Wikipedia talk:Bots/Archive 11

message: I would like to ask permission to do some interwiki botworks with my bot: RobotJcb. I run a multi-login bot, doing interwikis on several wikis. Today I allready did a few edits on EN.wikipedia with the robot: . I did not now that permission was needed, I'm sorry. But you may review that 18 edits to see what kind of upkeep I would like to do. Jcbos 15:27, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Is this a pywikipedia bot?  If so, then I am ok with you running it, as long as you only make links to articles in languages you can understand. (This is based on the existing policy, which we are discussion, so this may change shortly.)  Please let us know which languages you can understand well enough to judge whether or not two articles are on the same subject. -- Beland 03:09, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a pywikipedia bot: interwiki.py. It runs on about 20 languages, of which I can understand about 10. But I use the autonomous option, so if there are any doubts, it will nog change anything and just skip the page. Jcbos 11:49, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: i'd like to know if the en: community is approving of this bot or no. btw this bot does good work on nl:, and imho he deserves a little bit more feedback than from just 1 user responding to his request... oscar 00:33, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Not many people from the en community reply on this page.  Usually I'm the one who does.  The only problem the English community has is if the bot starts to remove interwiki links.  We don't want it to do that.  Modify, yes, delete, no. --AllyUnion (talk) 13:45, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I will keep that in mind and I will not remove broken interwiki links. Jcbos 23:22, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: In a few pages I already removed an interwiki yesterday, but I just restored them manualy. Jcbos 23:31, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's good you fixed it manually, but have you also fixed the bot to prevent it doing this again? Angela. 10:35, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It has been fixed and as far as I can see it didn't happen anymore. I will check my botedits from time to time as well. Jcbos 17:23, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Interwiki by RobotJcb 

message: The existing policy on the project page is a bit vague on what interwiki bots are "known safe", etc., and I have posed some questions above that affect a lot of interwiki bots, including the two most recent requests for permission.
I propose the following slightly revised policy on Interwiki bots.  I have posted an RFC pointing here. -- Beland 03:32, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Interwiki bot policy 

message: * Part of the reason I'm confortable with bots making links to articles in languages the operators don't understand is that these links are being made in the English Wikipedia.  Anyone who knows enough to complain about any such links should be able to do so in English. As long as the bot operator also speaks English, that should be fine.  If the bot operator doesn't speak the target language, then it should be fine to trust the judgment of a human who claims to know the right answer over a bot which could easily have made a bad assumption. I'm comfortable letting pywikipedia bots make the assumptions they do because there seem to be a lot of them running, and there does not seem to be any complaints that they are habitually inaccurate. -- Beland 03:36, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments/support/objections

message: * Just a note to state the obvious: Pages with edit histories, especially where any single version would not be eligible for deletion, should not be auto-deleted. -- Beland 03:02, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Further discussion

message: Ok, so I'm not sure if this is the right place for this but I couldn't find any other talk pages devoted to Wikipedia Bots so here goes; if a bot grabs a page via the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export method (both for ease-of-parsing, and to ease the load on the server), is there any way to submit its edits? By checking the page's source while editing it seems each submission must be accompanied by an opaque hash value. Is this actually enforced? Or is there something I'm missing here? Thanks in advance. porges 11:03, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You mean the wpEditToken? You can get that by loading the edit form; it's just there to detect edit conflicts. If you choose to use the special:export interface for getting the wikitext instead of ripping it out of the edit form (why?), make sure you first get an edit token and then load the text from special:export though, as otherwise there's a race condition where you could overwrite someone else's edits. --fvw<SMALL>*</SMALL> 12:03, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you need to fetch and repost wpEdittime, wpStarttime, and wpEditToken from the edit form, to prevent various kinds of problems.  Some of those are for security, and some are to detect edit conflicts.  It would save you from doing an additional HTTP transaction (and reduce server load, which is required of bots) if you also extracted the wikitext from the edit form. -- Beland 02:23, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It would be nice if the tokens needed to edit a page were provided via the export interface (maybe if provided with an extra parameter or something)... I don't need to be grabbing all the page formatting etc whenever the bot needs to grab a page. porges 23:23, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bot submissions 

message: I would like for NotificationBot to be allowed run to notify uploaders about their image in :Category:Images with unknown source and :Category:Images with unknown copyright status.  I would also like to have the bot use two (not yet created) templates:  & .  The only difference in these two templates is, the following text will be added: The user has been automatically notified by a bot.  Also, two new categories will be created: :Category:Images with unknown source - notified & :Category:Images with unknown copyright status - notified with the cooresponding templates.  These templates will replace the ones on the image and the bot will sign a date on the page to indicate when it first notified the person.  I would also like for the bot to give second notification on the 5th or 6th day before the 7 day period, then final notification on the 7th day.  On the 8th day, it will change the image page and add a  with the reason of: "User already warned automatically 3 times about changing copyright information on image.  Final notice was given yesterday, at the end of the 7 day period mark."  This bot will run daily every midnight on UTC.
Oh, and the notification text will be something that looks like this:
First notice:
center|	The image you uploaded, :, has no  information.  Please correct the licensing information.  Unless the copyright status is provided, the image will be marked for deletion seven days after this notice.
Second notice:
center|	The image you uploaded, :, has no  information.  This is the second notice.  Unless the copyright status is provided, the image will be marked for deletion in 2 days after this second notice.
Third and final notice:
center|	The image you uploaded, :, has no  information.  This is the third and final notice.  Unless the copyright status is provided, the image will be marked for deletion tomorrow.
--AllyUnion (talk) 11:34, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, take a look at Template:No source since and see if that one will do you much good. I recently started using it. «»Who?¿?meta 11:36, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

text: Sounds good. PS. Who, template sigs are evil. Can we get a bot to kill them? Alphax τεχ 11:40, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Corrected. I was wondering if it meant template namespace or not. trying to save edit space :)  «»Who?¿?meta 12:15, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Um, I meant of the form  - but they should definately NOT be in Template namespace. Alphax τεχ 13:12, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  It kind of does... but the category isn't what I want... and I think I should just use a clean template anyway. --AllyUnion (talk) 04:11, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

text: Go for it. --Cool Cat Talk 11:46, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

text: Here is the source of the actual template: User:NotificationBot/Image source. --AllyUnion (talk) 04:30, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

text: How will this bot handle the existing thousands of no-source images that are over seven days old?  What about cases where someone has uploaded several dozen unsourced images? --Carnildo 06:56, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  It goes through the above categories.  Unfortunately, it would have to make several notifications, one after another.  The other alternative is for me to program it far more extensively to have it operate on a flatfile database, collect all the information on what user needs to be notified of what, notify them and change all the images there after.  That would be invariably more complex than it is now, and far more time consuming for me to write.  As for anything existing no source image over seven days old, it won't mark a speedy on those.  Though, it could, but the point of the bot is to give the uploader notification of 7 days, THEN mark it with a speedy deletion tag. --AllyUnion (talk) 13:09, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

text:  It is under the assumption that anything in the former categories, the user has not been notified. --AllyUnion (talk) 13:42, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

text: If you can do it, go for it. HereToHelp (talk) 02:35, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notification Bot: cleaning up of Images with unknown.... 

message: There are some issues I'm trying to resolve.  One of them is that the bot is over writing itself.  My initial idea that I had for the project / program would that the bot would make a first pass on the category of images and move them into a notified category.  After the 7 day period in the notified category, it would be presumed that the images can be deleted if they are still in that category.  The problem now seems that I'd have to build up a list or category or a hash table based on repeat customers.  A database may seem overkill, but it seems to me to be the most reasonable solution.  We are talking about a great deal of images in that category that really need to be deleted and all the users need to be notified about them, even if they are not active no longer.  This covers our butts from someone getting really pissed about an image deletion that they were not notified.  It's more of a, "Yes, we did let you know, and you failed to do anything about it, so it's not our fault."  More information on my new project board: User:AllyUnion/Project board --AllyUnion (talk) 08:55, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If you can do it, go for it. HereToHelp (talk) 02:35, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Issues 

message: As part of the project  Wikipedia:Dead_external_links I would like to fix 301 redirects.
The bot will be run as User:KhiviBot.
This will be a manually assisted bot. It will be run using perl WWW-Mediawiki-Client-0.27.
I believe cleaning up 301 redirects is a nice goal to have.
Generating the list of url is a manual process since sometiimes the redirects
might not be valid. Hence human intervention is needed to generate a list 
of url's. Once the url list is obtained then the bot can fix them.
Example of this is 114 instances of http://www.ex.ac.uk/trol/scol/ccleng.htm .
:Seems like a good plan, only thing that has me slightly worried is that there could be people abusing HTTP 301 for temporary name changes or round robinning or such. Barring any examples of this actually happening I'd support a test run though. --fvw<SMALL>*</SMALL> 16:18, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like a good idea, in general.  The bot will need to retain the text which is displayed to the reader, if it already exists.  It will also need to be excluded from talk pages of all namespaces.  It might be prudent to exclude it from Wikipedia: space as well.  There is one case where a simple replacement might do the wrong thing: if the URL is part of a citation that gives the date accessed.  If the citation says "URL X, accessed on day A", then knowing both X and A, someone can find the document referenced on archive.org.  The change we want to make is to "URL Y, accessed on day B", but a simple bot would do "URL Y, accessed on day A", which might not exist at archive.org.  You might need to experiment a bit to find a heuristic to detect these cases and flag them for manual review. -- Beland 01:40, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  301 redirects fixing 

message: I notice User:Kakashi Bot is fixing double redirects like A -> B -> C, it sounds like by just assuming that A should point to C.  Looking at Special:DoubleRedirects, this is incorrect maybe 1% of the time.  And many of the problems seem to occur with loops or bad human edits.  Have we decided that any collateral damage here is acceptable, and in general, bots should just make this assumption?  That would obviate the need for an entire project.  Unless the bot could flag loops - that would be really handy. -- Beland 03:33, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I see there are about 991 now, split across two pages.  If we think this is OK, another run or two could clear these up entirely...I wonder how fast they are being created.  Theoretically, this Special page is updated periodically.  Hopefully, it's on a cron job, and it would be possible to put a bot on a cron job that ran just after the Special update. -- Beland 03:50, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  It would be a lot more efficient to link a bot on the Toolserver, Beland, then query dump the double redirects into a file, then correct them. --AllyUnion (talk) 08:50, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bots and double redirects