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	23	8	Primefac	2024-11-23 14:08	Primefac	2024-11-23 14:08
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		5	2	CFA	2024-12-08 03:31
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

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HTML errors on discussion pages

Is anyone going to be writing a bot to fix the errors on talk pages related to RemexHtml?

I can think of these things to do, although there are probably many more things and there might be issues with these ones.

• replace non-nesting tags like <s>…<s> with <s>…</s> where there are no templates or HTML tags between those tags
• replace <code> with <pre> where the content contains newlines and the opening tag does not have any text between it and the previous <br> or newline
• replace <font color=#abcdef>…</font> with <span style="color:#abcdef">…</span> where the content does not only contain a single link and nothing else

Jc86035 (talk) 13:50, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Changing font tags to span tags is a bit of a loosing battle when people can still have font tags in their signatures. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:48, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

I was under the impression all of the problematic users had been dealt with, and all that was left was cleaning up extant uses. Primefac (talk) 17:24, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Unfortunately not. There are a couple unworked tasks on the point in phab, but I've seen a few lately who use obsolete HTML. (Exact queries somewhere on WT:Linter I think.) --Izno (talk) 05:47, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

What is the use of fixing the old messages? I suggest you leave them as they are. This is not useful to change them. Best regards -- Neozoon 16:16, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

@Neozoon: The thing is, when there are HTML tags which are unclosed or improperly closed, their effects remain in place, not to the end of the message but to the end of the page. See for example this thread which contains two <tt> tags instead of one <tt> and one </tt>, so every subsequent post is in a monospace font. One tiny change - the addition of the missing slash - fixes the whole page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:01, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

If we're going to fix font tags, one issue I'd really like to see fixed is when a font tag is opened inside a link label and never closed, since I see that one frequently while browsing archives. Enterprisey (talk!) 20:16, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

BRFA filed Basically does what Jc86035 suggested in the first bullet point Galobtter (pingó mió) 07:44, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

Populate Selected Anniversaries with Jewish (and possibly Muslim) Holidays

Right now there is a manual process to go year by year to the last year's date and remove the Jewish holiday and then find the correct Gregorian date for this year and put it in. This is because Jewish and Muslim holidays are not based on the Gregorian calendar. There is a website, http://www.hebcal.org for Jewish holidays that lists all the Gregorian dates for the respective Jewish holidays. I suggest a bot take that list and update the appropriate dates for the current/next year. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 19:29, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Which articles are we talking about? Enterprisey (talk!) 20:15, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Not articles, the Selected Anniversaries pages which then lands up on the main page. For example, Wikipedia:Selected_anniversaries/July_22 has a Jewish holy day for 2018 but in 2017 and 2019.... that day falls on a different date. So the idea is to get a list of days that are worthy of being listed and then go to the page for the prior year and delete the entry and then add the entry for the current year. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 23:38, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello @Sir Joseph and Howcheng: - I'm thinking about and investigating this as a possible project, if you are still interested. It would help which Jewish/Israeli holidays are tracked on Selected Anniversary pages? -- GreenC 15:25, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

@GreenC:, yes and thank you for your interest. I know that hebcal is open source and has a data feed, but not sure how useful it is. My thinking is to create a subpage listing "Holidays to be posted on the Front Page" and then the bot goes to this year or last year and updates it. I'm sure you might have a better way to do it. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 15:44, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

http://www.hebcal.org appears to be expired now a click-farm. What I would need is a list of holidays, then I can see what resources are available. -- GreenC 16:22, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

my huge mistake, I meant hebcal.com Sir Joseph ^(talk) 16:25, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Great, I'll take a look. There is also Enrico Service 2.0 which is pretty good for an API but it's missing some holidays thus I would need to know which ones are needed before deciding on a data source. -- GreenC 16:30, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

I'd go with the hebcal integration. Many of the holidays posted to the front page are not national holidays so wouldn't be in enrico.Sir Joseph ^(talk) 16:36, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

You are right it is better. Would need to know which holidays. What happens with multi-day holidays like Chanukah, is an entry made in every Selected Anniversaries page (for 8 days I think?) or just the first day? -- GreenC 16:57, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

@Howcheng: would be able to confirm, but I think only one day is listed, except perhaps for Rosh Hashana. I will see if I can pull together a list of holidays unless Howcheng has one that he uses, this would be my own list and not what has happened in the past. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 17:11, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Actually, I was thinking NOT of SA/OTD, but to update the holiday articles themselves. If we can make sure all the articles have holiday infoboxes in them, then the bot can add the date20XX= parameters. Including them in OTD is a manual process because the articles have to be checked to make sure the quality is still good enough for inclusion. —howcheng {chat} 17:19, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

I'm OK either way, but wouldn't it be easier for you to not have to search for a holiday, but know a few days in advance as you do to check the SA and then see if that article is good enough? Sir Joseph ^(talk) 17:58, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

It's a bot, so there's no reason it can't do both, I suppose. —howcheng {chat} 07:20, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

After some reflection, I would suggest the way to display Jewish and other moveable holiday dates is with a Lua template. The data could be in an enwiki hosted JSON file during development, later imported into Wikidata once established to share with other projects. The data can be downloaded from hebcal.com, generated with a script using mathematical algos or otherwise manually entered. It only needs to be done one time up to 2050 or 2100 whatever makes sense. It can be for any holiday that uses a non-Gregorian calendar, for translating to Gregorian. For example {{holigreg |holiday=Hanukkah |date=2018 |df=mdy}} would produce December 2, 2018 - December 10, 2018. There can be other options to control display output. It might also have |date=CURRENTYEAR so it's always up to date for use in infoboxes. And support |date=CURRENTYEAR+1 to display dates previous and after. Another advantage is other tools and bots can use the database; so for example if a bot was written to update the SA, it could key off the JSON or Wikidata database in a consistent manner for Jewish, Muslim and I assume there are other non-Gregorian holidays. -- GreenC 13:13, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, that sounds like a plan, or I think I understand that it sounds like a plan. I know hebcal has a JSON here: [1] Let me know if you need anything from my end. I am sure we're going to need spelling equalization, etc. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 13:28, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

This is a really good idea. Just make sure that someone checks which "day" we tend to mark. Jewish festivals begin in the evening. I think we usually note the occurrence on the 'main day', not the day the festival begins, but there may be exceptions. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 13:51, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

This would also be a good approach to take for other moveable holidays, like Easter and its related holidays (Fat Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, etc), and ones based on the Chinese calendar as well. —howcheng {chat} 16:02, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

We should create a page with a table similar to this: User:Sir_Joseph/sandbox and that can be populated by the bot. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 16:11, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

New template is created. Follow-up at Template_talk:Calendar_date#Template. -- GreenC 19:02, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

Bot to remove religion parameter in bio infoboxes

2016 Policy RFC re religion in bio infoboxes Don't know if this has been discussed here previously. I've noticed several editors manually removing the religion from biographical infoboxes. Surely, there are thousands of these infoboxes that contain the religion entry. Wouldn't it make sense to just run a bot? — Maile (talk) 19:49, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

How does a bot know whether the parameter is appropriate for a certain topic? --Izno (talk) 21:14, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

FYI, it looks like there are roughly 4,000 instances of {{Infobox person}} that use the |religion= parameter. I am sure that there are other person-related infoboxes using this parameter as well. They will probably require a human editor, per the RFC outcome, to ensure that those cases in which the religion is significant to the article subject is adequately covered either in the body text or in a custom parameter. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:31, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

Misunderstanding here. It's not by topic, or by individual person. It involves all instances of Template:Infobox person, which seems to used on 290,000 (plus) pages. The notation says, Please note that in 2016, the religion and ethnicity parameters were removed from Infobox person as a result of the RfC: Religion in biographical infoboxes and the RfC: Ethnicity in infoboxes as clarified by this discussion. Prior to 2016, the religion parameter was allowed, and there's no way of knowing how many hundreds of thousands of Infobox person templates have the religion there. The immediate result, is that the existing religion stated in the infobox remains in place, but just doesn't show up on the page. What random editors are doing is going to articles, one by one, and removing the stated religion from the infobox. My question is whether or not a bot could be run to go through all Infobox persons in place, and remove that entry — Maile (talk) 22:58, 29 July 2018 (UTC)

There is a way of knowing, which is how I came up with the estimate above. Go to Category:Pages using infobox person with unknown parameters and click on "R" in the table of contents. Every page listed under "R" has at least one unsupported parameter in Infobox person that starts with the letter "R". (Edited to add: see also Category:Infobox person using religion).

As to whether this is a task feasible for a bot, see my response above, which explains why this request probably runs afoul of WP:CONTEXTBOT. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:00, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Jonesey95, I'm not really sure this is a CONTEXT issue. The template doesn't show anything when |religion= is given (which, based on the TemplateData, is actually used 8000+ times). Now, I wouldn't want to run this bot purely to remove one bad parameter, but if I could get a list of the top 20 "bad params" (or anything with 50+ uses) and/or include |ethnicity= and |denomination= (which also appear to be deprecated) then we might be getting somewhere. Primefac (talk) 01:38, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Following on from the above, there are (according to TemplateData) about 156 "invalid" params with 10+ uses, 75 with 25+ uses, 38 with 50+ uses, 20 with 100+ uses and 3 (religion, ethnicity, and imdb_id) with 2000+. There are about 2k invalid params all told, but the majority look like they're either typos (i.e. they are context-dependent) but by removing the most common ones it'll cut down the work load. Primefac (talk) 01:43, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

How does a bot determine that in cases in which the religion is significant to the article subject[, the person's religion] is adequately covered either in the body text or in a custom parameter? (words in brackets added to RFC outcome excerpt to avoid quoting the whole thing). As for other parameters, my experience with removing/fixing unsupported infobox parameters is that a large number of them are typos that need to be fixed, rather than removed. Maybe an AWB user with a bot flag can make these changes, but I don't see how an unsupervised bot would work reliably. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:18, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Because it's not a valid parameter. If |religion= is used in {{infobox person}} it does nothing, and thus there is zero reason to have it. As for the second half of your question - yes, the majority of the invalid parameters are typos, but the 2108 uses of |imdb_id= are not typos and could be removed without any issue (see my bot's tasks 7, 8, 10, 18, 20, 23, and 26 for similar instances of parameters being changed/removed). Primefac (talk) 16:01, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Maybe a specific example will help. If there is a person, Bob Smith, who is Roman Catholic, and his religion is significant, and the religion was placed into the infobox by an editor in good faith, and that religion is not adequately covered either in the body text or in a custom parameter, the religion parameter in the infobox should not simply be removed. That's what the RFC says. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:32, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

I suppose that's a fair point. The issue is that at this exact moment the template doesn't currently accept the parameter. Was the removal so that the "invalid" uses could be removed and the "valid" ones kept, so that it could be (at some point in the future) reinstated? Or will it never be reinstated and the religion parameter be reincarnated as something else entirely? Primefac (talk) 20:04, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Based on the close it sounds more like the religion parameter shouldn't be used in {{infobox person}} and thus the template call should be changed to something more appropriate. Pinging Iridescent as the closer, mostly to see if I've interpreted that correctly. Primefac (talk) 20:07, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

The consensus of the RFC was fairly clear that the religion parameter should be deprecated from the generic {{infobox person}},and that in those rare cases where the subject's religion is significant a more specific infobox such as {{infobox clergy}} should be used. That the field was left in place and disabled rather than bot-blanked was, as far as I'm aware, an artefact of the expectation that those people claiming "the religion field is necessary" would subsequently go through those boxes containing it and migrate the infoboxes in question to a more appropriate infobox template. ‑ Iridescent 06:51, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Lengthy post-RfC discussion at Template_talk:Infobox_person/Archive_31#Ethnicity?_Religion? .. -- GreenC 01:19, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

• Just an FYI from my personal experience. The bigger issue is the infinite perpetuation of the religion parameter through copy and paste off an existing article. If the religion is not supported, it merely doesn't show in a given article. Where the issue perpetuates is when a new article is created, and the editor uses the infobox from another article as the template, changing what needs to be changed. That's what I do, and I've been here more than a decade. Why bother figuring out usage from a new blank when I know an article that already has the basics I need? The only reason I know the religion parameter is not supported, is because of editors who are manually correcting templates, one by one. Might there be a lot of other editors, newbies and long-timers, who do the copy-from-existing-article-and-paste method? — Maile (talk) 11:54, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
• BRFA filed. Primefac (talk) 01:09, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Moving/removing ticker symbols in article lead

Hello all. Per WP:TICKER, ticker symbols should not appear in article leads if the infobox contains this information. My idea is to remove ticker symbols from article lead (more specifically the first sentence) if the article has {{Infobox company}}, and adding parameter traded_as along with the ticker symbol if it did not contain such parameter:

{{Infobox company
|name = CK Hutchison Holdings Limited
|type = Public
|traded_as = {{SEHK|1}}
...}}

If the article does not contain any infobox, it will be moved in the "External links" section of the page, the alternative position mentioned in the information page.

==External links==
* {{Official website}}
* {{SEHK|1}}

I was doing this action repeatedly in the past few days and realized that it would be a great idea if a bot can do this, especially when there is not an accurate list of these problematic articles for human editors to reference from. Would like to help creating a bot but not too familiar in this field, now asking for any experienced editor to help. Cheers. –Wefk423 (talk) 12:46, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

TICKER isn't policy or guideline which makes consensus difficult. Also tricky to automate since everything is free floating in the lead section it might break layout or context if removed. Perhaps AWB semi-automated would be better? -- GreenC 10:31, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

Removing BLP templates from non-BLP articles

Hello. As an example: according to PetScan, there are 1050 articles belonging to the 2 categories "All BLP articles lacking sources" and "21st-century deaths". We have this kind of templates for people who died 50 or even 100 years ago: William Colt MacDonald, Joseph Bloomfield Leake. Thanks and regards, Biwom (talk) 04:34, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Are they verifiably dead? If not we presume alive, unless they were born more than 115 years ago, see WP:BDP. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:40, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Hello. You are correct, but two of the first things I can read at WP:BLP are "we must get the article right" and "requires a high degree of sensitivity". Having a big banner saying that the person is alive before a lede that states a date of death is both wrong and insensitive. Let's keep in mind that these so-called maintenance templates are visible for the casual Wikipedia reader.

On a side note: PetScan is giving me 162 results for "All BLP articles lacking sources" and "19th-century births". Thanks and regards, Biwom (talk) 11:54, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Archive disambiguation bot

Something that's been bugging me for a while, but which I've been reminded recently by ClueBot (talk · contribs) is that section links to archived sections break all the time. So I'm proposing that we have a fully dedicated bot for this

When you have a section link like

• [[Talk:Foobar#Barfoo]]

where the section link is broken, search through all 'Talk:Foobar/Archives', 'Talk:Foobar/' or 'Talk:Foobar/Old' subpages for a #Barfoo anchor. If you find a match, update the section link to, e.g.

• [[Talk:Foobar/Archives 2009#Barfoo]]<!--Updated by Bot-->

If you find multiple matches, instead tag the link with

• [[Talk:Foobar#Barfoo]]{{Old section?|Talk:Foobar/Old#Barfoo|Talk:Foobar/Old 3#Barfoo}}

to render

• Talk:Foobar#Barfoo^{[Do you mean Talk:Foobar/Old#Barfoo or Talk:Foobar/Old 3#Barfoo?]}

Lastly, if you're looking in a dated archive (e.g. Archives/2008) or sequential (e.g. /Archives 19), then only search in the archives older than that. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:09, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

• Two questions: first, would this only be for slinks on that talk page, or any talk page link with a slink (e.g. would it check to see if Talk:Foobar#Barfoo worked when it was linked at Talk:Bar)? Second, would this check existing archives, or only deal with "live" pages? Primefac (talk) 16:01, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

  In my mind, I'd want the bot to run checking every talk page links, anywhere, both 'live' talk pages and archived pages. There would need to be extensive trials of course, to see if what issues arise, if any.Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:11, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

  When ClueBot III (talk · contribs) archives threads, it fixes inward links to those threads so that they don't get broken, and it does this even if such links are themselves within archived content. Here is an example of an archive amended by ClueBot III - this is one of a set of nine edits. If lowercase sigmabot III (talk · contribs) had been carrying out the archiving on that page, only the two earliest actions would have been performed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:17, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Lint Error elimination of poorly formatted italics....

Would it be possible for their to be a bot to look for and repair specifc LintErrors based on regexp?

https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Special:LintErrors/missing-end-tag&offset=70252016&namespace=0 was where I'd reach manually, but it's takign a while..

In this instance, the reqeust would be to search for mismatched italics, bold and SPAN's in a page ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 13:13, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

For the italics at least, I think this would be too context-dependent. For example, Special:Diff/854452962 contains two mismatched sets and it took me reading through it twice for the first one before I figured out where the closing '' was supposed to go. Primefac (talk) 13:27, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Mass category change for location userboxes lists

I created new category Category:Lists of location userboxes to better organize userboxes. I would like to change (and add where it's missing) all entries of

[[Category:Lists of userboxes|.*]] 

to

[[Category:Lists of location userboxes|{{subst:SUBPAGENAME}}]]

in all subpages of following pages:

1. WP:Userboxes/Life/Citizenship
2. WP:Userboxes/Life/Origin
3. WP:Userboxes/Life/Residence
4. WP:Userboxes/Location
5. WP:Userboxes/Travel

There are some exceptions, like WP:Userboxes/Location/United States/Cities should be [[Category:Lists of location userboxes|United States]], and not, [[Category:Lists of location userboxes|Cities]]. It would be nice if bot could distinguish such subpages (with titles equal to Cities, Regions, States, Nations), but it would be OK if it didn't — there is only a handful of such subpages — they can be updated later manually.

—⁠andrybak (talk) 12:40, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

It appears that only /Location has subpages, although /Travel has /Travel-2 and /Travel-3, which are a sort of parallel page that might be suitable for this categorization. I might have missed other pages that are not technically subpages. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:37, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. I guess going by page prefix would be better:

1. Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:Userboxes/Life/Citizenship
2. Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:Userboxes/Life/Origin
3. Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:Userboxes/Life/Residence
4. Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:Userboxes/Location
5. Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:Userboxes/Travel

—⁠andrybak (talk) 17:03, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

[r] → [ɾ] in IPA for Spanish

(reviving) A consensus was reached at Help talk:IPA/Spanish#About R to change all instances of r that either occur at the end of a word or precede a consonant (i.e. any symbol except a, e, i, o, or u, or j or w) to ɾ inside the first parameter of {{IPA-es}}. There currently appear to be about 1,140 articles in need of this change. Could someone help with this task with a bot? Nardog (talk) 12:55, 20 August 2018 (UTC) – Fixed Nardog (talk) 15:28, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi Nardog - I have a script, but could you confirm how these testcases should look, perhaps add other unusual cases that might come up:

*{{IPA-es|aˈðrβr|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|aˈðr βr|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|aˈðr-βr|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|aˈðr|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|aˈðrer|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|aˈerβ|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|ri|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|r|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|r r r|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|ir er or|lang}}

Thanks, -- GreenC 14:42, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

@GreenC: Thanks for taking a stab at this. In principle, any instance of r that is followed by anything (including a space, | or }) except a, e, i, j, o, u, or w in the first parameter of {{IPA-es}} must be replaced with ɾ, so the first seven would be

*{{IPA-es|aˈðɾβɾ|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|aˈðɾ βɾ|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|aˈðɾ-βɾ|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|aˈðɾ|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|aˈðreɾ|lang}} <!-- the first [r] should also be [ɾ] anyway but that is not relevant here -->
*{{IPA-es|aˈeɾβ|lang}}
*{{IPA-es|ri|lang}}

and the final one *{{IPA-es|iɾ eɾ oɾ|lang}}. *{{IPA-es|r|lang}} and *{{IPA-es|r r r|lang}} should probably be unmodified, but I found no such occurrence by searching hastemplate:IPA-es insource:/IPA-es[^\|]*?\|[^\|\}]*?[ \|]r[ \|\}]/. As a side note, a few transclusions include a comment inside the first parameter, but those have been fixed so you can likely exclude them. I've also fixed some other idiosyncratic cases like this and this. Nardog (talk) 15:28, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Alright that works. Since it's only 1,140 we can probably do this right away fully supervised. Would you be willing to help verify the edits? I can do 50 or so on the first run to make sure it's working correctly, and then 500 after that. If there are no problems in the 500 the rest can be finished with spot checks (it will be obvious there is a problem by looking at the edit byte count which will be uniform size 0 byte). -- GreenC 16:35, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Sounds great! (ɾ is 3 2 bytes long so it would be +2 +1 per change, by the way.) Nardog (talk) 16:39, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Nardog - Alright just did 73, hard to control exact number - see diffs for User:GreenC bot (ignore first 5 a typo in the script caused catastrophic fail). -- GreenC 17:06, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

@GreenC: Sorry, please add j and w to the list of symbols that can follow [r] (see the correction to my OP of this thread, I should have made it clearer). Other than that, the corrections are spot on. (2 bytes it was...) Nardog (talk) 17:31, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

500 done, I'll wait till tomorrow to finish the rest. -- GreenC 19:03, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

@Nardog: No response by anyone from yesterday's run which is a good sign so I went ahead and finished the rest it's a clean sweep (nice search formulation btw). This script is basically a cut and paste "bot complete" for anyone with a bot flag and OAuth credentials; it identifies the article names, downloads the wikisource, makes the changes and uploads the new article with edit summary. I can do it or anyone else in the future as needed. -- GreenC 15:58, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Awesome ;) Nardog (talk) 16:48, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Script

Dependencies: GNU awk, wikiget.awk, library.awk. MIT License User:GreenC 2018 ./wikiget -a ": hastemplate:IPA-es insource:/IPA-es[^\|\}]*?\|[^\|\}\<]*?r[^aeijouw]/" > ipa; awk -ilibrary '{fp=sys2var("./wikiget -w " shquote($0)); c=patsplit(fp,field,/{{IPA-es[^}]*}}/,sep);for(i=1;i<=c;i++){patsplit(field[i],aa,/[|]/,a); sub(/r$/,"ɾ",a[1]); gsub(/r[ ]/,"ɾ ",a[1]); d=patsplit(a[1],b,/r[^aeioujw]/,bb);for(j=1;j<=d;j++) sub(/^r/,"ɾ",b[j]);a[1]=unpatsplit(b,bb); field[i] = unpatsplit(aa,a) } if(unpatsplit(field,sep) != fp){ print shquote($0); sys2varPipe(unpatsplit(field,sep), "./wikiget -E " shquote($0) " -S " shquote("[r] → [ɾ] in IPA for Spanish [[Help_talk:IPA/Spanish#About_R|per discussion]] and [[Wikipedia:Bot_requests#%5Br%5D_%E2%86%92_%5B%C9%BE%5D_in_IPA_for_Spanish|botreq]]") " -P STDIN")}}' ipa

Cleanup needed in Category:Featured articles needing translation from <language>

Hello! The other day I was looking through Category:Featured articles needing translation from Chinese Wikipedia. This is a hidden category containing articles that have featured status on the Chinese Wikipedia. This is nifty because now we know we have a high quality article in Chinese that can be translated into English.

However, I noticed that a lot of these articles have had their featured status removed long ago (e.g. glove puppetry). Then I looked into other subcategories of Category:Featured articles needing translation from foreign-language Wikipedias and found similar problems. For example, Nationalist Party of Castile and León is in the category Category:Featured articles needing translation from Spanish Wikipedia, even though the corresponding article in Spanish appears to have never been featured.

This looks like a problem a bot could fix without much trouble. Just go each subcategory of Category:Featured articles needing translation from foreign-language Wikipedias, then for each article in that subcategory verify that it is indeed featured on the corresponding language's edition of Wikipedia, otherwise remove it from the category.

While we're at it, we could populate these categories by going through the list of featured articles in each language and adding each one to the appropriate category. This might be desirable because these categories are a bit sparse and many don't seem to be actively maintained. However this might be too big of a change to automate without consensus from the Wikipedia:WikiProject Intertranswiki or elsewhere.

I am relatively new to Wikipedia so sorry if this request is inappropriate! Flurmbo (talk) 21:45, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Doing... - @Flurmbo: - I think this is a great idea. I have started a discussion at the following projects Cleanup, Languages, and Categories. If this gains consensus I will be willing to complete the request. Kadane (talk) 18:32, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

Also asked for comments at Wikiproject Intertranswiki. Kadane (talk) 18:40, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

Bot to assist in uploading/linking spoken word audio files

I have an idea for a bot (well a piece of software actually) to assist in uploading/linking spoken word audio files.

In particular it would help with article title uploads. Eg short recordings, like "Scott Morrison" to be used in the Wikipedia article.

Workflow:

1. Display to the user an article title. Eg a random page or member of a category.
2. Record the user saying the title.
3. Name the recording (with the article title, language, accent)
4. Upload the recording to Commons (in ogg format).
5. If no other recording exists for the article, link the recording from a article page (perhaps a subpage like Scott Morrison/spoken - we can work out the details later).
6. Repeat step one.

If you need clarification let me know.

Does this software already exist, perhaps in other Wikimedia projects?

Potentially I could make the tool myself, but it would take a loooong time. If no one can assist could you point me in the right direction - I was thinking of using Python as the pywikibot would help with some of the tasks.

Thanks for your time, Commander Keane (talk) 08:22, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

• @Commander Keane: For clarification: you intend that such recordings only contain the title of the article, not a readout of the whole article, right?

That sounds feasible, but I am not sure it is easy (technically) to get the recording via browser. It is probably easier to have one user/client-side tool that (1) picks a list of article titles, (2) records the user saying them, (3) stores the whole thing with relevant metadata on the user's disk; and then to have another tool, either web/Wikipedia-based or client-side again, that (a) reads a directory on the user's disk, (b) uploads ogg files to Commons according to metadata or file naming conventions, (c) put relevant tags and links on article talk pages on en-wp. The first tool could be configured once to save user metadata (accent, preferred saving format, etc.) in every file. The second tool can also be made compatible with existing recordings, e.g. if someone names their files [article title]-title.ogg simple string matching can catch it, and made to upload more than title readouts (think [article title]-title.ogg, [article title]-lead.ogg and [article title]-fullarticle.ogg).

I have zero experience with audio files programming, but I can give a go at the first tool in Python, if nothing similar pops up. For the second tool, you will probably need some consensus first; since it uploads files and potentially writes to talk pages etc. it must go through approval processes (WP:BRFA on en-wp, I dunno what on Commons). There are also security issues, I think (we do not want a vandal to use the tool to upload a.ogg, b.ogg, ... z.ogg, aa.ogg, ... zzzzzz.ogg to Commons). Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 09:15, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

No surprise - it's c:COM:BRFA on commons Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 19:57, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

• Yes I am just thinking about recording the title of the article. I think you understand the concept well. Splitting it into two tools is interesting.--Commander Keane (talk) 09:38, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

• Update: I have created a tool that takes a list of articles, records and saves the audio to disk. The next steps need to be compleetd though.--Commander Keane (talk) 08:57, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Update GA section of Template:WPVG announcements

See my post at WT:Lua#Can Lua be used to parse a section of one page, change the contents and be transcluded on another page? for more details. Basically, the bot would take information from WP:GAN#VG, reformat it and add it to a new page that can be transcluded to {{WPVG announcements}} which is currently updated manually. @GamerPro64, TarkusAB, TheJoebro64, ProtoDrake, and Lee Vilenski: You are currently the main users doing those updates, do you think there is a problem to have a bot handle this in future? Regards SoWhy 10:02, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

@SoWhy: Are you requesting a bot to update the entire template, or just the WP:GAN section? If just one section, why not have a bot update the entire thing? Kadane (talk) 14:45, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

The GAN part is the one that sees the most changes. It would probably make sense to update the other parts of the template via bot as well but I don't really know how they are updated at the moment. I'll cross-post this to WT:VG for more input. Regards SoWhy 15:12, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

I think I suggested this a while back but usually the procedure is to get local consensus first before requesting that someone write a bot. Could pull from WP:VG/AA too. Also, a bunch of the WPVG regulars like updating lists manually, fwiw. (not watching, please {{ping}}) czar 01:51, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Bot to fix capitalization of "Senator" in specific contexts

I'd like to request bot help to downcase "Senator" to "senator" (and the plural) in specific titles and links to those titles, as follows:

• move List of United States Senators from Alaska and all the other states; and fix all links to them.
• move U.S. Senator from Alaska and all the other states; and fix all links to this redirect.
• move United States Senator from Alaska and all the other states; and fix all links to this redirect.
• move Template:United States Senators from Alaska and all the other states; also fix in the title and name fields of the Navbox template in these.
• move Category:United States Senators from Alaska; and fix all links to these.

This came up at Talk:Dan_Sullivan_(American_senator)#Requested_move_8_September_2018 and I've started an RFC to see if there's any objection, at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#RFC:_Capitalization_of_Senator. So far, nobody is claiming that senator or senators in these contexts is part of a proper name. Dicklyon (talk) 03:45, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

The problem is that the capitalization of “senator” depends on context, and bots are notoriously bad at determining context. This is something that should be done manually. Blueboar (talk) 11:40, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

If you look at the bot proposal above, you can see I'm only proposing very narrow specific contexts where the bot can easily get it right; 250 specific moves, and the links to them (not messing with any piped text of course). The rest would need to be done by hand, as you note. Dicklyon (talk) 16:13, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

There should be no need to "fix all links to" any redirects that may be created by a page move; this is WP:NOTBROKEN. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:01, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Presumably it would make sense to convert United States Senator from Alaska -> United States senator from Alaska because of how those words display on the page. If it's a piped link it wouldn't make sense to convert as you say it's not broken. -- GreenC 21:14, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose for multiple different reasons. First, I'm not convinced that "United States Senator" is incorrect; though I agree that "American Senator" is incorrect. Pages such as List of United States Representatives from Nebraska would be equally wrong. For categories, any change should encompass all the subcategories of Category:United States Senators. Perhaps a "Members of the United States Senate" formulation would be better. There's also no point to use a bot to update links to redirects; several of these formulations are already redirects and all of them should remain as {{R from other capitalisation}} forever. Finally, a proposal to move articles should be a WP:RM; you can probably bundle all 50 states into a single proposal if the page titles are otherwise the same. power~enwiki (π, ν) 03:45, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

  Can you explain your objections better? How can "United States Senator" be correct in the contexts mentioned? And are you objecting because I didn't go further correct other over-capitalization at the same time, like Representative? I'd be happy to add that on, but no need to do everything at once. As for links to redirects, there is absolutely a point. The redirect links usually appear in article text, over-capitalized; downcasing them corrects this very common style error in articles. Perhaps you didn't understand what corrections I meant; sorry if I was unclear. And yes I can easily generate the multiple-RM requests, but that seems like the wrong approach for such obviously uncontroversial corrections that have been discussed elsewhere; and even if the moves got done it would leave a ton of cleanup work for someone, where a bot would be a huge help. Dicklyon (talk) 03:23, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

  My concern is that in "Alabama senator", the word "Alabama" describes the person. In "United States Senator", "United States" describes the legislative body, not the person. Also, (U.S. senator) simply looks wrong to me. I doubt that consensus will agree with me on this point, so I'm not going to argue it in detail here. power~enwiki (π, ν) 04:05, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

  I don't see the difference. There's an Alabama Senate (I presume) and a United States Senate. But senator is a title whether it's an Alabama senator or U.S. senator, and doesn't need a cap except when attached to an individual's name as MOS:JOBTITLES explains. Dicklyon (talk) 02:50, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

  Oh, you're only referring to updating un-piped links in articles? I was thrown off by the use of the word "move". I guess that's fine, though I don't see the point of changing template names (and categories should go to CfD regardless; they already have bots for that). It's probably possible to do that with AWB fairly easily; I've never used that so you'll have to ask someone else. power~enwiki (π, ν) 04:05, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

  OK, we can separately do the Categories at CfD when this is all settled. Dicklyon (talk) 02:50, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

• Yes, List of United States Representatives from Nebraska is in fact equally wrong, and I would suggest moving those articles as well. Please also move List of United States Senators in the 111th Congress by seniority and similar; lots are linked at Lists of United States congress. Reywas92^Talk 18:52, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

  Thanks; I agree. Maybe you can help prepare a more comprehensive list or pattern for what to ask a bot to do. Dicklyon (talk) 01:39, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Bot to update 'Needs infobox'

So I was browsing the WP Backlog and came across a number of categories regarding articles needing Infoboxes. For example, Category:Baseball articles needing infoboxes, Category:Baseball articles needing infoboxes, Category:BBC articles without infoboxes. Did a little clicking around and found that a number of these actually already have had Infoboxes added but the parameter on the talk page was never updated to reflect this. So, my thought was to create a bot that would do the following:

1. Take a list of categories that are of the basic format <article type> articles needing infobox
2. Routinely (weekly?) checks those pages for an infobox.
3. If the page contains an infobox, updates the |needs-infobox=yes on the talk page.

I'm happy to tackle creating this bot myself but wanted to discuss it first and see what others thought? --Zackmann08 (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:59, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Sounds like a great idea. Category:Wikipedia articles with an infobox request definitely looks in need of bot help. -- GreenC 00:39, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

BBLd - Linkfix

https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&limit=500&offset=0&target=http%3A%2F%2F%2A.bbl-digital.de

instead of

http://bbl-digital.de/eintrag/$1/
http://www.bbl-digital.de/eintrag/$1/

it should be

https://bbld.de/$1

i.e. new domain, httpS, no "eintrag/" and no final "/". 78.55.121.98 (talk) 02:33, 23 September 2018 (UTC)