Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 3

message: I can't help but notice (from hitting "Random page" over and over) that Wikipedia is chock full of information about Tolkien's universe, and that a bunch of it mirrors how Wikipedia treats the real universe.  For example, just like there is a List of Danish monarchs, there is also a list of Kings of Gondor.  And if you look at, say, the page of the Gondorian king Atanatar II, you'll see one of those "preceded by/followed by" boxes, just like on the page of Eric VI of Denmark.  So clearly, these Tolkien fans have put quite a bit of effort into their corner of Wikipedia.  Furthermore, many and quite possibly most of these Tolkien-related pages mention some year or years in the fictional timeline.  So, although I'm not particularly into Tolkien myself, I wonder if people would like to have "Tolkien years" pages similar to the existing "real years" pages (and similarly, decades pages, centuries pages, et cetera, and potentially stuff like "Middle-earth leaders by year" to echo the real life "leaders by year" pages).  Tolkien pages could then link to 2037 TA (i.e. "2037 Third Age"), for example, instead of just having it be plain text.  If so, clearly a bot would be the way to go to build the base year/decade/century/etc. pages, which could then be populated by Tolkien fans at leisure.  If people are interested, and there's not significant opposition, I might be willing to write such a bot (no promises yet).  So, any interest or opposition? -Rwv37 06:33, May 5, 2004 (UTC)
:Personally, I would think that there wouldn't be enough material to have individual year pages for Tolkien--hell, most of the real year pages are terrible (see 500-1300 for some prime examples).  Honestly, more Tolkien isn't a huge priority for me, but I would support the idea if that's your thing.  Just make sure you don't create a bunch of pages with no possible content. Meelar 06:44, 5 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I like this idea. -- pne 11:47, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Tolkien Timeline Bot

message: Wikipedia:List_of_encyclopedia_topics lists many, if not mostly, topics which should be redirects or diambig pages.  Some are very obvious, such as all the counties.  Other articles have been deemed so seldom worthy of entry to be siphoned off into another page (that is, the list of viruses.)  Therefore, I'd like to write a script to do the following things:
# Remove viruses and worms from all the lists to be inserted into the list of viruses.
# Remove user-created non-redirect articles with content over some number of characters.
# Place all user-created redirects onto a page for scanning down by eye.  For all those that seem sensible, they'll also be removed.
# Compare every topic on the list with existing topics to determine if the names are different from current topics by the addition of words (the name of states or middle names in most cases).  This will create a long list of script-proposed topics and redirect/disambiguation that I could scan for sensibility.
# After scanning down the list, the script would make each disamb/redirect.
# Finally, these would be removed from the lists, but rather than remove them from the numbered pages entirely, they'll be placed under a heading for each page so that other users can scan them for sensibility.  The format would show both the old and redirected/disambiged links like "First Last -> First M. Last" and "Some County -> Some County, Texas & Some Country, Maryland"
I would try to make the script to edit each page on the list of topics once, but it would in all likelihood create thousands of redirect/disambig pages.  The vast majority of these would be orphans.  This has been discussed at Wikipedia talk:List of encyclopedia topics.  Basically, if the orphans are kosher, I think a script should be made to eliminate the easy ones.  If they're a bad idea, I think this should be made immediately clear. CHL 04:14, 14 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Bot to eliminate a lot of repetitive work on "List of encyclopedia topics"

message: I'd like to use a robot to upload certain series of pictures available on en: to cy: (for example, pictures of all the Popes). Does the downloading-from-en: part count as something I should ask permission for here? Marnanel 04:50, May 29, 2004 (UTC)
:No, you only need permission here if your bot would be editing. If it is just downloading from here, I think that all you need to do is follow our robots.txt. Angela. 05:17, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Downloading images

message: I'd like to run the pywikipediabot as D6. Would you mark it as a bot? -- User:Docu
:As there were no objections for over a week, D6 is now marked as a bot. Angela. 23:24, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: D6

message: How fast can a human edit? One user seems to do sustained periods of editing at 3 to 4 edits a minute. Is this possible or an unauthorized bot? How fast do bots usually edit? Rmhermen 20:53, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)
:I edited at that rate when I was fixing  messages. I don't think it's a problem, unless the user is making major edits. Guanaco 22:02, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: How fast can a human edit?

message: I would like to run the pywikipediabot as User:Guanabot to bypass redirects (twentieth century –> twentieth century), perform disambiguation, and update interwiki links. Guanaco 21:34, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: As there were no objections for over a week, Guanabot is now marked as a bot. Angela. 23:24, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

text: I'm not sure what you mean.  What would you put in a Vegetarian article that's not suitable for coverage in Vegetarianism? VV 21:41, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

text: Guanaco, "Vegetarian" might not be the best example, but there are plenty of redirects that are not so similar. When you say "I don't plan on...", how are you making that decision? Does the bot have some sort of title-parsing logic built in, or are you deciding on each one (which seems unlikely since it's a bot)? Hob 15:05, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

text: I am now running it on disambiguation pages with a 35 second delay. There is no reason to believe that this will cause problems, and there has been no objection to its use on disambiguation pages. If it makes a reasonable amount of edits without trouble, please reinstate its bot flag. Guanaco 00:29, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok. Angela. 19:47, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

text: This is a good idea. If you create any custom scripts for this, or for bypassing redirects (which is very useful after page moves) please publish them as part of the pywikipediabot project (or elsewhere if this is too much hassle). Deco 22:32, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Guanabot