Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Polbot 5

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

Approved.

[edit] Polbot

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

Operator: Quadell

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic, supervised

Programming Language(s): Perl, with Perlwikipedia

Function Summary: Remove piped linking in disambiguation pages

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): run in chunks until complete

Edit rate requested: 6 edits per minute

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

Function Details: According to the MoS, disambiguation pages should not use piped linking for entries (with a few exceptions for italicized movie titles and the like). Polbot will plow through Category:Disambiguation and subcats, looking for entries with piped redirects (avoiding the exceptions mentioned above) to remove the piping. The specific regex is ~~m/^(\*\s*\[\[[^]#]*)\|[^]']*\]\]/$1\]\]/gm~~ complicated, as it turns out. Also, while there she (the bot) will add {{disambig-cleanup}} if she judges the page to violate other MoS guidelines that she isn't sentient enough to fix herself.

[edit] Discussion

I brought this up to Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation, who seemed generally supportive of the idea. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 01:17, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
Will your bot take note of the exceptions to the general rule (that is, links to anchors, articles with wrong titles, and necessary formatting? The first two exceptions are the most important, I would think, the first one being easy for a bot to avoid, the second one being slightly less easy but still workable. With that in mind, this looks like A Good Thing (tm). — Madman bum and angel (talk – desk) 01:41, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
- I'd forgotten about links to anchors! I changed the regexp (above) to ignore links with anchors. To avoid wrong-titles, the bot could read every dablink, but that would slow her down considerably and load the servers more. Or she could start by reading a lost of all articles that transclude a wrongtitle template, and then compare each link to that list -- that would also slow her down, but at least it wouldn't load the servers too much. Do you think it's worth it to do that? As for necessary formatting, the regexp above is already designed to ignore piped links like [[Jaws (film)|''Jaws'' (film)]]. Is that what you meant? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 03:22, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
  - I'd read the backlinks of Category:Wrong title templates, yeah. I think you'll find using api.php, requesting 5000 at a shot, you can build that list pretty quickly. And yes, that is what I meant; I totally missed that you had a regex -- that's awesome. I'd do some testing, but I expect it'll work. :) — Madman bum and angel (talk – desk) 06:33, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
    - If approved, that's what I shall do. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 21:01, 24 June 2007 (UTC)