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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Laurinkus (talk | contribs) at 17:50, 27 February 2006. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Shortcut

This is not the page to request a bot.

Post here to ask permission to run a bot yourself. To request that someone write a bot to do something, please see Wikipedia:Bot requests instead.

How to ask for permission:

If you want to run a bot on the English Wikipedia, please follow the policy at Wikipedia:Bots, explain the use of your bot on this talk page, wait a week then ask for a bot flag at m:Requests for bot status if no objections were made.

How to file a complaint:

If a bot has made a mistake, the best thing to do is to leave a message on its talk page and/or that of its owner. For bots on their initial one-week probation, please also leave a note on this page.

If a bot seems to be out of control, ask an adminstrator to block it temporarily, and make a post below.

Authorized bots do not show up in recent changes. If you feel a bot is controversial and that its edits need to be seen in recent changes, please ask for the bot flag to be removed at m:Requests for bot status.

Archives:

Previous approvals and random discussions:

General policy discussions:

IW-Bot-as

I'd like to run bot User:IW-Bot-as, which will place interwiki links (mostly to lithuanian wiki). I would like to request bot-status for this bot. I use interwiki.py which is periodically updated from CVS. --Laurinkus 17:50, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

SEWilcoBot

User:SEWilcoBot has been created for various automated tasks, based on the pywikipediabot, often with modifications, to do various things that its creator was too lazy to do by hand. See user page for details and current status.

    • First task: Populating country template arrays for Wikipedia:WikiProject Flag Template.
      • Starting from United Nations list. Downloaded templates which point to flags. Built database of names, flags, and abbreviations.
      • Template array being initialized by script which does nothing if a template exists, and has 60+ seconds delay.

(SEWilco 06:24, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC))

I approve the running of this bot. -- AllyUnion (talk) 06:28, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I disapprove for it getting flag status at this time. -- AllyUnion (talk) 23:00, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
      • Present version: custom pywikipedia bot, given a parameter which directs it at a directory containing country info. If a template already exists, does nothing. Else creates template with country name/abbreviation/flag info. Using 61-second put_throttle. (SEWilco 00:44, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC))
  • June 23 2005: Most UN countries initialized. Various sources combined. Initialized table for finding ISO codes when a country name is known. Filling in gaps. (SEWilco 05:15, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC))
  • June 24 2005: All ISO countries defined. All non-obsolete FIFA countries defined. List of FIFA country codes converted to {{country}} format. Next will do conversion of existing ISO templates (ie, United Nations member states list) with 120-second put_throttle. (SEWilco 02:54, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC))
  • June 26 2005 ISO and many non-ISO countries updated. Converted Major League Baseball rosters to {{flagicon}} format. (SEWilco 00:23, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC))
  • July 3 2005 Testing footnote/references helper. (SEWilco 3 July 2005 23:21 (UTC))
  • July 7 2005 Manually used as helper to upgrade footnotes/References in various articles. Converting inline external links and others to Wikipedia:Footnote3 format. (SEWilco 7 July 2005 06:05 (UTC))
  • July 10 2005 Bot flag request: I will be cleaning up {{main}} and related template references and believe it would be polite to reduce Changes clutter. (SEWilco 07:44, 10 July 2005 (UTC))[reply]
    • Details: The misapplication of {{main}}, which is supposed to be used at the top of an article, has been brought up several times. I will modify a pywikimedia tool to change {{main|}} references which are "too far" from the top to a cousin such as {{seemain|}}. "Too far" will be a small number of text lines which have no leading nonalphabetic characters, thus accepting various templates and Wiki markup as being part of the "top". The above test tends to fail by overlooking some candidates, which merely does not change the current situation. I have not here defined the template to change to due to an ongoing discussion (improperly taking place in TfD) which will end soon and may change details, but the discussion will not change the existing tangle to be cleaned up. The needed code is trivial compared to the previous activities. (SEWilco 07:44, 10 July 2005 (UTC))[reply]
    • Schedule: I request the bot flag because by the time there is a week of history its work will be done, and a history of the behavior of my other tools exists. Special:Contributions&target=SEWilcoBot I point out that the mostly repetitious edits of User:SEWilco/Sandbox are examples of the testing given to tools. (SEWilco 07:44, 10 July 2005 (UTC))[reply]

In order to elaborate my reasoning, SEWilco's bot is described as "one-time" usage. I will approve for SEWilco to get his bot flag if he can boil down his specifics of what the bot will be used for. The reason behind this is that if the bot is going to run, it should run for something very specific and not at whim for one time tasks. This is only an insurance to as what we know SEWilco's bot is doing and whether or not the community approves it. --AllyUnion (talk) 06:40, 18 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • Based upon the descriptions of existing bots, and the variety of existing tools, I had not realized the bot flag was assigned for a specific task. It had seemed to me that the bot flag was a courtesy to reduce cluttering the changes visible to users during routine/maintenance alterations. I assumed this bot-usage community would still know what a bot is doing despite the flag (or due to it, if some people/bots have a "show only bot activity" ability). I thought these descriptions are part of that exchange, although some are rather brief. The speed privileges are minimal, and their import is actually in the rules throttling the unflagged to reduce speedy damage from the careless. (SEWilco 09:04, 19 July 2005 (UTC))[reply]
    • There was a whole issue with Anthony DiPierro where his bot was doing something that it was not suppose to do. A complaint was made here about it. What I am finding is that less and less people are worrying about what bots are doing and more and more are paying attention to vandalism. I am not saying you are a bad user, but I don't want somewhere down the line where users complain about why this and that person is permitted to run a bot that is doing something it wasn't designed or suppose to do. I don't mean to offend you or sound very bureacratic, but I feel that very few people come to review this page. --AllyUnion (talk) 04:58, 29 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If you can generalize this down to something like, "bot specifically to maintain templates," then I'd be happy to accept that generalization. --AllyUnion (talk) 03:27, 9 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Shark articles unifying bot

I request to run a bot, this is answers to the questions to be answered when requesting to run one.

  • The bot will be manually supervised
  • The bot will run while there is suitable task for it to do, there is no fixed set of tasks and therefore no fixed time line as of now.
  • pywikipedia
  • The first purpose is to unify the shark articles, to put fishbase, ITIS, marinebio links using the correct templates, if this works out (I have not run any wiki bot before so not sure how complicated it is) I might want to do other work to unify the articles later, and change/add the same templates for other fish articles also. I expect to be able to find the scientific name from tax box and add fishbase template autoatically, need to think a bit more about other references.
  • There are about 30+ shark articles now, a bot would make things much faster (I expect)

I will run the bot under user User:StefanBot, Stefan 04:08, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please create a user page for the bot. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:17, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Talk page created Stefan 12:23, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
1 week trial run permitted, may apply bot flag after that. Please make certain your bot is listed in the Category:Wikipedia bots, and on Wikipedia:Bots. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:49, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
ON X-mas holiday now, will start running after new year I think, thanks Stefan 17:10, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Bot to create French administrative division info

I'd like permission to use a bot for this. There is some discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject French communes and you can see some of the initial articles at [3] (machine generated but input by hand). I'm proposing adding arrondissements initially and then moving on to cantons and communes. I'll run it under User:Dlyons493Bot. It'll be manually supervised initially until I'm happy it's running OK. Currently working in the pywikipedia framework. I ran a test on three articles and it seems to be OK - see Arrondissements of the Eure-et-Loir département Dlyons493 Talk 18:43, 20 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please create a page for the bot. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:19, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Um... is there an English name for these pages? "Arrondissement" is not a word anyone would likely type normally. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:56, 25 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
'Fraid there isn't really an alternative - see e.g. Arrondissement in France. Mostly people will arrive at these as links from other articles anyway. And it's more typeable than Transitional low-marsh vegetation with Puccinellia maritima, annual Salicornia species and Suaeda maritima which used to be an article :-) Dlyons493 Talk 21:17, 25 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Approved for one week trial period. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:28, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Dlyons493 Talk 15:11, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I've extended this to add individual Arrondissements e.g. Arrondissement of Brioude and it seems to be working OK. I hope to move on to individual cantons and communes over the next few weeks. Can I apply for an extension of the permission period? Dlyons493 Talk 13:53, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, if you haven't any complaints for the first week run, you may apply for a bot flag. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:20, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

One time run request - Kakashi Bot; Text replacement

(copied from User talk:AllyUnion.)

Am I correct in assuming that one can request jobs to be done by your bot here? I'm currently trying to orphan Image:Flag of Czech Republic.svg and replace it with Image:Flag of the Czech Republic, but the amount of pages it is used in (especially English, French, Spanish wikipedias) is enormous... File:Austria flag large.png ナイトスタリオン ✉ 20:01, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand the difference between the two. --AllyUnion (talk) 23:34, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
For countries/regions with the terms "Republic" or "Islands" in their short name, correct grammar is "Flag of the Czech Republic", not "Flag of Czech Republic". Image names are expected to follow the same naming rules as article, AFAIK, so this grammar mistake should be corrected, and it'll be much easier with a bot. Furthermore, I've managed to upload basically all the national flags in svg format, and those should replace the earlier png versions, so the bot could be put to further use... Sorry if I'm getting on your nerves, but your bot seemed to be available for tasks. File:Austria flag large.png ナイトスタリオン ✉ 00:04, 25 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I dont mind doing it, thats if we have agreement that it should be done. thanks Martin 15:21, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User:Chlewbot (interlanguage bot)

I am asking for permision to run User:Chlewbot under a bot flag. It's primary goal is to check, add and fix interwikis originated at Spanish language Wikipedia.

Thank you.

— Carlos Th (talk) 21:16, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Are you using the pywikipedia framework? Please specify you are, or using something else. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:04, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. I am using pywikipedia framework.
— Carlos Th (talk) 12:34, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Approved for a trial test run of 1 week. Please keep your bot updated with the latest CVS code. May apply for bot flag after trial test run if no complaints. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:55, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Well. It seems there have been no complains. I am keeping chlewbot updated by CVS. Thank you. — Carlos Th (talk) 14:18, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Request at meta fulfilled. --Ascánder 02:44, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AzaBot

I would like to be allowed to run a manually assisted bot for the sole purpouse to touch pages to find obsolete templates, and eventually change templates calls to an other. →AzaToth 00:03, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification, what I ment by change template calls, is mostly to subst: them. this for tfd semi-orphant template →AzaToth 00:57, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please create a page for your bot. What is the reason behind doing this? --AllyUnion (talk) 09:05, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry for stepping in. Currently, I'm replacing calls of template:if to the server friendlier template:qif (AzaToth is the original inventor of qif).
We are currently accused for server strain by some Wikipedians at WP:AUM and I feel the technology behind if/qif is a bit "at stake" at the moment. There is a possibility that lot's of templates, among which are template:web reference and template:book reference are abolished due to pressure originating from WP:AUM.
"What links here" of template:if brings up a list of about 20'000 articles but I estimate that about 80..90% of the listed pages in fact do not use if as we are in the consolidation process to qif. So it is quite hard to find the real uses of template:if.
I've been working together with AzaToth around if/qif and templates "web reference" and "book reference" and others. I can affirm he is a nice person and he abides be the rules of wikipedia. I have just asked User:Bluemoose for a touch run on this, but I personally would think it would be good if AzaToth would be enabled to run a bot for touching so we might be able to lighten Bluemoose a bit from such requests, although I can say he's very kind and helpful. If AzaBot would get green light, I would ask AzaToth for such touch runs. – Adrian | Talk 21:58, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I operate User:NetBot which can assist with these tasks. Contact me on my talk page. -- Netoholic @ 07:38, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I oppose this bot - meta-templates ought be fully deprecated, not bot-inserted. Phil Sandifer 07:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Does this also mean you oppose exchanging calls of template:if with the server friendlier template:qif? Please note that template:if is a meta-template whereas template:qif is not. If if is replaced by qif in a template X, then that does not change the "meta-template" state of X. In fact, one template level is eliminated. – Adrian | Talk 13:03, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

KaiserbBot

I would like to request a bot flag for a manually assisted bot running on the English wikipedia to assist in fixing a variety of firearms, woodworking, and other pages with numerous redirects, and double redirects. Kaiserb 02:16, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You'll have to be more specific of what you plan to fix. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:31, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
When testing the bot it was used to disambiguate a number of pages from Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links. The bot performed well for this task and would continue to disambiguate pages. Additionally I would like to use it to solve disambiguation and redirects on specific firearm pages. There are numerous links on each firearm page to the particular ammunition used by said firearm. One that is a particular issue is 9 mm, 9 mm Luger and 9 mm Parabellum, that all link through a redirect pointing to 9 mm Luger Parabellum. In the first case 9 mm could refer to (9 x 18 mm), (9 x 20 mm SR), 9 mm Glisenti, (9 x 19 mm), (9 x 21 mm), (9 x 23 mm Steyr), or (9 x 23 mm Largo) while 9 mm Luger and 9 mm Parabellum are both 9X19. It would be nice to clean up this and other ambiguous ammunition links to tidy up these pages. --Kaiserb 05:14, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Approved for an one week trial run. If no objections made, may apply for a bot flag. Please remember to leave a note on this page if you plan to change the scope of what your bot does. Also, please be more descriptive on your bot's user page... like listing the same information that you described in detail here. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:41, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

OrphanBot

I would like to run User:OrphanBot to orphan images in Category:Images with unknown source and Category:Images with unknown copyright status in preparation for deleting them. The bot would go through the categories, and for each image, it would replace the image tag with  , to keep from breaking table layouts. It would then record on the image description page which articles it has removed the image from.

For images in articles in the main namespace, the Category namespace, and the Portal namespace, it would remove them. Images in articles in the User:, Talk:, User talk:, Template talk:, Image:, Image talk:, Category talk:, Wikipedia talk:, and Portal talk: namespaces would be ignored. Images in articles in the Wikipedia:, Template:, Help:, and Help talk: namespaces would be logged to the bot's talk page for human review, since they shouldn't have been there in the first place. --Carnildo 09:11, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There is a conflict of interest in the regards with notification bot on the removal of the link to in User talk space, unless the only thing you plan to do is to change it from an image to a linked image. Furthermore, removal of links may cause problems in the Wikipedia namespace when it comes to WP:IFD. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:29, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I specified that it doesn't touch anything in the User: namespace, or in most of the talk namespaces. Also, it doesn't do anything about images that have been linked, rather than inlined, so IfD is safe.
Also, I've made a slight change in how it removes images. It now replaces them with HTML comments, to make seeing what it's done easier. --Carnildo 09:42, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I feel safer with it commenting it out, that way people understand there WAS a picture there, and something should replace it... rather than leaving a missing image notice. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:37, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
How's this? [4] [5] --Carnildo 22:20, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. Can we tag these with a category? I go through runs asking people to delete images, and I generally start with Orphaned images advertising to prospective deleters that the probability of someone complaining about the deletion is fairly low... But that is only true for naturally orphaned images. Also be aware that if you do this to fair use images it is going to cause them, ultimately, to become targets under the fair use CSD. (course, they are already CSD so...). --Gmaxwell 03:44, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What sort of categorization are you thinking of? The bot already puts a list of what pages the image was removed from on the image description page, see [6] for an example.
Any fair-use image that this bot removes is already a CSD, because it was unsourced. Making it an orphaned fair-use image won't change things one bit. --Carnildo 06:54, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

SuggestBot, matching people with pages they'd edit

Hi, I'm doing some research to try to help people find pages to edit -- in particular, stubs that they might be willing to contribute to. We're doing some information retrieval stuff on a dump of the database to come up with algorithms for predicting edits based on other edits, and eventually we'd like to see if we can help real humans find articles they'd like to work on.

I am considering writing SuggestBot, a bot that selects a set of users, looks at their contribution history, picks a set (10-100, not sure yet) of stub pages they might be willing to edit, and posts that set of pages to the user's talk page. All processing except posting would happen on our lab's servers, using dumps of the Wikipedia database.

1. Whether the bot is manually assisted (run by a human) or automatically scheduled to run

  • This bot would be manually assisted

2. The period, if any, we should expect it to run

  • Sometime in January for a few weeks, more if it produces favorable results.

3. What language or program it is running

  • Not yet developed, but likely a standard framework for editing Wikipedia pages.

4. The purpose of your bot

a. Why do you need it?

  • To test our algorithms for recommending work to do in Wikipedia with real people, to help reduce the number of stubs in Wikipedia, and to help increase the amount of content and the value of Wikipedia.

b. Is it important enough for the Wikipedia to allow your bot?

  • I think so. A recent paper we did showed that 4 times as many people were willing to contribute to a movie database if we picked movies they had seen compared to other plausible strategies like picking recommended movies, random movies, or movies that appeared to be missing information. Showing these techniques work on Wikipedia could lay the foundation for increasing contributions to Wikipedia (and other online communities where people build community resources) and help to reduce the number of stub articles in Wikipedia.

The slightly scary part to us is that we modify user talk pages. I'm not sure how people will react, and I'm looking for community guidance. NotificationBot alters talk pages, but at a user's request. I wonder whether/how much this would be perceived as spam.

-- ForteTuba 23:35, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. I have some questions :
  • How does it work? Does it looks at the totality of what one user has edited, and the totality of what other users have edited, and then identify similar people (giving extra weighting to those who are extremely similar, and less to those who are semi-similar), and come to some list of recommendations based on what the people most like you have edited, but you have not? If so, I have wondered (purely conceptually) about doing the same thing for music. Basically we each like to think we unique - but we're not, and often specific people (who have never met, and who live in completely different locations) will have very similar tastes. For example, I have a good friend who lives in Sydney and who has musical tastes totally unlikely anyone else I know, who one day, purely-by-chance, found someone in the US, who had published their extensive list of music they owned on the Internet, and it was almost a verbatim match for his music collection. At first it kind of freaked my friend out, but then he promptly went out and bought those items this other person had and had liked, and he really enjoyed that new music. It saved him hours of research, of trial-and-error purchases - basically he could just go straight to the good stuff. He still checks back on the other guy's music collection, and will buy anything this other guy likes, because he knows that the chances he'll like it too are extremely high, because the totality of their musical tastes are extremely similar. Now, normally it's hard to do this for music because we just don't have the data (e.g. How do I know what music you've tried? How do you know what music I have tried? How do I know what you liked? How do you know what I liked?). However, with the Wikipedia, we do have some hard data, based on past edits. So, my question is: Is this how your approach will work (look at the totality of what I've edited, the totality of what you have edited, and if we're a very good match, then recommend to you some of the articles I have edited and that you have not yet edited?). Or is something else?
  • Spamming: Some users probably will see this as spamming. Better maybe to allow people to request this (at least at first), and give them some pages where they can provide feedback, both good and bad (e.g. positive feedback and negative feedback). You'll know after you've got 50 or 60 bits of feedback whether you're onto a winner or not. I'd certainly be willing to consider taking part in an early stage trial. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 00:56, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
We're testing a bunch of algorithms and variations against edit histories in the dump. Some are collaborative filtering style, like what you describe above (there are music recommenders, like AudioScrobbler/last.fm that are said to use CF. Amazon does this for many/all of its things, and MovieLens is our CF research site). There are a bunch of CF-based algorithms and we're going to try a number of them. We're also doing some search engine-style matching, using your edit history as a query against the wikipedia database. We won't necessarily use all edits, we're trying to figure out whether we can tell you're particularly interested in a topic by looking at characteristics of edits (length change, is it a reversion, marked minor, etc.) and maybe only use some of your edits to build the query/your profile. We'll actually deploy the algorithms that seem to do best in our offline tests.
Very good! I like that edits marked as minor (or where the amount of changed text is quite small) will be excluded. For example, as part of the Wiki Syntax Project, I frequently make small edits to topics that I personally don't care about, solely to clean up their wiki syntax. Also, I'm checking out Last.fm now - I had never heard of it before, so thank you for that! I'll also read over the collaborative filtering page (up until now I had only thought about the idea in a "wouldn't this idea be cool?" kind of way, and never knew before what the correct term was). One thing that may help you is if you can get users to show you their watchlists (if something is on my watchlist, chances are pretty good that I care about it), but since I don't think you can access this, it might be best to start off just using a user's edit history.
I was excited about watchlists until I posted on Wikipedia:Village pump asking people to mail them to me and someone said "you know, I put a lot of pages I hope get deleted on my watchlist". So, edit history it will be. We might come up with an interface that allows people to type in some arbitrary text as well, not sure yet.
On second thoughts, I agree with not using watchlists. I've reviewed the things on my watchlist, and I'm not so sure that they are representative of my interests (at least some things are listed because they were things I thought that should be deleted, some I thought should be merged, and some were things that I can no longer recall why they were originally watched, etc). Significant edits are probably the best indicator, as you say. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 01:26, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
When you say request, how do you mean? Would the bot just put a link that says "hey, we can find you more things we think you'll edit, click here" on user talk pages so it's not as intrusive as just dropping a bunch of links on someone's page? Or are you talking about trying to put a link in a public place? Someone suggested changing a welcome template up above... wasn't sure other Wikipedians would go for that. Thanks for the thoughts. -- ForteTuba 12:37, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I think you've got two issues. The first is, does it work and do people like it? For this, to start with, you might want to put up a notice at the Wikipedia:Village pump and the Wikipedia:Announcements page saying "we're running a trial and would like some participants" to get some people to test it and see what they think. This would be an opt-in type of thing (e.g. get people to add their names to a User:SuggestBot/sign me up for the trial page), so none of the participants will complain about spamming, and you're bound to learn something from the feedback that people give (both what they like about it, and what they don't like about it, and you should fine-tune it based on that feedback), and once you've done a trial with public feedback then people will be far more receptive on the second issue. The second issue is once you've got a working system, how do you tell people about articles they might like, without it being considered spamming? The danger for you is that if even a handful of people consider it to be spamming and complain, then your bot is likely to get blocked (just telling you the way it is - basically the onus is on you to structure it so that people will not get annoyed by this). For telling users about articles they maybe interested in, I think you have three categories of users:
Posting asking for watchlists on the pump didn't work very well, I've gotten 5 in two-ish weeks, but I agree, getting people to opt in would be nice. Maybe the bot could create subpages of user pages (or of user talk pages) that contain suggestions and then put a polite little note on the talk page. Not quite as intrusive as an in-your-face list of suggestions. Opting in via community pages mostly only works for experienced users... which dovetails nicely with your next.
  • Existing established users (these you should probably require to opt-in, and should not add to their talk pages unless they opt, as they are the most likely to complain loudly and extensively, and are the most likely to have already found the topics they are the most interested in).
Heh, I agree about both points.
  • Anonymous/not logged in users who use an IP address (you should probably not do anything with them, as they may be existing established users who have not logged in, or they may be a user who makes only one edit and is never seen again).
Also agreed.
  • New users who have a named account that's quite new and who have only a few edits (and for these users you could consider adding something to their talk page). For example: "Hello, I am the SuggestBot, and I notify new users about articles that they may be interested in, based on the edits that they make. I have included a list of the top 10 articles that you have not edited yet, and which people who edited the articles you have edited also liked. My suggestions are: (insert ranked bullet list of top 10 suggestions). I hope that you like these suggestions, but if you don't then please don't be alarmed because I will not leave you any more messages (unless you explicitly ask me to at my opt-in page). If you have any comments on this list, both good and bad, we would love to hear them at (insert link to positive feedback page and negative feedback page)."
Hope the above helps. Personally I think the approach outlined above will probably work, but others may have different opinions. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 02:20, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
This is close to what we were looking at. Opt-in for experienced via community portal and a polite page creation bot that samples infrequent/new editors might be a winner. Thanks for your thoughts, let me know if you have more. -- ForteTuba 21:55, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
All sounds good, but just a quick thought: if you're going to create talk subpages, you might want to not put them under the user's talk page, but rather under the SuggestBot's talk page (e.g. User:SuggestBot/suggestions/Nickj), and then put a quick note on the user's talk page linking to that. From a technical perspective, it makes almost no difference whether it's stored under the user's page or SuggestBot's; but from a human psychology perspective, they're very different things: one is a bot walking into "my" space and messing with it, whereas the other is the bot making a list in its space and then inviting me into that space to review the list. It's quite possible to get annoyed by the former, whereas it is much harder to get annoyed by the latter. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 01:26, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
That is a super-good idea. -- ForteTuba 03:45, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think this is a great idea, but I wanted to note that merely looking at who has edited an article, and perhaps the number of edits they made, isn't terribly indicative. What really indicates interest is substantial edits, where they have contributed significant new content or offered up a detailed explanation in the edit history or talk page. For example, many users performing disambiguation will edit hundreds or even thousands of pages they really don't give a damn about.
Also, keep in mind that unlike Amazon, our articles are strongly interlinked (some say you can't find two articles more than 6 links apart if you tried). These links, along with properties such as belonging to the same category/list, could be a valuable way of finding related articles once you've established the sort of article a person likes.
One last comment: don't recommend articles people already know about if you can. This would be really annoying. :-) Deco 06:16, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely agree suggesting things that the user has already edited in any way, shape or form is bad. Categories could be useful; Also articles that link to an article that the person has edited, but which are not backlinked, could be good (e.g. you've extensively edited A, and B links to A, but A does not link to B, and you have not edited B in any way; In this situation, you may like B, but not know about it). Could be more a "future directions" thing though. P.s. Off-topic: For a proof-by-existence of two articles being more than 6 degrees apart, see Gameboy to Maine Coon, which are at least 10 steps apart (but in one direction only). -- All the best, Nickj (t) 07:02, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
We were thinking of using local link structure to edited articles as a reasonable baseline recommender. We've thought about building one that uses categories to help cluster edits and make sense of interests; that is probably a Next Step compared to fielding a few plausible and easy-to-construct ones and seeing how people react first.
As for the substantive edits, we're trying both using all edits and trying to filter out non-substantive ones. A naive, ad-hoc approach to filtering non-substantive did pretty poorly compared to using all edits on the offline data, but it's hard to say how people would react without trying it both ways. (And, there are other strategies for filtering edits that we haven't tried yet.) It's a good suggestion. -- ForteTuba 03:45, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I sincerely recommend that this be not a bot, and rather be a tool like Kate's contribution tool. We should have the ability to just simply load, based on a user's name, what pages we should attempt next. This provides it to anyone who wants to use it. You can even sign up for a m:Toolserver account to place your new script tool there, since the Toolserver has access to database dumps anyway. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:27, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting idea, why do you recommend so? My initial reaction: I don't know enough about the toolserver to know if this is a plus or minus at this stage. Long run it's probably a win, but currently some algorithms are slow and would be hoggy and not suitable for interactive use (think many-word queries against the searchindex). Also, we would probably be happier in our research hearts in the short term to control who gets recommendations when, for the purpose of getting more generally useful and more likely valid results. I definitely think in the long run it would be nice for people to be able to get results interactively and of their own volition. FWIW, the bot wouldn't be running continously: we'd probably pick a set of users, run the algos offline for them, and put up the suggestions as a batch, then get a dump a week or two later to see what happened. -- ForteTuba 03:45, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
There is one problem that I have not yet worked out of the NotificationBot, that is how to deal with user talk pages that have been redirected cross project (i.e. a person may have a meta redirect) - the closest answer I have so far is to allow the site to do the work for you, but that would involve a lot of correction and assumptions in the pywikipedia code.
Huh... yeah, that could be annoying. Is it painful to chase the redirects yourself?
That aside, it's my feeling that you could easily create some kind of tree of articles for each article on the Wikipedia. So if we have an article on A, it follows that if B relates to A, then it should be in the set S1. (Then we continue to build different sets of S for each article in the Wikipedia. I suppose somewhat on the idea of Nick's Link suggestion bot...) I figure that you could basically create a network for what relates to what article using trees and such. Then when a user queries against his own name, you could then pull up a list of articles he or she has edited, pull up the trees, and generate a list based on tree relationships. Does that make any sense to you? --AllyUnion (talk) 10:34, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it makes sense. There are a lot of ways to define "relates": text similarity, pairs of pages that are edited by the same person, link structure, categories, and more I'm sure. For now we're going after the first three:
  • text similarity because it's so obvious to try (and is okay in our offline experiments, though slow)
  • co-editing because collaborative filtering is effective in lots of domains (and appears to do fairly well here in limited dump-based experiments, and is fairly fast)
  • a simple link-based relatedness algorithm because it's both reasonable and something that you could imagine people doing manually (still to be built)
As for building a relationship structure (trees are one way to do it), the relationships get represented differently for each. In the text similarity case, we use mysql's built-in text indexing because it's dead simple. For co-editing, we use revision history info from a full dump, lightly processed and text removed, to establish relationships between editors (and then to articles). Eventually I want to implement it using the revision table directly. For link-based relatedness I'm looking to use the pagelinks table. I'm hoping that with just a little optimization the last two will be quick enough to run online so we won't have to build the whole relateness model: time-consuming and space-expensive. -- ForteTuba 16:04, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User:Mathbot

This bot has been adding category tags incorrectly, so I've blocked for 3 hours and notified the author. I'm going offline now, so I hope an admin can keep an eye out to see if the problem is A) fixed before the three hours is up, so that the bot can be restarted, or B) the block extended if the bot carries on after 3 hours with the same errors. Cheers! — Matt Crypto 01:59, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, my bot went nuts. I was running it in semiautomatic mode checking from time to time how it was doing. Due to a bug (which I meant to be a feature) in my code, it started spitting garbage. Now the bot is stopped, and I don't plan to use it until I figure out the problem (it screwed up the last 32 of the 354 articles it changed, and I reverted all of those and checked a bunch more). Sorry for that, I will pay much more attention on this kind of things from now own. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:26, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Given the above comments, I unblocked User:Mathbot. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 03:42, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

CricketBot bot flag

I originally proposed CricketBot further up this page. It has now been running for over two weeks with no complaints, and positive feedback from WikiProject Cricket, so I've applied for a bot flag at m:Requests for bot status#en:User:CricketBot. Thank you. Stephen Turner (Talk) 10:25, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Pfft Bot, again

I haven't run Pfft Bot much in a while, but have recently started using it again. It still has no bot flag. Anyway, I got a request from Natalinasmpf to upload ~300 (actually ) small Xiangqi related images. They are in PNG format. I'm told they're a total of around 3 megabytes, but I have not recieved the images yet. I have source and licensing information on them (gfdl-her). Additionally, I'm assuming upload.py in pywikipedia will do what I want? --Phroziac . o º O (mmmmm chocolate!) 03:24, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, now she wants me to upload more, for {{Weiqi-image}}, to upgrade the images. Am i going to need to post here for every run I want to do? It's not like i'm uploading copyvios or anything :) --Phroziac . o º O (mmmmm chocolate!) 03:46, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Dude, upload them to commons...there's no reason not to--Orgullomoore 08:48, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I thought about that last night, and well you're right. I put a similar request on the commons village pump a few minutes ago. :) --Phroziac . o º O (mmmmm chocolate!) 16:39, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I just noticed pywikipedia has a script to copy images to commons and put a NowCommons template on wikipedia. Any objections to me using that? --Phroziac . o º O (mmmmm chocolate!) 00:36, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

None from me. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:22, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

New bot!

I have made a new bot, well its not necessarily a bot as it is primarily designed for semi automatic editting, there are many features to come, but if anyone wants to see what it is like then I would really like some feedback, let me know if you want a copy. See User:Bluemoose/AutoWikiBrowser for more details. Martin 21:33, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This would be more classified as a tool, rather than anything else... so long as this tool doesn't perform high speed edits and makes a user logs in under themselves, then we're okay. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:21, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It can function as a bot if you want. At the moment it is lacking some functionality that pywikibot's have, but ultimately it should be more powerful, and much easier to use. Martin 12:41, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I rather not have it function as a bot. Unless you can built in safety functions to prevent the tool to be abusive and make certain that part of functionality is approved on a per user basis, I rather not you make it easier to make an automatic editor which may have the potential to damage the site rather than help it. Furthermore, please ensure that you add throttles to your code, as it is an apparent dev requirement. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:12, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It does have a throttle, and also requires users to be logged in and their version of the software enabled here. I will disable the bot function on the freely available version anyway, only available on request. Remeber that anyone could use a pywikibot which is potentially just as dangerous. Martin 10:48, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The pywikipedia bot framework has some built-in restrictions to at least prevent serious abuse. Additionally, while anyone can use the pre-existing bots available in the framework, some programming knowledge is required to turn the tool to be abusive. --AllyUnion (talk) 23:08, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I am working on making it so it only works for users who have their name on a certain page (and are logged in with that name), so that way no one will be able to abuse it at all. Martin 23:11, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Can we make it so that they have to be a logged in user with a bot flag? --AllyUnion (talk) 09:53, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Bot permission please?

I have just been trying out Martin's AutoWikiBrowser. I would like to register User:Bobblebot as a bot account to use it. The task is to reduce linking of solitary months, solitary years, etc in accordance with the manual of style.

If another bot is already doing this task, please let me know. It is a huge slow task (for me anyway) and I would rather do something else. Bobblewik 18:06, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Um, reduce linking? I don't quite understand. --AllyUnion (talk) 11:32, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. For example Economy of Algeria has many solitary year links, including 14 to 2004. The policy and popular misunderstandings are explained at:
Wikipedia:Make_only_links_relevant_to_the_context#What_should_not_be_linked
Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Date_formatting
For example:
  • Text with links to solitary years: The short-lived ABC Cable News began in 1995; unable to compete with CNN, it shut down in 1997. Undaunted, in 2004 ABC launched a news channel called ABC News Now.
  • Text without links to solitary years: The short-lived ABC Cable News began in 1995; unable to compete with CNN, it shut down in 1997. Undaunted, in 2004 ABC launched a news channel called ABC News Now.
See this diff working towards that: [7]. Bobblewik 13:32, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
A bot can't distinguish between when it should or shouldnt be linked, it needs a human to watch over it. Plus it's pretty damn easy to do with the AWB! Martin 14:14, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
There is rarely, if ever, a valid reason to link to a year article when other date elements are not present, so removing such links (with proper edit summeries) is IMO one of the safest possible editing tasks for an automated or semi-automated process. Detecting the presence of other adjacent date elemetes (and they must be adjacent dor the link to function as a date preference mechanism, normally the only valid reason for the link) is pretty purely mechanical. DES (talk) 22:30, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
If the dynamic date formatting feature can recognize correctly-linked dates, there's no reason a bot can't. These links are pointless, look silly and should be removed by a bot. — Omegatron 22:41, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. I don't think bots should do the task suggested by Bobblewik nor I'm a particuarly convinced that Bobblewick bothers thinking about in which cases such links are definitely worth it, e.g. at Talk:Luxembourg_(city). -- User:Docu
Support. There is almost never contextual reason to link a solitary year, if these can be detected by a bot they can be removed by one. Hence, the bot makes perfect sense and should be run. Neonumbers 09:46, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

(moved from User talk:Bluemoose/AutoWikiBrowser by Bobblewik - please reformat comment): This bot is the bane of most history articles! J. D. Redding 20:46, 19 December 2005 (UTC) [... beginning to understand why most people are uneducated about history ..] (Ps., please don't let this loose on a timelime or similiar article... )[reply]

  • Is there a reason why it's being done while we are discussing if it should be done and in which cases it might be done? -- User:Docu
    • One reason (as eluded to by J. D. Redding above) to link to years is that is provides landmarks in a history article. For example, if you are reading History of Australia but are interested in events of the 1850s, the blue linked dates are easy to see (Note: it is not my personal belief that date linking should be used, so so get cranky at me about it).--Commander Keane 01:20, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Aha, link=highlight.
My own theory is that this is a huge unintended consequence of using square brackets to perform two entirely different functions: links, and date preferences. If date preferences could be done a different way, date preferences would not feed the link all dates myth. Bobblewik 02:21, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • You said reduce, not eliminate. Some dates must be linked. You should set the bot to eliminate repeated linked years or months across the text, not exterminate them. So, the idea is good, but not so good as I thought in the beginning. Armindo 21:31, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. As a bot, false-positive matches are very likely. For example, Mii-dera links to 1117; and the 1117 page has a factoid about Mii-dera. Links such as the 1117 link from Mii-dera should not be deleted, because it can provide historical context to the event concerning the temple. Neither User:Bobblewik or the author of User:Bluemoose/AutoWikiBrowser seems concerned about this problem, although these types of links can be detected via the Whatlinkshere page. For example, on Special:Whatlinkshere/Mii-dera, 1117 is listed, so it seems clear that there is a reason to keep the 1117 link on the Mii-dera page. Since most year articles mention events of that year, the Mii-dera example is far from the only case where this could happen. Neier 12:41, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sorry. I was going from the response on your talk page about how much bandwidth it would take to implement the check into the bot. I didn't notice that the comments above also came from you or that Martin is the sig for Bluemoose. So, apologies for thinking you didn't care about the problem. Neier 13:52, 23 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is not only not what a bot should be used for, it's not what you should spend your time doing on Wikipedia either. All these edits are incredibly annoying, they often remove useful wikilinks in appropriate areas, and they make the headings more confusing by deleting the spaces in between the equals signs and the words. I strongly oppose any automation of these tasks which more often than not make it worse. Talrias (t | e | c) 02:57, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It might be useful in this debate to distinguish between comments about the merits of:
  • Manual of Style guidance
  • a bot proposal to edit articles consistently with the Manual of Style.
For example, Talrias raised a perfectly valid question suggesting that he prefers spaces in headings. I don't care either way and had not thought about it. Now that I check the Manual of Style, it does not use spaces. So the criticism of making edits in accordance with the Manual of Style does not seem fair. If the Manual of Style needs changing, then we can change it easily enough. There are plenty of changes I would like in it. Please can we could separate our judgement about the merits of a bot proposal from our disagreements with guidance in the Manual of Style. Just a thought. Bobblewik 18:15, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Fine, I oppose the automation of tasks like this because bots get it wrong, making the article worse. I've seen cases where dates have been unwikilinked from in image captions. That's not useful and no human would delink them as "excessive". I find the intended target of this proposed bot highly unnecessary and "fixing" a nonexistent problem. Talrias (t | e | c) 18:47, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think you are reinforcing my thoughts that this is an issue for the Manual of Style. Dates in captions are not mentioned in the Manual. If you think they must be linked, then it is easy enough to add that to the Manual. As far as 'no human would delink them' is concerned, I have delinked plenty and I am a human (despite occasional accusations to the contrary). We should be debating these points of style in talk:Manual of Style, not here. I am not targetting you, but a lot of the discussion on this page has been people disagreeing with the content of the current Manual of Style. A bot proposal should be criticised on its merits, not on the basis that the Manual of Style that it follows is inadequate. Bobblewik 19:26, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
No, you are not reading what I'm saying. I'm saying removing excess linkage (per the manual of style) is good, but the way your script/bot has been doing it in the past is bad. Therefore, I oppose the use of a bot flag for these "cleanup" edits. I don't think this is something which should be automated. I don't think I can make it any clearer than this. Talrias (t | e | c) 22:49, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
What is the bot doing that a human being who was following the MoS would not do, apart from being faster? SlimVirgin (talk) 03:57, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Getting it wrong would be a fair summary. Talrias (t | e | c) 04:00, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, of course, but what would "getting it wrong" amount to in this case? SlimVirgin (talk) 07:35, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I've already explained this above, to you personally, and on a number of other pages. I've provided links to those pages above and in other places. I find your consistent badgering of me annoying. Please stop it. Talrias (t | e | c) 16:04, 28 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. An automated procedure makes these reversions easy to make, but it makes more mistakes with wikilinks than a proper manual review. Policy says that: "...should not be linked ... Months, years, decades or centuries, unless they will clearly help the reader to understand the topic." -- and a quick glance in an editor (AutoWikiBrowser) can not be sufficient at considering that. Also I consider the Manuals recommendation (Manual of Style...Date formatting) not be 100% a law, as also a (recent?) note there states it to be controversial. feydey 02:39, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. While there may be a very few limited instances where a year link may be helpful for readers to understand the context of an article, the vast majority of such links are just clutter. older≠wiser 21:01, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
A further example of how this bot screws up is this edit to List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, which removes unlinks the dates the particular Prime Minister in question is in office for. Talrias (t | e | c) 21:33, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
No dates were removed in that edit as far as i can see. >ots of dates were unlinked. I would have made the exact same changes manually, had I come upon that article. DES (talk) 21:38, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
How did he screw it up? it was much better without the over linking. Martin 21:39, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I didn't proofread. I meant of course unlinked. The links are of course useful so you can then go and find out what else happened in that year in question, in the same manner you would click on the link to the Prime Minister's article page to find out more about the Prime Minister. It is clearly better to have more links in an article than less, because it gives people ease in browsing to related articles. Removing them is an aesthetic difference and this should not be forced on other people - consider changing your own style preferences rather than forcing them on other people. Talrias (t | e | c) 21:43, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Strongly oppose; while there may be some basis to removing date links, it's still being debated. In addition, I don't believe that running it as a bot, even a manual bot, allows the user to know what pages they're editing, and whether the date links on that page might actually be useful. Ral315 (talk) 21:47, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I agree that there are too many year links in some places, but I don't think that using a bot to remove them is a good idea. It's something that needs more judgement than any automated system can give -- sannse (talk) 22:46, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think not. Many historical subjects will have years in which actual things happened but not "other date elements". This should never be done unconditionally, especially for the tiny amount of "value" it provides. Demi T/C 22:47, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose. Style issues should be handled on a discretionary article-by-article basis, as a matter of editor judgement, rather than something cranked out by an automatic bot. More importantly, the Manual of Style is not absolute gospel, and personally I think date links are useful for cross-indexing of information by chronology. If you look at it from the perspective that date links do no harm, and clearly show some merit for finding information about dates specified in the article, I cannot see merit in a bot for the purpose. --NicholasTurnbull | (talk) 00:27, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. There is a contention here that date link clutter is harmful. If so, it is a very marginal harm. On the other hand they do provide an article with context, even if that is a very marginal benefit. On the whole, this seems like a wash to me and so whether or not to keep them should be left to the discretion of the article's contributors. I am opposed to anyone, bot or not, mounting a campaign to systematically remove such links. Dragons flight 00:42, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Qualified support. I think that the semiautomatic use of AutoWikiBrowser for reducing the date linking is fine. In the example of 14 instances of links to "2004" in a single article, delinking 13 of them with the assistance of a semiautomatic bot (requiring human intervention) seems to be a good thing. However, instead of eliminating the first occurence of the link to a year, I have often found it more useful to change the link to something more relevelant to the article such as [[2004 in music|2004]], [[2004 in sports|2004]] or [[2004 in books|2004]]. A bot could not do that (at least not without some level of AI) and I would rather leave the link for a human to fix in the future if the person manning the AutoWikiBrowser doesn't take the time to do so. -- DS1953 talk 01:07, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Can we close this disucssion now? It seems clear that there is no consensus for User:Bobblewik to run a bot. The votes that continue to pile on aren't of any beneift and are disruptive to this page.--Commander Keane 22:49, 31 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

DFBot

I have created DFBot. Right now it has only one task. Once an hour it reads WP:RFA and creates a summary in my userspace of open noms. Maybe it will do more in the future, but that's it for now. Dragons flight 09:53, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for one week testing, may apply for a bot flag after one week. Please add your bot to the Category:Wikipedia bots, and list it on the Project page. If you should wish to expand the scope of your bot, please make sure you get it approved here first. --AllyUnion (talk) 12:29, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Martin has been kind enough to embed the date delinking regex as an option in AutoWikiBrowser. I have published its objectives and the actual regex in the hope that openness can lead to improvements. Please look at User_talk:Bluemoose/AutoWikiBrowser and suggest improvements. Bobblewik 20:06, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

AutoWikiBrowser -> flag needed?

I was fixing up some categories after a CFD when I found AutoWikiBrowser. I used it to quickly fix all the links to the categories. I found myself making ~8 edits per minute. Is that too many for a non-bot account to be making? The "Bots running without a flag" says I should be under 30-60 seconds per edit (granted it's not really a bot, but the effect is similar). Should I be using a separate account (eg. User:BrokenBot) with a flag to do such cleanups? Broken S 03:50, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, as I mentioned above before to Martin (Bluemoose), that his tool at that speed would in effect qualify as a bot for anyone who uses it. Users who wish to use his tool beyond the recommended limit must apply for a separate account, and run any high speed edits under a bot flagged account. --AllyUnion (talk) 12:32, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No template?

Is this a guideline? A policy? A rule? What? How did it make it into the Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines without a heading template? Stevage 14:09, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My interpretation of this question is: Do you think we should have a {policy} or {guideline} template at the top of the project page; Wikipedia:Bots?--Commander Keane 14:51, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
My humble thanks for interpreting my poorly phrased query :) Stevage 14:55, 21 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
This page has been around long before {policy} and {guideline} templates existed. One would think this page would be grandfathered in, but I think no one has bother to add that template to the top of the page. --AllyUnion (talk) 12:35, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have now added a {{policy}} template, I think you'll all agree that is correct. Martin 00:10, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I have just edited the comments above to stop them linking to the policy template. Not for any really good reason, in retrospect. Stevage 18:52, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

request : Wybot

Wybot is python bot by user:WonYong. it uses pywikipedia framework. it is manually used. period: 1 year or less. I can't not login frequently.

Unless you can describe the purpose of your bot in further detail other than what you can given above, your bot will not be approved from running on the English Wikipedia. --AllyUnion (talk) 12:36, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Purpose: test. I will study the bot usage without a flag. -- WonYong 22:53, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

RefBot

RefBot uses m:standardize_notes.py to process references and citations. It was developed in SEWilcoBot but has become specialized enough and there is enough demand for it that it has been separated to have its own identity. (SEWilco 19:57, 23 December 2005 (UTC))[reply]

I do not know on what extent the RfA ruling has against this, but should you wish to apply or run this bot, I believe it requires approval of the Arbitration Committee first. --AllyUnion (talk) 00:01, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Object - Too many citation-based conflicts surrounding this user. -- Netoholic @ 12:41, 1 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

----
The Arbitration Committee has ruled, Please assume the broadest possible interpretation. We will back up any administrator that blocks you under a broad interpretation. Meanwhile help work out policy. Fred Bauder 18:59, 28 December 2005 (UTC); Therefore, since this account is already blocked, the request is denied. --AllyUnion (talk) 08:06, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
RefBot will not be running the code which presently is public at m:standardize_notes.py and will behave differently. The ArbCom, in an improper RFAr, placed WP:V restrictions upon me under any account so the specific account name is not relevant. The RefBot account is blocked by someone who claimed it was created to bypass the ArbCom ruling, yet he also confirmed that the ruling applies to me under any account as I had stated, then he went on vacation (David Gerard's status is on WP:AC). The block does not yet matter, as RefBot is still being rewritten. (SEWilco 09:52, 11 January 2006 (UTC))[reply]

Adrian Buehlmann Bot

See Adrian Buehlmann Bot. Manually assisted bot without flag (edits visible in recent changes). Replace template calls and update list of used templates of articles. Uses Python Wikipediabot Framework. Adrian Buehlmann 19:27, 25 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for the intention of not running without a bot flag. Please make sure you list your bot in the correct section on the project page. May not apply for a bot flag, due to nature of the bot. --AllyUnion (talk) 00:03, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Object - I am uncomfortable with this user running a bot. Has shown some bad judgment regarding templates in the past. -- Netoholic @ 12:40, 1 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Emotional personal attack of Netoholic based on bilateral technical disagreement how to migrate a template. See [8] (lower part). Not based on any bad edit by me or my bot. I even reverted the template in question (template:Infobox President) to Netoholic's version which he said was a good revert to help fix a problem. I did not a single revert of Netoholic nor his bot. I've suspended my bot for the moment until further instructions are given. Adrian Buehlmann 13:12, 1 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

TPO-bot

I would like permission to use the above bot to aid in renames for WP:SFD in the same way as Mairibot, mentioned earlier.

It will use the following components of the pywikipediabot to accomplish this:

--TheParanoidOne 14:00, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial run for one week, may apply bot flag after trial run. Please make sure your bot is listed on the project page. --AllyUnion (talk) 00:09, 27 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Request made for bot flag. --TheParanoidOne 22:20, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ugur Basak Bot

This bot is using pywikipedia framework. I've been using this bot on :tr and :az. Mostly use for mass category creation etc. But also working as interwiki bot. My main reason for requesting to work on en is; in tr wikipedia there are interwikis for :en but mostly on :en for the same article there isn't :tr interwiki. I'll work the bot on :tr but use multi-login and when it finds :en doesn't link to :tr it will update the article on :en too. For my user name: Ugur Basak--Ugur Basak Bot 21:23, 29 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Approval for trial run for one week, may apply bot flag after that after no complaints. --AllyUnion (talk) 12:18, 1 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I guess i must add my bots name to the list on project page. I'll start a test run. And check how it works here.--Ugur Basak 11:23, 2 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
changed group membership for User:Ugur Basak Bot@enwiki from to bot --Walter 08:53, 7 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Request: User:CPBot

I have discovered WP:AWB (as have many others looking up this page) and would like to change all of the occurances of "Pokemon" to "Pokémon" - the correct spelling. "Pokemon" is never right. --Celestianpower háblame 12:50, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sadly, Martin has removed functionality under Windows 98 so I won't be able to use this. However, if Martin re-enables it - it would be nice to have this ready to start. --Celestianpower háblame 12:37, 1 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

statbot - non-editing

I'm not sure where to request this, but I would like to have permission to run a robot which downloads random pages in small numbers (say 200 to max 1000 / rate of maybe four a minute maximum) from wikipedia for some statistical analysis. There are several reasons why I don't want to do this from a DBDump.

  1. size. - I only need a small amount of data, not the whole data.
  2. proper randomness - I don't want to select a limited dump
  3. proper representation - I want to see it _exactly_ as it would be seen by an end user.

As far as I can see; the impact will be minimal since it's just normal page reads and quite slow is fine by me. In fact I've already been doing this manually to some extent, so it wouldn't make any real difference to end usage. Comments? Mozzerati 21:35, 1 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As long as it downloads the pages while logged out, any impact should be minimal. --Carnildo 07:19, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Vina-iwbot would like to run on English Wiki

I would like to request permission to run my interwiki bot User:Vina-iwbot on English wiki. I will be running the latest version of pywikipedia bot (have been for over a year in Chinese wiki) under the new multi-login mode. English wiki is updated to create the backlink to Chinese pages.

Waiting for permission before starting trial run.

--Vina 23:43, 1 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial run for one week. Please add your bot to Category:Wikipedia bots, and on the project page. May apply bot flag status after one week free of complaints. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:44, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Minor complaint about bot

The bot is occasionally forgetting to sign in, and is making edits from User:71.241.248.89. See the history of changes to Pope Pius XII. It appears to be working otherwise. Robert McClenon 17:00, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Asking Vina to stop. --AllyUnion (talk) 19:08, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No longer running on English wiki. I have sent a message to the mailing list, asking the developers to check what is going on. --Vina 22:16, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

new template for bot users (in case of emergency)

I made {{emergency-bot-shutoff}} for bot owners to put on their bots' user pages. This template leans more towards the fun side! :) --Ixfd64 02:12, 2 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This has the potential to actually block the bot and user... just FYI. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:41, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Sashato

I'm requesting bot status (flag) for bot User:Sashato. This bot is active on sr: and hr: wikis. The only job will be adding interwiki links here on en: wiki. I use pywikipediabot for this interwiki job. I can speek English, Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian language. Thank you — Stefanovic • 03:02 2-01-2006

Approved for trial run for one week. Please add your bot to Category:Wikipedia bots, and on the project page. May apply bot flag status after one week free of complaints. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:44, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Just notcied this edit made by User:Sashato which included interwikis for ja, he, no etc which are outside the scope of the description above. I thought the policy was to only add interwiki links you spoke the language of, but I can't find that written down anywhere.--Commander Keane 09:34, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, yes i see that edit, but what is wrong with that? Every interwiki is ok, and going to same article in all wikis. — Stefanovic • 04:21 13-01-2006
I'm just wondering how you can be sure that each of the interwiki links are correct if you can't speak the language. Do you guess?--Commander Keane 08:27, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I got bot flag. Commander, you don't know how pyinterwikibot work, so please don't ask that stupid question. Thank you all. (If someone want to leave me a message, leave it on my user talk page.) — Stefanovic • 03:29 16-01-2006

Request for permission for UBXBot

I am requesting permission for the trial run of User:UBXBot a bot that will assist with the Wikiproject Userboxes task. Its primary tasks are touching pages and mass editing userbox template includes with permission of WP Userboxes. --Grand Edgemaster Talk 00:07, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There seems to be several issues regarding user templates, and I would suggest to hold off until the matter is settled. --AllyUnion (talk) 07:55, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That probably would be the best target. I don't want any more conflict with the terrible mess that there is/was. --Grand Edgemaster Talk 21:27, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

79 androids request

I'd like to request permission for a trial run for a Python Wikipediabot, 79 androids. It will be human-assisted only and will be used to help automate standardization of the usage of {{Mlbplayer}} and other templates related to Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball players. android79 03:31, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial run for one week, may apply for bot status after. --AllyUnion (talk) 07:56, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Alperenbot

Used in Turkish Wikipedia (tr.wikipedia.org)

This bot is used to start stub articles with coordinate + location + external google maps links, it was running succesfully howeever the bot account is suspended infinetely by a bureucrat. I suppose that this action is illegal, and I want my right to use bot, editing only 1 article per minute. I accept my fault that was running an unapproved bot with 5 articles per minute speed, however an infinite suspension is a heavy punishment, because the bot was creating useful articles, not garbage. I request my bot to be activated to create articles again I promise not to use it too fast.

My account: http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alperen My Bot account: http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alperenbot

Thanks

I'm sorry, but this is the English Wikipedia. We have nothing to do with the approval or disapproval of what happens on the Turkish Wikipedia. Please go to m:Requests for bot status if you want anything done. --AllyUnion (talk) 13:26, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:G-Bot

Requesting permission (trial run). This assisted-bot will fix typos using Bluemoose's AutoWikiBrowser and possibly disambiguate pages. This bot will be manually run and each edit will be checked. Gflores Talk 04:22, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please sign your username --AllyUnion (talk) 04:03, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I will also be running solve disambiguation.py assisted bot from the pywikipedia framework on the account. Gflores Talk 06:19, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for one week trial. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:47, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:U-571?

The page User:U-571 says it's a bot but I didn't find it listed. What links here doesn't give a clue either. Anybody knows something about that? Who operates that? Adrian Buehlmann 16:56, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In theory it should be blocked, but it isnt doing any harm, if the owner doesnt present himself soon then I would block it. Martin 17:04, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes looks good what it did (as I've seen so far). Maybe that user just does not know what the term "bot" means :-). Adrian Buehlmann 17:12, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

DFBot - AFD Summaries

I am experimenting with using a script to generate summaries of ongoing AFDs. The work in progress can be seen at User:Dragons flight/AFD summary. Right now the only updates come when I am working on it and trying to perfect the analysis code, and I would appreciate feedback on what people think of the idea and what can be done to make it useful. Eventually, I'd intend to have it update automatically from the DFBot account. Dragons flight 07:59, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for one week trial run. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:46, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Rschen7754bot

It's been a month or so since I got approved for the trial.... well I've used it only a few times over the last month but it seems to work out as intended. Can I do 30 seconds in between edits instead of 60? --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 08:40, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

From Wikipedia:Bots#Current policy on running bots:
3. Until new bots are accepted as ok they should wait 30-60 seconds between edits.
I've been running mine at 30 second intervals after the first week, based on this statement. --TheParanoidOne 11:58, 8 January 2006 (UTC)--TheParanoidOne 11:58, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If you wish to exceed the 30 second limit and run at 10 second intervals, please apply for a bot flag. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:46, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Anonymous bots with no information?

At the moment User:70.193.215.124 is making robot-like interlink edits, and getting a few wrong, but there is no information on what bot is running in the edit summary. The User page and talk page are empty, so I assume it's a user not-logged in. However is it good policy that robot edits can occur with insufficient information in the edit summary? -Wikibob 14:22, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

post on the ips talk page, if you can't get in touch with him that way consider requesting a block. note that i've done some pretty major interwiki updates accross many wikipedias by hand on a mostly anonymous basis with no edit summaries so i wouldn't nessacerally assume this is a bot.

Zbot370

This is User:Zscout370 here, but under my bot account. What I want to do is use replace.py under this account to replace flag images, such as from Image:foo flag large.png to Image:Flag of Foo.svg. I have been doing this by hand for months now, but with the scope of the whole process of changing flag images, I believe that a bot should run the task. And, since I wish to use python, I have created my own bot account so that the python task can be used on this on, not on my main account. Is there is any suggestions or comments to make, you can ask them at User talk:Zscout370. Thank you. Zbot370 20:49, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial run & testing for one week. May apply for a bot flag after no complaints after trial run. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:43, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, but I was wondering if I can get assistance with running replace.py. I am logged in as the bot now on WP and on Python, but I am just having trouble running the program itself. I am trying to replace Image:Flag of Mexico.png with Image:Flag of Mexico.svg as my trial run. Zbot370 22:27, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a specific problem? Martin 22:43, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I am just having problem trying to run it. This is my first time running python (I should have mentioned this). Zbot370 22:46, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If all the pages that need changing are in a specific category you would enter the command: 

python replace.py -cat:category_name -putthrottle:20

hit return then enter what to replace then what to replace it with. Or if you have the names of the articles that need changing in a txt file called abc.txt in the directory of the bot you could enter 

python replace.py -file:abc.txt -putthrottle:20

Does this help? Martin 22:55, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Kind of. I am trying to follow the steps on Meta about how to run the program using Windows, but I am still not able to run anything, since when I do the "CD" command to locate files, it does nothing. Would this be best suited to continue the discussion at my bot's talk page? Zbot370 01:07, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
NVM, I got help on IRC and things are running smoothly now. Thanks again. Zbot370 04:57, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Permission

I was, unfortunately, unable to get WP:AWB to run properly (see [9], [10]). Thus, I've downloaded the pywikipedia kit and would like permission to run a manually assisted bot for such operations as fixing ambiguous links, double redirects, wiki-syntax errors, etc. I hope to expand this to other tasks as I become more familiar with the programming language, but all edits will be manually reviewed. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 11:22, Jan. 11, 2006

You will need a separate account for such a purpose. --AllyUnion (talk) 10:42, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm aware of this, I haven't created as I am seeking approval first. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 10:48, Jan. 12, 2006
Ok bot has been created and considers itself to be in trial mode. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 10:34, Jan. 18, 2006
Bot acknowledges the above. — Catapult (talk) 10:37, Jan. 18, 2006

User:Crypticbot and WP:TFD

Just to keep everyone here up to date, User:Crypticbot is now maintaining WP:TFD's daily subpages in much the same manner as AllyUnion's bots maintain AFD/CFD. The major difference is that, in order to keep from breaking the watchlist for TFD like it was for AFD and CFD (see archived discussion), I'll be creating the daily subpages by a page move from Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/Seed. Sorry about the lack of notification, but we didn't get any advance warning of the split on Wikipedia talk:Templates for deletion, either. —Cryptic (talk) 01:11, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What, your crystal ball broke? Seriously, good work on getting this working so quickly. Impressive. KillerChihuahua?!? 22:07, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

New behavior for OrphanBot

Since the situation with unsourced images is now somewhat under control, I've modified OrphanBot's behavior:

  • OrphanBot will now convert tags from the {{nosource}} and {{nosource|~~~~~}} formats to the {{nosource|day=|month=|year=}} format, which categorizes the images by date, making it easier to see which images need deleting. OrphanBot will also create these categories if needed.
  • OrphanBot will notify uploaders about unsourced images. Notification will only be given if OrphanBot can't find a link to the image on the user's talk page: if it finds a link, there's a good chance that the user has already been notified.
  • OrphanBot will only orphan images that are older than six days. Hopefully this will get User:Sam Spade off my back -- he only wants me to remove image after they've been deleted.

--Carnildo 07:25, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How is it going to do that, is it going to use, {{CURRENTDAY}} {{CURRENTMONTH}} {{CURRENTYEAR}} to just add that in? JtkieferT | C | @ ---- 07:48, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Going to do what? --Carnildo 08:38, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

html => wiki bot

Using a new database analysis tool I just made I have identified ~7000 articles that contain <i> or <b> html markup, I would like to run my bot to convert this to standard wiki markup, using the pywikibot framework. I am aware that the html works over multiple lines but the wiki markup doesnt (as demonstrated here). thanks. Martin 22:03, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Careful with this one: if there was a movie or book called 'Bots, it would probably be coded as <i>'Bots</i>, because '''Bots'' would create Bots, which would be improperly formatted and also affect whatever text follows.
Thus, it would be ideal to have the bot either ignore cases like this, or change any affected literal apostrophes to some &#nnn; or ‘ ’ instead. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 00:17, Jan. 15, 2006
I see what mean, it should be pretty easy to avoid those situations if I am careful with some regular expressions. thanks Martin 00:24, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Pokemon

On request I am going to change instances of Pokemon to Pokémon. Martin 23:29, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

NetBot concurrent runs

As raised on WP:VPT, I've noticed the same bot running multiple instances. In this case, because of problems with the change from {{See}} to {{Further}}. For one thing, I never saw a discussion on using Further instead of See.

For Israel, they appear to be from Special:Contributions/205.196.208.21:

The latter edit broke the display at Zionism and Aliyah, through bad interactions with other common templates ({{Main}} and {{See also}} and {{Israelis}}). Note the differences using "Older edit".

However, others show up in Special:Contributions/NetBot, see the range:

  • 2006-01-15 09:18:44 ... Canadian federal election, 2004 (Robot: migrating See calls to Further)
  • 2006-01-15 10:07:07 ... Tank (Robot: Migrate See to Further (match displayed text))

Is somebody running the same Bot simultaneously from an IP address? Is that permitted?

--William Allen Simpson 04:30, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
In that case we need to figure out how to set the templates so they don't break each other. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 06:51, Jan. 18, 2006

It is a bug with pywiki bots, I have found that roughly 1 in 1000 edits are performed logged out. Martin 13:37, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Here, by actual count, 15:142, which is a bit worse than that.... However, that seems like a rational explanation.
--William Allen Simpson 23:26, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you use a static IP you might put a message on the User talk page for those who notice and look for info. (SEWilco 15:25, 18 January 2006 (UTC))[reply]

bot0918

I have various spelling/grammar corrections I would like to make, as well as redirect and disambig repair (such as fixing all the redirects from Cambridge University to University of Cambridge), and stub sorting. Zscout370 helped set me up with this pywikipedia bot, and it appears to be working (made my first edit). — 0918BRIAN • 2006-01-18 06:37

Please add the parameter;
-namespace:0
As you should only make edits like this to main namespace pages. Martin 10:08, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! I was wondering how to do that :) — 0918BRIAN • 2006-01-18 10:16

bots on the commons?

Where do I go on the commons to request permission to use a bot? I have just under 500 images I wish to upload. Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 23:42, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ask at the Commons... We really couldn't tell you the answer. --AllyUnion (talk) 03:36, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

William Allen Simpson running occasionally as Botryoidal

Reading the instructions, it appears that it should be possible to run the standard py bot under our own name. I've been checking stuff by hand (orphaning templates) every day for the past several weeks that would be helped by a bit of automation. It's not currently a lot of edits per day, and it will be fairly slow as I'll be handling it late nights over dial-up. Any objections (or advice)?

--William Allen Simpson 20:46, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You need to outline exactly what work you are doing. If this has anything to do with disambiguation templates (or {{2LC}}, {{3LC}}, {{4LC}} etc) then I ask you to discuss any changes at the relevent project talk pages.--Commander Keane 03:06, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, this is exactly the template changes that I've already posted at the relevant talk pages. I'm getting tired of doing them entirely by hand. I'm seeing a lot of repetition, and apparently simple tasks (like mere substitution) are easy to do with standard bot utilities. I won't write any additional code, and will run the utilities "as is" from the repository. Shouldn't affect the performance of this site.

--William Allen Simpson 03:36, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You might consider using the Auto Wiki Browser for these tasks. It's as near to automated as you can get without people complaining that you use bots. (people with editcountitis, at least) — 0918BRIAN • 2006-01-20 03:38

Cannot, as I'm a longtime Unix(1977)/BSD(1983)/Mac(1984)/MacOSX kinda guy. But reading more of the instructions convinced me that it would be prudent to run a separate user. So, I just checked many variants of my name, and almost everything has already been taken by usernames with no edits! (FYI: Botch, Bottom, or Bottomless are still available.) Anyway, I'll try out Botryoidal later.

--William Allen Simpson 05:01, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Happy Joy Joy! Successfully editted a single page. Will try more later.

--William Allen Simpson 06:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This bot doesn't have approval. Stop using it and outline the activities explicitly.--Commander Keane 08:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Gentlefolk, earlier today (middle of night local time) Commander Keene blocked both this (my) User and my new bot User:Botryoidal. At the time, I gave up and went to bed. However, I just figured out that I was unblocked:

  • 2006-01-20 08:50:36 Commander Keane unblocked User:Botryoidal (collateral damage from blocking of Botryoidal)
  • ...
  • 2006-01-20 08:49:56 Commander Keane unblocked #84338 (collateral damage from blocking of Botryoidal)
  • ...
  • 2006-01-20 08:28:34 Commander Keane blocked "User:Botryoidal" with an expiry time of 24 hours (Unauthorised bot)

I followed each and every step listed for starting to use the bot. The bot was run manually, and run throttled. Indeed, I was manually running in alphabetical batches (20-30 or so edits at a time), and had just started 'E' about four (4) minutes before!

The stated rules for administrator block require that

1. "... they are unapproved, doing something the operator didn't say they would do, messing up articles or editing too rapidly."
  • Certainly the bot wasn't doing anything that I didn't say it would do (it was only doing exactly one edit, and that was what I stated, orphaning a template that I'd listed at WP:TFD) several days ago.
  • Certainly the bot wasn't messing up articles. I tested the first edits one file at a time by hand, and I checked each and every batch of edits on my screen before running the next batch. Heck, I'm generally considered a fairly careful and cautious "safe pair of hands"!
  • Certainly the bot wasn't editing too rapidly, Special:Contributions/Botryoidal shows that the edits were throttled to 30 seconds (as required), and run in the slack time (as required).

The stated rules for starting the bot say that:

"2. New bots should run without a bot flag so people can check what it's doing.
"3. Until new bots are accepted as ok they should wait 30-60 seconds between edits."

Now, how exactly are perfectly performing bots supposed to qualify during their "initial one-week probation" demonstrating they are run responsibly, when an administrator blocks them without any valid reason?

--William Allen Simpson 15:06, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Botryoidal has not been approved for the one week trial. It was blocked because the operator has not outlined exactly what the bot is doing and why. The operator still has not outlined that. There has already been a complaint about the types of edits that the bot is doing. The edits need to be discussed before the bot makes any more. If the bot edits without approval it will be blocked.--Commander Keane 16:26, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

So, you admit you know exactly what the bot is doing! (I didn't think I could possibly have been more clear — in fact, considerably more clear than any other bot request on this list.)

Anybody who looks at that reference will note that it is actually posted several days before the bot existed. So, you personally object to the edits I've been carefully and considerately doing for weeks by hand. Well, I don't think this is the place to re-argue a two week straw poll, that was started because of the flagrant template redirecting and category closing surreptitiously done on New Years Eve by the person you cite (Tedernst), and fairly quickly reverted.

--William Allen Simpson 18:36, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No one has yet given you approval to run your bot, and therefore it was blocked a day after when no comment was made on whether it was approved or not. I still don't understand what you intend to do with your bot account, since I really don't see your proposal here. Just a lot of complaining. --AllyUnion (talk) 03:35, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AllyUnion, please go back to the first paragraph. Orphaning templates. In particular, those I've currently got listed in TfD, or those of mine currently in TfD Holding Cell. Pretty straightforward work I've been doing by hand for weeks.

--William Allen Simpson 10:15, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Vandal Count Bot

I'd like to run VandalCountBot as an automated bot that would run once an hour. I have already created an IRC script that logs the amount of vandalism in #wikipedia-en-vandalism, and the purpose of VandalCountBot would be to grab the vandal count information from my server (based on the hour) and place it in a table, as it can be seen here: [[11]] (NOTE: The information in that table was manually entered.)

The bot wouldn't put any stress on the wikipedia server, as it would only be sending one POST request to the server every hour. The purpose of the bot would be to show trends of vandalism based on time of the day, day of the week, and even month of the year. I believe it will be a beneficial tool to the CVU to be aware of when the high vandalism times are. --Lightdarkness 02:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • This is based on the potential vandalism from the IRC channel? Would it also be possible to list the Recent Changes for the past hour, and count how many have some form of "rvv/Reverted edits by/revert vandalism" in their edit summary? This could be another useful curve. — 0918BRIAN • 2006-01-20 03:50
    • My script already does what you've described at the IRC level. It looks for the text used by scripts such as Godmode-lite and Popups, and disregards if their edit summaries match. If I'm not understanding what you're suggesting/commenting on, please let me know :-) --Lightdarkness 03:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • No, I understand what your current bot does. But the IRC vandalism bot gets false positives. It would be nice to have another curve to look at and compare to, specifically to get all the occurrences of "rvv/Reverted edits by/revert vandalism" in edit summaries in the last hour, or something like that. — 0918BRIAN • 2006-01-20 04:39
        • I see what you're saying :-) I'll start logging the RC changes per hour, then I'll write something to sort through them tomorrow, and we'll see how they match up. EDIT: After looking through just a few minutes of the RC feed, it'd be very hard for me to sort out all the non vandalism. The IRC CVU channel does a good job with extensive blacklists, whitelists, and numerous rules to see what is vandalism and what is not. Sure some things might be mixed, but if I were to analyze the raw RC feed, my vandal count would be much much higher, that it wouldn't even be accurate. Maybe down the road when I can write all the rules the CVU bots have, but as the beginning stages of VandalCountBot, I'd just stick with the CVU IRC feed. --Lightdarkness 04:52, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am running a test on the automation of Vandal Count Bot. Up until this point, the python script that does the updating has been manually run. Therefore, tonight at 8pm Eastern (0:00 GMT), VandalCountBot should update two pages. User:Lightdarkness/Vandalism and User:Lightdarkness/Vandalism/Sandbox I will be around to supervise it, but there should be no ill effects, as this is just a timer that is running the python file. --Lightdarkness 21:28, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

SundarBot

Hi, User:SundarBot is a bot based on pywikipedia that I'm using primarily for creating interwiki links for articles in Tamil wikipedia. I've been running this bot for sometime now. You can check it's contributions. -- Sundar \talk \contribs 12:44, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please add your bot to Category:Wikipedia bots and the main page. You may apply for a bot flag after... however, I as have never seen a request from you, and do not know if any complaint has been lodged, please give your bot an one week continuous run, then apply for a bot flag after. --AllyUnion (talk) 03:30, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Forgot to tell that I've done that. I've let the bot run twice on the complete set of articles on the Tamil wiki. You can look at it's contributions. -- Sundar \talk \contribs 03:53, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:RoboDick

I would like to use me Interwiki.py robot at EN.wikipedia. I have a multilogin robot, editing more than one wiki at the same time. See its Japanese edits. I will do a testrun of about 50 edits at EN.wiki and than wait for permission. Dutchy-Dick 14:35, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have end my testrun with 33 edits I hope I can have A Bot Flag Dutchy-Dick 16:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I checked some of the test-edits and they are ok. Jcbos 16:45, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Please run your bot for a complete week. If no complaints for a trial run of one week, you may apply for a bot flag. Also, please do not forget to add your bot to the Category:Wikipedia bots and place your bot on the main page. --AllyUnion (talk) 03:27, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I applied for a botflag at meta. Dutchy-Dick 19:27, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Flag activated. Bye. meta:User:Paginazero. 21:56, 1 February 2006 (CET)

User:Tsca.bot

I am requesting the bot flag for tsca.bot on the English Wikipedia. The bot has been active on several projects since 2004 (at this point it has the flag on pl.wiki, csb.wiki, pl.wikt, pl.books, en.books, commons, nl.wikt, da.wiki, sv.wiki, cs.wiki, pl.source, it.wikt, de.wiki). My intention now is to add interwiki links to Polish articles to en: (I can read the languages the bot adds interwiki to). Any other activity will be undertaken only after a proper discussion and making sure the community is interested. tsca ✉ 12:45, 28 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The bot and its owner are doing an extremely good job at Polish Wikipedia. The bot is also the Polish Wikipedia users with the biggest numer of edits :). Ausir 12:47, 28 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Which framework does it use? pywikipedia? That information would be helpful on the bot's userpage.--Commander Keane 13:10, 28 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
For the interwiki links the bot obviously uses interwiki.py. For any other work it uses my own software (written in perl + sh). tsca ✉ 13:21, 28 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just a question

I'm confused about the different sections on this, especially WP:B#Bots running without a flag. I just want to do a one shot replace.py of a certian category that isn't that big, but has too many to be done manually. So do I need to request permission here for something that simple? I can do--Commander Keane 07:20, 21 January 2006 (UTC) even like 5 minute throttle and at whatever off-peak time! It seems like this bot flag thing is for permanent bots. I just want to run this replace.py one time and probably never use it again. --Chris 06:57, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You probably don't want to bother with a flag if you are only going to be making a few changes but you still have to request permission here. This is because no matter how straightforward you think a change is, since a bot does a lot of work it's a good idea for others (ie at this page) to look over the idea and see if it is ok (take a look above here and here, both are cases where a bot operator thought they were doing something simple and yet infact bot permission was refused). So, what is the category change and where is the consensus for it? Also, you may want to consider using category.py if it's a simple category name change. If it's just a one off thing then you could consider a Bot request instead (and someone else will do it for you).--Commander Keane 07:20, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No it's not a category change. I'm introducing a new parameter into a template, but all of the articles that use it (which are all in this one category) will break if I just change it, so I want to fill all of the articles with a default value for the parameter. Eventually, many of them will probably manually bjavascript:insertTags('--Chris 21:24, 22 January 2006 (UTC)',,);e changed to something else, but I don't want them all breaking beforehand. --Chris 07:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Give the parameter a default value like this: {{{param|default}}}, then go assign a value to the parameter at each article afterward and you won't be throwing ugly curly braces into articles for even a few minutes. Note that the default can be whitespace/blank like this {{{param|}}}. — FREAK OF NURxTURE (TALK) 07:44, Jan. 21, 2006
holy crap. i never knew that. i have no clue how i missed that for this long. that must be a fairly new feature. ok, well that's good. i don't need a bot at all. thank you very much for the tip. --Chris 21:24, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Syrcatbot request

As an admin who has started doing a lot of category moves / etc at CFD, I'm thinking of making a separate account for the recat edits. As a first step, I've created User:Syrcatbot. I guess my first question is: is this a reasonable idea, or does nobody care that I will have a ton of recategorizations for User:Syrthiss?

Syrcatbot will still be me sitting there with AutoWikiBrowser, and will obviously not be tagged as Admin.

I'm still getting the hang of tagging cat moves for the other bots, but if that is what I should do for all my cat moves then I'm willing to stop doing recats by hand and leave it to the bots.

Thanks! --Syrthiss 15:18, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The reason why you'd apply for a bot account is to make faster high speed edits that seemed unhumanly possible. Also, this helps you being blocked accidently by Curp's autoblocker. So it is a good idea to make a new bot account, and apply for a bot flag after. --AllyUnion (talk) 03:25, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, then this is my official request for a bot flag for User:Syrcatbot per Wikipedia:Bots. I've populated the userpage for Syrcatbot, and added it to Category:Wikipedia bots. --Syrthiss 22:24, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

NetBot

Netoholic is running User:NetBot and modifying all instances of the {{main article}} template, which was previously (TFD'd and?) redirected to {{main}}. Has he asked for permission to do this or is just more disruption regarding conditional templates? — Omegatron 19:42, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Xiaogiabot: Need help with web crawler permission

I am doing a school assignment where I need to configure Heritrix web crawler to retrive pages from Wikipedia. I read Wikipedia:Bots and it says that I need to approval on Wikipedia:Bots talk. I am confused whether I need to get approval for the web crawler engine.

This is the information of the Bot:

  • The bot is automatic. I configured the URL to point to a page in Wikipedia.
  • It should run from Jan 25 - Mar 31 2005.
  • Heritrix from Internet Archive's Heritrix homepage. It is a Java program.
  • Purpose:
    • I need to crawl a topic to retrive the pages. The purpose is to preserve the topic for future use.
    • I notice that for every page there is a history that shows the history page. But, the purpose that I am doing this is for web archiving purpose. This is to archiving one topic and show a prototype of how this can be done. Wikipedia must allow me to crawl because I need this to accomplish my assignment. Please.

The user page for my bot User:Xiaogiabot.

Please let me know if my web crawler can crawl a topic in Wikipedia.

Xiaogiabot 08:43, 25 January 2006 (UTC)User:Xiaogia[reply]

Crawlers are not allowed, see Wikipedia:Database_download#Please_do_not_use_a_web_crawler, although if you are only crawling a small number of pages it may be ok. Martin 09:39, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:ABot update

I would like to use my bot to change instances of {{NowCommons|...}}/{{nowcommons|...}}/{{NC|...}}, where appropriate (that is, if the image name on the commons is exactly the same as the name here. The code is built on top of the pywikipediabot framework, and is availible upon request. – ABCDe✉ 04:36, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]


User:Xbot RFP

I have created Xbot for fuffilling the request of this user. I would like permition to run. The bot would only crawl through the military history category. TIA! - Xxpor 18:58, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Accessing the servers for stats

I am not really asking about a bot posting to pages itself (yet) but i run some scripts accessing all Special:Statistics?action=raw pages from Wikimedia servers to automatically create wikisyntax for pages with long statistics tables like 1,2,3, 4 and 5. I just provide the wiki syntax here though and copy paste manually. My question is now: What time intervals are ok when accessing all those stats pages? What timing can i set my cronjob to without being seen as an annoyance? (when running the scripts to update my local database) and should i think about also posting the result automatically or rather not and just offer people to copy and paste. Mutante23 20:39, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Tawkerbot

Tawkerbot is a python wikipediabot from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_the_python_wikipediabot. It will be running subst: on a list of userpages that I have created and checked that have templates without the subst tag.

I'm taking lists of user pages that have not used subst: on common warning templates and adding the subst in. I will be using a text file of configs.

= Config params given

As per the instructions, Tawkerbot will be run with the commands

python replace.py -file:articles_list.txt "{{test2}}" "{{subst:test2}}

with the articles_list.txt being a file created by myself and the template being the template that needs to be edited.

Sorry that I started running the bot, I misunderstood the bot procedures, thankfully I had 20 people on the IRC room trying to tell me I hard errored.

Update: This bot will also do user requests posted @ User:Tawkerbot - there is a request form there, I'm requiring a consensus link before having any bot operations commence for template replacement etc. I will post job requests that have a major impact on the wiki here and wait for 3 days prior to operation.

Present User Requests for Tawkerbot to do:

Rename

to Template:LightSources per material contained, and then fix the redirects. 68.39.174.238 22:42, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Tawker 02:35, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AlvestrandNLBot

This is a project in the making, not an existing bot... I created a couple of lines of Perl that allowed me to pull up a subsection of Category:Living people in a format that would allow me to cut-and-paste it into List of people by name. This led to some discussion, which included the points that:

  • This would be much more useful if it also read the article pointed to and attempted to pull some basic biographical data from there
  • Letting the script do the paste-back to Wikipedia itself would make some issues (particularly Unicode ones) easier
  • If the two changes above were made, the result would most certainly need permission to run under the Wikipedia bot policy.

So I'm hereby asking permission. The account for the bot is not created, the script is not written. But I would like to make sure I'm not getting ahead of myself. --Alvestrand 13:31, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We'd need to see the code before we can determine if it's ok or not, post the code on your bots usertalk page and we'll review it. Tawker 13:45, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I'm wondering if anyone can point me out where to get the answer. My question is that if I have a specific category, I would like to get all red wikilinks in all articles in that category. Do you know any bot that can do this thing? Thanks for any answer --Manop - TH 15:57, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I made a program a while ago, linked to on my userpage, that lists all the red links on a given article, that may help. Martin 16:07, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

LDBot

LDBot is a self named bot (Lightdarkness) which is to be created to do a few tasks. It is based off PHP and the Pywikipedia framework. The purpose of the bot would be to maintain Wikipedia:List_of_non-admins_with_high_edit_counts. The bot would check the edit counts via the toolserver of each user once a week (Spaced out in equal incriments, as to not cause stress on the server) and once every other day, update the counts at the previously mentioned page. The bot is being designed to make the stat tracking of that page automated, so it doesn't require user upkeep.

The Bot will not strain wikipedia servers at all. It will make no more than one request to the toolserver (or a wikimedia server) per hour, with updating to take place once every other day. If this behavior were to ever change, I would first bring it up here, or to AllyUnion to be sure that the bot is still within operating limits.

I've recieved the support of an active admin on that page, and another admin, which is why I've started development on this bot. Development will occur in my Usernamespace, and willnot edit the main page until the bot is approved, and testing is complete. --lightdarkness (talk) 03:09, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hvae you asked the people who run the tool servers if checking all edit counts once a week would stress their servers? Martin 09:35, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't specificly asked, I just came to the conclusion that it was common sense because I know several users who check their edit count using Interiots tool several times PER hour. I'm also very certain that Interiot uses the SQL function COUNT() which reduces the amount of processing power, but I will ask Interiot and the other toolserver admins if indeed it will be no trouble. --lightdarkness (talk) 12:05, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A question, currently some users bold their user names, for Users in bold have shown an interest in becoming admins.. What do you think about this, will you add this feature.--Ugur Basak 13:13, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Of course! Syntax for editing the users interest is as follows: "LDBot mod Lightdarkness <bold>" for making a user bold, if a user is not interested, you'd use the following: "LDBot mod Ugur_Basak (Not Interested) <strikethrough>" Where a comment is given within the parenthises, and the format type is given in < >. --lightdarkness (talk) 14:06, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This sort of thing would be much more efficient to implement on the toolserver itself (eg. a slight modification of this SQL query), and it would probably much less work to just pester someone who has a toolserver account than to write the code for the bot. Even better, wikisign.org has a database dump that's currently 10 days old, and you can run that query there. All that aside, a hit or three an hour isn't going to be noticable, but there may be better ways to do it. --Interiot 17:18, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The thing about it being on the toolserver though, is that users can't add their own comments on if they want to be an admin, no interest, links to previous nominations, ect. You do bring up a good point though, and I'll ask you about it on your talk page. --lightdarkness (talk) 21:36, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A single-user count is available here, but the tool specifically says "Please note, that mass automated querying of the edit counter (for example, to generate lists of user sorted by edit count) is not allowed.". eg. it's better to pester someone with a toolserver account to get the raw data that you want, with a single query, since that will only take 3 - 5 minutes to generate. --Interiot 22:01, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
But the thing is, the stats will be constantly updated over a period of time, I wouldn't think that one query per hour would be trouble, but I'm very open to ideas as far as what type of things toolserver access would attribute to this project. --lightdarkness (talk) 22:46, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't it easier for the report to be generated on the toolserver, with LDBot copying the results once per day and overwriting the local Wiki page? Or am I misunderstanding something? Titoxd(?!? - help us) 01:28, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That would pretty much do the same thing, I'm just using my personal server to do all of the data processing, but with toolserver access I could just get the counts and update there, but I'm not sure the toolserver has access to a mysql database to write to (which I'm now using on mine for storage), but I'll look into it. --lightdarkness (talk) 03:12, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The database in the toolserver does not have write access to the Wikimedia databases, so I don't think that is possible. However, the same effect can be done by making the raw query in the toolserver (which is much less expensive than querying Kate's Tool or doing anything like that), and then have LDBot read the file and process it slightly for posting in the local Wikipedia page. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 05:50, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I knew that the toolserver can't write to the wikipedia database, but the way I'm storing all the edit counts is on my own database, once I query Interiots tool for them. This way, I can space them out rather than gathering all the data at runtime. Even if it were on the toolserver, being run all at once would probably take quite a bit of processing power, and I wouldn't want to disrupt the toolserver. --lightdarkness (talk) 05:55, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

After re-reading all of the comments here, I thought I would just sum everything up. Interiot stated that 2-3 hits per hour wouldn't affect the toolserver, but suggests that there could be a better way of going about it. However, the current layout of WP:NA has a lot of information, regarding notes about users seeking adminship, links to previous noms, ect, that the toolserver cannot gather by doing a simple query. Which brings me to my conclusion. The concensus on the talk page of WP:NA suggests everyone is for the bot implimentation. Due to the limitations of the toolserver for this layout, I'll just be querying the toolserver once every hour for an updated editcount of the user whose editcount was updated the longest ago. Every night, my bot will grab commands from a specialized page in LDBot's usernamespace for commands to add, modify, delete users from the master list, and then LDBot will blank the page, signaling that the commands have been processed. Then, if any updates are required, LDBot will update the pages of the appropriate sections. I hope this wasn't too long, but this is the best way I can see doing it while automating the process and keeping the output the same. --lightdarkness (talk) 21:48, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Flag bot

I haven't had time to read all of this, but I was looking to run a bot that replaced flag images. Is there such a bot already? I could even help it if it exists... Fetofs Hello! 22:33, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean by replaced flag images? Do you need a straight text to text (imagex) in lieu of (imagey) or something more complex. If the forementioned is what you need, I can set user:tawkerbot to do it as soon as I have a consensus to do it. Tawker 09:12, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I wanted to get the bot myself, because there are a lot of flags on the .PNG format. But yes, it's a straight find and replace. I'll make some edits with it, I hope it clarifies things. Running in a week trial. When the flag things are done, I'll use it for general corrections. Fetofs Hello! 11:14, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

P.S: Can I use it to solve disambiguation links as well?

JoeBot

Hello everybody! I would like your permission to run my little JoeBot. It replaces common misspelled words, like 'begining' (beginning). I sort of started doing it on my own account and then realized that if I wanted to continue doing it I would need a bot account because of the sheer massive amount of these misspellings. So here I am! Wikipedia is getting so large that little mistakes fall through the cracks, and I'd like JoeBot to be able to be there to catch em'.

The bot will be manually run by yours truly, using the mighty fine AutoWikiBrowser by Martin. I'll be using it with the JoeBot account for a trial week to earn my spurs. It will only check the english wikipedia. JoeSmack Talk 18:39, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And yes, I am truly aware of regional spellings and pay special attention not to replace these. (example: 'color' and 'colour') JoeSmack Talk

Does policy apply to tools, or to edit frequency?

A clarification: if someone is using their browser to make fast edits, either with keyboard shortcuts or perhaps using a JavaScript tool or something like Greasemonkey, does that exempt them from this policy? I have noted a few cases of late where editors are making 10 edits per minute or more for extended periods, and when queried, they say they are not running a bot, but rather using browser features. Is this policy scoped to the tool in use, or the frequency of edits, or to something else? --TreyHarris 10:31, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If it looks like a bot, smells like a bot, acts like a bot, it's a bot. Talrias (t | e | c) 10:43, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A similiar question was asked a while back (here) and the answer concurred with Talrias.--Commander Keane 11:22, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Acutally the answer was "Use a bot flag to avoid clogging up recent changes" (paraphrase). Recent changes also has a "minor changes" flag, and a "logged in user flag" either of which can be used for that same purpose. The only distinction bots have is trusted status. Also things have changed since the early days, with 100+ changes a minute the rationale for a bot flag is slightly different - about 11% of changes are by bots (according to a recent poll of 500 changes) , and they are running all the time. Rich Farmbrough. 14:50, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The bot flag is just another filter on the RC feed, most users don't review bot changes on flagged bots because they assume they're approved. I see the main point of a bot flag is to avoid clogging up RC, I run my bot at 12 edits a min during off peak slow hours (especially when I'm doing an 8K job) - I checked with the bot filter off and my bot was 1 in 5 edits, its mostly just a trust/filtering thing. One with AWB can do the same amount of edits or more just clicking next each time. Tawker 07:16, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bot flag for SmackBot

Can I have a bot-flag for User:SmackBot to allow me to edit very quickly without cluttering "recent changes". Previously (for example when I put GFDL templates on 3000+ map images) marking the changes as minor has been the thing to do, but times have changed I guess. Plus if anyone can recommend a simple bot apart from pywikipediabot for me to look at I would be grateful. Rich Farmbrough. 13:04, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What will SmackBot do with its very quick editing powers (why do you need it)? Is it important enough for Wikipedia to allow your bot? How long will it run for? Is it using pywikipediabot or some other? Will it be manually assisted or automatic/scheduled?
Another simple bot apart from pywikipediabot is AutoWikiBrowser. I like it a lot. JoeSmack Talk 14:38, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well I was pluralising the "External links" header in articles with more than one external link. I have paused (or slowed to a crawl), because a user found it inconvenient when doing recent change patrol. There are currently about 7-8000 articles still to do. I would only use SmackBot account for manual edits, until further request (I.E. I am not requesting to run a bot at the moment). I would also restrict it to very simple edits, because they are the only ones that can be performed at high speed, the slightest complexity means careful checking is required, therefore recent changes is not cluttered, therefore no bot flag is needed and I would use my main account. I have used AWB it is very good, but in CSharp . Rich Farmbrough. 16:43, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bot flag for DFBot

DFBot has been maintaining the RFA summary and the AFD summary for a number of weeks now, but I have been too lazy to come back here and ask for a bot flag. Are there any objections to getting one? Dragons flight 17:07, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is C++/CLI Ok??

I have begun coding a bot in C++/CLI, nothing concrete yet...probably not for 2 or 3 weeks. Just checking that the programming language is ok. P.S. I will put up a bot page, specify exact mission and all that other stuff once it is nearer to completion and is closer to testing.Eagle (talk) (desk) 17:50, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think we really care what people write thier bots in as long as they write code that works properly and doesn't leave a mess behind for other editors to deal with. Plugwash 18:26, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ok Thanks, the only reason I was asking was because I did not see any other C++/CLI bots on wikipedia. Sorry about that!!Eagle (talk) (desk) 18:32, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Most bots are written in Python or Perl because those languages already have frameworks for accessing Wikipedia, and both have ready support for regular expressions. --Carnildo 03:41, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ok Thanks, still going with the C++/CLI as I don't know the other languages.Eagle (talk) (desk) 06:08, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bobblebot

I would like to use a bot to delink date links.

The task is to reduce linking of solitary months, solitary years, etc in accordance with the Manual of style. It will not delink date links used for date preference. Each edit will be checked visually.

For example Economy of Algeria has many solitary year links, including 14 to 2004. The policy and popular misunderstandings are explained at:

For example:

  • The short-lived ABC Cable News began in 1995; unable to compete with CNN, it shut down in 1997. Undaunted, in 2004 ABC launched a news channel called ABC News Now.

will become:

  • The short-lived ABC Cable News began in 1995; unable to compete with CNN, it shut down in 1997. Undaunted, in 2004 ABC launched a news channel called ABC News Now.
See this diff working towards that: [12].

Several editors were using Martin's excellent AutoWikiBrowser to do this task. That was a good solution that just got better and better. The shared experience of many users produced a 'whole is greater than the sum' process of logic improvements. I would be more than happy to share or give away the date delinking task to AutoWikiBrowser if it is permitted to do it.

A previous application on 15 December did not succeed. User:Sam Korn suggested that I should reapply and make clear that I look at each edit. So this is my re-application. Thanks. bobblewik 19:48, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose, Bobblewik has said in the past that he checks each edit yet his talk page has plenty of examples of where he has clearly not taken enough care to check that his bot script has not done something silly. I don't believe this will be any different. I am also opposed in principle to using bots to "improve" articles. Articles are organic things and rigid scripts rarely help. Talrias (t | e | c) 19:54, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    By the way, what has changed since the last application? Talrias (t | e | c) 20:01, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Basically, it was my perception (and Bobblewik has taken my advice, so please shoot me first :-) that most complaints were more due to concerns that the edits would not be monitored. Is there any reason why Bobblewik should not be allowed another chance? Sam Korn (smoddy) 20:44, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have no problem remove 13 links to 2004 in the first example but do not agree that the links are irrelevant in the second example. Worse, I have seen no effort on your part to determine which links are relevant - only mass removal. I understand you do not like these links. I also understand that some other people do. I don't see why a bot is required in this controversy. Rmhermen 19:57, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • So long as Bobblewik undertakes that he will look very carefully at complaints about mistakes and will examine edits carefully, I see no reason why this should not happen. Support Sam Korn (smoddy) 20:44, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I support a bot that makes these types of changes, as i did in Decemeber. i hate seeing over linked articles with respect to dates. David D. (Talk) 20:54, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I can't see what the damage could be. No information could be lost. As it stands no one could go to a date to find information anyway. Caution should always be exercised in using bots. --Wetman 20:58, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support. There are so many articles which overlink dates, I often fix these manually and comment about it in peer reviews, etc. it would be great to have a bot get rid of these overlinkings. --Fritz Saalfeld (Talk) 21:06, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, provided that the changes only delink dates and don't otherwise affect their formatting. (I'm particularly concerned about [[1941]]-[[1944|44]] becoming 1941-44, and not 1941-1944.) —Kirill Lokshin 21:09, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support/Oppose. Bobblewik's edits are manually checked, therefore they are at most robot assisted. Since we are all fallible, there is no reason these edits should not show on recent changes so a bot-flag should not be granted. Bobblewick is restricting his changes to 2 per minute - slower than some of his critics. If giving him bot-status will allow him to continue editing, then I support his request. If on the other hand, he should be permitted to edit at two changes per minute (or a faster rate) in any case, then I would oppose the bot status, and say let him get on with the editing. If someone has a problem with any of his edits, they can discuss them or revert them individually, and follow the normal dispute resolution procedure if that doesn't work. Rich Farmbrough 21:17 25 February 2006 (UTC).
  • Support, let the bobblebot role - get rid of needless date links. Vsmith 21:22, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Even if it delinked every year in Wikipedia it would probably be doing more good than harm, considering how bad date overlinking is. Kaldari 21:35, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. My only concern is that there seems to be an army of "robots" who are just going to mindlessly continue to turn every year and date into a link. It seems like there needs to be a way to get the people who make all these useless links to stop doing so. --JWSchmidt 21:39, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I do want to see those year links reduced. -- Donald Albury (Dalbury)(Talk) 21:54, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. As long as we are agreed that overlinking of dates is a Bad Thing, i.e. that the MOS isn't in dispute, it makes sense to grant Bot status to any program that will bring the Wikipedia closer to the MOS. Consider the possible good vs. the worst possible harm, as Kaldari did, above. It's hard to imagine a scenario in which net harm would be done.—GraemeMcRaetalk 22:05, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - All Bobblewik is trying to do is conform to policy, which is a noble goal. We should be thankful we have someone who is willing to do this nitty gritty work; I certainly don't enjoy going through hundreds of pages and doing it manually. Even though he is going AWB-assisted, it is manual in the end, so kudos to him. As an answer to someone who said he shouldn't get the bot flag because these are manual: he's had people repeatedly blocking him because he's "editing too fast" for a non-bot. If he doesn't get this bot flag he's just going to face the same kind of misunderstanding and repeated disruptions of his work. --Cyde Weys 22:16, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, I've made my views on this clear before. Stephen Turner (Talk) 22:25, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Support. As others have said, conforming to the Wikipedia policies is a good thing, and it helps us get this sort of maintenance/MoS work done quicker. — Wackymacs 22:37, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. – Quadell (talk) (bounties) 22:48, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Unnecessary links are a nuisance and bobblewik wants to do something about them. He has taken enough flak for his efforts and deserves the support of the community. Stroika 22:57, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support --Duk 23:08, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - Works on the nerves of many people (also this whole "crusade" idea, so comparable to the "conversion to BC/BCE" crusade, to the "conversion of references" crusade, etc - the proponents of these crusades all advocated application of guidelines as a justification of their crusade, all these were stopped by ArbCom leaving them on probation without permission for further conversion ***neither by bot nor manually***). This bot proposal would mean Bobblewik is "approved" to come in on any article (say, for instance, Furniture music), and decide which are the significant dates, and which aren't. Sorry, Bobblewik *may* be aware of which the significant dates are for several ranges of articles, but (s)he should not get a ticket to be allowed to meddle with any article (s)he pleases. Further, I take it as a principle that anyone who goes around inviting only parties who previously expressed sympathy to take part in a vote, should better not be granted anything. --Francis Schonken 23:47, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • What are you talking about, only parties who previously expressed sympathy, Bobblewik contacted some of his harshest critics, including admins who have blocked him before. Go take another look. --Duk 00:16, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Bobblewik has just spammed over 50 user talk pages (with the edit summary "Date links") about this bot account application. I'm assuming Bobblewik was using AWB, because a rate exceeding one edit per 10 seconds was reached.--Commander Keane 23:26, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Bobblewiki is not presently enabled to use AWB, plus all edits made with it reference the AWB page in the summary. Martin 23:32, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    I've done that rate with page moves and talk page notices. Look at successful admin candidates' edit rates immediately after their promotion. 10/minute is not difficult if all the edits are identical, and if you have a reasonable connection. Sam Korn (smoddy) 23:36, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    OK, let's stop this vote, and start an RfC on Bobblewik, what were we waiting for all the time? --Francis Schonken 23:47, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    An RFC on what, formatting pages to conform with existing policy? I don't think that'd get very far. --Cyde Weys 06:03, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    OK, my apologies to Bobblewik for the AWB assumption. I didn't realise that edits could be done that fast manually, and I'm glad the the AWB coutermeasures are still enabled.--Commander Keane 23:51, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Comment. Spamming or not, can users kindly refrain from having revert wars over this message on my talk page? The orange new message box keeps flashing up on my screen and it's really annoying to find there's no actual new messages. - Randwicked Alex B 06:34, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive73#Bobblewik and other experiences with user. --M@thwiz2020 01:53, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support: trivial date links are a scourge on WP that have somehow crept in on the back of the mechanism for formatting full dates. I can't imagine why anyone would object. I guess the only circumstance in which a year date might be useful is for ancient dates/centuries, but even so, that's not a good enough reason to stop the bot. Tony 04:43, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Fully automated is ok too - no text is ever lost. BTW, I think it is outrageous that an admin would block Bobblewik for 2 weeks(!) for making good, valid edits (to date links), following the Manual of Style, without revert warring, as was described on the Administrators' noticeboard link that Mathwiz2020 pointed out above. -R. S. Shaw 04:58, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, please get rid of the "sea of useless blue" as commented above. But the bot should have had a better name. Tempshill 06:01, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. The edits have no consensus, thus a bot is not appropriate. Ambi 06:22, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Are you sure there is no consensus? David D. (Talk) 00:52, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose, because I'm not so sure that all the changes being made are positive. Specifically, I'm thinking of this diff; although I agree that some of the delinkings were good style, some of them removed links to years in which a number of events pertinent to the article occurred, and I can easily imagine a reader clicking on the links for useful context. This suggests to me that the delinking should be done more slowly and thoughtfully, not quickly and automatically. RobthTalk 06:31, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Although I support this bot, Robth's example is a good one. It might be advisable for Bobblewik to concentrate on more recent dates, post-1800 or post-1900, say. Such date links are much less likely to be useful, and earlier ones may be useful. Of course, any cut-off point is arbitrary, and may lead to strange results if applied strictly, so I would make this a recommendation rather than a condition. Stephen Turner (Talk) 09:15, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strongly Support any and every means to get rid of unnecessary date links and nearly all of them are unnecessary. This is just a method of implementing the current guidelines, as published. We should all be implementing the guidelines until and unless an agreed upon change is made to them. Not noticing changes made in the past or not agreeing with changes made in the past is no reason to stop implementation of the guidelines. Hmains 06:38, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Absolute Support. Bobblewik has proven an excellent and dedicated user who will be able to handle the task of getting rid of unnecessary links after identifying them. Antonio Perrito Martin 09:34, 26 February 206 (UTC)
  • Support - removing the "sea of blue" is certainly helpful, and, as far as I am aware, in line with the MoS and consensus more generally. Why should every year in every article be linked? It helps no one. Yes, he makes mistakes; but, in my experience, his improving edits massively outnumber any unhelpful ones. Surely it is better that the worthless links are stripped out, and then more targetted ones added back?-- ALoan (Talk) 09:57, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support. Almost all such links are pointless and link-cluttering. I have faith in Bobblewik to identify the few exceptions. He is only working for a better Wikipedia. Neonumbers 10:09, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support The overlinking is pointless, and that it goes uncorrected perpetuates it, I know I started linking dates for no reason other than I saw it was being done, and assumed it was wiki policy, it was only in seeing bobble's edits that I then bothered to look at the actual MoS to see that I was wrong. Correcting the overlinking will help unclutter pages and make new users aware of what the MoS actually says regarding wikifying dates. Gheorghe Zamfir 10:50, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Neutral. Separating bobblewik's "bot edits" from his "real edits" will be a step in the right direction, though I disagree with the principal of many of the types of edits he is interested in performing, only one of which has been mentioned in this discussion. — Feb. 26, '06 [13:06] <freakofnurxture|talk>
  • Support. — Matt Crypto 13:09, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. older ≠ wiser 13:45, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. While I support the contention that multiple data links in an article are unneccessary, unless very widely separated, date links per se provide a useful mechanism for establishing historical context for events. I resist the 'automatic' de-linking of dates, and contend that this should only be done in the overall context of reviewing an article, and not on a 'fly-by' basis. Noisy | Talk 14:50, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak opppose. I sometimes use links to years and dates to search for events that happened on a particular date. I also like years being linked, since that visually differentiates them from other numbers. All of this based on my personal tastes, hence weak oppose. Zocky | picture popups 18:41, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. A solution in search of a problem, and Bobblewik's demonstrated carelessness when supposedly doing this sort of thing manually is likely to be magnified if done automatically. --Calton | Talk 20:58, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support. KillerChihuahua?!? 23:51, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support so long as the edits are well-checked, and if a bot-flag is needed (see Rich Farmbrough's vote above). ··gracefool |☺ 00:11, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Neutral The idea of the bot to assist in making wikipedia more consistent is worthwhile. However, there doesn't seem to be consensus on what the appropriate level of date-linking should be. I'd like to see that sorted out, first. -- Ch'marr 00:15, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I fully support the cutting back of date links (assuming it is done with care, and an understanding of the Article involved). I believe a date should be linked only if it enhances my knowledge of the substance of the Article I am researching. Michael David 00:55, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support –Joke 00:58, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - links that are not useful to someone reading the article should be removed. Most date links fall under this category. So long as it is monitored by humans to catch the exceptions to this rule then I am firmly behind this attempt to remove unconstructive link clutter. --HappyDog 01:13, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Support Excessive blue linking is one of two linking scourges on Wikipedia today. VirtualSteve 03:12, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Most date links are excessive; but, without a clear concensus on what must be monitored (ie, are historically significant years ok to link — and how does Bobblewik propose to sift those from his bot edits), allowing this to go at a fast rate is going to end up in several reverted pages which should be avoided. Neier 11:23, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support a bot to bring articles closer in line with recommended style but I note Rich Farmbrough's discussion above.Thincat 14:01, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support. However, the code should be reviewed and tested against all cases to ensure a minimal amount of errors. Gflores Talk 14:51, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Example diff given above by Robth shows why these chamges should not be made by an automated or semi-automated process. android79 15:19, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WatchlistBot

I would like approval to run my new WatchlistBot. Its purpose is to create/update a project watchlist by finding all articles which include a specific template. More details, including links to the relevant pages for the Numismatics project are at the bot user page.

  • the bot is not manually assisted (at this time -- if I expand it, it probably will be)
  • I plan to run it every few days, perhaps once a week. Definitely no more often than once a day.
  • It is written in Python, with pywikipedia
  • I have been manually updating the project watchlist for the numismatics project, and there's some copying and pasting involved. It's a bit of a pain. I'd also like to offer the bot to other projects (the idea came from WikiProject Hawaii). Although this is not a significant task, it's also relatively safe because only one page per project is edited. In the future, I'd like to expand the bot to tag the articles in a project (by traversing the directory hierarchy). This would involve editing article talk pages, but is very difficult to keep up with without a bot. Ingrid 00:00, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Couldn't you put a category in the template - then job done~? Rich Farmbrough 01:11 26 February 2006 (UTC).
An interesting idea which I hadn't considered before. However, the Template is linked on the talk page, and the formatted list contains both the talk page and the article. I think that makes it unworkable, but in case you have another idea I didn't think of, there are other issues I've thought of. These lists can be pretty long (the numismatics project currently has about 1200 articles/categories/templates/project pages, so the list has about 2400 entries), and I think there are server issues with categories since they update dynamically (although I am certainly no expert on that). Finally, the template is already on most of the pages it needs to be on, and I think there are delays with categories being added to articles through templates unless the article is edited. Ingrid 16:16, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

First sentence

The first sentence of WP:B seems very misleading to me. Many bots are not just automated processes but rather have a large degree of human input. I have seen this first sentence cause some confusion. Would it not be better to say "Bots are automatic or semi-automatic tools that interact with Wikipedia over the World Wide Web"? Cheers, Sam Korn (smoddy) 14:47, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Surely the definition of a bot is that it is fully automatic. Martin 16:19, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Looking briefly at the first few bots on the list, CanisRufus and Commander Keane bot are obviously semi-automatic as they are doing disambiguation and CricketBot says that all edits are checked. That doesn't sound like all bots (on Wikipedia at least) are fully automated. Sam Korn (smoddy) 17:22, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oh I agree about that, I think the real answer would be to have a new name for accounts that are semi-bot. But I suppose that isnt going to happen. Maybe you are right. Martin 17:27, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I am the owner of CricketBot, and I agree with Sam. It wasn't at all clear to me when I was writing CricketBot that it was a bot, but the advice here seemed to be that it should be regarded as one. But then AWB was invented, and says at the top of its page that it's not a bot, even though I don't really see the difference. So I'm still a bit confused about this. Stephen Turner (Talk) 18:42, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
AWB is not a bot in the sense that it is automatic, but people use it - as they have used other tools - under a "bot account" to seperate out their user contributions. I think we need to differentiate between bots that are automatic and bots that are actually users using some kind of tool (interwiki, disambiguation, javascripts, AWB etc.) Martin 19:13, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I have a direct interest in this issue too. I have always been a fast manual editor. People have frequently suggested incorrectly that my manual edits are automated. It was easy to say 'no I am not a bot'. After I started using AWB and scripts, I get the same suggestions but it is not so easy to know what to say in response. As I see it, there are two viewpoints:
  • 1. The editor's viewpoint
The editor knows whether a page edit is manual, software assisted or automatic.
  • 2. The onlooker's viewpoint
The onlooker can only see: edit frequency; edit count; edit content.
Some of the fears of automation relate to edit validation and editor responsibility. Perhaps we should describe editing in those terms e.g. fully automated editing of a page is not validated so perhaps it can be called 'unsupervised', 'unchecked' or some word like that. If a human checks each page, it could be called 'supervised', 'checked', or something like that. bobblewik 19:53, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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