text:
1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks, will do. Hiding Talk 20:02, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Please don't bot-create the subpage: otherwise we'll end up with several hundred thousand sub-pages saying nothing but "automatically assessed as a stub-class article due to being a stub", as well as several hundred thousand article talk pages saying much the same thing.  The "auto-assessed" surely says it all;  if people want to expand on that when they confirm (or deny) the auto-assessment, they can do so at their leisure.  Alai 10:01, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Standardizer bot
I'm not sure if this would be a good idea or not but perhaps it would be possible to build a robot to standardize Wikipedia pages (make them of similiar formatting).

Some points would be:
 * 1) Convert American spellings to English or vice versa.
 * 2) Capitalize words that should obviously be capitalized; for example, the beginning of a sentence.
 * 3) Uncapitalize words that should obviously not be capitalized.
 * 4) Convert accented characters to their normal equivalents (for example, '�' to 'e').

I'd be interested to see other people's points on this. Yuser31415 07:43, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * re 1&4 should be left alone American and Engish are both the same language. And the accents are there for a reason Betacommand (talk * contribs * Bot) 07:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Re 2 & 3, how would the bot know where the beginning of a sentence is or which words are improperly capitalized? For the first, if a sentence were to have an phrase such as "...percent of U.S. citizens...", how would the bot know that the word "citizens" wasn't the beginning of a new sentence?  For the second, how would the bot know that the word in question isn't part of a band name or something like that?  For instance, Red Hot Chili Peppers is a band and thus those words are capitalized but a bot wouldn't know that it's a band name and would therefore uncapitalize the words.  Dismas|(talk) 08:35, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I suppose you're both right. I was thinking of human interaction though: the bot finds keywords it's not sure about and the human checks them. I suppose this could take too long and would only be useful for individual pages.Yuser31415 19:11, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

 * It might not be exactly what you described, but the AutoWikiBrowser has this "Apply general fixes" option that is pretty similar. The program works with human interaction just as you described. --ZeroOne ( talk | @ ) 05:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Bot on wikispecies
I would like to request a bot that can touch about 80.000 pages on Wikispecies. I am one of the admins on Wikispecies, and we're going through some major changes. We do have one registered bot, but it stopped working, for an unknown reason. Perhaps a 'techy' is able and willing to do some standard changes. In principal it would need to delete '::::' colons out of taxonavigation sections. Perhaps also a check on a certain layout and if it does not fit standard layout add a Category. (or fix the issue if possible). Help would be highly appreciated. --Kempmichel 10:21, 3 November 2006 (UTC) (Wikispecies:User:Kempm) , because otherwise pages with more than one(i just saw one) would get clumped up ST47 Talk 19:34, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, I can write a quick thing for WP:AWB to remove colons, that's easy. The layout, you'd need to give me a 'good' example and a 'bad' example, but I can use AWB for that too once I can tell it what to look for. Can I see some sample diffs of both changes? Thanks! ST47 Talk 11:28, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok, the colon thing is funtional simply by changing :::::::Species: to Species: . ST47 Talk 11:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Note here it can also be ::::Subspecies, ::::Regnum, :Superregnum, :::Subregnum, or ::Subregnum, and many more :) --Kempmichel 12:13, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * ok, how about ^:+([KPCOFGSR]) -> \1 ?(that is, if it works, ill try it out in 5 seconds) ST47 Talk 19:08, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Yep, that works. Generating list... ST47 Talk 19:11, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * That ended up hitting interwikis, now I'm using [^(\w\w)]:+([KPCOFGSR]) ST47 Talk 19:30, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * And saving it to $1
 * And using [^(\w\w)]:+([KPCOFGSRIT]) cause some scientist hates me :) ST47 Talk 19:39, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * And 50 edits made, looks good to me, let me know if I can start it on automatic. ST47 Talk 19:49, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
 * You already found out :) --Kempmichel 14:05, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
 * indeed :) ST47 Talk 14:46, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm not like, killing your servers am I? ST47 Talk 14:46, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I have some annoying hiccups sometimes, but that seems quite normal. So far I received 20.000 e-mails from your edits :) Is that how many you did? --Kempmichel 17:58, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
 * 20,000? WHY! That's probably about right. i have 20k pages left to do, then i wait for a database dump and re-scan it ST47 Talk 19:03, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

A double redirect bot
I've just come back from fixing about 16 double redirects. Could someone write up a bot for me that fixes double redirects (If it's possible)? --AAA! (talk • contribs) 08:40, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
 * all ready being run Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 09:47, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Which? --AAA! (talk • contribs) 00:39, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Many bot do it (including mine). Just download the pywikipedia framework, a double redirect fixer is included (make sure that you get approval at WP:BRFA first though). — Mets501 (talk) 01:31, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

WP:COMIC noticeboard
Is it possible to have a bot written that would patrol subcategories of Category:Comics and where an article has been tagged for deletion it could add that fact to the relevant section of the WikiProject Comics/Notice Board? Hiding Talk 21:22, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

move pages with "Ancient Greece" in title to "ancient Greece"; "Ancient Rome" to "ancient Rome"
There are many pages dealing with subjects in ancient Greece and Rome that erroneously capitalize "ancient". WP guidelines and editorial consensus say that "ancient" should be lowercase. It's easy enough to move individual pages, but fixing the redirects is a pain. Is this the kind of task that a bot can help with? If not, are there other ways to (semi-)automate the process? Thanks. --Akhilleus (talk) 16:32, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Have you looked into WP:AWB? I know this could be helpful--Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 19:01, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Not in detail, because I mostly use OS X. But I have some access to a Windows machine, so I'll check it out. --Akhilleus (talk) 19:05, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

 * Of course, you want to be able to capitalize if it's the beginning of a sentence, and possibly some other contexts a bot might not always recognize. Maybe there could be a special symbol, such as inserting any invisible comment between ancient and Rome, which signals the bot not to decapitalize in this case (as well as the bot being smart enough to recogize almost all beginnings of sentences).  Just an idea.  --Coppertwig 19:32, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Errr...this proposal speaks of moving pages. Article titles must begin with a capital letter, for technical reasons. Hence the link ancient Greece will always point to the article titled Ancient Greece. Robert A.West (Talk) 19:47, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

 * OIC. If the article has "Ancient" in a medial position, then this makes sense.  Is that what was meant?  Robert A.West (Talk) 22:01, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Yes. My initial request was unclear, I see. I was interested in a less tedious way to make moves such as

 * Gymnasium (Ancient Greece) -> Gymnasium (ancient Greece) and

 * Art in Ancient Greece -> Art in ancient Greece

 * There's a similar problem with the titles of articles dealing with ancient Rome, classical Greece/Rome, and other articles where a country/culture is modified by an adjective.

 * Mistaken capitalization in the article text is also an issue, of course, but it wasn't what I was asking about. --Akhilleus (talk) 02:10, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

PDFlink bot
Could someone write a bot that'll convert the old Template:PDFlink format to the new one, while adding file size info possibly, some details one what needs to be done is located at Template talk:PDFlink -Dispenser 08:19, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I can't do the file size, but I'll convert the old style to the new style. — Mets 501 (talk) 14:35, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, should be done now. — Mets 501 (talk) 21:48, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Great work. However, there is a problem (now documented the on first page of the template) where if a link contains pipe (|) or equals sign (=) the template will cause the link to display incorrectly.  See . --Dispenser 06:33, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Memory Beta (aka Non-canon Star Trek Wiki)
Is it possible that a bot could be created or used that would be able to patrol all images on the wiki, and either add or replace the category with Category:Memory Beta images, as we have hundreds of images and it would be a mammoth task to do by hand. If so that would be fantastic, address for the wiki is Memory Beta Main Page. --The Doctor 11:32, 08 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I could make a list of all the image names on your wiki, load them into AWB, and if they have a page here, I could add the category. ST47 Talk 11:36, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
 * That would be brilliant if possible. Thank You :-). --The Doctor 12:21, 08 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Looks like there's something up with the wiki, I can't get AWB to connect to it, I'll hve to think of a better way to get your images. ST47 Talk 19:27, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, I have a list, and I have a way to isolate star trek images, can you create the category with a note saying it was populated by a bot and may have one or two false positives, and I'll do the categorizing as soon as I have a free computer ST47 Talk 19:39, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Userbox Bot
A lot of userboxes are being moved per the WP:GUS to userspace. This is probably a good thing; but when a box is moved everyone who had it on their userpage is left with something like this:. Could someone create a box to fix those automatically? ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 16:28, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Sure, give me a list of changes, my bot is already allowed to do that. ST47 Talk 18:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Many bots regularly do that (mine too). Just add the GUS template, it will appear in GUS, and bots go through that category fixing transclusions. — Mets501 (talk) 22:11, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Dead Playboy Playmates
Could someone run a bot through the Playboy Playmate articles to compile a list of the dead ones so that I can compare it to the list at Dead Playboy Playmates. I want to check the list to see if it has all of them or not. Dismas|(talk) 09:07, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Uhh...you want me to do what? with what? Define dead. We'll need a list of articles to check and a place to output to, and a way to define dead, and a category to add them all to is probably the only way to do it with a bot, still, bots, being bats, cannot determine whether something is dead unless you tell it how to. ST47 Talk 11:52, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Going through Category:Playboy Playmates and seeing which ones contain a by-date death category would work. Martin 12:16, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. Martin, that should work fine.  I just want the names if that's possible.  Maybe the bot could write them to User:Dismas/Playmates or something like that?  Considering there are more than 50 years of playmates, I'd rather not go through the articles one by one.  Dismas|(talk) 12:59, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
 * So do I take this silence to mean that nobody wants to help? Dismas|(talk) 23:08, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Show me a living one and a dead one and I'll see if I can do something ST47 Talk 23:14, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Dead Playmate and live Playmate. Thanks, Dismas|(talk) 01:50, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
 * cool, searching for anything that's dead and then i'll compare it to Category:Playboy Playmates ST47 Talk 11:37, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Dismas|(talk) 12:29, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

TABLE-to-DIV bot
I mentioned this on the Village Pump, but then I realized that this page existed: I've noticed that tables are used an awful lot everywhere on Wikipedia, even when using  tags would work just as well. I looked up When to use tables, and I thought it would make sense to have a bot to find unnecessary tables, i.e. single-cell tables, and turn them into an equivalent combination. That doesn't exist already, does it? Phoenix-forgotten 20:00, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
 * no I don't think so. Best way to do this would probably be
 * {|([^!\|]+)|} -> $1
 * Can I have a sample of a bad table and a good div for comparison?
 * In addition, if anyone has any ideas for or against this, please say so. ST47 Talk 20:44, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Divs can't be <tt>vertical-align: middle;</tt> in IE because it doesn't support <tt>display: table;</tt>. --Dispenser 21:20, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

One example is Template:TOCright. As long as the border is nonexistent, a div will still look just like a one-cell table does if you convert any cellspacing and cellpadding into an appropriate amount of CSS padding. If the table has a border though, I haven't been able to make an exact equivalent because the table always seems to have a one-pixel border for its cell, which messes up the border-style:outset the outer boundary has. Phoenix-forgotten 01:25, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Very specific template-conversion request
Hello, I need a very specific change to be made to a number of very specific articles. For a list, see User:lensovet/Rail. What I need is as follows: for each line that reads to be converted to that is: please let me know when you make the change. thanks! —lensovet–talk – 20:23, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) change template name from rail line to NJT line
 * 2) for previous and next parameters, remove piped link and keep only the part that is normally displayed
 * 3) if either parameter is not a piped link, remove it completely
 * 4) change route= to line=
 * 5) change Northeast Corridor Line to Northeast Corridor
 * 6) remove the col= parameter completely
 * There are 10 articles. Hardly seems worth a bot. ST47 Talk 22:27, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
 * There will probably be at least 20-30 more, just with different lines. I wanted to make this easy and break up the job into each line, and also to get a feel if something like this is actually feasible to do with a bot. How many articles do you want, 100? It's repetitive work regardless. —lensovet–talk – 23:27, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
 * It's definitely possible, my best idea would be using WP:AWB:
 * which is incredibly scary and almost certainly wrong. but we can make it work :) - only thing is that I haven't a clue what to do about the third request. I'll think about that. ST47 Talk 23:44, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Let me know if you can come up with something for the third request. also, i don't have access to a wintel box, so ideally i'd need a bot account to actually perform the edits. —lensovet–talk – 00:32, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
 * So, what's new here? —lensovet–talk – 20:38, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I can do the edits, I'd like to do a regex for each change, and we can to request for approval - I'll file it, but you might want to comment on it just to make sure we know what we're doing, I'll post when it's done. ST47 Talk 21:29, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Not worth filing a bot approval for 40 edits, just do it from your user account. Rich Farmbrough, 12:03 20 November 2006 (GMT).
 * I can do the edits, I'd like to do a regex for each change, and we can to request for approval - I'll file it, but you might want to comment on it just to make sure we know what we're doing, I'll post when it's done. ST47 Talk 21:29, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Not worth filing a bot approval for 40 edits, just do it from your user account. Rich Farmbrough, 12:03 20 November 2006 (GMT).

Wikipedia random copyedit bot
I was thinking last night that it would be fun to have a bot that randomly generated a page in certain areas for the editor to edit. Like folks interested in botany or biology could get a random biology or botany page, then copyedit it. If Wikipedians did this for a year in all major areas, many of our crummiest articles, apperance wise, would get cleaned up.

I think that there are numerous articles on Wikipedia that need copyedits. I attempted to do this in the [Herat] article and the [Afghanistan] articles, but got sucked into a vicious flame war--these articles need serious work. However, I moved on to using the Random Article generator to find articles that could use copyediting, leading me to copyedit obscure pages like [Pre-dreadnought]. About half of the articles that come up have to do with Anime or television shows it seems, and some are in areas I know nothing about, but sometimes I find something interesting that needs work.

I can find articles on list, fine, but adding a little fun to it, and making it an all-Wikipedia project could seriously improve many Wikipedia articles. Editors would be encouraged to add citation needed tags, categories, and just do the rudimentary copyedit work that really makes Wikipedia viable. By allowing folks to get random articles in selected categories people would work on articles in their areas.

One of the best things about Wikipedia is writing a good article, then coming back the next day and finding someone else has spit-shined for you. There are a lot of articles that have some useful information but are rather sorry in appearance. Devoting some time to cleaning up these articles would, imo, greatly improve Wikipedia. Adding a little twist for those seeking something to do would make it a bit more interesting.

Please someone write this bot. Oh, I would call it the KPBot (for Kitchen police)!

KP Botany 20:55, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
 * You may want to check out User:SuggestBot. It's very similar to what you're proposing. — Mets501 (talk) 21:07, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

main page protection bot
As we know, images and templates on the main page are changed on a daily basis. To prevent vandalism to Wikipedia's most important page, these images and templates must be fully protected. I'm sure that many administrators will agree that this task can be pretty tedious. Also, it's always possible that something will be left unprotected by accident. After all, we're all humans! :)

Therefore, I'm proposing a bot that will automate the following tasks:

 * 1) protect any images and templates that will be used on the main page (one day beforehand)
 * 2) unprotect any inactive images and templates (many inactive templates are still protected, despite being off the main page)

I do have one concern, though. If administrators become too dependent on the bot, some images or templates may be left unprotected if the bot suffers a downtime. --Ixfd64 09:44, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * We don't protect stuff on the main page:
 * "Important Note: When a page is particularly high profile, either because it is linked off the main page, or because it has recently received a prominent link from offsite, it will often become a target for vandalism. It is rarely appropriate to protect pages in this case. Instead, consider adding them to your watchlist, and reverting vandalism yourself."
 * ST47 Talk 11:20, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * But the main page policy does require protection for all images displayed on it (for obvious reasons). The protection policies only prevent the protection of articles linked from the main page. M a rtinp23 18:22, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Template:Verylong
It'd be nice to have a bot automatically add Template:Verylong to articles that are above the recommended size. Vicarious 09:24, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I can do that automatically with WP:AWB once I get back from vacation, but how long is too long? ST47 Talk 11:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't have a quick answer. Article size provides the general number of 32k, but if it's not too challenging it might be worth comparing different thresholds. Vicarious 13:15, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, I can do that - 16, 32, 48K mabye - I'll see what I can do ST47 Talk 15:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Whoa! Wait up.  We have featured articles such as 0.999... which are over 60 kilobytes in size, but are not "too long".  Too long has to do more with content than with the actual size in KB of the article.  I don't recomment doing this by a bot. — Mets501 (talk) 16:01, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, I can't do anything yet ST47 Talk 16:12, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, I just wanted to make sure you didn't start yet :-) — Mets501 (talk) 16:37, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm not entirely sure I agree with Mets that .999... isn't too long, but even if it isn't, the template can easily be removed from articles that it doesn't suite. If you think that the 32k threshold would provide too many inappropriate tags then we can increase the number to something where the ratio is much better. I have no idea how many very large articles there are but I feel reasonably confident that the vast majority of articles over 80k should be trimmed. Also keep in mind that a key reason to keep articles small is not just for readability, it's for technical reasons, and technical reasons don't care about your good reason for being too big. Vicarious 03:59, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Exactly what technical reason? My understanding has always been that anything over 32K can be problematic for users of certain browsers, but I've never heard of anything that would rise to the level of a true technical issue, i.e., a software or server problem. We are first and foremost an encyclopedia, and being so, the good reason for being to big (vis-a-vis being a good encyclopedia article) does and will always trump technical issues. Something tells me that if asked, Wikimedia's CTO Brion Vibber will tell us that there is absolutely no technical reason to start cutting featured articles back to stubs. Essjay   ( Talk )  04:16, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

WebCite (External Link Archiving) Bot
"On Wikipedia, and other Wiki-based websites broken external links still present a maintenance problem." linkrot I am hoping someone takes on the task to write a WebCite-Bot, i.e. a bot which automatically feeds all cited URLs in Wikipedia to WebCite, which is a web archive similar to the Internet Archive, but with enhanced features such as on-demand archiving, and with a focus on scholarly material (as opposed to IA's shotgun-crawling-"archive-all-you-can"-approach). WebCite creates a snapshot (cached copy) of the cited URL, thereby archiving/preserving the cited webpage or webdocument (if caching was successful, the link to the snapshot should be added to the original URL on wikipedia). WebCite takes care of robot exclusion standards, no-cache tags etc on the cited page. If caching was successful, WebCite hands back a WebCite-ID, which should be added to the original link (for an example on how this could look like see the reference list at the bottom of the article http://www.jmir.org/2006/4/e27/ - all cited non-journal webpages also have a link to the WebCite snapshot). The benefit would be that all cited material will be automatically preserved and link rot, 404s or changes in the cited webpages will no longer be a problem. WebCite has an XML-based webservice which allows to communicate the caching request as well as to receive the WebCite ID if the caching was successful, see technical guide http://www.webcitation.org/doc/WebCiteBestPracticesGuide.pdf User:Eysen 19:45, 01 Dec 2006 (UTC)

Translation
I wanted a bot to do the following :
 * take a page of the form Wikipedia:Translation/XXX in Category:Translation sub-pages
 * edit the article XXX
 * add at the top of this article the template   if it doesn't exist

Thanks,

Jmfayard 14:02, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
 * oh that's easy - couple of simple regexes and you're done - let me get a full database dump and I'll see what is to be done:
 * search for pages with title Wikipedia:Translation/.+
 * regex it to Wikipedia:Translation/(.+) -> $1
 * and then if not
 * add
 * sound good? ST47 Talk 20:24, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, this sounds good. Jmfayard 23:31, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

But I just noticed, there is something else to care of.

Before, we used Translation request and Translation request from German which are now obsoleted. Instead, one should use Translation. I just made a redirect of the two first templates to Translation. This solve the case of future translation requests with the old templates.

But there is the problem of existing translation requests.

The bot should replace the obsoloted templates in the talk pages Talk:XXX (the full list is hre) with
 *   if Translation/XXX exists<
 * Translation request (old) respectively Translation request from German (old) in the other cases (we do not want to port all the existing templates to the new system because it is a lot of work).

Is it doable ?

Jmfayard 23:31, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
 * That's not only doably, but as a template change, my bot can already do that - you want me to change and  both to  ?? ST47 Talk 23:55, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

No, this is not what I want.

To make it simpler :

I want you to replace
 * with
 * with

The thing is that, because I made a redirect, the talk pages with are not listed in Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Translation request as you could expect, but in Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Translation

Jmfayard 00:16, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Template:Verylong
It'd be nice to have a bot automatically add Template:Verylong to articles that are above the recommended size. Vicarious 09:24, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I can do that automatically with WP:AWB once I get back from vacation, but how long is too long? ST47 Talk 11:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't have a quick answer. Article size provides the general number of 32k, but if it's not too challenging it might be worth comparing different thresholds. Vicarious 13:15, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, I can do that - 16, 32, 48K mabye - I'll see what I can do ST47 Talk 15:57, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Whoa! Wait up.  We have featured articles such as 0.999... which are over 60 kilobytes in size, but are not "too long".  Too long has to do more with content than with the actual size in KB of the article.  I don't recomment doing this by a bot. — Mets501 (talk) 16:01, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, I can't do anything yet ST47 Talk 16:12, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, I just wanted to make sure you didn't start yet :-) — Mets501 (talk) 16:37, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm not entirely sure I agree with Mets that .999... isn't too long, but even if it isn't, the template can easily be removed from articles that it doesn't suite. If you think that the 32k threshold would provide too many inappropriate tags then we can increase the number to something where the ratio is much better. I have no idea how many very large articles there are but I feel reasonably confident that the vast majority of articles over 80k should be trimmed. Also keep in mind that a key reason to keep articles small is not just for readability, it's for technical reasons, and technical reasons don't care about your good reason for being too big. Vicarious 03:59, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Exactly what technical reason? My understanding has always been that anything over 32K can be problematic for users of certain browsers, but I've never heard of anything that would rise to the level of a true technical issue, i.e., a software or server problem. We are first and foremost an encyclopedia, and being so, the good reason for being to big (vis-a-vis being a good encyclopedia article) does and will always trump technical issues. Something tells me that if asked, Wikimedia's CTO Brion Vibber will tell us that there is absolutely no technical reason to start cutting featured articles back to stubs. Essjay   ( Talk )  04:16, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Beyond the admittedly uncommon 32k issue, people with slow internet connection will find it difficult to load very large pages, although I admit this is much more strongly effected by included images than text (although there is certainly at least a weak correlation). I think you're sensationalizing a bit when you talk about cutting featured articles to stubs. I also think that all techinical issues aside, keeping articles of reasonable size improves readability and makes them more manageable, keep in mind I've not suggested removing content at any point, and tag I'm suggesting we have a bot add doesn't encourage deleting material either. I might add, this is not just my opinion, refer to Article size. Vicarious 09:29, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

fiddler bot
the list of fiddlers is getting a little unwielding. right now it duplicates itself completely, listing all the names first alphabetically and then by style - nice, convenient, but long. the plan is to split it into two articles. obviously there's a problem: how do we make sure people put their additions on both pages? already people aren't adding them to both lists.

seems like there are a couple ways this could be done with a bot, though I haven't read up on how they work and what they're capable of. conceptually most simply a bot could copy recent additions from the one page to the other - but it would have to check to see if the editor had edited both already. if bots can get around edit protection we could protect the list-by-style and have the bot check for changes to the list by name (take a look at the page - each name in the alphabetical list is followed by the styles they play... could a bot find and parse those parenthetical strings, and copy the name into the appropriate part(s) of a protected list-by-style article?) --Eitch 19:21, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

 * IMHO categories is the way to do this. Rich Farmbrough, 12:06 20  November 2006 (GMT).

 * Absolutely. Is there an existing bot that can tag the existing entries in the list?  What about subcategories? Regards, Ben Aveling 00:53, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
 * My bot can trun list into cats. Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 00:57, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Whaddaya mean?^v^ [[User:orngjce223|my home page[[Talk:orngjce223|my talk page]]]] 21:12, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

 * This sounds suspiciously similar to a discussion I've been having over on the Simpsons project, for which I've set about developing ListGenBot - see User:Mortice/ListGenBot for a spec and let me know if it would help, or if it needs expanding in order to be useful for you --Mortice 21:24, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Pretty cool, Mortice, but I think Rich and Ben are right that -in the case of the fiddlers- categories are the way to go. Ben and ß: the only problem I see with implementing categories is how to deal with redlink articles. I guess they could go in "Articles that have yet to be written" subcategories... is there some kind of standard out there already for dealing with this? --Eitch 23:05, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Clean up Ganeshbot grammar
Someone should write a bot to clean up Ganeshbot's bad grammar. Kaldari 06:56, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
 * seems useless, can't ganeshbot clean up his own grammar? ST47 Talk 11:39, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
 * apparently not. why do you say this is useless? it would certainly be easier than me fixing thousands of articles by hand. Kaldari 02:07, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I am not sure this can be automated (or at least, it's not automatizable using simple regular expression replacement, as done by most bots.) Tizio 10:35, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Sounds like what I did for the Rambot articles. I'll take a look tomorrow if I get time. Rich Farmbrough, 23:14 18  November 2006 (GMT).
 * Well that example is easy. I'll do some tests and file an approval request. Rich Farmbrough, 12:07 20 November 2006 (GMT).
 * Awesome, thanks! Kaldari 06:14, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Adding articles to law enforcement wikiproject
Hello, would it be possible to have a bot created that would add the Law enforcement wikiproject header to articles that are in the Law Enforcement catagory? (here). Many thanks.--SGGH 14:37, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll take care of it shortly. Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 14:56, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Thankyou.--SGGH 15:40, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * What subcats do you want tagged? Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 16:25, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * If im understanding you correctly, then all of the sub cats apart from Unarmed people shot by police, People shot dead by police and Vigilantes.

Transitioning from Template:CopyrightedFreeUse
Template:CopyrightedFreeUse has been officially deprecated since February. However, there are still about 7000 images using it. The equivalent Template:PD-release should be substituted for it (or Template:No rights reserved which is also legally equivalent). Personally I prefer Template:PD-release as it is less confusing but means exactly the same thing legally, i.e. that all rights are renouced by the copyright holder. Kaldari 17:45, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Ill start on this Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 17:55, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
 * See User talk:Betacommand/20081201, thanks/wangi 22:41, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
 * It looks like some people have "Free Use" confused with "Fair Use". Regardless, this bot is still doing the proper thing. The images that have been tagged by people incorrectly will have to be fixed by hand regardless. Kaldari 04:53, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
 * The sooner we can get Template:CopyrightedFreeUse deleted the better. It seems to be the source of lots of confusion and redundancy. Kaldari 04:55, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Bot for country code
Could someone please create a bot which would automatically replace the Template:SER with Template:SRB. Even though SRB is an official ISO 3166-1 3-letter country code and an abbreviation for Serbia (from Srbija) many people still think this code is SER and having a wrong template doesn`t help either. It would be nice to have an automatic bot to correct future mistakes. Avala 14:08, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Generation of list pages
I'm tinkering with a proposal I've made which involves using categories to replace a list page (the proposal is WikiProject The Simpsons/Proposal for managing song lists on Simpsons episodes) but I wonder if this is something that could be well managed by a bot.

The requirement would be to generate a page (or I guess edit a delimited section in the middle of a page) based on all the pages listed in a different category. Perhaps the extended requirement would be to find all the subcategories of a given category and use them to generate a list of lists. For instance, 'generate a page with sections named from subcategories of the category "songs on the simpsons", where each section has a list formed from the names of the pages in those subcategories (which would be the names of songs)'.

Or perhaps to take the text from a given section from each page of a list of pages (identified from being members of a category) and generate one page containnig all those sections. For instance 'copy all the sections called "songs" from all pages in the category "simpsons episodes" to the "songs" section of the page "list of songs on the simpsons" page'.

This all sounds quite fiddly, but I can imagine someone may have made a generic bot that can be fed with parameters to do this sort of processing. Is there anything out there to do something like this, or any keen on developing one? Please feel free to chat on my talk page if you want to ask questions or suggest solutions --Mortice 18:10, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Sounds feasable, But i have few questions are the songs in their own cats? if not do the page names all follow a pattern? could this just be one master list sorted by name? Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 18:51, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Thanks for the feedback. There are, as suggested above, a number of options for doing this. The category based way would work something like this: category 'songs in the simpsons' contains subcategory 'songs in the simpsons episode 13'. Song 'happy birthday' is in category 'songs in the simpsons episode 13'. The bot should generate a page (or insert into a page) section "episode 13" with a bullet list including 'happy birthday'. The songs are all in 'episode' based categories (with structured names) which are all subcategories of the supercategory 'songs in the simpsons' so it should be all auto-generatable.

 * Hope that answers your question. The alternative might be easier (and preferable for editors?) - extract sections from the 'episode' pages into a big page, and I'd think that would make for a more generic bot (if you tend to do bots that way). As for your question about 'all just one list', personally I'd like the 'songs' page to have two lists, one alphabetical by song name and one sectioned by episode name, but that may be considered 'overkill'.

 * Even if the bot can be developed, this suggestion has to pass approval by the people who maintain the relevant pages, I'm just trying to kick some ideas around to see if one sticks --Mortice 20:25, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Update - I've been having a look at the bot API and it looks quite straightforward so I might 'have a go' at this (I'm a coder by trade and have a 24/7 connected server), although I know it will require 'approval' and I'm sure I'll need advice about writing an industrial strength bot --Mortice 00:40, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

 * I've written a spec for this bot - see User:Mortice/ListGenBot, which I'm sure would be of use for all sorts of pages. So much so that I'm sure someone must have developed it already - anyone confirm or deny that? And if I develop it I'm likely to have a few questions about producing a pywikipedia based bot - anyone volunteer to be a sounding board for me? I'm aware of the requirement to get it approved first --Mortice 21:56, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm currently developing this bot --Mortice 12:21, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Template moving
Category:Main pages with misplaced talk page templates contains pages with a template that belongs on the page's talk page instead. Can we employ a bot to move these? ( Radiant ) 13:28, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Yet again I should be able to do this if you explain the function a little better, Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 14:50, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Thanks. Templates in this category shuold be on an article's talk page rather than the article itself. The category I mentioned above contains articles that contain at least one of those templates. The bot should periodically check this category, remove the relevant template(s) (and any parameters) and add them to the talk page instead. ( Radiant ) 14:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

In use
And, Category:Articles actively undergoing construction and Category:Articles actively undergoing a major edit are supposed to be temporary categories, but have grown very large. Perhaps a bot could depopulate them weekly? ( Radiant ) 13:44, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes I can and Will have my bot empty the cat, Is there a day that you would suggest doing this? Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 14:44, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

 * Not particularly. Note that these categories are generated by inuse and Underconstruction. Thanks! ( Radiant ) 14:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Before I go and have my bot blocked for this, (as a malfunctioning bot) what should I use for the edit summary? Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 15:06, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * How about "(bot) Remove inuse tag, no activity for three days"? Or maybe five days. Or I could think of some pun to go with that :) ( Radiant ) 15:25, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I try to go through this and weed out the forgotten ones. It is a bit frustrating because some people demand the right to leave up the tag for long periods of time, and aren't shy about complaining. Also it's transcluded on a bunch of instructional pages, like Edit lock so some care needs to be taken not to mess up those pages. But if someone wants to run a bot and deal with the occasional upset article owner, I think that's great. --W.marsh 18:22, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Spam Bot
How do I make a bot to message Wikiproject Gold Coast members? If possible, can someone make it for me. Thank you -- Nathannoblet 07:49, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Can do this. But I need what you want sent out and to who. Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 13:08, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Bot for future PermissionRequested template
I have opened suggestions for creating a template for image pages that warns admins that a user has contacted the copyright owner requesting the image's use of Wikipedia and asks not for it to be deleted while a response is expected. The discussion can be found here.

In order to work, it will need a bot that checks a tagging date and remove images that have been tagged for more than one week, and create a relevant category of unlicensed images each day, the same way it is done in.

I don't have any expertise in creating bots, so could someone please create a bot that can do this? ~  ► W y k e b j s ◄  (userpage | talk) 18:05, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
 * WP:AWB can do this. If you want I can write up a guide for you and show you how to have AWB do this if you are intrested. Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 20:02, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Thanks Betacommand, that would be much appreciated. ~  ► W y k e b j s ◄  (userpage | talk) 21:15, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Infobox change
Also, Category:Pages needing an infobox conversion and Category:Needs album infobox conversion contain a template that should be switched to another template. Would a bot be feasible here? ( Radiant ) 13:33, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Likewise I can set my bot up to do this if you give some more detailed information on exactly what is changing Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 14:49, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

 * This gives some related info. I'll ask around a bit to get the specifics. ( Radiant ) 14:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * (queried at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Albums). ( Radiant ) 16:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
 * These three diffs are examples of the way the replacement works. The editor who does this is unconvinced that this can in fact be automated, so ymmv. ( Radiant ) 09:31, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

New articles bot
There are quite a few lists of new articles related to specific subject used by various wikiprojects. They all work 'manually' - with dedicated users adding articles they find to the lists - but this could all be easily autmomatized (botized). We need a bot that would: 1) look at a specified forum (i.e. Portal:Poland/New article announcements) 2) look at a specified section to find last reported article (they differ as various wikiprojects and such have no unified structure, so some may have 'November', others 'November 1-15', and so on 3) look at a 'what links here' of given article(s) - for example, Poland, Polish, Polish language for Portal:Poland, see what new articles have been added to the 'what links here' and generate a report in the above section in the format *article name created by User:Username on date This bot would save much time now spend by dozens of dedicated editors who scour the 'what links here' lists instead of doing more constructive work. Issues to consider: articles in question (countries) have many pages of 'what links here', to speed up the process the bot may want to look from the end to find the most recent article added, thus skipping 99% of the links - but this may skip checking redirect. I don't know how long will it take to analyze the entire page to find and analyze redirects, but once they are found they can be added to the main 'check' list and the bot wouldn't have to look through main article for them again, so it would be useful to have to options: normal scan (from the end to the last reported) and complete (from the end to the last reported, and then to the begining but generate only list of redirects). Additional features which I doubt would be included (wishlist): add lenght of the article, tags, lead; scan for new pictures, categories and stubs.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 18:03, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

 * I support this idea. If the bot doesn't work properly, it can be disabled. --Ineffable3000 18:58, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Support. It would definetly save a lot time for users. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 00:19, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Support. These lists could do with a bit of a hand. It'd be better if it had some way of working from newpages instead, but whatlinkshere would at least get it kicked off. Rebecca 09:40, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
 * This is an interesting idea. I would be happy to get a bot-generated list once per day of articles that might be related to Germany, I would check them by hand and announce at the relevant announcement page myself. Whether the bot should work from Special:Newpages or from some Whatlinksheres or both should be tried out experimentally, whatever works best. Kusma (討論) 16:39, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Seems worth trying the experiment. - Jmabel | Talk 07:51, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Mass renaming
Per here and on each affected template's talk page (thread name "Template name"), please dispatch a bot to rename all transclusions/links of:
 * to
 * to
 * to
 * to
 * to
 * to

Thanks! David Kernow (talk) 10:22, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think there's really a need for that. It wastes a lot of resources making all those edits, and the templates redirect to each other anyway. — Mets501 (talk) 21:32, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Template substitution
Templates wc, ec and ec2 need substing into what appears to be thousands of articles. Chris cheese whine 20:10, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I can do this with AWB, though can I have a link that says they must be substed? ST47 Talk 20:56, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Template namespace. Chris cheese whine 20:59, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Country and Cities Pages
Hi, I'm trying to get some Country and City Wikipedia pages for use on a Google map travel site. The code is written in C# and works ok for other sites. On Wikipedia I get a 403 error when I read in a page. Do I need to register my site process as a bot or could I use an existing bot to get the pages ?

please
 * our robots.txt blocks all automated crawlers. I would recommend that you either [download.wikimedia.org download a database dump] or use google's cache. ST47 Talk 01:51, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks I'll try those --Seewhere.net 02:08, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

WebCite (External Link Archiving) Bot
"On Wikipedia, and other Wiki-based websites broken external links still present a maintenance problem." linkrot I am hoping someone takes on the task to write a WebCite-Bot, i.e. a bot which automatically feeds all cited URLs in Wikipedia to WebCite, which is a web archive similar to the Internet Archive, but with enhanced features such as on-demand archiving, and with a focus on scholarly material (as opposed to IA's shotgun-crawling-"archive-all-you-can"-approach). WebCite creates a snapshot (cached copy) of the cited URL, thereby archiving/preserving the cited webpage or webdocument (if caching was successful, the link to the snapshot should be added to the original URL on wikipedia). WebCite takes care of robot exclusion standards, no-cache tags etc on the cited page. If caching was successful, WebCite hands back a WebCite-ID, which should be added to the original link (for an example on how this could look like see examples below and also see the reference list at the bottom of the article http://www.jmir.org/2006/4/e27/ - all cited non-journal webpages also have a link to the WebCite snapshot). The benefit would be that all cited material will be automatically preserved and link rot, 404s or changes in the cited webpages will no longer be a problem. WebCite has an XML-based webservice which allows to communicate the caching request as well as to receive the WebCite ID if the caching was successful, see technical guide http://www.webcitation.org/doc/WebCiteBestPracticesGuide.pdf User:Eysen 19:45, 04 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Webcite usage is under discussion at WP:EL. Could be a great idea, but this type of citation usage is still a long way from mass replacement by bot.  ∴ here…♠ 02:21, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I have seen a bot dealing with 404 broken links running on Polish Wikipedia. I couldn't remeber the bot's name, but you can ask at pl:Wikipedia:Boty.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 05:34, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * The idea of WebCite is to prevent 404s in the first place by archiving the cited webpage immediately after they have been cited, i.e. archiving them prospectively and replacing the original URL with a link to the cited snapshot (in contrast, I assume that the Polish bot merely deletes or flags broken links). BTW - In the discussions on WebCite I have seen some misguided comments on copyright concerns - on that note one should stress that caching on the Internet is frequently done and does not constitute a copyright violation if no-cache tags and robot exclusion standards are honored (see also Webcite FAQ, which cites a recent lawsuit against Google, which Google won). While retrospective "mass replacement" makes little sense, at least cited URLs in new articles should be webcited as soon as possible. I am still hoping for a volunteer to write an experimental bot which hands over new wikipedia submissions to WebCite and replaces newly cited URLs with WebCite links or at least adds a WebCite link to the original reference (for how to do this including explanations of the XML-based webservice see WebCite FAQ. Below, I have given some examples on how this should look like. --Eysen 19:22, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

--snip--

It is proposed to develop a bot which - using the WebCite webservice - changes a reference (or even "naked" URLs) as follows:

Replace a reference like:

 * Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying", The Guardian, October 27, 2005, retrieved October 27, 2005.

with a reference like this

 * Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying", The Guardian, October 27, 2005, retrieved October 27, 2005, WebCited December 4th, 2006.

or this (in addition to the WebCite URL, the original URL might be given):

 * Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying", The Guardian, October 27, 2005, retrieved October 27, 2005, original URL: http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1601858,00.html, WebCited December 4th, 2006.

Alternatively, the cited URL can also be retained as part of the link to webcitation, to keep the cited URL explicit and to allow easy reverting to the original URL should this be desired:

 * Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying"], The Guardian, October 27, 2005, retrieved October 27, 2005, WebCited December 4th, 2006, archived URL:http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1601858,00.html&date=2006-12-04

--snap--

 * As a lowly peasant of wikipedia only, I think this is a great idea - PocklingtonDan 22:06, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Great - any volunteers to write a beta-bot to experiment with this?--Eysen 17:21, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

WP:Arch request
Hello again, I was wondering if one of you lovely people could help us out again - we've set up an Assement department and would like all adding to all of the stubs currently listed at WikiProject Architecture/Stub categories, starting with those articles with  and  tags. Cheers. --Mcginnly | Natter 12:06, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Ill take care of that Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 14:19, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I see the bots off and running already - cheers. Please share a cigar with me as a token of my appreciation - for all you americans out there - it's the best cuban.......--Mcginnly | Natter 00:06, 8 December 2006 (UTC)[[Image:Cigar tube and cutter.jpg|thumb|Relaxing with the bot crew with a nice cigar - yes! swirling the smoke around the tongue and never inhaling.]]
 * Back again, on a similar tack, is it possible to add the FA and GA criteria as well, just leaving the A's and B's for us to assess? --Mcginnly | Natter 00:53, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Idea for a bot - worthwhile or not?
(This isn't a bot request per se but an "is this worth doing" post - I can write the bot myself if people think its worth doing.)

I notice that one of the items permanently on the maintenance list is the Cleanup list and that the number of articles needing cleanup seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. I had an idea for a bot that might help with this problem. I could write this bot myself (already have one bot on trial) but wanted to get people's ideas for whether it was worthwhile, comments etc etc, before I started on it.

Brief scope as I see it now (amenable to change): Bot would be manually run or automatically run on an eg weekly basis. Bot would trawlCategory:All_pages_needing_cleanup and find any new additions since its last trawl. It would visit each new addition and pull a list of contributors. It would then leave a message on the talk page of (every contributor) or (last 10 contributors) or (article starter) or (contributors with 10+edits) or (whatever) notifying them that the article is in need of cleanup and listing tips for how they could help to achieve this etc.

What do you think? Worthwhile? Ideas? Comments? - PocklingtonDan 17:44, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a nag-bot though if it's only weekly, I don't have a complaint on that. I'd be willing to help out with this if you decide to go ahead with it - for example, AWB can be used to generate a list, and to find new additions to the list.(it can compare 2 lists of articles) AWB can also probably be used to find the last 10 people - it has support for C# modules. I'd have to think about that one. But yeah, it is a good idea! ST47 Talk 19:04, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * It would be a nag-bot essentially, yes. I'm not sure from your wording whether or not you're suggesting there is generally a policy agains the use of nag-bots?? It just seems that the articles needing cleanup list is getting bigger and bigger and, since bots cannot effectively clear up articles, the next best thing would be to run a bot to try and prod users into cleaning up articles. Can I get some more input on this, from multiple people before I go ahead? Which set of users do you think it would be fair to "nag"? Perhaps last 0-20 plus article originator?? Editors with top 10 number of edits for that article?? Top 10 most-editing editors from other articles in the category? I want to get a good impression of whether people think the general idea is a good one, and then hammer out a more specific scope/specification before I start work on the bot. Cheers - PocklingtonDan 19:32, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * If the talk page has a WikiProject tag, could you have the bot flag the attention parameter instead? This will place the article in "X articles needing attention" for the specific WikiProject (see for example Category:Hawaii articles needing attention).   Members of the projects are supposed to be watching these cats, so there's no reason to contact anyone. —Viriditas | Talk 21:03, 7 December 2006 (UTC):
 * This seems like a useful extra feature, certainly. Can you just explain to me exactly how the attention flag works etc? Is it a simple case of adding something like "attention=yes" to the poject banner? If so, I don't see why the bot couldn't set that flag if it was a project article, or else contact some of the editors if not a project article. - PocklingtonDan 21:40, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, exactly. See Template_talk:WikiProject_Hawaii for a brief description.  I doubt every WikiProject has the appropriate template, so your bot could check against a list of WikiProjects currently using the assessment template. —Viriditas | Talk 22:05, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you for all comments. This is now in request for approval - PocklingtonDan 12:40, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Spacing bot
Hi there!

I was wondering if it would be possible to run a spacing bot, either automated or manual, that puts spaces or newlines between wiki syntax and removes spaces or newlines if they weren't needed? Obviously it would have to be pretty simple so as not to get spacing wrong. I could probably knock something up in Yabasic pretty quickly, using an external program like Wget to handle getting and sending data from the page.

If anyone's interested I'll give an account of different wiki syntax that I believe spacing makes easier to understand (like putting spaces after bullet points before the text).

Cheers,

Yuser31415 @ ? # & <i style="color:darkgreen;">help!</i> 02:44, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

 * This seems pretty straight-forward; But is it a valuable use of resources? Jmax- 02:59, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Yes, if it makes wiki syntax while editing pages simpler to understand. By the way, what would be a good delay between each edit? Thanks, Yuser31415 @ ?  #  & <i style="color:darkgreen;">help!</i> 03:09, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

 * I'm skeptical; that's a lot of resources. Part of the rules of AWB states"Avoid making insignificant minor edits such as only adding or removing some white space"and although that's not official policy, it's generally accepted.  Would it change the way pages are displayed, or only their wikicode? — Mets501 (talk) 11:56, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

 * The reason for that rule is primarily that (a very few) people complained about such edits (for a number of reasons - one was that there was no "hide bots" option on the watchlist then). With the amount of AWB editing going on, were it to be relaxed, very likely most pages would be in conformance with AWB's "Genreal fixes" quite quickly.  However the nightmare scenario would be if a different framework had different standards.  So it could work, but would need a little planning and cooperation. Rich Farmbrough, 12:45 7  December 2006 (GMT).

 * I don't know how many resources the bot would use up. I expect I would just focus it in the main articlespace. With a 2-10 second delay between edits, it should give the server enough of a break as so not to notice any difference (of course, you're more knowledgeable in this than me). I would make a suggestion that it runs about once every day for a period of about one or two hours; is this acceptable? (To me, it sounds quite a long time, so feel obliged to point out a better timescale.) I'm not sure the rules of AWB take any standing with this, although I see how they could be a good guideline.
 * The only nightmare I see is if different people have different spacing or newline standards. However, my (personal!) rule is to use as much whitespace as possible.
 * I would like to see your input on this. Cheers, Yuser31415 19:28, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Any bot that does nothing but make wikitext prettier is a waste of resources. 10 seconds delay between edits means an extra 8640 edits per day with no benefit to readers. Whitespace edits also tend to make diffs more complicated, although nothing has happened. I am not convinced that this bot will benefit the encyclopedia at all, so any potential mild harm should count against it. Kusma (討論) 13:08, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Just a random user here, but I have to say i'm baffled as to what if any benefit the clearing of excess whitespace brings?????- PocklingtonDan 13:27, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi! I agree with your statement, "... so any potential mild harm should count against it", but I personally disagree with your other statement, "... any bot that does nothing but make wikitext prettier is a waste of resources". 10 seconds delay is too little for this sort of bot, I agree; if it was a 60-second pause then that means 60 edits per hour, ie. 120 edits if the bot runs for a two hour period. Whitespace, in my opinion, can make editing easier (and if there are, by any chance, two newlines in a row, they will be converted to one newline, therefore changing the display). It may be you are completely right; however, I just want to 'do my bit' to improve the encyclopedia. Perhaps, instead, I could write a bot to detect very short articles with no stub marker and report them to me, or as such. Any ideas? Cheers, Yuser31415 19:06, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
 * (removing indent) I applaud your wish to contibrute your programmign knowledge its just I personally think re-arranging whitespace is a poor use of your bot's time and the server's resources. If there isn't already such a thing, a bot that flags near-empty articles as stubs would seem a much better idea. If it was able to flag the stubs as project stubs based on the category it was in or article name (this would probably need to be manualy-assisted) then all the better. Why not start a new section on this page to discuss this and move these comments there? - PocklingtonDan 19:11, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi! I agree with your statement, "... so any potential mild harm should count against it", but I personally disagree with your other statement, "... any bot that does nothing but make wikitext prettier is a waste of resources". 10 seconds delay is too little for this sort of bot, I agree; if it was a 60-second pause then that means 60 edits per hour, ie. 120 edits if the bot runs for a two hour period. Whitespace, in my opinion, can make editing easier (and if there are, by any chance, two newlines in a row, they will be converted to one newline, therefore changing the display). It may be you are completely right; however, I just want to 'do my bit' to improve the encyclopedia. Perhaps, instead, I could write a bot to detect very short articles with no stub marker and report them to me, or as such. Any ideas? Cheers, Yuser31415 19:06, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
 * (removing indent) I applaud your wish to contibrute your programmign knowledge its just I personally think re-arranging whitespace is a poor use of your bot's time and the server's resources. If there isn't already such a thing, a bot that flags near-empty articles as stubs would seem a much better idea. If it was able to flag the stubs as project stubs based on the category it was in or article name (this would probably need to be manualy-assisted) then all the better. Why not start a new section on this page to discuss this and move these comments there? - PocklingtonDan 19:11, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

WP:HI assessment
Aloha. WikiProject Hawaii assessment is just getting started and we really need help. To start, I need a bot to replace the current WikiProject tag with the new tag   on every category talk page contained within Category:WikiProject Hawaii articles (please exclude the subcats). Thank you for your assistance! —Viriditas | Talk 21:51, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Will add that to the que Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 22:06, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your good work. Can you do the exact same thing for Category:Unassessed Hawaii articles?  I just noticed it is full of cats. —Viriditas | Talk 21:49, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Great job. Now, on to stub assessment. I would like to add to all talk pages in Category:Hawaii stubs (including subcats). Please add class=Stub to unassessed or untagged articles only, skipping articles where class is already flagged. Thank you again. —Viriditas | Talk 01:32, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

User:WatchlistBot can help you with this. I'm a bit behind right now, but I'll add it to my to-do list and contact you when I can get to it, if you can't find anyone to do it sooner. Ingrid 01:48, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your offer to help, Ingrid. Long time, no talk!  Hopefully, Betacommand will get to the stub assessment  before you do, because I want to talk to you about developing a dedicated WikiProject bot as well as utilizing WatchlistBot data.  For example, I would like to see an infobox on the WikiProject page displaying the top ten most active articles in the project.  Furthermore, along with what others are proposing regarding stubs, I was wondering if WatchlistBot could also monitor the Hawaii stub cats (mentioned above) for new additions, adding the WP tag and flagging class=Stub as needed. Thank you. —Viriditas | Talk 03:45, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Inform 152 users of Common.css change
Per discussions here, I need these 152 users informed of a change made recently to the common.css file so that they can restore their ability to view Persondata. The bot should leave the following notice on those users' talk pages: "Per recent discussions, the way in which Persondata is viewed by Wikipedia editors has changed. In order to continue viewing Persondata in Wikipedia articles, please edit your user CSS file to display table.persondata rather than table.metadata. More specific instructions can be found on the Persondata page." If there are any questions about this request, please ask me on my talk page rather than here. Thanks. Kaldari 08:33, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Done! ShakingSpirit <sup style="color:#000000;">talk  00:36, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

lowercase bot
Simply, this bot would check for lowercase tags on an article, then rename an article (let's say, "Test article") to "Thisisanarticleusedbylowercasebot". Then, the bot would rename "Thisisanarticleusedbylowercasebot" to "test article". It should be easy to create, and would only need to be run once. -Slash- 20:27, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Lowercase names aren't allowed my the MediaWiki software. — Mets501 (talk) 20:55, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

featured article counter
This a request for a bot that counts the number of items at Featured articles and puts that number into a template. Once the bot has proved reliable, it envisaged that the bot will be flagged to edit the protected page Template:FA number, which is used as a counter within the Main Page FA box.

A bit of background, in recent discussion at Talk:Main Page consensus was reached for an FA counter. Once it was implemented as template requiring manual updating, several FA regulars expressed their unhappiness with being asked to keep track of another page when pulling together the results of WP:FAC and WP:FARC. On the Talk:Main Page discussion, FA regulars suggested a bot solution, which seems to address everyone's concerns. In case anyone remembers the recent attempt to get approval for a bot to edit a protected page, Raul654 has stated that he would be willing to set its flag once it proves reliable.

It occurs to me (as opposed to me relaying the results of the discussion to date) that some sort of vandal-spoofing feature would be useful. Featured articles is already under semiprotection, but a particularly determined vandal might add or remove items to make the Main Page number jump. One idea is the use of a user whitelist (admins and selected non-admin FA regulars), in which the bot waits 15 minutes or so if anyone not on the whitelist adds or removes articles, to give time for vandalism to be reverted. (Yes, I'm paranoid.) Hopefully this description has made sense. Thanks! - BanyanTree 13:43, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Seems pretty straight-forward; I'll let you know once I've set up a test page. --Jmax- 05:51, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Alright, See User:Jmax-bot/FACounter. I am in the middle of requesting approval for this bot.  I will also need a list of whitelisted editors for WP:FA. --Jmax- 02:31, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, is there a GA botcounter? b_cubed 21:00, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
 * It doesn't look like it. The number at Good articles is updated manually. - BanyanTree 21:44, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Biography stubs
Any chance that I can get a bot to go through Category:Unassessed biography articles on the Biography Wikiproject, and have it label any that are stubs as a stub in Wikiproject Biography's rating? I know there's a bot that's doing something similar, but that one's more purpseful in finding unassessed ones rather than assessing some. -- Wizardman 05:56, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Anyone? If there's a way to do it on AWB, how would I go about doing that then? -- Wizardman 00:52, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * You might want to take a look at Kingboyk's AWB plugin. It seems to be what you're looking for. — Mets501 (talk) 01:45, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Exactly what I was looking for, thanks. -- Wizardman 02:35, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * No problem. — Mets501 (talk) 02:42, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Datebot
Is there anyway that a bot capable of unwikilinking dates (specifically years) could be made? I read a lot of articles that contain such wikilinked dates, e.g. 1942 or 1784, which really add nothing to the article. I am aware, that as it stands now, the wikipedia policy on dates is to have all of the date wikilinked. However, in practice, there has been a growing trend with FA articles to unlink the dates. Personally I think a bot capable of this would be very useful. I'm not sure how to do it otherwise I'd try myself. The only concern is that you'd have to make sure it doesn't unlink the "fuller" dates, e.g. November 20 1983. (if you can respond on my talk page it would be helpful) b_cubed 19:52, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

 * If given the go-ahead I could probably write this myself, but I'll wait for further input first. Please note I'll be away for a few hours; I'll get back to you then. Cheers! Yuser31415 20:29, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Objections were raised that: ::*It would lead to overlinking - ie wikipedia doesn't want every year linked. ::*Four-digit numbers could be used as a number or a year. ie "In the year 2000, X did Y" or "X led 2000 troops into battle" ::*Numbers can refer to something more specific ie "2000 AD" or whatever that Judge Dredd comic is. ::*Numbers could be years, but as part of fuller strings, ie "Battle of Suessonia (1976)" should link tot he whole battle article, not just the year. ::*It wouldn't be possible to have a sufficiently clever bot to get round these caveats, so it would probably have to be manually-assisted and would thus represent a massive amount of work. ::Note the above are my recollections of what I read of a discussion of this same idea elsewhere

 * Ignore me, didn't read properly, thought your edits were going to be in the opposite direction (ie linking, not delinking). Oops - PocklingtonDan 21:46, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I can set it up and have it run just getting the linked to years Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 21:42, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Out of curiosity does anyone know if a bot like this has been made before? Additionally, would someone be willing to explain how to make bots? b_cubed 04:24, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I use AWB/Pywikipedia framework but this is a simple find and replace command that I could do fairly simply. Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 06:25, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
 * With regard to how to make bots, there is a new guide being written at Creating a bot. It is not yet complete - PocklingtonDan 09:37, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
 * So for myself to get a bot of this kind, would I need someone else to write the code for me or do I need to figure it out? Although I suppose it technically wouldn't matter whose bot it was, as it would help edit wikipedia, I wanted to have one of my own (assuming of course that its usefulness is approved). b_cubed 20:59, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Either/or would work. I would offer to write this for you but already got a bot development project on the go. If you have programming experience check out the creating a bot guide i linked above, and you should be able to do this yourself. if not, you'll have to hang around til someone with free time and programming skills reads this post - PocklingtonDan 17:29, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Looks like I will be waiting around. b_cubed 19:12, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Stub detector and marker bot
[Copied from above]: (removing indent) I applaud your wish to contibrute your programmign knowledge its just I personally think re-arranging whitespace is a poor use of your bot's time and the server's resources. If there isn't already such a thing, a bot that flags near-empty articles as stubs would seem a much better idea. If it was able to flag the stubs as project stubs based on the category it was in or article name (this would probably need to be manualy-assisted) then all the better. Why not start a new section on this page to discuss this and move these comments there? - PocklingtonDan 19:11, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd love to. How does everyone feel about this? Yuser31415 00:56, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Manually assisted I'd be fine with, but a bot going around analyzing articles and tagging them is a little unnerving for me. -- Mets501 (talk) 11:54, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
 * You are correct. My simple definition of a stub would be an article of 10 or less sentences; this could be manually assisted, the user giving appropriate stub markers, or the bot could just mark the article as a and move on. How does this sound? Cheers, Yuser31415 06:22, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Since you are able to write this yourself, I would move straight to the request for approval stage rather than posting here - you'll soon find out whether or not people think your proposal is any good there. If this is your first bot, make sure to follow the guidelines for the request process, including setting up a user page for your bot etc and writing a full spec - see other examples on the request for approval page - PocklingtonDan 19:22, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Okay, I will when I have time :). At the moment I am trying to figure out how to upload the text, it is a bit harder than I thought. I may use one of the frameworks yet. Cheers! Yuser31415 07:05, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Categorize
I recently created a new category Cars of England. There are quite a few cars from england, and it's quite tedious to add them all. I do, however, has a list of categories that list cars from manufacturers in England. Is there a way to have a bot add the category to all the articles found in these sub-categories? Thanks, Riguy 07:13, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

 * AutoWikiBrowser can probably do this. Can you give me the names of the sub categories, so I can give it a try? Jayden54 10:00, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Yea sure. Here are the sub categories I have so far: Category:Aston Martin vehicles, Category:Bentley vehicles, Category:Land Rover vehicles, Category:Lotus vehicles, Category:Rolls-Royce vehicles, Category:TVR vehicles.  Thanks for your help,  Riguy talk/contribs 03:12, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

 * I've done all the articles in those categories (around 160), and they've been added to the new category. Let me know when you have any other categories I need to do. Cheers, Jayden54 21:31, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

 * OK, thanks a lot for your help! Riguy talk/contribs 23:13, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Orphan article bot
Does anyone want to take over tagging orphan articles with linkless? The actual tagging is simple with AWB, just load Special:Lonelypages (it refreshed Saturdays/Wednesdays as of mid-November) and run the bot, it will make about 800 edits each refresh. I can supply you with the regex I used to ignore an array of pages that should not be tagged (dab pages, pages to be transwikid, various other odd stuff). You would also want to maintain a list of orphaned articles, you can see what I mean at User:W.marsh/orphans articles/A-C.

The one hitch is that you will also want to de-orphan the ignored articles somehow or other, you could create a list of orphaned dab pages and so on from your userspace, or manually add them to Links to disambiguation pages (which is what I did, hence the burnout after 6 months most likely). It takes maybe 2-3 hours a week (almost all on the manual stuff), maybe 5-10 minutes plus bot time if you just do the tagging and output the skipped articles to lists in your userspace.

The more automation you can add (e.g. automatically updated lists) the faster this would be, unfortunately I could never add much except automated tagging with AWB. It's not glamerous work (for every 3,000 or so edits my bot made, I got about one reply on my talk page) but I think it's helpful work, I did notice a whole lot of articles getting de-orphaned within a few days after the tag was added. --W.marsh 15:37, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
 * can you give me the regex? Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 20:11, 13 December 2006 (UTC) Ill take over some of the task. Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 20:11, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
 * The regex I used to ignore articles was:
 * linkless|geodis|copyvio|{{Disambig|this AfD|This page has been deleted|#redirect|dated prod|4LA|{{dab}}|{{hndis|{{disamb|numberdis|4CC|3CC|2CC|Schooldis|Shipindex|Tempdab|Wikipedia does not currently have an encyclopedia article for|{{wi}}|{{surname|4CC|TLAdisambig|{{deleted|{{move to|{{dicdef
 * It's crude but it worked pretty well. But you'll need to maintain some kind of a list, or use a non-AWB bot that can check "what links here" or special:lonelypages will just give you the same articles every refresh. --W.marsh 20:18, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Census Bot
We have a lot of articles about individual US towns, many of which refer to the "2000 census" in their introductions. As we have an article for the United States Census, 2000, maybe somebody could script a bot to wikify those references. Cribcage 07:43, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Are they in any specific category, or is there any other way I can track them? --Jmax- 08:04, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Are these the articles that were created by Rambot? If so you might want to speak to that bot's owner about it – Gurch 13:58, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Contact the people listed on Translators available
Hello, I've upgraded with others Translation into English which is now here : Translation.

One thing we decided is to migrate from one big static page with all the available translators (which is heavy, hard to maintain, never up-to-date) to two userbox templates (Translator and Proofreader) so 1) all the work is done automatically by the categories 2) each translator has a link to the translation page on his user page.

To migrate from the old system to the new one, since they were a lot of people, I need a bot which would go through every user listed on Translators available, and which would let the following message on his talk page :

Jmfayard 18:22, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Ok. I'll get this done for you ASAP. --Jmax- 20:19, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I have asked for clarification of policy for this request. I am still a relatively new editor, and am not completely familiar with WP:BOT.  Sorry for the delay. --Jmax- 03:44, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Please postpone this. I want to do changes to this system before we contact everybody. Jmfayard 16:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
 * A pretty trivial bot, lemme know when you want it run -- Tawker 08:17, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

New user bot?
Can someone make a bot which places new user templates on someone's talk pages? If you can, I would seriously appreciate it! Bushc a rrot ( Talk·Desk ) 23:20, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Such requests are usually denied, unfortunately. --Jmax- 03:01, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
 * If you haven't done so already, I would suggest contacting User:FrummerThanThou, who is trying to put together a proposal for this that everyone is happy with - PocklingtonDan 10:16, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Wow, I wanted to do exactly that. But, I don't know bot code. :-( Can someone help me?  B e  arly  541  13:49, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
 * There is no such thing as "bot code". Bots can be programmed in several languages. Read Creating_a_bot. Cheers - PocklingtonDan 13:55, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

WP:AIV-Clearing Bot?
Is it possible to make a bot that automatically removes users that are blocked? Often times admins forget to remove users that they block or spend time blocking the user and putting the appropriate message(s) on the blocked user's page. Or, sometimes when there are a large number of notices on WP:AIV they will go through blocking users first, waiting until a bit later to remove users. So, to help with efficiency (by cutting down on conflicts) a bot might be useful. --  tariq abjotu  00:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Check with Voice of All; he has a bot that does something similar on WP:RPP, so he probably has the framework that would be necessary already and could make needed modifications, rather than writing a whole new bot. Essjay   ( Talk )  01:14, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Do you mean something like: user A adds vandal B to AIV. admin C blocks vandal B, but forgets to remove him from AIV. bot D looks through all block logs of people listed at AIV every... 1 minute?... and sees that vandal B has been blocked, then edits AIV to remove the vandal, and posts on vandal B's talkpage about being blocked? Seems simple enough I might be able to give my framework a go. GeorgeMoney (talk) 05:31, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd be able to add this to VoABot I I suppose. It would just AJAX down the usernames looking at the ipblocklist for that user, if they are blocked, it could removed the name.  Voice -of- All  07:39, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Article/Talk Page latest revision date/time
As part of some work I am carrying out on Scottish Historic Railways, I have created a progress and reference page in my user space at User:Pencefn/Historical Scottish Railways. I would like to add the latest revision date/time into the table for the article and associated talk page on the second and fourth column respectively - which is updated to reflect the work in progress (covering updates to articles and the potential addition of more articles). Can anyone help me? Stewart 19:16, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
 * How often do you need it run? If not just once, then this may not be a valuable use of resources.  Not my call to make, however.  If deemed otherwise, I'd be glad to assist. -- Jmax- 20:55, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I guess once every two or three weeks. This is my first foray into the use of bots, so advice, guidance, etc. gratefully received. Stewart 21:08, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

UNsigned Comments IN Ref Desk/Welcome
Whoever puts any comments on REF desk without signing should be given a welcome template, so they will sign next time. (only if they don't have the welcome template already).--Judged 23:10, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
 * You should ask Hagerman about this (his bot HagermanBot already puts unsigned templates on unsigned user comments). — Mets501 (talk) 23:57, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Neutrality template categories
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to everyone. I'm curious if anyone knows of any bots working the neutrality template categories. I would like to know what percentage of articles have neutrality-related tags by WikiProject and have a report generated, with a template updated on the project page (Pearle produced a similar report listing articles needing cleanup). After the report is generated, the template on the project page could be updated with a percentage linking to the category of WikiProject-related neutrality issues. Something like, "12% of articles require attention for neutrality-related issues." WikiProject departments would deal with this. The bot would only need to be run once a week. Thanks. —Viriditas | Talk 03:33, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Massively multiplayer online games Banner Bot
I was wondering if someone with a bot would be able to place banners for WikiProject Massively multiplayer online games on all talk pages (including non-existant ones) in the category of Category:Massively multiplayer online games including it's sub-categories. This need not be a reoccurring event, but it is necessary to get this WikiProject up and running. Any help is appreciated! Greeves 04:31, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I should be able to start within the next 24 hours —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Betacommand (talk • contribs) 05:39, 19 December 2006 (UTC).
 * Not to be rude, but when will you be starting? It has almost been a week. If you cannot do it, would there be any other bot owners willing to help? By the way, the tag to place on the talk pages is WP_MMOG. Thanks in advance and have a merry Christmas! Greeves 00:00, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
 * He started today (my watchlist is now full of "Tagging for " ^_^)  ShakingSpirit <sup style="color:#000000;">talk  00:41, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Great! Thanks Betacommand! Greeves 17:10, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Not a problem just spread the word about my bot and the availability of it :) Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 01:14, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Permprot application
A bot would be needed to carry this task following a modification to Permprot: Circeus 21:14, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Look linked pages in the template: namespace.
 * If the page uses, add doc=yes as a parameter to Permprot.
 * Basically no bots have admin rights, so this has to be done by hand. — Mets501 (talk) 02:25, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Permprot is a talk page header. Circeus 02:31, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
 * can I get a few links to what you are talking about (examples)? Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 02:47, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I think he means pages like Template:POV. — Mets501 (talk) 03:03, 26 December 2006 (UTC)
 * No. Stuff like template talk:Cite news. However, the problem is actually that template:permprot is not too widely used, and maybe I should make similar edits to Template:Protected template instead, which will then make the bot request far more useful, by making it clear that edits to the documentation (quite frequent) can be made directly. Circeus 03:16, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

AfD alert bot
Given that my proposal for an additional step to the AfD process (found here) is meeting both opposition and the suggestion that the job could be better done by a bot, I've brought that proposal here. The suggestion is a reasonably simple one:

 * 1) Once or twice a day (preferably the latter), the bot would scan through the list of AfD nominations at WP:AFD/T.
 * 2) For each nomination, it would check the history to find the creator and creation date of the article;
 * 3) If the article is older than four months, it is ignored and the bot continues to scan the other nominations.
 * 4) If it is younger than four months, the process continues.
 * 5) The bot then moves to the User Talk page of the article's creator, and checks that it does not already contain an instance of AFDWarning or AFDNote for that article.
 * 6) If there is none, it places  ArticleName -- ~  at the bottom of the page. No new section is required, since the template creates its own.
 * 7) Finally, it returns to WP:AFD/T and continues.

This would avoid the bureaucracy that is the major criticism of my original proposal, and (hopefully) significantly reduce the problems of biting that I raised there. Thanks! Daveydw ee b ( chat/review! ) 01:11, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

 * I should note that I would be happy to manually run this bot once or twice daily, if it were not fully automated. Daveydw ee b ( chat/review! ) 01:34, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
 * If there is currently no system in place to notify users that articles they started are nominated for deletion then I think this is a great idea. I am unable to offer you any help right now due to other commitments but if you need help coding this in a week or so I could help. You can start the approvals request process without actually having any code written, which will tell you if it is a good idea or whether to give it up. - PocklingtonDan 19:19, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Support - this sounds like a really good idea, and I was wondering if any progress has been made. I can write this bot from scratch if necessary, just let me know. Jayden54 18:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

 * I have listed this request on Requests for approval so if have any comments or suggestions, please list them there. Cheers, Jayden54 20:01, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

deadlink removal
I'm using the Weblinkchecker.py bot and have a whole load of bad links. Is there a way to have a bot remove them from the articles? (I reaize that this could be hard, since we have refs and [] links) One output looks like: ST47 Talk 22:13, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
 * http://www.zbi.ee/fungal-genomesize/index.php
 * In Animal Genome Size Database on Tue Sep 12 01:04:24 2006, Socket Error: (10054, 'Connection reset by peer')
 * In C-value on Wed Nov 29 14:41:33 2006, Socket Error: (10060, 'Operation timed out')

 * I was looking at replace.py for this, and, well, it's ugly. Every link would need me to run the bot another time, with different parameters. I'm thinking a .BAT file with each replacement.
 * RegExes I will place here for development purposes
 * [\[| ]end tag
 * To
 * Tested in AWB, didn't work. Any other ideas? ST47 Talk 19:22, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Eagle_101, king of regular expressions, says:
 * ( |\])
 * I don't think simply removing dead links is a good idea at all. The linkw as presumably added for a reason - because it held good content. Because of web caching services such as google and alexa and WebCite etc this information may still be available eve thought he original link is dead. I would not want a bot siply removing the dead link without giving people a chance to manually update or find a caches copy of the linked page - PocklingtonDan 14:53, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Definitely NOT a good idea, though an understandable desire: Dead external links specifically says that dead links are NOT to be removed.
 * Definitely NOT a good idea, though an understandable desire: Dead external links specifically says that dead links are NOT to be removed.

 * On the other hand, TAGGING such dead links or otherwise marking them could be a GREAT idea - then other editors would know that a problem existed when they read the article with the bad link in it. A similar concept is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links; it has been suggested that a template be put immediately after the bad link; the template would display the problem (as does, for example,  ), and could contain a link ("more"; "help", whatever) that a user could click on to get to an instruction page that would discuss possible ways to fix the bad external link.  John Broughton  |  Talk 00:54, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Category counts
I'm trying to find out how many articles and categories ultimately descend from Category:Dungeons & Dragons and how many of these are stubs (both by categorization and by byte/word count). Lists would be good if possible. For comparison sake, I'm also seeking similar numbers for Category:Chess. This is for the following purposes:

 * See how much of Wikipedia as a whole is given over to D&D. (It seems to me D&D exposure is much higher among Wikipedians than the general population.)
 * Determine whether sweeping mergers are called for, into titles one level less specific (e.g. Dwarven deities in the World of Greyhawk rather than the individual deities).

Neon Merlin  23:56, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
 * There are 1041 articles in categories branching from Category:Chess. In order to collect the statistics you desire, I would have to request each of those pages and perform a character count.  I'll speak to someone from the Bot Approvals Group and see if they'll let me perform this, or what I must do in order to.  -- Jmax- 21:30, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
 * PockBot would give you a list of all articles in category, as well as their article class (eg stub) - PocklingtonDan 16:28, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

source: wikimedia

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 8