Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SelketBot 3

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

[edit] SelketBot

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

Operator: Selket

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic

Programming Language(s): pywikipedia and python

Function Summary: Fixes membership in redirect categories. For example, replaces Category:Living People with Category:Living people.

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Full run daily, partials every six hours.

Edit rate requested: 12 edits per minute

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): It was listed as pending after the previous approval, but I don't think it ever got turned on. Yes

Function Details: The bot has two modes, full and partial. The bot retrieves all of the subcategories in Category:Wikipedia category redirects (full mode) or Category:Often-populated Wikipedia category redirects (partial mode). It then looks in each sub category (these are categories that should have no members) and looks for the correct category in the {{category redirect}} template (see: here for example). The bot then edits the individual pages to replace membership in the incorrect category with membership in the correct category.

As per the template's instruction page there are other templates ({{Category redirect2}} and {{Category redirect3}}) that will cause the bot not to move pages. Sample log output is also available. After a few supervised runs, I will run this as a cron job with full runs daily and partials every six hours.

There was a bot that had this functionality previously, but it's maintainer has left.

[edit] Discussion

The log reports that the bot is flagged. ST47Talk 23:18, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Will you be able to ensure that the category that you are changing to does not already exist, such as in the rare situation that an article has both Category:Living People and Category:Living people? ST47Talk 23:19, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

I had not thought of that, but you make a good point. I have added the check to my code. If the bot finds both categories, it simply deletes the link to the redirect. --Selket ^Talk 23:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Great! That's the only thing I can see, hopefully a BAG member will be along shortly, good luck! ST47Talk 23:36, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

I can confirm that RobotG was doing this successfully before (I think in slightly broader terms, if I recall conversations with its operator correctly), so the principle behind this seems well-established, and I'd favour proceeding to trial. Alai 02:41, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Approved for trial. Sorry for the delay - requests for additional tasks can tend to drop off the radar. As I understand it, some BAG members (ie - myself :)), were planning to take a look at the request, but at the time there was an outstanding question on it. Anyway, on to business - trial for up to 100 edits. Thanks, Martinp23 23:43, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

No fault of your own -- if anything it just highlights the fact that BAG needs to be expanded. Test will run around 19:00 UTC. --Selket ^Talk 04:11, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

The log is posted at User:SelketBot/CatLog but also see the contributions. I did notice two issues. The first is that the source and destination of the category change in the log are reversed. I have fixed this, and it is important to note that this only affected the contents of the log file. The move itself and the edit summary are both correct. The second issue is that sometimes the log shows that an edit was made, when it was not. This is because pywikipediabot attempts to enforce edit rates. When the old task makes an update, the new task drops a few updates. I am looking for a work-around, but in the mean time, I am not particularly woried because those pages that were skipped will just get updated in the next run. --Selket ^Talk 20:59, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Everything looks fine from here (exempt what you've already mentioned), so I'm happy to approve. Approved. Martinp23 09:33, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

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