User talk:JonSDSUGrad

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Just noticed you are working on the bot proposal for the GNF project. Feel free to ask for any help related to wiki issues. David D. (Talk) 22:28, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks David. Everything is smooth flowing thus far, but I'll be sure to let you know if any issues arise (And I'm sure they will...) :) JonSDSUGrad 21:37, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Just listing myself as another go-to person for Wikipedia stuff. I can also handle admin tasks (delting pages etc). Tim Vickers 21:17, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Tim. We are very close to finishing up the alpha testing for this bot and I am sure there will be a lot of 'junk' pages in my sandbox afterward so that Deleting could be very handy :) JonSDSUGrad 22:04, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Testing

For the bot testing, please run the tests under the bots name. It helps us see what the bot is doing. Also, the bot is authorised to create 10 articles in mainspace, so once it's running acceptably please start that, and we can get on to letting it run fully. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 21:11, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Yep, I will be doing so as soon as I get a few more kinks worked out - the bot is still in alpha phase, but will be moving to a beta phase very soon. JonSDSUGrad 23:32, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Run the tests in non-mainspace under the bots account anyway - it makes it easier to see, and it is against policy to run the bot under your account. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 07:28, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, now that the bot is making 'unsupervised' test edits it is running under its own account - the test pages are still being created under my sandbox so it will be easy to delete them once testing is over. JonSDSUGrad 22:04, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Ok. Once it is ready, please say under the BRFA and then begin testing for 50 edits in the actual articles. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 01:32, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I think we were going to start with 10 edits at first and then move up from there after everyone has had time to see what has been done - at least that was what we were approved for (To my semi-limited knowledge). We'll be sure to make an announcement when the bot is in beta. JonSDSUGrad 03:12, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Ahh yes, I misread. The trial is to create 10 articles, then report back to the request page (Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ProteinBoxBot). Do you mind me updating the operator etc details on the request to you rather than AndrewGNF? Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 04:03, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

This is really Andrew's project - he is the one supervising it, so he is the one making all the announcements and has the final say on everything - unless he wants the operator etc details changed indicate me, you should probably leave it as him. He'll be the one operating it (along with students other than myself) after everything is slick and shiny -I'm just the coder. :) JonSDSUGrad 04:08, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Ok, in that case I will leave as him.

Also, I would highly recommend making all the tags optional - editors will see them as not needed and wasting space, and remove them, which could break the bot. Either make them all have a default, or read them off the talk page from a special header for the purpose - it also makes it easier to read/understand. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 04:09, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, technically all the Bot Tags are optional - if they are omitted then the bot will mark that page and skip it. The tags provide a functionality to tell the bot what to do and where to do it at. While the Protein Box may be identifiable as GNF_Protein_Box, the summary is not so easily identified - how will the bot know where the summary ends and the contributed text begins. I think the tags make for a nice way to allow contribution from everyone including the bot, while making sure that the bot is nicely controlled. If the editors think they are waste of space and delete them, then that page will have to be updated manually by an operator (however, the bot will try an ease that burden by placing easy to cut-and-paste material in the Log). This was a big issue for us when building the bot. There needed to be controls that everyone could use to control bot behavior and we needed a way to make sure that the bot would not trample on any additional contributions. Also, those tags are defaulted into every newly created page and are easy to cut and paste out of a log file for pages not updated by the bot. JonSDSUGrad 06:24, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

And just to chime in to say I'm not sleeping on the job... All the relevant pages to this bot (including this one) are on my watchlist, and I usually check once a day. Anyway, both Jon and I are staying on top of things, but for long-term continuity let's keep me as the operator... Thanks for the feedback and guidance Matt. Cheers, AndrewGNF 04:32, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Just a note - wouldn't it be easier to have it as a summary template? Have something like a template called PBBSummary, which takes one parameter, and outputs it. THen you can have the summary like this:

{{PBBSummary|Summary here, as much as you want}}

That would make it very easy to update, while keeping HTML comments out of the way. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 08:04, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Not a bad idea to use a summary template - that would eliminate one html comment tag: the End Summary tag. I am imagining the possibility of a user editing the summary at some point (even to correct minor information) and then not wanting that edit to be overwritten with the next update. So we would still need a <Update Summary?> tag so that a user could turn off the summary update, while allowing the protein box to still be updated. The information has to be there in some form - the goal should be to keep it in a form that is easily understood by the casual editor. The goal is to have biochem scientists contributing information to these pages at some time and we need to keep things simple and easy to understand for them. :) I'm open to suggestions, but I think at this point it would be nice to get to the trial phase soon and get some feedback from the whole community. If it is very apparent that the bot needs a rewrite in the tags area after that, then I'll recode it. As for right now, I need to finish the code that doesn't work right as opposed to working on the code that does. :) JonSDSUGrad 09:59, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

That might work - maybe adding a comment saying "If you want to manualy update, please add subst: after the first { { to subst this template, and stop the bot updating. If you want it to start updating again, simple re-enclose the text in the tag.". But yes, work on the non-working code first, and this stuff can come after the trial. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 22:05, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I think we have worked out a plan for after the trial involving using a 'GNF_Summary' template, and also a 'PBB_Bot _Controls template to regulate the bot activities better. Hopefully the trial run will be completed very soon and then I can start work on this newer idea. On a side note: Do you know what the maximum page read rate for a bot is? there is some ambiguity as to what 'edit rate' really means - I assume it is the number of pages that can be posted to per minute. Does that also include pages read from? If it doesn't then what is the maximum read rate? Some new code logic has me checking the page content of quite a few more pages and I need to place some kind of wait time in between the reads... thanks. JonSDSUGrad 20:44, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Edit rate is how often it edits. For the read rate, add &maxlag=5 (or ?maxlag=5 if there are no other query params) to the URL for it all, which will cause the server to send a 503 status message with a "Retry-After" header if the dbs are too lagged, and the bot needs to wait. You can see the details at mw:Manual:Maxlag parameter. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 21:38, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Excellent. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. JonSDSUGrad 22:18, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Hi there, excellent work on this bot. I had a tiny suggestion - would it be possible for the first letter of the box Name field to be capitalised? at the moment the bot is generating image titles like apolipoprotein E when the correct title would be Apolipoprotein E Thanks! Tim Vickers 17:56, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion - I have hence incorporated it into the bot. You can see a latest example of the bot run here: User:JonSDSUGrad/Sandbox/TEST8_Apolipoprotein_E. JonSDSUGrad 20:22, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thank you

...for ProteinBoxBot. The articles it created and updated are a) amazing and b) inordinately helpful – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 01:57, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

You're quite welcome. Thanks for the kind words. :) JonSDSUGrad (talk) 18:27, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Congratulations!

Well done mate! Now you are one of us! Tim Vickers (talk) 00:03, 12 April 2008 (UTC)