Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MartinBotII 3

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Request Expired.

[edit] MartinBotII

tasks • contribs • count • logs • page moves • block user • block log • flag log • flag bot

Operator: Martinp23

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic

Programming Language(s): Python (wikipedia framework)

Function Summary: Clears non-existant categories

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run):

Edit rate requested: 6 edits per minute

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): N (though undergoing another BRFA)

Function Details: Eagle_101's redlinkfinder program outputs at batch file, which when executed clears these categories. Of course, before deciding to run the bot, I would check through this .bat and ensure that everything would work. Then, category.py is used from the pywikipediaframework to clear the categories which have no header text.

[edit] Discussion

Sorry to have so many requests running - I've been inundated with them on my talk page (probably due to me offering to help with bots... but heh.) (Oh yeah - I also run User:MartinBot (a TB2 clone), User:AMABot, User:RefDeskBot and User:MartinBotII) Martinp23 21:43, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Let me make sure we're on the same page, you will get a list of redlinked categores and empty them? If so, why are these bad? If they contain articles, shouldn't someone use that to intitiate the category and make it blue instead? — xaosflux ^Talk 05:46, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I see where you're coming from here, but most of these cats are typos or plainly useless cats, which would be deleted under CFD if made. I'd invite you to take a look at WT:CFD#Cydebot.27s_actions - from what I've heard, it seems that Cydebot, Gnome (bot) and Betacommandbot have all carried out this task in the past. I hope that link (above) helps to describe some of what the task will do :) -- Martinp23 15:32, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Looks like that came from a complaint about emptying redlinked category, and the category guidelines actually direct editors to create new categories by using the redlink method. Could your bot count the articles first, and perhaps use a threshold (e.g. if >5 articles, dont empty)? — xaosflux ^Talk 17:30, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Yep, I'll do that (at >5) (sorry for my delay responding - have been away). Thanks, Martinp23 18:17, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

• TRIAL approved, up to 100 removals. Please post any difs and reference any editor feedback you get during the trial. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:16, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

My great apologies for the delay here - I've been struck down by food poisoning for the last week, which has effectively rendered me unable to program :-( - I'll get on it as soon as poss. Martinp23 15:25, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• 'Trial Complete

Done today - here's a diff which shows what happened in all of the 49 trial edits. [1] Thanks, Martinp23 17:43, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

The initial trial run looks OK, and has performed as described, but I'm a little concerned about some of the corretions, e.g. here and here. While these DID remove the pages from the bad nonexistant cats, there are some pretty obvious places that they could have been put in to if a human editor would have fixed the page (i.e. a change of {Category:1959 birth --> null} is not as effective as a change of {Category:1959 birth --> Category:1959 births}. Any thaughts? — xaosflux ^Talk 17:59, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Hmm - I see the problem there. I've fixed the second one (pluralisation) by running a category search to find any containing the text of the existing category. If a category which omes up on the search contains the existing category title, then the articles are moved to that (new) one. This should fix such errors. For the former - I don't really feel that there is much (if anything) I can to to prevent them. Hopefully such naming errors will be rare overall. For the record, I've manually fixed that diff. Martinp23 18:21, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I've requested additional BAg input at Wikipedia_talk:Bots/Requests_for_approval#Additional_BAG_member_input_requested on this request. Policy wise, this isn't breaking anything (we wouldn't mind if an EDITOR removed redlinked cats) but functionality wise we'd hope that an editor would fix a bad link rather than just remove it (e.g. typos/simple formating). I'd like to see some of the fixes dealing with plurals, if you can see or make any, to make sure they are working in the meantime. Thanks for your patience on this one! — xaosflux ^Talk 17:45, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I think seeing some more results would be good. I can't say I'm convinced this is a task well suited to automation. --kingboyk 17:47, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

More trial runs will be nice.... this looks like it has potential... -- Tawker 17:52, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow! So much response! I did a trial on just one category which I found - the result can be seen here: [2] and here. In the first one, the specific name under the old category was removed by the bot - I'm going to see about fixing this UPDATE: At the moment I'm writing this in C# - when I teach myself python, it'll implement this function (if we can go without it for now..) -- Martinp23 18:43, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Those diffs do indeed look good. Edit summary doesn't really match what happened though. I'm not entirely convinced this is a job for a bot, but the technical issue looks OK so if my colleagues are happy that's fine by me. --kingboyk 20:49, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

looks good Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 20:36, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I'll fix the edit summary for the category change -- Martinp23 13:29, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

• Trial Extended. I'd like to see this go in to prodcutino production with the above changes on a probationary status (30 days). Please inlude a link to this dicussion on the bot's user page. Technically everything seems to be OK, but this would give ample time for community input in the event removing these non-existant categotries gives anyone grief. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:06, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

OK - will do before I run any trials - I was just wondering what "prodcutino" meant for a while... Template:Emot Martinp23 22:13, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

What is the status of this bot? -- RM 13:13, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Preparing for a proper test run, with some major changes, code wise, in about a week and a half (around Dec. 21st). Thanks, Martinp23 17:09, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for this - would it be possible to expire this request, so I can come back to it when I've got more time? Thanks, Martinp23 16:12, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Request Expired. As per user request. -- RM 12:05, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.