Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 8

message: This bot will be used in the assistance and correction of pages using footnotes.  No proposed name has yet been suggested for the username and the code for this is still unwritten.
I am proposing that the bot performs like this:
(all pages refer to subpages of the bot's user space or a Wikipedia Project page)
# Every hour, check for articles listed by users at a /To Do/   subpage... either at its user page or a Wikipedia project page
# Fix template usage of the footnotes on that page and re-arrange them in order on the given page
# Remove added article on the /To Do/ page to /Completed/   subpage.
The initial suggestion was to actually browse all pages using the template.  I think that's a bad idea, as we're at half a million articles and the amount of pages the bot needs to work at is really limited.  Personally, I like the idea of having a dog like bot where you tell it, "Fix bot, fix." is a better implementation.  That way, 1) it doesn't need to bog the Wikipedia down searching for articles it needs to fix, 2) articles can be fixed when they need to.  Users would just simply leave the footnotes out of order and the bot would come around to correct the ordering. -- AllyUnion (talk) 06:53, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There have been several different footnote proposals and corresponding templates.  Would this theoretical bot be working with Wikipedia:Footnote3?  Certainly crawling all articles that use footnotes would put undue burden on the site.  But much of the point of the bot would be to catch footnotes which accidentally get put out of order.  A good compromise would be to load the "todo" page with the results of a Wikipedia:Database download analysis.  It would also be nice to convert all pages to use the same footnoting system, but that might require broader community consensus.  (Unless there are only a few non-standard pages, in which case they can be re-done by hand.) -- Beland 01:08, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don't know about the theoretical bot, but you can look at the SEWilcoBot contributions and see what it does to articles when I use my References bot.  It's under development and I run it as a Footnote3 helper on specific articles.  There is a style discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Footnote3#Footnotes_vs._inline_web_references.  (SEWilco 02:40, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Footnote bot 

message: I'd like permission to use a bot to update the pages on Dutch municipalities. Things the bot wants to do: update population etc. to 2005; add coordinates to infobox; add articles to the proper category. After that, I may use it as well for adding infoboxes to the articles on Belgian municipalities, and perhaps those of other countries. Eugene van der Pijll 21:45, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bot to update Dutch municipalities info 

message: I'd like permission to maintain a small collection of read-only psychology and mental health-only related material through a bot. This bot would prevent search engine indexing, and limit accesses via its interface. Given the tiny percentage of material I'm interested in, downloading and parsing the enormous database dumps is not an option given my limited server resources. Thank you. -- Docjohn (talk) 12:31, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Psychology and mental health content only bot 

message: I'm requesting permission for a bot still being in development: User:RCBot. Its purpose is to help with issues on the Wikipedia Commons. There is only one task that the bot is supposed to do at the moment: help renaming media files on the commons. Suppose there were two identical files (e.g. images) on the Commons that might even have been uploaded from different language Wikipedias. But media files on the Commons can be used in any language Wikipedia and so all languages need to be checked and – if necessary – the reference to the first file replaced by one to the other. This is what the bot is supposed to do and it therefore also needs permission in the English wikipedia. — Richie 18:24, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  RCBot 

message: Heya.
I've created this account to do some boring and exhausting little jobs, like correcting the 700 inbound links each to a set of 40 or so pages to be moved.
May I please have bot status?
James F. (talk) 22:50, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  JdforresterBot ("James F. Bot") 

message: Adding Wikipedia:Introduction header enforcement for the top two lines. -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:59, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikipedia:Introduction, Sandbot header enforcement 

message: This bot has been uploading maps for a little while now, blissfully unaware of the existence of this page.
It's a little wrapper around upload.py
Apparently there's a bot flag I need, so I'm listing it here. Lupin 00:29, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  LupinBot 

message: I would like to use pywikipedia's solve_disambiguation.py to facilitate my disambiguation work. 
I created an account User:WouterBot for this and now I would like your permission to use it. WouterVH 14:27, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  WouterBot 

message: Shouldn't User:Pending deletion script be listed on Wikipedia:Bots? Gdr 20:03, 2005 May 12 (UTC)
: No, because it's a dev's bot, and should be watched anyway. -- AllyUnion (talk) 00:52, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  That and it seems to be done. -- AllyUnion (talk) 00:53, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pending deletion script 

message: I've finished a bot that can upload quotes as well as other financial data (such as market cap, dividends, etc) on publically traded companies daily, from the machine readable interface provided by Yahoo Finance. It downloads a list of stock symbols and the format template from wiki pages, then sticks them data for each symbol in its own page in the Template namespace (something like Template:Stock:AAPL, for example).* Is this something that people are interested in? I guess it boils down to a somewhat philosophical question as to whether this kind of timely information should be considered "encyclopedic".
* Does this violate Yahoo Finance's Terms of Service or any other legal considerations? Most stock ticker apps that I know of use Yahoo Finance's interface for data, but it may be different for something of this scale.
Questions:
Taak 20:51, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Exactly how many symbols are we talking about?  I think it is a good idea, but it seems a bit excessive.  I find that "linking" the stock symbol would be better. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:07, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  It could work for as many symbols as desired. It would download the list from a wiki page. Taak 18:40, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  What I'm mainly concern is that there are so many symbols for companies and that such a bot may overtax the servers for updating market information every time the market closes... depending on which market you're talking about and such... -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:53, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a valid concern, but how many edits/day would it take to be noticeable? If it was updating daily it could certainly run during only off-peak hours. If we could get some numbers here we could figure it out. Taak 02:22, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  The question would be more of how many pages and how many symbols are we talking about, and which markets are you referring to.  Furthermore, I'd very much prefer to keep the bot's edits out of the template space.  Template:Stock:AAPL seems a bit excessive and rather unusual.  Let me see here...  the NYSE starts at around 9 AM ET and closes at 5 PM ET.  So, you'd have about 16 hours to update NYSE stocks.  Assuming if you updated a page every 30 seconds, which is the typical recommended editing speed, you'd only be able to update 1920 stocks out of the 2800 stocks traded on NYSE.  That only gives you 68.6% of all the stocks on NYSE.  Assuming if we allow you to "push" the limit, having an edit period of 10 second apart... 28000 seconds which is 466 minutes and 40 seconds which is 7 hours, 46 seconds, and 40 seconds.  So, you'd have to have your bot edit at least 15 second part each day to update stock information on all NYSE traded stocks.  Do you think it still is a bit excessive? -- AllyUnion (talk) 07:11, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: I've been thinking of something similar for currencies. How about this: only do full updates once a week (but stagger it through the week) except for particularly volatile stocks (say, stocks that have gone up/down by more than a certain amount since the previous day). But anyway: surely not every NYSE company is notable enough to have a wikipedia article? (I checked - 192 articles in :Category:Companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange) --Taejo | Talk 12:48, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  tickerbot