Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard/Archive 16

This is an archive of past discussions on Wikipedia:Bots. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current main page.

See User_talk:Bot1058#Talk:Basarabka_and_Moldovanka. The bot has been creating redirects in the talk namespace. Most are benign but just utterly useless blank pages, while several others are actually pages that have been properly deleted per WP:G8. The bot's task listing shows no tasks that would indicate that it should be creating pages. I'm loathe to pblock the bot from the talk: namespace as it actually does useful tasks there, but there's no reason why this should be creating pages, especially ones that have been G8'd. Hog Farm _Talk 23:43, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

I've left the bot operator a note pointing them at this discussion this is likely something that they can fix ~TNT (she/her • talk) 23:48, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

The bot has made over 58,000 edits in talk namespace, only 237 of which were page creations, and 204 of those page creations were redirects. Of the 33 page creations that were not redirects, just 15 were blank pages. The lack of an edit summary indicates that the bot thought it was making null edits. Unfortunately null edits are necessary because of limitations of the MediaWiki software. I can't confirm what happened as I only keep the log of the most recent bot run on my machine, but likely these deleted pages were still populating a category that the bot patrols. I think I can patch my code to work around this by double-checking to make sure the pages I null-edit actually have content on them before editing, but as I've been taken to this noticeboard and threatened with a block I've taken tasks 3, 4 and 5 down as a precaution until I get around to fixing this. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:42, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Apologies for coming across harshly, I didn't mean to. I was just a bit aggravated when I got a ping that a bot that isn't intended to create pages went and recreated something that I'd just deleted. I think the bot does good work, and would hate to see if down because I got testy. If all else fails, would it be possible for the bot to log pages it creates and then have someone go through and monitor to make sure they aren't restoring deleted pages? Hog Farm _Talk 02:55, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

@Wbm1058 You can use nocreate=1 flag in your edit API call. That would prevent creation of the page if it doesn't already exist. – SD0001 (talk) 07:13, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. I do recall running into this issue before and dealing with it relatively quietly. I think I was advised that another option was to use "purge" mode rather than "edit" mode. Noting that it's crept up for some reason. Of the 15 blank pages, just one happened in 2018, one in 2019, two in 2020 and eleven so far in 2021. Obviously I can't keep this on my back-burner of low-priority issues any longer, especially since the fix should be relatively easy. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:58, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Heh, I just noticed that my inherited bot framework (previous authors are all retired or dead) has a function purgeCache in it! Which I've never used until now. I'm gonna run some trials to check out how well it works for making null edits. That would be easier than adding a new argument nocreate to function edit. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:36, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Looking at the Purge API, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't always want to use forcerecursivelinkupdate – unless that's a really expensive operation? wbm1058 (talk) 19:47, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

IIRC, it puts all the transclusions onto the job queue for updating, much like a null edit. forcelinkupdate updates the links table entries for the current page (e.g. category membership), but doesn't queue up to reparse all pages transcluding the purged page. The operation without either of those parameters just updates the cached HTML without updating links tables. Anomie⚔ 00:26, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm still working on this. Testing just got a "mustbeposted" error: "The \"purge\" module requires a POST request." Assume this was something that was broken by previous API changes that nobody noticed previously because the framework's purgeCache function wasn't being used by anything. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:39, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, that would be the change that made it so there was a 'do you actually want to purge a page' interstitial when you purge a page, some several years ago now. Izno (talk) 21:30, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

 Fixed – the new bot version uses the updated botclasses.php – wbm1058 (talk) 20:42, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Worst case solution: I have for some time blocked COIBot from creating pages in mainspace (which it should not do but did) until I figured out why it did that sometimes by creating an edit filter for it. That both resolves the problem ánd logs that the problem occurred while you debug/test/patch. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 12:03, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Agree, this is a bad, non-scalable solution - out of control bots should just be blocked, not use up valuable abusefilter conditions. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:28, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Last week, two bots that I check on, AdminStatsBot and BernsteinBot, both went off schedule. I checked to see if there was a lag which there wasn't. BernsteinBot started updating but irregularly and it didn't return the regular schedule it had previously maintained with no problems. I posted a note to each bot operator on their user talk pages but neither have been active here in over a month.

But I'm posting here just to see if there was some change or update that would cause both bots to stop updating. Other bots I work with such as AnomeBotIII and SDZeroBot didn't have problems so I'm not sure what is up. Thanks for any information you can provide. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:47, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

FWIW, YiFeiBot stopped editing a little over four days ago as well (just after midnight UTC on the morning of 8 October). I have posted a note to the bot's talk page, but I thought I would mention it here as well. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:15, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, it seems like something changed on October 7/8. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:49, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 & User:Liz - I imagine this has been caused by the removal of some deprecated API parameters for obtaining tokens (see phab:T280806). There's nothing really we can do, the bot code will need updating. firefly ( t · c ) 06:11, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, this created problems in gadgets like LintHint too [1]. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:37, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes this. According to WP:BAM, Lowercase sigmabot III, ClueBot III and Mathbot are also down since 7 October. – SD0001 (talk) 09:20, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

• mw:MediaWiki 1.37/Deprecation of legacy API token parameters. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:15, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
• Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard/Archive 15#Heads up for CSRF token change. As I said back in June, these bot operators have a "hearing" problem kind of like the users editing with smartphone apps do. It's too bad that this is apparently the only way there is to find out who they are. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:15, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

At least one bot was fixed by updating pywikibot, which doesn't sound too tricky to this non-botop. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:59, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, as indicated at mediawikiwiki:MediaWiki 1.37/Deprecation of legacy API token parameters#Pywikibot, updating it to 6.6.1 or higher fixes the issue in PWB. --Izno (talk) 14:21, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

And you know, #Bots need to upgrade to Pywikibot 6.6.1 right above on this page :) Legoktm (talk) 17:16, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

BernsteinBot should mostly be back, each report is kind of handled individually so if specific reports are not updating I can take a look. And I've sent a pull request for Lowercase sigmabot III. Legoktm (talk) 17:18, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for all of the info on this. I rely on BernsteinBot and the bot was doing some updating, just not always the report I rely on. As for AdminStatsBot, I thought it was responsible not only for AdminStats page but for the templates many admins have on their User pages but the template is updating so I guess I was wrong about that. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:40, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

I looked into AdminStatsBot, it's using an old version of wikitools, which should be straightforward to update, except the code has no license associated with it (I filed T293173 for it on the Toolforge side). Template:Adminstats is updated by Cyberbot I, which seems to be working fine. Legoktm (talk) 05:17, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

AdminStatsBot (talk · contribs) is now back up and running. — JamesR (talk) 11:50, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Does anyone know why certain edits from bot accounts show up under Special:RecentChanges when the non-bot filter is selected? Winston (talk) 00:56, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

@Notsniwiast: in order for an edit to have the "bot" attribute, the edit must be declared as being made with the bot edit; to do this you have to have the bot permission, which the bot group infers. Not all edits made by "bot accounts" use this attribute, sometimes on purpose. Notably, antivandalism bots generally don't - so that if you look on your watchlist you can see that the vandalism on there was also reverted. If a bot account is "flooding" the recent changes or watchlist pages though - we can look in to it, but will need an example. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:17, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Ok thank you, that makes it clear. Winston (talk) 01:18, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Template:Row numbers recently went through an RfD due to its inability to display (at all) on the mobile app. I modified it to work correctly on the app again, but this needs changes made to the articles. I wrote a pywikibot script to assist with this in semi-automated fashion, putting the edited articles on the clipboard and opening Firefox at the right page to paste and review. The script works pretty well, after some initial difficulties with finding precisely when to escape equals signs. See [2] for example edits - a couple of the first broke ref tags in a way I didn't initially spot, but after handling them specially in the script, all later edits have been correct.

However, verifying all the articles individually is slow and there are about 100 left. Would this sort of thing be acceptable to run unattended? I'll open a proper BRFA if so. The core part of the current script (which doesn't save anything) is below, based on scripts/basic.py in pywikibot.

class RowNumberingBot(
    SingleSiteBot,
    ConfigParserBot,
    ExistingPageBot,
    NoRedirectPageBot,
    AutomaticTWSummaryBot,
):

    summary_key = 'basic-changing'

    def __init__(self, generator, **kwargs) -> None:
        """
        Initializer.

        @param generator: the page generator that determines on which pages
            to work
        @type generator: generator
        """
        # Add your own options to the bot and set their defaults
        # -always option is predefined by BaseBot class
        self.available_options.update({
            'replace': False,  # delete old text and write the new text
            'summary': None,  # your own bot summary
            'text': 'Test',  # add this text from option. 'Test' is default
            'top': False,  # append text on top of the page
        })

        # call initializer of the super class
        super().__init__(site=True, **kwargs)
        # assign the generator to the bot
        self.generator = generator
        self.regex = re.compile('(?s){{\\s*[Rr]ow (numbers|counter|indexer)\\s*\\|(?:1=)?\\s*(<nowiki>(.*?)</nowiki>)')

    def treat_page(self) -> None:
        text = self.current_page.text
        while m := self.regex.search(text):
            text = text[:m.start(2)] + escape_equals(m.group(3)) + ' ' + text[m.end(2):]
        if text == self.current_page.text:
            print(f"Skipping {self.current_page.title()}.")
            return
        subprocess.run('xclip -i -sel c'.split(), input=text.encode())
        subprocess.run(['firefox', self.current_page.full_url() + '?action=edit&summary='
            + urllib.parse.quote_plus(self.opt.summary)])
        input("Press enter for next page...")

self_closing_ref_regex = re.compile(r'''<ref( +[^= <>]+ *= *("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^ "'>]*))* *\/$''')

def escape_equals(s):
    """
    Escape equals signs in string s with {{=}} unless they are already within
    double braces or a tag.
    """
    n_brace = 0
    n_square = 0
    b = 0
    ref = 0
    out = ''
    for i, ch in enumerate(s):
        if ch == '{':
            if n_brace < 0:
                n_brace = 1
            else:
                n_brace += 1
        elif ch == '}':
            if n_brace > 0:
                n_brace = -1
            else:
                n_brace -= 1
        elif ch == '[':
            if n_square < 0:
                n_square = 1
            else:
                n_square += 1
        elif ch == ']':
            if n_square > 0:
                n_square = -1
            else:
                n_square -= 1
        # It seems that ref tags are special.
        elif s[i:i+4] == '<ref':
            ref += 1
            assert ref == 1, s[:i] + '\n\nFAILED\n\n' + s[i:] + '\n\n'
        elif s[i:i+5] == '</ref' or (ch == '>' and self_closing_ref_regex.search(s[:i])):
            ref -= 1
            assert ref == 0, s[:i] + '\n\nFAILED\n\n' + s[i:] + '\n\n'
        else:
            n_brace, n_square = (0, 0)
        if n_brace == 2 or n_square == 2:
            b += 1
            n_brace, n_square = (0, 0)
        elif n_brace == -2 or n_square == -2:
            b -= 1
            n_brace, n_square = (0, 0)
            assert(b >= 0)
        if ch == '=' and b == 0 and ref == 0:
            out += '{{=}}'
        else:
            out += ch
    assert ref == 0 and b == 0,\
            f"{n_brace} {n_square} {ref} {b}"
    return out

User:GKFX^talk 21:42, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

By the time we got through trials and discussion the task would pretty much be done. If there are only 100 pages needing fixing, then it is best to just do it manually. A cross-post to request someone run an AWB task on similar code might help. Primefac (talk) 07:35, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

What non-talk page discussion pages are there besides those in the Project namespace and the Template:Did you know nominations? This is relevant for bots working on discussion pages such as IndentBot. Winston (talk) 03:14, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Help. This information is available in JavaScript via mw.config.get('wgExtraSignatureNamespaces'), which will be removed soon, and via mw.Title.wantSignaturesNamespace(). I bet it can also be retrieved through API, but I can't find it right now. Nardog (talk) 03:35, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Could you give an example of a discussion page with signatures in the Help namespace? Basically I need the title prefixes of specific groups of pages, not just the fact that the namespace as a whole contains a discussion page. Since these seem hard to find, my hope is that there are so few such groups that they can be hard-coded. Winston (talk) 03:52, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

You can search for something like this. Granted, most of the results are false positives, and actual hits all have "/feedback" (or "/Feedback") in the title. There indeed appear to be only a handful of pages that actually have discussions in the Help namespace (six in my count if you exclude archives). Nardog (talk) 04:14, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Hmm, seems like they are pretty much inactive. I'll probably just ignore them. Thanks for your help. Winston (talk) 04:17, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

User space has 262 transclusions of Template:YesAutoSign, FWIW. I don't know why. I don't see any transclusions of that template in other non-talk spaces except for one in Wikipedia space. ETA: I have been misreading this template's documentation for over a decade. What I was looking for, apparently, was pages in Category:Non-talk pages that are automatically signed. I see some User subpages in there, a couple of Portal pages, and one page in the Help space. I may have missed a couple. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:18, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

For example, this edit? How is this is "high priority" edit? Archives should usually be off limits to further editing. In this case, it's changing history even if correcting "errors" at the time. Jason Quinn (talk) 10:20, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

The particular lint errors being corrected may not display as one might prefer at some indeterminate time in the future. Separately, these edits preserve the quality of the signature. Why do you think edits should be "high-priority" to change an archive in a way that preserves the signatures in question? Izno (talk) 14:31, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Separately, why did you not ask the bot operator first? Izno (talk) 14:32, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Linter errors can cause various display problems in pages, many of which were not present when the problematic edit was made to the page. For example, most of the errors that this bot is fixing are of the "font tag wrapping a link with a color" type; changes to the MediaWiki software have made it so that those links may no longer work as they used to. The bot, and editors who make similar edits, are fixing syntax errors on pages so that they display in the way that they used to. It's the opposite of changing history: it's restoring history, or doing preservation work so that archives do not unexpectedly change when additional MediaWiki workarounds for bad syntax are removed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:34, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Here's a concrete example: with this edit, the bot restored a User page link for User:James086 to its original #454545 color. It was that color when the editor put their signature on that page in 2013, but changes to MW software turned the link blue. The bot restored it, while also replacing deprecated font tags. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:00, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

@Inzo: Because I basically followed what the breadcrumbs of instructions said to do. I first went to the bot's page which says "If this bot is malfunctioning, anyone can stop it by editing the bot talk page by removing the redirect. Other messages about the bot can be left at User talk:ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ". I first tried to figure out what redirect it was talking about and I was unable. The bot talk page redirects to the operator's talk page. So then I thought, "oh this must mean MalnadachBot 10's talk page"... but that is a red link. But the MalnadachBot 10 page does say "To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard". Jason Quinn (talk) 02:33, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I thought the note at the top of bot userpage is clear enough. AWB has a setup such that any edit to the bot talkpage will automatically shutdown the bot. I have redirected the bot talkpage to mine so that the bot talkpage would need to be edited only for emergency stoppage of the bot if it is malfunctioning. Other things about the bot can be discussed in my talkpage. I don't get how this led you to the unrelated bot task 10.

Adding to the above replies, MalnadachBot only makes technical edits fixing syntax without changing the content. Web standards and Mediawiki software has changed a lot over the years, necessitating updation of old pages. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 05:13, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I understand in hindsight what you mean by editing the redirect. But I was thinking there was some special template on the talk page itself and ended up looking at your personal talk page's source for it. As for task 10, I mistakenly thought it was the only one active because it was at the end of the list and all the other ones I thought were "completed". I didn't notice that task 2 was active as well. It would help if the bot's active tasks were more visibly distinctive. Jason Quinn (talk) 05:52, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough, I have divided the active and completed tasks into separate tables. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:04, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello all (BAG, botops, etc), there is a new template {{Last N contributions}}, shortcut {{lnc}}, which allows for easy linking to a group of contributions for a user. For example, I can easily link to these 10 contributions going backwards from midnight last night. I think this will be extremely useful for BRFAs and giving trial diffs. The first point of this post is to notify about the template, the second is to ask a question: should the template be linked in {{BotTrial}}, specifically as provide a link, or is that just overkill? Is there a better way to let botops know about this new tool? Primefac (talk) 14:43, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

thoughts

• use, or at least support, a properly formatted date for readability? {{lnc|monkbot|25|2021-10-06}} → these 25 contributions; does not work, returns 25 edits from 2020-12-31
• the returned list should include edits made on the date. {{lnc|monkbot|25|20211006}} → these 25 contributions; does not work, returns 25 edits from 2021-09-25; the edits of interest were made on 2021-10-06 so the September list is counterintuitive and not helpful
• with the above date issue addressed, make {{{2}}} optional? If blank, the template substs in today's date? Don't know if that is possible.

otherwise this might be a handy template.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:13, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

As stated in the documentation, the second parameter is optional. So is the third. {{lnc|primefac|disp=this list}} gives this list of contribs from "now". Regarding the second point, if you want edits made on the date, then use {{lnc|monkbot|25|20211006235959}} (which gives this), because technically speaking your example is for 20211006000000 (midnight on the 6th). As far as the first point goes, that's a reasonable issue, and I'll see about allowing multiple date formats (though the main issue becomes one of "time"). Primefac (talk) 15:20, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

I should not have to specify 235959 (or any other specific time) on the day that I complete a trial to have a link to the diffs required by a bot trial (unless I have an active bot task running). When I add {{BotTrialComplete}} to a BRFA, the date of the trial's last edit is the date that I want to enter; not the date + 235959 because that is how I (and I dare say, most editors will) think about |ts=. To accomplish that easily, perhaps use &start= instead of &offset=? Here is the link currently produced by {{lnc|monkbot|25|20211006}}:

<span class="plainlinks">[//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=2021-10-06&limit=25&target=monkbot&namespace=all these 25 contributions]</span>

these 25 contributions – not what I wanted

Changing &offset= to &start=:

<span class="plainlinks">[//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&start=2021-10-06&limit=25&target=monkbot&namespace=all these 25 contributions]</span>

these 25 contributions – what I wanted

Use &offset= only when |ts= has hour/minute/second precision?

I suggested substing the date because defaulting to 'now' means that 1 day from today, 10 days from today, the the link will point to a different location in Special:Contributions and that is not likely to make BAG editors happy.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:35, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Oppose requiring it or making the template output a link to it. No objection to mentioning it in documentation somewhere, although IMO it doesn't seem more useful than just pasting the appropriate link directly. Anomie⚔ 23:56, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Wasn't thinking of making it mandatory, just figured it would be helpful for pasting contribs. As far as copy/pasting goes, my thought is that if you did a trial run on 25 October and were not planning on any other runs (for example, a newish or AWB bot that isn't going to be running constantly) you can post the timestamp as soon as it's finished without even needing to go to the contribs page. Primefac (talk) 08:29, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I think this template is useful. The normal Special:Contributions page does not give an option for listing contribs from a specific time. Here are some of my thoughts.

• I think the timestamp is non-inclusive, so if an edit was made at 11:50:21, you would have to use the timestamp for 11:50:22. The documentation should make this explicit. In particular, you probably mean {{lnc|monkbot|25|20211007}} instead of {{lnc|monkbot|25|20211006235959}}.
• I would stick with "offset" and just make clear that the contributions are from strictly before the timestamp, with omitted portions of the timestamp such as the hour, minute, and second defaulting to zero. The examples in the documentation should make things clear. You could say "20211007" is equivalent to "20211007000000". You could also be more explicit in the examples, e.g. saying that {{Last N contributions|Jimbo Wales|10|20030724}} would not give you contributions from the July 24th, but from July 23rd or earlier. Using two different parameters with different behaviors under different conditions would just complicates things.
• I do see the ambiguity with defaulting to "now" meaning either the time of inclusion in the wikitext or just the most recent contribs with no specific offset. One must decide if both options should be available from the template, and figure out how to deal with the ambiguity if so.

Winston (talk) 00:16, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Rather than burden this template with multiple time or date params to handle "before this" and "on this date", which could be confusing, it seems like the "on this date" issue could be solved by creating a wrapper template which calls {{lnc}} with an appropriate timestamp param, and then everyone gets the param usage and results they want.

Winston, I've adjusted the template doc to address your concerns; can you see if it's clear enough now or still needs work? (please  mention me on reply; thanks!) Mathglot (talk) 08:32, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

@Mathglot: I added "from strictly before" instead of "before". Looks good otherwise. Winston (talk) 08:41, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I see T.seppelt doesn't feel they have time to make it comply w/ current guidelines, is there an alternative today? – SJ + 18:07, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Given that the bot has been blocked since 2018, what indication is there that its tasks are now required? Primefac (talk) 18:15, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

I distinctly remember that several years ago a bot ran that automatically applied {{ShadowsCommons}} tags to Wikipedia files that had a non-identical file on Commons with the same name. Is it just a figment of my imagination, or did it actually exist? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:28, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

It was User:GreenC bot/Job 10 * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 16:31, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

User:Jo-Jo Eumerus it was offline since May due to changes at WMF that disallowed cross database searches. As of November 8 it is up working again with a new solution (GitHub also updated). I'm not 100% confident it is finding everything it should, but it is getting some things example just not at the same rate before May. If you are aware of anything it might be missing, or other processes doing this, that would be helpful to know. -- GreenC 03:38, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh. See, my impression was that back then ShadowsCommons situations were far more common than they are now. I've seen that many of the files on Wikipedia:Database reports/Non-free files shadowing a Commons file didn't have a shadows commons tag so I was wondering if the bot was tagging these. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:48, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

• DumbBOT (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights)
• Tizio (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Hello, Bot group,

I rely on DumbBOT which updates the PROD lists but since September, the updating schedule has shifted several times. I have left inquiries about this on DumbBOT's talk page but today, after another updating change, I went to the user page of the bot operator, Tizio, and saw that he hasn't logged in for over a year. I don't want the bot disabled but it seems like it should have an active operator who still works on Wikipedia. In fact, I don't understand how the updating schedule keeps shifting if the bot operator has been absent so long! Any chance that someone else could take over as operator? Thanks for any assistance you can offer. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:37, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi Liz, not a member of BAG but I've sent them an email pointing them to this thread. Their user page says I rarely log in lately. In case of problems with the bot email me. so perhaps we'll get a reply. I agree that bot operators should be active, and would urge a RfC on adding this to policy ~TheresNoTime ^{(to explain!)} 00:48, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

I seem to recall discussion about adding this to policy wayyyyyyy back in the past when I was on BAG (you know, when we had to use punch cards and snail-mail them to the WMF :P). Clearly it didn't happen! I entirely agree that bot operators should be responsive to concerns/bug reports/etc. I'm less sure about them being active in terms of some minimum edit requirement - as long as they respond to bot issues, that'd be good enough for me. (Which reminds me, I owe Liz a reply about the G13-warning task...) firefly ( t · c ) 08:39, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

It never occurred to me that the schedule of updates was important to some people. I sometimes do test runs, but other than this I haven't changed the times the bot runs. Except for the last couple of days, due to hardware maintenance; this may last some other time. Still, the bot is still working properly, and doesn't seem to me that updates were delayed that much. Tizio 09:50, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

We recently changed policy such that the operator needs to be available by talk page notification at a minimum. See this diff and instituting discussion. As for activity, I believe you're looking for this 2018 discussion, which I am not going to hunt down the specific change. Izno (talk) 17:25, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

I ended up activating email notifications, so that I will know when someone writes something to my talk page or the bot's.Tizio 14:38, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Even double redirect-fixing bots, like humans, like to procrastinate. At Special:DoubleRedirects, there is a list of hundreds of double redirects that have not been fixed for several days. Could this be considered "bot procrastination", then? GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:00, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

@GeoffreyT2000: These are fairly easy to fix with the pywikibot script, mw:Manual:Pywikibot/redirect.py ― Qwerfjkltalk 20:08, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

 ― Qwerfjkltalk 17:26, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

When editing through your main account, don't put "Bot: " in the edit summary. – SD0001 (talk) 17:45, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

@SD0001: How do you change the summary? ― Qwerfjkltalk 18:46, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Xqbot already runs that exact script, so I don't think there's any value in running it manually. If it's missing some page moves or edits, that should be reported as a bug against Pywikibot. Legoktm (talk) 22:17, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux and Ymblanter: In reference to this discussion, my bot was approved for another task that requires template-editor permission. After the issues with the last request, I completely forgot to request it again when the task was approved, and just realized now why edits haven't been going through. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:18, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

@Ahecht: it looks like @El C: just upgraded the protection on that page from ECP to TEP - perhaps ECP will suffice? — xaosflux ^Talk 17:32, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: I have no idea what page you're referring to. El_C 17:51, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

@El C: sorry, it is Special:Redirect/logid/123242534. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:50, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

@Ahecht: and you are the one that asked for this to be protected - breaking yourself! Why do these pages need TE protection? What is the actual usage count realized? — xaosflux ^Talk 18:52, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

That page is read by the WP:AFCH gadget (which is actively used by about 600 editors and was used to place WikiProject banners 110 times in the last month per quarry:query/60495), MediaWiki:AFC-add-project-tags.js gadget (which was used 867 times in the last month per quarry:query/60494, and which was switched to that file based on your comments here about not having mediawiki js pages calling a userspace page), and MediaWiki:AFC-submit-wizard.js (which was used 2802 times in the last month to add WikiProject banners per quarry:query/60496). It's also used by User:SD0001/draft-sort-burst.js and User:Ahecht/Scripts/draft-sorter.js. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 23:09, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

OK, so seems like ECP should be fine here - it is in relatively low use by a gadget and as a json page can't be used to inject commands? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:01, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Done. At your command, technocrats! El_C 00:11, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

In Special:NewPagesFeed, filtering for redirects and sorting by oldest brings up hundreds of month-old redirects from November 9. Some of them are recently-redirected articles and similar things with complicated page histories, but others (like this one at American Chemical Manufacturing and Mining Company) have only had one revision that whole time. I see that DannyS712 bot III's Task 66 was approved to patrol redirects automatically (following this RfC)-- indeed, the bot's log shows it patrolled some new redirects just a few minutes ago, and its to-do list is empty -- so what's going on here? jp×g 23:38, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Nota bene: I am posting this here because the bot's creator and maintainer, @DannyS712:, has said he's not around much anymore and hasn't edited since November 19. jp×g 23:40, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Never mind, I am a fool -- in the bot's source code it fetches a whitelist from pageid 62534307, which is Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Redirect whitelist. jp×g 23:52, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, December 2021

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. BRFA activity by month Welcome to the eighth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Maintainers disappeared to parts unknown... bots awakening from the slumber of æons... hundreds of thousands of short descriptions... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots. Our last issue was in August 2019, so there's quite a bit of catching up to do. Due to the vast quantity of things that have happened, the next few issues will only cover a few months at a time. This month, we'll go from September 2019 through the end of the year. I won't bore you with further introductions — instead, I'll bore you with a newsletter about bots. Overall Between September and December 2019, there were 33 BRFAs. Of these, Y 25 were approved, and 8 were unsuccessful (N2 3 denied, ? 3 withdrawn, and 2 expired). September 2019 Y Monkbot 16, DannyS712 bot 60, Ahechtbot 6, PearBOT 3, Qbugbot 3 · N2 DannyS712 bot 5, PkbwcgsBot 24 · ? DannyS712 bot 61, TheSandBot 4 TParis goes away, UTRSBot goes kaput: Beeblebrox noted that the bot for maintaining on-wiki records of UTRS appeals stopped working a while ago. TParis, the semi-retired user who had previously run it, said they were "unlikely to return to actively editing Wikipedia", and the bot had been vanquished by trolls submitting bogus UTRS requests on behalf of real blocked users. While OAuth was a potential fix, neither maintainer had time to implement it. TParis offered to access to the UTRS WMFLabs account to any admin identified with the WMF: "I miss you guys a whole lot [...] but I've also moved on with my life. Good luck, let me know how I can help". Ultimately, SQL ended up in charge. Some progress was made, and the bot continued to work another couple months — but as of press time, UTRSBot has not edited since November 2019. Article-measuring contest resumed: The list of Wikipedians by article count, which had lain dead for several years, was triumphantly resurrected by GreenC following a bot request. October 2019 Y OAbot 3, DannyS712 bot 47, Pathbot 2, PearBOT 2, DannyS712 bot 59, DannyS712 bot 62, HasteurBot 14, PearBOT 4, WOSlinkerBot 4, MilHistBot 5 Curb Safe Charmer adopts reFill: TAnthony pointed out that reFill 2's bug reports were going unanswered; creator Zhaofeng Li had retired from Wikipedia, and a maintainer was needed. As of June 2021, Curb Safe Charmer had taken up the mantle, saying: "Not that I have all the skills needed but better me than nobody! 'Maintainer' might be too strong a term though. Volunteers welcome!" November 2019 Y BHGbot 4, YiFeiBot 2, DannyS712 bot III 64 · ? PearBOT Old bots do new tricks: DannyS712 bot III 64 prowled redirects, YiFeiBot 2 archived GoCE requests, and BHGbot 4 removed links to portals deleted at MfD (until its authorization was revoked in January at operator BrownHairedGirl's request). December 2019 Y DemonDays64 Bot, DannyS712 bot III 66, Bot1058 6, Monkbot 15, MilHistBot 6, PearBOT 5, DannyS712 bot IV 65 · N2 SportsStatsBot · Xinbenlv bot, SteveBot 8 Redirects to be autopatrolled: A RfC took place at WP:NPP, closing with unanimous consensus that new redirects should be automatically marked as patrolled by bot. DannyS712 wasted no time, and submitted DannyS712 bot III 66 the next day; it passed two days after that. 200,000 bios get short descs: Along a similar vein, Bot1058 6 was approved to remove disambiguation pages from Category:Monitored short pages and a new bot (DemonDays64 Bot) changed lots of http links to https using JavaScript Wiki Browser. One particularly neat task, PearBOT 5, automatically generated short descriptions for more than 200,000 biographies. In the next issue of Bots Newsletter: What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers? What happens when two bots want to clerk the same page? What happens when an adminbot goes hog wild? Will reFill ever get fixed? What's up with ListeriaBot, anyway? Python 3.4 deprecation? In my PyWikiBot? (It's more likely than you think!) These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the January 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out! Signing off... jp×g 04:29, 10 December 2021 (UTC) (You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

XLinkBot (t · th · c · del · cross-wiki · SUL · edit counter · pages created (xtools · sigma) · non-automated edits · BLP edits · undos · manual reverts · rollbacks · logs ^{(blocks · rights · moves)} · rfar · spi · cci) (assign permissions)^{(acc · ap · ev · fm · mms · npr · pm · pc · rb · te)}

On 2020 July 3, XLinkBot has overwritten a redirect with the content of its target article, effectively creating a fork! Here's the diff: [3] - Waysidesc (talk) 18:32, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

XLinkBot reverted content for no apparent reason. Not the first time I have seen (on my watchlist) XLinkBot reverting content incorrectly. -- GreenC 18:42, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I guess this should be reported to User:Versageek. -- GreenC 18:42, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Operators notified of this discussion. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:10, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

The first one is 1.5 years ago, odd but untraceable why that happened (unless people can show me a pattern).
I hoped that I resolved the second last week, but apparently there is still an issue there. If that one persists please turn off editing in the settings until I can solve it). Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 13:19, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: I applied a new patch to both m:User:LiWa3 (who is at the core of the problem) and User:XLinkBot (who should properly check that what LiWa3 is telling him is true). It is running from now, please ping me if you see the wrong reverting problem appear again from, say, tomorrow (there may still be old edits in parserqueues somewhere, though it should be instant - XLinkBot should throw an error on what LiWa3 still had in parserqueues was wrongly parsed). Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:36, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Thought I did .. seems like I broke the bots. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 10:51, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

And fixed again. Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 18:27, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

@Beetstra: happening again. -- GreenC 17:38, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Bot is off for now. Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 04:07, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

I did a handful of adaptations to both LiWa3 and XLinkBot, it looks better now. I have turned XLinkBot back on, but please check whether I really solved it (proof is in the pudding). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 11:27, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Robert McClenon posted on the Teahouse (permalink to thread) about an action of Yapperbot (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), whose maintainer Naypta has not edited since August 2020. While the issue they mentioned could be closed ("working as intended"), they mention that a bot should not run without supervision even if it works fine. I think that is correct; as WP:BOTCOMM requires bot maintainers to promptly reply to any concern about their bot operation, they should be active on the project or at least responsive to pings/talk page messages.

Are we really going to block Yapperbot in the absence of a malfunction? Yapperbot is only one example, I imagine^{[dubious – discuss]} that there are quite a few bots that still run without a human at the other end of the leash. The question is what to do to enforce BOTCOMM.

I suspect the actual current enforcement scheme is that such "zombie" bots are left alone until they misbehave badly enough, at which point they are blocked, though no example comes to my mind (even though I have been reading this noticeboard for a few years). I also suspect that zombie bots would get blocked at the first sign of mischief, whereas bots with a responsive maintainer (who promises a fix is on the way) would be cut more slack. That is probably not what the letter of the policy says, but it is reasonable. Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 13:09, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Personally speaking, if a bot is acting as intended, I say let it run until a) its use is no longer required, or b) it starts messing up. I do agree with your hypothetical that we are often more lenient for an active-operator bot that is malfunctioning, but as has been seen with a few bots in the relatively-near past, sometimes they need to be blocked anyway. Primefac (talk) 13:15, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

I talk to the owner, if the owner does not respond after a 'real' error and the error repeats, I bluntly block the bot. If the owner does respond after the first error and promises to maintain I will allow for some more errors, but will then eventually also block the bot if the error is not resolved. I guess we will not know whether Naypta is responsive on the bot-error-part until we encounter bot errors. (P.S. did we try to email Naypta?). Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 13:54, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

If a bot is malfunctioning, blocking is always an option. If it gets blocked and the operator is unresponsive then it just stays blocked. I'm not up to block a bot that is working properly just because the operator is slow to respond. This noticeboard is a fine place to discuss such situations case-by-case. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:26, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

User:Tigraan - Thank you for raising the issue here. First, to clarify, Yapperbot is working properly and is doing a service for the community. It should be allowed to continue running. The situation that I tried to report was something of a corner case in which an RFC was tinkered with in a way that the bot did not understand. Second, I agree with the other editors about the blocking of bots. They should be blocked quickly if there is no responsible human, and if there is a human, there should be discussion with the human. Third, however, is someone willing to take responsibility for the bot? This is a case where we only noticed that the bot is running correctly but without a human because the behavior of the bot was suboptimal when the behavior of a human editor was suboptimal. Is this the right place to call attention, non-urgently, to bots that don't have a bot operator? Robert McClenon (talk) 16:40, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

To answer your last question in as few words as necessary, yes. Primefac (talk) 20:50, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Even if the operator were active and simply didn't want to fix the 'bug' in this example (due to time constraints etc), it wouldn't really warrant blocking the bot. An odd notification about a closed RfC due to some rare bug is not much of an inconvenience and it's very small in proportion to all edits. More could probably be done to aid in the maintainability of bots, like with scripts any IA is technically able to edit a script if required (for maintenance/bug fixes); not as simple for a bot which runs on a server of its operator (or even Toolforge, given the strict policy for unmaintained tools). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:19, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

An extreme case of this issue was Cydebot, which for about 15 years processed categories which WP:CFD had agreed to merge, rename, or delete. Cydebot did about 6.8 million edits in that time.

In the latter years, the bot owner @Cyde was around very rarely. That didn't matter while the bot did great work, but it became an issue when changes in bot functionality were needed. So a new bot was created, and when it was ready to roll, Cydebot was blocked to avoid clashes between two bots.

Cyde had done a magnificent job in creating a bot which ran error-free on such a huge scale for so long (average 1,200 edits per day for 15 years). There was no question of blocking the bot just 'cos Cyde wasn't around for chatter.

So I agree with Primefac: if a bot is acting as intended, I say let it run until a) its use is no longer required, or b) it starts messing up. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:52, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Hello! Does anyone know of a bot that tags unused fair use files for delayed speedy deletion under criterion F5? I'm going through the list of them right now, and some have been unused for a while — for example, File:"Mookajjiya Kanasugalu", Film Poster.jpg, which hasn't been used in Mookajjiya Kanasugalu (film) for more than seven weeks. (If there isn't a bot, I think I'd like to make one.) Tol (talk | contribs) @ 00:18, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

@Tol: I think that B-Bot does this (recent taggings) you could ask the operator about their process first. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:23, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Thank you, that was what I was looking for! It looks like B-Bot tends to tag the file a few days after it's no longer used — I'm not sure why some files slip through the cracks. I'll contact the operator. Thanks again! Tol (talk | contribs) @ 00:29, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

@Tol and Xaosflux: I'm out of the country at the moment (returning December 24) so I can't make changes to my code until I get back. The list of orphans I am using is Wikipedia:Database reports/Unused non-free files. Further, it's waiting 24 hours after it first sees a file appear on that list before tagging it (so due to when the list is updated vs when I am tagging it may be 2 days). The reason for the wait is that when the bot was approved, one of the concerns expressed was that some users considered it obnoxious if a page was undergoing revision or was vandalized and we tagged an image as an orphan moments later. (I don't share this concern - but this was requested in the approval discussion.) I was previously doing a direct database query using Quarry and using this database report page only as a backup, but the Quarry page changed and I need to update my code to use the new version of it. I'm not sure why File:"Mookajjiya Kanasugalu", Film Poster.jpg wasn't picked up, but it's not on the database report page and from spot-checking the history, I don't see where it ever has been listed there. So I'm not sure where the breakdown is. When I get back, I will update the code to use the new version of Quarry and we can see if that works better. --B (talk) 20:49, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Alright; thank you! Tol (talk | contribs) @ 21:46, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

As a followup, the bot is updated so that it is using Quarry once again (and only relying on the on-wiki database report as a backup). Hopefully that will resolve the issue. --B (talk) 23:23, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

That sounds great; thank you! Tol (talk | contribs) @ 19:47, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

A special page for double redirects contains a few hundreds double redirects for user's scripts which my bot can't process due to no permission. May be someone with sysop rights can process them? --Emaus (talk) 13:03, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Genuinely out of curiosity, can you (or any other respondents) think of a reason to keep those old user script pages? I would assume they exist due to user renames, so they would not be viable and could likely just be deleted outright. Primefac (talk) 13:17, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Not sure these pages are really necessary so the deletion can be the best solution. --Emaus (talk) 13:26, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

There may be some userscripts that someone else has imported. The rest might as well be deleted I believe. --Trialpears (talk) 13:35, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

@Primefac: if any of the "from" links on these are for accounts that no longer exist, we really should delete them for beans reasons. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:33, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Good point. And for the pages like User:Akbys/vector.js, which I suspect will be few and far between (only four that I counted in the first 25), we update manually? Primefac (talk) 13:36, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

I deleted a bunch of settings ones. I'll keep looking. Izno (talk) 00:19, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

I've deleted most of the rest citing either U2 or G6, with a handful of edits to the ones in the same user space, as suggested above. Feel free to review the ones still linked in blue text or in my contribs. The only ones I've left behind deliberately are for Silver Master, which is a CU-blocked account that got renamed and probably should be reported as having been renamed out of order, Izno (talk) 05:17, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

(And now I'm almost winning for most deletions in 2022. Hard to catch up to Explicit, and I've only got Liz by 1 right now.) Izno (talk) 05:19, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

@ProcrastinatingReader and TheSandDoctor: Recently approved TolBot 10 created Austin Vedder

1. Redirecting to Austin A. Vedder, which is another redirect (from a misspelling, no less). The bot should not create double redirects.

2. Inserted {{DEFAULTSORT:Vedder, Austin}} inside the {{Redirect category shell}} sandwich. This is not a redirect category template so it should be placed outside of the sandwich.

3. Placed {{R from short name}} inside the sandwich. This is not a valid short name, so this template should not have been put there; rather {{R from misspelling}} would be the appropriate template to put there.

— wbm1058 (talk) 02:20, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

These are base WP:BOTISSUE issues, best resolved by contacting the operator and asking them to make changes. It seems this hasn’t been discussed yet with them, and they haven’t been notified to this discussion? For one and three, it seems like the bot could either resolve double redirects, and change the rcat in case of double redirect, or (more simply) not process pages which themselves are redirects at all, which would probably be better. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 09:46, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I wanted to report this at the BRFA but since it was closed already, and I saw this message at the bottom:

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard.

That's why I came here. Maybe a bit out of frustration over my experience that I've generally had to wait weeks for some of my bots to get approved. Hopefully User:Tol sees our pings and resolves this. I don't want to make too much of a deal about it since so far it seems to be a one-off. wbm1058 (talk) 17:13, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Left operator a talk page note, agree that starting with operator talk would have been best at this point - I don't think the entire BRFA is defective. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:36, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I just found a second instance, Brian Garner. Same issues. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:47, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi all! I just noticed this. I'm sorry about that; I should have considered double redirects. I'll write a script to check all of the pages it's created for double redirects, and manually check all of them. Thanks for letting me know. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 20:35, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I have a list of problematic redirects and am working on them now. Approximately 244 (1.3%, 1 in 75) of redirect creations were problematic. As for placing defaultsort inside the redirect category shell, I was following the advice at Template:Redirect category shell#Other templates, which states that "This template may also carry and hold other [non-rcat] templates ... Even the {{DEFAULTSORT}} magic word and a sort key may be used either inside this template or below it." For all of the double redirects, I will convert them to Template:R avoided double redirect. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 22:00, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

 Done all with AWB. Thanks again for letting me know, and my apologies for the problem. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 22:26, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that link to the documentation; I didn't know that it was apparently boldly updated to say that back in July 2016. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:03, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

No problem. Tol (talk | contribs) @ 23:30, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:Bot § Handles bots with multiple tasks poorly. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 07:35, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Page watchers may be interested in WP:ANI#Rlink2. Izno (talk) 23:24, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Would a BAGger please look at Wikipedia talk:Bots/Requests for approval/Fluxbot 6 and advise? Thank you! — xaosflux ^Talk 16:59, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, January 2022

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. BRFA activity by month Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Vicious bot-on-bot edit warring... superseded tasks... policy proposals... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots. After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. Due to the vastness, I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. Some people thought this was a good idea, since covering an entire year in a single issue would make it unmanageably large. Others thought this was stupid, since they were getting talk page messages about crap from almost three years ago. Ultimately, the question of whether each issue covers six months or a year is only relevant for a couple more of them, and then the problem will be behind us forever. Of course, you can also look on the bright side – we are making progress, and this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020. Overall In the first half of 2020, there were 71 BRFAs. Of these, Y 59 were approved, and 12 were unsuccessful (with N2 8 denied, ? 2 withdrawn, and 2 expired). January 2020 Yeah, you're not gonna be able to get away with this anymore. Y ST47Bot, Seppi333Bot, Qbugbot 4 · N2 PkbwcgsBot 25, PkbwcgsBot 26 A new Pywikibot release dropped support for Python 3.4, and it was expected that support for Python 2.7 would be removed in coming updates. Toolforge itself planned to drop Python 2 support in 2022. Two new bots dropped in January 2020: ST47Bot, the successor to STBot, and Seppi333Bot, whose task was to perform a weekly update of four "massive" wikitables for WikiProject Molecular Biology. Cydebot, an adminbot operated by Cyde since 2006, was blocked after going berserk on categories that hadn't yet been CfD'd. February 2020 Y AnomieBOT 78, Cewbot 2, DannyS712 bot 67, DannyS712 bot III 63, PearBOT 6, DemonDays64 Bot 2 · N2 PearBOT On February 1, some concerns were raised about ListeriaBot performing "nonsense" edits. Semi-active operator Magnus Manske (who originally coded the Phase II software|precursor of MediaWiki) was pinged. Meanwhile, the bot was temporarily blocked for several hours until the issue was diagnosed and resolved. On February 18, ST47Bot got into a tussle with Amalthea (bot), and had to be partially-blocked from Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cases/Overview. March 2020 Y MajavahBot, SDZeroBot, TheSandBot 6, TheSandBot 7, Bitbotje, FACBot 6, TheSandBot 8, Qbugbot 5, Cewbot 3, SDZeroBot 2, PrimeBOT 31, WikiCleanerBot 12 · AntiCompositeBot In March, a long discussion was started at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy by Skdb about the troubling trend of bots "expiring" without explanation after their owners became inactive. This can happen for a variety of reasons -- API changes break code, hosting providers' software updates break code, hosting accounts lapse, software changes make bots' edits unnecessary, and policy changes make bots' edits unwanted. The most promising solution seemed to be Toolforge hosting (although it has some problems of its own, like the occasional necessity of refactoring code). Some of the twelve bot tasks approved this month were TheSandBot 6 (removing blocked users from Category:Wikipedia usernames with possible policy issues), and TheSandBot 7 (removing unblocked users from Category:Wikipedians who are indefinitely blocked for promotional user names). SDZeroBot 2 was approved to refine geographic stub tags. New bots approved this month were MajavahBot (to patrol WP:EFFPR), SDZeroBot (to merge stub tags), and Bitbotje (fixing DISPLAYTITLE modifications, DEFAULTSORT errors and broken behavior switches in draftspace). April 2020 Y TheSandBot 9, BHGbot 5, DannyS712 bot 69, SDZeroBot 3, ST47ProxyBot, WugBot 4, SDZeroBot 4, DatBot 10, WikiCleanerBot 11, WikiCleanerBot 13, WikiCleanerBot 14, AntiCompositeBot 2, Cewbot 4 · N2 DaedanBot 1 · Creffbot A discussion on the bot noticeboard, "Re-examination of ListeriaBot", was started by Barkeep49, who pointed out repeated operation outside the scope of its BRFA (i.e. editing pages in mainspace, and adding non-free images to others). Some said it was doing good work, and others said it was operating beyond its remit. It was blocked on April 10; the next day it was unblocked, reblocked from article space, reblocked "for specified non-editing actions", unblocked, and indeffed. The next week, several safeguards were implemented in its code by Magnus; the bot was allowed to roam free once more on April 18. ST47ProxyBot joined the stable in April, after a BRFA started in December was finally completed. As an adminbot, it was authorized to block IP addresses belonging to open proxies, public VPN services, and web hosts. New tasks approved for existing bots included BHGbot 5 (diffusing categories), TheSandBot 9 (taking over some tasks from the inactive RonBot), and WugBot 4 (updating data at {{Interactive COVID-19 maps}}). Also, DatBot 10 was approved to scale down non-free SVGs — I didn't even know that was a thing. A discussion at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy was started by Thryduulf about whether WP:BOTCOMM should explicitly specify that bot operators must be responsive to concerns raised on English Wikipedia specifically (as opposed to Phabricator, SourceForge, Toolforge, et cetera). Eventually, the policy was amended to its current form: Issues and enquiries are typically expected to be handled on the English Wikipedia. Pages reachable via unified login, like a talk page at Commons or at Italian Wikipedia could also be acceptable [...] External sites like Phabricator or GitHub (which require separate registration or do not allow for IP comments) and email (which can compromise anonymity) can supplement on-wiki communication, but do not replace it. May 2020 Y MajavahBot 3, DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, Dreamy Jazz Bot 4, QEDKbot, William Avery Bot 2, DannyS712 bot 68, PrimeBOT 32, TheSandBot 10, Bot1058 7, BHGbot 6, EaglesBot 2, Cewbot 5, WikiCleanerBot 17 · N2 MDanielsBot, PhuzBot 3, Gedimon · ? PearBOT 7 MajavahBot 3, an impressively meta bot task, was approved this month for maintaining a list of bots running on the English Wikipedia. The page, located at User:MajavahBot/Bot status report, is updated every 24 hours; it contains a list of all accounts with the bot flag, as well as their operator, edit count, last activity date, last edit date, last logged action date, user groups and block status. Other approvals for this month were William Avery Bot 2 (processing redirects in {{R from scientific name}}), DannyS712 bot 68 (allowing users to schedule bot reminders for themselves), TheSandBot 10 (removing blocked/locked users from Category:User talk pages with conflict of interest notices), Bot1058 7 (updating Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests/Permalink), Dreamy Jazz Bot 4 (adding {{WikiProject Biography|living=no}} to talk pages where their associated article is in a year of death category), and QEDKbot (deleting and nominating empty categories). General syntax fixing tasks were approved for DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, PrimeBOT 32, BHGbot 6, Cewbot 5, and EaglesBot 2, as well as WikiCleanerBot 15, 16, and 17. Seven bots who fell below activity requirements (with neither the bots nor their operators having any edits or logged actions in two years) had their bot flags removed. They were NekoBot, Robert SkyBot, DASHBotAV, VoxelBot, JackieBot, ReferenceBot, and CensusBot. On May 12, EmausBot was blocked. June 2020 Y QEDKbot 2, AnomieBOT 79, WOSlinkerBot 6, Yapperbot 2, Yapperbot, AnomieBOT 80, Dreamy Jazz Bot 5, WikiCleanerBot 18, HasteurBot 15, MusikBot II 4, NoSandboxesHere · N2 RedWarn · ? Seppi333Bot 2 In July 2017, Headbomb made a proposal that a section of the Wikipedia:Dashboard be devoted to bots and technical issues. In November 2019, Lua code was written superseding Legobot's tasks on that page, and operator Legoktm was asked to stop them so that the new code could be deployed. After no response to pings, a partial-block of Legobot for the dashboard was proposed. Some months later, on June 16, Headbomb said: "A full block serves nothing. A partial block solves all current issues [...] Just fucking do it. It's been 3 years now." The next day, however, Legoktm disabled the task, and the dashboard was successfully refactored. On June 7, RexxS blocked Citation bot for disruptive editing, saying it was "still removing links after request to stop". A couple weeks later, a discussion on the bots noticeboard was opened, saying "it is a widely-used and useful bot, but it has one of the longest block logs for any recently-operating bot on Wikipedia". While its last BRFA approval was in 2011, its code and functionality had changed dramatically since then, and AntiCompositeNumber requested that BAG require a new BRFA. Maintainer AManWithNoPlan responded that most blocks were from years ago (when it lacked a proper test suite), and problems since then had mostly been one-off errors (like a June 2019 incident in which a LTA had "weaponized" the bot to harass editors). David Tornheim opened a discussion about whether bots based on closed-source code should be permitted, and proposed that they not. He cited a recent case in which a maintainer had said "I can only suppose that the code that is available on GitHub is not the actual code that was running on [the bot]". Some disagreed: Naypta said that "I like free software as much as the next person, and I strongly believe that bot operators should make their bot code public, but I don't think it should be that they must do so". Two new bots had their first BRFAs approved: Yapperbot, to replace Legobot for handling the Feedback Request Service, and NoSandboxesHere, to remove {{user sandbox}} from articles in draftspace using Category:Non-userspace pages using User sandbox. Conclusion What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers? Will Citation bot ever be set free to roam the project? What's the deal with all those book links that InternetArchiveBot is adding to articles? Should we keep using Gerrit for MediaWiki? What if we had a day for bots to make cosmetic edits? These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the February 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out! Signing off... jp×g 23:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC) (You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Lots of categories named "NPOV disputes from Month Year" have been moved to the "Wikipedia neutral point of view disputes from Month Year" name by JJMC89 bot III as a result of Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 December 23#Category:NPOV disputes. Since then, most of them have been deleted by Fastily due to an automatic G6 notice for empty monthly categories. After that, some of them have been recreated by AnomieBOT and then the recreated categories have again been moved by JJMC89 bot III and deleted by Fastily. To prevent an endless cycle of creation by AnomieBOT, moving by JJMC89 bot III, and deletion by Fastily, all of the "Wikipedia neutral point of view disputes from Month Year" categories that were deleted by Fastily should be undeleted, any recreated category by AnomieBOT should be history-merged with the old history at the new name, and the corresponding templates should be modified to prevent the categories from being empty again. Also, both JJMC89 bot III and AnomieBOT should be temporarily disabled until all this is sorted out. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 21:16, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

SilkTork should not have listed the categories at WP:CFDW since manual work is required. (See bolded note at the top of the bot work section.) I've reverted the addition which will stop my bot. — JJMC89 (T·C) 21:31, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I have requested undeletion at Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion#NPOV disputes categories. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 22:22, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

As I appear to be the one that has caused the problem I will sort it out, though I am unsure what needs to be done. After I manually rename the cats, what should I then do to prevent problems? GeoffreyT2000, JJMC89, are you able to advise? SilkTork (talk) 08:47, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

As the categories are populated by templates, what you'll need to do is update the relevant templates to populate the new categories. You'll also need to move Category:NPOV disputes itself and the related stuff referred to at Wikipedia:Creating a dated maintenance category so AnomieBOT will work correctly.

There's probably no need to worry about the "NPOV disputes from Month Year" categories themselves, once you've done the other work they'll be emptied and someone (e.g. Fastily) will delete them, while AnomieBOT will create the new "Wikipedia neutral point of view disputes from Month Year" categories as they're populated. Just check later on that they did eventually get emptied and deleted. Anomie⚔ 13:20, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

I clearly should not have stepped into this. It seemed a simple closure, and it turns out to be somewhat more complicated and esoteric. Would someone advise me what the "relevant templates" are and how to update them "to populate the new categories". SilkTork (talk) 18:40, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Dated maintenance categories aren't the most straightforward to deal with. I think I got everything that needed doing. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:59, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

This is why I haven't gone into closing CFD discussions, they can have repercussions. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:17, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks JJMC89. Yes, I can now see why that discussion was unclosed after two months even with a clear consensus to rename. My attention was drawn to the discussion by a pink link, and after reading it I was going to add my support for a rename, but when I saw how old the discussion was, I thought the more appropriate thing to do was close it. And then I followed the instructions for what to do after closing such a discussion. I probably missed some instructions on that page for special cases like this. Anyway, lesson learned - like Liz I shall stay away from closing CFD discussions in future! SilkTork (talk) 08:57, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

This is not what should be happening. The overwhelming majority of CFD discussions can be closed by just listing the categories at CFDW, or at least doing so will not cause a disaster. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:12, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, * Pppery *, I think there needs to be a "Dummies Guide" to closing CfD discussions because I've read over the instructions several times over the past few years and found them intimidating enough that I never started doing closings. I think I need someone to walk me through it and to admit that is humbling. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:40, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

It's really not that hard.

• For discussions where the result is "Keep" or "No consensus" , you can just use XfDCloser, which should handle all required actions.
• For discussions where the result is "Delete", you can use XfDCloser to close the discussion, and then list the name of the category at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working#Empty then delete in the format specified in HTML comments on that page. For some categories additional manual actions are necessary, but nothing will go wrong if the category sits there and you let one of the people who watch that page do the manual work.
• "Merge" results follow the same procedure (with the same caveat), except the section to use is Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working#Merge then delete
• "Rename" results can be done following a similar procedure (using Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working#Move). There's slightly more potential for things to go wrong there, because the bot moves the category without leaving a redirect and tries to update all uses. If it fails for whatever reason, then the result will be pages in red-linked categories. Usually they get fixed properly by whoever patrols that list (or a CFDW watcher), but occasionally something goes wrong.

I can say for sure that it is not possible to recreate this specific mess (a "rename" case in which an incomplete implementation of the rename caused clashes with other bots) by closing any of the pending CfD discussions. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 03:00, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Why do the instructions not say this simple version? I had the same reaction as Liz. :) Izno (talk) 03:45, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm not the person who wrote the instructions, so don't know for sure, although my hunch would be they predate XfDCloser, and also the way I phrased it delegates some of the hard work to other people. Feel free to copy some version of what I wrote above to that page if you want to. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 03:53, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

* Pppery *, I see an exciting career ahead of you in software documentation! Wooo! I don't know why the CFD instructions are unnecessarily confusing and complex, you make it sound very straightforward. Many thanks. It's on my "To Do" list to try to take on some more simple closures next month. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:17, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I guess that would be down to me in most part, to address various things that went wrong in the past. Nice work, Pppery! I will look at further updating the instructions after I've had some practice using XFDCloser. – Fayenatic London 17:09, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

see here. Bot is not respecting {{bots}}. In a hurry right now can't type anything else —GMX^{(on the go!)} 21:15, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

• I've blocked the bot from editing Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Archived debates/January 2022 for a month, pending resolution. Any admin (including @Legoktm:) is welcome to unblock if resolved. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:27, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Operator notified on talk. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:28, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Bleh, thanks for the report and partial block, looking into it now. Legoktm (talk) 04:54, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

• @Xaosflux: the bot has started to malfunction once again - this time on Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Archived debates/February 2022. Please block it from that page and extend the block through February. —GMX^{(on the go!)} 14:57, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@PorkchopGMX (on the go):  Done — xaosflux ^Talk 15:43, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I disabled the automatic running of the MFD archiver script. I have some new code which should be ready to go, but I'll run it manually for a few days before automating it. There are no MFDs needing archiving right now so I'll give it a shot tomorrow and lift the partial blocks then. Legoktm (talk) 07:19, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

It looks like we have a few inactive bots by definition (both account and operator haven't edited in 2 years) according to the Majavah report. (Majavah, if there's a listed operator, could you get their contribs or something and add that to the report too? Maybe even a column to indicate mutual activity e.g. {{cross}} where neither are and a {{check}} where both are. This was painful. :)

And a few more in a month or so:

• PDFbot run by Dispenser
• Makecat-bot run by Makecat
• TAP Bot run by Thine Antique Pen
• BG19bot run by Bgwhite
• ProteinBoxBot (blocked also) run by Andrew Su and Julialturner
• TheMagikBOT run by TheMagikCow

We should consider asking the active bot operators whether all the rest of the bot accounts that haven't edited since a while ago (pick a number, 5 years seems fine generally) still need a bot flag. These particularly stand out...:

• SprinterBot is a redirect to RscprinterBot

  Operator talk left to see if this can be retired. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:25, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

   Removed per operator request in Special:Diff/1069313440. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:02, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• CeraBot is a redirect to Cerabot~enwiki

  Operator talk left to see if this can be retired. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:27, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• Citation bot 1, Citation bot 2, Citation bot 3, Citation bot 4 subsumed? by Citation bot
• Helpful Pixie Bot and Femto Bot (operator presently blocked)
• Legobot II (blocked)
  • Feel free to remove the bot flag. Legoktm (talk) 17:58, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
  •  Removed — xaosflux ^Talk 21:58, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
• TohaomgBot (blocked)
• KasparBot (blocked)
• FRadical Bot (blocked, and the operator CU-blocked)

   Removed — xaosflux ^Talk 10:42, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• Cydebot (blocked)

These ones seem like low-hanging fruit, but I think the rest should be queried as well. Izno (talk) 05:30, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

This was actually the subject of a proposal I was about to make -- I think it might be useful for a bot task that monitored the on-wiki activity of bot maintainers. Either "last edit date", or "edits in last 180 days", or something along those lines -- this could either go on a central status page or on the infobox of a bot's userpage. Oftentimes, the writers and maintainers of bots will go inactive for a long time, which makes it a little discouraging to report bugs / suggest new features, as it's likely they will fall into a black hole. Sjp×g 07:45, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

This seems like a good idea, but relies on something we don't actually have: a programmatic listing of all bot:operator relationships! I'd actually like to see a page/table for this. (which could then also possible be bot-updated with the last edit/action dates of each periodically) - but bootstrapping it takes some effort. — xaosflux ^Talk 10:53, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Picking a couple recently-approved BRFAs at random, it looks like "Operator:" is formatted relatively consistently between 2013 and now -- I might be able to scrape through these and come up with something. Maybe something that had to be manually verified, but it'd be something. jp×g 11:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Hell, even this one from 2007 has the operator noted the same way. jp×g 11:38, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Here's an idea, your idea might be better though: There's bot userboxes that are posted on the owner's page and indicate the operated bot as one of the parameters. Example: {{Template:User bot owner|Acebot}}. There's probably userboxes or templates for the bot's page too. These templates also populate categories such as Category:Wikipedia bot operators. –Novem Linguae (talk) 11:43, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

It's only somewhat related but I'd like to see a list of active approved bot tasks. There are lots of pages in Category:Approved Wikipedia bot requests for approval but this includes tasks that finished, op went inactive, are obsolete, consensus changed, bot went down, etc...

A useful way would be for the closing BAG to add a characteristic of a task (eg the task # in edit/action summaries) to Wikipedia:Bot activity monitor going forward, which would achieve that. Then maybe old tasks can be added on an ad-hoc basis. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 12:40, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

It would likely be a "going forward" for now, with potential retroactive categorisation later, but we could always base it on the "Edit period(s)" section of the task - if it's a One-Time-Run, sub-categorise it as such, otherwise put it into some sort of "ongoing" subcat. Primefac (talk) 20:53, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• I left operator notices for the first batch, if no response in a week we will deflag them and mark as {{retired|bot=yes}}. — xaosflux ^Talk 10:47, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• xaosflux: Regarding SprinterBot, I believe there is little realistic prospect of resurrecting this bot's tasks, so feel free to deflag the account. Rcsprinter123 (comment) 17:32, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I added a column to User:MajavahBot/Bot status report for the last recorded activity (any edit or publicly logged action) for any listed operator. Majavah (talk!) 11:05, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I recently posted on the help desk (Wikipedia:Help desk#Confusion on bot policy regarding semi-automated editing) where I explained my confusion on how one should approach/implement semi-automated edits. You may read the section I linked if you wish to. In a nutshell, I would like to semi-automate edits from a script I am running. I do not wish to create a bot account and would like to have the edits be on my main account (once I get more comfortable with the API I may consider expanding the script and may look into bot creation).

My requirements seem simple. However, according to mw:API:Edit I require a CSRF token, but apparently I can't just lazily do mw.user.tokens.get( 'csrfToken' ) and call it a day cause that does not work. As the code samples demonstrate, there is a 4-step process. Fine, but I'm confused about the second step (POST with lgname+lgpassword+lgtoken), because those parameters are to be obtained from Special:BotPasswords which states Make sure you are logged into your bot's account, and not the owner's account, before creating a bot password. , and as per WP:SEMIAUTOMATED, A bot account should not be used for assisted editing, unless the task has been through a BRFA.. So, I should not use a bot account, but I still need a 'bot password' from an account which it seems to imply cannot be my own?

Side note: MediaWiki JS sample code works fine. What I do not like about this however is that it needs to be done in a JS console on the wiki. I'd much prefer to have a script running in a terminal (ie. using NodeJS/Python).

Side side note: Psst while I have you nerds here, can someone point me to some docs explaining how I can achieve the functionality reFill achieves by sending you to a page that shows a diff with some changes made without making those changes. My script updates statistics, since I am semi-automating it, I would love for the script to run, and then show a diff so that I can visually confirm what it has done and then just publish the changes. Satricious (talk) 16:09, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

I think that I do something vaguely similar with awb. IANA periodically update their language-subtag-registry file. My AWB script reads that file and then updates Module:Language/data/iana languages, Module:Language/data/iana scripts, Module:Language/data/iana regions, Module:Language/data/iana variants, Module:Language/data/iana suppressed scripts, and Module:Language/data/ISO 639-1 from the subtag registry. Because it is not fully automated, I see a diff of the change before I manually save each module's update – all of this within awb. So, you might want to consider that as an option.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:44, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your input! I had no idea AWB was capable of that, I now see that as an option worth exploring. While that might actually be the best solution to my problem. I'd still love to hear from others about how I could achieve this using the API. Just because I'd prefer to do this myself without the use of a tool which I feel might restrict me. But you've definitely convinced me to try out AWB at some point in the future :p Satricious (talk) 17:25, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Special:BotPasswords is to be used while logged into the account from which you're planning to do the edits. That's usually a dedicated bot account for large-scale edit operations, but in your case ("semi-automation"), it would be just your own account. And by the way, you probably want to use a bot framework (see mw:API:Client code#JavaScript) which would avoid having to write boilerplate code for logging in, maintaining the session, handling tokens, etc which are both tedious and error-prone. – SD0001 (talk) 19:01, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification! I think my question has been answered now. I'd still like to know what API calls to make to show diffs before making changes (as reFill does). Do you how I might achieve this? Satricious (talk) 05:08, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Like this (taken from User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/DraftCleaner.js):

function goToShowChangesScreen(titleWithNamespaceAndUnderscores, wikicode, editSummary) {
	let titleEncoded = encodeURIComponent(titleWithNamespaceAndUnderscores);
	let wgServer = mw.config.get('wgServer');
	let wgScriptPath = mw.config.get('wgScriptPath');
	let baseURL = wgServer + wgScriptPath + '/';
	// https://stackoverflow.com/a/12464290/3480193
	$(`<form action="${baseURL}index.php?title=${titleEncoded}&action=submit" method="POST"/>`)
		.append($('<input type="hidden" name="wpTextbox1">').val(wikicode))
		.append($('<input type="hidden" name="wpSummary">').val(editSummary))
		.append($('<input type="hidden" name="mode">').val('preview'))
		.append($('<input type="hidden" name="wpDiff">').val('Show changes'))
		.append($('<input type="hidden" name="wpUltimateParam">').val('1'))
		.appendTo($(document.body)) //it has to be added somewhere into the <body>
		.submit();
}

 ― Qwerfjkltalk 07:15, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

@Qwerfjkl: That works! Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it. Satricious (talk) 07:32, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

This question has been answered. Satricious (talk) 07:32, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello. I am not sure if this is the correct venue. If this cant be solved here, kindly let me know where should I go.
I currently have the AWB bot on enwiki, User:KiranBOT. It adds wikiproject banners on talkpage (simplest task, I think). In short: I need to create a fully automated/toolforge bot.

Prelude:Around 20 days ago, I got bot flag on mrwiki (AWB). Within less than 20 days (in around 7-8 runs), it racked-up more than 10k edits there (mr:special:contributions/KiranBOT). Because of the syntax of Marathi language, and word rules (not grammar rules), there are many uncontroversial find and replace tasks. But there are less than 10 active/regular editors, so such tasks have been piled up.

To the point: On mrwiki, I would like to run a simple bot — but the one with continuous editing, like DumbBOT. Few hours ago, I created an account on wikitech/toolforge, and requested for membership. But I am still not sure how, and where to upload the bot's code. I want to code it in C#. The bot will obviously be discussed/vetted on mrwiki, along with the keywords to be replaced (I have created a rudimentary list at mr:User:Usernamekiran/typos). Any help/guidence will be appreciated a lot. —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 23:38, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Hey there. Here's my notes for PHP programming language: User:Novem Linguae/Essays/Toolforge bot tutorial. In particular, you can use this to get your FTP client and console running. For C#, I think you would want to use this: wikitech:Help:Toolforge/Mono. And also Grid instead of Kubernetes. Hope that helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:56, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

thanks. looking into it. —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 23:59, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

The Novem Linguae tutorial looks good to get started, but two things to note:
1. It mentions use of an FTP client to transfer files to the host. There's another way – git. You can set up a repository on GitHub/Gitlab and push your code there. On the toolforge host, you can pull it. There are ways, using webhooks or GitHub Actions, through which you can even trigger pulls automatically on TF when you push locally.
2. It mentions use of Kubernetes for cron jobs. Using the grid is much easier (requires just adding a line to the crontab file). – SD0001 (talk) 04:01, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

dummy comment to avoid archiving. —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 18:41, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

So I could transfer files using github, and also created files using mono on putty/CLI. But I couldnt execute the bot. First I went with C#, then python, but both didnt work. I have lots of material in .net to study/refer like dotnetwikibot framework, source code of AWB, and some other programs mentioned at mediawiki. All I need is a little guidance regarding how to compile and run it on toolforge. Your help will be appreciated a lot. Also pinging @Mz7, JPxG, and ST47: —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 15:44, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

@Mz7, SD0001, and Novem Linguae: Hi. So I downloaded phthon, and pywikibot to my computer, and made a couple of edits using it. It was pretty straightforward. I made one or two edits using replace.py. I also made a couple of edits using my own kiran.py. But I havent figured/found out how to perform find and replace task. Would you kindlt help me? The less than 10 edits can be seen at mr:special:contributions/KiranBOT_II. —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 20:06, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't know Python, so I can't help with this particular question. But Python is one of the most popular wiki bot languages so I am sure someone can help. Discord's #technical channel may be a good resource. Good luck. –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:14, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

The documentation is at mw:Manual:Pywikibot/replace.py. Find & replace would be something like replace foo bar -search:"insource:\"foo\" ", or am I missing something? ― Qwerfjkltalk 20:31, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Either that, or you can write your own python code for find and replace. Pywikibot just needs to be used to fetch the text in the beginning, and to save it in the end. – SD0001 (talk) 04:07, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Qwerfjkl: Hi. For the quick background: I want to create an automated bot on Marathi (mrwiki) to find and replace certain words or set of words. The current list has 42 words to be replaced in mainspace, and is expected to grow upto around 200. @SD0001 I already successfully edited pages using my own script. The only two things I am currently stuck at is the working find and replace syntax for pywikibot, and to tell the script to edits pages from ns:0. The script I created, I had told it to edit one particular page. —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 08:18, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Have you tried the regex module for python? ― Qwerfjkltalk 08:39, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

@Qwerfjkl: Hi. Thanks for the response, but unfortunately, I had found the solution before seeing your reply. I have solved the find and replace issue, now the only thing that remains is, how to tell the script to edit the pages of certain namespace(s). Can you help me with that please? —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 18:34, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

It depends on how you are supplying the pages to edit. ― Qwerfjkltalk 19:42, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

One technique would be to filter by namespace when you're generating your list of pages to edit. The details of that will depend on how you are generating your list of pages to edit. Are you using an API query, a pywikibot function, etc? I suggest sharing your code with us, you'll likely get more and better answers. –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:34, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

"Sharing you code" if you do so (and it's more than ~5-10 lines), either use a link to a repository, or a [13] to not overwhelm the page please. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:31, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Here is the code:

import pywikibot
from pywikibot import pagegenerators, textlib
import re

#retrieve the page
site = pywikibot.Site()
page = pywikibot.Page(site, u"user:usernamekiran/typos")
text = page.text

#edit the page
string = page.text
page.text = string.replace("abcusernamekiran", "xyz")

#save the page
page.save(u"experimental edit with modified script")

Thanks, —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 09:54, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Usernamekiran: You could generate the pages something like this (untested):

import pywikibot
from pywikibot import pagegenerators, textlib
import re

#retrieve the pages
site = pywikibot.Site()
pages = site.search( "intitle:\"foo\"",  total=5, namespaces=0)
for page in pages:
    text = page.text

    #edit the page
     text = text.replace("abcusernamekiran", "xyz")
    # or using the re module:
    # text = re.sub( "abcusernamekiran", "xyz", text)

    #save the page
    page.save(u"experimental edit with modified script")text

 ― Qwerfjkltalk 10:40, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

• The bot has been created, and it has been running successfully from toolforge/crontab since last two days. —usernamekiran (talk) 17:50, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Continuation of the discussion at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard/Archive_16#Template_Editor_permission_for_bot.

User:MusikBot II has template protected Module:Transclusion count/data/C so User:Ahechtbot can no longer update it. Either the bot will need Template Editor permissions, or User:MusikBot II/TemplateProtector/config will need to be edited to exclude the subpages of Module:Transclusion count/data. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 20:18, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

@Ahecht: I've added TE to the bot, edits should still be constrained to those approved in BRFA. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:59, 1 April 2022 (UTC)