Wikipedia:Bot requests

For the policy on bot requirements, see WP:BOTREQUIRE.

This is a page for requesting tasks to be done by bots per the bot policy. This is an appropriate place to put ideas for uncontroversial bot tasks, to get early feedback on ideas for bot tasks (controversial or not), and to seek bot operators for bot tasks. Consensus-building discussions requiring large community input (such as request for comments) should normally be held at WP:VPPROP or other relevant pages (such as a WikiProject's talk page).

You can check the "Commonly Requested Bots" box above to see if a suitable bot already exists for the task you have in mind. If you have a question about a particular bot, contact the bot operator directly via their talk page or the bot's talk page. If a bot is acting improperly, follow the guidance outlined in WP:BOTISSUE. For broader issues and general discussion about bots, see the bot noticeboard.

Before making a request, please see the list of frequently denied bots, either because they are too complicated to program, or do not have consensus from the Wikipedia community. If you are requesting that a template (such as a WikiProject banner) is added to all pages in a particular category, please be careful to check the category tree for any unwanted subcategories. It is best to give a complete list of categories that should be worked through individually, rather than one category to be analyzed recursively (see example difference).

Alternatives to bot requests

• WP:AWBREQ, for simple tasks that involve a handful of articles and/or only needs to be done once (e.g. adding a category to a few articles).
• WP:URLREQ, for tasks involving changing or updating URLs to prevent link rot (specialized bots deal with this).
• WP:USURPREQ, for reporting a domain be usurped eg. |url-status=usurped
• WP:SQLREQ, for tasks which might be solved with an SQL query (e.g. compiling a list of articles according to certain criteria).
• WP:TEMPREQ, to request a new template written in wiki code or Lua.
• WP:SCRIPTREQ, to request a new user script. Many useful scripts already exist, see Wikipedia:User scripts/List.
• WP:CITEBOTREQ, to request a new feature for WP:Citation bot, a user-initiated bot that fixes citations.

Note to bot operators: The {{BOTREQ}} template can be used to give common responses, and make it easier to keep track of the task's current status. If you complete a request, note that you did with {{BOTREQ|done}}, and archive the request after a few days (WP:1CA is useful here).

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Please add your bot requests to the bottom of this page.
Make a new request

#	Bot request	Status	💬	👥	🙋 Last editor	🕒 (UTC)	🤖 Last botop editor	🕒 (UTC)
1	"Was" in TV articles		7	5	Bunnypranav	2024-11-26 13:08	Bunnypranav	2024-11-26 13:08
2	altering certain tags on protected pages?		10	5	Primefac	2024-10-20 14:47	Primefac	2024-10-20 14:47
3	Replace merged WikiProject template with parent project + parameter	Done	7	3	Primefac	2024-10-21 10:04	Primefac	2024-10-21 10:04
4	Bot Request to Add Vezina Trophy Winners Navbox to Relevant Player Pages		3	3	Primefac	2024-10-19 12:23	Primefac	2024-10-19 12:23
5	Replace standalone BLP templates	Done	7	3	MSGJ	2024-10-30 19:37	Tom.Reding	2024-10-29 16:04
6	Assess set index and WikiProject Lists based on category as lists		19	5	Mrfoogles	2024-11-06 16:17	Tom.Reding	2024-11-02 15:53
7	Request for WP:SCRIPTREQ		1	1	StefanSurrealsSummon	2024-11-08 18:27
8	LLM summary for laypersons to talk pages of overly technical articles?		10	7	Legoktm	2024-11-12 17:50	Legoktm	2024-11-12 17:50
9	Redirects with curly apostrophes		6	5	Pppery	2024-11-11 17:30	Primefac	2024-11-11 16:52
10	Bot for replacing/archiving 13,000 dead citations for New Zealand charts		3	2	Muhandes	2024-11-14 22:49	Muhandes	2024-11-14 22:49
11	Basketball biography infobox request		7	2	Dissident93	2024-11-18 21:04	Primefac	2024-11-17 20:44
12	Meanings of minor-planet names		1	1	Absolutiva	2024-11-18 16:20
13	Reference examination bot		4	3	Wiki king 100000	2024-11-25 17:00	Usernamekiran	2024-11-20 13:02
14	Replacing FastilyBot	BRFA filed	25	9	DreamRimmer	2024-12-17 03:32	DreamRimmer	2024-12-17 03:32
15	Deletion of navboxes at Category:Basketball Olympic squad navigational boxes by competition	Working	4	4	Geardona	2024-11-20 23:48	Qwerfjkl	2024-11-20 17:32
16	Tagging Category:Cinema of Belgium	BRFA filed	17	4	Bunnypranav	2024-11-26 12:59	Bunnypranav	2024-11-26 12:59
17	Bulk remove "link will display the full calendar" from articles about calendar years		6	5	Primefac	2024-12-09 16:31	Primefac	2024-12-09 16:31
18	Province over-capitalization		6	2	Dicklyon	2024-12-12 02:32	Primefac	2024-12-11 22:00
19	VPNGate		10	4	MolecularPilot	2024-12-17 03:01
20	Creation for nano bot	Not a good task for a bot.	3	3	Primefac	2024-12-09 16:30	Primefac	2024-12-09 16:30

Legend
In the last hour
In the last day
In the last week
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More than one month
Manual settings
When exceptions occur, please check the setting first.

You may want to increment {{Archive basics}} to |counter= 69 as Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 68 is larger than the recommended 150Kb.

Redirects to lists, from the things they are lists of

Please could someone do this:

1. For every article titled "List of foo"
2. if the article called "Foo" exists; do nothing
3. otherwise, create "Foo" as a redirect to "List of foo"

For example, I just created Birds of Tunisia as a redirect to List of birds of Tunisia.

This might usefully be added to a list of monthly cleanup tasks, for new "List of..." articles. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:06, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Doing... - Though I have messaged WikiProject Lists to check consensus first. Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 12:54, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. Please see also #Century-item redirects, below. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:36, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

BRFA filed - Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MoohanBOT 8 It is just for this task as I had already generated the list of pages needed and there seems to be no opposition to it. I will have a look at #Century-item redirects in a few days but feel free to jump ahead GoingBatty as that one may be outside of my regex expertise... Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 11:05, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

It appears that User:Jamesmcmahon0 has dropped this. Can anyone else help, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:29, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

I see User:Jamesmcmahon0 has been editing again... Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:30, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

• The BRFA expired, this task is now open for grabs again.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 20:20, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
• This is a two minute job. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 03:12, 16 October 2015 (UTC).
  

Coding... Should get this done soon. Philroc^{My contribs} 20:10, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

BRFA filed All done! Philroc^{My contribs} 23:01, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

The BRFA has been denied for reasons unrelated to the task itself. Another editor is welcome to take this on. @Jamesmcmahon0: Are you willing to reopen the old BRFA? — Earwig ^talk 23:15, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

@Jamesmcmahon0: And I have refiled the BRFA. Philroc^{My contribs} 11:30, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

Denied again... — Earwig ^talk 01:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

• Wanna just make a list of the pages and let someone else do the redirects by hand. A search of red-links on a page and creating those as redirects is simply enough for AWB to handle, even if it's a lot of pages. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 02:36, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
  • This is fine. We can start by working further on the list from Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MoohanBOT 8. — Earwig ^talk 02:39, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
    • @Ricky81682 and The Earwig: et al - any chance of an update, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:55, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

DOI bot

Given a reference in the forms

"<ref>doi:10.[four digits]/*</ref>" "<ref>http://www.doi.org/10.[four digits]/*</ref>" or "<ref>www.doi.org/10.[four digits]/*</ref>",

the bot should insert the full reference into the article page and into Wikidata. It might be extended to add data to existing references that are, say, missing the date of publication.

See:

• Template:Cite_journal
• DOI official nomenclature
• Wikidata:Talk:Q737498

HLHJ (talk) 12:28, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

See User talk:Citation bot/Archive1#Replacement citation bot? and the immediately preceding section. --Izno (talk) 13:09, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

That discussion does not appear to be leading to getting a bot to start working on the Cite Doi templates. Abductive (reasoning) 19:13, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

The bot in question preempts the need for doing so (were it turned on). Inserting {{cite journal|doi=value}} and then the bot fills in the other data is what the bot does (or did with {{cite doi}}). --Izno (talk) 19:48, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

As for Wikidata, I'm not sure of your intentions, so you will need to clarify. Regardless, that bot would need to be approved at Wikidata, not here. --Izno (talk) 19:49, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

That sounds good, and would do half my request. I hope it's back soon.

Apologies for the lack of clarity. Wikidata has a data format for journal sources, but there is currently no way to create items from citation templates. See this discussion. There are tools for doing it from a DOI; see the tools section here. It seemed to me that co-ordination between bots working on both might be helpful at avoiding duplicates, etc., but I take your point that separate bots might be easier. HLHJ (talk) 14:40, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

There is consensus at WPMED to replace cite DOI with cite journal on medical articles. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:35, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

For the record, we have an user tool that can be used to derive {{Cite journal}} from DOIs. Having a bot that can autoexpand DOIs to full citations would be useful. Maybe one could reuse the {{Cite doi}} template for it; the bot would convert it to a {{Cite journal}}. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:01, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

FYI, consensus was reached to deprecate the {{cite doi}} templates.[1] Citation bot will no longer be creating those templates or inserting references to them into articles. Thus I don't think there's anything blocking the original request here. Kaldari (talk) 21:21, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Container category diffusion

Category:Container categories, by the current definition of the notice box, only allow subcategories, no other pages. If possible, I think it would help the maintenance process if a bot could check container categories for pages, and if found, check if they are already categorized in a subcategory of the container category being checked. If they are, remove them from the container category, referencing the subcategory and WP:SUBCAT in the edit summary. --Slivicon (talk) 14:57, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

I also think, such a bot is required -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo 13:27, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I would also like to see such a bot. Note: Ideally it would check not just immediate subcategories, but go down the category tree. Perhaps it could also generate a list of any that it can't fix. DexDor ^(talk) 07:11, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Update the lists at WikiProject Fix common mistakes

We really need a bot that updates the lists at Wikipedia:WikiProject Fix common mistakes#Log. Right now they are being done manually, which is a very tedious process. Some of the entries have not been updated since November of 2014 and there are a bunch of errors that we haven't added because we can't keep up with the ones we list now.

Note: This was brought up before at Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 63#Bot to updated lists at WikiProject Fix common mistakes, where it was marked as resolved and archived, despite the fact that we are still doing this by hand. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:40, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

BRFA filed  Hazard SJ  03:28, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Texas Historical Commission atlas has changed information links

I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this is possible to correct with a bot, but there are a considerable amount of articles that are affected by this. These atlas links have been used for NRHP citations, as well as other historical marker citations.

The home for the Texas Historical Commission atlas URL remains the same: http://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/

However, once you access information, those links have changed. Whatever is linked to THC as sources in articles are now dead links. I just made a recent change to an article. You can see by the diff how it's been changed. — Maile (talk) 22:25, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Copied from Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 140#Texas Historical Commission atlas has changed information links:

Special:LinkSearch finds 718 links to http://atlas.thc.state.tx.us. The count includes all namespaces and cases with multiple links on the same page. There are around 370 different articles. http://atlas.thc.state.tx.us currently says: "Welcome to the new Atlas! The original Atlas, now located at http://atlas1.thc.state.tx.us, will eventually be phased out in the coming weeks. Please begin transitioning your use to the new Atlas." The links I examined work if atlas is replaced by atlas1 but it sounds like this is temporary. It would be good to find and update to new atlas url's while the old content can be seen at atlas1 (not all url changes are of the same form). PrimeHunter (talk) 22:40, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I guess somebody is working on this, because Battybot is currently running he fixes. Thanks. — Maile (talk) 20:02, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

@Maile66: BattyBot is working on the Handbook of Texas links such as http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ - If you still need fixed for http://atlas.thc.state.tx.us, please let me know and I can submit an RFBA for that as well. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 21:30, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

findarticles.com

Mark all links to findarticles.com as dead. The links are being redirected to a another website. However, they are not marked as 404, or soft 404. That includes links to https://web.archive.org/web/$1/findarticles.com etc. which has been deleted retroactively from the archives. Examples:

• http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_1998_Nov_18/ai_53365282
• http://web.archive.org/web/20050922160253/http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_1998_Nov_18/ai_53365282

See more detailed reasoning read this on my blog and FindArticles. (t) Josve05a (c) 08:25, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

insource:findarticles.com: 16,609 mainspace matches. (t) Josve05a (c) 08:31, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Josve05a so that I understand the request correctly (and to help guide the answer) what you're looking for is: For every occurrence where the pattern findarticles.com appears inside a ref block (i.e. regex 'ref>*?findarticles.com*?</ref') append a {{deadlink}} template (with appropriate year/month for categorization) just inside the close of the reference tag. Is this correct? Hasteur (talk) 18:36, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, unless one {{dead link}} already exists. (t) Josve05a (c) 19:12, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Doesn't just has to be in refs, but in all external links, but if that's to complicated, then the refs are good enough. (t) Josve05a (c) 19:13, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

More fun: some links are already archived via archive.is, e.g. "Sega farms out Genesis". Consumer Electronics. March 2, 1998. Archived from the original on July 9, 2012. - the bot would have to take this into account. Max Semenik (talk) 23:22, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

@Josve05a: Just saw cyberbot II tag some dead links and add archiveurls. Hope it will get around to these links soon! GoingBatty (talk) 22:04, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

BC births and deaths categorizations

RfC: BC births and deaths categorization scheme has just been closed on:

(option 5:) Return to earlier guideline-conforming scheme adding "rollup" categories by decade/century

Could we have bot-assistance on realising that? Pinging a few people that may be able to give some assistance:

• @Fayenatic london: may have some experience as to what can be handled (semi-)bot-wise at the end of categorisation discussions
• @Rick Block: seems to have some experience with the "roll-up" systems
• @Good Olfactory: commented in a prior discussion here

If I need to be more specific on possible tasks involved, please ask me. --Francis Schonken (talk) 17:18, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

1. The "roll-up" on decade categories, as currently seen at Category:0s deaths, is simply done using <categorytree mode=pages>0s deaths</categorytree> on that page. The parameter in the middle of that string has to match the name of the page that it is on. There is a way to show an ordinary category tree using the PAGENAME parameter: {{#categorytree:{{PAGENAME}}}}. However, I do not know of a way to combine that with mode=pages. For more info see MW:Extension:CategoryTree. So AFAIK this "rollup" code will have to be added manually.
2. The old categories will have to be undeleted by admins; I don't know a way to automate that. After undeletion, we would then list them at WP:CFDWR so that Cydebot would remove the CFD templates from them.
3. I believe the member pages (biography articles) will also have to be reverted manually. The best that I can offer would be to provide links to the diffs made by Cydebot when emptying the old categories. – Fayenatic London 11:01, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

@Armbrust:: I manually undeleted Category:1 BC deaths to Category:9 BC deaths. Would you be able to automate reversals of your bot's edits starting from [2]? See [3] for the instruction at CFDW for deaths from 1 to 599 BC. – Fayenatic London 21:56, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

@Armbrust: I've manually reverted from the bottom of that page of contribs up to Curia (wife of Quintus Lucretius). Is it any trouble to you if we use rollback or undo on your bot's edits? – Fayenatic London 12:45, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

I don't mind, although some articles were edited after the bot. Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 19:51, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I've now done up to Horace. – Fayenatic London 21:23, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

As the work cannot be processed by bot, I have listed the CFDs listing the births/deaths categories to be reinstated at WT:WikiProject Years#BC births and deaths categories. – Fayenatic London 13:50, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

I subsequently moved the list and progress marker to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography#BC births and deaths categories. – Fayenatic London 21:36, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Re. "As the work cannot be processed by bot" – says who? I think part of the tasks can be processed by bot. I'd prefer to keep the discussion here (various bot operators may pick up on tasks for which they see a possibility to automate it), with a possible exception to logging tasks performed at WT:WikiProject Years#BC births and deaths categories. --Francis Schonken (talk) 15:31, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

@Fayenatic london: again, please discuss these issues here. --Francis Schonken (talk) 13:39, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Your confidence in bot-kind is touching. I agree that this task would be best handled by a bot, but I have never come across an existing bot written to do what is required here. Well, I suppose there is little harm in waiting longer; perhaps somebody may write a new bot for us. The main disadvantage of waiting is that subsequent edits to the biographies will mean that an increasing proportion of the bot edits cannot be reverted using Undo. – Fayenatic London 21:22, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Actually it could be done with AWB alone (replace year category with birthsyear cat and remove birthsdecade category), but compiling a list of affected articles is troublesome. Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 08:29, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@Armbrust: I had thought about using Cat-a-lot to do that, but ruled that out, because a year category on a bio could be for births or for deaths. A human editor could tell which, by referring to the decade categories, but that would probably be too difficult to program into a bot. So yes, it could be done using AWB, but requiring manual intervention on each one before clicking Save. – Fayenatic London 13:45, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

If you use the bot's contributions list compile the articles, than this shouldn't be a problem. Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 19:12, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@Armbrust: How would that help for those pages that have both, e.g. [4]? – Fayenatic London 09:04, 29 October 2015 (UTC)

@Armbrust: RSVP. Perhaps there is no way to automate this other than somebody writing a new bot. – Fayenatic London 21:43, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

User:Francis Schonken: How long do you want to wait? Perhaps this bot request might be reactivated by posting separate requests under separate headings for the three tasks: posting "rollup" category trees on decade category pages; undeleting year category pages for births and deaths; and reverting selected contribs by ArmbrustBot on biography articles. – Fayenatic London 21:43, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

"wait"? I didn't suggest to wait for anything. I'm only against splitting up the discussion, e.g. someone doing part of the reverts (bot-wise or not) and not logging them here, then someone else doing some reverts (bot-wise or not) and getting confused while not knowing what has been done etc... I'll make some subheaders to this thread (...opposing as I am separate threads not kept together). --Francis Schonken (talk) 03:36, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Subthread 1 – undeletion of BC births and deaths categories

I'm not sure but from some comments I deduce this task has been done partially or completely – can someone give an overview whether this is done?

Have any BC births or deaths categories been undeleted that weren't populated before these categories were deleted? (I'd advise against that but have no clue where we are with that). Can someone give an update? --Francis Schonken (talk) 03:36, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

I had undeleted deaths categories back to Category:89 BC deaths, and have just undeleted a lot of them again. I only undeleted those that were deleted in 2015; there are a few gaps which were not in use at the time of the 2015 CFDs.

I have now added a temporary note to Template:DeathyrBC to discourage further re-deletions. The notice appears only on empty year-BC deaths categories.

As the last batch of merges were on deaths categories, I have not systematically undeleted births categories yet, but only those which were repopulated by reverting two of the bot edits (death and birth year). – Fayenatic London 09:58, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Subthread 2 – adding "rollup" to BC births and deaths categories

I've no clue where we are with this task? Have rollups been added to BC birth and death cats apart from the few examples that came up in the RfC? If not, to me this seems like an excellent job for a bot... any takers? --Francis Schonken (talk) 03:36, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

No-one had started this. I have now done it on a few, Category:0s BC deaths back to Category:40s BC deaths. – Fayenatic London 22:45, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Subthread 3 – repopulating BC births and deaths categories

(basicly reverting armbrustbot's dual upmerge edits)

• I've been doing three or four a long time ago;
• I understand Fayenatic london has been doing quite a few too, but am not clear how far this got?

I still think this is best handled by a bot: going through armbrustbots edits on these BC biography articles one by one (that is: reverting them one by one, from the most recent one to the oldest one), and (this is the important part) giving a dump of the articles where such reverts are no longer possible (because they have already been done or some other intermediate edits prevented a revert). Then sort out the items on this dump manually. I'd be happy to help sort out manually when presented with such dump list. --Francis Schonken (talk) 03:36, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Any editor can help with reverting the biography pages.

The CFDs listing the births/deaths categories to be reinstated are:

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 May 25#1st to 5th century BC births

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 May 30#1st to 6th century BC deaths

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_22#6th-century_BC_births and 7th (below that)

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_16#8th_century_BC (just the births and deaths)

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_15#9th_century_BC and 10th (below that)

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_13#11th_century_BC

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_8#12th_century_BC

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_April_24#13th_century_BC

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_April_23#14th_century_BC to 16th

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_April_20#17th_century_BC

The last list of categories deleted (instruction to bot at CFDW) was [5] for deaths from 1 to 599 BC.

The contribs for the last set of bot edits (on BC deaths) ended here. Working up from the bottom, I have completed that page so the current page to be worked on is here.

I have manually reverted from the bottom of that page of contribs up to: Boduognatus. After completing the top one click "newer 50" and carry on from the bottom again.

My workflow is:

1. Mouse over the page history for next diff up the list. Review history using WP:POPUPS to see whether there have been subsequent edits after the category changes by ArmbrustBot.
2. If no, use rollback.
3. If yes, open the history, and Undo the one or two contribs by ArmbrustBot. For an edit summary, link to Wikipedia_talk:Categorization_of_people#RfC:_BC_births_and_deaths_categorization_scheme.
4. If this creates a redlinked category,
   1. undelete it with the same edit summary,
   2. edit the category page to remove the old CFD template, giving the same edit summary, and
   3. undelete the talk page with the same edit summary.

@Nyttend: you also appear to have helped to diffuse Category:40s BC deaths back down to years; do you have any other recommendations? – Fayenatic London 10:06, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

I discovered the situation because a few year categories were in CAT:CSD, and I figured that there surely would have been several notable Romans in each year; after moving several of them over, I just decided to move everything from the 40s into year categories, and I eventually discovered the bot's action. Are there a ton of edits that potentially need to be reverted? I'd just urge caution, because a lot of articles were wrongly categorised, so Armbrustbot's edit was helpful and shouldn't be reverted; for example, Antipater of Tyre died "shortly before 45 BC", so he shouldn't be in 45 BC deaths, and this edit was helpful, even though most of the bot's edits weren't. I did everything manually and would urge you to do likewise to avoid restoring overprecision like 45 BC for Antipater, although I'm not aware of how many articles are involved, so I understand that this might not be practical. PS, please don't have the bot do anything with the 40s BC deaths, since I've gone through them; none of them need work unless I messed up (e.g. I did Gaius Cassius Longinus just now, having overlooked him before), and the bot has no way to judge whether or not I messed up. Nyttend (talk) 13:39, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

I've removed Antipater from the other new category 45 BC as it is not for biographies.

This flags up a couple of points:

1. Individuals like this, for whom we do not know the exact year of death, will appear in the categorytree ("rollup") listing below the sub-cats, if we leave them in the decade categories. See Category:40s BC deaths. The template ({{DeathyrBC}}) on Category:45 BC deaths does say "People who died c. 45 BC.", so it seems acceptable to me that he was categorised in 45 BC deaths, although 46 BC might have been a better choice. Alexander of Judaea is another case, "died 48 or 47 BC", categorised in 48 BC. I suggest that it is good enough to pick a date which might be one year out.
2.  Instead of working from ArmbrustBot's contribs, we could work from the decade/century categories as our starting point, diffusing the contents back down into the year categories where the date is stated. We could still do the actual edit by reverting ArmbrustBot's edits in most cases, but it would be a different method of working. However, it's probably quicker to work from the contribs.

– Fayenatic London 22:41, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

@Nyttend: @Francis Schonken: I left links to this discussion at WP Bio and WP Years, but nobody has commented. What do you think about using the approximate year of death in such cases? – Fayenatic London 23:16, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't think that it's good to include circa 45 deaths in the 45 deaths category; these categories ought to reflect people whose precise death year has confidently been identified, with the parent 40s BC deaths (and comparable ones for other decades) being given when we know in which decade a death occurred, but we can't be sure of the year. Nyttend (talk) 06:26, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Fair enough. – Fayenatic London 22:59, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

@Francis Schonken: The longer we wait for someone to create a bot to revert another bot's contribs, the greater the proportion that cannot be reverted using rollback or Undo. I've picked up the task again (see above), and gone back past the batch of deaths (40s BC) that Nyttend had fixed. Will you join in again? – Fayenatic London 23:05, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Century-item redirects

My request for someone do this:

1. For every page or category beginning with a cardinal number (e.g. 17th-, 21st-) century; or articles prefixed "List of..." matching that pattern:
2. Create a redirect from the equivalent title, with no dash
3. Create a redirect from the equivalent title, using words
4. Create a redirect from the equivalent title, using words, with no dash

was markred as "not done - no wider discussion" and archived. What wider discussion is needed?

For example, for the existing Category:20th-century war artists, I just created:

• Category:20th century war artists
• Category:Twentieth-century war artists
• Category:Twentieth century war artists

Other examples matching the above pattern would include:

• 20th-century music
• List of 20th-century religious leaders

This might usefully be added to a list of monthly cleanup tasks, for new articles and categories matching the above pattern. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:27, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Anyone? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:14, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Is there any reason this can;t be done? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:56, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Deadlink Fixing

Maybe a bot that fixes a collection of dead links? The Ohio Historical Society once maintained a few thousand pages with a well-maintained naming convention, http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/ohpo/nr/details.aspx?refnum=XXXXXXXX (the Xs represent an eight-digit number), but they took down these pages a good while ago. Now that OHS has renamed itself to Ohio History Connection, it's put up a new website, and these pages are once again good, but with different URLs, http://nr.ohpo.org/Details.aspx?refnum=XXXXXXXX. Could a bot go around and perform replacements? The work should be easy, and manual fixes will take a lot of work for a human but should be easy for a bot, given the careful adherence to the naming convention. A few of these links have been correctly marked with {{dead link}}; it would also help if the bot were to remove that tag when it's present. Nyttend (talk) 21:45, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Then my bot should come by soon and replace the tagged ones with a wayback link.—^cyberpower_{Trick or Treat:Limited Access} 02:54, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

I'm confused: why would that help? Almost none of these are in archive.org (I've checked), and why would it be good in the first place for the bot to use an archive URL instead of the URL of a currently active page from the same source with the same content? Nyttend (talk) 04:42, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Sorry that was meant to be more of a general comment. Cyberbot II now attempts to attach wayback links to tagged links.—^cyberpower_{Trick or Treat:Online} 15:56, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

• It would be better to set up an external link template (like e.g. Template:Ofsted) for this, and editing the pages to use the template. Then, any future similar change to the external website could be dealt with simply by changing the template. – Fayenatic London 09:34, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

• Here's a complete list of pages that need to be updated, somewhat more than five hundred in total:

• Fayenatic london or C678, would either of you be able to run a bot to replace the old URL with the template that Fayenatic recommends? Again, it sometimes appears within <ref name=> tags or in the external links, so you'd just want to do a find-replace, and it would help if you'd remove {{dead link}} when it's present. I've not yet created the template; I'll create it once someone's agreed to run the bot. Nyttend (talk) 13:55, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
• Update — I've created the template at {{OHC NRHP}}. Nyttend (talk) 20:12, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

• Not me, I don't run bots, I just suggested a way to approach the task. – Fayenatic London 23:30, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Just to double check, this would be a one-time task to go through the list above and make the following changes:

1. Change url=http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/ohpo/nr/details.aspx?refnum=XXXXXXXX to url={{OHC NRHP|XXXXXXXX}}, and remove any associated {{dead link}} template
2. Change [http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/ohpo/nr/details.aspx?refnum=XXXXXXXX Words] to {{OHC NRHP|XXXXXXXX|Words}}, and remove any associated {{dead link}} template

Do I have that right? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 22:25, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

That looks correct. I doubt you'll find many of these links in citation templates (I don't use the templates, and essentially nobody else writes articles with this website as a source), so the second option will be virtually everything. Nyttend (talk) 22:34, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: There were only two articles in the list above that were tagged as dead links, so I just did those manually - see this edit and this edit. For the rest, BRFA filed. GoingBatty (talk) 00:56, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: The OHC NRHP template doesn't seem to work in citation templates. From Lima Stadium:

• {{cite web|url=http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/ohpo/nr/details.aspx?refnum=02000219|title=Ohio Historic Preservation Office National Register|date=2008-08-15|work=National Register of Historic Places|publisher=National Park Service}}
  • "Ohio Historic Preservation Office National Register". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2008-08-15.
• {{cite web|url={{OHC NRHP|02000219}}|title=Ohio Historic Preservation Office National Register|date=2008-08-15|work=National Register of Historic Places|publisher=National Park Service}}
  • [{{{2}}} "Ohio Historic Preservation Office National Register"]. National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2008-08-15. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)

Do you want to change the OHC NRHP template, or remove the citation templates in these articles? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:09, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

How many of these articles use the citation templates? I'm strongly inclined to remove the citation templates, if for no other reason than that the purpose of the OHC template is to ensure that all our links projectwide to these pages be in harmony, and I don't immediately see a way to resolve this problem without getting rid of that goal. Nyttend (talk) 01:11, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Only these six:

• First Hancock County Courthouse
• Adolph Boesel House
• Gaston's Mill-Lock No. 36, Sandy and Beaver Canal District
• List of George Franklin Barber works
• Hruby Conservatory of Music
• First Methodist Episcopal Church (Massillon, Ohio)

If you will fix these manually, then I'll change the bot request to do the remaining 460 pages that fall into #2. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:34, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Done. Nyttend (talk) 01:49, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Http->Https for Newspaper.com links

Hi all. If you didn't know, we have a substantial donation of accounts to WP:Newspapers.com as part of the Wikipedia Library partnership program. As part of the recent expansion of access to 300 accounts, our contact noted that they can no longer track referral traffic from Wikipedia, because of the change earlier in the year for all Wikipedia readers to be on Https (Https only communicates referrals to https not http). We would like help changing http to https links for Newspapers.com, for several reason:

1. From the start, the have been one of our most used partners by volunteers, and they are very much willing to expand our editor access to include more editors as demand; we want to keep currying this good will.
2. In part this demand from editors, is in response to their Open Access "Clipping" function (read more), which allows our editors to pull their sources out from behind the paywall on Newspapers.com. This particular case study has been part of our business case for other partners creating more open access options (for example WP:Newspaperarchive.com created the exact same feature as part of the development of our partnership, and we are using it to propose other reader-favorable access negotiations with other partners). Having good metrics for this case study from both the Wikipedia side and from the Newspapers.com analytics side, which includes referrer information, helps us make the argument to other publishers/databases
3. Https links are more secure for our readers that do click through to their project (even though Newspapers.com plans to redirect any traffic from Wikiepdia to a https url, that redirect loses the referral information, which effects 1 and 2, and temporarily routes readers through a insecure server).

Could someone run a bot that substitutes http with https when it precedes newspapers.com? Our contact assures me that none of the link should break. A tool/bot that can substitute http to https link like this might be useful for a number of different TWL and WP:GLAM partnerships in the future: part of the business case for most partnerships is increased traffic, and many of our historical allies will be converting to https in the near future, if they haven't already (for example, JSTOR plans to). Thanks much from the Wikipedia Library team, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 15:15, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

@Bender235: --Izno (talk) 15:46, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

(Thanks Izno for pinging.) This is somewhat related to my request above. I will include http://www.newspapers.com/ → https://www.newspapers.com/ in my AWB settings, but I think this could be done more efficiently by a bot. Because with Google Books links, I also remove the link clutter on the fly, but this doesn't seem necessary for newspaper.com, or does it? --bender235 (talk) 16:16, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

@Izno: Thanks! @Bender235: I had considered doing it semi-automatically with AWB, but it such a simple conversion that a bot should do it. All the urls are one of two types of structure URIs, so there shouldn't be any clutter, since we have been giving very clear recommendations with the Newspapers.com donation, that they shouldn't be inconsistent. It would be great to have a bot (or a bot activated by a tool), that can help with these kinds of conversions, because I am sure there will be a myriad of requests in the next year or so from GLAMs, etc. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

@Bender235: Saw the first 4000 links changed, thanks for doing it with AWB! Is there any chance we can update the rest of them in the next week or two, if no-one picks it up with a bot? We would love to be able to keep capturing accurate metrics data to our Newspapers.com partner, sooner rather than later. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Hm, I could try. --bender235 (talk) 16:12, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Related is m:Research:Wikimedia referrer policy. Legoktm (talk) 18:44, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

@Bender235: Per Legoktm's link, I am going to ask for a pause in targeting Newspapers.com links (for a month or two, keep updating them when you come across them in other updates, but don't target the http:// links with AWB). We are going to look at Newspapers.com in the referrer metadata pilot.Astinson (WMF) (talk) 21:22, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

List of old TWA user pages

Can someone come up with a list of userspace pages generated using TWA, that are over 6 months old? These have names of the form "User:Example/TWA", "User:Example/TWA/Earth" and "User:Example/TWA/Teahouse", etc. 103.6.159.71 (talk) 19:19, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

How about quarry:query/6047? – Giftpflanze 22:16, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

@Giftpflanze: Thanks. Could you, or another user, get the list on-wiki? Just post it in the Sandbox. 103.6.159.76 (talk) 13:52, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Add linebreaks

Perhaps someone's running a bot that already does this, but I thought I'd bring it up anyway, in case nobody was.

When text precedes a header, the header doesn't work, and the coding appears as normal text; run a Ctrl+F search for the equals sign at [6]. Fixing it is easy, because you just have to add a couple of new lines. If this isn't already being done, could someone's wikisyntax-fixing bot be given this as an additional task? Nyttend (talk) 15:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

I would try asking at WT:CHECKWIKI, they love that sort of thing, and would probably even generate monthly reports with offending articles. Frietjes (talk) 00:43, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Checkwiki #105 should be for that. So I assume, this can be marked as {{BOTREQ|done}}. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:41, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Idea: WikiProject stale participant member remover bot

Many WikiProjects have participant lists. Many of the editors on those lists haven't edited in months, or even years—rendering those lists out-of-date.

This bot would find and update participant lists. Once it found a list, it would remove users who haven't edited Wikipedia for more than three months. The Transhumanist 20:26, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

I imagine that this bot would work on an opt-in basis. Each Wikiproject would determine if there is consensus to subscribe their participant list to this bot's service, in a manner similar to Cluebot's talk page archiving service. Are participant lists standardized enough to allow this to happen? – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:10, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

See https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&profile=default&search=Wikipedia%3AParticipants The Transhumanist 09:25, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

People take breaks, some return here after gaps of years. What is the benefit of removing them from such lists and does it outweigh the disadvantage of telling returnees that they are no longer members? ϢereSpielChequers 10:09, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

New French regions on 1 January

On 1 January 2016, the number of administrative "regions" in Metropolitan France (the part of France in continental Western Europe, excluding Corsica and overseas regions) will be reduced from 22 to 13. Six current regions will remain unchanged, while the remaining 16 will be consolidated into 7 new regions (new articles have already been created for the new regions). In France "regions" are divided into departments, which are divided into arrondissements, which are divided into cantons (this level of government generally doesn't have articles on en-WP), which are divided into communes (towns). With one exception (Lower Normandy & Upper Normandy will be merged to form "Normandy"), all of the new regions will be known by a provisional name until their legislatures meet after 1 January and decide on a new name (must be selected by 1 July). That name must then be approved by France's Conseil d'État (which has until October 2016 to approve the new permanent names).

A bot will be needed to change the name of the "region" in infoboxes of tens of thousands of articles for subunits below the region level (departments, arrondissements, communes, & the few canton articles that may exist). For example, there are 10 departments (infobox template for regions & departments), 44 arrondissements (infobox template), and 5189 communes (infobox template) in the new region Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine. That's a total of 5243 infoboxes (I don't know if any cantons in this region have articles) in this new region alone that will need their infoboxes changed from the current region (Alsace, Champagne-Ardenne, or Lorraine) to Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine. The new regions are based on combinations of existing regions (none of the present regions are divided between 2+ new regions), so it is simply a matter of replacing the name of the present region with the name of the new region. In the future, a bot will be needed to change the name to the permanent name for the region. Because of the multiple changes, I thought this could be a good test case for Wikidata integration into infoboxes and made a suggestion here (no support at the time of making the bot request here).

Regions to be changed

The following comes from Regions of France#Reform and mergers of regions. Italics are temporary names that will eventually be changed to a permanent name. Current region (through 31 Dec) New region (effective 1 Jan) Burgundy Bourgogne-Franche-Comté Franche-Comté Bourgogne-Franche-Comté Aquitaine Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes Limousin Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes Poitou-Charentes Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes Lower Normandy Normandy (permanent name) Upper Normandy Normandy (permanent name) Alsace Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine Champagne-Ardenne Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine Lorraine Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine Languedoc-Roussillon Languedoc-Roussillon-Midi-Pyrénées Midi-Pyrénées Languedoc-Roussillon-Midi-Pyrénées Nord-Pas-de-Calais Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie Picardy Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie Auvergne Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Rhône-Alpes Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes The other regions of France will be unaffected.

In addition to just infoboxes on articles about political subdivisions (departments, arrondissements, & communes), which seems like a simple find-and-replace task, the infoboxes of many other types of articles ought to be changed, but discerning when to change seems like a more challenging task (should locations be changed in articles for historical events?). In those cases, the bot should change the region when it is mentioned in the "location" parameter of an infobox, eg. on the article Saverne Tunnel "Alsace" will need to be replaced with "Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine" on 1 January. To be clear, this request is only for a bot to make the necessary changes on 1 January; I've mentioned the fact that they will need to be changed again to the permanent name in case that is relevant to this request. AHeneen (talk) 01:32, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

BRFA filed AHeneen (talk) 23:09, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Pinging when a "task" section is edited

First: sections of a page can't be added to a watchlist, and this whole subject has seen some pushback over the years; see for instance this Phabricator page, which I learned about yesterday at WP:VPT#Section-specific notifications. Wikipedia is hurt every day, significantly, when people check their watchlists less frequently because they're forced to check hundreds or thousands of edits just so they can monitor the particular sections that represent the task requests they're interested in. This happened to me just yesterday; I don't pull up my watchlist as frequently nowadays because I have to keep WP:ERRORS watchlisted in case anything shows up in the Today's Featured Article section, which represents a small fraction of the edits to that page. There are many editors who struggle with the same problem daily. I'm asking for a bot that runs frequently, takes a diff of WP:ERRORS if there have been any edits, discards everything from the diff above and below specific text markers, and notifies me in some way (a ping would be fine) if the relevant part of the diff has changed. (It would also be nice if it didn't keep pinging me with each edit ... once per 24 hours would be fine ... but that's optional.) If anyone is willing to code this simple bot to run at ERRORS and a few other high-traffic pages, a lot of people will love you for it. (A red herring sometimes gets thrown into these discussions that searching for sections is hard to do ... that's both dubious and irrelevant. All we need is a bot that can search for specific, perhaps hidden, text, and can discard the parts of a diff above and below that text.) - Dank (push to talk) 15:33, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Dank, simulating a watchlist via pings and other (ab)uses of Echo would be pretty kludgy. One of the solutions mentioned in that Phabricator task you linked to was breaking up the page in question into a bunch of transcluded subpages. In your WP:ERRORS example, all TFA errors would go into WP:ERRORS/TFA (or something), which would be transcluded onto WP:ERRORS and which you could watchlist directly. This would be a pretty good way to solve the problem you're talking about, and we'd only need consensus on WT:ERRORS. APerson (talk!) 23:33, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Wondering if it would be sufficient if you created a local tool that would email you or something like that editors could run themselves. You could do it as a bot that users could sign up to have this done automatically for them too. But seems more like something that should be added to the base wikipedia code. Lonjers (talk) 23:10, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Adding Template:Research help to batches of WP:WPMED and WP:MILHIST articles

Hi all, I wanted to put in a request for adding the template Template:Research help to batches of articles in WP:MILHIST articles and WP:WPMED articles with clear messaging. There is a consensus from many of the core community members at WikiProject Medicine and WikiProject Military History and I notified the village pump.

I need a bot to insert {{Research help|Mil}} and {{Research help|Med}} into batches of articles under the ==References==, ==Footnotes== or ==Works cited==. In both, we will do this in batches: starting with 100 articles, then 500, then 2000, then 5000, then more. Moreover, in Military history, the consensus is to pilot on WWI and WWII task force articles first. The edit summary, needs to point towards WP:Research help/Proposal, asking for feedback/discussion on the talk page.

Also, cc-ing bot operators that have helped The Wikipedia Library in the past @Cyberpower678:. Would probably be able to implement this with AWB- its a insert-after activity. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 17:06, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Pinging a few more people who show interest/activity with similar projects here on Bot Requests: @Bender235, Harej, Fayenatic london, BD2412, Magioladitis, Kharkiv07, and Hazard-SJ: Anyone interested? Astinson (WMF) (talk) 21:52, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Sure, I can do this. I'll get the articles via {{WikiProject Military history}} (well, since this has no category that tracks {{{WWI}}} and {{{WWII}}} usages, either I check each page for the params or I check for Category:World War I and Category:World War II) and {{WikiProject Medicine}} transclusions, and do half the number of article edits for each WikiProject. Let me know if that sounds okay.  Hazard SJ  07:08, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: Brilliant! You are amazing!

For the milhist ones, couldn't you use: Category:World War I task force articles and Category:World War II task force articles? AWB allows conversion of talk pages to article pages.

Otherwise sounds good! Make sure that the link to the proposal is clear in the edit summaries. Also, as you update the different batches of articles, can you make sure you add a typestamped {{done}} in the pilot stages marked at: Wikipedia:Research_help/Proposal#Project_steps. This will help us measure pageviews in the experimental conditions, etc. to figure out the if/when of the changes. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 16:57, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

@Astinson (WMF): Definitely, I was unaware of those categories. I'll also go head and use Category:All WikiProject Medicine articles, while I'm at it.

Questions:

1. Should I simply skip if none of the three sections (references, footnotes, and works cited) are on the page?

   Then there's Rivadavia-class battleship, and possibly others, with the template in an endnotes section, even though both a footnotes and a references section exists.

2. If more than one of the sections exist, is there any specific way I should handle that?
3. Where in the section should the template be placed (e.g. at the very top, at the very bottom, just before/after reflists if any, etc.)?

Once I get these sorted out, I could proceed with the implementation of this task (P.S. I'm using Python, not AWB).  Hazard SJ  08:23, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: Thanks for the questions: the template should be between the {{reflist}} or the <references/> (these might be more consistent than the section headers). You might use those as the insertion criteria, but you are going to need a filter that removes just plain "Notes" or named reference sections (so reflists that use "|group ="?)). Once inserted the templates should look like: Wikipedia:Research_help/Proposal#Proposed_design_for_links_on_article_pages. As for the multiple sections: it should be the main referenced footnote section used throughout the articles. In the first couple small batch insertions, if you take add it to all the articles that have only one possible sections and/or one version of {{reflist}} and/or <references/>, and keep a log of the articles that don't get inserted, we can find where there are machine implementable rules for exceptions in the larger batches. However, this is a pilot: so as long as we know the number of articles added too, it doesn't matter if we skip a few (as long as we have a count/log those as well).

For section titles, I did some research a few years back and the most frequent section headers were: "Footnotes", "References", and "Works cited". If you add "Endnotes" to that list: it should cover something like 80%+ of the articles. Thank you so much for the thorough examination, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 14:45, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

@Astinson (WMF): Pings don't work unless you sign in the same edit. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 20:37, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@Hellknowz and Hazard-SJ: That I didn't remember (I am sure I read that at some point) Astinson (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@Astinson (WMF): The "Notes" section seems to be another section to include. With the sections we have so far, a quick partial dry run shows these pages as pages that neither have {{reflist}} not the references tag. I've looked through a few, and strangely Animal testing is on the list, so that's an issue with the parser I'm using (it strangely didn't detect all of the sections on that page, I'm trying to have that looked into). Also, please confirm that it's before the reflist (you said "between").  Hazard SJ  04:50, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: "Notes" sections tend to be split between commentary notes and actual reference footnotes: so they are not always tied to the research process -- we don't want to be overapplying the template right now - I would rather miss some articles, than create mistakes at this point; if/when we move towards an RFC, we will probably suggest that it be substituted in {{reflist}} templates, unless turned off, which should be a better solution than adding a separate template. Also, for right now, I think the other sections should be enough: I did a spot check on the list, and there are a number that have reference sections for example Adaptive_immune_system and Agent Orange, and I think you are missing articles that have a reflist w/ a variable (for example {{reflist|30em}}). You might want to look for the string {{reflist without the closing bracket, to make it more effective - that should capture both the | and }} which will follow. And for confirming location: yes, before the reflist template or references tag, after the section header (between the two) see the sample in the proposal). Thank you again! Its awesome to see this project moving forward, we are finding this page is incredibly useful in outreach, and have found a lot of teachers and librarians are excited about it :) Astinson (WMF) (talk) 15:24, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

@Astinson (WMF): Hopefully what I've implemented so far is okay. I won't check the Notes section as you said. I've made 4 tests in my userspace for you to see: Special:Diff/695426787, Special:Diff/695426845, Special:Diff/695426892 and Special:Diff/695426919. It should also work for <references />. Let me know if there's any issue with that. Also, for the edit summaries, how does "Bot: Adding <template> (see the proposal for details)" sound? Is there any additional content that you would want in the summary than that?  Hazard SJ  00:29, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: Maybe add to the edit summary "please leave feedback/comments at Wikipedia talk:Research help". In general, the edits look good. Make sure that you are using the variable in the templates correctly: in the documentation above I included all caps, but we set up the redirects to be capitalized for the first letter, and lower case for the second two (Mil and Med vs MIL and MED) this was a mistake on my part in the request; sorry. Otherwise, excited to see it start! Make sure to document when you do the batches at Wikipedia:Research_help/Proposal#Project_steps. Thank you again! Astinson (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

@Astinson (WMF): The summary and templates have been updated. I'm assuming you'll let me know when you want the different batches to be run? Also, it looks like we're ready to take this to BRFA now, right? (P.S. trial edits will possibly take up half of the first batch)  Hazard SJ  19:38, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: Go ahead and take it to BFRA. As for the batches: if you do them at 5-10 days apart based on your own volunteer schedule, that gives us enough time to respond to conversations within the community. I will let you set your own timeline (considering the holidays, etc) and will only poke you if we pass into that window of time without implementation. (I figured the first couple batches would be trials). Astinson (WMF) (talk) 20:25, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

@Astinson (WMF): BRFA filed  Hazard SJ  21:19, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Citation style

The citation style should be consistent in an article. A bot should automatically fix citations in some articles in Category:All articles needing references cleanup so that they will be consistent. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 02:30, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

How does the bot determine the right style for each article? – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:54, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Hmmmm I might start looking into this. I think this task is vastly to broad in scope to tackle all at once by a bot as Jonsey mentioned. But maybe there are some simpler sub problems that a bot could solve. Lonjers (talk) 02:47, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

• You could start with a bot run to calculate the citation style of each article and add an appropriate hidden category to those articles where the citation style is consistent. Subsequent bot runs could identify articles where a cite has been added in a different style, they might even be able to change the citations to match the style set by the hidden category. Though this would mean we needed to carefully monitor changes to that hidden category. ϢereSpielChequers 10:17, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Move protect DYK subpages

An adminbot should move protect all DYK subpages per Template talk:Did you know#How to move a nomination subpage to a new name. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 23:07, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Can't imagine that's worth the effort. Is this ever a problem? I'm sure there are occasional situations where moving is necessary; a blanket ban would be counterproductive. — Earwig ^talk 23:19, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Note that there's a WP:VPP discussion about whether this should happen going on right now. APerson (talk!) 23:01, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Substitute all cite doi and cite pmid templates

Per the RfCs at [7] and [8], the use of {{cite doi}} and {{cite pmid}} templates has been deprecated. We need a bot to go through all the articles that currently transclude those templates and substitute them instead. Kaldari (talk) 21:33, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

It looks like Dexbot may have already done this. Kaldari (talk) 22:02, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: What's the status of Dexbot's clean-up of these templates? Can they all be deleted now? Kaldari (talk) 22:03, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Hey, Yes. I did what I could. All removed now :)Ladsgroup^overleg 01:33, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't think the following is controversial: All instances of {{cite doi/*}} and {{cite pmid/*}} with no incoming links, transclusions, or incoming redirects can be deleted. It will take at least two passes to delete as many as possible, since some {{cite pmid/*}} templates are redirects to {{cite doi/*}} templates. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:29, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Note that this is nearly 100,000 deletions, no small feat. I would like to see a bit of clearer consensus first as a sanity check. At any rate, I hope we can keep discussion centralized on the village pump thread. — Earwig ^talk 07:48, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

The VPT thread has been archived. My sense of the discussion was that there were no technical problems with deleting this many unused templates. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:50, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Help with BAFTA articles

Hello. I recently split content from BAFTA Award for Best Film (which previously listed nominees for three different categories) to make BAFTA Award for Best British Film and BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language. But I've noticed that lots of articles are fixed to pipe straight to the "Best Film" article so they are now directed to the wrong place. See for example Ida (film) and the BAFTA link right at the end of the lead. It's happening like this on most relevant articles I've looked at (which is annoying because the redirects would have worked anyway).

I don't quite know what bots are capable of, but I'm hoping it's possible to fix this. I imagine the best way would be for a bot to search for any articles with: [[BAFTA Award for Best Film|BAFTA Award for Best British Film]], [[BAFTA Award for Best Film|Best British Film]], [[BAFTA Award for Best Film|BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language]], [[BAFTA Award for Best Film|Best Film Not in the English Language]], [[BAFTA Award for Best Film|BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Film]], [[BAFTA Award for Best Film|Best Foreign Film]]. And then hopefully it could fix them by removing the piping? If it's at all possible that would be great because doing it manually will take ages. --Loeba (talk) 11:24, 10 December 2015 (UTC)#

WP:AWB baby 166.170.47.209 (talk) 16:30, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I never entirely understood AWB but I've installed it, and after fiddling I think I could probably manage it. I've put in a request for full usage, let's see. --Loeba (talk) 17:48, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

This is too complicated for a bot. AWB works Set up a search for all links to BAFTA Award for Best Film and then have it do disambiguations for BAFTA Award for Best Film with the two others as options. You'll see every version and can work on it page by page to get rid of the piping. Contact me if you need help @Loeba:. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 18:53, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Sorting AfDs into into WikiProject Deletion Sorting

This may have been requested before but I couldn't find it searching (sorry if it has), but is there a bot that could automatically sort AfDs based on the page's current categories? Perhaps this is way too time intensive, but I figure it would save a lot of time if a bot could recognize the category a page has already been listed in, and then use that to sort it into the relevant AfD deletion sorting category. FuriouslySerene (talk) 18:56, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

A critical part of such a bot would obviously be some sort of list that links categories with the deletion sorting list they correspond to. I don't think generating such a list would be easy; given the diversity of topics that show up at AfD, quite a few categories would need to be on it. Detecting WikiProject banners for this purpose might be valuable, and this detection is already done by WP:AALERTS. Either way, it sounds like an interesting idea. APerson (talk!) 03:33, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Interesting. Perhaps the bot could learn from previous AfD sortings - there's a huge amount of data available potentially. Not being capable of coding such a bot myself, perhaps I'm asking too much. Thanks for the response! FuriouslySerene (talk) 14:11, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

WP:AALERTS currently detects banner- and infobox-tagged pages and pages that fall into certain talk page and main page categories, as well as DELSORT lists. We have deliberately limited it to few of those, only 1 per type. This is mainly because each of those categories/templates has to be correlated with each of the processes (AfD/PROD/RfC/etc.) and this is a lot of requests and data. That said, a few years have passes and it's possible we might consider some sort of expansion to this. I would say there should be a separate bot to guess pages belonging to projects and perhaps a supervised mode where an editor can very quickly accept or reject these guesses. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 20:15, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

AD / CE - BC / BCE Suggestion

I am asking that someone with the necessary skill looks at a BOT that can, if agreed, add the following;

• Link: AD to CE and BC to BCE.This would only need to be done once per article (maybe in the first instance of it occurring) a suitable article, for example, is History of timekeeping devices. It may also be required to wikilink AD / BC in the first place. If feasible the Bot should be able to reverse link (BCE to BC) the critical action is that AD is linked to CE and BD to BCE, whatever starting point is within the reviewed article.
• Why: AD and BC are based on a presumed date of a birth of deity and whilst whether it is factually correct is irrelevant, it has become the standard universal dating method. 1) Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, needs to inform that there is alternative terminology, and that within many educational establishments the measurement of time on this scale is taught through CE and BCE. Please see, for example one of many previous discussions at Talk:History_of_timekeeping_devices#WP:ERA. Whether the link is within the text of the article or separated out for whatever reason is another discussion, the importance is the one link between AD to CEand BC to BCE. Edmund Patrick – confer 08:44, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

A bot performing an action like this would, at a minimum, need consensus via a widely advertised discussion. I suspect that you would not find it easy to achieve that, given the existing guideline. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:49, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, I totally agree that a consensus would be needed, and this is just a small part of the conversation that needs to be had, but I disagree with your example of the existing guideline. What I am asking for is just a link that makes clear to the reader that BC = BCE and AD = CE. I am not asking for the dating style of any article to be changed, nor the manual of style, just for Wikipedia to do what an encyclopedia should do, inform! in this case by what is after all Wikipedia's strength a simple link. I will seek the next platform is raise this discussion, I would still like to know if it was feasible though? Thanks again Edmund Patrick – confer 09:24, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Although not originally written as a rfc I have today linked it to technical and proposals. With Thanks Edmund Patrick – confer 10:09, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Apologies RFC now housed on my talk page,here as I felt that was more suitable space rather than this specific talk page. With Thanks Edmund Patrick – confer 10:33, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Tagging articles lacking a lead (extreme cases only)

I am running a competition (Wikipedia:Take the lead!) in January. I have been looking at Category:Wikipedia introduction cleanup and Category:Pages missing lead section. However this is only a minor portion of all articles missing or with too-short leads as I can come across them pretty frequently if I hit Random Page repeatedly.

What I was thinking of was a bot that might pick up the most extreme examples, say, articles of over 5 kb (or 10kb?) prose with leads of 1-2 sentences only. I was thinking this might be a good way to pick up large/important articles with crappy leads. I didn't want to go crazy with tagging 50,000 articles. Writing in a stream-of-consciousness type way and happy for input on this. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:26, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

One thing to consider is lists. They tend to have rather laconic leads "This is a list of X" (in violation of WP:BEGIN and usually accompanied with a chronic shortage of words). Do you think mass tagging lists will raise awareness about the importance of writing good leads? Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 09:05, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

The hardest part about this is to determine which articles to tag. I've done some work on this, and have gone and excluded disambiguations. As Finnusertop said, however, the lists are going to still be a large number of the remainder. I've gone ahead and gathered a list of potential candidates so far here (excludes disambiguation, but nothing else, so some may have already been tagged; I didn't limit the size of the pages either). As you can see, over half of that list contains, well, lists. Therefore, the question would be how do we treat these?  Hazard SJ  00:50, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

@Hazard-SJ: thanks for doing that. Interesting quandary. Could go either way on lists. I am tempted to tag them. I think maybe asking some wikignomes to tag a few articles might be best. I don't really want to indiscriminately tag-bomb articles and yet would be good to point to a few broad/obvious fixes...hmmm.Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:59, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

@Finnusertop: after looking at 50 or so articles I am inclined to think that lists need leads....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:28, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

@Casliber: without a doubt your view is in agreement with our policies and guidelines. I, too, agree. It's just that this is one of those things that has never been enforced much and the community has developed bad practices. Tagging instances of this would affect a majority of list articles, and I'm wondering if this has the desired effect of raising awareness, or will it simply upset people. Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 19:32, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, maybe just tagging a few high-importance and broad articles would be good. And hence better done manually. I am not a fan of tag-bombing Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:26, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

If this is something that would affect the majority of list articles, it is obvious that the MOS does not reflect the consensus of the entire community, and enforcing the will of a few MOS editors over the majority of list-article writers runs contrary to our basic principles. Nyttend (talk) 14:41, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

The actions of Casliber (talk · contribs) prompted me to do this. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:17, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I came across a few like that. @Nyttend: umm, I am not sure what the consensus among list article writers actually is...? Come to think of it, had to look at the MOS too...actually it doesn't say too much proscriptive at all (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section).Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:21, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm not attempting to say that the consensus of list writers is for something, but enforcing MOS, written by just a small group of people, over different practices of the majority of list-writers is wrong. Policies being written to reflect what we generally do already, there can be no real basis for demanding that we follow MOS here, because there's definitely not a consensus of list-writers in favor of doing anything that can be bot-enforced, at least among suggestions made here. Nyttend (talk) 13:09, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Aah ok, I get you - that is a fair point and I concede that list-articles hadn't crossed my mind when initially thinking about this. The list of articles above that includes some lists is interesting, as it catches some articles that actually do have leads but that someone has slapped an Overview' section header at the top. Some definitely could do with decent leads however. In any case, I was just throwing this idea up for discussion and have already been tagging things manually anyway as the more I discuss it the more I am dubious of a bot's utility. Food for thought though....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:29, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Missing categories on footballer articles

I've noticed that a lot of articles on footballers do not have them in all the available categories. Would it be possible for a bot to run off a report identifying players who are listed as playing for a club in their infobox, but do not have the matching category (e.g. Category:Manchester United F.C. players). Perhaps this could be done (as a test run) for players in Category:English footballers.

If it's possible, the bot would know that certain clubs have been renamed (for example players listed as playing for Small Heath F.C. would be in Category:Birmingham City F.C. players. I'm happy to provide a list of these if it helps. Cheers, Number 57 11:44, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Remove MiszaBot config

A bot should remove all transclusions of User:MiszaBot/config because the three bots have been replaced by Lowercase sigmabot III. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:56, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

There's no effective need to do that, as my bot searches for User:MiszaBot/config. That said, it wouldn't be hard to replace the MiszaBot template with a different one on the bot's next run. →Σσς. (Sigma) 04:00, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Also, if they weren't replaced (just removed) all the pages that use the MB configurations (my talk page included) would cease to be archived. --kelapstick^(bainuu) 04:02, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

It's bad form to start this thread and less than a minute later file a MFD which pre-empts the outcome. See also WP:MULTI. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:12, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Moreover, this page is for tasks that already have consensus. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:26, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

This request has not been thought through, and the subsequently filed MFD is going down in flames for that very reason. Suggest this request be closed. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:38, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Not to prolong this request, but would it make sense to move and rename the (invisible) template to something like Template:Archiving bot configuration or even Template:Archive configuration? --Izno (talk) 22:42, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Request for Bot on Hak.wikipedia

Dear Sir,

I am the current Administrator of Hakka Wikipedia.

I would like to create a bot for use on Hakka Wikipedia which is programmed to create articles on small towns and villages of Europe (namely for the Netherlands, France, Spain, Poland, Germany, UK, etc). For example,

• this Dutch town (of this province)
• this French town (of this region)
• this Spanish town (of this Spanish region)
• this Polish town (of this Polish voivodeship)
• this German town (of this German district)

Of course, the articles on big cities would still be manually created by by real users but for small towns, it would save more time to have it automated so that other users can focus on editing the more complex topics.

Any help or guidance would be appreciated, Thank you. --Chrysolophus pictus (talk) 21:26, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

@Chrysolophus pictus: maybe Lsjbot bot can help you. You can contact bot owner at Swedish Wikipedia. But it should be possible to use Wikidata. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:06, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

@Edgars2007: Thanks! I will try and contact that bot owner to see how he could help. --Chrysolophus pictus (talk) 22:46, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Bot to tag orphaned SPI pages

I am an SPI Clerk, and this requested is related to a discussion held at the Clerks' Noticeboard. When a SPI case is opened (a page is created) using the process described at WP:SPI (or using Twinkle), the page is automatically tagged with the {{SPI case status}} template with no parameter (like this: {{SPI case status|}}). Then, a bot named Amalthea (bot) searches for such pages and adds them to the main list at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cases/Overview. This is list is, in turn, transcluded to WP:SPI and used by clerks and checkusers to review cases. But, sometimes an editor who is not experienced enough does not follow the procedure and creates a SPI page with no {{SPI case status}} templates. Such a page is then not listed at the main list, and gets lost. We need a bot that would either:

a) search for SPI pages without {{SPI case status}} template and then add template to the page, or

b) search for SPI pages without {{SPI case status}} and add such pages to the list at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cases/Overview with a status like "unknown" or similar.

Note that there are many pages in the SPI domain that are archived (example). Those pages should not be added to the list or tagged with the template. Here is an example of a page created without the template: [9]. Vanjagenije (talk) 17:36, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Bot needed to reverse contributions

As far as I am aware there is not yet a bot which will:

• undo contributions of another user/bot for a given date/time range
• write a list of diffs where it was impossible to Undo because of subsequent edits

One example where this is needed is #BC_births_and_deaths_categorizations above on this page, but there will be others. – Fayenatic London 13:37, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikiproject Women tagging

Could some AWB bot (pinging Magioladitis) do a little tagging? The list A is available here, list B - here.

Articles from list A needs to be tagged with {{WikiProject Women's History}}, articles from list B needs to be tagged with {{WikiProject Women}}. Although I did the basic check, the lists should be checked once more. Maybe some articles already have any of these banners in talk page:

• {{WikiProject Feminism}}
• {{WikiProject Gender Studies}}
• {{WikiProject Jewish Women}}
• {{WikiProject LGBT studies}}
• {{WikiProject Women}}
• {{WikiProject Women artists}}
• {{WikiProject Women's Health}}
• {{WikiProject Women's History}}
• {{WikiProject Women scientists}}
• {{WikiProject Women's sport}}
• {{WikiProject Women writers}}

Bot can skip them.

The consensus to tag articles is here. This is phase 1 (tagging those articles, which are also in German Wikipedia), there will be more phases later. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:57, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Question about WikiProject templates

@Edgars2007: I have seen talk pages that contain more than one of the WikiProject templates above. Are there any guidelines that state if a talk page has one of these templates that it doesn't need another template? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 20:30, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: Don't think, there is such guidelines. But the article can have let's say {{WikiProject Women's sport}} and {{WikiProject Women's History}}, if sportsperson is born before 1950 (margin for inclusion at {{WikiProject Women's History}}). But it isn't important in this proposal. Articles should contain at least one of those banners. In the very original proposal there was only {{WikiProject Women}}, but as it is easy to distinguish women by birth year category, the tagging is splitted to two banners. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:53, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

I can help with this. I 'll read the request carefully. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:49, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Edgars2007 if I just go and add the banners in the two lists it would be a problem? -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:40, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Magioladitis not a very big problem, but the list comparing is so easy in AWB. Or I didn't carefully explain, what I want you to do? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:54, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Edgars2007 I would prefer if someone else was generating the lists to reduce complains against my bot. If something goes wrong I can always blame you :) -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:07, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Magioladitis The lists are already here - in the first line, you just need to do a simple check. Yes, you can send complainers to me :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 12:17, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Edgars2007 OK then I ll start tagging later today :) -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:24, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Just noting that Magioladitis is currently blocked so the bot is not operating. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:55, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

@MSGJ: User:Yobot isn't blocked though, right? GoingBatty (talk) 05:41, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Bot to create and update lists of most requested articles within a WikiProject

Is there interest in a bot that, at the request of a wikiproject, looks through the articles in its scope and compiles a list of "most requested" articles based on red links? I imagine it similar to how User:AlexNewArtBot creates a list of articles that project members can look through and include on a list. I got the idea from working on WP:Linguistics so I'll use that as my example here, but the bot could be useful for any number of wikiprojects.

I would imagine a bot would periodically (once a day? once a week?) look through the WikiProject category (Category:WikiProject Linguistics articles) and count the number of times various redlinks appear in those articles. So for example it would see that both Linguistic Society of America and List of presidents of the Linguistic Society of America both have a redlink to George Melville Bolling and put down that the article has 2 incoming redlinks. It would then put that down on a page that project participants can look at and decide whether those requested articles are within the projects scope and add them to the "requested articles" section of the WikiProject.

If there's interest, and something similar doesn't already exist, I would be willing to work on it. Thoughts? Wugapodes (talk) 21:19, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't think there is one for all WikiProjects, but there are some similar lists, like this one. Certainly worth looking into. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 12:58, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Similar redlink bots have been built over the years. Most fell out of use, and most dedicated to a single Wikiproject but I certainly can see the interest in such a bot that could work for any project. I know I would make use of it for WP:PHYS and WP:JOURNALS (as a supplement to our existing WP:JCW which Hellknowz mentioned, but that one is fairly unique to the project.) Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:27, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

If no one else is working on this let me know and I will take a stab at it @Wugapodes: Lonjers (talk) 23:09, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

@Lonjers: I haven't begun working on it, as I wanted to make sure there was interest (which there seems to be), and because I'm still reading the API documentation. I'd be willing to work together on it if you want. Wugapodes (talk) 03:31, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

@Wugapodes: Created an empty git hub repo for it https://github.com/utilitarianexe/requested_wiki_articles. I would just use pywikibot to create it but let me know if you would prefer something else.

Cited tweets

As noted in this blog post, we have some citations to tweets which "use the obsolete HashBang URls (e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/007/status/133679555167784960.) Some Tweets have been deleted." Can a bot fix these two issues? Or perhaps that's a job more suited to AWB? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:23, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@Andy: So the two issues would be:

1. Change URLs of the form http://twitter.com/#!/foobar to https://twitter.com/foobar (with variations for URLs with https and www.twitter.com)
2. Fix dead Twitter links - I hope the bots that already mark dead links and/or add archiveurls would pick these up too.

Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 18:21, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, though your point about dead links and bots may be right. A third change might be to change links to accounts (not individual tweets) in EL sections to use {{Twitter}}. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:07, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@Andy: BRFA filed for #1. GoingBatty (talk) 21:59, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

That's great; thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:27, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

@Andy: #1 is  Done - please let me know if I've missed any. Thinking about #3 - what would be the benefit in changing links to {{Twitter}}? (I have a guess, but I don't want to put words in your mouth). Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 15:52, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Two benefits: easier tracking; and we'd be able to pull the values from Wikidata. In fact, it might be worth converting the template, first, then replacing links and removing the Twitter handle (or moving it to Wikidata) in one go. Thoughts? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:52, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

@Andy: Changing {{Twitter}} to behave like {{Official website}}? Sounds like an interesting idea. Too bad you didn't get any response to your suggestion on Template talk:Twitter#Wikidata. I've invited a couple editors to discuss there (everyone else is welcome too, of course). GoingBatty (talk) 21:06, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Just saw cyberbot II tag some dead links and add archiveurls. Hope it would do it for Twitter links too. GoingBatty (talk) 22:01, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Removing bad merge requests

Over the years, I have come into situations where someone will slap a merge tag on an article, and then not follow through with adding a merge tag to the other article, if they even decide to mention why they want to merge the two pages at all. These tags can often remain up for years until they are removed, so I was wondering if there was a way to program a bot to remove these sorts of things, as I suspect a sizable chunk of merge request taggings are just that. This may be near impossible to do, but it would be worth looking into, if possible. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 17:33, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

@Kevin: I'm sure someone with better bot skills than I have could code this, but is there consensus to do this? You request does not seem to be in line with the instructions at Template:Merge#When to remove, and I don't see any discussion at Template talk:Merge. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 22:06, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

I'll go leave a note over there, but I suspect that it would not be all that uncontroversial. Either way, thanks for letting me know, and if anyone wants to start coding a bot just in case, feel free to do so. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 22:27, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Merge bot manages the merge tags. I might look into modifying that to add reciprocal tags, where only one of the articles is tagged. It may also be possible to mark those where there is no discussion. But the ongoing problems with this project area are an overabundance of drive-by merge-taggers who make low-priority WP:summary style merge requests, when there is nothing inherently wrong or broken about having separate detailed-subtopic articles, albeit stubs, drive-by managers who don't actually work on merges themselves but think they can fix the process, and a dearth of editors who actually work on merges. Bot requests come and go in this area; few are actually implemented. The last battle I was fighting was to stop editors from creating tags to request that section 5 of article "A" get merged into section 7 of article "B", and such silliness. Wbm1058 (talk) 15:14, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Fix a disaster

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Can a bot fix this complete chaos? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.170.48.181 (talk) 20:48, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

N Not done. See this thread – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:49, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Articles update

A multi-lingual edit-a-thon. 70+ editors are participating from 18 Wikipedias meta:User:Titodutta/GI_participants. Is it possible for a bot to report on a Meta subpage the articles created by these editors in every 4-6 hours for next 1 week? @MZMcBride: --Tito Dutta (talk) 00:22, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Dead links

I am here again, I would like to inquire if we could create a dead links bot that searches for and tags dead links in articles. I find dead links from years back every day. I think that the system needs to keep up with the high amount of dead links that are not tagged as such. So that the bot that is currently archiving the dead links doesnt just take for example one dead link that happens to have been tagged but leaves behind 5 others.BabbaQ (talk) 15:54, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

@BabbaQ: Just saw cyberbot II tag some dead links and add archiveurls. Hope it makes its way to your favorite articles too. GoingBatty (talk) 22:03, 25 January 2016 (UTC)