Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 7

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Grammarbot

Old discussion moved to User talk:Grammarbot. r3m0t 11:05, Mar 5, 2005 (UTC)

Moved the rest to User talk:Grammarbot. -- Beland 05:01, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

bot request

Can someone make a bot to go through the 366 days of the year and put links into the BBC's on this day page? They come in the format http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/month/date/ replacing month with the month, and date with a numerical date, not including a leading zero, 9 not 09. Dunc|☺ 22:39, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I don't think you need a bot for that... really... See my comment on your talk page. -- AllyUnion (talk) 11:10, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Sorry if I didn't make myself clear. The link ought to go into an external links section in the pages in the style of "February 20" rather than the little ones that appear on the front page. It should be possible to go to March 18 (say) on any date of the year and the link should link to http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/18. If it is coded into the article text with {{}} then that will always take the user to today's article, rather than the date in the article title. Dunc|☺ 12:45, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This has or is being handled under User:Kakashi Bot maintained and run by me. Since this is a one time 'run', I don't think a bot flag is necessary. -- AllyUnion (talk) 19:09, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

dykbot

I'd like to use my own account (User:Gdr) to run DYKbot to assist in the updating of Template:Did you know. Updating DYK is a long and tedious process, and I have found it quite error-prone when carried out by hand. Bot assistance is likely to be much quicker and more reliable. I can't run this bot under User:Gdrbot because it needs to edit the protected page Template:Did you know, and protect images while they are on the Main Page; both of these operations require administrator privileges. The bot only runs attended, with every operation requiring confirmation by the operator. See User:Gdr/DYKbot for a description of what the bot does. Gdr 19:49, 2005 May 12 (UTC)

While I approve of this, your account doesn't need a bot flag, and because it is a bot assisted task, just make sure that your edits are only 30 seconds to 1 minute apart when you do this. -- AllyUnion (talk) 00:56, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't like a bot running on a "real person" account, especially an admins using admin functions. This task doesn't tempt me to lay aside that reservation. -- Netoholic @ 05:48, 2005 May 16 (UTC)

I understand your concerns. That's why I designed this bot to only operate attended, with user confirmation at each step. Gdr 09:38, 2005 May 16 (UTC)

NekoDaemon Log Indexing

I am updating NekoDaemon to perform a log index update on the last day moved to the log. It will basically insert a index link between the previous CFD log day and the next for all pages no longer transincluded on WP:CFD. -- AllyUnion (talk) 23:34, 15 May 2005 (UTC)


Gdrbot

I'd like to use Gdrbot to automate tedious tasks — in particular, fixing links to disambiguation pages and fixing double redirects. I plan to only use this bot interactively, never unattended. Gdr 20:19, 2005 May 11 (UTC)

I'm also running User:Gdr/Yearbot on this account for adding births and deaths to year articles (runs attended) and User:Gdr/Nomialbot for creating redirects from Latin names for genera and species (runs unattended). I plan to run other automated or semi-automated tasks under this account which I will announce here. Gdr 11:17, 2005 May 20 (UTC)

Pearle for msg: removal

According to User:Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason/msg, a lot of transclusions need to have {{msg:foo}} converted to {{foo}}. I can easily modify Pearle to do this, and have her fix all the articles on that list. Please let me know if there are any concerns to doing so. -- Beland 05:41, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

I approve. -- AllyUnion (talk) 04:32, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
  • Okay with me, perfect task for a bot as it's a simple text replacement. I'd probably run my bot to do it if no one else had taken up the challenge. RedWolf 04:45, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
  • (Done. -- Beland 22:21, 3 August 2005 (UTC))

I look after Special:Newpages in Russian Wikipedia (categories, interwikies, stubs, cleanup, copyvio...) and i want to use interwiki bot (pywikipediabot, warnfile.py) for make backlink between Russian and English Wikipedias under my manual direct control (about 20 edits per day).

Can I add it (en:User:Roboto_de_Ajvol) to "Bots running without a flag" list?

--ajvol 13:39, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

So, if nobody against it, let do it. --ajvol 15:42, 18 May 2005 (UTC)


RussBot

I am requesting approval to use User:RussBot to run the solve_disambiguation.py script, strictly under manual control, to replace links to disambiguation pages. Russ Blau (talk) 15:43, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

You may run your bot for one week without a bot flag. Please keep all your "bot edits" under User:RussBot so that at the end of the week, the edits can be reviewed. If, at any time, someone makes complaint about it during the week, that comment should be linked or copied on to here as an objection. -- AllyUnion (talk) 06:37, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Thank you, AllyUnion. I have been away over the weekend, but started running the bot early today (31 May 2005 UTC). Russ Blau (talk) 15:09, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

No problem. Should no one make any complaint here or your user page or the bot's user page (which I see you redirected to your own page anyway)... you may apply for bot status on June 3. -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:06, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)


VFD Bot extension task

VFD Bot has been requested to update Wikipedia:Nooks and corners of Wikipedia that should be frequented (WP:NAC) the same way it updates the VFD page. -- AllyUnion (talk) 10:29, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

NTBot: authorization

Hello all, I'm requesting authorization (if possible, bot flag too) to pt:Usuário:NTBot (pywikipediabot), for the unique purpose of passing the warnfiles generated at pt:wp. We have lots of pages without backlinks, so this would help a lot. Do you agree? Nuno Tavares 28 June 2005 23:29 (UTC)

Approved running for NTBot for one week. If no complaints have been cited here, Nuno Tavares's talk page, or the bot's talk page, then Nuno Tavares may apply for bot status. --AllyUnion (talk) 07:11, 18 July 2005 (UTC)


E2mb0t

I am also requesting authorization. I am planing to use only autonomous warnfiles generated at pt.wp, mainly articles that only exist there and here. --E2mb0t 03:47, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Not approved for running or bot flag until bot has an owner account --AllyUnion (talk) 07:11, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
This user account would be OK. Thank you. --E2mb0t 03:47, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
I mean, E2mb0t is the bot, E2m is the user account. --E2m 22:18, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Thank you for that clarification. I approve for one week "test" run. If no one complains within the "test" run, you may apply for the bot flag. --AllyUnion (talk) 04:59, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Upgrade affect Bots?

I see at least one bot was affected by the upgrade, but I don't know if it was due to something which only that bot is sensitive to. Are there known changes which may affect bots? (SEWilco 3 July 2005 06:26 (UTC))

All pywikipedia bots were broken by the upgrade. If you are running a pywikipedia based script is neccesary to edit wikipedia_family.py to move "en" from "latin1" to "latin1old" so that it recognizes this as a UTF-8 encoding rather than a latin-1 encoding. If you are running an interwiki bot you probably need to download the new version of the wikipedia_family file to get all the changed settings relevant to other wikis. Lastly, in many cases you will also need to rerun the login script before it will allow you to save changes because of a change that occurred in the stored cookie formatting. Dragons flight July 3, 2005 07:07 (UTC)
Yea, I ran into these issues right after the upgrade. I pulled the files mentioned from CVS but then changes were being rejected by the server (without an error message - argh). I logged in again just by chance and that fixed the problem. RedWolf July 3, 2005 08:58 (UTC)


Help please

Does anyone know why I keep on getting this message: "ValueError: code2encodings has wrong charset for wikipedia:en. It should be utf-8, but is iso-8859-1" I am trying to set up a bot, but can't even get it to login. What can I do? Thank in advance.

--Fred-Chess July 6, 2005 10:34 (UTC)

I think it has to do with the recent utf-8 updates to all wikipedias. Get the updated bot code (directly from cvs).

--Yurik 9 July 2005 17:19 (UTC)

Pfft Bot

I'd like to run a copy of pywikipedia here, under the username Pfft Bot. The first use would be running solve_disambiguation to help with, well, solving disambiguations. I already have some experience with pywikipedia, from using it on my own wiki. What do you all think of it? --Phroziac (talk) 18:26, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

I presume, it will run manually assisted? --AllyUnion (talk) 01:32, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Yes, it will. --Phroziac (talk) 22:51, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
You may run your bot. I don't personally think it needs a bot flag, because it is manually assisted, however you may apply for one after one week. --AllyUnion (talk) 04:21, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Ok, but you confused me now. I thought it was ok to run the bot after a week of no one complaining about the request, so I already ran it a few times, starting 6 days ago. *blush* Was I not supposed to do that? --Phroziac (talk) 01:41, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
Well, the way I've been asking users to prove that their bot is harmless is to run a test run of a full week. If no one complains in a specified time frame, they can continue on to use it and apply for a bot flag. --AllyUnion (talk) 04:41, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Unauthorised 'Willy On Wheels' Bot

User:Shake your Willy... appears to be an unauthorised bot, moving vast numbers of categories to "Category On Wheels". They've been reverted. I can't see where the most appropriate place to report vandalism by bots. Can someone point me in the right direction, please? KeithD (talk) 18:48, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism in progress and Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. --Carnildo 19:32, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
Thanks a lot. I see someone else has already listed it anyway. KeithD (talk) 19:41, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Whobot

I would like to run this bot for WP:CFD related tasks, similiar to Pearle. I am actually going to be using the Pearle code, which is tried and tested for doing specific Cfd tasks. I do quite a lot of the Cfd tasks manually, and am around often enough to use it, rather than requesting permission (to have another bot perform the task). I have not started using the bot, and am just setting it up. I plan on working with Beland to get the bot going for these tasks. ∞Who?¿? 03:17, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

  • Specifically it will do the following Cfd tasks:
    • remove {{cfd}}, {{cfr}}, {{cfm}} tags
    • move articles to new categories
    • move sub-cats to new cat
    • move category text
    • add sort keys (not always)

It will not be automatic, and it will be monitored during use. ∞Who?¿? 06:21, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Approved for one week trial run. May apply for a bot flag afterward. --AllyUnion (talk) 17:35, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
Temporarily inactive due to power outage from hurricane Katrina. Will hopefully be running by next week. :( ∞Who?¿? 20:25, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Arbritrary note, still w/o net access, but plan to be back running soon. ∞Who?¿? 01:17, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

GrinBot

user:GrinBot, updates interlang links between hu: and en:. Hu entries only. Test run would probably consist only one run now, updating mostly year entries. -grin ✎ 20:05, 2005 August 31 (UTC)

Test run was done on 1010s and 1020s, looks fine. (Was done as myself to prevent complaints... *shrug*). --grin ✎ 20:11, 2005 August 31 (UTC)
Permitted test run for a week, may apply for bot status if no complaints are made. --AllyUnion (talk) 04:24, 1 September 2005 (UTC)


AFD Bot

Newest bot to my collection... it is to support the rename situation at Votes for deletion to Articles for deletion. --AllyUnion (talk) 07:36, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Sandbot modifications

Sandbot has been modified to allow manual enforcement of headers on Wikipedia:Sandbox, Wikipedia talk:Sandbox, & Wikipedia:Introduction.

Additionally, the sandbox has user controlled resets of the following pages:

--AllyUnion (talk) 10:54, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

New modifications now allow a big reset button on all sandboxes. --AllyUnion (talk) 17:30, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

User:Curpsbot-unicodify

This bot converts character entities into literal Unicode text. The details are on the bot's user page. I have test-run it on eastern European (Baltic state) pages, where most new edits are already incorporating direct Unicode text. I am verifying each edit manually within minutes. The source code builds upon the pywikipedia package. -- Curps 06:35, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

It turns out there was already a request for such a bot, at Wikipedia:Bot_requests#HTML_Entities_to_Unicode_conversion. -- Curps 09:34, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

I only have one minor problem with this, and I'm very concerned over Asian languages. I'm not entirely certain it is wise to change the Asian (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc) languages... --AllyUnion (talk) 23:13, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
Can you explain why? For articles about Chinese people, many people have made many edits over the years to add the name in Chinese of the person in question (same with Japanese, Korean, etc). Before Mediawiki 1.5, the software would automatically convert this into &# character entities; now it no longer does so. So now whenever people add Chinese text to an article, it stays in literal Unicode Chinese characters.
In other words, from now on, many, many edits from from many, many ordinary users are adding literal Unicode characters into our articles all the time. So if you think the presence of literal Unicode characters for Chinese/Japanese/Korean in English Wikipedia articles is going to cause a problem, well, you can hardly expect every ordinary user to look up and manually type in the &# entities. -- Curps 02:42, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I said that I'm concerned... doesn't mean I'm opposed to it. I'm uncertain if there are still technical problems, because systems don't usually default as UTF-8. --AllyUnion (talk) 06:55, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Most browsers do now, and there is now a special bit of code (see bugzilla:2676) so that the others don’t screw up the text. Susvolans ⇔ 07:08, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
In addition to that bugzilla entry there is this discussion in Village pump (technical). It seems the problem is solved. And like I said, there are probably hundreds of edits every day now by ordinary users that are adding literal Unicode characters to pages (just see various eastern European pages, for instance). You mention that you have a special concern for Asian languages... why is that? If UTF-8 doesn't work in a browser, that affects everything beyond Latin-1, not just Asian languages. -- Curps 10:33, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Just that I don't think Asian languages are part of the Latin-1 set. They are, I believe, only existing in the UTF-8 set. --AllyUnion (talk) 11:06, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Only western European languages are part of Latin-1. Everything else (eastern European, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Asian, etc) is not. So there is no special restriction or difficulty with Asian languages compared to everything else. -- Curps 13:11, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
The bot leaves a page's rendered display (what readers see) entirely unchanged, and it leaves a page's wiki markup (what editors see) looking exactly as it would if the page's entire edit history had been edited under Mediawiki 1.5. In other words, the result is exactly the same as if the page had first been created after June 28 2005, with all the exact same edits. I don't know if it's possible bugs you're worried about, but if the bot works as advertised, the results cannot be wrong, by definition, because it makes pages exactly the same way the the Mediawiki 1.5 software makes them. -- Curps 19:48, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
What about Template:IPA? See Template talk:IPA --AllyUnion (talk) 04:37, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
The IPA character range (Unicode 0250-02AF) is not part of the range of characters that the bot converts, with the sole exception of the lowercase schwa U+0259, which is a letter in Azerbaijani and is available in most default fonts. I have noticed that some pages use Greek-letter epsilon within an IPA template when they probably intended to use U+025B ("latin small letter open e") from the IPA range. To the extent that IPA may reuse certain characters already available in other Unicode ranges (such as æ from Latin-1), these are usually already entered as literal characters rather than as character entities). -- Curps 05:19, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
Okay. It looks like you really thought out everything, I have no objection anymore. --AllyUnion (talk) 08:39, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

I also have an idea for a second bot (not yet written). After Mediawiki 1.5, many pages were moved to a title with diacritics, but pages that link to there still use a link without diacritics (which is now a redirect). This is an extra redir and also hampers the "Related changes" from working fully (since it just looks for changes to the redir page and not changes to the article (redir target) page.

So this second bot would look at the links on a page, and for each link that is a redirect, and the link is identical to a diacritic-less version of the redir-target article title, the link on the page would be updated. Does that sound OK? I think I could write this fairly quickly by using the pywikipedia library. -- Curps 09:21, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

Basically you want to disambig all diacritic pages... at least, that's what it sounds like to me. --AllyUnion (talk) 04:37, 1 September 2005 (UTC)