Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 4

message: I have written a disambiguation bot that looks for very specific text in pages and then changes that text. The current plan in to disambiguate Hispanic which has over 30,000 pages linking to it (the vast majority of those are from the data put in by User:Rambot). I was using the solve_disambiguation.py but even that is just way too slow and tedious.
So I wrote my own bot. I registered User:KevinBot to run the bot.
The way the bot works is as follows:
#Gets the pages that link to Hispanic.
#Get's the text of each of these pages.
#Searches through the text for "% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race."
#If the text does not exist it does nothing to the page.
#If the text does exist it changes it to "% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race."
#It submits the page back as a minor edit with a summary that is TBD.
Also, the bot has more than one throttle so I can slow it down to whatever threshold is deemed appropriate.
Note: this is a custom bot and is not related in any way to the python bots.
I am not yet done testing the bot, but I thought I'd throw it up here for consensus so that when I am finished testing I can get right to running it.
Kevin Rector 05:05, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)
:Some time ago, we discussed changes need to the Asian references included in most of the same articles (by Rambot). They are even more in need of fixing as they lead not just to a disambiguation page, but to the wrong article and we can't really make Asia into a disambiguation page. 
:I was going to try to fix them with the py-bot, but it's obviously preferable if you'd include them in a series of changes you will be doing with your bot, as the number of articles to be covered is very high. 
:So if there is a possibility that you include a change to Asian in your edits, that would be great.
:-- User:Docu
::I can do that, but I'd need to know what to change it to. I would suppose that it should be changed to Asian. Is that what it should point to? Kevin Rector 13:01, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
:::Yes, though I can't locate the previous discussion. Personally, I'd prefer to use redirects such [[Asian (US census)|Asian] ], but Asian is much better than the present solution. -- User:Docu
I agree with Docu on changing Asian and thanks to Kevin for stepping up to fix this. I'd prefer Asian (note the full stops and capitalization) over Asian because Rambot was changing all the links to point to Race (U.S. Census)<nowiki> before he vanished without finishing. I personally think linking all of these racial labels to the same place is confusing, so the links should direct to [Asian American|Asian], [Hispanic American|Hispanic], etc., but using <nowiki>Asian allows us to change this linkage to Race (U.S. Census)<nowiki> should the consensus change. We should also link to <nowiki>White and Pacific Islander (U.S. Census) and change "African American" to "Black and African American" (per census wording). --Jiang 05:23, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: the problem with using Hispanic and Asian and White is that if we want it to link to the race articles instead, then we will need your bot to run the thousands of changes. It is much easier to have Hispanic and Asian and White and have Hispanic (U.S. Census) and Asian (U.S. Census) and White (U.S. Census) all redirect to Race (U.S. Census). This way, it reduces down to a matter of changing the redirects rather than running a bot on thousands of articles. --Jiang 06:06, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Disambiguation Bot / Rambot data

message: I'd like to write a bot to import the FCC's list of US broadcast stations including FM, AM, and Television. Nothing's been written yet but I wanted to make sure this was okay to do before I bothered to do any work. If someone else wants to do it, that's great. I'm willing to do it but I don't want to duplicate effort. Not sure whether I'd start from scratch or use the python bot.
Posted a request on the pump yesterday but I didn't get any replies, so I thought I'd bring it here. Following is my comment from the pump. Rhobite 15:43, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)
:The lists of radio stations in the US are a little jumbled, e.g. List of radio stations in Massachusetts, List of radio stations in Ohio, List of radio stations in Oregon. Each state's page is formatted differently and contains different kinds of information. There are thousands of licensed stations in the US.
:One of the few things the FCC's done right is publishing downloadable data  . You can get a list of all the stations in the US. Thoughts on importing this data into Wikipedia? There are something like 8500 FM stations listed, so I'm not sure if that list includes defunct or trivial stations. Anyway we could filter by certain criteria like wattage, I'd have to do more research to find out possible filters. I could write the bot to do this but it might take a while given my schedule. Rhobite 04:26, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
::8500 is not a large number for the entire United States, considering that many major cities have dozens of radio stations, and not all radio stations are limited to major cities. I'd say, put them all in. Derrick Coetzee 16:43, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'd like to see it, myself, and hope you could find a way to do the same thing with television stations. Rhymeless 19:53, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bot to import FCC stations 

message: Does anyone have a link to the discussion of this bot?  I couldn't find it. anthony (see warning) 03:09, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: My bot was created several months ago and was given a bot flag after discussions with Brion Vibber on IRC. It is used almost exclusively for uploading batches of files that I don't feel like uploading manually. I just added it to this page today because that is the first time I'd run across this page. Nohat 05:59, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds fine to me. anthony (see warning) 11:06, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: NohatBot

message: I've found two recent cases in which, after a week of no comments at all on their requests, people began running bots. Both of these bots have caused some amount of controversy. (In one case, because people listed objections before the bot was run, but after a week had passed. In the other because the bot started making bad edits.) What do people think of ammeding the rules to make clear that someone, at least, needs to say "OK, run it." before a bot is run? Snowspinner 20:35, Sep 26, 2004 (UTC)
:I think we need less bureaucracy here, not more.  If a bot is going to do something useful and harmless, why wait a whole week?  One or two days without objection should be enough.  After that: "Sysops should block bots, without hesitation, if they are unapproved, doing something the operator didn't say they would do, messing up articles or editing too rapidly".  anthony (see warning) 13:38, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Objection time

message: If there are no objections by the beginning of 11 Dec 2004, let's declare the above resolution as policy.  If we don't have complete consensus, then we can start tallying up votes one way or the other, and consider amendments as needed. -- Beland 04:18, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for that note at the pump. Jamesday 04:51, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Adoption of resolution

message: I am proposing a 'sandbot', a simple robot which would purge the contents of the sandbox automatically every six hours. It could also be used to re-paste the sandbox header code back into the 'box if it gets dleted by accident or whatever. -Litefantastic 15:51, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: It sounds interesting, especially the part about the sandbox header code.  However, what if someone made an edit 1 second before the 6 hours expires.  Their change would be lost immediately.  I'd prefer it if the bot would only run if the box has been idle for a certain period of time by checking the page history.  Thus after 6 hours the sandbox becomes idle for 5 or 10 minutes you can perform the revert. -- Ram-Man 16:46, Nov 11, 2004 (UTC)
Agree with Ram-Man about using idle time in addition to the six hour limit.  I'd even support up to every hour I suppose.  I've noticed the sandbox message isn't readded very often any more.  I thought we had abandoned it. anthony 警告 17:42, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: Okay, so it would be set for a delay period of... how about five minutes of inactivity? Or ten? -Litefantastic 18:15, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: Only purge the contents rarely after long idle periods, but write a bot to re-add the header if needer by checking every few minutes. Cool Hand Luke 08:47, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: Only if we're going to censor the rest of Wikipedia as well. --Carnildo 00:55, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Sandbot

message: I would like to run pywikipediabot's interwiki.py (unmodified code) manually as Tkbot, for the purpose of cleaning up interwiki links on articles I've created or edited. —Tkinias 04:49, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tkbot 

message: Since today is friday and tommorow is saturday (typical low server load times) and no objections have been stated to the adding of UN/LOCODEs and adding the map templates, I plan to start immediately assuming I can get the rambot programmed in time, rather than wait until next weekend for the next "downtime".  It would be nice to have a category which lists those cities that have LOCODEs attached to them, but that would be a category with a few thousand entries.  Should I just hold off on this?  They can always be added later, I suppose if some better system is worked out. Update: See here for an example of some of the current work being done.  – Ram-Man (comment) (talk) 20:58, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC)
: Good luck! Constafrequent, infrequently constant 05:14, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: That new map template is very cool. Obviously, Australia needs one too! So I've copied it, and added it to an Australian suburb. A big thumbs-up to adding this to the RamBot articles. All the best, -- Nickj 04:36, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Friday and rambot 

message: I'd like to request permission to run a bot, User:DanBot, using pywikipediabot, whose primary purpose will be to make corrections to the various highly similar articles containing Formula One statistics. First, it will convert a bunch of navigation tables (such as the one at the bottom of 1990 Australian Grand Prix) to templates (such as the one at the bottom of 2004 Monaco Grand Prix. The bot's other tasks will be similar tweaks to this limited body of articles. — Dan | Talk 04:25, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request permission for a bot 

message: I plan on creating a bot to edit my userpage and update my personal statistics once a day during offpeak hours. I may work on other projects too at some point, for instance I have an idea for helping get media files from the various wiki's to commons, however I will test these on the test wiki first, and post my intentions here before I do anything different with the bot.  — マイケル ₪ 14:46, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
*Support. anthony 警告 12:11, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[User:MBot|MBot]]