Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 3

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Simple regex bot?

(Moved from Wikipedia talk:Bots) Kevin Rector 14:42, Aug 19, 2004 (UTC)

Hi. I've noticed that a lot of pages are misusing HTML entities by not using the trailing semicolon. In some cases, this is accepted and rendered properly, but other cases not. This could be fixed by a pretty simple regex:

s/&sup2([^;]|$)/\²\1/g

Example of pages where this is needed but still rendered properly: Arches National Park:

119 mile&sup2 or 76,519 acres (310 km&sup2).
119 mile&sup2 or 76,519 acres (310 km&sup2).

Example of pages where this is needed and not rendered properly: Sakaki, Nagano:

313.80 persons per [[square kilometer|km&sup2]]. The total area is 53.64 km&sup2.
313.80 persons per km&sup2. The total area is 53.64 km&sup2.

This is actually very common for the older pages for Japanese towns (added by User:TakuyaMurata, his new additions are correct). I don't know squat about wikipedia bots, but I thought this might be a good thing to add to one of the existing bots that can do regexps. Comments? Thanks. --ChrisRuvolo 04:43, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. I have seen this myself in the past and have corrected it manually but this would be well suited for a bot. RedWolf 23:46, Aug 4, 2004 (UTC)
KevinBot can do this (when it gets done doing what it's doing now) but I would like to have a list of pages to edit (or at least be pointed to where I could get that list). KevinBot doesn't crawl (it can, but I'd rather not) but rather compiles lists of pages to check and then checks them. If you have a good idea of where to get a list of pages, let me know. Kevin Rector 06:07, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)
I'm not sure how to generate the list of pages. Perhaps from a download of the database and then a grep through the data or import it into MySQL and perform a query? The on-line search function doesn't help here since if one searches for "sup2" (to continue the example above), it will match every page where that entity is used, regardless of whether the trailing semicolon is there or not. Other ideas? --ChrisRuvolo 07:42, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I've put up a list of pages (as of the 23rd Oct DB dump) containing the regex above at User:Topbanana/Reports/This article contains a malformed HTML entity. Hope this helps. - TB 12:50, 2004 Nov 1 (UTC)
That regex would delete the character right after the entity. It needs a \1 at the end like s/&sup2([^;]|$)/\²\1/g Goplat 21:01, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for the correction. Changed above. --ChrisRuvolo 18:03, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
FWIW, I can add this to the list of automatic replacements that the rambot already does for the articles that it parses, so that will at least get over 95% of the U.S. city/county articles. -- RM 04:22, Dec 24, 2004 (UTC)

Are lists for this problem being posted somewhere, or should I suggest this be added to Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax? -- Beland 01:10, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Olympic Medal Count Bot

(Moved from Wikipedia talk:Bots) Kevin Rector 14:42, Aug 19, 2004 (UTC)

Information like the Olympics medal count from previous games could be bot-generated, and I know I've thought of other uses for a bot, though I can't think of them now. Thoughts? Tuf-Kat 01:47, Aug 19, 2004 (UTC)

TUF-KAT's comments above were edited by User:Kevin Rector when he moved them from Wikipedia talk:Bots.

No substantial changes. My name is Tuf-Kat, and I approve of this message. Tuf-Kat 05:25, Aug 23, 2004 (UTC)

WikiProject notices on talk pages

I would like a bot that could place project notices on talk pages. For example, adding {{album}} to the top of the talk page for every article linked immediately following a bullet point on the list of albums. Tuf-Kat 21:51, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)

I would also like a bot to do the same thing with {{YearsProject}}, placing it at the top of each, Year page. Trevor macinnis 01:19, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Bot to fix most pages listed at "This page links many times to the same article"

I have been trying to fix articles listed at: Wikipedia:Offline reports/This page links many times to the same article. However, it is quite tedious by hand. Automation would be welcome. What does anyone else think? Bobblewik  (talk) 11:41, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I second that. In the particular case of the Category:Lists of asteroids pages, the bot would need to scan the table and compare the links in any given cell with those in the cell immediately above. If a link is repeated, the lower one should be de-linked. For this to work in one pass, note that the bot would need to scan the table from the bottom up. See List of asteroids (1-1000) for an example of the expected result. Note that some links will repeat within the page, but this seems a good compromise for user-friendliness.
Urhixidur 17:32, 2004 Sep 17 (UTC)
I agree that this bot could be helpful. However, could it do a larger proximity check say 10 or 20 lines. Otherwise, if the link term alternated none of the links would be removed. In very long articles extra links may be justifed, say, one every screen. Also dates (both year and day) need to remain linked for the dynamic conversion user preference to operate. Rmhermen 20:56, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
Having multiple links to the same target is often useful, but how is a bot to know that? I have no objection to human editors fixing pages where there are too many links to the same target, but I would strongly discourage the use of bots to do the same (except if the bot runs under careful human control, such that a human is making an informed decision for each link). Heuristics such as "no more than one link per n lines of displayed output on a typical screen" would help, but I can imagine valid exceptions to just about any heuristic. —AlanBarrett 07:54, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I support your suggestion that such a bot should be limited in design and operation. Even a highly constrained bot would reduce the workload. The last 3 topbanana lists of excessive links appear to have no valid exceptions. Bobblewik  (talk) 10:53, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Multiple redirects across projects

  • Dear friends, Please take a look at Wikipedia:Multiple Redirects#Multiple Redirects across projects. To my understanding I found a Double redirect in meta:.
  • I assume that detection of multiple redirects is done on a "per project basis / base (?)". Do you know if this detection is done on meta: too?
  • I think that bugzilla:850 is related somehow to the name of this section and can NOT be detected analysing one project alone. It maight be that project "chains" could be involved in 850. That would be malicious. Regards Gangleri | Th | T 16:54, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)

P.S. Would be happy about your feedback. Regards Gangleri | Th | T

Pngcrush bot

I'm wondering if this could be useful...a bot that finds large .png images and runs pngcrush on them. Pngcrush is a lossless png optimizer. It would help de-bloat pages and reduce database size. Vacuum c 03:18, Dec 31, 2004 (UTC)

Good idea IMO. Another thing you might be able to do is try converting 24-bit RGB images that use less than 256 colors to a indexed color palette. I would suggest using -cc 3 on pngcrush, but it is not yet supported. This can reduce PNG size by large amounts (usually around 50%-60% smaller in my experience), but it is only really useful on larger images that contain lots of solid colors. --ChrisRuvolo 02:27, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Where would you look to find the big images? Kevin Rector 14:33, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)
images are NOT stored in the database. and this is certainly NOT a job for a bot. (if it was to be done it should be done by the server admins locally. The real problem is that the scaling system always produces truecolor png output but that is a difficult issue to solve in the general case (rescaling ALWAYS gives a flood of extra colors and its difficult to know how many can be safely discarded). Plugwash
I would no more trust a sysadmin to do the job than a bot.
bot could suggest smaller versions without replacing them? 217.25.194.150 8 July 2005 14:56 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I should have been clearer. Pngcrush does not rescale images; it merely recompresses them using the zlib library. Vacuum c 19:14, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

Spellbot request

The idea of this bot, although automated, it would not change any of the articles. Rather, it would simply bold out or highlight spelling errors on the discussion page (giving the complete sentence so an editor could see where the misspelling is coming from), or a temporary page with the copy of the article. A series of HTML comments could also help out the bot in checking or not checking the page, or which sections to check, and which sections to leave alone. -- AllyUnion (talk) 07:01, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

imo spellchecking is best handled by a semi automated tool (ie it suggests and its operator approves or rejects the edit) going via the talk page just sounds like talk page spam and creating extra work for editors. It is unclear as to whether a semi automated tool like this would need bot permission or not i asked at Wikipedia_talk:Bots#editing_tools but i only geto one reply which imo is not sufficiant to count as any real consensus on the issue. Plugwash 01:07, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
There are plenty of tools for checking spelling as you edit. See Wikipedia:Typo#Miscellaneous. But a tool that analyzed a database dump offline and highlighted pages with possible mistakes would be useful, I think. It would need a really good dictionary, some way to remember exceptions, and a lot of training at first. -- Beland 01:32, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
I agree, a manually assisted tool would work best. Could someone create one? I know it would help the Typo WikiProject enormously. User:Humanbot used to exist, but I don't know what happened to it. I'm not sure how bots work, but maybe I would tell it a misspelled word (and it's correct spelling), it'll look it up on Wikipedia using the Google search excluding talk and help pages. It'll go to the pages linked and find the text, highlight it and ask me whether I want to replace it with the correct spelling. And it continues with another word I specify. I don't know, thanks for listening. Thank you. Gflores Talk 22:24, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Google statistics bot

Wikipedia:List of articles frequently visited through Google could use some updating. There is Perl code on the talk page; it would be cool if someone adopted this project. It would also be interesting if someone could get the "top 10" lists automatically updated. Instead of scanning the entire article namespace for hits, an article could be checked for appropriateness for listing only when someone is referred to it from Google. (That would require access to server logs, and obviously shouldn't be run on every visit.) Don't know if permission from Google would be required, or if their standard API license would do. -- Beland 04:12, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles which are number one for one word Google searches would be helped by a bot, too. --Tothebarricades 18:56, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
I second that. --Freiberg, Let's talk!, contribs 20:25, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Common English error detector

It would be a neat project to throw together a read-only bot that had a built-in grammar parser, so it could detect common word-choice mistakes, like it's vs. its, and whether vs. weather. The designer would probably need a few go-rounds in order to find algorithms that work well for this sort of thing, but boy would it be educational. This would be a great project for a computer science student. -- Beland 04:36, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

  • Note for future reference - the next time MIT 6.863J ("Natural Language and the Computer Representation of Knowledge") is taught, it might be a good idea to e-mail the professor with NLP-related Wikipedia project ideas like this one. The students need to do an independent project at the end of the term. (I've taken the class myself.) It should show up on the OpenCourseWare listing for MIT EECS. If anyone knows any other college NLP classes of a similar nature, feel free to spread the word. -- Beland 04:56, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Religious freedom reports

Template:SOreligiousfreedomATW has links to a slew of articles that don't exist. The common practice to start them seems to be to copy the (public domain) country report from the U.S. State Dept. web site and then wikify and de-POV as necessary. There is also by-country material on Freedom of religion. A little automation could kick-start this process. -- Beland 04:08, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Human rights reports

A similar process could be undertaken for by-country human rights articles (though no template currently exists, but see Human rights). State Department reports are here. -- Beland 04:13, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Category collapse

Two requests for bots to stem the wildgrowth of categories...

  • Move all pages from a category into its parent category, then delete said category
(useful for categories that are so specific that only two or three articles can ever apply to it)
User:Pearle can be used for this. Nominate the category to WP:CFD as desired. -- Beland 04:02, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Combine all pages from a category into a single list article, then delete said category
(useful for categories of articles that can never be more than stubs)
Radiant! 21:53, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)
Heh, I was just banging out code to do the opposite. 8) -- Beland 04:02, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Well, I suppose both could be useful. Stubs are useful if it seems likely that they will be expanded. If it seems implausible that they will be (and some articles can never be more than stubs) then collapsing them back would be an option. E.g. list of fictional materials would be a horror as a series of stubs, but it's very practical as a list. Radiant! 08:12, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)
I think this is a question to be debeated more genrically (it is not a question related to just bots) AnyFile 15:48, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Automated Wikipedia --> Commons uploading

All 22 articles on regions of France has at least two images: A map impage and a flag image. all the map images were (laboriously) hand-uploaded to the Commons by me; the flag images are not. Is there a way to automatically upload them? They all have the same syntax: Image:Name_flag.png. Here are the articles:

Thanks. --Neutralitytalk 04:53, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, it would seem to make sense to upload almost all Wikipedia images to commons. Hmm. -- Beland 01:34, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Title sorting on Category:Lists

Would it be possible to go through all articles titled List of ... or Lists of ... that are on Category:Lists (and sub-categories) and make sure that they are sorted correctly. For example List of famous trees should be sorted under f not l. The bot would just need to change Category:Lists to [[:Category:Lists|Famous trees]] or whatever comes after the of. Where an article already has a vertical bar in its category link then the bot should not make any edits (so List of British rail accidents doesn't get moved from the top of Category:Rail transport related lists (its link is [[:Category:Rail transport related lists|*]])). From my experience populating the rail transport related lists subcategory, this work is timeconsuming and laborious for people. Thryduulf 03:01, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)


Battle Bot

I know nothing about making a bot, but could and would like to implement one to create the rest of the Battles of the American Civil War using the public domain text from these pages. All I would need is the ability to enter an article name and the url of the source text, and have the bot convert the stats into a battlebox and copy and paste the paragraphs to create an article. If anyone would like to provide this bot, or information on how to make it, I can do the work to implement it. --brian0918™ 03:34, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There's a lot of non-bot work involved - since it all has to be wikified and so forth it'd probably be easier to do it manually. It is a lot of work either way, perhaps a WikiProject? --Tothebarricades.tk 23:30, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Superfluous/VfD template removal

It has been suggested at WP:TFD and WP:RFD that a bot could usefully be employed for removing large quantities of superfluous templates. In particular,

  • Template:VfD-1 E16 km2 through Template:VfD-Über (all redirects to old VfD pages, see WP:RFD for details)
  • Template:2005Calendar through Template:2024Calendar
  • Template:AprilCalendar2004Source through Template:AprilCalendar2025Source, and the same for every other month.

Because it requires deletion powers, these bot tasks would have to be run by an admin. Radiant_* 10:12, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)

A small part of this task requires admin, but most of it does not. Noel (talk) 14:01, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
I'm not an admin, so I'll have to leave this to someone else. Kevin Rector 13:42, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)
Many Template:VfD- templates are not redirects at the moment (see Wikipedia:VfD votes in the Template namespace); a bot to move the to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion subpages, where they are available for fresh nominations to review, does not need administrative privileges; neither does updating the Wikipedia:Archived delete debates subpages to bypass the redirects before they are deleted. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 17:10, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • True, that would be a large step. But it would turn those templates into redirects - which (by discussion on RFD) seem delete-worthy. Radiant_* 09:21, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)
  • Yes, those should then be deleted - it would take a bot with admin powers to do that part of the process, of course. Noel (talk) 14:28, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Mediawiki redirects

Associated with almost all of those Template:VfD-{foo} pages are redirects from Mediawiki:VfD-{foo}, and those also need to be deleted. Noel (talk) 14:28, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I would be happy to work with someone with a known-safe bot if they are interested in doing this but do not have admin capabilities. Noel (talk) 14:01, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
Unless I am mistaken I cleared this up manually in late 2005. Rich Farmbrough 14:35 13 March 2006 (UTC).

Mediawiki: redirects to Template:

Related to the previous request: All redirects in the MediaWiki namespace that point to Template: should also be deleted. (The original proposal at Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion/Old#January 4 was for all Mediawiki: redirects, but this sounds a bit dangerous to me; on the other hand, I think ditching all redirects to Template: should be safe. For additional safety, one could delete only redirects where Mediawiki:{foo} points to Template:{foo}.) In the past, a number of non-system messages were placed into the MediaWiki: space. This included what have now become templates in the Template namespacea, as well as a number of other items. All of these non-system messages have long since been moved to the Template: space, leaving hundreds of redirects (too many to reasonably delete by hand). Unfortunately, because of this, whenever the User:Template namespace initialisation script runs after an upgrade, it re-moves a lot of items and readjusts all the related links. Non-admins cannot fix these errors and double-redirects, because the entire MediaWiki: space is specifically protected. In order to avoid problems in the future, simplify maintenance, and make Special:Allpages more useful, we need to delete all of those redirects. Once all the Template: redirects have been done by the bot, it should be easy enough to check the remaining redirects by hand. This will ensure that no items, other than the internal system messages, will be left. Netoholic @ 21:05, 2005 Jan 4 (UTC) / Noel (talk) 13:29, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

I would be happy to work with someone with a known-safe bot if they are interested in doing this but do not have admin capabilities. Noel (talk) 13:29, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Detection of articles to be split

Pearle has been stumbling across articles that are really two articles on different topics wedged together on the same page. This seems to be a common problem among short, neglected articles. ssd pointed out that it might be a good idea to write some code specifically designed to flag articles with this problem, so that humans can fix them. I've noticed that the presence of a horizontal line (----) correlates strongly with this problem, as does violation of the ordering rules listed on Pearle's homepage. Just thought I'd list this idea here in case anyone wants to do anything with it. -- Beland 05:06, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

(----) is indeed meant for this type of page. I'm not sure if they necessarily need to be split, but it would be nice to have a category for them (e.g. Category:Multiple topics ?). In the same time, I suppose we could get rid of all (----) used for something else. -- User:Docu
There is a template {{Split}}. It populates the category Articles to be split. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 17:21, 6 May 2005 (UTC)


To do | To do, priority undefined

The To Do category is pretty large, so about a year ago someone came upon the idea to split it into ten subcats by priority. This is explained in Category:To do, by priority. I've CfD'ed the lot of them earlier because I thought that nobody was using them, but it turned out that people did find them useful. So, can someone please use a bot to populate the various categories? It's a simple matter of counting ingoing links to an article - articles with many links get a higher priority. Radiant_* 14:43, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

Clear links to bogus articles on Special:Wantedpages

The Special:Wantedpages is useless as the top 50 or so are crap leftover from vandals or links to deleted userpages. A bot to clear the links to those articles from wherever they are linked from would make that page potentially useful. SchmuckyTheCat 19:09, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

i'm not sure a bot is the right soloution there. what we need to do is get the devs to change it to add combo boxes for source and target namespace, with the default being to only show links from the main namespace to the main namespace. Plugwash 07:18, 13 May 2005 (UTC)


Calendar Bot

Calendars of 2005 contains holidays organised in calendar format. The current day on the calendar is highlited in pink. The problem is, manually changing the highlighted day is tedious, and there are three different calendars (Gregorian, Chineese Lunar, and Muslim). Is there a bot that can do the work? --Munchkinguy 18:35, 18 May 2005 (UTC)


See also bot

Lots of articles have the miscapitalisation ==See Also==, should be ==See also==, Related articles and External links suffer from same problem. seems like a perfect bot job to me. thanks Bluemoose 11:06, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

while we're at it, maybe such a bot could turn links in text lists (link1, link3, link4) into bulleted list. Circeus 14:27, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)
Agreed. In addition, we need a standard on External link or External links (with or without s, depending on how many links are on the list itself). -x42bn6 Talk 01:05, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
Hi, I might consider working on this sort of bot. My question is how does the bot find the pages to process? Any suggestions besides manually crawling every single one? — Ambush Commander(Talk) 00:15, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Stub sorting bot

The template {{bio-stub}}, which populates the category People stubs, has been applied to 15,000 articles, which is far too many for anyone interested in expanding stubs to wade through. Many of these articles have been double-stubbed with {{bio-stub}} and another template stub, and in many cases there is another stub template that could replace the two of them. For instance, {{bio-stub}} combined with {{China-stub}} could be replaced with {{China-bio-stub}} (for a nationality), and {{bio-stub}} combined with {{mil-stub}} could be replaced with {{military-bio-stub}} (for an occupation). Susvolans (pigs can fly) 17:09, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)


Commons --> Wikipedia backlink bot

Okay I have brought this up at commons:Commons:Village_pump#interwikis_and_bots but I don't think anyone is doing this. I think we need a bot to put in interwiki backlinks between the Commons and the projects that use their stuff.

I have manually set up one image to show what it should look like. Take a look at commons:image:Sheila and John Maynard Smith.jpg, it had backlinks to all of the wikis that use it:

In addition, each of those should then interwiki with the other languages.

To implement, start from a wikipedia, find a commons image, put in the backlinks from the commons to the wikipedia.

The second part is when a commons image is used on multiple projects, having run through the first lot, there should be identified and the interlanguage links put in. Licensing information could also be copied across if necessary.

So I guess there are two bots here really, the first one is the most important though as it shows people in the commons where tose images are being used. Dunc|☺ 15:16, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

KCR stations

A concensus has been reached at Wikipedia talk:Hong Kong wikipedians' notice board to rename the stations from [[Foo (KCRC)]] as [[Foo (KCR)]]. There are altogether 100 articles to be renamed under the KCR stations categories. Assistance from a bot would be much more efficient (and appreciated~!) than moving each of the articles by human work. Thanks. — Instantnood 19:27, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)

  • the articles are moved, but I have nothing to parse inter-article links. SchmuckyTheCat 21:19, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Request for the Eald Englisc version

I'd like to request a bot for the ang wikis to change all the accented characters áéíóúýǽ (and the capital letters) to the macroned versions: āēīōūȳǣ --James Johnson July 7, 2005 10:18 pm

Schoolbot

Hi, I think a good bot idea would be a bot that made articles on and gave statistics on United States/other schools. E.G.-- Ouachita High School have the number of students, percentages of things, test scores. The bot can gain the statistics from a goood number of websites out there. If someone is willing to take the time and effort to do this I'm sure it will be appreciated. I myself have no experiance in computer science and programming.

Anyone trying this would likely be shot. -- Cyrius|✎ 07:21, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Changing Templates...

I need someone to build a bot that changes all pages that link to "User:Ilyanep/Welcome Message" (within { not [) to link to "subst:User:Ilyanep/Wel". Thanks. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 01:17, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

I'd also like all links to "User:Ilyanep/Test1", "User:Ilyanep/Test2", "User:Ilyanep/Test3", "User:Ilyanep/Test4", and "User:Ilyanep/Ban" to have subst: added before. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 02:47, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
What links here only shows about 60 welcomes, 30 test1s, and a handful of the others. It's just as easy to do it by hand, and heck, I could stand something boring at the moment, so I'll go ahead and do it. —Cryptic (talk) 04:13, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Oh, well thanks a lot. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 04:34, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
There are still a handful left, so I'm waiting to archive this until they are fixed. -- Beland 23:26, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Redirect cleanup

A lot of single redirects could be bypassed, improving navigation for readers and improving site speed slightly. Some easy cases where a bot could probably just go ahead and bypass the redirect on its own:

  • Inline links where there is display text set which is different from the link target's title. (And it's not a simple case of stripping the namespace prefix.)
  • Simple links in "See also" sections. In some cases, multiple articles in the same list have been merged. It would be good to consolidate these into a single listing with the new title. I assume you'd want to preserve whatever ordering already exists in these lists, rather than alphabetize. I would skip any sections which have more than one list, as these may require human attention to sort links properly.

There might be other cases which could be handled by bots, but there are certainly many that need fixing but require human attention. I guess the thing to do would be to start a "redirect sorting" project, similar to the stub sorting project. Perhaps a bot could help with getting that off the ground, as well. (Redirects are already beginning to be sorted; see Category:Redirects. -- Beland 21:54, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and tags that transclude a template that is actually a redirect could also be switched over automatically. -- Beland 23:05, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

It is a good idea to replace template redirects with their target (e.g. {{disamb}} with {{disambig}}) or redirects for misspellings with their correct spelling, but in general, replacing Redirects with possibilities or redirects such [[railroad]] or [[railway]] with Rail transport or [[colour]] with [[color]] should be avoided. -- User:Docu

Hello, I believe User:Ambush Commander/LinkFix dump offers half this functionality as it does not automatically edit pages but points out trouble links. If you have an article you would like the bot to look at, please drop a note on my talk page. — Ambush Commander(Talk) 03:18, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

List of disambiguation pages

Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Links to disambiguating pages says the manually maintained list should be replaced by an automated list. Either that, or the SQL query that updates Special:Lonelypages will need to be changed to exclude articles tagged {{disambiguation}}, etc. (Then people who needed an actual list could just use Category:Disambiguation.) After this is done, Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages and related pages could possibly be deleted. "Wikipedia:List of disambiguation pages" would be a better name (if you ask me), if such a page is still necessary. -- Beland 23:05, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Small American communities

Articles on many small American communities, such as Moore Township, Michigan appear to have been automatically made from census data. I wonder if a bot could put most or all of this data into one or more tables. Maurreen (talk) 06:58, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Transwikification

Many of the subcategories in Category:Articles to be moved have backlogs (again). The task of moving these articles out, however, could be automated because it is very straightforward. -- Beland 22:54, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

  • The reason that the backlogs exist is that the 'bots that already were performing the transwikification semi-automatically, KevinBot (talk · contribs) and McBot (talk · contribs), were broken by the MediaWiki software upgrade, and have not been repaired yet. As an interim measure, I am processing the queues by hand as I did the last time that there was a backlog. Uncle G 11:40:00, 2005-08-05 (UTC)
    • Now I'm processing them semi-automatically with the aid of TRANSWIKI, running under the aegis of Uncle G's 'bot (talk · contribs). Only one of the aforementioned subcategories actually has a backlog. Uncle G 03:57:41, 2005-08-19 (UTC)


USAAF bot

To change all instances of "United States Army Air Force", "U.S. Army Air Force", "US Army Air Force" and "Army Air Force" to the proper United States Army Air Forces. You will have to be careful, because we don't want United States Air Force being changed accidentally, nor do we want United States Army Air Corps, the USAAF's predecessor to be anachronistically renamed. --Jpbrenna 21:30, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Given that they're all redirects, and all fairly valid abbreviations, what's the need for this? ~~ N (t/c) 22:38, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Well, how about "U.S. Army Air Force" & "Army Air Force" at least — they never existed!--Jpbrenna 04:44, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Um, sure they did. Isn't "U.S." as valid an abbreviation as "US"? Although the last one might do well to be changed in articles where it might confuse people who don't realize the US is being referred to. ~~ N (t/c) 05:14, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
There was never (officially) a singular "United States Army Air Force." It was "United States Army Air Forces". The progression was:
  • Aviation Section, United States Army Signal Corps
  • United States Army Air Service
  • United States Army Air Corps
  • United States Army Air Forces
  • United States Air Force

I don't see a "United States Army Air Force" in there, do you? Maybe I'm a nitpicky, chickenshit sonfoabitch, or maybe other Wikipedians are lazy and/or uninformed. I think it's the latter, and I myself am too lazy to go through every single one of their articles to pluralize "Army Air Force." I have better things to do — hence the bot request. --Jpbrenna 22:00, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Also, I think US is going to have to go. Someone once stalked all my contributions looking for "US"'s to change to "U.S." and cited some obscure Wikipedia spelling convention. --Jpbrenna 22:15, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Redundant category remover

I'd like to see a bot that determines whether any categories listed for an article are direct subcategories of each other and removes the more general one(s). For example, something that flags articles with the following Category:Composers and Category:American composers and offers to remove the former. --Hooperbloob 02:47, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

/Temp

See Wikipedia:Temps. A bot is requested to move all temporary subpages (/temp, and variations) to talk pages instead, to prevent them being included in searches and article count. Radiant_>|< 13:03, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

  • I don't think it's a good idea to have a bot doing this. For starters it would be highly disruptive of the talk pages involved and the users editing them may wonder where they went. Further, the articles would still exist, but they'd be blanked, which means neither of those problems would be solved anyway. In fact, it would only increase confusions when someone searching ended up getting a blank page. Instead, how about a bot that added a boilerplate to the temp pages, making it clear that the page is there for archival purposes, and that the content may not be complete? --Ryan Delaney talk 15:50, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
    • The intent is a move, not a merge, and any move creates a redirect. Thus, not really disruptive. The articles would then be redirects which aren't categorized, nor found by most indexing services. Radiant_>|< 11:18, August 24, 2005 (UTC)

AutoSubster

A long-standing feature request is to allow certain templates to be automatically subst'ed whenever used, to reduce server load. Now I haven't heard from any developers on the matter, but it seems to me this matter can easily be taken care of using a bot. It should run once or twice per week, have an input list of templates, then find all pages using those templates (via whatlinkshere) and substitute in the template text. Some help would be appreciated. Radiant_>|< 09:58, August 15, 2005 (UTC)

  • Trivial to implement with replace.py. (SEWilco 15:51, 15 August 2005 (UTC))
  • I am working on this at User:SubstBot. Any help would be appreciated, as I am new to this. --Ryan Delaney talk 15:41, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Need a simple bot

I am looking for a bot that fills in data from a .csv file for my India-related edits. eg.

$name is a district in $state with a population of $population and an area of $area. (basic example)

I would also like to use it to fill up lists on political parties etc. User:Nichalp/sg 08:20, August 16, 2005 (UTC)

Recategorization bot

For {{Categoryredirect}}, a bot is requested to automataically (e.g. once or twice per week) move any articles in the redirecting category, into the category it redirects to. Radiant_>|< 12:54, August 16, 2005 (UTC)

Oh, feel free to bug me about this if I don't get around to it in a timely fashion. I can program Pearle to do it. -- Beland 05:59, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
Radiant already bugged me about it, I'm in the middle of programming it. Everything is available in the pywikipedia framework, I just need to make some small alternations. --AllyUnion (talk) 06:21, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
Request filled. --AllyUnion (talk) 04:05, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

FPC bot

I was hoping that someone could write a bot to automatically do certain functions at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates. Fairly simple stuff like two days after listing move from the comments only section to the voting section and then two weeks later move from the voting section to the decision section, from there it would of course have to be taken up by a human to decide whether it passes or not. I don't think this would be that hard to accomplish since as far as I know something fairly similar is being done on vfd by a bot. Jtkiefer T | @ | C ----- 05:05, August 20, 2005 (UTC)

On my "to-fix list". See also: User:Kurando-san/FPC. --AllyUnion (talk) 05:32, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Discussion copied over to User:Kurando-san/FPC. please continue discussion on thread there -- Jtkiefer T | @ | C ----- 07:02, August 20, 2005 (UTC)

Rename request

Remane all articles Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Foo and Wikipedia:Pages for deletion/Foo to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Foo because we need naming consistency. Dunc|☺ 13:19, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Why can't the old ones just stay where they are? Seems like a lot of work and pressure on the servers for no real benefit, jguk 14:16, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Well, when a new deletion discussion comes up, you'll want people to stumble across the old discussion. Naming consistency would facilitate that, and also make these pages easier to find, in general. -- Beland 01:01, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
Furthermore, article recreations can not be found very easy if the archive is not moved to the appropriate place. There is no reference if they think it was never nominated before. --AllyUnion (talk) 20:17, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

IMDB bot for films?

Wikipedia is desparately in need of a self-motivated bot with a positive attitude to extract any available film-related information from IMDB, and create articles out of it. For example, the bot could pick out the director, actors, tagline, quotes, release dates, budget, etc, and rewrite this information in sentence form. There is a definite bias on Wikipedia toward newer films, and countless classics are being left red. You could start with all the top film lists on IMDB. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-08-27 17:27

  • This could be a bit tricky because IMDB isn't a public domain source, unlike Rambot and US census data. This could violate their terms of service. A more feasible idea might be simply to add an IMDB link at the bottom of each film page or actor page that's currently missing it. -- Curps 14:25, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
    • I know it's not public domain, that's why you wouldn't include IMDB's plot, or any other text that could be considered copyrighted. Names of people, dates, and budget numbers, however, are a different matter. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-09-2 17:19
      • All text in the IMDB is copyrighted, though the underlying facts are not. Given this problem, it seems entirely likely that the Wikimedia Foundation lawyers would not approve of the IMBD bot idea. If anyone is motivated to investigate further, though, they could be consulted. -- Beland 01:00, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Lists and generally-available facts are non-copyrightable. However, I believe "data mining" would contravene the IMDB terms of use. --Oldak Quill 18:29, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
  • There's got to be a few free places to get data from great films (although I honestly can't think of one). Maybe? Gflores Talk 22:18, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

request for hip hop bot

could a bot search for any stubs in category hip hop and compose a list of em?

  • why has noone responded to my original post?i still want this botUrthogie 02:35, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
I don't see what you are trying to accomplish with such a bot... If you like to request a Hip-hop stub, ask WikiProject Stub Sorting. They do have some scripts to help find stubs. --AllyUnion (talk) 20:16, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Flag images bot

What I want to do is having a bot that replaces flag images names, such as Image:Belarus flag large.png --> Image:Flag of Belarus.png. While I have been doing this by hand for months, I feel like a bot can easily do this task. While I see a bot doing this on occasion, I want to have one running on the English Wikipedia firstly to start using Commons images, then, later on, on request. While I am an idiot and cannot figure out code, I am willing to try to work with someone to build on this bot and eventually put it into action on EN. If there is any comments or concerns, just let me know please, or if you wish to help. Zach (Sound Off) 02:28, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Images that are simply scaled-down versions of other images are supposed to be deleted. It would be great if redundant flag images on en could be tagged for deletion (if appropriate) with a pointer to the larger image. See Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. -- Beland 03:44, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
I was going through the process of doing it manually until I was told of the impending SVG image support. I stopped until recently. Personally, I think we should wait since Image:Flag of Belarus.svg is very bigger than Image:Flag of Belarus.png, which is also very cleaner. Until I see a huge need for svg images, or a way to make them smaller than png's, I will still continue to do everything by hand. Zach (Sound Off) 04:12, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
Ok, now that the bugs have been worked out, and I finally learned how to use python on Wikipedia, all someone has to tell me to do is how to replace the files and I will be on my way to make my idea come true. But, so far, is there any objections to me using the bot/script? Zach (Sound Off) 20:35, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
I don't see why you need to delete the old images... Personally, uploading all SVGs would force everyone to that standard. Keeping the static images still allows for some backwards compatibility. --AllyUnion (talk) 23:54, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
Mainly want to clear our redundant images with this bot. Zach (Sound Off) 00:03, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
Again, I do not see how the images are redundant when there are some people who are on modems, and would very much prefer the static image rather than downloading the Adobe SVG just to view the image. Furthermore, SVG is not a standard on all browsers and computers. You have to consider that there are public terminals which are installed and locked down a certain way such that they may not have the proper software for SVG. Furthermore, people use other things than computers to read the Wikipedia, like Palm Pilots. We do not want to restrict the Wikipedia to SVG even if the images are redundant. --AllyUnion (talk) 20:14, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
You do realize that the Wikimedia servers render SVG as PNG images for you, right? See for example Image:Flag of the Bahamas.svg. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 21:58, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Royal Society request

The Royal Society have a list of all their fellows, foreign members and presidents at http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=1727 and I think this would serve as a useful indication of articles that are needed. There are 26 pdf files at http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=1727 thru http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/downloaddoc.asp?id=796 but a script is needed to go through and somehow arrange them from "surname, firstname" into "firstname, surname", and ignore the titles. Formatting doesn't appear to be preserved by copying out the text, which would be very useful in knowing which data are where so that they can then be jiggled. Any thoughts? Dunc|☺ 23:12, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Use something like ScITE (s/([A-Z][a-z]*), ([A-Z][a-z]*)/\2 \1/g) to reform the names - titles can be removed with a simple "Find and Replace" function in Notepad ;). Links can be made using either of these applications. --Oldak Quill 00:30, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
We already have Presidents of the Royal Society. I don't think a complete listing of all members would be terribly encyclopedic, but putting it on Wikisource would be OK, if copyright licensing is compatible. Having a list of members who actually have Wikipedia articles would be useful. As noted, a "bot" is not necessary, but someone does need to process these files before posting. -- Beland 01:24, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Replace template Prettytable by class wikitable

Styling for a class "wikitable" has been added to the mediawiki:common.css stylesheet. This replicates to a satisfactory level the original template:Prettytable (and several variants of it). Currently the template has been modified to refer to the class. However this is still a drag on server time. Could someone create a bot to do the following replacements in all articles:

{{subst:prettytable}}          => class="wikitable"
{{Prettytable100}}       => class="wikitable"

{{Prettytable95}}        => class="wikitable" style="font-size: 95%"

{{Prettytable-center}}   => class="wikitable" style="text-align: center"
{{Prettytable100center}} => class="wikitable" style="text-align: center"

{{Prettytable-center2}}  => class="wikitable" align="center"

{{PrettytableN}}         => {{prettyinfobox}}

{{Prettytablewidth|x}}   => class="wikitable" width=x

The last two are special cases. The last one has a parameter. The bot should extract it as "x" and replace as indicated. The one before the last is currently a redirection, that can be rolled up.

After all replacements have been done, the templates can be removed. −Woodstone 20:01, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

The conversion should be done whatever the outcome of the VfD. — Christoph Päper 23:10, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Pending image deletion notifications

The following has recently been added to WP:CSD by decree of Jimbo Wales:

A bot is urgently needed to notify uploaders (on their user talk pages) of these images of the pending deletions, to give them a chance to supply correct source and copyright information. (Image deletion is permanent.)

I am currently reinstalling the operating systems on both my home computers, and can't address this problem in the near future. If any other bot authors would like to tackle this problem, that would be very helpful. -- Beland 03:20, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

It would be helpful to create a category that something along the lines of "Category:Images with unknown source - uploader notified" or "Category:Images with unknown copyright status - uploader notified" --AllyUnion (talk) 09:46, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

AllyUnion seems to have taken this up; see Wikipedia talk:Bots. -- Beland 03:54, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

IFD auto-tag

For images older than 7 days a bot should come along and put an {{ifd}} with no source. The bot would also have to add the entry into the page specified on the template. Just the other day I found an image which was years old with no source or copyright information. It's been deleted now but it would make life easier if a bot could elimate all the "no sourcers" after 7 days. One more thing, it would have to leave a message on the uploader's talk page too. -- Thorpe talk 15:50, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

The problem with this is that you're asking to find images that don't have tags... Which means that the bot would have to either get a database dump, or actively create its own database of images to ignore (not to check). You'd need a feature that would allow you to query the database of images uploaded on a certain day... and I don't think the upload log does that. --AllyUnion (talk) 05:43, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

A bot to automate the procedure for the nomination of the most reverted administrator.

I want to give the most reverted administrator award. Thats why I need a bot that searches into the history of the user pages of all the active administrators, and count how many history entries contain into their edit summaries the words rv, reverted, or vandalism. Could you please help me? Most reverted admin award 21:06, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

What a dumb idea, and almost impossible to accurately measure what is intended to be measured. Gene Nygaard 21:14, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Don't bite the newbie, now. It's hard to measure, but I like the idea. ~~ N (t/c) 21:31, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
What I have in my mind: get the list of all active adminstrators. Issue a wget command, asking for the history of the userpage of every admin, and ask for the latest 500 history entries. Then cat the result and grep the words "revert" or "rv" that reside inside the edit summaries. Sort the result and discover who is the admin who has been reverted the most. This admin wins the "most reverted admin award". What do you think? Most reverted admin award 22:00, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
for example:
wget "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:A_Man_In_Black&limit=500&action=history"
echo "A_Man_In_Black="`cat "./index.php?title=User:A_Man_In_Black&limit=500&action=history"|grep cur|grep last|grep -i revert|wc -l` >> final_list
Most reverted admin award 22:07, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Precisely. I would also search for "^rv" and " rv" (not "rv", which might be in the middle of a word), and use the -O option to wget. And you don't need permission to run a bot that does a fairly small, read-only operation like this. Just wait a few seconds between each invocation, to keep load down. ~~ N (t/c) 22:15, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks! Do you know the flag I have to use in a single grep command in order to catch "revert" OR " rv" OR "^rv". I need a regular expresion something like this : grep -i ("revert" OR "^rv" OR " rv") Most reverted admin award 22:26, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
No problem. man grep makes it look like the correct syntax is grep -e pattern1 -e pattern2 file. BTW, why not do this under your own user account (given your knowledgability, I assume you have one)? ~~ N (t/c) 22:32, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks again! I ll do this under my own user account, but unfortunately my dialup connection is extremely slow and it is going to take time. If anyone wishes to run a similar bot in order to discover the most revert admin, he is welcome to edit my userpage and present the results of his bot there.Most reverted admin award 22:45, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Out of curiosity, what is your actual account, and why did you create this new one? ~~ N (t/c) 23:00, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
I am an anonymous wikipedian. I have no account. Most reverted admin award 08:58, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
His user page says I hope that this list will make any admin having his userpage reverted many times by wikipedians, to ask himself why this is happening. Userpages usually get reverted because somebody vandalized them. It's not real hard to figure out. The wording sounds like some kind of vague anti-admin agenda. -- Curps 22:29, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
I would see this award as an honor, because the most likely meaning is that you're good at bothering vandals by warning and blocking them. ~~ N (t/c) 22:32, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Correct. Some wikipedians may consider this as an award of honor, others as an anti-award. IMHO the "most reverted admin award" could be both.But I dont care about politics, I am just a statistician. Most reverted admin award 22:45, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
You obviously haven't really though through either what you are looking for, nor what your findings will show. Do your homework first, before bothering anybody else with your "vague anti-admin agenda". Gene Nygaard 00:59, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
What do you mean? I think these are interesting statistics, even if there's not much point. ~~ N (t/c) 01:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
I doubt that you have any better idea about what is being looked for, nor of what is being found, than the anonymous proponent, who is not a newby with the new user name. The most obvious thing this that there is no consideration of distinguishing reverts made by the administrator, reverts of an edit by an administrator, reverts of an earlier editor after the administrator's edit, and reverts to an earlier version by the administrator. And even more important, multiple reverts of the same thing. But that's only the tip of the iceberg, really.
You also need to consider potential abuse resulting from the mere existence of this list; anyone with a vendetta against some administrator could easily skew the results. Gene Nygaard 01:26, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Thank you very much for your advices! I didnt thought all those different cases. In my bot design I ll take into account your helpfull advices. I just want to remind to all of you that this is a Bot request, so I am asking others to help me. As you have already notice my bot design can evolve from an initally easy design, to a much more complicated one. Most reverted admin award 09:08, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Ooh, abuse, good point. So this should just be kept quiet until the results are released. ~~ N (t/c) 01:41, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
The real clincher, however, can be seen by looking at the proponents page, and lists of supposed counts for a few administrators. Those counts, as near as I can tell, even include reversions made by people other than the administrator, of edits by editors other than the administrator, going back to versions last edited by someone other than the administrator in question.
Naturally, those who edit frequently edited articles would be most penalized by that screwball procedure. Gene Nygaard 01:29, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
What I am planning to do is to run my bot, and choose the first 10 admins. Then I am planning to recount the reverts by hand, in order to have the accurate result. I will give a gold, a silver and a bronze metal to the three administrators who have been attacked the most by vandals or by angry wikipedians Most reverted admin award 07:56, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
...? This is counting reverts by anyone, solely to an admin's user page. The idea is to see which admins are most frequently attacked by user-page vandals. ~~ N (t/c) 01:41, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Category-refugees bot

Not sure if this exists or is even feasible, but what I'm looking for is a way to step through the articles in a Category/"Category substring", scanning the links for wikilinks that step outside the category requirement. This would be more akin to a spider or database query, except the former is forbidden (?) and the latter seems unsuited to the task. For example:

  • Let's say Han Solo links to rogue, Leia Organa, and Jacen Solo. We're hunting for articles that should be in "Categories:*Star Wars*", but ain't.
    • bot finds that all two of the three above links are in the specified categories.
    • However, in scanning Jacen Solo, it finds a link to voxyn which has not been categorized at all.
  • Results given to user:
    • rogue links out of defined Category-space, from Han Solo (false positive)
    • voxyn links out of defined Category-space, from Jacen Solo. Oops! User categorizes it, and now the voxyn article is maintained with the rest of the SW articles.

Obviously it's an imperfect example, and because it takes no action, it may not really be a bot, but it could be a boon in fiction/other specialized cats that very rarely link out of their own categor(ies). nae'blis (talk) 22:28, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't see what this is intended to accomplish... especially because it sounds like you're saying voxyn should not be in a Star Wars category, when it quite obviously should (if it weren't a redirect). ~~ N (t/c) 22:36, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Okay, obviously I didn't do a very good job of that. In my example, voxyn' (hypothetical article) *should* be in the SW categories, but isn't through user error. It's fairly difficult right now to find these without a human user checking all theoretically category-bound links on all pages in the category. Ideally this would be a list of "exit links" - links that go out from Category articles that are no longer in Category. Things like rogue, sword, energy blast would be easily scannable as false positives, leaving only the mis/non-categorized articles to be tagged. nae'blis (talk) 02:41, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
So this would be a human-operated bot to add articles to cats? I like it. Keep in mind, though, that subcats may sometime be necessary; for instance, if we had categories "Star Wars animals" or "Yuuzhan Vong biotechnology" (which, I think, we don't), "voxyn" would go in one of those, not the root SW category. ~~ N (t/c) 03:03, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Sure; while I'm dreaming, it could check a WikiProject subpage for names of various subcats, rather than just a regex... and maybe be able to use previous "exit link" logs to avoid false positives on a second pass. *shrug* :P nae'blis (talk) 12:45, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Its probablly ok to do this online if your search rate is kept low but it may be better to download dumps of the relavent tables and process them directly since then you will be able to process them as fast as you wan't without bothering the wikimedia servers. Plugwash 15:30, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I have already written some code that looks for uncategorized articles and suggests some categories for them, based on existing "see also" links. It's not really completed, and it's neglected at the moment, but if you have ideas or want to help, see Wikipedia:Auto-categorization and the old dump Wikipedia:Auto-categorization/see-also-1. It would be interesting to expand the idea to articles which are already in categories, though it's clearly easier for uncategorized articles, and those are probably in more urgent need of attention. I'm not sure links outside of the "see also" area would be likely to be in the same category, but I haven't done any field testing of that idea. It might make an interesting seed list for manual review, but that depends on relative frequency of useful vs. not useful suggestions. -- Beland 04:03, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

User submission bots: Do they exist?

Hi, I'm just wondering if there was a bot that can get all the articles contributed by any one user and put that in a list with no duplication (e.g. user making multiple edits to one article)? BigDan 02:44, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

It's probably possible to do this using User Contributions and then feeding the result into MS Excel, stripping the information down to page names and then eliminating duplicates. nae'blis (talk) 13:38, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
You can also do this with the getVersionHistory() function in pywikipedia bots and compile a list of users then running unique function on your compiled list. --AllyUnion (talk) 09:29, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Bot for making pages with similiar format in te wiki

Hi a bot that can create pages for all the years taking one template page in telugu (te) wiki would be very much appreciated. Or any suggestions on how to automate the routine grunt work like this are also welcome --Vyzasatya 00:24, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Missing interlanguage links

Is there a bot or script that check links in a particular page and see if the target article does have an interlanguage links with the specified language. For example, it checks if all the featured articles linked from WP:FA have an interlanguage link to their equivalent in French (one specified language). Thank you. CG 20:10, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Script generation of uniform polyhedra articles

I'm interested in generating some 50+ stub articles on the missing uniform polyhedra.

I have a list at:

I'm a programmer, but not done any online scripting. I can write a program to extract information from a table and generate files with wiki templates, but I can't get the results online into wikipedia, except copy&paste by hand.

Similarly I have a list of vertex figure images for 80+ uniform polyhedra that I'd like to upload automatically, rather than by hand.

I wouldn't plan to overwrite any existing pages, although it might be useful to overwrite a set of images in the future, if I can get better images, or want to change resolution or whatever.

I imagine there's a way of using Javascript or something to manipulate webpages, filling in form data perhaps and activiting buttons.

Alternately there might be a URL approach in Wiki to transmit article and image information for generation without using the web page controls.

I'm not in a hurry, and still cross-checking information, but it would be great to have some upload automation when I'm ready to upload.

Any help is appreciated.

Tom Ruen 21:23, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

You would need a bot to upload stuff to Wikipedia in batch mode. See WP:BOT#Software which may be useful for making bots. You have the choice of using a Python or a Perl framework. I myself use the Perl WWW::MediaWiki client from a shell script. Many other people prefer Python. If you decide to stick with Perl, you can write on my talk page if you need any help. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 08:50, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
PS I don't know if any of these upload images, I used the perl bot only for wikitext. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 08:50, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Alexa rank checker request

I'm a little concerned about Wikipedia being used as a medium for self-promotion and advertising non-notable sites. Might it be possible/desirable to write a bot to check the Alexa rankings for all externally linked sites, and list all links to sites below a certain Alexa rank? Humans could then review that list and decide what to do with the less notable sites.

This is actually a request for two different functionalities: the first would be for the bot to go through every current Wikipedia article, checking external links, while the second would be for the bot to patrol Recent Changes, doing the same. The first functionality would obviously need to be done carefully, so as to not be percieved as a DoS attack on Alexa; if necessary, it could run fairly slowly, over a period of weeks or months, even. --Ashenai (talk) 08:17, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

While I agree that wikispam is a very bad thing, a site with low Alexa rank might have information highly relevant to an article. My opinion is that the external links should be checked by editors and not by bots. +MATIA ☎ 00:48, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Null edit bot?

Can't imagine a simpler bot than this to implement, or a more harmless one to run. (He observed, leadingly...) Has anyone previously suggested a "null edit" bot, to assist in forcing renamed stub categories to pick up their "new" categories? (This doesn't happen automatically, if the category in a stub template is changed, but the transcluding article isn't.) At present, stub category renames tend to be done opportunistically when they're small, but it'd sometimes be useful to have a convenient way to do this by "brute force" on existing, large categories, when a naming convention changes, or is "clarified". Running either on a given list of articles, or a given category would be good. Proposed "null edit": add a blank line to the end of an article. Possible refinement, to stop continually growing article if for some reason it's repeatedly edited by this, and never otherwise: instead delete a blank line at end of article, if it already exists. Alai 01:54, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Pywikipediabot's touch.py does this. Pearle can also. See Wikipedia talk:Bots#Mairibot, who will soon begin operation. Note that there's no need to actually add a blank line to the end to get categories and such to update. —Cryptic (talk) 03:15, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
Is Pearle meant to be Perl? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:24, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
No, it's User:Pearle. —Cryptic (talk) 09:43, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks God for wikilinks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 10:02, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks: I should have thought to check the talk:, and not just the project page. "GMTA", clearly, as Mairi's proposal has exactly the same motivation as mine. And thanks also for the clarification on null edits: I'd inferred and assumed an actual db-changing edit was required, without bothering to check whether this was the case (shameful for any self-described scientist, I know). Alai 22:42, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Census I

On the site [1] there are historical census population figures for states and counties. Could a bot be used to add this data to the appropriate articles, as I have done by hand to Warren County, Ohio? PedanticallySpeaking 16:27, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Census II

Data exists from the Census on Ohio's townships here and here. Would it be possible to creat a bot to create articles on Ohio townships as was done to create basic county and municipality articles? I've created a number of these township articles by hand, as have SwissCelt and Beirne, and created Wikipedia:WikiProject_Ohio_townships to provide guidance. But there are many townships to go—over a thousand—and I'd appreciate some help. I'd appreciate replies to my talk page. PedanticallySpeaking 16:27, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Subst-bot

Template {{main}} could/should be a subst command {subst:main} because it saves on server load (see WP:AUM for details), being one of the most commonly used templates on Wikipedia. But most people use the template instead of the subst command, for the simple fact of not knowing about the existence of the subst command, and server load issues. The output looks exactly alike. I would like to propose a bot to convert occurances of {{main|articlename}} to {{subst:main|articlename}}.Stbalbach 01:54, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Is there approval for this, such as in Template talk:Main? (SEWilco 05:39, 31 October 2005 (UTC))
And are there other templates that should be similarly substed? There's bound to be some article overlap. —Cryptic (talk) 06:00, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
There are many templates that should be using subst (see WP:AUM). But I just read more about subst, its not what I thought it was, and can see how it might not be the best idea to replace across all articles without more detailed discussion of the pros and cons, so I withdraw the request, unless anyone else wants to pick up. There is also a discussion on Template talk:Main about it. Stbalbach 06:25, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
  • Seconded. It would be much appreciated to have an "auto-subster" bot. For instance, {{afd}} should always be subst'ed, per longstanding guidelines. Subst'ability of individual templates could be decided at the template's talk page, or at WP:TFD. Ideally this bot would have a 'source page' that lists all templates it should subst (and that would be protected just to be sure). Radiant_>|< 09:41, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Could this be done by simply finding {{main| and replacing with {{subst:main| if so then i'll do it with a bot soon. Martin 19:31, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Also, if someone tells me what all the templates to be subst'ed then I'll do them all. Martin 19:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
As mentioned above, first get approval from users of the template. Some templates are temporary and easy removal may be important. Other templates are more like automated display formats which are expected to change in the future, so should be retained in template form. (SEWilco 21:20, 31 October 2005 (UTC))
OK then, I don't mind doing the bot work, but I don't know which templates I should and shouldn't do, AFD is temporary so it's not worth doing, {{main| should always be done though should it not? Martin 21:29, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
  • Template:Afd top and Template:Afd bottom and their redirects, per Wikipedia:Deletion process (where they appear as {{subst:at}} and {{subst:ab}}). Besides server load, they contain html comments with instructions on what to do if you're trying to renominate. Because they used to contain self-referential links, there are going to be many false positives in the what-links-here for these; you'll want to cache them between runs. —Cryptic (talk) 21:57, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
    • I've created a short list at Wikipedia:Subst and advertised it for community suggestions. Radiant_>|< 23:01, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Simple touch-bot

This is a simple request: could someone, anyone, send a bot out to touch all of these and these? Most of the former contain a transclusion of {{unicode}} which used to itself transclude {{unicode fonts}} but does so no longer. I have been attempting to clean them up, but I think I've got all the substantive references now, just leaving a huge residue mostly consisting of user signatures containing unicode characters. The latter is about the same except it's about {{IPA}} and {{IPA fonts}} instead: I suspect there will be a great deal less false positives in that lot, but some people do use this in their signatures. It would make life a lot easier if someone could clear away the chaff so I could get to the wheat, so to speak. TIA, HAND —Phil | Talk 13:03, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

I'll give 'em a touch. Martin 13:26, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Doing it, will take a while, i'll let you know when it's done. Martin 14:26, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Cheers. In the meantime I'll keep plugging away :-) —Phil | Talk 16:46, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, that's much better :-) —Phil | Talk 09:39, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

AidBot

I'm sort of in charge of the Article Improvement Drive, and all articles nominated for improvement have a template put on them to mention that they've been nominated - Template:AIDnom. And when the nomination expires, or is made the AID project for a week, the template is stripped off. Or that's how it should go. Could someone make a bot to attach and strip away the template at the appropriate times? -Litefantastic 18:31, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Asteroid bot

I would like to run a bot with account User:HELLO, WORLD! to maintain the lists of asteroids and create new articles for asteroids. - Yaohua2000 03:44, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

You are going to run the bot? WP:BOTS says "Before running a bot, you must get approval on Wikipedia talk:Bots".--Commander Keane 17:33, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Can someone write a bot to fix all the asteroid articles that say "... is a minor planet orbiting Sun". so that they refer to the' Sun? Look here, for example: 631_Philippina. I did a few manually, but it's a pain in the neck to do. Reyk 03:59, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Watchlist RSS Feed

I'd like to be able to watch my article watchlist via RSS feed. It would be a little faster than just refreshing the whole watchlist page.

Just a thought.  :-)

sohmc 04:13, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Syndication has some related discussion. --Pamri • Talk • Reply 09:17, 2 November 2005 (UTC)


Bot to reduce overlinking of solitary dates and solitary months

Many articles have several solitary links to the same year. For example, Economy of Algeria has 14 solitary links to 2004. Many articles repeat links to solitary months such as February too. I count this as overlinking and tackle these manually, but a bot would help. Bobblewik 02:01, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

I second this. Gflores Talk 22:21, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Template replacement

Is this the right place to ask for a bot to replace all instances of {{Journal reference issue}} with {{Journal reference}}? The former is a simple REDIRECT to the latter so this should cause no great upheaval; this would help a great deal in the ongoing clear-up of citation templates. Thanks in advance. —Phil | Talk 16:56, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes this is the right place, I'll get my bot to replace them. thanks Martin 17:04, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Sentence case in headings

Could a bot turn some common headings into sentence case? I know this was done for 'See also'. I have been doing this by hand for many instances. For example, compare the table headings and the section headings in Soyuz 30 with Soyuz TM-23. There are a lot of articles with similar headings. Thanks. Bobblewik 23:24, 9 November 2005 (UTC) Soyuz TM-23

Disambiguation pages-birth and death dates

I work with the Missing Encyclopedic Articles and am constantly pruning new lists of already existing articles. One of my big pet peeves when I run into a disambig page is that there is seems that there never enough info on the disambiguation page to fully disambiguate who the person was and I have to check several articles just to be sure. According to the Manual of style for disambiguation pages, birth and death dates are supposed to be added to help make the disambiguation easier and provide some context for who the person was. Can this process be automated by a bot checking disambig pages and looking for Category:1931 births Category:1995 deaths on linked articles and adding birth and death dates where appropriate? Thanks! --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 21:06, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

delete self-referential redirects

I request for a bot to aid in deletion of redirects in the main namespace that redirect to ones in the Wikipedia name spaces. There are also inappropriate redirects for various combinations. See WP:RFD and WP:ASR. -- Zondor 10:40, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure that's appropriate, considering sometimes the Wikipedia: page is the obvious destinatation. -- Beland 08:09, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Adding Everything2 Articles to wikipedia

I suggest we contruct a bot that would grab all Everything2 articles that include a short statement saying they wish to be reproduced by bots. Perhaps a copyleft statement or something of the sort. They could all be attached as subtopics to the User Everything2.

It would be great to have other bots designed to gather websites from other excylcopedish sites that include copyleft text, and attach them as subtopics to appropriate.

--MathiasTCK 1:49 November 12th 2005

Everything2 content is copyright by each individual author [2]. That's entirely incompatible with Wikipedia:No ownership of articles and our policy that all contributions are covered by the GFDL. We can't use any Everything2 content. Even if copyright weren't an issue, there's incompatible site policies on things like Wikipedia:Neutral point of view and so forth. -- Curps 16:30, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Copyvios

Would it be possible for a bot to generate a list of articles created by anon IPs? As mentioned on Wikipedia talk:Association of Copyright Violation Hunting Wikipedians#Some ideas by me, most of the copyvio articles get created by anon IPs or newbies. It wd be great if atleast a list of articles created by anon IPs yet seeing a good history of edits can be made available. If this is not the right place for requesting report generation, please move the request to a more appropriate place. Thanks, --Gurubrahma 04:56, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Probably would be good to incorporate this into Wikipedia:Neglected articles by ranking this first. -- Beland 08:08, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Archival Bot

Certain pages, most notably the Village Pump, Reference Desk and Admin Noticeboard, have a tendency to get overly lengthy. I was wondering if it was possible to create a bot that checks once per day, and moves to an archive page each section that ends with a datesign of more than a week ago. Almost all sections on those pages end with the standard signature + date, and any section without recent activity would be archivable.

I'm not sure if people like this idea, but before suggesting it on those places I'd like to ask the botters if it's actually possible. Radiant_>|< 01:06, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Shouldn't be terribly difficult, so long as everyone signs their posts, or are tagged with {{unsigned}} or one of its variants using a standard date format. The bot should be checking all of the timestamps in the section, of course, not just the lowest one. If people don't object to having a bot do this, I'll see what I can put together this weekend. —Cryptic (talk) 13:55, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
  • I've asked the question on WP:AN and WP:VPT to see if there are any objections. Glad to hear it's possible; I sometimes spend five to ten minutes loading one of those pages. Radiant_>|< 17:01, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

SectionDating Bot (also related to the previous request)

I have been supersectioning (=MONTH DAY=) WP:HD and the four WP:RD categories (/H, /S, /L and /M) for while. This sectioning by the date-of-question has been well received as it been helpful for navigation and archiving by providing chronological breaks. The bot that I'm requesting would add the supersection date header at the bottom of those five places at approximately midnight (UTC) daily. One complication in doing this manually (me) is that many questions are unsigned/undated and so into the Page History I go (which is listed by my local time) and sort out the UTC breakpoint. This complication would wouldn't be a problem for the bot as the headers would be added at midnight in UTC realtime. The relationship to the previous request is that the archiving bot could work from the date tag file. Tediously, hydnjo talk 16:42, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Adding a new template

Hi, I made a new template called Template:NOCin1972SummerOlympics. It's supposed to go in all the 74 articles in Category:Nations at the 1972 Summer Olympics, at the bottom of each page. Anyone interested? This could be of great use as we venture backwards to the 1968 Olympics, 1964, 1960... Punkmorten 23:04, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Doing it... Fetofs Hello! 23:57, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll just contact you on your talk page next time then! Punkmorten 09:01, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
Note, however, that there are some tasks that my bot cannot do. For example, it can only append messages and templates to talk pages, not articles. However, I managed to do it using a version of a "find and replace" function :) Fetofs Hello! 15:39, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Image:Czechoslovakia flag.png

The file Image:Czechoslovakia flag.png is redundant, it's even been replaced in "{{CZS}}" [ Flag of Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ] - the flag of the Czech Republic is identical, and in the preferable svg format (Image:Flag of the Czech Republic.svg), but Image:Czechoslovakia flag.png is used in a few articles, so could anyone replace those images before I put it up for deletion? Or should I put it up for deletion first, then replace the image in articles? Cheers! +Hexagon1 (talk) 14:18, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

You should replace the occurences first, then delete. I'll tell User:Fetofsbot to replace that, once I get it to finish the above request. Fetofs Hello! 15:41, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
Done. A sysop should delete the image soon. Fetofs Hello! 16:09, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. +Hexagon1 (talk) 08:29, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Maintenance template sort key

The majority of the maintenance templates do not use a sort key for the category. Sorting on the word Template in the category page is not useful. The template pages need to change from:

[[Category:Wikipedia maintenance templates]]

to

[[Category:Wikipedia maintenance templates|{{PAGENAME}}]]

I suspect that the same issue affects other template categories. -- Doug Bell (talk/contrib) 03:46, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Done for all the templates that weren't protected. —Guanaco 04:15, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
Thanks...much better! :-) – Doug Bell talk•contrib 04:44, 23 January 2006 (UTC)