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The Signpost: 06 January 2016

The Signpost: 13 January 2016

Logging in

MediaWiki will change the way bots log in. This will affect many bot owners, such as you, Cyde. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 21:28, 22 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 20 January 2016

The Signpost: 27 January 2016

The Signpost: 03 February 2016

Kosovar Albanians -> Kosovo Albanians

Hi Cyde,

I saw you ran the bot and moved pages from Category:Kosovar Albanians to Category:Kosovo Albanians, deleting the former. The rationale points here [1] but I don't see any entry there for these particular categories. The only proposed move was Category:Kosovar Turks to Category:Kosovo Turks which was opposed. Can you please point me to the discussion section?
Thx --Mondiad (talk) 03:35, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 10 February 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:28, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 17 February 2016

The Signpost: 24 February 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:04, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 02 March 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:00, 8 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 09 March 2016

Category:Cite doi templates

Could Cydebot handle Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Update_to_request? It's a request to delete approximately 31k orphaned templates at Category:Cite doi templates and Category:Cite pmid templates. There's a separate google docs spreadsheet containing each page that is to be deleted so I don't imagine it would be terribly difficult to implement. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 21:13, 17 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 16 March 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 19 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 23 March 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:25, 27 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 1 April 2016

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The Signpost: 14 April 2016

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The Signpost: 24 April 2016

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The Signpost: 2 May 2016

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The Signpost: 17 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:33, 17 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cydebot misbehaving

How can it happen that User:Cydebot repeatedly empties out a category after an editor reverted the bot's erroneous edit? Category:Vosges was renamed in that CfD, but was recreated by myself as a distinct topic. Basically that's what the CfD was all about. See Sport in the Vosges and Mountain passes of the Vosges for the bot's erroneous edits that even caused the whole category to be nominated for speedy deletion. I think we need to fix this bug ASAP, not just for the individual case but more generally for this type of cases. Thanks, --PanchoS (talk) 10:45, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@PanchoS: it's not a bug. This was happening because the instruction to the bot had not yet been removed from the Working page. User:Od Mishehu added the instruction yesterday[2] and it was still there.
AFAIK there is no guidance on who should remove instructions after they have been processed; in practice, sometimes admins remove instructions left by others, sometimes we leave them there for the original admin to check and follow up. Whoever removes them, WP:CFDAI states that we should first check backlinks etc. I've done this batch now, so go ahead with your re-creation. – Fayenatic London 13:30, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Fayenatic london: Ah, thanks, I didn't know about that. But why don't we require User:Cydebot to mark an instruction as "processed" once it has been successfully processed? This would still allow the original admin to doublecheck and followup, while preventing the bot from processing it again and again? Cheers, PanchoS (talk) 13:44, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely a good idea. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:33, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

hoax vs. forgery

A hoax and a forgery are not the same thing, and Cydebot should not be changing the category hoax to category forgery. It should also not edit war with a real live human who fixes its mistake. Awien (talk) 12:23, 24 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Don't blame the bot, it was only implementing the consensus at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2016_May_5#Category:Literary_forgeries (I assume that is what you are talking about). If you disagree with the close, discuss it with the editor who closed it, in this case user:Good Olfactory. – Fayenatic London 14:52, 24 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cydebot is thrown by invisible control characters

Hi, I've noticed that Cydebot sometimes doesn't move a few articles when it renames a category. Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Openmind_Projects&diff=721440632&oldid=721431310 – the page had an invisible control character at the end of the category name. Please can you program it to catch these as well? – Fayenatic London 21:44, 21 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The specific character in question was LINE FEED. How the hell did that even happen -- was someone editing with an electric typewriter? I'll try to figure out how that impacts the regexes that pywikibot uses. --Cyde Weys 03:08, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, worse than that. That alone probably would've been OK. What was really screwy was the presence of a LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK character between "Thailand" and the closing square brackets. You can sort of infer its presence without having to resort to codepoint inspection of the text by noticing that Thailand is marked in the diff as having changed. What a mess. Looks like MediaWiki is stripping this out for the purposes of determining what the category should be, but Pywikibot isn't. There may not be a good solution here; Unicode-handling is notoriously hard. --Cyde Weys 03:29, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Control characters sometimes get included when an editor copies the category name from another Wikipedia window, and pastes it onto the article. I think when I've done this myself, I may have copied the category name within WP:POPUPS. Sometimes the invisible control character gets converted to a visible string, e.g. Category:Example category[edit] – in which case it's obvious and I have to delete it; at other times I unwittingly save it on the page and only find out about it later, when I see a bot editing the page and removing the character. – Fayenatic London 14:45, 24 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Here's another example: user:Rathfelder's edit before [3] – Fayenatic London 21:40, 26 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 28 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 28 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Bot's edit summary

Is there a chance you could shorten the edit summary that the bot uses when moving pages? See this edit; the summary is so long that the link to the CFD page is broken, mainly because the bot repeats the page's old and new names. Since the software automatically supplies the page's old and new names, I don't see why the bot needs to mention them as well. Nyttend (talk) 11:55, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Already been fixed. That edit you link to is from last year. If you see any more recent misbehavior please let me know. --Cyde Weys 20:38, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

April 0

I don't think this is what you intended. nyuszika7h (talk) 15:22, 2 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed the same thing.— Gorthian (talk) 15:58, 2 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oh no! Sorry, everyone, that was my fault. I listed some Speedy cases under the wrong heading.[4] Those should have been one section up, under "Speedy moves".
Cyde, would it be possible for Cydebot to skip any instructions that were not under a valid date, or at least any with a day = 0 of the month? – Fayenatic London 22:37, 2 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Fayenatic london: There's the 0th and 32nd day of any month; 31st of February, April, June, September, and November; 30th of February; and the 29th of February except in leap years. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 22:41, 2 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but it's the 0 that the bot accepted as valid, and this was on the page in hidden text above the list, reminding admins of the format required by the bot:
list begin (leave this here); to keep this section bot-readable, use the format:
; Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2016 April 0
* Category:xxxxx to Category:yyyyy
It's possible but unlikely that an admin would type in an invalid date; we are more likely to occasionally type a valid but incorrect date – and it's practically impossible to guard against that. It's evidently also possible to paste a list with no date, and that is the case that I hope Cydebot could easily be modified to ignore. – Fayenatic London 22:51, 2 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 05 June 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:13, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cydebot offline

It appears Cydebot has been offline since around 18:30 on June 8th (UTC). ~ RobTalk 05:33, 9 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 15 June 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:57, 15 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 04 July 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:47, 4 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hassan Mohi-ud-Din Qadri

My published page Hassan Mohi-ud-Din Qadri was reviewed earlier by some editors. But on 6th July some User:GorgeCustersSabre ruined it. He added this article to deletion. Verify and revert the article soon. Otherwise the page will be deleted. Please help in maintaining Wikipedia. Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mohd Sarim Ashrafi (talk • contribs) 16:08, 7 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 21 July 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:19, 21 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 04 August 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:33, 4 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Bot Request for CfD

Hello Cyde, a discussion regarding a new bot task related to WP:CFD is open at: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SSTbot 2. I thought you may have some insight that could help the discussion. If you are interested, please stop by and comment. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 23:52, 16 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 18 August 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:40, 18 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Explaining lack of Ch 0 on early Astor TV sets

Actually the lack of Channel 0 on TV dials was because Ch 0 was not introduced until 1960 when several changes were made to the TV channel allocations

Wenlock

wenlock.burton@hotmail.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.173.115.94 (talk • contribs) 01:07, 7 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Seattle, Washington and subcats

Please note that Category:Seattle, Washington and subcats are listed at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/Large. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 04:21, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 06 September 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:44, 6 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Category deletions/merges

Hi,

Just wondering why some category deletions/merges/etc are done by Cydebot while others are done by humans? Ottawahitech (talk) 05:23, 20 August 2016 (UTC)please ping me[reply]

@Ottawahitech: This decision is not taken by Cyde, but by the closer of the discussion. In small cases (e.g. just containing a couple of sub-cats), or cases that require further manual changes, it's sometimes less work to do the whole thing manually. This option may also be chosen when Cydebot is busy, or (as now) for some reason is not working on categories. Non-admin closers, and admins who are less experienced at CFD, may also implement changes manually. – Fayenatic London 20:13, 8 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Fayenatic london: Thanks for responding. Since Cydebot is directed by closers of wp:CfD I wonder if you would be kind enough to also contribute to the discussion at:Category_talk:Residential_condominiums_in_Miami,_Florida#Why was this category created by a BOT? where Cydebot deleted a (useful) category without leaving a link to the deletion discussion. How can editors follow up or find out who closed the discussion, when the history is gone? Thanks in advance, Ottawahitech (talk) 14:31, 10 September 2016 (UTC)please ping me[reply]

"Category:Category:" in move reasons

When your bot moved Category talk:Rivers and streams of Croatia to Category talk:Rivers of Croatia, the move reason included a link to Category:Category:Rivers of Croatia. Your bot should be fixed so that when a category named "A" was moved to one named "B", the bot reason for moving the category talk page will include a link to Category:B, not Category:Category:B. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 14:29, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Great to have the bot working again, but I confirm this error. Here is a link to contribs showing the same error for Rivers of Arizona. [5] The edit summary is fine when moving the contents, but not on moving the category-talk pages.
Also, I like that it is updating Wikidata, but it's doing the Category:Category thing in the edit summary there too. [6] – Fayenatic London 15:16, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I have a fix ready to go for both talk pages and Wikidata. It seems like we caught a bug in Pywikibot. The reason we didn't catch it earlier is that I hadn't updated the code running Cydebot in quite awhile, whereas I just checked out HEAD for Tool Labs. --Cyde Weys 16:26, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Category redirect at target name

Here's another thing. Cydebot is sometimes re-creating the category page at the target name, old-style, instead of moving it. Not all of the time, e.g. [7] is fine. There was a different process at Category:Rivers of Arizona, in that (1) a redirect existed at that target name when Cydebot started. (2) Cydebot presumably attempted and then skipped that move. (3) I manually deleted that redirect. (4) Cydebot re-tried that one, and for some reason did the renaming as an old-style re-creation instead of moving the page from the old name. – Fayenatic London 15:24, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That Arizona case may have been a one-off due to timing issues. I have manually moved the old page now. – Fayenatic London 21:59, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If you can make it delete an existing category redirect found at a target name, please do. I think this would be welcomed by all. @Good Olfactory and BU Rob13: do you agree? At the moment we can get tied in knots around these, e.g. see User_talk:BU_Rob13#Rivers_categories. – Fayenatic London 15:38, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree completely. -- Tavix (talk) 15:58, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Fully agree with moving over redirects. ~ Rob13Talk 16:22, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cydebot inactive

In case anybody else comes here looking for news on Cydebot (talk · contribs), which has made no contributions since 23 August, Cyde is now aware of this. – Fayenatic London 21:12, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Update on this, my long-time server that was running Cydebot for over ten years appears to have finally kicked the bucket. I'm not physically located near it, so I can't deal with it in person. The good news is I already pre-emptively off-loaded all the files I'd need to start Cydebot back up and running a long time ago. I've started spinning up the Cydebot tasks on Wikimedia Tool Labs. There's probably going to be a period of increased issues until I get everything running smoothly in the new environment, but after that it should be better in the long run, as Tool Labs presumably has datacenter-quality power, and sysadmins! --Cyde Weys 14:08, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this. It seems to be inactive again currently, perhaps intentionally pending resolution of the point reported below. When it is working again, please check that it will also process WP:CFDWR. – Fayenatic London 22:01, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I have to port the retain script over to the current version of Pywikibot. It was running on old Pywikibot (what is now called compat), and I'm not running compat on Tool Labs. --Cyde Weys 02:36, 15 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I just got around to figuring out how crontab and Grid works on Tools Lab (and setting that all up). It should be working continuously now, on CFDW and CFDW/Large anyway; other tasks to come soon. All previous runs over the last few days were manually kicked off and inspected as I was gaining confidence in the new environment. --Cyde Weys 15:33, 11 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Extended confirmed protection

Hello, Cyde. This message is intended to notify administrators of important changes to the protection policy.

Extended confirmed protection (also known as "30/500 protection") is a new level of page protection that only allows edits from accounts at least 30 days old and with 500 edits. The automatically assigned "extended confirmed" user right was created for this purpose. The protection level was created following this community discussion with the primary intention of enforcing various arbitration remedies that prohibited editors under the "30 days/500 edits" threshold to edit certain topic areas.

In July and August 2016, a request for comment established consensus for community use of the new protection level. Administrators are authorized to apply extended confirmed protection to combat any form of disruption (e.g. vandalism, sock puppetry, edit warring, etc.) on any topic, subject to the following conditions:

  • Extended confirmed protection may only be used in cases where semi-protection has proven ineffective. It should not be used as a first resort.
  • A bot will post a notification at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard of each use. MusikBot currently does this by updating a report, which is transcluded onto the noticeboard.

Please review the protection policy carefully before using this new level of protection on pages. Thank you.
This message was sent to the administrators' mass message list. To opt-out of future messages, please remove yourself from the list. 17:49, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Category:DC Extended Universe characters

Hello, Cydebot recently deteled Category:DC Extended Universe characters after it was recreated once again. This marks the fourth deletion in the past year. Would it be possible to WP:Salt the page? Thank you.--TriiipleThreat (talk) 15:33, 27 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 29 September 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:21, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Category moves

Hi Cyde,

Could you make it so that, when moving (or speedily moving) a category from an old title to a new title, Cydebot will delete the old title as a default? This does not appear to be happening currently and can be very problematic depending on why the category was renamed. While a category redirect is often useful, they should be created as a result of human judgment, not mass-created by bot except under very narrow parameters.

Thank you, -- Black Falcon (talk) 05:22, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ping, to keep the archive-bots away. -- Black Falcon (talk) 05:57, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly support this request. If the bot is currently keeping redirects that have incoming links from user pages, please ignore User:RussBot/category redirect log and User:Mdann52/CfD. – Fayenatic London 20:18, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Mind you, the best of all worlds would be a way for the admin who lists the category to choose whether the redirect gets kept or not. Maybe on the Working page, split the Speedy and the Move/merge sections into two? Or use a prefix e.g. ** to indicate keeping a redirect? – Fayenatic London 17:01, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Black Falcon and Fayenatic london: Changing the CFDW format would be a bit more work, and we can consider that if we feel that it would be genuinely useful. As a stopgap solution, how about if I simply update the bot to not leave behind a redirect at the old page? Is that better default behavior? That's how the bot was running for a long time (almost a full decade), if I recall correctly. --Cyde Weys 01:52, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I do believe that would be better default behavior for Cydebot. I think Fayenatic london's idea would be optimal, but I do not know the amount of work that would be involved and so hesitate to ask you to take on that burden for a task that takes only seconds to perform manually—literally just typing {{Category redirect|}} and copy-pasting the name of the destination category. Thanks! -- Black Falcon (talk) 02:14, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that not leaving the redirect would be a better default.
Black Falcon, if the category was renamed (as opposed to merged), a much easier option is to Undelete the redirect that is (temporarily) created by moving the page. – Fayenatic London 12:20, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Black Falcon: Exactly how often are redirects desired on the old category page anyway? You'd know better than I. I'll change the default redirection behavior as soon as my other pending fix for edit summary messages goes in. --Cyde Weys 02:44, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
While Cydebot has been generally not deleting them, I've been deleting some but leaving more than 50% in place. Before, I used to create/undelete a lot less than half. So for me, whether they are "desired" depends quite a lot on whether they need any action on my part. Objectively, I prefer to have a redirect where the old name is a plausible category that someone might well add to an article, esp. variant spelling/punctuation, or short/former names e.g. for sports teams.
Pinging @Good Olfactory: as well. – Fayenatic London 12:20, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
As Cyde has not implemented this, I have just added a deletion link in Template:Category redirect, following the one at the foot of Template:Cfr-speedy full. This gives admins a quick way to delete unwanted redirects left by the bot. @Good Olfactory: and @BU Rob13: as the most active admins at CFD, is this the most practical way forward? – Fayenatic London 12:58, 21 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]
That's OK for me. Thanks. Good Ol’factory (talk) 01:36, 22 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]