Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MartinBotII 5

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[edit] MartinBotII

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Operator: Martinp23

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic

Programming Language(s): C#

Function Summary: Similar to MathBot, but allowing selection of articles

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Weekly (at the moment, could get more recent)

Edit rate requested: 6 edits per Minute (absolute max, very unlikely to be this high!)

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y

Function Details: This task is for WP V1.0 and does the same sort of thing as MathBot, except that all features aren't yet implemented. The main difference is that, in its tables, it only lists articles which have been rated by a wikiprject and achieve a score based on calculations done by the bot based on the rating and importance of the article. For the tests thus far, all those articles which have achieved the minimum score on the wikiprjects which were tested were put into sub-pages of this page. This was only a very limited trial - when approved, the bot will add all the talk pages of all those articles (and images) which meet the requirements to a category - this is the reason that I've isolated this project, along with the potential for a huge number of edits (depending on overall quality of course, but could go into tens of thousands (spread out over weeks).

[edit] Discussion

I also run tasks on MartinBotII, AMABot and RefDeskBot, as well as MartinBot when needed. Martinp23 19:24, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

  • I'd have my usual preference that the bot stick to six edits per minute, the rate suggested at WP:BOT. I don't follow how it could be doing so many edits, though: do you mean that's the read rate? In either case, how many reads per run? (I'm not quite clear whether this is to be done with only category page fetches, or if it'd require talk-page fetches, which would presumably be much more numerous, if necessary.) Alai 13:39, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
  • I've changed the edit rate to reflect that (it's my usual preference too - no idea why I got it wrong there...). The reason for the edits (in short bursts) is described above: "when approved, the bot will add all the talk pages of all those articles (and images) which meet the requirements to a category". For the larger wikiprojects, there may be a hundred or two pages which meet the crtieria, hence the large edit expectation. The bot reads the categories at the moment, and that is all, though in future it will probably get the wikitext of pages which meet the minimum score in order to find tags to indcate unsourced statements, NPOV violations, and the like (this will be done when I get a list of "bad-words" to look for). Needless to say,the bot will only run at periods of low traffic on wikipedia. Martinp23 13:51, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Setting aside the future functionality (which if it's just going to act as a filter, is presumably not going to be a problem), can you clarify the criteria this is to work with? If these articles aren't already in "class" and "importance" categories (which is what I was assuming was intended, given the comparison with MathBot), what's the input to the process? Alai 14:26, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, my description above is rubbish! The bot gets the class and inportance categories and uses an article's membership in them to calcualate a score for that article (based on a formula - yet to be finalsied). Then, the talk pages of all articles with a score above some threshold (to be decided still) are added to a category, such as Category:Wikipedia CD release candidates (TBC) as well as adding the articles to a table, as described above (you can see the tables from some tests here). Into that table will be added details of the bad words discovered. Sorry about the appalingness of the orignal discussion - my only excuse is tiredness and preoccupation Martinp23 14:40, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Ah, OK, I see. The mind does somewhat boggle at the amount of intermediate steps (apparently) required in the 1.0 process. Seems OK, though, so long as the read-rate is roughly in line with the edit rate, and isn't "spidering" a significant percentage of the database. Alai 14:47, 26 November 2006 (UTC)