July 2016 sports events. All this categories will be populated later. It is very difficult to create so many categories without bot help. Thank you. 178.94.167.39 (talk) 16:46, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
• Could WP:AWB do this? Unsure but @Omni Flames will know. ProgrammingGeek (Page! • Talk! • Contribs!) 20:20, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
  • IP and @ProgrammingGeek: Yeah, AWB can easily do this, but the only problem is that as per WP:MASSCREATION, any mass article creation task requires approval at WP:BRFA. The same applies to mass non-maintenance category creation, and BAG are very unlikely to approve such a task without a clear consensus that it should be done at somewhere like WP:VPPRO. Additionally, why do we need to create these categories if we've got nothing to fill them up with? There's no point in creating empty categories that we can't populate, because they'll just be deleted. Omni Flames (talk) 22:01, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
    • They will be empty for small time only. They will be populated by me and other users in some days/weeks, sure. Each month of 20th/21st century is presented by some events in wiki (not each for 19th). There are no any arguments against creation. We need for that categories. If not, let's go from 21st century (since 2001 till 2017). Create "events" / "crimes" / "sports events" subcategories. Also, I don't know, is it really to fill that categories by bot using information (month) from articles' infoboxes? If yes, really good. 178.94.167.39 (talk) 09:09, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
      • "They will be empty for a small time only". Why don't you just create them when you need to place articles in them. If you're willing to populate all these categories, then it should be barely any extra work to create them as well. "There are no any arguments against creation". Well, personally, I'm against the creation of these categories. You can't just create a bunch of categories because you feel like it, so please seek consensus for this task before coming back here. Omni Flames (talk) 23:41, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
        • Marking as Needs wider discussion. Omni Flames (talk) 23:42, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Change interface language to English in Google links

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T142224

This has been first suggested in 2014 by Sfan00 IMG (talk · contribs) but apparently never implemented.

A lot of the millions of Google Books, Google News, etc. links on Wikipedia carry a non-English language option. For example (in Midrakh Oz) the link

https://books.google.co.il/books?id=3-a0L0VACWYC&lpg=PP1&hl=iw&pg=PA202#v=onepage&q&f=false

opens Google Books in Hebrew. Since this is the English Wikipedia, the link should instead be

https://books.google.co.il/books?id=3-a0L0VACWYC&lpg=PP1&hl=en&pg=PA202#v=onepage&q&f=false

which opens Google Books in English. As Sfan00 IMG (talk · contribs) wrote back in 2014, we basically need a bot that looks for a link of the form *.google.*, looks for the regex &hl=((.)*)& and replaces it with &hl=en&. --bender235 (talk) 16:29, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Should it also be books.google.com instead of books.google.co.il? An insource search for insource:/books\.google\.co\.[a-tv-z]/ shows 7,000 pages linking to non-".uk" versions of Google Books. The search may need to be refined, but that looks like a first cut at finding target articles. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:38, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Well, in general it should be books.google.com instead of books.google.[not com], as a simple precautionary security measure. In some countries, particular top-level domains may raise suspicion of authorities and ISPs (*.co.il in some Arab countries, *.com.tw in China, etc.), so transforming these to the generic books.google.com might not be a bad idea.

However, this is a yet another fix than the one I suggested above. --bender235 (talk) 16:45, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Now that Quarry exists, it should be even easier to generate an initla list of links to fix ;) Sfan00 IMG (talk) 17:53, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

The abov said I think in some instanced the not linking via .com is too do with the fact that different Google Books domains apply differing interpretations of what is and isn't copyright/ licensed in a particular region. .com I think follows the US rules, whereas .ca, .uk ,.au etc follow more localised rules IIRC. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 23:02, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

No, that is not true. In cases of different copyright situations between, say, US and France, Google discriminates based on your IP address, not the URL you browse to. In other words, if something is illegal in France and you are currently in France, you won't see it regardless of whether you click books.google.fr or books.google.com. --bender235 (talk) 17:22, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

Make more use of external link templates

{{Anarchist Library text}}, for example, has just three transclusions; yet we currently have 222 links to the site which it represents. A number of similar examples have been uncovered, with the help of User:Frietjes and others, in recent days, at the daily Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log sub-pages. I've made {{Underused external link template}} to track these; it adds templates to Category:External link templates with potential for greater use.

Using external links templates aids tracking, facilitates quick updates when a site's link structure changes, and makes it easy to export the data into Wikidata.

Is anyone interested in running a bot to convert such links to use the templates, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:58, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

Requested articles check against draftspace

Would it be possible for a bot to check each of the redlinks within the subpages listed within Wikipedia:WikiProject Requested articles against draftspace and just create a list of which pages have drafts created for them? The pages that are blue are obviously created (or currently redirects) but if someone started a draft on it, it would be easier to remove it and link to the draft (which I'll review and do manually) and merge whatever content if any is listed there. I doubt it's a lot (if there's any) but it would helpful to know since some pages there have sources worth incorporating and working on. Basically, it would be (1) have a list of redlinks; (2) check if Draft:Redlink exists for each one and (3) if it exists, give me the page where you found it and the draftspace link. I suspect we'll have false positive as well but I think it'd be helpful. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 07:45, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

Template:China line

Could someone help substitute all transclusions of {{China line}}, which has been in the TfD holding cell for more than a year? (In addition, could instances of

{{China line|…}}{{China line|…}}

where two or more transclusions are not separated by anything (or by just a space in parameter |lines= of {{Infobox station}}), be replaced with

{{Plainlist|1=
* {{China line|…}}
* {{China line|…}}
}}

since this format seems to be heavily used in some infoboxes?)

Thanks, Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 16:04, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

If no-one else picks this task up, ping me in like two weeks and I'll do it. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 21:17, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

The first part of your request can already be handled by AnomieBOT if Template:China line is put in Category:Wikipedia templates to be automatically substituted. Pppery (talk) 22:09, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

@Pppery and BU Rob13: So maybe just do №2 with a bot through AWB and then put the template into AnomieBOT's category? Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 16:04, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

(Pinging BU Rob13 and Pppery again, because that might not have gone through Echo. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 16:05, 23 August 2016 (UTC))

Wait, Jc86035, I missed something in my previous comment. AnomieBOT will only substitute templates with many transclusions if they are listed on the template-protected User:AnomieBOT/TemplateSubster force. Note that this process of wrapper-then subst has been done before with Template:Scite. (I did get the above ping, by the way) Pppery (talk) 16:07, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

@Pppery: Thanks for the clarification; although since BU Rob13 is an administrator, that's not necessarily going to be much of a problem. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 16:12, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

@Jc86035: Note that pings only work if you do nothing but add a comment (not also move content around in the same edit), and thus neither me nor Bu Rob13 got the ping above. Pppery (talk) 16:19, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

(neither do pings work if I misspell the username, BU Rob13) Pppery (talk) 16:20, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

I can probably still handle this, but I currently have a few other bot tasks on the back burner and I'm running low on time. I'll get to it if no-one else does, but it's up for grabs. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 20:39, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

Non-nested citation templates

Please can someone draw up a list of templates whose name begins Template:Cite, but which do not themselves either wrap a template with such a name, or invoke a citation module?

For example:

• {{Cite web}} invokes citation/CS1
• {{Community trademark}} wraps {{Cite web}}
• {{Cite CanLII}} does not wrap another 'cite' template and does not invoke a citation module

I would therefore only expect to see the latter in the results.

The list could either be dumped to a user page, or preferably, a hidden tracking category, say Category:Citation templates without standard citation metadata, could be added to their documentation. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:16, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

I don't have access to database dumps, but petscan might be able to help. Here's a first stab at a query. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:07, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Thank you. Alas, my recent experience suggests that the relevant categories are not applied in many cases. One of the purposes of my request is to enable doing so. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:00, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Does this link work? It seems pretty basic. It might miss a few that for some reason include the text "cite" or "citation" in the template directly, but I don't think that will be many if any such templates. --Izno (talk) 16:08, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

aeiou.at

We have a round 380 links to http://www.aeiou.at/ using the format like http://www.aeiou.at/aeiou.encyclop.b/b942796.htm

Both the domain name and URL structure have changed. The above page includes a search link (the last word in "Starten Sie eine Suche nach dieser Seite im neuen AEIOU durch einen Klick hier") and when that link is clicked the user is usually taken to the new page; in my example this is: http://austria-forum.org/af/AEIOU/B%C3%BCrg%2C_Johann_Tobias

To complicate matters, 84 of the links are made using {{Aeiou}}.

Some pages may already have a separate link to the http://austria-forum.org/ page, and some of those may use {{Austriaforum}}.

Can anyone help to clear this up, please?

Ideally the end result will be the orphaning of {{Aeiou}} and all links using {{Austriaforum}}. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:56, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Gawker

Gawker (Gawker Media) has been driven into bankruptcy, and then bought out by Univision, which will be shutting it down next week. We've got a lot of articles that cite Gawker pages. Can someone send a bot through the database as a whole, looking for everything cited to Gawker, and then making sure that it's archived (archive.org, WebCite, etc)? DS (talk) 19:23, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps Green Cardamom or Cyberpower678 could handle this? They've both run bots related to archives in the past. This is an extremely high-priority task. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 19:36, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot maintains a massive database of URLs it encountered on Wikipedia and specific information about them, including their live states. I can set the states of all the URLs of this domain to dead and the bot will act on it.—^cyberpower_{Chat:Limited Access} 20:16, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678: I noticed InternetArchiveBot has been disabled for a bit. What's the reason for that? ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 20:46, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

A lot of bugs have been reported. They're all fixed, but given the massive scope of this bot, it's being extensively tested before being re-enabled.—^cyberpower_{Chat:Limited Access} 21:13, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

When archived at Internet Archive, Univision has the option to block viewing at any time for the whole domain with a single line in robots.txt .. I don't know if Univision would do that but once Peter Theil learns the articles are still available online it seems likely he would put pressure on Univision. WebCite only checks robots.txt at the time of archival. Archive.is doesn't care about robots and is outside US law. Maybe I can generate a list of the Gawker URLs and trigger a save for WebCite and archive.is but I haven't done that in an automated fashion before so don't know if it will work. -- GreenC 21:14, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

I believe WebCite supports archiving, even in batches, of URLs over their API, which is XML based. It will then return the respective archive URL. If you wrote a script to handle that, and generate an SQL script, I can run it my DB and InternetArchiveBot can then make the alterations. I can very quickly populate the respective URLs we are dealing with.—^cyberpower_{Chat:Limited Access} 21:23, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

It looks like archive.is has already done the work. Every link I spot checked exists at archive.is .. also I checked webcitation.org and can't find docs on batch archiving. And I read they will take down pages on request by copyright owners so same situation as archive.org with robots. Maybe the thing to do is save by default to Wayback and if robots.txt blocks access deal with that later the normal way (not established yet). At least there is backup at archive.is and probably less than 1500 original URLs total. -- GreenC 23:44, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Just a note that archive.is seems to be better at archiving Twitter posts, which Gawker articles refer to frequently. I think that might be the better choice for completeness of the archive. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 21:49, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Does it help that all of Gawker's original content is CC-attribution-noncommercial? DS (talk) 22:05, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

The ToU says "Gawker Media's original content" but is some of it may be by guest writers plus user comments I would be wary of a bot sweeping up everything as CC. -- GreenC 23:44, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

• InternetArchiveBot now considers the entire gawker domain as dead.—^cyberpower_Chat:Absent 13:39, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

CFD daily subpages

A bot should create daily WP:CFD subpages for days in the following month at the end of each month. The ones up to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2016 August 1 were created by ProveIt, while the ones from Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2016 August 2 to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2016 September 1 were created by BrownHairedGirl. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:56, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

@Anomie: Could part of the script you use for AnomieBOT's TfD clerking be adopted for this easily? You wouldn't even need to worry about the transclusions and all that, just the creation of the actual subpages similar to how Special:PermaLink/732802882 looks. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 05:50, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it could, although for TfD it creates each page daily instead of doing a whole month at a time (is there a reason for doing a whole month at once?). Are there any other clerking tasks at CFD that could use a bot, e.g. updating the list at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion#Discussions awaiting closure? Looking at the history, it seems @Marcocapelle: and @Good Olfactory: do it manually at the moment. For reference, the list of things AnomieBOT does for TFD are listed at User:AnomieBOT/source/tasks/TFDClerk.pm/metadata in the "Description" column. Anomie⚔ 15:50, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

I created the August pages after I noticed in the early hours of one day that the current day's page didn't exist. I have done that a few tines over the years, but there appear to be other editors who do it regularly. It's a tedious job, so congrats to the regulars ... but it could easily be done by a bot.

When I did the August pages I had forgotten that some time back, I created a template which could be substed to create the new pages. This discussion reminded me of it, and I eventually found it at Template:CFD log day. It may need some tweaking, but it would be handy for a bot to use something like that. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:02, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

• It would be nice if this process can be automated. It would be preferable, in that case, to create daily updates. Marcocapelle (talk) 17:40, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

It is already mostly a bot, I have a program that creates a page and loads it into the paste buffer, then you just paste. It takes about 10 minutes to make a months worth of pages this way. It would be no big deal to make it fully a bot, I've written dozens of bots for a previous employer. If I had permission to run a bot I would have done so years ago, but really it only takes 10 minutes a month. I hate to think of anyone making them by hand. -- Prove It ^(talk) 15:23, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Dead links

Are there currently an active bot that can archive dead links in articles? Otherwise I would request that one is started. It seems that all the active ones are inactive.BabbaQ (talk) 11:55, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

See the above section on Gawker - Cyberpower678 said that his bot is still being tested and stuff, so it might be some time before that can start running. Enterprisey (talk!) _{(formerly APerson)} 18:41, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Publisher

Is it possible to request that a bot adds the publisher in the |publisher=, section of the references in articles. I see articles everyday without the Publisher named. I think such a task would be beneficial for the project when people are searching for information and its publishers.--BabbaQ (talk) 12:01, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

@BabbaQ: This couldn't be done for all references, as it may not be possible to programmatcially determine the publisher. It's also nots sensible for a citation where |work= includes a link to a Wikipedia article. But it may be possible (and could be added to AWB's routine tasks) for a set of commons sources. Do you have some examples in mind? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:37, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: - Sorry for the late reply. If I am getting your point correctly I would suggest adding sources like BBC News, Sky News, CNN News as a routine task to fill. It would be quite easy I pressume. Also for my own benefit while creating articles about Swedish subject I would appreciate if Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens nyheter (DN), Svenska Dagladet (SvD), The Local, was added. If I have understood you correctly those are the kind of sources I would think would benefit the Wikipedia project. --BabbaQ (talk) 14:23, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Bot to remove external link to MySpace?

Following the TfD discussion here: Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2015_January_15#Template:Myspace, I think we should remove all external links to MySpace as unreliable. They keep poping up. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:05, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

We have over 3400 links to MySpace. I'd want to see a much wider discussion before these were removed. [And its deplorable that a template for a site we link to so many times was deleted] Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:43, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

They are often in the external links section. See 120 Days. It is the band's homepage. Is there reason to delete primary sources? Also don't understand the template deletion. -- GreenC 13:21, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Apparently the links were added after the template was deleted. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:41, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Looks like they were converted? [3] -- GreenC 14:16, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

I've posted a proposal to recreate the template. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:16, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Green Cardamom and Pigsonthewing thanks for the heads up. I would expect that according to the deletion reason of the template that the links were removed. Otherwise, the template is a valuable shortcut that helps against linkrot. - Magioladitis (talk) 15:23, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Non-notable article finder bot

Almost 1000+ pages get created everyday. Our New page patrollers work hard. Still some articles which are clearly non-notable survive deletion. In Special:NewPages we can see only one month old articles, if we click the "oldest".

Some pages can only be deleted only through AFD. Users tag them with speedy deletion, administrators remove speedy deletion tag with edit summary suggesting "that the article has no notability but can be deleted in AFD". In some cases the article is not taken to AFD, as the user who tagged for speedy moves on to other new pages, or he is busy with his personal life (they are volunteers). And as the AFD template stays for two/three days before being removed by administrators, other new page patrollers who focus on pages two days old sees the speedy deletion tag. But sometimes, they don't notice that administrator removed the speedy deletion tag with a suggestion of AFD. Luckily a few of these articles pass one month limit and survives on English Wikipedia.

Some articles are prodded for deletion, the prod is removed after two/three days. If anybody notices that the article is not notable, then it will be taken to AFD.

And some articles where the PROd is removed survives if the article is long, well written, has paragraphs, infobox template, categories, seemingly reliable sources, good English,(But only doing extra research can show that the article is not-notable). Means spend our internet bandwidth.

As there is a proverb "finding needle in a haystack". Finding these articles from five million articles is a nightmare. We don't have the time, energy and eternal life, nor any other editor.

I am damn sure that there are thousands of such article among five million articles. Only a bot can find these articles.

This is what the bot will do. In Wikimedia commons they have flickr Bot.

• This Bot will check articles, which are more than six months old. If any article which was speedily deleted before and recreated by the same user, but was not deleted after recreation by the same user, this bot will put a notice on the talk page of the article. Volunteers will check the deletion log and see whether the article was speedily deleted before.

• Those article which are minimum six month old, has less than 50 edits in edit history and edited by less than 15 editors. This bot will google news search with "article name" inside quotation marks"_____". The bot will also google book search the article name. If both the results are not satisfactory, then the bot will put a notice on the talk page of the article (If google news results show that the article is not notable, but google book search shows good result, then the bot won't tag the article's talk page). Then volunteers will check the notability of the article. The bot will not make more than 30 edits everyday.

The problem is that many good articles are unsourced and badly written, After checking on the internet, editors decide that the article is notable. While some articles which doesn't have any notability are wonderfully written. Thank you. Marvellous Spider-Man 13:13, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

User:Marvellous Spider-Man, for something like this, could you apply the above rules to a set of articles manually, and see what happens - pretend your a bot. Then experiment with other rules and refine and gain experience with the data. Once an algo is established that works (not many false positives), then codifying it becomes a lot less uncertain because there is evidence the algo will work and datasets to compare with and test against. You could use the "view random article" feature and keep track of results in columns and see what washes out to the end: Column 1: Is six months old? Column 2: Is 50 edits? etc.. -- GreenC 13:56, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Birmingham City Council, England

Birmingham City Council have changed their website, and all URLs in the format:

https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=Member-Services%2FPageLayout&cid=1223092734682&pagename=BCC%2FCommon%2FWrapper%2FWrapper

are dead, and, if in references, need to be either marked {{Dead link}} on converted to archived versions.

Many short URLs, in the format:

http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/libsubs

are also not working, but should be checked on a case-by-case basis. *sigh* Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:54, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: I believe Cyberpower678's InternetArchiveBot already handles archiving dead URLs and thus no new bot is needed. Pppery (talk) 15:03, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: Did all pages get moved to the new URL format, or did they create an entirely new site and dump the old content? If the former, it may be helpful to first make a list of all the old URLs on Wikipedia, and then try to find the new locations for a few of them. That may help make the bot job easier if a good pattern can be found. Having the new URL format is helpful, but having real examples of the before and after for multiple pages should make it easier. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 06:23, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

The page for the first, long, URL I gave above, like many others I've looked for, appears not to have been recreated on the new site.

The page that was at:

http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=Parks-Ranger-Service%2FPageLayout&cid=1223092737719&pagename=BCC%2FCommon%2FWrapper%2FWrapper

(archived here) is now, with rewritten content, at:

https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/20089/parks/405/sutton_park

and clearly there is no common identifier in the two URLs. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:05, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Help with anniversary calendar at Portal:Speculative fiction

In order to more easily update the anniversary section of the calendar, I would like a bot that:

1. Runs once per week
2. Makes a list at Portal:Speculative fiction/Anniversaries/Working of mainspace articles listed within Category:Speculative fiction and its subcategories (the categories in the "Subcategories" section on the category page).
3. Updates Portal:Speculative fiction/Anniversaries/Current with all mainspace articles currently linked from the anniversaries pages (there are pages for every day of the year in the format Portal:Speculative fiction/Anniversaries/January/January 1).
4. Checks Portal:Speculative fiction/Anniversaries/Ignore for a list of articles marked to be ignored (this page will be updated manually unless we can figure out a good system where the bot can do the listing).
5. Updates Portal:Speculative fiction/Anniversaries/Todo with all mainspace articles from step 2 that are not in the list in step 3 and not listed to be ignored in step 4.

I hope that makes sense. Anyone up to the task? Thanks in advance for your time. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 06:18, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

@Nihonjoe: I don't think we really need a bot to do this. I can update the pages every week semi-manually if you like. Just one thing, I'm a bit confused as to what the "ignore list" is meant to do? How do you plan on getting the articles to go on it? Omni Flames (talk) 22:05, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

@Omni Flames: I figured a bot would be able to do it faster than a person. It shouldn't be too complicated a task, either, but it would be tedious (hence the bot request). I could do it manually myself, but it would take a lot of time. The ignore list would likely be updated manually, with pages determined to not be needed on the Todo list. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 22:10, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

@Nihonjoe: Well, when I said manually, I didn't really mean manually. I meant more that I'd create the lists using a bot each week and paste it on myself. That would mean we wouldn't even need a BRFA or anything. However, we can do it fully-automatically if that suits you better. Omni Flames (talk) 22:58, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

@Omni Flames: If that's easier, that's fine. I figured having a bot do it automatically would relieve someone of having to manually do something every week. I'm fine either way, though. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:15, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Idea: Multi-wiki KML bot

Are there any bot operators willing to work on a multi-work bot task? If so, please see meta:Talk:KML files - Evad37 [talk] 04:06, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Coordinates format RfC: Infobox park

Per this RfC (see Help:Coordinates in infoboxes), could all articles using {{Infobox park}} which are also in Category:Pages using deprecated coordinates format be run through with AWB (minor fixes turned on) with this regex (entire text, case-sensitive, other options default)? This should affect roughly 2,000 pages (with no visual changes, aside from the minor fixes).

Find:

 *\| ?lat_d *= ?([\-0-9\. ]+)(\n? *\| ?lat_m *= ?([0-9\. ]*))?(\n? *\| ?lat_s *= ?([0-9\. ]*))?(\n? *\| ?lat_NS *= ?([NnSs]?) ?)?\n? *\| ?long_d *= ?([\-0-9\. ]+)(\n? *\| ?long_m *= ?([0-9\. ]*))?(\n? *\| ?long_s *= ?([0-9\. ]*))?(\n? *\| ?long_EW *= ?([EeWw]?) ?)?(\n? *\| ?region *= ?(.*) ?)?(\n? *\| ?dim *= ?(.*) ?)?(\n? *\| ?scale *= ?(.*) ?)?(\n? *\| ?source *= ?(.*) ?)?(\n? *\| ?format *= ?(.*) ?)?(\n? *\| ?display *= ?(.*) ?)?(\n? *\| ?coords_type *= ?(.*) ?)?(\n? *\| ?coords *= ?.*)?

(There's a space at the beginning.)

Replace:

| coords = {{subst:Infobox coord/sandbox
| lat_d   = {{subst:#if:{{subst:#invoke:String|match|$1|%.%d%d%d%d%d|plain=false|nomatch=}}|{{subst:#invoke:String|replace|{{subst:#expr: ($1 * 10000) round0}}|(%d%d%d%d)$|.%1|1|false}}|$1}}
| lat_m   = $3
| lat_s   = $5
| lat_NS  = $7
| long_d  = {{subst:#if:{{subst:#invoke:String|match|$8|%.%d%d%d%d%d|plain=false|nomatch=}}|{{subst:#invoke:String|replace|{{subst:#expr: ($8 * 10000) round0}}|(%d%d%d%d)$|.%1|1|false}}|$8}}
| long_m  = $10
| long_s  = $12
| long_EW = $14
| region  = $16
| dim     = $18
| scale   = $20
| source  = $22
| format  = $24
| display = $26
| type    = $28
}}

Thanks, Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 15:22, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

(Pinging Mandruss and Jonesey95. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 15:23, 31 August 2016 (UTC))

@Jc86035: Are you sure about |type=$28? That parameter is not deprecated in Infobox park. ―Mandruss ☎ 16:25, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Are there sample edits that show a few articles in which this regex replacement has already been done? – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:21, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

@Mandruss and Jonesey95: The |type= is the parameter in {{Infobox coord/sandbox}} (substituted to create {{Coord}}). The parameter |coords_type= of Infobox park is put into it. I've done the replacement on 11 infoboxes (example, example), but without the rounding for latitude and longitude (which I have yet to test properly). Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 01:31, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

@Jc86035: More things I don't understand. What is the rounding you refer to? Are you altering coordinates precision? And in your first example you are switching from signed decimal to unsigned, is that your intent? ―Mandruss ☎ 01:51, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

@Mandruss: The precision in many coordinates – 7 digits – is rather high for parks, which are generally wider than 10 centimetres. Because the input has always been put through {{Infobox coord}} (I'm just substituting a variation with comments and empty parameters removed), there aren't any visual changes. I used Infobox coord as a wrapper because I didn't want to break anything in current uses. —Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 02:04, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Rounding improved to keep zeroes on at the end. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 02:14, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Very not happy with bot decreasing precision. Mill Ends Park --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:17, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

@Tagishsimon: Well we could always take |area= into account, but the vast majority of parks don't need that level of precision. I'll build it in at some point. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 02:21, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Also, that one doesn't need conversion since it already uses |coords=. Jc86035 (talk • contribs) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me 02:23, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

@Jc86035: WP:COORDPREC suggests 5 d.p. for objects between about 0–37° latitude and about 8–75 m. If we're going to blindly reduce precision, I don't think we should go fewer than 5 d.p. for parks. I assume we're never going to increase precision.
If you at some point take area into account, the only reasonable object size for this purpose would be the sqrt of area. Object size is always one-dimensional, which is why COORDPREC states it as m and km, not m² and km². ―Mandruss ☎ 02:57, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Draft space redirects

An adminbot should create a fully protected redirect from Draft:A to A for each article A (including disambiguation pages). If Draft:A already exists, then there are three cases to consider.

• Draft:A is not a redirect. In this case, the adminbot will ignore it.
• Draft:A already redirects to A. In this case, the adminbot will fully protect it.
• Draft:A is a redirect to some target other than A. In this case, the adminbot will fully protect and retarget it to A.

63.251.215.25 (talk) 17:05, 2 September 2016 (UTC)