User talk:Shubinator

User

Talk

Scripts, Templates, & Bots

Contributions

Email

Awards

Did you know?
Introduction and rules
Introduction	WP:DYK
General discussion	WT:DYK
Guidelines	WP:DYKCRIT
Reviewer instructions	WP:DYKRI
Nominations
Nominate an article	WP:DYKCNN
Awaiting approval	WP:DYKN
Approved	WP:DYKNA
April 1 hooks	WP:DYKAPRIL
Holding area	WP:SOHA
Preparation
Preps and queues	T:DYK/Q
Prepper instructions	WP:DYKPBI
Admin instructions	WP:DYKAI
Main Page errors	WP:ERRORS
History
Statistics	WP:DYKSTATS
Archived sets	WP:DYKA
Just for fun
Monthly wraps	WP:DYKW
Awards	WP:DYKAWARDS
Userboxes	WP:DYKUBX
Hall of Fame	WP:DYK/HoF
List of users ...
... by nominations	WP:DYKNC
... by promotions	WP:DYKPC
Administrative
Scripts and bots	WP:DYKSB
On the Main Page	T:DYK
Main Page errors	WP:ERRORS
To ping the DYK admins	{{DYK admins}}

Issues with DYKcheck?

Hi Shubinator, I was attempting to run DYKcheck on two articles tonight (including Soaring Stones) and I ran into some issues. The check never finished processing and only output the following lines:

• Prose size (text only): 3631 characters (584 words) ''readable prose size''
• Article created by Another Believer on April 17, 2015

• Article has not been expanded 5x since it was created.

The third line is blank and the DYK eligibility scan states that it is still in progress. I know that the article fails the DYK check, but it does not tell me so. Do you know why?

Thank you, MJ94 (talk) 07:53, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

How curious. I'm seeing the bug on Google Chrome, but not Internet Explorer. Which browser are you using? Looks like Google Chrome is having trouble parsing the date the article was promoted to GA. Shubinator (talk) 07:12, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I believe I've fixed the bug with this change. Can you check if the bug is fixed on your end? Shubinator (talk) 04:44, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay; yes, I am using Chrome, and it seems to be fixed now. Thank you! MJ94 (talk) 04:57, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Happy to help :) Shubinator (talk) 16:24, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

The easiest feature request ever

A bot is going around replacing transclusions of template redirects (example). It would save some unnecessary edits if DYKUpdateBot started using {{DYK talk}} instead of {{dyktalk}}. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 08:26, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Done :) Shubinator (talk) 19:41, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Please check DYKUpdateBot

as it missed the last update on 13 January, thanks. Materialscientist (talk) 02:35, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Both bots are having issues editing Wikipedia, and unfortunately the issues didn't disappear after a restart. I'll dig deeper tomorrow when I'm more awake. Shubinator (talk) 07:47, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Curiosity won over sleep. The bots are "seeing" Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. every time they try to edit. Feels like it's due to a recent MediaWiki update since the bots' edit/login code hasn't changed in months. Shubinator (talk) 09:17, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Fixed. Not the most elegant fix in the world, hopefully when I have more time I can revisit it. Thanks everyone for keeping things rolling while the bots were down :) Shubinator (talk) 05:34, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

Request/bug carryforward

I've just archived a bunch of stuff from my talk page. There are a few requests/bugs still on my list though:

• DYKHousekeepingBot sometimes notifies nominators of untranscluded nominations after human error while closing the nomination. Original conversation here. I dug into the records and this bug cropped up 8 times in the last ~16 months, for an average of once every two months. Tweaking DYKHousekeepingBot to ignore nominations with "The result was:" in the wikitext should get the bot to do the right thing in these cases.
  • Fixed! Shubinator (talk) 00:21, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
• More informative DYKUpdateBot error edit summaries and leaving around unresolved errors, requested by User:Mandarax.
• DYKUpdateBot's incorrect handling of existing blank dykentry parameters in {{ArticleHistory}}. Original conversation here. I skimmed through the records for the past two months and this bug appeared once.
  • Fixed! Shubinator (talk) 00:21, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

On a slightly related note, it looks like MediaWiki authentication changes will be rolled out in the next few weeks, which will disrupt the bots.

If I missed/forgot something, let me know! Shubinator (talk) 05:49, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot okay?

I noticed DYKHousekeepingBot has been inactive for seven hours, which is strange considering how frequently this bot edits. Jolly Ω Janner 21:57, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Back in action! Thanks for pinging me :) Shubinator (talk) 07:01, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot appears to be down

Shubinator, it's currently 22:47, and the DYKHousekeepingBot hasn't done an update since 14:41. As there have been a great many changes to the list of nominations in the past eight hours, the bot would appear to be down. It strikes me that DYKUpdateBot may well be down, too. Can you please check them? Many thanks. I'll drop a note to our manual updaters, so they know to keep an eye out at midnight in case DYKUpdateBot isn't awake then. BlueMoonset (talk) 22:51, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Apparent cause of the bots being down due to OS maintenance on the servers that required reboots. --Allen3 ^talk 00:14, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Started up both bots. Thanks everyone for stepping in! Shubinator (talk) 07:00, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for getting them back up and running. It's good to see a new DYKHousekeepingBot report. BlueMoonset (talk) 07:06, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot failed to complete 12:00 27 Jan 2016 update.

DYKUpdateBot appears to have halted in the middle of the 12:00 27 January 2016 (UTC) update. The bot completed the user talk page credits but failed to add a {{DYKfile}} template to File:Fleet Street. By James Valentine c.1890..jpg, clear Template:Did you know/Queue/1, or update Template:Did you know/Queue/Next. The bot has also failed to clear a test message placed into User:DYKUpdateBot/Errors‎. DYKHousekeepingBot appears to be operating normally. A glance through the Labs-l mailing list finds some recent NFS problems so this may be server related. I will leave things alone till 20:00 or 22:00 (UTC) in case you get a chance to look at the situation but will manually complete the incomplete update before the 00:00 28 Jan update is scheduled to run if needed. --Allen3 ^talk 13:18, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Looks like the bot was having trouble tagging the file, unfortunately I don't have time to dig deeper. I've restarted the bot, hopefully the issue won't crop up again on the next update. Thanks for pinging me! Shubinator (talk) 16:03, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Repeat of image tagging problem

It appears the problem with tagging an image file has returned. The 12:00 February 26, 2016 update by DYKUpdateBot completed all the userpage notifications but the image tag at File:Mells Somerset2.JPG is still pending. --Allen3 ^talk 12:15, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Curious. Might be related to MediaWiki's authentication changes; I'll try to update the bot with the auth changes this weekend. In the meantime looks like the bot's auto-reset kicked in and it's back up and running :) Shubinator (talk) 07:44, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Fell sick this weekend with cold/allergies, digging deeper will have to wait :( Shubinator (talk) 07:51, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot missed 00:00 20 Feb 2016 update

DYKUpdateBot missed the latest update and ‎DYKHousekeepingBot has not made an update for over 5 hours. There was a series of reboots on the Labs servers today (a continuation of yesterday's security reboots), so that is the most likely cause of the outage. Please check/restart things when you get a chance. --Allen3 ^talk 00:32, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Both bots restarted! Thanks for letting me know :) Shubinator (talk) 00:52, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

The DYKUpdateBot makes February 29 red

Please have a look. The DYKUpdateBot makes all hooks for February 29 red at Wikipedia:Did you know/DYK hook count, even though those hooks are clearly not yet late. Must have something to do with today being leap day and all? Not sure how easy this is to fix, but it sure is an eyesore. Well, have a nice day regardless!—♦♦ AMBER^(ЯʘCK) 11:59, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Actually, that would be DYKHousekeepingBot's issue, but it looks odd either way to have the current date be light red; that's only supposed to happen for over-seven-days-old dates and for dates in the future. Since the 29th is not in the future, something ought to be done. (If it isn't done before midnight UTC, it's going to be interesting to see whether the 29th stays that color, and whether March 1 will be the same color or the normal white.) BlueMoonset (talk) 19:06, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, things seem to be fixed right now. I'm betting it has to do with February 29 being leap day, and the algorithm not properly accounting for that. But now it's March, the issue seems to have resolved itself. Hooray! —♦♦ AMBER^(ЯʘCK) 10:04, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Follow-up: now that it's March 8, and February 29 should be back in the (light) red, it's still white. I imagine that it will change color along with March 1, a bit over 20 hours from now, but it's clear that the algorithm, whatever it is, can't properly handle leap day. The good news: you have nearly four years to fix it for next time. ;-) BlueMoonset (talk) 03:41, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

File:E Minas Geraes C.jpeg listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect File:E Minas Geraes C.jpeg. Since you had some involvement with the File:E Minas Geraes C.jpeg redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Stefan2 (talk) 20:51, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot missed an update on 24 March

Please have a look. Materialscientist (talk) 01:27, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Both bots back up and running :) Looks like the Labs server was restarted, which brought down the bots. Thanks for pinging me! Shubinator (talk) 02:13, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Shubinator, DYKUpdateBot, at least, is down again: its most recent edit was at 12:48 UTC, with no sign of activity, and an update due at 00:31 UTC, about 45 minutes ago. By contrast, the DYKHousekeepingBot did an update about 46 minutes ago, at 00:30 UTC, and continued working all day yesterday. I don't know whether it didn't do a new update at 01:00 because it finally died, or because there was nothing to do. Please take a look as soon as you can. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:21, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Follow-up: DYKHousekeepingBot did an update at 01:31 UTC, ten minutes after I posted the above, so it seems that only DYKUpdateBot is hors de combat. I hope you see this soon and can restored it to health. Thank you. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:49, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Further follow-up: DYKUpdateBot started updating at 02:11 UTC, finishing at 02:13 UTC. I have no idea why it didn't update at the scheduled 00:31 UTC, nor do I know why it set the time of the next update at 12:16 UTC—11 hours and 45 minutes after the scheduled start, rather than 11 hours and 45 minutes after the actual start of 02:11 (which would have been 13:56). Shubinator, you can investigate when you see this, but with the main page having been refreshed, the major urgency is gone. If you do want to adjust the time of the next update from 12:16 to 13:56, that would be nice, so the current set gets nearly 12 hours instead of barely 10. Thank you. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:41, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately the logs don't have many clues. The bot did wake up at 00:31 UTC and tried to update, which is why the next update time was set "correctly"; unfortunately the bot ran into trouble attempting to edit Wikipedia. I've shifted the next update time as suggested, and will hopefully find more time soon to make adjustments to the bot. Shubinator (talk) 05:43, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Major infrastructure migration next week (Tuesday and Thursday, 14:00 UTC)

Shubinator, I wasn't sure whether you had seen the notification for this one, but it's being displayed at the top of the Watchlist page: Wikimedia Technical Operations is planning a major infrastructure migration on Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April, starting at 14:00 UTC. This process is expected to take 15 to 30 minutes each time. During these times, you will be able to read, but not edit any page. The team apologizes for the disruption.

Assuming DYK doesn't get unmoored from its noon/midnight schedule (not a safe assumption, alas, as prep builders haven't been that active), that would mean a check before midnight on those days to be sure the DYK bots don't need to be restarted. I have no idea whether this even fits your schedule, but I thought a heads up now might avoid bot issues later. Thanks as always for keeping the bots running. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:35, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up! I'll aim to check in on the bots at around 15:00 UTC on those days. Shubinator (talk) 04:17, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot looks good, DYKHousekeepingBot is being a bit weird. I'll manually restart DYKHousekeepingBot in ~12 hours if it's still misbehaving. Shubinator (talk) 15:20, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Both bots look healthy today :) Shubinator (talk) 15:17, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot didn't finish final steps at 14:08

Shubinator, DYKUpdateBot promoted Queue 3 to the main page at 14:06, but didn't finish the final two steps: clearing out Queue 3 at the end, and setting the next queue to be Queue 4. Both of those steps have been done by hand. So far as I can tell, it did all of the talk page notifications. We'll find out at 01:51 UTC whether the next main-page promotion starts on schedule. (Queue 4 is ready to go.) I thought you'd want to know about this hiccup. BlueMoonset (talk) 18:10, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Looks like DYKUpdateBot is back to normal. Thanks for letting me know! It feels like we've seen the same bug crop up a few times now...I'm hoping I can dig in later this month and find the pattern. Shubinator (talk) 23:25, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Saw another instance of this problem with the 00:00 23 May 2016 (UTC) update. As in the past, manually completing the update (incrementing the count at Template:Did you know/Queue/Next and clearing the queue page from the incomplete update) woke DYKUpdateBot from its slumber. --Allen3 ^talk 12:49, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Good to know, thanks for the additional data point! Shubinator (talk) 19:17, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

You can add the 12:23 24 May 2014 (UTC) update as another data point. Update manually completed. --Allen3 ^talk 12:40, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! Shubinator (talk) 13:45, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

The 12:00 28 May 2016 (UTC) update was a repeat of the problem. --Allen3 ^talk 12:38, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

• The problem repeated with the 12:00 6 June 2016 (UTC) update. --Allen3 ^talk 13:05, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Gender-based price discrimination DYK nomination

Hello,

I recieved your message indicating that step 3 for my DYK nomination of the gender-based price discrimination page. However, I added my nomination to the May 6th date on the nominations page per step 3. Can you let me know if I did something wrong. I am unfamiliar with this process.

Thank you

FPizzo (talk) 12:35, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) FPizzo, you received the message because you originally created a nomination for Template:Did you know nominations/Gender-Based Price Discrimination on May 6, and that's the one you added to the DYK nomination page per step 3.

On May 11, you created a second nomination page, Template:Did you know nominations/Gender-based price discrimination. It's this second page that Shubinator's bot picked up on. This second page creation is where you went wrong—it's an unnecessary duplication—and you should add the db-g7 template to it as per the message so it can be deleted. (Don't do anything to the original May 6 page.)

When articles are moved, such as yours was (from Gender-Based Price Discrimination to Gender-based price discrimination, you do not need to create a new nomination page. All you need to do is mention the move on the nomination, and we can make a few adjustments—I've just done that, so your original nomination is up to date as regards naming and links. Please let me know (on my own page; no need to continue this here) if you have any questions or need any further assistance, such as with deleting the May 11 second nominations page. I hope you enjoy the DYK process. BlueMoonset (talk) 13:36, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot missed 12:00 2 June 2016 update

DYKUpdateBot missed the 12:00 2 June 2016 (UTS) update. There is some maintenance occurring on the Lab servers, but it is not clear from what I can see if the maintenance is of a type that could affect the bot. Please check things when you get a chance. --Allen3 ^talk 12:27, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Back up and running! It looks like the bot was confused because {{main page image}} was split across multiple lines -> crash. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 15:09, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

June 12, 2016 DYKUpdate bot didn't clear Queue 2 after putting it on the main page

I manually cleared the queue about 6 hours later, but the bot missed clearing it. — Maile (talk) 17:53, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

• The problem of DYKUpdateBot hanging when tagging an image description page repeated during the 00:00 13 June 2016 (UTC) update. The update has been manually completed. --Allen3 ^talk 00:43, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
  • Thanks both! This is high on my list of things to look into. Shubinator (talk) 14:23, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
• A repeat of this problem occurred during the 12:00 24 June 2016 (UTC) update. --Allen3 ^talk 12:08, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot stopped

Did not do the updates this morning. It seems to have stopped about 12 hours ago. Please fix. — Maile (talk) 12:24, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

I am starting a manual update. --Allen3 ^talk 12:32, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Manual update complete. There is no obvious maintenance listed at the Labs-l mailing list, so I am not sure what caused the bot to go MIA. --Allen3 ^talk 12:46, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Looks like the bot got snagged in the same bug related to images. The auto-recover code kicked in after the manual update, looks good now. Shubinator (talk) 14:15, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

There seems to still be some type of problem. A test message I placed into User:DYKUpdateBot/Errors has not been cleared despite having been present for a couple of hours. --Allen3 ^talk 15:05, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

The bot has once again failed to do the 17 June 2016 00:20 (UTC) update just now, so I guess it's nonfunctional at the moment. — Maile (talk) 00:27, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

@Shubinator and Allen3: I just did a manual update. Never having done that before, and not seeing any instructions, I sure hope I did it correctly. — Maile (talk) 00:54, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

My bad, I misread the timestamps in the logs earlier. For some reason the bot's job isn't terminating on the Labs server, which looks like is also preventing me register a new job for the bot. Hopefully in a few hours the job will get cleaned up... Shubinator (talk) 02:23, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Server still in a bad state, so I'm unable to get the bot running. I can run the bot for a one-off update at ~13:30 UTC. Shubinator (talk) 06:04, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks to the helpful folks at Tool Labs, DYKUpdateBot is back in action! Shubinator (talk) 06:20, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

It just worked!! Thanks. — Maile (talk) 12:38, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I think DYKUpdateBot is down

Shubinator, it doesn't look like DYKUpdateBot finished the last set of updates, though it did the bulk of the work. It didn't clear the queue, and it hasn't promoted the subsequently loaded queue, though that was in place at 08:15, in plenty of time for a 12:05 promotion. Please do what you can to get the bot running as soon as you can, or if it's running, to pick up the waiting queue. Many thanks.

Allen3, is there any chance you can do a manual promotion while we're waiting for the bot to be restarted? Thanks for anything you can do.

Note that Queue 3, the queue that is currently sitting there waiting for promotion, is also the queue that wasn't cleared by the bot (not to worry: this is an entirely new set of hooks, taken from Prep 5). There's been a bit of confusion lately around preps and queues; I'm hoping that things will straighten out going forward. BlueMoonset (talk) 20:34, 25 June 2016‎ (UTC)

Looks like the same bug we've been seeing where the bot chokes on the file :( The bot did auto-recover and appears to be operating normally at the moment. I'll look into the bug when I get the time! Shubinator (talk) 05:14, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for checking, Shubinator. BlueMoonset (talk) 06:03, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

User:DYKUpdateBot userpage

Hello Shubinator, I'm not sure why this bot blanked its own userpage - but as an admin bot we really need to have some information available to people landing on that page, and the categorizations are somewhat useful. If you are retiring this bot please let us know so that it have flags removed. Please let me know if I missed something else that may be going on. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:01, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Looks like it's an extremely rare bug, under normal conditions the bot shouldn't be blanking its own userpage. Shubinator (talk) 13:47, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Bot not clearing queue after promoting

I just manually cleared Queue 2. The bot updated the main page hooks 20 minutes ago, but did not clear the queue afterwards. — Maile (talk) 14:46, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know! Looks like a repeat of the same bug we've been seeing. Bot is back to normal. Shubinator (talk) 00:58, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Bot vs Bot

The FACBot didn't like the dyktalk entries being created by the DYKUpdateBot.

According to the documentation, these should be in the form:

{{DYK talk|date|hook}}

But the DYKUpdateBot is using an undocumented form:

{{DYK talk|day month|year|hook}}

I have changed the FACBot to accept this form. Do we need to update the documentation? Hawkeye7 (talk) 07:56, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Makes sense to me. DYKUpdateBot is using the same form its predecessors used. Looks like the documentation used to align with the bots, but was changed with this edit, so you may want to double-check with that editor as well. Shubinator (talk) 15:14, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Updating "DYK is almost overdue" message

Shubinator, it was just pointed out that the auto-generated overdue message by DYKUpdateBot needs a bit of updating.

Step number 1 currently starts with the admonition Check the prep areas. The problem is that "prep areas" is a hard link to Prep 1, which is not always the next available prep. We now have six preps; the next prep that should be promoted (and is the first one they should check to see whether it has been filled) is recorded at Template:Did you know/Queue/NextPrep (it's an integer from 1 to 6).

The message has been like this for years, but it take new eyes to notice that something doesn't make sense in old boilerplate, and MPJ-DK noticed the discrepancy. I'm guessing it won't be a difficult fix; how soon do you think you'll be able to find some time to update the bot? Thanks, and I hope you're having a great summer. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:12, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Should be straightforward, I'll try to find time within a week to fix it. Shubinator (talk) 05:17, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

That's great, Shubinator. Thank you so much. BlueMoonset (talk) 22:25, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Done :) Shubinator (talk) 03:00, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

And again, thanks. I look forward to seeing it soon—but not too soon or too often, since that means we have a queue that needs to be filled pronto, which gets annoying if it happens too frequently. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:32, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

A new draft

Hey. So there's this new draft I've written at Draft:Devonshire White Paper and I would really like to see it at DYK some time in the future. Would you mind checking it out. Really sorry to bother you like this, but I'm so new to this DYK thing. Thanks, MediaKill13 (talk) 10:50, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Welcome to DYK! Unfortunately I myself haven't edited or reviewed articles at DYK in a few years, so it's best to ask one of the regulars over at WT:DYK. (Talk page stalkers, if you'd like to help, feel free to chime in.) Shubinator (talk) 00:20, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

August 31 Labs maintenance appears to have halted ‎DYKHousekeepingBot

There were a couple of maintenance operations performed on the Labs servers today.[1][2] It would appear that one of them took out DYKHousekeepingBot (this addition occurred over an hour ago and the bot has not made an appropriate update). DYKUpdateBot has not had a scheduled update since ‎DYKHousekeepingBot's last update but if we lost one bot then it is likely we lost both. When you get a chance, please check both ‎bots and restart them if needed. --Allen3 ^talk 21:41, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Both bots back up and running! Thanks for letting me know :) Shubinator (talk) 01:12, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Pallache family

Is the submission for the Pallache family and related articles now correct? (Listed under September 17, 2016) --Aboudaqn (talk) 14:16, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

It looks a little off, for example the ellipses after "that" are unnecessary. Best to ask the folks at WT:DYK to double-check, I've been away from the nominations page for too long to give good advice :) Shubinator (talk) 14:49, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Extended confirmed protection

Hello, Shubinator. This message is intended to notify administrators of important changes to the protection policy.

Extended confirmed protection (also known as "30/500 protection") is a new level of page protection that only allows edits from accounts at least 30 days old and with 500 edits. The automatically assigned "extended confirmed" user right was created for this purpose. The protection level was created following this community discussion with the primary intention of enforcing various arbitration remedies that prohibited editors under the "30 days/500 edits" threshold to edit certain topic areas.

In July and August 2016, a request for comment established consensus for community use of the new protection level. Administrators are authorized to apply extended confirmed protection to combat any form of disruption (e.g. vandalism, sock puppetry, edit warring, etc.) on any topic, subject to the following conditions:

• Extended confirmed protection may only be used in cases where semi-protection has proven ineffective. It should not be used as a first resort.
• A bot will post a notification at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard of each use. MusikBot currently does this by updating a report, which is transcluded onto the noticeboard.

Please review the protection policy carefully before using this new level of protection on pages. Thank you.
This message was sent to the administrators' mass message list. To opt-out of future messages, please remove yourself from the list. 17:49, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot didn't do 00:00 1 October 2016 update to main page

Shubinator, DYKUpdateBot didn't do the daily DYK update at midnight, 1 October 2016, and the update is currently about 4 hours overdue. I hope you'll see this soon and be able to get the bot working again. Thanks!

The DYKHousekeepingBot seems to have survived whatever happened to DYKUpdateBot; it has already done three separate updates today. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:58, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

Looking. Feels like the apostrophe in the next set's filename is confusing the bot. Shubinator (talk) 04:46, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

After unescaping the apostrophe we're back in business :) Thanks for pinging me! Shubinator (talk) 04:49, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for responding so quickly! Good to know all is well. BlueMoonset (talk) 06:59, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

Why does the bot it suggest G7?

I suspect that 99% of the messages DYKHousekeepingBot sends out are due to missing templates on the main nom page, right?

So then why does it suggest G7 as a solution? Oddly, it doesn't suggest anything that will save the nom, only two ways to destroy it.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:04, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

The message proposes two different paths forward. If the nominator would like to continue, the message links to the nomination procedure. If the nominator would not like to continue, the message suggests steps to clean up the nomination. Feel free to edit the message, it lives here: Template:DYK nomination needs transcluded. Shubinator (talk) 06:25, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

Should I edit it in place? I do not understand the instructions below. In any event, here is what I would have done:

Hello! Your submission of [[]] at the Did You Know nominations page is not complete; if you would like to continue the process, you need to link your nomination page to the main DYK nomination page, see step 3. If you do not want to continue with the nomination, tag the nomination page with {{db-g7}}, or ask a DYK admin. Thank you.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:51, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! I've gone ahead and updated the message, let me know if it needs further tweaking. Shubinator (talk) 01:05, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot is down

Shubinator, the bot hasn't done any updating since 17:49 UTC on the 25th, over 19 hours ago. There have been a number of events that would have triggered a bot update, including the new day. Thanks for getting it restarted. (DYKUpdateBot seems to be fine; it did the midnight update as usual.) Thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 13:05, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

Back up and running :) Not sure why it went down in the first place, possibly server maintenance. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 14:10, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for getting it back up and running so quickly! BlueMoonset (talk) 04:35, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot is down

DYKUpdateBot did not update Queue 5 to the main page today. It's about half an hour overdue right now. — Maile (talk) 00:22, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Restarting... Shubinator (talk) 00:25, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. — Maile (talk) 00:30, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

No problem :) Both bots are back up and running. Thanks for pinging me! Shubinator (talk) 00:38, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot down?

Shubinator, I believe that the bot is down; it hasn't updated since 00:10 November 9, and there should definitely have been an update at approximately the same time today (November 10) with the shifting of the dates, but it's 00:47 and the date shift was at 00:04. Thanks for any help you can give. (Note: DYKUpdateBot ran at 00:00 as scheduled, so it's apparently still up.) BlueMoonset (talk) 00:52, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

How odd. Every time DYKHousekeepingBot tries to edit, Wikipedia says it's edit-conflicting. Shubinator (talk) 01:33, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure why Wikipedia thinks the bot is edit-conflicting. It's possible Wikipedia doesn't think the bot is signed in. I can take a longer look over the weekend, unfortunately the bot will be out of commission until this is sorted out. Shubinator (talk) 01:49, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

One of your attempts seems to have worked, though it oddly isn't showing under the DYKHousekeepingBot contributions list: the page says it was updated at 01:28, 10 November 2016 (UTC), but not since. Thanks for the manual run. I hope you don't mind, but I removed that "0" you added, which hadn't managed to provoke an automatic update (and also two empty days, since those dates have been removed). If you can do a manual run once a day until the bot is fixed, at some point after the new day has been added to the nominations page (usually by 00:10), that would be fabulous, but if it isn't convenient, we can certainly continue muddling along. BlueMoonset (talk) 19:20, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Sure, I'll aim for ~daily manual updates :) Shubinator (talk) 03:52, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Curious. The bot works when I run it under my account. Shubinator (talk) 23:25, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Found the issue, bot should be running normally now :) Thanks for your patience! Shubinator (talk) 23:50, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Two-Factor Authentication now available for admins

Hello,

Please note that TOTP based two-factor authentication is now available for all administrators. In light of the recent compromised accounts, you are encouraged to add this additional layer of security to your account. It may be enabled on your preferences page in the "User profile" tab under the "Basic information" section. For basic instructions on how to enable two-factor authentication, please see the developing help page for additional information. Important: Be sure to record the two-factor authentication key and the single use keys. If you lose your two factor authentication and do not have the keys, it's possible that your account will not be recoverable. Furthermore, you are encouraged to utilize a unique password and two-factor authentication for the email account associated with your Wikimedia account. This measure will assist in safeguarding your account from malicious password resets. Comments, questions, and concerns may be directed to the thread on the administrators' noticeboard. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:33, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

A new user right for New Page Patrollers

Hi Shubinator.

A new user group, New Page Reviewer, has been created in a move to greatly improve the standard of new page patrolling. The user right can be granted by any admin at PERM. It is highly recommended that admins look beyond the simple numerical threshold and satisfy themselves that the candidates have the required skills of communication and an advanced knowledge of notability and deletion. Admins are automatically included in this user right.

It is anticipated that this user right will significantly reduce the work load of admins who patrol the performance of the patrollers. However,due to the complexity of the rollout, some rights may have been accorded that may later need to be withdrawn, so some help will still be needed to some extent when discovering wrongly applied deletion tags or inappropriate pages that escape the attention of less experienced reviewers, and above all, hasty and bitey tagging for maintenance. User warnings are available here but very often a friendly custom message works best.

If you have any questions about this user right, don't hesitate to join us at WT:NPR. (Sent to all admins).MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:47, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Update bot is down

The DYK Update bot has missed the update time. — Maile (talk) 00:21, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure what went wrong; the bot's logs cut off more than a day ago. That said, I've restarted the bot, and it looks normal now. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 02:52, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Shubinator, whatever you did doesn't seem to have taken; the bot hasn't made an edit since November 15. I'm going to see whether there's anyone around who can do a manual update. Please take another look. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 00:44, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

It looks the bot process was killed, which is different from whatever happened yesterday. I've started DYKUpdateBot back up again. Shubinator (talk) 02:03, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Not working again. Is somebody messing with the bot? — Maile (talk) 00:13, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

The bot was fine, just nobody cared to protect the image file of the main hook (and I've missed that too). Materialscientist (talk) 00:38, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

I don't have admin rights on Commons, but it's good information to have. — Maile (talk) 00:41, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

As an admin you can upload the image on en.wiki under the same name and full-protect it here. The image will be deleted later. This is a regular procedure. Materialscientist (talk) 01:22, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. So kind of a reverse thing. It's on Commons, but I could upload it as a File on Wikipedia and protect it that way. — Maile (talk) 01:27, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Yep. For future reference, the bot outputs error messages on User:DYKUpdateBot/Errors for certain errors, like unprotected images. Shubinator (talk) 05:03, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, Shubinator. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of File:ThunderII.jpg

A tag has been placed on File:ThunderII.jpg requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section F2 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is an image page for a missing or corrupt image or an empty image description page for a Commons-hosted image.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 10:17, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot didn't complete last night; it might or might not need to be restarted

Shubinator, last night the DYKUpdateBot died before it did any of the notifications; basically, it updated the main page, archived the old set, and set the time for the next update. That's it. It didn't to the notifications, and more crucially it didn't clear out Queue 1 or update the next queue to be Queue 2.

I've put out a call for an admin to reset the next queue to 2 and to empty out Queue 1, as well as do all the uncompleted notifications to article talk pages and user talk pages, but in case you're around, I was hoping you could keep an eye on the bot and make sure it started up again at midnight UTC. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 20:00, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Shubinator, I just did a manual update. The DYKUpdateBot is still not running. — Maile (talk) 00:36, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

I've restarted the bot. It looks like User talk:Samuele Madini is an edge case that hit a bug in the bot - it's a user talk page that redirects to a non-talk page. Shubinator (talk) 03:11, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_additions Is not updated.

06:24, 17 December 2016 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.39.230.243 (talk)  

Good call, I've updated it with the 17 December set :) Thanks! Shubinator (talk) 01:13, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Possible changes to the DYK nominations page and DYKHousekeepingBot

Shubinator, the problems we were having with the DYK nominations page (T:TDYK) not being able to transclude all of the nominations has been recurring since the end of November, and getting steadily worse. I think it's now attributable to the overall increase in template usage in individual nominations—it's now a rare one that doesn't use the ping template, for example—and the increasing number of extant nominations.

While a number of suggestions were bruited about in the most recent DYK talk-page discussion, including when to close nominations and the like, it seems like the one that received general support is the one to split the nomination page into two pages: one for nominations still needing approval (Regular), and one for approved nominations (Approved).

It seemed to me that this split would require changes to the DYKHousekeepingBot:

• To build the List of DYK Hooks by Date table that's currently included on the Queues and Preps and Nominations pages, it would need to check and extract data from both the existing Regular nominations page and the new Approved nominations page.
• Ideally, the bot would also take any nominations on the Regular nominations page that have been approved and move them to the Approved nominations page.
• Also, the bot would take any nominations from the Approved nominations page that have run into trouble, and move them back to the Regular nominations page.

However, I imagine that the code to move hooks from one page to another could take some time: new date sections might need to be created as part of a move, for example. You'd also need to protect against editing collisions: people adding new template transclusions to the Regular page, moving hooks to the Special Occasions section (which would be located on the Approved page), and the bot adding a new day and rotating the New section of the Regular page, which happens once daily. Also, I rather suspect some people will move hooks by hand between pages rather than wait for the bot to do it.

So, the big question would seem to be whether you have time to take on this project, and how long each phase would take. The crucial one is the first one: getting the DYKHousekeepingBot to be able to read and combine the data from the Regular and Approved pages into a single table. Once that is ready, we can go live with it and manually move the hooks between the Regular and Approved pages. (It will be a bit of a pain, but at least all nominations will once again be visible.)

I suppose, technically, we could set up the Approved page and just have the hooks moved there disappear from the Nominated page, while you're working on the code for the List of DYK Hooks by Date; I think it would be confusing to have them just disappear, though. Do you have a suggestion on a name for the Approved page? Or should we put it directly "below" the nominations page: Template talk:Did you know/Approved?

Thanks for any advice you can give, and your thoughts about how long it would take to revise the bot for each of these steps. BlueMoonset (talk) 20:08, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

I can get the first step up and running later this week. Would be great if someone could create the Approved page with one or two (possibly fake) noms so I have something to work off of. Template talk:Did you know/Approved works for me :) I should have time this Friday, so if the Approved page is created before Dec 23 00:00 UTC, I can likely get the bot reading both pages by Dec 24 00:00 UTC.

As you mentioned, moving the nominations around is likely to cause edit conflicts, and right now neither bot handles edit conflicts gracefully, so it might best for the bots to not do these tasks. Shubinator (talk) 01:08, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Shubinator, I imagine that any moving will be done by the bot Wugapodes will be building, so we'll let him worry about that when the time comes.

In the meantime, I have just created the Approved page. Sorry it's a day later than you were hoping. Based on the most recent discussion at DYK talk, it seems clear that this page will not be date based; while it may have sections, I think for the time being you should ignore the possibility and just list/count all of the hooks regardless of section (yes, including the special occasion ones).

I've structured the page with an overall first-level Nominations section like the current Nominations page, and second-level "Approved nominations" and "Special occasion holding area". However, while the Special occasion second has third-level headers (by date), the Approved nominations section does not. Will your bot look up and count the nominations in both sections even if they're at different levels, or would it be better to put in a third-level header under Approved nominations (called, say, "Ready for promotion")? Also, it seems to me that since there won't be any dates on the Approved page, would it make sense to give the page its own line on the "List of DYK Hooks by Date" table, and perhaps (because there won't be dates there) rename the table?

I should mention that it is possible for hooks to be on the Approved page and not be approved, since subsequent reviewers can come in and find issues with them, so there may be more total hooks than verified hooks.

I stocked the Approvals page with four approved but unpromoted hooks. (They're all from December 6 on the Nominations page.) There are also three approved hooks in the Special occasions section; I basically duplicated everything there that hadn't been promoted, all of which were from the New Year.

Please let me know if you have any questions or preferences, or would like adjustments to the newly created Approvals page. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 00:01, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! As long as each nomination has a fourth-level header, the bot will be able to parse it out. For the table, is something like this what you were thinking?

Count of DYK Hooks
Section	# of Hooks	# Verified
December 14	6	4
December 15	8	2
December 16	14	4
December 17	10	7
Approved	4	3
Total	42	20
Last updated 01:05, December 24, 2016 (UTC) Current time is 15:57, 6 January 2025 UTC [refresh]

Shubinator (talk) 01:06, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Shubinator, thank you. Yes, that was what I was thinking of. It's good to know about the fourth-level headers; since all nomination templates are built with those headers, then we should be all set—I'm guessing that it doesn't matter whether the structure above them includes third-level headers or not. Can I make a minor request regarding the dates at the bottom of table? It's always seemed odd to me that the "Last updated" line uses an mdy date, while the "Current time" uses the dmy format. Any chance that they could standardize? (I'd imagine dmy should be used if so, since it's what we get in edit histories and user contribution pages and the like.) Once you have a test version ready, some input from the others would make sense: would "Approved" or "Approved page" be clearer, should it have a white background or pink or another color, and so on. The page will eventually need to change again once the other features have been nailed down and implemented, but this allows the two-page solution to be implemented. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:10, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Done :) See the bot's output here: User:Shubinator/Sandbox/DYK hook count. If the discussion settles on date sections for the Approved page, it's relatively easy to tweak the bot code for date sections in the future. Shubinator (talk) 23:38, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

The bot version currently being tested (you've just been pinged from one of the discussion pages) has date sections for the Approved page, so it would be nice if you'd tweak your bot code in that direction. It has been pointed out, however, that the links do go to the Nominations page, which isn't helpful if you're working on the Approved page. Right now, the links work differently depending on whether you're on the Queues page or the Nominations page. How feasible would a three-way test/formation be when adding the Approved page into the mix? I'm guessing it's more complicated, and not only because both Nominations and Approved pages have the same top-level directory... BlueMoonset (talk) 16:34, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

I'll try to make the change within a week. Tweaking the links to support the Approved page should be doable, the table would always link to sections within the Approved page if it detected it was on the Approved page. Shubinator (talk) 05:39, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Done, check out User:Shubinator/Sandbox/DYK hook count. The table reflects unapproved + approved hooks on both the normal nominations page (User:Wugapodes/DYKTest) and the approved page (User:Wugapodes/DYKTest/Approved). Links are formatted as described above; the table links to sections within the Approved page if it thinks it's on the Approved page. Shubinator (talk) 01:56, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

I've updated the live version of DYKHousekeepingBot with the above changes, so it now picks up nominations on the Approved page that are in date sections. Hopefully everything will work seamlessly when Wugapodes's bot is started up. Shubinator (talk) 05:29, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Shubinator; it looks good! Wugapodes has just posted that the power and wifi are both out due to a storm, so the Wugbot runs are delayed by a day. BlueMoonset (talk) 06:49, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Recent DYKUpdateBot issues

Shubinator, DYKUpdateBot has recently had some trouble with completing its updates. Today's 12:00 update that moved Queue 3 to the main page stopped after posting the notifications to the editors (the DYKmakes and DYKnoms) and before adding the credit to the image page. The same thing happened with Queue 1 36 hours earlier (we've just gone from updates every 24 hours to updates every 12 hours).

The problem with the update dying on the image step is that the key final steps—clearing the queue and updating "next" to the next queue—don't get done. And there isn't always an admin around, which could mean a queue getting promoted again if a clean-up isn't done.

Is there a way of making the image credit step more bulletproof—that is, if something goes wrong, can it just proceed without doing the credit? And if that's going to continue to be problematic—these are hardly the only times the image credit step has failed and caused this problem—might it make sense to swap the order of steps so the image credit is done last, after emptying the queue and updating to the next one? (You'd need to keep the image data around after the queue holding it was gone.) Sometimes it does manage to fail over: on January 8, while the image credit isn't logged, after a four minute gap the bot was able to finish up. January 9, as noted above (Queue 1), there was no recovery and the bot didn't do those all-important final steps.

Thanks for anything you can do. Please let me know what you think is feasible. BlueMoonset (talk) 18:32, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Looks like a couple different things are happening. First, DYKUpdateBot's delete and unprotect abilities appear to be broken. I'm not particularly surprised, a year ago I suspected the quick patch implemented here fixed edit capabilities but not delete/protect/etc. Thankfully DYKUpdateBot only uses delete/unprotect for image related stuff, nothing crucial to the updates. A year ago DYK was rarely uploading temporary files to English Wikipedia so I didn't get a chance to test my hunch at the time. Second, for some reason the bot is having trouble editing images that were once on English Wikipedia but have since moved to Commons. Not sure why.

As for solutions. I've gone ahead and commented out the code for deleting/unprotecting files as they come off the Main Page. I've moved the image-related part of the update to the very end as you suggested. And I've also fixed the edge case that took down the bot last month. The code change is here for the curious.

Do we think the delete/unprotect functionality is valuable? I'm not sure how much effort it would take to fix this. If we want to fix it, I may just rewrite the bot against pywikibot (which has a healthy community of bots using it) instead of making my own fixes to the 8-year-old JavaWikiBotFramework (which has pretty much no community, and no updates in years). That said, I'm not sure when I'll find the time to rewrite our beloved bot.

As always, thanks for letting me know of trouble brewing. Shubinator (talk) 05:51, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot appears to be down

Shubinator, the bot didn't run at 22:07 30 January 2017 like it should have; it's now 00:13 31 January 2017 and no sign of the bot doing as it ought. Can you please restart it as soon as you see this? Many thanks. PS: I'll let you know if I hear more from Wugapodes on progress. In the meantime, we've finally got all of the hooks visible again on the Nominations page, though I have no idea how long that will last. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:14, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Materialscientist did a manual update, so we're set for the next half day: the next update is scheduled for shortly after noon UTC. Still, I'm hoping you see this well before then and can give DYKUpdateBot a restart. Note that DYKHousekeepingBot seems to be working fine; it last updated about 40 minutes ago, to reflect the new date added to the Nominations page shortly after midnight. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:50, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

I've restarted the bot. I'm not sure what went wrong, the bot's output stops on Jan 19th. Hopefully if/when it happens again, the logs will capture whatever it is. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 02:08, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter - February 2017

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2017). This first issue is being sent out to all administrators, if you wish to keep receiving it please subscribe. Your feedback is welcomed.

Administrator changes

NinjaRobotPirate • Schwede66 • K6ka • Ealdgyth • Ferret • Cyberpower678 • Mz7 • Primefac • Dodger67

Briangotts • JeremyA • BU Rob13

Guideline and policy news

• A discussion to workshop proposals to amend the administrator inactivity policy at Wikipedia talk:Administrators has been in process since late December 2016.
• Wikipedia:Pending changes/Request for Comment 2016 closed with no consensus for implementing Pending changes level 2 with new criteria for use.
• Following an RfC, an activity requirement is now in place for bots and bot operators.

Technical news

• When performing some administrative actions the reason field briefly gave suggestions as text was typed. This change has since been reverted so that issues with the implementation can be addressed. (T34950)
• Following the latest RfC concluding that Pending Changes 2 should not be used on the English Wikipedia, an RfC closed with consensus to remove the options for using it from the page protection interface, a change which has now been made. (T156448)
• The Foundation has announced a new community health initiative to combat harassment. This should bring numerous improvements to tools for admins and CheckUsers in 2017.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee released a response to the Wikimedia Foundation's statement on paid editing and outing.

Obituaries

• JohnCD (John Cameron Deas) passed away on 30 December 2016. John began editing Wikipedia seriously during 2007 and became an administrator in November 2009.

---

Discuss this newsletter • Subscribe • Archive

13:37, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

DYK bot difficulty again

@Shubinator and BlueMoonset: When the bot swapped out the sets at 00:00, 11 February 2017, it did nothing else, it did not place the DYK templates on the individual pages. Even though it also missed the update at 12:00 today, there was no message on WT:DYK that the update was late. I manually did the update and reset the clock according to the instructions on its page. I also did a manual update of Wikipedia:Recent additions. — Maile (talk) 12:50, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

@Shubinator and BlueMoonset: I don't know where you are, but the bot is nowhere right now. Second manual update in a row. — Maile (talk) 01:11, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! Looks like the bot ran out of memory (which is unusual), so it crashed. I've restarted the bot and it's back to normal now. Shubinator (talk) 02:42, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Can you run the untranscluded DYK nomination templates list?

Shubinator, it might be nice to have this list run again now, while the nominations are comparatively recent. Thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:48, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Sure, I've put the list at Wikipedia talk:Did you know#Orphaned nominations March 2017. Shubinator (talk) 07:44, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I expected a bit more than that, but it's good to get these done. BlueMoonset (talk) 08:29, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

No problem :) My part was easy, thanks for looking at them individually! Shubinator (talk) 23:53, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot is down

Shubinator, the bot last ran at 16:25 today. Since then, there have been a few new hooks added, none promoted that I'm aware of, plus I created a new date (March 6) for a badly misplaced hook at 23:13 which hasn't yet resulted in a DYKHousekeepingBot update, although that was 35 minutes ago. I'm forced to conclude that the bot is not currently running, and needs manual intervention on your part. Thanks as always for your help and your bots. BlueMoonset (talk) 23:49, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Restarted, it's back up and running now. Not sure what happened, the bot's process was no longer running but the logs don't show anything unusual. Thanks for pinging me! Shubinator (talk) 03:18, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for getting it back up and running! BlueMoonset (talk) 17:25, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot missed 25 March 2017 00:00 update, but don't restart it unless the next update time has been updated

Shubinator, in case you didn't see the ping from the WT:DYK page, DYKUpdateBot didn't run when it was supposed to about three and a half hours ago (its last edit was at 00:02 on 24 March 2017 (UTC), and a partial manual update was done about 50 minutes later that failed to include updating the time of the next update, but did include incrementing the next queue to be promoted. Please do not restart the bot until first making sure that Template:Did you know/Next update/Time has been updated from 2017-03-24T00:00:00Z to 2017-03-25T00:00:00Z ("24" needs to have been changed to "25"); otherwise, the bot will immediately overwrite the set that was manually updated with a new queue, which would be bad. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:15, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

I've completed the latest manual update, so the only problem is to revive the bot. Materialscientist (talk) 05:52, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks both! I've started the bot back up. At a glance the logs show the bot crashed in the image protection logic, my hunch is the nested template on that set confused the bot. Shubinator (talk) 06:14, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

The bot is back down; it missed the midnight update. I'm going to see if I can get Materialscientist to do a manual update for the set that was supposed to be promoted about two and a half hours ago. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:36, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Updated. Materialscientist (talk) 02:48, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Materialscientist. Shubinator, it looks like whatever killed DYKUpdateBot also took out DYKHousekeepingBot; it last ran at 17:17, 30 March 2017, and would have made an update by around 19:47 if it had been active, so whatever happened probably took out both bots between those times. I hope you see this soon and can restore the bots: the next main page update is for the first April Fools' Day set. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:35, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Both bots back online :) Looks like their server was restarted. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 05:50, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Shubinator. BlueMoonset (talk) 06:08, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot is down (last update 15:36 UTC)

Shubinator, DYKHousekeepingBot hasn't done an update in over 10 hours. There have been plenty of edits to the nominations page, including adding the new date section at 00:00, so I'm pretty sure the bot needs your assistance in restarting.

Oddly, this did not affect DYKUpdateBot, which did the 00:00, 4 April update as scheduled.

Thanks for anything you can do. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:53, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

I've restarted it :) Not entirely sure what went wrong, the logs show the bot was stuck in a loop while trying to login. Thanks for pinging me! Shubinator (talk) 03:45, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Article Efe Ejeba up for DYK

hi i created an article few days ago and still not heard an info about it either it's been up for nomination or not i just want you to shed more light to me on the article i created with the title Efe Ejeba i really need to hear some news on it thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hameensleek (talk • contribs) 09:53, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Hey there. It looks like the DYK nomination for Efe Ejeba is not yet complete, please take a look at step III of the nomination process here: Template talk:Did you know#To nominate an article. Also you'll want to clean up the redlink in the hook and phrase the hook as a question (see the other nominations for examples). Good luck! Shubinator (talk) 06:24, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Protection change at RFPP

I had pinged you on this at RFPP. Maybe you weren't online today. But the protection level you put on Template:DYKmake/DYKmakecredit has now been reduced. I don't know if that's relevant or not. — Maile (talk) 22:21, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know! This should be fine, the credit templates don't affect the pipeline of DYK hooks to the Main Page. Shubinator (talk) 03:30, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, April 2017

Bots Newsletter, April 2017

Greetings! The BAG Newsletter is now the Bots Newsletter, per discussion. As such, we've subscribed all bot operators to the newsletter. You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list. Highlights for this newsletter include: Arbcom Magioladitis ARBCOM case has closed. The remedies of the case include: Community encouraged to review common fixes Community encouraged to review policy on cosmetic edits Developers encouraged to improve AWB interface Bot approvals group encouraged to carefully review BRFA scope Reminders/Restrictions specific to Magioladitis BRFAs We currently have 27 open bot requests at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval, and could use your help processing! Discussions There are multiple ongoing discussions surrounding bot-related matters. In particular: RFC on COSMETICBOT Efforts at WP:CHECKWIKI to identify cosmetic fixes Requested move for the Bot Owners' Noticeboard A phabricator ticket T162685 has been made to have a "bots" tag, so issues related to bot frameworks can be tracked New things Several new things are around: A BAG Guide has been created (WP:BAGG, discussion). Users now have the option to hide AWB from their watchlists via a script (WP:HIDEAWB, discussion) The guidance on how to deal with bot issues has been overhauled (WP:BOTISSUE, discussion) The bot policy has been updated to clarify that bot operators are required to register accounts. (WP:BOTACCOUNT, discussion) Wikimania Wikimania 2017 is happening in Montreal, during 9–13 August. If you plan to attend, or give a talk, let us know! Thank you! edited by:Headbomb 11:35, 12 April 2017 (UTC) (You can unsubscribe from future newsletters by removing your name from this list.)

DYK update

Hello! I used some slightly unusual syntax in a DYK queue and watched at the update time to make sure that it didn't confound the bot. When the update didn't occur, I removed the aforementioned code and made the update time later (I think), but that didn't seem to help. My apologies if I've caused the bot to shut down. —David Levy 03:28, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

No worries, I've started up the bot. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 05:07, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

DYK talk issue

• Bot says the story on Wikitribune appeared on DYK on 21 May 2017
• But archives the story as if it appeared on 22 May
• Thus {{DYK talk}} points to the wrong section:

...leaving the reader confused, as the item they're looking for is off the top of their window, so they need to scroll up to find it (if they'e savvy enough to figure that out).

How to fix this? wbm1058 (talk) 13:05, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

This is a longstanding issue. What's going on: the date on {{DYK talk}} is when the hook was placed on the Main Page, the date in the archives corresponds to when the hook was removed from the Main Page. The two dates often don't line up, especially for sets coming off the Main Page at 00:00 UTC. Shubinator (talk) 06:41, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Regarding Dyk Update Bot

DykUpdateBot seems to be putting up the dates on Recent additions one day late, I got a message on my talk page for a DYK nomination with the date 21 May while on the target page it was situated at 22 May. King Prithviraj II (talk) 14:03, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Feel free to join in the discussion in the section above. Shubinator (talk) 06:43, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Problem with redirect

I am not sure this is the right place to report this, but here goes... When I first created a DYK nomination template I erroneously entered the full name (William Ruben Rowley) to create a template for William R. Rowley, (the correct title), so I had to rename (move) the template from William Ruben Rowley  to  William R. Rowley. However, now when one clicks on 'Review or comment' on the DYK talk page listing, the Redirect page/template comes up, which no doubt will confuse many reviewers. How can we get the talk page listing to display the proper title and go to the proper template when one clicks on 'Review or comment'? Here is the link to the proper template: Template:Did you know nominations/William R. Rowley -- If this is not the right place to report this problem could you forward this message to an appropriate place/user? Sorry for the hassle, and many thanks. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 00:29, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

I went ahead and fixed up the template, should be good now :) Shubinator (talk) 06:37, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, everything seems to be in order. THANKS !!

DYK not updated for 31 May yet

FYI. --71.183.132.170 (talk) 00:24, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot restarted, it's chugging along on the May 31 update. Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 00:46, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

DYKcheck is saying articles have 0 prose characters

Shubinator, something is causing DYKcheck to say that articles have only 0 prose characters even though they clearly have quite a bit of prose in them. Can you please take a look and see what's causing the problem? Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 13:57, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

I should probably qualify that Batman and Harley Quinn was the initial article in question, and I tried a few more, all of which came up 0. Since then, I've tried Gasparo Cairano, which measured out at 35408, but I'm still getting 0 on the others. Any idea of what's wrong? Thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 17:17, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Looks like the HTML structure changed a bit. Specifically, there are two more layers in articles' HTML than before, and that's confusing the script. I'll try to figure out a fix this week, but I'll be traveling, so no promises. It's tough to predict how long this will take to fix because fixing the first issue might uncover more issues introduced by the HTML restructuring. Shubinator (talk) 07:20, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Prosesize.js likely ran into the same issue, User:TheDJ fixed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=User%3ADr_pda%2Fprosesize.js&type=revision&diff=783374164&oldid=778550354 . Hopefully the same tweaks will work for DYKcheck. Shubinator (talk) 07:25, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

This is an alternative fix I think: [3] (ignore the console.log line) for character count plus [4] for word count. I don't think it's as future proof, but more straightforward. I've only tested in Vector. - Jarry1250 ^{[Vacation needed]} 12:08, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Jarry! I've adopted your fix, tested on all four skins. Sorry for the delay. Shubinator (talk) 04:21, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Ran into the same problem while reviewing Deepak Dhar since it was my first reveiw and it left me completely confused since DYKcheck has been billed as the most accurate among them all.FORCE RADICAL (talk) 06:26, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

About 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami train wreck

User:DYKHousekeepingBot said it's uncompelete but now compelete i think,this bot will send to me message are full corrected? — Preceding unsigned comment added by TalismanOnline (talk • contribs) 14:55, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

It looks like the nomination is still incomplete; it needs to be added to Template talk:Did you know. That said, it looks like the article is not eligible for DYK because it was not recently created, expanded, or promoted to Good Article. For more details check out WP:DYKRULES. Shubinator (talk) 04:27, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot is down, and DYKUpdateBot too, I think

Shubinator, the last update was at 10:42 on June 21; there have been new nominations since, and of course we're past 00:00 UTC with the new date added. Please restart the bot at your first convenience. Also, I'm pretty sure DYKUpdateBot is down; it didn't send the warning message two hours before 00:00 UTC for June 22. Many thanks.

I'm going to have to find an admin to load up a queue in any event, and then someone to do a manual promotion if you haven't seen this by then. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:45, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Looking. Shubinator (talk) 01:47, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Wow, that was fast! Thanks, Shubinator. Incidentally, someone had already loaded up Queue 3 while I was writing you, so as soon as DYKUpdateBot is back up I imagine it will get promoted automatically. I haven't yet asked anyone to do a manual update, so I doubt anyone will try. BlueMoonset (talk) 01:55, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

And both bots are back in business :) Thanks for pinging me! Shubinator (talk) 02:03, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

You're welcome, and glad to see the results! Happy to do it. Hope all is well with you after the first day of summer. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:07, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

It's been a busy day, but the good kind of busy :) I'm debating whether I want to see the August eclipse in person... Hope you're doing well! Shubinator (talk) 02:20, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot is down

Just wanted to give you a heads up that the bot is not updating the main page. IronGargoyle (talk) 00:32, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot did its most recent update at 19:29, 29 June 2017 (UTC), so it is also down; at a minimum, there would have been an update shortly after midnight on 30 June had it been running, and there wasn't one. I hope you can get both bot back running soon. Thanks, Shubinator! BlueMoonset (talk) 03:00, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

Both bots back in action :) Thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 05:25, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, July 2017

Bots Newsletter, July 2017

Greetings! Here is the 4th issue of the Bots Newsletter (formerly the BAG Newletter). You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list. Highlights for this newsletter include: BAG BU Rob13 and Cyberpower678 are now members of the BAG (see RfBAG/BU Rob13 and RfBAG/Cyberpower678 3). BU Rob13 and Cyberpower678 are both administrators; the former operates BU RoBOT which does a plethora of tasks, while the latter operates Cyberbot I (which replaces old bots), Cyberbot II (which does many different things), and InternetArchiveBot which combats link rot. Welcome to the BAG! BRFAs We currently have 12 open bot requests at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval, and could use your help processing! Discussions Efforts at WP:CHECKWIKI to identify cosmetic fixes are still ongoing. The RFC on COSMETICBOT has concluded with "a clear consensus exists to adopt the proposed language". The new wording is now live. The venue for bot appeals and reexaminations has been changed from WP:BRFA to WP:BOTN (see discussion) The Wikipedia:Bot owner's noticeboard is now the Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard (see discussion). New things A historical correction was made to WP:BOTPOL (see discussion). WP:HIDEBOTS now mentions how to hide all bots from your watchlist, not only specific bots. The phabricator ticket T162685 is now closed, and we now have "#Bots-Framework" tag, so issues related to bot frameworks can be tracked. Wikibits.js has been removed (see discussion). 21 inactive bots have been deflagged (see discussion). WP:BOTISSUE has been updated to mention that BAG members can act as neutral mediators in bot-related disputes. WP:INTERWIKIBOT has been updated to reflect the post-February 2013 practice of putting interwiki links on Wikidata, rather than on Wikipedia (see discussion). Upcoming HTML Tidy will be phased out in June 2018, or possibly earlier. This may affect some bots (see FAQ). Wikimania Wikimania 2017 is happening in Montreal, during 9–13 August. If you plan to attend, or give a talk, let us know! Thank you! edited by: Headbomb 17:12, 19 July 2017 (UTC) (You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

بچه گربه‌ای برای شما!

از شما متشکرم

Aw a kitten, thanks! Welcome to Wikipedia! Shubinator (talk) 03:14, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Invitation to Admin confidence survey

Hello,

Beginning in September 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation Anti-harassment tool team will be conducting a survey to gauge how well tools, training, and information exists to assist English Wikipedia administrators in recognizing and mitigating things like sockpuppetry, vandalism, and harassment.

The survey should only take 5 minutes, and your individual response will not be made public. This survey will be integral for our team to determine how to better support administrators.

To take the survey sign up here and we will send you a link to the form.

We really appreciate your input!

Please let us know if you wish to opt-out of all massmessage mailings from the Anti-harassment tools team.

For the Anti-harassment tools team, SPoore (WMF), Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 19:52, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot appears to be down

Hello Shubinator! It seems like DYKUpdateBot is down, as it's not updating the current queue. If you could restart the bot sometime soon at your earliest convenience, that would be great. Thanks so much! Alex Shih^Talk 05:12, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot seems also to be down; its last edit was at 17:43, 28 September 2017 (UTC). Please also restart this one as well. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 05:41, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

It looks like both bots are having trouble editing Wikipedia, presumably due to an API change. I'll keep looking at this tomorrow. Unfortunately I'm not sure how long the bots will be out of commission. Shubinator (talk) 06:20, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Found the culprit. When the bots are trying to edit, they're getting this error message: "It appears that your browser does not support Unicode. It is required to edit pages, so your edit was not saved." Looking into different ways of addressing this. Shubinator (talk) 16:22, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

For the curious, here's the corresponding API change: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/374422 Shubinator (talk) 16:25, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Both bots should be up and running again. Thanks everyone! (For the curious, here's the fix: Special:Diff/803132637.) Shubinator (talk) 17:20, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Please run the untranscluded DYK nomination templates list

Shubinator, I believe I'm aware of all those from prior to October, but I think some from last month were promoted and then pulled back, but WugBot deleted the transclusions (as it's supposed to do) after promotion, and the person who pulled the nomination back forgot (or didn't care) that they needed to retransclude the nomination template. I'd like to find those now and get them transcluded again; there should be a few of them at least. There's no immediate rush; please post the list here when it's ready and ping me, and I'll get to work on resurrecting them. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 23:29, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

Here you go BlueMoonset! I'm not sure if this list would include those nominations, they would need to still be a member of Category:Pending DYK nominations. Shubinator (talk) 04:32, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

• Template:Did you know nominations/Heroic Medicine
• Template:Did you know nominations/Thomas Richard Morris
• Template:Did you know nominations/Ikebana
• Template:Did you know nominations/Gerard Barnes Lambert

Thank you very much, Shubinator. As it happens, I already knew about Heroic Medicine and Thomas Richard Morris, both of which were not retranscluded after being pulled from prep a while back, but the other two were new to me, and available on the Pending DYK nominations page (I've been checking that category lately). Oddly, Ikebana wasn't ever added to the nominations page, yet the nominator wasn't sent the "you forgot to transclude this" message by DYKHousekeepingBot. I've just taken care of posting to the nominator's talk page, though as the nomination isn't a 5x expansion and has referencing issues, I doubt the transclusion will ever be done. The Gerard Barnes Lambert nomination page was created by an editor making their first edit; there is no article about this person at all. I've put the page up for speedy deletion. That takes care of all the untranscluded nominations! BlueMoonset (talk) 05:18, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

That was fast, thanks! It looks like Ikebana's nominator has a nobots template on their talk page so DYKHousekeepingBot respected the template and didn't notify them. Shubinator (talk) 05:28, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

Hello, Shubinator. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Both bots are down

DYKHousekeepingBot last did an update at 15:22, 16 January 2018 (UTC), and DYKUpdateBot did the 12:00 update on the 16th but not the after it, the 00:00, 17 January 2018 one. (We're currently on a twice-per-day schedule.) If you can see whether the bots can be restarted, we'd greatly appreciate it. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:42, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Both bots back in service, thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 06:16, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing them so quickly! Hope all is well chez Shubinator. BlueMoonset (talk) 07:27, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Down again?

Shubinator, DYKHousekeepingBot last did an update earlier today at 14:44, 17 January 2018 (UTC). While DYKUpdateBot did its own update after that, between 16:00 and 16:03, none of the subsequent changes to the DYK nominations page, including new nominations added at 17:51 and 19:37 and a nomination being approved at 18:05, have been picked up by the Housekeeping bot, which leads me to believe that it is again down. And if it's down, the DYKUpdateBot is also likely affected. Can you please check to see whether they're working, and restart them if not? Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 22:12, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

It looks like DYKHousekeepingBot went down (unclear why, nothing odd in the logs), DYKUpdateBot stayed up. I've started up DYKHousekeepingBot again. Thanks for pinging me! Now bedtime :) Shubinator (talk) 08:40, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, March 2018

Bots Newsletter, March 2018

Greetings!

Here is the 5th issue of the Bots Newsletter (formerly the BAG Newletter). You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list.

Highlights for this newsletter include:

ARBCOM

• Magioladitis 2 happened, leading to further restrictions on Magioladitis (decision, summary).
• Betacommand 3 was proposed to be amended to lift the indefinite ban on Δ, but was unsuccessful (decision).
• A motion concerning Crosswiki issues (mostly concerning Wikidata) was passed (see discussion).

BAG

• Hersfold was removed from the BAG due to long term inactivity.

BRFAs

We currently have 6 open bot requests at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval, and could use your help processing!

Discussions

While there were no large-scale bot-related discussion in the past few months, you can check WP:BOTN and WT:BOTPOL (and their corresponding archives) for smaller issues that came up.

New things

• WP:BOTDICT, a dictionary of common bot-related terms (see discussion).
• 6 inactive bots have been deflagged (see discussion).
• The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey happened. Two bot-related proposal passed, #6 deploy Article Alerts to other languages and #10 Commons deletion notification bot, although other entries may affect bots as well.
• Category:Wikipedia bots and its subcategories has had some cleanup. Bot-related pages that were historically important but are no longer of interests can be found in Category:Wikipedia bots (historical)
• The edit summary limit has been increased to 1000 characters (see T6715). If a bot you operate relied on the old truncation limit (255 characters), please review/update your code, as overly long summaries can be disruptive/annoying. If you want to use extra characters to have more information in your edit summary, please do so intelligently.
• You will soon be able to ping users from the edit summary (see T188469). If you wish to use this feature in your bot, please do so intelligently.

Upcoming

• HTML Tidy will be phased out in June 2018, or possibly earlier. This may affect some bots (see FAQ).

Thank you! edited by: Headbomb 03:12, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

---

(You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

DYKUpdateBot appears to be down

Shubinator, the 00:00, 13 March 2018 (UTC) update of the DYK section on the main page did not go as scheduled, so I'm assuming that means DYKUpdateBot is down and needs to be restarted. Interestingly, DYKHousekeepingBot has not been affected; it made updates at 23:37, 00:07, 00:37, and 01:07. (I don't see any transactions that would have required an 01:37 update, so my assumption is that it's still working.) Please take a look and fix whatever you can. I have pinged Materialscientist's talk page in the hope that a manual update can be done, but have no idea whether it will be seen anytime soon. Thanks! I hope all is well chez Shubinator. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:03, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

Back online! The logs don't show anything unusual, so it's a mystery. Sorry for the delay, and thanks for pinging me! Shubinator (talk) 02:22, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Bot error: incomplete template

in this edit. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:05, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

Interesting. The bot assumes the dykbotdo template has a parameter, and doesn't handle the "no parameter" case well. Straightforward fix, will try to implement it the next time the bot needs a restart, unless it's a common occurrence these days. Shubinator (talk) 00:32, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Fixed! Shubinator (talk) 04:37, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Untranscluded DYK nominations list

Shubinator, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could run the list of untranscluded DYK nominations when you get the chance. While I've identified and taken care of all those through January 2018, there are too many in February and March for me to manually check Category:Pending DYK nominations (which is how I found the earlier ones). It would be helpful for me to identify the more recent ones before they get too old. Thank you very much! BlueMoonset (talk) 00:36, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Sure! Here's the list:

• Template:Did you know nominations/Hanbit Unit
• Template:Did you know nominations/Jeju Oreum
• Template:Did you know nominations/Joan Benesh
• Template:Did you know nominations/Marcel Cordes
• Template:Did you know nominations/Patruni Chidananda Sastry

Hope you're doing well! Shubinator (talk) 21:13, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

I'm doing fine; thanks for asking! How about yourself?

Of the five you've listed, I knew about the first two (they're from back in December), the third had actually gotten lost along the way, the fourth had been promoted but someone added a Pending category to it by mistake (now removed), and the fifth doesn't seem to have been an article (or the article was deleted) and had no hook, so I've put in a speedy deletion request on it. That was easy, thank you! BlueMoonset (talk) 23:50, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Happy to help! I'm doing pretty well, fairly busy with real life stuff as usual. A couple weekends ago I realized one of the admins that nominated me for adminship was desysopped for lack of activity back in 2014. Made me a bit sad, but times change. Anyways, I took care of that speedy deletion for you :) Shubinator (talk) 00:31, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of File:MicaSheetUSGOV.jpg

A tag has been placed on File:MicaSheetUSGOV.jpg requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section F2 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a missing or corrupt image or an empty image description page for a Commons-hosted image.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 08:43, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

DYKbot notifications

DYKbot noified me twice. DYKbot noified me twice. SpinningSpark 12:08, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Spinningspark, the bot did what it was told to do; in this case, the "credit" templates on the nomination page included one for you as creator/expander and another as nominator, and it should only have been as the former. Usually, someone catches this and only uses the DYKmake (creator/expander) template when creating the set that eventually gets moved to the main page; in this case, both DYKmake and DYKnom templates were used, and the bot dutifully processed them both, hence the double notification. Sorry for the inconvenience. BlueMoonset (talk) 13:50, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

So basically, it was my fault. SpinningSpark 13:58, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Spinningspark, no, it wasn't your fault. The module that generates the template sometimes includes both DYKmake and DYKnom templates for the nominator, which I imagine is some sort of bug. Promoters and checkers usually notice this unnecessary DYKnom and don't include it when promoting the nomination to prep; if they miss it, then someone usually spots it while at the prep stage, or even when the set has been moved to the queue. Every once in a while, one of them slips through, and it happened to be yours this time. We don't expect nominators to know the ins and outs of the template forms, just to follow what instructions there are (like don't edit above a certain line or below another line). BlueMoonset (talk) 06:59, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Bot down

Hi Shubs. The bot is down again. I'd very much appreciate it if you'd get it running again quickly, as we are on a 12-hour cycle at the moment and the workload over the last few days has been phenomenal even with the bot working. Thanks, Gatoclass (talk) 12:35, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

I've restarted the bot, it's online again. Thanks for everything you do for DYK! Shubinator (talk) 23:49, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot down?

Shubinator, the bot hasn't updated the Wikipedia:Did you know/DYK hook count page since 17:49 UTC (over eight hours ago), and there have been various changed that should have caused updates, including adding the new day (June 7). Can you please check the bot and get it started again, and also take a look at DYKUpdateBot, just in case it also has stumbled? Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:13, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot appears to be down too. I will do a manual update. Alex Shih (talk) 06:17, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

I just got back to my computer and can take a look. Alex, let me know when you see this message - I don't want to turn on the bot while you're in the middle of an update. Shubinator (talk) 06:20, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. I finished updating. Alex Shih (talk) 06:38, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot and DYKHousekeepingBot back online! Thanks to both of you. Shubinator (talk) 06:45, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

The DYK update for June 9 is now 3½ hours overdue. 🙁 --173.129.168.189 (talk) 09:04, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Four hours now. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 09:48, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Looks like this got sorted out on WT:DYK; image protection issues. Shubinator (talk) 04:27, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

Moving back to midnight

Shubinator, whenever we get off schedule at DYK due to a problem with promoting a queue, whether because the queues are empty or the image isn't protected or someone forgot the DYKbotdo template that belongs at the top of the queue that's there, DYKUpdateBot will automatically move back to midnight in 15 minute increments, either by adding or subtracting to get us to midnight fastest. This worked reasonably well back in the days of three sets per day, but in the era of one set daily it can take an awfully long time. We just had a situation where the queues were set for promotion at 11:11, which would take 45 days to get back to 00:00 in 15-minute chunks. (It's being manually moved in rather large steps: the first is from 11:11 to 06:00.)

I was wondering how easy it would be to base the time moved on the value of User:DYKUpdateBot/Time Between Updates. If it's 86400 (24 hours), then move one hour; 43200 would move half an hour, and anything less would move the current 15 minutes. Or we could perhaps vary the time move based on how far away we are and how often the main page is updated: if we're over six hours off and updating once daily, then move two hours; over three, move 90 minutes, otherwise one hour (and similarly for twice a day).

Please note that I'm not asking you to do this unilaterally; if all or parts are feasible, then I'd bring the suggestion to the talk page. But this is exploratory; it may be that the actual periods moved might be longer or shorter depending on whatever the consensus is there.

Let me know what you think. Thanks as always. BlueMoonset (talk) 23:09, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

So good news is, the bot is already programmed to handle something similar. It's not exactly what you describe, but hopefully close enough. Take a look at User:DYKUpdateBot/ResyncDrift. Similar to User:DYKUpdateBot/Time Between Updates, admins can tweak the values at ResyncDrift and alter the bot's behavior. Changing both 15's to 60's should do the trick. The bot reads the wikitext, so in case someone wants to use template magic etc to make ResyncDrift conditional based on Time Between Updates, that won't work. Shubinator (talk) 03:46, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

DYK update bot grammar

"if there are between 6-10 hooks"

You don't use "between" with a hyphenated range. It should be either "if there are between 6 and 10" or "if there are 6-10". --Khajidha (talk) 16:48, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Updated to "if there are between 6 and 10". Shubinator (talk) 03:56, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Requesting new untranscluded DYK nominations list

It's hard to believe that it's been over three months since the last time! When you get the chance, getting the latest list of untranscluded DYK noms would be very helpful. Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 05:53, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Sure, here you go!

• Template:Did you know nominations/Manshuk Mametova
• Template:Did you know nominations/Robert Duncan (pilot)
• Template:Did you know nominations/Batas Militar (1997 film)
• Template:Did you know nominations/Lined butterflyfish
• Template:Did you know nominations/LeBron James
• Template:Did you know nominations/Sega Technical Institute
• Template:Did you know nominations/lonsdal belt 2
• Template:Did you know nominations/Telfair Hodgson

Shubinator (talk) 06:27, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, Shubinator! As always, there were some pages I already knew about, but a good half of them need to be dealt with. BlueMoonset (talk) 14:16, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot down

Shubinator, DYKHousekeepingBot hasn't done an update since 12:05 UTC today, and that despite my removing two empty dates from the Nominations page (April 26 and May 3) at around 14:40, which should definitely have triggered an update. There have also been four subsequent new nominations added to the Nominations page, and at least seven approved nominations moved from Nominations to Approved, so it's clearly not seeing many changes.

Please get the bot working again, and if DYKUpdateBot is also hors de combat, get it running again as well. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 23:28, 12 July 2018 (UTC)

Looking into it. Both bots can read Wikipedia just fine, they're having trouble making edits. Not sure why yet. Shubinator (talk) 03:25, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! I've just posted a note about the bot issues as WT:DYK#Bots are down; main page hasn't been updated; if you can post your progress (or lack thereof) there, and coordinate with any admin who might want to do a manual update, since we're three and a half hours late in the update, that would be great. I figure it would be more efficient to wait if you think the bot issue might be solved in the next half hour or so, but if it looks to be a more significant problem and/or you need to stop work, then a manual update is probably the way to go. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:36, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Both bots back online! The bots were unable to edit because this commit made wpUltimateParam a required parameter on the edit form, and the bots weren't passing that parameter. I've added that parameter to the bot code in Special:Diff/850035868, MediaWiki is happy now. Thanks for pinging me BlueMoonset! Shubinator (talk) 04:43, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

And for future reference to myself, here's the link to EditPage.php. Shubinator (talk) 04:46, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Is DYKHousekeepingBot down now?

Shubinator, I think DYKHousekeepingBot may just have gone down. Its most recent edit was at 05:18 (a little over two hours ago), a notice to a talk page that the nomination page they created had not been transcluded on the Nominations page. The one immediately before that was at 00:18, which updated the nominations table with the addition of July 24.

However, less than 15 minutes later, at 05:31, the nominator did the requested transclusion, yet the bot has not since revised the table of nominations. Further, Cwmhiraeth promoted four nominations to prep between 05:46 and 06:34, and the bot didn't pick up on these, either. Since the bot runs every half hour, all five of these changes should be reflected in the table before now, but missed the 05:48, 06:18, 06:48, and 07:18 runs (or it could have slipped by a minute, as it gradually does over time). If you could take a look, to see whether the DYKHousekeepingBot (or, for that matter, the DYKUpdateBot) need a restart, I'd greatly appreciate it. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 07:38, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

The bot's made a few edits since then and seems to be running fine. It's possible the Category API is lagging behind on Wikipedia's end, which would mean the bot wouldn't see the latest changes immediately. Shubinator (talk) 06:47, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. Something weird is certainly happening, since there was a similar gap the evening of July 26 into July 27, with over five hours elapsing between the midnight date addition on the Nominations page and the DYKHousekeepingBot updating its own list. But since the bot seems to be running fine otherwise, the delays may be an API issue. I'll keep monitoring the situation and let you know should it become chronic. BlueMoonset (talk) 19:31, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of File:Flag of Tanzania.svg

A tag has been placed on File:Flag of Tanzania.svg requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section F2 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a missing or corrupt image or an empty image description page for a Commons-hosted image.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:10, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, August 2018

Bots Newsletter, August 2018

Greetings!

Here is the 6th issue of the Bots Newsletter. You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list.

Highlights for this newsletter include:

ARBCOM

• Nothing particular important happened. Those who care already know, those who don't know wouldn't care. The curious can dig ARBCOM archives themselves.

BAG

• There were no changes in BAG membership since the last Bots Newsletter. Headbomb went from semi-active to active.
• In the last 3 months, only 3 BAG members have closed requests - help is needed with the backlog.

BOTREQs and BRFAs

As of writing, we have...

• 24 active BOTREQs, please help if you can!
• 5 open BRFAs and 3 BRFAs in need of BAG attention (see live status).
• 54 approved bot tasks since the start of 2018. Of note, Community Tech bot 5 (the #10 Wish on the 2017 Community Survey) was approved to notify users concerning problematic images and files from Wikimedia Commons.

Also

• If you're a bot operator that can help with Tidy/Linter error cleanup (see discussion, discussion), please file a BRFA!
• 8 inactive bots have been deflagged (see discussion, discussion, discussion).

Discussions

These are some of the discussions that happened / are still happening since the last Bots Newsletter. Many are stale, but some are still active.

• Use of tags by bots – Exploring the use of a new 'bot' tag.
• Mass page moves – Bot policy question/clarification about mass moves.
• Creation of redirects – Bot policy question/clarification about the creation of redirects.
• Guidance on disruptive use of semi–automated tools? – Related to meatbots (see also MOS discussion, which resulted in small addition to MOS:VAR).
• Discussion concerning WP:BOTFLAG/WP:RC – A reminder that bots should use the bot flag when it makes sense to use it (see also VPT discussion and CREATEBOT update).
• Out of curiosity... (to all bot operators) – BotPasswords vs OAuth usage amongst bot operators.
• Introducing Toolhub – Toolhub is looking for feedback.

New things

• {{Automated tools}}, a new template linking to user-activated tools and scripts has been created. It can be used in articles previews, and can be placed on any non-mainspace page/template (e.g. {{Draft article}}) to provide convenient links to editors.
• AWB 5.10.0.0 is out, after nearly 20 months without updates. If you run an old version, you will be prompted to install the new version automatically. See the changelog for what's new. Note that the next version will require .NET Framework 4.5. Many thanks to Reedy and the AWB team.
• BotWatch, "a listing of editors that have made >2 edits per minute [without] a bot flag", is being developed by SQL (see discussion).
• Massive updates and improvements have been made to Citation bot in the past few months (see discussions, discussions, discussions). You can activate the bot here, amongst other methods.
• HTML Tidy has been phased out (see Tech News #28).
• {{Newbot}} has been reorganized a bit (diff). In particular, it links to previously approved BRFAs (see discussion).
• Wikipedia:Bots#See also has been reorganized a bit (diff).
• The bot dictionary has two new entries, context bot and context-sensitive edit.
• The bot request header has been updated to include better guidance (see discussion).
• The subcategories of Category:Wikipedia bot requests for approval have been sorted in a consistent manner to make past BRFAs easier to find.

Thank you! edited by: Headbomb 15:04, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

---

(You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

incomplete nomination?

User_talk:Michael_Hardy#Incomplete_DYK_nomination

I got this notice about an "incomplete DYK nomination" two or three weeks or so after I was notified that the article I nominated was already in the queue to appear on the main page. What's going on? Michael Hardy (talk) 17:16, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

(tps) Michael Hardy, that DYK was pulled from the prep area due to some concerns raised. As it was not re-listed nor marked for re-listing, the housekeeping bot was prompted. I have re-listed this DYK entry for the time being. Alex Shih (talk) 17:29, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

@Alex Shih: A message to me saying that that's what happened and some further action needed to be taken would have been comprehensible. But I never got anything like that. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:36, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

@Alex Shih: What does "tps" mean? Michael Hardy (talk) 17:50, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

@Michael Hardy: It means talk page stalker. I am sure Vanamonde93 pinged you here ([5]), but you may have missed it. If you wish to reply to this, please reply at my talk page so Shubinator does not get too many notifications. Alex Shih (talk) 17:57, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

I still don't know what it means, but I'll put the other concerns on your talk page. Michael Hardy (talk) 18:19, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

@Michael Hardy: See WP:TPS; some people use the {{tps}} template instead of the bare letters that Alex Shih used. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:14, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

DYKcheck anomaly

Shubinator, I just discovered a very odd circumstance with DYKcheck in the course of replying to a ping from the Template:Did you know nominations/Ismail Amat page. It appears that DYKcheck is overcounting the articles when the "lang-ug" template is included for Uyghur names. Depending on what's in the template, counts were inflated by around 1170 prose characters, which naturally messes up the 5x expansion determination.

I tested these in Preview (so as not to mess up the article), with the current Ismail Amat article and with the one on 3 September 2018 (immediately prior to expansion), and both of them were at least 1171 characters larger with the template, though maybe 25 to 50 of them are due to the template-generated latinate characters. I don't know about the arabic(?) ones.

It seemed to me that you ought to know about this, though I'm not sure what could be done. Thanks for anything you can do here. BlueMoonset (talk) 21:33, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

How very odd, thanks for letting me know! Looking the page source, that template is adding a fair bit of font stuff into the HTML, and my guess is that's being added to the count. I'll try to take a deeper look over the weekend. Shubinator (talk) 08:29, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

User:DYKUpdateBot

Shubinator, the bot is down. — Maile (talk) 00:15, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Back up again, more details at WT:DYK#DYKUpdateBot is down; admin needed. Shubinator (talk) 08:00, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, Shubinator. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot down? (Or just lazy?)

Shubinator, DYKHousekeepingBot last ran at 23:16, 6 December 2018. Three and a half hours later, there hasn't been another edit by it even though the new day was added at 00:00, 7 December 2018, and other events have occurred that also would cause an update. Might you be able to encourage it to resume its housekeeping chores? Many thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 02:50, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Fixed! The nominations page looked weird, after a couple edits (Special:Diff/872443565 + Special:Diff/872444428) the bot's happy again. Thanks for letting me know :) Shubinator (talk) 07:11, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

Thanks for your work on bots, the dyk one really helped me.

Qwerty number1 (talk) 13:48, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

What a cute kitten! Shubinator (talk) 04:47, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Proposed tweak

Would it be possible to make two tweaks to User:DYKUpdateBot:
(1) If an article's talk page is using {{Article history}}, rather than placing {{DYK talk}} and filling in its parameters, the bot adds the appropriate parameters to {{Article history}} and fills them in. This would serve to condense redundant templates into one.
(2) The bot removes Template:Did you know nominations/ARTICLE_NAME from the talk page at the same time that it places {{DYK talk}} (or fills out {{Article history}}), since that template is no longer transcluded or necessary and can cause a blank space to appear on the talk page.
- Ergo Sum 03:07, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

(1) The bot should be doing this already, though the logic isn't perfect. Feel free to show me cases where it's not, they're likely edge cases.

(2) I believe the DYK nomination conversation is supposed to stay transcluded on the article talk page. WT:DYK is the best place to ask. Blank space isn't good though, so there might be a template bug here.

Shubinator (talk) 04:22, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Here is one example of where it happened: Bishop John Carroll (statute). I've seen it happen elsewhere too. As for the transclusion, I can't image why it would be necessary, since once the DYK is complete, there's nothing to transclude. Am I mistaken about this? Ergo Sum 04:40, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Consider a DYK which was on main page yesterday, its talk page includes the line

{{Template:Did you know nominations/Martin Hellinger}}

which displays precisely nothing (look between the "Daily article pageviews" box and the "A fact from Martin Hellinger appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page" box). This is because the entire content of the DYK nom page is enclosed in <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags, which were added by Yoninah (talk · contribs) in this edit four days earlier. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:58, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Hi, saw myself pinged here. Often page creators add the DYK template to the talk pages of their articles. When I promote a template to the DYK prep area, the program automatically puts everything on the template between <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags. Not sure what I'm being accused of here... Yoninah (talk) 16:36, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm trying to explain what goes on with a DYK that is accepted for main page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:51, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

OK. Carry on! Yoninah (talk) 17:18, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

As another example, see Talk:World Suicide Prevention Day#DYK nomination - that apparently-empty section contains a transclusion of Template:Did you know nominations/World Suicide Prevention Day. The need for that section is nil, since the {{dyktalk}} at the top contains a link to the transcluded page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:01, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot appears to be down

Shubinator, the bot last ran at 20:26; it's now 04:51 and it hasn't been heard from again, despite a new date having been added to the list at 00:01, and various other changes having been made in the interim. Thanks for whatever you can do to get it moving again. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:52, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I've restarted the bot, thanks for letting me know! Shubinator (talk) 02:31, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

So glad you got it going again. Thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 04:25, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it's down again; last update was 12:58, 20 February 2019 (UTC), nearly 20 hours ago. Thanks for looking into it! BlueMoonset (talk) 08:19, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

I suspect you're just not around this weekend, but here's a ping in case you didn't see the above post a couple of days ago... BlueMoonset (talk) 22:04, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Whoops, sorry for the delay! Bot is back in business :) Shubinator (talk) 08:22, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for taking care of it! BlueMoonset (talk) 15:30, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Another untranscluded DYK nominations list

Shubinator, it's been a while since I last requested a list. I found some of the more obvious ones looking at Category:Pending DYK nominations, but much of what's left is hiding in the crowds of properly transcluded ones. Thanks for taking the time to produce this for me; it may be longer than usual... BlueMoonset (talk) 15:59, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

No problem!

• Template:Did you know nominations/Zoo Interchange
• Template:Did you know nominations/African Democratic Congress
• Template:Did you know nominations/Lotay Tshering
• Template:Did you know nominations/Little Drummer Boy Challenge
• Template:Did you know nominations/Lunar New Year Film
• Template:Did you know nominations/Goest Ryder
• Template:Did you know nominations/Solar radiation 1
• Template:Did you know nominations/R. Hari Kumar

Shubinator (talk) 20:51, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

As always, this was a great help. The oldest of these has already been transcluded, reviewed, and promoted to prep, and all of the others are being addressed in some manner or other. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 08:19, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

DYKcheck inflating prose character count?

Shubinator, we've had a case here where DYKcheck is returning 2144 prose characters, and even if you do include the "Citations" and "Bibliography" subheaders in the Reference section (which are indeed just text, but shouldn't be considered prose), I only see 1941 characters when I pull all the prose out into Word and count it there. The nominator is getting similar numbers using a variety of tools.

Can you please take a look and see what's amiss here? Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

I've been sick the past few days, will take a look after I recover. Shubinator (talk) 02:55, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

DYKUpdateBot didn't do the midnight promotion

Shubinator, I hope you're feeling better now.

DYKUpdateBot didn't do the promotion about 30 minutes ago at 00:00 UTC. This was the night we were going to go back from twice daily updates to one a day, so this is a little bit awkward.

I'm going to see whether Materialscientist is around and can do a manual update, but in case you stop by tonight, a check of the UpdateBot would be great. (HousekeepingBot seems just fine; it ran a few minutes ago at 00:28 UTC.) BlueMoonset (talk) 00:35, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Nope. Nevermind. It ran about 35 minutes late, just as I was writing you. I don't know why it was so late, but it did run. I'll drop a note to Materialscientist to say to ignore me. BlueMoonset (talk) 00:37, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Heh I was wondering if someone would notice that. Long story short I ran into some trouble while migrating DYKUpdateBot off of Toolforge's Ubuntu grid and onto their Debian grid, things should be good now. Will add more detail in a few minutes about this so talk page stalkers know what's up. Shubinator (talk) 00:56, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Bot migration Ubuntu → Debian

FYI to my talk page stalkers, as of ~00:43 today DYKUpdateBot and DYKHousekeepingBot were migrated off of Toolforge's Ubuntu grid and onto Toolforge's Debian grid. This was necessary because the Ubuntu grid will be decommissioned next week; more details from the Toolforge folks here. As part of the migration both bots are running on much newer software, in particular newer versions of Java. In theory this shouldn't cause issues, but I wouldn't be surprised if something comes up. As always, please drop a note here if either of the bots are misbehaving.

For the curious, the latest DYKUpdateBot update was delayed because I ran into a bug during the migration where the bot couldn't login. It's not related to the newer software on the Debian grid, the bug would have cropped up the next time DYKUpdateBot was restarted. I've fixed this so we should be good to go now. Shubinator (talk) 01:11, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

About DYKUpdateBot

Hello, this bot is wondeful, how can I intergrated this bot into my Wiki? I'm at the Vietnamese Wikipedia. Thanks! phjtieudoc (Talk) 12:01, 25 March 2019 (UTC)