Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 18

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Curps rollback bot

It is my opinion that Curps (talk • contribs • blocks • protects • deletions • moves) has added anti-vandal rollback functions to the bot being run under his main account. As I see no evidence of this being documented or discussed, I have raised the issue at WP:ANI. Participation from people at this forum would be appreciated. Dragons flight 22:21, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Site notice updates

The Communications committee is working on coordinating the use of sitewide notices for Wikimedia projects. This is needed for the upcoming fundraiser, as well as other potential announcements relevant to all projects, such as Wikimania or technical issues like single login.

It's anticipated that we will use a bot to help update these messages, which due to the nature of the pages being edited will need to have universal sysop privileges. Rest assured that we won't be using it for other sysop functions.

--Michael Snow

Chair, Wikimedia Communications Committee

Quick request

Could someone please run a bot to replace all instances of Image:RN-White-Ensign.svg with Image:Naval Ensign of the United Kingdom.svg? Would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! —Nightst a llion (?) 02:34, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

And the same for replacing Image:Japanese-War-Ensign.svg with Image:Naval Ensign of Japan.svg would make my day. ;) —Nightst a llion (?) 02:59, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

And one more: Image:French-Ensign.svg to be replaced with Image:Civil and Naval Ensign of France.svg. —Nightst a llion (?) 13:35, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

All done, except for a few random ones, I think my bot ignored them because the image was is transcluded from a template or something. (p.s. I just added functionality to WP:AWB to get a list of articles from an image page, it will be in the release version soon). Martin 15:46, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Unauthorized Anonymous Bot?

See Special:Contributions/82.245.240.2. While the edits appear to be benign, it was confusing to see a bot that is an IP. I would guess that it hasn't been approved, either. Ardric47 22:39, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Almost certainly an authorised bot becoming logged out, this is a problem with the pywikibot software. Martin 23:07, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

It's obviously using the interwiki module from pywikipedia. It's not that uncommon for interwiki links to be added anonymously, a lot of users don't bother creating accounts in other languages. The only way this could be a big deal is if the links were incorrect. Ideally, we'd have one screen-name to rule them all, but then, in a perfect world, the interwiki links would be automatically generated by the software as well. In the meantime, let's not block people who creating any actual disruption. — Jun. 6, '06 [23:17] <freak|talk>

There is a different precedent above. Ardric47 00:25, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

IDF fairuse and Orphanbot communication problems

Hi. Orphanbot keeps tagging IDF fair use images for deletion, even though I explained to its owner (who I want absolutely nothing to do with - this complicates things) that the IDF states: The user may make "fair use" of the protected material as set out under the law. Is there anyone who can help me to interact with the bot's owner; I wish to avoid any direct communication with him. See also: my WP:AMA request. El_C 21:52, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

You really should talk to the bot owner, but it appears to have tagged them as they were fair use without a rationale, which is surely correct behaviour. Martin 22:04, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I really should not. Sorry, but I'm not fond of repeating myself. El_C 23:14, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Automatic reverting is not harmless

I've noticed some editors and their accounts and bots have been doing away with good edits, improvements of the page. What they are doing is not harmless to the encyclopedia. They seem to be trying to keep what they wrote as the top page, thus preventing any possible improvements.--Chuck Marean 23:32, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Any specific examples? Both of the bots I see regularly reverting vandalism have a >99.9% success rate. (ESkog)^(Talk) 03:34, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, when I looked at Tawkerbot2's accuracy rate I ended up with $\mu_{\bar x} = 94.847% \ \sigma_{\bar x} = 3.359%$ with 5 samples of ~53 reverts, 266 total (random time, go down a contrib list of 100) assuming $H_0 \ \mu = 99.9%$ and $H_1 \ \mu < 99.9%$ and

α = .025

I rejected

H 0

with over 97.5% confidence. Some of the times it was reverts to vandalized versions, others reverting someone uncensoring song names or something, sometimes reverting someone that claimed to be the subject trying to 'delete' the article when it probably should have been deleted (in one case it reverted blanking of unsourced claims of someone molesting children, thrice). I don't think that >99.9% claim is that accurate. Kotepho 04:58, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I'd be interested in specific examples as well. Bots are not intended to prevent forward progress in articles, but rather to thwart silly vandalism. When examples are brought forward, the bot authors make their bots better. That seems goodness to me. ++Lar: t/c 03:37, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

He has no examples. The only time one of his edits was reverted by a bot was when he reverted a page to its 2003 version in order to make a point. He seems to think that anyone reverting his edits must be guilty of malfeasance. I fear he thinks that because I occasionally used the rollback button when he was being especially recalcitrant, I must be a bot. Sorry you guys have to deal with this. - EurekaLott 11:32, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Tawkerbot is great. — Omegatron 06:52, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Curps bot-blocking accidental blanking

[1] (apparently a bug with the Google toolbar for Firefox) resulted in [2]. --SPUI (T - C) 01:31, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Would my bot be approved?

Hi all. I am thinking about setting up a bot to work on archived pages. Not a bot to do the actual archival of the pages themselves, but one for archival maintenance, such as adding archive header templates (for example, see Talk:Main Page/Archive 1).

This bot would be human assisted. Basically, I think I would feed it a list of pages and it would make sure they all had the proper headings. Although there are quite a few archival pages, I don't think this would be a server hog, as it could be run at set intervals.

Would a bot like this be approved? I could write a basic javascript for my monobook.js that would let me basically do the exact same thing, but I'd have to sit there and click through the pages instead of letting the bot click them for me. ~MDD 46 96 17:17, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

As long as its human assisted and it goes on pages people want edited I'd have no problems approving such a bot -- Tawker 18:56, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

How

How are bots given bot status? Please reply on talk page. General Eisenhower • (at war or at peace) 01:03, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

The Bureaucrats have a special MediaWiki interface through which they can assign a certain user (the bot's account for example) to a special user group named "bot" and that's it - the user's edits no longer show up in Special:Recentchanges. What talk page did you mean? This is a talk page. Misza 13 ^{T C} 11:05, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Also copied to the user's talk. Misza 13 ^{T C} 11:08, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Which MediaWiki page is it? and can it be done on Wikia? General Eisenhower • (at war or at peace) 16:21, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

The page is Special:Userrights --Stradenko 20:33, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Bot for researchers needed

Crossposted to Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Bot_for_researchers_needed.

A bot (or perhaps a script, or some other tool) would be very useful to the growing amount of people (myself included) who are interested in studying Wikipedia. I'd very much like to see and use a tool that would look at the history of any article (including a talk page!) and:

generate a list of people who have edited target article
generate an information feedable to a statistical analytical program (comma-separated values format is quite simple and popular) which would tell:
- how often each individual edited this article
- when did he edit it
- how much new content has he changed
- was the edit marked as minor
- was the edit summary used
- was the edit a vandalism (possibly using parts of Tawkerbot2)
- was the edit a vandalism revert
- was the edit part of a revert war

Even one or a few of those if implemented would be much, much appreciated! If we already have tools that can answer some of these questions, please let me know.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 20:01, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Portions of this information can be obtained via the toolserver, (Example). Perhaps it would be better to request expansion of those tools. — Jun. 19, '06 [20:13] <freak|talk>

Thanks for the info. This is definetly a good start. Unfortunately the toolserver seems to analyze all namespaces save the Wikipedia namespace (and as far as I can tell the toolserver doesn't display results for anything other then articles). Where should I request expantion of it?--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 22:43, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Request for approvals page

Would this work better with sub pages like AfD? It would bmake archiving eaier. Rich Farmbrough 15:13 20 June 2006 (GMT).

Wikipedia:Requested bot flags

I am (being bold and) making this page live per the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive_17#Flagging. Rich Farmbrough 22:09 22 June 2006 (GMT).

User:OrphanBot

Please delete this account, the bot spams user pages, doesn't identify correctly tagged images (apparently looking at templates instead of categories), and it doesn't wait to let users fix their errors. The owner is unresponsive to complaints on the bot's talk page. -- Omniplex 13:03, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Forwarded to WP:ANI after four days, because I've now removed User talk:OrphanBot from my watchlist. -- Omniplex 11:23, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

If you hate OrphanBot, you might want to look at this

Micoolio101 00:29, 3 July 2006 (UTC)Micoolio101

Agreed that OrphanBot is problematic. It's attempting to do unattended something which really should not be being done without manual supervision - namely accusing (or stopping just short of accusing) large numbers of users of plagarism. That it looks neither at the image itself nor at the description (except for the template) is a severe technical limitation, most likely not fully resolvable. For this reason, it should not be running unattended for pretty much the same reasons that we traditionally have opposed running spellcheckers unattended.

That other bots have been reverting some of its edits as vandalism, while marginally amusing, is telling. If it's too time-consuming for one person to manually oversee the activity of this 'bot, given the number of pages it's attacking, then the task needs to be split between multiple people - not blindly left under control of an unattended automated process which neither understands plaintext in the image descriptions nor is able to make any determination of content by viewing the image itself. --carlb 17:12, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Crypticbot - now orphaned?

It seems that Crypticbot is now rather orphaned, as its master User:Cryptic(User talk:Cryptic) hasn't edited for several months. It continues plodding on its way, doing useful things it appears, and hasn't particularly misbehaved AFAIK. However, without a master it can't be adapted to changing situations.

In particular, it is the force behind archiving of the Wikipedia:Reference desk group of pages, and is failing there. It has partially failed in archiving the /Science page for several months, and just in the last day or two looks like it may be failing to archive for the whole group. So I suppose one thing needed is another botmaster to step up and take over the archiving. See Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#Failure of automated archiving, and also the good idea of using Daily transclusion. -R. S. Shaw 05:38, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

I've banned it for being unsupervised. Secretlondon 12:09, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Cryptic just showed up to reply to a "your bot is broken" message. I left him a message that if he is going to "stay with the project" at least as a bot operator, that I will unblock the bot account. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:32, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

meta icon

For those inclined to use meta icons on userpages, feel free to use {{User:Fluxbot/Bot}}> to add the gear icon to your bot pages. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:12, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Suggested section split

Hi, I think the list of bots is becoming too big, and should not be maintained on this page. I propose we split it up and move the list to another page. --Yurik 22:07, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Better yet, we should categorise them instead. Category:Bot accounts on Wikisource is an example of this, although several subcategories would be useful here. // [admin] Pathoschild (^talk/_map) 05:54, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I moved the section, you are welcome to split it up :) The page uses a number of sub-page templates, so don't forget to make proper redirects. --Yurik 20:46, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Unicode problem

I am writing a bot to run on Hindi Wikipedia. I am using python wikimedia framework. I am getting an error, "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: unexpected code byte" when executing the following code,

       f = codecs.open('hi-towns.csv', 'r', config.textfile_encoding)
       x = f.read().decode('utf8')

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ganeshk (talk) 03:50, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

This was solved. - Ganeshk (talk) 15:15, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Project Page Entry clarification - spiders and dynloads

Point number 5 and 6 below "When naming your bot" seem to not really belong to that section. The information they contain seems unrelated to naming ones bot and seems to be nothing one would expect under this headline. Also, if there exists something laid out as a policy in its own right on these subjects, there might be a good point in pointing to that policy, and doing that early on the project page instead of hiding it in the place it is now. --62.134.227.14 01:15, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

AWB Spellcheck - assisted bot?

I want to make a lot of AWB spellchecking edits, and so as not to crowd my contrib list and make more than the 1-2 edits per minute, I want to make a bot account. As always it will be human-assisted, and I'll monitor each and every change (AWB shows me the diff preview) but since I'll be making a lot of edits, a bot account makes sense. Is this the place to apply for approval for such a venture, or is there some policy that easily defines what I should and shouldn't do with AWB? --Draicone ^(talk) 06:55, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Just create a second account and make it a AWB account no need to get a Bot status it is still just you behind the controls it doesnt matter about getting it approved. Just be careful it meets WP:BOT#Spell-checking_bots Betacommand 06:32, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. User:DraiconeBot has been created, and I have applied for its AWB approval (maybe I should have applied from that account?). --Draicone ^(talk) 06:50, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Problems downloading Wikilink

The external link to WikiLink has been down for some time now. Anyone who has it, I'd appreciate a mirror upload. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 06:34, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Scratch that, it's working now. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 20:01, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

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