This is an archive of past discussions with User:BattyBot. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Mike - please post your requests on User talk:GoingBatty, as they have nothing to do with this bot. (Also please use the New section button to give your posts a title, and use ~~~~ to automatically sign and date your posts.) Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 12:14, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
Bot
How often is this bot going to be doing runs? When it edits I am unable to see the previous editor on my watchlist. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:30, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
These sorts of changes are not needed [1][2] and if they are going to occur on a weekly basis we may need to shut this bot down. They are burying vandalism. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:34, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
Thanks. I am a content editor and care little about the ordering of the date. These are minor tasks. The issue is if they are interfering with more important surveillance. Can you bundle tasks together such that the bot is only run once a quarter? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:39, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
Dubious "fixes" of abbreviated months.
Yes, please stop this bot. I have wondered about some of these changes before, but changing "Sept." to "Sep" (this edit) is pointless, even silly. And the double indirect link to a possible explanation is not satisfactory. If there is some rationale for this change please link to it directly. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:02, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
1) As before: the link in your edit summary does not point to any discussion or text justifying the conversion of "Sept." to "Sep", not even to (quoting Jonesey95) "the third and fourth row in the MOS:DATEFORMAT table".
2) MOS:DATEFORMAT lists acceptable date formats. It does not require, recommend, suggest, or condone conversion of abbreviated months to "short month name". It does specify "[o]nly ... where conciseness is needed", which is not the case for edits you did.
3) "Sep" is certainly used as an example several times. But you seem to have missed the example in a following section — Consistency — where the mixed use of (what a coincidence) of "Sep" and "September" is explictly rejected.
4) The proper correction for an abbreviated month, especially where the context already includes full month names generally, is — the full month name. Your "correction" is inconsistent, and thus incorrect.
I just would like to know why you deleted the "orphan banner" in the Wikipedia page of Arnaud Courlet de Vregille ? It's a good news for me because I am the creator of this page ; but I would like to know what happened for the acceptation of its deletion...
Hello BattyBot. I've noticed you changed some settings in the categories section. I took those ":" so the category section would display correctly. With the ":" in, the "Category" is displayed before every category name. I am pretty new to WP editing so forgive me if it's a silly point. Can you tell me, please, why it's better to have the ":" in? --- PeterMo (talk) 20:11 (UTC) 3/3/14
@PeterMo: I presume you're referring to this edit to User:PeterMo/sandbox. While those categories are fine for the real Péter Érdi article, user sandbox pages should not also be included in those article categories. On your sandbox page, you can either remove the article categories completely, comment them out using <!-- -->, or add a colon to the beginning of each one as my bot did so they're still visible. For more information, please see WP:USERNOCAT (which I included in my edit summary). I just added a few more categories to the real Péter Érdi article and make some other minor improvements. Thanks for asking! GoingBatty (talk) 20:40, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
<ref name="AR13-countries">[[#AR13|BP (2013)]], p. 4</ref> (ref #13)
<ref name="AR13-employees">[[#AR13|BP (2013)]], p. 4</ref> (ref #5)
<ref name="AR13-stations">[[#AR13|BP (2013)]], p. 34</ref> (ref #16)
<ref name="AR13-USstations">[[#AR13|BP (2013)]], p. 34</ref> (ref #207)
One of AWB's general fixes is to combine references that are exactly the same. After my bot's edit, the first two were combined into ref #5, and the second two were combined under ref #15. The reference name doesn't matter, since it's not visible to the reader. Hope this helps! GoingBatty (talk) 22:46, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
I made some other improvements to the article. You may want to work on fixing all the dead links in the references section. Try running Checklinks on BP. Happy editing! GoingBatty (talk) 23:37, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
Year suffix
BattyBot is removing year suffixes (such as the "a" in "2002a"), which are necessary to disambiguate Harv references with identical author(s) and year. Such removal is not covered by MOS:DATEFORMAT. BattyBot also ignored {bots|deny=Citation bot} template; please advise if a different name needs to specified. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 18:58, 20 April 2014 (UTC)
Such as the year-suffix removal and mdy issue (above, but also other instances), and the "Sept. -> Sep" matter (that was pretty annoying). It seems to me there was something else from further back, but I am not presently inclined to dig it out. The bottom line is I don't have confidence in BattyBot, and don't want the hassle of having to check its changes. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:38, 24 April 2014 (UTC)
J. Johnson (JJ) may be thinking of this discussion, where GoingBatty and I bent over backwards to fix citation errors in an article that contained highly inconsistent date formatting in its citations, along with other errors.
We have been working diligently to detect and fix inadequacies in BattyBot's date error detection and repair code. Thanks for reporting this bug.
The Sept./Sep matter was the subject of a MOS RFC, with which the bot is compliant. The consensus was that month abbreviations should be three letters only, with no period (full stop) following the month. I believe that the bot did not perform any date correction while the RFC was pending. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:59, 24 April 2014 (UTC)
@J. Johnson: Thanks for your continued feedback. Harmonizing the date format on Puget Sound faults in this edit was not done with BattyBot. It was neither "arbitrary" nor "contrary to existing usage" - more dates were in mdy than dmy format before I made the edit. The best way to ensure no one makes "messes" in the articles you are passionate about (either via bot or manually) is simply to fix the issues yourself (e.g. the inconsistent date formats on 2014 Oso mudslide and Earthquake prediction) using whatever valid format you want. I hope you will continue to let me know if you have issues with any of my other edits. Happy editing! GoingBatty (talk) 02:28, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
My issue in the "Sept." matter was that the dates should have be expanded, not trimmed. My sometime problem with mass conversions is that some times, where there has been a lot of inconsistent editing, the preponderance of one form or another can vary, making the result some what arbitrary on when it is done. But no matter. I appreciate you are working hard on these matters, and I thank you for your assistance. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:13, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
Changing date formats can appear arbitrary when the editor does not fully explain their decision making process, and that two people can look at the same article and have different (even opposite) objective decisions on which date format to use. If I ever choose a format you don't agree with, I believe that dropping me a quick note (as you did with the "Sept." matter you mentioned) will lead to a much more satisfactory solution for everyone than blocking the bot would. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 22:22, 25 April 2014 (UTC)
I would suggest that when ever you find an ambiguous situation you should not automatically make a decision, but leave a comment or tag requesting clarification. BTW, another point of disagreement here is the automatic creation of "named refs". ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:47, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
@J. Johnson: The goal of the bot is to make the minor formatting fixed of dates before the Check date values messages become visible to all readers. The bot does not change dates that are ambiguous (e.g. |date=01-02-03) If you'd like to see those comments before the general public so you can help with the clean up effort, please see the info below. The automatic creation of "named refs" is one of AWB's general fixes. Your comments about that functionality would be appreciated at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 23:07, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
By default, Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2error messages are visible to all readers and maintenance messages are hidden from all readers.
To display maintenance messages in the rendered article, include the following text in your common CSS page (common.css) or your specific skin's CSS page and (skin.css).
(Note to new editors: those CSS pages are specific to you, and control your view of pages, by adding to your user account's CSS code. If you have not yet created such a page, then clicking one of the .css links above will yield a page that starts "Wikipedia does not have a user page with this exact name." Click the "Start the User:username/filename page" link, paste the text below, save the page, follow the instructions at the bottom of the new page on bypassing your browser's cache, and finally, in order to see the previously hidden maintenance messages, refresh the page you were editing earlier.)
Even with this CSS installed, older pages in Wikipedia's cache may not have been updated to show these error messages even though the page is listed in one of the tracking categories. A null edit will resolve that issue.
After (error and/maintenance) messages are displayed, it might still not be easy to find them in a large article with a lot of citations. Messages can then be found by searching (with Ctrl-F) for "(help)" or "cs1".
You can personalize the display of these messages (such as changing the color), but you will need to ask someone who knows CSS or at the technical village pump if you do not understand how.
Nota bene: these CSS rules are not obeyed by Navigation popups. They also do not hide script warning messages in the Preview box that begin with "This is only a preview; your changes have not yet been saved".
BattyBot made this edit (good, thanks), but the article refers to the Observance of 5th November Act 1605, so changing "5th November" to "5 November" is not always appropriate. An editor has reverted the bot and added a "bots deny", but is there a better solution to perhaps whitelist specific text? Johnuniq (talk) 02:33, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
This article is not deemed as "notable??" The Independence Trail was the first Wheelchair - Accessible ADA Approved nature trail in the entire United States - who are you to say that isn't notable?!!!! THIS IS WHY I (Sometimes) HATE WIKIPEDIA!!!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jefferson383 (talk • contribs) 14:57, April 29, 2014 (UTC)
Thanks GoingBatty. @Jefferson383:, Batty is correct. The applicable notability standards appear to be WP:NGEO and WP:GNG. Based on a quick glance NGEO seems a bit dicey. If you could add a few non-affiliated secondary sources I think you could in good conscience take down the notability tag. Best regards... -Ad Orientem (talk) 22:46, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
Stop
Stop messing with my article Rayrayzone — Preceding undated comment added 18:45, June 17, 2014 (UTC)
@Rayrayzone: Oh, are you referring to the bot's edits to User:Rayrayzone/The 410 Folks? If so, that's not an article, it's your user subpage. Each of the bot's edits had an edit summary stating "changed article categories to links per WP:USERNOCAT", which contains a link to Wikipedia's guideline on categorization that says "user subpages that are draft versions of articles should be kept out of content categories...If you copy an article from mainspace to userspace and it already contains categories, remove them or comment them out. Restore the categories when you move the draft back into article space." BattyBot has been approved to remove article categories from user pages such as yours. I see that you have not explained your reverts - could you please let me know why you're not happy with the bot's edit? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:47, 18 June 2014 (UTC)
@Bfpage: Not sure my bot's edit warranted a barnstar, but thank you for your kind thoughts. I have made some manual updates to the page as well. Happy editing! GoingBatty (talk) 02:46, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
@ArthurRead1234: I don't see anything on The Shapies that BattyBot could help with. I see that you could unbold the episode titles and song titles and put them within quotation marks instead. If you would like to talk about this page further, please use User talk:GoingBatty so you don't stop BattyBot's activities. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 20:23, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
@Computermacgyver: Thanks for letting me know. I've reverted the incorrect bot edits, and put steps in place so that I'll look at all the Proofreaders and Translators categories before my bot runs again. Thanks again, and happy editing! GoingBatty (talk) 01:07, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Removal of userspace pages from hidden project category
@GoingBatty: Hi Battybot. You removed all the userspace drafts from Category:University_of_Sydney_Wikibomb_2014 and cited WP:USERNOCAT. But careful reading of that policy allows for "draft versions of articles ... are permitted in non-content or project categories". The category I mentioned is a hidden category which helps organize a project event. Please can you revert these changes? --99of9 (talk) 00:29, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
@GoingBatty: Thanks, but then hmmm... you did it again, this time in draft space, but really there's not that much difference between that and a sandbox, since the original writer never chose which namespace it ended up in. --99of9 (talk) 01:40, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
Why is the bot doing things like this? In March the bot changed all notability templates to "Notability Academic Journals", which was kind of weird, since NJournals is not a guideline but only an essay. And now it is changing that to NProducts, which is even weirder because that is really not applicable to academic journals. --Randykitty (talk) 15:18, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
@Randykitty: Per this earlier conversation, I had BattyBot add the "Academic journals" parameter because it was a valid parameter of {{notability}} at the time. Now that the parameter has been removed, I'm doing a one-time run to remove the parameter. Isn't an academic journal a product of an organization? GoingBatty (talk) 15:28, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
I guess you can see it as a product of an organization or a company (publisher). However, I have never even once seen NProducts used in notability discussions of journals. They use NJournals or GNG. So it is weird that if you tag a journal for notability, that it links to a guideline that actually never is used for that subject. --Randykitty (talk) 15:34, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
I also think using NProducts is kind of weird. In the absence of a dedicated notability guideline for journals, I think we have to stick with WP:GNG. —Psychonaut (talk) 16:53, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
